Wherever you are right now, whatever you're doing - pause. Fix your gaze on a specific object or person - see. Run your fingers along the fabric of your clothing - feel. Select a specific sound - hear. Take a deep breath - smell. And run your tongue along your teeth and lips - taste.

When we deliberately experience the moment, we further develop our ability to be present - to have presence. Come to your senses - you have five of them, use them.

A quick look at the news will confirm that normal people do not know how to behave themselves.

Here, in France, the politicians are slugging it out - Francois Hollande's left are doing their damn best to destroy Sarkozi's chances of even running for president in four years' time. Whilst Sarkozi's troups' behaviour, during his time in power, has come under the microscope, the current carry on is being played out, nightly, on the evening news for all to see.

At pretty much the same time, we have people beating the living daylights out of each other on the streets of Northern Ireland - all prompted by a battle that took place over three hundred years' ago - what chance have you got of overcoming your programming in that kind of environment?

Further afield, we have Sunnis and Shiites killing each other daily. Two families who, fourteen hundred years ago, had a row over who owned one of the first written versions of the Koran - it makes the guys in Northern Ireland look like novices!

You have the US spying on all and sundry - its allies all upset by the 'news', only for us to discover that everyone's at it... surprise, surprise.

In the middle of all this, you have you and I trying to get on with our lives. But, like the people on the streets of Rio - who got the transport price increase reversed - if we starting behaving appropriately, you and I, what difference might we make - first of all in our lives and, then, in the broader society of which we are part?

I am an integral part of the universe. My energy is entangled in all energy. How I direct my energy has a direct - albeit subtle - affect of all energy. How I expect energy to behave affects its behaviour. Indeed, even the very act of my observing energy affects its behaviour. And, although one might consider that this scientific reality only takes place at the quantum level - at the miniscule subatomic particular level - the emergence of the new scientific field of quantum biology is confirming that the apparently bizarre goings on at the quantum level has a direct and real impact in what you and I would consider the so-called real world.

In fact - in scientific fact - the real real world is a marketplace where energy is exchanged - where I get a return on my investment of energy. Unfortunately, however, if I am using my ordinary mind in an ordinary way, I invest almost none of my energy in the reality of the present moment. Instead, my energy is bound up in ruminative thought, engrossed in many of the 70,000 thoughts that randomly crowd my brain in each day. These thoughts arise randomly but they are not random - they emerge from my preconditioned subconscious, a mind preoccupied, quite literally, by nonsense that has been squatting there since my formative years - taking up space and, more importantly, sapping my vital energy.

If I invest almost none of my energy in this great energy exchange that is the universe, what do you think I am going to get in return? I will be like the chap in the Bible story who was given one Talent to mind for his master and, having hidden it away for fear of losing it, he lost everything. That's what's going on with you and I when we are mindless to the extent that we sleepwalk through the mundanity of our ordinary everyday lives... wondering why things are not different. They are not different because you've done nothing about it - you haven't bothered to turn up to your own life.

But, if you come to your senses (see Today's Quick Tip), if you take the necessary, though incredibly simple, steps to actually put in an appearance on life's great stage, then you will be rewarded - and rewarded hansomely. Like all marketplaces, life's great energy exchange works on the basis that you get a return on what you invest - the more you invest, the more you get in return.