November 2025
Evidence is mounting that consciousness is nonlocal. Bestselling author Dan Brown realised that this will totally change the way we view our world. He spun a 700-page novel around this new knowledge, which now has the potential to reach tens of millions of readers
SCREEN SHOT: Dan Brown’s official website
“The Da Vinci Code” author’s latest novel holds potentially immense significance for raising visibility of postmaterialist science and cutting-edge research on consciousness. It could be just the breakthrough that the legion of scientists, academics and practitioners — whose work is focused on unseen forces and a conscious field — have worked, hoped and prayed for as millions of people around the world get entertained and educated about the intersection of science and spirituality.
In writing “The Secret of Secrets”, Brown was inspired by the work of the Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), whose chief scientist Dean Radin is mentioned in the book. Radin and his research colleague Helané Wahbeh recently created a special online presentation of the science behind the novel’s story. Their work has explored the frontiers of consciousness for decades.
The outer framework in Brown’s story is the magnificent Czech capital Prague, which, in the eyes of the author, seems to be filled with mysteries. The inner framework is the cutting-edge findings in consciousness studies, specifically the ever more abundant evidence that consciousness is nonlocal. Several chapters are dedicated to explaining psi phenomena like telepathy, precognition, blindsight and psychokinesis, and other phenomena like Near-Death Experiences (NDE), Out-of-Body Experiences (OOB), past-life memories, acquired savant syndrome, and Dissociative Identity Disorder, all of which are completely inexplicable using a physicalist lens but make sense if consciousness is seen as nonlocal.
One of the early chapters delves into the astonishing experiments made at IONS and the HeartMath Institute showing that the brain (and the heart) receives information about a randomly selected picture before it is shown on a screen. The lead characters, professor of religious iconology and symbology Robert Langdon and noetic scientist Katherine Solomon, discuss the hypothesis by psychology pioneer William James that the brain is a filter, or a receiver/transmitter of information, rather than a producer of thoughts and memories.
Central to the characters’ conversations about these matters (which happen in-between the action-filled plot twists) is the increasingly accepted view that consciousness is fundamental and that matter is derived from it, rather than the other way around. There are many names for the consciousness field we are thus all a part of, such as the Akashic field, Brahman, cosmic consciousness, or the quantum field.
As it appears, it is when the brain is “shut down” we can access this field. A core scientific finding in Brown’s story is that the levels of a particular inhibiting neurotransmitter, GABA, are high when we feel firmly in the physical world, and low when we have nonphysical and spiritually transformative experiences. (In an article in Psychology Today, psychologist Betsy Holmberg questions the way Brown describes GABA’s effects.) Psychedelics make their way into the story, as well. New research indicates that psychedelics like psilocybin and DMT enable the “shutting down” of the brain.
Quantum mechanics is also referenced, for example in the context of retrocausality, that events in the future can influence events in the past.
Many prominent NDE and psi researchers are mentioned in the book, as are pivotal figures in the broad exploration of the non-physical and spiritual, such as Nikola Tesla, Carl Jung, Stanislav Grof, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Terrence McKenna, Carlos Castaneda, and Michael Pollan.
The author doesn’t forget to make a connection with millennia-old spiritual traditions we are only now beginning to see in a new light, where we can interpret previously discarded esoteric verbiage through a refined scientific lens.
In one chapter, Brown plays with the modern metaphor that the Internet might be seen as a proxy, albeit pale, of the nonlocal consciousness that pervades everything. Some thinkers even say immersing ourselves in the virtual world is a sort of ‘practice’ for the coming insight that we are actually all connected — for real.
And, of course, the CIA is involved in the plot. This might seem like a cheap shortcut to creating a thriller, but the agency’s role here is very much to the point. It is well-known that the CIA, as well as intelligence organisations in other countries, have conducted experiments with remote viewing, telepathy and other psi phenomena for decades. Brown speculates that a certain project — which was ridiculed when it was revealed — was never abandoned, and actually was strengthened. It’s not far-fetched.
The fact that consciousness isn’t produced by the brain means that consciousness doesn’t die when the body does: Death is a transition, not something absolute. When this knowledge becomes mainstream, the book argues, it will have huge implications for the way we perceive and thus live our lives. Fear of death is a fundamental driving force in a materialist world, and fear makes us selfish, asserts the character Katherine Solomon in one interchange. If we could free ourselves from that burden of fear, “we would immediately live in a dramatically improved world”, protagonist Robert Langdon says.
Those who hold a post-materialist worldview will say Brown has done readers of this world a great service by helping erase the artificial boundary between science and spirituality. Perhaps he has contributed to bringing forward a much-needed paradigm shift.
It remains to be seen to what extent, and how, the mainstream media, other writers and debaters will convey the core message of Brown’s brick of a book. Here are a couple of positive examples so far:
In a brief but informative interview with NPR, the author said that he entered the topic skeptical but came out with a totally different view. “I no longer fear death at all”, he said.
In an excellent article, The Los Angeles Times deemed Brown’s book “his most ambitious undertaking yet”. ‘The Secret of Secrets’ is “a dense thriller that is also a meditation on the nature, and the possible future, of human consciousness”, wrote Marc Weingarten.
Brown told Weingarten it took him eight years of research to prepare to write the novel.
“And I discovered that we have a model of consciousness that’s outdated in the same way the geocentric model of the universe was outdated,” Brown said. This research will change the way we view our world.”
And hopefully, Brown’s book will help people find that research.
Written by Anders Bolling
Edited by Liza Horan
