This year I’ve undergone what I can only describe as a profound awakening.

A year ago, I took The Landmark Forum, a weekend course which transformed my life in ways that I never imagined. For me, it made me see that I’ve gone around my whole life adding meanings to life, and that those meanings – which become the totality of what I think I know about myself, others and the world – have shaped my view. Once I got that they were just my own meanings, and not the truth, I then was free to be present, live in the moment and see life as it is.

This has profoundly impacted how I view my body – I stopped living inside an opinion about my body and began to see it as it really was – my relationships with family and friends, my ability to communicate and listen to others (I listen to them, rather than to my opinion about what they are saying), to connect with people and many, many other exciting results.

Now, this year, as I approach 30, my life has undergone an even deeper transformation. It is something akin to a purification of the mind, a stripping away of the structures of ego and a de-programming of conditioning. It has been exhilarating and… well, odd.

You cannot free yourself from conditioning without questioning the very nature of reality. I’ve been asking some very profound questions about what I have always known and thought to be real and whether or not it really is.

Realization 1: We live in an upside-down world.

My journey has shown me that that pretty much everything that I have been taught to believe is, well, nonsense. We humans are running around on this earth doing things in accordance with an understanding of reality which is, actually, unreal.

This is the reason for so much suffering, disease, war, unrest and upset in our world. And when you think about it, it makes sense: if you follow a map that is inaccurate, you will not end up in the right location. We humans follow a map that leads us, for the most part, to unrest and unease. Seeing that for myself has been a mind trip, let me tell you.

Realization #2: Spirituality is more than a nice idea.

I’ve always been spiritual but I must admit that part of me thought that spirituality was just a nice idea, perhaps something that I could use to feel better about life, and I felt, at times, a conflict between spirituality and the material world. But during this time, I’ve come to see that the spiritual is not a fancy notion, but is really the nature of the universe in which we live. The universe is made up of energy, which others might call spirit, consciousness, or Being. The material and the spiritual are one.

I had to find out more about this, so I began delving into various bodies of scientific work. Wow. Well, there I have found that there is a HUGE amount that scientists know about reality that would give humans such a vastly different understanding of themselves and the universe, yet that information has not been passed on to us.

Realization #3: We are using the wrong roadmap to live

Isaac Newton gave the world a linear, fragmented, absolute, mechanistic view of humanity and the universe which reduced people to limited beings who are separate from one another and from the workings of the earth and the universe. He gave us the paradigm that there is a separation between man and his environment, and that there is an absolute concept of time and basically that past, present and future are real. His view of the world remains the predominant one.

However, since then, Newton’s view has been debunked. It is erroneous, inaccurate and outdated. Einstein – who came quite soon after Newton – realized that rather than living inside a linear, mechanistic universe, we live in a quantum, energy-filled, boundless universe in which we are all part of one whole and that everything emanates from one source.

There is no separation between beings nor their environment. Even more dramatically, Einstein said that there is no difference between the observer and the observed. That is, what anyone sees and experiences is a function of who they are rather than what is.

Yet, we are still living inside a Newtonian-based world and being taught Newtonian-based principles that pervade education, healthcare, society and politics. The funny thing is that even Newton rejected his own idea of the world as being the way that he had described it.

From the idea about what a human being is, to what we are capable of, to how we make things happen, to what the world is, how it works, who other people are it’s all back to front. I’ve come to discover that we live in an upside-down, back-to-front world in which we are literally taught things that are the total opposite of how things actually work.

Realization #4: What I think about reality and what is real are two different things

Our world, for example, is run by the idea of lack and scarcity. We live inside a global paradigm of not-enoughness. I’m not enough, you’re not enough, the world isn’t enough, nothing is enough. We must get, have, be and do more, more and more.

This view is further exacerbated and driven by western consumerist culture which teaches us that we are nothing and nobody until we achieve, own, possess or have certain things – certain things which have been determined by goodness knows who.

However, scarcity is not real. If you look in physical reality, where is scarcity? There are millions of species of plants and innumerable species of animals. It is said that scientists have no idea how many species live in the sea, and that we have perhaps discovered about 10% of them. Inside your body are trillions of cells. The universe has been alive for some 13.73 billion years (at least) and contains an octicillion – yes you read that right – of atoms.

Physics has long known that all matter is energy. (Hence, Einstein’s equation that E=MC squared.) Those who studythe universe have found that the amount of energy in the universe is infinite, and ever expanding. This essentially means – since all matter is energy – that there is an infinite amount of invisible energy which can produce an infinite amount of visible matter in the universe. The universe is a living creative entity that has created, is creating and will create ad infinitum.

Realization #5: Limited senses = a limited view of the world

It is only when we use our senses to understand the nature of our world that we see scarcity. Our senses cannot perceive invisible energy so it looks as if we live in a scarce world, limited by what we can perceive. What we seem not to realize is that our perceptions are not the same as reality. If we live inside perceptions, we are trapped, since your perceptions are inherently limited. This is what happened when people thought that the sun revolved around the earth. They perceived it to be so, but that didn’t mean that it was so.

Realization #6: We see the world we are, not as it is.

One of the key things that I have come to know in the past year, and as Einstein and others have shown, is that the observer and the observed are the same. What this means is that what I see is who I am. The world is not separate from me. I see a world that IS me. This means that each of us lives in a self created universe. When you think about this, it’s not really that radical – place 10 people at the scene of the crime and they will all come back with 10 different views of what happened.

Although this is simple, it is also very profound. Wars would stop if we really understood this. Relationships would improve if we really understood this. Your workplace would alter if we really got this. People only compete with each other because they perceive a world of limitations and scarcity. People only hate each other because they perceive that their own ideas about life ARE how life really is and that they must defend them and hate others who don’t believe the same. Relationships only go sour because we interpret another’s words and actions and them live as if our interpretation of them is what’s true.

If you really understood that you see the world as you are and not as it is, what difference would that make for how you interact with people? or even yourself? Are you seeing what is, or are you seeing your perception? I realized that I lived inside a world of perceptions, interpretations and opinions which had nothing to do with reality, and that for as long as I lived inside those, I’d be eternally misguided at best. Not living in perceptions means actually being awake and being conscious to the fact that I even have perceptions that are different from reality!

An exercise!

This week as you go around, observe yourself. Observe whatever happens around you and then see if you can notice your judgements and perceptions about those things and how they shape how you view and respond to everything around you. That’s all there is to do, just to be aware. For the most part you may not even realize that you have judgements and perceptions – it will appear to you that what you see is just the way it is. But that’s part of the erroneous conditioning.

Let me know how it goes!

It’s time for us all to wake up!!!

You may have asked yourself the question above at some point. You know, you are at work and the guy who is the Managing Partner of your firm doesn’t seem to be anything special to you. Yet, he’s the Managing Partner, making wayyy more money than you, with way more power and influence.

Or how about that woman who is number 1 in the charts and is splashed all over the cover of every magazine? She’s an average singer with average looks from your perspective, but she’s massively wealthy and famous. What’s so special about her then?

Or what about the person you went to school with who get worse grades than you but is now a superstar entrepreneur?

Many of us have wondered how this kind of thing happens.

Is it their family? Their connections? The way they speak? Being in the right place at the right time? Well, there’s no doubt that some of those things come into it. But they can’t be all. Even if you come from the ‘right’ family, if you don’t know how to make the most of what you have, it will make little difference. So what does make the difference?

It’s what’s in your head that makes the difference. Yes, your thoughts. Your mindset. Your attitude. How you view yourself. How you view life. How you view others. The things you say to yourself. The most important and valuable tool that you have at your disposal is your mind.

Unfortunately, mostly our minds run us rather than us using our mind as a resource. Imagine if your hand kept hitting you in the face? You’d think there was something not right. After all, you direct your hand to work, not the other way around. Yet that’s what we do with our minds!

I have a degree from Cambridge and pretty much the best education that money can buy. Literally. And I’ve come to realize that none of it on its own makes the blindest bit of difference. Not in the real world.

We are taught that education is the key to success but if that was true then professors and academics would be running the world. I know that it is not my education that makes the difference to the quality and experience of my life, nor to my success – material or otherwise.

It’s no surprise to me that many of the wealthiest and most successful people (on a material level at least) in our world are not massively educated. Many of them left school at a relatively young age or dropped out of college. What makes them do well is their mindset. Look at this Will Smith video and hear what the man is saying. It is those beliefs that has him be where he is today. Is he the best actor in the world? No. But so what?! He is harnessing his most precious tool to create results.

Even if we don’t define success in terms of material things, the quality of the experience of your life still comes down to what’s going on in your mind. I recently met a woman whose daughter and husband were two of five Americans who were killed in the bombings in Mumbai a few years ago. I cried when I met this woman. She was devastated, but she was at peace. Despite the tragedy, she is now working with governments to foster alliances and peace with terrorists. Peace! Not revenge, not blaming, not scapegoating but peace. This is a woman who has had her entire family and life shattered, yet in the midst of that has chosen – because it is always a choice – peace.

Yet I know people who are still upset because their parents said something mean to them when they were 15? Or those whose life is consumed by a relationship that didn’t turn out right? This is all of us to some degree… We all have those past experiences which have impacted us. But the only thing that will make a difference is, once again, what’s in our mind. What we choose to have that experience mean, and the power we are going to choose to give to circumstances.

This is not about positive thinking by the way. Nor is this about having perfect circumstances. It is actually about using your mind to be powerful wherever you are. It’s about realizing that that is what the mind is there for!!

You may notice in the video that Will Smith said that where he came from didn’t matter so much as where he was going (I paraphrase). This is what enables the supposedly ‘average’ student, or ‘average’ singer to greatness. The truth is, if what you have, where you live, who your parents are or your education was the determining factor in quality of life, most of us would be screwed!

I always say that the reason we come into the earth naked and leave naked is because we already have everything we need within us. The other bits are just peripheral.

So today I challenge you to become aware of what’s going on in your own mind. Who would you be being if you truly realized and understood that your greatness already lies within in you and is in fact right in between your ears?

We live in a hyper fast world. Emails, text messages, IM’s, Facebook chats and tweets are delivered in a second. Speed is the order of the day, and we want to do more in a shorter period of time. What where does this leave us? It can leave us stressed, frazzled, and not to mention unfulfilled. Isn’t it a paradox that the more stuff you fill your life with, and the faster you go the emptier you can feel? And what’s the point of the job titles, the money, the clothes and whatever else if you don’t have peace of mind, joy and contentment?

It’s a wonder that despite the evidence to the contrary – just look at some of the highest profile people in our society – we seem unable to really see that doing more and having more is not the key to happiness. The key to happiness is quite simple – it’s just to be happy. Yes, right now, where you are with what you have.

The only thing that has an influence on your experience of life is your state of being. And your state of being is a choice. If you choose to be miserable about something, that will have a particular experience of life that involves misery and suffering. If you choose to be joyful, you will have a joyful experience of life – regardless of your circumstances.

The main key to all of this is that you can only experience life right now. We are often so concerned about getting ‘there’ that we fail to look at who we are being here! There is no ‘there’ to get to, no someone to become. Slow down, be present, and be happy with who you are. Today. Here. Now.

“I think therefore I am” wrote the philosopher Descartes. He could, although he didn’t, have also said “I feel therefore I am”. Most of us believe both statements to be true.

We are conditioned to invest our thoughts and feelings with a great deal of power and credence. The idea is that we must pay attention to, examine, and identify with every thought and feeling that crosses our mind. We actually come to believe that we really ARE – as Descartes said – our thoughts and feelings.

On any given day, our mood can range from high to low, based on what thoughts are going through our mind at any time. If your mind says “I feel bad” then you start feeling bad. If your mind says “I feel good” then you start feeling good.

There is nothing wrong with this, it is just worth being aware that for the most part, we do not consciously choose which thoughts and feelings we are going to have, nor do we tend to be conscious of where they are coming from. They arise and we simply buy into them. For the most part, we do not have thoughts, they have us!

I assert that we are not our thoughts nor our feelings. We can’t be. By virtue of knowing that we have thoughts and feelings, we cannot be them. So, who are we beyond thoughts and feelings?

What if the things you felt and thought weren’t true? What if they were just old conditioned responses from the past, created when you were a child, that you just continue to repeat over and over again as an adult?

What would your life be like if you simply stopped giving some much power to your thoughts, if you didn’t have to follow each one as it arose? What if you chose those which gave you power and left alone those that didn’t?

What would your life be like if you could just observe your thoughts, see them for what they are – just some thoughts – and allow them to pass on by, while you attend to what you are here to do? Live!

For today join me in taking on allowing your thoughts to arise, observing them and letting them pass…

Beyond thinking lies peace!

How do you feel when you don’t know something? Do you welcome uncertainty, or do you feel that you need to be – or at least act as if you are – certain, sure and have it all together? How comfortable are you with not knowing?

As humans, we rate knowledge highly and we often hold on – tightly – to what we know. Listen to people debating religious or political beliefs and you’ll see what I mean. Or, see how many of us respond to a circumstance such as unemployment. We could see those times as opportunities to learn something new, grow and undertake new endeavours rather than threats or things to be feared.

Not knowing can, and often does, induce fear and panic. However, contrary to what we have been conditioned to believe, not knowing is a wonderful place to stand. It is an opportunity and a space of creation.

Little is possible when you think you know everything already and believe that you already have all the answers. Not knowing begs the question “what’s possible?”

If you took away everything you ever knew, what would be available to you? If you stand in a space of not knowing today – since, in fact, we never really know anything for sure – what’s possible for your life?

There are two components to life: what happens, and what you say about that. What happens is just what happens. What you choose to say about what happens has the most impact on the quality of your life. And your word in the matter of your life is *always* your choice. What are you saying about your life today?

When you die, what will you leave behind? You’re creating your legacy right now…Make it count!

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The presence of each and every one of us on this earth makes a difference. YOU make a difference. Not only do you impact the quality of your own life, you impact the quality of the lives of others, and the quality of life itself on this earth. You have that kind of power.

What quality of life are you and your actions creating today? And what kind of quality of life will you create tomorrow? It’s for you to choose and to create.

When you die, you will leave behind your creations. A word you say today – whether uttered out of love, or anger – can go on to make a difference for years and generations to come. A gesture – whether kind or unkind – can alter someone’s experience of life. Choose your words and actions with care.

You will leave behind a world in which others will continue to inhabit. Who you are matters not only for your life, but the lives of others to come.