Dawn of Discernment
Reverse Engineering the Afterlife
Brendan's first interview dedicated entirely to Book 2 — covering the Consciousness Transition Model, what happens to consciousness at death, and the cross-tradition research behind Reverse Engineering the Afterlife.
[0:00] Introduction
Dawn: Hi, and welcome to another episode of Dawn of Discernment. Today my guest is my friend Brendan Murphy, who I connected with pretty early on in the 2020 nonsense, because we were both talking about that for a while. For anyone not familiar, Brendan D. Murphy researches consciousness, post-mortem models, non-physical perception, and the origins of modern metaphysical narratives. As the creator of the Consciousness Transition Model, his work synthesizes contemporary data with classical esoteric frameworks, most notably in Reverse Engineering the Afterlife — Book Two of the Grand Illusion series — a cutting-edge study of the afterlife system and the rules of non-physical perception, which is coming very soon and will be the focus of our conversation today.
Thank you very much for joining me. I have read some extracts that were sent to me, and you're in for a treat. Whether people have read The Grand Illusion — Book One — or not, it's amazing, and I'll be honest and say I haven't quite finished it yet. I'm a bit of a butterfly with books. I dip in and out of them. But it's thanks to you that I've dived into some of the original works you've referenced, because it's fascinating to see what those writers came up with. Anyway, in those extracts there are a couple of quotes that I think are going to be central to what we discuss. One is: consciousness is the fundamental ground of reality. The second: reality is consciousness interpreting information and generating meaning. And the third, which is probably closest to our main topic: death is just consciousness exiting the physical-etheric tuning system.
As I was saying just before we started, I came across the Seth material back in 2002. I know it's channeled material and we can discuss that if you want, but one of the things that was so powerful for me was the phrase "you're as dead now as you're ever going to be." There was something in that that just spoke volumes. So getting into NDEs and those kinds of experiences has been fascinating. Before we dive in, I'm curious — have you envisioned how many books you think will actually be in the series? You alluded to Book Three at the end of Book Two.
Brendan: I've had to cull a massive amount of material out of Book Two, so Book Three is already underway. I've been thinking for a while that this will be a trilogy — the Grand Illusion trilogy — and maybe after that I do something in a slightly different vein. But yes, there's definitely going to be three, and the material leads into Book Three very naturally. I've had to cut a lot that will actually fit into that third volume.
Dawn: Well, there was quite a gap between Book One and Book Two, and you obviously spent a lot of time researching. I know you draw on forty different sources, and from what I've read you are extremely thorough in the depth and breadth of your research. No wonder these books take you a long time. So — Book Two is called Reverse Engineering the Afterlife?
Brendan: At the moment it is. It might change, but I kind of like it.
[5:30] The Core of Book Two and the Consciousness Transition Model
Dawn: Can you tell us about the core essence of Book Two — what led you to concentrate on that aspect?
Brendan: That's a great question, and to answer it I have to go back to the start of my writing timeline. When I started writing I was twenty-four, and I didn't have a clear idea of what exactly I was trying to produce. I went for nearly six years before I produced Book One. I wasn't clear until maybe three or four years in that okay, this is going to be Book One, all the other material goes to the side. By the time it was finished and ready, I had probably seven or eight volumes of material I'd generated — no, not using you, not using you. Book Two was a huge chunk of that material that didn't make it into Book One. I already had the bones of probably two hundred thousand words sitting there, very much leaning in the direction of post-mortem existence and afterlife themes. As I kept working on it I realized I was able to have insights that weren't out there, weren't published, and as I pulled on the threads more I thought: I'm onto something here, I need to drill down further. Even now, in the back end of the editing process, certain things are still crystallizing. I'm still having insights around certain things.
Dawn: The content is quite different from Book One, which is the synthesis of science and spirit. This one is focused on NDEs and the afterlife — questions we all ask: who are we, why are we here, what happens. You introduce the concept of the Consciousness Transition Model. Can you tell us more about what it is and why the field needs it?
Brendan: The premise is that the fundamental nature of reality is consciousness. That's the starting point, the ground. It's meaningless to speak about existence without positing consciousness as the baseline and foundation. Within that view, my position is that the only thing that exists — at least as far as we're concerned — is consciousness moving through, or transitioning through, different states, different experiences, and different operational contexts. That's the essence of the CTM. That's all that's really happening. There's this continuing, ongoing cycling through different states of awareness, different modes of being, and I don't see that there's actually an end point to that either. It's very fluid.
Dawn: Yes, and that's where our language gets in the way — people want beginnings and endings, and wrapping our heads around just the now can be difficult. So consciousness is always transitioning. That's your basic premise.
Brendan: That's it.
Dawn: And that naturally leads into a discussion of the afterlife, of different operational contexts for consciousness post-mortem, and what shifts we go through. So you have an architecture — and I suppose in some respects people are already aware of some of those ideas, but you've taken it further. You're trying to flesh out what the rules behind the transitions actually are, what it looks like on the other side, what constraints govern the experience of shifting from one state of consciousness into the next. So rather than looking at belief systems in terms of whether they feel comfortable, you're looking at the underlying structure and mechanics that bring those belief systems into being in the first place.
Some people might say, well, how can you know — you're not dead. But OBEs give people a glimpse while they're still alive, and there are plenty of people who have had such experiences and reported them. Do you think more people have these experiences than actually report them?
Brendan: Probably. I didn't report any of my experiences to anybody.
[12:00] Brendan's Own Experiences — OBE and Parallel Reality
Dawn: Would you like to share one? The first one, or the one that gave you some insights?
Brendan: As far as OBEs go, it was never really my main focus. My journey started with The Holographic Universe, and that actually triggered what some people would call a mystical experience or peak state — essentially an experience of infinite consciousness. That became my operational context, and it was never really my priority to go having out-of-body experiences as such. I did have one very brief, spontaneous one in Melbourne at a friend's place. I just separated, bounced off each wall in the room, and went straight back into my body. Very quick, almost like: oh, I was just curious, wanted to try that out, and now I'm done.
The more interesting experience I mention in Chapter Two is not what I would class as an OBE but more of a spontaneous parallel reality experience — an alternate version of my earth life. I was living in the Byron Bay region with Amy. I had to have a blood sample taken, and for some reason healthy young men seem to be weirdly prone to getting faint around needles. That's basically what I did. I was sitting in the chair and blacked out. Amy said my eyes rolled back into my head, and I was suddenly in this other alternate earth life situation. Some of the details have faded now, but I was walking outside, in some kind of cityscape somewhere, sun shining, completely familiar. I had this sense of tacit knowing — this is just life, this is just normal — and I was going about my business in this other parallel earth reality. That bothered me a bit afterward, because this version of my life didn't exist while I was out. It was gone. That lack of continuity sat in the back of my mind as something to try to figure out.
Robert Monroe — the OG of the OBE, who documented his experiences across three books — categorized his experiences in different ways: Locale 1, Locale 2, and Locale 3. Locale 3 he basically defined as a parallel earth, an alternate earth reality. His visits there included all sorts of interesting experiences — he found their technology was a little anachronistic, still using steam-powered trains and so on. He took it as a literal alternate parallel universe, and I was tempted for a while to class my experience similarly. But it may be that we have these potential realities that only exist when we actually shift our awareness into them — that's when they become real. Tom Campbell, who used to work with Robert Monroe, has gone in that direction: they don't exist as independent realities, but become real when we shift our awareness to them. I tend now to lean more that way.
Dawn: How would you say that differs from what we call dreams? Because it's still us in a dream, and dreamscapes can be all kinds of things — similar to waking reality or very different.
Brendan: I get quite a bit into that in Book Two. When we're dreaming, we're generally not in a particularly lucid state. There's a lot of discontinuity, very bizarre and surreal things that don't make sense. You go along with it because you're not fully present unless you become lucid, which is a different thing. A dream is qualitatively and experientially very different to, say, a Locale 3 parallel universe kind of reality. When I say I was having the ostensible experience of that alternate earth life, it was absolutely crystal clear, completely lucid, as real as what we're doing right now. My dreams are not like that at all. The dream to me is like we have the body-based conscious mind awareness, and when we go to sleep we shift a little — it's an altered state, but we're still essentially in our own little bubble, a personal customized dream world, very subjective and fluid. That can shift into a lucid dream, and people talk about the lucid dream as a gateway to OBEs. So to me they exist in different categories.
[20:00] The Self, the I, and the Thread Soul
Dawn: When we talk about "we" and "us" — in your experience, you know it was you. But you also say we exist as multiple selves. The word "self" and what we identify as self — a lot of people just identify with this body, and yet we're more than that. Who or what is the self? When you say it was you in that parallel reality — was it you, Brendan, or was it a slightly different aspect of you?
Brendan: That's a good question, and it's awkward to verbalize sometimes. If we borrow a Vedantic term — they talk about atman and Brahman, where Brahman is the universal infinite consciousness and atman is the localized center within that infinite field. They're the same in essence. So wherever we are, whatever altered state of consciousness we're in, that I-center — the I — is still present. In the context of my weird experience, that parallel guy wasn't Brendan, because that was a different universe, different life, different city, different everything. But the sense of "I am," the presence of being aware, felt the same. That's a strange situation.
The presence of the I is what stabilizes and normalizes things across all the different transitions and shifts. This is part of esoteric traditions, which talk about the sutratman — the thread soul — that weaves its way through these different experiences, different bodies, different personalities, while the center of I-consciousness remains. When people die, a lot of them don't realize they're dead because the I is still very much awake and aware. Sometimes they need help with that.
[25:00] NDEs — Structural Commonality Across Cultures
Dawn: From everything you've studied — NDEs in particular — what have you come to in terms of an understanding of the similarities and the differences across different cultures and traditions?
Brendan: People in NDEs are generally getting glimpses of the lower, initial stages of transition. What you see across the centuries, across all the cultures around the world — I've mapped this out in Chapter Three — is that they tend to experience similar things: similar types of journeys into this other world, encountering a light, encountering beings, possibly encountering deceased family and friends, having some kind of transformational or healing experience, and returning to their body. There's an underlying structural commonality across continents and millennia.
What happens is that cultural conditioning determines the graphic user interface — what that looks like on the surface level. Where people get confused is that the surface appearances of things look different, but the underlying structure is actually really similar and has been similar for centuries. You can map parallels from NDEs that happened this week to NDEs that happened centuries ago. Cultural conditioning plays into how it appears on the surface level — which characters show up, which god or goddess or savior shows up. This is called cultural embeddedness in the field. Underlying it all there's something like a program or an algorithm that dictates a process — the life review, for example, has an algorithmic quality. It tends to happen in the same kind of format to everybody. In the modern era people typically describe their life review as happening from their most recent moment right back to conception or birth, and it doesn't involve any kind of conscious will or choice on the part of the person. That algorithmic quality shows that there are system rules dictating the kind of experience people have — and it shows that we are participating in something shared, a collective field.
Dawn: Skeptics will say people are just hallucinating. But the commonality is what I find stunning. It clearly refutes that idea. You can talk about the differences — they're cultural — but the commonality is just undeniable.
Brendan: I'm glad you touched on that. Raymond Moody has been onto these so-called skeptics for decades. They actually shouldn't call themselves skeptics, because they don't fit the definition. They don't operate with genuine skepticism. They have this weird tendency to not want to address the evidence honestly or work with what the data actually indicates. They prefer to twist it to suit their preconceived notions — that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of the brain, end of story. To maintain that narrative they have to lie to themselves, and unfortunately they're also lying to the public. They've been caught multiple times lying by omission. That's their favorite method, because in order to notice someone has left a crucial detail out, you have to already know the material. I've been doing this for twenty-three years and I've seen many instances. There's a case that came up through Anthony Peake — a researcher, I believe his name is Woerlee, omits the most important detail of a well-known case study to push the idea that there's nothing to see here. The whole case, properly read, is a powerful piece of evidence for survival of consciousness outside the body, and he just leaves out the key part.
Someone actually did a study comparing skeptics and more open, curious researchers, and found that when skeptics made a mistake in their analysis, one hundred percent of the time it supported their confirmation bias. In the other group, some mistakes did not support their belief system. The level of bias is off the charts. They are not skeptical of any of their own ontological assumptions. They take all of it for granted and protect it with a weirdly religious zeal — which is funny, because they're supposed to be the antidote to religious mentality, but they have exactly the same mentality pointed in a different ideological direction.
[35:00] Anita Moorjani and the Case Studies
Dawn: One of the most powerful cases for me is Anita Moorjani. She's just a real, genuine person. She was close to her deathbed, expected to die imminently — the medical establishment said there was nothing more to be done — and she recovered from that position completely. That also says something important about what the medical establishment doesn't understand about the body.
Brendan: I actually have a chunk of her case study in the book, because I'm talking about aspects of it. I want to mention that when I work with case studies and stories, I'm not just repeating them. I'm excavating and analyzing them for what's going on structurally, what it means and represents. Hers is very powerful, and she did have that spontaneous remission. There were aspects of what she experienced that are absolutely common to a lot of other NDEs.
In my framework I have a concept I refer to as the causal corridor — basically what happens when you start to expand your awareness beyond your current personality. Esoterically, the causal body is the level at which you become aware of past lives, alternate versions of yourself, past and future lives. Some NDEs happen in low-to-mid-level astral kind of environments, but some people start to expand into more of the causal corridor. Hers did somewhat, because she started to have those interconnections with other people and spontaneous memories — her brother being a character from another life, that kind of trans-lifetime awareness. So yes, there are definite parallels with other NDEs.
[40:00] Ian Stevenson and Children's Past-Life Memories
Dawn: One of the books I actually did finish was Ian Stevenson's Children Who Remember Previous Lives. Children seem to have more access to this information, and there's a pretty good reason for that. Can you talk about why children's accounts are so important?
Brendan: Stevenson did such massive work with these children. He found that past-life memories were more available up until the age of about five, after which children's minds become focused on other things. His work showed that whether or not you like the reincarnation idea, these kids are getting information that doesn't belong to their current-life personality. They have these vivid connections to someone in the next village — no connection to their current family, but the child has a clear memory of being a member of this other family. Stevenson was a detective. He would interview everybody concerned, and the details and the emotional investment of the kid in this other family — the sense of connection — were profound and not normal in any explainable way. Reductionism has no explanation for what his research found. It doesn't fit a physicalist paradigm at all.
I know some people try to explain it as the child picking up somebody else's memories from the field, which is possible in principle, but I find those explanations bland and unconvincing. It feels like avoiding the obvious: consciousness separating from the body in one life, returning to the non-physical for some period of time, and then reinserting itself into a slightly different context. In these cases it's usually a very similar context — a neighboring village or town — and the personality structure has retained itself to a high degree of fidelity. This is what I was trying to get at before. These people who vividly remember past lives often died young or violently — which is why you get the wound-to-birthmark correspondences Stevenson documented — and they tend not to go deep enough into the post-mortem architecture to fully reintegrate and heal. They remain quite earthbound. The personality structure that had the astral and mental body intact simply waits for another opportunity to reinsert into the earth-life system, and you get this massive recall because the data is still fresh. They haven't reintegrated with the causal oversoul entity. They've stayed in that low-level astral simulacrum of earth life and just jumped back into the game as quickly as they could.
Dawn: That makes sense, especially given the violent deaths you mention. There's also something you discuss in the book about souls not fully integrating into the fetus until the second or third trimester — which might explain why young children are still so open to these other dimensions.
Brendan: Yes, and that shows up across several different sources — esotericists from the eighteen hundreds, people having past-life regressions right now. It's coming from all over the place. Apparently the incoming personality structure doesn't feel the need to connect with the fetus until quite late in the process. There's a melding and integration that happens, and there are different reports about bonding with the baby's body, working with the nervous system. But it seems like they can leave it to virtually the last second. What's reported is that a lot of these personalities can come and go as they please — in and out of the body — through the first few years of childhood. So they're consciously living in two very different paradigms simultaneously.
[50:00] Computing Analogies, the Video Game, and Simulation Theory
Dawn: You use a lot of computer-like analogies in your work. You're not calling this literally a video game — these are analogies. Can you explain how you use those terms?
Brendan: When I say video game I'm not being literal. I refer to it as different things depending on the context, just to illustrate how something works. The video game analogy is actually very useful for talking about the reincarnation stuff in particular. A lot of people have gone down the road of thinking we're literally in some kind of technological construct, but that's not tenable as a literal claim. As an analogy or metaphor it's actually very useful at certain times to explain the dynamics of what we're participating in. That's why I call it an operating system and use computing terminology — because so much of what happens in computing maps well to our lived experience in the earth-life system. Ultimately I come back to consciousness being the fundamental ontological ground. It's formless. We're not literally in a computer, but computing analogies help get the point across.
Dawn: Have you any ideas about why simulation theory has become so popular?
Brendan: I think it's part of the process of people moving on from old ideas about what we're doing here. Most people today aren't convinced by classical religious models. So we're looking for better explanations, groping in the dark for something that seems to make sense and fit the facts. But I keep coming back to the warning that literalism invariably leads you into a cul-de-sac. It's never the answer — whether it's born-again Christianity or simulation theory literalism. As soon as you get into the literal side, you've lost the plot. You end up in a holding pattern, chasing red herrings. The analogies are useful on a conceptual level, as long as we don't fall into the trap of literalism — whether that's the soul trap discussion or anything else.
We're always engaged in the process of mythopoesis — creating myths about where we've come from, what's going on, where we're going, what it all means. What's interesting is that ideas can be fed into the collective and get picked up. I might have a vision about a Matrix-kind of scenario, and the Wachowskis might pick up on that through the collective field and turn it into a film. People see it and latch onto certain aspects because they seem to make sense of something. That's how we build collective myths. The Matrix on one level is really showing you how the mind imprisons itself — how people create mental prisons for themselves — and also how there is a control system of some kind. But don't take it literally. As soon as you leave behind the Abrahamic religions and their myths, part of you goes looking for something else. We like to have answers. So as people break away from one form of hypnosis, they become susceptible to the next. They leave one belief system and get hypnotized by another.
[1:02:00] The Soul Trap — Analysis and Critique
Dawn: This takes us to the soul trap. People are stuck in these ideas — don't go to the light, there's a machine that traps souls. Is there anything to it, or is it a complete misunderstanding? I know you go into considerable detail in the book.
Brendan: Chapter Nine is where I address it, and there's no way I can replicate that level of analysis in conversation. It's very detailed, multi-layered, and comprehensive. If people want to understand the soul trap — not just get an opinion on whether they like it or not, but understand how we got there and what's driving it — that's in the book.
But there are different elements. There's an experiential element where people have had certain types of encounters in near-death experiences — an entity seeming to try to deceive them or encourage them to reincarnate. What most people do is look at that experience at face value and go: that's literally what's happening. Or a psychic type will say, "I've literally seen the soul trap, I've seen the machine." They're taking their subjective perception in an altered state and literalizing it, concretizing it. That's where the conversation ends for people with that mindset. They're not thinking critically through it.
We've been warned for at least a couple of centuries by mystics and esotericists about astral perception — this low-level mode of non-physical perception and how illusory and misleading it is. Blavatsky is just one example. She's been very clear about how delusory astral perception can be. But none of these people seem to heed those writings or be aware of those frameworks. They take perception at face value and go: that's literally what's happening, end of discussion.
What we're actually doing in these lower states is operating in what the esoteric tradition calls the manasic mind — low-level consciousness, symbolic, dualistic, heavily mediated by cultural conditioning and life experience. When you go into non-physical states and encounter an entity in the early stages of an NDE, that is low-level interface phenomena — just the beginning of the transition. In a proper NDE the brain is no longer acting as a filter, and you have raw consciousness operating in a raw consciousness environment. That's much more abstract. There's an abstraction faculty that has to come online and stabilize, and it's generally not functional in the early stages.
I discuss a specific example from Isabella Green's book — a guy who had an NDE and experienced a being in the very early stages, in the manasic field, with the abstraction faculty not yet functional. He has this exchange with the entity, interprets it as an archon administering the soul trap, and then simply refuses to comply and goes on his merry way. Any strong form of soul trap conjecture falls to pieces right there, because he just refused the offer. How bad is the soul trap if you can simply decline? Obviously it's not a very effective trap.
There's also the dweller on the threshold phenomenon — when people have their first OBE or similar experience and encounter an entity. It's a mistake to interpret that as an independently existing separate being that has nothing to do with you. The dweller on the threshold is a projection of your own mind, seemingly external to you. It's essentially a mirror — an aspect of your own psyche that has become externalized. I'd suggest we should at least consider the possibility that when we encounter so-called archons or demons, these are actually unconsciously projected, split-off, externalized aspects of our own psyche confronting us. When the mind separates from the body and moves into a completely non-physical environment, it's looking for anchorage points, orientation, stabilization. The ego is scrambling because all its familiar reference points are gone. Many people look for an external source of help — Jesus, the Buddha, Aunt May, whatever it might be — and we conjure an entity or being.
The Tibetans understood this a long time ago. In the death process they speak of the display of rupa — encountering gods and goddesses, wrathful and peaceful deities — and they were very clear that we are projecting this. It's all projections of the mind. They had the sophistication not to literalize those entities and say, "That's separate from me, it's being imposed on me." They realized what was going on. Modern people, when they separate consciousness from the body, have their cultural conditioning and belief systems to orient them. So collectively, what people are doing is creating virtual reality holographic environments that seem hyper-real and then participating in them as if they're real. This is what I call the astral fantasia — it's all low-level manasic mind trying to make up a story, create meaning, orient itself, make sense of things. We unconsciously conjure these entities. They could be a demon, the dweller on the threshold, a so-called archon — but we need to look at the underlying mechanics rather than taking things at face value.
[1:18:00] Who Meets Us at Death
Dawn: That's fascinating. It makes me wonder whether whoever we encounter in that shift out of here is going to be what's appropriate for us — in the same way that some people are met by Jesus, others by the Buddha, others by family members. Is that the comforting part of the transition, or is there something more systematic in how we are met?
Brendan: I don't dismiss the distinct possibility that people are genuinely encountering the consciousness of people they've known, because the whole premise of my work is the survival of consciousness. If I'm saying that we survive, obviously I have to extend that possibility to people who've gone before us.
If you look at the regression field — the Newton school — there are tens of thousands of case studies of people who basically all have the same experience: going into the spirit world and being greeted by their soul cluster, family and friends accumulated through time. That's supported through other sources as well — channeled material, clairvoyant reports, OBEs. All these points of convergence say we absolutely can have contact with people we've known before.
I have a section in the book on peak and Darien cases, because they're some of the most powerful pieces of evidence for the survival of consciousness. They typically involve a family member who died previously to the person having their NDE. The person has their NDE, goes into this amazing altered experience, and then someone shows up whom they've never heard of from this life — don't know the name, nothing. When they come back and recover, they mention, "Oh, so-and-so came and met me, a sister named Sarah," and the parents look at each other and say, "You never knew you had that sister. She died before you were born. We just never told you." That's repeated over and over in the literature. Eben Alexander experienced meeting his deceased sister whom he didn't know about — nobody had told him about her — and she was the one who met him in his NDE. I think one of the reasons this happens is because it's very powerful evidence for the individual that the experience was valid. If it was someone they already knew, it wouldn't have the same impact.
As for how deceased people appear — the thing is, if you're operating in a consciousness-based environment, that mind can configure itself to create whatever appearance it feels like. It could show up as anything. There are also helper beings who sense that someone's having an NDE and need basic support, and they can sense the belief system of the person. So for a fundamentalist Christian they might show up looking like Jesus, because that will be comforting and help move the person on. That's literally reported across multiple sources — Seth talks about this, as do Bruce Moen and Robert Monroe.
[1:30:00] Blavatsky, Steiner, and the Theosophical Tradition
Dawn: You've mentioned Blavatsky and Theosophy. Some people are skeptical about her background and various things that have been said about her. But forget the messenger — what about the message? You've also looked at Steiner. What's your view on those perspectives?
Brendan: Theosophy essentially means divine wisdom — wisdom of the gods, or the gods' wisdom. All the tradition was trying to capture was the wisdom of more ancient traditions, to synthesize them — because Blavatsky herself was a master synchretist. She's one of the most misunderstood figures in this realm. There are people who are misunderstood — Steiner, Jung — but she seems to have attracted the highest level of confusion and misrepresentation of anybody I've come across. She was actually an intellectual giant — a giant among pygmies. Judge, a co-founding member of the Theosophical Society, said of her literally, "She is not of this earth." This knowledge and information just poured out of her in a way that baffled everyone around her. She was also incredibly well-researched. Even now, if she were alive today, most people still wouldn't know what to do with her because she was so syncretic.
What her work was aimed at was basically continuing the wisdom traditions and connecting those old traditions — including the Eastern ones — to the modern world, so people could start waking up. There's a lot of garbage talked about her as a person. People make accusations like she worked for British intelligence, but I've yet to see any meaningful evidence for that. Rather than getting distracted by that, look at the actual content of the message — because what she put together was very powerful and for her time extremely advanced.
One of the things people miss — and particularly the born-again Christians, who are just tedious about this — is they say she's "New Age" and a Satanist. First of all, the New Age came after Blavatsky, so they're getting the chronology completely muddled. And if you bother to look at the work, she stresses across multiple texts the absolute critical importance of moral development and becoming a better person. That was central to her message. It wasn't about developing occult powers. She wasn't an advocate of black magic at all — she was opposed to it. She didn't even want people distracted by developing occult abilities. Her message was: become a better human being. That's the throughline of the ancient traditions she was trying to bring to people's awareness. And her point was that occult or spiritual development actually hinged on moral development. Nobody who criticizes her seems to have a clue about that. It gets left completely out of the discussion.
Dawn: And you see the same in Steiner — who was also a Rosicrucian initiate and was involved in Theosophy in the very early days before he went his own way.
Brendan: Exactly. Moral development was absolutely central to Steiner as well. Blavatsky would be rolling in her grave at the way her teachings have been misrepresented.
[1:42:00] Karma, Reincarnation, and the Life Review
Dawn: That almost takes us into reincarnation. So many people talk about karma as though it's a punishment-reward system. Is there a purpose to reincarnation? What's your view?
Brendan: Karma is a cause-and-effect thing — it's not a punishment or reward system, it's simply the system dynamics. You harvest what you sow. That was the mentality of a lot of those teachers, particularly at that time. But in my model I look at reincarnation from multiple different levels. From where we stand it looks very linear, because of the nature of the game we're participating in. Then you have the astral and mental levels, which are still extensions of the earth-life system. There's temporal continuity there — the personality leaves the physical realm, goes into what you might call the astral orientation area, goes through healing processes, maybe plans the next life. That's at least what the Newton school shows through regression. But what interests me more is the causal level, because that's where things get much less linear. If you get to the level of the causal entity — the oversoul entity — there's basically no sense of linear time at all. From that level you can just pick and choose: a lifetime in two thousand BC, a lifetime in nineteen sixty-eight. The timeline is just open to you. It's all the same from that level. That's the architect level in my model, where the planning happens and the next personality structure is created by bundling together different traits or subroutines.
Dawn: So there can't really be cause-and-effect karma in a linear sense, because it's not linear. And yet a lot of people want justice — they want those doing terrible things in this world to face some kind of reckoning. The life review is where I'm going with that. What happens in the life review, and is there judgment?
Brendan: The life review, when you look at it in detail, never involves imposed judgment. There's never condemnation. The system rules or algorithms that determine the experience operate impersonally. What people experience in the early stages is essentially their externalized mind. The life review shows them: here's what this person experienced when you did that to them. For a lot of people that's very painful because they literally experience the pain they caused somebody else. But it's not inflicted by any external authority. It's just part of the system where their awareness field has expanded its boundaries to take in the other personality as well. So they have their experience, and they also have the other person's experience of how it impacted them.
In some cases, like Dannion Brinkley — who was a professional assassin — in his first NDE life review he experienced not only the death or suffering of the person, but the ripple effect through that person's family, then their friends, multiple layers. It's just an expansion of perceptual awareness, the perceptual field expanding to take in much more than it usually does. And it's not only the bad stuff — they get the good stuff too. Smiling at a random store clerk as you leave, not thinking anything of it — it actually made their day, or stopped them from doing something harmful to themselves. They get the full picture.
So it's not a punishment system. It's a life review — here's what happened on an effective level for you and for the other person, and the cause-and-effect ripple effect of that. A very long-winded way of saying that the system we're in is not moralistic in the religious sense. What people get fed back in the life review is just the fruits of what they've done. The point is transformation — to do better when you continue on. There is a kind of cosmic impersonal developmental thrust in an evolutionary direction: become a better soul, harvest as much knowledge and experience as you can, become a better version of yourself in the process. The system is designed to nudge in that direction. You can fight against that — free will is there — but eventually you will harvest what you've sown, and that might not be a pleasant experience if you've gone down a dark path.
[1:58:00] Free Will Within the Architecture
Dawn: Free will — if we apparently choose to have this experience and certain experiences within the physical realm, where's the free will in what we do here if choices were already made at a higher level?
Brendan: This version of our personality is not the part of us that initiates incarnation into the game. We have that memory essentially suppressed because of the contraction process required to participate in this realm. A lot of people think we have a maliciously imposed amnesia by archons or whatever, but it's wrong. It's just part of the nature of the system. As you descend into certain operational contexts, certain information becomes part of your subconscious. It's not lost, not erased — you just can't access it as readily because you're in a compressed state. We come into physical earth life under enormous restrictions and constraints that don't exist virtually anywhere else. As soon as you drop the body you have a hugely expanded capacity for freedom and choice. While you're in the body in the physical game, you have massive constraints. So free will is there, but it's not as free as we might be accustomed to. It's free will within certain limits.
If we accept that there's a higher being — the oversoul — that actually architects the life experience and dictates the evolutionary arc to be explored, then an individual human personality is just one aspect of the exploration of that larger arc. Dawn can write a book about health and illness, or she could go write a book about rabbit breeding practices — but her personality has been structured in advance in such a way that she's not likely to write that rabbit book. I'm not going to join the corporate world. That's just not what I'm here for. I'm not designed for that. So I could technically do a lot of different things, but my personality narrows the scope considerably.
Astrologically, when you're born, that's another layer of constraints — not a cause-and-effect thing, but a map. You can map somebody's general life arc numerologically or astrologically, and those are the energetic constraints that exist at the moment you come into the game. We have multiple levels and layers of constraints we are essentially volunteering to operate under.
There are also traditions like Buddhism and Vedanta where it's not so much about an oversoul consciously architecting the new personality, but more the skandhas — heaps or aggregates of traits and tendencies, almost like subroutines in the personality — operating in a non-deterministic way. You accumulate through lifetimes certain personality attributes that get stored in the non-physical field and then become embodied in the next personality instance. Those might not be consciously chosen, but they are internal biases and attractors that draw us in certain directions. I've been drawn into writing and music because of those internal algorithms, and so I am inevitably going to move in certain directions and avoid others — regardless of whether it was intentionally architected or emerged through the more Buddhist process. Either way: free will, but under the constraints we've inherited, acquired, or chosen.
[2:10:00] Terminal Lucidity
Dawn: One of the interesting things I came across in the extracts you sent me is terminal lucidity — people who are very close to death, quite often with dementia or severe cognitive impairment, very little communication, and then just before they die something shifts. They're suddenly lucid, sometimes physically revived in ways that make no sense medically. What do you think is going on?
Brendan: It doesn't make any sense from a normal physiological or medical perspective, so we need a different explanation. I have a little theory or hypothesis about this in the book. I think what's happening is that the person is dying and a separation process is taking place. When you're born you have the integration of the mind with the body, and as you're dying you have the opposite — disintegration and separation. The center of consciousness — the I, the ego in the esoteric sense — is starting to separate from the physical and operate less through the neurological context, shifting its locus to a more astral, non-physical level. But it hasn't completely separated yet. So you get this expansion of perception, cognitive ability, and physical ability that baffles everyone and that the dying brain framework completely fails to explain. The brain and body are no longer the central anchorage point of the mind — the mind is starting to operate in the non-physical context, and you might get the recovery of cognitive and even physical abilities that have been dormant for years. Then this mysterious sudden resurgence of vitality, of talking and singing, leaves everyone scratching their heads. It doesn't make sense from a dying brain point of view. That framework just doesn't work.
[2:17:00] Shared Death Experiences and Non-Locality
Dawn: You mentioned shared death experiences as well — people at a deathbed who experience the transition alongside the dying person. Can you explain what that is and why it matters?
Brendan: Raymond Moody put that on the map. I do talk about it briefly. People at someone's deathbed suddenly experience the room filling with light — multiple people having the same experience — or ethereal music filling the house at the exact moment the person transitions. I have a couple of spectacular clairvoyant reports from a woman who watched people's souls separate from the body and be escorted away by deceased family members — a deceased child who had died earlier, for example. You read those descriptions and they're quite stunning.
The key word with all of it is "shared." Whether it's an NDE, someone at the deathbed of the dying, a shared OBE, or shared dreams — that's the crux of it. That's actually the most important thing to me: the shared aspect of any of these experiences. As soon as you have shared experiences in consciousness, the materialist physicalist paradigm fails. Michael Talbot shared a classic example in The Holographic Universe — someone temporarily died in a hospital, had an NDE, went into the light, had an experience on the other side, and as they were coming back through the tunnel toward their body they passed someone going the opposite direction having their own NDE. When they got back to their bodies they recovered, eventually compared notes, and realized they'd had a literal shared NDE — neither knowing the other was in the same building, neither aware the other was having a medical emergency. Unless consciousness is non-local, how do you explain that?
[2:25:00] Channeling — A Mixed Bag
Dawn: What are your views on channeling?
Brendan: I think it's a bit of a mixed bag, and I don't think it's necessarily one thing. The Theosophists — Blavatsky in particular — viewed the whole concept with disdain. Their view was that the ego or soul of the deceased had moved on into the post-mortem realm, and from there would not be coming back to the physical realm to do channeling. Their position was that what was being channeled was either a discarded astral shell — an astral body left behind — becoming animated by the energy of the medium and the people attending, or potentially an elemental entity. We exist in this elemental essence, this field that can be animated or influenced by human thought. So you get these elemental creatures becoming the thing being channeled and posing as the living conscious soul of the departed. That was Blavatsky's perspective. She was also constantly warning that most psychics and clairvoyants didn't have the capacity to discern what being they were actually allowing to speak.
I don't know that that's necessarily the whole picture. There are times when it certainly seems like there's compelling evidence that some channeling events might be legitimate contacts. If we accept general contact experiences with people coming back from the other side, that lends certain types of communication some credibility. But I think there's an important distinction between communicating with someone who's supposedly deceased and on the other side, versus someone who thinks they're channeling an ascended master or an alien. I hold the latter in very low regard. A lot of what comes out of channelers in that space is patent fluff and nonsense, with no discernment on the part of the channeler or the audience.
I spent two years sitting in a mediumship development circle from age twenty to twenty-two, and I saw a lot of very weird and interesting things. Some of it, on the face of it, might be legitimate. But channeling as a broad category isn't one thing, and a lot of it just doesn't make sense and is wrong. I also want to say: I've seen channeled material held in such high regard, as if it's automatically the best information we can come up with. I don't agree with that at all, which is why I have no desire to channel my books. I actually write and research and operate critically.
The Seth material is superior to most channeled material I've seen — it's quite coherent, quite high quality — but even there, as you said, a lot of the information was filtered through Jane Roberts' own belief systems. That doesn't discredit everything. It is that discernment piece. And I think the right approach is to use it as a stepping stone, not a destination. Sit in the question, see what stands up to scrutiny, see what makes sense, and keep going.
[2:38:00] The Book, the Crowdfunder, and What's Coming
Dawn: Let's bring this toward a close and talk about the book — where you are with it, and what people can expect when this episode comes out.
Brendan: By the time people see this episode, the crowdfunding campaign to bring the book into print will be active and live. The best way to get your hands on it at this point is via the crowdfunder, because we've got not just the book but other rewards at different tiers. I encourage anyone who wants to get their hands on it to head over there. The book is written — it's not a concept, not an idea I want to write one day. It's written. The crowdfunder is to bring it into the world properly, to execute the way it should be executed rather than doing it half-heartedly. It is something unique in the field, and it does move the field ahead. So I appreciate anyone who wants to get on board, get early access, and support bringing it to the world as a physical print item.
Dawn: And it's a hardcover, paperback, and ebook?
Brendan: For the campaign, yes — all three. Whether there'll still be a hardback after the campaign I'm not sure, but we'll definitely have paperback and ebook. We're also doing an audio book. Book One doesn't have one — the prose style doesn't lend itself to audio — but Book Two will work for it.
Dawn: For Book One, the best place to get it is directly from your website?
Brendan: Yes. Going through my website directly is better than through Amazon because fees don't get taken out. That's at brendandmurphy.com — if you add /tgi that takes you straight to the Book One page.
Dawn: And Evolve Yourself — are you still running those programs?
Brendan: Yes, still going. If people want to check it out, the free masterclass is at evolveyourself.live. It's a transformationally oriented program. We work with sound, and there are three core initiatory experiences spaced out over a timeline. It addresses the physical, the non-physical, the astral, mental, and spiritual levels. It's not something I run every day — it's once every five or six weeks. And on Substack — my Substack is called Awakening Minds, at substack.com/@officialbrendanmurphy.
Dawn: Is there anything else you'd like to add as a parting thought?
Brendan: There's always this little voice in the back of my mind in an interview saying, "Oh, but what about this?" In an interview format we can't cover every angle — it's just not possible. But in the book I can, because I can hear people's objections as I write and I've covered them. It's a very multi-layered, iterative read. People are going through my own chronology and timeline — the structure of the book reflects how it's been developed over a long period, and how my awareness and insights have progressed as I've made it. If you start at the start and get to the end, by that point you are a quantum leap ahead of where the discussion currently is. And my best insights and realizations have really been happening in the last six months, through the distillation and crystallization that comes from sitting with something for so long. The back end of the book concentrates a lot of that — the new framework, the new insights, the things that people could take from Chapter Nine and apply back to Chapter Three to see how things look through that lens. I'm pretty pumped about the result of what's in there now.
Dawn: Wonderful. I cannot wait to get my own copy. Thank you so much, Brendan. The extracts I've read show the depth and breadth of your contemplation and exploration, and how you synthesize all these pieces together without just saying "that's what it is" — you're still exploring, still looking. It's wonderful. Thank you very much for your time.
Brendan: Thanks, Dawn.