Dan Brown, author of the wildly successful The Da Vinci Code, is being sued by two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (HBHG) for plagiarism.

The problem they have is that countless books written in the wake of HBHG have mined that book for facts and ideas. Moreover, thousands of copies of HBHG were sold off the back of Da Vinci, which has generated a whole publishing industry in its trail.

The interesting question is, have those ideas gained common acceptance, especially among leading authorities in the field?

Quite a number of Biblical scholars have written books broadly agreeing with many of the points brought out in HBHG. The Templar fortune, for example, and the “treasure” of the Cathars — thought to be the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, have been much discussed. The “Priory of Sion” may or may not be the genuine article, but the concept of Rex Deus, a group descended from the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem, seems to have a strong foundation in fact.

The Gnostic Gospel of Mary shows Mary Magdalen to have been much more than a common harlot. Respectable scholars now believe she was Mary of Bethany, and some say the wedding there was Jesus’s own to Mary. So, children would not have been out of the question.

There is alleged to be a document in the Vatican library dated 37AD which tracks Joseph of Arimathea’s journeys to Britain, and persistent rumours and historical echoes have come down to us in folk tales and various accounts.

That Mary might have escaped to the South of France and inadvertently founded the Merovingian dynasty is credible given the many references to Mary and Mary Magdalen in churches in the region.

Any analysis of the conventional Gospels show them to be contradictory and historically inaccurate. They were most probably rehashed from older Egyptian sources, involving Horus, a god born to a virgin mother, Isis, then murdered and resurrected miraculously. These already-ancient ideas would have been grafted on to memories of a local holy man in order to bolster his claims in the very competitive religious marketplace of the time.

My book, COSMOSITY, shows that all these powerful echoes relate to a mystical state, which I call Nirvanic experience (to avoid religious distortion), and which demonstrates the immortality of consciousness.

There’s probably some deep underlying truth in both HBHG and The Da Vinci Code. But, like a dream, the details appear garbled when reviewed after the event.

I wrote a post recently quoting Andrew Cohen’s short piece, distributed by email, about the difference between what’s personal and impersonal.

This is a topic I have a great interest in because it goes to the heart of the meaning of life. We tend to think that losing the personal side of things and entering the impersonal is a loss of consciousness and a depletion of our resources. In fact, it’s a raising of our awareness beyond the imperatives of the physical life. It’s often called “the sorrowless state” and that’s because the fate of our little “person” is no longer relevant to consciousness.

Andrew Cohen covers this topic particularly well in his Evolutionary Enlightenment drive. A recent blog post delves deeply into it.

Since its first significant emergence on July 30, 2001, this potential has revealed itself in a series of powerful eruptions of enlightened or nondual awareness among different groups of my students. A deeper or higher state of consciousness that transcends ego would miraculously engulf many individuals simultaneously, in such a way that suddenly the very ground of relatedness or intersubjective awareness would be enlightenment itself. As has been described on this blog, it literally took years for this new potential that I call Radical, Transformative, Impersonal, Evolutionary Enlightenment to even begin to come into being. When it did, it emerged as an intoxicating and profound shared state experience, in which many were coming together in what I call the Authentic Self, for longer and longer periods of time. Last November, this state was sustained for literally weeks on end, and spread like wildfire throughout my entire international student body.

Impersonality is a release, not a death. Although no loss or gain is involved, it is a vastly superior situation to the ape-like existence we experience on Earth.

When scientists, especially quantum physicists, get spiritual, you can expect fireworks. In the movie documentary, “What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole: Extended Director’s Cut” that’s just what we get.

The basic question asked is this: “Is the spirit and science tying the knot once more?” And, if so, where is that leading us?

Donna Freitas, who has seen this movie and reviews it for BeliefNet, writes:

They … build on the notion that all the universe, consciousness itself, is a great collective organism in which we all swim, move, live. This notion takes the statement “what I think effects the world” to a new level, since, as one scientist explains, the universe — and we, the human elements of it — are made of an “ocean of pure potentiality, abstract potentiality, pure abstract self-aware consciousness that gives rise to everything.”

In other words, as conscious elements of the larger universe, we are its co-creators. For lack of a better term, as conscious beings we are each of us gods (but not the only gods, as all consciousness is god), creating reality with our thoughts, actions, choices, and by merely being here and watching and paying attention.

We are then, co-creators of existence. “God is not within, but in fact we ourselves are divine” Quantum physics “has its own spirituality of unity” and tells us that separateness does not exist, that we are all literally connected.

This sounds like an unmissable DVD. A shorter version is already available in North America. (Aff)

F. C. Happold was one of the most convincing writers on mysticism and esoteric subjects. He was a schoolmaster and headmaster most of his life, apart from his service in the first world war in which he won the Distinguished Service Order.

His most famous book was Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology, which was published by Penguin in 1963. Here are a couple of passages I like from his Perennial Philosophy (1970):

What is mysticism? The word “mystic” has its origin in the Greek mysteries. A mystic was one who had been initiated into these mysteries, through which he had gained an esoteric knowledge of divine things and been “reborn into eternity”. His object was to break through the world of history and time into that of eternity and timelessness. […]

In the world, constituted as it is, men are faced not with one single truth but with several “truths”, not with one but with several pictures of reality. They are thus conscious of a “discord in the pact of things”, whereby to hold to one “truth” seems to be to deny another. One part of their experience draws to one, another to another. It has been the eternal quest of mankind to find the one ultimate Truth, that final synthesis in which all partial truths are resolved. It may be that the mystic has glimpsed this synthesis.