Delve into the Mysteries with Love

“Some believe the answer to life and the universe can't be found by looking through a microscope or inspecting spiral galaxies. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves. Our consciousness is why they exist. It unifies the thinking, extended worlds into a coherent experience and animates the music that creates our emotions and purposes - the good and the bad, wars and love. It doesn't load the dice for you to play the game of life.”
— Mickie Kent

If you travel all over Scandinavia, Norway, Denmark, and particularly in Sweden, you will find standing stones left behind by the Vikings and covered in carvings and a form of writing known as runes. You usually find them on Viking gravestones, and because they are etched into large monumental bits of stone rather than parchment or vellum, there is a tendency to mythologise them - to see great truths in the runes.

According to Norse mythology, the runes were found by Odin, the supreme god of the Norsemen, while he was hanging from the tree of life, the famous Yggdrasil. It is said that for nine days and nights Odin stayed in the great tree waiting in hope, until eventually the runes fell into his hands and revealed themselves to him. Odin passed them to people, and thus, from the start, the runes were associated with magic and the mysteries of the cosmos.

This story about Odin up in the trees and the origin of the runes is an example of the extraordinary power words have over us. They have a resonance that echoes the importance of communication, and word-smiths and writers who are distilling the world around us divine for truth through them. In my series, "Love is Communication", I wrote about the power of words, and it is clear when we look down the ages of our human history that words, letters and symbols are loaded with meanings for us.

For instance, the runic alphabet or Futhark had 24 letters originally, but they took it with them when the attacked Britain, and it grew to 33 letters. The new letters were needed to describe new sounds. Every time the Vikings conquered a new territory, new words entered their language. They needed new letters to describe them. So, the runes were never some cobweb-covered dead language, the words were always alive, vibrant and constantly changing.

Although their reputation has a raping and pillaging horde of berserker tribes gives us an inaccurate picture, the Vikings were one of the last so-called "barbarian" nations to convert to Christianity. Paganism's hold on the frozen north wasn't broken until the 10th Century, a thousand years after the birth of Christ. King of Denmark, Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, is famous for bringing Christianity to the Danes - lured by the power promised of mortality conquering death.

Death is a subject that has kept its impenetrable secrets to itself, but religion has been an avenue for trying to understand the mysteries of life, and its end. The ancient religions have enjoyed a resurgence, too - the summer solstice, 21 June, is one of the most important dates in the calendar for many followers of ancient religions, and it's a special time for people in Greece who worship the country's pre-Christian gods.

In our mythologies, our mystic writings, and our religious beliefs we are searching out for answers to what happens after death to - or even if there is - a human spirit. Humans are complex creatures. Even our simple processes are complex. For instance, giving helpful solutions to someone (depending on how you deliver it) might sub-communicate that your solution to their problem is so obvious that they are stupid, incompetent, and inferior. Aeschylus, an ancient Greek playwright in 500 BC, said: "It is an easy thing for one whose foot is on the outside of calamity to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer".

When you want to help a fellow human being, and are tempted to send a solution to someone, you must acknowledge to yourself that you don't know the whole story. And this is true for the mysteries of life, too. Even when you think you know the truth, you probably only know one side of the story.

Experts tells us that human behaviour, and everything we experience, is like an iceberg. The visible tip of an iceberg is 10% of the entire iceberg because the density of the ice is less than the density of the sea water. The remaining 90% of the iceberg is below the surface of the water, not visible to the common eye. How the 90% of the iceberg is shaped cannot be determined by looking at the tip of the iceberg.

So the theory goes, we are icebergs - and more dangerous than anything the Vikings had to skilfully navigate across. Everything we do are icebergs. This can be a double-edged sword. On one side, most people never concern themselves with understanding the 90% of a person or story that remains hidden to nearly everyone. They prefer to focus on themselves, stick with what they know, and never seek to fully understand people or the mysteries of life. On the other side is the tremendous potential to connect with people and life in a way they've never connected before.

Read about the power of communication.

If you only try to assert yourself and persuade the person to your way of thinking, then you will probably push them further away instead of helping them. The same is true when we search for the mysteries of life, and is possibly why traditional religions are being usurped by even more traditional and pagan beliefs. We don't want to feel that our beliefs are being imposed on us; we want to question, and research and spiritually assess the world around us for ourselves.

No one likes to be told what to do. No one likes being controlled because it impedes on their freedom. It is a fundamental human need to be in control of one's life. Some psychologists say the more a person is in control of his or her life, the more happy he or she is. Powerful people lead others without controlling so they have freedom to make their own choices. It communicates that you are not trying to change that person, but merely help them.

The most common communication barrier people use in this situation is giving advice. They try to send a solution to help the person. They think they're doing the person a favour by giving advice, but all they're really doing is making the person feel frustrated for having received the solution. Helping someone isn't about exerting control. A side-effect of having control over someone is the feelings of inferiority in the advised person. When we lose control of ourselves, we feel like a lesser person. We seek to feel important, but solutions and advice prevent people from fulfilling this important need.

Going back to the example of where you tried to help someone, only to be met with resistance and hatred, imagine if you knew exactly why the person reacted the negative way they did towards you. What would you do? You would remain calm because their anger, abuse, silence, shooting down of your ideas, humiliation of you - or whatever poor behaviour and communication they used - would not surprise you. You would know how to exactly how to handle the situation, and would not be caught off guard. You could work with whatever force someone threw at you and convert it around to get you - and them - out of a crisis.

What if someone is just spouting hatred from their ignorance? The far-right political party formed as a splinter group from the National Front in 1982, the British National Party's leader Nick Griffin recently insulted Nelson Mandela, who is in hospital fighting a lung infection, sparking anger by describing the ailing Mandela as a "murdering old terrorist" on Twitter. The far-right politician claimed the 94-year-old former South African president oversaw the transformation of his country from a "safe economic powerhouse" under the racist Apartheid regime to a "crime ridden basket case". He also seemed to mock the lung infection which has hospitalised the Nobel Peace Prize-winner.

What is more frightening are the majority of comments that agrees with Griffin's views carried by the Daily Mail article. However, it seems they have missed the point. The point is not whether Mandela was a terrorist or not, the point is apartheid ended; whether Griffin likes it or not, it brought the necessary change. For South Africans, love him or hate him, Mandela will have left his mark on all their lives.

The "reality" of life

When we are faced with examples of humanity's inhumanity to one another, it is only human of us that we sometimes wonder if it's worth it. But if reality isn't a thing, but a process that involves our consciousness, then can we bring about change by becoming more consciously aware of how interconnected we are to each other and the energy of life itself? Some believe if we accept a life-created reality, it all becomes simple to understand, and you can explain some of the biggest puzzles of science. For instance, it becomes clear why space and time - and even the properties of matter itself - depend on the observer.

Like the reality of life, the reality of the soul is among the most important questions of life. Although religions go on and on about its existence, how do we know if souls really exist? American essayist, lecturer, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "If, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, pre-existing within us in their highest form".

Traditionally, science has dismissed the soul as an object of human belief, or reduced it to a psychological concept that shapes our cognition of the observable natural world, but this ancient spiritual question, the idea of the soul, is bound up with the idea of a future life and our belief in a continued existence after death.

Many of us fear death. Asteroids could strike Earth at any time, producing a surface-charring blast of heat, followed by years of dust that would freeze and/or starve us to death. Nearby stars could go supernova, their energy destroying the ozone layer and sterilizing the Earth with radiation. And a super-volcano could shroud the Earth in dust. These are just a few (out of billions) of things that could go wrong. That we are even alive is a billion to one chance, and scientists surmise that in about 2.8 billion years, Earth will be devoid of all life.

Nevertheless, some argue we believe in death because we have been told we will die. We associate ourselves with the body, and we know that bodies die. But some thinkers have started to challenge the old physiochemical paradigm, and to ask some of the difficult questions about life: Is there a soul? Does anything endure the ravages of time? In answer, a new scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal event we think.

Is there a quantum theory to the soul?

The 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant declared in 1781 that space and time were real, but only indeed as properties of the mind. These algorithms are not only the key to consciousness, but why space and time - indeed the properties of matter itself - are relative to the observer. But a new theory called biocentrism suggests that space and time may not be the only tools that can be used to construct reality. At present, our destiny is to live and die in the everyday world of up and down. But what if, for example, we changed the algorithms so that instead of time being linear, it was three-dimensional like space? And if there were multiple time lines, what if we could walk through them like walking through a door?

One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. There is instead a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation, the "many-worlds" interpretation, states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the "multiverse"). The scientific theory biocentrism refines these ideas. Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology, Robert Lanza explains:

There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling – the "Who am I?" - is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?

Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting either this or that result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it's still the same battery or agent responsible for the projection.

According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects we think. Wave your hand through the air - if you take everything away, what's left? Nothing. The same thing applies for time. You can't see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything together.

Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Albert Einstein admitted that an old friend's death meant departing "from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us ... know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Immortality doesn't mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.

If we believe in this theory it means that when a loved one dies, they are still alive outside of time. After the death of his son, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote "Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature." I believe, however, that grief can teach us; it can unite enemies or sharpen our resilience - it is a restorative process where must get used to the loss of something we became accustomed to, but one which we must ultimately let go of because it adds nothing to the fact that the loss we feel is really in our minds. Possibly this is what Emerson meant; once we realise that our loved ones are still living out there somewhere in another form or time, we can leave the moment of their passing in that particular time, and move on with our own.

Consciousness is the most profound mystery in the universe, and it's said that our consciousness animates the universe like an old phonograph. Listening to it doesn't alter the record, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call "now". The songs before and after are the past and future. In like manner, you, your loved ones and friends (and sadly, the villains too) endure always. The record doesn't go away. All nows exist simultaneously, although we can only listen to the songs one by one.

"The most important thing I learned," said Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Slaughterhouse Five", "was that when a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist". In this sense, reality isn't a thing, it's a process that involves our consciousness. Life is a melody so vast and eternal that human ears can't appreciate the tonal range of the symphony. Time is the mind's tool that animates the notes, the individual frames of the spatial world.

English theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author Stephen Hawking said, "There's no way to remove the observer - us - from our perceptions of the world... The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities". You, the observer, collapse these possibilities, the cascade of events we call the universe.

In short, attempts to explain the nature of the universe, its origins, and what's really going on require an understanding of how the observer, our presence, plays a role. You can't see through the bone surrounding your brain (everything you experience is information in your mind). Biocentrism tells us space and time aren't objects - they're the mind's tools for putting everything together.

Read about the power of the mind.

We take for granted how our mind puts everything together. Like the actor on a stage, we can't see beyond the footlights. Reality is simply an information system that involves our consciousness. Until we understand ourselves, we will continue to blunder from light to light, unable to discern the great play that blazes in front of us. And understanding ourselves means understanding our universe, and how it powers the energies that gives us life, and then takes it away again.

Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg summed it up best:

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little bit above the level of a farce and gives it some of the grace of a tragedy.

Kant pointed out over 200 years ago, everything we experience - including all the colours, sensations and objects we perceive - are nothing but representations in our mind. Space and time are simply the mind's tools for putting it all together. If objects only exist with real properties if they are observed, suggest that a part of the mind - the soul - is immortal and exists outside of space and time.

What is the nature of existence?

Science has brought us countless insights that have transformed our lives. It's amazingly good at figuring out how the parts work. The clock has been taken apart, and we can accurately count the number of teeth in each wheel and gear. We know Mars rotates in 24 hours, 37 minutes and 23 seconds. What eludes us is the big picture, which unfortunately encompasses all the bottom-line issues: What is the nature of this thing we call reality?

Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions? Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome. Choices you haven't made yet might determine which of your childhood friends are still alive, or whether your dog got hit by a car yesterday. In fact, you might even collapse realities that determine whether Noah's Ark sank. "The universe," said Scottish philosopher John Haldane, "is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose".

Some scientists believe we must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos. We are more than we've been taught in biology class. Everyday life, it's said, makes this obvious. You're not an object - you are your consciousness. You're a unified being, not just your wriggling arm or foot, but part of a larger equation that includes all the colours, sensations and objects you perceive. If you divorce one side of the equation from the other you cease to exist.

Read about the riddle of consciousness.

Immortality can be achieved, some futurists believe, by downloading this consciousness into an inorganic body that can last for the long-term. Others go further to argue that by 2045 humans will achieve digital immortality by uploading their minds to computers. But is time really the enemy of consciousness? Does it even exist? We watch our loved ones age and die, and we assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. But experiments increasingly cast doubt on the existence of time as we know it. In fact, the reality of time has long been questioned by philosophers and physicists. When we speak of time, we're usually referring to change. But change isn't the same thing as time.

We awake in the present. There are stairs below us that we appear to have climbed; there are stairs above us that go upward into the unknown future. But the mind stands at the door by which we entered and gives us the memories by which we go about our day. According to biocentrism, time is the inner sense that animates the still frames of the spatial world. Remember, you can't see through the bone surrounding your brain; everything you experience is woven together in your mind. So what's real? If the next image is different from the last, then it's different, period. We can award change with the word "time", but that doesn't mean that there's an invisible matrix in which changes occur.

In biocentrism, space and time are forms of animal intuition. They're tools of the mind and thus don't exist as external objects independent of life. When we feel poignantly that time has elapsed, as when loved ones die, it constitutes the human perceptions of the passage and existence of time. Our babies turn into adults. We age. That, to us, is time. It belongs with us. For some immortality doesn't mean perpetual (linear) existence in time, but resides outside of time altogether.

Read 5 reasons why you won't die.

William Blake, an English poet and painter who would have visions which he incorporated into his art, said, "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern". Life is a journey that transcends our classical way of thinking. Experiment after experiment continues to suggest that we create time, not the other way around. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. At death, there's a break in the continuity of space and time; you can take any time - past or future - as your new frame of reference and estimate all potentialities relative to it.

In the end, even Einstein acknowledged that, "the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Life is just one fragment of time, one brush-stroke in a picture larger than ourselves, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality.

And when asked if he believed in God, Einstein replied, "There must be something behind the energy". According to biocentrism, that something is the human (or animal) mind. As already mentioned, the theory states that it's you, the observer, who collapses reality. Consciousness is one side of the equation, and matter and energy the other. In these days of experiment and disconnected theory, one point seems certain: the nature of the universe can't be divorced from the nature of life itself. If they're split, the reality is gone.

Emerson in his essay "Self-Reliance" said that "Time and space are but the physiological colours which the eye maketh ... But the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night". And religion - or in broader terms faith - gives us the courage to accept and face the night that is to come. Sometimes, it's the hope of another life which gives us courage to meet our own death, and to bear with the death of our loved ones; it seems we are twice armed if we fight with faith, and thrice armed if we fight with science.

Internationally acclaimed neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander always considered himself a man of science, until his near-death experience. He made a full recovery but he was never the same. He woke certain of the infinite reach of the soul, he was certain of a life beyond death, and wrote about it in his book "Proof of Heaven". In summary, the secret could be that we can't reduce life merely to the laws of physics – as all the great spiritual leaders of the world have intuited – because we are part of something higher, which is more noble and triumphant.

The mysteries of life are in both science and spirit, and one without the other cancels out any knowledge we may gleam in regard to the mysteries of life. When religion ignores science, it does so at its peril, when science ignores the factor of human consciousness it loses its soul. This has been true throughout our human history, but similarly - like life - history is a biological phenomenon; it's the logic of what you, the human observer experiences.

In my article "Life is Beautiful with Love" I mention how although future historians labelled the Elizabethan era as a "golden age", to the people living through that time it was probably anything but. Going further back to an age that preceded it, the Dark Ages is a time when people say civilisation stopped and ignorance ruled the world, but as historians re-evaluate that time, it is now believed to be a fine age for art. And as we understand its people through their art, for those living in the time, it was an age of light.

If any art challenges the myth of the Dark Ages, it's the art of Islam, as some of the most sophisticated art ever made. The Islamic prophet Mohammed died in 632 AD, and for the first 50 or so years after his death, Islam was preoccupied with conquest. The speed at which the Islamic empire expanded was remarkable. In just a few decades it went from nothing to gigantic. Dark Age historians describe it as the most fastest, most aggressive and most vastest feat of empire building the world has seen. Just 100 years after Mohammed's death, it stretched from the whole of Spain, whole of North Africa, the entire Middle East as far across as the borders of India.

From the great Mosque of Cordoba in Spain, to the magnificent golden Dome of the Rock in Israel the architectural art these believers left behind is some of the world's finest. Jerusalem was the heart of the religious Dark Ages, and it held some of the most early creations of Islamic art and architecture. Most of it has gone, only some survives - notably the Dome, which is situated in the holiest spot in Jerusalem where King Solomon built the first Jewish temple.

The Islamic Dome of the Rock sits upon layer on layer of crucial religious history. When the Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 AD, and claimed this site for Islam, they took possession of what is probably the most loaded religious spot on Earth. The Dome is not a mosque but a holy shrine built around a rock, which the Jews believe Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. The Ark of the Covenant is thought to lie hidden somewhere beneath as well.

Islam has a different tradition, they believe this is the holy rock from which the prophet Mohammed set off on his great night journey to heaven. So the legend goes, the angel Gabriel came to visit Mohammed at Mecca and brought him to Jerusalem. From the famed rock, the prophet ascended to heaven and there in paradise, met God and God instructed him on the Muslim duty of prayer. The rock and the architecture around it is a point of contact between man and God, and that is said to be the religious message of the whole building. It's about trying to understand the mystery of life.

Delving into the dark

The Dome has been described as one of the most significant buildings ever put up, a piece of architecture that changed history, which was deliberately taking on the architecture of the Christians. Completed in 691 AD, all the internal decorations are intended to evoke a vision of paradise for the Islamic pilgrim - a green and verdant alternative to the harsh desert landscape into which Islam was born, portraying the joys that await the believer in heaven - like a wonderful oasis in the desert.

From the outside, the Dome of the Rock has a powerful geometry about it, an air of mathematical clarity, and that is one that continues in Islamic architecture. For instance the octagon is found in a lot of Islamic art, symbolised as a bridge between the Earth as the square and Heaven as the perfect circle. Buildings were seemingly shaped by a divine mathematics, which gave it a sacred meaning. Meanwhile, the earliest known Islamic star chart can be found at a prince's 8th Century bath house, the Qusayr Amra in Jordan, depicted with Islamic frescos dotted with imagery of naked women.

Again not what you would expect from Islamic art, but this secular form of expression is just as traditional as the religious one. Islamic art, from its beginnings in the Dark Ages, holds this sensuous dimension to it - a relationship to pleasure you just don't find in other art. Such sensual imagery which was at the heart of early Islamic art is something modern Islam often forgets. Although the sexual imagery depicted was for private delectation and had no religious purpose, it's important to remember that sensuality was a part of those times, and Islamic art has depicted the naked human form - male and female - bare breasted and copulating.

The Islamic sense of humility comes to the fore in its religious building. All the great mosques of Islam inherited their clarity, simplicity and underlying sacred geometry from the humble house of their prophet. Islamic architecture is of spaces not of details, of courtyards not capitals, because they are all based on their prophet's own simple dwelling, with its most decorative niches probably inspired by Byzantine or Christian architecture.

But where Christian churches are full of pictures telling you a story, Islamic decoration is all about a visual rhythm. There are no pictures, but endless patterns and inscriptions from their holy book, the Koran. As with the legend of Odin and the runes, the power of the word was one of the most creative obsessions for Muslims of the Dark Ages.

Similarly, the barbarian Franks - the ancestors of the modern French, who were originally Germans just like the Anglo-Saxons that settled in Britain - arrived in Gaul and early in their story converted to Christianity. They became particularly fierce defenders of the faith. If you've ever wondered why the French sometimes conduct themselves as if they were the chosen people, it's because that's exactly what they thought they were. In 732 AD, the Franks, led by the heroic Charles Martel - Charles the Hammer - defeated an invading Muslim army, which had come up from Spain, hoping to conquer Europe.

The Franks believed God had chosen them to save Europe from Islam. They were His chosen people. And their art seems to particularly reflect this special position they believed they had. Plenty of Dark Age societies liked their art to sparkle, and a taste for gold is one of the Dark Ages' defining characteristics. When it came to religious bling, the Franks were at the top of charts. The mightiest of the Frankish kings, Charles the Great, or Charlemagne as he is usually called, came from a dynasty called the Carolingians. With typical Frankish modesty, after he was crowned in 768 AD, Charlemagne pushed himself right to the front of Dark Age politics.

Did Charlemagne really exist?

Charlemagne was determined to expand the Frankish empire as God's chosen empire by God's chosen leaders, and this expansion of Charlemagne's Christian empire was achieved with deep brutality. In Germany, the Saxons, who were still pagans were given a very simple choice - convert to Christianity, or die. That was Charlemagne's choice. In 800 AD, in Rome, on Christmas Day itself, the Pope rewarded Charlemagne for his efforts on behalf of Christianity, by crowning him as the Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne was now the leader of the largest empire Europe has seen since the fall of the Romans.

The centre of gravity in Europe had shifted north, where it remains today. When we think of the Dark Ages, this does not come to mind; we commonly associate it as a time of darkness. But what is perceived as darkness, can be filled with light, depending on the observer. We use religion, faith, symbols, words to light the darkness, and in doing so come to some greater understanding about the world we live in.

Unfortunately, history also shows, how we have used those same tools to dominate and persecute people we observed to be different from us, or whom we wished to assimilate to our way of thinking, or life. Once we believed we had found all the answers, we felt that it had to be followed by everyone.

Today, there is a belief of pluralism, that there is not one way, but many ways, many thoughts, and beliefs, many realities depending on who is observing it at that present moment - which is not a "time" as we classically understand it, but simply itself "reality" we have created by observing it through our consciousness. Indeed, some argue there will be histories where the power in Europe never shifted, or a world where patriarchal religions such as Islam and Christianity never existed to create so much bloodshed - and beauty - across the centuries, caught in their warring riposte.

At once, and separately, they have bulldozed and pleasured the senses of their followers, and they have in their own way tried to delve the mysteries of the universe, and declare their answers with mystical inscriptions and fascinating architecture. In Pagan Britain, Christianity attacked in from three directions at once - in a three-pronged religious assault. In the south of Britain, in ancient Kent, a team of monks led by Saint Augustine were sent by the Pope in Rome. They brought with them the official Roman version of Christianity.

In the north of Britain, it was Irish monks from across the sea, who came to convert the pagans, and they brought with them a more harsher, more basic, more penitential form of Christianity. They settled around 635 AD, and purposefully cut themselves off from life's comforts, calling themselves "Exiles for Christ". The Viking raids on Britain, which did so much to tarnish the reputation of the Norse men, began with a raid on these monks in 793 AD, and for the next century or so the Vikings kept coming back. Monasteries were easy pickings; they were basically undefended, manned by peaceful monks, and they were packed with sumptuous religious treasures.

Conversely for monks that wanted to get away from it all, the monasteries of the Dark Ages were Aladdin's cave of treasures. For the Vikings - still hardcore pagans at this time stubborn believers in Odin, Thor and Freya - the attraction of the mysterious was twofold. Defending what they saw as an assault on their pagan views - from the tactics of people like Charlemagne - while raiding all the Christian gold they hoarded, golden crosses studded with rubies and pearls and jewel-encrusted relic boxes. We live in a world in which Louis Vuitton luggage and Jimmy Choo shoes seem precious. In the Dark Ages, they knew better.

The third type of Christians found in Anglo-Saxon Britain were the ones who were already there. They were a modest Christian presence dating back from when Romans converted to Christianity under Constantine, and not a lot is known about them, apart from their humility of worship resembling that of the early Muslims. Rather than the golden artefacts of the Franks, more focus was placed on spiritual treasures, on carvings on stone, as the Vikings did.

This idea of carving on stone, as something more eternal than humans, is something that was shared by all the voyaging tribes of the north. This pagan belief translated into Anglo-Saxon funeral crosses once they had converted to Christianity, with a sense of the atmospheres of Stonehenge underneath, a connection with the faraway past, and the central mysteries of Creation. Although Celtic in origin, you can find patterns called interlacing on Anglo-Saxon crosses, but also on the great manuscripts written later by the Irish monks who converted the north of Britain - not by the sword, but with the word.

A lot of people have written a lot of books on the subject of Celtic interlacing - what it means and why it was used. It's beautiful to look at, and also intrinsically mysterious. They say its origins lie in basket weaving and plaiting, and we'll never for sure, but some historians believe it is also an attempt by the Dark Age mind to grasp and mimic the rhythms of Creation - like the Islamic patterns that decorate their mosques - to convey the sense that the cosmos goes on and on, and that everything is interrelated.

Possibly these are the two greatest secrets we discover when we delve into the mysteries, and is it mere coincide that these two constants are components to love? We have placed these mysteries in our words, letters, inscriptions throughout the ages, from runes to italics - and wherever they appear they seem to glow with the same secrets. In the Dark Ages if you controlled the word, you controlled the world. The captivating evidence of the immense power words have are still prevalent in our societies today.

And like the stories of the Dark Ages, those looking back from the future - as they delve further into the mysteries of life - will discover that our times were just as much elusive to us in understanding, as theirs will be to them. Our struggle to survive, to understand and to better ourselves will continue, and so will our connection with life and with love.

Yours in love,