[DRAFT] 24 | Nonlocal Consciousness: What The Secret of Secrets Reveals About the Nature of Mind
~15 MINS READ
NONLOCAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BRAIN-AS-RECEIVER MODEL. WHY DAN BROWN NAMED PSYCHEDELICS ONE OF THREE DOORWAYS TO PROVING CONSCIOUSNESS SURVIVES DEATH. THE PSYCHEDELIC PARADOX AND WHY LESS BRAIN ACTIVITY PRODUCES MORE EXPERIENCE. THE CONSCIOUSNESS SPECTRUM: FROM INTUITION AND REMOTE VIEWING TO PRECOGNITION AND FULL-SPECTRUM AWARENESS AT DEATH. WILLIAM JAMES'S TRANSMISSION THEORY, HUXLEY'S REDUCING VALVE, AND A 130-YEAR SCIENTIFIC LINEAGE. AMANDA FEILDING, THE BECKLEY FOUNDATION, AND THE BRAIN IMAGE THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING. PRESENTIMENT RESEARCH AND THE GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS PROJECT. THE GOOD FRIDAY PSILOCYBIN EXPERIMENT AND WHAT HARVARD PROVED. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GOVERNMENTS WEAPONIZE THE RECEIVER MODEL. TWO PATHS THROUGH CEREMONY: HEALING PAIN AND EXPLORING THE MYSTERY. TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY, THE FEAR OF DEATH, AND WHY UNDERSTANDING CONSCIOUSNESS MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT WORK OF OUR TIME.
What if consciousness doesn't need a brain?
Iraq, 2004. A rocket landed within the kill radius. In that fraction of a second, time did not behave the way it is supposed to. It widened. My life appeared, not as metaphor, but as a compressed review of everything I had been and done. I could observe myself reacting automatically for survival while simultaneously wondering, from somewhere outside the reaction, whether I was going to make it.
Watching the body respond while something else watched the watching.
I did not understand what had happened. I only knew that whatever was doing the watching did not feel like it lived inside my skull. Researchers call it tachypsychia: the brain processes information so rapidly under extreme threat that subjective time expands. Bruce Greyson's research found that 60 to 70 percent of near-death experiencers report time stopping or losing meaning entirely.
That question has driven every choice since: biomimicry at Arizona State, the Fourth Way, the travels across cultures and traditions, the hundreds of ceremonies, and the work I do now as a guide. It is all one question. What are we, underneath everything we have been told we are?
The foundational assumption of Western science is that consciousness lives inside your skull. That your brain manufactures you. That when it stops firing, you stop existing.
There is a growing body of peer-reviewed evidence that this model is not wrong but incomplete. That the brain does not produce consciousness at all, but receives it, the way a radio receives a signal it did not generate. And that psychedelics, meditation, and near-death experiences may be the most direct ways we have of demonstrating it.
That is also the premise of Dan Brown's The Secret of Secrets. When a novelist who has sold over 200 million copies dedicates multiple chapters to arguing that psychedelics are a primary portal for expanded awareness, it is a cultural signal. Brown told NPR he started the book as a skeptic and came out the other end no longer fearing death at all. I would encourage anyone drawn to these ideas to read it. The surprises Brown builds into the plot deserve to be discovered on their own terms.
The drop does not create the ocean. The ocean was there first.
“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”
Why Less Brain Produces More Mind
The central scientific puzzle is this: if the brain produces consciousness, then reducing brain activity should reduce experience. Less brain, less mind.
The opposite happens.
In 2012, Robin Carhart-Harris and his team at Imperial College London gave psilocybin to volunteers inside fMRI scanners. They found only decreases in activity, especially in the Default Mode Network, the part of the brain that maintains the ongoing story of who you are, the self-referential narrator I explored in Self-Remembering. Subjects reported the most expansive experiences of their lives while their brains were doing less, not more. This has been confirmed with LSD, ayahuasca, and magnetoencephalography, a brain imaging technique that measures magnetic fields produced by neural activity.
In cardiac arrest wards, the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel documented rich conscious experience during zero measurable brain activity. Separate research published in Nature Medicine showed psilocybin increased global brain integration. Carhart-Harris formalized all of this as the entropic brain hypothesis.
This paradox is fatal to the production model. And it is strong evidence for the receiver model. If the brain is a filter constraining a pre-existing field of consciousness, then reducing brain activity is like lifting a veil. Like a desert after monsoon rain: when the hard-packed surface softens, what was dormant beneath finally breaks through.
The sacrament does not add anything to you. It removes what was in the way.
The Theory Your Doctor Was Never Taught
In The Secret of Secrets, Brown presents the argument through his fictional character Katherine Solomon, a noetic scientist. Katherine is not a real researcher, but the model she articulates draws on a 130-year scientific lineage. William James proposed a transmission theory at Harvard in 1898. Henri Bergson argued the brain filters reality for survival. Aldous Huxley synthesized both into his reducing valve in 1954.
Katherine identifies three doorways through the filter: death, psychedelics, and sudden moments of clarity. In those moments, the filters fall away and we see more of reality. I experienced one such moment without any substance at all, a spontaneous opening in Berlin in 2007 that lasted months and reshaped everything that followed, a story I told in Beyond Belief.
Katherine uses a metaphor worth sitting with. When you browse the internet, your awareness is not located inside your computer. When the computer shuts down, the internet does not disappear. The brain, in her model, works the same way. It accesses consciousness. It does not create it.
Brown also references the Akashic Record, the ancient concept of a universal field containing all knowledge and memory. In Katherine's framework, this is not a mystical metaphor. It is a description of what the receiver model actually points to. Yesterday's mysticism. Today's hypothesis.
You are not the hardware. You are the signal.
“Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
What Comes Through When the Filter Thins
Expanded awareness is not an on-off switch. It is a spectrum. Katherine presents the brain's filter as something that can be dialed. As the filter thins, other signals come through.
Intuition. Sensing who is calling before you answer the phone.
Telepathy. Perceiving another's thoughts or emotions across distance. Documented in laboratory settings, still controversial.
Remote viewing. Perceiving locations the physical body has never visited. Studied in classified government programs for decades.
Precognition. Receiving information from events that have not yet occurred. Presentiment research suggests the body reacts to emotionally charged images approximately 400 milliseconds before the images are randomly selected.
Full-spectrum awareness at death. Katherine argues that dying is not the dimming of a light. It is the removal of the lampshade.
Then there is sudden savant syndrome: a teenager is kicked in the head and wakes speaking fluent Spanish. A man hits his head and becomes a piano virtuoso overnight. If the brain is a receiver, a strong impact might re-tune it. The skills were always broadcasting. The injury changed the channel.
The mystics were not deluded. They were early.
The Woman Who Made the Invisible Visible
March is Women's History Month, and there is no one I would rather honor than Amanda Feilding (1943 to 2025), called "the hidden hand behind the psychedelic renaissance." She founded the Beckley Foundation and co-founded the Beckley/Imperial Research Programme with David Nutt, producing over 80 peer-reviewed papers.
The 2016 LSD brain images became iconic. On placebo: each network isolated. On LSD: a dense web of connectivity, boundaries dissolving. The Default Mode Network steps aside. The orchestra does not fall into chaos. It plays something larger.
Amanda passed away at Beckley Park last year saying she was excited to be on the cusp of discovering the ultimate mystery.
Image courtesy of the Beckley Foundation and Imperial College London, revealing expanded neural connectivity under psilocybin
What Harvard Proved and What Was Buried
Harvard, where James first proposed the transmission theory, sits at the center of two defining chapters in psychedelic history.
The first is dark. The CIA's MKUltra program ran over 150 subprojects across two decades, testing LSD on soldiers, prisoners, and unsuspecting civilians. It was consciousness as a weapon. The most powerful intelligence agency on earth studied the very substances it would later help criminalize, and when exposure threatened, it destroyed thousands of files.
The second is luminous. On Good Friday, 1962, at Marsh Chapel, Harvard doctoral student Walter Pahnke administered psilocybin to ten divinity students in a double-blind experiment, growing from the broader Harvard Psilocybin Project led by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Every subject reported profound mystical experience. Twenty-five years later, Rick Doblin tracked down the original subjects and found the effects had persisted across their entire lives. The lineage from a chapel basement in 1962 to Johns Hopkins is direct and unbroken.
The political backlash that followed shut it all down. Not because the research failed. Because it succeeded in ways that threatened existing structures of authority. The research was never wrong. It was interrupted.
When Governments Weaponize the Receiver
Brown imagines what happens when the same institutions that ran MKUltra gain access to modern neuroscience. I will not spoil what he builds, but the novel asks what happens when the receiver model falls into the hands of institutions that see consciousness not as a birthright but as a resource to exploit.
Katherine's moral line is absolute: consciousness research must serve liberation, never control.
That tension is not fiction to me. When I served as a US Marine Security Guard and detachment commander at US Embassies in Russia, Germany, and Cyprus, holding a Top Secret clearance, I practiced remote viewing, astral projection, and lucid dreaming on my own time. I petitioned to become a remote viewer professionally. Every person in my leadership told me those programs no longer existed.
Then retired viewers from Project Stargate trained me. Stargate was the US government's classified remote viewing program, run through the Defense Intelligence Agency from the 1970s through 1995. The program was officially shuttered. But the people who had done it professionally taught me what they knew. I wrote about the broader reckoning in War After War.
What I had been practicing alone turned out to be something an entire intelligence infrastructure had quietly developed and then disavowed.
What a species does with expanded awareness will define it. Every tool is also a weapon, until consciousness itself decides which it will be.
The Body That Knows Before the Event
The evidence extends beyond the brain. It suggests consciousness operates beyond both body and time.
In presentiment studies, the body reacts to emotionally charged images before the images are randomly selected. Approximately 400 milliseconds before. The body knows before the mind does, and in this case, before the event itself has occurred. The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, has extended this work.
The Global Consciousness Project, initiated at Princeton and now hosted by IONS, placed random number generators worldwide and documented a 7-sigma anomaly during events of mass collective attention, including September 11, 2001.
Like a flock of starlings changing direction before any single bird has turned: something in the field knows before the individual does.
We are receiving more than what is here. We are receiving more than what is now.
What Harvard Proved and What Was Buried
Harvard, where James first proposed the transmission theory, sits at the center of two defining chapters in psychedelic history. The CIA's MKUltra program ran over 150 subprojects testing LSD on soldiers, prisoners, and unsuspecting civilians across two decades. The most powerful intelligence agency on earth studied the very substances it would later help criminalize.
But on Good Friday, 1962, at Marsh Chapel, Harvard doctoral student Walter Pahnke administered psilocybin to ten divinity students in a double-blind experiment. Every subject reported profound mystical experience. Twenty-five years later, Rick Doblin tracked down the original subjects and found the effects had persisted across their entire lives. The lineage from a chapel basement in 1962 to the most cited research at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research is direct and unbroken.
The research was never wrong. It was interrupted.
When Governments Weaponize the Receiver
Brown does not stop at the historical record. He imagines what happens when the same institutions that ran MKUltra and Project Stargate gain access to modern neuroscience. What he builds from that premise is chilling, and I will not spoil the details. But the novel asks what happens when the receiver model falls into the hands of institutions that see consciousness not as a birthright but as a resource to exploit.
Katherine's moral line is absolute: consciousness research must serve liberation, never control.
The door that opens in ceremony can also be forced open in a laboratory. The difference is who holds the key, and for what purpose.
That tension runs through the novel and through my own experience. When I served as a US Marine Security Guard and detachment commander at US Embassies in Russia, Germany, and Cyprus, I practiced remote viewing, astral projection, and lucid dreaming on my own time. I petitioned to become a remote viewer professionally. Every person in my leadership told me those programs no longer existed. Then retired viewers who had been part of Project Stargate trained me. What I had been practicing alone, they had done professionally, paid by governments who publicly said the work was impossible. I wrote about the broader reckoning with what I experienced in uniform in War After War.
What a species does with expanded awareness will define it. Every tool is also a weapon, until consciousness itself decides which it will be.
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”
The Watcher Outside the Skull
I want to name something I have never fully written about before.
The Berlin period was not just the spontaneous opening I described in Beyond Belief. It was months of sustained, uninvited psi phenomena. Out-of-body experiences. Extrasensory perception. Energy that moved through me in ways I had no framework to understand. I was a detachment commander at a US Embassy. No substances were involved. The experiences arrived on their own and stayed for months, reshaping my sense of what is real.
I have had experiences like this throughout my life. An out-of-body experience the first time I met my ex-wife, perceiving myself from the corner of the room while simultaneously being inside my body. Moments on and off the sacrament that the materialist model cannot account for. I do not believe they make me special. I believe they point to capacities the brain normally filters out.
Psychedelics, when they came later, were not the origin of these experiences. They were a bridge back to them. Early on I was like a kid in a candy store, exploring with the excitement of someone who had found a map back to a place he thought he had imagined. Over time, the emphasis shifted from peak experiences toward integration, toward learning to carry what the sacrament reveals into the texture of ordinary life.
What I have been doing for over a decade, working with biofeedback devices, experimenting with meditation, breathwork, and somatic practices on and off the sacrament to map the edges of expanded perception, turns out to be remarkably close to what classified programs studied for decades. Reading The Secret of Secrets was like watching a favorite author build a thriller around the questions I hold most dear.
I do not have a tidy conclusion about what all of this means. I hold the receiver model the way I hold any map: loosely enough that reality can still correct it. What we call "altered states" may be corrections, moments when we perceive more of what is actually here. I explored the architecture of these crossings in Thresholds.
Two Doors Into the Same Room
If the receiver model is real, then the question becomes: how do you begin to experience it? In the people I walk with, I see two doors into that territory. They are not separate. They are phases of the same journey.
The first is clearing the receiver. Most people begin here. They arrive carrying grief, shame, trauma, patterns that have run their lives for decades. The sacrament meets them there. The Default Mode Network loosens its grip. The nervous system learns it is safe to feel again. This is the work I have written about across the Grief series and the Shame Addiction series. The first door is about removing the static that keeps the receiver locked on a single narrow frequency.
The second is exploring what the cleared receiver can access. Once the heaviest material has been met, the curiosity that first pulled a person toward ceremony stops being about healing and starts being about the nature of consciousness itself. Not as philosophy but as direct experience.
Healing asks: can I stop hurting? Awakening asks: what am I when the pain is not running the show?
A woman I will call S. arrived for her first ceremony carrying a terminal diagnosis and the weight of a lifetime spent performing certainty. At a moderate dose, something shifted. She grew very still. After several hours of silence, she opened her eyes and said, quietly: "It is so much bigger than I thought. I have been afraid of the wrong thing my entire life." She was not speaking about the cancer. She was speaking about death itself.
These two doors are complementary. The clearing makes the exploration possible. The exploration gives the clearing a wider context, because once you have touched the field directly, the old story that you are broken loses its authority. What I am seeing is a quiet migration. More people arriving not because something is wrong but because something in them knows there is more. If you want to understand how my own path into this territory began, Beyond Belief is where I tell that story.
You do not fix a signal. You learn to receive it clearly.
The Fear That Runs the World
If consciousness extends beyond the body, then fear of death, the engine that drives most human dysfunction, is based on a misunderstanding.
Brown draws on Terror Management Theory: fear of death makes us selfish, tribal, materialistic, and indifferent to the earth. The counter-finding is what matters. Research at Johns Hopkins confirmed that a single psilocybin session produces sustained decreases in death anxiety in those facing terminal illness. If the sacrament can dissolve that fear through direct experience of consciousness beyond the body, the implications are civilizational.
At the Scottsdale Research Institute in Arizona, Dr. Sue Sisley is conducting the first FDA-approved clinical trial using whole psilocybin mushrooms, not synthetic psilocybin, to treat PTSD in veterans, firefighters, and police officers. It is the first group-based model of its kind: eight participants dose together, grouped by profession, with structured integration after. The shift from synthetic compounds to whole mushrooms represents a move toward natural sacramental context. That it focuses on veterans and first responders is strategically significant for shifting broader policy. I am inspired by Dr. Sisley and her team's pioneering work.
A species that knows what it actually is has a chance at peace. A species that does not will keep mistaking separation for reality and fear for wisdom.
“The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual’s way of being in the world.”
Tuning the Receiver
If the brain is a receiver, then every contemplative tradition in history has been doing the same thing: learning to tune it. Meditation builds the foundation that makes ceremony more productive. Ceremony reveals capacities that remote viewing and lucid dreaming can develop deliberately. Self-remembering holds the thread between all of them.
Here is where to begin.
Meditation. Start with the breath. Fifteen minutes a day. You are not building something. You are removing what is in the way. Long-term practice quiets the Default Mode Network and shifts the nervous system toward equilibrium.
Ceremony. The sacrament can open in hours what meditation opens over years. But ceremony without a daily practice is a window into a room you have not yet learned to live in. I wrote about preparation in Psychedelic Preparation, and the red flags to watch for in Choosing a Psychedelic Guide.
Remote viewing. Have a friend place an object in a sealed envelope and practice receiving impressions before opening it. What matters is not initial accuracy. It is the willingness to notice what arrives before the rational mind edits it out.
Lucid dreaming. A nightly laboratory for exploring what awareness can do when the body's external receivers are offline.
Self-remembering. Being aware of what you are perceiving while simultaneously aware that you are the one perceiving. The foundation beneath all the others. I explored this practice in Self-Remembering.
None of these practices will give you certainty about the nature of consciousness. What they will give you is direct experience. And direct experience is what changes the question from intellectual curiosity into something you carry in your body.
You cannot scroll your way to freedom. But you can sit still long enough to find it.
Questions to Sit With
Have you ever experienced something your current model of reality cannot explain?
What would change in how you live if you knew, with certainty, that consciousness survives the body?
What is the relationship between your fear of death and the way you show up in your closest relationships?
Are you clearing the receiver, or learning what it can access? What would the next step look like?
If practice is tuning the receiver, what are you currently tuning toward?
If you are sensing that the crossing you are in requires more than the tools that built your current life, a Discovery Call is where we begin. You can also start with my free Ceremony Readiness Guide. I hold biweekly Integration Circles for those who want to do this work in community.
Book a Discovery Call when the time is right. Not when it is comfortable. When it is right.
What if consciousness doesn't need a brain? What if the only thing standing between you and a direct experience of this is the willingness to sit down, close your eyes, and listen?
I know which question I am living inside. And I know what I have found there.
If this post may help someone you know, I would be grateful if you shared it. Someone in your life may be carrying a pattern that keeps repeating. They may not have the word for why.
From my Heart to yours,
Yeshua Adonai
Psychedelic Guide
aboutyeshua.com
Yeshua is a traveling psychedelic guide currently based in Phoenix, Arizona. USMC combat veteran, former diplomat, and serial social entrepreneur devoted to mental health innovation, he has spent decades exploring contemplative traditions worldwide and learning to trust his own experience along the way.
“Sometimes a change in perspective is all it takes to reveal the Truth.”
Frequently Asked Questions
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No. It is Dan Brown's latest novel, a thriller built around the premise that consciousness is nonlocal and survives death. Brown told NPR he began writing it as a skeptic and finished it with a completely changed perspective. The novel functions as both story and reading list, weaving real research from Johns Hopkins, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and the history of government psi programs into a fictional narrative. The science it references is real. The conclusions it draws are worth sitting with.
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The receiver model proposes that the brain does not produce consciousness but receives it from a pre-existing field, the way a radio receives a signal it did not generate. William James proposed a version of this at Harvard in 1898. Henri Bergson developed the idea further. Aldous Huxley synthesized both into his "reducing valve" metaphor in The Doors of Perception. Modern neuroimaging research showing decreased brain activity during expanded psychedelic experience provides empirical support for this framework.
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The Default Mode Network is a set of brain regions most active during self-referential thought: the inner narrator that maintains your sense of identity, replays the past, and worries about the future. Psilocybin and LSD reduce activity in this network, which correlates with the dissolution of ordinary ego boundaries and the expansion of awareness. In the receiver model, the Default Mode Network functions as part of the brain's filtering mechanism, and its quieting is what allows broader signals through. I explored its relationship to inner work in Self-Remembering.
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Project Stargate was the US government's classified remote viewing program, operational from the early 1970s through 1995 under the Defense Intelligence Agency and various military branches. The program studied whether trained individuals could perceive distant locations, events, or objects through consciousness alone. It was officially terminated, though participants reported meaningful results and several have gone on to teach the methodology publicly.
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On Good Friday, 1962, Harvard doctoral student Walter Pahnke administered psilocybin to ten divinity students in a double-blind experiment at Marsh Chapel. The study emerged from the broader Harvard Psilocybin Project led by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Every subject reported profound mystical experience. When Rick Doblin followed up 25 years later, the effects had persisted across their entire lives. This study is the direct ancestor of modern psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins.
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Presentiment research studies the body's physiological responses to stimuli before the stimuli occur. In controlled experiments, subjects show measurable autonomic reactions, skin conductance changes, heart rate shifts, approximately 400 milliseconds before a randomly selected emotional image appears on screen. The body responds before the event has been determined, suggesting consciousness has access to information beyond ordinary time.
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The Global Consciousness Project, initiated at Princeton and now hosted by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, placed random number generators at locations worldwide. During events of mass collective attention, including September 11, 2001, the generators documented a 7-sigma anomaly, a statistically extraordinary deviation from randomness. The data suggests that collective human attention may influence physical systems in ways current models cannot explain.
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Most clinical trials have used synthetic psilocybin, a single isolated compound. Dr. Sue Sisley's trial at the Scottsdale Research Institute uses whole psilocybin mushrooms, which contain a spectrum of naturally co-occurring compounds. This distinction parallels the difference between isolated pharmaceutical extracts and whole-plant approaches in traditional contexts. The shift toward whole mushrooms aligns with how these sacraments have been used in indigenous and ceremonial settings for millennia.
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Remote viewing has been studied in classified government programs for over two decades, with results that remain disputed by skeptics but have never been definitively debunked. My own experience includes training from retired Project Stargate viewers and years of personal practice. I do not claim certainty about mechanism. I claim direct experience, repeated across enough instances to trust that something real is happening, even if our current models cannot fully explain it.
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No. Katherine Solomon identifies three doorways: death, psychedelics, and sudden moments of clarity. Meditation, lucid dreaming, breathwork, and spontaneous openings can all thin the filter. My own most sustained period of expanded perception, lasting months, occurred in Berlin in 2007 with no substances involved. The sacrament is the most direct path I know, but it is not the only one.
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Clearing the receiver is the process of working through the grief, trauma, shame, and conditioned patterns that create interference in the signal. Most people who come to ceremony begin here. The sacrament helps loosen the Default Mode Network's grip and allows the nervous system to feel what it has been suppressing. Over time, as the heaviest material is met and integrated, the receiver becomes capable of accessing subtler and wider frequencies of experience.