The Exploration of Consciousness
Mapping the Afterlife
Brendan joins Matt Presti on The Exploration of Consciousness to map what happens to consciousness at death — drawing on twenty-three years of cross-tradition, evidence-based research into near-death experiences, post-mortem states, and the Consciousness Transition Model.
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[0:00] Introducing Brendan D. Murphy
Matt: Welcome to The Exploration of Consciousness.
And welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This is TEC, episode number 40. My guest today is Brendan D. Murphy, who is a consciousness researcher and author of The Grand Illusion and the forthcoming Reverse Engineering the Afterlife, working at the intersection of consciousness science, comparative metaphysics and systems thinking. He maps the architecture of consciousness in post-mortem states without the constraints of religion, materialism, or New Age ideology. He is the creator of the Consciousness Transition Model, the CTM, the first structured cross-tradition framework of how consciousness moves through post-mortem states. He publishes regularly on Substack and is based in Mexico.
Good day, Brendan. How are you today?
Brendan: I'm good, Matt. I appreciate having the chance to chat.
[1:10] A Time Zone Mix-Up
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I've been wanting to get you on for a while. I'm glad things worked out. Sorry for the confusion last week. We had a sort of time zone thing. And I never ask AI. I'm anti-AI all the way. And I ask AI, is his time zone the same as my time zone? It said they are identical time zones.
Brendan: Yeah.
Matt: There it is, the one time. One time you do it.
Brendan: Yeah. No, it's all good. It happens, man.
Matt: It keeps happening. Even the best among us just can't seem to always get the time conversion right.
Brendan: I did it to somebody on Monday, messed up.
Matt: Yeah. So it's fine.
[1:46] Brendan's Background and Life in Mexico
Matt: Very good. Very good. Well, give us a little bit of background on you. Where do you hail from and how is it that you got into the study of near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences? And all things in this Consciousness Transition Model, which we're going to discuss.
Brendan: I was born and raised in Sydney. Spent the first 23 years of my life there. Very, very normal life, born into a middle-class family in the suburbs. And I had a pretty normal upbringing, pretty mainstream, really.
Eventually, through my brother providing me with a connection, my younger brother, he gave me a book recommendation which came from this young entrepreneur guy who had visited the school and given this talk. My brother was like, wow, this guy is supposed to be talking about business but he keeps going off on this tangent about this book about the nature of reality and thought you might want to know about it. So that triggered my whole search and my curiosity was sparked. And that was when I was 20. And yeah, I've been doing that ever since. I've just never kind of took it and ran with it.
We live in Mexico right now. I'm shooting in from Mexico. We've been here for the last five years. [section omitted] That's a snapshot of my background, where I'm from and all that.
Matt: Yeah, that's similar to Joel Rafidi. He relocated from the Queensland, is it, right? Called Queensland, Australia, right?
Brendan: In Queensland, I can't remember, but yeah, he did around, I think he left a year after we did. So yeah, ended up in Mexico as well.
Matt: Okay, yeah, good deal. How do you enjoy it there? Is it to your liking?
Brendan: Yeah, yeah. It's a really different kind of cultural vibe for sure. And it works for us. Our daughter loves it. She thinks she's Mexican. My wife is really happy where we are in San Miguel Allende. It's a really sweet little place. The people are awesome. And it's a different pace. We're busy, obviously. We've got work and kids, not a kid, but the mentality of Mexico is a little more chill. It's very family, very welcoming, family-centric. It's all about community. They're very communal. And that's been really nice, actually, because they welcome you in with open arms. It's like instantly part of the family kind of thing. So that's cool. It's nice.
Matt: Excellent. Very good. Yeah, very colourful, too. A lot more colour, seemingly. But I'm in the rental car thing recently, and all the rental cars are either white or grey. You don't see red cars anymore, hardly, unless they're a sports car or something, but it shows you how the colour of America is sort of becoming in PC kind of flavour, less. Kind of thing. But yeah, definitely colour is something that we, even in movies and Hollywood and such, but there are some colourful experiences when it comes to near-death and out-of-body experiences and things of that nature.
[5:09] Early Experiences and Research into NDEs
Matt: Were there any experiences that happened to you personally that contributed to your interest in researching this?
Brendan: Yeah, pretty early on. I mentioned that book by Michael Talbot, which was The Holographic Universe, which you probably read, I'm sure. Shortly after I read that, that blew my mind. At that point in time, it just destroyed all my vague ideas about how things work, how life works. And so shortly after that, I had my first taste of what I can only call infinite consciousness.
So for me, I was lucky, I guess, to ground the concepts in a lived experience pretty early on. And then from there I took up meditation and I did a lot of meditation from the age of 20 to 22 and I had more experiences along those lines and hung out at the spiritualist church a little bit and did some meditation group work, all that kind of thing. So those were the early experiences that I had that really grounded it for me and allowed me to speak from like a Gnostic, or a position of Gnosis, if you like.
Matt: Excellent. So any actual near-death experience in your life?
Brendan: No, no. I'm glad I haven't had any.
Matt: Okay. Right. How many would you say you've researched in total?
Brendan: I don't know. I've seen a lot at this point, after being in the space for 23 years, it's hundreds, thousands, I'm not sure. It's just interesting to notice how those experiences blend into mystical sorts of experiences, religious ideas and different traditions, how they all sort of interconnect. Because NDE is a very powerful stream of data. But I don't focus exclusively on that. I'm interested in how that connects into the wider tapestry.
Matt: Right, right, right. Yeah, it's very interesting because there's a lot to it and we're going to get into that today. There's quite a few interesting questions I have for you.
[7:32] Defining Consciousness
Matt: So I like to, in most cases, ask my guests, what is or how do you define consciousness? So from your perspective and research, which is very thorough, especially in the near-death and out-of-body, how would you define consciousness?
Brendan: It becomes a self-referencing kind of thing. What is consciousness? Well, it's awareness. What's awareness? It's perception. What's perception? It's consciousness. You kind of circle back, it becomes that circular thing. But to me, the foundation is a basic substrate of consciousness, and that's the faculty, if you like, that makes sense of everything else.
Whereas what we're trying to do, what the mainstream world has been trying to do in science for a long time is the inverse of that. They start from the materialistic reductionist perspective and go, well, how do we explain consciousness in terms of all this, when really it should be actually consciousness is the explanatory principle. And everything fits inside of that. We don't have to try to squeeze it into these sort of narrow frameworks.
So consciousness exists on a spectrum of infinite possible states and altered states. And when you dig into that and people's experiences of altered states and phenomenology around that, that's where it gets really interesting.
[9:13] Materialist Science Versus Mystical Experience
Matt: Yeah, it is for sure. One of the things I notice with materialist science is they tend to, as Russell would say, be so married to their senses that everything has to be defined in terms of electrical effects, which is what our senses are. They can only observe electrical effects because that's what they are, right? So how does one come to know something that isn't observable? Like the word love, for instance, and I've said this on many podcasts, there's no actual test to weigh love. It's not reducible. It's not quantifiable. But yet every physicist uses it. At least he should if he wants to stay in good graces with his wife when he leaves for work.
But so, yeah, have you found any dissuading or between the materialist explanation of consciousness being an effect of the brain? Versus an idealist definition which consciousness would be causal and to a Russell definitely a causal thing. He likened God as being consciousness itself, which is why we shouldn't build altars to it or sacrifice things to it, because it's not really something that is just one-sided, like anger, like we must appease the volcano god or this or that god.
But what have you found in your researching between the sense-based approach and definition of science for consciousness from science's perspective versus the mystical and the more near-death experiential? I'm sure you've seen some differences, but what are some of your takes on that? And where does science fail? As a Tsarion would say, science leaves consciousness at the door. As well as psychology in most cases. So from your perspective, tell us a little bit about what you learned in your investigations between the materialist version of consciousness versus the more mystical and experiential of the near-death survivors, for instance.
Brendan: Well, I guess you'd know all that terrain pretty well. I don't need to tell Matt Presti that the materialists' ideas about that are pretty limited and they're pretty outdated. It's kind of like this Newtonian-era view of things, which it's a weird thing to see persist into the 21st century because we have a hundred plus years of psychical research, mediumship research. We have about a century or maybe a bit less than a century of parapsychology, which is a kind of a refinement and progression of the old psychical research and all these different disciplines that come under the banner of parapsychology, which are numerous. And for decades they've all been producing very rigorously and carefully evidence of non-local consciousness.
So it's a strange thing to see, and quantum mechanics also doesn't support a materialist cosmology either. So it's a weird thing to see people hanging on to that kind of mentality, which is a really contradictory and conflicted one. It's an attitude that's like, ah, well, if I can't see it and touch it, it's not really there. But they also know damn well that there's a lot of things that they can't see and touch that are there and are measurable. So their closed-mindedness to the world of post-materialist research and these paradigms is quite strange.
Even in certain instances, you have these sceptics, professional sceptics of the paranormal and what have you, who some of them write for magazines like the mainstream science magazines like Scientific American or whatever. And even Michael Shermer is a classic example, when he had an experience not that long ago, it might have been a few years.
Have I still got you, Matt?
Matt: Yeah, go ahead.
Brendan: Oh, cool. He wrote about an experience he had a few years ago, which was in connection with, if memory serves me, his wife's deceased father. And they had this radio, this old radio that was disconnected, it wasn't plugged in, and somehow this radio kind of came to life.
If memory serves me correctly, there was a song that played or a message that came through or the song contained a kind of a message, encoded into the song lyrics or whatever. And it made no sense to his worldview that this could happen because the thing was unplugged. It shouldn't be possible. And it seemed like ostensibly a communication from the other side.
But I don't know how much more obvious it could get, but in situations like that with that kind of mentality, they go out of their way to dismiss it as quickly as possible and rationalise it away. But it's not a scientific stance that they're taking. It's just a belief system.
And I've actually written quite a bit about the way that these materialist types are really actually the mirror image of the religious fundamentalists in the sense that they have the same attitude. It's the same attitude. It's not the same belief system, but it's the same attitude and kind of mentality applied to a different belief system, which they're very equally dogmatic about, equally close-minded about, often very hostile. And they're not interested in information that does not simply support their dogma.
So they're an interesting bunch, but the science around non-local consciousness and telepathy and influencing people's dreams and sending messages remotely and just all sorts of really interesting phenomena. You're talking about tens of thousands of experiments that have been run over decades and have continued to produce what a rational person would call proof of non-local interconnection. So it's the materialist view and what's actually happening in the world are two very different things.
[15:37] Scientism and the Hard Problem
Matt: Yeah, yeah, that's well said. My next question was going to be, have you received any blowback from the materialist paradigm? And you're quite right to say that. Scientism is paramount, basically, or it absolutely is a religious belief system, right?
It's quite a different format, it's based on the evidence of the senses and quantifying and reducing everything to sort of its lowest common denominator of particles, parts, matter, as being causal things. But yeah, it does fail to really honour a lot of the qualitative side of analysis, which is a whole other paradigm.
And we have Descartes to thank for that when he actually created the mind-body problem or the hard problem of consciousness because he didn't discover that it was two things. He separated them so that he wouldn't end up like Galileo in prison. Because the Catholic Church was on his ass. And so he said, well, I better separate physics and materialism, materialist, which was called physicalism back then as a philosophical connotation.
But he did that to protect people who were using basically quantifying and reductionism. Basically, hands off the mental, hands off the spiritual. This domain of physicalism is ours and you guys don't get to touch this. So it wasn't something he discovered, something he created. And that's what is known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
So yeah, you're right to say that there's a hundred tons of evidence, at least, to support non-local and other things. Experientially, quantifiably even, the data from near-death experiences alone, I've said this in the past, could amount to huge evidence if it was fed into a, let's just say, a large language model to pull out similarities, to pull out things.
[17:49] Writing the Book
Matt: And there's tons of evidence here that you present as well. How long did it take to compile? And give us an example of one of your more compelling testimonies that you received from someone in the book.
Brendan: Okay, so to give you an idea of that journey to writing it, I started when I was 24 and I did not have a clear plan of what exactly I was trying to produce so I just started putting massive amounts of material together. I was reading a lot, studying a lot and then writing a lot and because I didn't have a clear plan of exactly what it was going to look like in the end, that process went on and on for more than five years. I think it was nearly six years by the time I published it.
And I was spending anywhere from eight to 12 hours a day just doing that, just doing the research and the writing. So it was kind of a monastic lifestyle in a lot of ways. So I ended up covering a lot of ground and different paradigms and perspectives. And the second part of your question was what exactly?
Matt: What about a specific example of?
[19:06] A Compelling Case That Deepened the Quest
Matt: Yeah, I'm sure you had, as I was saying, there's a lot of quantifiable stuff that, just from people's experiences, personal experiences, but one experience that you researched or investigated that was notable to you, perhaps that also, let's just say, ignited an even deeper quest, desire to keep questing after this kind of a research because it's not something that a lot of people do. A lot of people don't take on death as a research, for one. I've met PMH Atwater. I've met a few others. Robert Monroe, the Monroe Institute, is in the same area as the Russell Museum in Virginia. So there's a bit more of a community focus there around these subjects.
But I'm sure there is at least one case that made you say, oh, wow, I got to look more into this, as perhaps an inspiration for your book and your, what is the most important avenue of research in particular?
Brendan: That's a tough question because it's kind of like, okay, got to go into the files and think of something, it's your description. A lot of it, a lot of it affected me or made me kind of go, ooh, wow, that's pretty amazing. I can give you a reason, actually a really, it's hard for me to think in terms of book one, okay, what was one particular thing, because there's so much in there, but you've brought NDEs a few times, and one of the things I found recently, actually, which raised my eyebrows, and it takes quite a lot to do that now, was a connection between an NDE report from Dr Eben Alexander from 2008 and what Rudolf Steiner was talking about in 1904, a century ago, and the detailed overlaps between those two accounts.
I've seen a lot of overlaps between accounts and reports at this point, but that one was really striking because Eben Alexander, as a hardcore, he was a materialist atheist who just thought, when you're dead, you're dead. The only thing that's real is the brain and physical paradigm. And he had no interest in any of this stuff like the esoteric or nature of consciousness.
So he had this NDE which was induced by E. coli, an E. coli infection in his cortical tissue. So it ravaged his brain, his neocortex, and basically shut it down and took it offline. And so he was in a coma for about a week. And while he was in this coma, effectively functionally, functionally dead, he had this amazing protracted experience of going into these different states of consciousness and sequencing from what some people would call the low astral or the Kamaloka, in the sort of, the murky, murky filth of the collective kind of low energies and then moving out of that through a spinning vortex into a new realm where he finds himself accompanied by this girl who appears and says, hey, don't worry, everything's fine.
And then he's in this beautiful summer land, this village, he's flying through the sky looking down at these. Villagers and people playing out in the sunshine and having a great time. And he effectively lands in what the spiritualists would have called the Summerland, which the theosophists were basically saying is kind of like somewhere in the upper astral planes. It's a very pleasant kind of environment, very earth-like, just much more pleasant.
And then from there he ends up in a realm that actually really eerily fits Rudolf Steiner's description of what he called Lower Devachan. And it's fascinating because his description of that, and if you want me to give you the full detail, I can open up the passage. But Steiner's description of it was this realm is largely sonic, it's sound-based, and that's if the mode of expression is sound. And he describes there's different terrains or aspects to this Devachan environment. There's the air environment, there's the earth environment, there's the ocean environment, and he delineates between all those.
And then he identifies, he specifies as a type of being that lives in this environment, which basically is a sound-based being and it expresses and receives impressions. It's sound-based sonic. And he calls this being an archangel. He says it's not a regular angel, it's an archangel. So it's a higher order of angel.
And so, Eben Alexander, a century later, a significant part of his NDE happens in this realm, which he describes in the exact same way as Steiner's Devachan, and he describes seeing this being, which emits this amazing, incredible sort of divine sound. And actually more than one of them, this type of being. And they're flying high up in the air zone and emitting this sound. It's just this expression of pure joy. And that's the environment that he's describing, essentially the same as what Steiner called Lower Devachan.
His brain was offline at this point in time and he was a hardcore atheist. So for these parallels to exist and for these two people a century apart to describe effectively exactly the same thing. And he actually says in his report, he sees this being and he's reaching for a label to capture what this being is. And he's like, ah, angel, angel's not quite right. It's not quite enough. It's something else. And it was interesting because he's reaching for something a little bit more transcendent, which is what Steiner was calling an archangel.
And Steiner was saying even by his time a century ago, we had basically lost the meaning of the term archangel. It had kind of vanished off our radar. So yeah, there was a lot to Eben Alexander's experience, which I've kind of skipped over. But that was one recently that really kind of got my attention because the parallels are too obvious.
[25:44] Why Brendan Took Up This Research
Matt: Yeah, I guess I'm just, I'm trying to find, you haven't had your own NDE and not necessarily any special interest in this research that you're doing. What was the impetus though that made you jump headlong into it is an interesting thing. I get it.
Brendan: It's funny because people seem to, yeah, they seem surprised when I'm doing this because when I haven't had an NDE or a major existential crisis that makes people kind of wonder about what it's all about. But that was the effect that Talbot's book had on me back when I was 20.
Matt: Wow. Okay.
Brendan: That was the effect it had. It was just, oh, wow. Okay. And the level of curiosity and fascination and inspiration that that activated for me was the same as what people who've had NDEs talk about. So for me, that was a transformative moment.
And then I went and had some pretty high-level mystical experiences, which kind of locked in that on an experiential level. And a lot of NDEs, they happen, well, actually, I'm kind of getting off on a tangent, but I'll let you jump in because I feel like you were kind of going somewhere with that.
Matt: When you say you've had mystical experiences, were they substance experiences, or did you have an actual divine illumination in the classical sense? Can you share a little bit about that?
Brendan: I would say the Vedantic framework really fits my first experience really well. One night, not long after reading Talbot's book, maybe a few weeks or months later, I'm lying in bed and I'm waiting to go to sleep. And suddenly I'm just infinite consciousness. I'm having the classical Atman, Brahman, non-dual transcendent experience of being this point of awareness in an infinite field of awareness, which is all me. It's total integration and total non-duality, and the vastness is just unbelievable.
So that maps to that type of framework, the Atma. If you contact your Atma, that's considered the highest human spiritual principle. And in that framework, Atman and Brahman are the same thing, essentially. They're substantially the same thing.
So that was my first experience, pretty deep. And then others were very similar. So in a sense, I bypassed all the lower or intermediate transitional stages. A lot of people are incredulous when they hear me tell that story, because it's like, well, why would you just be lying in bed waiting to go to sleep and suddenly have this amazing experience that doesn't make any sense? And I'm like, well, the only explanation I have for that is that Talbot's book opened my mind and created such an interest and fascination that some part of me was reaching out for validation of the concept. I wanted the experience. So, yeah.
[29:10] Research as a Calling
Matt: Well, I find that fascinating. That's very cool, because that explains now the motive behind the work you're doing. And it's also sort of a calling, wouldn't you say? Because, like I said, it's not every day that people just decide, oh, I'm going to research near-death experiences and really map out, with a Consciousness Transition Model, what are the states between physical existence, life, death, and all of the above?
It's a bit morbid for most people. Most people are terrified of death, but I think it's very important that there are periodicals and books and research done on one of the most incredible experiences any of us can ever have. And I like to say that doctors all agree that the leading cause of death is birth. So it's good to have some research out there.
I'm very much looking forward to diving more deeply into your work because I've been how to turn on the oil in the pan. A long-time researcher of near-death experiences, going back to at least the middle 2000s, especially after my own personal near-death experience in 2007-ish. That completely was a course correction in my life and is how I basically found Walter Russell's work. Two days after I had felt good enough to go out of my studio, I find the book The Secret of Light for $2 in a used bookstore. And the rest, as they say, is history.
But the inspiration you felt from Talbot's book, certainly inspiration is a key golden opportunity to unfold something that you wouldn't normally get into. So having that connection there, it sort of seems that you were appointed, I would say, to do this work.
[31:12] The Creator and the Non-Dual Field
Matt: Can you give me, from your perspective, how does a creator work into your theory on the Consciousness Transition Model, and what kinds of research have you done? The creator is a very big part of obviously religions and whatnot. But from your own personal research, what is the creator in terms of maybe boiling down the near-death experience and what you've found, at least for your part in this? Care to explain that a little bit?
Brendan: Yeah, I liked how you phrased that question in the first part. Most people are accustomed to thinking in anthropomorphic terms, like a creator. The man behind the curtain, pulling the strings and levers and making it all go.
And as you well know, one of the things that always stuck with me after I finished reading Monroe's work was, and there were so many fascinating tidbits in it, you could spend a lifetime pulling those threads, which I've done a lot of anyway. But one of the comments he made was that after a certain amount of his OBE journeys he had to let go of the idea of God, the normal idea of God. And it was this sad, wistful moment where he just realised it's simply not there. There's no man behind the curtain, there's no one pulling strings and stuff. And it's much more strange and subtle than that.
And me being me, with my early experiences, they fit a number of esoteric traditions really well. I think one of the first two, the first two I was really exposed to, were the Vedantic ideas of Atman and Brahman, and also the Theosophical ideas, which lean very heavily on Buddhism and the Indic traditions as well. So that reinforcement. And so to me, when we're talking about a creator, it simply doesn't make any sense.
Nobody has ever produced any kind of mechanical explanation or theory of how we go from a field of non-duality, the infinite one, to the differentiation and manifestation and duality, in a way that makes sense. There are traditions that are talking about emanation, where the one just overflows in its beingness and it emanates downstream effects of different realms and intelligences and this kind of thing. And these are some of our awkward attempts to capture something of the idea of how the hell anything actually happens or eventuates, because it kind of doesn't make any sense.
But my basic starting point is that infinite field, the non-dual field. And that is some kind of underlying fundamental intelligence, which through mechanisms we don't really fully understand creates this downstream effect of differentiated intelligence and manifestation. So I think I've wandered a bit from your initial question. Sorry about that. But yeah, you go ahead.
[34:41] Walter Russell's Model of Light
Matt: Oh, yeah. Well, that's where Russell will come in. The way he explains it, not only does he have literally hundreds of charts and drawings to show how basically the ground of all being is the light of mind, which is consciousness, which is God. Yes. And any division in that is the expression of that in temporal body form. But through compression, which you mentioned in the excerpt you sent me, which we'll talk about a little of that as well, this compression, this implosion, so to speak, which is created through the division, the compression and expansion begin simultaneously.
So through the north and south poles of things, bodies, we have a left and right hemisphere or north and south hemisphere, you could say. Those things centred by an equator, or a cube of the plane, a plane of the cube, if you will, in this particular approach. Through that division process, the sphere is expanded upon the integration of the implosive force and then expands at its equator. So you literally get a temporal universe of bodies in motion, which are basically the result of divisions of the light of mind itself.
So it's a really great model, something I would definitely implore you to take a look at, because for me it did explain that very question of how does this force of Brahman or mind go from being a static stillness of complete totality to such individuated expressions.
Brendan: And I agree. It's not that I'm not at all familiar with it. I like it. I think it's as good as any.
Matt: Yeah, sure.
Brendan: But from the level of that raw beingness or pure beingness, where nothing happens or nothing is happening, for me, I get the intellectual model, but there's some part of me that resists going, this is actually what happens. There's a disconnect between the state of being at the highest level or the deepest or whatever you want to call it, versus our ideas about how the downstream effects actually occur. But I like that as a physics model and theory. I like that a lot. And it ties in with Dan Winter's wave phase conjugation golden ratio stuff, which is also great. So, yeah, it's really cool. What he came up with was brilliant. And I think it was also the result of an NDE, wasn't it?
[37:34] The Light in Near-Death Experiences
Matt: Yeah, mystical illumination experiences, classical illumination, near-death experience at different ages. But you can extract, again, through near-death experiences, the experience of light, and I wanted to ask you about that too. It's a universal experience, you could say, with near-death, to experience the light. And in your research, how much of that do you experience, in terms of quantifying all the different people who have had this unique experience? How many would you say experience this light directly, this all-pervasive love, all-totality, light of God, or for lack of a better term, creator? Was that a major theme in what you correlated?
Brendan: Yeah, it's pretty significant. It does come up a lot. I don't think anybody has, at least I haven't seen any of the researchers who are focused on NDEs provide numbers, like X percentage of people experience this. There are figures around certain things, like experiencing passage through a tunnel. That's maybe a maximum of roughly a third of people reporting that kind of thing. The light is something that comes up again and again. I just don't think there are any actual figures about it.
And light shows up in different ways as well. You have the initial interface stages where someone's transitioning into the non-physical imaginal realm. Maybe they experience passage through a tunnel or passage into a light, which then brings them to a different realm or state of consciousness. Some people encounter what they identify as a being of light, and this being maybe initiates a passage into a different realm, or the being initiates the life review. That being of light, so to speak, is often connected to the life review and reported as triggering it.
Then you have the higher-tier mystical unified light experiences, where people are getting all sorts of information flowing into them and getting insights into how everything works, and they feel like they've become all knowledge and all that kind of stuff as well, which is definitely not uncommon. And a lot of people are really radically impacted by that.
Even if you've seen the story of a guy called Tom Sawyer. He was an American guy, very rough and ready, blue-collar kind of guy, very uneducated. And he identified as himself, he called himself a redneck. He was basically, I used to be a redneck. And he had this NBA.
Matt: I know a lot of them.
Brendan: Right, right. So he had an NDE which was triggered when he was working under his pickup truck and the platform it was resting on came loose and fell on him and crushed him. And he was unconscious for something like roughly 20-odd minutes. And he had this experience of becoming one with the lights and all this knowledge and all this information. And when he came out of it, he went from being a wilfully ignorant redneck who had never read a book in his life to suddenly getting these answers to these complex equations coming into his mind and being like, how do I know this stuff? And suddenly he likes classical music and suddenly he wants to read voraciously on every topic, and it's all metaphysics and physics and all this kind of stuff.
That's the experience a lot of people seem to have in the aftermath of it, that connection with the light or the oneness. He was just a spectacular example of that to illustrate.
[41:36] Total Darkness Experiences
Matt: It seems like a lot of the near-death experiences result in an increase of being informed, knowing something you didn't know before. And in also your studies, what are your correlations with people who experience total darkness?
Brendan: That's a great question. For people who are really devout atheist types, it seems like that is a little bit more correlated with this. They find themselves in a darkness, usually afraid, disoriented, wondering what the hell has happened to them, what's going on. That is definitely not helpful, to hold the belief of a hardcore materialist, because by their framework you can't exist beyond the death of the body. A lot of these people will tell you it's nothingness, it's darkness and blackness. Well, that becomes your rendered environment when you no longer have a body. If you really hold a strong belief system about what you expect to happen, that tends to be the thing that renders your experience.
And so you hear that. I've seen a number of instances of somebody with that mindset beginning their experience in darkness. George Rodonaia was a classic example of that. He was that mindset, no belief in an afterlife, any of that. He was strictly scientific. He was targeted by the KGB and he was run over with a car and ended up in the morgue. They actually thought he was dead. He was so dead that they put him into one of the freezer compartments in the morgue. And he was there for three days. While he was effectively physically dead and separated from his body, he had these very interesting experiences. One of them, I think, began with darkness.
He was very scared and became self-aware and started talking himself through it. He was like, oh, well, if darkness exists, then the opposite must exist. Through that, he experiences, oh, now there's light. It reminds me of the Tibetan Bardo teachings, these prayers that they read someone who's dying, because the whole point of that is to orient them and keep them coherent and calm as they transition. So he gave himself a kind of coaching session into lucidity. And then he ended up flying around the hospital.
He saw some things that were later verified. There was a tiny little baby that was crying incessantly and nobody could calm it down or figure out why. In his disembodied state, floating around the hospital, he saw that the baby had a broken bone, which apparently was the result of the nurse actually dropping the baby. When he came out of this coma state, he spoke to the medical staff and he was like, that baby on the floor, whatever room, it's a crime because it's got a broken bone. They went and had a look at it properly and found, oh, yes, it does actually have this broken bone. And so it got proper attention. So, yeah, he had a really fascinating experience that began with that typical atheistic nothingness.
[44:59] Belief Systems and Near-Death Imagery
Matt: Yeah. It's really, really amazing. One thing I think a large language model AI could do well is quantify a lot of this stuff in terms of actual percentages. But another question I have for you is in your experience. You mentioned this too, that basically what people see and believe, how much of that NDE experience from your research coincides with their own belief system. So many that I encountered in my early studies of NDEs tend to see what it is they believe in, whether it be Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad, based on the belief system, to be the sort of communicator between them and their destination. What is it that you've encountered with research into that?
Brendan: Yeah, I agree. A lot of that is exactly what happens. I characterise that NDE state as an interface state. It's a transitional state. So you get interface imagery, which is really, like you're saying, a lot of it is based around people's belief systems. Also, I think it's important to realise, for the sake of us putting together a pretty complete picture, it's not just what you believe, it's also just ideas that you've been exposed to. People who've grown up in, say, a Christian country, even if they're basically materialist and not religious and don't want anything to do with that and they think that there is no afterlife, they tend to experience some sort of Christian interface imagery. Some of these people report angels or Jesus. So it's like the mind tries to draw on what it's familiar with, to create some kind of a rendered environment to orient itself in. And that stuff's all very temporary and transitory.
I would point out, as Kenneth Ring, who's studied thousands of NDEs, pointed out some years ago, the being of light never identifies itself as Jesus. That's always the interpretive overlay that we put on. So, yeah, it's sort of like the mind goes into its database and goes, what might exist here? How can I fill in the blanks here? How can I orient myself? And if all you've got is Christianity, angels and demons or whatever, then Jesus, that's often what shows up for people.
Or in certain extreme cases, like Howard Storm, he was, if I've got it right, I'm sorry, I might be confusing two different people. There was a guy who's named in my book who was a preacher and he believed in all the sort of fire and brimstone stuff. He was really tormenting his flock with this sort of fear-based preaching. And he spent 35 years in that job. And when he finally had his NDE, he experienced initially a very wrathful God. And it's no surprise. That's what he spent 35 years drilling into his consciousness. And that's the expectation he set up for himself. And it turned out, obviously, it's a transitory thing that you can move through and get past. But yeah, to your point.
Matt: It's sort of the similar warning, careful what you believe in because it might be what you meet, right?
Brendan: Yeah, exactly. It really often, very often is.
Matt: It can become your worldview and the model that you use to interact with the world, which we see a lot of that today in people's beliefs in different conceptual ideas, politics, the whole realm of, even to the shape of the earth and other things. So there's quite a lot to be aware of and cognisant of, that can shape your experiences both in life and after.
[49:04] The Consciousness Transition Model
Matt: So, well, tell us, Brendan, a little bit about the CTM, the Consciousness Transition Model. It sounds fascinating. Give us a bit of background on that and how is it you came to develop that?
Brendan: Yeah, okay. So the CTM is basically the Consciousness Transition Model. It's basically my term for, or my way of describing, the shifts in consciousness states that people tend to move through post-mortem. To a degree, it's predictable. There are predictable patterns and pathways. Also, there are personal wrinkles and things. It's not exactly the same for everybody, but there are also general patterns and it seems like rules at play that guide and inform people's experiences.
So for me, existence is just these transitions between different states of consciousness and really there's nothing else. That might sound a bit intimidating because some people want to have a finish line or somewhere that we get to and we're good. That's it. But I haven't been able to justify that kind of thinking. It looks more like an endless series of transitions and maybe you reach what they call Nirvana or what have you, and don't expect to hang out there too long. Don't get too attached.
But yeah, so that was after seeing the amount of data that I had and all the different case studies, it was then what I wanted to do was try to systemise it and assign, where I could, labels and definitions and things to make it more systemised and apply some of the computing analogies and systems thinking to what people are actually experiencing in their NDEs and their alternate states. So that's the mentality behind the CTM, I guess.
Matt: And on your site, let me go ahead and share that just so people can get a look at it. You have the CTM. What is there here that people can interact with to get more?
Brendan: I think eventually we're going to have a fully interactive model. It's not there yet. Yeah, not there yet. But yeah, people can grab a bit of information about what the book's about, what's in it. They can put pre-orders in. They can find the first book as well. Really, that's the point of my site, just to give people an access point to the writing. Yeah, so they can find probably enough information there. I've also got a substack where I've been publishing some book excerpts as well.
[51:53] Influential Near-Death Experience Researchers
Matt: Excellent. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the 3D model because you got me there, very interested. And on your work with the things you've studied, it's probably immense. I mean, you could probably name who were maybe your three top near-death experience researchers that you used to help culminate all the information that you gathered.
Brendan: That is a very good question. There were people, Kenneth Ring, I think, is one of the absolute best. He's sort of put himself out to pasture now. He's not doing interviews or anything anymore. But his work was really good and very insightful. PMH Outwater did a lot of good investigative work. Just as a kind of reporter and detective style, she was very thorough. She had a, what do you call it? She had a databank of something like 5,000 NDEs or more. So there's a couple that come to mind. There are so many that I get to mention. Raymond Moody, he's the OG. He put it all on the map and made people interested in it. So his work is fascinating as well. They've all contributed a lot of really interesting things and data that I've been pretty pleased to be able to work with.
Building on that, just for context, I've pulled on at least, I think, at least 500 different fields of research and different topics and at least 60 different traditions. So I'm kind of like, okay, how does all this fit together? How do the NDE researchers fit into this? Where do the mystics fit into this? And all that kind of thing. So the NDE is basically Chapter 3 for the people who are super, super duper interested in that. But it's really actually kind of the bare bones. It's almost like that's not even to me the most interesting part of the material. It gets deeper and deeper as it goes. So I get to stand on the shoulders of the giants like the people we just named to try to build something that I haven't seen anybody else put together.
[54:18] Psychedelics and Meditation
Matt: Yeah, very good. Definitely, again, it's something that I think needs to be done, and it takes a special person to pursue this kind of work, because it's, again, it's not for everyone. Right?
Brendan: Just unhinged enough to cry.
Matt: Right, right, exactly. Have you ever done any psychedelic substances and if so, how does that play into your research?
Brendan: Yeah, I have. I've tried a few. I've done mushrooms, DMT, 5-MeO DMT, Bufo. Yeah, I mean, I gotta say my most significant experiences were just that first one I told you about and then the meditative experiences. All the substance-based ones were interesting. They all had their own things to show me and reveal. But yeah, I think a lot of people want to fall back on the plant medicines and stuff as if that's the end game or the final solution. And I really, I don't think it is. And so for me, I'd rather meditate and develop that skill, and have that access through that channel rather than putting a substance into me, getting blasted. I don't like the sort of uncontrolled aspect of that kind of stuff a whole lot.
And it was interesting. I watched a video not that long ago on YouTube by a guy who's very deep into the plant medicine side of things. And he really wanted his, he had some yogi friends based in India, and he really wanted a couple of them to try the plant medicine. I think it was ayahuasca. He wanted them to try it out or it might have been something else, but whatever it was, I think it was ayahuasca. And he finally got, he went there to visit them and they arranged for them to take it and try it. And the guy who was the most badass meditator who'd been doing it for decades, just accustomed to non-duality, the deepest levels, he took it. He didn't say a word, he didn't flinch, he spent the whole session just silently, calmly sitting there. And then when the effects started to wear off, he just opened his eyes and went, are you happy now?
He was not impressed. He was not overwhelmed or awed by the experience because he'd been doing it himself off his own bat for God knows how long in meditation. So I like to remind people of that. My experiences, the most profound have been in meditation or that first spontaneous one.
Matt: Yeah. And you're sober. That's the interesting thing.
Brendan: Right.
Matt: Right, right, right. I would agree with that. When I interviewed Mitch Schultz, who directed The Spirit Molecule back in 2010, I remember I said to him, it's not just you having an experience on mushrooms, but it's also the mushroom, its consciousness, experiencing what it's like to be human. And if it freaks the f*** out, then that's pretty much what we'd call a bad trip, in my opinion.
But yeah, we're dealing with, again, plant masters, plant medicines. There's a whole realm of that to be careful about. But I would definitely say that having experienced illuminations, and I call them minor for my personal self, but also having done plant medicine, there is a major difference between the two.
And one tends to be brought on by inspiration, by following your inspiration. That's typically the classical illumination experience that we read about, which is a sober one. And then there's also ones that can have and derive from, which is more the senses experiencing colour and waves, seeing waves behind nature, things like that.
[58:28] The Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead
Matt: But in your experience too, and if you have at all, give us a little bit information on this, the Tibetan and Egyptian books of the dead. Have you looked into those and how do those correlate with your research?
Brendan: Yeah, that's a good question. I do talk about both of them in the book because they do have a lot to say about our modern experiences. The Egyptians, they gave us our Western Christian concepts of hell, the fires of hell, for one thing, and also basically gave us the template for Satan and all that jazz.
But they also had their process of the heart being weighed against the feather of Ma'at, which is kind of a very kind of symbolic way to represent the process that we go through after death of internal reflection and assessment, the Life Review that we go through, which apparently there's two. So it happens in a couple of stages. And so they kind of captured that idea in their way.
And they also had this idea of, they did have an afterlife realm that people would go to, which was kind of like the... I don't want to get the term wrong. It's sort of like the field of reeds where they're out there and it's kind of like a lot of other traditions, even till now, what people have actually experienced. It was a very elevated earthly realm. They're still out there. The workers are still out there kind of like tilling the land and what have you. It's just a more pleasant version of earth life.
And that kind of parallels the Indian happy hunting grounds and maybe the Nordic kind of like the Norse Valhalla and a number of other kind of things that are actually all possible experientially in what esotericists would generally call the astral and mental planes of the afterlife. So very form-based, still form-based rupic.
But yeah, so they gave us some interesting correlations, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead is probably even more interesting because they mapped a number of specific phenomena that people actually do experience when they have NDEs and even in past life regressions when people are put through. A previous death experience and maybe the disorientation, the hanging around the body, wondering why people are ignoring them because they can't see them, and trying to maybe get back in the body and trying to communicate with your friends and family, but failing, the stress and the concern.
And they talked about all of this stuff and documented their Bardo realms and that kind of thing. But it was, yeah, interesting to see the contributions there as well.
Matt: Yeah, I find that all fascinating. It's where I started. My research was the Bardos and things like that. And also looking into psychedelic, sort of, I wanted to know what is this thing? So it was sort of a scientific investigation with entheogens for me for a period of years before I actually had a bona fide illumination experience, which was in a sober state.
And so that allowed me to start to say to myself that these are two different things, two very different things. And then the actual near-death experience I had, which was one that was very life-changing, life-altering in a lot of ways, which I couldn't see at the time. Only until later did I really know.
[1:02:11] Egregores, Archetypes and Demons
Matt: But I find this all fascinating. The Egregore versus Archetypes versus Literal Demons, Angels. Would you care to comment a little about that and what your research shows?
Brendan: Yeah, okay. So an Egregore is a group-created entity. Excuse me. It's generally something that we are unconsciously creating. It's through belief systems, people's. But here's the thing that very few people talk about is the reality is that when you have a thought, it is visible at an astral level and a mental level. It exists on those other levels. It's not just electrical impulses in the brain. It's also clairvoyantly visible as a form, and maybe a more subtle kind of form at a higher level. So there's this automatic process that's always going on and thoughts manifest as these entities.
But when you have a group consciousness together, particularly if it's got a common belief system or a common goal, it's generating these collective Egregores, which are these thought form entities, which can become kind of pretty autonomous and functional in their own right and potentially even absolutely autonomous and kind of cut loose.
So that's a really important idea to understand when we're talking about the afterlife and OBEs and stuff like this, is that you're in an environment where you're confronted with the contents of your psyche as well as the contents of other people's psyches. And that is the environment you're in. There's no more physical anchorage points. It's all consciousness-based. And a lot of the stuff that people are reporting is really the unconscious projection of their internal, their ego's contents. And some of it gets identified as demons or aliens or archons.
And even, it's tough for people, I think, because it's very real. And they can seem very intelligent and they don't necessarily betray the fact that they are connected to you or created by you. They seem like completely autonomous beings and they can come and have a conversation with you and say, hey, you need to, it's not your time, you need to get back into your body. And you can argue with them or debate with them or what have you.
But that's one of the things I try to emphasise in the book is there's this zone, this interface layer where we are confronted with our psychic contents. And it can be very deceptive. The occultists of yesteryear told us from multiple different traditions, Steiner and Blavatsky and Golden Dawn Society and several others were all telling us the astral light is, Eliphas Levi was another one, the astral light is very, very deceptive. You can't necessarily take what you perceive there in these states at face value.
[1:05:17] Archontic Misattribution and the Soul Trap
Brendan: And this is the mistake that a lot of people are making now. And this is actually a way that, it seems like this is how you get the views and build a reputation is by having these types of experiences and just sort of spewing them out there and going, this is what happened. Therefore, this is what I perceive. Therefore, this must be how things work.
When actually what these people are encountering is probably something much more subtle, an informational, a code or program to do with a process that is much, much more subtle, but it's manifested to their perception as a being, an entity, this thing, that thing. And so they literalise that and they go, oh, well, I'm interpreting it as an archon, therefore, because it wanted me to go back to my body, therefore we are part of, we're stuck in a reincarnation trap. We're in a human loosh farm or something.
Matt: Right, right.
Brendan: And so, yeah, sorry, yeah.
Matt: I was going to ask you specifically about that, because I'm really in agreement with you there on the whole Soul Trap thing, and I think what you're basically saying is that it, though it's been referenced, it doesn't really hold water. Is that your view?
Brendan: Yeah, when you look at it, if you stop looking at it at the level of story and narrative and you start looking at it in terms of process and structure and dynamics, you get a very different reading on the situation. And it's just not discussed out there in the discourse. It's the popular thing is to jump on the bandwagon and go, yeah, down with the archons, boo for the Soul Trap.
And the reality is that it's completely delusional to think that there's anything separating us from our higher nature or God, if you want to call it God. There's no separation. We're swimming in it. It's inside of us. We never left. The higher principles, the higher spiritual principles never leave that realm in the first place. From a more Vedantic kind of point of view, this whole realm is kind of just, meh, it's a hallucination, it's an illusion, it's Maya, don't worry about it. Because it's not what you are, you're really up in this other kind of, other deeper realm.
And so I came up with the term Archontic Misattribution because of what a lot of people are doing. They're attributing this agency to these beings, which it doesn't matter if you call it an angel or a demon or an archon or whatever, whatever it presents itself as. And they're attributing agency to it and manipulation and this higher governing structure, these guys are in charge and we're stuck inside this cage.
Which is a really structurally untenable position, especially once you start understanding, well, you're in a consciousness rendered environment. What you're experiencing at that level is very symbolic, highly representational. You haven't gone to the levels, the depths where you're actually bypassing all of that sort of stuff and getting behind it to see what's behind it. And the underlying, more subtle undercurrents.
And so we end up with this myth-making process. It's mythopoiesis in action right in front of our eyes. And it's just our 21st century kind of astral theology, whereas we were used to looking at the theologies and the metaphysics of bygone ages and going, oh, well, obviously we don't take that literally. Obviously that's just kind of mythological and symbolic. And yet we forget to apply that lens to what's now being reported, which is kind of more of the same, really, in a lot of ways. It's just a slightly different flavour, a little bit of a different spin on it.
And a lot of the people pushing this stuff don't have the experience or the study behind them to understand the original teachings in the more correct kind of vein or the spirit that they might have been intended in. And so if you apply a more mythological or a depth, the lens of depth psychology, you start to see these things very, very differently.
[1:09:22] Archetypes, Egregores and the Non-Jective
Matt: Yeah, that's wonderfully put. And I truly appreciate your objective approach to all of this because it's very easy to get into a subjective explanation of everything, and it's sort of the way Jung would look at archetypes. And he too understood, as did the Russells as well, that the Greek gods, for instance, could be better understood if you were to look at them not as physical, actual gods on Mount Olympus up high, but actual expressions of human emotion. The god of war is anger. Aphrodite, the god of love, so many things make more sense if you can personify it.
[section omitted] That everybody locked down for how many years and people are still wearing masks to protect against an Egregore, which is a thought form, really, which is sort of the mindwave universe idea. Behind mentalism and hermeticism and Russell Science and you can go on and on, even in shamanic practice and here and there they call it the trickster, right? What we believe, what we think we perceive is actually a trick to our actual real state of understanding, which I like to say there's a non-jective approach to all of this, which is there's always a happy middle, the third strand, the missing third strand between subjective and objective.
The non-jective gets behind the motion and can analyse the polarity of the seesaw versus being immersed in the motion and then trying to figure it out from there using motion to explain it. It sort of causes always one, effect is always two.
[1:11:07] Brendan's Age and Years of Research
Matt: Your work of 23 years, what are you, 47 or so, somewhere in there?
Brendan: 43.
Matt: 43. Okay, I was adding from earlier, you said you started at 23 years old in this?
Brendan: I started writing when I was 24, but I was already four years into the process.
Matt: Okay, so I'm not dissing you there. You actually look a lot better than I do at 55, but it's maybe the sun in Mexico too. I should get down there more often, but 23 years, man. You've researched and your conclusions that you've made, and I look forward to getting the new book when it comes out. So I'll get with you after the show and make sure I get, and also I'm going to send you a copy of Why You Cannot Die. Really, something in me saying, get that book to you. So I'll call the university and tell them to ship that to you.
[1:11:58] Whether Twenty-Three Years Changed His Conclusions
Matt: After 23 years and your conclusions, have they changed or expanded? And if so, what one thing that you held in the very beginning changed or expanded so much that it leaves you ultimately changed?
Brendan: Oh man, that's a really difficult question. I don't feel like I have a great answer because where I started was essentially Talbot's conceptual holographic universe model, which was then anchored in a very sort of Vedantic kind of non-dual experience. And that hasn't really changed.
The thing with me, though, is I don't have a doctrinal position. So when I'm researching the afterlife and I'm doing it across hundreds of different domains and subjects and disciplines, I'm not reaching the conclusion that you should become a non-dualist or you should become a Buddhist or you should... I'm not saying any one of them are correct. I'm not attributing any kind of ultimacy to the One, the Infinite, the Non-Dual. I'm not making the physical realm of manifestation evil or dark or diabolical or assault or any of this stuff. I'm not kind of polarizing into a position or any one of them.
So I don't know. I was driven to flesh out, well, if my experience is true in this non-dual state, if that's the case, if that's the ground of reality and the fundamental aspect of me, how does the rest of it fit in and connect? Which has been a lot of the work I've been doing ever since. I don't know what I've really changed my mind on as such. The fundamental premises haven't been really challenged.
[1:14:03] Science and the Study of Death
Matt: Well, that truly speaks then to your objectivity, which is how academia should approach knowledge and information, right?
Brendan: Yeah, I wouldn't know about academia. I'm not a part of it.
Matt: Well, that's good. That's probably why I've had you on the show. But there's a lot we can learn from certain processes. But when it comes to actually studying death and what happens afterward, science has literally shut the door on itself for being able to really explore that. Because, again, it's frowned on. It's something you can't really necessarily do with the senses. You can still quantify data. There is data of near-death experiences by the tens of thousands that if they were quantified, fed into a large language model, for instance, you could come up with percentages. What percentage of people saw light? What percentage saw darkness? What percentage experienced devils? How many experienced egregores? So there's some quantification that can be had and that might push things along to a greater degree of understanding how many were Christian, how many were Muslim, who saw what and where and when. So, yeah, it's really important to be able to come at it from that angle. So let's go to the next.
[1:15:24] The Sheep-Goat Experiment
Brendan: I wanted to actually, before you go to your next question.
Matt: Sure, please. Go ahead.
Brendan: There was something you were asking about the research and the studies early on. And we're talking about parapsychology and all that jazz. One of my favorite studies that they ever produced. And this was into the effects of mind over matter. So the ability of someone to remotely influence a machine or a ball that was falling and to try to dictate which path it took. And someone did these great, I think it might have been Gertrude Schmeidler who did this, sheep-goat experiment where one group was disbelievers, very firm disbelievers in psi phenomena. So they didn't believe in non-local consciousness. And the other group were not really believers, but just open to it. It was like, might be possible.
And the hilarious outcome from that study was that the psi disbelievers, the really ardent disbelievers, actually remotely influenced the devices to a statistically significant extent, but they influenced it in the opposite to what their intention was on a consistent basis. So if they want the ball to fall left, it goes right. And for them, the result is, oh, we'll see, it doesn't work. But they actually managed to create that effect to a statistically significant extent, therefore proving that their mind actually is reaching out into the surrounding environment, just like the people who were open to the belief, they also got significant results.
So it doesn't matter what you believe, the reality is that non-local mind is reaching out and influencing things anyway, regardless. And it's going to do it in a way that supports your belief, at least on a surface level. You will organize your reality to make it look like it matches your beliefs. But when they looked at the data, it was, oh, actually, these people who don't believe in psi are actually psychically affecting these things in a significant way. So that they don't reinforce. So that they don't.
Matt: That's wild. How come I never win at anything? How come nothing ever works out for me?
Brendan: Well, right. It sort of explains that.
Matt: Yeah. Interesting.
[1:17:41] Reincarnation and the Multi-Layered Reality Stack
Matt: Well, I wanted to ask definitely about reincarnation. What does your work, how do you tackle such a subject? Because it's very vast, right? I mean, honestly, again, from the Russell perspective, they would say reincarnation scientifically explained would be better if you use the word repetition, like nature has repetitive patterns, patternings and leaves come back every year. So the ideas of forms are contained within their seeds, like the oak tree and the acorn in the egg when the sperm and egg meet. You know, the pattern is already there. It just has to unfold. But reincarnation in your work, how does that play a part in your research?
Brendan: Yeah, like you said, it's a huge, huge subject. So a lot of Chapter 8 is around that. And it depends, like I've got what I call in the model, I call it a multi-layered reality stack. I've got essentially a taxonomy of consciousness states. So we've got the physical level that we have, like the etheric level, which is part of the physical system. Then we have the astral planes, the mental planes, the causal planes. Then we have the buddhic, which is where we start to get very distinct, transcendent, divine, non-dual states. And then we have, from the everybody in one at the Buddhic level, we have the one, the simplex.
So I'm looking at it through these different lenses and it depends on which level you look at it from. Depending on that, it looks very different. At a physical level, even physical, astral, mental, it tends to look quite linear. You have a lot of the regression therapists talking about, they put people into their trance and they report on, oh, well, this is what I was doing in between this life and my previous life. And this is how we spent the time. And I was planning my next life. And I wanted to be this kind of person to have this type of experience. And it looks very linear from that level.
And then if you shift up into what I call the Oversoul level, which is the very upper reaches of the causal planes where right before you collapse into everybody in one, you get this, time really looks very different. It's very non-linear. This is an intelligence field that essentially holds all the different personalities that have ever incarnated from it, that it has ever spawned into the Earth life system, are all there present simultaneously. And because at that level you're not experiencing time in the way that we do, you can be like, yeah, I've got all this huge database, I've got all this experience, but I'd like to have the experience of being a 13th century Cathar in France and then just... There's a part of you that descends into the lower realms and plays that out in this kind of virtual reality hologram.
But from that level, time and space don't mean what they mean to us here and now. You have access. It's kind of like a high dimensional level where you can see all these different multiple lifetimes and timelines and pick and choose. How I want my next experience to look at the level of the incarnate human, I'm still going to be up here in remote, non-local contact with it. And then obviously at higher levels, you have just the end of any kind of process, any kind of happenings and sort of stops. And everything's just, everyone's there, everything's there. And then at the highest level, it's just pure being. There's nothing happening. There's no processes that can run. It's just a raw beingness. So it looks different depending on what level you address it at. And so, sorry if I'm waffling a bit, but yeah.
[1:21:48] Where the Journey Ends
Matt: It's very interesting. What is your data correlation when it comes to the final? Where do most people say that it ends, or from your research, where does this journey of death actually end? What is the furthest? In other words, stone out that you've discovered through your research.
Brendan: Yeah, I don't know that there's anything we could call an end.
Matt: Or final destination, if you will, like having it for the Christians, or what is the furthest thing out that you've discovered in your research?
Brendan: So the Christians will tell you they're going to heaven and they're going to hang out at the throne of God and all this kind of stuff. But actually where they're going is one of the mental or astral planes in the belief system territories. And it's very non-transcendent and apparently quite boring. And so these religious belief systems tend to lead people into that that realm which Robert Monroe called Focus 24 to 26. That's where these people end up essentially. And so that's what they imagine is going to be their endpoint. But it's really actually a state of stagnation where essentially, they need to be pulled out of that, rescued from it, because they're so hypnotized, they can't just move on. And so we have networks and bands of helpers who are always scouting for someone who's ready to move on from that hypnotic state.
But if you look at the contemplative traditions, they're all about transcending and achieving moksha, liberation, nirvana, get out of here. We don't want to be drawn back into transmigration and samsara. And I don't really subscribe to that. I feel like there's something missing in that view. It's like, how many other versions of you have already received Nirvana or already liberated themselves, but here you are having your experience? I don't think so, because I think that reality is just too strange to be able to capture with these really limited concepts. It's a very linear, nuts and bolts way of looking at it. Like, oh, well, I'm here. I don't want to be here. I'm going to achieve liberation and I'm going to hang out in blissful non-duality forever and ha ha, you'll never see me again.
Matt: Get out of jail free card, right?
Brendan: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can get out for a while at least. We know that we can touch something deeper in meditation. There's nothing stopping us. I just find that view a little bit flat and simplistic maybe. So I don't really say in the book, here's where it all wraps up and we can put a bow on it. Because I don't feel like I'm justified in doing that.
Matt: Got you. Well said. Yeah, I think this is a great starting point. One thing I imagine to be able to do with you in the future is have a small panel with a few near-death experiencers just to have somebody of your caliber.
In fact, I'm thinking of one lady in particular, Jen Ven, who was on my show a couple of times, and she has quite an interesting experience, having been told she'd never walk again, not believing the doctors, of course.
I'm sure you've run into that, too, that death sentences by allopathic medicine are very, if you believe in them, right, they certainly can become concrete traps in a sense.
But also just the Gnostic view that this is a prison created by a Demiurge or a fallen god who uses the archons to administer its form of justice over the rest of us.
I'm glad you don't subscribe to these ideologies which really limit the human soul, in my opinion.
[1:26:09] The Spark at Birth and Death
Matt: But so, yeah, when you come into existence, and you wrote about this too, again, I'm really looking forward to the book when it comes out, is the idea of the spark at birth and the spark at death. Can you just go into that just a little bit?
Brendan: Oh, man, that's testing my memory. That's really testing me.
So, yeah, there have been a number of people who've noticed, for example in regression therapy, being regressed back to the beginning of their life. One of the reports was that this person saw their parents at the moment of conception and there was this flash of light at the moment of conception.
And that actually, as you would know, does happen biologically when the sperm fuses with the egg. It's to do with zinc in the mix there and it creates this flash of light which has been measured, it's been videotaped. So it's not just a poetic idea, it's actually biologically what happens.
And so at the same time, people in altered states, regression, they've also seen an equivalent, maybe a parallel level of that flash.
Okay, the death aspect of that. I might need you to prompt me, help jog my memory slightly. This is really testing me.
Matt: Well, yeah, I can consult my, hopefully, my notes, but go ahead. I'll just speak briefly to this.
I like to say we all have two illuminations for sure, with certainty, and that's at birth and at death. Typically, many women are on record having illumination experience during childbirth, but we get to experience two flashes of light, there's no doubt. One at conception and one at leaving the body. And if we're lucky, we get to experience a flash of light in between.
It can be as small as an inspiration, symbolized by the light bulb over the head. A flash of light, an idea comes to someone. So we're really touching on the Divine or the Immortal side of life where, as a Russell would say, all knowledge exists. It can be ours for the asking. And this omniscient ground of all being where all knowledge is, all presence, all power.
If we're lucky, we can have that flash of light throughout our lifetime as say a Russell did or Tesla, during his flashes of light, he perceived the AC generator, the AC motor.
But all these flashes are interesting to me because, again, with both conception and at death, we definitely experience it. And so at death, we know we're exiting the body, at least the essence of what we are. And maybe a lot of people describe this as what the light at the end of the tunnel might look like for some, for example. But I was just wanting to get your comment on that.
[1:29:30] The Death Flash
Brendan: So I've got a brief section on it in Chapter 6. The guy who put this on the map, as far as I could see, was a professor of biophysics called Janusz Sławiński, four decades ago. He was really interested in the process of death. And he called it the death flash. And also he called it necrotic radiation. So this is something that is happening at the moment of death.
I've just got a little quote from him, which I can read so we can give your audience something concrete instead of me just waffling. He tells us the hitherto closed system at this moment becomes an open one and the rupture of thermodynamically unstable molecular rings leads to their rearrangement associated to an electronically excited state. The radiative deactivation of which generates the photonic chemiluminescence effect. A complex superposition of standing waves stored within resonant cavities of biological structures are irreversibly liberated from the system as a coherent integrated field containing an immense amount of information, which I agree with.
And he says, thus we have a mirror-type symmetry between the photonic mechanisms involved both in the beginning and the end of physical life.
So it's kind of like at the beginning of life, as we establish a connection into the physical, we get the download spark or the embodiment spark and then at the moment of death we get the disembodiment spark. He actually, I think he took it a little bit too far by saying that this thing he was measurably detecting, this flash of light, might be the evidence of a surviving consciousness. But I don't think that's what it is at all. I just think it's one of those biological effects that happens to coincide with the release of consciousness from the body because there's a lot happening at that moment in parallel.
He was rebuked by Dr. Evan Harris Walker on that point, who also didn't think it would be the conscious identity that was being detected. He didn't agree with that. I think Walker is right. I just think it's a biological mechanism. Any surviving consciousness is not going to be detected in that kind of way with that setup.
[1:31:51] The Weight Loss at Death
Matt: Very interesting. Yeah, yeah. Any relevance or fact to this idea that at death the body loses two pounds? Said to be the soul, I mean, leaving perhaps?
Brendan: Yeah, I think that's actually much more significant anyway, at least as far as I'm concerned. So it was Dr MacDougall, if memory serves, and this is again in Chapter 6 as well because this is all kind of linked. He found there was this weird anomalous weight loss happening to people right at the instant of death or within a matter of seconds of them dying. He was getting a measurable decrease in weight.
That work got really heavily criticised. I just think that the time he was living in, people were just so biased against the possibility that that weight loss could have been legitimate because he was linking it to the departure of the mind, the consciousness from the body. And obviously the climate at the time scientifically was completely against that kind of thinking.
But his work became the basis of the movie 21 Grams. And he repeated that measurement. So this was the approximate amount of weight loss he was detecting. It's about 0.75 of an ounce if you're working in ounces. So that's where we got this popular idea of the 21 grams. But he did do it multiple times. He got the measurement multiple times.
It seems to me that that would be to do with whatever the effect, in terms of this is more physics and biophysics, whatever the effect of a consciousness, the implosive consciousness vortex, inhabiting the body and then disinhabiting the body, because he had these people on a scale that accounted for all of the physical level weight loss that could have possibly been happening, including evaporation off the skin of bodily fluid, sweat, whatever. So it's pretty weird and it's pretty strange.
I think that it's something to do with the electromagnetic vortex actually separating from the body, because, again, speculative, me not being an expert on it, but there's got to be some kind of relationship between that and the mass and weight of the body. And so if you disconnect those two, there's probably a measurable change. I'd be actually very interested in your thoughts around that.
Matt: I tend to wonder if not electrical motion could have a weight of its own, because there's all this process going on in the electric body that could account for that 21 grams, for instance.
I was just thinking if I died once a night, by the end of three weeks, I'd be right at my height-weight ratio. My desired height-weight ratio of 178 pounds for a 5'11".
Brendan: Well, that's a drastic way to get there, mate.
Matt: Yeah, yeah, I know, right? I think I'll go the safe route and try exercise first.
[1:35:09] Closing Remarks and the Upcoming Book
Matt: Well, Brendan, it's really been a pleasure to speak with you, mate. I just want to give you the floor here for any closing thoughts, remarks. Tell us about the upcoming release. I'll put all the links below so people can get The Grand Illusion, A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality, 600-page book, Mapping the Convergences Between Consciousness Research, Quantum Biology, near-death experience data, et cetera. And then Reverse Engineering the Afterlife. Just let us know, when is the book set to be released? Is that date pretty close?
Brendan: Yeah, I think it's reasonably close. We're taking pre-orders. People can put orders in. And I'm hoping that in the next three to four months, we can actually print it out and send it.
Matt: Excellent. All right. Well, I'll be one to order myself. Closing thoughts, remarks.
[1:36:05] Matt's Near-Death Experience
Brendan: Well, look, man, I appreciate you taking the time and I've kind of been sitting here going, oh, well, tell us the details about your NDE and what's that about? Because I don't know the details.
Matt: Well, yeah, I'll also link to that, especially on Substack. I've got an actual presentation where I go into detail. I'll link that. A lot of my listeners have already heard it several times, so I'll put that under and you'll be able to check it out. I actually have video to go with it, so it helps to explain a little bit.
But the short of it was a night in early 2007, I went before sort of a Stonehenge setting, and there were 12 stones basically, and each one had an animal head over the top of it. It was very Stonehenge-esque, and when they would speak, all the heads would go into one head. And so it was basically an elephant and a bear and other heads.
But the elephant goes, what is he doing here? He's not supposed to be here. We put a lot of time into this one. Send him back. And so basically I end up telling this. And I was like, I'm not a figurine sort of jury. It's like some kind of judge and jury that I wasn't going back to that effing place.
And right when I say this, I look up and this light literally just envelops me. And it says, you're not supposed to be here. This isn't your time. And I literally went back into my body. Came off the futon and landed back down on it. And I had what I can only describe as rigor mortis that was set in. My body was ice cold and there was no life. I could barely move. It felt like I had been dead for a couple of hours.
Brendan: Wow.
Matt: That's how I would describe it. And it was shortly after that, I got myself up and about and fell to my knees and basically said, look, God, I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. I'll do whatever you want me to. Just let me know what it is, in true sincerity with tears in my eyes alone. I said this out loud and a couple of days went by and that's when I found the secret of light and ended up President of the University, having never gone to college.
There's a lot of strange things that occurred after that, but part of it was, I think, getting Walter Russell's work back out to the world was part of the mission that I unconsciously signed or consciously signed up for, you could say. But yeah, I'll list that below. It'll be below in the more info section.
But right on, brother. Is there anything that is a future project beyond Reverse Engineering the Afterlife that you care to share? Before we let you go.
Brendan: Yeah, I've got material for book three. It's already there.
[1:39:12] Sign-Off
Matt: All right. All right. Well, very good. Like I said, I'll send you some stuff from the university. We'll get that to you. Hopefully, it gets to you in Mexico without any trouble.
Brendan: This should be all right. It's usually pretty good.
Matt: Okay. So hang out and I'll get your info as to where to send that. And guys, support his work. Reverse Engineering the Afterlife is available for pre-order. I look forward to it and to having you back on, maybe do a panel because this is a fascinating subject. There's so few words written about it. And I think the Western perspective and the objectivity that you bring to the table is so important. So again, thank you, Brendan, for joining me for this conversation.
Brendan: Back at you, man. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.
Matt: Okay.