Vikas Agarwal

“Fear makes us selfish,” Katherine said. “The more we fear death, the more we cling to ourselves, our belongings, our safe spaces … to that which is familiar. We exhibit increased nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance. We flout authority, ignore social mores, steal from others to provide for ourselves, and become more materialistic. We even abandon our feelings of environmental responsibility because we sense the planet is a lost cause and we’re all doomed anyway.” “That’s alarming,” Nagel said. “Those are precisely the behaviors that fuel global unrest, terrorism, cultural division, and war.” “Yes, and that make the CIA’s job so difficult. Unfortunately, it becomes a hall of mirrors. The worse things get, the worse we behave. And the worse we behave, the worse things get.” “And it’s your theory that this troubling”
― Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets

“Religions had learned long ago that a human mind facing the terrifying prospect of eternal nothingness would believe almost anything. Timor mortis est pater religionis, Langdon mused, recalling the ancient saying made famous by Upton Sinclair. Fear of death is the father of religion.”
― Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets

“The most important point in the research, however, shows that those who do not fear death, for whatever reason, tend to exhibit behavior that is more benevolent, accepting of others, cooperative, and caring about the environment. Essentially, this means that if we could all free our minds of the burden, of the terror we feel about death…” “Then we would find ourselves in a dramatically improved world.” “Precisely,” Katherine said. “To quote the great Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, ‘The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual’s way of being in the world.’ Grof believes that a radical inner transformation of consciousness might be our only hope of surviving the global crisis brought on by the Western mechanistic paradigm.”
― Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries. —Nikola Tesla”
― Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets