Above right: Large Hadron Collider Left: a Dharma Initiative logo

This Popular Mechanics article on “debunking” the science of Lost does little debunking and much fawning and speculating.

Michio Kaku, author of Physics of the Impossible, thinks the Lost creators are using cutting-edge science to lay the groundwork for a transversible wormhole to another point in space and time—a trip foreshadowed in an off-season video about the so-called Orchid station, which Lindelhof and Cuse promised would be a key to the next few episodes. “They’re amping up the energy to the point where space and time begin to tear, and the fabric begins to rip,” Kaku tells PM. “When the fabric of space and time begin to rip, things that we consider impossible become possible again.”

Full Story: Popular Mechanics

(via Daily Grail)

What was Alternative 3?

Alternative 3 is a television programme, broadcast in the UK in 1977 as a fictional hoax, an heir to Orson Welles’ radio production of The War of the Worlds. Purporting to be an investigation into Britain’s contemporary “brain drain,” Alternative 3 uncovered a plan to make the moon and Mars habitable in the event of a terminal environmental catastrophe on Earth.

The programme was originally meant to be broadcast on April Fools Day, 1977. While its broadcast was delayed until June by industrial action, the credits explicitly date the film to April 1st. Alternative 3 ended with credits for the actors involved in the production and featured interviews with a fictitious American astronaut. However, some conspiracy theory supporters have argued Alternative 3 is at least partly true.

Full Story: Wikipedia

Black Belt Jones writes:

Chances are if we’ve been to the pub together over the last 15 years, I will have mentioned Alternative-3, amongst the canon of great media proto-ARGs that include Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds, Ghostwatch, etc.

I re-watched it on the plane over to the USA, and my addled-brain couldn’t help but retcon the whole thing into the LOST universe.

It was made of course, when the DHARMA initiative is intended to have made their orientation movies, which helps.

But the plot within it is worthy of Abrams, Lindelhof, et al.

Full Story: Black Belt Jones.

Above is a screencap of Ben’s secret door from last night’s episode. Here’s some information about what the symbols mean.

More to come…

“Everywhere I see them there, I stop and stare at patterns… ”

A big part of what makes Lost so successful (and at the same time so hit-and-miss) is the way it doles out mysteries and secrets. Hidden clues and cryptic statements are the bread and butter of the show, leading some to frustration at never getting answers, while others dig deeper and deeper into the material to find the truth. The writers and producers of the show have gone out of their way to encourage theorizing, pattern recognition, clue-spotting, and solving the puzzles constantly thrown to the audience. Why does this show fire people up so much; capable of turning the most mundane conversation into wide-eyed frantic speculation on who Jacob is, or what the deal is with that Black Smoke Monster? It’s because Lost is one gigantic apophenia machine.

Apophenia is a fancy psychological term that refers to finding patterns in seemingly meaningless or unrelated data. There is a great deal of this going on in Lost, the Numbers being only one of the most obvious examples. Deliberate connections were made between the different castaways in flashbacks, such as Locke and Sawyer’s shared history with the same man. The production team intentionally adding in patterns leads to the hunt for more and more patterns, going deeper and deeper into minutia. Therein lies the danger of finding too much order: connecting things that are completely unconnected, or only incidentally related.

There seems to be a fine spectrum of pattern-recognition, where apophenia is classed as a disorder (or a Type I Error) and can lead to psychosis, and the other side of the spectrum leading to invention, creativity, and discovery. On the one hand, the Skeptic’s Dictionary goes so far as to define all paranormal and supernatural events as apophenia. Another skeptic’s analysis presents many examples of apophenia sliding into madness. Familiar stories can be found among many conspiracy theorists, especially when the one proposing the theory happens to be at the center of it as well. The visual subset of apophenia, called pareidolia, is often the true cause of religious visions, Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, and other equally bizarre sightings. In Lost, the producers seem to encourage this, putting clues in quick flashes that can’t quite be seen but for the pause button on a TiVo (Christian Shepard’s eye in the cabin window, for example), but it has led to fans finding meaningful connections and images even in accidental prop goofs, cloud patterns, even letters in the waves on the ocean. This is sometimes known as the Confirmation Bias, or as Robert Anton Wilson put it in Prometheus Rising, “What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.” In other words, whatever you believe, or whatever pattern it is you are searching for, you’ll find it.

The possibility of discovering patterns that don’t exist should not, however, dissuade anyone from looking for the patterns to begin with. It can be useful to see how history connects to itself, despite being a collection of unrelated people and events, as in James Burke’s television series called Connections. In the search for connections, the universe starts to take on a certain kind of structure of its own. The notion that the world is a
complex and deeply interconnected mind is found behind nearly all
mystical practices. In Hermeticism, it is called The All; in Hinduism the piece of god within everyone is the atman; in Buddhism the doctrine is of Interpenetration. One of the more useful metaphorical illustrations of interpenetration in particular is Indra’s Net, which then bleeds over into physics in the holographic universe theory. In such a reality, everything actually is connected to everything else, something also hinted at in Bell’s Theorem of non-locality. This makes finding patterns in random noise much easier, which is what divination is for. The methods of divination are nearly endless, all of them taking input from random phenomena of the world and interpreting meaningful results. One of the better-known ancient divinatory practices is the I-Ching, which decorates the outer edge of the DHARMA logo. Of course, there’s an extreme to this end of the spectrum as well, where one falls into the belief that imposing a pattern on the universe is just as easy as finding one; or even that one creates one’s own universe.

In another view entirely, both sides are equally illusory. Finding order where there’s only chaos, or finding chaos where there’s only order; neither one is the full truth. “Reality is the original Rorschach.” Profound stuff? Actually it’s Discordianism. Really, I agree with this comment that what really counts is the meaning you assign to any given perceived structure. There’s room for both sides of the coin, both on the psychological level and the practical magic level.

As a mystery show that seems to include references to practically everything everywhere, Lost is highly susceptible to false-pattern recognition. This is, however, part of the narrative structure, to give hints and red herrings at every turn. So many narrative themes, leading to so many theories. What to do, but connect everything to everything! We’ll know the truth by the end of Season Six–or at least, we can hope.

I wrote an article on Lost and the occult for Key 64. Probably nothing new for readers of this blog.

ABC’s Lost isn’t the first pop culture phenomena to crib from occultism - movies, television shows, and video games have integrated occult themes and rituals for years. But one thing that sets Lost apart from the crowd is the apparent sincere interest on the part of executive producer and co-creator Damon Lindelof. While most pop cultural attempts at integrating magic and the occult are done merely to add atmosphere to the story, Lindelof has a deeper interest in the material. And rather than beating the viewer over the head with “authentic” occult rituals, Lindelof is more content to pepper the series with references and concepts, leaving the the viewer to decipher their significance.

Full Story: Key 64.

Apparently, the way time travel works on Lost is movement of consciousness through time and space to experience “retrocognition of the past and occasions of precognition of the future.” The breathtaking occult art of Paul Laffoley has dealt with this subject for years, most notably in his painting The Time Machine : GEOCHRONMECHANE : From The Earth - the plans to build a working time machine. More info can be found on Paul Laffoley here. He can also be heard explaining his time travel plans in his lecture at Esozone 2007.

I’m also reminded of the occult action comic The Invisibles, which I reviewed here. Characters in the Invisibles use a consciousness projection technique to travel through space and time. The source for the time travel techniques of the Invisibles is the book The Voudon Gnostic Workbook, a collection of materials Michael Bertiaux used to instruct his cult in Chicago.

However, Michael Szul of Key 64 points out that the Invisibles can travel to places in time that they haven’t been and don’t need a “host body.” He suggests that the time travel in this episode is more reminiscent of Slaughterhouse Five. Lostpedia has this to say on the subject:

Desmond, during one of his flashbacks/time travels, speaks to someone else in the military with him. His friend’s name is Billy. Billy Pilgrim is the main character in Slaughterhouse Five. The narration of the story of Billy Pilgrim begins: “Listen. Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.” When Desmond is with Daniel in 1996 and Daniel is about to experiment on Eloise, he says that he is going to unstick her in time. Also, the narrator of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut, says that he likes to call old girlfriends late at night. Desmond calls Penelope at night. When Desmond spoke with Mrs. Hawking, she said that events are structured and that the universe will course correct. In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim explains that , according to the Tralfamadorians, aliens who can see the fourth dimension, time is structured and events cannot be changed (we are like bugs in amber). When asked about the end of the universe, the Tralfamadorians explain that one of their test pilots presses a button that destroys the universe. Billy asks why they cannot stop the pilot from pressing the button, and they reply that the pilot always has and always will press the button. The moment is structured that way. Desmond’s purpose, according to Mrs. Hawking, is to turn the key and he cannot avoid it. The moment is structured that way. Billy Pilgrim sees the future, and even predicts his own death. Desmond predicted Charlie’s death and other events on the island.

(The whole landscape becomes indistinct. A forest ebbs out and a wall of rough rock ebbs in, through which can be seen a gateway. The two men pass through the gateway. What happened to the forest? The two men did not really move; they did not really go anywhere, and yet they are not now where they originally were. Here time turns into space. Wagner began Parsifal in 1845. He died in 1873, long before Hermann Minkowski postulated four-dimensional space-time (1908). The source-basis for Parsifal consisted of Celtic legends, and Wagner’s research into Buddhism for his never-written opera about the Buddha to be called “The Victors” (Die Sieger). Where did Richard Wagner get the notion that time could turn into space?)

And if time can turn into space, can space turn into time? (40-41)

PKD/HLF came to believe that Thomas was also Elijah, John the Baptist, Dionysos, the Buddha, and many others, all at once. They were, according the HLF, homoplasmates—living human embodiments of the Logos, the Logos being not simply the word of God through Christ, but living information, which was also a secret to transcend time. HLF called the Logos plasmate, and believed this secret was a technology for eternal life that the early Christians understood, as well as the Rosicrucian Order, the Renaissance alchemists, Apollonius of Tyana, Elijah, Dionysos, the Dogon of western Sudan, the Gnostics as recorded in the Nag Hammadi library, and others. The fish symbol, as well as being a representation of the age of Pisces, was a geometrical symbol of two circles with the same radius that each have their centers intersecting with the other circle’s circumference. The center of that intersection is the fish symbol. Take just that central intersection image and twist it, and you get the double helix of DNA.

Full Story: Dark UFO.

Remember when Ben told Michael ”We’re the good guys?” And remember when Juliet told Jack that killing people is a big no-no in Others society? And remember how the Others actually really resent being called ”the Others”? Well, I recently discovered a group of people over at Wikipedia.org (Official Research Tool of Crackpot Lost Theorists everywhere!) that could really relate to Ben and the rest of his misunderstood friends. Meet the Cathars, a Gnostic sect of Christianity considered heretics by The Roman Catholic Church and were horribly persecuted. Like most Gnostics — Christians who really want to be Buddhists — Cathars believe that God is actually bad; that human beings are spirits trapped inside the corrupting matter of flesh; and that Satan is actually Good for wanting to liberate us with enlightenment. Cathars don’t view death as a punishment for sin, but a natural part of an individual’s spiritual progression. Not incidentally, Cathars took a dim view of murder, as it had profound consequences for a soul’s journey. And Cathars didn’t call themselves Cathars. ”Cathars” was a derogatory term, imposed on them by their enemies. Instead, Cathars called themselves by another name: The Good People.

[…]

According to Wikipedia (Official Research Tool For Crackpot Lost Theorists Everywhere!), Shambala is ”a hidden mystical kingdom” in Tibetan Buddhism. Various Eastern-infused esoteric traditions in the West (read: New Age, Occult, ”Mystery Sect” religions) consider Shambala to be ”inhabited by a mystic brotherhood whose members labor for the good of humanity.” Even more provocative is this: ”Some early twentieth-century occultists… view Shambala as a source of negative manipulation by an evil or amoral conspiracy.” Shambala lore is linked to Agartha, a mystical lost city at the center of world, inhabited by enlightened, possibly eternal beings known as The Old Ones who — get this — KIDNAP HUMAN CHILDREN AND RAISE THEM AS THEIR OWN!

Full Story: Entertainment Weekly.

Key points:

The bracelet is just a bracelet

The freighties are NOT from 2007/2008.

The flashforwards are “real” and not alternate realities

Find 815 may not be canon

Full Story: Entertainment Weekly.

The book John Locke brings Ben at the beginning of tonight is VALIS by Philip K. Dick. It’s difficult to summarize, or to overstate, the importance of Dick, and of VALIS in the modern occulture.

Philip K. Dick was a science fiction author, responsible for the stories that became Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and Total Recall (amongst many others). His work frequently speculated as to the nature of reality, and frequently with the subjects of control, authority, and paranoia. VALIS was one of his final works, a semi-autobiographical book based largely on the mysterical experience/mental breakdown he experienced.

Notably, VALIS deals heavily with gnostic themes. Wikipedia on Gnosticism:

Gnosticism refers to a diverse, syncretistic religious movement consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world created by an imperfect spirit, the demiurge, who is frequently identified with the Abrahamic God. The demiurge may be depicted as an embodiment of evil, or in other instances as merely imperfect and as benevolent as its inadequacy permits. This demiurge exists alongside another remote and unknowable supreme being that embodies good. In order to free oneself from the inferior material world, one needs gnosis, or esoteric spiritual knowledge available to all through direct experience or knowledge (gnosis) of God. Jesus of Nazareth is identified by some Gnostic sects as an embodiment of the supreme being who became incarnate to bring gnosis to the Earth. In others he was thought to be a gnosis teacher, and yet others, nothing more than a man.

Gnosticism could bridge the seemingly contradictory Buddhist and Catholic themes of the show.

More:

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick, an online comic about Dick’s experience by Robert Crumb.