The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon, #6)

by Dan Brown

The afterlife is a shared delusion … created to make our actual life bearable.

Coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.

“Let’s face it—the human mind hates change,” she had said yesterday while sipping espresso at the stylish La Boheme Café. “And the mind despises abandoning existing beliefs.”

Langdon smiled. That’s why religions endure for millennia despite mountains of evidence contradicting their beliefs. “Thirty years ago,” Katherine complained, “physicists proved that communication between two entangled particles is instantaneous … and yet we’re still teaching Einstein’s mantra that ‘nothing travels faster than the speed of light’!”

Timor mortis est pater religionis,

Fear of death is the father of religion.

Immortality through fame, Langdon mused as he took photographs, recalling that Shakespeare, Homer, and Horace had all opined that the uniquely human desire to be “famous” was, in fact, the symptom of another uniquely human trait—our fear of death. To be famous meant you would be remembered long after you died … fame a kind of eternal life.

“I believe the same holds true for each of us as human beings,” Katherine said, sounding excited now. “We mistakenly picture ourselves as isolated individuals when in fact we are part of a much larger organism. The loneliness we feel is because we can’t see the truth—we are, in fact, integrated into the complete whole. Separation is our shared delusion.”

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 last moments of life … become our first moments of truth.

“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. Stephen Hawking was essentially a mind without a body. Imagine if someone suggested pulling the plug on him!”

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.

TMT had established that the predominant fear and strongest motivator behind human behavior was, undeniably … the fear of death. When a person was terrified that he or she might die, the brain employed extremely well-defined strategies to “manage” that terror.

Under extreme circumstances, however—war, crime, violent confrontations—people behaved predictably across all demographics; they would either battle to the death to save themselves … or flee the threat. This was known classically as the fight-or-flight response, and for military strategists, it was particularly helpful to predict which of the two would occur.

the more terrifying our world becomes, the more time we spend preparing subconsciously for death.”

“Fear makes us selfish,” Katherine said. “The more we fear death, the more we cling to ourselves, our belongings, our safe spaces … to that which is familiar. We exhibit increased nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance. We flout authority, ignore social mores, steal from others to provide for ourselves, and become more materialistic. We even abandon our feelings of environmental responsibility because we sense the planet is a lost cause and we’re all doomed anyway.”

First loves are important, she recalled a romantic movie once saying. Because they open our hearts for what’s to come.

The online world is not so different from our world … except for one stark difference.” Katherine smiled. “It’s nonlocal.”

“The online world,” Katherine said, “is untethered from your location. You inhabit it as a bodiless mind … free from all physical restraints. You move effortlessly anywhere, see what you want, learn what you want, interact with other bodiless minds.”

our current technological explosion is actually part of a spiritual evolution … a kind of training ground for the existence that, in the end, is our ultimate destiny … a consciousness, untethered from the physical world, and yet connected to all things.”

The spiked halo adorning America’s Statue of Liberty was the same ornament that had crowned enlightened minds for millennia. The seven spikes, each over nine feet long, were said to symbolize the rays of enlightenment that would radiate outward from this young country and illuminate all seven continents.

It’s the precise opposite, Katherine believed, seeing them as rays of enlightenment that flowed inward … representing the stream of cultures, languages, and ideas from the seven continents, all coursing into the melting pot that was the mind of America. This nation, after all, had been created as a kind of receiver, pulling in disparate souls from around the world, all of them flowing inward toward a shared experience.