[Garry Hovard]

I am aware that some readers of my OP might have thought that I was making a big fuss about a seemingly innocuous experiment. I shall try to explain why we need to take such experiments of Noetics Science more seriously and see the truth in them.

The moment I heard the name 'Noetics Science' in Dan Brown's novel 'The Lost Symbol' and started reading his overwhelming praise on it--

• as a "new cutting-edge discipline";

• with possible "ramifications across every discipline--from physics, to history, to philosophy, to religion" that would 'change everything soon' (that is, in the forthcoming age of Aquarius (21 Dec 2012 to 4012 CE);

• with the conviction "we are the masters of our own universe"

--I had a vague feeling that something of a make-believe, a hype, is possibly created, to be touted eventually as the ultimate panacea for the ills of the world's religions. Anyone is likely to have similar doubts when coming across the following explanations about the Noetics Science:

• In the "first stage", the modern materialistic science freed the "knowledge of the objective sense-perceived world" from religious and traditional authority, from being "the guarded property of an elite priesthood", and made it public so it can be "empirically based and publicly verifiable, open and free to all". Thus, there is no Russian or American Chemisty, or Hindu or Christian Physics--only science as the "best framework of empirical relationships and conceptual models currently available", and "continuously tested in public by agreed-upon procedures."

• The goal of the "second stage" is to free, or rather distill, and bring to public limelight a "similar body of knowledge, empirically based and publicly validated, about the realm of subjective experience" that is currently lost "in dogmatization and institutionalization, or degenerating into manifold varieties of cultism and occultism".

('What Are Noetic Sciences?' By Willis Harman posted at
IONS - Review #47 (Winter 1998) - What Are Noetic Sciences)

Can a subjective experience ever be made into an objective experiment that anyone can empirically verify, mechanically simulate and repeat?

To put it more plainly, can the techniques of meditation and yoga be learnt and practised scientifically using mechanical apparatus like the treadmill?

Such questions are going to pose the biggest challenges of the Noetics Science, in spite of its ambitious goal in the 'second stage'.

Assuming that it would be eventually possible to simulate the states of altered consciousness using physical means and mechanical apparati, what could be their possible ramifications? Dan Brown describes a couple of experiments in his book:

Weighing the human soul

Materialistic Science questioned the existence of the soul, but a Noetic Science experiment seeks to find the weight of the human soul as it leaves the body:

A super-sensitive weighing machine is designed that looks more like an incubator for premature babies in hospitals. This machine is adult size, and has a long, airtight plastic capsule that sits on top of an electronic gear.

When switched on, the machine displays a weight: 0.0000000000 kg. When a tiny scrap of paper is added, it displays the weight: .0008194325 kg. Thus the balance can display weight down to the precision of micrograms.

Now starts the horrible--interesting, of course, in the scientific POV--sessioin of the experiment:

A dying man with an oxygen mask is placed inside the capsule. Science has certified that he has no way of escaping death. His wife's consent is obtained and she sits to watch the experiment. When the experiment starts, the oxygen mask is removed and the man is left to spend his final moments and pangs of death inside the closed, airtight capsule.

Initially, the machine shows the man's weight: 51.4534644 kg. The old man's breathing becomes shallow, accelerates and then stops all of a sudden, after he takes his last breath. And then it happens: the number on the scale decreases suddenly, as if the man has become lighter immediately after his death. The change is only minuscule, but measurable, with the mind-boggling implication that it was due the weight of the departed soul.

Meditation Machines

After Science discovered in 1966 that liquid breathing was possible by submerging a mouse for several hours in oxygenated perfluorocarbon--a breathable liquid, the TLV--Total Liquid Ventillation was developed, initially for medical purposes, to help premature babies breathe by simulating the conditions of liquid breathing in the womb.

The US military picked up the TLV technology and used it for their ocean-diving teams. NASA trained their pilots in liquid breathing to withstand higher g-forces.

Stories circulated that the CIA used a TLV capsule for torture: the panic associated with drowning brought out truths better than conventional torture methods.

Unaware that he can breathe inside a liquid, when the liquid enters a victim's lungs, he would initially black out from fear and later wake up in the ultimate solitary confinement. With numbing agents, drugs and hallucinogens mixed with warm oxygenated liquid, the experience can give the prisoner--or the practioner, a total sense of isolation from the body. The body lies still and wet, and does not respond to the commands of the mind as the practioner/prisoner realizes when he wakes up after the initial black out. In this state of total disorientation, the submerged practitioner practically lives in his mind, his consciousness floating in space as it were.

In Dan Brown's book, a hardcore Freemason ritualist of mock bloddy rites, wearing only a silky loincloth and tattoos of Masonic symbols all over his body, tortures the hero Professor Robert Langdon in a TLV capsule about which the learned professor has no idea. As he is 'drowned to a horrifying death', Langdon reveals the final piece of the code of the Masonic pyramid that points to the Lost Word, buried deep underground somewhere in the city of Washington.

The book hints at "extreme experience labs" using TLV tanks as "Meditation Machines."

**********

As the Noetics Science progresses, the modern world will have new paradigms of scientific spiritual realization, finally obliterating the 'primeval beliefs' of ancient spiritual and religious pursuits. Primitive religion and spirituality would only be found in history books and historical movies.

The Hindu sacred science of Ayurveda that was the mode of treatment at no or nominal cost by our sages until 200 years or so back has today become a posh and expensive treatment and a way of relaxation in the spas and swimming pools of five star hotels and holiday inns. The name Ayurveda is retained because it sells today. Even the simple practice of the Hindu dorbiH karaNam (toppu karaNam) has been 're-invented' and copyrighted as the Superbrain Yoga.

In the near future, Noetics Science would teach our successive generations to use the term 'Entanglement' for Brahman, and 'perceiving one's entanglement' for Self-Realization--to give a couple of examples--and words such as 'soul, Self, God' would become taboo.

Aldous Huxley's novel 'Brave New World' starts with test-tube babies moving in conveyor belts in state controlled laboratories getting hatched outside wombs and the infants getting trained as the state desires them to be. Society is divided into four 'classes'--alpha, beta, gamma and delta. People who still practice primitive religion are moved to barbaric colonies outside the limits of the modern cities.

Today's Material Science and tomorrow's Noetics Science are IMSO, moving in the same direction, aiming at widespread rational knowledge but having no controls on how it might be used.