Being Human
They Call Him Oneness — The Grand Illusion
Brendan D. Murphy discusses The Grand Illusion, consciousness, and human potential with Richard Atherton on Being Human — reaching a professional and leadership-oriented audience with a rigorous account of the evidence for non-local consciousness.
[0:00] Introduction
Richard: Welcome to another episode of Being Human. I'm delighted to be here with Brendan Murphy, joining us from San Miguel in Mexico. He is the author of The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality — which I have to say completely blew me away. It was just page after page of "oh my God, oh wow, really?" — that was my experience reading it. There's just this panoply of scientific breakthroughs as pertains to paranormal effects that I simply wasn't aware of, and I'm relatively well-versed in this field. I just congratulate you on the achievement. And I know you've got Book Two coming as well, so I can't wait to dive in. Welcome to the show, Brendan.
Brendan: Thanks, Richard. Thanks for the kind words and the review. Good to be here.
Richard: Great. So as we were saying before the show, you started to take an interest in the other world early in life. Can you share a little bit about your childhood — your family, where you grew up — and ultimately how you came to this work?
Brendan: My childhood was pretty unremarkable. I grew up in a middle-class family on the North Shore of Sydney. My mum was a stay-at-home mum, my dad was out working five days a week. My parents weren't religious, weren't spiritual — very much mainstream. My dad's a super old-school kind of guy. So I didn't have any out-of-the-box stuff coming at me. But I always had a little bit of an interest in shows that got into paranormal stuff — haunted houses and that kind of thing. We had a great show in Australia called The Extraordinary, and it often had some really bizarre weird content, and I was always drawn to that. But it was a really normal childhood — I played all the sports, had friends, no major dramas or traumas. The awakening didn't really happen until after high school. I was twenty when that paradigm shift occurred.
[7:00] The Holographic Universe and the Paradigm Shift
Richard: Tell me about that experience when you were twenty.
Brendan: My brother is three years younger than me. He was still in school — Year Eleven, I think — and he came home one day and said we'd had this young entrepreneur come in to give a talk about business, but he kept going off topic and talking about this book he was really into. He mentioned it to me in case I was interested. I logged the name of the book but didn't look it up for about six months. Then I finally went and got a copy and read it. That was the beginning of the end for my identity as a normal human.
Richard: What was the book?
Brendan: It was by the late physicist Michael Talbot, called The Holographic Universe. It gets a few mentions in my book because it was excellent.
Richard: Maybe that's a good place to start. What is the holographic universe — the thesis of the book?
Brendan: Talbot was drawing on the most recent science at the time — he was writing around 1991, published ninety-one or ninety-two. He pulled together strands from quantum mechanics, neurology, psychology, and other fields to build a case that reality wasn't what it seemed to our normal five-sensory perception — that it was a kind of hologram. In a hologram, all information exists at every single point. If you have holographic film and you encode an image in it, then break the film into pieces, you get the entire image in each fragment. That's very different from breaking a mirror, where you get lots of little fragments of the whole. The key aspect of his idea was that the universe functions like that, that consciousness is tied into that and functions like that — so we can with our minds access any information from anywhere and direct our consciousness into very different types of realms or experiences.
Richard: And you said that was a paradigm shift for you. In what way?
Brendan: I'd been exposed to Christian theology to some extent in primary school and at the Anglican high school I attended. So I had this weird religious conditioning sitting alongside the mainstream twentieth-century scientific paradigm, and they didn't really mesh together in my mind. I didn't have a well-thought-out view of how it all fit together. Talbot's book showed me a paradigm that was coherent and extremely cutting-edge at the time — a convincing thesis that reality doesn't work the way we're brought up to believe, and doesn't work the way mainstream science asserts. I read it two or three times very quickly because I just had to absorb it. That was the end of being able to look at reality the same way ever again. That book triggered the whole last twenty-one years of my life going down this particular road.
Richard: And what were you studying at the time?
Brendan: If memory serves, I was at the Australian Institute of Music. Out of high school I'd spent a year doing Rehabilitation Counselling at Sydney University, realized that wasn't for me, then spent the next year at the Institute studying voice — I'm still a musician. That year was very pivotal. The book really pushed me in a certain direction. By the time I was twenty-four I was putting together my own research material and assembling writing, and that was the beginning of the manuscript that eventually, five or six years later, became the book you have there.
[14:00] First Mystical Experience and the Spiritual Practice
Richard: As you're reading and researching and writing, are you also starting to seek altered states? Are you meditating? What are you doing experientially aside from the research?
Brendan: Shortly after reading Talbot's book — not long after — I had my first what you'd call a mystical experience or very altered state of consciousness. I was just lying in bed waiting to go to sleep one night and suddenly I was infinite. I don't know how else to explain it. I experienced myself as a point of consciousness in an infinite field of consciousness, with no beginning, no end. The vastness of it was indescribable, but at the same time I wasn't surprised by it — it was totally normal. Which tells me we all know this subconsciously. Otherwise it would be quite a shock. For me it just felt like coming home.
That anchored in Talbot's holographic universe concept and this very different view of reality. I started meditating from twenty to twenty-two — two years of pretty consistent practice. I went to a spiritualist church in Chatswood, Sydney, where they were doing trance meditation. My intention in going was to try to open up my clairvoyance, and if you do it diligently and consistently, especially in a group where the energy is very supportive, that process does start to open up. So the first two years of my twenties were pretty focused on that. The most transformative and important experiences I've ever had — including plant medicine and psychedelics — were those spontaneous and meditation-based ones, with no substances involved.
[19:00] Stage Two — The Conspiracy Revelation
Richard: After Talbot and The Holographic Universe, what are the next influences that start to emerge?
Brendan: Probably the two watershed moments for me were — stage one was the paradigm shift through Talbot's book, then stage two was what I'd call the conspiracy stage. I had a good friend while I was at the Institute of Music. Her mum was quite a different character — her nickname for me back then was "Oneness." Imagine having a nickname like that — sounds like you got it at a hippie commune.
One day she took me by the hand and said, "Come with me, I've got a book for you." She took me upstairs to her bookcase and handed me Children of the Matrix by David Icke. I'd never had much of an interest in the political side of anything, but without having to accept everything he's saying wholesale, that book showed me there was undeniably a massive level of manipulation and deception going on on a worldwide, highly organized scale. It was like: oh hell, we're all having the wool pulled over our eyes on so many different things. The consciousness side of it is fundamental to really breaking through all of that, but at the same time it's useful and important to at least be aware of that side of manipulation and the forces driving it. That was a very disturbing second stage of the awakening process, because it was like: oh God, this is horrendous.
I think it's ideal that the spiritual awakening came first. If people can get grounded in themselves and in the true nature of who they are, then everything else is secondary — still significant, but secondary.
Richard: And it's interesting because you don't get anywhere near conspiracy in this book. This whole book is about citing scientific studies and building a picture of what reality might look like based on the science — showing what the science is telling us and also what the mystics have been saying, and here are thousands of different lines of completely diverse research all converging on the same point.
Brendan: Exactly. And it is practical. There's been this massive materialist prejudice against all of this, and an idea — hopefully not as strongly held now — that psychic effects are so minuscule they're not even worth discussing statistically. But that's not true. We know that people can predict the future and do all sorts of things that affect the macro level visible tangible world. That's not debatable.
[27:00] Quantum Weirdness and Cosmic Oneness
Richard: Let's start pulling on the threads in the book. In Chapter Four you describe quantum weirdness and cosmic oneness. Talk about what you've discovered in terms of quantum physics and its relationship to our understanding of the universe.
Brendan: That chapter talks about the different paradigm-shifting experiments that have been done in quantum mechanics and what they apparently tell us about how the world works. One key idea is that we do not exist as separate observers from what we think of as reality. With the quantum measurement problem, we have this weird situation that nobody really expected: so-called foundational particles only exist as wave probabilities until somebody measures or observes them. Then they exist as so-called particles. I don't know if that's even fully integrated into scientific culture yet because it's so anti-materialistic, and materialism is still the prevailing prejudice. But the idea that reality is a system we are participating in the creation of, rather than being separate from it — that was a profound shift in thinking. Now we've got this weird interrelationship with and influence over things. We're not separate from each other, and we're not separate from the system we're operating in.
Richard: And this idea that we live in a probabilistic universe?
Brendan: Quantum waves have tendencies to exist rather than fixed positions. You can't predict with certainty — it's statistical. If you take enough measurements you get a pattern, but you can't say the wave will manifest as a particle here or there. Reality has a tendency to exist instead of being this fixed, stable, solid thing we tend to think it is. And we affect how things unfold through our conscious attention. Dean Radin did experiments where people remotely and mentally tried to influence the pathway of photons — little particles of light — just concentrating in a separate space. Distance doesn't really make much difference because reality is holographic and everything is interconnected. People proved they could use their intention to manipulate the pathway of a photon.
[35:00] Localized Sight, Remote Viewing, and Nonlocality
Richard: You mention an experiment in the book by Charles Richet, where a person under hypnosis was able to localize their sight to their fingertips. How might that work?
Brendan: Nobody has explained that properly. I have friends whose twelve-year-old kids can play video games completely blindfolded — I've seen it in person. There have to be multiple layers or levels of information present. If you're blindfolded and regular light isn't reaching your eyes, some form of information from the screen still has to be reaching your mind or consciousness somehow. Whether we talk about the etheric level, etheric particles, or higher overtones of light frequencies penetrating through the blindfold and being registered by the etheric body or biofield. It's not just fingertips or closed eyes — anywhere in the body can receive information. People have read off pages with their elbow, with their forehead. Nobody has come up with a really convincing detailed theory of exactly what's happening, but obviously it involves non-conventional information processing.
Richard: And there are experiments where people far beyond chance detect a card placed in a book in another room.
Brendan: Tons of research has been done in that realm — that's getting into remote viewing, which I have a chapter on. It is absolutely established. The US government knows about this. I would suggest virtually every major government does. We've had Russian psychic spies and American psychic spies, people paid to retrieve information from thousands of kilometres away using nothing but focus and concentration.
Richard: Beyond the universe being holographic, what are the mechanisms that enable that?
Brendan: It depends who you ask. Esotericists and occultists would give a different answer than quantum physicists. "Nonlocal" is a word that gets used a lot — it's another way of saying intelligent interconnectedness between distant things. We don't have great detailed theories about this. We have ideas and speculation. We have to talk about information being perceived remotely by consciousness, which tells us either the information is present locally, or your consciousness is present over there, or both simultaneously — which is the holographic model.
[42:00] Torsion Waves, Coherence, and the Effects of Love on DNA
Richard: You mention Kozyrev and his idea that thoughts and feelings generate torsion waves. What are they and why are they important?
Brendan: Kozyrev linked torsion to time and processes in nature — as events happen they throw off these waves. Dan Winter actually has the most detailed scientific take on it. He'll tell you that torsion waves relate to what he calls wave phase conjugation and the acceleration of waves past light speed. When you get past light speed you're essentially back into non-locality — reverse-time effects, that kind of thing.
Richard: What about Glen Rein's research on the effect of unconditional love on DNA?
Brendan: Really interesting research. To help clarify the torsion wave aspect: we're talking about electromagnetic waves that also have a component that can't be shielded or blocked — aluminum or plastic will block a torsion wave, but otherwise they can penetrate and move through almost anything. Rein was doing this research with people doing remote influence on DNA samples, and what he found was that when someone was in a state of love, bliss, or gratitude, they were generating coherent electromagnetic waves — these so-called torsion waves spiraling out — and the DNA molecule in the sample was able to decompress and expand. Whereas if someone was in emotional incoherence — anger, rage, something along those lines — they couldn't get the same effect. They couldn't influence the samples if they weren't in a state of love, gratitude, or coherence.
Richard: That's consistent with studies suggesting that certain trauma-release approaches can improve IQ — that if a trauma-release process allows someone to touch into more unconditional love for themselves, they may be manipulating their DNA and expanding their intelligence.
Brendan: Absolutely. When you're in trauma you're functioning suboptimally. You can't properly access the higher parts of the brain — the prefrontal lobes, where our highest cognitive functions and creativity sit. In trauma the midbrain is running the show in an unconscious way. Bruce Lipton talks about how being in fear limits your intelligence because it contracts you. You contract your awareness of options and cognition along with it. You're just in survival mode: do I run, do I fight, do I freeze? It's all in the same vein.
[52:00] Coherence, Crystals, and Reducing Crime
Richard: You mention an experiment by Dr. Alexander Golod, who placed crystalline substances inside fibreglass pyramids inside prisons and observed criminality reduce.
Brendan: There have been some very strange experiences and research done in that area. I think it all comes back to coherence. If you take something that's energetically coherent into an incoherent environment, it can entrain the other energies present. A little bit of coherence goes a long way — it's more powerful than incoherence. It may only take one tiny influence, whether it's one person walking into an incoherent room or a crystal or whatever they've charged up in the pyramid. Take a coherent state into an incoherent system and it can entrain the whole system into coherence. You can play classical music in a shopping mall and it affects the space and makes people behave differently.
Richard: David Hawkins made a similar argument — that one yogi who reaches 800 or 900 on his scale pulls the consciousness of the entire planet up logarithmically.
Brendan: And that's been tested. I think it's around Chapter Eleven where we cover the Maharishi experiments. They got a group of people meditating together in a city, tracked crime data over months, and that small group's meditation consistently correlated with massively reduced crime. That's a very concrete example of what we're talking about.
Richard: It's fascinating to reflect on how small a role this plays in public consciousness. Nobody in prison reform discussions is talking about increasing coherence in the population. It's always more police or longer sentences.
Brendan: And yet any kind of beauty or coherent environment produces change. Certain Scandinavian prisons have made prison environments more homely and comfortable, and the behavior change in inmates is huge — they save money and stress because the environment creates a kind of harmony for the individual. And it costs essentially nothing. Unfortunately in America, prisons are for-profit enterprises, so there's less incentive to care about that.
[1:00:00] Sacred Architecture and the Golden Ratio
Richard: That reminds me of the thesis that our cathedrals were actually designed as healing centers — used in ways we no longer understand, understood as much more than places for religious observances, but places to go and heal through the energetic environment.
Brendan: Totally. Most of these old buildings are beautiful and convey something — divinity, reverence, something palpable. Whoever was building them, whether through intuition or an intellectual framework, on some level they knew what they were doing. If you want to connect with the divine, you create a coherent energetic environment.
Richard: I'm in Bury St Edmunds, and there's a cathedral here that's impossible not to feel the impact of just walking in — the stained glass, the acoustics, the sacred geometry.
Brendan: Anything built with sacred geometry is probably built around the golden ratio — phi — which is essentially the mathematical definition of energetic coherence, the definition of fractality and maximum embeddedness. When a building is based around those proportions, it naturally supports through its structure the energetic state you want people to be in when they come to worship. Just having an aesthetic consciousness in architecture would be transformative. Amy and I have complained about the terrible buildings in Australia — so sterile and cookie-cutter and soulless, not built according to any principles of beauty or Aesthetics, definitely not around the golden ratio. These big featureless oblongs rising many stories into the sky. They alter the way people feel, and when people feel different they function differently and make different choices. If you want to get conspiratorial about it, keeping things grey and lifeless and soulless supports the control system — it keeps people at a low level of consciousness, incoherent, more prone to fear and fear-based manipulation.
Richard: And schools — classrooms with fluorescent lights, sitting in a box for eight hours a day.
Brendan: Yeah. Far out. Yeah.
[1:08:00] Extraordinary Friends — Psychic Phenomena Witnessed Firsthand
Richard: You pepper the book with stories of your friends and the extraordinary things they do. What are some of the best things you've observed that have blown you away?
Brendan: I've seen a fair bit of weird stuff. Lissa — who I mention in the book — was highly psychic, with a lot of access to other beings and information. I remember she was giving me a healing treatment on a massage table and started talking about other beings in the room. Some were Pleiadian and apparently wanted to work on me. I was a bit blasé about it — a bit of a smartass, but genuinely interested at the same time. They apparently got a bit tired of my cheekiness, rolled their eyes, and left. We had some interesting conversations with what appeared to be reptilian entities, which were fascinating. I don't know what the true ontological nature of those entities was, but she was a lot of fun. I've also seen misty spiraling energy in rooms and had poltergeist-type stuff happen around us.
Lissa was actually quite phenomenal with what you might call psychic impressions — if you just gave her a name, she could accurately cite details about that person's life. Effortless.
Richard: You also had your own experience visualizing etheric energy?
Brendan: Yes. I remember standing in a room with a palpable misty kind of energy moving around us. There was one room in a friend's house where Lissa and I were together, with a lampshade hanging from the ceiling that started moving weirdly without anyone touching it. There was misty energy I could see plainly in one of the adjacent rooms — moody and swirling. She would experience something different because she was very kinaesthetic — she'd feel a lot whereas I didn't feel anything but could see certain things. Different viewing angles on whatever was going on.
There was a time sitting on a couch when we heard a clang from the kitchen, went to investigate, and found a wooden spoon on the floor. It had been sitting on the bench, in a spot where it couldn't physically fall off without help. We picked it up, put it back, went back to the other room — and heard another clang shortly after. The spoon was on the floor again. This happened a third time. Then Lissa took a photo of herself with her phone, and in the background over her shoulder there was a gargoyle-looking entity very clearly visible — mouth open, weird oddly shaped eyes. She felt it was a warning. I didn't know quite what to make of it but I didn't worry about it.
[1:17:00] Etheric Photography and the Subtle Bodies
Richard: You reference a particular photographic technique where you can take images of a car lot and still see the energetic imprint of cars that have already left. Is that right?
Brendan: Yes. Harry Oldfield has done similar work with his camera technology, which he developed from Kirlian photography — a modified version he calls poly-contrast interference photography, or PIP. He's been able to see things in scans that are historical — no longer present in the current moment — but show up in infrared frequencies. I think it was an Air Force study talking about the parking lot. These things show up in infrared or ultraviolet frequencies — you can literally see parts of the past that were in that space.
Richard: And related to that — people who've had amputations and using this photography you can see the arm is still there, but slightly shorter, because the etheric body is starting to recede but still persists immediately after the amputation.
Brendan: That's probably the best interpretation — the etheric body, which can be visualized and photographed using certain approaches. When you remove a limb the etheric arm no longer needs to be there, so it starts to retract and draw back into the rest of the body. Steiner explained the etheric as a force body — the form-building subtle body. It's not really a vehicle of consciousness the way the astral or mental bodies are. Its job is to shape and maintain the physical form. Hack the arm off and the etheric arm begins to withdraw.
[1:23:00] Out-of-Body Experiences and the Subtle Body Architecture
Richard: Tell us about the research on out-of-body experiences and your take on what's going on.
Brendan: From an esoteric perspective we're composed of a nesting of different energy bodies. My thesis in Book One was that these represent the psyche, the mind — because it's obvious the brain doesn't actually generate consciousness. What happens is we have an association of consciousness with the physical body. It kind of hooks into it, synchronizes with it, and you get this brain-based experience of consciousness and physical reality. But if you shift your locus of awareness into the astral body or the mental body — which we're characterizing now as plasma phenomena, because the way they behave is only really describable in terms of plasma, based on the research that's been done in that arena — then you have a very different experience of reality. And the key point is that they don't depend on the physical body for their existence. You can separate those layers of the psyche from the physical body and experience a completely different kind of reality.
It's a natural phenomenon. Everybody has technically a form of out-of-body experience every time they go to sleep — it's just not consciously recorded. Materialism has kept us from moving forward here, and the last seventeen to eighteen hundred years of Roman Catholicism and Christianity — calling it the devil, calling it nonsense — have been equally unhelpful. Both camps opposed to rationally approaching the subject. It's as natural as going to sleep. If you stay conscious during the process, now you're having an OBE.
Richard: Could you recap the distinction between the etheric, astral, and mental bodies?
Brendan: The etheric body is the form-building force body — essentially the template for the physical body. It's lines of force that physical matter follows and flows along, creating and then maintaining form. The astral body — also called the desire body — is separable from the physical. In your astral consciousness you have a very high level of freedom of movement, able to go basically anywhere on the Earth plane. Esoterically, the difference between the astral and the mental is that the mental is a little more flexible and mobile — the seat of what we associate with reason, logic, and everyday thinking. The astral is more emotionally and desire-based. It's where the desire principle is seated — our cravings, desires, all of the vices. These don't come from the physical level. They come from the astral principle.
Richard: So my base desires, my compulsions — I've always associated those with the body. But you're saying they actually come from the astral?
Brendan: A number of out-of-body explorers — Robert Monroe, Preston Dennett, Robert Bruce, and possibly Bruce Moen — have all commented on this. Monroe talked about how difficult it was to overcome the sexual impulse in the astral state. Preston Dennett talked about going into an astral version of the Earth — because you get virtual reality duplicates of Earth at a few levels before you move past them — and ravenously consuming everything he could get his hands on in a shop, or going and finding someone to have sex with, before he could move past that layer. Multiple people have had experiences along those lines supporting this very old esoteric idea.
[1:35:00] Beyond the Astral — Higher Realms and What Awaits
Richard: Is there anything beyond the astral?
Brendan: Technically in a field of infinite consciousness the possibilities are infinite. Esoterically, models tend to be seven-tiered — seven layers or realms of reality. The astral is relatively low. Above that you have the mental level, and the top three layers of the mental are called the causal. Beyond the causal there's the buddhic plane, and so on — vastly expanded past anything the astral represents.
A lot of the astral stuff pertains to the immediate afterlife experience. When people first drop the body and cross over, they're generally in these astral layers of the collective unconscious. They have to get oriented — sometimes they need help realizing they're dead but still alive. Most of the environments at those levels are based very much on the familiar Earth environment. Even at slightly higher levels, people generate more elevated versions of Earth life so they can orient themselves and get accustomed to the new environment. Then beyond that it becomes less earthlike.
If you look at someone like Jürgen Ziewe — a contemporary out-of-body explorer of consciousness — he talks about what he calls super-dimensions, which correlate roughly with the theosophical ideas about the causal and mental planes. His descriptions of them are totally sci-fi — unbelievable beauty, very otherworldly. Every level up you go gets more glorious, more rarified, more luminous, more beautiful, to the point where people find it very difficult to convey the experience because it's so far beyond anything we're used to and we simply don't have the words for it.
Richard: Does that correlate with stories of yogis who become kind of garbled — incapable of fully being in the physical world, needing to be looked after, because they're existing somewhere else entirely?
Brendan: I think some of those guys are just very much not home anymore. Very dissociated. I personally see our job here as being in the world, not trying to escape it, because we're all going to be leaving it eventually anyway. I'm more interested in what we can do during our presence here. I don't fancy sitting under a tree for days in a semi-comatose state getting bitten by insects. That way of life worked in certain cultures at certain times, but in the twenty-first century, with jobs and family and work to do, it's not viable for the vast majority of us even if we're genuinely interested in spiritual matters.
Richard: But if you take the Hawkins position that one individual elevating can raise consciousness for everyone else on Earth, then you can understand what social bargain that community was making — we'll support you to do this, because we know we're all energetically linked and this is going to raise all of us.
Brendan: Absolutely. And now I think we have such exponential expansion of knowledge that we can all make a choice to be on a lower-level version of that and have that kind of influence — because it's not so mystical or mystified anymore. We understand coherence, we understand how to create it. It's as simple as love, gratitude, bliss — anything in that spectrum turns you into an antenna of coherence that affects the immediate environment. If you meditate for ten or fifteen minutes a day, you're having an effect on the world.
[1:47:00] Julian of Norwich, Mystic Christianity, and the Language Problem
Richard: You reference Julian of Norwich in the book — a Christian mystic who was essentially locked in a cell on the side of a church, fed through a hole, supported by the community to elevate herself spiritually for the good of society. It's interesting that that principle was alive in the Christian realm.
Brendan: It's interesting because that's completely outside the paradigm of most exoteric Christians today. But it shows they had the knowledge back then. There have always been branches of mystical Christianity with a level of insight and knowledge that wasn't necessarily shared with the masses — protected knowledge. And she was intimating the nature of the holographic universe in her writings.
Richard: We're about an hour and a quarter in, and we haven't really talked in depth about Book Two yet. Are there any major threads you're exploring in it that would be worth sharing?
Brendan: There are a lot of threads in there that I want people to get. The focus is immortality — the case for immortality, the evidence and information about the afterlife, the different afterlife realms that have been mapped out and that we have information around. I have very interesting material on hell — different hell realms — a chapter debunking the biblical Christian concept of hell but also expanding on it, putting it in context, and showing from an informed point of view how you can meaningfully talk about hell and what it looks like for some people. And I think it's actually going to be slightly longer than Book One. So there's a lot in there.
Richard: What you're doing is synthesizing across many disciplines, and there's an important role for that. The head of psychiatry from Cambridge University came on my show and lamented that at Cambridge every subject is literally housed in its own building — physically separated. To become a specialist is the norm, but multidisciplinary synthesis across multiple realms is anathema to the academic ethos.
Brendan: I am intentionally trying to bridge gaps and move things forward. I can do that because I've been doing this for twenty years. I can see the blind spots and what we're missing. Context building is why I write such deep, long books. Without context, people have a very low-level view. You start building context, you come up a level, and now you can see that previous body of data in a completely different way — and then move beyond it. Contextualizing things allows you to see what you couldn't see before.
Richard: Language is also part of the challenge. Part of being this far out in the exploration is that the agreed-upon terms and shorthand just aren't there in many cases.
Brendan: Languaging is huge. We're still trying to develop useful vocabulary for this, and a lot of the most helpful new analogies and metaphors are coming from computing, electronics, and the internet. Talking about non-physical realms as virtual realities or simulations starts to land a little more. That's kind of where the conversation is going. Mainstream academia has shunned this material for so long that we haven't developed a proper lexicon for it, and the framing from fundamentalist religion — all negative, all "it's the devil" — hasn't helped. But that's the thrust of what I'm doing in Book Two and Three: using these new analogies and terms to convey the information, and I think it's going to land in a very impactful way.
[2:00:00] Closing — Evolve Yourself and What's Coming
Richard: Are you still doing the DNA activation work?
Brendan: Yes, still going. There's a free masterclass people can check out at evolveyourself.live. The webinar explains the whole concept and how it works. I'll probably run a new ceremony in a couple of weeks.
Richard: And where can people find Book Two and get on the waitlist?
Brendan: People can pre-order via my website at brendandmurphy.com — I'll send you a link for the waitlist as well so people can be notified when it's ready. And Book One is also available directly through my website.
Richard: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much, Brendan. It's been an education and a validation. And I hope we can get you back once Book Two is out.
Brendan: That sounds great, Richard. More than happy. I'm sorry if I was a bit vague on some of the Book One material — it's been twelve years since I looked at it closely. But hopefully it was useful.
Richard: Absolutely. Thanks again and enjoy the rest of your day in San Miguel.
Brendan: You too. Cheers.