A World Without Love

“A world without love is unlovable.”
— Mickie Kent

In my "Profit with Love" article I had mentioned how there would soon be no women represented on the banknotes we use in England and Wales. Well, I was both happy and saddened to read that this would soon be rectified thanks to a woman who started a campaign over the matter. Why saddened? Well, the lady in question, Caroline Criado-Perez, said that she started receiving abusive tweets the day it was announced that author Jane Austen would appear on the newly designed £10 note.

We are a strange species. Messy, angry, confused, destructive and yet creative, tidy, calm, certain and loving. It all depends on who you see, or what you think. Perception is key; but whatever way you choose to look at things, if we base all perceptions on love, then it's impossible not to see us all as individual miracles.

Even the most sceptical human being can't fail to be moved by the miracle of life. Brands are always trying to sell us something, so whatever message they give will always be attached to inventive ways to make us part with our hard-earned cash - but have you seen that recent LG commercial? The one that tells us:

You have over 100 trillion cells. You crawl from 5 months after birth, and then the walk for the rest of your life. You use around 4,200 different words and have up to 50,000 thoughts everyday you make around 1,700 friends and meet 95,000 people in your lifetime, but it only takes a split second for you to fall in love. You'll share 540,000 laughs and cry 3,000 tears, and you'll dream 104,000 times. Everything about you inspires me, to me you are perfect.

This image of perfection mentions how we strive to communicate and reach out to people everyday. My six-part series "Love is Communication" focuses on just that very thing, and I have had literally hundreds of emails thanking me for the information I provided to be freely shared by like-minded people. Many called it a "game-changer", many called it "life-changing", but really the information is just common sense. It is similar to the hype over how the majority of us equate being single with loneliness. Loneliness is a state of mind and soul, not a state of relationship.

Indeed recent research seems to point to the idea that singles are growing in numbers, and so may become the dominant living unit, and therefore less social disadvantages/stigma will exist in staying single. Researchers such as Rutgers University sociologist, Deb Carr, say that over the past 30 years, the health gap between married and unmarried persons has narrowed to almost completely close. They go on to say that, once people accept their "singleness" - make peace with it so to speak - they do just as well as most married people.

The point is that being single doesn't mean you live in a world without love. The advice is you need to do being single right. As most researchers would concur, there's a big difference between living alone and living "isolated". My series on communication, and other articles I have published, all mention how long-term isolation can become deprivation, and is a no-no when it comes to your mental and spiritual and physical development.

Even the ways we tend to end our isolation can often have the opposite of effect of making us even more isolated from healthy social contact. Too much time spent in front of our screens may or may not make TV viewing distort our outlook on the real word, or playing too many games distort the way we interact with each other (but in the real-time world we generally don't wear headphones when we speak to each other and threaten to shoot to kill). Or just by isolating ourselves on the internet - and thus leaving ourselves vulnerable to the dangers of websex and hook-up sites that promote dangerous and risk-taking behaviours, which can eventually result in real life dangers ranging from sexually transmitted diseases to physical abuse and the loss of life.

Moreover, statistics show that people who are isolated from human contact, social connections, and activities are much more likely to die at an early age. But isolation and loneliness doesn’t only occur amongst singles. Many married people are very lonely and isolated in marriages where there is little to no interaction with each other. They face the same health risks of loneliness/isolation as singles do, say researchers. The key to staying healthy and happy - whether you live alone or with a spouse, friend, relative - is to maintain positive human relationships.

Often times, singles have a much more expanded network of friends and acquaintances than marrieds do and they make more frequent contact with them. Recently, research has shown that maintaining an active social life - activities with friends - is key to staying healthy and living longer. It would seem that singles have couples beat in that area. That seems a crazy statement to make, doesn't it? Especially on a blog so focused on its belief on love, but what the evidence is telling us is that - irrelevant of our relationship status - if our world is without love, then we are sentencing ourselves to our dark and dismal life.

The best way to live single, stay happy and healthy is to:

1. Seek out more social connections – join groups, clubs of like-interest people you can meet up with once a week or every other week. Find a safe, trustworthy place to meet like-minded people with weekly, monthly daytime group activities.
2. Go where people go - get out of your house, go out for dinner, movie, whatever. Yes, it's nice to have someone join you, but sometimes a friend is not available, so don't be afraid to go solo. Enjoy your own company, don't be afraid of it.
3. Being single, you can make your lifestyle, living environment, hours, whatever you want it to be. Create the life you want, but be responsible in doing so and avoid reckless behaviour.
4. If you're older, make sure your home is fall proof. Secure throw and area rugs to floors with rug tape, watch electrical wires cutting your path. If you live alone, you want to make sure that you don't fall where you could lie on a floor for hours. Always have a backup plan of who will come to check in on you if you don't answer the phone.

To sum it up, despite the best efforts of friends and family always trying to play matchmaker for you, there's absolutely nothing wrong with living single. In some instances, your married/partnered friends may even be a little jealous of your freedom in only having to account for yourself.

On the other hand, if you're single and truly hoping for a relationship, don't wait for it to find you, and don't settle for a fix-up if the person isn't a match for you. Take responsibility for your own happiness and put yourself out there. Similarly, if you're content living alone and living the single life, there's no reason why you can't be as content and healthy as happily married people. Take time to eat right, exercise, and live responsibly. Think of it as being happily married to you – promise to love, honour and take good care of yourself.

— For more on this subject read "Healing Loneliness with Love"

In years past, if you weren't married by the time you were 30, or if you were an older person who hadn't replaced a lost relationship within 3 years, your friends, family, and many people had that pitying tone when they asked how you were. It was like there was something inherently bad or too sad about being, or staying, single. There is nothing wrong with being single. What is important to note is not to take anything for granted.

As well as taking ourselves for granted, we tend to take time for granted, too. But time is a very strange concept. The theory of relativity is that you're right about your perception of time, and everyone else is wrong, and so our perception of it varies from person to person - when we are bored it feels like time is going much slower - and moment to moment. We have come to realise that time itself does actually go slower sometimes, for instance, nature messes with time near black holes in space.

But do we have a grasp on what time is? Time can play tricks on you, and it can impact on your life in surprising ways. The human concept of time is fundamental to our survival as a species. Many of the accomplishments of higher thought are down to our ability to visualise the future. It's how we make plans. We long believed that no other animal has been blessed with this simple but powerful way of thinking, but sensational new evidence has emerged that perhaps we're not as unique as we like to think. This miracle of perfection extends to all life.

For example, scientists enigmatically call our ability to visualise into the future as mental time travel. For decades it was thought to be a uniquely human ability, something that set is apart from every other animal. But new research in this area is redefining our relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom by reading the minds of rats.

The revelations came from experiments that allowed rats to choose what they ate. The rats know there are different flavoured foods dispensed in each corner, with a countdown tone telling them how long they had to wait for that flavour. Low pitch means they get the food quickly, high pitch means a long wait. In this way the rats haven't just learnt to look for the food with the shortest wait, they know where their favourite flavours are, too. When a hungry rat hears there will be a long delay for a favourite food, it hesitates. It seems to be using a very human-like kind of thinking, weighing up the options about whether it is worth the wait. In other word's it's planning ahead.

However, simply interpreting an animal's behaviour is not hard scientific evidence of its thinking. Scientists found a way to tune in to the rat's receptor cells, brain cells that are active when a rat is thinking about a specific place. And it was discovered that sometimes a rat wasn't just thinking about where it was, but where else it could go next. Studies have interpreted that as being an imagination of another location. This is first evidence that this special skill of being able to plan ahead is not uniquely human, but is a skill we share with other animals.

The interesting thing about this is that it says something about evolution. Whatever it is we do as we're mental time travelling it occurred in animal evolution at some point where we had a common ancestor with rats. Therefore, if it has been conserved for that long, it means it's much more fundamental to our survival than just planning ahead for your next meal. If it goes that far back in the tree, you'd assume primates, birds, we be candidates too. We also share other inherent development stages, those that are built in to how your body will function. For instance, with our body's circadian rhythms and how a baby "knows" to be born at nine months.

The intelligence of dolphins

Studies are showing that dolphins are some of the smartest animals on the planet. It seems they could even rival humans - at least when it comes to remembering their friends. Every dolphin makes a whistling noise that is unique to that animal, and researchers in the US have just shown that dolphins can recognise the whistles of companions, even if they haven't seen them for 20 years. The evidence suggests that long-tern memory plays a role in social bonding in dolphins, just as it does in humans.

As a human animal we are extremely arrogant in the way we judge intelligence; we judge other non-human animals' ability to think about things based on ours. But trying to survive, trying to find new places, trying to remember where you've gone, trying to imagine going forward should be a fundamental ability of most animals. Similarly, with such revealing scientific research, studying our universal also makes us humble. It shows us we have to get away from this anthropocentric way of thinking of animals - both our brain and a mouse brain is a bunch of particles doing a very complicated computation. It gives us fantastic insight how complex all live is at any level, and we are not on top of the tree, but merely one component in the circle of life.

When we look at cosmic history, compared to our planet's history, we are a very tiny dot in the scheme of things. The age of the universe is something that scientists have wrestled with for a long time, although now it is believed to be 14 billion-odd years old, but there is a huge gap in our knowledge known as the Cosmic Dark Ages. Scientists can trace the story of the universe right back to the Big Bang, but there's an important part missing. The time when the first stars were born and started to forge the very stuff our world is made of.

Love the world you're in

So when it comes to how stars and light itself began, we're quite literally in the dark. What happened to the universe in its formative years? Although we understand the physics, we can't simulate on a computer how those first stars came to be. The universe starts with a spark of light, and then there is dark until the first stars are able to form and produce starlight, initiating what we have come to know as the Cosmic Dawn. Although we can see flashes of energy fro the first atoms, we've never been able to see how they became the first stars.

The universe's teenage years are not as yet a part of our knowledge. Although scientists have pictures of the evolution of the whole universe, this is a really important exception - this one tantalising gap where those early stars began to forge matter that built our universe, transforming simple gasses into the building blocks of life. When we say we are made of stardust, this is when it all began. But we've never been able to detect those first flickers of visible light.

The Cosmic Dark Ages have remained beyond the scope of even our most powerful telescopes, but now scientists have found a way to shed light on that distant darkness. The low frequency array LOFAR mapping radio-waves from the time the universe was born. Scanning the dark fog of hydrogen that made up the universe before the stars and galaxies formed, to scan for tiny little holes that signal when the stars formed. It's painting a picture of the universe which we don't have. We may finally see what the first dawn looked like, a postcard from when the universe became recognisable to us. Thanks to this technology, for the first time we can scan the dark fog of hydrogen that made up the universe before the stars and galaxies formed. Gaps in the fog are the give-away signs where the gas turned into the first stars. We are in effect looking for tiny holes in the universe.

It is believed that gradually the hydrogen gas was amplified through gravity into big clumps, galaxies, stars, planets, and to all of us here. No one knows whether they were stars or black holes came first. Some think super-massive black holes started first. We used to think of black holes as the bad guys of the universe; they just ate things up and destroyed things, but now we're beginning to think they were very important in the whole formation of galaxies. We often think of black holes as vacuum cleaners that suck anything up, but they now thought to be actually very hard to feed - like a child, that spews out his food - and maybe in a similar way it was those beasts that first lit up the universe by this sloppy feeding process.

But this technology also highlights something else, about how we need to work together to get the results that will yield the best answers for our times. Radio telescopes are nothing new, we've been using them to map the skies for decades, so why haven't they been able to reach back to the cosmic Dark Ages yet? At that distance hydrogen's radio waves become stretched and you need a dish the size of Europe to make sense of them. LOFAR in the United Kingdom is part of just one of a network of listening posts, working together they create the equivalent of a Europe-sized radio telescope.

There is a huge fibre network that links the stations together and takes all the data to Holland where it is put together by a massive supercomputer. It's painting a picture of the universe we don't yet have, poised to finally show us what the first dawn looked like. It looks like a ridiculously low-tech solution to a fundamental problem, but it's an elegant bit of physics, going back to the early days where huge amounts of money weren't thrown at problems, but we still managed to discover huge amounts about the universe.

Love the body you're in

Before we get nostalgic, another one of the major ways we want to slow down time, or control it, is when it comes to human ageing. Bats may seem an unusual candidate for seeking out eternal life, but in nature, there is a hard, fast rule - how long you can live for is typically predicted by how big or small you are. Small things live very fast, think of a mouse. Whereas big things live much more slowly, they live in a slower lane. This is always said in the number of heartbeats as well, as it is a rough estimate of metabolic rate. The faster you life, the shorter your lifetime.

Bats defeat this rule. They are very unusual in that they live very, very fast, and yet can live for an extremely long time. So, the secret of an extended health span lies within their genome. Generally animals have a certain amount of time that they can keep their cells regenerating, and then they stop. In each one of our cells we have all our DNA. And along each length of our chromosomes, we have these repetitive regions known as telomeres. There's a big problem in how DNA replicates, because every time your cell divides and replicates your DNA gets shorter and shorter.

Telomeres are at the end of our chromosomes, which allow us to deal with all this replication. There is a theory that cells can only replicate so many times, because what is believed to happen is that as the telomeres get shorter and shorter they get to a critical point where the cell dies. It is similar to exactly how many heartbeats you can have over a lifetime. In regard to bats, therefore, scientists have been asking if bats have some way of lengthening these telomeres or stopping them from actually degrading? So instead of nasty, blood-sucking vampires, next time you think of bats, think of them as holding the secret to everlasting youth!

The idea is if we can find the genetic factor that makes the bat so remarkable, we may be able to use it for ourselves. So what is it that bats are doing? As we age some of our genes get switched on and off; there's an ageing related disregulation. Do the bats not experience this? If not, then what is it they're doing that allows them control of the regulation? And then the important question is how would we do this?

Having such a long way to go on this subject shows just how difficult it is to slow down time - in many ways. Another element of regeneration is rejuvenation; when it comes to internal organs breaking down or wearing out, we've been relying since the 1950s on transplants. There are remarkable new developments that could be from the realms of science-fiction, where scientists are now experimenting with growing organs and transplants from stem cells. The most potent stem cells are embryonic ones, as their job is to create every other type cell in our bodies. After six days if doing that, they're gone. It is the metaphorical Biblical God within us creating the world in six days.

But there is another type of stem cell we all still have, these are adult stem cells. They help our bodies repair themselves. Scientists believe they can use these stem cells to build organs that matches the body, kind of like bespoke human transplantation. Experiments are now trying to replicate one of our mist complex organs, the heart - which is an extremely complex three-dimensional structure with an intricate vascular system. Vasculature, or blood vessels, are really the Holy Grail of this type of tissue engineering. Doctors expect to be able to transplant hearts of these kinds into a human in less than ten years.

One day, it might be possible to generate any human organ using this technology. You could grow these organs when and where you needed them, and you wouldn't need anti-rejection drugs, because biologically they would already be part of the patient. What is currently confined to a laboratory, may in the future become a normal part of medicine. The motto behind it is to give the body the tools it needs and then allow the stem cells we have to do their job. It's cutting-edge science, and the type of experimentation we can now do in these areas in nothing short of spectacular.

Love the time you're in

“We speak of Time and Mind, which do not easily yield to categories. We separate past and future and find that time is an amalgam of both. We separate good and evil and find that Mind is an amalgam of both. To understand, we must grasp the whole.”
— Isaac Asimov

In science, working together is reaping more benefits that ever before. There is a growing movement that describe themselves as hackers - not in the old computer science term - but people who liberate technology, apply imagination and possibly achieve world-changing results.

For instance, we have been using tools for thousands of years, but recently those tools have become a lot more sophisticated and our relationship with them has changed. Back in the day, we understood how the gadgets in our lives worked, we could take them apart and fix them. But these days, modern gadgets are altogether more complex. We don't really understand how they work, and it can make us afraid to open them up and learn their mysteries. However, virtual pioneers are now part of a new hacker movement aiming to change all that. It's all about unlocking the potential of technology for yourself.

In this respect, hacking is taking what exists, improving upon it and sharing it. The lure of getting creative with technology is bringing people together. It might sound like just a bit of fun, but the urge to make things is fundamental human; it's a chance for everyone to unleash their inner creativity. Just the act of turning one object into another means you not only learn a lot, but it empowers you - and that is the beauty of hacking proponents say. It can also make a difference to all our lives, by bringing cutting edge technology to the masses because the recycling of component parts means it is a lot more cheaper.

We do knock the games industry for the violence and the isolation it creates amongst its community users, but the industry has made technology so cheap - such as sensors and graphic cards - that scientists have been able to utilise parts to use for life-saving equipment and sophisticated detection warning systems (such as for earthquakes). Gaming is even a good way of crowd-sourcing, to get people together to help power studies and research in citizen science projects.

Arguably, this is where real creativity is unlocked, where it is not only fun, but pushes people to think outside of the box, turning objects that may have been designed for recreation use into an object that could save lives. From virtual technology to real-world value at an astonishing low cost - this is a prime example of how working together is more important than ever. For instance, the Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by a non-profit charity - a complete computer that will work when you add a keyboard and monitor - which only costs £30-40 to make.

In developing countries, finding cheap ways to develop things is the norm, but in developed countries the uses are endless. Inventions such as where scientists in Japan have managed to embed hundreds of electronic sensors into durable, stretchy super thin film could change the way we look after our health. A patch made up of these sensors could replace all the bundles of tubes and wires that we currently use to monitor everything from heart rate to muscle activity. The patch is designed to be worn anywhere on the body like a second skin, or even inside it.

In another example, a species that knows all about working together, the spotlight is on bees at the moment because their numbers are falling. But scientists think they've worked out how their beautiful geometric honeycomb is made thanks to bees heating the beeswax of an original circle, allowing surface tension to pull the points into the shape we recognise, which look so regular they almost look human made. Or how about levitating droplets of water on sound waves? Researchers in Switzerland have for the first time used a technique to mix liquids together without them touching anything that could contaminate them. This could radically change how we handle everything, from DNA samples to hazardous chemicals. Answers and innovations that have resulted in cooperation - amazing what working together does for us!

We haven't even skimmed the tip of the iceberg in terms of innovation. From portable water filtrations systems to clothes and helmets that seem normal but become inflatable "air-bags" during a crash (by design students in Sweden), or best of all, to using a dangerous animal's own genes to combat its own threat. If I asked you which animal had killed more humans than any other in history, what would you're answer be? Would it be mosquitoes? Now a team of British and Brazilian scientists are engineering mosquitoes for a mission that could save millions of lives. Ethical issues aside, scientists say they are part of a battle against a disease even harder to control over malaria - dengue fever, a disease which has no cure or vaccine.

The deadly bite of the mosquito

The mosquito is one of the most successful and one of the most deadly animals on the planet. And now the complexity of its main weapon has been revealed in astonishing detail. For the first time, researchers have filmed beneath the skin of the host as the mosquito bites. Videos show how formidable a creature the mosquito is - its main needled-like mouth part is not rigid but bent, almost at a right-angle. It's made up of six different mouth pieces, thin filaments that help to pierce the skin and to grip onto the flesh. The main tube splits into two, with one side putting out saliva while the other side is sucking blood. It is hoped the information will give us a better understanding in finding defences against a mosquito bite.

Dengue has become an epidemic in Brazil, and affects over 100 million people every year. The way it spreads so fast - reaching as far as southern Italy - is what makes it so dangerous. Eradicating the mosquitoes that carry the disease is difficult as they reproduce so much, but some scientists believe that genetically modifying mosquitoes so that they did not make it to adulthood. This level of tampering with nature is dangerous, some say, but done ethically, others believe it could have a good future. But scientists also do self-experimentation, there are many unsung heroes that have tested their experiments on themselves for the technological and medical advancements.

Two men who really did do it for themselves was Larry Patrick and Colonel John Stapp - both of whom tested their bodies to the limits of their endurance to help humankind. Back in the 19050s before crash test dummies were invented, scientists had to experiment on themselves, and these two pioneers tested how the human body would react to high speeds and collisions. They endured great pain and discomfort, but both lived well into their eighties with good health.

And if we don't want to be left behind, then we need to hook up to these movements of knowledge and togetherness. Find you flow, link up, and start creating, or manifesting the dreams that will change or build a new world for you to succeed in all that you desire. These are opening possibilities for new ways for humans to live their dreams.

Furthermore, working together, we can update and shift our energetic success patterns, and enhance the energies of our intuitive guidance in a way that resonates with our soul. You can attain your highest dreams with much more ease, grace and joy in a lot less time. But the vast majority of people have lots of habitual patterns that are outdated. Updating them mentally is the key to manifesting your new dreams.

Ready to get your groove on? Have you ever felt frustrated with manifesting your dreams with visualisation? If your answer is yes, you're not alone. Many people understand the basics of manifestation, but when it comes to actually applying the mechanics of it to manifest your desires, this can be a little trickier than some folks realise. To help you with the manifest applications that will aid you to see consistent results in your life, here are 7 steps to gaining your manifesting mojo:

1. Always start from what I call a "Happy Place". People often overlook this one. You must always make sure you're in a "feel good" positive vibration before you ever even think about setting an intention or goals, so that the goals you set will be infused with the same positive energy. One way to immediately increase your vibration is to think of one thing that you're grateful for in your life right now, no matter how big or small. Do this and you'll be surprised how quickly your energy will shift towards the positive!
2. Set a clear intention to enlist the help of the Universe. Write down your intention and repeat it each day WITH CONVICTION so you signal the Universe that you're ready to receive the help and guidance you need to make your intention a reality.
3. Create a clear, measurable goal. Get clear on exactly what you want. If you want to make more money, exactly how much do you want to make? If you want to attract the relationship of your dreams, what qualities or characteristics does this person possess? Get clear on what you want so that the Universe will know what to send your way - and when you receive it, you'll be able to recognise it.

   Is the best goal no goal?

4. Create powerful affirmations that support your goals. Create affirmations that describe what life would be like once you achieve your goal. Ideally they should also detail the thoughts you'll be thinking and the actions you'll be taking to move closer to your goals. Keep them short and powerful, make sure you use positive, present tense language, and say them aloud daily for maximum results.
5. Visualise with emotion daily. Take even just a few minutes each day to visualise what it is you want to manifest. The most potent time of the day to do this is the last 5 minutes before falling asleep or just when you wake up. Also, when you are visualising, make sure you're really allowing yourself to fully feel all of the emotions you'll experience once you've manifested the object of your desire. This significantly multiplies your manifesting abilities and helps you to learn to love and embrace every emotion.
6. Take consistent action, big or small, in the direction of your goals. The Universe rewards action! So each day, aim to take one action that will create some forward momentum towards what it is you want to achieve - and you'll be opening the door for the Universe to send even more light-bulb ideas, "chance" meetings and other unexpected opportunities your way.
7. Expect wonderful! Once you've followed all of the 6 steps above, your final step is to expect the abundance of the Universe to flow in your direction. Life is your wonderground! Keep your eyes open for the people, opportunities and resources the Universe will send into your path, and be ready to reach out and grab them when they do!

As a bonus along with these 7 steps are two more that will help you. Meditation is also an important part of visualisation, as it can help you get "in the zone" - and breathing is THE huge factor to help you achieve this. It will help keep you focused, motivated and its mindful attributes can enhance your consciousness to greater awareness.

There is a breathing method that is said to even help you lose weight while you do it, so for those interested they can utilise these two steps into their breathing programme. Note that the steps below are for you to do standing up, but you can do them just as easily sitting down to get you in the right frame of mind before you begin manifesting.

1. Tighten the buttocks and place one foot in front of your body while placing 90% of your body weight on your back foot. (Or tighten the buttocks whilst seated.) Once you're in position, breath in for 3 seconds while lifting your arms above your head. Then exhale contracting all the muscles in your body to help you get all the air out, for 7 seconds. It sounds easy enough, but most of the air comes out in the first couple of seconds, leaving you to flex your abs as you run out of breath.
2. The second method requires you to stand up (or sit up) straight and tighten the buttocks. Place one hand on your abdomen and another on your lower back, and breath in for 3 seconds while sucking in your midsection. Finally, exhale for 7 seconds and suck in your stomach even more.

A happy side-effect to manifesting in this way is that you can also have fantastic, inspired day, and know you have come closer to building a better world for yourself.

Keep in mind, that if you're tired of working too hard and then crashing, or trying to emulate other successful people with limited results, then groove to your own "single" beat first, to understand your own unique pulse, before you rush to pair it with another's own unique chime. This is how we need to be "single" and yet not be isolated from people power, whether than be in like-minded support groups, or connecting with your twin flame. It's about building your own world - with love.

Yours in love,