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.

I used to have a bad temper.  I’d get angry about a whole lot of things, including inanimate objects that didn’t bend to my immediate will.  The ‘red mist’ would come down and I’d be carried along by a tsunami of emotion over which I had absolutely no control.

But why do we get angry?  As I explain in Time-Light, anger has several roots, all related to time.

One cause is the recognition of an anticipated pattern.  In other words, there is an immediate comparison to a past event that didn’t go the way we wanted, and we fully expect a similar outcome again.

Another can be the extension of time into an imagined future.  Something in the present moment frustrates the progress towards something that is about to happen, such as making an appointment or catching a train.

I’ve been re-reading Talks with Ramana Maharshi the last few days (strange how books suddenly demand to be taken from the shelf).  It’s a book I’ve owned for more than 30 years; it is a verbatim account of his talks with visitors to his ashram during the mid-1930s.

His message is simple, yet frustratingly elusive for most of his questioners.  You are consciousness – the seer behind sight, the hearer behind hearing, the observer that is with you when you are awake and when you sleep.  The mistake we make is believing we are a body.

I can imagine his visitors being inspired by his message and his presence – but soon after, I reckon they quickly got back into their day-to-day struggles of making money and surviving.

So why don’t we ‘get’ it?  Why don’t these messages – even from the greatest sages – ever quite stick?