With The Da Vinci Code movie now on general release, interest in the story is widespread. Specifically, is it true, or how much of it is true?

I’ve tried to analyse the book’s basic themes over on Syntagma, and discover how much is really factual in the whole package, bearing in mind that it is a novel. However, it’s a novel that takes its broad themes from an earlier book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, so I’ve especially looked at that book too.

Here’s the link: The Surprising Truth in The Da Vinci Code.

In the North-Indian Buddhist scripture, The Flower Garland Sutra, there’s a description of the masters of enlightenment, or Bodhisattvas, who come into the world to bring others to spiritual knowledge. Described in Thomas Clancy’s translation as “enlightening beings”, they are often not what they seem:

“Some appear in the form of mendicants,
some in the form of priests,
some in bodies adorned head to foot with particular emblematic signs,
some in the form of scholars, scientists, doctors;
some in the form of merchants,
some in the form of ascetics,
some in the form of entertainers,
some in the form of pietists,
some in the form of bearers of all kinds of arts and crafts — they are seen to have come, in their various guises, to all villages, cities, towns, communities, districts, and nations …
(They) are lamps shedding light on the knowledge of all beings …
for the purpose of leading people to perfection.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the American Transcendentalists of the 19th century, along with Henry David Thoreau and others. They produced a literary journal called The Dial in Concord, Massachusetts.

Emerson was known for his spiritual essays like, Self-Reliance and Nature, usually on sturdy American themes. One of my favorite quotations of his is this:

“Do not go where the path may lead,
Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’ve been researching the posthumously-published aspects of the work of C.G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher of mysticism. In particular, the late chapters and appendices of his memoirs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which show how far he had progressed beyond the orthodox science of his day.

It’s always interesting to view the private jottings of public people. The enormous lengths they go to in trying to hide their real views from critical gaze is fascinating. In Jung’s case, his belief in the purpose of “Individuation” contrasted starkly with the nihilism of many of his colleagues.

Here’s his personal view of Individuation:

“When the summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges … and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation, he who is inwardly great will know that the long expected friend of his soul, the immortal one, has now really come.”

C.G. Jung