On Becoming a Fictional Character: Insights from a Comparison of Noetic Scientists Katherine Solomon and Marilyn Schlitz
Ah, to be a fictional character in a best selling novel. It's the stuff that dreams are made of--if one dreams of such things. For me, it does feel like a dream. Out of the blue my colleagues and I have become part of the plot line in Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol. The lead, Katherine Solomon, is a Noetic Scientist with whom I can relate.
Of course, there are others in the frontier field of Noetic Science who see themselves in Katherine Solomon. And this is reasonable, for certainly she is a composite of several in our order. Still, I must confess, 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. As I read The Lost Symbol with mounting fascination, I am pondering what it means to become a fictional character in a book that has captured the collective imagination like wildfire on a hot summer day.
I begin with a theme that pervades The Lost Symbol: the Masons. Both my father and my brother were 32nd degree Masons and members of the Scottish Rite. I grew up wondering about the secret meetings for men only. My father and my brother learned mysterious symbols that could not be shared with me, despite my many probing questions. My father wore the iconic Masonic ring, which was passed down to my brother after his death, just as it was in Katherine's family.
As Noetic Scientists, Katherine and I share a mutual fascination with the powers and potentials of consciousness. We have both pursued careers well outside the mainstream and both live our work, as friends and family can attest.
As President/CEO of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, both Katherine and I know the value and the urgency of our studies, as well as the complexity of explaining our work to the world. For both of us, Noetic Science is a multidisciplinary approach that seeks to understand the role that consciousness plays in the physical world, and how understanding consciousness can lead to creative new solutions to age old problems. We have been inspired by breakthroughs that were sourced through intuition and inner knowing and expressed through reason and logic. We believe that consciousness matters, now and in the future!
Like Katherine, my career began at the ripe age of 19. And early on, my mentor was a neurophysiologist who introduced me to ancient Egyptian texts and modern scientific views of consciousness. As an undergraduate at Montieth College, Wayne State University, I read Newton, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, and Copernicus, as well as spiritualism, theosophy, parapsychology, and comparative religion, like Katherine, looking for ways to broker a paradigm shift for our modern age.
I began as an experimental parapsychologist, studying the interface of mind and matter. I published my first paper on remote viewing in 1979; this attracted members of the CIA/DIA team doing classified work on psychic phenomena. Years later I gained security clearance through my work in the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory at SAIC, a large government sponsored research site where I conducted research on mind over matter. While my work was never classified directly, I can easily stretch my imagination to that of Katherine's fictional story--her research hidden deep in a web of classified intelligence.
Throughout the past three decades, I conducted laboratory-based and clinical studies involving distant intention, prayer, altered states of consciousness, contemplative practice, subtle energies, and healing. Like the Noetic Sciences program in the Lost Symbol, my experimental research has included studies of distant intention on living systems, including microorganisms, mice, and human physiology. My research on distant mental influences on living systems (DMILS) has been replicated in laboratories around the world, moving it beyond fiction and into peer review journals.
I conducted RNG-PK experiments in the mid 1980's with Helmut Schmidt, the physicist who developed this research area. In our published report, we found that time that intention and attention appeared to impact the outcome of random event generators, or what can be thought of as electronic coin flippers. In particular, we found that meditation practitioners did better than the average population on shifting randomness. And the more practice, the better the results. I'm pleased to note that Katherine confirmed our findings.
Several years ago I convened the first international meeting of the global consciousness project at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Working with Roger Nelson who worked at the PEAR lab at Princeton, IONS has been the organizational sponsor of this work and its remarkable unfolding over the years. The network of random generators around the world has allowed us to extend our laboratory research into the field and to track the role of collective attention on the creation of order from randomness. The results are highly encouraging, though we have not yet exceeded fictional expectations.
As we have sought to gain a theoretical understanding of our Noetic Science data, my colleagues and I consulted experts in the area of quantum theory. I learned from the best, including Brian Josephson, Richard Feynman, Hans Peter Duerr, Roger Penrose, and Henry Stapp, among others. In addition to research on entanglement and nonlocality, I continue to track complexity, emergence, and string theory, research areas that have also been central to Katherine's studies.
Our laboratory at the Institute of Noetic Sciences includes a 2000 pound electromagnetically shielded room, which we now affectionately refer to as the "Cube." Two wealthy patrons donated funds to build our lab, believing we are on the verge of a breakthrough. In it, my colleague Dean Radin and I have conducted studies of intuition, gut reactions to distant emotional stimuli, order in randomness, the role of intention on water crystals, and the potential non-local nature of dual consciousness, all topics that have been considered in The Lost Symbol. I've published the results in my two main books and in many journal articles (just as Katherine has done). I've even presented this work at the Smithsonian Institute, including discussion of ancient lore about biofields and subtle energies. My team and I look forward to discussing our findings with Katherine and Robert when the dust settles.
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. In our detailed study of consciousness transformation, we studied practitioners from 60 different transformative traditions, some ancient and some modern. Bringing the lens of science to these diverse practices, we identified the factors that stimulate, support, and sustain positive changes--while avoiding the pitfalls that seem to plague Mal'akh and his rigid fundamentalism.
IONS has sponsored research and conferences on the potential survival of consciousness after bodily death. We have studied crosscultural cosmologies of the after life, supported field research on the rainbow body, and collaborated with Ian Stevenson and others on reincarnation and mediumship. As I have written in several publications, the fact of our mortality and what happens when we die are critical issues as we seek a path to peace within ourselves and across cultures.
Both Katherine and I share a deep commitment to the positive unfolding of life on our planet. Like the final message in The Lost Symbol, I believe that human beings are poised on the threshold of a new age; Noetic Science may help lead the way. And, as Katherine mentions, we are grateful for the media relation's bump that the new book offers as we share the findings of the Noetic Sciences with the world.
And I invite you to hold the collective intention that can lead to positive transformation by joining the Institute of Noetic Sciences www.noetic.org.
Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Ph.D.
President/CEO
Institute of Noetic Sciences
