DECODING THE LOST SYMBOL by SIMON COX

Author:SIMON COX
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A TOUCHSTONE BOOK
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Institute of Noetic Sciences

The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), a nonprofit organization that encourages and conducts research into human consciousness and its potentials, began life in 1973. It was founded by U.S. astronaut Edgar Mitchell—one of the few to walk on the moon—and Paul N. Temple, an industrialist with a background in the petroleum business. IONS has over twenty thousand members and operates from a two-hundred-acre campus about thirty-five miles north of San Francisco. It produces a quarterly magazine, Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness, which details the research from the world of consciousness studies.

One of the leading characters in The Lost Symbol, Katherine Solomon, is described as a noetic scientist, and there is considerable mention of various research projects showcasing this branch of study.

The word noetic comes from an ancient Greek word noesis, which roughly translates as “inner knowing.” There is no precise English word which corresponds exactly with the original Greek term, but intuition comes close. IONS has dedicated itself to exploring the nature of consciousness using rigorous scientific methods in an attempt to establish the connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm as well as the inner and the outer worlds.

Following his return from space aboard Apollo 14 in 1971, Edgar Mitchell related eloquently how walking on the moon and seeing the Earth from such a distance affected him profoundly. Before he went to the moon aboard Apollo 14, he was a man who believed in rational science. But then, on the flight home:

Suddenly from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slow swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth— home.

On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious. We went to the moon as technicians, we returned humanitarians.

When I went to the moon, I was as pragmatic a test pilot, engineer, and scientist as any of my colleagues. But when I saw the planet Earth floating in the vastness of space … the presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes.

Just two years after returning home, Mitchell cofounded IONS. His work at the institute could not have been more different from his career with NASA. You could say that Mitchell used to explore outer space, but his work with IONS is all about exploring inner space— the world that exists only inside our heads, yet which, according to IONS, has the potential to impact the world all around us.

Much of the work done at IONS sounds like science fiction, but it is rooted in real science and study of the human mind. The institute evaluates phenomena that not so long ago would have been classified as magic or firmly in the realm of the occult.

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