I was born in Foxhall, a village near Loughrea in Co Galway, Ireland. My parents were farmers and I was the third child in a family of ten. Our parents nurtured an attitude of honour, respect, and compassion both for ourselves and our fellow man. A sentence my father frequently repeated was; “always remember that nobody knows where the shoe hurts only the man that wears it”.

At the tender age of seven I ‘decided’ that I wanted to be an engineer. While the financial hurdles that stood in my way were huge, I never wavered from that goal and in 1974 I achieved my dream when I qualified as a mechanical engineer at the College of Technology, Bolton St. Dublin.

After qualifying I worked in Canada in various engineering sectors for four years, but it wasn’t until I joined Mostek in Dallas in 1978 that I found the area in engineering that made my heart sing – I loved designing wafer fabrication facilities for the micro electronics sector. I returned to Ireland with Mostek in 1981 but by 1984 the recession took its toll and wafer fab design stalled. I lectured in my old alma mater, DIT, for two years before starting up an engineering design company with two colleagues. Our engineering design company went from strength to strength and by 1995 we were employing over 200 engineers. However around that time I lost my appetite for engineering – it no longer made my heart sing– and in 2000 we sold the company.

By 1995 I had achieved all that life could offer me and I found it to be unfulfilling and profoundly meaningless At that stage I believed that there must be more to life that just success in the world of business. I became convinced that there must be a non-physical or spiritual aspect to life, that this non-physical aspect is just as real as our physical aspect, and if acknowledged and nurtured, it is the source of our joy and happiness. In my effort to get in touch with this spiritual aspect I studied meditation and spiritual healing. I also joined groups who practiced meditation, healing, mindfulness, and holotropic breath work and found these experiences very enlightening.

However my logical brain realised that these activities would always be marginalised by the ‘real world’, which believed only in the physical aspect of life, and was dominated by a culture of selfishness, corruption, abuse of power, and greed (SCAG for short). Around the turn of the century I was appalled at the level of SCAG that seemed to dominate in all our political, public service, financial, and religious institutions worldwide. I realised that the only way of overcoming the SCAG culture was to acknowledge and nurture the non-physical aspect of our being. However I realised that the people in the ‘real world’ will only listen the scientific understanding of life which is that; life emerged from non-life and it evolved and continues to evolve based on mutation, natural selection, and time. In other words science believes that life is purely a physical phenomenon. I then realised that if I were to convince people in the ‘real world’ that there is a non-physical aspect to life, I would have to base my arguments on scientific theories and concepts.

I set about developing a new worldview, using scientific concepts, which showed the interconnection between all aspects of reality from the source of the universe to life, mind, and human consciousness. In my book, Dark Energy and Human Consciousness, I present these arguments which explain that dark energy is not only responsible for the expansion of the universe, but is also responsible for the expansion of human consciousness. Dark energy is the non-physical aspect of life which, if acknowledged and nurtured, has the potential to move humanity from the culture of SCAG to a paradigm where love care and compassion will be extended to all humans – this is humanity’s only path to freedom.