From Golems to Blank Spots: What Dan Brown's "The Secret of Secrets" Reveals About Us

When I first picked up Dan Brown’s Secret of Secrets, I had the strange sensation of reading my own book in disguise. Page after page, he was teeing up the very themes I’ve been wrestling with for The Dream of Matter: Neuroscience and decoding the mathematics of the soul.

At one point I actually laughed and thought: maybe I should just send Mr. Brown a thank-you card. He’s doing the heavy lifting of warming up a mass audience for ideas that—when stripped of the chase scenes and Vatican corridors—are exactly the terrain my work lives in.

And not just my work. This is very important territory. If we could properly understand the nature of mind—the reality of the soul—it could change everything. How we think about free will, how we approach mental health, how we structure society itself. These aren’t abstract puzzles; they’re the root problems we have to face if we’re going to solve some of our biggest challenges.

Consider this essay the first in a series of riffs. Perhaps it’s a nonfiction companion to Secret of Secrets. I’ll pick up threads Brown spins in story form, and we’ll follow them into the deeper architecture—reason and mathematics, rather than empirical snapshots.

It’s also a teaser for what’s coming in The Dream of Matter. A fair warning: light spoilers ahead.

What is consciousness, anyway?

One of the first things I appreciated about Brown’s novel is how Katherine frankly acknowledges the confusion around even defining consciousness. That’s an honest move, because the field of “consciousness studies” often runs aground on its own definitions. Katherine seems to adopt the common view that consciousness is basically experience—what it’s like to be something. Her manuscript even points out that infants have conscious experiences from birth, overturning the assumption that consciousness gradually develops later in life.

But what do we really mean by “conscious”? If it’s experience, then yes, an infant qualifies. But if we follow Julian Jaynes, consciousness is more than that—it’s the ability to step back, narrate, model oneself, reflect on thought. Jaynes’s approach earns its keep because it explains far more: it accounts for metacognition, inner narration, and crucially, it leaves room for the vast work of the unconscious mind we’ll explore next. By that measure, infants have experiences without yet being fully “conscious.”

The trouble is our words. We end up debating when consciousness “begins” without clarifying which “something” we mean. My own view, reasoned from the mathematics of mind, is that consciousness is a special pocket of coherence within a much larger unconscious system. The unconscious isn’t an afterthought—it’s the ocean. Consciousness is like a tide pool within that ocean.

The unconscious as primary

That’s the other thing we routinely get wrong. The unconscious is treated like a basement: dusty storage for repressed memories, instinctual drives, embarrassing furniture. In reality, it’s the primary mind. Consciousness is just what happens when a portion of the unconscious takes a step back from the rest. In other words, consciousness is a coherent pocket of activity inside the unconscious—a stable, self-observing eddy in a much larger current.

In The Dream of Matter I describe this in terms of producer and consumer minds. The unconscious is the producer: constantly generating thoughts, perceptions, possibilities. Consciousness is the consumer: it edits, selects, and—crucially—revises the script. Attention and free will give us the power not just to play back what the unconscious generates, but to edit it. This reframing sets the stage for rethinking free will.

Ontological Mathematics frames the mind as a frequency domain, infinite and dimensionless, while the body (and brain) are a spacetime projection of some of that information. Consciousness is a kind of local clearing, a pattern stable enough to notice itself. No wonder Katherine emphasizes that even defining consciousness is a mess for science—the question is aimed at the wrong level.

Free will and the Libet experiment

Katherine even references experiments like the famous Libet study, which seem to show decisions arising in the brain before we are conscious of them, suggesting that free will is an illusion. I appreciate Brown’s research here—but I think the interpretation can go in a very different direction.

Maybe what those experiments actually show is that the unconscious acts before the conscious narrator catches up. That doesn’t kill free will; it reframes it. Consciousness, in this view, isn’t the origin of decisions but the commentator, the running play-by-play.

Ontological Mathematics helps clarify this. True free will doesn’t sit inside the brain’s meat clockwork at all—it lives in the mind itself, outside of physical space and time. The brain is just the projection, not the source. The Dream of Matter will go into much greater detail about this, but the core idea is that freedom originates in the frequency domain—the soul—and expresses itself here through resonance, not reaction.

So when Katherine describes those experiments, I don’t hear “no free will.” I hear confirmation of the unconscious mind’s primacy. In a future essay in this series, we’ll explore why things happen the way they do. And if you’re curious right now, you can check out some of my earlier essays.

Dissociative identity disorder in Secret of Secrets

Unlike Brown’s earlier novels, which feature villains carved out of singular obsession—Mal’akh in The Lost Symbol comes to mind—Secret of Secrets centers a character with dissociative identity disorder (DID). I was honestly surprised by this twist. Brown doesn’t make any claims about the structure of mind like I do, yet DID is precisely the example I would have reached for.

I knew exactly what was happening the moment the Golem was introduced. Brown describes this character as a kind of protector—“a mystical guardian… just like me… tasked with sacrificing his own comfort to carry another’s pain.” That’s the logic of DID in a nutshell. Trauma becomes unbearable, so the psyche generates a partition—an alter who can bear the weight.

Brown captures the texture vividly. Sasha experiences “blank spots,” lost time, akin to daydream-driving and arriving with no memory of the journey. And when life improves, the protector retreats, the system relaxes. That rings true.

Then there’s the Golem’s moment of reverence: kneeling alone, opening to “the unity of souls that so many failed to perceive.” Brown may not have meant it literally, but I couldn’t help hearing an echo of the Logos. Dissociation, at its best, isn’t just defense—it can tune us to unseen patterns.

In The Dream of Matter I describe how, ontologically—at the level of what truly exists—we are not one, but many: each of us an eternal, irreducible mind. Yet functionally we have the potential to become one, to resonate together so fully that separation dissolves in practice.

That’s the deeper meaning I hear in the Golem’s intuition, and why I suspect those who navigate DID might sometimes be more attuned to the architecture of mind itself, in the same way Carl Jung’s own brushes with the unconscious opened pathways to his deepest insights.

Brown also depicts Sasha’s struggle to stay moored to her body: “With rising panic, Sasha struggled to locate herself… but the effort only fatigued her, and the light began to fade. An undertow was already churning beneath her, eroding the physical world that constrained her. Then, with an overwhelming force, the tide rose up, cresting over her like a wave, and plunged her back into total darkness.”

This resonated with me immediately. I’ve spent much of my life navigating sudden “sleep attacks”—waves that pulled me down into blackness. I don’t identify with DID, but I do recognize this undertow of dissociation, and it echoes other dissociative experiences that eventually led me to study mind in such depth. That’s the point: DID isn’t an alien exception. It’s a magnified version of dynamics present in all of us.

Plurality and integration

In fact, I’d argue we’re all “on the spectrum” of dissociation. Most of us just have simpler constellations: an ego, a couple of close personas, some shadow elements. DID is a more dramatic partition, often born from trauma, but the structure is familiar.

And here I’ll note that Brown has nodded to this before, perhaps without realizing it. In The Lost Symbol, the plural nature of God is directly referenced, echoing the very idea of E pluribus unum. Personally, I suspect that initiates of secret societies—including some of the American founders—understood this plural nature of mind long before neuroscience caught up. It may even be reflected in our national motto. (I explore this in my essay E Pluribus Unum.)

We are interference patterns of sub-selves, always working toward greater coherence. Imagine pebbles dropped into a pond—if the ripples reinforce one another, the waves build; if they clash, they cancel. That’s what happens inside us too. Jung called the process of locating the parts of our psyche that are out of sync and bringing them back into cooperation individuation; I think of it simply as alignment—learning how to bring the different voices of the self into harmony.

You can see this in daily life. Try to get something going in your neighborhood—say a clean-up day. If even a few people are aligned, the whole thing gathers momentum. If everyone’s pulling in different directions, the effort fizzles. Our minds work the same way.

And these insights are moving from the collective unconscious into the collective consciousness. Severance even visualizes integration as two sine waves coming into synchrony—exactly the kind of coherence logic I reason through in The Dream of Matter.

I believe such a shift isn’t just interesting—it’s necessary. If we continue to treat ourselves as sealed-off individuals, we’ll keep running into the same gridlock. But if we begin to see the self as a community of parts, and extend that recognition outward, we can start thinking more collectively.

As we recognize that each of us is not a single monolith but a small community of parts, our mindset can shift from “me” to “we.” From isolated egos to cooperating inner teams, and then outward to cooperating communities. That recognition alone can change how we listen, how we coordinate, and how we solve problems together.

Why Logos matters

This brings us back to Brown himself. His gift is Mythos: story, symbol, the thrill of secret knowledge. Mythos wakes something in us. But the destination isn’t Mythos—it’s Logos.

Logos is reason and mathematics. It’s the recognition that mind is wave-structured, that “conscious” and “unconscious” describe differences in timing and stability, and that free will is exercised in the frequency domain. The unconscious isn’t a junk drawer—it’s the engine. Dissociation isn’t abnormal—it’s a clue.

And Logos goes deeper still. Just as someone with DID can learn to transform from a fractured set of selves into a more cooperative system, so too can societies. The same timing-and-alignment logic applies at scale. When individuals get their inner signals working together, they become whole. When communities do the same, they generate what Rousseau called the General Will—not a forced sameness, but a resonance. That’s what I mean by decoding the mathematics of the soul.

The Resonance Beyond

So yes, maybe I do owe Dan Brown that thank-you card. He dramatizes the Mythos in a way that reaches millions. But once the door is open, it’s Logos that walks you through.

If you want a final image, think of an orchestra tuning. At first it’s discord—violins sawing, brass blaring, oboes squeaking. Then slowly, threads of sound lock into place. Harmonics align. Suddenly the noise becomes music.

That’s the task of mind. From Sasha’s system learning to cooperate, to each of us learning to bring our inner signals into step, to societies struggling toward the General Will—it’s all the same geometry: learning to work together.

And when it clicks, you recognize what the Golem intuited in Brown’s tale: separation is an illusion.