The Truth is Hidden Within Us

"Maybe there is a universal truth embedded in everyone's soul.

Maybe we all have the same story hiding inside
like a shared constant in our DNA.

Maybe this collective truth is responsible for the similarity in all our stories.

Truth has a power
and if we all gravitate towards similar ideas,
maybe we do so because those ideas are true,
written deep within is
and when we hear the truth,
even if we don't understand it,
we fell that truth resonate within us,
vibrating with our unconscious wisdom.

Perhaps the truth is not learned by us,
but rather

REcalled

REmembered

REcognized

as that which is already inside us."

- transcribed from the audio book presentation of "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown

Underlying Order

"My friends, as you can see, the chaos of the world had an underlying order. When the ancients discovered PHI, they were certain they had stumbled across God’s building block for the world, and they worshipped Nature because of that.  And one can understand why. God’s hand is evident in Nature, and even to this day there exist pagan, Mother Earth—revering religions. Many of us celebrate nature the way pagans did, and don’t even know it. May Day is a perfect example, the celebration of spring …the earth coming back to life to produce her bounty. The mysterious magic inherent in Divine Proportion was written at the beginning of time. Man is simply playing by Nature’s rules, and because art is man’s attempt to imitate the beauty of the Creator’s hand, you can imagine we might be seeing a lot of instances of the divine Proportion in art this semester."

- Dan Brown. The DaVinci Code. DoubleDay: New York, 2003. pg 95-96

Life is Filled With Secrets

"Life is filled with secrets. You can’t learn them all at once."

- Dan Brown. The DaVinci Code. DoubleDay: New York, 2003. pg 101

Process the Unprocessible

"Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors."

- Brown, Dan. The DaVinci Code. DoubleDay: New York, 2003. pg 341-342

The Number Phi

1.618

Langdon turned to face his sea of eager students. “Who can tell me what this number is?”

A long-legged math major in back raised his hand, “That’s the number PHI.” He pronounced it fee.

“Nice job Stettner,” Langdon said. “Everyone, meet PHI.”

…
“PHI is generally considered the most beautiful number in the universe.”

As Langdon loaded his slide projector, he explained that the number PHI was derived from the Fibonacci sequence—a progression famous not only because the sum of adjacent terms equaled the next term, but because the quotients of adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618—PHI!

Despite PHI’s seemingly mystical mathematical origins, Langdon explained, the truly mind-boggling aspect of PHI was its role as a fundamental building lock in nature. Plants, animals, and even human beings all possessed dimensional properties that adhered eerily exactitude to the ratio of PHI to 1.

“PHI’s ubiquity in nature,” Langdon said, killing the lights, “clearly exceeds coincidence, and so the ancients assumed the number PHI must have been preordained with the Creator of the universe."
- Dan Brown. The DaVinci Code. DoubleDay: New York, 2003. pg 93-94

I don't know how much of this is based on fact. A quick Google search on "phi" didn't turn up much. But I really do like this idea. It seems to suggest an order to the universe.

It kind of sounds like the theory of Intelligent Design. Brown has Langdon state a few other natural occurrences of PHI that I will succinctly list here,

1. divide the number of female bees by the number of male bees in any beehive in the world and you always get the same number – PHI
2. nautilus – a cephalopod mollusk that pumps gas into its chambered shell to adjust its buoyancy. The ratio of each spiral’s diameter to the next is PHI
3. Sunflowers grow in spirals and the ratio of each rotations diameter to the next is PHI
4. Human bone structure –distance from tip of head to the floor, then divide that y the distance from your belly button to the floor – PHI
5. Humans cont. – distance from your shoulder to your finger tips, and then divide it by the distance from your elbow to your finger tips – PHI
6. Humans cont. – Hip to floor divided by knee to floor. Finger joints. Toes. Spinal divisions. PHI. PHI. PHI

Hidden Symbols

“There are symbols hidden in places you would never imagine.”
- Brown, Dan. The DaVinci Code. DoubleDay: New York, 2003. pg 97

Invisible Connections

“Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events. The connections may be invisible, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard, but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface.”
- Brown, Dan. The DaVinci Code. DoubleDay: New York, 2003. pg 15-16.

I think that everything is interconnected in some way. That’s why I really enjoy this quote from this great novel.