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Considering the fundamental laws of the material order, and the solidity of current theories.

History’s Biggest Con

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The world’s most successful con man is not in finance or politics. He is the scientist that runs the world’s biggest machine. He has defrauded the US taxpayer of tens of billions of dollars, and he’s not done yet.

This is the story of particle physics and its kingpin, Carlo Rubbia.

A Field Forged in Fear

Particle physics is the study of matter and space. Newton and Einstein are the most famous scientists in this field. For centuries, physicists went about their business largely unnoticed by the public. Then came nuclear weapons.

History’s most famous equation was given to us by Einstein. E = mc2. To military planners, the equation is important because it says that matter can be converted to pure energy. Prior to World War II, chemical munitions only used a billionth of that explosive potential. The atom bomb showed that chemical munitions could start a nuclear reaction that achieved a million-fold improvement. A decade later, atom bombs were used to trigger fusion in a hydrogen bomb, achieving another factor of forty improvement.

Naturally, after World War II, politicians recognized that particle physicists were the most dangerous people in the world. A single hydrogen bomb can wipe out a city like London. Particle physicists were organized under the Department of Energy and told to find out whether even greater horrors were possible. That mission was sustained by the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.

This work was done at particle colliders. Over time, these became the world’s largest machines, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate.

Fortunately for the survival of the human race, by the mid-eighties we knew that the hydrogen bomb was the limit. Everything discovered by the particle colliders was unstable, lasting at most a millionth of a second. However, this was bad for particle physicists. They needed a new marketing message to convince politicians to give them billions so they could keep on building and running colliders.

Given that the researchers were inspired by the prospect of blowing up the world, perhaps we should have expected what came next.

The Final Theory of Everything

Every politician knows that politics is a contest of wills. In the halls of Congress and in the White House, palpable energy is generated by these contests. Politicians know that spirituality is real.

Could that energy be tapped? Well, not according to physics. In fact, Einstein’s theories seemed to prove that spiritual energy couldn’t exist. Remove all the matter from space and there is nothing left.

Physicists knew better. Richard Feynman, the quirky theorist from Cal Tech, spoke about going to Princeton to speak before the “Monster Minds.”

This, then, was the pitch: “We know that our theories of matter and space are incomplete. Give us money so that we can find the final theory of everything. Then we’ll know how to harness the power of will.” Now, this was absurd from the start. Will is generated by the human mind, which needs to avoid explosions at all costs. But it worked for a while. Congress is a creature of habit, and it wasn’t too much money, at first. Only a couple of hundred million dollars a year.

Then, in the mid-eighties, came the supercolliders. These were billion-dollar machines. Finally, the international particle physics community banded together into coalitions. In Europe, researchers at CERN promoted an upgrade to their collider. In the US, states competed to host the Superconducting Super Collider. Not surprisingly, George Bush Sr. picked Texas as the winner.

As the price tag went up and up, the particle physics community realized that only one candidate could be built. And this is where the con started – the con that left the US giving billions of taxpayer dollars to CERN.

Nobels Oblige

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and arms merchant (alas, explosions again) who bequeathed his fortune to fund the Nobel Prize. Winning the Nobel Prize in any science is one of the few ways that a scientist gains public notoriety. With that stature comes access to politicians that funnel taxpayer dollars into research. Universities and laboratories, naturally, compete to hire Nobel Prize winners. When they can’t hire them, they try to create them.

Inevitably, the Nobel Prize is a highly political award. It’s not just the ideas that count.

The Nobel Prize for Physics is dominated by fundamental physics. Discovering a new particle or force is almost guaranteed to be followed by an invitation to Stockholm.

Motive: billions of taxpayer dollars for the next particle collider. Opportunity: given that politicians don’t understand a single thing about particle physics, winning a Nobel Prize establishes prestige that could determine the flow of those dollars. Means: the existing collider at CERN. Sounds like a recipe for crime.

Exposing the grift is difficult because particle physicists speak an arcane language. I will try keep it to a minimum, but to be able to confront the perpetrators of this crime against the American taxpayer, we need to understand some of that language.

As well as particles of matter called fermions, the universe contains fields. These fields come in packets called bosons. Bosons allow matter to interact. As a practical example, when you chew food, the atoms of your teeth are not mechanically breaking the food apart, but generating bosons called photons that break the food apart.

How do physicists prove that they have discovered a new fermion?

The concept is built upon Einstein’s equation. E = mc2. To achieve perfect conversion of mass to energy, physicists discovered that they could make antimatter that, when combined with normal matter, annihilates completely.

How to make new kinds of matter? In this regard, the most interesting bosons are the W and Z. Through these so-called weak interactions, any kind of matter can be created. The only requirement is that enough energy exists to run annihilation in reverse. This is called “pair creation.” From the pure energy of the Z, matter and antimatter are created.

To find a new kind of fermion, a collider first manufactures antimatter. It then takes the antimatter and matter, pushing them through voltage that adds energy of motion, creating beams. Finally, the beams are aimed to an intersection point at the center of a detector. Randomly, annihilation occurs. Both the energy of mass and the energy of motion are available to create new fermions.

The process is rote. Build a collider. Use the acceleration to control the energy of the collisions. Analyze the data coming out of your detectors. When you get to the power limit of your collider, go to Congress and ask for more money.

The challenge is that sometimes beams collide without producing anything interesting, filling your detectors up with noise. Fortunately, there is a specific signal that occurs most frequently when creating a new kind of fermion. The detectors will see two photons moving in opposite directions.

Remember that last fact. When a new kind of fermion is found, we see two photons moving in opposite directions.

From the start of particle physics until 1987, eight fermions were discovered. They first six showed a definite generational pattern: a light lepton followed by two heavier quarks. The first triad is known as electron, down, and up. The second generation contains muon, strange, and charm. In the third generation, colliders had detected the tau and bottom. The field was racing to find the third member of that generation, the top.

Along the way, there was another important discovery. The weak interactions are weak because the W and Z themselves have large masses. On the way to finding the top, the bosons were confirmed, at energies of 80 and 93 GeV. (The units are not important. Remember the numbers.) For purposes of understanding the fraud, I emphasize that the W and Z do not produce two photon signals.

The W and Z results confirmed theoretical predictions, convincing politicians that the field was on a solid footing. For this, Carlo Rubbia was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984.

I was in my last year of my graduate studies in 1987 when CERN announced the discovery of the top, publishing its claim in Physical Review. One of my thesis advisors, Mary Kay Gaillard, had come to UC Berkeley through CERN. That connection brought researchers from CERN who described the result. I was shocked to hear that the data did not demonstrate the required two-photon signal. Furthermore, the accelerator energy during the study was 346 GeV, exactly twice the sum of the W and Z masses.

I trusted Mary Kay. In my presence, she denounced the evils of nuclear weapons. I went to her and voiced my confusion. How could this be a new particle? It looked like a collection of four weak bosons, exactly at the energy that you would predict.

Her answer amounted to, “Go home little boy. The adults are playing politics.”

As the leader of CERN, winner of the Nobel prize, and lead author of the top paper, Carlo Rubbia was the kingpin of particle physics. And CERN won the competition for the next collider.

Higgsy Pigsy

Let’s return to the political context now. Remember: the Cold War was ending. Everyone knew that no new bomb technology was coming out of particle physics. The goal was now a theory of everything. How long would that political motivation last?

Given the abstractness of the motivation, the field needed a long runway in its next accelerator. This was part of the strategy with the top announcement. The heaviest particle to that point was the bottom quark, at 4.2 GeV. That the fraudulent “top” was all the way up at 173 GeV suggested that there was much more to come, if only politicians would fund the work.

The proposed upgrade of CERN was not modest. It set a 20-year goal of attaining a sixty-fold increase in the collider’s power. Bedazzled by Nobel prizes and the pretty pictures produced by taxpayer-funded science propagandists, the politicians were persuaded to comply.

Then came turn-on date in 2012. The machine was ramped up through its energy range, scanning for new particles all the way up to its limit.

Nothing. Zero, Zilch. A ten-billion-dollar boondoggle, funded in no small part by the American taxpayer.

Except then, after a summer spent scanning higher energies, the machine was turned down to 125 GeV. Be clear: this was an energy accessible by the earlier collider. At that energy, the detectors showed a two-photon signal. Detecting this signal is a primary design criterion for every detector. As it occurred at lower energy than the signal announced as the “top,” it must have been known before that study.

Demonstrating their impenetrability to shame, the 125 GeV signal was published in Physical Review and announced as the long-sought after “Higgs particle.”

“Really,” I though, “you are going to double down on your fraud?”

Remember: two photons is the signal for a new particle. The “Higgs” is what the top should have looked like. In fact, by the standards of the field, I should be awarded the Nobel prize for recognizing that it is the top.

None-the-less, the shameless perpetrators began their pressure campaign. They leaned on the Nobel committee to recognize Peter Higgs, the developer of the field’s minimally coherent theory of particle mass. In the background, Marco Rubbia, CERN’s prior laureate, went to the funding panels, demanding, “You know, this Higgs is kind of weird. We need more money for another collider.” The Nobel committee, having acceded to the Higgs award, heard of this and protested, “We are about to award the Nobel Prize for this discovery. Is it the Higgs or is it not the Higgs?” Rubbia backtracked.

Only temporarily, however. Read the popular science press and every week you will see a propaganda piece promoting the next collider at CERN. After all, the full-time job of their taxpayer-funded propagandists is to secure funding for that collider.

Omerta

The question, in any massive conspiracy, is how the community maintains discipline. This is a matter of leverage.

You see, university posts in particle physics are not funded directly. They are funded as an adder on collider construction and operation budgets.

For twenty years, I have been trying to get particle physics out of the rut of superstring theory – a theory that is certifiably insane for its violations of everything that we observe about the universe. In the one instance that I was able to get into dialog with a theorist, I was told “I know that you are right, but if I work with you, I will lose my funding.”

CERN is the only game in town. Anything that does not build to more construction is not funded. Pure and simple, Rubbia is the godfather of particle physics. If you don’t play, he won’t pay.

It is time to stop the grift. The next machine will cost the US taxpayer tens of billions of dollars. Enough is enough. Call your local congresspeople and demand that they investigate and shut this down. We have more pressing problems to worry about.

Einstein Led Us into Mass Hallucinations

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Technocrats ask us to “follow the science.” But what happens when that leads into mass hallucinations?

Ever since Einstein published his theory of gravity – General Relativity – physics has been in pursuit of a theory of everything. In this post, I will explain where Einstein went wrong, and how mass has been used to paper over all the evidence that disproves their theory of everything.

Einstein’s work depended upon the assumption that we can’t tell whether we are moving. Consider: sitting on your chair, you don’t feel like you are moving. In fact, you are carried along with the surface of the earth as it spins, completing a revolution each day. That cycle is embedded in larger cycles: the earth rotates around the sun, and the sun rotates around the center of the galaxy.

Of course, during an earthquake, we know that we are moving, because we can feel acceleration. Even here, however, Einstein said that we don’t know whether the earth is shaking or whether gravity is changing. Both shaking and gravity create acceleration.

To enshrine the principle that we cannot tell whether we are moving, Einstein declared that, should all matter be removed, space would be empty. Once matter is added, it causes space to deform, and the relative positions of particles begin to change. This relativity of motion is declared in the names of his theories: Special Relativity and General Relativity.

Once General Relativity was announced, other physicists considered how its principles might apply to other forces of nature. Eventually, we had three complete theories covering electromagnetism (most of engineering and chemistry), color (that keeps atomic nuclei from flying apart), and the weak force. In trying to extend General Relativity to those forces, a certain perspective became popular. Einstein was interpreted as having said that gravity exists to allow matter to change its position. In trying to build a theory of everything, then, physicists thought of forces as means of allowing any and all of the properties of a particle to change.

Before explaining how that ambition led to mass hallucinations, I will observe that to the spiritually sophisticated, Einstein is clearly wrong. In my career, I have worked with many spiritually sophisticated scientists. They are troubled by the failure of physics to explain spirituality but can’t see their way out of the trap that Einstein built. I have offered them that escape, but to accept it is to admit that everything published by particle physics and cosmology over the last forty years has been wrong. They aren’t ready to accept that humbling.

Pride comes before the fall.

Fortunately, I don’t have to explain the last forty years of journal articles to you for you to understand the mass hallucination.

Let’s start by counting the number of particle properties. We have:

  • Three positions (although some add time as a fourth property)
  • One electric charge
  • Two weak interaction charges
  • Three color charges
  • Spin (some particles act like turning tops)

That’s a total of ten. Mathematically, the equations that describe the effects of interactions between these properties cannot be bolted together, however. To unify them, we have to allow the possibility that there are other particle properties, currently hidden from us.

This is now an open-ended search. If we currently cannot see the other particle properties, how do we test our theories? This led the theorists to rely upon the principle established by Einstein in General Relativity. Forces exist to allow particles to influence other particles. The properties of one particle change the properties of another particle.

To theory starts, then, by putting all of the particle properties into a single bag. But how big a bag? Now we confront the constraint of analytical feasibility. The theorists needed to choose a bag that was subject to mathematical analysis. They turned to telecommunications, which had learned how to encode twenty-six channels of data into a single stream. Twenty-six is obviously more than ten, so this seemed an acceptable place to start.

Given this scheme of describing everything as the intermingling of properties, the problem was then to figure out how to test the theory. Here we come to the first of the delusions that follow from Einstein’s assumption that space was empty.

When Edwin Hubble began his survey of galaxies, it was obvious that light lost energy (“red-shifted”) as it traveled to us from distant galaxies. If space was filled with a substance, that could be explained as light bouncing off that substance. Given Einstein’s authority, however, that possibility was rejected. The only explanation available was that distant galaxies are moving away from us. From this explanation, we are led immediately to the conclusion that the universe formed in a huge explosion called the “Big Bang.”

Physics uses its theories to predict the history of objects. Here on earth, conditions are too complicated to support a test of theories of everything. But the Big Bang, conceived of first as starting at a single point and then as a small bubble in a super-heated soup of particles, simplified the starting conditions so that predictions could be calculated. This linked the theory of everything to cosmogenesis – the early history of the universe.

As that work progressed, the following problems arose. In each case, the problems were made to go away by introducing a “vacuum potential” to the theory. In what follows, I give that mechanism the degree of respect it deserves by substituting “pixie dust.” The outrageousness of its application demands the concession that the theory is no longer a theory of everything, because it cannot explain its own pixie dust.

  1. If we limit the properties to three positions, the equations predict that space should be filled with black holes and other “topological defects” that are too complicated to describe here. To avoid this, the theory has to allocate ten positions. This obviously contradicts our everyday experience, so the theorists sprinkled pixie dust to make the extra seven dimensions curl up and disappear.
  2. With ten positions, we still have sixteen other properties whose interaction we need to describe with other forces. Today we only see seven properties. To make the other nine go away, the theorists sprinkle more pixie dust.
  3. The early, super-hot universe is turbulent (think of an airplane in a storm). The universe we observe, however, is smooth. To make the turbulence go away, the theorists sprinkle more pixie dust. In fact, they use so much pixie dust that almost all of the matter we observe arises from the pixie dust. Unfortunately, that matter comes with anti-matter, which should annihilate all of the matter. The theory still cannot explain how matter survived.
  4. In all of these calculations, the theory ignores mass. To create mass, more pixie dust is sprinkled (the “Higgs boson,” a fraud that I will expose in a post to come).

Even with all of this pixie dust, the theory still does not guarantee that the universe will come out as we experience it. In fact, there are tens of millions of other possibilities. The chance that we exists seems impossibly small. To avoid this problem, the theorists gather all the remaining pixie dust, declaring that we live in a “multiverse” that contains more universes than there are atoms in our universe.

The definition of insanity is an inability to align our beliefs with the reality we share with others. On all of these grounds, the current theory of everything is insane. The delusion is sustained by the use of pixie dust in the form of vacuum potentials. The effect of the pixie dust is to disappear anything that disagrees with observation. It is a “mass hallucination” because the effect of the pixie dust is to use mass to prevent the disagreements from lasting beyond the earliest stages of the Big Bang.

The characterization of “mass hallucination” also applies in the psychological sense. Physical Review has a whole section dedicated to arguments over the theory of everything. The pursuit of evidence to prove the theory funnels tens of billions of taxpayer dollars towards construction and operation of earth- and space-based detectors. The largest machine in existence, the supercollider at CERN, itself costs more than a billion dollars a year. To that we must add neutrino detectors, space-based telescopes, gravity wave detectors, and others.

To protect that funding, these projects hire science publicists that flood media with what, given the pixie dust identified above, is pure propaganda.

As I indicate above, I have offered physics an escape from the delusions that follow from the dogma propagated by Saint Einstein. To the rest of us, this is not an idle matter. As I have explained, psychiatry was led into a dark corner by Einstein, to the suffering of tens of millions of our children and neighbors. It is time to stop funding this delusion.

Einstein and Mental Illness

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For more than a century, psychiatrists have been trying to solve mental illness by changing the brain. They have failed, and that failure has harmed the lives of many, many people.

Psychiatry was driven to emphasize the brain because Albert Einstein declared that if we removed matter, space would be empty. This was a death knell for the soul, leading to conceptions that people are just machines. Treating mental illness was therefore like changing a spark plug.

In this paper, I prove that Einstein was wrong. The physical world that we observe is actually more gracefully and accurately explained if space is filled with a lattice of infinitely slippery polygons. Within that sea, there are loops of spirit that become a soul. Loops that attach to the polygons are understood in Einstein’s physics as “charge.” It is through this attachment that the soul connects to matter. Our “minds” are therefore the brain plus our soul.

Mental illness is not just a problem in the brain. It is a problem in the soul. In this new vision of reality, damaging the brain to fix the mind is clearly understood as counterproductive.

The paper is not an easy read. Please, if you know a young or aspiring physicist, get them to look at this. Physical Review X refuses to publish this paper, so I am putting it out to the public through social media. I have explained to PRX that I am trying to clear up a critical public health problem, but the old guard is afraid that they are going to lose their research funding.

Explaining Wave/Particle Duality

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For anyone that has ever mulled this over, I want to explain quantum “wave/particle duality.”

Imagine that you have a pool of water with a ball perched on the deck. The ball falls into the pool, causing waves. Ignoring for the moment the effects of the air and the loss of wave motion into heating of the water, the only way to stop the water waves is for the waves to combine to push the ball back up onto the deck.

In the quantum system, the “particle” is the ball. The “wave” is the water motion. Due to conservation of energy, you cannot bring the entire system back to rest unless both the particle (ball) and wave (water) are brought back to rest.

This understanding eludes quantum theorists because they subscribe to Einstein’s axiom that space is empty. This is necessary to his theory of gravity. In fact, however, we now know that space is filled with “dark energy.” Returning to our metaphor, dark energy is the “water.” An electron (for example) is the “particle.”

The mathematics are well known to the quantum theorists that study superconductivity. In that case, the particles are again electrons, and the waves are the vibrations in the metallic crystals (vibrations in the sense of a plucked guitar string).

Quantum Inversion

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In modeling large-scale systems, wave equations are often useful approximations. So, while water at the quantum scale is made up of molecules that bounce around like billiard balls, in our swimming pool waves look perfectly smooth, and we can predict their behavior using wave theory.

A researcher at Cal Tech has applied this approximation to the modeling of very large astronomical objects: super-massive black holes and their entourage of stars and planetoids. In pursuing the mathematics, he discovered that the system behaves according to a wave equation that looks just like the equation that governs slowly-moving subatomic particles: Schrödinger’s equation.

But the equation alone does not generate “quantum” behavior in the objects described by the equation. That is generated by Fermi’s “exclusion” rules. In Fermi’s rules, the particles that make up stable matter all obey this rule: all particles of any one type (such as an electron) are indistinguishable, and therefore the equation describing the behavior of the system must be the same if any two particles are exchanged, with one exception: the amplitude of the wave changes sign.

Going back to our swimming pool, this is like saying that if we exchanged any two water molecules, the wave would turn into its mirror image: where there were peaks in the wave, now there would be troughs (and visce-versa).

I am absolutely certain that this makes as little sense in describing the behavior of supermassive black holes as it does in describing the behavior of pools of water.

That a working physicist could so casually misrepresent the nature of the system reflects the subtlety of quantum concepts, and the tempting ease with which those concepts are used to manipulate public fascination.

More Bread on the Water

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When I went out last to the Skeptics Society meeting in Pasadena, I had to apologize to the presenter for my difficult questions. My three sites (Love Returns here at WordPress, and the philosophical treatise at the original everdeepening) are not random ruminations, but develop messages. In interacting with other intellectuals, I tend to drive conversation into those oceans of meaning.

The challenge is their eclectic foundations: physics, philosophy, theology, spirituality, sociology, politics, and psychology. I have been blessed to live in an era during which people exploring at the edges of those fields have been nibbling at each other’s cheese, so to speak. Unfortunately, those feasting on the resources established to support mainstream thinking have also become adept at avoiding discussion of alternatives.

But I am proud of the body of work I have amassed, and believe that it deserves consideration. Since I earn enough to make ends meet, I’ve decided to finance that process through Stumble Upon.

It’s bracing. I set up two campaigns, one pointing at Love Returns and the other to the New Physics page here. I went in pretty hard, setting up to spend $100 a week. In both cases, I decided to target under-forty audiences, expecting that they would be more open to new ideas.

I was warned when I established the advertising campaign for my books. Click-through rates are about 3%. So while views on my sites have indeed mushroomed, only about one in twenty appear to actually click through to read the development outlined in the initial page.

Feedback is limited, much as it is here. New Physics has gotten three likes in 300 views. Love Returns four likes and five dislikes in 500 views. I’m actually surprised that it’s that positive: the target audience are Christians, and I was expecting dogmatism to push the dislikes far higher.

When I was in my first year here, I had a couple of visitors from the Philippines start at the very first post and walk all the way through my blog. That hasn’t happened in either of my Stumble Upon campaigns. People pick and choose their content, based upon the thumbnails on the anchor page.

But people are looking. I can’t maintain $100 a week, given that I’ve got $100 a month already in outlay here and at Wistia for the video feed at Love Returns. I’m not expecting anybody to contact me to ask me to come speak to them. But I think that I’m getting enough click-through activity that I’ll keep it going at about half the current outlay. That corresponds to 1000 views a month between the two campaigns. We’ll see if it tails off at some point.

Anti-Matter Antidote

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On my New Physics tab, I have a set of links that document some important facts that are unexplained by modern particle theory. These aren’t obscure points of experience. Rather, they include facts such as “the proton weighs 50 times as much as it should” and “quazars precede galaxy formation.” They are “first order” facts that should cause every particle theorist to blush in shame.

Experimenters at CERN have now magnified the problem.

The reigning theory of the universe holds that it formed from a super-hot gas – so hot that the very fabric of space contained more energy than the existing particles. As the universe cooled, that energy was converted to particles.

One problem with this theory is that energy is converted to matter through a process called “pair production.” You can’t make only one particle – you have to make two.

Specifically, the particle comes with an “anti-particle” with equal mass and opposite charge. The conundrum is that those particles attract, and when they meet, they annihilate each other. The matter and anti-matter convert back to pure energy.

This leads the physicists to wonder: how did we end up with a universe composed only of matter? In principle, there should be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, and every solid object should be annihilated.

The answer proposed by the theorists was that matter and anti-matter are slightly different – and most importantly in their stability. Anti-matter must disappear through some unknown process that preserves matter.

The experiment reported today attempted to measure differences between the most important building-block of matter – the proton – and its antiparticle. None was detected.

In consequence, everything created by the Big Bang (or the Expansive Cool – take your pick) should have disappeared a long time ago. There should be no gas clouds, no galaxies, no planets, and no life.

If that’s not a reason to be looking for new theories of fundamental physics, then what would be?

Understanding Emptiness

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Having discovered a central role for women of grace through my interpretation of Revelation, I was hungry for more insight. It arrived for me at Thunderbolt Books in Santa Monica, in the form of Judith Simmer-Brown’s Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism.

As I explained at Love Returns, Unconditional Love cannot judge, for to judge would be to reject experience that must be understood to bring healing. This is the central tenet of Buddhism: the acolyte must avoid attachment to phenomena, seeing them clearly without judgment, and use compassion to transform experience. This principle is called “emptiness.”

Christianity struggles with this wisdom, for it foretells of an era of universal love guided by Christ. When people hurt others, Christians categorize them as “fallen,” as among the goats the Jesus separates from the lambs in the Last Judgment.

Being the least subjective of our great religious traditions, in my reading of Dakini’s Warm Breath, it appears to me that Buddhism has advanced most closely to the underlying nature of reality.

Dakinis originated in Indian Buddhism as carnal demons that protected nature from exploitation. Perhaps understanding that Humanity was going to place itself in opposition to nature, they originally sought to stifle spiritual development. In Tibetan Buddhism, this changed when enlightened persons projected their commitment to compassion and honor for all aspects of reality. Discovering a partner in those practitioners, many dakinis took cause with them, becoming defenders of the wisdom teachings from corruption. Having removed this impediment to relation with the divine feminine, Tibetan masters then encountered the Great Queen Prajnaparamita.

The parallels with the Book of Revelation are too obvious to ignore. The carnal dakinis would be Whore of Babylon; Prajnaparamita would be the Sacred Mother. Indeed, Simmer-Brown explains:

So, she who manifests as Prajnaparamita is the Great Mother of all the buddhas of the past, present and future.

Parjnaparamita has specific characteristics that allow her to serve in this role. She is space. She “shows the world for what it is.” and she “reveals the thoughts and actions of other beings.”

In Love Works, I advanced a model of spirit that explains these characteristics. The primary duality of existence is self and other. To have compassion, we must preserve our self. That is the gift of space, without which all phenomena would collapse into a single point. Space is not empty, but a lattice framework that supports the evolution of spirit.

When an event occurs, space does not transform the event – it does not seek to interpret or change the event. Those that seek the truth are given access to that history, while those that serve the self must fight against the resistance marshalled by the truth.

All events unfold into spirit. To those that do not impose themselves upon the world, instead choosing to negotiate win-win outcomes for all beings, those thoughts are freely available. Those that work for selfish ends trap themselves in their materiality, and so are cut off from this source of wisdom.

As Simmer-Brown explains, the Buddhist knows this through experience, but has no answer to “Why?” The Christian relies upon the promises of Christ, and answers “Why?” with “Because God loves us.”

In the first hundred pages of Simmer-Brown’s beautiful, wise and compassionate treatise, her teachers emphasize that the dakini is the root of Buddhist practice. The bodhisattva is a practitioner of “skillful means” that propagate the dakini’s wisdom. This seems to deprecate the masculine role.

At Love Returns, I offer this: Love seeks to create marvelous relationships. In a wounded world, to do so it must divide into two parts: a masculine part that changes and a feminine part that preserves what is good. Neither is superior or subordinate. Eventually, they unite, and our division from love is healed. Masculine virtues will continually invent new experiences, but only under the guidance of feminine virtues that prepare space to receive those manifestations.