To explore the similarities and differences between humans and machines, in May 1980, after resigning from my marketing job with IBM in London, I began a thought experiment in which I imagined that I was a computer that switched itself off and on again, so that it had no programs within it, not even a bootstrap program to load the operating system, not unlike those that led Albert Einstein to develop the special and general theories of relativity.

However, I did not do this through an act of conscious choice, for there is no ‘I’, as an autonomous agent, who can conduct such a thought experiment. Rather, I use the concept of thought experiment to describe how a big bang erupted in the utmost depths of my being at 11:30 on 27th April 1980 as I was strolling across Wimbledon Common to the pub for lunch.

For, it was at that eureka moment that the creative power of Life, emerging directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe, told me that active and passive data in both computers and humans are causal, and hence energetic. I knew immediately that the notion of nonmaterial energies was the key that would open all the innermost secrets of the Universe, which I had struggled to find in adolescence, during my formal education.