20250409



CHRISTOPHER ALTMAN
Starlab veteran・日本語・NASA・Kavli・Delft・Harvard
Chief Scientist・Quantum Technology・Artificial Intelligence
NASA-trained Commercial Astronaut


We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

Richard Feynman

We stand on the shores of a vast cosmic ocean, with untold continents of possibility to explore. As we continue forwards in our collective journey, scaling the cosmic ladder of evolution, progressing onwards, expanding our reach outwards in the transition to a multiplanetary species — Earth will soon be a destination, not just a point of origin.

From early childhood, I set out to convey a profound and positive impact on the long-term future of humanity — to make the world a better place for our children, our children's children, and the generations yet to come. As we're collectively propelled forwards as a species, I committed to ensuring core values of balance, integrity, and ethical responsibility are upheld with paramount importance in scientific research and principal government leadership. With unprecedented leaps and bounds of progress in our scientific understanding — enabled by the development of converging and expanding exponential technologies — newfound, unexpected discoveries await, just over the horizon.

Rapid advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, molecular nanotechnology, neuroscience, renewable energy, spaceflight, supercomputing and quantum technologies — each enabled by the recursive technological progress of Moore’s Law doubling in computer processing power, speed and complexity — will converge to confer radical changes to society over the coming decades, as we move forward in the collective transition towards the dawn of a post-scarcity economy. The future is unbounded. The responsibility falls upon us to ensure that its limitless potential is filled with dreams of hope, happiness, freedom and fulfillment. 

In tribute to timeless, inspiring, and visionary friend, colleague, collaborator, and coauthor Serguei Krasnikov (1961 – 2024) — whose midnight brainstorming sessions and legendary time travel parties at Starlab will echo through the ages. May we carry forward his boldest dreams, fulfill his most audacious ambitions, and meet again — somewhere, sometime — just beyond the horizon.

LINKS・SELECTED JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS



Portrait of Christopher Altman

ASTRONAUTICS・BREAKTHROUGH PHYSICS
RETROCAUSALITY・QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY

20250315


Shodan Rank Kyūdō, Meiji Temple, Tokyo, Japan

Black belt, First Class, shodanCertificate of recognition, as first foreigner to qualify in eight years. 認許する, Japanese traditional archery, Kyūdō, “standing Zen,” 弓道初, formal recognition awarded by the Japanese National Kyūdō Federation, 全日本弓道連盟

20240512

Starlab: the 'Noah’s Ark' of scientific research that launched 1,000 startup ideas

Lab-concocted vodka, time travel and epilepsy treatments:
Welcome to the Moonshot Factory
“ a place where 100 years means nothing … ”

What happens when you round up more than one hundred of some of the world's greatest scientists, maverick geniuses working on some of the world’s most groundbreaking ideas, put them together in a Belgian castle, and let their imaginations run wild? 

Fire extinguisher duels, bootleg vodka made with lab-procured ethanol and worldbeating treatments for epilepsy are just some of what went down at Starlab: a one-of-a-kind experiment created to unite some of the world’s most daring technologists.

When it was founded in 1996, Starlab was compared to other top research institutes — like Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center — that successfully bridged the gap between idea and market. It was also a prototype for the ambitious organizations of today like Google’s “moonshot factory,” X, trying to bring entirely new ideas to the world. 

But the centre’s idealism was to be its downfall; its pie-in-the-sky approach couldn’t pay the bills, and it went dramatically bankrupt during the dotcom crash. But what most people don’t know is that Starlab’s legacy lives on in the picturesque hills overlooking Barcelona and elsewhere. 

Many European VCs and universities claim they’re backing innovations that will solve humanity’s problems, but huge successes have been elusive. One of the companies from Starlab’s second generation has found significant success, but the centre's tale forces anyone interested in innovation to ask themselves: how do we really bring the wildest ideas to life — and make them financially viable?

The Noah’s Ark of science


Christopher Altman

Starlab was established by serial entrepreneur Walter De Brouwer together with MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and European VC pioneer Johan Konings. The idea was to create a utopian “Noah’s Ark” of science, where the brightest minds from different fields would be brought together to work on “deep future” research. 

“De Brouwer’s ambition was to bring the best scientists in the world together to ‘think thoughts for the very first time.’ It was very interdisciplinary — no walls, no boundaries, no borders …” says Christopher Altman — astronaut, quantum physicist and Starlab veteran. 

In its heyday, Starlab was home to more than 130 scientists from 36 countries, who worked on ideas ranging from time travel and consciousness to new media and “intelligent” clothing. The majority lived on site: a neoclassical castle designed in the late 1800s on the outskirts of Brussels.


Starlab “Time Travel Party,” May 2001. (L to R): Hugo de Garis,
Serguei Krasnikov, 
Roman Zapatrin, Christopher Altman

“It was like a pirate ship in a way, which is what I think I fell in love with. Or you could call it a kind of sect,” laughs Giulio Rufini, neuroscientist and current CEO at Starlab“We’d stay up all night talking in-depth theoretical implications of closed timelike curves (time travel). Roman had a centuries-old recipe for homemade vodka and put to use some surplus ethanol he reappropriated from the biophysics lab down in the basement,” says Altman, referring to one of his colleagues, a quantum topologist and mathematician. “One time a few of the researchers covered themselves in yards of aluminium foil as “armor” and started a duel, complete with fire extinguishers as weapons, in the courtyard.”


Running aground in the dotcom VC drought

But how did Starlab plan to commercialize these wild ideas? Starlab’s research was loosely divided across four main areas: Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes. 

The acronym (BANGwas later adopted by MIT Media Lab. They borrowed that from Starlab a few years after the fact,” recalled Altman. Alongside the team of swashbuckling scientists working across these disciplines, Starlab also employed a commercial team who were tasked with trying to monetize the research.

One of them was Ana Maiques, who’d recently married Rufini before they decided to both join the project. “At the time they were developing “iWear,” intelligent clothing with integrated sensors.We'd reach out to Levi's and all these companies and say, ‘Put €100k on the table per year, and you have access to the IP that is being generated.’” 

“In some cases it was successful, but it was hard to replicate in others.”

And while the lab was always run as a private entity, intended to be distinct from academia, commercial deals like these weren’t enough to sustain it. Maiques remembers how Starlab reflected the heady optimism that was common in the early days of the internet age, as VC capital was pumped into the institute with no urgency on getting a return on investment.

“They would say ‘100 years means nothing at Starlab’. Well, for 100 years to mean nothing you need to be full of capital to develop those technologies,” she says. “The problem was that the dotcom bubble crash happened, and they couldn’t secure the next round. It happened overnight … one day we were eating lobster, and the next they came to close the company.”

Altman says that when one key Swiss investor pulled their backing out of Starlab, the team began approaching people like Bill Gates — Altman himself even went to George W. Bush in person, approaching him at his hotel on his first visit to NATO in an effort to save the lab. Enthusiasm was abundant, but government grant timing was prohibitive, so all the effort was for naught. “It was kind of a bummer, having set up all this stuff,” Rufini says wryly.

Rebirth in Barcelona

But Maiques, the more entrepreneurially minded of the recently married couple, wasn’t about to give up on Starlab. “Ana’s always had more of a business head than me, and she said, ‘Let’s just buy this and run it ourselves,’” says Rufini.

Rufini and Maiques had already been working on setting up a Spanish chapter of Starlab, and had recruited 15 scientists to begin work at the Fabra Observatory, perched in the hills overlooking Barcelona. The team had already secured research contracts with the European Space Agency but, in absence of funding from the central operation, had to dramatically scale back ambitions.

“We had to take radical action, we had to lose about half of the people unfortunately,” says Rufini. “It was the crossing of the desert and it was dealing with a different type of Starlab reality.” This new reality also meant radically narrowing the scope of research. 130 scientists working across BANG were reduced to six scientists working on two core areas: space and neuroscience. 

It was here that Starlab began building the foundations of what would become Neuroelectrics, a non-invasive neural interface startup that raised $17.5m in 2021 to fund a Phase III trial for epilepsy treatment.

The company’s Starstim headcap reads electrical brainwave data from the wearer, and can electrically stimulate areas of the brain to target treatments for conditions like Alzheimer's and epilepsy. Apart from relying on grant funding, Maiques describes how she would go door-to-door at research companies, selling early iterations of the Starstim headcap, as well as data processing services. 

“We needed to run payroll. That's why I was going out and knocking on doors and trying to sell to companies out there, which is something that the research field never does — that kind of commercial action,” she says.

'You’ve got to let the broth boil'

Neuroelectrics was able to self-sustain for 10 years with this bootstrapping strategy, and the company now helps finance Starlab’s research.

But some of the spinout attempts haven’t been such a hit. Another commercial product Starlab launched is a satellite observation company called Greendex, which analyses the amount of vegetation surrounding real estate to assess air quality in different neighborhoods.


“It hasn't been as successful as Neuroelectrics. The market doesn’t seem ready,” says Maiques.

“Spinouts are not easy. You need to have the technology, but the timing also has to align with the market.”Maiques says that, today, the space and satellite observation side of Starlab’s research has taken a back seat, with more energy going into neuroscience. 

Rufini and his team are now working on a project called “neuro twins” — which aims to use various data sources like MRI and EEG scans to build a digital model of people’s brains to identify how and why things might be going wrong across different pathologies.

“Neuro twins is still 10 to 20 years away, so we still have the long-term science vision with the short-term focus on return on investment. We never abandoned shooting for the moon in deeptech areas and we're still finding grants to sustain that,” says Maiques. “It’s like a broth. You have to give it time to boil.”

Making science useful

While Neuroelectrics is the commercial poster child for the current iteration of Starlab, the institute’s 25-year history has contributed to countless areas of innovation.

The “iWear” smart clothing project was eventually sold to Phillips, while another 
biotech company, Bioprocessors, was spun out and relocated to Silicon Valley. Rufini adds that a whole host of ideas that are now commonplace were born at Starlab. “I came up with the idea that, pretty soon, cars will have the internet and we could use that information to forecast traffic,” he says.

“There was another one called ‘spitters.com’, where you could send off spit samples to your genotype. There was another one called ‘pajamanation.com’, which was a marketplace for jobs for people working from home.”

Deep Future


Some argue that Starlab’s greatest legacy isn’t in the scientific advances or spinoff businesses that it created, but in the way it encouraged those who walked through its doors to think in a truly unique way. 

Christopher Altman went on to work at quantum research projects for NASA and with the US government, and later launched renewable energy cryptocurrency SolarCoin with fellow Starlab alum Nick Gogerty. Today he’s still not afraid to attach his name to such “Deep Future” speculative science, and is a cofounder of a nonprofit scientific research organiation studying the phenomenon of UAPs. 

“There are paradigm shifting technologies to be discovered if we can get to the bottom of the phenomenon,” he says. “Confirmation of extraterrestrial artifacts would quite readily qualify as the single greatest discovery made by the human race.”

Maiques adds that no less than eight former researchers at Starlab Barcelona have gone on to start their own companies, in fields ranging from virtual reality to earth observation radar. This entrepreneurial spirit, she believes, is something that’s baked into Starlab’s business model, and something that she says is sorely lacking in European academia.

“In Europe we are good at turning money into knowledge, but we're really bad at turning knowledge back into money,” she says. “I honestly cannot think of a private company doing science in such a way with this model to create spinoffs. We always had the drive to go to the market and make money. It's just a different vibe.” 

Starlab’s director of neuroscience, Aureli Soria-Frisch, agrees that European science all too often gets stuck in the lab. “There is a lot of very interesting science in Europe. But how can we make this useful for people? We need better licensing policies and career development support outside of academia,” he says.

In that sense, Starlab’s story serves as a microcosm for this big question in European tech: how can we make the most of the continent’s scientific innovation? The project’s first chapter serves as a warning for what can happen when venture capital flows into ideas without a viable business model. Its second chapter is a lesson in how great research can be done with the market in mind, given the right conditions. Europe, so far, just hasn’t excelled in creating those conditions.

COMING SOONSTARLAB 2.0



ASTRONAUTICS・BREAKTHROUGH PHYSICS
RETROCAUSALITY・QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY

20230922


Deeply grateful, profoundly humbled. It's an honor to receive such profound recognition for a relatively modest role. It takes each and every one of our collective efforts to manifest the profound and positive change that's so very much needed in today's rapidly-changing world.

With thanks for longtime influence and inspiration, to brilliant and practical pioneers of quantum mechanics including Anton Zeilinger, Danny Greenberger, and Michael Horne , co-inventors of the Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state and higher-dimensional multipartite quantum entanglement. Zeilinger shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics with Aspect and Clauser for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering a new era of quantum information science.

I lived and worked with Anton's group for two months on two consecutive Austrian National Research Fellowships for my research proposals to “Quantum Mechanics in Higher Dimensional Hilbert Spaces,” and “What is Real in the Quantum World?” at the Austrian International Akademie, Traunkirchen, with Anton Zeilinger, Marcus Aspelmeyer, Caslav Brukner, Rupert Ursin, William Wootters, Christopher Fuchs, Daniel Greenberger and Michael Horne. 

Photos of the picturesque setting and the idyllic, crystalline lake in Traunkirchen are available on Flickr.com.




GLOBAL INSPIRATIONAL LEADERS AWARD



At the confluence of cutting-edge science and space exploration, where magic is borne and miraculous discoveries await, an extraordinary figure emerges: autodidact polymath, protean Renaissance explorer, Christopher Altman is an American quantum technologist and NASA-trained commercial astronaut bringing tomorrow's technologies to bear on today's greatest challenges. 


In vibrant Japan, immersive studies on a Japanese Fulbright Fellowship brought together the sharp contrast between the futuristic, neon-lit cityscapes of Tokyo's living cybernetic metropolis with the ancient temples, bonsai gardens, and spartan dojos where Altman practiced bushidō, the traditional Japanese martial arts disciplines of kendo, shōdan kyūdo, and judo


In 2001, he was recruited to multidisciplinary, Deep Future research institute Starlab, where his research group's record-breaking artificial intelligence project was featured in a Discovery Channel Special, recognized with an official entry into the Guinness Book of World Records, and he was called to provide expert testimony to the French Senate, Le Sénat, on the long-­term future of Artificial Intelligence.


In the aftermath of the tragic September 11 attacks, Altman volunteered, then was elected to serve as Chairman for the UNISCA First Committee on Disarmament and International Security. His Chair Report to the General Assembly on the exponential acceleration of converging technologies found resonance at the highest echelons of power — at the White House, through direct meetings with US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, et al — providing early momentum for the creation of the United States Cyber Command. For his contributions to the field, he was selected as recipient for the annual RSA Information Security award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Policy the following year.


Altman was then tasked to spearhead a priority national security program in Japan, personally reporting to directors DARPA QuIST and ARDA/DTO, direct predecessor to IARPA, under mandate to create coherent national research estimates and compile long-term science and technology roadmaps for advanced research and development activity across East Asia, attending conferences including the World Technology Summit and the Gordon Research Conference, collaborating with leading scientists and Nobel laureates, and briefing US national labs researchers, policy and research funding agency leaders with a comprehensive assessment of forward-looking trends in the field. His comprehensive national quantum roadmaps went on to serve as the quintessential prototype for the creation of the official US Government Quantum Roadmap — an accolade conveyed directly by the program chair leading the initiative at Los Alamos National Labs.


Returning to the United States from a graduate research fellowship at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Altman was recruited to lead a futures studies program at NASA's Ames Research Center, where he was mentored by a panel of veteran astronauts and shuttle mission commanders and a USAF General, PhD astrophysicist and former head of US Space Command. Altman conducted manned spaceflight training, then selected by a committee comprised of current and former NASA astronauts and astronaut trainers to as a flight member with the world's first commercial astronaut corps. His keynote on The Future of Spaceflight broadcast live to 108 cities around the world — served as catalyst for NASA to fund the corps for its first series of manned spaceflight missions. Altman successfully completed spaceflight training the subsequent spring.


As senior research scientist at PISCES, a technology testbed and astronaut training facility on the slopes of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii — where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trained for the Apollo 11 Moon landing — Altman served as principal investigator for a team that includes NASA and Caltech scientists working together with the world's-first inventors and world-record holding pioneers of free-space quantum teleportation. As Chief Scientist for Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Technology, Altman works with colleagues to establish the foundation for a global network of satellites linked together by macroscopic quantum entanglement for secure quantum communications.


As affiliate researcher at Harvard University, Altman's reach extends far beyond Earth's orbit and out among the stars to seek definitive evidence of extraterrestrial artifacts through the detection of anomalous aerial technosignatures and interstellar objects — a mission complemented by his role as lead astronaut in a program aiming to pinpoint celestial transient events in search of potential exoprobes orbiting the Earth, with preliminary results twice published in the scientific journal Nature.


Sustainable living in space requires sustainable living on Earth, through in situ resource utilization (ISRU) and beneficial, dual-use spin-off technologies. As Chief Astronaut Technical Officer for MIT partner Mars City Design, Altman's experience and perspective is applied to directing agency plans for long-term lunar and Mars settlement. As Cofounder and Chief Scientist of SolarCoin, he aims to accelerate our societal transition from petroleum-dependent, scarcity economics to a renewable energy-based, post-scarcity economy. With each step forward, his tireless efforts lift humanity just a little bit closer to the stars — and to a future where we can truly call the whole cosmos home.

20230711






EUROPEAN UNION・ANNO DOMINI 2001.

I began my scientific career at a multidisciplinary research institute, Starlab, located deep in the serene and secluded forests outside Brussels, Belgium. The lab’s principal base of operations was housed in a historic landmark — an imposing 19th century manor, remarkable both in scale and magnificence. In a previous incarnation, the palatial grounds served as official embassy for the First Republic of CzechoslovakiaIts nearest neighbor, the world renowned Pastéur Institute, was one of but a handful of highly-secured Biosafety Level 4 labs in the world. 

Cofounded by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and serial entrepreneur Walter de Brouwer and established in partnership with MIT, Oxford and Ghent University, Starlab was created as a “Noah's Ark” to bring together the world's most brilliant and creative scientists to work on far-ranging multidisciplinary projects that hold the potential to convey a profound and positive impact on future generations. 

Starlab was borne as an incubator for long-term and basic research in the spirit of Bell Labs, MIT Media Lab, Xerox PARC, and Interval Research. Its research mantras were “Deep Future” and “A place where one hundred years means nothing.” Approximately 130 scientists from thirty-seven different nationalities — each established leaders in their respective research fields — lived and worked at the lab. 

A second base of operations, Starlab DF-II (Deep Future II) was established in the Royal Observatory in Spain on a mountaintop perch overlooking the city of Barcelona. With a more tightly-focused mission scope of space-borne and neuroscience research, DF-II continues to innovate and grow to present day. 

Discovery Channel Special
Onsite research ranged from artificial intelligence, biophysics, consciousness, emotics, intelligent clothing, materials science, protein folding, neuroscience, new media, nanoelectronics, quantum computation, macroscopic entanglement, robotics, stem cell research, theoretical physics — e.g., the possibility of time travel — transarchitecture, and wearable computing. 

Our custom-built supercomputer, the CAM-Brain Machine, was supported in part by a 1 Million Euro grant from the European Union. The custom-designed and created supercomputer — as powerful as 10,000 Pentium II PCs — harnessed the power of Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA) evolutionary hardware to evolve seventy-five million neurons in a massively-parallel artificial neural network instantiated directly in silico using evolutionary genetic algorithms. With each clock tick, the supercomputer simultaneously updates hundreds of  millions of cellular automata billions of times per second. 

When the laboratory came up short on research grants in June, I personally went to the President himself when fate brought us together at the same time and place on his first trip overseas after election. The Commander in Chief, who had just arrived in Brussels for a meeting with NATO, impressed us with both his immediate familiarity with our work and and his enthusiasm in response to my earnest request for $1M in budget that had been allocated for national security priority scientific research topics through a grant newly created by Clinton with his last act in office, the 2001 National Nanotechnology Initiative

For my contributions to the program, I was selected by the US Government as one of three graduate students most likely to impact the future of the field at Salishan, an honor shared with John Carmack and Bill Butera, sponsored to attend conferences and senior administrator briefings at Fort Meade, National Security Agency headquarters outside Washington, DC, attended the World Technology Summit in London, was an invited delegate to the French Sénat to provide testimony on the future of technology and how it will transform our lives over coming decades — and more.

Following three days of enraptured debate with senior politicians, senators and international diplomats at the French Sénat hearing on artificial intelligence in Paris, the world's first senate hearing on the topic, Starlab's principal investigator and AI program lead, Hugo de Garis, predicted I could one day even be elected President myself. Far sooner than that, however, he drew my attention to the threat of assassination from technology Luddites who stand in opposition to the rapid pace of progress in technology and artificial intelligence.

Our living arrangements at the lab consisted of an expansive three-bedroom master suite with fully-stocked library, typically reserved for visiting prime ministers, senators, and senior diplomats. My quarters were shared with none other than the project's principal scientific investigator, Hugo de Garis. One midsummer's afternoon as the two of us strolled on a random walk through the sprawling estate and lush wooded grounds surrounding the manor, immersed in a passionate debate on the long-term promise and perils of superintelligence, the ever-eccentric 
de Garis came up with the radical idea to obtain a life-size replica of Fat Man — the solid plutonium core, 21 kiloton, 10,300-pound nuclear bomb detonated over Nagasaki in World War II — and to mount it precariously to the vaulted ceilings of my apartment, with the bomb hanging directly over my bed.  

The Volkswagen beetle-sized replica of the bomb was constructed for the Discovery Channel documentary de Garis had just finished filming on the future of artificial intelligence, which featured a potential global war between humanity and artificial intelligence. He'd purchased it outright from the director, making arrangements for expedited shipping and delivery direct to Starlab's headquarters in Brussels. The sheer audacity of the proposal was outrageous. He intended the bomb to serve as a dramatic and powerful reminder of “the weight of my responsibility to the future of humanity.” He certainly knew how to drive home a point.

With the explosive rise of AI we've seen over the last twenty-four months alone, with artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) seemingly just around the corner, one could say that de Garis — though radical and exceedingly unconventional in his unprecedented approach — was just a few years ahead of his time. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI founder Elon Musk, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have each claimed that AI poses an extinction risk on par with nuclear war. My firsthand experiences and life lessons learned living at Starlab have proven priceless, growing in timeliness and importance with each passing day — though friends sometimes joke that the wrong Altman is leading OpenAI 

A recent Financial Times (FT) spinoff magazine article in Sifted highlights our research going back to Starlab, AI and time travel research projects, and my subsequent travels across East Asia to create national quantum roadmaps for US national research funding and IC agency directors. In years that followed, I continued on through research fellowships in nanoscience and the foundations of quantum mechanics with Nobel physics laureate Anton Zeilinger’s research group in Austria and across Europe, then was recruited to lead a futures initiative at NASA in collaboration with Ray Kurzweil and Google, together with leading companies, luminary scientists, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and around the world. 

From 
manned spaceflight training at NASA on to the summit of a volcano where the Apollo 11 astronauts trained before the first landing to put a man on the Moon, to field expeditions employing state-of-the-art sensors in rough desert terrain, from collaborations leading diplomats to advise the United Nations on critical security issues of the future to multidisciplinary teams of scientists, researchers, special forces domain experts and engineers field testing next-generation technologies in austere environments — each 
of these initiatives was undertaken with the singular aim to make a profound and positive impact on the future of humanity, for our children, our children’s children, and the generations yet to come.



“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light — not our darkness — that most frightens us. We oft ask ourselves: ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are we not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small here doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that lies within us. It’s not just in some of us. It’s in everyone—and as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. ”
 Marianne Williamson