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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Brown
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September 19 - October 11, 2025
“Working with the military is anathema to everything I believe. Under no circumstances would I consider it. Noetic research is for everyone…It should never be weaponized.”
That there!! Science, especially when beneficial, should be for everyone and not weaponized.
He instructed Brigita Gessner to coax the noeticist to Prague with a prestigious lecture invitation. Gessner was to assess the lecture, then sit down face-to-face over a few drinks and see what she could get Solomon to divulge about her manuscript.
They definitely did not account for the Golem.
Gessner’s text implied Solomon was considerably savvier than Finch had believed and might well be hiding something monumental about her manuscript.
The subtle incorporation of the historic Vel spear symbol in the A was Finch’s touch—an iconographic nod to the weapon of valor, strength, and enlightenment being created beneath the earth.
Why would Gessner show this card to an outsider—especially Katherine Solomon?!
Or, you know, a world renowned symbologist.
The search had located a match near the very end of the manuscript. As the page popped up, Finch leaned in, his eyes racing across the text. Within moments, he realized this was a disastrous scenario. Whether wittingly or not, Katherine Solomon had stepped squarely into a hornet’s nest. Her book posed a severe problem.
The fourth option. “There’s a good possibility,” Langdon had told them minutes earlier in the basement boiler room, “that even if we take the meeting with Finch, and he believes we’ve signed those NDAs, he’ll never share what’s really happening at Threshold. There’s only one way to be certain we have the information and the proof we’ll need to protect ourselves—and that’s documentation and photos.” He paused, eyeing them both. “Somehow, we need to get inside Threshold.”
Instead, she had dug out her old personal Samsung, which she never powered up except to stream after-hours entertainment at home. No need for the embassy to know I listen to Taylor Swift and watch reruns of Ted Lasso.
But the card had not been enough; Gessner had withheld that detail last night. To access Threshold, The Golěm required one final item. Pulling a pair of heavy wire cutters from the full rack of tools, he walked to the EPR pod and knelt beside Gessner’s corpse.
He would need to make a human glove...
“In a sense, yes,” Katherine said. “Stargate tried to develop a never-before-imagined surveillance technique called ‘remote viewing.’ It consists of a ‘viewer’ sitting in a quiet location, meditating until he falls into a trance, and then projecting his consciousness out of his body…freeing it from its local bonds…and letting it materialize effortlessly anywhere in the world so the consciousness can ‘view’ what is happening in remote locations.”
That is what Gessner's pod allowed.
In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
As Katherine described in her manuscript, an entire flock of white crows had now been flushed out…by noetic science, by quantum physics, and by the work of an impressive cadre of academics who were vocal advocates of nonlocal consciousness.
Katherine believed that everyone would have at least one out-of-body experience in their lifetime. The moment of death.
The data overwhelmingly suggested that death was accompanied by a transition through a conscious out-of-body experience, usually perceived as your mind detached from your body, hovering over your own physical form on an operating table, accident site, deathbed…observing those who were attempting to revive you or say their tearful goodbyes.
The true nature of death, Katherine knew, was the secret we all yearned to understand…across every culture, every generation, and every era. Unlike most of life’s unknowable mysteries, however, this was a secret that was guaranteed to be unveiled to every one of us…yet only at the end. Our last moments of life…become our first moments of truth.
The ancient Sumerians had written about mystical “star journeys”—out-of-body experiences in which their minds traveled to the stars to view distant worlds. Of course, there was a lot of opium involved, Langdon knew, wondering if maybe Threshold might be exploring drug-induced altered states…perhaps even relating them to nonlocal consciousness.
Concurrently with MKULTRA, faculty psychologist Timothy Leary launched the infamous Harvard Psilocybin Project, which encouraged students to explore the mind-expanding benefits of hallucinogens: Turn on; tune in; drop out. Many now suspected that Leary might have been working undercover with the CIA.
during sexual climax, the mind experiences a blissful moment of oblivion in which the entire corporeal world evaporates.
Climax is considered in every culture to be the most intensely pleasurable experience a person could have, a blank-slate detachment from oneself, a momentary abandonment of all concern, pain, and fear.
Brigita Gessner—no disrespect for the dead—was a self-serving egomaniac and a ruthless businesswoman. If she hired an uneducated Russian mental patient for her inner circle, it’s because Sasha has something Gessner needs.”
if Threshold has anything at all to do with remote viewing…then Sasha’s epilepsy makes her valuable.”
“Think about it! The fundamental skill possessed by a remote viewer is the ability to conjure an out-of-body-experience. The challenge is that organic OBEs are exceedingly rare, and very few people can actually have them.”
So, the implant would be like an on/off switch for this? That may also mean that the Golem is actually inhabitting that body.
“I forgot to mention that Gessner brought another epilepsy patient to Prague from that same institution—before Sasha—a Russian named Dmitri. He received the same surgery as Sasha and was also cured.”
Dmitri is the Golem.
The classified project Nagel had blindly helped facilitate was now in danger of being made public, and the fallout would be catastrophic. What she had just heard about the program sickened her, and she could only imagine how the rest of the world would react.
Before his foot had even touched the floor, a bank of floodlights blazed to life overhead, momentarily blinding him.
So, thats why the Golem had a seizure.
The caduceus? Langdon was surprised to find a medical symbol in a CIA facility, but there it was, prominently displayed. Iconographically, he knew this symbol was frequently misused, as it was here. The caduceus was actually the ancient symbol of Hermes, the Greek god of travel and commerce. The more accurate symbol would have been the Rod of Asclepius—the staff of the Greek god of healing—a similar icon with no wings and only a single snake, rather than the caduceus double snake. Embarrassingly, in 1902, the U.S. Army Medical Corps had mistakenly emblazoned the caduceus on their uniforms, and
...more
Sasha Vesna is far more valuable than a spy. She is an investment…a work in progress…an unwitting CIA asset.
In addition to several substances she did not recognize, Katherine saw vials of diethylamide, psilocybin, and DMT—the effective ingredients in LSD, magic mushrooms, and ayahuasca. She even spotted containers of distilled Salvia extract and MDMA—both illegal in these forms.
Citizens can't do them knowlingly, but the CIA can administer them with or without consent.
The presence of these drugs inside a VR lab could mean only one thing. Threshold is administering drugs in conjunction with state-of-the-art virtual reality immersions.
Neuroscientists had already begun to see startling structural changes in the brains of young people who combined computer gaming with designer drug use.
Look into this later.
“Robert, it now occurs to me that if Threshold repeatedly placed a subject into an artificially induced out-of-body state—accentuated by psychedelics—that subject’s brain would begin to rewire itself to make that disassociated state feel more…normal. In other words, this process might be trying to tune a consciousness…to be more comfortable outside the body.”
“and if we’re right…and we can find proof that the CIA is experimenting on innocent test subjects without their knowledge…”
They have been doing that for decades -- especially to people of color.
In recent years, their enemies had needed only the most rudimentary social media tools to influence the minds and decisions of millions upon millions of people.
What are Dan Brown's political beliefs? He seems slightly libertarian possibly?
“If Gessner lied,” Langdon said, “and the implant she put into Sasha was actually a more advanced, subcranial chip…” “Then that implant could easily function as the RLS stim device to control Sasha’s epileptic seizures, and yet, at the same time…it could have countless other functions.”
“So I hypothesized that one day, in the distant future, we would figure out how to build an implant that could regulate GABA levels in the brain—essentially lowering our filters on demand…so we could experience more of reality.” “Incredible,” Langdon said. The mere thought of it was thrilling. “And that’s not possible?” “God, no!”
The CIA may have developed that here in Threshold though.
What if Katherine was about to publish a book that described an ultrasecret chip the CIA is already building?!
“Like I said, the chip I described is not buildable. It’s interesting conceptually, but strictly hypothetical. The technical barriers to its construction are immovable—specifically this: regulating system-wide levels of a neurotransmitter would require complete physical integration with the brain’s neural network…and the brain has over a hundred trillion synapses to monitor.”
Before we can even talk about integrating with the brain’s dendritic tree, someone has to invent a nanoelectric biofilament.” “A nanoelectric what?” “Exactly—it’s not even a real thing. I invented it in my book as a way to talk about a technology that does not exist. It would be a futuristic, ultrathin, flexible filament made of biocompatible material that can carry both electronic and ionic signals. Essentially, an artificial neuron.”
“Then I think you should come over here,” he said, waving her to the window. “It looks like Threshold is growing something…and I’m guessing it’s not arugula.”
In an unvented space, the new volume would have nowhere to go, and the pressure buildup would happen so fast that it would create a “pressure bomb”—a near-instantaneous, violent outward force expanding in all directions.
So, we know how he plans to blow it up.
Considering these three fail-safes, the probability of multiple tank failures at the same moment carried a statistical probability of zero. It simply could not happen. Not without help.
Langdon knew the cliché “Great minds work alike” had been borne out countless times through the ages; Newton and Leibniz independently invented calculus; Darwin and Wallace simultaneously envisioned evolution; Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both invented a telephone device and filed patents within hours of each other. Now, it seemed, Katherine Solomon and the CIA had both figured out how to make artificial neurons.
“Yes! Robert, I first proposed—and documented—the exact design for these artificial neurons in my postgraduate thesis…twenty-three years ago.”
Her writings must have inspired Threshold?
“You also need a card to exit, Robert. Someone was trying to prop this door open…but we’ve just locked ourselves in.”
If this video leaked, Judd had little doubt it would go viral almost immediately—across the globe. Not only did it feature the brutal torture of a prominent scientist, but the video contained a confession that revealed the existence of a highly secret U.S. intelligence project…including its location…technological breakthroughs…and use of nonvoluntary human subjects.
I wonder how many of these projects exist.
it seemed clear from the RFID cards required to enter and exit this area that the tunnel likely led to the most secure area of Threshold—rather than to an exit.
Langdon had once seen another secret underground dome—also owned by the U.S. government—concealed beneath the golf course of the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.
For over three decades, the U.S. Congress’s private nuclear fallout shelter, Greenbrier Bunker, had been one of America’s best-kept secrets until the Washington Post published an exposé in 1992.
Soft lights illuminated inside, revealing a padded interior that resembled a futuristic sleeping pod.
My guess: given the existence of the Golem entering that man's body, what if this is a way to get a consciousness out of a body and one of a dead person into the body?
This place was engineered to unveil life’s most enigmatic secret…the mind’s ultimate altered state…the single most elusive of human experiences.
