“What does consciousness actually navigate when the body stops? Not metaphor. Not mythology. The structural mechanics of what happens next.”
Thousands of near-death experience accounts have been documented across five decades of clinical research. Esoteric traditions have described post-mortem states for millennia. Depth psychology mapped archetypal transition imagery throughout the twentieth century. None of these bodies of work talk to each other.
The result is a field fragmented by disciplinary silos, ideological commitments, and the assumption that symbolic content is equivalent to literal description. Materialists dismiss the data. Religionists literalise the imagery. New Age frameworks conflate symbol with destination.
Reverse Engineering the Afterlife operates at the structural level, extracts the cross-tradition pattern, and builds a named explanatory model—the Consciousness Transition Model—that accounts for the data without requiring faith in any tradition's myth-language.
Materialist reductionism attacks symbolic content as if it were literal claim—and concludes there is nothing to explain
Religious cosmologies treat post-mortem states as moral sorting mechanisms, not functional architectures
New Age frameworks collapse function, form, and interpretation into one—treating symbolic environments as literal destinations
NDE research literature maps transition mechanics without a unifying structural framework
Comparative religion describes the same territory in incompatible myth-languages without extracting the structural convergence
In Brendan's first interview dedicated entirely to Book 2, Dawn Lester—co-author of What Really Makes You Ill—leads a deep conversation on the Consciousness Transition Model, the cross-tradition architecture of post-mortem states, and what 23 years of research reveals that neither religion nor materialism has adequately addressed.
WATCH ON SUBSTACK →Hosted on Dawn Lester's Substack—free subscription may be required.
The Consciousness Transition Model introduces 14 novel insights that existing frameworks have either not made or have gestured at without doing the explanatory work.
Four bundles are available, from Digital to Ten Copies. Every tier includes the ebook and Inside the Consciousness Transition Model, the bonus presentation delivering October 12—well before the rest of the book. Print bundles add a jacketed hardcover first edition and paperback copies to give away.
“Since his first exceptional book, Brendan has spent the last decade extensively researching, studying, and interviewing experts on a wide range of scientific, spiritual, esoteric and experiential phenomena.
This book takes all of this intense research, evidence, observations, and perspectives, and integrates them all into a high-level standpoint. In so doing, finally building a bigger picture of how it all fits together into an important, groundbreaking understanding that everyone will want to read.”
“This young man is genius quality. No doubt about it.”
Brendan is a systems thinker working at the intersection of consciousness research, comparative metaphysics, and modern explanatory frameworks. Reverse Engineering the Afterlife is the second volume of a multi-year research project into the architecture of consciousness and what death actually means for what continues.
Reverse Engineering the Afterlife is a cross-tradition, evidence-based investigation into what happens to consciousness after physical death. It introduces the Consciousness Transition Model (CTM)—the first structured framework mapping post-mortem states from NDE research, regression data, depth psychology, and esoteric traditions, without borrowing the myth-language of any single tradition.
The Consciousness Transition Model (CTM) is a structural framework developed by Brendan D. Murphy that maps how consciousness moves through post-mortem states. It identifies six primary transition phases derived from convergent evidence across NDE science, comparative metaphysics, depth psychology, and systems thinking. It is falsifiable and not dependent on any religious or spiritual cosmology.
Most afterlife literature is theologically pre-committed, scientifically dismissive, or New Age in orientation. Reverse Engineering the Afterlife operates at the structural level—extracting what is consistent across thousands of NDE accounts and cross-tradition sources without committing to any tradition's cosmology. It introduces original terminology and a named explanatory model that no previous work has produced.
Reverse Engineering the Afterlife is currently available to pre-order direct from the author at brendandmurphy.com. The ebook is $20 and the paperback is $32.99 plus shipping.
No. Reverse Engineering the Afterlife is written to stand alone. The Grand Illusion provides the broader philosophical and evidential foundation, but Book Two is self-contained and introduces the Consciousness Transition Model on its own terms.
Book 1 builds the consciousness-first foundation that Book 2 operationalises. The 600-page synthesis of quantum biology, NDE data, psi research, and esoteric traditions—available now on Amazon.
