'Lost': 'The Age of Dharma Decline'

One of my favorite Lost mysteries ever was the Map. I speak of the secret graffiti that John Locke found painted on the blast door in the Hatch in season 2. According to Kelvin Inman, the Dharma dude who found Desmond when he washed up on the Island, the Map was started by Radzinsky, the ''Black Swan'' science zealot bent on exploiting the Island's electromagnetic energy to save the world. When Radzinsky shot himself, Kelvin took it upon himself to finish the scientist's cryptic art project. The Map, which you can find at Lostpedia, showed where all the Dharma Initiative hatches were located. More interesting was how the Map was filled with annotations that described the history of the Dharma Initiative — specifically, its latter days — and the increasingly disturbed state of mind of the Map's makers. ''The disease worsens with the treatment,'' ''I think, therefore I suffer,'' and ''Life up your hearts!'' were among the notations. The Map was an encoded chronicle of Dharma's decline, an expression of existential despair, and a hopeful prayer. Bookmark that sentence; we're coming back to it when I lay my Mappo theory on you. Yes, I said Mappo. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Locke thought he had found a codex to unlock the secrets of the Island as well as his own destiny. The marker on the Map that he remembered most was the question mark in the center — the apparent hub around which all the other hatches orbited. Locke and Eko, the Island's two men of faith, sought out ''the Question'' and found the Pearl Station. Its purpose: to observe and report on the work being done in the other hatches. According to the Pearl's orientation film, the people inside one of the other stations were unwitting participants in a somewhat cruel psychology experiment; they had been told they were taking part in a world-saving project, but really the whole thing was a crock. (Or so the video claimed.) Locke assumed that the video was referring to his own Hatch, where he had been dutifully pressing a button every 108 minutes. He believed pushing the button was important. He believed it was his purpose. He believed it was destiny. But the revelation inside the Pearl left Locke feeling profoundly betrayed. He angrily decided to stop pushing the button. He assumed that if he did, nothing would happen, because the whole operation was a mind game. He was wrong. Pushing the button did have a purpose, and by failing to push it, Locke had set in motion a protocol that would have led to...something really, really bad. But then Desmond turned the fail-safe key, and something only kinda bad happened, a thunderous, radiant ''catastrophic electromagnetic event,'' to use Widmore's recent phrase. The Hatch exploded. Locke, Eko, and Desmond should have died, but they didn't, a metaphysical puzzle that to this day Lost has never explicitly explained.

Now, I have a theory that suggests Locke's Hatch digression was phase one of the Monster's far-reaching master plan to get Locke killed and assume his form — but that's for another column. I want to get back to the Map. The other day, I was doing some research in order to answer some of the questions you sent me this week. Part of the research involved investigating Buddhism. During the course of my inquiry, I came across a Wikipedia entry for something called ''Mappo.'' And as I began going down the rabbit hole, I found myself landing in a strange new land, an exotic and pure land, one I don't think I completely understand.

NEXT PAGE: An actual Pure Land?