This is the missing link between modern science and ancient mysticism.
The search for the place where science and religion meet has deep roots. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a young French Jesuit, found inspiration in exploring the connection between theology and evolution in the early part of the twentieth century. He promoted a concept he called le Tout (the All) that explored the interrelatedness of everything in the universe and the constant change that took place within this universe. He once wrote, “The life of Christ mingles with the life-blood of evolution.” He believed that the allegories in the Bible and the evidence provided by science of the earth’s history were compatible, observing that, while evolution was in his opinion irrefutable, life evolved in a fashion too orderly to be simply a matter of natural selection. Perhaps Teilhard’s most enduring contribution to this conversation is his conception of the “noosphere,” a collective consciousness, essentially a thinking planet that rose from mankind’s evolution and the evolution of the world around him. He also envisaged the “Omega Point,” a theory of evolution as arriving at some eventual, godlike place.
Around the same time Teilhard was making his breakthroughs, Duncan MacDougall, an American doctor, was attempting some breakthroughs of his own. MacDougall believed he could use science to prove the existence of the soul. He posited that the soul had physical mass, and therefore could be measured by noting the weight loss that took place the instant a person died (the moment when the soul presumably left the body). In 1907, he built a special bed in his office, set it on a finely calibrated scale, and then placed dying volunteers on it, waiting for the moment they expired. MacDougall had made accommodations in advance for normal fluctuations in body weight, so he was convinced that any drop that came in the moment of death would be the weight of the soul. He conducted the experiment six times, concluding that the soul weighed approximately twenty-one grams. He then ran a similar experiment on fifteen dogs (the assumption being that animals didn’t have souls) and determined that none of these dogs experienced any measurable weight loss.
MacDougall published his work quickly, though his sample size was extremely small. The scientific establishment assailed him equally quickly. They pointed to the inconsistency of his findings: in fact, only one body measured by MacDougall lost twenty-one grams. Another lost fourteen, yet another forty-five, and a third actually gained weight initially. MacDougall threw out one trial because he’d failed to adjust the scales properly and another because the subject died on the bed before MacDougall and his associates had completed all the necessary adjustments. In spite of these inconsistencies, MacDougall maintained his position that the soul weighed twenty-one grams. And, somehow, this turn-of-the-century urban legend persists to this day, even finding a foundational place in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s feature film 21 Grams (starring Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, and Benicio del Toro), as well as a recent song by Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry titled “Oh Lord (21 grams).”
In The Lost Symbol, Katherine Solomon conducts a high-tech version of this experiment, utilizing a high-precision microbalance and an airtight plastic pod in which to rest the dying body. Dan Brown is clearly paying homage to MacDougall with this, though he never mentions the doctor by name, nor does he mention twenty-one grams (chapter 107):
Moments after the man’s death, the numbers on the scale had decreased suddenly. The man had become lighter immediately after his death. The weight change was minuscule, but it was measurable . . . and the implications were utterly mind-boggling.
Katherine recalled writing in her lab notes with a trembling hand: “There seems to exist an invisible ‘material’ that exits the human body at the moment of death. It has quantifiable mass which is unimpeded by physical barriers. I must assume it moves in a dimension I cannot yet perceive.”
From the expression of shock on her brother’s face, Katherine knew he understood the implications. “Katherine . . .” he stammered, blinking his gray eyes as if to make sure he was not dreaming. “I think you just weighed the human soul.”
Noetic science gained tremendous momentum—and its name—in the early seventies, literally from a cosmic source. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell was a member of the crew of Apollo 14 that embarked on a nine-day mission including two days on the surface of the moon. As dazzled as Mitchell was by his extraterrestrial jaunt, the return trip turned out to be truly life-changing. A view of the earth from space struck him with a sense that everything was connected in ways he’d never understood before. “The presence of divinity became almost palpable,” Mitchell was quoted as saying, “and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. . . . The knowledge came to me directly.”
From that moment, Mitchell became committed to seeking deeper truths than his scientific training had afforded him up to that point. He believed that he needed to explore the inner space of consciousness with as much passion as he had explored outer space, and that accessing a new combination of empirical and conjectural (at least from a hard-science perspective) would lead to a new understanding of our universe. He sought to create a laboratory for exploring the “inner world of human experience” with the same attention to detail with which others explored the sciences that propelled him to the moon.
In 1973, Mitchell helped found the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), the real-life institute referred to by name in TLS. The term noetic derives from the Greek word noesis and was defined by philosopher William James more than a century ago as “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority.”
IONS, located in Petaluma, California, has sponsored hundreds of projects (its Web site lists “a comprehensive bibliography on the physical and psychological effects of meditation, an extensive spontaneous remission bibliography, and studies on the efficacy of compassionate intention on healing in AIDS patients” among these), has nearly thirty thousand members, and has three hundred associated community groups around the world. Said former president of IONS Willis Harman,
For the first time there is hope that this knowledge can become not a secret repeatedly lost in dogmatization and institutionalization, or degenerating into manifold varieties of cultism and occultism, but rather the living heritage of all humankind. In part, at least, we are dealing here with the rediscovery of truths that in some sense have been discovered over and over again, and have left their track in the culture more rapidly than in the scientific community.
This, of course, is in synch with the fictional work Katherine Solomon is doing in Pod 5 at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center. As encouraged by her brother, Katherine has become a scholar of both cutting-edge science (entanglement theory, superstring theory, etc.) and ancient wisdom (the Zohar, the Kybalion, and translations of Sumerian tablets from the British Museum, among others). She thinks very much like a member of IONS, and she name-checks the organization in several places.
As she does Lynne McTaggart. By all indications, Dan Brown did not know McTaggart personally when he was writing The Lost Symbol, yet he’s made Katherine Solomon—at least partially—in her image. McTaggart (interviewed in this chapter) is approximately the same age as Solomon, has the same color hair, and has published two bestsellers on noetic science. Solomon has conducted several of the experiments that McTaggart chronicles in her books The Field and The Intention Experiment, and is very actively involved in the intention work that forms the foundation of McTaggart’s current pursuits. In the kind of thing that can happen only in a certain type of fiction (thriller writers and graphic novelists seem to have cornered the market on this), Katherine Solomon seems at once to be Lynne McTaggart and to be McTaggart’s successor. She references McTaggart while at the same time claiming to do things that McTaggart has done, but also claims to have taken her work to en
tirely new levels.
Lynne McTaggart had already established herself as an award-winning investigative journalist with her books The Baby Brokers and What Doctors Don’t Tell You, the latter of which I had the pleasure of publishing when I was publisher of Avon Books. In the late nineties, she started examining the work of the scientists researching the existence of the Zero Point Field (a theoretical energy field that connects everything in the universe). This led her to write The Field, whose opening paragraph will sound very familiar to anyone who has read The Lost Symbol:
We are poised on the brink of a revolution—a revolution as daring and profound as Einstein’s discovery of relativity. At the very frontier of science new ideas are emerging that challenge everything we believe about how our world works and how we define ourselves. Discoveries are being made that prove what religion has always espoused: that human beings are far more extraordinary than an assemblage of flesh and bones. At its most fundamental, this new science answers questions that have perplexed scientists for hundreds of years. At its most profound, this is a science of the miraculous.
McTaggart followed The Field with a book even more ambitious and more distinctive in its conceit. The Intention Experiment sought to prove, through the exploration of the work of scientists at leading institutions, that thoughts could have a real effect on the world. In the book, she invites readers to come to her Web site (her Web traffic has grown exponentially since the release of The Lost Symbol) to become part of the ongoing research in this area. Using the Web site, McTaggart brings together large groups of people from all over the world to focus their thoughts on a variety of benevolent pursuits. She has weekly “intentions” directed at individuals in need of help, and less frequent wide-scale intentions directed at huge problems like combatting pollution, Alzheimer’s, and ADD. She believes that her Peace Intention Experiment might have had a direct impact on bringing peace to regions of Sri Lanka. She holds these experiments under lab-controlled conditions, and engages physicists and psychologists from the University of Arizona, Princeton University, the International Institute of Biophysics, Cambridge University, and others.
Lynne McTaggart is not the only person who sees herself in Katherine Solomon. Marilyn Schlitz, the current president of IONS, noted in a recent blog post, “short of olive-colored skin, long hair, a wealthy family, and a crazy sociopath pursuing her, there are some exceptional similarities in our mutual bios.” Schlitz, who also makes a contribution in this book, notes that a paper she published on remote viewing drew the attention of the CIA (referenced in the novel), and that she, too, has conducted intention experiments, that she has run experiments regarding the impact of intention on random number generators and on water, and that she has done extensive research on entanglement theory, string theory, complexity, and other areas that Katherine Solomon also pursues. Her lab at IONS is an electromagnetically shielded room very similar to Katherine’s Cube, and two wealthy patrons donated the room and the equipment in it. “I’ve even presented this work at the Smithsonian Institution, including a discussion of ancient lore about biofields and subtle energies,” Schlitz notes. “Like Katherine, my work is dedicated to bridging science and ancient wisdom. It is at the interface of these two ways of knowing reality where we believe great breakthroughs lie.”
Another noetic scientist who plays a prominent role in this subplot but doesn’t receive any mention by name is Masaru Emoto. In several places in The Lost Symbol, reference is made to experiments which show that concentrated thought has an impact on water molecules. The most famous of such experiments in the world outside Dan Brown’s fiction are those conducted by Emoto and chronicled in his wildly popular books, Messages from Water and The Hidden Messages in Water, among others. Emoto photographed newly formed water crystals that had been exposed by concentrated thought to loving words (for example, love, gratitude, thank you), angry thoughts (Adolf Hitler, demon), and beautiful music (Beethoven’s Pastorale, “Amazing Grace”). The water exposed to positive messages formed jewel-like, proportional crystals, while the water exposed to negative messages formed jagged, scarred crystals. Emoto, a bestselling author who lectures around the world, believes this offers proof that our thoughts have a dramatic impact on the physical world around us.
Another figure referenced yet unnamed in The Lost Symbol is Dr. Gary Schwartz, a psychologist at the University of Arizona. In the novel, Katherine mentions that she has used CCD (charge-coupled device) cameras to show the energy coming from a healer’s hands. CCD cameras are cooled to minus 100 degrees centigrade to take images of biophoton emissions. In his 2006 paper, “Research Findings at the University of Arizona Center for Frontier Medicine in Biofield Science: A Summary Report,” Dr. Schwartz, director of that center, offers CCD photographs of precisely this.
Many people encountered the concepts of noetics for the first time in the 2004 film What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (What the Bleep Do We Know!?), which was rereleased in an expanded version in 2006 called What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole. The film, which featured both Emoto and, in the expanded version, McTaggart, was a lavishly produced part story/part documentary that followed a woman named Amanda (played by Marlee Matlin) on an unanticipated quest for enlightenment. Her quest exposes her to great secrets and changes her life forever. To underscore Amanda’s discoveries, fourteen experts on everything from quantum mechanics to string theory to psychic phenomena act as what the filmmakers call a “Greek chorus” to drive home the message that science and religion are pointing in the same direction and that the universe has many more possibilities than most of us have acknowledged.
What the Bleep was a surprise hit by documentary standards (though it was also a surprise documentary by documentary standards, since it includes quite a bit of narrative). It did well at the box office and phenomenally in ongoing DVD sales and rentals. (An interview with the producer, script writer, and director of the film, William Arntz, is also in this chapter.)
What the Bleep moved the conversation about noetics away from the New Age fringes and toward the mainstream. What the Bleep viewing parties popped up all around the country, and the film gained the kind of cocktail-party-chatter status that other works on this subject had never generated before. It was in wide circulation in the same 2004 to 2005 period that Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code continued to dominate the bestseller lists and the audience for The Da Vinci Code and What the Bleep had a high degree of overlap. The scientific community has been largely dismissive of noetics; so dismissive, in fact, that it is difficult to find scientists who consider themselves pure scientists who will even acknowledge that noetics is a legitimate field of study. The overwhelming criticism of noetic experiments is that they fail to hold up to the rigors of the scientific method. Because this is the case, most noetic researchers base their conclusions on observation, and they conclude their findings on the selection of a particular event in a study rather than the consistent appearance of that event. Masaru Emoto, for instance, has been repeatedly unwilling to share details of his methods with the scientific community. He is known to select particular photographs because they confirm his hypothesis and has resisted exhortations to subject his experiments to double-blind testing. Institutes such as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences have also commented on the lack of scientific evidence in the claims of parapsychology (a field analogous to noetics).
Perhaps the most significant blow to the legitimacy of noetic science was the closing of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program (PEAR). In TLS, we are told by Dan Brown that experiments at PEAR “had categorically proven” that human thought, if properly focused, could affect and change physical mass, a claim most skeptical scientists would find preposterous. PEAR’s work is treated with reverence in TLS, with Brown, Langdon, and the Solomons apparently unaware that PEAR was terminated as a Princeton project in 2007. According to a press release from the university, PEAR conducted an “experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human c
onsciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality.” But it fell under regular criticism from academics. Most damning, though, was the limited impact of the results it claimed. After conducting millions of trials on intention, they concluded that intention could have an impact on two or three events out of ten thousand. Robert L. Park, a former executive director of the American Physical Society, said of PEAR, “It’s been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton. Science has a substantial amount of credibility, but this is the kind of thing that squanders it.”
Ultimately, though, it comes back around to Arthur Clarke’s observation. If noetics is in fact a “sufficiently advanced technology,” then perhaps the naysayers are wrong in dismissing it. Centuries from now, maybe people will look back on the scientific community’s unwillingness to accept the findings of noetic science as an egregious case of small-mindedness.
On Becoming a Fictional Character in a Dan Brown Novel
by Marilyn Mandala Schlitz
Dan Brown loves to base his characters on real people. Though he name-checks Lynne McTaggart in the field of noetics, Katherine Solomon’s closest living equivalent may equally be Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, the daughter of a Freemason, a scientist by training, and president of the nonfictional Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). Schlitz says that she was not in touch with Dan Brown during the research stage of the book.
IONS, based in Petaluma, California, was cofounded in 1973 by former Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell and other like-minded people who “felt the need for an expanded, more inclusive view of reality” than contemporary science was willing to explore. Its mission, “to expand our understanding of human possibility by investigating aspects of reality—mind, consciousness, and spirit—that include but go beyond physical phenomena,” is echoed in Katherine’s research in the novel.
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 22
