After The Secret of Secrets: A Rational Account of Consciousness
After finishing Dan Brown’s Secret of Secrets, I realized there was a hole in my own manuscript (The Dream of Matter): I hadn’t clearly explained what I meant by consciousness. The word is used everywhere—in science, in spirituality, in tech hype—but rarely with the same meaning. Is it just the thing that vanishes under anesthesia? The ground of all being? A future spark in AI code?
In this new section, written as I prepare the manuscript for editing, I try to offer something more precise: a rational account of consciousness as coherence. Not mysticism, not hand-waving idealism, and not materialist reductionism—but consciousness as the mind learning to come into phase with itself.
It begins with the inner dialogue that Julian Jaynes saw as the spark of awareness, extends into the rhythms of the brain measured by neuroscience, and ultimately points toward a collective possibility: civilizations themselves becoming more coherent, more self-aware.
I share this excerpt here because it feels urgent to bring clarity to a word that has been so overused it risks becoming meaningless. And maybe, just maybe, because some ideas—if they’re too clear—risk being resisted. Hopefully no conspiracies this time.
Consciousness is a word so overused it has almost become useless. Some say it’s the ground of all being, the universal ocean everything floats in. Others say it’s just what slips away under anesthesia and returns when you wake. Contemporary philosophers frame it as the puzzle of what it’s like to be anything at all—what it’s like to inhabit a mind from the inside. In tech circles, it’s the finish line for artificial intelligence, that mythical spark when code suddenly “knows itself.” Everyone uses the same word, but they’re rarely talking about the same thing.
Throughout this book, we’ve meant something precise. Consciousness in the Julian Jaynes sense: not raw perception, but the ability to be aware of one’s own inner states. To narrate what’s happening inside. To hear yourself think and to know that it’s you doing the thinking. That little recursive loop: “I’m feeling this. I’m imagining that. I’m deciding this.” In modern terms, it’s metacognition—thinking about thinking, the mind catching sight of itself. This reflective capacity doesn’t just give us awareness, it gives us freedom. With it comes enhanced will—the ability to edit the script rather than be bound by it.
Theories of consciousness abound. Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s epic 2024 paper, A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications, surveys the terrain—nearly 200 theories—with almost obsessive care. He arrays theories across ten broad categories and twenty-seven subcategories, spanning everything from hard physicalism to radical nonphysicalism. His aim wasn’t to crown a winner but to create a taxonomy—a map to compare, contrast, and critique, and maybe to see connections we’d otherwise miss.
What struck me is how the map clusters. For Kuhn, the distribution stretches across a spectrum—on one end, theories that treat consciousness as fully physical, on the other, those that treat it as irreducibly nonphysical. My own takeaway is simpler: they all fall into two camps. Either they’re empirical, driven by science, or experiential, driven by mysticism. Both run into trouble when they collide with the unobservable. There are no rationalist “theories” represented.
Materialist theories at least have the advantage of being measurable. They’ve been mathematized. You can put numbers on neurons, networks, and signals. Most idealist theories, by contrast, have not. Some have tried to sketch mathematical versions, but they’re not built up from rationalist first principles. They borrow math metaphorically rather than derive it ontologically.
Which leaves open the question: could there be another way? If Ontological Mathematics is the rational foundation of reality—the only true “theory of everything,” really a proof of everything—then it ought to supply a rational theory of consciousness as well. Not just another empirical model. Not just another mystical assertion. Not hand-waving idealism. A rationalist account would be deductive and necessary, not one guess among many. Reason deals in truths that cannot be otherwise, which means multiple rationalist attempts should converge on the same singular result. Science, bound by falsification, can only circle closer—it cannot arrive at truth. Reason alone can.
The explanation I want to sketch here is simple. Julian Jaynes was right: language was the catalyst that sparked the evolution of human consciousness as we know it. And beyond that spark, consciousness grows as coherence grows.
It’s not about silencing the inner monologue or dissolving into some featureless awareness. The voices themselves aren’t the enemy. The problem is when they’re out of sync—when the parts aren’t cooperating, when the orchestra of the mind is playing in clashing keys. The magic lies in helping those fragments learn to play together.
Phase is the key. Phase tells us how rhythms line up, how signals cooperate. When a mind comes into phase with a deeply unconscious part that was previously out of step, insight tends to follow: suddenly we glimpse what was driving us. When two minds fall into phase with each other, thoughts can cross the gap—intuition, psychic flashes, the eerie sense of just “knowing.” Wherever phase locks in, awareness and cooperation grow.
And when the brain—and mind—is badly out of sync with itself, symptoms emerge. It’s like a rogue complex in the psyche running on its own agenda, disjointed from the rest of us. But when rhythms come back into harmony, the symptoms often dissolve. In practice, I’ve watched people have insights about how they got stuck in the first place—insights arriving right as their brain began to shift back into sync.
The brain, as we’ve seen, is not the generator of thought but its tuner, the interface where soul meets space and time. When rhythms across that tuner fall into alignment, something changes. Awareness sharpens. Self-reflection deepens. You don’t become less noisy, you become more musical.
Neuroscience gives us language for this. Brain regions coordinate not through words but through rhythms, and those rhythms have to sync. A slow oscillation sets the beat, faster oscillations ride on top of it, carrying the detail. When this cross-frequency coupling weakens, awareness fragments. Under anesthesia, for example, the nested scaffolding collapses and consciousness with it. Georg Northoff calls this “temporal nestedness”: slower rhythms providing the time-structure for faster ones. When the structure holds, we experience a continuous self. When it breaks, we don’t.
The flip side is just as interesting. Practices like lucid dreaming, meditation, or even certain altered states often show increasedcoherence and CFC beyond the waking baseline. The rhythms lock in tighter, opening awareness into normally unconscious territory. What feels like mystical expansion may just be mathematics: the mind becoming more synchronized with itself.
The hemispheres add another layer. The left parses sequences, the local steps of thought. The right grasps context and metaphor, the non-local patterns that hold everything together. Alone, each is partial. Together, they can form a dialogue. Maybe that dialogue was the evolutionary leap. Jaynes thought language was the spark, McGilchrist emphasizes balance between hemispheres. I suspect both are right. Consciousness may not be the birth of an inner voice so much as the moment the voices—local and non-local—began to converse.
It’s tempting to imagine we should live in these heightened states all the time, perfectly synchronized, permanently lucid. But that’s not practical. Everyday life on this planet needs fluctuation. We have to fall out of sync to cook dinner, to drive a car, to deal with the grit of being human. Higher coherence is not a permanent home—not yet. It’s a tool, a mode we can enter for growth. Lucid dreaming for exploring the unconscious. Neurofeedback for retuning distortions. Astral exploration for sensing the collective. Each practice raises coherence, not to escape this life, but to live it more intelligently.
So maybe consciousness isn’t something we’re simply given, but something we build. A project of fragments learning to cohere. Every increase in synchrony—across brain regions, across hemispheres, even across people—is another step into greater conscious awareness. Consciousness doesn’t emerge from silence, but from harmony. Not from muting the voices, but from teaching them to sing together.
And if that’s true for a single mind, why not for civilizations too? Imagine phase spreading beyond individuals—minds locking into rhythm with each other. The collective becoming more cooperative, more self-aware. Shared thoughts, shared insights, not as fantasy but as an emergent property of coherence. A culture learning to think as one.
We began in unconsciousness. Language lit the spark of bicameral consciousness, the voices of the “gods” internalized into ourselves. Dialogue between hemispheres allowed logic and intuition to converge. Practices of phase and rhythm opened doorways into deeper states. Each step has been coherence building on coherence, awareness rising on awareness.
Perhaps the story of consciousness is simply this: the universe learning to come into phase with itself.
And maybe the arc doesn’t end until every mind has resolved its own inner dissonance, and every mind has resolved with every other. No internal resistance, no collective pushback. Just full agreement. At that point there’s nothing left to become conscious of because nothing remains unconscious. That moment—when all is in phase—is also the moment of maximal freedom. From there, anything is possible. Every future can be glimpsed in the perfection of light: the orchestra of the universe resolving into pure radiance.
Enlightenment, then, is simply coherence perfected. The task now is to strip the haze from that word and see it in rational light.