Journey to the Fringe
Journey to the Fringe with Paul Wallis, Michael Lauria, and Brendan Murphy
Brendan joins Paul Wallis and Michael Lauria for a wide-ranging exploration of consciousness, reality, and the evidence that challenges the mainstream account of human existence.
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[0:12] Introduction
Michael: Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Journeys to the Fringe. My name is Michael Lauria. I'm joined by my co-host Paul Anthony Wallis and today we have Brendan D. Murphy.
Brendan is the author and host of Truth Averse podcast. And he has blown minds and changed lives around the world. He's the author of the epic The Grand Illusion, A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality, Book One, and the co-founder of the censorship-free Facebook alternative Truth Network, spelled T-R-O-O-T-H. Brendan's work is designed to push humanity and civilization to greater consciousness, freedom and health.
And to give you a bit of a lead in here, I asked Brendan what he'd like to talk about today and he gave me this list to choose from. We can talk about collective, conscious, unconscious, anything, afterlife, reincarnation, past lives, does hell, heaven exist, dark entities, alien concept, contact, the devil, NDEs, OBEs, spirit contact. Dot, dot, dot. So there's a lot of topics here, but we're going to focus on a couple of those today. So Brendan, welcome.
Brendan: Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it.
Michael: You are very welcome. I'm going to hand over to Paul and Paul's going to kick us off here because I've known Brendan for a little while. So I think Paul can kick us off and get us going.
[1:27] Where Heaven and Hell Came From
Paul: Well, Brendan, we could do an episode on every single one of those topics, which would be a lot of fun, but I want to start on the heaven and hell thing. And it's because I have a personal interest in that, and I would love to get your research and insight on this.
Way back decades ago, I was in theological college training to be a priest in the Church of England, the Anglican Church, and I was quite young in my Christian faith, and I had a personal goal, a couple actually, in going to theological college. And one was I wanted to get to the bottom of where this heaven and hell thing had come from. Because I'd come to Christianity from outside as an atheist. I started reading the Gospels and I just couldn't find the hell teaching that the church seems to have run with, with great enthusiasm for many centuries.
And so I wanted to find out for myself, is it in the Gospels? And if it isn't, what does that mean? How does that impact our beliefs? What my teaching is going to be? So I wanted to ask you, where does your interest come from in that topic? And what have you found out?
Brendan: I guess, weirdly, when I was about 15, I started wondering what happens when you die. And so I've had this kind of nagging obsession for some reason, don't know why, I just wanted to know about that kind of thing. And I had this sort of slightly philosophical inclination.
And I also, like you, had a bit of a Christian sort of upbringing, not because of my parents, but because I went to a primary school where they brought in a teacher once a week to do a scriptures class. And we didn't know any better. We believed in Santa. So we just accepted what they told us. And from there, I went to a high school, which was an Anglican high school. So again, we had the weekly or bi-weekly, I can't remember, chapel sessions, plus another scripture class during the week. So I'm familiar with the basics of the whole sort of theology of Christianity.
I had that initial spark of curiosity and then ultimately my questions weren't, I never had any abiding or enduring sense of sustainable faith that came out of that early indoctrination. What happened for me was I was just curious about everything. I had questions, more questions than answers. And I was interested in shows like, in Australia back in the day, we had a show called The Extraordinary, which was all about this paranormal stuff. And I was really quite interested and intrigued by all of this.
So from there, I had my awakening experience when I think I'd just turned 20. And after reading The Holographic Universe, which opened my mind. Once you have an open mind, you expand your capacity to have different types of conscious experiences. And so for me, then I had an experience of infinite consciousness and that grounded the concept for me in reality. And so when you live from the context of infinity, just about everything's on the table, right? But it also means that a lot of the sort of quaint little theological concepts that we get indoctrinated with, they kind of fall apart, or you can at least see them in a much bigger perspective.
Paul: Yes, indeed. Indeed. Unfortunately, through the ages, society seems to have been pretty amenable to taking on some of these quaint little doctrines, as you call them. How has that happened? Why has there been that predisposition to accept the heaven-hell narrative? What difference does it make?
[5:10] Julian Jaynes and the Changing Experience of Consciousness
Brendan: I think that first question is actually huge. That's a massive can of worms. And you have to go and read someone like Julian Jaynes to even start putting it in perspective. Because what you realise, and Carl Jung talked about it too, is that through the millennia, the experience of internal subjective consciousness has actually been evolving and changing through the ages. So our experience as 21st century humans, who we think of ourselves as being self-aware and conscious in our own way, that would have looked quite different five millennia ago or seven millennia ago.
And what Jaynes showed in spectacular fashion was the way that the experience of internal awareness and self-awareness has actually mutated through the ages. And now it's quite different to even, say, someone like Homer's time, when he was writing these amazing pieces of prose.
So that's where my mind goes back to, that we used to have a connection to. Okay, put it this way. Jaynes put forth the idea that many, many, many moons ago, we experienced our internal volition, our will, as coming from outside of us. So someone might hear a voice externally, and to them, it was the voice of God, or a God, or the gods. What they may not have recognised back then in their different state of consciousness was that that was how they were experiencing their own will.
So they go to decide, they make a decision, but they don't realise they're making it because they're hearing a voice coming from outside themselves telling them to go and do something. And if they conceptualise themselves as this little creation of the almighty God or the almighty Lord, you don't question that, you just go and do it.
And it seems like from the Jaynesian perspective, we evolved to gradually incorporate that sort of separate version of ourselves, it became integrated. And so now we experience will as just your internal monologue. I just decided I'd go and get a drink and I didn't hear the voice of God telling me to get a drink. I just got up and got it. So it's shifted quite a lot. And I think that's that gradual disconnection from what we used to conceptualise as maybe the voice of God needed to be replaced.
And maybe there were different people at different times who were in different stages of that evolution. And so some people had lost that connection and they'd integrated it and become more modern humans, whereas some still had these archaic remnants of that. And some of them were like prophets or, what's the word I'm looking for, clairvoyant types, the future predictors, these types of people who retain a sort of sense of that connection to this other dimensional something that gave them information. And so we gradually lost that, but we kept remnants of it.
And so the ideas of being in contact with God, that has shifted. And at the same time, we've needed to try to explain the things we couldn't understand and try to explain life and death. And so the ideas have mutated, like if you go back to ancient Egypt. They laid it all out for us. What became Christianity was ultimately largely, as far as I can see, largely lifted from ancient Egypt. And these concepts like the Lake of Fire and the different sort of heaven journey and this kind of stuff. And the people who created Christianity took that and they put their own spin on it and their own distortions on it. And I feel like I'm getting a little bit off on a tangent there. Sorry, away from your original question.
[8:47] Why Societies Accepted the Hell Narrative
Paul: Yes, I was wondering why societies have been so amenable to buying into this heaven and hell narrative when it's actually not very well founded in the texts of any religion.
Brendan: Yeah, you're right. It's not at all. And I read a piece by a devout Christian lady not that long ago who was pointing out that there's no authentic scriptural basis for a belief in hell. So why the hell do so many Christians believe it? It's not there. In the Old Testament, it's not there. So it's this weird thing where people aren't doing their homework on one level, on a basic academic level, they're not doing their homework.
But a lot of it comes back to the need to put our lives into a meaningful context. And also we have an understandable, I think, fear of death and what happens when you die because no one wants to believe that they're going to stop existing. And so we've come up with ways to try to explain a version of continued existence that makes sense to us.
But as you point out, there's no actual real scriptural basis for a belief in a place of eternal damnation where our loving Lord sends us for eternity. That's a distortion that's come down through the power structure and the people who have wanted to maintain control over the mass consciousness and direct things in a way that benefited them. Nothing really has changed that much.
Paul: For sure.
Michael: I was going to touch on that psychological part of it where we as humans want to believe that there's something more and that life has some kind of meaning beyond just this corporeal existence. And so I think from a psychological perspective, it gives us something to connect with after we pass on from our physical form, that there's something else and if we're not a good person then we'll go to hell. And if we are a good person, we get to, and every religion has its own version of heaven and its own version of hell. But generally what happens is that heaven is paradise where we actually exist in a way that we wish we could right now. And hell is essentially a representation of the worst possible state that we can be in, the worst possible existence that we can have. And I think it gives our lives some meaning. It helps us from a psychological perspective to apply some meaning to what we do here.
Paul: I don't think that concept of hell is there, though. The worst possible outcome you can imagine. That's really something that Christianity has championed. It's not there in Judaism. It's not there in the Eastern religions. And so I think there is a particular reason. It found a home within the world of the Pax Romana, for instance. And I'm intrigued by that because you can see why the powers would want a doctrine like that. All governing powers would like a doctrine like that in order to get a meek, fearful, compliant people. But it only really bedded down in that context, and you don't find it when you go to these other cultural centres.
[12:01] Brendan's Awakening Experience
Paul: So that's why I was intrigued to ask you the question I did, Brendan. But if we can switch topics slightly, you said something earlier that I was very interested in, and that was your experience around age 20, 21, which gave you a totally different perspective on all these things. Can you say a bit more about that?
Brendan: Yeah, cool. Basically the long story short is my brother was still at school at the time and I was out of school. Kind of just didn't really know what exactly I was doing with my life. And nice and open-minded and sort of ready for some kind of revelation. And he came home from school one day and said, hey, there was this guy who came in to talk about business. He was a young entrepreneur, but he kept talking about this book that he was really interested in. And it was The Holographic Universe. And he said to me, I think maybe you'd be interested in this. And he never came home with book recommendations for me. This was out of the ordinary thing. Right? So it's like destiny.
And so, yeah, I put that in the back of my mind for probably six months or so. And then eventually the seed sprouted and I had to go and read this book. And when I did, I realised it all made sense why he came home with this book recommendation. And it just completely blew my mind. So this guy was a physicist and he put together the cutting edge research of the time, which showed that reality as we know it is actually nothing like what our senses present to us. And we essentially live in this holographically organised information field. And we are this consciousness that is basically fundamentally formless and timeless.
And so that was my revelation, which just set me off. My curiosity was just on fire at that point. And I just went off and I never looked back. That's all I've really pursued since then. So, yeah, I was able to have experiences then. I took up meditation a little bit further down the track and was able to have sustained experiences of what I can only call infinite consciousness and connecting with, like palpably connecting with what feels like galaxies and things flowing through you, is a very hard thing to put into words. But it's the way that you can ground a concept into your physiology and reality. So I can speak from experience. It's not just theoretical or conceptual to me.
[14:20] Overlap With Other Altered States
Michael: Can you say a little bit about how that experience relates to, people listening to that will think, oh, I think I've experienced something like that. I experienced something like that when I had this particular tea ceremony in Central America. Or I did a psilocybin ceremony that was curated, and I think I had an experience like that. Or others will say, yes, through holotropic breathing, I achieved that. Can you say a little bit how all those things fit on the map? If you find yourself connecting with people who've had those experiences and you find, yes, there's a lot of overlap here.
Brendan: Yeah, there is in a lot of ways, for sure, because certain types of substances or rituals or practices will tend to produce similar sorts of experiences. But there's a thousand and one different ways that you can experience an expanded state of awareness. And the thing about infinity is that there's an infinite variety of ways that you can experience that. So there's a lot of commonalities and there's a lot of differences as well. But ultimately, people experience being boundless or being outside of time or not limited by space and these kinds of concepts, which hem us in the physical experience. But if you want to clarify what you're driving at there, feel free, because I feel like there's something more.
Michael: Oh, no, I just imagine you connect with a lot of people who are coming from different start points, whose worlds are opening up in a very similar way and trying to get their bearings.
Brendan: Yeah, it is the case. I think now especially there's definitely a movement around welcoming in or embracing different modes of experiencing different things, different altered states of consciousness. So I see the increased interest in it. I don't necessarily get a lot of people coming to me and saying, hey, man, I did this amazing ayahuasca ceremony. Actually, incidentally, my brother did one not that long ago, and he had quite an interesting experience. He actually got to experience the death of our family cat as the cat, and the peace and the bliss of that moment.
I haven't actually gotten around to ayahuasca yet, but with psilocybin, having a heroic dose of mushrooms the last time I did, it was great, actually, the experience of annihilation. It's quite a blissful thing to be annihilated in that kind of way and under those circumstances.
[17:06] Who Casts the Hologram?
Paul: I have a question around the holographic universe. You've spoken about that a little bit. Assuming for a second that that's true, that we live in a holographic universe, who casts the hologram? What's the most accepted theory around that? Who casts the hologram?
Brendan: It probably depends who you ask. It's not as fresh in my mind as it could be. But you've got string theory and branes, and there's an image that's projected from this membrane, a two-dimensional membrane, which projects a three-dimensional image, kind of like in a holographic plate, which if you shoot a beam of light at it, it will cast a three-dimensional object in the space. So this kind of thing. I think it's basically, in essence, done from the inside out, if that makes sense.
So the field of consciousness is, for want of a better way of putting it, introspecting and it implodes an idea or a vision within itself, sort of like impregnates itself with a vision. It's quite difficult for me to try to explain this in words, but I think it's from the inside out. So essentially there's this conscious foundation, this infinite, timeless, spaceless medium that then essentially just has a dream or dreams and dreams within dreams.
[unclear]: So would you suggest, go for it, Paul, I'm just still percolating on that.
Paul: It's a big concept to get our heads around, but what you were just saying, Brendan, is Plato was saying that two and a half millennia ago using slightly different language, but it was the same concept, that the primordial thing is a field of consciousness, and that what we experience as the material cosmos emanates from the field of consciousness, and that the individual things we perceive are downloads of information. And he had his particular language for it, but it was there all that time ago, which I find really intriguing. I suspect this was one of the insights he got to through an altered state of consciousness as well. And so the correlations I find really interesting. I find it really adds weight to the concept when you realise people in different ages, different cultures have spoken in very, very similar terms. It's still mind-boggling, but hearing the repeats I think is interesting.
Brendan: Yeah, you're right. You'll find similar stuff in Buddhism and the Tibetan traditions. And there's the Indra's Net concept, which is a very holographic idea. And that's ancient, and it goes to show that people through millennia have had the capacity to have these types of altered state experiences where they tap into this information field, and the experience of it through the ages is actually quite similar. It doesn't necessarily change that much, which tells you something quite profound, really, if you think about it.
Paul: It does. It tells you there's something objective to it.
Brendan: Yeah, something objective. And this thing that we are contacting is eternal and timeless. And when you realise that that's what we are birthed from as 3D beings, and the conscious part of us actually resides in this timeless, spaceless realm, that's really something to ponder. That's where things get quite interesting, and I can see why, the more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've understood the terror of certain people who don't want to deal with that kind of concept, because it's vast. It's infinitely vast and that's pretty intimidating stuff as well. It's not necessarily reassuring. It's not like the Christian fairy tale where we go to heaven and hang out with Jesus at the right hand of God and everything's shiny and golden. It's like, no, this is far, far more involved and sophisticated and vast.
[21:14] Communing With Collective Consciousness
Michael: I watched years ago, or it wasn't actually that many years ago, this TV series. It was about Superman's ancestors on Krypton, still, right? And they had this thing where they were able to commune with their ancestors in the collective consciousness on Krypton. And it was really cool. And it brought me back to this whole theory of the holographic universe and collective consciousness, because in that moment I thought, wow, I bet you that's possible. We just haven't tapped into the ability to be able to commune with all that is and all there ever has been, and all that will be in this moment right now, and be able to commune and connect with that and the collective wisdom that must come with that communion as well. It was something that really stood out for me and I thought, I wonder if that's possible. What do you think, Brendan?
Brendan: I think it's evidently happened to varying degrees to lots of people through time. Certain types of abilities open up pathways to that type of information. I don't know if you're going to go as far as getting the whole download of everything and everyone, but definitely under certain conditions, people are able to tap into information that goes back through the ancestral line. And what was I going to say there? I lost my train of thought.
Well, one of the things is the near-death experience where people go very deeply. If they go deeply enough into a death experience, they often find themselves immersed in this amazing, comforting, blissful light, and then they find themselves with access to essentially what they feel like is all information. Everything that exists is there on tap for them. And as soon as they ask a question, they immediately get the answer. And that's one of the very transformative aspects of near-death experiences for people who go deep into them. It's pretty profound. So I think it's very true. And it's definitely a human capacity that we have. It's just not necessarily well-developed at this point.
[23:16] Practical Ways to Access Information
Michael: What have you found out about tapping that? Because people have this experience in NDEs. It would certainly be useful if we could foster that in day-to-day, week-to-week living. Have you got some hacks for making that work in everyday life?
[unclear]: Hacking infinite knowledge.
Brendan: I'd love to say that I've got some hacks for that, but honestly, the answer is not really. It's such a vast thing. And if I ever find any hacks, I'll definitely let you know. So I think the closest we can get is being devoted to a consistent meditation practice, which helps us tap into these intuitive flows and streams of information. But at that scale of vastness, the near-death experience scale is a different ballgame.
Paul: Yes. There are traditions that relate to that. So you've got the Cathars at one end of the spectrum who really did believe they could access that cosmic field of information through their protocols, which were mindfulness protocols, fasting protocols, abstinence protocols and other things as well. And the Hesychasts had their breathing protocols. And I think you do find that there are things we can do that, at the very least, heighten our sensitivity to information that might be flowing from that kind of dimensionality.
Brendan: Yeah, I totally agree. And even just under-eating, it might sound drastic, but that does open you up to what you might call the subtler levels of information. Your physiology becomes a little bit more dissociated, or it's able to divert its resources into those areas. When I was doing a cleanse many years ago, I suddenly found myself realising, oh, I can see into my body. And that was because of the two weeks of not eating. So we definitely have protocols and things that you can do to expand the realm of frequency, perception and information. It's just a question of having the dedication to do it. And I'm definitely not at the place where I'm that dedicated.
Paul: No, fair enough.
[25:50] Brendan's Second Book
Paul: So what are you focused on at the moment, Brendan? What are you working on at the moment?
Brendan: Well, I'm working on finishing the second book, which is very heavily based around the types of afterlife-related concepts we've talked about. So I go into all the afterlife, NDE stuff, OBEs, the heaven thing, the hell thing, and I break it all down so that at the end of it all, it's all in perspective, and touch on the Gnostic side of things and the shamanic, sorry, Paul, go ahead.
Paul: Oh, no, I'm keen to read this book because these are all topics I'm really interested in, so keep going.
Brendan: There have been a number of times where I've been like, oh, this is really interesting, the threads that I've been pulling on, and it's like, man, I really need this to be out there so other people can experience this. But the shamanic stuff and some of the ways that I've managed to tie in the Australian Aboriginals and their history of shamanic practices and insight, and their ideas of the afterlife and other dimensional, like the Dreamtime, for example, and how that connects into our more modern ideas of the afterlife or the man in the sky with a beard, the old man with a beard in the sky. That's been around for millennia. There were certain Aboriginal tribes that actually had that concept and they would go and journey shamanically to the sky, the sky father, and that's where they would get their shamanic powers in that part of the ritual. So there's so many interesting interconnections through different areas and pulling it all together into perspective is an extremely interesting, but also time-consuming exercise.
[27:32] Lost Knowledge and Deleted History
Paul: Yeah, because you're trying to pull information that exists over centuries, eons almost, from all different civilizations around the world, some of whom couldn't keep very good records. And so much of this is being pulled from places that possibly don't even exist or exist in some kind of form of legend or myth in some way. I would say.
Brendan: Yeah. And it doesn't help that the Romans and the Christians burned down all the libraries and trashed all the greatest literary treasures that we had through history. So we've lost a massive amount of knowledge and perspective. And it's really quite an interesting thing to think about the way that we've almost deleted history and then rebooted the collective psyche with this Christian construct 2,000 years ago. And then we pretend that we didn't have any knowledge before that or we didn't have any perspective before that. It's quite bizarre.
Paul: Yes. And, of course, deliberately delete the earlier information carried by the cultures we invade.
Brendan: Yeah, that sort of helps with the amnesia. That really helps set it in place.
Paul: Definitely. And it's such a tragedy as well because the, sorry, my hair keeps blowing in my face.
Brendan: I have that problem all the time.
[unclear]: So annoying.
Oh, awkward.
He does it all the time.
It's the beard, right? It blows around.
It really does.
Brendan: Oh, yeah. No, it's like we've had... There's really astonishing information and knowledge that still does exist in pockets. There are still certain people who hold that tradition. I'm thinking particularly in Australia, but other places as well. History has been so doctored and this culture has been almost erased completely.
Even now, there are still probably a handful, you could probably count them on one hand, but in Australia, there are probably a handful of original clever fellas who can literally teleport themselves through space and time. It was actually done recently. I wasn't there for it, but I know several people who were, and I believe their account because I know who they are and what they're about. There was a senior clever fellow who did it in the presence of a famous writer. I won't say his name just in case he's not talking about this stuff, but the famous writer was there. I think this is in the public domain.
Michael: So we're talking about Karno.
Brendan: Okay, yes. I just wasn't sure if I should go there. It's already been said by other admirers and followers of him, but I don't think the name of the journalist is in the public domain.
Michael: Okay.
Brendan: Well, it's not about him anyway, but let's just say he was sufficiently mind blown. His jaw was on the ground because he saw Karno do a real life actual demonstration of teleportation. So the knowledge is there.
I know other people too. There's a guy down in Sydney who, there's a certain walking track he can cause to light up in the black of night, as if there are lights down the path when there actually are not.
Paul: Oh, wonderful.
Brendan: The knowledge is there. There's still a handful of them who have that connection to the land and their ancestral magic. But it's just not well known. We're forgetting it.
[31:13] What Teleportation Stories Mean for Us
Paul: Brendan, when you hear a story of someone like Karno being able to teleport, or what he would call go behind the curtain, it's an amazing story. But where does that take us? What do we do with that information once we know it's possible?
Brendan: Well, I don't know that there's necessarily that much of a pragmatic aspect to what we do with it. I think that people should know about it because it opens the awareness of what is actually possible. When you realise these things are happening, it tells you something about the reality that we inhabit.
We've been indoctrinated into this materialistic, reductionistic, the only thing that exists is the physical world and what your senses can tell you exists. And at the same time, we've got this weird kind of Christian streak as well in the psyche. It tells us, well, we don't believe in all that woo, but we believe in Jesus and in the cloud kind of thing. So we've got this really weird, conflicted, mixed up kind of concept of what happens and how things work.
But once you start getting into the quantum side of it and the holographic side of it and understanding things as fundamentally being composed of information, and information doesn't necessarily exist in place A or place B, it can actually exist in both simultaneously in a superposition state, then you get into some interesting possibilities.
When I was writing my first book, I just knew that I needed to share what I'd learned with other people. I didn't know what kind of effect it would have necessarily. But I've had people come back to me and say that it changed the course of their life because it just opened their sense of possibility so much compared to where it was at. And it's like, well, if this is what we are capable of, why am I putting up with this petty, small little life, pretending I'm this little peon, working for the man or whatever? Why am I pretending to be powerless and living powerlessly and acting like I don't have causal agency and creative command here? Because that's really what those types of things are teaching us, that we have an enormous level of creative agency. If you can make your body disappear and reappear somewhere else, obviously you're pretty powerful.
[33:36] How Can We Learn These Abilities?
Michael: So people will hear that and we agree with that, right? But people will hear that and they'll say, how the hell, that's only in science fiction and special effects in movies, right? How the hell can we make our bodies disappear and appear somewhere else? That's how people would love to know, right? So there are people that you're saying can do that. And I've heard these stories before. Even Zen monks in the Himalayas levitating this far above the ground. And how the hell do you do that stuff? I'm not talking about the charlatans that bounce up and down the ground. I'm talking about the ones that actually levitate. Where do we get access to this wisdom, this knowledge, the ability to be able to do that stuff? How do we learn it for ourselves? How can everybody get access to that information?
Brendan: Well, it probably doesn't sound very exciting, but the fact is that meditation on a consistent basis helps to open you up to that because it's tapping into the knowledge that exists in the collective or in the information field. And whether that comes through consciously or subconsciously or a bit of both, it helps you to actually be able to implement things or to experience things that you otherwise wouldn't experience or be able to do or see.
When I was meditating in my first two years of my 20s, my clairvoyance started to switch on and I started to see things that didn't exist at the physical material level. I realised what was going on because that was kind of my intention behind it. And when I stopped meditating, it's use it or lose it, it goes away.
But the how of it is very much speculative and people have their own theories about it. I don't think that there's any chance of consensus on what's happening exactly anytime soon. People have their different alternative physics theories and it's interesting. But I think it's more important that we're just expanding our sense of possibility and remembering who and what we are and what we're here for and what we're capable of, more so than understanding the theory behind it.
Michael: Yeah, I would agree with that.
[35:44] Brendan's Meditation Practice
Paul: Somebody listening to you just now would say, though, hold on, I do want to foster that and I want to start seeing things beyond my immediate little perceptual field. Therefore, I want to know what was Brendan's meditation practice that opened that up for him? What is meditation for you? What do you do?
Brendan: Well, I don't do it anymore in the way that I used to anyway. I don't actually even currently have a practice. But I used to meditate with the intention of developing clairvoyance. Whenever I was meditating, that was my purpose. That was, if you like, the kind of information field that I was operating in and the skill that I was trying to develop, as well as having those really transcendent kind of high-level interconnected mystical type experiences. So to me, intention is key. If you are trying to achieve something, you want to have that intention and hold that. But there's probably a million different ways of approaching meditation itself.
I used to go to a spiritualist church and we had a trance group there once a week and they had another session once a week. I found that being in a collective energy quite helpful, quite supportive because it sort of augments exponentially the process and the dynamics in the room as opposed to just being on your own. So in a group where everyone's kind of like-minded and on the same page, I think that can really accelerate your development.
But as for the method, I think it's nothing really special. We went through guided meditation. You focus on the energy centres in the body, open up, expand, bring the light into your body and all this kind of stuff. That's pretty standard. And I think that people just need to find what it is they're trying to achieve and then find the approach that actually supports that and works with it. Would you agree?
Paul: I really like that. It's a good actual practical grounded approach, which I think most people, everyone has access to. So I like that.
[37:50] Were These Abilities Once Mainstream?
Michael: Would you say that this knowledge and these abilities were mainstream back thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, if not millions of years ago, and something happened to alter our awareness, our DNA in some way and almost dumb us down so that we lose the ability?
Brendan: Yeah, I do have a fair bit of sympathy for that because it's a theme that keeps coming up again and again. I think that it's possible a lot of different things have happened. You've got this ancient alien school of thought where there's the idea that somebody came down to Earth and actually physically manipulated and genetically engineered us. That's sort of the Zechariah Sitchin school. I think the issue with someone like that is often their interpretation, and they project their interpretation onto things that are actually a bit more open-ended and a bit more vague than they let on. I was just looking at a passage of Sitchin's for my book, for one of my chapters on the shamanic stuff. I went back to the original Bible passage and it's like, okay, all right, I can see where he's put his spin on it, and here's what the original actually says. So it's always useful to go back to the sources.
But there may have been a trauma as well. There's this idea that we've lost civilisations beneath the waves, like Atlantis and Lemuria and this kind of thing. Maybe a collective trauma psychologically created a sort of backwards evolution, a downgrade in our physiology and put us into a survival mode where we lost those abilities. Maybe it was a genetic engineering thing. Maybe it was done deliberately. Any number of possibilities. I'm open to all of it. I just don't necessarily believe or invest a belief in a belief system. I'm just open to the evidence as it presents itself to me and I go through it.
Michael: Perhaps it was the destruction of Atlantis where we lost all of our knowledge.
Brendan: Yeah, I don't care what you call it, but we've definitely lost civilisations. Yeah, we've absolutely lost it. There's probably this ancestral memory deep in our subconscious about this traumatic event where we lost not just homes, but land. Vast swaths of land went under the waves. That would be an enormous trauma to then have in the psyche, being passed down through the ancestral line. And we may have actually blocked that off and screened it out as a mode of self-protection and self-defence. There's a lot of possibilities.
[40:23] Academia and Gatekeeping
Paul: Yes, I think there's something to that. There's certainly a resistance in mainstream academia to accepting the probability of lost civilisations. It looks like there's some collective psychology going on there because it's such an obvious thing to suggest, but it seems so hard for the mainstream to go there.
Brendan: No, I think you're being pretty polite.
Paul: Yes.
Brendan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're finding pyramids on the ocean floor and these massive monuments, and they pretend that it's not there. You get these idiots like Zahi Hawass, who's the head of Egyptology. It's bizarre. It's so stupid that it's kind of comical that you get these people in positions where they can act as gatekeepers and prevent knowledge and prevent the progression of understanding and our remembrance of history and who we are. It's laughable that these are the guys we hold up as authorities when they're nothing but clowns.
And you're right, there's definitely collective psychology playing into it as well. Academia is a great example of collective denial and the hubris of academia. They don't want to listen to anybody who's a filthy layperson or somebody who challenges their version of events or their favourite theory. I've seen so much of this. It's a cesspit of that kind of thing. Gatekeeping in the scientific community shouldn't happen, but it's rife.
Michael: Who appoints the gatekeepers?
Brendan: Oh, that's the million-dollar question, Paul. Oh, man. Well, we can only speculate. It's weird. A lot of the time there are verifiable conspiracies, verifiable agendas that you can identify and there's evidence to back that. And then there are other times where it looks more like the collective psyche unconsciously orchestrates things to, it's kind of like, what am I looking for? The comparison here is, I don't know. It's like groupthink on a grand scale.
Paul: Yeah, that's right.
Brendan: But it's also there's this unconscious aspect to it, where the unconscious side of the psyche is almost having a joke at our expense. It's like, oh, I'm going to put Zahi Hawass in charge of Egyptology. How do you like that? And then the peons, all these useful idiots, get involved in the cause and they make it all coalesce and come together without even realising what they're doing. It's quite astonishing to watch. And that happens everywhere. And it's like, man, something really odd about this. It's kind of like a joke, like the UFO phenomenon, how it has these kooky little weird little elements built into it that make us look at it and go, oh, that's funny. That's odd.
Yes, I agree.
Michael: Would you say that sometimes we can maybe even put forward that the people that appoint the gatekeepers are the ones that hold the actual knowledge and don't want the actual knowledge released to the public?
Brendan: I think in some cases that's probably true. There are instances where that would be pretty obvious. And I also think there are times where maybe we give them, with a capital T, we give them too much credit. And we assume, we project that they have this amazing secret knowledge. And in some cases, I think that's the case. But I think it's also very heavily, things tend to be very compartmentalized. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing, and that's by design. Whoever runs this little operation over here doesn't want these people finding out about it. So it's on a need-to-know basis down through the hierarchy. So, yeah, I think it's kind of like a bit of this and a bit of that.
I don't like to subscribe to an overarching kind of worldview where everything's controlled by the same handful of people. I know that there are times when it definitely looks like that, but it's an easy trap to fall into, this sort of paradigmatic fallacy of, oh, well, everything's an evil conspiracy. We see a lot of that in the truth community where people adopt this stance that everything is consciously, calculatingly manipulated to the nth degree to be a malevolent agenda, when in actual fact, a lot of it is just pure idiocy, it's a conspiracy of idiocy. These people in positions in the hierarchy are mostly just clowns. So many of them are absolute idiots. They couldn't organize a proper conspiracy if they tried, but somehow we kind of conspire with them collectively to create this kind of hilarious situation where the most absurd things happen and we block our own awareness and understanding.
It's quite a bizarre dynamic. It's like every time we get close to something, the masses manage to steer away from it. And we blame the controlling secret brotherhood or whatever. But sometimes it's like we just trip over ourselves on the way.
Michael: Yes, I can see all that in the mix for sure.
Brendan: It's a mix, right?
Michael: Absolutely. And it's muddy too. It's difficult to find your way through because it's difficult to know what's true and what isn't true, what's fact and what isn't fact, what's fact and what's fiction. And also what's anchoring for us as well? People want things that are anchoring for them so that they can anchor to something and feel a foundation under their feet. And when they can't feel a foundation under their feet, they usually invent something to put under their feet so they feel a little bit more stable.
Brendan: Totally. Totally. And it's basic psychological need.
[46:19] Embracing Uncertainty
Brendan: I think it's useful to embrace uncertainty because ultimately we are all going to have to face the fact one day that there is much, much more information that we don't know than we do know or ever will know. And we're not in those rooms, the secret board meetings, the stuff that happens in the shadow, we're not there. So we can't have direct, personal, first-hand knowledge of it. And if we don't have that, then it's just second-hand, it's conjecture, it's speculation. So I think we should embrace the unknown or the uncertain. And learn to swim in the waters of uncertainty because, that's all there is, really. We just have so little idea of what's actually happening.
We get these little bits and pieces and we can put together a model. But ultimately, the model isn't reality. It's not the same thing. The map isn't the territory. So I think it's good to be mindful as we go along trying to figure stuff out to not fall into that tempting trap of manufacturing an artificial sort of certainty to feel better about it. Rather, I think it's better to embrace uncertainty. And that's a sign of a psyche that's probably reasonably well grounded and quite stable and maybe mature, as opposed to needing an infantile kind of fantasy to cling to to make you feel better about what's all the things you don't know.
[47:38] Grounding and Orientation
Michael: So what grounds you? How do you get that grounding when the picture you've painted is so confusing? How do you live a life where you're not boxing against the air, so to speak? What is it that gives you your orientation in all this, Brendan?
Brendan: Probably to a large extent, family does. And I know that's probably a very prosaic sort of a thing to say, but that's my immediate concern.
Michael: Yes.
Brendan: And I think aside from that, as I said, I've always wanted to know, is there an existence aside from the physical body? And that's the only place where I've really, I think, approached something approaching certainty, where I've approached it from every angle I can possibly think of. I've had mystical experiences. I've done plant medicine. I've researched. I've read all the scientific, the technical stuff. And it all points in the same direction of we are this, we are this immortal, timeless thing, this consciousness that then dreams itself into a dream that we call reality. And we pretend that we're Brendan and Paul and Michael and these are little adventures that we have in the grand infinite field of possibility. And then we just keep going and recycling ourselves in all these different ways.
And we shouldn't necessarily be concerned about that because it doesn't happen in time. It happens outside of time from that level. It's like we only have time here, but at those levels, it's not really a thing.
[49:17] Fear of a Constructed Reality
Michael: It's mind-blowing to just try to conceptualise for a moment. For everybody watching, it's just to conceptualise that everything. Literally everything that we're experiencing right here in this moment is quite possibly and quite probably a construct of a collective consciousness that we're not fully aware of. I think that just is amazing, to be honest.
Paul: I love that because it actually, what it does, a lot of people are afraid of that. A lot of people are afraid of that because we're so conditioned to believe that our physical existence is it.
Michael: Right.
Paul: And then when you suggest something like this to them, you touched on this before, right? There's so much uncertainty around it. There's so much lack of stability around that for people because of how we're being conditioned, that it repels them and it scares them and it puts them into this state of fear where they just don't know what to do with it. It's like, what does that mean about my life? What does that mean about who I am? What does that mean about my job and my financial situation and my life in general? Is it like unimportant?
Michael: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it challenges people.
Brendan: It does.
Michael: It does. It does. Sorry, Paul, did you want to jump in?
Paul: Well, I absolutely relate to what Michael's saying, but I sense that for you, Brendan, your perspective actually gives you confidence in the way you go about life and energises you. So I'm intrigued by that sort of dichotomy, those who feel overwhelmed by this bigger picture of who and what we are and what the cosmos is. And then there's you. You're actually deriving inspiration, energy and confidence from these insights.
Brendan: Yeah, it's funny how that works. I don't know what to tell you there. I just think of it as my job. It's my mission. It's what I'm here for. It's like you step into a dream to initially forget who you are. And then part of the job is to wake up and remember who you are and then help other people to wake up and remember who they are. And then once we're awake together, we get to explore infinities together.
[51:35] Closing and Contact Details
Paul: That's beautiful. I love that.
Michael: And I would say that that's probably a great place to end this first chapter, which I hope is just our first chapter of future discussions that we can continue because there's a lot to unpack.
Brendan: Yeah, I'm definitely out for a second one, guys. But I appreciate it.
Paul: I'm looking forward to the book you're working on. It touches on so many things that excite me. I'm really grateful you're out there doing that work and sharing it in the way you do because you're a very eloquent communicator.
Brendan: Oh, thank you, sir. I appreciate that. Yeah, I appreciate your time too, guys.
Paul: You're welcome, man.
Michael: How can people contact you if they'd like to?
Brendan: Well, you can follow me on pretty much any social platform, Brendan D. Murphy Official. You can email me via my website, which is brendandmurphy.com. You can find the book there as well. If you add a slash TGI or you just search it on the page. So, yeah, I'm not hard to find. I'm on most of the socials or truth.network, T-R-O-O-T-H. Yeah, easy to get in touch with if you need to.
Michael: Awesome. Thank you, man. Appreciate you being on Journey to the Fringe.
Brendan: I appreciate it.
Paul: Thanks, Brendan.
Brendan: Thanks, guys. Cheers.