Something Is Missing - Science (No. 3 in Series)

This is the third in a blog series that will help you discover your spirituality and experience more love and happiness in life. Previous blogs are available via the index to the right.

In the last blog I started to put forward some answers to the question "Who am I". In this blog I look at what science can tell us about what we call reality, and is has some surprises up its sleeves!

Science

I would imagine that you don’t spend much time questioning the reality of the world around you. Objects look and feel as if they are solid and exist separately from each other. You believe you are a separate person on a planet that has billions of other individuals living on it. But if you were to ask a scientist about this experience of reality they would tell you that it’s not as straight forward as it seems. Here is what they might say.

 If your eyes were able to see very small things then you would see the molecules and atoms that make up the cells of your body. If you magnified things even more you would see each atom with a number of electrons surrounding a central nucleus, which in itself is also made up of even smaller particles. The electrons would be orbiting at a huge distance out from the nucleus compared to its size. In other words most of the atom is space. Given that you are made up of atoms, this means that a vast proportion of you (and everything else in the Universe) is not solid, it is space. What gives you the sense of solidity is the forces that exist between the atoms.

These scientific discoveries completely changed our notion of reality, but even this atomic view of matter was challenged at the beginning of the nineteenth century by a number of brilliant scientists. They showed that the fundamental particles that make up atoms are not solid and can also exist as vibrational waves. With his famous equation E=MC squared, Albert Einstein showed that every piece of matter in the Universe is made up of nothing else but energy. He also showed that when we move fast, time slows down and the length of an object shrinks when looked at by somebody who is standing still. All this has been proved many times by experiment and Einstein’s corrections are applied everyday to the GPS system that orbits the earth, to make sure your satellite navigation remains accurate.

Building on Einstein’s work, other physicists started to build a new theory of matter called quantum mechanics and things became less and less intuitive. Long gone were the days of classical physics were you apply a force to an object and calculate how fast it would move or which direction it would go in. In the world of very small things everything comes down to chance. Particles can change into waves and back again and it is not possible to pin down exactly where they are and what they are doing at any particular moment. Instead the physicists had to work with probability theory to create equations that could predict the behaviour of matter statistically.

Despite the challenges of defining something that is so ephemeral, quantum mechanics has been very successful in showing how very small things manifest and behave. At first many of the implications of the new theory seemed very weird indeed, and many physicists challenged them because it was so hard to make intuitive sense of them. Nevertheless most predictions have now been confirmed by experiment. The most telling of these is that at the quantum scale of matter nothing exists in isolation. Everything in the Universe is connected to everything else. This also means that changes in one atom are felt at some level in all other atoms in the Universe. This is an astonishing scientific discovery, but as we have already seen, this is something that we already know unconsciously.

For thousands of years sages, theologians and mystics have been telling us that we are all connected in one grand state of universal oneness, and now we find that science is pointing us towards exactly the same conclusion. Of course this is not a coincidence. Deep within us is the knowledge of our natural state of being. Despite the illusion of being ‘separate entities’, we never forget that we are connected. We know intuitively that the bonds of love are always present and are incredibly important to us. The trouble is that we don’t always recognise or remember this about ourselves or the people around us. So why should this be? To answer this we must start looking into the nature of consciousness, which is the subject of the next blog.

I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them. Previous blogs in the series can be read via the list on the right.

Something Is Missing - Who Am I? (No. 2 in Series)

This is the second in a blog series that will help you discover your spirituality and experience more love and happiness in life. Previous blogs are available via the index to the right.

In the last blog I helped you to identify what is most important to you in life - love and relationships. I also asked the question, why if this is so do we so often push love away through relationship problems? I suggested that it is because we are afraid of love. In this post I will start to explain why this is by looking at how we develop our self-concepts (how we see ourselves). I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.

Who Am I?

Human beings have probably been asking themselves the question “Who am I” since the beginnings of conscious thought. The fact that we are aware of our own existence creates an intense curiosity about the nature of self and our relationship to the world and the Universe at large. Although we may assume that these are just philosophical musings, the conclusions that we draw from these questions has a profound impact on our psychology, particularly the amount of fear that we experience.

Your view of who you are is likely to be largely influenced by your sense of sight. Your eyes tell you that you are separated from the people and objects around you. Your other four physical senses then reinforce this belief and confirm that you are an independent being who thinks, feels and acts in isolation. Of course you will interact with other people through the relationships that you have but you will retain your sense of separation and self-determination.

You are not alone in this self-concept. Most people have exactly the same understanding of who they are. It is possible to find some measure of success and happiness in life in this way, particularly when you are young, but what you probably don’t realise is that your belief in your own separation will ultimately damage your relationships and cause you to suffer emotionally. The reason it does this is because it is not an accurate description of who you are. Your sense of separation is an incredibly powerful illusion that has evolved to help you find food and water, protect yourself and survive in the physical world, but it hides you from a deeper truth about yourself. You are in fact intimately connected to everybody and everything.

Although you lead your life on a daily basis as if you were a separate entity, unconsciously you do know that this is not your true state of being. Deep within you is a memory that tells you that you are connected and at one with all that exists in the Universe. This memory is triggered when you either choose or are forced to let go of the material aspects of life. That was why in the earlier death-bed exercise it was so easy for you identify what really matters to you. When all the physical distractions that have preoccupied you in life have fallen away you naturally return to your authentic state. You know intuitively that this is about being re-connected to the people who have meant the most to you in life. It is like trying to get back to your true home; a place of heartfelt bonding and love.

Clearly we have a problem with perception. Our conventional senses tell us we are separate from the people and things around us but our hearts tell us that we a connected. So what is real? To understand what might be going on we can look at what science has discovered about the nature of matter. I will focus on this in the next blog...

 I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.

Something Is Missing - Introduction (No. 1 in Series)

This is the first blog in a major series that will eventually be built into a book called 'Something Is Missing'. The blogs will show you how to find and develop your spirituality so you can bring more love and happiness into your life. I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.

 

Many people in the more affluent and technologically developed parts of the world have a sense that ‘something is missing’ from their lives. They may be relatively successful and are materially comfortable, but they have still not found the contentment and inner peace that they crave. If you are reading this blog I assume that you are familiar with that nagging feeling. Or you might be searching for understanding and meaning following a difficult or challenging episode in your life. Although you might not be desperately unhappy, you have a feeling of emptiness inside and know that something critical is missing from your life.

Although these feelings are unpleasant, at least your intuition is working well and telling you that something is wrong with the way you are approaching life. This is useful in itself but there is much more to these feelings than this. For your intuition to warn you that something is missing, you must already know what that something is! In fact it's not missing,  it's just hidden within you at the moment. So the good news is that very thing that will bring you true happiness is lurking somewhere deep within your mind, and it is waiting to be discovered.

I hope that the fact that you already have everything you need to make you happy comes as a relief. It means you don’t need to learn anything new or strive to be anything or anybody that you are not already. You have all the gifts you need to find true and lasting happiness. You might not be aware of these things at the moment because they are largely hidden in your unconscious mind, but I will help you unearth them in these blogs.  

In order to do this I would like to take you through a process of self-discovery. It will dig down beneath the surface details and distractions of your life so you can find the real you. This will require quite a lot of personal honesty and courage because it is likely to bring up some difficult thoughts and feelings. Please don’t be put off by this. I am not trying to scare or disturb you, I am opening up these areas of your mind because by facing your fears and letting them go you will automatically reveal your underlying gifts of love and happiness.

So let’s begin with quite a challenging exercise. I want you to focus straight away on the things that matter most to you in life.

Imagine that today is the last day your life and you know that you have only a few hours left. What are you thinking and feeling? What matters most to you in these precious last few hours? What would you do? Spend a few minutes considering these questions.

How did you get on?  It’s not easy to think about these things. Most of us are not in the habit of dwelling about our own death because it brings up our deepest fears, but I hope you were able to put these aside and think about what you would want in your final hours. The worries and distractions of your daily life should have fallen away to reveal what really matters to you.

When I first asked myself these questions I was quite surprised at what came up. I didn’t think about myself at all – my mind went immediately to my children, parents, my wife and the rest of my family. Gone were all my daily concerns about money, work or health. These practical things just didn’t matter at the end of my life. All I could think about was my love for the people closest to me. Then came an aching desire for them to be by my side so I could tell them, and show them how much I loved them. I was soon overwhelmed by my emotions and am not ashamed to admit that I shed many tears.

I would guess that in your final hours you also focused on the love for the people close to you. Nothing else seems important when we face the ultimate and unavoidable conclusion to our lives. If you have ever lost somebody you love through death or faced the ending of a particularly significant relationship, you will know how painful this can be. Suddenly all the practical aspects of life fall away and you have a stark reminder that all that really matters is love and relationships.

I am always struck by how easy it is to identify the central importance of love in our lives when we face losing it. Few people would deny that it is through loving relationships that we find true happiness and success, and yet the truth is that we often struggle with this element of our lives. A vast majority of the problems that we face in life are relationship problems - at home, at work, in society, or internationally. Even our relationship with the planet we live on is out of balance and unsustainable.

So we must ask ourselves an important question. “Why if love is so important to us to do we lead our lives as if it wasn’t”? In answering this we are drawn to an inescapable and disturbing conclusion. We must be deliberately denying love and sabotaging our relationships. Dig even deeper and we discover that the only explanation for this is that we must be afraid of love.

At face-value it seems ridiculous that we could be afraid of love, something that is so beautiful and brings us so much joy. I certainly felt this way when I was first introduced to this idea, but as I have become more self-aware I have come to accept that I do indeed have this fear. I have also begun to understand where this fear comes from and how it is damaging my life and virtually everybody else’s life. It is hard to over-estimate the pain and misery that is created by this denial, and yet we are largely unaware that we are doing this to ourselves. 

In the blogs that follow I will explain where this denial comes from and how it is intimately related to our fear of love. In the next blog we will look at the process of falling in love and how this teaches us so much about love and the fears that surround it.

Next Blog: Falling In Love - What It Teaches Us About Love

This is the first blog in a major series that will eventually be built into a book called 'Something Is Missing'. The blogs will show you how to find and develop your spirituality so you can bring more love and happiness into your life. I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.