This Week's Personal Development Video Seminar - "Which Personality Type are You?"

Myself and my family recently spent an evening on our balcony star-gazing – watching the annual Perseid Meteor Shower – when the earth passes through a band of wayward comet grit.  Many people might just see one shooting star in their lifetime – but, in the space of about twenty minutes, we counted a dozen.  It was a humbling experience.  Here we were, five insignificant dots on the balcony of a house – no more than a dot on this planet which, in itself is no more than a tiny pebble spinning at high speed through a vast space. 

That evening, we watched pieces of rock - undoubtedly billions of years old (comets are leftovers from the Big Bang) - spend the last seconds on their existence as they burned up on entering our atmosphere.

As I say, it was a humbling experience and one which gets you thinking about who you are and your place in the world - and the universe. It also gets you thinking about what people believe in - and why, as a client asked me recently, very bad things happen to ordinary people. She asked why "a loving God" would be party to the tragic drowning, whilst on holiday, of her five year old nephew. My answer related to the universe and how it responds to the things that most occupy our minds (her nephew's mother was always convinced that something dreadful would befall her children and, as a result, was over-protective).

God - who probably does not exist in the traditional religious sense - is not a loving God. God is a responsive God. Quantum physics tells us that there is a mathematically improbable degree of order in the universe because that order is being "orchestrated by an underlying entity or singularity". Quantum physics also tells us that the energy of the universe is responsive to our energy - responsive to the things that most occupy our minds.

Psychology tells us, however, that normal people's minds are most occupied by nonsense - whether it's the fifty thousand random, mainly useless, thoughts that pepper the conscious mind daily or the extent to which all normal people's minds tend towards the negative. There is strong empirical evidence to prove these facts.

As a result, the responsive universe, of which we are an integral part, gives normal people what they inherently expect - varying from the norm of "not too bad", to the tragedies that pepper the human condition. It's not that "God" does awful things, it is that we conscious or subconsciously wish these awful things upon ourselves. Buddhism might call it karma, Christianity might say the what goes around comes around - either way, these are the fundamental truths of our scientifically proven responsive universe. We get what we expect.

That truth goes a long way towards explaining our part of the greater whole - it goes a long way towards explaining why the collective nonsensical thoughts of normal people wreak havoc, on a grand scale, in our world - whether that be from war and oppression or the starvation of millions in a world where many feast themselves into obesity. That truth also gives us an insight into how we can live better lives, experience happiness, peace of mind and effortless success. In other words, it's all in our minds.

We've got to change our minds in order to play a positive role in the great responsive universe in which we live. We've got to step outside the norm - become abnormal. We've got to expect something different and, quantum physics tells us, something different will happen - for us, for those we love and for the world at large. In other words, we've got to carve out our own destinies. It is our responsibility - not that of a "loving God". After all, God loves a trier - God helps those who help themselves.

This extraordinary - or abnormal - journey starts and finishes within. We've got to take responsibility for the only thing that we can fully control in our lives - our own state of mind. We have extraordinary inner energy, power and potential. And, yet, normal people only use 1% of that inner power - the rest of it idling destructively on useless thought and the negative. If we want more out of life, we need to invest more than 1% of our mental or spiritual energy in the universe and, in turn, as sure as night follows day, the universe will respond.

The steps on the personal journey that can bring us an abnormally successful and happy life are taken one at a time - moment to moment. No one can commit to being abnormal for the rest of their lives - each of our lives is lived moment to moment in the here and now, the only place and time we have and the only time in which we can commit to being either abnormal, or abdicate our responsibility for ourselves and lapse into horrible normality. Hence, the "power of now".

The most effective way of taking control of your inner power and potential is to increase your attentiveness to what is happening and where you are, in the present moment. This is easily done by paying attention to what your five senses are telling you. We all did this as children but research tells us that we pay almost no attention at all to our five senses as adults. We need to really, really see, feel, hear, smell and taste where we are. In doing so, we prevent our minds dwelling on useless thought or on the subconscious negative. In doing so, we change our experience of now and, as a result, we change our lives. Most importantly, in doing so, we become more attuned to the free-flowing energy of a responsive universe.