Love is Communication-6

Change and communication are intricately linked. Life is constantly communicating its changes, and we in turn, as we develop, are communicating the results. Self-improvement is a communication in itself - that we are honouring our authentic self and purpose in life.

We are often told by the experts that keeping ourselves adaptable and on the move - and open to change - is the best way to be successful in life. Too much rigidity can make us brittle and open to cracking during times of hardship and challenging changes. Accepting the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed, the best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes.

How religion has had to change and adapt throughout the centuries is a great example of adaptability being necessary for survival. In the fifth part of this series, it was looked at in detail how the 16th Century scholar William Tyndale's drive for an English language bible had been an exerting force of change, by communicating to the people with strong and passionate rhetoric. Today, one of the forces exerting pressure on religion to change is science.

The Copernican Revolution - when scholars grasped that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than vice-versa - is an obvious example. And as we change, so does the way we communicate, it is a close relationship to our thoughts and to who we are, as we try to absolve ourselves from the mistakes of the past.

In every century some loathed changed, some embraced it. For instance, the 17th Century was the age of self-depiction; a literacy revolution where all kinds of people were learning to read and write. Writing drove the revolutionary changes in what some describe as the first truly modern century.

Going back to the first part of this six part series, the 17th Century was the century of the written word. Reading and writing allowed people to question what they had been told, to engage in debate and rewrite the rules in politics and self-expression. This was the beginning of the age we now live in, the moment we left the middle ages behind and set out on the track to modernity.

Setting down a way to communicate this via a person's native language had already begun in the prior century, and now all of the forces of modernity began to stir under the old order, slugging it out on the great battleground of religion and politics. And writing was the factor that drove these forces in the first truly modern century.

It was the first great age of self-depiction, and many describe it as the century of the written word. All kinds of people were learning to read and write, and through their writings to question what they had been told, to engage in fierce debate and rewrite the rules in politics and self-expression. This was the beginning of the age we now live in, the moment we left what past historians used to call the Dark Ages behind and set out on the track to modernity.

Read about the myth of the Dark Ages.

Traditional societies, dense with reverence and hierarchy, were being turned upside down by conflicts that raged between the supporters of royal rule and and parliament - over principles, liberties and different ideas of god. A bitter ideological war was fought as much with the pen as with the sword.

There were two big revolutions in the 1600s, once political and one personal, and writing drove them both, revealing the innermost workings of the self. Not poets and dramatists, or aristocracy or clergy, but a first generation of ordinary people who could write their own stories. We had begun to communicate our self in writing.

The invention of the printing press and the need to read the Bible triggered a literacy revolution. We began to keep account of our inner selves rather than just dealings with money; for the first time ordinary people began to write about their lives and their emotional credits and debits. They began making an account of their own selves, their doubts, ambitions, and life experiences, noted down on any available space - essentially they were writing the first diaries. Whole lives poured between two covers to document the cataclysmic political changes their time wrought, and the effects it had on them personally. Tradition was under siege, and for people with conservative values that would have seemed very threatening.

The deep changes in the mid-17th Century, which saw people with no titles or tradition of ruling gain power in the English Civil War would have had traditionalists looking at the past, and the more they looked, the more attractive it would have seemed with the glow of its "golden ages". Ordinary people had learnt to write, and so to rule, but writing would have also played a part in those against change, in an attempt to control their ever changing environment - from practical purposes, such as keep financial accounts, to becoming a coping mechanism, providing a private world where everything was all right.

It might seem egotistical, this concern with the self, but as we write our life onto the page, we are attempting to uncover a greater self - and when we write about the spirit, passion is the only ink that will do. To write from the heart we need to first connect to it; intimate thoughts, feelings, the font of our tears and desires are all aids for us to make sense of our fears, our anger, our life. And to this aim, we have through the centuries confided again and again to the written word on the trusted page. This is writing - and power of communication - in action.

Connect to the spirit and grow.

Communicating growth to the spirit via the literacy wave was to have lasting consequences in religion, too. In the 17th Century, because of the access it gave to the Bible, there was a spirit of liberation that allowed people to enjoy a new direct relationship with God. One of the most radical new Protestant groups of that time to advocate this were the Quakers.

Quaker beliefs threatened inherited ideas; through the power of the word they were going to change society. Women were a major role in this ideal, bombarding England with pamphlets about the new Quaker gospel of equality and tolerance. To this aim, words were not a private refuge but an instrument of revolution.

For George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement, the established church was full of falsehood, and believed instead that true religion meant people should ignore the corrupt clergy and interpret the words of the Bible for themselves. And at the rebellious heart of the Quaker movement was writing.

In searching for meaning, the Quakers argued for freedom of assembly, free speech, a free press, and the rights of women as preachers - sparking political debate across Britain. This type of writing stirred up a whole new conversation about what type of society people wanted to live in. But people bound to their traditions saw the Quakers as radicals that wanted to destabilise the country. In the 1660s, six thousand Quakers were imprisoned for their beliefs, but for many - although it was a terrible disease infested environment that by definition deprived anyone of the instruments of command and control - their pen was their sword and they continued to write from their cells.

The belief that all people are equal became a national movement from Quaker writings - through pamphlets and letters they sowed the seeds of religious freedom that would in time become central to British society. It's a challenging concept, but perhaps we can come a little closer to understanding that meaning of using writing to become ourself - and also using writing to stay in touch.

As mentioned countless times throughout this six part series, the human being is a social animal of communication - and as literacy spread the code of writing was unlocked for the masses to use as a method of communication.

The art of letter writing became widespread. But privacy also became an issue - how did you take precautions to hide those written secrets that had started to become accessible? How could you guarantee that the wrong people didn't read your letters and capture the very thoughts your own literacy had allowed you to express on paper? The invention of printing had been a great development, but it also made for less privacy.

Most in the 17th Century had to assume that what they wrote had the potential to be written by others, and so many turned to secret communication and to code. Because as writing helped our voice become public, it also voiced the most private. Looking at the letters of the 17th Century, we see that the common problems that plagued the people in that era continue to bother us. Money problems, loss of social status, fair-weather friends that disappear in our hour of need, political and religious beliefs, and of course outpourings of love. Some experts see 17th Century communication as the beginnings of modern communication; it is often described as a communications revolution.

But the skills of literacy which gave our thoughts voice, also gave us a vehicle in which to climb the social ladder, to make ourselves be heard. Reading and writing were the classic aids in allowing ordinary people to become entrepreneurs - self-sufficient, self-starting, self-improving minds that demanded something better than the low social position into which they had been born. In searching for meaning, we improved ourselves to give ourselves meaning, become central to the ambition of figuring out who we are.

It is in human nature to go searching for our limits, and then to go beyond them; telling ourselves that the only limits are the ones you set yourself. Writing in itself has no moral colour. It can be pious, vulgar, refined, aggressive, private, pompous, loving - but that is also its great quality. Writing can be anything you want it to be, it is the great liberty train, the road to possibility on which increasing numbers of people in 17th Century Britain had decided to climb. They have left behind an amazing archive of people realising that the betterment of self was more important than money or estate.

The art of writing gave people the chance not only for public opinion and private refuge, but the chance for people to re-write themselves and their role in society. Learning was power. Writing was its source, and the pen (or quill) was your sword that was simultaneously forged from it and wielded its impact. It is easy for us to write today, bang on a keyboard and there you have it; but in the 17th Century it was an elaborate process of hand-cut quills, imported paper and bottles of ink. But through this process, people could step into their own lives or the stories of others.

The question "Who am I?" became one that many asked of themselves and others, and self-invention became the essence of the future. In this way, writing was about the release of the person into new possibility. Some believe a love of writing is a love to discover what makes us human. Our human history of literature is evidence of the driving force that pushes us to search for meaning, to communicate with our humanity as we take a see-saw ride through society.

In books we take on a persona to hide our feelings, we yearn for equal opportunity, reduced to penury we struggle just to survive, or we escape to distant lands to forget our own - throughout the centuries we have poured our creativity onto the page in a fiesta of self-expression and self-promotion. Some meant for public consumption, some meant for the consumption of a single heart, and some meant just to console the writer during a dark time.

When we question what we want out of life, we often turn to writing. Increasingly in the 17th Century, as people became aware of and met up with the printed word, it became a larger part in their lives. For enjoyment, for expression of love, for celebrations, for legal purposes, reading and writing became a monument, if not a staple, of life. It became an asset that we attended to as religiously as any other route humans have chosen down the centuries in search for meaning. Perhaps this is why so many people celebrate and champion the arts, and bestow celebrity status on those that master them.

Some would argue that as celebrity has become the realm of the non-talented, this status has changed in recent times, pushing us to become more focused on superficiality. But we also deride them, and criticise them with our writings of derision. With writing, we have the ability to turn the world upside down, to change our shape, and take on different roles throughout our life.

We also try for immortality, to defeat death through the written word. For some of us, meaning is not simply about living a life as best as can be had, or becoming the sort of person we dream of being, but releasing a new liberty not only from the shackles of ignorance, but from death itself. Writing was not only about changing, enlarging, extending and enlightening your life, it was about preserving it.

For instance, centuries before writing hit the masses, the Dark Ages was a time when the language of love was completely fused with the language of religion - which was all about the salvation of the soul. Lady Julian of Norwich, an Anchorite, out of a singular act of faith had herself bricked up in a cell for the rest of her life in order that she could exist in sublime religious contemplation, and was the first woman we know of who wrote a book in English about her thinking - and thus the contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer of some 15 years or more.

This Christian mystic in her revelations of divine love summed it all up in that word "love".

God showed me in my inward being ... that love was His meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did He show you? Love. Why did He show you? For love. Hold on to this and you need not know anything else because love is our Lord's meaning.

People at the start of the century were living in such a God soaked universe, that their reality appears to scarcely mesh with ours - these were lives emerging from a pre-modern world. The writings of those times sketch a journey towards the 17th Century, where committed Christians of all ages began to describe in detail their every thought and deed; the diary was the only place where in seclusion from a changing world. Believing they were standing in the court of of God's judgement with their conscience, where in His presence sin could be washed away, their writing books were a confessional for some - especially the Puritans of the times.

And because of the great changes wrought in the 17th Century, many harked back to more primal religious times. However, from a passive acceptance of God's will, to an active scientific investigation of the world, writings from those times reveal the inner life of anxious, passionate, and questioning minds. The 1600s was a century of liberties, none more important or lasting than the one conferred by literacy. In the previous century, literacy to read was a ticket to greatness in Elizabethan England, moving those who could read up the social ladder. At the start of the 16th Century, only one in ten men could read and write, but by the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I that had increased to one in four.

Even more strikingly, the proportion of women who could read and write increased from 1% to 10% - a tenfold increase. It marked a revolution, which culminated in the literacy wave of the 17th Century. Reading and writing allowed the people of Britain a vision of themselves that was essentially unconstrained. A life in which they could hope to read the truth, and write their own futures.

As a country and as a culture, Britain was moving into the modern and self-realising world. This new world of the written turned its gaze to our understanding of the universe, of God, nature and the structure of reality. This made the 17th Century an exciting time for those who lived it, and for those of us who look back on it. Partly for its strangeness, its muddle of maths and magic, its fierce beliefs and high idealism, its long and intricate struggle to understand the material world. But also because its people are so knowable through what they wrote - their journals, diaries, letters and notebooks. It's the first great age of self-depiction, and of a rewritten universe.

Communicating to the world we live in

“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
— Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" 1625

This transformation in the 17th Century also affected our attitudes to the universe and our place within it - historians say this is when science and religion begin to take their modern form. Before 1600 only a tiny number of people had accepted the idea that the Earth orbited the Sun, most were stuck in a mind world that hadn't developed since antiquity.

But all changed with the new literate century, because it was different than what had come before - it was essentially curious. It wanted to find out and then write its discoveries down. What were we made of? What was the world made of? How did the stars work? How did God work? And when we look back to that century, how did the 17th Century think, and what part did writing play in the greatest intellectual revolution that some say there has ever been - the giant shift from the pre-modern to the scientific frame of mind.

By the first part of the 1600s, the medieval Christianity of Lady Julian, where people had lived unquestioningly in the embrace of a deeply hierarchical church was long gone. The English Reformation half a decade earlier had changed all that. Zealous Protestants were now suspicious of the idea of bishops and priests, even making the sign of the cross, or baptisms, or kneeling in church.

The Reformation had left the individual naked before God, and although His purpose was revealed in the words of the Bible, He was everywhere around them, too. And for those Puritans anxiously writing in their diaries, God was the great headmaster equipped with a terrifyingly all-seeing eye. God was watching and there was no escape from His unforgiving gaze.

Struggling for the truth of existence, the 17th Century itch to write down one's life was often used to still the turbulence of everyday living. Many tried to reconcile their idea of a good and loving God with the real pain and suffering the century had brought to bear on them. In a world with no insurance policies, people looked for signs everywhere that they lived in a goodness providing cosmos.

For Puritans trying to making sense of God in their lives, they were constantly trying to discern whether they were destined for Heaven in their writing. Unlike Catholics, who rely on good works to move towards salvation, Puritans appeared to sit back passively and write their lives out to try work out what would happen to them after death. There was no such thing as luck or chance in a Puritan's life. Everything was significant.

When the rain fell, it was God's mercy, when the harvest was bountiful, it was God bestowing goodness. The 17th Century's intense transcribing of daily life is almost like an account book of the soul. Historians say many Puritans felt the need to write down every little detail of their lives in a God dominated world, so as to interpret its meaning when read back later, and to remember them as the signs or markers of God's presence in their lives. For them the Lord would intervene in apparently the most trivial ways, from stepping into a puddle, surviving a fall, to getting stung by a bee.

In this way, protestantism and puritanism was one great catalyst for people writing down their lives, while another was the upheavals of the century making people feel that world was not they thought it might be. The civil war in the mid-17th Century prompted people to think about their place in that world, in a new world order; the social change meant that people had to think of themselves in different ways.

For instance, when a something like the monarchy - which was seen as an inevitable, natural God-given construct - is suddenly abolished, that must have at a very profound level shaken their sense of the world and their community and how they should fit into it. Moreover, with the printing explosion, a lot of publications, large and small, were being distributed and people were reading more. Literacy rates were rising. And when we read more about people's lives, that provides us with new models for our own life.

It was a life lived under siege; writings were a constant, almost obsessional discussion, on pain, sickness and death. Their world was a precarious one, with inadequate medicine, and lives lived in constant danger at home and at work - an average English family suffered daily and weekly basis in ways and on a scale that today few of us can even comprehend. Most of us now only bury our parents and grandparents, in the 17th Century it was more usual to bury someone younger than someone older than you. Their whole lives were surrounded by death, and nothing in our lives is comparable to the experience of having family members and loved ones die at an almost constant rate of three or four every ten years.

Death was more prominent in 17th Century England that at any time after it - the figures are far worse than modern Afghanistan, or even the poorest country in sub-Saharan Africa. Believers struggled with such realities - how could a good God allow such suffering? Could affliction be a sign of divine love?

Pious people prayed for submitting hearts, not to question the divine wisdom but to accept it - even when it was the death of a child in infancy who breathed out its soul as chastisement for some heavenly wisdom. And in the 17th Century, for a Puritan, if things went wrong, then it was deserved, because God was punishing them for something they had done wrong. God's punishment was a sign of God's love.

They believed it was in such terrible ways that God revealed His purposes, and they would in their writings consider their heart and their ways, to see why the rod of chastisement had fallen on them. These people lived in an angry and unforgiving universe, full of argument, rage and punishment. In effect they suffered the world, virtually impotent in front of it. But there were many in the 17th Century that wanted to substitute the disputatious Christianity that filled the diaries of the Puritans with curious investigation - a rational attempt to make sense of the world.

The founding of the Royal Society in 1660 is often seen as the birth of science in the Britain, but that gathering of learned gents grew out of a world of proto-scientists and investigators who would had been examining, experimenting with, and writing down what they'd found in the natural world for many decades.

At the end of the previous 16th Century, the attitude of people towards nature and the material world was a very literal understanding of the Bible. What was written in the Bible was how they understood the natural world, coupled with what they saw around them, but it was very much dependant on authority. The great polymath and philosopher Francis Bacon is seen as a key to the change in this understanding.

Bacon was an English philosopher writing at the very beginning of the 17th Century. He said that what set apart the Elizabethan era from the medieval age was gunpowder, printing and the compass. The compass and other new technologies were used by explorers to navigate their way around the world, but it was superior fire power that meant they could attack indigenous populations with impunity and plunder rival ships to finance the wealth of the age, and challenge the mastery of the world's oceans from other nations like Spain.

Many historians consider the reign of the Tudors as marking the end of the Middle Ages in England because they were able to centralise royal power, which enabled the stability necessary for an English Renaissance and the development of Early modern Britain. But what really set Elizabethan England apart was the idea of change. Religion had been transformed, they saw the ruined monasteries for themselves, and they knew an Englishman could circumnavigate the globe. They saw that change was possible, and that change for the better was possible. This is perhaps the most important idea that humankind has ever communicated to itself, and some historians believe it is the lasting legacy of the Elizabethan era.

As well as driving innovation, this belief expanded knowledge of the natural world. Having travelled the globe, English explorers and adventurers brought back a mass of new discoveries that helped transform the understanding of the natural world. It proved there was a whole world out there waiting to be discovered and exploited. If you visited England at the start of the Elizabethan era and then at the end, you would find a profoundly different place.

For example, Shakespeare's plays hold a mirror up to his society, reflecting a rapidly changing society riding on the crest of a cultural wave that is still breaking on the shores of the world. Scientific and geographic knowledge were transformed beyond recognition, and everyday life underwent a revolution. Explorers from all over Europe, including Englishmen such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh brought back plants and animals such as the potato, tomato, tobacco and the turkey, while the science of botany took a huge leap forward. Consequently, those that returned after voyaging into the great unknown came back with not only treasure, but great advances in science, trade and knowledge.

For centuries, it was believed that the wisdom of ancient writers like Aristotle, Ptolemy and Pythagoras provided an unquestionable basis for all human knowledge. Any new thinkers who could see further could do so simply because they were "dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants". But when in 1492, Columbus discovered the Americas, he proved the great minds of the ancient world did not know everything.

Advances in science went hand in hand with exploration, building on what Columbus had started. That discovery cannot be overestimated; the leading scientists and geographers in the Elizabethan era 50 years later, and men like Bacon, became giants themselves, standing on the shoulders of giants. It was Bacon's ideas about experiments that sparked what some have called the scientific revolution.

Bacon suggested we could conduct experiments to find out about the natural world. This meant thinking of an idea and then going out and testing it; he was very keen about collecting a lot of information on all aspects of the natural world. The sense of this new method was that there was more to be discovered about the world than people knew at the time. In Bacon's philosophical work "Novum Organum", full original title Novum Organum Scientiarum, written in Latin and published in 1620, he writes:

Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do, and understand so much, and so much only as he has observed, in fact or in thought of the course of nature.

It's easy to think of science as an enemy of religion, but that isn't really true of this period. Indeed prior to the 17th Century, one word you didn't hear very often was science. Instead there was the notion of Natural Philosophy, a catch-all term that covered everything from mathematics to geography. It also included some very unscientific things, such as the interpretation of dreams, astrology and the occult. There was a definite blurring of science and religion.

The people who conducted what we think of as science were in fact devout Christians; many were clergy who believed science would support Christian ideas. They believed there would be a limit to man's understanding of the world, and beyond that limit would be God, the great designer. This theory underlay many thoughts: such as human-made objects that look perfect to the eye, when scrutinised under a microscope the less perfect they become, but when looking at natural objects, the more you look at them the more beautiful and the more perfect they become - suggesting some natural designer higher than humans.

The microscope and the telescope, two key instruments of the period, opened up a whole new world to people and their perception of it. They showed people there was a new world to be seen. In the rising swell of 17th Century curiosity there was an urge to question inherited wisdom, to look at the world and note down all its oddities and rarities. A new generation inspired by the works of Bacon began to look at the world in a different way than the Puritan. They were going to test it, not relying on the inherited wisdom of the past, but using their eyes to experiment and investigate - teasing out the truth with the instruments of likelihood and logic. They were going to write the world down in a new way.

What's so fascinating about the 17th Century are the intellectual tensions that drove it. The Biblical view of the cosmos and our place in it was being challenged. The hitherto invisible world of the very small and the wide expanse of the heavens were opening up to human exploration in the 17th Century. Scientific enquiry which began in the Renaissance was finally flexing its muscles.

It was the embryonic age of science. People were observing and recording in precise detail and putting forward theories to explain their findings. On the one had you had the Christian church saying that everything that one wished to discover about the beginnings of the Earth was in the Bible, then on the other side you had men of science - who were still God-fearing - but they come to ask the big universal questions through their own natural human curiosity. What was our place in the cosmos? How did it all fit together? They had had learnt from the big lessons of the Renaissance. Look around you, what can you discover from what you can see? Seek and follow the evidence.

For the 17th Century human being, the two most invaluable commodities were the ability to encounter the world as it was, and then to apply reason to it. These modes of communication were the two great pillars of truth - experience and solid reason. Restless curiosity and an unending sequence of enquiries into the real world, gathering their materials around them like curators of reality.

Nature was meant to be read. God had written into nature the meaning of the universe in shorthand, like a secretary, and so much was opaque in the world that those with the knowledge to see, could see. If you looked for it, the meaning of the universe was apparent in nature, seen with wider reason as luminaries in the abyss. If you looked hard enough at nature, you could see what it meant. They focused on the wonders of the world around them; filled with dazzling properties and most compelling ingredients of the intriguing detail and minutiae of nature which many believed set forth the wisdom of the maker.

Driven by an endlessly curiosity about the natural world, the enterprise of 17th Century science was very often deliberately fragmentary in its sensibility. It knows it is never going to produce a system or a treatise; it's only ever going to be able to fill in the odd bit of the jigsaw. Writings of the time very much illustrate this, where they document all that is possible to say, but no more. Sometimes they would speculate about scientific conclusions, but not very often. Although filled with a rapacious hunger for the world, it's not as meticulous as modern science would become - 17th Century knowledge doesn't read as though it's organised at that sort of level. It learned knowledge with the awe of a child, and curiously limited that knowledge to remaining a child, some would say.

But it could be that some were just highly intelligent people that wore their learning lightly. There was a sense of a great roaming mind, too. As a 17th Century scientist, some historians point at a type of hodgepodge above observation; no one limited themselves to any specific genre above the own interest, making investigation feel more alive and exciting than dry science, which shuts itself within specific areas of research. There is no structure at the time that they are bound to observe, and so writings evolve in different ways because they are unshackled by a lack of categorisation, or what came before.

And as the new world they were discovering was largely uncharted, they even found they needed new language to describe and communicate their observations. English writers were incredibly inventive with new words, dragging them into English from Latin and Greek, adding to the word pile used by other 17th Century writers. Over hundreds of words now in the Oxford English Dictionary were used by such writers for the first time - such as coexistence, electricity, cylindrical, jocularity, literary, locomotion, medical, ulterior, ultimate - they were word making machines pushing the boundaries of communication ever further.

This life of curiosity and invention found a popular outlet in the writing and the books of the time, encyclopaedias of ideas were abound. Their wild and odd encounters with the natural world searched out truths to be proved by experiment; some of the ignorance of the past was dispersed and some of the light of knowledge brought into the world via writing. Feeling their way into this new understanding of nature, some dedicated their lives to making connections between the investigating minds around them - like a modern-day search engine.

Letter writing, information gathering, spreading knowledge - for some people in the 17th Century the word was all. Not for personal gain, but because it was believed that a good society depended on what was known as "correspondency" - linkages, networks, the most fruitful exchanges of information that could be devised. It was a grasping of the key fact of the century - that communication lay at the heart of the new civilisation.

Communication is our purpose

To some good Puritans, this burgeoning world of knowledge was to be seen as part of God's purpose - a sign that England, particularly in the 1650s as Oliver Cromwell began to rid the country of its old royalist ways after the civil war, was on the brink of a new heaven and a new earth. It was a time for a communications revolution and a moment of great optimism; instead of fear a great door of hope had opened to them, that they would be firmly and fully settled in all abundance of peace and truth.

In this fashion, teams of scribes and scholars would gather knowledge and spread it through letters and printed books; people were like knowledge fountains, improving lives in practical ways. Compendiums of all kinds of knowledge and expertise in wine-making, in farming, in gardening, on new inventions of the day were in abundance. These sharers of information were going to change the word with correspondence. It was felt that communication would make man happy, and that it was the narrowness of our spirits that makes us miserable.

This was writing for the common good; writing by the people for the people. They didn't believe in singular authority, every person could and should be willing to contribute. These contributors were driven by a new kind of idealistic thinking: If people could use their senses to get a true grasp of nature, and their reason to understand how the world works, and revelation in the words of the Bible to interpret God's will, there was a good chance of making a good society in England. The way to do that was to tell each other, to spread the word.

At a time when Parliament had triumphed in the civil war - in imprisoning and then executing King Charles I in 1649 to establish the only Republican government Britain has ever known - many believed it was the right moment to help build this utopian commonwealth of happy, well-informed citizens envisaged by the sharers of knowledge. One of the most extraordinary schemes set up in 17th Century England with this aim was an Office of Address.

This ambitious project was to be a combination of employment agency, counselling centre, commodities exchange, marriage bureau, patent office, public library, and a living, ever-revising, encyclopaedia. Connection would be all, in a centre and meeting place of advice, proposals, treaties, and all manner of intellectual rarities, freely given and received, to and from, by and for all such as who wished it. It wanted to set itself up much like the Royal Exchange, where huge material benefit was derived from the trade of whatever anyone needed or wanted, and the idea of an Office of Address was going to give England exactly what it needed - information.

It was envisaged as a place you could go and have any question answered. It was like Google in a way. It was beautifully idealistic, akin to its proponents of that time as creating a paradise on Earth. It was believed that before the last judgement of could take place, a universal reformation had to occur, in which humankind could be lifted from its baser instincts to a more sublime level.

It was with this belief that many thought it necessary to pursue this universal reformation. All the great 17th Century "scientists" are deeply involved with the idea that this is God's world, and that real human understanding of the earthly world is a route to the Godly one - and such gathering of information was seen as a defining blueprint towards which all projects and innovations had their end.

As the century wore on and experimental science gathered momentum, a separation between these two aspects becomes more latent. Naturally, if you were a natural philosopher of the 17th Century you would be interested in apocalyptic ideas, but what became clear was that the written word was central in all lives, however much their thoughts began to divide them. Their lives became inconceivable without writing and the level of literacy that was around in the mid-17th Century. It was about communicating information, initially within their networks, but ultimately for the public at large.

This idea of an Office of Address was thwarted by changes in government, and by the naivete of its proponents, and for all their persistence, zeal and determination, the idea of a great office was doomed. One pilot office was set up in Threadneedle Street in London, but on the whole a scheme for a universal information service failed to take-off, largely because of the completely chaotic conditions in Cromwellian London.

Different factions of the Parliamentary party at each other's throats, travel being dangerous, soldiers clamouring for food and money they had never been given, a total breakdown of local justice - it just wasn't a situation where you could set up a network of sweet, communal, idealistic information centres.

After the collapse of the Cromwellian Commonwealth and the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the idealism of that Republican moment gave way to the corruption of the Restoration court. In the end the great monument that was left by the cavalcade of 17th Century idealists and dreamers was the mound of correspondence. And within some of these lay the signs of individuals who would be intent on nothing less than less than discovering the structure of the universe. Such as Sir Issac Newton, described as the century's greatest man who tried to cram the universe into a notebook.

Newton's notebook wasn't a blind Puritan wandering about the mind of God, or a collection of oddities from nature written with the awe of a child, but an attempt to understand the underlying principles of the universe. His notebook was an agenda for revolution. Newton was exchanging the world of inherited wisdom, for observation and measurement.

The truths Newton was setting out to discover - the nature of matter and time, and place and motion, the cosmic order, rarity, fluidity, softness, violent motion, light, colours, vision, sensation - filled his pages. Every statement in his pages was an implicit experiment and the notebook was the key instrument. There experiments would be described, theories tested, hypotheses proved.

The notebook was where Newton's life came to fruition; in 1666 at his yeoman farmer family home at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, on the run from the plague in Cambridge, he conducted his most famous optics and light experiments. For Newton, it was vitally important first to know how he saw what he saw, and so armed with his trusty notebook, he started to explore his own vision. But the thing he wanted to prove most was his intuition about the nature of light itself.

Before Newton, the thinking was that the light they saw was the colour white. People thought that light was essentially white. A "natural" source of white light was the real thing - it was pure, homogeneous and God-given - and that somehow it was being mixed up, dyed or coloured when seen in different colours.

Newton's experiments with a prism, which reflected a spectrum of colours from sunlight didn't prove anything at first, as people believed what the prism was doing was actually colouring the light. The critical bit was the next part of his experiment; to test his theory that the prism was not somehow adding colours to white light, Newton brought in a second prism to show that the colours in the light are of their own nature. They are essentially homogeneous, whereas a white light is heterogeneous, or mixed.

Always accompanying Newton's experiments were copious notes, and he had called this second experiment the crucial one, because it had never been done by anybody else before. It completely changed the way people looked at light - that white light is no longer the original, regal source from the Sun. Newton's experiment showed that white light is a muddle of coloured lights.

Newton's writings indicate that he had this phenomenally penetrating desire to understand, and everything he did was to try and penetrate more deeply into his subject. Experts say he had an intellect that was almost vicious, once he got hold of a problem he would concentrate on it to such an extent that in the end it would yield to him. His notes reflect the intensity of his intellect. He said of himself that he didn't look upon himself as having genius, but what he could do was concentrate, and it's the concentration that you see in everything he ever did, particularly in his writing.

Newton produced a vast amount of work, but his communications didn't want to communicate with anyone else, his notes were him talking to himself. When you look, for instance, with the problem of colour, he found that when he did try and communicate to others, people were so opposed to his ideas that he said he would give up trying to publish, and he would just get on trying to find out for himself.

Newton's notebook is really a correspondence between him and truth, or him and his God. It wasn't really for public consumption until people discovered what he had done. And one of the major things he was interested in was finding out where God intervened - he was obsessed about trying to find out exactly what part God was playing in the physical universe. Newton had arrived at a kind of reality, and the whole modern history of radiation flows from that moment. And Newton's writing had arrived at a new maturity, so the notebook became not just a vessel for observation, but an instrument for understanding.

Where some early "scientists" used writing to report on the details of the world - an essential Baconian task - and not think about it much beyond that, and others used writing to promote a good society, Newton used it to think about the nature of the world, and using mathematics, to tease out its underlying structure. By 1700, England was beginning to realise that Newton had described with arithmetical precision the workings of the universe. God was no longer a capricious deity who taunted people with his cruelties. His rationality was now evident in a universe that was observable and observable through telescope and microscope, barometer and thermometer.

New lines of communication had opened a new horizon on to our purpose, and today we are still looking for new ways to communicate for the betterment of our lives. Indeed, in business, in our relationships, even in sex, not communicating clearly will create problems that need not arise. In modern times we have long-term relationships with our social networks and the service provider - and when they, at some stage, change terms as they engage in technical innovation (they offer new services, they want to collect different data or the prices change) if we feel they don't communicate this with the requisite transparency we complain.

As the popularity and the reach of social networks increase, we also have to be increasingly careful what we tweet or post, as an offending remark can land you in prison, even in countries like Britain, or bring us under the government's secret surveillance spies. Likewise, we hold public figures under scrutiny when they try to communicate what we should do in our lives, to see how they look to their own. When they make public decisions that seem against public opinion, it doesn't take a child genius to figure out what type of double standard that communicates as a whole.

It is time, therefore, that we started to communicate intents and concepts that come from love and a desire to abstain from violence and negative thoughts. When you are wronged or hurt by another the natural response may be to lash out or seek revenge. So many times we hear of jilted lovers doing terrible things in the heat of passion or friendships ending due to misunderstandings.

It does take a certain strength to forgive someone who has wronged you, but revenge will not erase the wrong that was done, it will only create more hurt. If we use revenge as a way to communicate our pain, we become a part of a vicious cycle of revenge. Revenge is a cyclical thing. Once you carry out your vengeance, you will bring more negativity and wrong down upon your head. If you can search within and find the strength to forgive your friends and foes alike, then that is far more admirable and better for the world.

This communicates that we accept all humans are flawed, despite our best intentions. And a humble spirit is one that will continue to become better and better. The way to achieve this is through admitting your mistakes and learning from them as best you can, as you forgive others for theirs.

With a spirit of humility you can see where you went wrong. You can't let pride blind you in this regard. To do so would be to never truly evolve. The same mistakes would continually pop up in your life because you never properly learn your lesson. We would do well to align our thoughts, actions and words towards this aim. In doing so we stay true to ourselves.

To be true to yourself is a great thing. Follow your heart and let all facets of your being be guided by it. To do this we need to understand how important effective communication is in our lives, it is our drive, it is our purpose in many ways as living being interconnected with all living things, to reach out and connect. In tales of parents struggling to connect with their autistic children, communicating through animals often gives autism sufferers a link that opens up wider communication with their world.

Animal bonding is evidence of the power of loving communication, which is also critical in sustaining human relationships: sharing with others and comforting people in distress. The ability to share and to give comfort to those in need rely on the separate ability to recognise the desires and emotions of others and to empathise with them - and we can only do this through effective communication. The growing evidence suggesting that pets can improve both mental and physical health for all people; previous data suggest that animal companions reduce stress, improve mood and may even prevent the development of some allergies if introduced in childhood.

However, simply having a pet around isn't enough to reap psychological benefits: you must love and connect with the animal, or else, not surprisingly, it won't relieve your stress or lift your mood. The key is to understand how loving communication - via a desire to connect - links us all. Experts say this is a healthy way to look at things, because it leads us to a happy place - a better state of mind. When we do this, we communicate to the universe from inspiration and not desperation.

There will come a time when we must communicate this single purpose to ourselves and allow it to radiate from our thoughts and actions. We are here to connect. We are here to communicate. Ultimately there will come a point in our unique journey where each person is responsible for their choices and actions in life. Be mindful of this when living your life and it will help you to want to make the best decisions possible when you communicate with your life.

This is why we need to communicate with love; we need to communicate that love is communication. It shares the same purpose as the great minds that awoke in the literacy age, or pushed for religious reform, or even for those individuals who just want to create a loving family life with their partner. Communicative is active, it allows us to bring our noble ideas and concepts to life and help change our surroundings for the better.

Putting out ideas and words to good use puts love into our communication. We have seen in this series how the past and future are great concerns for many. People look to the past longingly for times that they cherished. They worry about the future for the sake of their children, wondering what type of world we are leaving to them. In order to honour the memory of the past and ensure the future is a great one to leave to our children, we must live in the present, and communicate directly to the flow of now in our lives.

The present moment in time is the one we have control over. We can change the way things are now by living our lives as best we can. We can mould the future through our actions now, but if we do nothing but think about times past and times to come the moment will pass us by. There is no going back to a moment in time. Let your mind live in the here and now.

Dialogue and action are integral parts of the process of initiating changes, and having a spirit that is willing to endure tough times and continue to strive forward is an important quality in achieving great things in this world. Continually communicate to yourself that you are willing to learn new things and change accordingly.

It is important not to be stagnant in life, because only by continuing to improve one’s self can one keep up with the changing world around us. We possess the abilities to learn, increase our skills and come to a better understanding of so many different things, as long as we remember that loving communication is the strongest way to connect over all.

Read more in this series: -1 -2 -3 -4 -5

Yours in love,