The Lost Symbol, Noetics, Avatar, and Qi

I just finished reading Dan Brown‘s latest novel, The Lost Symbol, and I decided to write today’s blog post about it. I don’t intend to give any significant spoilers, so you’re safe if you haven’t yet read the book.

The setting is Washington, D.C. The protagonist, as in his last two novels, is symbologist Robert Langon, whose job it becomes to prevent the antagonist, an evil man who calls himself Mal’akh (hebrew for “angel”), from obtaining the secrets to achieving apotheosis, the transformation of man into god. According to the story, these secrets have been guarded for many generations by the Freemasons, many of whom were instrumental in founding our country. Throughout the story, we find buildings, artwork and artifacts designed and placed by these founding fathers with the intent of protecting the secrets until the time came for a deserving individual to decipher the maze of codes to find the secrets and transcend mortality, becoming the messiah and ushering in a new age of understanding.

In this story, we see the return of Katherine Solomon, who you may remember from the Da Vinci Code. She has been doing a great deal of groundbreaking research in the field of Noetic Science, and is on the verge of releasing her pivotal body of work to the public. The idea behind Noetic Science is to learn the capabilities of our mind previously thought to be outside the realm of possibility. The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) was founded to study this topic. Their website introduces them as follows:

IONS is a nonprofit membership organization located in Northern California that conducts and sponsors leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness—including perceptions, beliefs, attention, intention, and intuition. The Institute maintains a commitment to scientific rigor while exploring phenomena that have been largely overlooked by mainstream science.

It further states,

Noetic sciences are explorations into the nature and potentials of consciousness using multiple ways of knowing—including intuition, feeling, reason, and the senses. Noetic sciences explore the “inner cosmos” of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) and how it relates to the “outer cosmos” of the physical world.

What interests me is investigation into the claim that we have the possibility of using our minds alone to affect other entities (particularly living ones) around us; the claim that with focused intention, we can manipulate a certain unseen energy present in all living beings, enabling us to do things such as heal others, or even, as shown in Dr. Masaru Emoto‘s famous work Messages from Water and corroborated by Kristopher Setchfield, change the molecular structure of inorganic material around us .

The aspect of Noetics is what is most interesting to me about this book, and I couldn’t help but draw a parallel to Avatar, which I recently saw in IMAX 3D, an experience I highly recommend. This movie is also based on the idea that all living organisms are connected by way of an unseen life force that is probably the same energy Noetics is concerned with, and the same energy that Eastern culture calls Qi.

The field of Noetics is still very new, having been created in the 1970s. Many people agree, however, that Noetics is simply the rediscovery of knowledge that was well-understood, practiced and documented in a variety of ancient mystical traditions. The Lost Symbol points out several possible parallels between this emerging field and the well-documented phenomena from ancient times. My belief is that without all the modern technology we have nowadays, ancient people spent more time focusing their energy on introspection and study of the mind. Nowadays I think we have become distracted, and have lost the abilities once possessed by the ancient scholars.

I am hopeful that research continues in the area of consciousness. There have already been a huge number of unbelievable discoveries, many of which have been summarized and cited in The Intention Experiment by Lynne Mctaggart, which not only shares the scientific progress that has been made in this exciting field, but concludes by encouraging its readers to participate in collective intention studies through the associated website, www.theintentionexperiment.com. This book is referenced by name in The Lost Symbol as Katherine’s inspiration. I smiled when I read this, as I had already purchased the book several months earlier. I have only gotten a few chapters into the book, but am now actively reading it, and look forward to sharing my thoughts in a future post.

If this is a topic that interests you, you may be interested in reading The Intention Experiment, as well as a couple of other less scientific but still interesting books, What the Bleep Do We Know? and The Secret. Movies have been made of both of these books, but I recommend reading the books to allow yourself more time to think about the topics at your own pace.

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