The Visionary Summit
Brendan Murphy — Lenses on Voices and Visions
Brendan presents at The Visionary Summit 2022 — examining the lenses through which voices and visions are interpreted across traditions, and what a cross-tradition structural approach reveals.
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[0:07] Welcome and Introduction
Conference: Amazing. And we are live. So today in this first session to kick off the summer, I'm really excited to have Brendan Murphy, Brendan D. Murphy, jumping on here to give an incredible talk on lenses on voices and visions.
So the author and host of Truth Averse podcast, Brendan has blown minds and changed lives around the world. Author of an incredible book, The Grand Illusion, I'm sure he will mention it, share a bit with you guys about it. It is incredible. It's huge just if you're checking it out, and incredible. And co-founder of the censorship-free Facebook alternative, Therese Network.
Brendan will probably push buttons. He's really good at it. But I think that's why people like him. So welcome, Brendan.
Brendan: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Sam. The words thing is always fun. Thank you.
[1:12] Setting Up the Presentation
Brendan: All right. Well, I've got a little slide presentation, which I think I'll just jump right into and do a bit of a screen share here. So just bear with me for a moment. I'm a bit of a tech tard myself. So things tend to go wrong. But, of course, that won't happen today.
Conference: No, no, no. No, no, no chance.
Brendan: With me at the helm here. Here we go. Present, present. And can you see the screen share?
Conference: Yes.
Brendan: Okay.
Conference: Awesome.
Brendan: All right. Cool. Thanks, Sam.
[1:45] Overview of the Talk
Brendan: So my little talk is lenses on voices and visions beyond the false dichotomy of madness versus divinity. So it's a little bit of a tour through a few different ways of looking at this, which for the most part, they all tie together. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive. One of the things I like to do is look at things from a lot of different perspectives, which is why I find Sam and her perspective quite interesting. She's always got a very unique perspective to share and she's one of the more compelling and intelligent humans that I've met over the years. Yes, hopefully this is something along the lines of what she's after. She really doesn't have a clue what I'm going to present.
So some of what we're going to cover is the bicameral era and the voices of the gods. I'll explain any terms you don't recognise. Divine encounters, the brain's interaction with the quantum field, shamanic experiences. We might have a chance to mention entity attachment. We have an entity or two pictured. The pre-bicameral era, we'll have a brief mention, we won't spend too much time on it, N-dimensional beings and plasma, and encounters with the collective unconscious. A lot of these things really tie together and sometimes we'll be talking about, well, these different terms are actually pointing to the same thing.
[2:57] About Brendan
Brendan: So just by way of quick intro, Sam already gave me a pretty sterling introduction, but yeah, I'm Brendan. Obviously, I go by the name of Freedom Hacker or Truth Addict. They're a couple of my handles. And, oh, hang on. Here we go. A little bit about me. I've been doing this for nearly 20 years. Next year, I'll be able to say I've been doing this for 20 years, so I'm up to 19.
I host a podcast called brendandmurphy.com and you can find the episodes at B****ute and some of them on YouTube, but some of them get taken down because I'm a naughty boy who believes in freedom of speech and freedom of thought. And YouTube and most of the big tech platforms don't like that.
So yeah, I published my book in book one in 2012. As Sam said, it is huge. And if you're into these subjects, you'll like it. If you're into these subjects, you'll really, really like book two even more, which will be out next year. I'm still just finishing that off. And yeah, I run something called Evolve Yourself, which is Evolutionary DNA Activation Work and Transformative Inner Work, Shadow Work type stuff, all good things. So that's me in a nutshell.
[3:58] A Timeline of Consciousness and the Bicameral Era
Brendan: And I want to just intro you to a little bit of a timeline of consciousness. It's really kind of ridiculous that I've even decided to talk about this stuff in a 45-minute time slot because I really need four to six hours minimum.
So on the left, you'll see 12,000 years ago, prehistoric proto-shamanism. And then the question marks symbolise the fact that we know less about that time frame pre-12,000 years ago than we do about the modern era or the bicameral era.
So the bicameral term itself came from Julian Jaynes, Dr. Julian Jaynes, who's a psychologist. And he had this massive revelation, which I'm going to explain. I'm going to tease that out a little bit. And in this bicameral era, we had a very different experience of consciousness. We had a radically different state of mind to what we have now.
We tend to make the assumption, modern humans tend to make the assumption, that what we experience as mind and consciousness or awareness must have been the same down through the ages, but what James proved, he saw things that other people didn't see, and he proved essentially beyond any reasonable doubt, I think, that actually that's not the case, and the ancients, it's particularly from 10,000 BC to around about 1500 BC, 1000 BC, had a radically different experience. So I'll get into that and explain that.
In a sense, they were more robotic. They were more like automatons. They did not really have a conscious freedom of will in the way that we experience it. We could call this the pre-conscious era. And they experience their will in terms of voices and visions, which probably sounds really bizarre. And because everybody heard voices back then, nobody had mental illness. They didn't have the concept of mental illness because let's face it, if everyone hears voices, then nobody's insane. And obviously, these are terms, these are figures of speech. I'm not actually saying that you're insane if you hear voices.
[5:48] The Shift to Self-Awareness
Brendan: So if we move forward through that era, and I'm going to explain more of what the bicameral era is. If we go into around about 1500 BC to 1000 BC, then that is when the state of mentality actually starts to radically shift. And it was because the culture that we humans were in was radically changing. We had things like 4000 BC, we had the development of writing and culture itself was becoming more sophisticated and complex. And all those developments were changing the way that our brain actually worked and interacted with itself.
So then we became self-aware. At some point, that increase in complexity generated a level of awareness we'd never had before. We went from being kind of robotic automatons into subjective internal beings with our own self-conscious intentional will. So now we can visualise ourselves, like I can visualise a version of myself, a virtual version of myself, who, if I wake up in the morning, I'm like, oh, what am I going to do today? What do I want to do? And I go, okay, maybe I'll walk down to the pool. And I visualise myself walking down to the pool. Okay, yeah, that's how that's going to pan out. And yeah, that sounds like fun. Then I'll get some food and I can narratise myself in this virtual kind of reality. And that's something that the ancients through the bicameral era didn't have the capacity for, which becomes quite obvious if you study the texts or at least the work that James did studying these texts and all the other evidence.
So a monumental leap in consciousness actually occurred. And with that, the loss of the voices and visions that were completely normal and day-to-day. We lost contact with the so-called gods. I'm going to explain that more. And we eventually developed this. The people who could still hear voices became known as prophets and oracles, and they became stigmatised eventually in the modern era as having mental illness. And obviously, mental illness has a sort of relevance within limits. But I don't like the way that it is weaponised by institutional psychiatry.
So anyway, bicameral versus self-aware. We are in the self-aware era from, say, 1000 BC to now. The last 3000 years is the only time in history that we've had the kind of self-awareness that we've got. Another way of putting it is that we are aware of being aware. The bicamerales in that ancient timeframe of 10,000 BC to say 1500 BC, they did not have consciousness of being conscious. They didn't have that meta level where they could step back and see themselves in that sort of virtual way that we were talking about. They couldn't picture themselves going for a walk down to the park. And narratizing these events, these virtual events in their minds, they didn't have the capacity. They were more like our domesticated pets in the sense that they were just present with the immediacy of their sensory input. And that was basically it.
And there are actually some rare people alive today who still function like that. And we consider them, they're considered to be quite unusual and very interesting because the rest of us, still the rest of us have this internalised awareness, but they don't. And it's extremely unusual.
[8:51] Hallucinated Voices of the Gods
Brendan: So back then in the bicameral era, what Jane showed was that when people needed to make a decision, when they experienced some kind of novelty or stress that required a choice, they would hallucinate, essentially internally hallucinate, the voices of a god or the gods, some kind of a deity, and it would tell them what to do.
Nowadays, now that we've left the bicameral era, culture and complexity forced our brains to adapt and evolve, we have an internalised volition and will. We can think about things and go, hmm, maybe I'll take this path. No, no, maybe I'll take this path. They didn't have that option. A voice spoke up and told them what to do and they did it and they didn't have a choice to disobey or obey. They just had to do it. That was the situation they found themselves in. Now, we can internally debate ourselves. It's very different.
So to summarise this, and Sam, maybe Sam, if you want to jump in with any questions, I know we don't have heaps of time, but if I really need to elucidate something that I've skipped over, feel free to jump in.
Conference: Yeah, for sure I will. This is actually just amazing listening to and sort of actually restructuring or evaluating how I've felt about it and relating it back to this. It's quite intriguing. So keep in flow and for sure I'll jump in with a question if I've got it.
Brendan: All right, rock on.
Conference: Cool.
[10:06] The Timeline Fleshed Out
Brendan: So to summarise this timeline a little bit, flesh it out a little bit more for you. And again, I'm only giving you a teaser, taster overview of all these subjects because they all need hours to really get into it.
So in the second millennium BC, we stopped hearing the voices of the gods, the deities, and they were known as the Elohim, Lord, Yahweh, these types of terms. In the first millennium BC, so 10020, the year zero, people who still heard them to some extent, heard the voices, were known as oracles and prophets, and they started to die out. They were actually persecuted and hunted down as well. That's actually documented in the Bible, for example.
And then in the first millennium AD, these divine inspirations of these prophet-type characters became preserved in what we call sacred texts. And that allowed non-bicameral literate humanity to retain contact with its lost gods. So the gods receded from us as our brains changed. The voice inside that we used to hear, which made decisions for us, became our internal monologue and we became a little bit more sophisticated and able to make kind of free will conscious decisions, which we didn't used to have. So when the gods left, we were left in charge of ourselves. Essentially, in a sense, we became the gods. And this has to do with the right brain communicating with the left brain, which I'll get to.
So following on from that, the second millennium AD, these sacred writings basically lose most of their authority. So that's the general timeline as outlined by Janes in The Origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of The Bicameral Mind. Terrible name in terms of marketing a book, just awful.
[11:42] Jaynes's Brain Model and Wernicke's Area
Brendan: Okay, so James's insight was profound. And I'm not a reductionist. I'm not a materialist. He seemed to be. So he interpreted everything of this nature as simply an internal hallucination. I'm going to show you that it's not quite the case.
So he tells us in the book, the amalgamating of admonitory experience was a right hemisphere of the brain function, and it was excitation in what corresponds to Wernicke's area that occasioned the voices of the gods. So there's this part of the brain on the right-hand side that corresponds to the left, around the temple lobe on the left, which is known as Wernicke's area. And what happened was in situations of stress where people needed to make a choice in the bicameral era, the, excuse me, the right side of the brain would trigger a communication through what is called the anterior commissure. It would send a signal through. And basically it was us making a decision, but it was experienced internally as the voice, like an external voice basically shouting at us to do something. And we experienced it as gods or gods, deities, and we just did it because you don't argue with God, right? So that's how we ended up with the voices of the gods. And it was a standard day-to-day thing. It was not abnormal at all.
Basically, in the stronger form of his model, he suggested that this right hemisphere admonitory function, which is like a warning kind of function or a do this, don't do that kind of function that this part of the brain served, it was actually received, the signal was received from the right into the left side of the hemisphere and decoded as a voice which had to be obeyed. They literally didn't have a choice as to whether or not to do what the voice was telling them. They actually, and really, they would have been disobeying themselves or arguing with themselves. So that wouldn't make sense. They just did what the voices told them to do.
And so just because there may be a vague term here, the admonitory aspect of this is what he's talking about is the way that we go through life and we learn from our seniors, our elders, our authority figures, what to do, what not to do. They condition us. And so the voices that people hallucinated, even though they attributed them to gods, it was this accumulated kind of conditioning and experience telling people, oh, here's the decision I need to make in this situation.
So that's Wernicke's area on the left. It has to do with language processing. And there's a corresponding part on the right side of the brain in basically the same area, which he was saying, sending a message over to this left-hand side, Wernicke's area, where it was then decoded and literally experienced as a voice, like an external voice. And this is what the biblical prophets were experiencing to some extent. We'll talk about one or two examples here.
So Jacob, allegedly circa 1500, around 1500 BC, is spending the night in a field outside of Haran on his way to Haran. He lays down to rest or sleep. We're not actually sure exactly what he was doing. The Hebrew Bible, which is the basis of the Old Testament, tells us that he had a shalom, likely meaning that he entered into a state of peace or tranquility, AKA an altered state of consciousness. The etymology of Shalom is not actually 100% certain, so context is key in exactly what the passage is telling us.
In his reverie, Jacob, who was the grandson of Abraham, saw, quote, a ladder set up on earth and its top reaching heavenwards on which, quote, angels of the Lord, that is Malachim, were busily going up and down. That's from Genesis. So he's having this altered state experience, this divine vision in his reverie. It fits James's timeline quite nicely if it really did happen around 1500 BC. A lot of the biblical dates are very highly disputed. We won't get into any of that.
But in that timeframe, around 1500 BC, because of the neurological evolution we were going through, we were losing contact with the gods. We were having less divine visions, hallucinations, whatever you want to call them. We were having to go into altered states or use, say, hallucinogenic plants and what have you to have these types of experiences, whereas they used to be quite quotidian, commonplace, day-to-day.
It was suggested by Brian McVeigh, actually, that he may have been sleeping near a ziggurat or temple of some sort, hence the reference to a ladder, which could be interpreted as stairs. If that's the case, you may know that a lot of the temples, ziggurats, pyramids have been constructed on places around the earth that are considered sacred sites. They have anomalous aspects to them. People tend to have certain types of paranormal experiences in these places. That's why they build these structures there, to exploit that, to harness the energy, that kind of thing. So it's possible that he was sleeping nearby one of these types of structures.
Conference: Excellent.
Brendan: Okay. To finish this, I'll just continue the quote. The Lord himself stood at the top of the ladder, announcing himself as the God of Jacob and his forebears. And Jacob thereafter exclaimed, Indeed, a God is present in this place, and I knew it not. How awesome is this place? Indeed, this is none but the Lord's abode, and this is the gateway to heaven.
One way of looking at this is that one of the many local tribal gods or lords, Yahweh, whatever, whatever the name was, they're all basically more or less on the same level. It could be interpreted that something made an appearance to him in his altered state or that it was an activation of this latent or vestigial bicameral function of the brain. So it may have been a combination of the area he was in, the electromagnetic properties of the area. Maybe there was a temple that was harnessing energy, which simulated his brain, the right-hand side, to generate one of these amazing divine sort of hallucinations. Maybe it was simply a contact that was allowed because he was in an altered state. We don't actually know.
So in Jacob's Shalom, a visionary experience unfolded, and it may have seemed to him that a doorway was opened between our realm and the so-called angelic or heavenly realm. And it's generally an interpretation that's consistent with many UFO and contact experiences from the modern era.
[17:44] Bicameral Schizophrenia and Ezekiel
Brendan: One of the things that James said in his book was that everyone was schizophrenic back in the bicameral era. So because everybody heard the voices of God and hallucinating the deities was commonplace. When Achilles went to react to Agamemnon in a fury, he experienced the God Thetis grabbing his hair and pulling him away. And that was the internal neurological process of his own mind and brain making a choice for him to not harm or kill Agamemnon in that moment. And that was just normal. So everybody back then, we would look at it through a modern lens, saying, well, they were kind of all schizophrenic in a way. But yeah, because of that, mental illness didn't exist.
There is a very famous biblical patriarch fellow called Ezekiel, who is featured in the book of Ezekiel, funnily enough. And he had some very interesting experiences, which actually had some quite shamanic aspects to them. And Professor Benny Shannon, who is a psychologist, actually suggests to us that the verses in the book of Ezekiel actually describe hallucinations that are very similar to those experienced on ayahuasca. And the primary ingredient of ayahuasca, if you're not already aware, which you probably are, is DMT. So it's a major hallucinogen. And he's not saying that necessarily Ezekiel took this substance per se, but he's making the comparison and saying the type of experience Ezekiel describes is actually very similar to what a lot of ayahuasca experiences in the modern era describe.
[19:19] DMT, Stress and a Personal Contact Experience
Brendan: Incidentally, most contact experiences with so-called alien beings or what have you happen in the early hours of the morning when the pineal gland is most active, so potentially generating its highest levels of DMT. And I'll come back to Ede Frecska, who is a Hungarian gentleman scholar, who tells us that high stress also triggers elevated DMT levels and people often have encounters at points of high stress in their lives.
And I can include myself in that. And I saw at a very pivotal moment or stage of my life as I was about to, I was going through a breakup process and I was about to have to leave a beloved pet behind and move out of the state. It's one of those very significant moments in your life where there's so much meaning. And it's often those points, those pivotal points, choice points, where there's a massive amount of meaning or something's on the line, something's at stake, that a lot of people have these contact experiences.
I was standing out in the backyard one night, and it was sort of evening, early evening, and I had the impulse for no apparent reason to look up in the sky directly above me. And I saw a huge orange disc. And as soon as it realized that I had consciously registered that it was there, it took off and it vanished very quickly. It actually vanished by phasing out. It didn't go over the horizon and disappear. It actually phased itself out and disappeared. So I know, from experience, the reality of this type of thing happening at key moments, pivotal moments in someone's life.
And I've marvelled at the number of times I've seen born again Christians, for example, say that at this point of meltdown, complete meltdown in their lives, they had a strange experience, which they've interpreted through a Christian lens and what have you. Anyway, that's another tangent.
[20:59] Psychedelic Access to the Gods
Brendan: Psychedelic access to the gods is quite possibly what was going on in the Near East and many other places. This image bottom right of the screen, I think, comes from around about 9th century. And it's a Mesopotamian clay tablet, which shows in the background a plant that looks very much like Peganum harmala, which is top right there in the corner, top right. And in front of it, obviously, is a very unusual looking being, reptilian head, bird-like wings, humanoid general form, and holding a pine cone, holding its ritual bucket there. The types of chimeric strange beings that people often encounter in UFO experiences, altered states of consciousness, psychedelics, you name it.
So again, there's a hint here in this tablet that the people in this phase coming out now, coming out of the bicameral era, were actually systematically, intentionally, ritually using hallucinogens to continue to be able to have divine encounters. And that probably actually goes back, that behaviour goes back probably many, many thousands of years prior. We just know a lot less about it.
So yes, Acacia and Syrian Rue are found in the Near East, which is where a lot of these biblical prophets obviously were located, like Ezekiel. He was actually a priest in exile in Babylon. In the 6th century. So again, BC, I should say. So again, coming out of the bicameral era and into the conscious, self-aware, subjective era, post-bicameral. And so Syrian rue actually amplifies the effects of DMT and acacia contains DMT. Both of those plants are found in the Near East. So it's quite plausible that these people were having hallucinogenically triggered experiences.
[22:49] Michael Persinger and Temporal Lobe Sensitivity
Brendan: This is Michael Persinger, Dr. Michael Persinger. He died in 2018, unfortunately, so we can't ask him about these things and his fascinating work anymore. Some of the research he did was around near-death experiences and other types of paranormal experiences. I've done a lot of research into near-death and other types of stuff, which I'm writing about extensively.
And what they found was that most aspects, and I stress the word aspects or elements of a near-death experience, an NDE, could actually be triggered in an experimental setting with minimal electrical current induction to the temporal region of the brain. Now, they weren't triggering full-blown whole, what's the word, integrated or integrative near-death experiences. They were triggering fragments, elements. So it's not quite the same thing. But they learned some interesting things.
And they found that people with a natural tendency towards electrical sensitivity in the temporal lobe or what they call temporal lability can be seen as comprising the so-called encounter-prone personality type and may be naturally more susceptible to different types of paranormal experiences. He goes on to tell us that people with higher temporal lobe activity have higher levels of creativity, suggestibility, memory capacity and intuitive processing. Many possess a rich subjective internal experience. Sam comes to mind there. Fostering adaptability.
They have more frequent experiences of sensing a presence and endorsed so-called exotic beliefs over traditional religious experiences, which is quite an ironic kind of a comment, I find, because if you actually do the digging and the research, you can see that our Judeo-Christian religions and the core dogmas and tenets and the prophetic experiences actually have emanated from these exotic places, means, techniques, and are analogous to bicameral epileptic episodes, so-called epileptic or schizophrenic episodes.
So where James and I part ways is that he never touched the paranormal. He didn't go into the transpersonal realm. Transpersonal realm is the paranormal realm. It's the quantum realm.
[24:43] A Photographed Entity
Brendan: In this red circle here, I want you to just notice, I don't know if you can see my mouse moving, but here there is a face in the background and you can clearly make out there's a bottom lip, there's a chin, there's the outline of a jaw, there's a mouth that looks to be wide open, there's a nose and then some very strange looking, very large eyes. And this, to me, suggests some kind of gargoyle-like figure. This is an entity that manifested over the left shoulder of my ex-partner when we were living in Melbourne. And there is absolutely no doctoring of this photo. It has not been manufactured. It is an actual legit image of an entity that has manifested.
So cameras don't hallucinate. Cameras don't have a bicameral mentality or brain. They simply show what they show from the frequency spectrum that they can view from. So, temporal lobe, temporal lability is strongly correlated with psi experiences, including clairvoyance, precognition, and so on and so forth, as well as a proneness toward visual imagery, hypnotic suggestibility, and dissociativeness, according to Persinger. As you can see here, sometimes when clairvoyants talk about beings or entities, they aren't just hallucinating. There is something there and we can see them. We can photograph them. Depends on the equipment you're using.
[26:03] Joan of Arc
Brendan: One of the very interesting characters from the Middle Ages is Joan of Arc. And this is well into the subjective phase of consciousness. We have a lot more in common with Joan of Arc than we do any of the Mesopotamian characters, all the really old school prophets that we've talked about. She had subjective conscious awareness and she still had these interesting experiences with bright lights manifesting, descending from the sky, communicating with her. There are actually witnesses to some of her communications with these lights. And sometimes they actually physicalized and became tangible humanoid beings who were actually solid enough for her to hug, literally wrap her arms around them and hug them. And other people saw these lights and what have you. So it's not like she was just simply having an internal subjective hallucination.
What happens in the UFO and contact phenomenon, which goes back thousands of years, as far as we can see, is that the beings manifest themselves in a way that is recognisable to the human that they're presenting themselves to. So they appeared to her as recognisable personages or presented themselves that way.
The thing about Joan of Arc is she doesn't, these aspects of her experience and her story, and she has a massive, very involved story and massive, it's hugely tied in with paranormal experiences. She only lived barely 20 years. It's a very, very, very involved story there. And she was heavily involved with these paranormal experiences. She made successful predictions. She had foreknowledge of certain things. And she actually managed to find Frankish military leader Charles Martel's lost sword, which was hidden in a church for a number of centuries, something like 700 years. And she knew what it was, somehow knew where it was and went and found it. So she had access to information that she shouldn't have had, which, again, shows the limitations of Jaynes' reductionist model. This is where we part ways because sometimes what we are hallucinating is quite real. It's just a matter of interpreting it.
[28:04] Geological Activity and Earth Lights
Brendan: One of the things that we can touch on briefly is that there are certain areas on the planet, certain places and locations like fault lines, geological fault lines, places where there's a lot of quartz in the ground or metal ore, where there is the ability of these substances to actually emit electrons, and these electrons can generate plasma formations, and plasma formations can then become quite strange and interesting things. So geoactivity, geological, geomagnetic activity can lead to earth lights, plasma manifestations and also, these fault lines and what have you, these active areas can also potentially stimulate our brains to maybe facilitate some enhanced communication with another world beyond the veil, so to speak.
What was I going to say here? So, yes, I'm going to talk a little bit more about plasma just so I can qualify that and show why it's relevant. It's funny, there's a pattern of anomalous experiences and strange lights appearing around areas where there is a buildup of tectonic tension and stress. And then when the earthquake hits and the tension is released, the manifestations actually die out and they stop for a while. So there's something very interesting going on there.
This is one of these fascinating books that ties a bunch of the different strands together, connects the dots. So Collins and Little are both talking about UFOs as plasma entities. Again, they can be formed geologically quite organically, but then something strange tends to happen to some of them, and they can start behaving as if they're conscious beings, start interacting with people, even telepathically.
And so they're proposing the idea of these plasmas as a window into a hyperdimensional realm or an n-dimensional realm, just representing any number of dimensions. It could be six dimensions, 11 dimensions, what have you. So n-dimensional beings inhabit these hyperdimensional realms. Obviously, we have no way of knowing how many dimensions or what have you, where they come from, really. But we can call it the quantum field or the implicate order or hyperspace or whatever you want to call it.
So what Collins and Little are kind of proposing is that these plasma constructs can actually then, even though they're organic formations, they can actually, or sometimes they're organic formations, I'm not going to say they're always, but sometimes they are. And even when they are, they can become windows for hyperdimensional intelligences to then operate through.
So Basil Hiley called it pre-space. He was one of David Bohm's colleagues, David Bohm, the physicist, and he called it, Bohm called it the implicate order. Whatever you want to call it, hyperspace, doesn't really matter for our purposes.
[30:41] Footage of a Shape-Shifting Plasma Entity
Brendan: I just want to show you, if you haven't seen a shape-shifting unidentified entity in the air, this is what one looks like. Here's a pretty great example. This is very recent. Someone was in a plane, they pointed their phone out the window of the plane, and this is what they captured. There's no sound.
You can see at the end here, it looks like this being has stood up and raised its arms in the air and you can sort of see a head shape there. I've watched it a few times now and I just got chills because I just noticed things that I didn't notice the first couple of times. That is quite mind-blowing.
All right, so whether or not that was a plasma formation, that is some of the things that plasma formations can actually do, they shape-shift. They can separate, they can go apart, fly around, you see UFOs, these lights in the sky fly around and then rejoin, and that's always baffled us until maybe now when we realise we can explain this stuff through plasma. It is the most abundant form of matter in the universe and funnily enough the most recently discovered or realised, and basically just charged particles. So-called gas of charged particles. So they're very versatile and they seem to facilitate very paranormal events.
[32:19] Sacred Sites and Skinwalker Ranch
Brendan: So regarding some of these ancient visions and prophets and what have you, one of the major, a major site as far as the Judeo-Christian tradition is concerned is Mount Gerizim in Palestine, sorry. Which is known as the dwelling place of God, and something called the Shekinah was known there for centuries, been known for centuries, and it was the divine light, the divine light of God, and this was something that manifested this light and hung around this particular mountain and the people of the time and many, many years prior interpreted this kind of stuff as God or the gods or what have you.
An example of a modern place where this type of thing still happens is Skinwalker Ranch in the Uinta Basin of Utah. Again, shape-shifting beings, really strange stuff going on. And in an area where there's a lot of crystalline substance in the rocks, the rock formations in the ground, what have you. So it lends itself to these types of plasma formations and lights and whatnot.
There is an interaction between these beings very often and the people who are watching them. Like I said, when I looked up at the UFO and it seemed to realise that I was now seeing it, it took off. And that kind of behaviour is quite widespread and quite common.
[33:33] The Implicate Order and the Collective Unconscious
Brendan: So I mentioned David Bohm called the fundamental ground of reality from which our reality emerges from. He called it the implicate order. And a lot of these concepts overlap, like we could talk about the collective unconscious. We could talk about, my friend Nick Sandbrook calls it It, that's him bottom left there. I should have labelled it or something, but I don't just put photos of random blokes' faces on the slides. It is actually the author of the book there on the right, It Pieces in the Dark.
I've known Nick since 2014, very smart, very perceptive guy, and he's helped really elucidate the dynamics of the collective unconscious, what it is, how it operates, how it manifests and can physically manifest from, you know, lights entities into even physical solid entities.
And one of the more radical examples of a UFO contact that I've ever read, and I've read a lot, is there was actually an eyewitness report. Excuse me, from the modern era. And there was a platoon of soldiers walking through some, they're walking along a mountain, mountain range. And someone watched this happen. So there was a bunch, a group of these guys. A craft came down and landed on the mountain. I'm calling it craft, for want of a better term. But it opened some kind of a hatch or portal, and the troops proceeded to walk into it, and at which point, once they were all inside, it took off and disappeared.
I'd love to know what happened to the guys who got on that thing. I started to think, hopefully, maybe best case scenario was some kind of time travel experience that they've now in a parallel time frame on earth or something. Hopefully nothing too challenging. But yeah, this is really bizarre stuff. And that was one of the more extreme cases. So literally the collective unconscious can manifest into even physical solid objects.
[35:22] Group Energy and Thought-Form Manifestations
Brendan: And I talk about this in book one, the ways that we can generate energy, manifest energy unconsciously and consciously. Robert Monroe did an experiment with a group of people who generated intentionally a red kind of neon light, a wavy neon light up in the sky. And that was just through a group effort. A small group of people are that.
So you can imagine when you have billions of people feeding psychic energy into a belief system, an idea, the amount of psychic power that comes in behind that can be enormous and you can have some very powerful and strange manifestations.
So UFOs and so-called ETs are probably largely what we could call tulpoidal or thought form miseries emanating from the implicate order, or if you want to think about it in terms of the collective unconscious, Nick calls it It. And technically, it's all us. It's kind of like the manifestation of us on the other side of the mirror, poking your head into, we're talking about the other side of the mirror being a reference to Alice in Wonderland or Alice behind the looking glass. Is that what it's called?
And so even though we always tend to look at these things in terms of, well, the other, the self and not self, these things manifesting over here, that's not self, this is me over here, self. But ultimately in a quantum reality, in a holographic reality, in the mystical reality, the mystical tradition is that, as far back as we can trace any form of mysticism, everything is ultimately one thing. Everything is one. So technically, everything is a manifestation of us.
[36:51] Contact Experiences Mirror the Beliefs of the Era
Brendan: And one of the reasons why the UFO contact phenomenon manifests in ways that people can recognise the manifestation is because it is intimately tied in. At the very least, we could say that whatever that intelligence is that's showing up is very aware of the belief system, the beliefs and the perceptions of the people of the era that it's appearing in.
And so we've had ships manifest flying in the air like seagoing vessels, but flying through the air completely, in defiance of the so-called laws of physics, dropping anchor, creating all sorts of havoc. And that's an example that's actually in the literature. And that was from, I think, maybe the 1700s, 1800s or so. An example of the technology matching the era that it's showing up in, whereas now we have a much more, we think of things in terms of space, space travel, extraterrestrials and that kind of thing. And so these entities, intelligences, what have you, tend to show up looking more like that. They present themselves in a way that it's kind of like not violating our expectations too much.
So they clearly know the psyche of humanity. And I think at least some of the time that's because they are literally a manifestation of the collective unconscious of humanity. Nick does a pretty good job of explaining all this, the way that it works, in his fictional books, It and Blue Angel Night.
[38:14] The Shamanic Thread
Brendan: So as I've mentioned, there's a shamanic thread here. We're not really going to spend any time on the pre-bicameral era because we won't have time to, other than to point out that we know less about that era than we do about anything else. There is this shamanic thread running through all of these visionary experiences.
And Jacques Vallée tells us the symbolic display seen by the abductees is identical to the type of initiation ritual or astral voyage that is embedded in the occult traditions of every culture. The structure of abduction stories is identical to that of occult initiation rituals. The UFO beings of today belong to the same class of manifestation as the occult entities that were described in centuries past. So whatever this is showing up has been with us for a long, long time.
One famous example of this is Betty Andreasson, who had a very bizarre contact experience with all sorts of beings that you can see in the picture here. And I do believe that the aliens professed a belief in Jesus at some point. So it was all happening. It was a menagerie. And again, a reflection of the fact that this intelligence knows what we believe and what we think. And it presents itself in a way to kind of mirror some of that back to us without violating too much of what we expect, I guess. Though sometimes it clearly does violate that.
And Dr. Kenneth Ring has spoken to this shamanic theme that runs through all of this. And he says that we see the elements of separation, the appearance of the cosmic shaman, dismemberment ordeals, death and rebirth motifs, esoteric knowledge and the return to the physical world with a special sense of purpose. Betty, too, has been shamanised. So the aliens, so-called aliens, play this role of the cosmic shaman. And the cosmic shaman shows up in all sorts of forms, trickster, what have you. And it seems to perform, it seems to be more of a function than a group of beings or entities from that sense.
[39:57] Pablo Amaringo's Ayahuasca Art
Brendan: This is some shamanic artwork by Pablo Amaringo, who has based his art, which is amazing, on his ayahuasca experiences. And you can see an incredible amount of detail there. You've got all this natural nature imagery. You've got celestial cities. You've got UFOs and flying, bizarre winged creatures flying in the air. You've got the rainbow serpent down the bottom. You've got mermaids in the water, all sorts of things. All of this angels in the middle, all inspired by his experiences with the hallucinogens.
So there's a great article from Loes Modderman, which I'm going to quote from. He tells us that Amaringo's descriptions of what ETs are doing in his paintings is seemingly as much part of our own abduction lore as it is of interdimensional origin, as described in the interaction with nature spirits, shamans and holy humans in an extra-dimensional setting. Excuse me. So some elements also sound reminiscent of our own UFO lore, the shape-shifting abilities, the sudden appearance when being called on, the ancient astronaut analogies and even the disappearances underwater.
[40:56] Ancient Astronauts and the Bicameral Lens
Brendan: Now, just to clarify, because I skipped over this earlier, the ancient astronaut references. If you look at the last 12,000 years through the bicameral lens, which is a very powerful and incredible revelation and insight, and hopefully I've got a couple of minutes left because I think I'm close to the end, but not quite there. I've got maybe four or five more slides. Hopefully Sam's not freaking out.
But the ancient alien reference or ancient astronaut reference, that is, we'll be right back. Most of that came out of the bicameral era, incidentally, as it happens. And so it needs to be really heavily strongly revised with that awareness. I just have never seen, I've actually never seen anybody in that realm acknowledge the monumental Jaynesian insight, which shows us that the gods, the so-called ancient astronauts, were actually, for the most part, anyway, hallucinations occurring as a result of right brain, left brain communication. I'm not saying all of it is, but I just wanted to mention the ancient astronaut theme there, because there's a lot of misconceptions around that.
[41:50] Vehicles, Fairies and the Secret Commonwealth
Brendan: So Pablo Amaringo tells us that these vehicles may take many shapes and are able to attain infinite speed, can travel underwater or under the earth, and the beings in them are like spirits, having bodies more subtle than ours, appearing and disappearing at will. And you can see in this picture, there's this sort of modern-looking, I don't know, cruise liner type ship, which goes to show, in these types of visionary experiences, there can be this real mixture between what's anachronistic or really ancient and really modern. And that's reflected in a lot of people's contact experiences.
Jacques Vallée tells us that the modern global belief in flying saucers and their occupants is identical to an earlier belief in the fairy faith. The entities described as the pilots of the craft are indistinguishable from the elves, sylphs and lutins and pixies and goblins of the Middle Ages. Through the observations of unidentified flying objects, we are concerned with an agency our ancestors knew well and regarded with terror. We are prying into the secret commonwealth.
And they were quite right to regard some of that stuff with terror because some of the experiences people had were absolutely terrible and people sometimes disappeared and did not come back.
[42:55] The Brain's Contact with the Quantum Field
Brendan: So I'm getting close to the end now. I just want to mention quickly, hopefully I'm not going too much over time, the brain's contact with the quantum field. It gets a little more technical. I get into this more in the book, in book two in particular.
And this is Dr. Ede Frecska who I quoted from earlier. He's saying basically DNA is receiving our information from the microtrabecular lattice, which is woven around the microtubules, which exist inside the cytoskeleton of our cells. So these are incredibly small structures, incredibly fine, measured in a handful of nanometers, incredibly fine.
So this is visualised as being what is most in communication with the quantum field and deriving that energy from it, or the information, I should say. So spirit beings mediating non-local internal perceptions have more informational value than the entities of strictly internal intrapsychic projections.
So if you are actually having a genuine kind of transpersonal interaction with the quantum field or the collective unconscious or the implicate order, whatever you want to call it, there is the potential for massive informational value and perspective that comes through with that. Of course, some interpretation is often necessary, in terms of the messengers delivering it or what have you.
And he also tells us that when we use our direct, intuitive, non-local consciousness to override our linguistic, cognitive mode of functioning, which is what we're using now to say words and share these ideas, we can then tap into the consciousness and information of the plant and the animal kingdoms as the seers and the shamans. And maybe some schizophrenics and temporal epileptics and what have you, and interesting people like Sam are doing. So I'm going to skip that.
[44:32] The Telos of Transformative Experiences
Brendan: So the telos, if you want to jump in, Sam, please do. I know I'm going a million miles now. But the telos of transformative experiences, to wrap this up, basically, we are also talking about massively transformative experiences, whether they're near-death experiences, contact experiences, shamanic Initiation, what have you. It is an experience of altered reality. And then there is time necessary.
Even my DNA activation work follows this pattern, this pathway that I do with people. Altered reality experience. And then there's a timeframe of integration where we grapple with it, we work with it, we feel like we're changing somehow, some sort of perceptual shift has occurred, a metanoia has occurred. And then over time, the human that comes out of that is transformed. They're radically different to the human who went into the experience initially.
So this is the pathway that most of this stuff we've been talking about, all the different contact experiences and what have you, actually follows. And I do believe I'm at the last slide. So thank you for listening. You can follow me, Brendan D. Murphy, official on things like Telegram, Instagram. And also I've got Truth Network, which is an uncensored platform for people who value free speech. Back to you, Sam.
[45:40] Host's Reflections on the Presentation
Conference: Amazing. Thank you so much, Brendan. This has been incredible. And really just seeing how the language we have about our experiences, our ability to explain them, make sense of them. And for you to bring this research, the historical, the looking into texts, the science lens, to put words around different people's experiences is incredible. So very grateful for that.
I actually had this moment of, when you have a vision of an event and then it's so exciting just to see it come together. So I do think you need a whole day. I think this is a full-day event with multiple sessions and just little bits of space for people to go, wow, what does that mean? How have I experienced that?
Because for me, even listening, I loved every bit of this. But listening to it sometimes, the words can get heavy or technical, like a direct, non-local something, like intelligence, what does that mean, and when do I feel that or what's the experience, how do I know when that's happening. For me that's the bridge I really am connected to, trying to translate that. I'm like, yeah, this has been amazing. I'm so excited for people to watch this and check it out.
I'm really excited and just please, you jumped in and shared this. So hoping everyone has more incredible questions, that this opening frame got you guys thinking, thinking about how we can understand experiences in a bigger way.
[47:31] Brendan's Own Experiences
Conference: One question before, I'm curious, before you go, Brendan. What kind of experiences of voices and visions have you had? Do you have any that you want to share? I know you mentioned the UFO, which is really cool, but are you all right?
Brendan: I've had some pretty epic meditational experiences. And I've done a bunch of plant medicine, but I've got to say the most profound stuff has been without any form of external. It's just sitting in meditation. And I've had a few very profound visuals, but I have a tendency to go. There's something about the way I'm wired. My nature is to go to the fundamentals or the biggest picture rather than. I bypass. I tend to bypass the intermediary, the beings and the intermediary beings and the astral stuff and all this. And I go to Infinite Consciousness. So that's kind of the foundation of my paradigm and my awareness.
And I've had a sprinkling of some plant medicine work around that's been interesting. But yeah, I wouldn't emphasise that that's been as amazing as certain, just natural, so-called natural, self-guided type stuff. But yeah, I've had some interesting things, but I'm not prone to visions or voices as such. I don't have that necessarily wired into me. And I stopped working on clairvoyance a long time ago. So it's like they say, use it or lose it.
[48:58] Not Everything Is Good
Conference: Yep. Yep. Amazing. Yeah, just so excited to have this incredible, broad perspective research approach to give us a few different labels, descriptions, lenses, ways of seeing experiences. And I also really loved how you had a few comments in there around that not everything we're seeing and receiving is good. It's not always great. We don't need to pedestal it. It's about really understanding how do we interface or interconnect with these experiences. And even the part of that it is us as well on some level, like that infinite consciousness, that side of it. Yeah. How do we, wrapping words around it's been incredible. So thank you so much.
Brendan: Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it.
Conference: Yeah. Anything final you want to share?
Brendan: I'm actually glad you mentioned that about the whole, it's not always good, don't put it on a pedestal. I had a thought there that was actually quite lucid that I wanted to share around that. And now it's basically gone. So, hey, let's just wrap it up.
[50:12] Closing Thoughts
Conference: Yeah, look, it's been important for me. I've had as many difficult experiences as amazing ones. And the book is focused on those that were a lot more, as you said, transformative or healing. But it's very much looking at where's the midpoint? Where's the midpoint without finding a new narrative about how we include this inside the story of who are we as humans evolving and developing consciousness?
Yeah. Yeah. Super grateful. Love your work. Thanks, Brendan.
Brendan: Thanks, mate. Cheers. Appreciate it. And I like that. I'm going to say moving beyond the dichotomy of divine or insane or good versus bad or getting rid of the moralistic lens. It's not about any of that. It's about understanding what's going on and making the inquiry into that. And you may never get an answer, but at least make the inquiry. And that's my mentality around it.
Conference: Thank you.