Author name: Bryan Hubbard

Everything is energy.  The table in front of you is energy (it just seems to be solid because of the bandwidth at which your senses and brain operate), and so is your anger, upsets and disappointments of yesterday and the years before.

This is not news to those of you involved in energy healing, but it’s always worth repeating, and it helps makes sense of the rest of what I’m going to say.

It all starts with two books I’m reading right now.  The first is Identically Different by Tim Spector, a professor of genetics at King’s College London.  Spector was a paid-up member of the Richard Dawkins’ school of genetics, the ‘bottom-up’ approach that posits that we are nothing more or less than walking gene machines.  Our genes dictate everything about us and determine what we do.

That is until he started looking at the lives of identical twins, who have identical DNA, of course.  If Dawkins is right, you’d expect the twins to have almost identical lives – similar wives or husbands, similar tastes in everything, similar careers, similar health issues, and so on.  Except – they didn’t.  The lives of the twins he studied had remarkably different lives – from different coloured eyes, being right- or left-handed, to dying years apart.  One twin even spent her life plotting the murder of her sibling!

The historian and writer Gitta Sereny died last week, and something in her obituary caught my eye.  Her motivation in visiting most of the world’s war zones was “the search for what it is that leads human beings so often and so readily to embrace violence and amorality.  For me, the answer to this fundamental question lies in a personal and human rather than a theoretical or intellectual realm.”

Many in the New Age movement speak sweet words about global peace and non-violence, but they are not serious in their quest. Until we get to the heart of violence –why man enjoys war and, shocking as that sounds, it seems he does – we cannot hope to end it.

Last week I looked at a few common causes of anger.  This week I’d like to explore one of the most intriguing of them all, and it reveals something miraculous about you.

Some of us get angry when our view of how the world should be clashes with the stark reality of how it actually is.  He should have done this, but he did that…she shouldn’t have said that (but did)…he shouldn’t have behaved that way, and so on.

Sometimes we look at ourselves the same way.  I shouldn’t have been so stupid…I should have realised she would do that…I should never have said that.  And sometimes we rail against the way the world is: we should do more to feed the hungry…we shouldn’t go to war…

Mystics and philosophers tell us that it’s pointless trying to mould our world and ourselves into what it should be, and instead accept things as they are.  In ethical philosophy, it’s known as normative, and shapes the way the world should be through a series of maxims (eg, people shouldn’t murder – but they do, of course, so a more pragmatic ethical system would instead start from that premise).

Biologists agree.  If we are, indeed, complex sensory-input, carbon-based bipeds, why do we keep imagining what isn’t there, or wishing away what’s in front of us?

But I’m intrigued by that ubiquitous word should, because I think it gives us a clue about ourselves.  You see, I think we constantly use should because that’s how the world once was for us.