The new physicist’s picture of reality is very much like that of many Eastern mystics and Western sages. They now agree that each individual has the potential for performing the godlike functions found at the level of universal consciousness and in the minute world of quantum mechanics. They validate the inner creative potential that seems so incredible to everyday, nonscientific, nonspiritual thinking.

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in taking the ideas of physics into the biological and physiological realms, offers a strong case for considering seemingly random chance events as dependable energy manifestations.

The new physics indicates that tremendous energy resources lie within each of us and that we are united with energy patterns in the universe. Sheldrake proposes that there are morphogenic fields, or “invisible organizing structures that mold or shape things like crystals, plants, and animals, and [that] also have an organizing effect on behavior.” He posits that these fields contain influences from all of history and evolution. As such, they begin to explain the “lucky coincidences” that sometimes solve our problems.

In our sense of unity with a masterpiece, we lose our heads, forget all the trivial mind chatter, meet our own Maker. As the Sufis say, “Painting and Painter are one.

I am reminded of what Einstein said on the death of his friend: He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.

Stafford Beer takes an approach to this problem that helps to mark the distinction between information theory and cybernetics. That solution is to say that information and action are one and the same; variety coming in from the environment, or being transferred from one system to another, only counts as ‘information’ if it has a causal role in decision-making. Otherwise it’s just ‘data’ — collections of facts that hang around on disk drives, waiting to be erased* or for the format to become obsolete.

*There are a lot of people is Silicon Valley who might do well to consider how much money they have invested in ‘data’ without bearing this distinction in mind.