Food for Thought

There have been many wise words written over the years. This selection of quotes all make fairly obvious sense on first reading, but it is my hope that each one will mean even more to you by the time you reach the end of this book.

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation."

Herbert Spencer

"To be, or not to be: that is the question."

William Shakespeare

"A human being is part of the whole called by us "Universe" ... a part limited by time and space. He experiences his thoughts and feelings as separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his own consciousness. This delusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."

Albert Einstein

"Imagine all the people sharing all the world."

John Lennon

"There is so much good in the worst of us, And so much bad in the best of us, That it hardly behooves any of us To talk about the rest of us."

Edward Wallis Hoch

"Whisper words of wisdom, let it be."

Paul McCartney

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Reinhold Niebuhr

"Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness."

Eckhart Tolle

"The greatest power we are given is the power to change our mind."

Marianne Williamson

"The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."

John Milton

There are countless other quotes that I could have included, but these few cover most of what I want to talk about. There is a lot to get through, and where better to start than at the beginning?

In the Beginning

The double meaning in the title of this book is, for me, a profound truth. We are far more than the sum total of our thoughts, and therefore we are far more than we think we are. Whatever you may think of yourself at this precise moment, good or bad, I believe that by the end of this book you will realise that you are far more than you previously considered possible. We are more than we think. Our thoughts and feelings are part of the story, but there is a lot more to it than that. Far more.

I talk about "we," but actually I am really referring to "me." I am making the heroic assumption here that there are enough similarities between you and me to render my experience relevant to some degree. There will be many differences, certainly, because each of us is unique, but there will also be similarities because we all have varying degrees of the same basic human characteristics. If what I say makes no sense, then hopefully we can agree to disagree. If I occasionally cause offence or irritation, I apologise. I am not claiming to have all the answers, but I do know that my own life has changed extraordinarily for the better as a result of what I have found to be true.

There is no previously unknown wisdom in this book. I claim little credit for any of the ideas or concepts that you will find here. It is simply that my own life experience has caused me to search for understanding, and fortunately, I have had the time and resources to do so. What I have discovered has completely changed my perception of the world and consequently my whole experience of life.

Some of the ideas presented here may well seem unpalatable at first, but I encourage you to read through to the end, so you have the opportunity to see the whole picture. We often spend so much time looking at the threads of our lives that we fail to step back and see the beauty of the tapestry. The landscape that emerges is far bigger and more wonderful than I could ever possibly have imagined.

I am going to cover a broad range of subjects in the coming pages, but I am no expert in any one of them. It has been, for me, like working on a giant jigsaw puzzle. Once I have a clear enough view of each piece, I simply fit it into place and move on to the next. I could spend much more time on each piece and go into more depth, but the danger here is that we get immersed in the individual trees and miss the beauty of the woods.

We live in a privileged age, in which many of us have access to the Internet and hence to a significant proportion of the cumulative knowledge of humankind. The information presented online is also being constantly updated. I have no doubt that the ideas presented here will raise many more questions, and we all have the opportunity to investigate any one of them at our own pace by simply typing a search into an Internet browser.

My own research has taken place over several years and has involved a great deal of reading and listening. It has also led me to talk with many hundreds of people along the way, from all sorts of backgrounds and beliefs. A key theme that emerges from these interactions is that most people who seek deeper understanding of life tend to do so from a position of suffering. I believe this is because our own sense of self is so powerful that we have no interest, or need, to look beyond our ego unless we are in so much pain that we have to. Pain is the touchstone of growth. "No pain, no gain," as the saying goes. My hope is that this book will not only help those who are suffering but will also be of use to those who currently feel safe and secure in life but wish to experience something more. However good or bad your life may be at this moment, it is my deepest wish that you may find something in these pages that is of benefit to you.

My primary motivation in writing this book is to share what I have learned. We all lead busy and purposeful lives, yet it is only when we quiet our minds that wisdom emerges. This wisdom is not mine to possess or indulge in. My purpose is simply to pass it on.

If you find the material in this book relevant for your life, I would encourage you to please share this knowledge with family and friends. My objective is not to sell more books but to share this wisdom as widely as possible. Personal recommendation is far more powerful than any amount of marketing, and you can make a big difference to the lives of others if you choose to do so. Knowledge is readily available, but wisdom speaks loudest when it is shared with love.

Moving now to the fundamentals of spirituality, let us start with a topic that matters to all of us: the important subject of energy.

Energy Matters

Much of what we will cover in the following chapters is underpinned by a simple yet crucial scientific understanding that we should explore briefly at the outset. Science tells us unequivocally that physical matter is ultimately comprised of vibrations of energy. My perception of the world used to be based predominantly on what I could physically experience through my senses, but now I see it all as energy. If we view spirituality as some form of non-physical energy, this opens the door to the possible coexistence of physical matter and spirit. It also introduces the idea that everything in the universe is made from the same underlying energy. The variations of physical matter seem to be infinite, yet within every conceivable thing there must be the energy that lies at its source.

Most of us have, at some time, placed a log onto a fire and watched with fascination as it eventually bursts into flame, releasing incredible light and heat. This simple, common event holds the key to everything else that we are going to cover, because what we observe here is matter changing into energy in front of our very eyes. Matter and energy are visibly interchangeable. In my mind, matter and energy were two totally separate things, but it turns out this was one of many misconceptions I had held. Matter and energy are the same thing, just existing in different forms depending on their individual states.

A useful way to clarify this idea of interchangeability is to consider the various forms of water that exist in our daily lives. If we take an ice cube out of the freezer and drop it into a saucepan on the stove and apply heat, we already know what will happen. The solid ice will slowly turn into liquid and will then gradually come to a boil and evaporate as steam. If we were to capture the steam, condense it, and then place it back in the freezer, it would obviously return to being ice. This example is not intended to demonstrate matter turning into energy but to show how a substance such as water can exist in different forms depending on its temperature—or to use another term, subject to its energetic vibration or oscillation.

This same concept of apparently different things being composed of the same thing applies to energy and matter. According to Albert Einstein, there is a fixed quantity of energy and matter in the universe, and the two are interchangeable. This interchanging is happening constantly. One glance at the sun tells us that this is so, with the mass of the star being continually converted into light and heat. At the subatomic particle level, each new discovery in particle physics is taking us closer to the inescapable conclusion that the tiny, subatomic components of matter are themselves simply vibrations of energy. Also, it is understood that the process of photosynthesis uses the energy of the sun to fuel a chemical reaction, the result of which is a tiny increase in the mass of the elements involved in the conversion. In simple terms this means the growth of a plant is partly due to the interchanging of the sun's energy into physical matter. So we have matter turning into energy, we have energy turning into matter, and we have subatomic particles being comprised of vibrations of energy. It is basically all the same thing, just as the different states of water are the same thing.

The next point to consider is that matter itself is not what we first imagined it to be. Our classroom chemistry teacher told us that materials are made from chemicals, which are made from molecules, which in turn are made from atoms. These atoms are comprised of a nucleus and numbers of electrons that whiz around the nucleus at great speed. What I did not fully appreciate until recently was the relative scale of these components. If we were to imagine the nucleus of an atom as a tennis ball and place it in a huge, open space, the electrons would be the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence and would be travelling around up to two kilometres away. I still find the picture difficult to visualise, but this is the underlying reality of our physical world. Amazingly, it is estimated that atoms are 99.9999 per cent empty space. What we sense and perceive as solid objects are in fact chemical constructions made from spacious atoms, and even the miniscule subatomic particles themselves are just vibrations of energy anyway. Everything is just space and energy.

These two ideas regarding energy and matter are difficult for us to accept because our experience in the world does not seem to support them. I still find it difficult to conceive that solid objects are 99.9999 per cent unoccupied space. When I touch something physical, I perceive it to be solid, yet in reality it is not. When I look at my body it seems real, but it is said that if we stripped out all the empty space in every atom in our bodies, the actual matter remaining would be the size of a pinhead.

The solution for me is to imagine that the electrons in the atoms are all moving around so fast that they create the illusion of being in different places at the same time. It is a bit like the propeller on an aircraft that seems to create a circular shape when it rotates quickly, but then reveals just the blade when it slows down and stops. We are left with the inescapable truth that solid objects are neither solid nor inert. A lump of rock is simply an underlying energy manifested in physical form, and so too is everything else in the universe, including us.

All things move and vibrate in perpetuity. This implies that the physical world as we perceive it is in fact an illusion. The use of the word "illusion" here is problematic because we instantly reject the notion that our view of the world could be so mistaken. However, the definition of an illusion is an instance of misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience. It is a tough one to grasp, but for me the logic of the scientific explanation is impossible to ignore, and I have to conclude that my perception of the world has hitherto been too narrow.

The science behind particle physics is a huge subject in its own right, but for our purpose, all we need to do is recognise and acknowledge that energy and matter are the same thing existing in different states. Once we appreciate this basic truth, we can quickly see how everything in the universe could be made from the same thing. There is much scientific research underway at this very moment to explore these ideas and theories in more depth. There are also theories of a unified field of energy that I will attempt to explore in a later chapter. The complex physics are way beyond my comprehension, but for me the principle is established.

Energy really does matter. All is not as it seems. We are living in a gigantic illusion. The physical world that we experience is instead the universal energy of life expressing itself as matter. It is the energy that matters, and it matters far more than the perceived physical reality of life. The source of all that we experience is energy.

Out of My Mind at Last

Having established that we are 99.9999 per cent non-physical, we can move on to consider what the underlying energetic reality of our existence might be.

We have probably all heard the phrase "body, mind, and spirit," but somehow I had the notion that my mind and spirit were rolled into one. I considered myself to be comprised of just a body and a mind. This is perhaps understandable given the way in which we go about our daily lives.

We see ourselves in the mirror and easily identify with our bodies. Indeed all of us are acutely aware of our bodies, either positively or negatively, or a mixture of both for most of us. We are bombarded with images and advice as to how we should look, how we should dress, and how we should appear to the outside world. For many of us, our physical appearance is of paramount importance in our lives.