THE SECRET OF SECRETS

Members of the SMN will find the following quotation strangely familiar: ‘The theory … is called non-local consciousness… and it’s based on the premise that consciousness is not localised to your brain… but rather it is everywhere. Consciousness permeates the universe and is, in fact, one of the fundamental building blocks of our world… Our brains intersect with an existing matrix of awareness.’

In the novel under review these claims are followed by the usual analogy of the brain as a sort of radio receiver; then they are followed by the even better analogy of a time-travelling Mozart confronted with a loudspeaker. A resuscitated Mozart would find it impossible to grasp that the music he was hearing ‘was in fact hovering silently all around us in the form of radio waves and was somehow received by the speaker. The music exists everywhere around us’

These sentences come, astonishingly, not from a new study of the metaphysics of human consciousness but from the latest Dan Brown novel, The Secret of Secrets, a good old thriller from the author of The Da Vinci Code.

But this cannot be! I hear you cry. Dan Brown? And yet it is truly the case. It is he.

If you think about it, it makes sense. Brown is an extraordinary intellectual magpie, an assiduous tourist, a conspiracy specialist, and quite something of an historian. He knows a lot, and he knows how to use his knowledge to make up thrilling, if largely incredible, plots - and to make millions of dollars out of them. And he has found the plot of plots - one that coincides with all of our ‘new’ thinking.

In his novel, which is inter alia more or less a travel guide to Prague, the CIA (who else?) are busy trying to suppress an academic manuscript because the resultant book, they think, will interfere with their parapsychological researches whose aim is to defend America by promoting Remote Viewing and thus scotching the dastardly Russians who are on the same track. This research is more or less Son of Stargate for those who know. The plot is a brilliantly-assembled conventional thriller not aspiring much higher than the romps we enjoy with James Bond and Indiana Jones, of course, but it relies on an impressive knowledge of the post-materialist paradigm, the very one that the SMN has been speaking up for since the 1970s.

Brown returns to non-local consciousness, which is the basis of the future threat to America, several times in the novel; N-LC is the secret of secrets. The world will belong to those who learn this secret and master it. Well, well…

Even more encouragingly for us, Brown insists in a special epigraph that the whole of his novel is factual, including ‘all artwork, artifacts, symbols… documents, experiments, technologies… scientific results… organisations…’ This is apparently almost a true story we have in our hands. So we have to ask whether he also thinks that the paranormal events he describes, essentially various forms of OBE and NDE, are also true. And if we turn to an interview he gave to The Independent in September we find that he does. I quote:

‘About eight years ago, my mom passed away about the time that I was thinking of writing about consciousness, and I started asking myself, “What happens when we die?” and if you’d asked me eight years ago I’d say Nothing. It’s full stop, total blackness. Over the course of the eight years that it took me to write this book and all the conversations that I had with philosophers and physicists and noetic scientists, I’ve come out the other side with a totally different mindset. And in fact, it sounds crazy. I no longer fear death.’

So, welcome aboard… Let’s get Dan signed up for the SMN and have him talk to us. Or, less parochially, let’s rejoice that a mainstream popular novelist can, like anyone else, look into consciousness, life after death and all such matters and, though starting as a sceptic, move seamlessly, following the evidence like one of his own heroes, to a broad acceptance that there are more things in heaven and earth… you know the rest.

Is this the sign we have all been waiting for? The sign that the Paradigm Shift is finally occurring? Dan would be delighted.