{"id":114271,"date":"2025-10-10T22:06:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T22:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/114271\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T22:06:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T22:06:19","slug":"dan-browns-new-book-takes-on-another-big-topic-the-nature-of-human-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/114271\/","title":{"rendered":"Dan Brown\u2019s new book takes on another big topic: the nature of human consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

US author Dan Brown posed during a press conference to present his new book titled “The Secret of Secrets” on September 18, 2025 in Prague, Czech Republic. (Photo by Michal Cizek \/ AFP) (Photo by MICHAL CIZEK\/AFP via Getty Images)MICHAL CIZEK\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

If you come across Dan Brown out for a walk with his dog and muttering to himself, do not be alarmed: He\u2019s probably just cracked the code on a thorny plot point in his next novel. <\/p>\n

He\u2019s more of an iPhone voice note guy these days, but he used to dictate notes into the kind of analog voice recorder journalists might use. <\/p>\n

Books we’re reading and loving in October<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI was like, \u2018If I lose this, somebody is going to call the police, because you\u2019re panting because you\u2019re walking, and you\u2019re saying, \u2018Okay, so kill the cardinal, drown him in the Fountain of Four Rivers \u2026\u2019\u201d says Brown, chuckling as he tells this story over a camomile tea at the Toronto Four Seasons hotel when he was in town a few weeks ago.<\/p>\n

As his (many, many) fans will know, Brown isn\u2019t referring to some sinister conspiracy he was embroiled in but to a plot point in 2000\u2019s Angels & Demons, the first novel in his Robert Langdon series \u2013 and the one that came before The Da Vinci Code, the book that changed his life and had the kind of impact authors can only dream of in a postmonocultural world. See: More than 80 million copies sold, a movie starring Tom Hanks that made US$$111-million in its first week in North America alone, an archbishop dedicated by the Vatican to debunking its \u201cshameful and unfounded errors\u201d after its controversial \u2013 and fictional! \u2013 content (for example, that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child together) caused a furor among Catholics. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt came out at a moment when there was a lot of distrust in the church, of authority in general,\u201d says Brown, who just published the eighth instalment in the series, The Secret of Secrets. \u201cWhat happened for readers is the same thing that happened for me \u2013 the story made more sense to me than what I had been taught in church.\u201d<\/p>\n

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He maintains that he really didn\u2019t think the book would be controversial. \u201cMaybe that was naive of me, but it took me totally by surprise,\u201d he says. \u201cI asked, \u2018What does it mean for Christianity if Jesus is not literally the son of God but his immortal prophet?\u2019 That seemed like a pretty reasonable question, but \u2026no, no, no.\u201d <\/p>\n

Brown, now in his early 60s, is self-deprecating about the way the intervening two decades have taken their toll on his working memory. \u201cWhen I wrote Da Vinci Code, I could take a walk, see everything in my head \u2013 move it around, take some notes,\u201d he says. \u201cNow, I go for a walk and I\u2019m like, \u2018Okay, his name is Robert Langdon. I got that.\u2019 It\u2019s crazy.\u201d <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Something that has not dulled, however, is Brown\u2019s appetite for taking on lightning-rod topics \u2013 Freemasonry, the Catholic Church, artificial intelligence a decade before ChatGPT made it mainstream \u2013 and packaging them into heart-stopping thrillers liberally peppered with real factoids from history and current events. <\/p>\n

In The Secret of Secrets, Brown\u2019s first book in eight years, he takes on the very nature of human consciousness, and whether anything remains of us after our physical death.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like writing about big topics, and with consciousness there really is no bigger topic. It\u2019s the lens through which we see reality, through which we interact with each other,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Just as Brown started writing this book, his mother died, a loss that shaped some of the bigger questions this book explored. \u201cWhat just happened? All of her hopes and dreams, did they just go \u2018poof!\u2019 and they\u2019re gone? Or is there something else?\u201d he asked himself.<\/p>\n

Brown says he didn\u2019t have any kind of religious experience in the process \u2013 \u201cthis book is all based on science,\u201d he says \u2013 but writing it changed his mind entirely on what comes after we die.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you had asked me when I started this book, \u2018Is there life after death?\u2019 I would have said no. What happens when you die? Absolutely nothing. It\u2019s like falling asleep and you don\u2019t wake up. The computer cable has been cut, and it\u2019s just wires,\u201d says Brown. \u201cEight years later, having done all of this research, I\u2019ve come out the other side.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a result, Brown says, he is \u201csignificantly\u201d less afraid of death. \u201cI\u2019m in no hurry. I have a wonderful life and I\u2019m very grateful for it,\u201d he says. \u201cBut that notion of \u2018My God, at some point this is over,\u2019 is no longer a terror. It\u2019s a curiosity.\u201d <\/p>\n

That fear of death, he adds, seems to be responsible for \u201ca lot of bad behaviour,\u201d things such as nationalism, prejudice and materialism that spring up when we\u2019re racing against a finite clock to make our mark on time. \u201cThere\u2019s thinking that if the human race realizes this is just one stop on a much longer journey, maybe a lot of that behaviour starts to fall away,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s what I\u2019ve seen in interviewing people who\u2019ve had near-death experiences. They change their lives. They quit their job to do something else, they make amends with people, all of those really benevolent things.\u201d <\/p>\n

Six thrillers to read now, from suburban paranoia to historical mystery<\/a><\/p>\n

While he only briefly touches on manifestation in the thriller \u2013 which revolves around the theft of a manuscript purporting to contain a paradigm-shifting revelation about the nature of consciousness, with renowned symbologist Langdon in hot pursuit \u2013 Brown says he does remember people asking him if he\u2019d somehow spoken The Da Vinci Code\u2019s phenomenal result into existence. <\/p>\n

\u201cPeople asked, \u2018Did you know it was going to happen? Did you envision it?\u2019 and I said, \u2018Sure, you always envision success, but I did it for my first three books and they were failures,\u2019\u201d says Brown. \u201cI would put my faith in hard work, persistence and a little bit of luck.\u201d <\/p>\n

Brown says that, at the end of the day, he just writes the books that he would want to read himself. \u201cIt\u2019s been so gratifying that so many people share my taste, and that really is how I think about it,\u201d he says. \u201cThe people who share your taste are your readers, and the people that don\u2019t are your critics.\u201d <\/p>\n

And while Brown does have his share of detractors, he\u2019s far more interested in the person who picks up his book and says it reminds them of how much they love reading. \u201cIf I could win every award and every great review, I would trade it all in a heartbeat for a faithful readership,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s who I\u2019m writing for.\u201d<\/p>\n

The best compliment he\u2019s ever gotten, Brown adds, was from a librarian who said that reading his books was like eating your vegetables but it tasted like ice cream. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s exactly right. My first job is to entertain, or else nobody turns the pages. My second job is to make you so curious about a topic that you close the book and dive into something else to learn more about it,\u201d he says. \u201cI write in the grey area between two things \u2013 between noetics and materialism, national security and civilian privacy, antimatter and Vatican history. That grey area in the middle is where I like to live, and it sparks a lot of dialogue.\u201d <\/p>\n

Brown also has a strong sense for the sort of stuff that will be catnip to his readership. In The Secret of Secrets, for example, he features real-life Devil\u2019s Bible, notable for a distinctive portrait of Satan and being the largest medieval manuscript, at 92 centimetres tall, ever created. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just so cool, and it\u2019s real. And you look it up and you see that it\u2019s made with the coats of 237 donkeys,\u201d he says. (It\u2019s actually 160 hides.) \u201cI know that readers are like me. They want to learn, and they want to hear about cool stuff. So when I find out about the Devil\u2019s Bible, this has to be in the book.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Secret of Secrets, Brown says, is 200,000 words long but he estimates he wrote a million to get to that point. About half of what he cut was science, which he painstakingly refined to make more accessible to a general audience. And when things may be tiptoeing toward the far-fetched, he adds, his hero Langdon is there to be the \u201cskeptic on your shoulder,\u201d doing the heavy-lifting so readers can relax.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd by the time he\u2019s convinced, you\u2019re like, \u2018I\u2019m convinced,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: US author Dan Brown posed during a press conference to present his new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[4320,4309,4321,359,9,4302,4322,995,4301,4314,4315,4311,4303,4300,179,2597,18,117,440,4313,4307,4333,4304,4305,3428,19,17,4310,3521,3136,4323,4306,4328,4329,4331,4326,4330,4324,4327,430,4317,4318,790,4316,4325,4308,82,4319,4312,4222,66,4332],"class_list":{"0":"post-114271","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-arts-news","10":"tag-bc","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-breaking-news","13":"tag-breaking-news-video","14":"tag-british-columbia","15":"tag-canada","16":"tag-canada-news","17":"tag-canada-sports","18":"tag-canada-sports-news","19":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","20":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","21":"tag-canadian-news","22":"tag-economy","23":"tag-education","24":"tag-eire","25":"tag-entertainment","26":"tag-environment","27":"tag-federal-government","28":"tag-foreign-news","29":"tag-globe-and-mail","30":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","31":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","32":"tag-government","33":"tag-ie","34":"tag-ireland","35":"tag-life-news","36":"tag-lifestyle","37":"tag-local-news","38":"tag-manitoba","39":"tag-national-news","40":"tag-new-brunswick","41":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","42":"tag-northwest-territories","43":"tag-nova-scotia","44":"tag-nunavut","45":"tag-ontario","46":"tag-pei","47":"tag-photos","48":"tag-political-news","49":"tag-political-opinion","50":"tag-politics","51":"tag-politics-news","52":"tag-quebec","53":"tag-sports-news","54":"tag-technology","55":"tag-travel","56":"tag-trudeau","57":"tag-us-news","58":"tag-world-news","59":"tag-yukon"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}