Our Paranormal Afterlife
Consciousness & The Afterlife
Brendan discusses Reverse Engineering the Afterlife with Simon Bown — covering thousands of documented NDE accounts from clinical research, esoteric traditions' descriptions of post-mortem states, and depth psychology's archetypal imagery. The conversation centres on the Consciousness Transition Model: a cross-disciplinary framework that maps what happens to awareness after death without relying on any tradition's mythological language.
[0:00] Introduction
Simon: Welcome to Our Paranormal Afterlife. I'm your host Simon Bown. This week I'm talking to Brendan Murphy about his book Reverse Engineering the Afterlife. Brendan is an independent consciousness researcher and author. His first book, The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality, drawing from quantum physics, consciousness research, psi phenomena, and comparative philosophy, established him as one of the most thorough independent researchers in the field. He is a professional member of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. Hi Brendan, thanks a lot for coming on the podcast.
Brendan: Thanks for having me, Simon. Appreciate it.
Simon: We're going to be talking about your book Reverse Engineering the Afterlife and your first book The Grand Illusion. In the new book you talk about the Consciousness Transition Model. Can you tell us what that is?
Brendan: It's basically a way of reframing the conversation around the afterlife and non-physical perception and experience more generally. My fundamental premise — and the premise of the model — is that the only thing that's ultimately real is consciousness, and that the only thing that ultimately ever happens is consciousness shifting its state. That's how we end up with different worlds, different realities, different experiences.
[4:00] Personal Experiences — OBE and the Parallel World
Simon: Before we get into the afterlife, I wanted to ask about your own experiences. You had an out-of-body experience, though quite a quick one?
Brendan: Yeah, that was a long time ago. Very briefly, spontaneously shot around the room, bounced off the walls so to speak, and landed back in my body. A really brief one-off. I haven't spent much time on the practical side of things — trying to have out-of-body experiences isn't really my focus or priority. My focus is the actual research and putting my books together. But yes, that did happen, probably around 2010 or 2011.
Simon: When you were out of body, did you have your normal waking perception, or was it more dreamlike?
Brendan: It was so rapid I wouldn't say it was better or worse. I felt like myself in terms of that perceiving awareness — the "I am" still very much awake and present. But it was so brief that I didn't have a chance to go any deeper.
Simon: Then there was another experience — you fainted while giving blood?
Brendan: Yeah. I was told by the nurses that it's quite common for healthy young men to react badly to needles. I was sitting up in the chair and blacked out. Amy, my wife, said my eyes rolled back in my head. As far as I was concerned, I didn't know about any of that because I was gone — in what seemed like an alternate universe or parallel world, living another version of myself, which just seemed like the most absolutely normal thing in the world. I appeared to be in the outskirts of some kind of metropolitan area, outdoors, walking somewhere. I don't know where I was going, but it was absolutely as real as the desk in front of me right now. It left quite an impression.
Simon: How long did that last?
Brendan: I don't know exactly how long I was passed out for — I'd have to ask Amy. Maybe a minute, if that. But I had a very vivid, tangible experience of being somebody else in another world, and it just seemed completely normal. Like I'd always been there. There was this weird sense of continuity that shouldn't have existed. And then when I came back to this body, that was the end of it. Left me with a lot to think about.
Simon: Was this other person another version of Brendan, or a completely different person?
Brendan: It's kind of funny — I feel like that observer presence was the same in a sense. The "I am" observer was still awake, aware, perceiving, and it all just seemed totally normal. But it wasn't a different version of Brendan as such. It was just someone else — still very human, still that same core awareness, but operating in a very different context.
Simon: I've interviewed a researcher who studied coma patients and some of them lived what seemed like another full life on another Earth, just as real as this one. One man in a thirty-day coma reported living twenty-two years on this other Earth — he had a job, did a tour of duty in a country that doesn't exist here. When he came back he didn't know which life was the real one.
Brendan: I can relate to that completely. If I had stayed passed out longer, whatever I was experiencing in that other world was just going to keep unfolding. I didn't get to see much of it, but I totally agree with those accounts — it is absolutely one hundred percent convincing, as real as anything else. And that's what makes it kind of disturbing in a way.
[9:30] Parallel Lives, Simulation Theory, and the Atmic Theater
Simon: Does the idea of parallel lives or parallel universes fit into your consciousness model?
Brendan: Yes, though I treat them more as potential realities. I lean in that direction rather than assuming there's an independently functioning alternate timeline running continuously somewhere. Tom Campbell, who wrote My Big TOE and worked with Robert Monroe at the Monroe Institute in the very early days, leans in a similar direction — looking at these alternate realities as potential realities that aren't really rendered until consciousness shifts its attention into them and creates them in the act of doing so.
Simon: Does that count for this life as well — it's not real until it's rendered?
Brendan: Yeah, I think there's some truth in that. In the book I use the phrase "atmic theater," referring to the Vedantic concept of the Atman — the highest spiritual principle. This abstract intelligence that it seems like what we call reality, whether here or in a parallel world, is just a dream that the Atman projects and then immerses itself into. In that sense there's no real difference between this reality and the alternate one. It's whichever one the Atman shifts its attention to that becomes real.
Simon: Is there a simulation theory element here? Because whenever I hear that word, I think of servers and code.
Brendan: I don't like the literal aspect of simulation theory. I think computing metaphors and analogies can be useful — I use them myself — but only up to a point. When you take them literally and reify them, that's where you lose the plot. You end up inviting an infinite regress: you're in this machine, and there's no way out, and any escape is just another level of the machine. That kind of thinking isn't really grounded in empirical experience with altered states of consciousness. The ancients more or less had it figured out: it's consciousness in the abstract that dreams reality into existence. That's what we could call a simulation in the sense of a dreamlike production — not entirely real in the way we think it is, but also not a trap we're stuck inside of. The "stuck in a box" framing is really quite off the mark.
[13:00] The Soul Trap — Why the Narrative Fails
Simon: You address the soul trap narrative in the new book. I've come across that idea, and having taken hundreds of people through past-life regressions and talked to many NDE experiencers, I don't see any evidence for it. But you think something real is happening that's being misinterpreted?
Brendan: Yes. The data is what we have to work with, and I base my work around phenomenology and experience. But I don't stop at the surface level the way soul trap advocates do. They stop at the level of appearances and narratives. I try to get to the architecture and structure underneath — the dynamics of consciousness that create the appearance of a soul trap or create the interaction with a particular kind of entity that seems to function as a gatekeeper.
The issue with the soul trap idea is that its proponents aren't actually looking at the dynamics and the architecture. They're essentially saying: here's a story I like, so I'm going to sit in this camp and reject the other story. But if you actually get into the mechanics of things, you start asking: why does someone even have the experience of encountering a being that tries to persuade them to stay in their body or reincarnate? Why does that experience happen in the first place?
When you eliminate the physical body, the only thing that's left is a non-material consciousness — there's no biological anchor anymore filtering perception. So the field of consciousness becomes self-referential. What happens automatically is that the mind starts looking for ways to stabilize and orient its experience. What generally happens is it reverts to things familiar from embodied physical life — other people, beings, entities, structures, hierarchies, rules, externalized mechanistic structures. So we project that into the field of consciousness and then that's what people experience. They think, oh, there's a real entity there, or there's this archontic soul trap. The right approach is to take the report seriously but not accept the interpretation of it. That's really what this work hinges on.
Simon: It says more about the person having the experience than about what's actually happening.
Brendan: Yeah, it really reveals somebody's mindset and the contents of their psyche more than anything. Because ultimately that's all that's left in the operating environment when the body is gone — the psyche. It has to render its experience somehow. Most people create what seem like different worlds, discrete landscapes, distinct beings and entities. I don't rule out that we can contact other consciousnesses — our ancestors or family members who've gone before us. That's incorporated into my model. But the soul trap idea in particular comes from a very low-resolution, naive perspective that only acknowledges a fragment of the actual data. It ignores all of the data from hypnotherapy practice, and virtually every hypnotherapist around the world is saying the same thing or producing the same data. There's simply no real evidence to support that kind of thinking.
[20:00] NDEs — Cultural Overlay and the Real Structural Evidence
Simon: You were saying the psyche renders the experience. So would you say that what somebody goes through in an NDE is heavily influenced by their mind state and subconscious?
Brendan: Yes, absolutely. That's exactly what the data shows. NDEs in particular give people an experiential touchpoint with the low-level early-stage interface environment as they transition from physicality into non-physicality. They get these glimpses and previews of post-mortem life, but generally not in a very stabilized or high-level way. It's often quite low resolution, or they end up in an environment we could call the mid-astral — very pleasant, rolling hills, pretty towns, that kind of thing. Some people think that's the final destination or home, but really it's just consciousness stabilizing and orienting itself in the early going.
People get a cultural overlay, which is actually very well documented now. That overlay comes from lived experience and exposure to religious belief systems, atheistic belief systems — whatever has been programmed into that individual's mind. Whatever belief database they've got to draw from when they drop the body, that's what they unconsciously use to initially create the environment they feel they're transitioning into. Some people have unpleasant near-death experiences where they feel attacked by demons, but it's quite possible those entities are unconsciously projected by the self. Equally, the entities could actually be other centers of consciousness who are something else entirely, but they're being overlaid with a fearful interpretive lens and construed as something they're not. There are a few possibilities, and I rarely stop at the first emotionally appealing solution.
Simon: And then there are the veridical near-death experiences — the ones where people obtain verifiable information they couldn't have known. There's so much evidence there that even skeptics are finding it increasingly hard to dismiss.
Brendan: If you're an honest investigator you can't really reach any other conclusion. There are thousands and thousands of case studies on record from around the world going back over two millennia, and they all point to essentially the same conclusion: consciousness is not dependent on the physical body. It survives, and in my view preexists, the physical body in some form.
The experiences vary in terms of the overlay — the graphic user interface, the way things look, which beings show up, the landscape — but underneath that there are generally a few consistent structural things going on. There's a transitional stage away from the body. There's an aspect of self-assessment, the conscience assessing the life that's been lived, which gets externalized in different forms — judges, Anunnaki, whatever — depending on the culture. Then there's often a journey or adventure of some kind, some transformative aspect to it, and then they wind up back in their body and invariably they are transformed. I have some ancient case studies from the Greco-Roman world that read remarkably like contemporary NDE reports. One man was considered an absolute scoundrel before his NDE and had a complete one-hundred-and-eighty-degree personality transformation afterward — he became almost saintlike, respected and admired where before he'd been loathed. It served as a genuine initiatory experience.
[25:00] The Nature of the Self — Souls, Layers, and the Atman
Simon: Would you say we have souls or spirits, or is our consciousness more part of a field where we're not so individual?
Brendan: It's a mixed answer, because there are layers and aspects to us. If you look at traditions like Vedanta and the modern traditions that built on them, we have different aspects or principles of consciousness. If your locus of conscious awareness refocuses at the level of the Atman, you're in a very different operational context experiencing a very different mode of reality. The Atman is considered the highest human spiritual principle, and when it's paired with what they call buddhi you have this individuality — this monadic intelligence, a very elevated state of consciousness. Then from buddhi you get the next radiation or emanation, which is manas — this is where we have true individuation. The principle of manas is essentially the mind or the human soul. So when manas extends into the lower worlds, that's where you get what we could call souls or over-souls.
There is an aspect of truth to the idea of a soul. I just can't endorse in my model what a lot of people mean when they talk about a permanent immortal soul. I think we are anchored in that soul reality contingently and temporarily. The awareness can shift up a level or down a level — into physical embodiment or into much more abstract and expanded and blissful states, or upward into the absolute, which is very hard to describe with words. Blavatsky used the term "Be-ness" to try to capture some of the abstractness of it. We are able to shift our awareness through a lot of different contexts.
Simon: Do you have a model for how consciousness interacts with the physical brain? I like the idea of the brain as a receiver — like a radio. When the radio breaks down, it doesn't mean the radio station stops transmitting.
Brendan: In terms of a detailed physics theory, I don't really focus on trying to solve that. I'll leave that to physicists who want to offer hypotheses about how consciousness binds with or connects to the body and brain. For me, the useful baseline is just to acknowledge that consciousness is not generated by the brain in the first place. The body and brain act as more of a filter and constraint system rather than a generator. That's the foundational principle rather than getting into the physics nitty-gritty.
Simon: I notice you use technical language like "rendered" and computing analogies throughout. Is that because the ordinary vocabulary just isn't adequate for this subject?
Brendan: Exactly. Language is a huge limitation when discussing these altered states, because language was developed to describe our experience in embodied physical life — not in more abstract states. So we're forced to use analogies and metaphors. Computing ideas give us something people in this era can actually relate to. I find those terms quite illuminating when mapped onto what people actually report in near-death experiences and different afterlife contexts. They're analogies though, not literal descriptions.
[30:00] Peak in Darien Experiences
Simon: Can you describe what a Peak in Darien experience is?
Brendan: It's basically an experience where somebody — for example during a near-death experience — makes contact with the consciousness of someone who has died, when they did not know that individual existed or did not know they had actually died. I have a number of case studies in the book around this because they're quite spectacular when laid out. The name came from an old book by a woman whose name I'm momentarily forgetting, who was describing that type of case. Eben Alexander is one well-known example — he had his NDE and experienced communicating with a female consciousness he wasn't familiar with at the time. After he'd recovered from his brain condition, he realized it was his deceased sister, whom he didn't even know existed. There are multiple types of cases like that, where the individual contacted didn't even know they existed before the NDE brought the information.
Simon: Then there are shared death experiences — people who are with a dying person and experience something extraordinary alongside them. I've always wondered whether that's somehow arranged, perhaps by guides or spiritual beings making it happen for a reason.
Brendan: Yes. I think there's an aspect of conscious awareness from the other side around the sense that someone connected to you is about to transition. I actually had a quote in my manuscript from what was believed to be channeled material that confirmed this kind of idea — that there's something like a network on the other side where people are alerted or sense that someone they know is about to die, and so they tune in and make an active connection. That's what I think is often happening in NDEs as well, though those are probably a bit more mixed in their dynamics. Raymond Moody himself had his own shared death experiences with his own parents — nine people were involved in witnessing the energy in the room change as the individual on the deathbed transitioned. It's a cross-cultural phenomenon that I think has been happening for as long as we've been around.
[36:00] NDEs and the Origins of Heaven and Hell
Simon: Is that where mankind originally got the idea of heaven and hell from — people thousands of years ago having near-death experiences and telling others about them?
Brendan: I think there's a feedback loop there. As people try to figure out the world and their place in it, they create ideas — religions, theologies, mythologies — to explain their experience. Then when people die or have a near-death experience, they carry that belief system into the experience and may actually render an environment or beings that are in line with that particular mythology or religion. They come back and say: I saw the gods, or Jesus, or what have you. And it reinforces the mythology or religion. So there's this interesting feedback loop operating across history.
Simon: Dr. Gregory Shushan has a great book on near-death experiences and indigenous religions, looking at these kinds of stories that have been passed down across cultures for a very long time.
Brendan: He did a really good job documenting the ancient cultures and different types of afterlife experiences and NDEs. That's actually one of the most valuable historical studies done on the subject. He showed that structurally, across cultures and across long periods of time, the common underlying elements — beneath the surface graphic user interface — are consistent and persistent through time. That's how we've continued to develop our religious belief systems and ideas about who we are and where we're going. Shushan's study was genuinely thorough, and the fact that it was published by Oxford University Press meant it wasn't immediately subject to the usual reflexive skeptical dismissal.
Simon: There's definitely something changing in the collective. Publications like Scientific American are starting to publish things that would normally be outside their wheelhouse. They've been pretty committed to materialism, but that's starting to shift.
Brendan: It's a really good sign for everybody. The materialism and the old outdated legacy religious beliefs are, I think, actually combined holding us back a great deal. As you said, it's possibly the old guard retiring and dying — the next generation coming through is more open-minded. Which, as you noted, is essentially what Max Planck said: science advances one funeral at a time.
[40:00] Skeptics — Ideologues, Not Investigators
Simon: You've said in other interviews that skeptics have a religious zeal. What did you mean by that?
Brendan: The posturing of skeptics in the realm of consciousness research, the paranormal, or parapsychology is a very deliberate attempt to present themselves as impartial adjudicators — the voice of reason. What I found after twenty-three years of investigating this subject is that they're actually not what they pose as. They don't work as functional skeptics. What they are, almost without exception — and all the best-known ones fit this to a T — are absolutely committed ideologues who think they've already got the answers before they've even done the investigation. They're committed to philosophical materialism even though it's a completely untenable position now. The evidence from multiple streams of research is just off the charts.
They don't examine the evidence properly, they don't examine it impartially, they frequently misrepresent it, and they conveniently leave out critical details that completely change the way a case study actually reads. This is not ancient history — it's still going on right now. And I've come to realize they are actually just the mirror image of hardcore fundamentalist religionists. It's the exact same psychology pointed in a different direction. Both groups are committed to their respective ideologies. The skeptics are essentially stuck in a kind of perpetual reaction against religion that kicked off centuries ago. They haven't moved with the times. They're still in the 1700s.
Real skepticism just means doubt. These people possess no doubt towards their own dogma or their own belief system. They don't self-examine. Dean Radin mentioned a really interesting study in one of his books that analyzed the mistakes made in research around parapsychology. They compared two groups — the committed skeptics and the more open researchers. Every single time a skeptic made a mistake in their analysis or reporting, it supported their commitment to materialism. Their bias was so entrenched that even their unintentional errors fueled their confirmation bias in the direction of their dogma. The other group, who were just more open, had a much lower percentage of mistakes that actually supported any pre-existing belief system. That illustrates just how deep the bias actually goes.
Simon: I also wonder whether there's something about the mindset of the person doing an experiment that affects the results. I've seen ESP research suggesting that having committed skeptics in the room creates a dampening effect on the phenomena.
Brendan: That's documented by multiple people. What's fascinating is that when skeptics were put into parapsychological experiments — some kind of mind-over-matter test — the people with active disbelief actually created real measurable parapsychological effects. The funny thing was their effects were always in a negative direction, as if they were proving the phenomenon was real but doing it in a way consistent with their belief system. J.B. Rhine found something similar with his Zener card tests: even really talented subjects showed a decline effect when put through repetitive boring tests, performing progressively worse. What they concluded was that as people got bored, their performance deteriorated — which is actually another confirmation that something real is going on, since chance performance would have stayed flat. The observer effect you're drawing a parallel to from quantum mechanics does seem to tie in.
[48:00] The Society for Psychical Research and a Century of Ignored Evidence
Simon: The Society for Psychical Research was doing rigorous experiments with mediumship over a century ago. William Barrett's book on deathbed visions was published in 1922. And medical science just ignored it. It's only now starting to come back around.
Brendan: The SPR wanted to be taken seriously by the scientific world, and it attracted some of the best and brightest minds of the time to investigate and either validate or invalidate these phenomena. By any rational, reasonable standard, they proved the phenomenon a century ago. Their research standards were incredibly meticulous — very fastidious in the way they studied, analyzed, and reported things. If people had been open to it back then, we wouldn't even need to have this conversation. We would have moved things forward. But there's still a large part of the world that is still trying to prove phenomena instead of taking it to the next level — actually understanding it and working with it. But yeah, the work was done. It was done a century ago.
[51:00] How Brendan Got Into This — and the Deeper Design
Simon: How did you get into all this? Were you always interested?
Brendan: As a kid I had a leaning toward paranormal sorts of content — TV shows, the X-Files, anything with unexplained or paranormal themes. I was drawn to that and found it fascinating. So my personality was kind of wired that way from the beginning. Then when I was twenty I read Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe, and that just blew my mind. The vague and loose ideas I had about how the universe worked were obliterated by that book. It activated such a level of fascination and curiosity. There was no going back. It went from a casual passing interest to a monastic level of intensity in the research, trying to make sense of what was going on. I've been doing it for twenty-three years since then.
Simon: I wonder if for people like us, we're being led along the path in some way — the universe giving us little nudges that take us on the next step. For you it might have been those experiences, the OBE or the moment when you were giving blood. Perhaps something wanted you to be on this path, to be a communicator and write these books.
Brendan: Well, here I am — though I don't think we discussed the terms of pay very thoroughly. But yeah, I do feel like the regression material in particular reveals a layer of architecture that I designate as part of the causal architecture or causal corridor, where we are planning life arcs and major turning points and forks in the road. That comes up very clearly and lucidly in regression material from around the world. That part of us that exists at that level of reality is essentially architecting and designing the human life to come — saying: okay, this is the road I'm going to go down, these are the experiences I want to have, this is the knowledge or wisdom I want to take away from it, this is my contribution to the world. We have a kind of programmed intention built into us from day one that I think we generally follow in varying degrees of lucidity or success.
[55:00] Reincarnation — How It Actually Works
Simon: What do you think is happening with reincarnation? How does it work?
Brendan: The answer really depends on which layer of the model you're answering from. If you look at what a lot of people call the oversoul, that's a multiplex intelligence that genuinely transcends time, space, and causality as we know them. It's a vast intelligence that contains all of the distilled love, wisdom, and knowledge from the various personalities that have lived earth lives or lives elsewhere. At that level, things aren't linear or sequential at all. It can inject itself into any timeframe in history it likes — wanting to have an experience in the Middle Ages here, while simultaneously injecting a personality into the year 2300 for a futuristic life. Non-linear.
Come down into the causal corridor a little lower — which is where a lot of regression material comes from — and it looks much more linear. As individuated consciousness, the principles of Atma, buddhi, and manas operating there have a sense of continuity across different lifetimes and awareness of all the different lives lived. There's a developmental arc. You can look at what's come before and ask where you want to go next to continue the development and garner more experience. Then down another level you have the lower astral and mental planes, and finally the earth plane where we actually live out our lives in a heavily constrained context — very limited bandwidth, very limited access to the information available at the higher levels.
[57:30] Book Two, Book Three, and What's Coming
Simon: Reverse Engineering the Afterlife — where can people get it?
Brendan: Right now we're in the pre-order phase. People can pre-order at a link I'll provide for the show notes, since it's a bit long to remember off the top of your head. If they go to brendandmurphy.com they'll find their way to the pre-order page and all the information about it — the timeline, what it's about, everything. It'll eventually make its way out to the various bookselling platforms, and we'll have an audiobook as well eventually.
Simon: And it's Book Two of the Grand Illusion series. Is there going to be a Book Three?
Brendan: Yes — he says through gritted teeth. I've got a lot of material, and now that I've got the framework established in Book Two, I'll be able to apply it to the material already waiting for Book Three, which I've had to separate out because of sheer volume. I'm quite clear that Book Two gives me an interpretive framework and jumping-off point for tackling all of that material — getting into some of the alien and UFO stuff, some of the interesting off-world past-lives material, anomalous experiences with strange beings manifesting, all of which really invites deeper critical analysis. I've also had a few novel ideas about how to frame the collective consciousness field and develop the analysis from there. Hopefully I can get it done in the next couple of years, because I definitely don't plan on having another fourteen-year gap between books.
Simon: Thanks a lot for coming on the podcast. It's been great.
Brendan: I appreciate it, Simon. Thanks very much.