Everything and Anything...and a Bit Gay
What Happens After You Die? 23 Years of Research on NDEs, Reincarnation & Consciousness
Brendan joins Zach for a twenty-three-year deep dive into near-death experiences, reincarnation, consciousness, and the architecture of the afterlife — including a striking parallel between Eben Alexander's 2008 NDE and a 1924 Rudolf Steiner lecture, how the oversoul level works, and where simulation theory gets it wrong.
[5:00] Introduction
Zach: Hi everybody, thanks for joining me in the Everything and Anything in a Bit Gay podcast. Today I have a guest that I have been looking forward to speaking with for such a long time, and I'm really happy to say Brendan Murphy is here and we're going to have a really amazing, unique conversation. Welcome to the show.
Brendan: Thanks for having me, Zach. Appreciate it.
Zach: There are so many things I could talk with you about — I could probably spend six weeks with you and still not be satisfied, because you've done so much amazing work over what was it, twenty-three years of research? I just want to give my audience a high-level idea of who you are and what the research is that you've done. Can you give people an overview?
Brendan: Basically my main interest has always been the nature of reality and consciousness. Those two questions are really the same question, I've found. That's what I've been pursuing for the last twenty-three years.
Zach: What got you interested? Something happened when you turned twenty?
Brendan: Yeah. My backstory is that one day my brother — who is three years younger than me, still in high school at the time — came home and said there was this guy who came to give a talk at school, supposed to be talking about business, like an entrepreneur character, but he kept going off topic and talking about this amazing book that had changed his life completely. It was a book called The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, which is quite well known now. I shelved the idea for about six months before I did anything about it, eventually went and read the book, and it absolutely blew my mind. That was the trigger point. From there I started meditating, started reading a lot, had certain altered state consciousness experiences — and that just locked it all in. There was no looking back.
Zach: And you don't need psychedelics to get there — you've learned to do this through meditation on your own?
Brendan: Well, my first experience followed shortly after reading Talbot's book. I was just lying on my bed waiting to go to sleep and suddenly I found that I was a point of awareness in an infinite ocean of awareness, raw beingness. That was just spontaneous. That then spurred me to take up meditating, and I had other types of experiences in meditation that were more controlled or sustained. I've used various plant medicines over the years, but the most profound experiences for me were actually that very first one, and even after that the meditation experiences without any substances were still more powerful for me personally. I know people can have amazing experiences with substances, but I know from experience we can do this ourselves. We can cultivate it as a skill.
[10:00] NDEs — What Are They Really?
Zach: Let's talk about NDEs for a minute. You've studied thousands of these. What do you think people are actually experiencing when this happens?
Brendan: It's hard to generalize because it's really a mixed bag. There are a lot of different types of experiences and I'd say some of them are legitimate previews of the life to come. You have all sorts of journeys into other realms — someone finds themselves in a city, something we recognize as familiar relative to earthly life. A lot of people go to some transcendent city made of crystal or light. They may have interactions with beings or people there. At the other end of the spectrum you have lower-resolution experiences, just little glimpses of the other side, or someone has a brief encounter with a deceased relative and they're sent back because their time isn't up.
Then there's another category entirely, where people are in something constructed from their own memory — it becomes this kind of virtual reality dreamscape, incredibly realistic, made up of their unintegrated psychological content. There's a fascinating example with a woman called Kathy McDaniel, I think her name is. She was induced into a coma, and apparently this happens quite a lot with people put into comas — consciousness becomes effectively separated from the body without having a chance to prepare for it. The physiological anchor point is suddenly offline. So now they're in a psychological reality that may or may not be very pleasant. In Kathy's experience she went through a series of stages, one of which involved encountering zombies who physically assaulted her. It was a harrowing ordeal before it eventually moved on to a pleasant encounter with her deceased husband. After she came out of the coma and had time to process it, she realized that all of those unpleasant aspects were based on her own life experience — put together spontaneously by her psyche as an externalized environment that was completely tangible, solid, convincing, and terrifying, which she then had to work through. So there's a real spectrum.
Zach: Is there something that really jumps out to you from all the NDEs you've studied — something that changed the whole way you think about things?
Brendan: I'll tell you something that actually happened just recently. I found a parallel between Eben Alexander's 2008 NDE — Dr. Eben Alexander, the neurosurgeon who was a hardcore materialist atheist when he went into a coma situation — and a 1924 lecture by Rudolf Steiner. In Alexander's experience, he went into this transcendent, beautiful earthly realm and noticed in the air a type of being he couldn't quite label. In his book he says something like: the word angel was not quite enough for this being. It was something similar but a step beyond. It was a being generating sound — this amazing chant that suffused the environment — and it wasn't absorbing any input at all. It was purely outputting into the environment.
That struck him deeply, and he described it in detail. I only recently found that Steiner, in a 1924 lecture, described the exact same thing in the exact same type of environment. Steiner was a polymath, a clairvoyant, an initiate, a Rosicrucian — he had consciously been exploring these other realms for a long time. He had an actual system for it. This particular layer he called the lower Devachan, and he described it in exactly the same way Alexander did from his 2008 NDE. The being in the air that Alexander was trying to capture with words — Steiner described it as not an angel but an archangel. And he described it doing exactly what Alexander described: only outputting, making these amazing beautiful sounds that fill the environment, never receiving. That blew me away. They're separated by 104 years. Alexander had zero belief in any kind of non-physical existence whatsoever. That's as close to a double-blind confirmation as you're going to get in this field.
[20:00] The Materialist Argument — Why It Fails
Zach: When skeptics say NDEs are just brain hallucinations, what do you say to that?
Brendan: Honestly, I don't say much to them because they're generally not very open-minded — they're very dogmatic, those people. But the argument doesn't withstand any real scrutiny. I just gave you an example of two reports that shouldn't produce those parallels, especially coming from the mouth of an atheist with no prior framework. There are also cases of people who have died and during their NDE encountered someone who had also died — maybe far away — whom they didn't know was dead. They believed that person was alive and well. During the NDE they encounter this person. When they're resuscitated and recovered, they find out that person had died just before them or at the same moment. Those cases are documented and there are many of them.
And then the all-time most powerful category is what are called Peak in Darien cases, where people encounter somebody they didn't even know existed. For example, you might have had a sister who died at birth, and you're born a few years later, and your parents decide not to tell you yet. Then you have your own NDE and you encounter a little girl who says: I'm your sister, you don't know me because I died at birth. They might offer some other bits of data, and when this person recovers and tells their parents, the parents are just flabbergasted — because they never told them about the child who died at birth. You cannot explain that with a malfunctioning or dying brain. None of those materialist explanations work. They're desperate attempts to preserve a philosophical position that just isn't tenable.
[24:00] Reincarnation — Stripping Away the Religion
Zach: Can we bring in reincarnation? I started this podcast thinking when you die, you die — cremated, buried, that's it, I had no religious background, nothing caught on. I didn't believe in reincarnation either until I started doing this podcast and meeting people. I did a past-life regression hypnosis with a woman and she took me back to two lives — one was a farmer in Kansas in the 1940s with a wife and two kids, which was nothing like what I imagined, and the other didn't even seem to be on this planet. So what do you think reincarnation actually looks like when you strip away all the religion?
Brendan: I go into a lot of depth in the book around this — it's a huge topic. You have to look at it from a linear point of view because that's kind of how reality works to us when we're attached to our physical sensory system, but you also have to acknowledge a non-linear point of view, and it's layered.
At the lower end, reincarnation can happen from an earthbound condition — somebody pops out of their body and just goes straight back in, like: I don't care about anything else, I need to get back in a body. There's a lot of evidence for this from Ian Stevenson and other researchers. Then at another level you have the astral planes, mental planes, causal planes, and from any given level in the architecture people could opt to turn back toward earth life and take on a body again. It really depends on how deep they go into the post-mortem integration process and what options they're aware of having. For many people there's very little awareness around options, so they need guidance and orientation. Robert Monroe talked about orientation centers — almost like an airport terminal — where people are coming into the earth system and also leaving, and where they get the rundown on their options.
Beyond that you have the causal planes, where people start to remember other lifetimes on Earth and become aware that they're involved in a very long-term evolutionary journey — trying to garner as much experience as possible, as many different modes of experience as possible. This is why people don't tend to reincarnate into the same exact culture repeatedly. They tend to take on a very different situation next time.
At a higher level you have what I just call the oversoul level, where we're integrated into a kind of collective entity — an identity multiplex made of what I would suggest are many thousands of different personalities coming together in a shared identity space. From that level it's very abstract, very little to do with our concepts of space, time, and form. From there an oversoul intelligence can sort of go: I might feel like having a journey as a seventh century preacher in Europe somewhere, or I'll go into the twenty-third century. It's not a linear game from that level. But lower down it starts to look much more serial — one lifetime, another lifetime, another lifetime.
Zach: Do you think we come back with the same people every time?
Brendan: It looks like there's a cast of intimate associates that we tend to return with in different guises and different roles. There's a lot of evidence and testimony around that.
[34:00] What Determines Post-Mortem Experience?
Zach: If consciousness continues after death, what determines where we go and what we experience next?
Brendan: First and foremost it's the individual psychological configuration of somebody. That's really it, because when you take away the body, the only thing that's left is the psyche. The significance of that is still quite underappreciated. When your physical body stops working, the only thing left is a mentally generated environment — some kind of consciousness-generated rendered environment. From there it's a matter of: what do you believe? What have you unconsciously held as true? What kind of emotional material have you not worked through and integrated? What kind of healing work have you done or not done? Because that ultimately is the state of your psyche, which then becomes your externalized operating environment. There are so many case studies that attest to that. That's really the beginning of the answer.
[36:00] Heaven, Hell, and What Happened to Hitler
Zach: Heaven and hell aren't places — they're states of consciousness we generate based on who we are. So let's take Hitler as an example. What do you think happened to him when he died? Was there punishment? Is there even judgment?
Brendan: There's zero evidence for any kind of imposed punishment. That's the first thing. People who have a religious mindset might want to believe that there is, but believing something is not the same as being able to prove it. The suffering people experience post-mortem is due to the internal state of their mind. For someone who is a really psychopathic, violent, predatory individual, they're likely to end up in a very hellish dreamscape environment. There's also a collective aspect to it — like attracts like. So when you have people who are highly criminal, very deviant, sadistic, they end up in their own hellscapes together. They end up with social structures, living in these environments where the same kind of criminal mind has been drawn into high concentration.
I imagine — and I don't know about him in particular — but I imagine he would have ended up in some kind of hellscape and probably lingered there for a very long time given what I know of his personality type. But at the same time, there are always souls or spirits trying to break through to people in these situations. They've been referred to by various names — the Mercy Band, Band of Helpers — basically the same idea of spirits who are highly organized and whose job is to go and try to intervene where people are stuck in a hellscape or self-imposed isolation, and give them a friendly nudge: would you like to see something different? Is there another way?
Monroe's term for places where people with strong religious beliefs have gathered together is belief system territories — there's a Baptist heaven, various heavens for various beliefs, and these helper spirits go in and try to find someone whose mind has started to entertain some doubts. Maybe they're starting to think: hang on, this doesn't add up, the priest is making promises that aren't coming true, what are we waiting for? They find that person and say: actually, you're not really supposed to be here, there's all this other stuff waiting for you.
For very narrow-minded, hardcore materialist individuals, they'll probably just be unconscious. A blank, flat unconsciousness. Because if you don't believe you can exist after the body drops, what kind of experience can you actually have? A lot of people may just sleep through it.
[44:00] Simulation Theory
Zach: What are your thoughts on simulation theory?
Brendan: I get into that quite a bit in the book, because I actually found it really interesting how well computing and IT metaphors and analogies can be applied to the consciousness system and the post-mortem structure. That kind of blew me away the more I went into it. But they work only as analogies and metaphors. I don't believe at all that we're trapped in a computer or any kind of physical structure. That kind of thinking just invites an infinite regress — there's no way out. You think you get out of the game, and you just find yourself in a different part of the machine.
So it's kind of naive and unhelpful. I see it as a low-resolution take. People who've had really high-level mystical experiences don't take it particularly seriously. But there's a grain of truth in it: what we think of as reality is not quite what it seems. It is a kind of simulated environment, but it's generated from a field of consciousness — not by a computer.
[47:00] Raymond Moody and Moving the Field Forward
Zach: When you spoke with Raymond Moody, did he say anything off the record that shifted how you thought?
Brendan: No, the interview was the interview. Raymond's the OG — the guy who started it all and put it on the map. I have enormous respect for everything he's done. The people who were there in the seventies and eighties did a phenomenal job unearthing and surfacing really critical foundational data. But what none of them have done is build a coherent metaphysical framework to make sense of that data. They've produced really valid insights — the dying brain hypothesis has been decimated as an explanation, for example, and they've done that to the nth degree. What I'm trying to do is move the conversation forward and give a structured framework that actually contextualizes the NDE data and the reincarnation data and shows something of the process and the rules and the laws — why things happen the way they do — rather than just repeating: here's a cool NDE story. What happens when we go deeper into the underlying process and the rules? That's where it gets really interesting.
[50:00] Grief, Fear of Death, and What Awaits
Zach: Whenever you've lost someone in your life, does knowing all the research you know help with grief?
Brendan: It definitely changes the way you see it. The loss is still going to be sad — that's unavoidable. But the difference in the interpretation of the event is pretty radical. For someone who's a hardcore atheist materialist, there's zero hope. No expectation of ever seeing that person again. No silver lining. It hits with an existential severity that's quite devastating. Now I can look at it and go: okay, this is sad, but I'm confident that they are in a much better condition now than the rest of us are.
Zach: Are you scared to die, and — not that you're looking forward to it — are you curious to find out what really happens?
Brendan: I think everything I do is kind of preparation for that. I'm interested in the nature of reality, I'm trying to make sense of things, but at the same time I'm preparing for my own death. There's always been a part of me, even from the moment I had that infinite consciousness experience, that has the doubting voice — the part that says: well, maybe it's not what you think. Part of me has been driven to try to silence that part, or at least to make that voice sound as ridiculous as possible when it does pipe up. But yes, I do have that looking-forward-to-it aspect. I'm not ready to go yet, but from twenty-three years of research I've seen a good deal of what the other side looks like, and it looks pretty amazing. We have a lot to look forward to.
Zach: For what it's worth, doing this podcast has also made me not afraid to die. I'm scared of suffering through the process, but the destination — I'm actually curious about it.
Brendan: I find it strange when people don't think about it. Like, what are you avoiding? You think you're getting out of this somehow?
[56:00] Is Earth the Hardest Place? Other Worlds and Lives
Zach: You always hear that Earth is the hardest place to come to, or the one where you learn the most. Do you think that's true, and do you think we're able to go to other planets or places?
Brendan: There's probably some truth in it. The general consensus is that the post-mortem between-lives environment is far more pleasant and enjoyable, and that this is the hardest kind of environment available. There are a lot of reports of people having lifetimes on other worlds that are less intense, less difficult. There's a tension though — Earth may kind of be the only game in town in one sense, and in these altered states we may be downloading ideas about different modes of existence or visiting other worlds through the field of consciousness rather than literally going there.
The alien theme — actually being an alien on another world — seems to have only appeared in the regression literature in the last forty or fifty years. Before that I really can't find it being talked about anywhere. And that follows on from Aleister Crowley's ritual involving a being called Lam, which looked remarkably like what we now call the grey alien type — though that term didn't exist back then. Shortly after that, the idea just exploded into the collective. To me there's a feedback loop between the individual and the collective field. We put ideas into the field and somebody else can pick them up. I think there's a lot of that going on.
When people say they had a download or an encounter with aliens in a dream or out-of-body experience, I'm generally very skeptical, because I've seen the ways consciousness can deceive itself and render an environment around it that seems completely realistic but may be absurd. There's a term in the esoteric world — manas — which is essentially the human mind, the conditioned human mind. Most of the reports we get from NDEs or from people saying they were channeling aliens are all filtered through manas, through this shared mental field that we're all immersed in like fish in water. Someone in an altered state can pick up what is essentially a thought form from the collective — something planted there by enough people thinking a particular idea — and have a very convincing interaction with it. You could even create a thought form of a ninety-foot purple octopus alien, and someone else might tune in and think they've discovered a new species. That's a silly example, but the essence of that process is actually what's happening. We have this mythopoetic process going on where we're generating myths through the collective field, and the critical question becomes: how do you discern what's genuinely real from what's illusory? That's a study in itself, and I pull on that thread at length in the back section of the book.
[1:02:00] Closing
Zach: My last question: if there was one question you could pick to have answered from a higher source, what would it be?
Brendan: I don't have a clue. I genuinely don't know what I'd ask. Can I have a vacation? Maybe.
Zach: I told you this at the start — I was so happy you made time to come on. The research and work you're doing is amazing. Your website is brendandmurphy.com, I'll put links to your book and everything in the description. And do you want to mention where people can work with you?
Brendan: If they want to work with me, they should check out the Evolve Yourself masterclass at evolveyourself.live.
Zach: I'll put that in the description too. Thanks so much for being on, Brendan.
Brendan: Thanks, man. I appreciate it.