The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon, #6)

by Dan Brown

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

a quote from Albert Einstein. 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.

our conscious minds delude us and trick us into seeing disconnectedness where there is only unity.”

important truths often begin their lives as total impossibilities. And just because we can’t imagine how something could possibly be true, doesn’t mean we can’t observe it to be true.

“In the nonlocal consciousness model, your brain is a kind of radio that receives consciousness, and like all radios it has countless stations bombarding it all the time. So you can immediately understand why a radio must have a tuning dial—a mechanism that enables it to choose which single frequency it would like to receive. The radio itself has the capacity to receive all stations, but without a way to filter the frequencies that flow in, it would play all those frequencies at once. The human brain works the same way; it has a complex series of filters to prevent the mind from being overloaded with too much sensory stimulus … so it can focus on only a small sliver of the universal consciousness.” That makes perfect sense, he thought. Our perception of light and sound is filtered. Langdon knew that most humans were unaware that they experienced only a small fraction of the practical frequency range and electromagnetic spectrum; the rest sailed by us, beyond our tuning dials.

The concept of “filtered reality,” he knew, was a recurring theme in ancient scripture. The Hindu Vedanta, which had inspired the great quantum physicists like Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger, described the physical mind as a “limiting factor” that could perceive only a fraction of the universal consciousness known as Brahman. The Sufis defined “mind” as a veil that disguised the light of divine consciousness. The Kabbalists described the mind’s klipot as obscuring most of God’s light. And the Buddhists warned that the ego was a limiting lens that made us feel separate from the universe—uni-versum—literally “everything as one.”

“The key to understanding consciousness!” she exclaimed. “Human beings have extraordinarily powerful minds, but we also have extraordinarily efficient filters to prevent an overload of input. GABA is the protective veil that prevents our brains from experiencing what we can’t handle. It limits how expansive your consciousness can be. This single chemical may be the reason why humans are not able to perceive reality as it truly is.”

Ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu had devised entire military campaigns around his famous mantra: Confusion creates chaos … and chaos creates opportunity.

Respected minds like Harold Puthoff, Russell Targ, Edwin May, Dean Radin, Brenda Dunne, Robert Morris, Julia Mossbridge, Robert Jahn, and many others had made astounding findings in diverse fields like plasma physics, nonlinear mathematics, and consciousness anthropology, all of which supported the notion of nonlocal consciousness. Their popular books bore titles like Limitless Mind, Remote Perceptions, The Seventh Sense, Anomalous Cognition, and Real Magic.