Circle of White Light Radio

[0:00] Introduction

Alan: Hi folks, welcome back to another great show and a great interview. My guest on the show today is a chap called Brendan D. Murphy, who contacted me, and I went through his bio, and I'm sure we're going to have a great chat today. Thanks, Brendan, for coming on. I appreciate it.

Brendan: I appreciate it. Thanks, Alan.

Alan: Now, before we get into talking about all the subjects and the things that you do, for people who don't know you, because this is the first time you've been on my show, give us a bit of a background on what you do.

Brendan: I guess what I do is I research and write about the nature of reality and consciousness. Broadly speaking, that's my thing. I've been in that space since I was a 20-year-old, basically, when I had my little spiritual awakening, and that was the path that took me down. So I've been doing that ever since. I don't really have a so-called normal job. I'm all about the reading, writing, just putting my research and insight into written format and getting it out to the world, so to speak.

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[1:04] A Time of Big Shifts

Alan: Okay, so give us your thoughts on where we're at at the moment. What is your belief on where we are regarding the world and everything else going on with that, and consciousness? Because we're in 2026, there's a lot of talk about changes coming down, energy changes. I'm a spiritual person and I've been involved in that side, and obviously doing loads of interviews with different people who have their own take on what they feel is going on. So where are we with humanity and consciousness, and what's happening?

Brendan: I think that we're going through an interesting period of time that's been identified by a lot of different people, particularly a lot of children in the field of near-death research. A number of these kids who are having NDEs have come back and said things like, "I'm here to help with the changes. I wanted to help with the changes that we're going to be going through." And they gave a time frame of basically what we're living through now, something like 2024 to 2030, that was going to be a time of very big shifts, very big changes.

So I do think that we're seeing that unfold, and it may be that we're in the end of, or a transition between, very large time cycles. People talk about the transition out of the Kali Yuga age, which may be happening, and so that's going to be turbulent. Reportedly, according to the tradition, there's always turbulence in the changeovers between one of those cycles and the next. So I think there's a lot going on. AI is changing everything as well. We're going to see a lot of people being challenged, a lot of upheaval, and a very interesting next few years, I think.

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[2:39] Can Humanity Make the Shift Itself?

Alan: Over the next few years. One of the things that I always say, and I've said it on numerous occasions on the show, having a background in psychology, I have said it time and time again, is that I don't feel mankind is going to be able to solve the problem, because we're too ego-based, we're too greedy, we're too selfish, we're too immature. There's a lot of people with their nose in the trough, and they like the system the way it is, and there's leaders, and we have elites who are controlling the system for their own selfish benefits and everything else. And I always say it's something outside of humanity that will create the shift, or cause the shift, because humanity themselves are like teenagers. They're just not mature enough to make any changes and go forward.

And it's funny that a lot of these guys who are whistleblowers regarding the ETs, and the ETs they talk to and everything else, they actually say the same thing about humanity: that we're just too immature. We fight each other, we have all these wars, and that kind of tells you something. So, given that I have that belief myself, that it's not going to be humanity that solves the problem, what do you feel will be the shift? What do you feel will be the change?

Brendan: Well, when you were talking then, I was reminded of the whole paradigm shift that apparently happened when humanity discovered psychedelics, entheogens and plant medicine. Because what happened was, probably many, many thousands of years ago, people started using these substances and they started receiving guidance from the plants, and the plants were telling them, "Okay, here's what you need to do. Here's this other plant you can use as medicine," and so on. So we had these leaps forward in understanding through nature.

So I think there's something to the idea of this external intervention as well. The question of what the ontological status of these beings is, these ETs and so on, is an open question, which I wouldn't try to settle in a conversation. But I feel like there's something interesting happening there, whether it's coming from the depth of the collective unconscious. That's what a lot of NDEs and contact experiences do suggest to me, and that's a pattern through contact experience going decades back, where people come back with a very similar paradigm shift to the people who have been having near-death experiences, saying things like, "We need to look after the place better. We need to look after ourselves better. The way we've been functioning is unsustainable. We need to really take ourselves up to the next octave."

So I see that happening as a general grassroots phenomenon, with people taking more of an interest in spirituality, and taking more of an interest in plant medicine as well, because a lot of people have very powerful healing experiences and paradigm shifts through that. I'd like to think that we can bootstrap ourselves and keep the process going. But in my opinion anyway, and probably yours, it needs to speed up a little bit. It's going a little bit too slowly.

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[6:03] What Would You Say to an Atheist?

Alan: Oh, totally. I totally agree with you on that. A few years ago, I interviewed a lady called Dr. Diane Corcoran on my old radio show, and she had interviewed over a thousand people that had experienced an NDE. They were all giving, obviously, their versions of what they'd seen, a lot of it quite common. So to somebody who's an atheist, and who's convinced that once they're dead, that's it, what would you say to them, based on your knowledge and experience of NDEs and the research that you've done and people you've spoken to?

Brendan: It's funny. If you look at the research done by Dr. Rick Strassman, who you probably know, he was giving DMT doses in a clinical setting, and a lot of the patients who undertook those trials came back after having a certain dose saying, "Well, you can be an atheist up until this dose here, and then it's game over. That's the end of that. You can't be an atheist. If you have that dose, you're gone."

So I think there's something to that line of thought. The little skin-encapsulated ego is generally pretty good at maintaining its own little worldview and its comfort zone. And I see this with professional skeptics all the time, skeptics of the paranormal. They operate according to a massive bias, massive confirmation bias, so they're just filtering out information that doesn't support their existing belief system.

So for an atheist, or anybody really, the principle is the same. We have a belief, or a believer, inside the mind, and then we have the part of the mind that goes and filters our reality so that it supports the belief. So we have the perceiver and the believer, and they work together to sustain that reality. But near-death experiences and deep mystical experiences and high doses of entheogens break that filter down and turn atheists into mystics.

Alan: Obviously, we're not going to be promoting this on the show, that people should go off and do their DMT or ayahuasca or whatever. That's up to them, all right? But I will say that normally you get people who are skeptics, like, say, a neurosurgeon, who will turn around and go, "Yeah, there's no such thing as NDEs. There's no experience there. It's a chemical imbalance in the brain, and that's all it is, during part of the death process." And that was the general consensus by the neurosurgeons and the medical doctors. But then there was a doctor a few years ago who was a neurosurgeon who believed that kind of idea. He believed that that's the way it was, until he went into a coma for seven days, and he came back and he wrote a book about it, and he said, "Right, actually, I was wrong. There's actually more to what's going on there."

And obviously Dolores Cannon has done regression hypnotherapy with a lot of people as well, and she's come back and said a lot of things about what they've seen. And the other two books that I've read, by, I forget his last name, Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls. Michael Newton. He's taken a scientific approach to it, and he did regression, I believe, as well in the book, and he was speaking to people about the journey in between your previous life and your new life, that superconscious that you tapped into. What's your take on all of that?

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[9:36] Life Between Lives and Hypnotic Regression

Brendan: It's really interesting. And I just wanted to say, you mentioned the neurosurgeon. That's Dr. Eben Alexander, and if you wanted to, we could come back and excavate that, because there's a very interesting comparative study to be done there.

Alan: I think we should talk about that, because there's so many people who are atheists, and that's their belief, and that's fine. But I always say, in one of my books behind me, do you have a fluid belief system? It's all about challenging your belief system. Whatever belief system you have, you should always challenge it, because it's healthy to do that. Some people are locked in the belief system and they won't move, and you never learn if you can't challenge what you believe. So we will get back to that, but go ahead.

Brendan: So you mentioned reincarnation, and life between lives, and the regression stuff. It's interesting because the people who've been trained by the Michael Newton Institute have now done, they estimate, over 55,000 client regression sessions, and Michael himself did 7,000-plus. What's come out of that is an unbelievably homogeneous style of report, which paints a very consistent picture of the life in between lives, the spirit world, if you want to call it that.

It's very difficult to dismiss, especially when you then look at other practitioners who are not Michael Newton Institute practitioners who are producing the exact same kind of data, like, for example, Dr. Joel Whitton. Helen Wambach did similar stuff. Michael Newton gives you almost a half-day session to dig into it and allow the material to come up, whereas she gave people a very short amount of time, in a massive group situation. And basically they produced essentially the same kind of data as the Michael Newton people, who had much more time to allow it.

The consistency is mind-blowing. It's painting a very consistent picture of this spirit world, life between lives, which actually lines up unbelievably well with other traditional reports, from Rudolf Steiner, through to the Theosophist clairvoyant Charles Leadbeater, through to the modern-day out-of-body explorers like Jurgen Ziewe and Robert Monroe. And that's why I've pulled all this stuff together, because the cross-correlations are actually unbelievable, and they can't be explained by a materialist paradigm. It can't be explained by, "Oh, well, it's a coincidence that people just keep having the same..." I think there's actually something much deeper going on there.

It's an open question to me how much of it is really mental interference or overlay, but there's a consistent structural foundation that can't be dismissed if you are actually willing to look at it rationally. There's something very interesting going on.

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[12:27] Are We Living in a Computer Program?

Alan: Yeah, no, totally. And trying to educate people... Again, the atheists have their choices and they've made their decisions on that. Ricky Gervais is one guy I watched. I watched his show, and he talks about Noah and the Ark and everything else. And that's all great, and it's entertainment and it's humour, but he's missing the point, really. I think he's trying to really have a go at the Bible, rather than actually the whole idea of NDEs and life after death. And I'm sure he'll find out eventually.

And it was interesting that, again, some people I've talked to and interviewed on the show say we're actually in this construct of a computer program, and the idea is that when you die, you actually leave that construct. It's like the movie Avatar, where your man was actually in the machine and you could get in. So what's your take on that, the whole idea that we're in this advanced computer program, and it's predefined, predetermined, and when life is finished, we actually go off somewhere else? The energy, obviously, again, we talk about energy: you can't create it and you can't kill it, it just changes form. So what do you think happens?

Brendan: I think that idea is coming from the right place. It's moving in the right direction. I don't agree with people who think we're literally inside a computer or some kind of technological device. And what you'll find with those people who advocate that type of thing is that, generally speaking, they are operating more from a siloed academic perspective. They're not people who've had high-level NDEs, for example, or they're not coming from a contemplative tradition where they've gone deep in meditation and had these massive epiphanies. So they're trying, with just the lower concrete mind, to find a way forward that makes sense based on the evidence. They're aiming in the right direction. It's just more weird than that. Reality is more subtle and more strange, and I think much more inexplicable than that. We are participating in something that we may never really fully understand at any level.

But it's consciousness that creates what we think of as reality, and it's just like dreaming a dream. When you're in a dream, it's all realistic, and everything seems tangible and so convincing, and even more so when you are lucid. And it's the same principle. That is a created world that you have simply, instantaneously, created out of nothing. It's just a mental construct.

My basic thesis is that what we call physical reality is essentially the same thing. It's just part of a tiered stack of reality, structured in a way that we can move up and down the structure vertically through altered states of consciousness. And that's where we start to realise, as we go up it and we get out of the ordinary concrete mind, or what they call manas, or lower manas, esoterically, we get into the higher levels, which are where we find the direct gnosis, the noetic understanding of things, which goes beyond the levels of the constructs of the mind. And that's where we're like, "Oh, okay, well, this is just consciousness dreaming a dream." There's nothing technological about it. But as far as metaphors and analogies go, I find the computing and information technology analogies and metaphors really, really useful. I use them a lot in the book.

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[16:00] Ascension, the Rapture and 5D Prophecies

Alan: Okay. And in the kind of Christian faith, obviously, they talk about the rapture, and that's supposed to happen. It's supposed to happen in September, actually. It's supposed to happen every September, and it never does. There are so many stories of people selling stuff and finding out that, oh, it didn't happen. As I say, that's in the Christian faith, but it's still a belief that people have, that they're going to be raptured and they'll go up. On the other side of it, I mentioned Dolores Cannon earlier: the whole idea of the ascension, the 3D and the 5D, and what's going to happen with that, and energies. So where does that fit into the whole NDE thing? Do you feel we won't experience anything until we actually physically die, or do you feel there's a possibility that there will be a shift down the line where our physical bodies will experience a change or shift?

Brendan: I don't see anything indicated in what we could think of as the near future for any kind of experience along those lines. And I think a lot of that material comes from the myth-making machinery of the collective consciousness, which is always coming up with a new story, a new prophecy: "This thing's about to happen any minute now. We're going to ascend. We're going to have the rapture. Oh, it didn't happen again. Don't worry, we'll reschedule it, we'll postpone it, we'll do it again."

There's always this part of the human psyche that's reaching towards the divine, the heavens, this kind of thing. And it's also driven by how uncomfortable Earth life really is, I think. A lot of the time, people just find it so hard. They're like, "Man, I can't wait to get out of here. This is too much." And all that feeds into this myth-making machinery, which is the collective consciousness groping for some kind of a model and answer: what's going on, where are we going, what's it all about?

But a lot of that kind of material is coming from people who are sitting in channelling, that kind of thing, and a lot of that stuff can be interesting and a lot of it can be complete nonsense. It just depends on the source and the situation. So, personally, I've looked at that a lot and I don't lend it a lot of weight, as far as "We're going to ascend" or "We're going to go 5D." We are probably going to continue more or less a very similar type of experiential arc here. We will still essentially experience being physical, I think, for a very long time to come, but it may be that the experience of that changes very subtly and starts to change very gradually. So I encourage people to stay very grounded when it comes to predictions that sound too good to be true.

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[18:48] What Was Your Trigger?

Alan: Yeah, no, I think we're all wishing it, because obviously at the moment everybody's not happy, and a lot of people are saying, "I don't want to be here." And plus, you said earlier on that the window of opportunity was between 2024 and 2030, and there are a number of people who also are backing that up and saying that something's going to shift or change. And we're apparently going into the Age of Aquarius anyway; we're supposed to see a thousand years of peace. And I suppose what we're seeing on a physical level, in the 3D world, is a lot of stuff being exposed by what's going on. I think that's very important, and more and more people are beginning to wake up and realise there's something wrong, and they're questioning that, which is great.

So what I'd ask you is, what was your trigger? Because there's always a trigger for people. When I ask people what their trigger was, there's always a job loss, a medical issue, somebody dying. There's always something. So what was your trigger for you to step outside the matrix and start questioning what was going on?

Brendan: It's funny. I've been getting this question a lot, and I've realised there's a pattern that happens: people usually don't understand my origin story, how my trigger happened or what it was. Because, as you would know, a lot of people come into this world because they have a massive trauma, or they have a near-death experience, or their life falls to pieces, and they try to find a sense of meaning in something, or they find Jesus or whatever. That wasn't the case with me, and people are kind of incredulous when I tell my origin story.

Essentially, as a 19-year-old, maybe 19 and a half-ish, I had a younger brother three years younger than me who was still in high school at the time, and he came home from school one day and said, "We had this guy come in to give a talk today. He was a young entrepreneur. He was supposed to be talking about business, but he kept wandering off topic and talking about this book he'd read, which was about the nature of reality, and it blew his mind. He kept going off topic to this book, and I thought you might want to know about it, because it was about all that sort of stuff."

Up until that point in time, I hadn't been actively interested in any of this. I'd been interested in the paranormal in a passing-curiosity kind of way. I'd watched the TV shows about the paranormal and the unexplained, and The X-Files, and all those things, so I had that natural gravitation to it. But I heard his suggestion, and I sat on it for about six months. And when I finally went to read this book about the nature of reality, which was based in science as well as working with the paranormal and the realm of consciousness, it just blew my mind so completely that I never looked back. It changed my paradigm so much that for me to then operate in the normal world, and just go get a job and work the nine-to-five and get married and have kids and all of it, the normal pathway was no longer an option for me.

Shortly after reading that book, I think my mind was so open that I actually had my first mystical experience. I was just lying in bed one night, waiting to go to sleep, and it was like someone flicked a switch, and suddenly I was just infinite consciousness. And it seemed completely normal and natural at the time as well. It was just the most normal thing in the world. So that anchored the conceptual side that the book had given me. I started to meditate, and I started having more of these deep experiences, and that just locked me into the path that I've been on for the last 23 years.

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[22:31] Spiritual Awakening and the Conspiracy Side

Alan: Okay. And have you gone down the New World Order route and the elite route? Have you looked at that side of it at all?

Brendan: Yeah, quite a bit.

Alan: Okay, well, that's good. The reason why I ask you that is because I find, on the path that we are on, part of the awakening process will be: we're in the matrix, we become aware of the whole idea of the New World Order, the elite and all that kind of stuff, and then we become self-aware of who we are in the whole cosmos and the universe and everything else. But what I have come across is that there are people who step outside the matrix and they become self-aware, and they miss the whole idea of being aware. They don't understand their job, or their role down here as a lightworker. They know it's all nice being a lightworker, and the energies and stuff, but they've no concept of the New World Order. If anything, they would say to me, "Oh, you're a conspiracy theorist," and they're the ones who are speaking to spirits. So I turn around and say, "Well, I have factual evidence regarding COVID, and here's all the evidence to say that it was... Now, can you tell me who you're speaking to?" This is the thing. They get so tied up in what they're doing that they're pushing away factual evidence. Now, I'm a spiritual guy and I've been involved in the spiritual side, so I understand it, but from an argumentative point of view, or a debate point of view, I will debate them just to see how much they know.

Brendan: Yeah, no, I see the phenomenon you're talking about, and I've seen a lot of it, where you have somebody who wakes up to the spiritual side of things, at least to some degree, and they start having a real interest in that and they go do the things. And then they just completely drop the ball across all these other subjects. They have no idea about health, medicine. They have no idea about how geopolitics works. They have no idea about the conspiracies. The power-structure side of it completely eludes a lot of people.

And I've noticed also there's another pattern, which I think is pretty common: people like me, for example, have the spiritual awakening first, which then grounds them in something larger, something much bigger, and then it's easier to tackle the conspiracy side, the earthly, earthbound side of it. For me, that was definitely the case, because coming into that side of things is pretty unpleasant. If you've never looked at it before and then suddenly you get smacked in the face by it, it's a lot to take in. So it helps to have that spiritual grounding. But like you said, a lot of people just never make it there. And I guess most people are just in a state of hypnosis. Even the ones who think that they're spiritually aware are in a state of hypnosis where they're so fixated on what's in front of them that they don't have the bandwidth or the capacity to tackle anything else, or let anything else in.

Alan: Yeah, totally. It's a strange thing. My concern is a lot of these people who are on the spiritual side obviously went off and got jabbed.

Brendan: Yeah, right.

Alan: And I'm thinking, well, that's the part they're missing: understanding what's going on, the whole being aware of what's going on. They've jumped over that and gone into self-aware, and that's worrying. For me, when I had my awakening and my download and everything else, I thought, "Okay, well, that's it. We're stuffed. We can't do anything about this." That's when the spiritual side came in for me. I learned about the spiritual side, and I went, "Ah, I see. Okay, so there is a way around this." And then I got involved in the spiritual side. So that was the negative, and then the positive came in with the spiritual side, so it was a good complement when it happened. And maybe a lot of people are like that. I don't know; that's just my side of the way I see it. But I'm just hoping that something down the line is going to change or shift, because I think people need to know there's something more than just the 3D world here.

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[26:51] Common Threads in NDEs

Alan: We talked about NDEs. Have you interviewed or spoken to people who've had an NDE, and what were their experiences? Have you noticed quite a similarity between people across the board?

Brendan: I've seen a lot of different experiences at this point, and there are definitely a lot of commonalities, for sure, a lot of themes. I would say that most NDEs situate the experience in what the occultists would call the astral planes or the mental planes. But a lot of the experiences will also, as I talked about with this vertical structuring of altered states, go through several different layers of what I call my multi-layer reality stack. I've got this different tiered structure, different names and labels. Essentially, I've built a taxonomy of different states of consciousness that relate to the afterlife.

So a lot of people will be in the astral planes or mental planes. They may breach into the causal, or make contact with something even larger than that. And some people report what we could only call source contact: they go to the void, or the full void, or they go into the light, this bright light. So there's all these subtle variations, but there are threads running through a lot of them.

And it's funny: a lot of people, when they've hit the astral or mental planes, get this amazing sense of "Oh, I'm home. I'm home again." They remember, "I've been here before," just like Joel Whitton's people in hypnotic regression have the same experience: "I've been here before." Rick Strassman's people, up on DMT: "I've been here before. I died here, I've been through this process." So I found that interesting. A lot of people think, "I'm home," because here they are in this beautiful, light-filled realm. It's also pretty and lovely. But actually, that's just the low levels, an entry level. There's much more on the spectrum that's available to people. I don't know if that's answering your question. It's kind of a broad one.

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[28:47] Going to the Light and the Soul Trap Idea

Alan: Yeah, no. Well, personally, I've been on the astral twice, but I've had two bad experiences being on the astral, and it was just one of those things. I don't know why that was the case and why it happened, but it did, and I learned from it. So I suppose I'm lucky to be able to say I've been there.

The other thing is, a lot of people talk about going towards the light. The whole typical... what was the movie, Ghost, where he goes towards the light? And on the spiritual side, we're all told that when you do spiritual rescue, bring them to the light, bring them to the light. But there's a counter-argument to that saying no, don't bring them to the light, because that's an archonic recycling machine, and the archons will actually tell you to go to the light, and you'll be recycled and chucked out again, and that's part of the process.

Now, there's a book that I read, and it's entitled something like An Interview with an Alien, and it has to do with Roswell 1947, where one of the ETs, called J-Rod, survived, and there was an Irish nurse who was there, and she was able to communicate with him. She was one of the few that could communicate with him, and this book is a kind of transcript of what happened and what took place. And he, in that book, talks about this archonic recycling, and "Don't go to the light." And there's a few spiritual people who I've interviewed who've also said, "No, when you pass over and the light's there, what you say is, 'I want to go home.' You look at the universe and say, 'I want to go home. I don't want to go into the light.'" So we won't know until we get there, but is that something that you've come across?

Brendan: This is part of the soul trap mythology that's been built up over the last few decades, and there's a lot there. I've actually spent a lot of chapter nine digging into that in depth, because there's a lot to unpack in it. In that world, people who are pushing this idea that we're in a reincarnation trap and we're going to be recycled aren't talking about the nuances of the nature of those types of experiences, in the astral planes, for example.

We've been warned across the last couple of centuries by occultists and clairvoyants who are very knowledgeable, very serious about their craft, through multiple traditions, like the Golden Dawn society, Helena Blavatsky, a number of other people, Rudolf Steiner, who've all said that when you're in what they call the astral light, you are in a realm that is very heavily saturated with illusion and the possibility for self-deception. And if people go into that without preparation, a lot of preparation, they're going to be prone to these illusions and these unconscious self-deceptions.

And I remember the J-Rod thing; I came across that years ago, so I know what you're talking about. But this issue: they don't talk about these little details, about the fact that when you are out of body, or your body is offline, you are in a consciousness-rendered environment. So the contents of people's minds tend to get projected externally as the environment. And they don't realise that that's what's happening, first of all. So they take whatever they see and experience, maybe a being of light, something they interpret as an archon or something they interpret as Jesus or whatever, and they take it literally, at face value, instead of going, "Well, this is probably actually a projection of my own unconscious," which is one of the Tibetan teachings going back many, many centuries.

When they're walking people through the dying process, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, they're giving them a protocol to stabilise their consciousness and to help them avoid being distracted by appearances, the emergence of the wrathful deities, the peaceful deities, and whatever else. These days we have a lot more than wrathful and peaceful deities. We have aliens and archons and all sorts. It's a whole zoo. We've built this zoo in the collective unconscious operating system, and very few people are discussing the problem with taking that at face value and literally. And this mythology has been getting more and more convoluted and more detailed as it's gone along.

But people need to realise there's nothing in between you and what you call home, or source. There's nothing in between. This idea that you go anywhere is an illusion as well. If you turn your attention internally, you're there. Atman is Brahman; the Brahman field is everywhere. The source field is everywhere, whatever you want to call it. There's nowhere that it is not. There's no way that you are separate from it. And I think a lot of this soul trap stuff is actually just, again, the lower mind projecting meaning into an information field, a consciousness field, and trying to make it make sense in a way that makes sense based on the person's knowledge level and experience level. And unfortunately, a lot of it is just illusion, but we're not seemingly having that conversation.

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[34:02] Dying Prepared

Alan: Yeah. I suppose for people who are not familiar with any of this, and they're in the matrix and they just have a certain belief, and then they pass over, it's going to be probably more scary for them, whereas for myself and yourself, if we pass over and we have our consciousness, we can go, "Okay, now we've just passed over." Because obviously, depending on what the death is, chances are, if it's quite quick and sudden, then we don't realise it. But if it's something where we know that we're on our way out, at least we can start prepping our mind and get ready for that.

I've been in spiritual circles where we've had people come in, and one chap came in, his name was Andrew, and we said, "How can we help you?" He said, "Am I dead?" Because the accident he had was so quick that he didn't realise he was dead. And there's a lot of incidents like that, with spirits coming back and saying, "I didn't know I was dead," or it was a quick accident or whatever it was.

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[35:02] Eben Alexander's NDE

Alan: Now, as we're talking about this, and we talked about atheism and people not believing, and we talked about the neurosurgeon, tell us what your thoughts are on that.

Brendan: Okay, so, Eben Alexander's NDE. I think his book was published in 2008, so it happened not long ago.

Alan: I have read it, but it was a while ago.

Brendan: Yeah, I got the impression you'd read it already. So he has this infection in his neocortex, basically a meningitis-type situation, where his neocortex is being eaten away. It's virtually dissolving. And he's in a coma for a week, as you said. And while his neocortex, that conscious-level part of the brain, is offline, he's having this amazing multi-tiered NDE, which goes on for a week.

Alan: Okay, hang on a minute. Before we... for people who don't know about him, or people who are new to this, let's just rewind a little bit. Right, folks, to explain what the situation is: there's this guy who's a neurosurgeon, and he had the same belief as everybody else, that when you die, it's just a chemical imbalance in your brain, and that's why you experience an NDE and all that kind of stuff. They bring you back and you say you saw it, and they go, "Oh, it's just a chemical imbalance." But this neurosurgeon actually had a situation in his own life where he ended up being out for a week, I say seven days, a week, and he experienced what he thought was a chemical imbalance, but he wrote the book and said it's actually not. Sorry, Brendan, for jumping in there, just to clarify for people who don't know anything about this.

Brendan: No, you're right. That's exactly right. Everything you said is correct, basically. So he had that background, and he had no interest in the occult, paranormal, consciousness, whatever. He was just like, "When you're dead, you're dead. That's it." And he thought it was all just silly woo-woo fluff. That was his attitude.

What has blown me away most about his experience was not actually his experience. It was an amazing one, and it was quite unique in the sense that he was one of the very few very deep NDEs whose conscious earthly identity actually was not present throughout the experience, which is an anomaly in the corpus of NDE literature, because typically people are very lucidly aware of who they are while it's happening. So that was one very unusual thing about it.

So while his brain's effectively brain-dead and offline, he's having this amazing, deep, multi-tiered experience, going through different layers of the consciousness architecture. He starts out in the realm of the earthworm's-eye view, I think is what he called it. It's all murky, and he's disoriented, and there's faces bubbling out of the murk around him, and it all seems hostile and unpleasant. He hears sounds, and he's not enjoying it a whole lot. So he's in the early stages of the Kamaloka experience, but he's got what the out-of-body researcher Robert Crookall would call Hades conditions. At that point in time, you're still entangled with the physical-etheric level of the system, and the etheric body creates a disorienting, muddying effect. It's like looking through stained glass instead of a clear window, and so you get this distortion and these weird psychedelic effects, and you don't quite know what's going on. So in these Hades conditions, people are very confused.

At some point he manages to extricate himself from this muck of the earthworm's-eye-view realm, and he starts to ascend, and he has these other layers where he accesses what the spiritualists would call the Summerland. So he finds himself flying through the air in a very pleasant realm, countryside below him, people in villages, kids outside playing with the dogs, all very pleasant. The atmosphere is absolutely beautiful and luminous and amazing. And again, all this has been mapped by people like Robert Monroe and the spiritualists and the Theosophists and so on. So he's just confirming this layer of the architecture that's already been mapped by multiple sources. And then there's a guide who appears, a female who appears by his side and reassures him that everything's okay.

And then they go deeper, and I'm getting a little vague here, because there's something he calls the Spinning Melody, and feel free to jump in if I miss details, Alan. The Spinning Melody is this gateway to another, higher level. I'm just not sure exactly which comes first, but he goes from the Summerland level, maybe through the Spinning Melody, into the next realm. Possibly I've got that order backwards. But he goes to this new realm, which is seemingly based in sound. He's looking up into the sky, and it's all beautiful and transcendent, but it's different. It's not the Summerland anymore. He's looking up, and there's these beings floating around and emitting these amazing, joyous, melodious sounds, just pure joy coursing through them, and he's in awe of them. He's trying to figure out what they are, and he can't quite grasp it. They're kind of angelic, but that's not right. There's something beyond angelic, and he doesn't know what the word is. But it's a sonic realm, and these beings are defined by the emission of sound into the environment. Unlike him, absorbing sound or receiving it, their whole mode of being is emitting and pushing sound out in this melodious, amazing, joyous sort of song.

And then from there he ends up going into the void, which is this beautiful dark void, a full void, a plenum, like the source, his experience of the source, which is very pleasant and amazing.

Later, after the experience, he realises who the girl on the butterfly wing was, who was acting as his psychopomp. After he's fully recovered and out of hospital, he's going through a family photo album, and he finds this old photo he hasn't seen before, and he goes, "Oh, who's this girl? Oh my God, that's the girl from the butterfly wing in the NDE." It's his sister, who he didn't even know anything about. So he's now having this validation. This is like a Peak in Darien kind of case, where he doesn't even know. And correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not 100% on this, but he didn't know that he had a sister in the first place.

Alan: Vaguely. It's been a good few years since I read the book, so you probably remember more than I do. But yeah, that sounds about right.

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[42:03] Eben Alexander and Steiner's Lower Devachan

Brendan: Yeah, and I think that was what made it so powerful, but that's actually not an unusual thing either. There's a lot of those cases in the literature where people experience someone they've never known existed. So he has that validation: "Oh my God, that was the girl from the butterfly wing."

Overall, his NDE goes down as one of the most extensive, deep NDEs in the modern record. But what really blew me away about it was when I compared what he was saying with what the seer Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, was saying, because Steiner would explore the non-physical realms through clairvoyance. He would go into his meditation and experience these other realms, and he mapped them out. He was a Rosicrucian initiate as well, which means he had a degree of training and skill and whatnot.

So in particular, with this realm where Eben Alexander is talking about these aerial beings emitting sound, and it's amazing, and he can't figure out what class of being it is or what to call it: Steiner had already mapped all that out. It was his lower Devachan, and it was exactly as Eben Alexander described. You can find this in a 1904 talk by Steiner, where he talks about lower Devachan, what it is and what typifies it. The attributes of lower Devachan are that it's very sound-based. It's sonic. The beings in lower Devachan emit sound. They're not absorbing sound; they're pushing sound out. So their sensory mode is exactly what Alexander was experiencing 100 years later, in 2008 or what have you, 2007-ish.

And Steiner was very explicit that these beings up in the air, flying around, emitting these beautiful melodies, are not angels. They're archangels. And he was saying that by the time Steiner was around, we'd already lost the term "archangels" and what it really meant and what it was about. So he mapped out this Devachan layer of the architecture, which is exactly what Eben Alexander was trying to capture and describe, and which awed him so much. And when I saw that, the report of an atheist 100 years later describing exactly the same thing Steiner was describing as a clairvoyant mystic, I mean, what else is there to say?

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[44:24] Hellish NDEs and Consciousness-Rendered Environments

Alan: I think Diane Corcoran said that during the interview, about the number of atheists that had an NDE and came back all spiritual, because they realised there was something more. What about people who end up in the fires of hell, let's call it that? They go over and they have an experience. Because I've read a number of instances where someone had an NDE and they'd be in hell. Maybe they did something in their life. Maybe that's wrong, the whole "if you're a bad person, you're going to hell; if you're a good person..." It's a bit cliché, isn't it? But this guy ended up in what he called hell, and he said the only way he could get out of there was... because he wasn't spiritual or anything, he just died and that was it, and he said he started using the words "Jesus, help me. Jesus, help me." And with that, things started happening in a positive way, and he was taken away from that realm. Where does that fit into the whole NDE structure and what you've come across?

Brendan: It's not uncommon. Atheists tend to be a little more predisposed to that type of experience, or also Catholics. Guilt-soaked Catholics have a lot of the hellfire-type stuff going on. So, in my terminology, my CTM, I'm talking about these states as being an interface environment. It's a low-level situation where someone's just come out of the bodily orientation. They're now a discarnate intelligence in the consciousness field. And as I said before, consciousness renders its environment based on its own contents, mostly the unconscious contents of somebody's mind, which means what their belief system is, what their knowledge level is, what they've experienced in life. And all of that feeds into what they create as their external environment.

So the hellfire thing is actually kind of common. There was a case I mentioned in my book, a woman who was Catholic at the time, and she was badly burned in an accident, I think in a hairdressing salon, and that put her into an NDE. And the first thing she notices in the NDE state is that she is surrounded by flames. So, first of all, her environment physically was that she was on fire. But secondly, she also had the Catholic hellfire indoctrination in her subconscious as well. And she's going, "Oh, well, this looks like hell. This is a hellish environment." But as she stabilises herself a bit, she realises she can calm the flames in this environment using her mind, and so that's what happens. She settles it down. So this again comes back to this consciousness-rendered environment. We don't want to take it as being something that's externally imposed. It's a construct.

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[47:15] Who Defines the Construct?

Alan: Yeah, yeah, but who defines the construct when you go over? Oh, we could say we define the construct, but that's a bit too easy of an answer. Is it a case that, if you know you're going to die, you start building your construct for when you go over? So when you die, you go, "Right, I want to be in Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion when I go over. That's going to be my construct." Or where am I going to be? So when does that come in, to build your construct? Who defines that?

Brendan: Initially, in these early interface environments, what I'm saying is that the individual psyche is more important at that point. And where you're talking about somebody saying "Jesus, help me, Jesus, help me," that's where the consciousness is reaching out of that bounded sandbox environment, and that's where you start getting people in the spirit realm, or even humans who are out of body, who are helpers, hearing the call, so to speak, and going, "Oh, here's somebody who needs some assistance," and so they dive in. If they feel they need to, they will disguise themselves as Jesus or some other religious icon, based on the individual's belief system, just so that they're more comfortable and not freaked out.

But as we go past these initial transitional stages, we get into the more collective environments, where the environment is not entirely individually created. I've touched on a very powerful case, where we talked about Steiner's lower Devachan. Steiner didn't build lower Devachan. He discovered it. It's something that seems to be in the collective unconscious architecture, and then Eben Alexander comes along a century later and discovers it independently. So there's these layers as well that are not sustained by any one person's mind.

But then, as you're going deeper into the afterlife, you start to stabilise. What most religious people do is end up in what Robert Monroe mapped as belief system territory. There's endless numbers of these. They're all in the same kind of bandwidth of consciousness, the same kind of frequency level, and he mapped it as focus levels 24 through 26. This is where the BSTs, the belief system territories, are. I like to call them BS territories. So these are collective environments where people go right into their little niche of belief. A Southern Baptist will go into a Southern Baptist belief colony, and they'll give each other a pat on the back and say, "Hey, welcome aboard, you made it. We're here in heaven. Isn't this great?" And they'll stay there for as long as their belief system can be sustained in that little bubble. That's just what people do at that level, and that's even just at shallow levels. We're not even getting into the depths.

Alan: Yeah, exactly. But that's quite interesting. By the way, folks, I wouldn't be putting the construct together for Hugh Hefner's mansion. I'm saying that for a bit of fun, just in case people think, "Oh, you have this..."

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[50:17] Preparing for Death and the Holodeck

Alan: Yeah, okay. But when I was in my spiritual circle and we were doing spiritual rescue, we would get spirits that wanted to move on, but they were grounded spirits. They'd obviously died, and for whatever reason they didn't go and do the complete journey, and they felt that they wanted to go over now. So we would do the spiritual rescue and we would move them over to the light. That's what we did. So are you saying that what we should be doing is thinking now, we should have a construct in mind, so it's already in our mind, so if anything happens to us and we do end up passing over, that construct will actually kick in? Is that what you're saying?

Brendan: Well, I would say you would want to be prepared, as the Tibetans liked to be, which was the point of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The death rites that they would read people were to help them transition in an intentional, conscious way. So I would say to people, you don't even necessarily have to have a construct. You can absolutely go for it if you've got something in mind that you think you would enjoy. If you have the mindset of, "Well, I'd rather just go home. I'd rather just reconnect with the infinite, reconnect with whatever my version of the ultimate is," if you've got that in mind, that's great. For me, it's not necessarily that I would encourage someone to have this thing or that thing in preparation, because it's really a matter of preference, right? It's a matter of personal taste and preference. What do you want to experience? What do you want to experience in the field of infinity? What would you like to have next?

Alan: This is like a holodeck thing. You're programming the holodeck, and what you're saying is, what do you want in your holodeck?

Brendan: Exactly. I use the holodeck as an analogy in the book because of that, because it's exactly what you just said, Alan. When you have no body left, it's like you're immediately in the holodeck: "Okay, what do you want to experience?" And so the more important thing to me is not what you're aiming at. I know I've got a massive amount of material around what's possible, but I'm also trying to help people understand: let's strip away the things that are illusory and unhelpful, and the fear-based stuff, the paranoia, the conspiracy angles that are going to keep you spinning your wheels even after you've dropped the body, because now you're scared and don't know what's what. Let's get rid of all the nonsense, the astral fantasia stuff, as I call it, that layer of the collective consciousness. And once we're clear of the distortion and the fear, well, you have carte blanche, or virtually carte blanche, of infinite possibilities. Where do you want to go from here? What's your holodeck going to be looking like?

Alan: And this is why the fluid belief system, the book I've written, is about having a fluid belief system: because you don't get stuck in the dogma and the constructs of whatever belief system you're in, like the Catholic religion, with fire and brimstone and all that kind of stuff, and "You've sinned and you have to repent" and all that kind of stuff. If you have a fluid belief system, I feel that people can then build their holodeck as whatever they want it to be, for the construct of going over. I assume you've obviously thought about this yourself?

Brendan: Oh, yeah.

Alan: Okay, I won't ask. I won't probe.

Brendan: I don't mind.

Alan: I'm just thinking there, what would I do? And I go, okay: Tico Torres, the drummer with Bon Jovi, gets sick, and Jon Bon Jovi asks me to step up and play the kit for a concert that they're doing. That'll do me. That's going to be my holodeck.

Brendan: There you go.

Alan: This is the thing. There's no right or wrong here. There's no religion in there. It's just pure music and fun. That's what it's all about.

Brendan: Right, exactly. Well, maybe I'll hang out in your holodeck, because that sounds good. I'm a musician, so let's hang out there for a bit.

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[54:31] Wrapping Up

Alan: Brilliant, brilliant stuff. Well, Brendan, we've reached that time. A big thank you for coming on to the show. I really enjoyed the chat. I actually like these kinds of chats, which go outside the boundaries of the 3D, and people's real-life experiences of what they've come across and seen, and their life-changing moments.

And I am kind of very sad about Ricky Gervais, as I said. He's an atheist, right? But because I talk about the fluid belief system: Ricky Gervais is basing his opinion on his own knowledge, and his probable lack of experience in the spiritual side. If he actually went in and did the studying and saw the facts and actually experienced it himself, I reckon he'd have a change of heart, a change of attitude. But that suits him. He's pushed that for years, that "I'm an atheist," so for him to change his mind, I don't think he'd do that, because he's bought into that for years, and it's something major.

Brendan: And it's given him so much great material for his shows.

Alan: Exactly, exactly. So the investment in something like that, especially for somebody who's invested in a certain subject, it's very hard for them to get... Again, they're stuck in that kind of belief system, and it's very hard to get them away from it, unless something pushes them outside the comfort zone, and then they have no choice. Well, that's the whole thing about life, isn't it? We're here to experience and keep on learning until we move over. But a big thank you, Brendan, for coming on. Before I let you go, give out all your details, where people can find you. I know you mentioned you had a book there. Tell us all about that.

Brendan: Yeah, thanks, Alan. I appreciate it. People can find the book, if they want to check it out or put an order in, at brendandmurphy.com. Maybe in the show notes we can put the full direct link. One of the ways people can work with me a little more closely is through my Evolve Yourself program. They can check that out at evolveyourself.live, or via my main website as well, and all the info is there. There's a free masterclass as well. Those are the two places I direct people if they want to see extra book samples or extra writing. I do have a blog on the website as well, so they can check that out. And that's the main stuff I point people to.

Alan: Brilliant stuff. Brendan, thanks for coming on. Much appreciated. Take care.

Brendan: Thanks, Alan. Cheers.