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Einstein had famously declared: Coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.
Langdon sometimes sensed the only reason to do anything anymore was to post it for the world to see.
It is said that in death, all things become clear.
Opening line of Dan Brown’s own novel, Digital Fortress.
The age-old argument, Nagel thought. Someone is going to do it, so it had better be us. The most dangerous and ethically questionable scientific endeavor in history—building an atomic bomb—had been launched on a similar justification.
the ancient teachings of Asclepius bubbled up: 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.
“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.”
“Robert, when you see someone glued to a phone, you see a person ignoring this world—rather than a person engrossed in another world…a world that, like this one, is made up of communities, friends, beauty, horror, love, conflict, right and wrong. It’s all there. The online world is not so different from our world…except for one stark difference.” Katherine smiled. “It’s nonlocal.”
“When we lose ourselves in the virtual world,” Katherine said, “we are giving ourselves a kind of nonlocal experience that, in many ways, parallels an out-of-body experience—we are detached, weightless, and yet connected to all things. Our filters are dropped…We can interact with the entire world through one screen and experience almost anything.”
I’ve come to believe that 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.”
“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.
“Only Kissinger could convey such a complex truth in only sixteen words.” A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.
