The Lost Symbol and Reality

Just as millions of other readers, I was captivated by Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. The power of the human mind is indeed amazing and has not yet even begun to be developed in any serious way.

Being a serious student of the mind, the book was especially interesting to me for a variety of reasons. The first two books in Brown’s trilogy basically exposed religion for what it always has been. Will and Ariel Durant concluded in their "Story of Civilization" that religion did not evolve as a way for man to find God. It evolved as a way "to coerce moderate pro-survival behavior in a tribe." That makes a lot of sense to me. Next to the guy who had the biggest club, the most powerful person in a tribe was the one who rolled the bones. The sad part is that the current system has also been subject to the foibles and failings that inevitably infect all power structures.

The Lost Symbol offers an alternative path; that of self realization as taught by ALL the true Masters who have ever walked the planet. The Masons and other “Secret Societies” have worked diligently to maintain the ancient wisdom, often at the cost of their own lives. Why do you imagine the documents from Nag Hammadi were hidden?

Granting that the ancient wisdom is everything it is imagined to be, the challenge still remains to be able to use it, whatever “it” is, in our individual lives. Someone once stated that even “the truth must be arrayed in the garb of the day.” In more modern words, we must translate the ancient knowledge into something we can relate to, understand, and use, today. Looking to the past to give us the answers won't work because we are looking for what "can be," not what was.

From the past we can gather some important guidance about where and how to look, but the work must be done today. Imagining the reality is much simpler today because we have access to numerous great metaphors not available before. Implementing the reality may, however, be more difficult today than ever before because of the numerous distractions and pressures we allow to be part of our modern world.

To boil the message of the ancients down into the sound bite sized information we have been conditioned to receive, the message is this: The “Mind,” the animating part of our being, exists outside of our physical brain. It can be referred to as Soul, Spirit, Atman, Christ Consciousness, Buddha Mind, Quantum Mind, or any other name we can think of meaning something so big we cannot possibly comprehend it and also that it knows a whole lot more than we do.

Actually the Mind doesn’t “know” anything in the same sense as we do. The Mind is the storage of every action and reaction that has taken place in the Universe since the Big Bang. It contains all the archetypes and the residues of everything that has happened in the last 14 billion years.

We are expressions of The Mind and there is only One Mind. The teaching of The Masters that we are all One is probably the most difficult for any of us to grasp. Thankfully we have radar to use as a metaphor.

Radar works by sending out billions of rays. If a ray bumps into something, the ray has an individual experience and is reflected back to the Source where a Big Picture is compiled using all the beams that have been reflected. Each beam has an individual experience and if it were as semi-sentient as we are, it may even conclude it has an individual existence just because it had an individual experience. The real Source, Experience, and Potential manifested by the beam, however, is as a part of the Whole.

So it is with us. We conclude we are having an individual existence because we imagine we are having an individual experience. This faulty conclusion is the result of asking our brain what something means rather than asking our Mind.

Our brain is limited to recording experiences and then comparing current experiences to past experiences and assigning meaning to them. A good example of this is to imagine standing at a bus stop with your Lover, who leans over and pats you gently on the backside. The physical sensation you feel is exactly the same as if you were standing there alone and a total stranger patted you on the backside, but the meaning and emotion your brain applies then will be radically different.

Two diagrams may help. The first demonstrates our Human habit of being taught to ask our brain what something means instead of our Mind.

We are taught to do this exclusively. We, especially in the West, are taught to ignore things like intuitions, premonitions, and gut feelings. We also make a huge mistake when we define Love as warm fuzzy positive emotions we have about someone or some thing.

What can Mind experience directly. Not much because Mind functions in the Present and all meaning our human brains apply our current experiences are reflections of our past experiences. Mind can directly experience almost nothing in our physical experience other than Love and those things we have been taught to ignore.

The flow of energy from Mind to Matter more or less follows the path in the following diagram.

MIND
Energy
|
Ethereal
|
Physical
||
THOUGHT
||
BRAIN
||
IDENTIFICATION
||
CAPACITY
||
ABILITY
||
EXPECTATION
||
EMOTION
||
MANIFESTATION

At any step in this process we can interfere with the energy and mis-qualify it with our beliefs and emotions. The “Secret” proclaimed all we need to do is “intend” and the giant catalog in the Universe will deliver whatever we order. At least 95% of us cannot make intention work because intention is wishing, and our beliefs, or expectations, are much more powerful. We also have lots of “issues” when considering our Identification, Capacity, and Ability, to make something happen just because we desire it.

Notice the absence of any of the words such as Soul, Spirit, Atman, Christ Consciousness, Buddha Mind, or Quantum Mind in any of these explanations. The use of these words describes something we “may” be on a different plane of existence. Those words also create and maintain an artificial separation between who we actually are and who we have been taught to think we are. That separation simply does not exist, but because we believe it to be so, it is for us.

WE ARE MIND. The world we inhabit is subject to the same laws that apply to the rest of the Universe. The physical manifestations in our imagined individual experience came about by our use of the same process Mind uses. By depending on our brain for definitions however, we make mistakes in the areas of identification, capacity, and ability, and mis-qualify and mis-create manifestations, BUT the process we are using is the same.

To experience Mind, close your eyes and hold up your hand. What does your hand feel. Other than knowing you have a hand, the hand is feeling nothing. At one time, you are experiencing Mind and living in the Present. Your brain is on hold, waiting to feel something it can experience. It is this Potential to experience that is at the Heart of Mind. If you go ahead and touch something with your hand, your brain comes on line and tells you what you are experiencing, but it is really only able to tell you what you have already experienced.

What would our world look like if we didn't already know what we were seeing? "We are not our thoughts, or the object of our thoughts. We are the Thinker."