The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon, #6)

by Dan Brown

The three Hebrew letters—aleph, mem, tav—from right to left, spelled EMET. Truth.

Prague Castle.

My services are required by her at unexpected times—day and night.

This body is not mine.

I have simply manifested within it.

The Hermann grid.

Einstein had famously declared: Coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.

Precognition. The ability to sense or foresee future events before they happen.

By erasing the letter aleph, א, the Hebrew word for truth—emet—was transformed into something far darker—met—the Hebrew word for dead. אמת became מת. Truth became … Death.

Sine Ira et Studio, which meant “Without Anger or Bias,”

Пей воду!

VIRTUAL REALITY

Social media, Dana thought. The biggest intelligence boon since the Catholic Church invented confession.

We know there was no bomb.

An obdurate mind can be an immovable mountain,

According to Sherlock Holmes: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

“Psyops” was a bloodless, low-risk, extremely effective way to weaken the opposition. Disrupt. Destabilize. Disorient. An enemy distracted by chaos made poor decisions and was easier to manipulate.

Someone powerful wants to prevent the publication of Katherine Solomon’s manuscript. But who—a rival scientist perhaps?

Timor mortis est pater religionis, Langdon mused, recalling the ancient saying made famous by Upton Sinclair. Fear of death is the father of religion.

A human being is a part of the whole called by us “universe” … He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us.

“Spokoynoy nochi, milyy. Good night, sweetheart.”

nonlocal consciousness.

Both revered and feared, what lay within these walls had become known worldwide … as the ghostliest place on earth.

Alone before the elegant tomb, The Golěm reverently knelt on the cold ground and opened his mind to the unseen connections of the universe … the unity of souls that so many failed to perceive … and refused to believe. We are as one. Separation is an illusion. Minutes passed, and The Golěm could feel himself absorbing power from this mystical place. Slowly, he began to feel a growing presence, and the strength of the original golem flowed up through the earth and filled his soul.

There are only two paths … Truth or Death. The Golěm had chosen both. Unveil Truth. Accept Death. The Golěm had died countless times, but death was never permanent. Unlike the ancient golem whose death had been final, The Golěm moved in and out of this form at will.

I am my own creator. I will always be my own master.

Sun Tzu

Confusion creates chaos … and chaos creates opportunity.

a kind of proxy victim—sustaining

Defiance and endurance,

Death is the absence of life.

The irreversible cessation of all cell function.

“Death,” she explained, “has nothing to do with the physical body. We define death in terms of consciousness. Consider a brain-dead, nonresponsive patient on life support—his body is technically very much alive, and yet we routinely pull the plug on that body. Without consciousness, we view a human body as essentially dead … even when its physical functions are perfectly intact.”

“And the opposite is equally true,” she continued. “A quadriplegic in a wheelchair, who has lost physical function in his entire body and yet remains conscious, is very much alive.

“Robert,” she finished, “we can no longer deny the growing tide of evidence that consciousness can exist outside the body … beyond the confines of the brain. The day has come for us to entirely redefine consciousness … and therefore entirely redefine death!”

Far too many fear death and regard it as the worst disaster that can befall them: they know nothing of what they speak. Death comes as a

dissolution from an exhausted body … Just as the body leaves the mother’s womb when it is mature in it, so also does the soul leave the body when it has come to perfection.

“I’ve witnessed your proclivity for proximity to peril.”

“And I your predilection for paranoid presumptions.”

“It all funnels into one larger concept,” Katherine said fervently. “Death is not the end. There’s more work to do, but science continues to discover evidence that there is indeed something beyond all this. That message is one we should be shouting from the mountaintops, Robert! It’s the secret of all secrets.

Just imagine the impact it will have on the future of the human race.”

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.

Semper Fidelis,