Here For The Truth
Beyond the Veil
Brendan takes listeners on a deep investigation beyond the veil — covering NDE research, Monroe Institute findings, and why the materialist account of death fails against the evidence.
[0:00] Introduction
Joel: What's up everyone, welcome back to the Here for the Truth podcast. Today we're seeing the return of Brendan Murphy — author, speaker, researcher. We have an amazing conversation diving deep into some of the themes of his work: his first book The Grand Illusion, and his upcoming The Grand Illusion Part Two — the nature of reality, what is beyond the veil, what is consciousness, what happens when we die, what is heaven. I think you're going to get a lot of value out of this one.
Brendan Murphy is an author, speaker, and researcher known for integrating spirituality and science. His book The Grand Illusion challenges materialist views of reality, presenting consciousness as the foundation of existence. He explores themes like the holographic nature of the universe and the brain as a receiver of consciousness. He's also the founder of the Truthiversity, a platform for raising consciousness, and facilitates personal growth through his Evolve Yourself program.
He first joined us back on episode 90. But anyway, man, we're now neighbors — we're both living in San Miguel de Allende here in beautiful central Mexico. We've gotten to hang out, get the families together. It's been awesome. How are you doing?
Brendan: Good, good. It's good to be back here with you. Yeah, stoked to be neighbors, man. It's awesome. Life is a weird wild ride.
Joel: Such a trip — like we were both born in Sydney, never really met in Australia, then connected here in Mexico in person. Trippy for sure. I want to get into some of the meat and bones of your book because we didn't really go deep into that realm last time we spoke. What inspired The Grand Illusion?
Brendan: The short version is that I had experiences that concretized the ideas put forward in a book I read when I was twenty. The book was The Holographic Universe — pretty well known. It came into my life through my brother, who's three years younger. He was still at school and came home one day saying there was a young entrepreneur who gave a talk but kept going off topic and talking about this other book he was into. I logged the name, put it on the back burner for about six months, eventually got around to reading it, and it blew my mind. Not long after, I had my first mystical experience — lying in bed one night and suddenly I was infinite consciousness. That was the beginning of a very big paradigm shift. The message of my book is basically conveying that realization from as many different angles as I possibly could — pulling different fields of research together to show that the message at the end of the day is the same: consciousness is the basis of reality.
[6:00] The Holographic Universe — What It Means
Joel: What does the holographic universe actually mean?
Brendan: The core idea is that all information in a hologram exists at every point within the hologram. If you have holographic photographic film and imprint an image into it, then cut it into pieces, you get the whole image in every single fragment — not fragments of the image like you'd get from a broken mirror, but the entire image in each piece. So applying that to the cosmos: all information exists at any point you go to. In principle, if you can access the information field, you can access any information from anywhere. We're kind of like filters or prisms through which the information field operates.
Joel: I've had moments in personal reflection and contemplation where it feels like everything can be known just by examining what's happening within me — like the same principles apply on every layer. Does that fit?
Brendan: A hundred percent. That's exactly it.
[10:00] Immortality and How We Live
Joel: What does this mean for a human being coming into this knowledge? How should it impact the way people live?
Brendan: For me it provides a basis for understanding that consciousness doesn't come into existence through a physical body or a brain. We can now have a starting point for understanding that we can survive the death of the physical body — that we are, in essence, immortal. The thing that created us is not subject to the rules of time and space. Your choices have consequences. Nobody gets out alive, so to speak, but your consciousness continues to exist. The nature of that existence after the body stops working is determined by the kind of life you've lived and what you've made of yourself. The whole field of near-death experience research is rife with that message. What you become in the afterlife is what you made of yourself here and now.
Yerasimos: With the realization that the game doesn't end, the weight of every single choice we make is so much greater — every decision is either casting a shadow if it's based in lies and illusion, or it's leading toward growth.
Brendan: That's quite profound. It's not like you can just come here, run amok, do whatever you want, and get a clean slate at the end of the day.
[14:00] Reincarnation, Past Lives, and the Architecture of the Self
Yerasimos: Would you say that as we go through reincarnations, there's always an incremental progress? If I'm living my life now as Yerasimos, doing my best to be conscious and live with integrity — does that continue on? Or could someone revert in their next life?
Brendan: That's part of the game. There are different levels to it. If you go up to what you could call higher levels of consciousness and self-identity, you get a much broader bird's-eye view of yourself. You realize you're this self, but all these other selves as well scattered through what appears to be time. You might get to see versions of yourself living in far-away galaxies and completely different cosmoses with different physical laws. That's all part of you. As you go up in dimensional levels, you get access to more of yourself, and your concepts of time change with that. All your past lives would become kind of present to your awareness as a higher entity that is emanating those personalities.
Joel: On a personal level, have you experienced past lives that you've lived, or potentially future ones, simultaneously? And how do you integrate that and go — this is real, as opposed to hallucination or imagination?
Brendan: There's a massive body of research on past-life regression. Multiple practitioners in the realm of hypnotherapy have independently produced essentially the same body of information — we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people around the world going through this work in altered states and coming back with information that in essence is more or less the same, time and time again. People are absolutely convinced the information they've accessed is real, and they say that world is more real than this one. The NDE crowd says the same thing — it was so much more real than this life here.
Joel: I read Brian Weiss's Many Lives, Many Masters a long time ago and it had a huge impact. What really struck me was that his patient under hypnosis was able to tell him things he had never told anyone before.
Brendan: That's pretty normal in that space, and it happens in the NDE world as well. People come back with information they shouldn't have had access to under any normal circumstances, let alone when their physical body was clinically dead at the time. It's compelling. It changes people's lives forever. Weiss himself was so moved by the information — she came up with things about his father and his son — that it radically changed the direction of his entire life's work. It's like, okay, we're not just meat sacks. We're something much more complex than that. It turns out it's a lot harder to die than we thought.
[23:00] Joel's Father, Mediumship, and Communication Across the Veil
Joel: I want to bring up something that happened to me recently. My father passed away in February, and I met someone through our local health-freedom community here. She came up to me at the farmers market and said, "I got a message from your dad." A couple of weeks later she came up again and said, "He wants you to know that he's proud of you — he didn't understand everything you did in this life from his vantage point, but he gets it all now." It hit me emotionally because it resonated, but on another level I just don't fully understand it. I'd like to talk to him myself one day. This isn't the first time I've come across someone who can connect to the other world in this way. Have you had personal experience with something like that?
Brendan: I've had stuff like that as well. Very powerful when it happens. Back when I started down this path at twenty, I spent two years going to a spiritualist church in Sydney. They'd have a guest medium come in and do readings for the audience. One of them singled me out — a woman off the street, no way of knowing anything about me. She said, "I've got your pop here." She knew he was dead even though she knew nothing about me. She started describing his tattoo on his arm, which was accurate. Then she said he was telling her I'd been thinking about getting a tattoo. Honestly, the two weeks leading up to that church service were the only two weeks of my life I'd ever pondered getting a tattoo — before or since. She said he was telling me not to do it because I'd be stuck with it forever. Then she started talking about his little pet budgerigar and exactly how he'd interact with it, let it walk up and down his arm, fly around the room. Everything she said was absolutely accurate, including knowing I was thinking about getting a tattoo when I'd never thought twice about it the rest of my life.
Research into mediumship is pretty extensive now and it's verified under rigorously controlled conditions. Dr. Gary Schwartz ran ridiculously controlled experiments with mediums like Allison DuBois, James van Praagh, and John Edward — conditions where it's impossible to cheat, impossible to fake getting information. Some of these psychics are scoring ninety-five, ninety-eight percent accuracy with absolutely no idea who they're reading for and no informational feedback at all. Completely blind, and the information is very, very accurate.
Yerasimos: There's a story I heard about a woman whose uncle died and was buried in a full suit with all his jewelry. She kept getting these recurring visions where she sensed he was cold — overwhelmingly, persistently cold. She commissioned the funeral home to dig up the coffin, and he was completely naked. The suit was gone, the jewelry was gone. He'd been grave-robbed. The "cold" message tracked exactly.
Brendan: That's interesting because it's a specific kind of message. "I'm cold" — his soul isn't hanging out in the ground. That phrasing is quite a particular kind of communication. Sometimes that's how it comes through.
Yerasimos: And it raises the question of what a soul actually experiences. Do they experience temperature? Like what is the personal experience of these entities that communicate with people on Earth?
Brendan: There's a spectrum of experience that's possible when people cross over. You get people who are very strongly identified with physicality, and they tend to be very earthbound. What's more, not everybody who dies realizes they're dead. A lot of the information we get is about someone who died suddenly or in their sleep, and somebody in the spirit world has had to come and try to explain to them that their situation has changed. Sometimes that's a really difficult conversation because they feel so viscerally alive — full sensory experience, warm skin, everything — that they can't believe they're dead. The person trying to help them seems like a raving lunatic.
There are teams of workers in the non-physical realms who are devoted to dealing with exactly these crisis situations. When it's mass disasters, they send teams in to shepherd people into the appropriate post-mortem realm — because there isn't just one place. People's belief systems largely dictate the immediate post-mortem experience and where they go.
[35:00] Belief System Territories and What Lies Beyond
Yerasimos: Is there a different realm for each Abrahamic religion — Christians go here, Muslims go there?
Brendan: That's exactly what the research shows, which is kind of funny. People's belief systems divide them, and what you identify with is what you gravitate toward. There's a belief-system heaven for every religion. There are no Buddhists in a Christian heaven. What happens is people construct a virtual reality simulation that matches what they believed in their physical life. They go there and they're comfortable, not too disoriented. The problem is a lot of these belief systems are not very enlightened — there's not much self-awareness built into the deal. So a lot of these people end up in a Christian fundamentalist heaven and think they've made it and that's it. Then somebody who's outside of that system has to kind of come in — almost like going undercover — to single out the ones who are starting to have a little doubt, starting to sense that something doesn't add up, and to quietly plant seeds: hey, this isn't actually the ultimate heaven, this is just your Christian belief-system heaven. There's this other place we can move on to. Gently expanding their scope of awareness so they're not stuck there.
The Monroe Institute calls them belief system territories. I place them all in my model as low-to-mid-astral simulated realities where beliefs create a holographic world that seems real and convincing. Beyond that there's infinity — all these other different realities waiting to be reconnected with and remembered. All we do by being dogmatic in our beliefs is delay the process and risk retarding our spiritual growth. You don't want to be stuck in a belief system territory. It's a very temporary phase for someone with a very limited outlook, not the end game.
Joel: So there is a more genuine afterlife or realm beyond the dogmatic sections?
Brendan: Yes. There's infinity. There's all these other different realities. The Monroe Institute's framework is actually quite useful here for understanding the full scope of what's available.
[43:00] Why We're Here — Earth as a School
Joel: So what is this experience and why are we having it?
Brendan: Universally, in the NDE crowd and the past-life regression crowd, the answer is that it's basically a school. It's a temporary stage in our overall spiritual growth and development — a way to have a particular type of experience that otherwise wouldn't be possible. And it's done entirely by choice, voluntarily. Nobody forces us to be here. We're not trapped. It's not a soul trap, not a soul harvest, the archons aren't in charge — that's not how it works.
Yerasimos: Are there like levels or grades? Do you graduate?
Brendan: That is actually part of the Monroe Institute's lexicon — the idea of graduates of what they call the Earth life system. Basically, the graduates are people who have managed to embody unconditional love. That's kind of what it boils down to. The challenge here is to overcome life circumstances and a biological framework that is somewhat inimical to the experience of unconditional love. It's kind of the ultimate challenge. We're here to learn to love in a way that's as unconditional, as broad, and as non-agenda-based as possible. The people who do that to the fullest extent are the ones who graduate and move on to whatever comes next. Maybe they go back to their oversoul group, their soul cluster, and hang out there for an indefinite amount of time.
I'm not a fan of the nirvana talk, the liberation talk, because at the core of existence is a mystery that no one can really unravel. There's even a mystical tradition that says liberation is just another form of maya — another form of illusion. And what are we trying to escape from, ultimately? Being our consciousness? Yeah. Earth life is hard. But if you think your highest purpose here is to get the hell out of here, you've actually missed the point of why you came in the first place.
[52:00] The Soul Trap, Infinite Consciousness, and Why Escape Makes No Sense
Joel: David Icke would seem to disagree with you — he comes from the perspective that this is a place to escape from.
Brendan: Someone sent me pages from one of his recent books — I think it was The Trap — because people kept asking me about the soul trap idea. There wasn't really much substance to it. He's got one foot in one camp and one foot in another. His foundational message for thirty years is infinite love is the only truth and everything else is illusion. Well, if infinite love is the only truth, then what is the truth of life here? Isn't it just another variation of that theme? What are we trying to escape from?
His paradigm and mine are the same — infinite consciousness. And I speak from experience. It's not a belief. It's an experience I've had multiple times. So for me it's not abstract in the slightest. That's the container that all my other realities exist within — infinity. If we are infinite, what is there to escape from? What is there to run away from? Who can keep us trapped or imprisoned? It doesn't make any sense.
Self-imposed amnesia is one thing. People come in and go through a process of forgetting — drinking from the river of forgetfulness, so to speak. And we have to do that. That's part of the experience of being here — sublimating the rest of our memories, all the data of who we are on a multi-dimensional massive timeline scale. We sublimate that, and that's part of the deal. We know that coming in, because it allows us to focus on having this life's experience and just optimizing that experience rather than being distracted by oh God, I did all this horrible stuff in other lives, or getting sidetracked and wallowing in self-pity. We're supposed to be focused on this life. Joel Rafidi and Yerasimos are supposed to live the best versions of themselves that they can possibly manage. That's it. That's the focus. And that's my focus as Brendan. I get to be Brendan this one time. Whatever comes after that, I don't know. And we're not supposed to know.
Bruce Moen — a colleague of Robert Monroe — watched in his out-of-body states souls coming into the earth-life system. He perceived something like a facility with a compression point. Souls would come through and undergo a massive compression of their energy field. The energy field goes from expanded down to condensed. It's not just intentional forgetting — it also serves a protective function. As far as Moen could discern, if we had our normal expanded energy field here in earth life, we would not be able to function. There is so much emotional and mental noise being broadcast by millions and millions of other people that we'd be overwhelmed. The compression is what makes earth life survivable.
Yerasimos: Even just being me now, dealing with my own mental and emotional stuff — if I had access to all my previous lives on top of that, I don't know how I'd be able to function at all.
Brendan: It'd be an endless source of distraction. What life do I want to re-watch today? That one was fun. It doesn't serve a constructive purpose. So we block it out temporarily.
[1:02:00] Where Is Consciousness Located?
Yerasimos: Where is consciousness located?
Brendan: Everywhere and nowhere. It's the foundation of reality, so everywhere you go there's already an infinite substrate of consciousness present. This is the holographic idea again — it's already there. My first mystical experience was being a point of awareness in an infinite field of awareness. You're vast on a level of vastness you can't put into words, and it's almost a sense of expanding — but everywhere you expand you're already there. Very difficult to convey.
That's my answer. Consciousness is the only thing that's actually real. Everything that exists is a manifestation of consciousness. Chapter Six of Book One gets into this from a different angle — clairvoyant research into subatomic matter showing that matter is just these tiny nano-vortices. It's the field of the etheric medium, or the field of consciousness, spinning in a way that creates bubbles in the field. What ends up looking like physical matter to us is actually emptiness, nothingness, geometrically arranged. There's no duality to me. It's all one thing manifesting in endless variety of ways.
[1:07:00] Is the Physical World an Illusion?
Joel: Would you say the physical world is an illusion?
Brendan: I agree with that in the sense that it's a temporary creation — a construct, a dream. People call it a simulation. I'm sympathetic to that because of the nature of my journey and the research I've done. It's accurate. I just don't like it when people use it in a way that diminishes the experience or tries to block it out — the spiritual equivalent of Catholic self-flagellation. And there's a common flip side in certain spiritual communities: a diminishment of suffering. Suffering isn't real, trauma isn't real, none of that should impact you — all you have to do is remember your eternal self, and then suddenly being raped doesn't matter anymore. I don't agree with that.
And people will sometimes twist what we're saying into: so you can just go do anything to anybody and it doesn't matter because it's an illusion. That's not what we're saying. There are consequences for the choices we make within the illusion, within the dream. You have a dream at night and wake up with no real consequences. But when you wake up from this level of the dream, there are consequences. That's what makes this level not simply illusory — there's real purpose to it.
Yerasimos: There are people who take certain spiritual concepts and bastardize them, oversimplify them without greater context, and then deny other people's realities and perspectives. Those people tend to have a lot of unresolved shadow work to do. It's a way of trying to escape.
Brendan: Exactly. And what you make of yourself in this life is what you are when you drop the physical body. You can't hide from that. People who've been through the life review — we have this data from across the veil — had to face what they were and the life they'd lived. Some did not like what they saw. They could see all the people they'd hurt, all the flowing consequences, people they'd never even met who were affected by their selfishness. Within the illusion that we're operating in, it's a game that's been designed for a reason. It's not a temporary hallucination with no purpose.
[1:20:00] The Wave and the Ocean — Individual Selves and Infinite Consciousness
Joel: A lot of people use the whirlpool and river analogy — the river is consciousness, you're a whirlpool of it, you die and go back into it. But even now we're talking about our afterlife selves, our non-physical selves, where we're still somewhat individual. How does that fit with the idea that we die and dissolve back into oneness?
Brendan: We are the river and we are the whirlpool both at the same time. It's a matter of where you focus your stream of attention — the sutratman, to borrow the Sanskrit term. Where you focus determines the kind of reality you experience. You can focus at the level of the source, the creator, and have that vast non-duality and experience being infinite — but you will still have that pinpoint of "I am." You are a unit of awareness in the greater field of infinity. You're not a drop in the ocean. You're the ocean in a drop.
You will always retain that point of I. It's just that the experience of the I will differ, and the sense of it changes based on where we put our focus and what kind of reality we're in. An unbalanced view says you're just the ocean, full stop. The middle way is to say it's both. We are all of it. The separation, the sense of separation, is legitimate and valid — it's part of the simulation, part of the design. It's not the ultimate truth of what we are, but it's real enough that if you take a knife to Joel's arm, he's not going to be happy about it.
[1:28:00] Evil, Growth, and the Soul's Perspective
Joel: What gives rise to evil? What allows it to exist and proliferate?
Brendan: It's worth stepping back on the concept itself. Evil is a mental category. Can I go to the supermarket and buy a six-pack of evil? Does it really exist objectively? I take your point completely — things I would experience as horrific, yes. But one of the reasons I raise this is that we're having this conversation at a particular level of consciousness. A lot of the deeper levels have a very different perspective on what is going on in physical experience. There are NDEs who've had very deep, profound, life-changing experiences and come back saying: I now understand what we would call evil on a whole different level. It's not actually what it looks like.
From a human standpoint, obviously people would use the word evil for certain things, and I understand that. But as soon as you see it from the spiritual level — let's say everyone involved is now on the other side and able to see it from a higher vantage point — there's a possibility of something like: if you hadn't done that, I wouldn't have had this growth experience. I wouldn't be able to see things the way I do. It's changed me in a way that means maybe I don't need to reincarnate five hundred more times. You just saved me a whole lot of trouble, because I've taken on this lesson and embodied it in a way that wasn't possible until I had that experience.
That said, my basic message is: if you're using any of the spiritual principles or lessons to justify hurting people or exploiting people, you don't get it. You're on the wrong path and you're going to have a really rough time.
[1:40:00] Love — Self, Unconditional, and Its Challenges
Joel: I agree we're here to learn love. What are our barriers to that, and what do we need to dissolve to be more loving? Though obviously unconditional love doesn't mean being boundaryless.
Brendan: Loving sometimes is telling someone to get lost. That can be exactly the medicine somebody needs in that moment. M. Scott Peck's definition resonates with me — love is being interested in the spiritual development of another person. And genuinely, sometimes a firm boundary or a direct calling-out is leading them down a spiritual development path. Sometimes that's precisely what's needed.
Joel: The English language falls short here — the Greeks had six words for love. Self-love, romantic love, playful love, long-standing love built over decades, love for humanity. They're all different.
Brendan: And the modifier of unconditional love is a really interesting one — without attachments, without an agenda. That's challenging. It's one of the ultimate challenges. It's easy to love someone who's doing what you want them to do or behaving well. But loving someone who's actively your enemy — who wants to tear you down — that's huge. A friend of mine, Francis Haley, was trained with a martial artist for ten years — one of those last-of-the-lineage types — and one of the things discussed was exactly this challenge: loving through different levels. From basic romantic love all the way through to loving an active enemy. If you can do that, that's a genuine achievement.
I've had Christians who hate my guts because I don't see things their way. How much "turn the other cheek" have they embodied? Not a lot. Unconditional love tends to get reduced to: I love you unconditionally if you see things exactly as I do. So yeah, no conditions attached.
[1:52:00] Book Two, the Brain as Filter, and What's Coming
Joel: On the nature of the brain — the materialist view is that consciousness lives in our heads. How does your work correlate with, say, Sheldrake's idea of a morphic field, where the information is actually external to us?
Brendan: That's all very related to what I was doing in Book One — his idea of the morphic field and morphogenetic field is super relevant to the research. And yes, Stan Grof referred to the brain as a reducing valve. Instead of generating consciousness, it's doing the opposite — actually eliminating ninety-nine point nine percent of our awareness so we can have a particular type of experience. We have tons of information that categorically proves that consciousness operates beyond the physical body, and more importantly that it's not generated by the brain or body at all. It exists completely independently.
Joel: Are there other books you'd recommend for people who want to go deep into this research?
Brendan: That's the reason I wrote Book Two. What we don't have in this field is a model for understanding what's going on — not just acknowledging cool stories and amazing NDEs, but asking what's the nature of what's happening and why does it look like that. Most of the stuff out there is a collection of case studies. Too many researchers, particularly academics, don't connect their work with other fields. That's where someone like me has to step in. It's ridiculous that the job falls to nobody Brendan from the suburbs of Sydney — but I have to do it because it's not being done, and not being done well. Book One is very comprehensive and lays the foundation. Book Two is the immortality and afterlife deep dive. What I've done with Book Two in particular is actually move the conversation to another level and push it forward. If people want to save themselves ten thousand hours of research, go read Book One. When Book Two is ready, you can save another ten thousand hours.
Joel: People who want Book One?
Brendan: BrendanDMurphy.com/tgi for Book One. I'll also send you the link for the Book Two waitlist.
Joel: Anything you'd like to leave the audience with in closing?
Brendan: Nothing dramatic comes to mind. If people found anything here interesting, they should read my work. I can talk about this stuff in conversation, but the writing does something I can't do in a conversation — it's a whole other thing. So if people want the level of depth and detail, that's where to find it.
Joel: Dude, thank you so much for joining us again. Lots of love for you and your family. Let's go shoot some hoops soon.
Brendan: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, guys.