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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 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.

Urrational

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As spirituality is my only reliable source of joy, my rejoinder to the materialists is “Your assertion that spirituality is delusional is like a blind man telling me that art is delusional.” I recognize that is not the most constructive approach, but I have worn myself out trying to puncture their arguments.

The concern is not moot – the self-righteous forces that threaten our civil order are inspired in their loyalty by the spiritual cocoon of acceptance. When told that they are delusional, they are perfectly justified in their rejection of temporal institutions that seek to divorce them from that sustenance. Scientists, in deriding spirituality, are the locus of a great evil in their lives.

Why are the materialists so set in their rejection of spirituality? At root, their complaint is simple: science has no explanation for spiritual experience.  Worse, serious attempts to test telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance have failed. The explanation offered by the spiritualists is that the scientific environment generates “negativity” that blocks their skills.

The unfortunate implication – reflected in my retort above – is that the negativity arises from the experimenters. This pits the rationality of science against mystical faith. It pits humanity’s reason against the better angels of its nature.

When I realized that most of our minds exist in our souls, I identified another rationale. Science is reductionist; it tries to decompose systems into their smallest parts with the goal of learning to control outcomes. Given this practice, if you were a spirit arising through billions of years of effort, would you expose yourself to manipulation? Perhaps an analogy would make the choice obvious: the materialists insist that the brain is the mind. The only way to test this hypothesis, unfortunately, is to map every synapse of the brain, control the chemistry of the cerebral-spinal fluid, and inject a controlled stimulus to determine whether the brain responds as predicted by the material laws of the universe. In other words, the test subject would have to sacrifice their life to science.

Not an appealing prospect, is it?

But there is another possible source of the negativity that disrupts scientific study of spiritual experience. Our religious traditions celebrate the avatar’s protection of the faithful from spiritual torment. In both Buddhism and Christianity, that power is held also by their disciples. Those spirits that profit from our torment, then, have an interest in preventing our ascent to spiritual maturity. The negativity, then, would arise from the spiritual realm. It is a form of gaslighting.

How to puncture this falsehood? I found the answer in this week’s Bible study, in a mysterious passage in Luke 11. Jesus is accused of being in league with demons, and concludes his rebuke with these thoughts:

33 “No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light. 34 Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. 35 See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. 36 Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be just as full of light as when a lamp shines its light on you.”

How can light be darkness, for example? This makes no sense.

And then an incident came back to me. I was down in Port Hueneme doing work for the 2020 Census. On that Sunday, the temperatures ran up into the 90s. The front of the house was exposed to the sun, so I took refuge in a slim slice of shade beneath the eave to disrupt a young family preparing to take their children on an outing. The woman stared at me uncertainly, but answered my questions willingly. Finally, as her husband came to the door to shuttle another child into the minivan, she interrupted me, “You know that your eyes are glowing?”

There is so much of this in the New Testament, where the record elides the stage direction. “Jesus’ eyes began to glow.” He was educating the disciples to moral discernment. When someone offers sacred wisdom, they project light into the world. We don’t need to rely upon the judgment of our minds when confronted with moral controversies – we can see who is telling the truth. So be patient with the materialists. Speak your truth with love. They will be confronted with evidence that their science cannot explain. In the union of rationality and love, we shall surpass human limitations and material constraints, bringing healing to the world in their synthesis: urrationality – rationality that penetrates illusions to reveal the heart of existence.

Priorities

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Our modern age is an age of science. Despite the nobility of science as an endeavor, to a degree that will only become clear later, this age of science has culminated in an era of spiritual violation. This is not the fault of the scientific process. Science is simply an application of respectful rational inquiry to convert magical thought into understanding. Our spiritual difficulties are a consequence of the order of priorities faced by our forebears.

To anyone who has faced the force of a natural disaster, it is obvious that life is a fragile gift. For various reasons, our urge to master the management of energy requires that we commit ourselves to the preservation of life. First, each person is a chance to achieve mastery. In some sense, they are an experiment. Unplanned interruptions of an experiment limit the understanding that can be gained from it. Secondly, we are Lamarckian creatures: we benefit to the degree that we share our journey. Disrupting that participation robs us of the chance to accomplish our goals.

Obviously, there is much to respect and admire in primitive cultures. In many cases, they manifest a lost balance with the earth that sustains us. But they were fragile, precisely because they could not reliably manage the natural tyrannies. The elements, disease, hunger, and predation were all terrifying and imminent realities that have faded dramatically in the consciousness of advanced cultures.

It is hard to argue that magical thinking did not play a significant part in how ancient peoples responded to the natural tyrannies. We know that sacrifices of wealth and life to propitiate the gods were a normal practice by ancient peoples. The diversity of the pantheons among ancient cultures would lead us to conclude that whatever basis those practices may have had in reality, the implementing mechanisms were not understood clearly by the practitioners. One significant problem, perhaps the overwhelming one, was the difficulty of training competent practitioners and channeling their intentions. Consequently, their activities produced unreliable results.

Science was the response to that difficulty.

The scale of the problems represented by the natural tyrannies has certain social implications. The complexity of reality meant that, even with the benefits of Lamarckian evolution, any individual investigator could achieve only an incremental increase in understanding over that of his instructors. Specialization was required simply to achieve mastery of what was already understood, much less to participate successfully in advancing knowledge. Finally, the effort involved in building systems for controlling the effects of natural tyranny requires the energy of many individuals. For all of these reasons, significant progress was predicated upon the development of institutions to organize, coordinate and sustain effort across cultures and generations.

By nature, successful coordination of these activities limited efforts to those aspects of reality that are almost universally apprehensible. (We commonly call this “objective” reality.) In fact, the necessary cultural focus was so narrow and intense that today we relegate to “mental health” providers all those that are unable to conform their perceptions.

Our current mental health “crisis” is one manifestation of the problem of optimization. The driving goal of science was to allow society to successfully evaluate and respond to the life experiences of its members. In part, the compact between members of society was that the experience of successful members would be transmitted to their fellows. But if society is so fragile and narrowly focused that experimentation must be controlled to avoid disruption, does the compact still survive?

On the other end of the scale, as institutions grow, the complexity of their internal working goes up as the square of the number of participants. Unfortunately, the number of managers only increases linearly. At some point, the skill of managers is overwhelmed, and organizations must be “restructured”.

In what follows, the reader will be introduced to techniques, until now largely misapprehended by science, for negotiating and optimizing the relationship between the individual and society.

On Intellect

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In Reductio ad Consterno (reduction to the point of alarm), I threw out the idea that philosophy, considered properly, is the exploration of the operation of intellect. The thought wasn’t deeply considered – it was rather a convenient bridge in the essay, a way of linking what preceded with what followed.

But as I continue my reading of The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained (TPB below, by Buckingham, et al. with DK Books) I am realizing that it’s actually central to the project of my life. In Ma, my celebration of the feminine virtues, I illustrate various expressions of intellect (as defined below) through the main characters. This has the unfortunate effect that the narrative is rendered disjoint by the shifts in perspective. As I thought about this post yesterday morning, I considered the subtitle “The Philosophy of Ma and Golem” with the hope that readers might gain some insight into those works. But, given that after my father’s passing I am the only extant reader of that collection, I must now conclude (with some chagrin) that the earlier works were a type of “narrative study” for the thoughts that are crystallized below.

To set the table again: TPB contrasts the viewpoints of Plato and Aristotle as the central issue in philosophy, which the authors characterize as the search for a firm foundation for knowledge. Plato held that all events are ephemeral and rendered indistinct by our senses, and so that all knowledge is in the realm of ideas. Aristotle countered that ideas that do not arise from experience are not knowledge, but fantasy. As the history of philosophy is traced, the Aristotelian perspective is bolstered by scientific study, and in fact the proponents of Plato’s view appear less and less coherent.

Of course, the Aristotelian empiricists materialists have a huge advantage in this quest. Science, in the large, is the study of things without personality. That means that the subjects of scientific research don’t evolve new behaviors when we study them. An insulator will not start to conduct electricity, and an electron won’t shed its mass. Conversely, Plato and all of his followers insist that knowledge emanates from some form of “The Good,” which was understood to be “God” in Islamic and Christian cultures. The Good does not reveal itself, but must be courted with disciplined moral intent. So while empiricists materialists can describe things that anyone can experience, the mystic must grope for terms to describe perceptions that often are completely foreign to the reader. The empiricist materialist is popular; the mystic is obscure.

This insight sets us on a path to reconcile the two primary views of philosophy. Indeed, while much of modern philosophy tends toward  a social focus, often that is driven by reaction to cultural dysfunction that arises from trying to force people to behave as if only one view was valid. But I do not believe that our reconciliation is sufficient. There are unexamined deficiencies in Philosophy as a whole, manifested most obviously in the fact that almost all of its luminaries are men.

So I am going to conclude this post with a definition of intellect that may serve only to make it clear just how complex the problem is.

Intellect manifests in the capacity to synthesize mental states.

Our mental states are not only thoughts. They are a complex amalgamation of sensory perceptions, physiological response (or emotions), thoughts and spiritual interactions. Synthesis is accomplished through either stimulation or combination of those states.

The job of philosophy, as I asserted before, is to understand the virtues and pathologies of intellect, and to establish means to strengthen the first and heal the second. The complexity of the problem is seen in that most of the history of philosophy was spent in a fruitless search for some solid ground to stand on – some truth beyond Descartes’ “I exist.” Fortunately for humanity, most of us continued to carry on with our exploration of what is possible.

In that search, we must recognize that the intellect also has variable expressions. Just as species adopt different forms in the struggle to secure an ecological niche, so does the intellect vary. There are those dominated by sensory perception, those immersed in emotion, those lost in the whirlpool of their thoughts, and those with their eyes locked on the heavens. Each of them brings a piece of the puzzle to our attention. No perspective can be denigrated or ignored without threatening the integrity of the whole.

Spirituality without Religion: Hope or Hoax?

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Sam Harris has amassed a fortune decrying religion. His latest best-seller, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion, describes a journey that I must herald as a step towards personal maturity. I won’t consider the details, because his preface was enough to let me know that he’s got a long, long way to go. Harris asserts that our minds are the only tools that we have to manage life’s challenges. That’s a sort of lobotomy, and the best response I can offer is that of Hume. Following Hobbes’s characterization that the experience of most is of:

continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short

Hume diagnosed that Hobbes had forgotten “the operation of his own heart.”

That may seem a small point, but a compassionate heart is the singular difference between a monstrous ego and a great personality. In its lack, the rational mind tends to the conclusion that everything that violates its logic is error, possesses no value, and thus should be destroyed.

This is the conclusion that the anti-religious have indulged in for far too long.

Now I hope that Harris will eventually confront the errors of the axioms that allow him to conclude that religion has no value. Foremost is the confusion of correlation with causation: the fact that the brain is essential to the physical manifestation of our will does not mean that our will arises from the brain. The soul does exist. When that is recognized, the heart becomes full, and logic leads us to a different set of conclusions.

For example: Harris’s book bears the picture of a face superimposed on the cloudy heavens. What happens when spirits collide in that space? How do we negotiate conflicts? Only by resort to institutional structures staffed by experienced arbiters. That is religion.

The second erroneous axiom is that the mythical aspect of scripture proves the unscientific world view of our intellectual predecessors. Far be that from the truth: those men and women were investigating aspects of reality that Harris has yet to encounter, and doing it using practices that, if one strips away the branding, are scientific in their core. That wisdom was transmitted to us from the past through – you guessed it – religion. The alternative offered us in the modern age – schools – are prey to short-term political fashion, also known as propaganda, and pit students in a competition that places knowledge above compassion.

The alternatives to religion that Harris offers, at least in his preface, are use of psychotropic substances (a.k.a. – illegal drugs) and meditation. The former is pathetic: I raised my sons with the wisdom that love is the anti-drug. Using drugs to temporarily achieve an elevated psychological state is no substitute for submitting to the discipline required to sustain loving relationships. Lacking that discipline, the craving for love, which is built deep into our hearts, leads to abuse of drugs and self-destruction. What institutional structures confront us most meaningfully with the practice of emotional discipline? Well – religions.

Meditation is where I find hope for Harris. Meditation serves to reveal the preconditioning of our minds that prevents us from accurately perceiving experience. Through it, as Deepak Chopra inveighs in The Future of God, the seeker after truth eventually confronts the reality that love exists even when no person is present, even when no drug stimulates our senses and minds, even when we do nothing. That is the nature of God – and for reasons I have outlined elsewhere, that is the only God that could ever exist. Nothing but unconditional love can bind together things that want to be apart: the Greek word religio meaning to bind anew.

When Harris encounters that presence, I am certain that he will want to find a place in which to share his joy. That would be, of course, to find religion.