Living Free
Existence & Consciousness: Living Free with guest Brendan Murphy
Brendan joins Living Free for a conversation on existence, consciousness, and what genuine freedom looks like when grounded in a rigorous understanding of reality.
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[0:00] Welcome and Following Brendan's Work
[unclear]: Your health, your way, your community. Make the change. Join the movement.
David: Welcome everyone to another episode of Academy. Today we're talking about existence and consciousness and we have Brendan D. Murphy with us. Brendan, welcome.
Brendan: Thanks for having me, Dave. It's good to be here, mate.
David: So Brendan, a bit of a confession. I've actually followed your work from many years ago. You were part of my waking up process as I started to delve deep into some of the rabbit holes. And you had a program along with your lovely wife, where you went into all these strange and crazy topics at the time.
And I can remember putting in my headphones at the gym and listening and coming back to my wife and going, hey, I just listened to this and it's blowing my mind. And did you realise that there's underground bunkers and there's these crazy things? And so, confession, I've followed your work for quite some time and you've done some amazing things.
Brendan: Yeah, that's awesome to hear, man. Thanks. Yeah, I didn't know that.
[1:18] The Path Into the Rabbit Hole
David: So let's go back a little bit. Let's learn a little bit more about yourself. You've been at this for quite some time, I think almost 20 years.
Brendan: 21 years.
David: And so do you want to go back to, I guess, what took you down this rabbit hole of information and what have you sort of learned across that period to get you to this point now? So that's a massive, massive point that you can either take on a short part or delve a little bit deeper.
Brendan: Well, I guess if you're asking for my background, I've got to go back to when my brother was in his, I think, last or second last year of high school. He came home one day from hearing a talk by a guy who was visiting the school just to give a presentation. And this guy was an entrepreneur. He was supposed to be talking about business, but he kept going off topic and referencing this book that had really blown his mind. And for some reason, my brother thought that he needed to come home and relay that to me. And so he was like, okay, this is the book. And I just thought, you might want to know about it.
At this point, I wasn't awake. I hadn't had my big epiphany. But that was the trigger. About six months later, I was moved to go and finally look up that book and track it down and get a copy and read it. And when I did, it just absolutely destroyed everything I thought I knew, all my assumptions about how reality works and what it is and all that stuff. And that lit the fire in me to then go down the path that I've been on the last 21 years, which is pursuing a lot of things, but particularly the theme of the nature of reality and consciousness as well.
[3:10] Working With Aimee
David: So it's yourself and your wife, Aimee, that have been on this journey. She was very much a part of this as well, from my understanding. And you've written some books. Is Aimee a writer as well? Is that right?
Brendan: She is. She's actually a really good writer. She's got a Substack actually, so I recommend people check it out. It's Aimee Q Devlin and she spells her name A-I-M-E-E.
David: Okay, beautiful. Yeah, so I found her stuff quite interesting as well. You guys have been on this journey together. Did you find each other during that or did you take the lead? Did you meet each other and then take the lead and take it down this pathway, or how did that all look?
Brendan: Well, she found me. She actually found me through that first book that I wrote. So that was how we connected. I don't know how she found it either, but she did. And then she read it and looked me up and found me on Facebook. And so we connected on Facebook and that was 11 years ago now. We just had our 11th anniversary in November. So I'd already been on the path for, at that point, nine, 10 years or so.
And then the last 11 years I've been with Aimee and we did the whole, like you were talking about, the global freedom movement stuff and the podcasting and all that stuff together back then, back in the day. I think it was 2014 through 2015 that we were doing all that stuff, and then got involved in the early days of the Empower movement, all sorts of stuff. We were very much in the sort of activist phase. So yeah, we've done a lot together. We've kind of moved away from a lot of that type of stuff now and a lot of other people have picked up the ball and run with it. So we're more honing in on our writing and the things that we're really most focused on.
[4:52] The More You Learn, the Less You Know
David: So looking back at some of the work that you've put out, how much do you think that your opinions have changed over that time? And how much do you think that the more that you learn, the less that you know?
Brendan: Yeah, the more you learn, the less you know. And I guess it's good in a way because if you have that sense of living in the question and have the mindset of being a perennial seeker, even if you think you've got answers, then at least it never gets dull. It's always interesting. So I have that mentality of seeking and seeking no matter what.
But to answer your question about have my views on things changed, fundamentally, no. The core thesis of the first book I wrote is still the same now. When I get around to doing a revised edition, it's going to be the same. I'm not going to be changing a lot other than a couple of minor details.
In some sense, you try to just develop your perspective so that it's not stagnating and challenge your foundational premises and question those. And I'm always doing that. I haven't managed to debunk my initial thesis entirely. But reality, it's such a slippery thing. I think we can talk about it, but I'm not actually really that convinced that we really can talk about it. With words, you have these signposts that point in a direction, in the direction of something that we think is a reality and hopefully is a reality. But words are so limited and language is so limited and our concepts are so limited. It's very difficult to even say, well, we can talk about the nature of reality, whatever that means. It's getting a bit sort of floppy maybe, but you'll have to get me back on track.
[6:50] Sources of Knowledge and Direct Experience
David: Well, the topic today, we're talking about existence and consciousness and both of those elements are somewhat subjective. We don't have evidence that 100% tells us that this is the way. A lot of what we're talking about today, no doubt, is going to be talking about near-death experiences. It's going to be talking about ancient texts and beliefs and these types of things to be able to gather that information. Where have you gathered your information to, I guess, get to this knowledge on consciousness and existence?
Brendan: Well, the first place is, I guess, myself in terms of having altered states of consciousness experiences. So what some people might call mystical experiences or peak experiences or whatever label you want to use. And to me, gnosis experiences. And that is essential. That's always been my opinion, since I had that initial epiphany very shortly after I read that book we were talking about. That book opened my mind and then because my mind was expanded, I was then able to have very altered or very expanded states of awareness.
My first one was just lying in bed one night waiting to go to sleep. And suddenly I was in a very different paradigm, experiencing myself as infinite consciousness. And that was the first of that type of experience that I had and that grounded the theories and the ideas and concepts that were in that book that I found so compelling. It grounded it in there for me. I was like, oh, well, this is real. I've just experienced this directly. This is not secondhand information. This is not hearsay. I know this is a gnosis experience. So that's the first most fundamental thing.
And for me, it's probably the biggest blind spot or limitation that we have collectively as a species, is most people haven't had those types of experiences at that level. And so they're stuck in the conceptual realm. They're stuck in the realm of very limited ideas, without having experience that takes them beyond that conceptual realm. So hopefully that all makes sense. And then feel free to ask me to clarify anything. But to answer the second part of your question, my other sources are endless. We're talking thousands and thousands.
[9:18] Accessing Expanded States of Consciousness
David: Yeah. So okay, let's go into that consciousness stuff. You're saying that you've had that experience lying in bed as your first one. How frequently can you access that by training yourself or doing certain things, or is it just one of those things that's happened to you once, or has it happened many times, or is it something that you then need to access? A lot of people access these things by using psychedelics or other things. What's been your experience in being able to access this level of consciousness?
Brendan: For me, I would say the most useful or most important experiences that I've had have not involved any kind of psychedelics or any kind of mind-altering substance at all. Aside from that first one, it's been just in meditation. So I know from experience, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to do to induce yourself into that kind of a state.
But people have their methods. You might have heard of something called the Cosmic Cobra Breath, which is a breathing technique that some people recommend and seem to have good results with, able to induce themselves into that type of state, some people call it the void, a void experience. So there are different ways.
I've actually been very, very neglectful of any kind of actual practice in the last, man, 18, 19 years. I've been really just lazy about it. It's only been in the last few months, I guess, that I've tried to make my way back into that space and start doing something again, because most of the time, aside from the fact I've got a four-year-old and a lot of stuff on my plate, I've been focused more on the informational, theoretical, conceptual side so I can work on that, try to develop my material so I can share that with people and help them move forward in their awareness.
But I just think people should find a technique that seems to work for them better. I don't think it's a great idea to rely overly on psychedelics and stuff. They can be very powerful as healing experiences. And if you have a particular purpose for doing it, then knock yourself out. But it's not necessary. If you learn to meditate, then you don't need those things.
[11:49] What Consciousness Is
David: And so effectively with your research, how would you explain what consciousness is? What's the definition in Brendan's mind?
Brendan: My experience is most definitions of consciousness end up being kind of self-referencing and circular. And it's hard to get away from that, really, because what is consciousness? Well, it's awareness. Well, what's awareness? That's consciousness. It's not a thing. We're so used to thinking of things in terms of objects or something concrete, something tangible. But awareness is an intangible. It's something that's very hard to capture with words, the difficulty of language.
And so it's the thing that makes other things enter into our perception. It's the perceptual field. It's whatever, this kind of this is kind of the direction that the conversation goes. But ultimately, consciousness is the thing that elucidates. It's the thing that gives us any kind of meaning. It's the thing that allows anything we talk about or discuss to have any form of meaning in the first place, because you can't have consciousness without meaning and you can't have meaning without consciousness. They're so interrelated and interdependent. So as I said, it tends to be a bit circular, but I hope that at least is somewhat clarifying my position.
[13:18] Existence, Purpose and Place
David: Yeah, it's a difficult one. Some people might use other words for it as well, like your spirit and these types of things. And they can be explained in that. But effectively, what we're saying is that there's this thing that we don't really completely understand that we have access to now, but it's also infinite, is my understanding, that it will continue on past this physical body realm. And we don't really know what's past that.
So then we start to talk about existence, which is, I guess, why we've got those two aspects in this topic. They're kind of interrelated, right? We're talking about something that is ongoing and something that surpasses our current understanding of what our existence is. And so therefore, it opens up a whole range of questions on, well, what's our purpose? What is our existence here for? What is this place that we're in? All of these questions come from, I guess, going deeper into these topics. So what are your thoughts on what's our purpose? What is this place that we're in?
Brendan: Yeah, that's kind of the million-dollar question, right? I try to live in the question. Even though I've done a lot of research and study in those areas, it doesn't mean we should settle for the answers that are provided.
I consider existence here, the type of existence that we're familiar with, as being a state of an altered state of consciousness. And you could say that any form of existence is an altered state of consciousness. When we die, we experience an altered state of consciousness. When we're born, we experience an altered state of consciousness. And any other form of reality we inhabit is also really just an alteration in what we call the field of consciousness.
But again, as soon as you start using words to get into this stuff, you start mangling it. There is this mystery of this thingness that exists and which somehow allows us to have awareness, but we don't really know how to pin that down.
And all we do know, and there's a lot of evidence behind this, is as you suggested, there's the survival of awareness beyond the physical body. We're at the point now, this is a big theme of my second book, the first one too, but the second one even more so, that when the physical body stops working, awareness continues.
You compare it to a dream. If you're having a dream and in the dream you somehow are killed, you fall off a cliff or something horrendous happens to you in the dream, what happens? Well, you immediately find yourself experiencing something different or having a different vantage point of the situation. You can't die in the dream. And that's what we find in our reality. What we think of as reality is that the same thing applies. This is a dream. And when the physical body stops working, then the dream continues in just a different format, a different paradigm.
And so once you get away from the body, a panoply of possibilities opens up that we've only just begun to scratch the surface of.
[16:47] Tom Campbell and the Simulation Question
David: There's a guy I'm sure you're familiar with called Tom Campbell, who's done a lot of work, My Big Toe, which is My Big Theory of Everything. And he talks about effectively the studies that they did and they went up into a conscious state and they would have these communications. They were both in separate rooms and they'd come back down and they'd compare notes. This conversation, I guess, that occurred in this conscious state. So are you familiar with his work? I'm assuming you are.
Brendan: Only a little bit. I haven't gotten around to reading his stuff, but I know roughly what his sort of outlook is because he used to work with, he was in the early days involved with Robert Monroe at the Monroe Institute. So, yeah, he's one of the original gangsters of that scene. So I think actually he's pretty onto it. I think he's basically saying this is a simulation type thing or a dream of some sort. And I'm basically on a similar page as far as what I've seen of his work for sure.
[17:44] Purpose, Religion and the Reincarnation Trap
David: I think where most people struggle with this stuff is that it comes back to then your purpose, right? So if you're in a simulation, then why are we in that simulation? Do we choose to be in this simulation? These types of questions. So that becomes back onto your purpose. And then I think that's where religion has filled that gap for a lot of people in explaining the reason for our existence.
But I think a lot of people are walking away from mainstream religious ideas. And then potentially also walking away from the idea that nothing matters, that all the rest, there is some level of purpose in what we're doing, but it's somewhere in between. And there's truth in the religious texts and that sort of thing. And there's truth in some of these mythological stories that we've heard, but where is that truth? And we're trying to grapple with some of these concepts, but it comes back to your purpose. And then some of these concepts start to go on to, that there is no purpose.
And that's what I find personally difficult when I grapple with reading into these topics, is that the idea that you have no purpose. What's your thoughts on that? You'd be aware of some of these people that, effectively put out that there is nothing, that we're just here, we're going to go around the same thing. We're going to, instead of going to the white light, we should go to the dark light. And all of these types of concepts. When I hear that stuff, there's something inside of me that jumps out and thinks that that's a trap in itself. What's your thoughts?
Brendan: Yeah, I'm going to get into this a little bit in book two and even more in book three because I think it's quite rich. A lot of that stuff seems to come out of the basement level of the collective unconscious. You have people have an experience in the astral planes or whatever it is. Have a meeting with an encounter with some sort of a being. And it's interesting. I would say to simplify it for the most part, it's not helpful.
It sounds like you're touching on the reincarnation trap idea and this type of thing. Stop me if I'm wrong. But put it this way, I've been in this space for the last 21 years and that idea was not there back when I started. I think it's a very recent thing and it seems to have gained momentum. I think it's fuelled mostly by the fact that life has gotten increasingly difficult for many people. So the experience here is not very pleasant and it's become more and more of a struggle. So a lot of people are kind of like, well. Why would I have signed up for this? What's the point of this? Why do I have to suffer like this? Which is understandable. I just don't think that there's a lot of useful, a lot of useful perspective there. It's more like, okay, that's kind of the astral level of the paradigm.
And some of the people out there are saying, okay, so when you have a near-death experience or you die, don't let these beings, what do they call them? The handlers, the handlers of the reincarnation trap, trick you into coming back and reincarnating and all this sort of stuff. And they really make quite a big deal out of it. And I think it's interesting because I wouldn't necessarily dismiss all of it out of hand. I think there's aspects of it that are worth considering and looking into further.
But for me, having had the experiences I have, I've had a tendency to completely bypass all of that stuff. That paradigm, if you want to call it that astral paradigm, I tend to refer to that stuff as the astral fantasia because I don't put a lot of weight in it. And when you bypass it, you realise there's really nothing to worry about. Your infinite consciousness can't be put in a cage or a box. It's not a thing. It's not a tangible thing to be caged or boxed. So you can shift your reality paradigm anytime you like, into virtually anything. And that's what stuff like near-death experiences and mystical experiences have been showing us for centuries. You can alter your state of consciousness.
And again, this idea of a soul trap or reincarnation trap is very recent, super recent. And unfortunately, it seems to be fuelled by a lot of misinformation and people who are saying things that are super inaccurate, people who are talking about having a near-death experience who actually haven't had one, but they thought they might know what it's like to die because they were stressed out about something one day. This kind of nonsense gets fuelled and all of these ideas get shoved into this bucket, the reincarnation soul trap bucket. And then it's like, so much of it's unhelpful and not particularly useful.
And I think it's easier to talk about in writing as well, honestly, to break it down and go, okay, here's this thing. Let's examine this idea. And then here are the pros and cons. This is why it works. This is why it doesn't work. So that's why I want to dig into it more in my writing. But for the most part, in book two, I don't focus on it a lot. I do talk about it, but not a lot because it's like I'm moving people past that whole thing anyway. It's like, don't get bogged down in that stuff. It's fear. A lot of it's fear porn. It's not necessary. It's not helpful. It's actually an extension of our collective kind of victim mentality as well in a lot of ways. And that's really what it supports in some respects.
So the point of what I do is to remind people, okay, the foundation is infinite consciousness. As far as I'm concerned, I can't get around that. I can't disprove it. I can't debunk it. This is what you fundamentally are. And so within that container, there's endless possibilities. So, okay, you don't want to reincarnate. I personally don't think that that choice is made from this level of the paradigm, this paradigm. It's not made from this paradigm anyway. But if you are at least aware that it's not mandatory to be here again, I suppose that's useful. Nobody forced you to be here in the first place. You on some level consented, even if you were kind of inveigled into it by these supposed handlers that are supposed to be running the trap, you still consented. You could have said no, you could have been off to some other different experience. So maybe keep that in mind for when we kick the bucket and we're moving out of here.
[24:34] Consent and Suffering
David: So that idea of consent, though, I believe we are in a consent-based realm that we agree to that. And then you've got to take that one step further, is that if that's the case, then we have most likely consented to be in this place right now. In some capacity, in some location, we consented. Then that brings in the idea of those who are, for me, I did some stuff in anti-child trafficking stuff and everything. And that then becomes, well, what did you consent to at that time? Because could you have consented to this most horrific life? Are you aware of the journey that you're going to have when you come into this location? Are you given full disclosure, if you like, of what is going to occur or is that part of the consent? You just go, okay, I know that I'm going into what can be a very evil place or it can be a very beautiful place, but you consent to go into that.
And because you get down to the child trafficking of minors who have had no choice whatsoever. So where did that consent then occur for them? And the only rationale I've been able to come up with in my mind to make sense of that consent base is the fact that maybe there's a way in which we evolve in our spirit, in our consciousness, whatever, depending on the journey in which we take. And sometimes we could take that small journey and have a lot of trauma quickly and go back and have evolved. Quickly, or maybe we choose to have a longer journey down here with less traumas and all the rest of it. How do you reconcile that idea of consent then, into the traumatic experiences that people have? Because I'm assuming people don't choose to have that experience.
Brendan: Yeah, it's a good place to, it's a good question and place to investigate. If you look at a lot of different sources on this, without trying to list them all, particularly the life between lives regression, hypnosis regression realm, over 50,000 people have been hypnotised and regressed just by Newton practitioner, sorry, Newton Institute practitioners all around the world. And basically what happens, and obviously that doesn't include all the other different practitioners out there who are just doing their own thing. And basically the reports from the afterlife realm or the interlife, the life between lives realm, are very uniform. They're extremely uniform.
And from that paradigm, we get this kind of perspective of, well, okay, so when you were in the spirit world, you chose this life path for this particular evolutionary experience, like this is a growth experience. And in a nutshell, that, if you like, the Oversoul or Higher Self entity that wants to play in this realm and incarnate into it. It doesn't seem to care a great deal about the idea of suffering at the human level. It just doesn't. It actually, again, based on, I'm not saying I necessarily wholeheartedly agree with this, but the evidence available is pretty extensive.
So it's almost like a bloody-minded mentality. The being in this eternal being has this impulse to evolve and develop. And it understands that experience in the Earth life system is the fastest way to do that, partly because it's so hard and brutal. And if we remain in the spirit realm, we are not challenged. We're really not challenged to anywhere near the same extent.
This is one of the reasons or the rationale for having experiences like the Earth life kind of experience and the evolutionary acceleration that it offers.
And again, from that paradigm, the higher self kind of level, it doesn't care about the suffering of the human that it's going to be living as, for better or worse.
So, yeah, it's interesting because when you look at people who've had near-death experiences and they come back and they go, oh, well, they go to the light and they experience the higher self or the Oversoul or whatever. And they come back and go, I know why we're here. I know what my purpose is and I'm supposed to be doing this, that and the other. And we're just supposed to live and have joy and live our purpose. And generally, I have a very positive mentality. My point is they come back with a very positive mindset about their individual role and journey in this life.
And yet, at the collective level, as my friend Nick points out, on a collective level, the human experience appears to be kind of a nightmare, like it's a disaster. It's like the divine orchestrator is not actually kind of at the wheel. It's not really doing its job. It's all well and good for the individual who has that insight and goes, okay, well, that's why I'm here doing this and that. And that's why I had to experience this horrible thing and that horrible thing because it's helping me grow in this way. But on a collective level, it's like, well, is there anybody really kind of at the wheel steering this?
So it's interesting, but that's at least a couple of one or two different realms of research where we get that kind of an answer. It's like the personal journey, it's very much a personal individual choice to be here for an individual reason. And then that connects in with families and soul clusters and these ideas where we're incarnating with groups of people to allow us to have certain types of experiences. And then to get back to your point about the really awful stuff, some of those experiences are, again, coming from the regression and also spontaneously recalled past life memories and interlife memories. Some of that, again, coming from those sources is preordained and selected intentionally.
So there was a guy, I've got a few case studies in my book, book two. One of the guys had the memory, he had an NDE and he had the experience of being able to access information about why he chose to live a life with his particular debilitating disease. And then he understood why it was that he selected that and it was so that he could experience, I think it was, pain with grace and dignity or something along those lines. And so these are the kinds of experiences that are not possible if we don't invent or dream the kind of human experience into existence, I guess. There's one way of looking at it.
[31:09] Purpose and Its Absence
David: Yeah, I think for me, a lot comes back to your purpose as well. And I was an atheist for years, so no belief that there was anything else. But there was always this something that I got brought up with opportunities to go down the wrong track and I chose not to. And that's the interesting thing, if there is no purpose, no greater reason to do that, then why not go down the wrong track?
And I think that there was obviously something inside me that said, no, you don't want to be that. But I've always dreamed of robbing banks and doing those sorts of things. And you sit there and go, okay, well, could you get away with it? Could you do those things? But there's this something inside you that's guiding you in some way, and it's whether you listen to that or you ignore that, I guess, as to whether you go down the wrong track.
For me, there's something inside of us that's greater. There's something that's there that we can't, some people say it's God, some people say it's your inner consciousness, whatever it is, whatever you've learned for that experience. But when you remove that purpose, then there is nothing. If you say that we're here for no other reason, just to have this experience, then it has no purpose. But if you say you're here to have that experience so that you can grow in your consciousness or your spirit or which continues on infinitely, then there's a purpose behind that growth of being a better person, of treating people well, of making decisions that are going to better your life, of working towards creating your own reality that's better than the reality of not doing so.
So to me, purpose is so important. In this to give us that direction, whether you've got that strong enough voice inside you to give you that or whether it's for other reasons that you can articulate such as, I want to evolve, I want to go to a higher consciousness. But I always struggle when people remove that, when they have a theory that's based on that you don't have a purpose, because that to me doesn't feel right inside.
So for you, what's the purpose? How do you know, and whether it be God or consciousness or whatever that you're talking about, how do you know that we've got a purpose here?
Brendan: I mean, I kind of agree. I tend to agree with most of what you said there. For me, the realisation that consciousness is not a physically generated thing, that it exists before the body and after the body, that changes things because then it's like, well, okay, if I'm going to survive the death of my body, that has repercussions and implications. Whereas if you cease to exist when the body dies, then nothing means anything and who cares? Like, I tend to agree with that.
Depending on what kind of area of research you want to draw on, basically all of the sort of modern streams of data that we have do support the idea that we are here for a purpose. And it's usually on a personal level. They emphasize that it's the personal journey and the personal growth journey. And that's the point of it.
But if you go back into the ancient Buddhist sort of mentality in the ancient Hindus, the mystical streams, they saw their purpose as getting out of this system and getting the hell away from ever being back here again. Like, don't come back onto the wheel of samsara and reincarnate. So that's a very different attitude, which I do empathize with to a point as well. But my personal mindset is more towards, well, what's possible? What kind of experience is possible? What kind of growth is possible? Like, what can I make out of myself? And especially because I know that consciousness is not mortal, it's immortal, that increases the scope of the possibility infinitely. So where does it end? I mean, how far can we take this? And what can we make of ourselves in the field of infinite possibility? So I'm interested, I'm kind of curious to find out. Hopefully not too soon, but yeah.
[35:44] Fear of Death and Staying Here
David: Well, there's two aspects I'll talk about there. But effectively, you say, hopefully not too soon. You've got a four-year-old. There's an innate thing inside you that wants to keep you here. The fear of death is one motivation for people to not want to experience this. But if there's this infinite consciousness and we go on and we have these experiences, then should we fear death at all?
And it's a really interesting concept. I think it's one of the biggest battles that we have internally in this experience is that most people for the part want to be here. They don't want to die, even though their life may be experienced a lot of difficulties. So there is a fear of death that keeps us wanting to stay in general terms, unless you've obviously got major depression and these sorts of things.
But then the idea is, well, if there's more, then do we want that more? And if we go back into a consciousness part, which sounds amazing when everyone talks about it, this amazing consciousness state, then why are we so motivated to stay here in this time right now?
Brendan: Yeah, well, that's a great question. I mean, the two, it seems to me that the different paradigms, the different realities, if we can call them that, don't seem to have a great deal of, if you go to the source, talk about the idea of the source, the creator, when people have that experience and they come back and tell us about it, particularly NDEers, that is a realm of light and bliss and just absolute ecstasy and they never want to leave it. And then it's like, okay, well, there's no problem there. There's no challenges there. There's nothing. Nobody wants to leave. It's so perfect. No one wants to leave. But there's a disconnect here between our experience here. It's like, okay, so there's this amazing universal intelligence, but it doesn't seem to be doing a very good job of running the show down here.
I feel like I'm kind of getting away from what you were talking about because you raise a good point. But maybe you could just jog my memory because I need to circle back to what you're actually saying.
David: Well, it's just more the, I guess, coming back to the fact of why is it the fear of death that keeps us here? Or if we do believe that there's this other world that's waiting for us, that's blissful, and then yet we choose and we've got this thing inside of us that's wanting us to stay here. That we want to stay here and have this experience. Otherwise, we can choose to exit that experience. Or if you exit it early, do you not have that experience? That's the other, I guess, thought of suicide, that maybe if you choose to not be here, then you don't actually get to have those experiences.
It's just, to me, it's something that's interesting as you grapple with these ideas. It's like, well, what's the purpose? Why are we here? If this other magical thing, it's like Disneyland's on the other side, but you just are choosing to not go in. You're choosing to not have that experience. I find that an interesting concept in people's mind as to, if you start to believe that's waiting for you, but you're choosing not to take that, well, why is that?
[39:15] Ego, Curiosity and Infinite Possibility
Brendan: Yeah, I mean, I guess on a physiological level, the ego doesn't want to die. The ego associates itself with the body very strongly. So it sees the body's death as its death. So on that level, everybody really wants to live as long as they can. And it takes a pretty drastic state of emotional depression or something to change someone's mind about that, where they want to actually get the hell out of here.
But I think you keep coming back to purpose. And to me, I lean in the direction, I have a lot of different perspectives, but I lean in the direction of the individual purpose that's pre-intended or pre-selected from a different level of reality. So that the, whatever you want to call it, the higher self, the Oversoul, can have a particular kind of experience.
And it's like, we go back to, there's so many different ways to talk about this. Bruce Moen and Robert Monroe were guys who, well, they were actually friends and colleagues. But as we mentioned earlier, Monroe worked with Campbell. And so all these guys have been doing this kind of out-of-body exploration stuff in these different paradigms. And Moen talks about curiosity as a metaphor for the indefinable thing that wants to experience the unknown. And so curiosity with a capital C, in his words, sends a probe out into physical reality, the physical Earth life system. And the probe ultimately takes the form of a human like us. So the probe is having the human experience for a little while to gather information about the unknown. So that's one way of looking at it.
No matter which way you slice it, I don't think what we think of as manifest reality, I don't think it cannot exist. I think it has to exist one way or another. Whatever is driving experience, whatever it is at the core of reality, if there is such a thing as a core of reality, this infinite consciousness that we talk about, I don't think it can help manifesting different kinds of experiences or different kinds of paradigms to explore.
You know, what's the point of hanging out in bliss indefinitely? I don't think that's what we're really supposed to do. [section omitted] A lot of people talk about it as if we are supposed to be there indefinitely forever and let's never have an experience in the world or any form of other alternate reality ever again because they're so traumatized. They don't want any part of it, right? They just want to go and soak in the peace and the bliss of the void. But I think that's kind of naive and short-sighted. I don't think that experiencing different types of realities is really avoidable at the end of the day. I mean, if it was, we wouldn't be here in the first place. I think the creator has to create, put it that way. Infinite possibility has to be infinitely realized. That's what I come back to.
[42:12] Life Review in Near-Death Experiences
David: So some of the near-death experiences talk about having a life review. And I think there's quite a few that talk about that concept, which then in itself would back up the fact that there must be some sort of purpose. Why would you review a life and go through that if there was no purpose to that life to begin with, right?
So can you share, I guess, on some of the near-death experiences that people have spoken about with a life review?
Brendan: Yeah, I mean, it's, excuse me. I might just grab some water, dude.
David: All right.
Do you remember what we're talking about?
Brendan: You're asking me about the life review and near-death experiences, right?
David: Yeah.
Brendan: Yeah, at this point, there's a lot of data about that. There's heaps of life reviews on record now. And I talk about a number of them in the book, because they are very revealing, I think, and very telling. And the near-death experience in itself is something that someone really needs to look at.
So Nancy Rines was a relatively recent one. She had an NDE back in 2014. Basically, while she was cycling, she got dragged under a car, horribly injured. And she ended up basically having this, as a result of the physical injuries, she finds herself standing in a meadow, bright light, rolling hills, the sky looks kind of metallic or pearly blue. Beautiful flowers and grass and all of this stuff. That sort of stuff, that meadow scene, the rolling hills, is extremely common. Heaps of people have that experience in the early stage of their NDE. And it's hyper real, extremely real.
She hears a voice say, welcome home, this is your home. And this is very profound for her, extremely moving. And a lot of people, when they talk about their NDE, they're almost moved to tears. It's so profound. So she considers this to be home, as many people do when they get there. And typically the level of bliss and peace that they experience there is so high that they don't want to come back to the body. They don't want to leave. But overwhelmingly they are, one way or another, pushed out, kicked out, if you will.
And so somebody takes form in this realm that she finds herself in. A being appears out of nowhere and she tells her that she's going to be her guide and teacher. And actually help her to continue her life on earth in a way that she can be proud of it. So again, what's the point of that unless you're going to look back on it and assess it and see how you did kind of thing.
So at this point, the guide tells her, you've already agreed to go back and you agreed to do that before you were born. So this whole experience was preordained, preplanned. And Rynes, she didn't like that. She was like, well, I don't remember that. So in front of her, in the air, the being shows her the time before she was born when she was agreeing to some of the things that she wanted to do and experience during her lifetime. Excuse me.
So one of the agreements she made was that she would turn away from spirituality and religion for a while and she would have three different opportunities to come back to that, three different planned opportunities on her timeline to come back and live a more spiritually connected life, in her words. One of those experiences was when she was a teenager and another one was when her father died. And that second one was the time she was supposed to kind of wake up and walk down the spiritual path again, remember who she is and all that sort of stuff. But she didn't. She blew right past it. And the third opportunity was one that was a lot less pleasant. That was the accident she had being dragged under the car and all this. So that was the third one that was pre-planned.
So as she's seeing all this, watching it, she has a sudden influx of memories she gets hit with. And she remembers being in the presence of her spiritual teachers and making these agreements. So she accepted that she had to come back and finish her lifetime to live it out and finish the job. She actually flatlined for two minutes on the operating table while they were working on her. So in the meantime, while she's dead, she gets a tour or sort of a journey through all these different realms and places and she's learning all this stuff about these other realms along the way and the meaning of life and this type of thing.
[47:06] Love as the Purpose of Life
Brendan: And so I'm just skimming through this, but the guide's teachings for Nancy focused around love and gratitude and connection to other people, connection to each other. And that is actually the love and the connection thing is a very, very persistent theme in the near-death literature. It's huge. It's like the things we think matter don't really matter. What matters is love and knowledge and the way that we treat each other, essentially, in a nutshell.
That's what is over and over and that's the message that comes back, which makes sense from a higher in terms of a higher level paradigm of everything being one, one infinite being, because it's ultimately how you're treating yourself. So, of course, if you were the infinite being, you would want to have guidelines in place to be like, OK, so don't forget when you're in this other experience, this other reality, treat each other well because you're actually dealing with yourself, this kind of thing. So that is over and over the purpose of life as people having near-death experiences and past life regression and spontaneous life memories tell us over and over and over again.
So, yeah, feel free to jump in.
David: Yeah, I think the love thing is I always come back to that aspect because it seems that no matter which teaching, and provided that they're not sort of taking you down the wrong track, in my view, comes back to that. So whether you talk about sort of some of the different religious texts or whatever, those who seem to be more evolved in their experiences come back to this idea that love is the key. That we need to learn how to love and we need to be able to do that. And that becomes the bigger purpose.
And even if you go into a Christianity, I was watching something from Aaron Abke the other day and I've forgotten what he talks about, but it's basically that there's one rule and it all comes back to love God with all your heart and love yourself as though it's your neighbor or whatever that aspect is. And if you, and I sort of come back to, simplify that even further. And it's like, don't be an a*******. If you stick with that, don't be an a*******. Just be nice. Just try to do good and try to love and try to do those things. Then you seem to be okay. So a lot of all this other stuff becomes irrelevant because you just, you can simplify it down to do your best in that.
And even when I look at family and friends and things that have made poor decisions or treated people poorly, I now look at them in a way that is more feeling a bit sorry for how far they might have got to, is that they've evolved to this stage and they've got a lot of traumas that they haven't dealt with or whatever it is. And it becomes more and more clear to me that when you come with them with love rather than anger and resentment and whatever other sort of emotions that you can put onto it, you can start to see their wounds. You can start to see that they're, I don't think anyone tries to be bad. I think they try to be good, but they can get taken off track. And that life is difficult and they can often spiral down and become someone that they're possibly not proud of.
Or they get to a stage where even talking about these types of things, it's just way too much. So the idea of evolving, they get to their limit. And maybe that's just on this journey and their next journey, they can take it further, whatever it is. But the idea of coming back to love seems to be consistent across many different ideologies.
Brendan: So it is, it is. And also the biblical teaching, do unto others as you would have done to yourself. And that that's affirmed. That is affirmed. Absolutely. Through the LBL literature, the NDE literature, all sorts of sources tell us the same thing over and over. So it's fundamental. It's absolutely fundamental. And there are consequences and repercussions for being an a*******. To use your terminology, there are.
Someone who is functioning like that has forgotten their fundamental nature. And so what then has to happen is kind of like a process of reminding and learning, relearning and remembering and waking up. For the most part, people don't try to be bad. Like you said, they do what they do in a state of forgetfulness and trauma and adaptations to trauma. And we end up with these kind of mangled psyches that it's like we've carried, we've made it through all the trauma and then we don't heal the trauma. So we're still operating like we're in that original situation that was traumatising and carrying those programs through. And that's where people come really undone.
It's very hard to operate out of compassion and love if you're in trauma. If you're in fight, flight, freeze mode, you can't. You physically, neurologically, you can't do it. So a lot of people are neurologically, psychologically incapable of doing that at any given moment because of the stuff that they've been through. And that's not to say that we're absolved of responsibility. It's not your fault that somebody abused you, but it's now, unfortunately, your responsibility then to do something about it and to move forward so that you can move forward.
[52:41] Planned Unconsciousness and Spiritual Traps
Brendan: Also, I wanted to mention, in Nancy Rynes story, she talked about how she planned to live part of her life very unconsciously and not have any spiritual awareness. And I think that's actually more or less the path for most people at this point in time. I actually think that most people are pretty much supposed to be unconscious in the sense that that was not part of their chosen plan. If you're awake and aware, there are certain things you're just not going to do. Choices you're not going to make and then that would preclude you from having certain types of experiences that the higher self might want to have for the purposes of exploration and growth and exploring the unknown.
David: Yeah, I think it's a bit of a trap as well. When you go down this alternative thinking pathway and those who are promoting themselves as enlightened and these types of things and they go, well, I pray all day or I sit there and I meditate for five hours a day and I, and there's a biblical thing where it says faith without works is dead. And that is my belief, right? There's this part where you can be so enlightened and some of the monks in Asia and that sort of stuff, they sit there and they pray or do meditate or whatever all day. And that's meant to get them to this higher state. To me, that doesn't feel right.
Because once again, it comes back to purpose. Surely your purpose isn't here just to sit there and try to get to another state. Surely you're here for a reason. And if you're not doing something or trying to discover or trying to self-evolve or trying to give love back and do these sorts of things, then you're effectively in another trap.
And so I find that that's a really interesting thing is most of this stuff is it's never fully one way or fully the other. You can be fully enlightened and do nothing. And I think you probably don't actually evolve and get any further. Or you could be fully ignorant to the fact that there's something that we can't explain fully in this reality and ignore everything that doesn't fit that narrative. But it's somewhere in between, I think, is the part where I come back to with most of these things that we need to have some level of consciousness and understanding. And we need to also put some of that into works to try to, whether that is to increase or our ability in some other realm, but to put some purpose toward that life. So to me, I think it's somewhere in the middle. It always is.
[55:22] Discerning Gurus by Their Fruits
David: But we have to put our trust and our time into people that are also, another quote is, by their fruits, you will know them. And it's something that we need to look at is where are we getting our information from our so-called experts? What have they done? Have they produced fruit? Have they produced and done these things? Or are they just talking from this higher level of, I'm an expert, I'm a guru, come and follow me. That seems to be a big trap in itself.
Is there any thoughts that you've got on those things of when you're trying to navigate this world of how to discern between those who have got good fruits and those who have got none?
Brendan: Hmm. I'm always suspect of anyone who's kind of like sitting in full lotus position all day. And any gurus, how many gurus have turned out to be just sexual predators, manipulators, narcissists? You can use the garb of spirituality to pull all sorts of cons.
But when I was in the early stages of my process, to me the idea of going and sitting in solitude somewhere far removed from people seemed pretty good. There's a part of me that sees the appeal in doing that and go sit on the mountain and don't bother with it all. But now, being in the world, I'm very much in the world these days, especially having a kid, that kind of thinking is not relevant. It's just not relevant. So I don't really go there anymore.
But, yeah, people can choose what kind of experience they want to create for themselves. None of it's right or wrong. I just think that I tend to empathize with where you're coming from, regarding what is the point of being here and then pretending that you're not here, or pretending that you're so enlightened.
What does enlightened even mean? I don't believe in the concept of enlightenment itself, let alone someone being fully enlightened. How is that? How are we quantifying that? Where's the scale for that? I think people who act like that are very suspect and usually are trying to compensate for something. They've got their own unresolved wounding and trauma that they're trying to gloss over. It's like the self-aggrandizement to compensate for the internal inferiority complex.
Yeah, there's a lot to this, but feel free to jump in.
[58:04] Faith Without Works and the Life Review
David: Well, Aaron Abke, actually, when I was watching, and I don't watch much of his stuff, we're looking at contacting him, maybe bringing him out for the festival. So I watched a couple of episodes the other day, and one episode he was talking about was a near-death experience of a pastor, I think it was.
And this pastor had this experience where he went up and there was this life review and effectively it was, you haven't done anything. And he's like, hang on, well, every day I praised you, I did this, I did this or whatever. And he's like, but you didn't live it, you didn't mean it, you didn't actually implement it. You said that in front of everyone, but you acted like this outside of that. And then he obviously came back and then he changed his way. I think he still might be a pastor, this guy.
And I haven't watched the full interview of the near-death experience, but it was just explained on that, which I find quite interesting as well when you bring religion into it. Is that this idea that I'm doing the right thing because I turned up on a Sunday and I sat there and I said five Hail Marys or whatever it is. And I did these things, but then I bagged them out as I walked outside of the church. I bagged out and gossiped about this person. And I said, look at how terrible they are. They didn't have the right shoes, whatever it was.
And so this conflict between, I guess, outsourcing that idea of taking that personal responsibility of what you are and living authentically towards that, and then living inauthentically, once again, I think, confirms that there is a purpose that is more than what the rest of the world can see. Even the closest family and friends might not know some of your darkest secrets. So that's the idea of what we put out there in the face and then who we are. Those two things can be a conflict, but I don't think that they can be hidden in this other level of consciousness.
So that then puts this level of responsibility and accountability of who we are, which I think is the exact thing of what we were talking about just before, of like you have these experiences, but do you hide behind that trauma or do you take accountability for that, responsibility for that and do your best to work through that situation to find ways in which you can still give value even though you're in a very traumatized state, or do you become a victim to that and allow that to dominate your life?
I think that these are all really important topics in which people have to grapple with in order to progress in whatever this consciousness world is. In whatever that is, there has to be some enlightenment that happens through that process of taking accountability, responsibility and trying to give in love and be authentic and do all of those things.
Brendan: Yeah, and I liked that you come back to the faith without works thing. I completely agree with you on that. It's interesting, there was another pastor. Did you say the pastor you mentioned was from Texas?
David: No, I actually don't know where he was from. He was just someone that was shared just briefly as he was talking about near-death experiences, but could have been for sure.
[1:01:40] Hell, Belief and Hollow Heavens
Brendan: Yeah. I mean, there was, I've got him booked to a mention of a guy who had an NDE in 2016 and he was a pastor. So a man of the cloth and based in Texas, he's still alive. He was pretty young guy. He had something like a heart attack and found himself in hell, funnily enough, as a number of Christian people have over the years who've had NDEs.
And the reason for this guy in particular, as he was there observing the strange sights and sounds of hell or what he thought was hell, he learned that the reason he found himself there was because even though he was a man of the cloth and doing the outward things and ticking the boxes, his internal state was quite hellish. His internal state, he held a lot of resentment towards certain people, people who he thought had done him wrong. He held a lot of hostility towards them. So he was not a man of forgiveness. He was not a guy who had successfully embodied the symbolism and the metaphor and the teachings of Jesus.
And so that's really what it comes down to. If you're going to go into the Christian side of things, the point of that, that paradigm there, forgetting about the Old Testament, the New Testament with the leading light of Jesus, the point is to be that, be the so-called Christ, be imbued and embody yourself as that Christ consciousness. And a lot of religious people find out the hard way that just believing in something, some concept or some precept, some collection of commandments, that actually doesn't mean squat at the end of the day.
I mean, believe whatever you want to believe. It's not going to have much effect on your end experience when you cross over, for example, and your body stops working. You are going to have to face what you actually are as a whole psyche, like you will be faced with yourself because what happens there is the subconscious, your entire subconscious literally becomes your surrounding environment. And so some people, some Christian people, Catholic people, people of the cloth find themselves in hell during their NDEs because they don't get it. They miss the point of the teachings that they're supposed to be teaching and spreading. So the example, like the spiritual metaphor of Jesus is what we are supposed to be striving towards. That's the whole point of it.
So when you talk about, you mentioned not being able to hide what we are and this kind of thing. When you die, you can't hide what you are. It's blatantly obvious to any other being that meets you at that level because you are existing as a mind. You're not a body anymore. You are there as a mind and people see what you are. So that's why we have to take it upon ourselves, like you said, to have accountability and be responsible for ourselves.
And unfortunately, a lot of religious people, particularly I find with the born-again Christians, they seem to succumb to it more than most people. They miss the point of the teachings and they don't take responsibility and they don't make themselves accountable. They think that because they believe in a historical version of the biblical, the New Testament events, they think that because they believe in this thing that they're going to heaven. Well. We have names for the places that those people end up, and they're called hollow heavens.
These are collective belief system territories, and that's the term Robert Monroe used, belief system territories, where people of like minds find themselves. So birds of a feather flock together. And people who believe in, say, the literal version of the New Testament account, they find themselves together in this heaven or what they think is heaven and they get to worship their version, their idea of God there, and congratulate each other and pat each other on the back.
Unfortunately, that then means, because they're stuck in a very low level of consciousness, other people who are other souls or spirits who are more aware then have to come in and help to essentially rescue them from the self-made prison that they put themselves into in their hypnotized state. So there's all sorts of ramifications of the belief system that you choose to take on. It's a very interesting area of study. I get right into that in book two.
[1:06:09] Other Concepts in the Books
David: So what else in book two are you sort of discussing? Let's even go from book one because I think book two is a continuation of book one from my understanding. So is there anything in these two books that we haven't sort of touched on in ideas? And I know, obviously, you go into incredible depth in these books. But are there any concepts that you want to share with us that you touch on within these two books and potentially your third book as you work on that?
Brendan: I mean, we could go so many places with that. I think one of the themes in there is, since we were just talking about it, the idea of the unconscious and the collective unconscious and these belief system realms that we create unconsciously as virtual realities. Even though we are here animating physical bodies, on the level of what we could, if we want to use the languaging of the astral planes or the mental planes, on those levels of paradigms, your thoughts become literal entities and literal landscapes, buildings, architecture, all this stuff.
So they're a Christian belief system. Areas, locales with buildings, churches, streets, all this stuff, glorified, apotheotic, rarefied versions of what we experience here. Nicer, more aesthetic, more appealing, but in terms of the hollow heavens we mentioned, they're largely devoid of any kind of soul. They're largely devoid of love. That's why they're called hollow heavens, because these are created by believers who have lost the heart. They haven't connected to the heart of the teachings and they haven't connected to their own heart and their feeling sense and their intuition is offline. And people who are like that are very easy to manipulate and scam. And that's unfortunately one of the ways that you can go with belief systems.
But there's a belief system territory for every single belief system on the planet. It doesn't matter what religion you point to, there's going to be a belief system territory, one of these virtual realities that we've created at that level, the so-called astral level. And beyond that, there are many other much more interesting realms and states of consciousness that you can experience.
But that's one of the things I just urge people to not allow themselves to become hypnotized into a belief system, particularly a religious belief system that is. I think you could take them different ways. I think some of the better ones are coming out of the Buddhist traditions and the Hindu traditions. Some of the more risky ones, in a sense, for the people who are psychologically vulnerable are the literalist versions of mainline Christianity and this kind of stuff. But everybody makes their own meaning out of it. And as a result, when they die eventually, potentially, that state of consciousness largely dictates the kind of experience they're going to have.
So it's worth considering, it's like while we're alive in the physical body, we make our bed and when we die, we've got to lie in it. So the part of the purpose of what we're doing here is at least once you're awake to the fact is to prepare yourself adequately for the future life, the next paradigm once the physical body is no longer relevant. But I mean, your question was so open-ended. We could go almost anywhere with that. And yeah, so I just kind of rambled a little bit there.
[1:09:44] Evidence for the Hollow Heavens
David: Well, I've never heard of this idea of hollow heavens. And so that's actually a new concept for me. And so where's that come from? Is that once again, near-death experiences that people go to this place and then they explain that? Or where's the evidence of these hollow heavens?
Brendan: It comes from a number of different sources, actually. That was one of the things that was so interesting to me doing the research. It's an old idea. And we get it from the near-death experience line of research. We also get it from people like Robert Monroe, Bruce Moen, William Buhlman. There's a number of people who are modern-day out-of-body explorers, I just named a few, who have gone and experienced these types of realms and documented what they experienced there.
And it's the same stuff that we were being told 100, 120 years ago, more, by people like Charles Leadbeater, who was a clairvoyant, or someone like Geoffrey Hodson, who was his protege. Madame Blavatsky talking about these other realms. It's been consistent over a large period of time that there are these other places that are built out of belief systems and very low-level belief systems and low-level consciousness, low-level awareness, self-awareness.
And so, yeah, a number of people have gone into them, explored them, documented their experiences. And across the decades, they're very, very similar. I mean, Charles Leadbeater went into a lot of detail about what he found on each different level of the so-called astral planes and where the believers of the Christian traditions tended to end up and where the believers from the Hindu or the Platonic traditions ended up. And as a general rule, the Christians were usually at the lower levels of the sort of ladder because of the way they approached the teachings in their favorite religious book, whereas some of the more enlightened or more sophisticated thinkers raised their consciousness level much more significantly. So they had a different paradigm that they were part of.
But yeah, as I said, a number of different people have gone and explored this stuff. The cross correlations between the reports are pretty astonishing.
[1:11:58] The Holographic Universe
David: I've got a few questions in the chat, which I'll get to now, but if anyone wants to ask live, feel free to raise your hand.
So the first question I've got in the chat: what was the book you were talking about that you first read when you were 20 or whatever, that your brother passed on?
Brendan: That was called The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot.
[1:12:22] Crossing Between States of Consciousness
David: Question here. What do you think about the crossing between states of consciousness? Some people say there are more ideal ways to die. And if you manage to be present in dream state, then you may be more able to manage the death realm and crossing of states of consciousness.
Brendan: Well, some of that I'd like to have clarified a little bit, but let me just home in on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is a manual for crossing over in a self-aware, conscious way. Yogis have been documented as crossing over intentionally. They feel they can sense, as a result of their meditation practice over a long time, when their actual time of transition is coming, and they will sit in meditation, sit in samadhi and intentionally leave the body permanently.
So you can definitely do it intentionally and consciously. And that is the point of some of these religious texts like the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I would encourage you, you don't even necessarily need to practise. I wouldn't stress to people that you've got to do this certain thing or practise this thing or do this ritual. It's more important to just be aware of what you are fundamentally. Give yourself some awareness, and then give yourself some awareness of the possibilities of what lie on the other side of that, of the transition, so that you're not limited in your scope and awareness.
David: But in saying that, most people when they cross over are greeted by members of their family who've already died. So there's a sort of management system in a way, where people can be welcomed in and acclimated to the new state that they're in.
And I think a lot of this is in religious beliefs, but there are a lot of theories that you must do A, B and C to be able to enter the higher realms of heaven. And it's always a checklist, or it's some sort of ceremonial thing that you need to say or believe or whatever that could be.
So in the near-death experiences, in the research that you've done, all of that sort of thing, do you think that there is anything that you need to do here to be able to enter, some ceremonial thing or say something or whatever? Or is it more about what we are, who we are, our intentions, that sort of thing?
Brendan: Yeah, as a general rule, it's more about who you are, what you have made of yourself in your life. Because your state of consciousness when you die is your state of consciousness when you cross to the other side. That dictates to a large extent what possibilities are available to you.
And even though I say that, there are still the welcoming committees, the ancestors, the family who've gone before you, to welcome most people. I won't say absolutely 100% everyone, but most of the time there seems to be at least one person who's there as the welcoming wagon. So it's not really a matter of protocol as such. It's more about who you are as an individual. And that's where that personal responsibility and accountability comes in. There's no avoiding that.
I emphasise that in the book. I have a chapter on hell, dismantling and dissecting the concept of hell and showing where it comes from in the religions and through history. And then the modern-day explorations of it out of body and all this sort of stuff. People experience these types of things because of their state of consciousness, not because somebody sends you there. It's not because God is angry with you or anything like that. It's the experience that is an extension of your consciousness in that moment and who you are in that moment.
[1:16:18] A Course in Miracles
David: Another question. Do you know of A Course in Miracles?
Brendan: I know of it. I think I started reading it a long, long, long time ago. And I don't think I felt the need to finish it, to be honest.
[1:16:33] Sacrifice, Valhalla and Astral Heavens
David: Okay. Another question. The Norse talk about entering, I don't even know how you say it, Fólkvangr or Valhalla. When you hear some of those things, that is a big thing with the Vikings, that you had to do these ceremonial things, put coins on their eyes and you'd be wealthy in the other world. And burn the bodies or sacrifice and those sorts of things.
Sacrifice is a really interesting one because to me, it's never made sense that you need to sacrifice to these gods to be able to get favour in this life and all of that sort of thing. Because that seems to me, coming back to that a******* idea, like a pretty poor decision of, well, I'm going to feel better about this world by sacrificing you, not me, you over there. And by chopping your head off or by doing this, I'm going to get these rewards. To me, that's going down the hell trap. That's going down another line or another world that I'm choosing not to be a part of.
What's your thoughts on some of those ideas? Because some of those pagan sort of things have continued on and still continue on to this day.
Brendan: Yeah, trying to supplicate the gods or appease the gods, it's really just a very outdated kind of concept. It's got no relevance whatsoever to the experiences we're going to have on the other side after death. It really is. Anyone who thinks that they're going to improve their experiences by doing that stuff is absolutely lost. Absolutely lost.
And it's in a similar boat, in the same category as the religious people who think that, well, if I just believe in X, Y, Z, and that's it, I'm good, I'm going to be on the cloud. It's nonsense. It's a very infantile, primitive way of approaching the subject.
You mentioned Valhalla. I've got a little paragraph here that actually does talk about it, because in the astral planes, as we call them for convenience, you get these realms. You can go to the Vikings' Valhalla, the Nordic heavens and this kind of stuff. I've got a paragraph here where it says Freemason Manly P. Hall, who is an esotericist and obviously initiated into Freemasonry at the very least, made the observation that there was little difference between the Tibetan Gardens of Sukhavati, or the paradisiacal sphere of the early Christian church, or Egypt's Anru Gardens, or the Pleasant Lands, or the Elysian Fields of the Greeks, or the Nordics' Valhalla where the heroes feast.
And that was specifically that only the heroes go to Valhalla. The common folk who don't die heroically in battle, they don't make it. Or the American Indians' Happy Hunting Grounds. All of these are different astral dreamscapes or belief-system territories. So it's not really a place you want to necessarily aspire to. There's much more that's possible beyond that.
[1:19:38] Elites and Dark Bargains
David: I think, if you look at the world that we're in, the elites, if you want to call them that, that most likely do some of these ceremonial sacrifice type things that we touched on, they seem to get some level of favour in this world, or some level of power. And that's certainly the belief, if you go deep into that stuff, that they're gaining power from those that they've done bad things to. And this is somehow giving them a better experience here. I don't know if that's accurate, that they get a better experience here. I don't aspire to be these people in any way, shape or form.
But it would seem that the riches, by selling their soul, and you hear them talk about that so much in the industries, that there seems to be some level of truth that by selling your soul, by giving up and doing these bad things, you get rewarded for some reason here. How would you explain that? Is it the devil, Lucifer? Is it granting their favour? Is it taking that? How would you reconcile those concepts?
Brendan: It is possible to work with or create arrangements with what you could call negative entities or really unpleasant entities, who may help you to achieve your earthly goals. Some people might think of them as demons or whatever. And this has been explored a little bit as well by people like Bruce Moen, who've gone into the hell realms and found the really very diabolical kind of criminal types of people, really sadistic types of people.
And they can potentially interact with our world if someone conducts a ceremony and opens up a portal and invites someone in. Those types of people or beings can come through and you could potentially create an arrangement there. And that's, I think, something that the elite are doing, whether they realise who's on the other end of the phone line, so to speak, is another question entirely.
The devil aspect of it, the whole Satan thing, I know that fundamentalists are very fond of that idea, but we created that. We absolutely manufactured the devil Satan thing completely and utterly. And the Christian version has its template largely in ancient Egypt and a number of other traditions. I actually had a chapter on that pulling it all apart, but I might have to take it out just because I've got too much material. But yes, I don't recommend any of those kinds of practices. It's not a good way to create a nice experience in the post-mortem condition, put it that way.
[1:22:39] David Icke and the Trap Idea
David: We've got one last question, which we've actually touched on. I think this person may have arrived afterwards. The question was, David Icke has recently been saying that the light at the end of near-death is a trap, and it's taking us back into the matrix. What are your thoughts here?
We did touch on that, where we said those ideas, those concepts, are probably not beneficial. I think the other one that talks about that is Howdie Mickoski, who we've actually had on the platform for another topic as well. And that was one of the people that I watched and my body just rejected that concept. I actually switched it off. And whether that's right or wrong, that I didn't even want to listen to it is another idea in itself. But there is something that doesn't feel right with that. And you sort of confirm that yourself as well.
Brendan: Yeah, most of those people are stuck in their own very limited paradigm and they can't get out of it to see it from a higher level. If you can see their information from a higher paradigm, it takes on a different look.
One of Arch's people, who he had in a documentary, I didn't see the documentary, but I saw that he had this woman on it. I read a book recently and I'm just blanking on her name. I've got it in the Kindle. It was called something like Escaping the Trap or something along those lines. I read it. It was a very short book. It could have been put together a little bit better and ultimately not very impressive. I wasn't very impressed by it. And it's one of those things where it's a little bit naive. I think a lot of the people pushing this stuff are very naive. They don't have enough information. A lot of them have their own little kind of, I've had my experiences and this is how it is, instead of taking the blinkers off and going, well, what about the larger tapestry? How does your experience fit into the larger tapestry? Is there a bigger context that you're missing? And the answer is usually, yeah, a s***load of context is missing.
And David Icke, I think his fundamental message is exactly the same as mine, that you're infinite consciousness. So why not emphasise this instead of pushing the fear of, oh, the light at the end of the tunnel is a trap and all this kind of thing? I think that's very simplistic and quite naive. And I think also David comes across as a bit confused in some ways. He's not clear. He's not that clear in the ideas that he's putting forward. It's a bit of a mishmash, a bit of a hodgepodge. And so that's not really helping people.
I remember someone sent me six pages of his book. I think it was six pages of The Trap because they emailed me, what do you think about this idea? And I was like, well, can you send me a screenshot or something of what's in the book? And it was six pages and there was really nothing there. I was kind of surprised. I was like, well, if that's his case, it's threadbare. It's really weak in terms of putting the thesis board for the trap. It's really weak.
And I wasn't very impressed with that lady whose name I forget. I'm sorry. I wasn't very impressed with that book either. And unfortunately, a lot of context was missing from that. It wasn't very good in terms of citing references and sources. People throw this idea around, for example, of Loosh.
They use this as part of their Soul Trap paradigm and thinking. Oh, well, we're being harvested for Loosh. That idea she mentioned, but she didn't show where it came from. It actually comes from Robert Monroe and his out-of-body explorations, and the entities and little beings that he had contact with and information from. Those kinds of things are little red flags.
I think it's very unimpressive. I've seen their paradigm and their argument and I'm not the slightest bit concerned about it. That's all I can do.
[1:26:33] Interviewing David Icke
Brendan: We had David on for an interview. I had big expectations, because he's done some fantastic work in the past. When we tried to delve deeper, there was just this cap of where he was at in his thinking. And so we walked away.
We actually did a follow-up chat about this on the platform where we just sort of said, look, we recognise some of the great work he's done, but he seems to be at a point where he's just recycling the same information. And we actually know one of the guys where he got the original information from, where he got a lot of that from. And that guy passed away. So you wonder whether it's recycling that information, and then you've got to your limbers. And then it's actually for people like yourself and others who have delved down further to take that to the next level. That's where we came to with David.
David: Can I just jump in? Can I just quickly ask you who the person was who you thought he might have got that idea from? Someone on here will know maybe. Sorry to put you on the spot.
Brendan: Are you talking about Credo Mutwa?
David: Credo, yeah.
Brendan: So Credo was who he credited a lot of the early stuff to, and he had those experiences and then, yeah.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Brendan: I agree he's done a lot of great work in terms of mapping out the level of control and manipulation at the physical level. But I don't think his paradigm has really developed in the last 10 or maybe more years. Like you said, he's recycling the same ideas. He's got this kind of bucket of ideas and he keeps throwing more and more ideas into it. People like that are not stopping to check, do these puzzle pieces actually fit together? Does this actually make sense? And that's why I said he seems a bit confused right now. His ideas are not clear and they're not that well fleshed out.
So for me, it's a weird thing. I love David. I think he's awesome. He's an awesome dude. He's done awesome stuff. But he was the second stage of my awakening, 20 years ago. And I feel like I've moved on, move past that. It's like the apprentices moved beyond the master at this point. And I don't know of anyone who's like the book I'm about to publish in next year. I don't know of anyone who's put anything like this together. So I feel like I'm standing on an island at this point.
[1:29:11] The Book and Truthiversity
David: Yeah. Well, let's touch on that. So let's talk about your book. Talk about when it's going to release. Where can they find your number one book? And you've also, have you still got the other platform, Truthiversity or something?
Brendan: Yeah, I do. People can join the Truthiversity. It's truthiversity.com. If you like, I can hook you up with a link there.
David: That's all right. We'll put it in the notes as well.
Brendan: Yeah. And I will send you a link to the, I'm just trying to find it now actually, the, I do have a wait list. Because the book's not published yet, I'm putting people who are interested in this kind of subject matter in on a wait list. So I can give that, if you like, I can give you that link and people can just hit the link and drop their email in and when the book's ready, I'll shoot them an email and let them know.
David: And how long do you reckon before it's ready?
Brendan: Honestly, I'd love to think I can get it done in the first quarter of 2025.
David: Okay.
Brendan: Wish me luck.
David: So by mid 2025, we might be getting close.
Brendan: I'm hoping that in the first three months, and we'll see what happens. Just put some good juju out for me.
David: Yeah, it sounds like you've got all the components there. You're now trying to get it down to make it more concise and choose what you're going to keep and that sort of thing. Is that right?
Brendan: That's exactly right. And also then you've got to go through the editing process. Someone, a professional editor has to look at it. And then we've got to go through the whole rigmarole of putting the book together and publishing that, that's a whole thing. So it's not something that you just whip up over a weekend. But because I've been working on it for so long now, the level of density of information, the perspective in it is going to really blow people away.
[1:30:59] Closing Thoughts
David: Awesome. Brendan, it's been a pleasure to have you on to discuss all of these topics. Is there anything else you want to share before we close up?
Brendan: I've really enjoyed the chat, man. I appreciate it. You've given a great container for it and for me to just kind of ramble on. As I said, if anyone's been interested in the stuff we've been talking about, then they will definitely want to read that book when it's out. So just jump on the wait list if you guys are able to connect them with the link. And love to have people check out my Substack where I publish some of the book excerpts and other writing.
That's more or less it. I'll peddle my wares for an extra couple of seconds. If people don't already know about my Evolve Yourself program, they might want to check that out. There's a free masterclass at evolveyourself.live. I can send you a link for that too.
David: Perfect. Thank you, mate. Take care. And all the best with your four-year-old.
Brendan: Yes. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thanks, brother.
David: All right, mate. Take care.
Brendan: Thanks very much.
David: Thanks. You too. Cheers.
[unclear]: Cheers, everyone. Bye.