Page 89 of The Secret of Secrets

A silence hung over the table as the ideas sank in.

“But in our reality…things are different.” Katherine leaned in toward them. “In the world of nonlocal consciousness…the music exists everywhere around us. Our brains simply ‘tune in’ to hear it.”

Faukman thought for a long moment. “You’re saying consciousness is like a streaming service to which our brains subscribe?”

“Very close…more like an immeasurably large radio dial. Think of consciousness as an infinite cloud of radio waves in this room. Your brain is a receiver…tuned to its own unique station. In your case, it’s tuned to the Jonas Faukman station.”

The editor frowned. “Not to sound like Mozart, but it sounds…impossible.”

“I don’t disagree,” Langdon said to Faukman. “But in fairness, many scientific discoveries were initially deemed absurd or impossible—heliocentricity, the spherical earth, radioactivity, the expanding universe, germ theory, epigenetics, and countless others. Historically speaking, important truths often begin their lives as total impossibilities. And just because we can’t imagine how something could possibly be true, doesn’t mean we can’t observe it to be true. The ancient Greeks proclaimed the earth was round nearly two millennia before Newton explained exactly how the oceans stayed in place thanks to gravity.”

“Touché.” Faukman smiled. “I should know better than to debate a Harvard professor.”

“I think what Robert is trying to say,” Katherine offered, “is that while we are still learning exactly how nonlocal consciousness works…we have certainly shown that the theory offers clear answers to a host of phenomena that seem incomprehensible in the current model.”

“Okay…”

“Moreover,” Katherine said, “unlike Mozart, you have the advantage of living in a world where you interact daily with a very similar model.”

“Similar to nonlocal consciousness?” Faukman saw no parallel in his world.

“What if I told you,” Katherine said, “that I could fit all the information in the world into a container the size of a deck of playing cards? True or false?”

“Impossible. False.”

Katherine held up her cell phone. “It’s all in here. What do you want to know?”

“Clever…” Faukman said, smiling. “But that information is not contained inside the phone. The phone is accessing data contained in countless data banks worldwide.”

“Exactly,” she said, although he sensed she was leading him…somewhere. “You make an excellent point. Now, what if I told you I could store millions of gigabytes of data inside a blob of human tissue about the size of…well, say…a human brain?”

Faukman frowned. That was fast. Checkmate in three moves.

“It’s the identical concept,” she declared. “The inconceivable storage capacity of the human brain is a physical impossibility. It’s akin to trying to cram every song in the world into your phone. It makes no sense. Unless…”

“Unless,” Faukman conceded, “the brain is accessing data…from elsewhere.”

“Nonlocally,” Langdon added, looking impressed.

“Exactly.” Katherine smiled. “Your brain is just a receiver—an unimaginably complex, superbly advanced receiver—that chooses which specific signals it wants to receive from the existing cloud of global consciousness. Just like a Wi-Fi signal, global consciousness is always hovering there, fully intact, whether or not you access it.”

“The ancients certainly felt that way,” Langdon chimed in, now seeing myriad parallels in history. “Almost all of the world’s spiritual traditions have long echoed a belief in a universal consciousness—the Akashic Field, the Universal Mind, Cosmic Consciousness, and the Kingdom of God, just to name a few.”

“Indeed!” Katherine said. “This ‘new’ theory actually runs parallel to some of our most ancient religious beliefs.”

She went on to describe how nonlocal consciousness was increasingly supported by discoveries in diverse fields like plasma physics, nonlinear mathematics, and consciousness anthropology. New concepts like superposition and entanglement were unveiling a universe in which all things existed at all times in all locations. In other words, the nature of our universe was unified, or, as the title of a recent Oscar-winning film had so aptly described it—Everything Everywhere All at Once.

“What is really turning heads,” Katherine continued, “is that this new model provides logical explanations for all the ‘paranormal anomalies’ that have plagued the traditional model for so long—ESP, sudden savant syndrome, precognition, blindsight, out-of-body experiences…the list goes on and on.”

“But how could any model,” Faukman challenged, “explain an average kid getting hit on the head with a baseball and waking up a virtuoso violinist?”

“Well, it does happen. Sudden savant syndrome has been medically documented numerous times.”

“Yes, I’ve read about it,” he said, chuckling, “and I choose to ignore it!”

“Precisely…” Katherine said. “That’s how we humans have always dealt with phenomena that don’t fit our reality. We ignore the occasional oddity rather than admit our entire model is wrong.”

“And you believe nonlocal consciousness explains all this? Getting into an accident and suddenly being able to speak fluent Mandarin?”