The Lost Symbol: Praise the god you didn’t know existed

27 September 2009 - Filed under Life Outside Work

Unlike Carly Palmer, I couldn’t finish the 509-page book in 2 hours and 34 minutes. Having finished it, however, I don’t think it’s possible to say what the Lost Symbol, after all, exactly was – because, well, it’s much more than just a symbol that had been lost. It’s actually a phrase, an idea, a god, the Truth. The Truth of the highest degree of understanding. Rather than painstakingly advancing (both time- and money-wise) to the 33rd degree of the Masonic hierarchy of secrecy, the author offers a ritual-free shortcut to the Truth in a 133-chapter book – most chapters are only 2-3 pages long, by the way – whose teachings can be absorbed in as little as 2 hours and 34 minutes.

Okay, because it is admittedly a cheap ticket to the Truth, it does not come packaged with elaborate information on the hidden treasures or the answers to the conspiracies in history around the world. If you’re into that sort of entertainment, National Treasure does a much better job; that movie has got it all: history, Freemasons, and the secret treasure. But The Lost Symbol does an elegant job of articulating the core idea of the Second Renaissance: the Great Architect, the God of the Enlightened, is plural, and is actually each one of us who believe and invest in the power of the mind. The Good News is that this works regardless of the cultural, ethnic, or religious background we come from, as suggested by the various key characters in the novel.

I appreciate the historical fact and the depth of the author’s research presented in The Lost Symbol. The book richly and correctly points out that the New World, now known as the United States, was indeed founded by the Freemasons according to their ideals and spirit. Still, I do not subscribe to the convenient generalisation of the different religions and what they stand for. Nor do I believe that the exponential advancement of the science of the mind (“noetic science”) will produce scientifically irrefutable answers to ALL of the questions the mainstream sciences could not conquer. Wasn’t it almost 80 years ago that Kurt Gödel, one of the greatest mathematicians in history, scientifically proved that not all truths, while observable, are provable?

No matter what the Truth is or what degree of understanding the reader reaches, there are clear winners emerging from the irrefutable success of the book: The Institute of Noetic Sciences, the tourism industry of Washington D.C., and Sudoku.

Update: An independent review of The Lost Symbol on Amazon contains a secret code that sums it up in two words.

2009-09-27  »  JK