The Life Stylist
What Really Happens When You Die?
Brendan joins Luke Storey on The Life Stylist for a two-and-a-half-hour conversation about what really happens when we die. They cover reincarnation and the "soul trap" theory, the Tibetan, Jungian and near-death accounts of the transition, and why so many spiritual seekers get stuck in fears of "loosh harvesting" and a "prison planet".
Along the way Brendan draws on Peak in Darien cases, where the dying meet relatives they never knew had died, Ian Stevenson's birthmark research on children who remember past lives, phobias as imprints of past-life deaths, and a woman who lived seven years of experience inside a three-week induced coma. The message underneath it all: work through your attractions and aversions while you're still here, because what you carry shapes where you land.
Help Luke and Brendan get this episode out there. Download an image for a feed post or a story, tag us (@brendandmurphyofficial and @lukestorey) and share it with what you loved most about this conversation.
[0:53] Introduction: How Brendan's Spiritual Awakening Began
Luke: What led to your spiritual awakening? How did you get interested in the non-physical realm?
Brendan: So I have a younger brother who's about three years younger than me. He was still in school. I had left school a couple of years earlier. And he came home from school one day saying, "Hey, we had this young entrepreneur in to talk about business, but he kept veering off topic and talking about other stuff and the nature of reality and this book that blew his mind," which was quite a well-known book called The Holographic Universe, which I'm sure you've at least heard of, if not read. And a lot of people have. And so he tells me this guy was just going on and on about these tangents to do with this book that blew his mind. "So I thought I should mention that to you."
And so I sat on that for about six months. I didn't go and chase it up. I just kept it in the back of my mind. But eventually I had to scratch the itch and go and read this thing. And that was the beginning of the rest of my life. It was one of those watershed moments where it was just, oh, everything that I've assumed about how things work was nonsense. I was brought up, not in the home but at school, I went to an Anglican school. So I had a certain amount of religious indoctrination, but then that also competes with your scientific worldview that we're all indoctrinated into at the same time. So I had these weird vague ideas about scientific, religious, how life works. And that all just got blown to pieces. And so that lit the fire. That was the thing that got me really, really curious.
Luke: So it was coming from a place more of curiosity and open-mindedness than some sort of existential crisis.
Brendan: Yeah, I'd say the crises have followed. It was just pure, pure curiosity. Absolutely. So that gave me a conceptual idea of things, like a model or a framework, and then from there I started to have experiences like infinite consciousness, and so I was able to ground the concepts in lived experience, which was really the other piece of the puzzle.
Luke: And what ways were you finding to start to explore consciousness after having that door opened by that book?
Brendan: Yeah, the first thing that happened was I was just actually lying in bed waiting to fall asleep, and it was like someone flicked a switch and I was just infinite. And I don't know why, other than I think that the book, Talbot's book, actually, because it opened my mind so much, laid the foundation for me to have those types of experiences. But people sometimes seem incredulous that that's how that happened. But I was just lying in bed waiting to go to sleep. Next thing I know, I'm infinite consciousness. I've got the Atman–Brahman experience happening, the point of awareness within the infinite sea of awareness. And I realised that's what things are. That's the nature of reality.
And so I took up meditation somewhere around that time. I started hanging out with the local spiritualist church. And so I was around a lot of psychic types and a lot of different types of meditation, that kind of thing. And I started meditating quite a lot, a few times a week, and having other experiences along those lines, a little bit more sustained and controlled and whatnot. So for two years solidly I was meditating a lot, going to these developmental things, hanging out with all the fun psychics and all that jazz. That was where a lot was happening for me at that point in time.
Luke: I find both of those aspects of your story interesting. One being that you weren't in a place of abject suffering that led you to finally surrender and accept that there's more to reality than we typically believe. And also that you weren't exerting a lot of energy or will in order to facilitate that kind of awakening experience. I think that's somewhat rare. Usually it's someone's working with psychedelics or doing some super intense yogic practice or breathwork and poof, you can pop through. I had a little one this morning just doing a little breathwork after I meditated and I was like, "Oh, I love it here." And then I was like, "Oh no, I got a podcast." Well, I didn't. But it took a little bit of effort and then poof, I popped through for a second, like, "Oh, yeah. Home."
Brendan: Yeah. Right.
Luke: Exactly. Yeah, I find your experience interesting. There have been a few big ones like Eckhart Tolle and some other people who were just normal people, sitting on a park bench one day, and all of a sudden all illusion is shattered and they're in a different frame of mind and being from that point on.
Brendan: Yeah. All I can say is I would attribute it to the mind opening of that book just laying the foundation, because I had the interest after that point. Some part of me was obviously reaching out. So that was just how that happened.
Luke: What's the premise of that book? It's one that's on the long-term to-do list, like many others that I've heard about for so long, but I've not read it myself.
Brendan: Essentially, I guess it's a lot of what I thought were really interesting ways of looking at the question of, or essentially trying to demonstrate the truth of, that mystical insight from as many different angles as possible. So investigating a lot of different fields of research and different disciplines, from parapsychology through to psychical history and clairvoyant phenomena and all sorts, all the different human abilities, so to speak, that connect into the basic: everything is fundamentally born of this infinite ground of consciousness. And so that was the premise of the book. It's a postmaterialist thesis, I guess you could say, on some level. And so book two leads off from where that one stops.
Luke: So the intersection of psi phenomena and consciousness.
Brendan: Yeah. I wanted to frame it within that larger field rather than just being, "Oh, isn't this interesting that we have evidence of psychic ability and someone sent a telepathic message to somebody. Isn't that fascinating?" It is interesting, but there's a bigger picture, right?
Luke: Yeah. How and why?
Brendan: Yeah. What's it all about?
[7:31] Living in Australia Through the COVID Era
Luke: What was it like being in Australia throughout, or however long you managed to last there, throughout the COVID era? And what was it like to try and express your views during that time?
Brendan: Yeah, it was a very, very strange time to be an Australian at that point. I think I thought we were further ahead than we really turned out to be. I've had that conversation with Aimee, my wife, a couple of times about how you think that the consciousness level is here, but then something happens and you realise where people are actually at. And I found that very disturbing, because 99% of people did not ask any questions. They didn't investigate anything. Were the claims being made by the media and the government based in anything? None of that stuff. So I found it really infuriating as well. I was quite angry for a while because of the way that everybody just went along with it, in this hypnotised state. And just watching life get engineered around us by a network of people who, like you and I both know, are psychopaths, doing all of this. So I found that really infuriating.
And not a lot of people were on the same page there. People just wanted you to go along with it and shut up, and even out where we were living, which at that point in time was the capital almost of Australian alternative scene, people who were questioning things, let's say open to questioning things, and very health-conscious and that kind of stuff. But even in those regions, people fell over, they fell in line, and that's why we didn't last very long. It was November 2021 when we left, and it was only a month or two before that when Aimee and I were in town and I was just looking around going, "You know what, I don't know that Australia is the place for us anymore. I don't know that this is it." And then we packed up very quickly and left after that.
So there were a lot of things that led to us leaving Australia, but I feel like that was the last straw. It was, well, cost of living is going the wrong way. Everything's pushing us out, but this COVID thing is a real litmus test of what things might be like if the poop hits the spinning blades in Australia. I don't want to be stuck here on this island with people functioning in the way that they were functioning at that point in time. I think a lot of people have woken up since then to some extent. But it was just a lot of things pushing us to try something else.
Luke: I was surprised by, I mean, of course I wasn't there, so I'm only seeing social media and a bit of the mainstream media, but I found it surprising that the Australians were as docile as they appeared to be, or gullible maybe. In America, we think of Crocodile Dundee, right? We think of Aussies as beer-chugging badasses, wilderness outdoors people. And obviously I'm grossly generalising here and being stereotypical, but I've always thought of Aussies as a bit tough, you know? The former prison colony idea and all of that. And watching on social media and seeing people just roll over was counterintuitive.
As was so much during that. Nothing made any sense at that point. Same thing in California, and even in the spiritual communities. The psyop really hit the boomers hard. The meditation centres and spiritual teachers for whom I had previously had a lot of respect ultimately turned out to be a bunch of bootlickers, and I was like, "You guys were the counterculture of the '60s. What happened?" And I'm curious to get your take on that. But it seems to me, looking back now with a little hindsight, that you have a segment of the population that are geared toward compassion, and the compassion was weaponised by the parasitic class, who are highly sophisticated in their understanding of the human mind and the human ego and what drives us. So it's, "Okay, you've been meditating for 40 years. You're a good person. You're kind. The kind thing to do is not kill granny."
Brendan: Exactly. No one wants to be a granny killer.
Luke: Yeah.
Brendan: I think the same exact thing happened in Australia as well, with especially that generation. And it was this weird twisted irony, because in the region we lived in were a lot of those boomers who were pioneers in founding those towns and the culture, which was a counterculture kind of a thing: very health-oriented, very eco-oriented, forward-thinking. They want to protect the environment. They want to do good by people. It's a very ethical, conscientious mentality, and they all want to do the right thing. The problem is they've also bought, through just being born into this civilisation that we're born into, they've inherited a lot of the programming around things like germ theory and viruses and all this kind of stuff. And unfortunately that's all layered on top of each other, so that it forms this paradigm that's just invisible to them. It's like a fish in water. They've never known anything but water. So if you come along and you say, "Hey man, you're actually in this thing called water," they're going to go, "What the hell are you talking about, you crazy conspiracy theorist? There is nothing here." It's invisible. It doesn't compute, because their baseline reality for how things are, that unconscious programming, just can't be confronted head-on in that way, because they're effectively in a trance.
And so we watched the exact same phenomenon with that age group in particular. They were the ones who were most keen to go and get the shots and get the boosters and all that sort of stuff. And it was really sad to watch such quality people become effectively some of the more dangerous people in a way, because they turned out to be the bootlickers. It's none of my business what somebody does to themselves. But when they start getting on board with this communist, Stalinist or fascist collectivist, "We all have to do this, otherwise we're going to go on these witch hunts for the people who aren't toeing the line," that's when people become dangerous. Like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. "We don't want to kill granny, but if we think you might kill granny, we're going to lynch you" kind of thing. It's a weird twisted mentality, but a lot of people got quite unhinged and aggressive about it. It was disturbing.
Luke: Yeah, there was quite a bit of that in California, too. I left around the time you left Australia, a little before. And I think it just stopped feeling like home, you know? It was just difficult to find people with whom I related outside of my little inner circle, because people were just so easily psyopped. I was just like, "What the hell?" That was just shocking to me. I'd go into my little local health food store, yoga class or something like that, and I'd be getting yelled at by some teenager to put a diaper on my face. It was just like, "Okay. No, this is not working."
Brendan: Yep.
[15:03] What Makes the Human Psyche So Susceptible to Propaganda
Luke: What do you think it is about the human psyche that makes some of us so susceptible to that kind of propaganda and manipulation? The do-good kind of, that veiled, disguising of it, or just any of it. Even now, right, there are many people in this country, for example, who still believe that there are two arms of government and that there are two sides, when from where I'm sitting, and I've been sitting for quite a long time, and I'm not trying to be superior, I just look at history. Psychopathic people tend to gravitate toward those power structures. And I don't think it matters if they wear a red or blue hat. It's just the people that seem to be drawn to that type of institution are people who really enjoy power.
Brendan: Totally. Totally.
Luke: More than they enjoy freedom.
Brendan: Yeah. And they need, for that to work for them, the majority of people to be of a follower mentality. And I found Julian Jaynes' work, if you haven't looked at his, what's it called, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, or something like that. He did a groundbreaking study into ancient human history and the archaic mentality that, according to his research, we used to have. The way the brain worked in his thesis was very, very different. So the hemispheric connection played out quite differently. One hemisphere communicating an instruction to the other hemisphere got interpreted as voices and visions. So under duress, in situations where they couldn't just autopilot their way through something unconsciously, where they had to make a choice, like a novel situation, they would have auditory or visual hallucinations of a god or goddess telling them, "Do this, do that," being given the answer by something divine, so to speak.
So there's this legacy, in his way of framing it. We've got this follower mentality where we used to follow the gods and the goddesses and they used to tell us what to do. And we really haven't, it seems, progressed very far past that point, where we're always looking for the external: the figurehead, the demagogue, the leader, the cult leader, the political leader, somebody to tell us what to do. Because it's easier if you don't have to make the choice and you don't have to be accountable and you don't have to bear the responsibility of making the choice, the consequences that come with it. Because if somebody else makes the choice for you, you can just point the finger at them and blame them and be angry about it. It's actually much more taxing, and it's obvious. It's just easier if you can coast and let somebody go, "Just don't worry about it. Just do this. Just put the nappy on your face and everything will work out. Trust me. We're the experts. We're listening to panels of experts. We know exactly what we're doing. Just wear your diaper."
And that is a much more appealing proposition, I think, to a lot of people, because it's easier. It's the path of least resistance. So we want to follow, and we also have this herd mentality, being social creatures. Nobody wants to be the bison, the buffalo, that gets left behind. We know that there's safety in numbers. And so these are some of the things that the psychopath class exploit, because they know all this, and they've put billions of dollars into think tanks that study human psychology, and resources that are almost unimaginable. So they know all of this stuff better than most people do, and they know exactly how to exploit it. So we're still watching that play out, I think, on many fronts, politically and medically and all the rest of it.
Luke: For me at this point, pretty much any major world event strikes me as a psyop. I've been psyopped for so long and in so many different variations of it that I really don't trust anything unless I have direct experience or my intuition strongly indicates that someone or something is worthy of trust and credence. Especially with AI, we're going to be in a place very soon where, I mean, it's difficult to tell reality from falsehood now, but it's only going to get worse. Or better, depending on how you look at it.
But to your point, that makes a lot of sense, wherein if someone doesn't have a direct relationship with themselves as a spiritual being and doesn't have a direct line of communication with a higher power, something or someone is going to need to fill that position, right? Because you're inherently disempowered if you don't know your own innate wisdom and strength. And this is something I butt up against when I riff with people regarding my thoughts that the world would be a lot better place without any government anywhere whatsoever. And the answer is always, "Well, who's going to protect us? Who's going to take care of the bad guys?" yada yada. And I don't have the problem of how to make anarchy work solved by any stretch. It's above my pay grade. But I do have eyes and ears, and I see that the parasitic nature of these institutions is not only prevalent but has been going on for a very long time, based on, I think, a hallucination that we have that a certain sect of people have an inherent right to rule over other people. And I think that's the premise that I have a difficult time accepting.
Because you say you have some sort of title or you're waving some sort of flag, then I'm going to let you subjugate and exploit me or physically harm me because you were born of a certain bloodline or a certain number of people checked a box at the local voting booth or whatever. I just don't believe in that. I believe in true equality, right? Everyone is equal. And obviously certain people are going to have skills and are going to be more adept at some things than others. I'm never going to be a mathematician. I'm good at the things I'm good at. So I think society has a way of ordering us, and there are going to be people who earn a certain level of authority because of their expertise or their wisdom, right? But when we look at the people who have somehow managed to gain control of the entire civilisation, typically they're the least qualified and least intelligent. And because they have some sort of uniform or title, we just blindly follow along. And I think it's basically born out of what you described. How could I ever be autonomous or sovereign if I don't believe in myself? Then I feel like I need protection or guidance or something like that. But I imagine, and I don't know this to be true, but if I just imagine, say, a few hundred years ago, a few thousand years ago, a hunter-gatherer tribe of 50, 60 people.
[22:31] Where the Demand to Be Ruled Actually Comes From
Luke: If someone becomes psychopathic, they're going to be removed from the group, right? Or meet some sort of punishment just by majority rule. We don't need a police force or a military to handle that person, because the consensus is going to be we take care of one another, because our survival depends on it. And it just feels a lot better, right? It seems like at the advent of agriculture, then all of a sudden you have resources that you can store up, and so therefore you need a police or military class to protect said resources, because you're no longer nomadic. Seems to be that was the root of it, speaking broadly. And out of that, of course, there's going to be people within that tribe that aren't physically fit enough to protect their resources, etc. So, okay, bring in the big guys and we'll create an army, and then if we run out of resources, we'll go over there to the other land and take their... right? I don't know. I always wonder where did that seed of naivety come from, and that disempowered experience within ourselves that leads us to not only believe but almost demand that we're ruled by other people.
Brendan: Yeah. Our politicians now are like stand-ins for the gods of yesterday, like you were talking about the divine right to rule. And it's got this weird tribal... politics is a very tribal thing. Even though you and I would both agree that it's two wings on the same bird, for people who are not operating there and they're in the system thinking, "Oh, well, my team is better than your team," it's like you've got one tribe going to war against another tribe, and the chieftain or the warrior that's chosen by their tribe goes out to duke it out and fight. And it's this weird continuation, this legacy of this old tribal mentality or tribal system that probably used to actually work quite well.
When I've spoken to some of the originals, clever fellas or aunties, uncles of the Aboriginal culture in our country, they'll tell you how their traditions used to work and how things used to be, and it didn't require government. It didn't require all the things that we've got now, because they had social contracts that they adhered to. Everybody knew to chip in. They had the men's business and the women's business, and they didn't interfere with each other. They gave each other space to do their thing and they figured it out.
Even now, you talk about how do we make anarchy work? I don't know. I don't know the answer. That's not my focus. But there are pockets of Mexico, for example, where people have taken over the town. They've reclaimed the town from cartels or they've reclaimed the town from crooked police, and they've gathered together the people, the grandmas have brought their guns out to the front porch, and they've scared off the people who were making life miserable for them. So it's just communities self-organising, making a way forward, just improvisation. We've just always had to figure it out, because there is no template for us to follow. I think we've gotten pretty deep in confusion at this point. We're following these legacy programmes, but they've been hijacked and diverted into weird things like politics and partisan politics and this kind of stuff. So it doesn't work anymore. But we have to find a way to snap out of the trance somehow, one way or another.
Luke: It certainly is a trance. That's a good way to put it.
Brendan: Yeah, it's like a daddy syndrome, right? Freud would probably have a lot to say about it.
[26:40] From Politics to NDEs, Telepathy and Reincarnation
Luke: Yeah, it really is. So let's talk about... you have some expertise in areas about which I'm extremely fascinated, and I was telling you earlier, man, I've always wanted to do shows about X, Y and Z. I'm just waiting for someone who has done enough research and really has enough to say about it. So I want to talk about NDEs. I want to talk about telepathy, things of the psi phenomena nature, and reincarnation. These would be some topics that I'm really fascinated by. Specifically reincarnation. Maybe we can start there, actually. That's the one that lit me up out of all those areas of interest.
I've gotten to a place where I'm not terribly attached to this particular lifetime, this incarnation, right? I don't want to die, don't get me wrong. I enjoy my life and I don't want to be separated from my wife and the people I love. I'm terrified of our dog dying. My dog's 12, and my wife and I, we don't have kids, so it's our kid. I look at the dog and I'm like, wait, how many more years? Yet at the same time, I've had numerous experiences that have proven to me beyond the shadow of a doubt that death is a fallacy. That death, as we commonly think of it and hold it, is actually a non-reality. So I know that I don't die. I know when the dog dies, the dog doesn't really die. I think about my body and mind as a radio. And right now there's a signal from consciousness being transmitted through this unique radio they call Luke Storey. When the radio battery dies, whatever was projecting its transmission into the radio is still there.
[28:37] Luke's Fear of Being Duped Back Into the Recycling System
Luke: My greatest fear now, more so than death... it's not like I lay awake at night worried about it per se, but if I had one existential concern, maybe not a fear, it's this idea of cyclical reincarnation into this purgatorial realm in which we live. And that doesn't mean that it's devoid of beauty, but it's definitely the school of hard knocks, right? The earth realm is not heaven. I see a lot of value in it. I've been able to evolve a lot in this lifetime, born out of a lot of pain and aversion to that, and then got to a place, maybe where you started, which was, oh wow, this actually feels really good to start to open my mind and to start to have a relationship with the non-physical realm.
But the crux of this for me is that, as you were talking about politicians, right, that they're just puppets or fronts for something behind them, there's an agenda that's being pushed forward. And my best guess is that whomever is pushing this agenda forward, this parasitic system, is likely non-physical. Everything is physical and non-physical. So I have this idea that when you leave your body, it's possible that the same psyop mechanism that's been controlling you in your life in the physical realm could also then dupe you into coming back here into this realm, so that they can continue to siphon your energy, right? Your productivity, your creativity. Because that force to me really lacks creativity, which is why everything is inverted and everything is a mirror and everything is copied, and everything they seem to do is very parasitic in nature. So that's the existential, oh man, I hope I have the discernment I need when I leave the body.
I've contemplated this a lot, and where I've arrived at this point is this. The very fact that I'm aware that that is a potentiality probably means by the time I get there I'll know what to do. You know what I mean? And that I won't be duped. Because the souls who are completely unaware that that's a possibility, to be put back in this recycling system if they don't want to be, which I don't think I want to be, I feel like I'm pretty complete here, they wouldn't even be thinking like that. They wouldn't even have that question, right? So they would cross over and they would see a projection of their granny, and granny's like, "No, no, you've got to come back." They follow this false light. So the fact that one is aware that there is at least the potential for light and false light when you leave the body and you enter these other etheric realms, you would probably be able to take care of yourself in there and make an autonomous, self-guided decision about which direction you want to go.
So I don't even know if there's a question in that, but these are the kind of things that I contemplate as I just think about my life and what happens afterward. I don't know, where do you want to go? Because I know you've gone so deep into all of this. But I think the reincarnation piece is one that... and many people don't even believe in it, right? Many people have had past life experiences, past life regression, things of that nature. I've only had that happen once in a meaningful way. But even prior to that, because of the timeless nature of consciousness, it just seems strange to me that there would be a beginning and an end of a person who is also just an expression of consciousness, right? Of which there is no beginning and no end. Right? So it's like, what happens in the middle of that infinity? Do we keep spinning around? And if we don't really feel like we want to keep spinning around and coming in and out of this plane, do we have a choice? That's where I'm... I don't know. Just curious.
[34:56] The Layers of Consciousness: Soul, Oversoul and Atman
Brendan: As you were talking, I had so many little thought bubbles happening, because I write in a lot of detail about that. And I've spent a big chunk of the second book really drilling into reincarnation, what it looks like, what drives it, why it happens. I have a tiered structure with different labelled layers of consciousness. It's like a taxonomy of consciousness on a spectrum. So we have the physical level, us, the physical devices, child nodes connected to parent nodes. We have also the in-between layers, a step up, which is like Michael Newton, all the regression material from all the various hypnotherapists who've gone and excavated that stuff. We have that part of us, the soul, that is ostensibly having this great life in between the human incarnations. It's doing a little bit of planning for its next life. It's going off having adventures. It's in a social environment hanging out with all its loved ones, all this kind of stuff.
Then another level or two above that, we have something that some people refer to as the Oversoul, which is a collective intelligence of every single incarnation. I call it a virtual neural server, or cloud-based parent node. So that's connected to every incarnation it's ever spawned into physical existence. All those different personalities are united in this Oversoul intelligence. It's a multiplex, so many identities in one. And then if you get above that, you have what some esoteric traditions refer to as Buddhi or the Buddhic consciousness, which is the luminous aspect of source, or the One, the Atma, whatever language you want to call it, which is just pure beingness at the top of the chain. Just pure beingness, which is that Atman–Brahman type experience. So depending on which level you look at reincarnation from, it looks different from every one of those tiers.
Luke: I understand.
Brendan: So it's a very multi-layered answer, and there's no way I can possibly excavate it all here in conversation. It's not going to happen. It takes a 1,200-page book, or a series of them. It takes a lot of words, to be able to do it methodically and address it in a logical order. In the back half of the book there's a lot of reincarnation-related material, and I'm laying out the structure of the multi-layered reality stack of the different tiers of consciousness, and the final chapter is actually a very granular deep dive into this reincarnation trap idea and why it even emerges in the first place. What makes people think that maybe it's a trap, or we're being forced to come back, and that kind of stuff. So I've excavated that in a way that I haven't seen anybody take it on, at that level of detail. So my answer is a roundabout way of saying I have a lot to say about it, but I need to know which thread to pull on at any moment.
Luke: So, okay, starting from the model of this strata of consciousness or awareness, which you could simplify by saying there isn't just one version of you, right, of anyone. There's multitudes of you, because you're infinite, right? Which means your unique expression of consciousness can and does manifest in a multitude of ways in a multitude of dimensions. So there's an interdimensionality to all of reality, and we're inclusive of that reality. So the living, breathing, fleshbound version of a person, there isn't just one, you and then your soul when you die, right? There's a strata. Is that an adequate way to...
Brendan: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
[38:56] The Reincarnation Trap and the Thought-Responsive Afterlife
Luke: So talk to me about what you've discovered around the reincarnation trap aspect, because I think that's really the crux of where my mind is drawn to generally.
Brendan: Yeah. Good. Well, you're really going to enjoy this book. So the reincarnation thing, there are some key aspects to it. One of the things I want to say any time I hear people talk about this is, if you look at any of the great contemplative traditions, like Buddhism or any version of the Indic religions, the Hindu traditions, through to the modern era, someone like a mystic occultist like Rudolf Steiner, any of the... Helena Blavatsky, anyone you look at who has a deep, deep metaphysical knowledge and is a mystic slash clairvoyant type who has that background, they uniformly do not... let's say they uniformly do not advocate a trap mechanism, that kind of scenario.
Steiner would tell you that we are drawn back largely unconsciously into the realm of manifestation, because we have our own internal attachments, predilections and things that we really enjoy about being physical and embodied. And so that draws us back. Because in his work, for example, part of the afterlife is spent actually unconscious, effectively. And that's actually mentioned by other people as well. We may actually alternate through periods of consciousness and unconsciousness. And I think maybe the goal, essentially, in the long run is to actually remain fully conscious, and therefore be able to make a conscious choice at every possible instant in the process.
Also, there's a book that's been doing the rounds over the last few years called The Kybalion, which is by William Walker Atkinson, who wrote it under the pen name of Three Initiates. I remember a couple of passages in that, and I've read a few of his close together, so I might be blurring the different books together, but he talked about people who are saying, "Oh, I'm done with this life. I don't want to come back here. This stinks. I'm not into it." And he's saying, as an initiate and an esotericist, that that's all well and good at the personality level. At the conscious level people may feel that way, but it's immaterial. It doesn't matter, because when they're no longer physically embodied, all of their suppressed or repressed attachments and desires and urges are going to kick back in, and that's what pulls people back into the mechanism of reincarnating again.
And Steiner was saying something similar. The Hindu traditions, saying similar things. The Tibetan system had liturgical prayers for people who are in the process of dying, so that they could actually stabilise their mind as they left the body and help them to remain coherent and oriented, so that they didn't get carried off with their own internal perceptions of gods, the wrathful deities and the peaceful deities and all this sort of stuff. Because the Tibetans understood when you are no longer physically embodied, you exist in a field of consciousness, and then the phenomena you're experiencing, at least in that transitional stage, are largely your own unconscious projection.
And so that's one of the things that I think gets overlooked in that discussion. And I'm not including you in this, I'm just saying from what I've seen in the social media realm: usually when people advocate a nuts-and-bolts mechanism for trapping people or forcing them back, they overlook these kinds of things. And there literally cannot be a mechanism to do that, because it's a field of consciousness, and what you make of yourself in that is really what it comes down to. Which is why the Tibetans had their prayers for the dying person, to help them remain lucid and coherent and not get distracted by their internal hallucinations of gods and demons or whatever happens to be the case.
Now we're not just seeing gods and deities and demons. It's all sorts. It's a menagerie. It's a zoo. We're seeing all sorts of creatures and critters and aliens, and the list just goes on and on now. But nobody talks about the fact that actually you're in a thought-responsive environment, which means that the so-called environment around you is being carved out largely by your unconscious content. And that's what's really showing up in that transitional phase, that interface period, is largely people's unconscious mind contents. And even people like Carl Jung had things to say about that sort of thing as well. So it's not new. I'm not proposing anything drastically new, but I'm applying that lens to the current contemporary discourse or conversation.
[44:10] Working Through Your Attractions and Aversions Before You Die
Luke: Yeah. That actually makes a lot of sense. Correct me if I'm not understanding you, but if you haven't worked through your attractions and aversions here, which is, I think, a good part of the curriculum, right, to be in a place of neutrality and surrender and not controlled by fear and desire, if you've not evolved through that, then you're going to be taking an element of that with you, which is going to play out when you're in the Bardo, or wherever you are where these decisions seem to be made by you, or by whatever force is making those decisions. Is that part of what you're describing?
Brendan: Yeah, it's part of it. Yeah, it is part of it. And I had a few different thoughts there. I was just going to say, my friend Kathy McDaniel [?] has been doing the podcast circuit talking about her NDE, where she was in an induced coma. And it turns out a lot of people have very, very powerful NDEs, and some very disturbing ones, when they're induced into a coma. So there's this whole movement now against putting people into a coma unless it's absolutely necessary. And she was in a coma for something like a week or so. Sorry, Kathy, if that's not quite right, but she was in quite a protracted period of being comatose, and she went through initially several stages of very harrowing, traumatising experiences in that NDE condition that she was in. And then eventually, after working through these horrible stages, she ended up with a reunion with her deceased husband. And that was all wonderful, and then she had to come back to her body.
But what she realised in hindsight, thinking about why she had all those really disturbing experiences, was basically every single stage of that NDE, the hellish NDE side of it, was based off memories of actual events that had happened to her in her life. So it was unmetabolised emotional charge that then created essentially her field of reality. And the thing is, it can be unbelievably real. Remote viewers know this. People who've had NDEs know this. People who are veteran out-of-body explorers know that you can be in these virtual reality spaces and it can be absolutely as tangible and realistic as this. And when it's unpleasant, it's really, really unpleasant. She had really nightmarish experiences, and it was all unconscious content in her mind that had not been, if you like, resolved or worked through.
[46:53] Ian Stevenson and the Evidence for Reincarnation
Luke: Wow. That's as if we needed another motivator to do our work, to do our healing work. On the reincarnation tip, what empirical evidence, or what's the most compelling evidence, to support the idea that we do continue to come back over and over again? I've seen things such as... this doesn't prove anything per se, but a video of a four-year-old kid playing Beethoven on the piano just on the fly. Things that you just can't explain. There's no rational way to explain that. Particularly, I think the ones that get me is when a really young child is gifted beyond all comprehension. You brought that in from somewhere, you know what I mean? And maybe not. Maybe some phenomena are just instantaneous, right? And poof, you had this transcendent experience just chilling at home and all of a sudden life is very different. There are infinite possibilities. But I've seen clues that intuitively feel like they've been here before and they brought some of what they had with them. What have you witnessed that's been most convincing to you?
Brendan: Well, there's been a lot, actually, because it does make a lot of sense of certain things. Edgar Cayce said that you inherit most of what you are from yourself. Charles Leadbeater, the theosophist clairvoyant, said the same thing, basically. If you're talking about prodigious talents and skills and stuff, mostly inherited from yourself, from another lifetime. Those guys, particularly the theosophists, they took a very linear view of reincarnation, like Steiner did as well.
But Ian Stevenson did a lot of really, really good work, just field work, going overseas. He travelled, I think he said, 50,000 miles a year, investigating cases of largely children who remembered being somebody else. And so he would go to the village and interview them and interview the family, and then he would go and investigate this other town where they remembered having their previous life, and he'd interview that family, and he would just do this over and over and over, and basically try to effectively debunk or disprove what the kid was saying. Except that he very largely actually verified what they were saying, time and time again. So the information they had was correct and accurate, and they had very strong feelings for this other family, who they would remember: "Oh, well, that's my sisters." They really felt it too. It wasn't just that they knew things about them. They actually really had an emotional connection to them.
And he was investigating the physiological sides of it as well, like birthmarks and wounds. For example, say somebody remembered, "I was shot," or something, or maybe they didn't remember it, but he would look at, okay, who's this other person this child is talking about? I'm going to go and investigate this. Okay, this individual was shot here. The bullet entry wound is here, the exit wound's over here somewhere. And that actually happens to match up with these birthmarks on this child. And this child's never seen this. These things can't be explained through a local consciousness model, essentially. Even if you don't accept reincarnation as the explanation, you have to accept a non-local field of consciousness where people are all interconnected in this field of information. And these kids were coming up with accurate information, and he was able to corroborate birthmarks with where the person was injured in the last life, and the way that they died, whether it was a spear or a bullet or whatever. And the birthmarks correlated to unbelievable degrees. Not coincidental in the slightest.
So he verified it on a nuts-and-bolts physical level as well, as far as you could possibly take it. Technically you can't say it's a proof of reincarnation, but it's about as close as you can physically get to having a proof, because it can't be explained in any other way other than, well, consciousness is not local. That's the bare minimum conservative thing you can say: okay, well, it's telepathy, super-telepathy, all this information is being picked up. The kids are correct, they've got this accurate information, but I don't want to believe in reincarnation. But I still have to admit all the rest of it, because it stands up under scrutiny.
Luke: I've wondered about phobias. People seem to just come into this world with extreme and very specific phobias.
[51:21] Phobias as Imprints From How You Died in a Past Life
Luke: Some people are afraid of heights. Others are afraid of snakes, afraid of water and drowning. I see this on, I watch reality shows, survival shows. Those are my favourite. And people just have strange fears of spiders. And it's like, why isn't everyone afraid of the same thing? Which to me would be the things that are in actuality and in truth the most threatening, right? People are afraid of things that are totally irrational, and the degree of fear they have is also beyond rationality. So I've always wondered, it's like, okay, you mentioned the kid was shot in a past life and now has corresponding scars. Is the person who has a phobia of water and never wants to learn how to swim, did they drown? And there's an imprint of that that's carried over. Have you seen any evidence that corresponds to that phenomenon?
Brendan: Yeah, I think I have along the way. It definitely comes up, because that's part of the reincarnation, the hypno-regression field; it tends to show that kind of stuff up. And I think that, if memory serves me, Brian Weiss's client Catherine had some stuff like that going on. She had these regressions done, and she went into these other lifetimes, and one of them I think she was drowned, or this and that. And as a result of those experiences she had, whether or not we accept literal reincarnation, as a result of those regressions she had massive healing of all sorts of... She was beset by chronic anxiety and all sorts of things that just didn't make any sense. She was just a wreck. And the more she went through these past life regressions, the more of that she just shed and got rid of, and she ended up being completely healed and just completely normal and functional. Whereas when she went in to see him in the first place, she was an absolute mess psychologically and physically.
And so it does come up. I've got an example in the book of, it's not quite exactly what you're asking, but as opposed to a phobia, there was a case supplied by Dr. Stan Grof, who had one of his clients who came to him with massive sinus problems and massive nasal discharge, and she would have these constant coughing fits, and it would drive her husband crazy, and all this kind of thing. And she went into a regression with him and found that, if memory serves me correct (it's in the book, so the details are correct in the book), her husband in that current lifetime had been part of a group that had effectively targeted this woman as a witch in a past life. And they had tied her to a board and drowned her in a pond that had algae. It was just really nasty water, algae and all sorts of stuff, really murky. And so as she's drowning, she's inhaling and breathing all this murky, disgusting, algae-filled water. And so this is like, oh, this is the revelation for her. This is where her current lifetime symptoms are coming from.
And then the result of that, while she's in the session with Stan Grof, suddenly all this green mucus starts pouring out of her face, unbelievable copious amounts of green mucus coming out. It was like the algae coming out. It was bizarre. And so she gets through this session, and at the end of it, as a result, all her allergies and all this kind of stuff, all the coughing and the mucus and the sneezing and all that, just done. It's gone. And that was the end of it.
Luke: Wow. Fascinating. Fascinating.
[55:02] Whether Past Lives Are Sequential or Stacked All at Once
Luke: Another trippy thing about the idea of reincarnation and having lived past lives is when you look at the way we experience time and how we're so stuck in this experience of linear time. I had a guy on the show a few months ago who was able to break it down. I should go back and listen to that episode, because it was so mind-blowing. But he was talking about how time is essentially a creation, a construct that's only possible relative to the speed of light.
Brendan: Mhm.
Luke: Right. And so therefore, if there was no light, there could be no time. Light is the thing that creates time in a way, right? Again, I'm not doing it justice, but it made sense to me enough where I thought, hm. I'm already not a believer in time as we hold it, and it's made my life actually quite challenging, because I really struggle with calendars and clocks and...
Brendan: You should live in Mexico.
Luke: Yeah, totally. Someone's like, "Hey, can you meet at 2 tomorrow?" I go, I don't know what I'm going to feel like at 2 tomorrow. We had a podcast at 2 today, so I need to be accountable, but I'm more like, let's meet around when the sun's right there tomorrow-ish. You know what I mean? I feel like these timekeeping systems have been foisted upon us, and we're all slaves to these clocks and calendars. And don't get me started on the Gregorian calendar, which is one of the biggest scams ever. And I think that's why many of us, like me, are so out of sync even with the existing calendar, versus just following the celestial calendars that be.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: So that is to say, okay, let's just take it for granted that time as we experience it is a construct. So there's a simultaneity of reality wherein everything is happening all at once, ad infinitum.
Brendan: Mhm.
Luke: Therefore, as I said, I had one pretty strong past life vision. And it was with the assistance of 5-MeO-DMT. So you can't really hang your hat on it, because in that space, who knows what's real, right? But it was the only one I've ever had, and it was quite clear. And it wasn't so much like I was Napoleon or some figure. I was just basically a spiritual seeker, a peasant in India. And it wasn't just like I saw one lifetime. It was a succession of lifetimes, just like flipping through a deck of cards, dozens or hundreds of lifetimes seeking God and burning on the Ganges kind of thing. But it was clear and meaningful, but it didn't have a lot of specifics. It was more just the essence behind it.
So I would think of that in the way most people hold the idea of reincarnation, as a past life. But if there is no past, right, then that would just be another life...
Brendan: Mhm.
Luke: ...that is simultaneously going on, kind of what you were saying earlier, like in the strata, right? It's like versions of what I believe myself to be, happening all at once in an infinite field, this eternal field with no beginning and no end. So if reality or consciousness itself never started, and therefore can't and never will end, and I'm an aspect of that consciousness, it kind of debunks the premise of a past life. It's like subsequent stacking of lives.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: What's your take on that? Do you think it's my other lives, or are they truly past lives, that they're sequential in time, or are they all just happening in a stack of simultaneous experience?
Brendan: It's kind of all of the above.
Luke: Damn it.
Brendan: Yeah. A non-dualist, like a Vedantist, would say, forget about all of that. There's only Brahman. There's only Atman-Brahman, the single field, and ultimately everything that seems to be happening, everything time-bound, is ultimately an illusion anyway. So don't worry about it. Their focus is on the one unchanging reality.
Luke: It's funny, I've been getting back into Nisargadatta Maharaj, the book I Am That, which is the first spiritual book I ever had. It was gifted to me when I was in the throes of addiction and was totally incapable of reading it. But I just hung on to it all these years. This is 35 years ago or something. Someone gave me that book, and it made no sense to me at all. It makes no sense to most spiritual seekers, if you really get into the pure non-dual, Vedic perspective. The mind hates it.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: Because the mind cannot operate in that space, in that understanding. But I've been really into that lately, just over the past couple of weeks, revisiting that, because that perspective to me is the one that has rung the most true for the longest period of my life. So if I follow that, to your point, it's like, dude, it's only your mind that cares about this and is trying to figure it out, which isn't even real. So just surrender. Don't worry about it. Be in the beingness of I Am, right?
Brendan: Yeah. And I support people who want to take that approach. It makes sense that there's a foundation for that. That's why there's a tradition that's so old, because it's grounded in people's actual lived experience in altered states of consciousness. And then the goal, as far as some of these traditions are concerned, is to actually be able to sustain yourself in that, which is a whole other thing.
But yeah, because in book two I'm really very phenomenological. I want to look at what people's lived experience is, to build a map, a really comprehensive map of postmortem existence and the processes and dynamics and rules that are involved with that. So even though I guess you could say I started as a vague Vedantist in a sense, I'm not pushing anyone's philosophical or religious or whatever doctrine. Because I want to just look at, okay, what is the tapestry of possibility here for discarnate consciousness? Obviously there's a lot of evidence that consciousness is not created by the brain. That was the premise of book one. I'm not rehearsing that again in book two. That's taken for granted. And then, what are people experiencing, and how do we map that? If someone reports such and such, where does that belong in the tiered structure that I've got? And how do those tiers relate to each other? Do they relate at all?
And so, yeah, the time question is obviously very relevant for us here in this particular paradigm. It's also, I would say, quite relevant in a lot of afterlife contexts, because people are working through what are known esoterically as the astral planes or the mental planes, where we are still essentially carrying the same psychological makeup with us, the same psyche. And it tends to recreate environments that are based on Earth life to a large extent. And then if you go up a level into what are known as the causal planes, the causal states of consciousness, that's where it gets a little more murky and a little less time-bound. It's like, oh, now we don't know quite where we are.
And then if you go deeper into that, higher causal, where you have the Oversoul multiplex, that intelligence doesn't play in time really. It doesn't experience linear time. That's an artefact of the fact that we have these spacesuits, human bodies, that we're carrying around. And from the multiplex higher causal self, it's like a vast field of potentiality that just goes, well, maybe I feel like having an experience as a 13th-century Cathar in France, or what have you. And so it sends out a ray, to use the esoteric term, where it injects itself into this virtual reality, dream essentially, and then has this hallucination of linear time: I'm born, I live, I die, and all this kind of stuff. But it can experience things very much more simultaneously.
And then you're on the verge there of going up into, well, everything and everyone who's ever existed is here and now. And that's the Buddhic threshold kind of thing. And this is reported by multiple different sources, which all say essentially the same thing. One of them was a guy on ketamine who lost his wife in a house fire, and he had an NDE trying to rescue her, and later on took ketamine to try to recapture that NDE and the realisation. And he found himself in a place where everybody who has ever lived was present there. And that's like that Buddhic, massively integrated consciousness, right on the threshold of just pure beingness, which has nothing to do with any multiplicity whatsoever. It's just the one infinite awareness, and that's it.
Luke: Yeah.
Brendan: And then obviously the concept of time is absolutely irrelevant at that point.
Luke: Yeah. Wow, there's so many fascinating ideas in there. This is fun. I love this.
Brendan: Thank you.
Luke: Love talking to people like you.
[1:06:27] Non-Existence and Why a Past Life Regression Should Heal You at All
Luke: So, back to the idea of the other lives or the past lives, and using that strata model that you've created or adopted or put together. I guess at the end of the day it doesn't matter, right? It's like, what is your intended purpose of this earthly experience? And if your experience is to wake up to the truth of what you are, not even who you are, but beyond and above that, what you are, right, which is you are consciousness, you're one aspect of God. And if our intention is to get to that Buddha field passageway where you merge into the totality of existence and you're not differentiated in any way from it, you're just God that can't experience itself, right? Kind of thing. It's like, okay, maybe worrying about all this stuff doesn't really matter. Let's just aim for that. But when I aim for that, which seems like a really worthy endeavour, the ego goes, you're talking about non-existence. And non-existence to the ego is infinitely more terrifying than death.
Brendan: Oh, yeah. Non-existence is rough for the ego. That's the absolute worst possible outcome. I think from what I've gathered, the Egyptians had a very strong aversion to that idea, the non-existence idea. They preferred to come up with other things, anything but that. The fires of hell and this kind of thing, the second death. Actually, sorry, I'm getting off on a bit of a tangent there.
One of the things I found really interesting about, you talk about these specific cases of past life regressions: why does somebody even heal from having a regression done? How does that even make sense? Why should that experience heal somebody on any level? It doesn't add up. And so what's happened in the last, I guess, 40 years or so is people who are in the realm of science or adjacent to science who've tackled this kind of stuff have gone, okay, well, we've got this field of consciousness. We can call it the Akasha or whatever we want to call it. And we're all interconnected in it. So everybody's information is available to everybody. And so we're tapping into this field, which stores information from the full library of the past and the future. It's all here and now. And so you can tap into anybody's information at any point in space, wherever you are. This is the holographic principle. And so they flatten out the ontology of it by going, well, it just doesn't really mean that much, because you're just connecting to somebody else's information. But I thought, well, why should that heal you?
Luke: Yeah.
Brendan: Nobody talks about that, because the next step is that you think you've solved the problem, but actually you're just raising another series of questions. If that's the case, why is this woman healed of these chronic conditions that she's carried her whole life? So to me, stripping every personal element from it was unsatisfying, which is, I guess, the opposite of what a Buddhist or a Vedantist would do. But I'm trying to look at things in a way that makes sense. Why would you be healed by a past life regression at all if it's just somebody else's information? Who cares? You don't watch TV and go, "Oh, I'm healed now of my lymphoma because I saw this guy on TV." It doesn't work like that. So what's happening there in the field?
And ultimately, yes, it is everybody's information on that level, at the level of just total unity. And then on the other level, I wanted to just dig into the wrinkles of it and go, well, okay, but we do have a lot of this information that suggests maybe we shouldn't be so dismissive of it, and go, okay, there's something very interesting happening here. Maybe there is a more personal connection. Maybe it's a correlation that just happens. Maybe it's a resonance thing. And it's not so much that it was your past life. Technically, all the past lives are your lives because of the infinite connected field. But maybe it's something a little more personal. Maybe it's a resonance condition. You've tuned into somebody else's experience in the field. They had something similar going on, and by recapitulating their experience in the field, that is actually healing you and helping you to integrate that. Maybe you've inherited that from the field, and that's why you've got these problems, and so going and recapitulating that material is actually integrating it for you. So you no longer have to carry that unresolved charge with you.
Luke: Yeah.
Brendan: Something like that. So I talk about it in other ways in the book as well, but there's a few thoughts.
Luke: That makes a lot of sense if you think about the challenges that we experience within one lifetime. For me, the key to freedom has been looking in the past, right? It's going back to birth, childhood, then this happened, then that happened. All the ways in which I was disconnected from myself and from reality as a whole, and going back and retrieving versions of myself and embracing them and healing them, but also breaking patterns that keep me stuck in creating the past over and over and over again.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: So it makes sense on a linear level that if you could access experiences you've had before, it's almost like you're getting another shot at taking the test, right? It's like, for whatever reason, you weren't able to embody or integrate those challenges in lives that you've lived as someone else, because they're still accessible through this Akashic record that some people seem to have the ability to take other people to and facilitate. And then sometimes it's spontaneous, like, whoa, I had a vision, like I did, which wasn't intentional at all. But even in mine, actually, now that I think about it, it wasn't so much...
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: Yeah. It wasn't an unfinished business thing. It was a self-love thing.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: It was like patting myself on the back and just going, "Dude, you [ __ ] did it. You did it." Oh, yeah. There was another part to it. Totally forgot about this. This is beautiful. Thank you for eliciting this memory.
Brendan: Thank you for sharing.
[1:13:06] The Voice That Said "You Already Have It All"
Luke: So, yeah. So I'm having this vision and just seeing that I was just a devotee, just a devoted soul who was seeking God. And I remember asking myself, why do you keep going? Why do you keep doing this over and over again, the seeking of God? And then I answered... This is so awesome. I wish I would have put this in my book. This is a good one. I answered, and I might have even whispered this as I was coming out of the experience. I said, "Because I want it all." And then the Voice, capital V, said, "You already have it all."
Brendan: Mhm.
Luke: It's like, you already are where you think you need to get to, right? And that was such a massive affirmation, right? It was just like, oh God, I don't have to work so hard at this [ __ ]. There has been a lot of progress made already. Not that I'm going to rest on my laurels and let it go to my head or become complacent or something, but that I need God. It's like, you can't not be with God. Your problem is just acknowledging and accepting what's always been present. So it was a huge realisation for me. So much so that I forgot it and compartmentalised that part of it. I think the more alluring part was that it was the only time I've really had any inclination that there were things that I've experienced before as other people.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: Right. But now that I'm looking at it, the real value, to your point, was, okay, cool, that's a reference point that gives you some insight into who and what you are today, in this lifetime, in this persona. And there's a real gift in there of just self-acknowledgement, and just to be able to relax and not take the whole journey so seriously, right?
Brendan: Yeah. Exactly.
Luke: You don't need to strive so hard toward this thing. It's like the thing you think you're after already lives within you. That was the experience of that.
Brendan: Yeah, that's great. I think that also circles us back to this idea of the reincarnation trap, or this prison planet idea, because the reality is that the highest spiritual principle never descends from heaven. It never leaves heaven, and it never leaves source, God, whatever you want to call it. So that part of us that is the immortal part, or what some people would say is the only real part of us, that part never leaves. It never descends. It's the undescended soul of Plotinus. It's always there. So to think that you're anywhere else is a form of hallucination. And what you were just saying was perfectly, that was the teaching of Buddha. He was saying, you don't become enlightened, you just stop being deluded.
Luke: Yeah. Exactly. That's it. Exactly.
Brendan: And that was it. So if we actually connect, even if it's just conceptually, to the fundamental roots of what we actually spiritually are at ground level, it just automatically melts away a lot of the other concerns and the conceptual constructs and the things that we've worried about, and the mythologies that we're inventing and reifying right now about this malicious trap that we're stuck in on Earth and all this kind of thing. You're like, arguably this isn't even happening. It's a perceptual thing, because the Atman, or the source consciousness, has in a sense had a daydream or hallucinated itself into a reality construct, a hologram or a virtual reality game, a video game. And it's only in that that it then forgets where it came from, or what it really is, or where it originated from. And so you have just this temporary amnesia, or delusion.
And at any given moment the potential is there for somebody to go, ah, I'm going to connect back to... I never left. We're pervaded by the field of Brahman. We're pervaded by it. Source is with us. It's the thing that sustains us. You can call it the ether or whatever; it doesn't really matter. But there's something there that never changes, and we never left. The highest parts of us never descended, the undivided self.
[1:17:26] Differentiation as the Only Thing the Infinite One Can Do
Luke: That makes me think of the phenomenon of dreaming, right? You ever been dreaming and you're having a nightmare, and then you awaken from the nightmare, but you prevent yourself from falling back asleep right away, because you know you could jump back into it?
Luke: I've had this happen so many times in my life, where I'm going to hang out for a few minutes and just become a little more wakeful, so if I fall back asleep I can start a new timeline, right? It's like putting a different film in the projector, so to speak. But that is a really strange thing, because obviously when you're in the dream it's just as real as us sitting here right now. Same thing with psychedelics. I've been in some spaces and when it's over I go, "What am I doing here? This is all a fabrication. The place I just was is the real place." And I have that same kind of thing with dreams. But when we have a dream, whether it's pleasant or not, we don't then wake up and take a shower and be afraid that we're going to fall into another dream tonight, right? It's like, "Ah, that was a dream. I'm cool. Everything's back to normal. I'm back in the realm of materiality." And to be afraid of the dream you had last night is ridiculous.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: So what I'm getting from you is perhaps this whole puzzle begging to be solved of, "I want to make sure when I die I do it right." It's like when you die is also a dream.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: In a way, right?
Brendan: Yeah. It kind of is in a way. And so, to me, it's not about adopting a doctrine or a dogma about "this is what you should do, this is how you should do dying, or this is how you should live" or whatever. It's about what are the possibilities, and the possibilities essentially seem infinite. And at the end of it, underlying all of that, is the unchanging source field, which we fundamentally are, which there's nothing stopping us from reconnecting with at any given moment. And that's something that, to me, I think is reassuring in a way. If we get too distracted by all this talk of reincarnation, or "I don't want to be here," or "someone's making me be here," all this kind of stuff, it only takes one little shift in your state of consciousness to connect to a radically different paradigm. And there's nothing in between you and source. The idea that we've got to go somewhere is the height of delusion, really. It's internal.
And that's what we fundamentally are. We're just having these little dreams as Luke and Brendan, and that's all fun and games, and it's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just a temporary dream that the infinite one is having, because if you were the infinite one, what else would you do? This is why I don't have any opposition to the concept of being embodied or having other lifetimes or different types of manifest experiences, because fundamentally you are a field of infinite being. And why not explore? Why not create these other realms to just see, "Okay, if I just inject myself into this, what happens? What if I invent this thing called humankind and I inject myself into one of these human bodies and have a bit of a play and see?" The only problem is that we forget. We have the amnesia that comes with it, but there's nothing malicious about it, or morally wrong or whatever. It's just a little exploration.
And that's actually one of the things that came out in my research from multiple different sources who are writing about their experiences connecting with the Oversoul level: that at that level, that's the highest level where mind, or the mind principle or the soul principle, individuation, is actually functional. And they all say essentially the same thing, in their own wording, their own vocabularies. Essentially at that level it's just curiosity and it's just play and it's just running experiments. It's just, "Well, I want to have infinite experience. I want to know what's possible. I'm not just going to sit here in the oneness. I've got to find out what happens if I create these parameters and then dive into that," because otherwise how would it know, you know what I mean?
Luke: It's like the principle that the eye can't see itself.
Brendan: Yeah. Exactly.
Luke: Like, sans a mirror, the eye can't see itself. You can look down and look at your arm, but you can't see your eyes, because you're seeing through your eyes.
Brendan: Exactly. Yeah. That kind of thing.
Luke: It's like the cosmic giggle of the godhead wanting to experience itself. Therefore, it has to become others, right? Other things to experience itself, because it just is one thing.
Brendan: Yeah. Yeah. So from an absolutely undifferentiated state of being, the only possibility is differentiation, right? So that's how we end up here.
Luke: Right. Wow.
[1:23:59] Evidence That Consciousness Isn't a By-product of the Brain
Luke: So I get the feeling you're not someone who's interested in holding a dogmatic position, let alone bringing other people to your side. It seems like your work is, "Here's a menu of options that are interesting," a choose-your-own-adventure kind of thing. That said, what would you say to someone who is of the materialist ilk and believes that consciousness is a by-product of the brain or the mind? What evidence do we have, or what subjective experience do you have, that would support the converse of that perspective?
Brendan: Oh man, that was really the focus of book one in a big way. We have so many fields of research around that. If you go back 100, 150 years, you've got the psychical research, mediumship research. That moved into parapsychology, where the standards of research became very, very exacting and very pedantic. Also you've got telepathy, you've got psychokinesis experiments, tens of thousands of trials. Again, the dream-related stuff: influencing someone's dreams, implanting ideas or material into their dreams. Those studies have been done. There are so many different variations on those themes, thousands of sources that have produced positive results that simply can't be explained by a materialist or reductionist kind of framework.
Luke: Kind of goes back to the analogy I was using earlier about the radio.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: And the source of the transmission and the carrier wave reaching the radio. If you just look at it from a kindergarten perspective, it seems unlikely that the radio is the thing producing the signal.
Brendan: Then how do you change channels, right? If there is this bandwidth of different possibilities of data from those channels, then if it was being produced by this thing, how come you can tune it into something that is non-local out there?
Luke: Mhm. Just like you can tune your own awareness to different things, right?
Brendan: That's it. And it's largely focus and intent, which is, I think, why Robert Monroe called his different levels of consciousness focus levels, because what you focus on and intend is what essentially renders your experiential reality, in a sense.
[1:26:37] The Near-Death Experience as a Departure Lounge
Luke: With the near-death experience, do you think of it as a final destination or a departure lounge?
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: Is "departure lounge" your language?
Brendan: Yeah, it sounds like me. It's more of a departure lounge sort of thing than a destination, because with most of what people are experiencing, first of all, they're coming back to their body. So it's a kind of in and out. It's like a little brush, a little preview. The experiences are pretty varied in terms of the content of them, so that's a very personal kind of a thing. Some people experience a light, they go into the light, they emerge into a different world. Some people visit a remote city, a glorious city of crystal or gold. The experiences are really kind of diverse. So you get glimpses of these other dynamics, other worlds, other states of consciousness, but it's not allowing the individual to stabilise in it and to really actually get oriented.
And that's where you need to look at other research, like the past life regression, but also the mediumistic communications and anything adjacent to that, because they all essentially dovetail and produce a very similar kind of a reading, which is, for most of us anyway, the part of us that is mental, mind-based, soul-based, we go on to have these other stages of the journey where we're metabolising our unprocessed emotional content. We have life reviews. We have to look at ourselves and the way that we've lived, the way that that's affected other people. We experience the other people's points of view in relation to us. And then we go into any number of different potential stages that follow from that.
A lot of the time, for most people, I think the ultimate attractor is kind of Earth life. So I think most people spend a certain amount of time in the sort of postmortem afterlife realms, and then they are essentially turned back to physical existence, because that's what seems to make the most sense to a lot of people. Like you were saying, you didn't understand or relate to that book that you had read initially. I think that's real for a lot of people. It's very hard to connect with what seems like such an abstract thing as Brahman or what have you. But again, without a body weighing you down, you have, I think, a lot more leeway. The constraints are looser when you're in discarnate states. So potentially, if you had the mindset for it and the intent, you could have those types of experiences much more easily.
[1:29:21] Masters Who Choose to Stay: Bodhisattvas and Robert Monroe
Luke: Another phenomenon I find really interesting is where highly evolved beings, mystics, saints, sages, gurus, et cetera, reach a level of consciousness wherein they have a conscious choice as to whether or not they're going to stay here. There are these stories, this folklore, some of which I'm sure are true and perhaps some of them aren't, that they could just decide to leave at any given moment, but they stay as an act of service, or there's something further for them to evolve into.
Brendan: Mhm.
Luke: And that when some of them cross over, even though they've graduated from this curriculum, they're like, "Ah man, I'm going to go back and serve," and they come back again, as is the case with the chosen one, the child that is deemed to be a successor in a lineage of gurus and this kind of thing. I find that to be really fascinating. It's like some souls take one for the team: "I don't really want to go back into the physical realm, this Earth school, but I'm willing to do it because of love," right? Because of love for humanity. I find that to be really interesting. These stories of people just evaporating out of their body and things like that, right?
Brendan: Yeah. Yeah. It's really trippy. Yeah. The bodhisattva who puts off nirvana to hang out and help humanity, that kind of thing. Yeah. I think that happens a lot, and there's probably an aspect, at that point where people could integrate into the one, there might be that little part of them that just doesn't want to. And so they're like, "Well, if my choice is to reintegrate or to hang out and see if I can be of service, I'll hang out and I'll try and be of service." Because what else? We've got infinity on our hands anyway. It doesn't matter. It's not like you're out of time, like, "I'm due back at the infinite one now, and so I can't—" No, it doesn't really matter.
I think a lot of Westerners are even reaching that point. Maybe not a lot, but an increasing number. Robert Monroe, the pioneering out-of-body experience guy who founded the Monroe Institute, died in, I think it was 1995, and since then multiple people have shared reports about interacting with him in their out-of-body adventures.
Luke: Oh, really?
Brendan: Yeah. And one of them was Bruce Moen. And it seems like Robert had essentially hit that bodhisattva kind of fork in the road, where he was like, "Oh, I'm still kind of interested in how things pan out for humanity, so I'm going to hang around a bit and try to help out, but I've also got one foot in the infinite one," kind of thing.
Luke: Just curiosity, right? If I left today, I'd probably want to see what's going to happen with AI in 50 years. It's like, what are these humans up to? I just got to see it. Just a morbid fascination, if nothing else. Have you ever been compelled to go do the Monroe Institute training?
Brendan: I haven't had a chance. I'd like to.
Luke: Yeah, I'd like to. I've had a couple people on the show who've done it.
Brendan: Okay.
Luke: Yeah. I kind of had a lapse of awareness that that even existed for a long time. Back in the late '90s, I used to listen to his Hemi-Sync programmes and things like that, but I didn't know there was a whole body of research and an active centre and community of people doing that kind of work. That's when I first heard that name, and it kind of just fell out of my awareness for a long time.
Brendan: Yeah. A lot of people have had amazing experiences doing that, going in person to do the workshops and stuff.
Luke: Yeah. Phenomenal. Yeah. I don't know. One part of me is like, I don't know, this reality is scary enough. I don't know if I want to be able to bilocate and things like that. It's hard enough just to stay in my body and just accept life as it is sometimes here, right?
Brendan: Yeah, I get that. I get that. You don't want to accidentally make it more complicated than it already is.
[1:33:28] Peak in Darien Cases and Meeting Relatives You Never Knew Existed
Luke: Exactly. In your research of NDEs, what are some of the most compelling pieces of evidence to support it? Some basic ones that come to mind for me, for example, would be someone's in the operating room and they flatline for a period of time, and they describe themselves as this open, broad awareness that's up here in the corner of the room, witnessing the phenomenon of the medical team and the emergency. And then they come back into their body and describe to the people in the room what they just saw.
Brendan: Mhm.
Luke: And the doctors and clinicians in the room are of course shocked and awed by the fact that they were accurate in their assessment, even though on an empirical level they were flatlined, heart wasn't beating, they're dead, right? That's a good one for me. You read a few of those and you get the sense that the people aren't delusional or dishonest, because what would motivate them to come back with these stories? So what stories like that have you come across that have stayed with you?
Brendan: Yeah, there's been a lot of that kind of thing. Let me think. Some of the more powerful ones, I think, are what are known as the Peak in Darien cases. So where someone has gone into an NDE experience and encountered somebody who they didn't know actually existed. For example, they might have had a brother or a sister born before they were born, but who died in childbirth or died very young in life, and the parents never told them about it. They have an NDE and they suddenly meet this brother or sister who's been in the spirit world, and they come back and they go, "Oh my god, that was amazing, Mum and Dad. I met little Johnny. He was telling me all about—" And they're like, "Oh my god, how did you know about— We never told you about little Johnny." That kind of thing happens more than a lot of people would care to admit. And it's very difficult to explain away when these kids are coming back with accurate information about people they didn't even know existed at all, and it's correct.
Luke: Wild. Yeah. Is it pretty universal that people that have NDEs don't experience time when they're outside of their body? Like someone might be clinically dead for six minutes or something, then they come back and what they experienced exceeds that Earth time period.
Brendan: Yeah. I think actually the best example of time not matching up is the people who are coming out of induced comas and having essentially what we would call NDE experiences. Let me think. I had a Substack article I posted not that long ago about a French woman who had been induced into a coma for, I think it was roughly three weeks, and in the coma she was actually living an alternate life which went for seven years. So she experienced seven years of linear time in this alternate reality where she had children. She had three children, had a family, was just going through the day-to-day normal life. And then when she was snapped out of the coma and the medical staff were there, she was like, "Where are my kids? Where's my family?" They were like, "You don't have any kids. What are you talking about?" kind of thing. And she was actually devastated, because it was so absolutely real for her for seven years. Her experience was seven years of linear time in the space of three weeks. So that's kind of the opposite. Instead of no time or losing track of time, it's very crystal-clear time.
Luke: So she's watching her kids grow up and become seven-year-olds?
Brendan: Actually, that was what she experienced. Yeah. And so you can imagine, she had to go to counselling and all sorts. She was absolutely devastated.
[1:37:39] Being Present When Luke's Father Died
Luke: Have you ever been present as someone died?
Brendan: I don't think I have, actually. I don't think so. No.
Luke: No. Yeah. I've always wondered what that's like, and I got to experience it last year when my dad died. He was in a coma for a couple days. And I'd always imagined it to be, I don't know, much more dramatic, if not theatrical. I just imagined that you would have a very strong feeling in the room, right? That it's like, "Whoa, there's a big transition happening," which I experienced once on a hunting trip when I shot a big pig, and it got really weird when that consciousness left the body. It was potent. Things got super trippy. So I was like, well, if that's what happens when a pig dies, I can imagine what happens when a human dies, let alone someone that you love deeply.
And it was a powerful experience, but not in the way that I ever imagined it. It was somewhat non-eventful in terms of consciousness is held in the body and then it leaves the body. There wasn't a big fireworks display, so to speak, when that moment happened. Time kind of slowed down, right? And it was like, "Whoa, this is happening." But there wasn't a strong feeling that something supernatural was happening. It was actually kind of ordinary. Extremely sad and all of that, obviously, but it wasn't extraordinary. It was just kind of, "Okay, things felt one way, now they feel a bit different." And there's some emotions, obviously, that are asking to be processed and dealt with and faced and all of that. But yeah, I always imagined it to be kind of a big blow-your-hair-back moment, and maybe there will be others, maybe it's that way for some other people. I don't want to say it was disappointing. It was surprising. It was surprising. I was like, "Huh, that's it, right?" I really had always felt that it would be a much bigger experience in the kind of supernatural way. It was a big experience on a personal level, but the field didn't seem to change all that much in the room.
Brendan: Interesting. Yeah, for some people those deathbed experiences can get, like you said with the pig, very interesting and strange.
[1:40:07] A Cacophony of Emotion After Hunting His First Large Animal
Brendan: I kind of want to ask you about the pig thing now. What happened that made it weird?
Luke: Well, I'd never taken the life of a large animal before. That was part of it. So I'm sure some of it was just the emotional shock and overwhelm and the intensity and the adrenalised moment of the experience. But as I got close to the animal, I was just completely overtaken by emotion. And it was a cacophony of emotions that were inclusive of all of them. So there was some guilt, there was some sadness, there was joy, there was awe, probably mostly awe, right? And my visual field got very ephemeral and trippy, like I had taken medicine or something. It's like, whoa. And I was just really overwhelmed with emotion and just crying, but not crying in association to one specific emotion. It's just like, "Whoa, man. I got to breathe." It's just intense. It's just intense, just that moment. And it was so clear, the moment of departure. It was just, "Whoa, man, some big energy just moved." It was a transitory moment of big energy that also moved through me at the same time.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: And it was really, really intense. Life-changing, and also revelatory in the sense that it was so clear to me, and this is going to sound weird to a PETA activist or something, but I didn't just kill that being. You can't kill anything, right?
Brendan: Right.
Luke: The consciousness that was animating that animal is not something that can be killed.
Brendan: Yeah. Moved.
Luke: Yeah. It went somewhere. It's not in there anymore. Now that's bacon, not to be crass. But that body had very little relevance once that transition had happened, which was similar to being in the room with my dad too. I was looking at his body and it's kind of not my dad anymore.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: But it was much more pronounced in that particular experience.
Brendan: Yeah, it's interesting.
Luke: Yeah, it was very moving. And I've never been present at a birth other than my own, which I don't remember much of, obviously, but I've always imagined that when a baby's born, the people in the room probably experience something similar, even though that being is already alive.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: But I've always imagined there's something about when the oneness between mother and baby hits that moment of separation, that there's some big energy there too.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: I've interviewed a lot of doulas and birthkeepers and things like that, and they describe it in that way, for the most part. But I think these transitions in life really have a lot to teach us if we're paying attention.
Brendan: Yeah. Yeah. I can't help but wonder if your experience with the pig might be really similar to what traditional hunter-gatherer nomadic people might have actually experienced on a regular basis when they were hunting, because they had a completely different mentality towards the relationship with the animal.
Luke: Yeah.
Brendan: On a fundamental level. And also in the past, I think we were just a little more open on that level.
Luke: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, I think the indigenous traditions were obviously much more tapped in, right, to the cycles of life and death, and also in communication with the natural world in a way that we're largely divorced from.
I actually had a similar situation. I went to a bison harvest. I don't know if you've ever seen a bison, but they are a massive and powerful animal. They are a force of nature. And same kind of thing: it was shot from a distance, maybe about 50 yards. And when a bison dies, at least in this case, its nervous system is still full of charge, right? So it's kind of running in place on its side, but its brain died five minutes ago. The heart's still beating, the body's still heaving up and down. You're kind of tentatively approaching it, because you feel like it could get up and run you over, you know what I mean? The sniper, a military sniper that took the shot, explained that, taking into consideration the speed with which the bullet travels, by the time we heard the crack of the bullet ignite, the animal was already brain dead. It's that fast, 4,000 feet a second or something like that, right? So there's no chance, scientifically, that there was any life left in that animal. Yet there still was the electricity, right? It was still present. It was really interesting.
But same kind of thing. It's like, "Whoa, I got to breathe." And a few of us went up and just said prayers and offered tobacco and just had a moment with that majestic, beautiful animal. But an interesting thing about both those experiences, despite the overwhelm of emotion, sadness wasn't the prominent emotion. There's gratitude in there too, and all kinds of different feelings. And with the bison, there was much more of that, I think, because I wasn't the one that pulled the trigger, too. So there was less emotional investment in it as a witness than as participant or causal force. But yeah, I think these kinds of experiences really have a lot to offer.
[1:46:24] Why Contemplating Consciousness Matters
Luke: So you, as someone who's obviously really, really into exploring the nature of reality and consciousness, for someone listening who maybe is thinking, "What are these guys talking about? Why does it matter?" (which I doubt there are many that are still with us at an hour 40 minutes), what value do you see, for you or other people, in contemplating these big ideas and just exploring consciousness in whatever way one feels called to do so?
Brendan: Yeah, I think that my wife has asked me that many times: "Why do we care? Why should we be interested?" this kind of thing. And to me, it just reframes the physical human lifetime in a really profound way. Why would you want to have that very small vision of, "I'm just this little human meat sack, and one day I'll die, and that'll be when I stop existing, and that's the end of my story, and lights out"? As opposed to widening the frame and expanding the picture a bit and going, "Well, actually, this is just one possibility playing out right now, and there's an infinitude of other possibilities that are open to me at any given moment, even more so at the point of death." And so, rather than being so bleak about it, or fatalistic or nihilistic, just seeing it as an adventure amongst a series of adventures. And maybe we don't have to be so afraid of dying. Maybe we don't have to take it all so seriously.
I think there are a lot of positives that come out of a genuine interest in these topics. And people have said to me, "Oh, wow. After I read your book, I thought, what was I doing with my life? If this is what's possible, what am I doing? I could be so much more," kind of thing. And to me, that's the human potential aspect that I think interests me a lot. It really opens the range of possibilities up. You don't have to stick with whatever role might have been assigned to you, or whatever role you thought you were given. You're a lot bigger than that. You're kind of like a great cosmic puppeteer and you're just puppeteering. You've got your hand up Brendan's backside, you're just making him say some words for a little while and do some things, and then he'll run out of energy and you'll hop over to the next little puppet show kind of thing. It's not really that big of a deal, in a way.
Luke: I think for me that very much describes the benefits that I've derived from thinking about, feeling about, talking about these kinds of things. It's like the burden of seriousness in life gets lighter.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: When you start to realise that you're completely insignificant and the most significant thing there is at the same time. You know what I mean?
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: It's not like a futile or apathetic point of view. It's just like, "Oh god, I can just relax a little bit, man." It's like, "Whoa, I'm never going to know all there is to be known, so why don't I just have fun knowing what I can and not worrying about it?"
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: It's just kind of— Yeah, I think you described it well. This is just playing the role in life that I've been given with as much authenticity and love and integrity as I possibly can. What else is there to do, right?
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: And in my experience, the longer I've done that, the less I suffer.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: But I'm not trying to avoid suffering per se. It's just a net consequence. Meaning, consequence: it's the next thing that happens if you're oriented the way that I am.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: And when I was oriented differently, I lived with a lot more fear.
Brendan: Mhm. Yeah. And it's that egoic kind of delusion, like, "I'm just this little ego, this little character." I don't know, I just had the analogy: imagine if you discovered that you were a hair on your head. You're that one hair and you're like, "Oh my god, I'm a hair. I exist." But there's lots of other hairs. It doesn't matter. It's not that big of a deal. Yes, you're valid and you're real, but you don't have to take it so seriously, and it's not the be-all and end-all. You're part of something much larger than that one thing. And so, to me, there's that macrocosm, this cosmic process that we're all just part of. We're all just little ripples on the surface of the ocean. We have a little lifetime, a ripple here and a ripple there. And really losing sight of the ocean is kind of what gives us so much of our suffering, I think.
[1:51:24] Not Prompting a Child With Existential Questions
Luke: Yeah. And you have a kid or kids?
Brendan: Yeah, I got one.
Luke: How old?
Brendan: Nearly six.
Luke: Nearly six. Do you ever ask your kid existential questions out of curiosity?
Brendan: No, I actually try to not open those cans.
Luke: Okay.
Brendan: Because, yeah, sometimes you get caught with a question where you're put on the spot, like, "How can I answer this in an age-appropriate way?" It's not always easy. So if she raises it, it's okay, but I don't feel the need to prompt her. Sometimes she says stuff that's like, "Wow, she's so switched on," but I'm not trying to tease it out of her.
Luke: Sure. Yeah. So you just pay attention and bear witness if she says something that's beyond her years.
Brendan: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not trying to make her be more than—
Luke: "Do you remember your past lives, honey?"
Brendan: Believe me, I was watching out for that. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. But no, I'm pretty laid-back about that kind of thing.
Luke: Yeah. You're a normal dad who thinks about the paranormal things.
Brendan: Yeah. Yeah. Something like that.
[1:52:29] Giving a Child Full Autonomy to Name Itself
Luke: When we were really gearing toward being parents, this idea did not pass by the wife, needless to say.
Luke: But I had the idea, what if we just don't name our kid and just be like, "Hey, you," until we can ask them, "What is your name?" Just to see what they come up with, to see if they're like, "Oh, of course I'm Jonathan," or whatever. Just to give an incarnated soul complete autonomy to self-identify, so to speak, right? It was just like, I'm not going to impose who I think you are, who I want you to be, on you. Reveal who you are to me. I always thought that was a really interesting idea. Probably impractical, 'cause someone has to call them something, but...
Brendan: Right.
Luke: That was one of my harebrained ideas that I never got to actually experiment with. Maybe in the next life.
Brendan: Yeah, exactly.
[1:53:22] Jesus, Relatives, Angels, Aliens and Archetypes as Interface Imagery
Luke: In my other life, maybe I'm doing it right now. Tell me how Jesus, relatives, angels, aliens or archetypes perform the same underlying function differently.
Brendan: Okay. So, a lot of that stuff shows up in the transitional phase of someone separating from the body, even just in an out-of-body context, or maybe a plant medicine context or what have you. So I call it, in my model in book two, interface imagery. So it's not necessarily something that we want to be taking at face value or literally. It might just be the way that our mind presents itself to our perception. And it's very much based, it's largely informed by someone's experience in life, their religious indoctrination, or that life experience and knowledge base and their belief system. So for different people it'll look like Jesus or Buddha.
And I'm not dismissing the significance either of actual literal surviving souls or ancestors, family members, what have you. That's actually a legitimate category in itself. But in the early stages of postmortem existence or non-physical existence, we have a process of needing to stabilise consciousness so that we perceive things correctly or clearly, and not with our projections being overlaid on top of them.
And that was something Bruce Moen talked about. He called it in one instance a fear mask. He was helping a guy who was having an issue with out-of-body situations, and there was another being, a friend of his actually, trying to connect with him in this non-physical environment, but the guy was projecting this fearful imagery onto him, and so he looked like this monstrous half-man, half-beast thing. And Moen called it a fear overlay. So he helped him understand, "You're actually making him look like that. You're perceiving him like that. It's not his fault. He's not actually that. So there's something underlying that that you're not perceiving correctly."
So there's a process of having to stabilise awareness to see things clearly, if you like, if you can put it that way. And so that has a few other ideas that come with it, like the ties back into some of the soul trap stuff, ideas about manipulation and archons and people trying to send you back to your body when you don't want to go back to your body.
Luke: They want to keep taxing you. It's the IRS, the out-of-body IRS agents.
Brendan: Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff that actually we need to look at in a different way, rather than accepting the narratives that have become established or that are now proliferating.
[1:58:02] What Loosh Harvesting Actually Is and Where Monroe Landed
Luke: Going back to the soul trap topic that we were covering earlier, what's your perspective on the idea of loosh harvesting? L-O-O-S-H.
Brendan: I'm glad you've asked that, actually.
Luke: On its face, you would look at the system, the matrix, and you could see on a surface level that they're going to use fear and terror as a tool of coercion and control. But there's another level that I've heard people speak of around this loosh harvesting: that the energy of those potent emotions holds value in some realms to some beings, and that some of what the chaos that they create in the world is designed for is to actually create energy that they can then transmute into whatever their plan is.
Brendan: Yeah. I think there's a few different things there, and I think that basically they're happening in different ways. If you look at the networks of the Epstein class, you're dealing with organised networks of Satanists, dark occultists, who are involved in manipulating the masses, large groups of people, to essentially do exactly that: to harvest energy, to redirect it into something else. So that goes on. It's not something that I focus on in my work. It's not really overly something to be concerned about in terms of our discussion about living and dying and postmortem existence and that kind of thing, but it does happen. It's just more of an Earth-level kind of a thing.
The loosh idea specifically came from Monroe, and that was something that he really... He published three books, and the second one was the one where he really reified that loosh idea. And again, coming back to the idea of stabilising consciousness and out-of-body perception, it came from his early adventures where he was getting these vague perceptions of "human energy is somehow valuable to someone somewhere." And if you look at the way he was wording his reports on it, it has this really mythical, mythological flavour to it, almost like this distant figure, this distant god or creator figure, created the human garden. And he called them something like "someone somewhere"; that was the vague placeholder name that he gave them.
Then people took that idea, and he called it loosh, and people took that idea and basically, for the most part, seemed to stop reading him at that second book. Which is unfortunate, because if you read his third book, his journey and his perception has developed and actually gotten clearer, and he completely leaves the loosh idea behind. So he's gone from "someone somewhere finds human emotion really valuable and useful, and it's important, I can't quite pin it down, I'm going to call that entity someone somewhere," very mythological flavour. And then over here in the third book, he's dropped the whole loosh concept entirely and is reporting from a higher vantage point, where he's actually started to connect his perception to that Oversoul layer. In his system it's called Focus 34/35, and this is the Oversoul intelligence level. It turns out that that Oversoul level of us, that collective networked intelligence, is what values the human loosh, the human emotion. And it actually values the entire spectrum, not just the...
Luke: Oh, interesting.
Brendan: This is the thing: the soul trap crowd have latched on to this loosh idea and they've actually twisted it and made it "they're harvesting our negative, low-frequency emotions, and that's what it's all about. It's trying to prompt us into being loosh-ed." But actually what Monroe was showing in his third book, when he stopped using the term and he moved on from his mythological framing... The human farm was how he framed it in the second book.
Luke: Yeah.
Brendan: And he moved on from that and completely dropped it.
Luke: I need to read that.
Brendan: Make sure you read two and three.
Luke: Yeah.
Brendan: And three is really the one that people miss, and that's the most important one, because that's where his perception becomes clearer and he gets the view of, "Oh, I'm part of this really amazing, incredible intelligence surrounding the world, all these Oversoul intelligences connected." And it's they who have seeded, in a sense, this experiment, and are getting so much value from it, because it's this amazing play, experiment, what have you. It's an exploration. Like we were saying earlier, there's nothing else to do from a point of utter non-differentiation except for differentiation. And so the Oversouls find this to be this incredible experiment and experience, and they find it really valuable, every single aspect of it.
And that's what I think a lot of people will struggle with: at that level, that ontological level, there is no rejection of any facet of human life. None of it's seen as negative or bad or whatever. It's all valuable, because it's experience for the sake of experience. And so that's where Monroe quietly put away the loosh idea and the human farm idea. He didn't officially retire them. He just quietly left them behind and moved on. And if people don't get that last instalment, they have tended to get stuck in this paranoid "we're part of this human farm, we're being loosh-ed." There is massive manipulation, like you were saying. There's multiple different ways people are manipulated. But in the non-physical, it's not quite the soul trap thing that people have made it out to be. And Monroe's contribution to that was unfortunate.
[2:04:15] When Spiritual Seekers Get Trapped in the Darkness
Luke: Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. That explains a correlation to the conspirituality archetype and mindset. Many people I've noticed, especially in the past few years... But I was into conspiracy theories long before the pandemic, just as a hobbyist. A lot of it sounds pretty far out and not true, but some of it is obviously true. But I think that people who are interested in, oriented toward, consciousness and spirituality are sometimes more susceptible to, I don't know, becoming obsessed and preoccupied with the darkness in the world, because you want to be an aware and awake person, right? Which means you have the courage to go look into the shadows, but the shadows can also be quite a trap.
Brendan: Mhm.
Luke: Whereas your average person who's just watching TV, drinking beer, 9 to 5, just doesn't sit around contemplating these big ideas.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: Is probably in a sense living a more peaceful life, right? Ignorance is bliss, right? Than someone who really starts to explore, to push the edges of their reality and their understanding of the nature of this universe. We seem... and I'm including myself in that, 'cause I've definitely fallen prey to that and found myself living in a lot of undue anxiety and fear, because you start digging and you go, "Oh man, wild things." As beautiful as life can be, the equal polarity is also real too. But it's, I don't know, it's almost a Luciferian temptation in and of itself. It's like, "Oh, you want all the love and light and you want to understand the nature of reality? Cool. Well, there's this part of it, too."
And in my own life, I've derived a lot of growth and benefit from exploring the unexamined parts of myself and bringing them to light in order to heal them and all of that. But in the microcosm of your own life, if you're so preoccupied with what's wrong with you, it's very difficult to see what's right. And you can navigate the world in the same way and get really trapped in the idea of the loosh and the human farm and all these things. It's a little bit of a risky territory for some of us.
Brendan: Yeah. It's almost like a rite of passage in some ways. I think a lot of people go through that, where they get stuck there for a while and they're spinning the wheels. They're really bogged down in the heaviness of it and the darkness of it, and then you're like, "Oh, there's this agenda." And then you start looking ahead: "Well, here's what's coming. Here's what's planned." And you can really get yourself in trouble doing that. And to me, at some point you have to prioritise the internal work over the external conspiracy research or whatever, because that is a never-ending rabbit hole. It doesn't end, and you can stay in it for your entire life. You can be consumed by it, and no good will ultimately come of it.
At some point, it's like, yes, awareness is good. We don't want to be ignorant. We value being knowledgeable and understanding at least something of what's going on. So I respect the mentality of wanting to research, understand, but at the same time you can lose yourself in it very easily. I watch people do it and destroy themselves, and they have no life and they're miserable, and it's like, well, you've got to be here anyway. So why not try to make the most of it instead of making yourself miserable with...
Luke: It's almost like too much information that you can't metabolise, and it's overwhelming.
Brendan: It's overpowering. Problems you can't possibly solve as an individual, and you're just swimming in it. So it actually gets really unhealthy, potentially.
Luke: Yeah. I've experienced it myself. I would vouch for that perspective. It's just tricky, because if you're someone who's just geared toward learning and understanding and growing, you have to at some point... As you said, I guess it can be a stage. I'm hoping that's what it's been for me. If you want to be a positive contribution in this human experience, I don't know, I think some of us have the impetus that we want to fight the darkness, and ultimately it can be dangerous and counterproductive, because that darkness is drawing you in, and now you hate the people that hate people. It's like, wait, I thought I was fighting hate, but I really hate them because they're hateful, right? It's like acts of violence against violent people, that kind of thing. It's just the hurt-people-hurt-people cyclical trap that ultimately is probably counterproductive when taken to the extreme.
[2:09:38] Perception Isn't Always Ontology
Brendan: Yeah. Exactly. And I think you were verging in this direction. A lot of those people who are also metaphysically or spiritually inclined, they take that idea of the manipulation and the control and they extrapolate it into the non-physical realm, and they superimpose this structured machinery of slavery, spiritual slavery, which is... As if it's not bad enough, now we're making the non-physical realm this hell where we can't escape kind of thing. And certain people are drawn to it, and I don't think that there's any talking certain people down from that. They're going to have to figure out in their own time that perception isn't always ontology. Perception is not always reliable. What you see isn't necessarily what's actually happening. You might be seeing a representation of something that's actually much more subtle or much more abstract, non-physical, some kind of informational process that is being presented to your mind's eye as beings or archons running a soul farm or something.
But if you get behind that, which they never seem to want to do, it's actually much more interesting, 'cause now you're talking about the underlying mechanics of perception and consciousness and non-physical existence, instead of getting stuck at the surface level of "Oh, well, what I saw must be reality," 'cause that's not how it works. And many different esoteric authors, metaphysicists, occultists have warned us over the last 200 years, to say nothing of the Buddhists and the Vedantists, who are just going to say it's all illusion anyway. But many occultists have warned us that perception in the astral realms is massively liable to being hallucinatory and deceptive. And the reason for that is because people take their unconscious content, their unconscious unresolved emotional content, their unconsciously held beliefs, and that then becomes their rendered perceptual reality, because you're no longer anchored in a physical space, to couches and chairs and things that are solid to hang on to. You don't have any of that. All the furniture is stripped away. Your mind has to furnish the environment, and that's where people lose the plot, because they forget that, and now you're in trouble.
Luke: Right. Right. Ramana Maharshi was quoted as saying, "Don't bother trying to change the world, because the world you see doesn't even exist." The world you see is a projection of your own awareness and focus, right? So if I'm focusing on the loosh harvesting and the reincarnation trap and the human farm, and that I'm going to be taxed even when I'm out of a body, you know what I mean? It's like, okay, that starts to get really grim quickly. And I've gone down that too. I'm sure a lot of my questions have revealed that I'm still a little nervous about this whole thing, right? Things are progressively getting more free for me in my life, but because I choose to be aware of the full spectrum of the experience... There's a lot of spooky stuff out there. So do I want to just be aware of it? Okay, noted. Check. But not put all of my eggs in that basket, and all of a sudden the basket's overflowing with rotten eggs, right?
Brendan: Exactly. Yeah.
[2:13:08] Audiobooks, Show Notes and the Evolve Yourself Programme
Luke: Well, I love your perspective, dude. I can't wait to read. Do you do audiobooks of your books?
Brendan: I will make this one an audiobook.
Luke: Oh, cool. I'm much better, unfortunately, at listening to books than I am reading them. Mostly just due to time. You can drive around and listen to a book, and to sit with the book is a great experience, but it takes dedication, right?
Brendan: Yeah, I know what you mean. I have a 5-year-old, so I don't do nearly as much as I'd like to.
Luke: Yes. Yes. So, let's see. What have we got here? I forgot to mention the show notes. That'll be lukestorey.com/nde [?]. I'm glad we discussed that, because we talked about so many things that would have not been a great show notes plug there. For details and discounts on Brendan's books and offerings, including his Evolve Yourself programme and masterclass, you can go to brendandmurphy.com/lifestylist. And we'll also put that in the show notes to make it easy and clickable. Tell people how they can interact with you more and learn more from you. I've not looked into your programmes and offerings and things like that. So give me a pitch.
Brendan: Yeah. Well, the masterclass does explain what the Evolve Yourself programme is and consists of.
Luke: Okay.
Brendan: So the page where the masterclass is also has the info. So if people don't have the time to watch the video, they can just read the info. It's basically a way that I work with a particular type of sound-based modality, which is a little bit different to normal sound healing modalities. It's got an evolutionary flavour to it. So it's different. We do four distinct ceremonies spaced over a 27-month timeline, and it's aimed at essentially spiritual evolution and self-realisation, I guess you could say, as opposed to a sound healing where we just want to feel nice and relaxed and maybe hope that our stress level or blood pressure drops or something like that. Not that I'm knocking that, 'cause that's also awesome. So all the information is on that page. I think it's brendandmurphy.com/lifestylist.
Luke: Oh, okay. Oh, I missed the D. That's right. Everybody, D Murphy. We'll put it in the show notes for an easy link. So this programme and the ceremonies that happen throughout the duration of the programme, are those online or in person?
Brendan: We generally connect with a Zoom call. People don't have to join the Zoom call. They can just tune in remotely. But the Zoom call's available. So it's like 30 minutes, and it's very convenient.
[2:15:44] A Sound-Based Modality Born From a Decade-Long Dark Night
Luke: Epic. And how did you come upon this particular aspect of sound as a tool?
Brendan: I connected with a guy in the States, I think it was 2011, who's a fellow author working in an adjacent area. His name is Sol Luckman. Super interesting guy, if you ever want to get him on the show. And so he had developed this sound-based modality after going through a dark night of the soul for a decade. He'd had severe vaccine damage and it ruined his life for 10 years. He was trying to find a solution to get back to normal and heal himself. And so, without getting too much into the nitty-gritty, the end result of that search and that journey was these codes, essentially these sequences of vowels that constitute the content of the activation. They just appeared in his mind's eye, fully formed, on four separate occasions.
Luke: Oh, wow.
Brendan: So each one is a separate activation ceremony, essentially. And so he realised he needed to vocalise and chant these. And there's actually one line that gets chanted out loud and the other line gets done mentally, just silently, mentally. So you're doing a bit of multitasking. But he realised, "Okay, this is my medicine." And so when he did this in a ceremonial setting, he used it on himself, and that began his healing process back to normal. So he ended up successfully reversing all of the horrific damage and whatnot, and actually realising that he was developing himself and expanding himself. He wasn't just undoing physical-level damage. So he realised, "Oh, I've got this evolutionary modality here that's expanded me." And so that was how that was born. And so I connected with him in 2011 and learned about it and did it on myself, and then realised, "Oh, well, this is having an effect on me, so obviously I need to share this." And just took it from there.
Luke: Beautiful.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: I wonder if his evolutionary process was actually primary to the healing.
Brendan: Explain.
Luke: Well, he got this download and connected the idea that it could help him heal, and then, as you described it, after the fact realised that he was going through an evolutionary process. But perhaps the evolutionary process was primordial, right? That was the substrate of the actual healing, right? Which came first, the chicken or the...
Brendan: Oh, yeah. Exactly.
Luke: It's interesting, because in my own life I've had experiences where I'm working on healing something in particular and I forget about it and end up having some other revelatory experience, and then the byproduct of that was the thing was healed, even though I forgot that's what I even went to work on. It's like there's an overarching healing presence or energy or modality or whatever that supersedes the symptomatic expression of that particular thing you think you're trying to heal.
Brendan: Yeah.
Luke: There's a more universal or global healing taking place.
Brendan: Yes. Yeah. I think that's going on.
[2:19:01] Three Teachers, Book Two and Thousands of Hours
Luke: Well, dude, this has been a really illuminating and fascinating conversation. I was really excited for this one. I talk about a lot of different things on the show, and I can find myself interested and enjoying all of them, but the realm of consciousness and just the infinitely fascinating world of what a human is and what makes us tick is really my lifeblood. So I'm really glad we had an opportunity to sit down and chat about all this stuff, and I'm excited to check out your stuff. I want to do the sound thing. I'm like, I need that. Just when I think I've tried everything, I meet someone like you, I'm like, I've got to do this thing. I just got to see. I'm a curious person.
Brendan: Yeah. Yeah. Just one more.
Luke: Yeah. Exactly. And then I remind myself of what I experienced, that the guy who wants to go all the way is already there. So that's part of it, too. But I'm still going to keep doing stuff. All right. Last question for you. Who have been three teachers or teachings in your life that have most impacted who you are today?
Brendan: Oh man, that's really putting me on the spot.
Luke: Well, you've referenced a ton of people that you've studied and learned from already. So just top of mind, the intuitive answer.
Brendan: Okay. The most obvious one is the guy who kickstarted me, which was Michael Talbot with his book. So that was the seminal awakening moment. I would say, actually, if people read book two, they'll see the name of my colleague and friend Nick Sambrook show up a few times. When I connected with him, he actually found me through my first book in 2014, through a synchronistic happening, and I realised he had a very advanced understanding of certain things that was very compelling and motivated me to pull on those threads a little more. So his influence there has been really actually quite significant in terms of where my work has gone. So that's two people off the top of my head. I don't know if I can think of a third. But there's definitely those two, and then somewhere in the thousands of footnotes and citations I could probably pick out a third one. Not sure off the top of my head. I can't think of one.
Luke: That's okay. Two is fine. There's no rules here, only suggestions. When does your book two come out?
Brendan: So we're hoping to get it to print pretty soon, in the next few months. We're taking pre-orders and we are taking orders.
Luke: Okay, great.
Brendan: So if people actually go to that link, they're not going to hit a blank page. They're going to be able to see it, and if they want to, they can put an order in. So we're going to get it out as soon as we possibly can.
Luke: How much Earth time went into book two, if you can quantify? I know it's difficult.
Brendan: I can't say exactly, but I know for a fact that we're talking thousands of hours.
Luke: Thousands of hours. Yeah. Because your books are quite long, right?
Brendan: Yeah. They're longer than average, but the amount of study and just thinking and collecting and organising, just thousands of hours of actual work, to put the material together like it is... Only if you saw it, you would have to say only a madman would do something like that. So it's one of those things you do when you're obsessed with something, or it's just this is your calling or whatever. When something is trying to express through you, you don't really feel like you're even in charge or in control of it. It's more like you're just the vessel for something that's trying to be expressed. And so it's dominated my life for the last 23 years. So I'm probably pushing 20,000 hours at this point.
Luke: Wow.
Brendan: It's a lot.
Luke: Yeah. I ask having just finished a book, and it's just given me a whole new respect for people that write books, especially books that are really deep and substantial, like some of my favourite books. Oh my god, I wouldn't wish that upon anyone, because I know what it takes. And I'm sure it takes a lot more if you're really teasing apart big ideas as you are.
Brendan: Yeah. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
Luke: Yeah. How has your family held up to your mission?
Brendan: Oh, my wife, Aimee, is very supportive. I couldn't have done better there.
Luke: Cool.
Brendan: Yeah. No, she's cool. She's very cool.
Luke: Great. Great. All right, man. Well, thanks for joining me today. I can't wait to do it again.
Brendan: Thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it.