The new physics gives scientific evidence of each person’s potential power and connections to the world. Split-brain research and the triune brain findings establish that everyone has an inner creative resource with great breadth and depth. Pribram and others provide an integrated scientific justification for believing in your own experience of creativity. If the world is a hologram, that means your perceptions form your world; that your thoughts (in the form of holograms) can have an effect on what you actually experience as the world; and that what lasts inside you is what is manifested as the entire world. If the universe is biographic, its concreteness is an illusion created by your own mental construction.

Those answers are developments of ten ways of being with each other. I call them ‘the ten components of a thinking environment’. We will explore them in depth in a little while because when we live them, as a system of being, we and the world around us do begin to change.

This ‘thinking environment’ starts and ends with the promise not to interrupt each other. It really does. I know that sounds too simple a thing to change a life, much less a world. But that simple promise is loaded. Like an atom. Take it apart and you see an unimaginable force, a force that generates the brilliance of life, in this case the brilliance of independent thinking.

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.

Dan Gilbert at Harvard has looked at this area and demonstrated the effect letting go of your options has, in a study evaluating how people made decisions about different Monet art prints. He asked people to rank five different Monet prints according to their preference, numbering them from one to five. Whichever prints the subjects ranked numbers three and four he said the experimenters happened to have spare copies of and were letting subjects take one home with them. Of course, most of the people took the one they had ranked number three. Then, interestingly, the experimenters told some of the people that they could swap the one they took for the other one later if they wanted to, and the other people were told that whatever print they took home was it—no swapping.

After a few weeks, the experimenters checked back with the subjects. The people who had been told they could swap their prints—even though they had not done so—were less happy with their choices than the people who had chosen the exact same prints but had been told the choice was irreversible. It turns out that reversibility is not conducive to establishing reliable happiness with a decision. Apparently, just the invitation to reconsider and “keep your options open” makes us doubt and devalue our choice.

A funny thing happens to people in a community of truth. Somebody has a thought. The thought is like a little circuit in their brain. When someone shares a thought and others receive it, then suddenly the same circuit is in two brains. When a whole classroom is considering the thought, it’s like the same circuit in twenty-five brains. Our minds are

intermingling. The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls these circuits loops. He argues that when we communicate, and loops are flowing through different brains, we are thinking as one shared organism, anticipating each other, finishing each other’s sentences. “Empathy” is not a strong enough word to describe this intermingling. It is not one person, one body, one brain that marks this condition, Hofstadter argues, but the interpenetration of all minds in ceaseless conversation with each other.