The Way Forward
Afterlife, Past-Lives & Aether: The Enigmatic Fabric of Reality
Brendan joins Alec Zeck for what he has described publicly as "the best interview I've done to date." The conversation covers the afterlife, past lives, and the enigmatic fabric of reality — drawing on NDE research, Monroe Institute data, and hypnotic regression studies to build a rigorous picture of what persists beyond physical death.
[0:00] Introduction
Alec: Brendan D. Murphy is a consciousness researcher, host of the popular Truthiverse podcast, and author of the critically acclaimed epic The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality — Book One. You're working on Book Two right now, finishing it off. He's also the founder of the Truthiversity, the number-one consciousness-raising university for awakening minds at truthiversity.com, and facilitator of accelerated evolution inside his Evolve Yourself program. Both links are in the show notes.
I was trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to discuss with you today, and your book is a perfect representation of you — it's incredible, but it's also so dense. There are so many topics you cover in Volume One, and you're working on Volume Two, that it's so hard to distill it all down into specific topics. But one of those topics I'd like to cover today — fitting for the occasion, I wore a hat that says "Swimming in Ether" for those listening on audio — I want to start with something I actually don't know: your journey of waking up, so to speak. It started for you at a relatively young age. You've been doing this for a while — you said you've been friends with Eileen McKusick for like twelve years?
Brendan: I've been doing this for twenty years now.
Alec: Twenty years — that is crazy. And you're forty?
Brendan: Yep.
Alec: So you've been doing this since you were twenty years old. What was I doing when I was twenty? Oh my God.
Brendan: It was interesting because I still did all the normal twenty-year-old stuff with my mates, but you just can't have certain conversations.
[2:10] The Book That Changed Everything
Alec: So what's the backstory of your waking up?
Brendan: I can kind of credit my brother. He was still at school at the time, I was out of school, and one day he came home and told me about this entrepreneur who'd come in to give a talk about business, but kept going off topic and talking about a book that had blown him away. That book was The Holographic Universe by the late Michael Talbot — he was a physicist who was also deeply interested in the paranormal and the mystical. My brother mentioned it, and it stayed in the back of my mind for about six months. Then I finally read it, and it was one of those absolute Hollywood-style turning-point moments. That was the point where my life went off in this other direction and never looked back.
Reading that book absolutely destroyed my ideas of what reality and possibility were up to that point. From there I just became obsessed with pursuing that path — what is the nature of reality, what is the nature of consciousness, what are we doing here. That was my awakening. From that point on it was impossible for me to fit into the normal world. I never got a full-time job, never worked nine-to-five, never had a mortgage.
Alec: You have no clue what that looks like.
Brendan: I just don't know what that world is. My partner Aimee reminds me every now and then how weird that is and how much of a freak I am because of it.
Alec: That's why you look like you're twenty years old and you're forty. You didn't have to undo all of that conditioning and trauma. Your life wasn't being siphoned every day.
Brendan: That was why that book came to exist. Four years after reading Talbot's book I started putting together what eventually became The Grand Illusion. I didn't know what I was putting together at first — I thought it would be like one of those big books where you just throw everything into the melting pot. But in the end I spent so long on it, and gradually got more and more clear about what to focus on. It became this investigation into the roots of reality. Book Two is technically the second half of this one.
Alec: How many pages is Book One?
Brendan: I think it's 665.
Alec: Oh my goodness. So if you had to summarize Book One in a couple of sentences, how would you do it?
Brendan: Twelve years after publishing it, I don't think I've managed to do that. It's an investigation into the nature of reality and consciousness. I ask those two questions — you can pick either one, reality or consciousness — and you're actually asking the same thing. I'm showing you through a mystical, esoteric, and scientific pathway how all these different paths converge to the same point, as far as the nature of reality and who and what we are.
[7:45] Does Consciousness Survive Death?
Alec: One of the topics I want to get into is the afterlife — especially because from my understanding that's what you're focusing on quite a bit in Book Two. I want to cover things like the reincarnation trap, reincarnation itself, after-death experiences, near-death experiences. Where's the best place to start? Do you think the afterlife itself is an irrefutable fact?
Brendan: The issue is the term itself is so loaded. Everyone has their own ideas of what it looks like or doesn't look like. The real question is: can your consciousness continue past the point where your physical body stops working? The answer is unequivocally yes. Thousands and millions of people around the world know that because they've directly experienced the cessation of their body working and then conscious existence continuing — the NDE being the most obvious example, but also mystical experiences, remote viewing, any case where people access information they theoretically shouldn't have access to. Something else is obviously going on. Consciousness is not restricted to the skull. It's not inside your brain, it's not generated by the brain. It really has nothing to do with the brain other than being temporarily associated with it for however long your body is working in tandem with your consciousness. When the body stops working, consciousness continues on. I've approached that from as many angles as I could humanly conjure up, and the answer is yes from every single one.
[10:30] Compelling NDE Cases
Alec: What are the most compelling near-death experience stories you've come across?
Brendan: There's one — a Russian guy, Yuri I think his name was — who was biologically dead for three days. He was pronounced dead, his body was put into the morgue refrigerator, and when he was brought out for the post-mortem, the surgeon sliced into his chest and it started bleeding. He was eventually revived and had perceptions, conscious experience, during the entire time his body was in the fridge. One of the things he witnessed, with what I'll call for convenience his astral or out-of-body perception, was a child who had been in pain and crying, and the hospital staff couldn't figure out why. He saw that there was a broken bone that had gone undiagnosed. When he came to, he told the nurses exactly what the problem was and where it was. They checked, and the child had the broken bone precisely where he said.
There's another case — a man who had a car accident, and someone pulled over in a family business truck with the company branding on the side. His body was essentially dead on the ground from head trauma, but he was floating and watching the scene unfold. He noticed the information on the side of the truck while out of his body. After he recovered and was through hospital, he still had that image — the business name, the contact details — and he tracked down the woman who'd helped him. He went to her house, she opened the door, and they had this extraordinary reunion. He shouldn't have known she even existed, but he had her details from his out-of-body perspective. The list goes on. People find out about a sibling who died before they were born while they themselves are physically dead — meeting a family member they didn't know about, and then the parents are stunned because they'd never told their child they'd lost a baby. It just goes on and on.
[17:00] Religion, Hell States, and the NDE
Alec: What do you think about cases where people have an NDE and claim to meet Christ, or Muhammad, or some other figure aligned with their religious background? Some people come back saying they experienced hell because they weren't following their faith correctly. I interviewed someone named Vinnie Tolman — a devout Mormon — and his NDE completely shifted his understanding. He said candidly that in the afterlife there are people of all religious orientations, and that hell is not a fixed place. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Brendan: The NDE-religion connection is a huge can of worms. What you're describing has been verified by lots of different people who have no religious affiliation whatsoever. Robert Monroe is a classic example — he explored these places and found that religious groups of certain types essentially create a virtual reality environment. What we call the astral planes.
Alec: Do you think it's a creation of their co-creative capacity — their ability to consciously shape aspects of their reality?
Brendan: It is, and it's obvious when you dig into it. We create an environment because consciousness without the body has very few limits. You're in an environment that consists entirely of the matrix of consciousness, so every thought has a creative effect on the environment around you. You're interconnected with everything.
[22:15] Shared Hypnotic Realities — The Charles Tart Experiment
Alec: I want to pull up something from your book that ties into this — the Bill and Carol shared hallucination experiment. Brendan covers this brilliantly in the book, which we'll link in the show notes. Can you explain it?
Brendan: That was in Book One, and there's actually a very similar story in Book Two. These two people got involved in a hypnosis experiment where one was inducted into a hypnotic trance, then the other, overseen by someone with the relevant skills. He gave them both the same instructions and set them into the same reality. As revealed by the notes made and exchanged afterward, they were experiencing the same shared reality. At a certain point in the experiment — I believe this was run by Charles Tart, if my memory serves me correctly — they stopped talking to each other. He found out after the fact that within the constructed reality they'd been interacting and giving verbal feedback, but then they stopped verbalizing because they were in this shared telepathic virtual world together, experiencing environments, walking on the beach, swimming in water that was like champagne.
Then at one point a third person accidentally walked into the room while the experiment was running, and she got incorporated into their virtual world experience. She was sharing their reality. There was a moment where the male participant told her — all telepathically, mentally, within the virtual world — not to enter a certain space. It was his space, a tunnel leading into a cave, and at the center of the cave was something precious he didn't want anyone to see.
Alec: That literally sounds like Inception.
Brendan: Very Inception. She waited at the entrance as instructed. All of this was established after the fact by comparing notes — three people had all shared the same experience in this virtual reality, while the person running the experiment had no idea what was going on unless someone volunteered something verbally. Later there was a second part where the female participant who was supposed to be in the experiment went back into the cave all the way to the room she wasn't supposed to enter, and she encountered an old man figure — a wisdom figure — who was not overly welcoming. She was in some deep recess of this guy's psyche.
Alec: Some subconscious thing.
Brendan: Exactly — which is probably why he wanted to guard it. The really compelling element was that third party who walked in, wasn't supposed to be there, got incorporated into the reality, and was able to verify that they were all having the same experience. Three people sharing it. How do you call that coincidence?
[30:00] Reincarnation — The Evidence
Alec: I want to circle back to reincarnation. I'll preface it with where I'm at. I think it's either that we do reincarnate — there are strong indications from yogic traditions, Eastern traditions, and countless examples of children recalling specific information about previous lives in extraordinary detail — or these individuals are unknowingly tapping into what many call the Akashic records, just accessing information stored in the field. It could be both. There's also the question of whether we are quite literally one being modulating itself in infinite ways, versus individuated souls inextricably linked to a creator. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Brendan: My answer can be really short: all of that is simultaneously true. That's basically what it boils down to. But The Reincarnation research angle is interesting to dig into properly. The pioneer was Professor Ian Stevenson, who spent forty years or more traveling thousands of miles per year all around the world to investigate case by case, primarily children, who were reporting information from somebody else's life as their own. Getting emotional about a random family in the next village. He used the closest approximation of the scientific method that was humanly possible to investigate these cases, and what he did was unbelievable. He basically single-handedly used scientific method to prove — as far as it's possible to prove — that reincarnation happens within our linear frame of reference.
Alec: What were some of the most compelling things he found?
Brendan: One of the major correlations he found was between a person's birthmarks and the wounds of the previous personality. Where they were killed — by a bullet, a spear, an arrow — would very frequently correspond to the exact same spot being a birthmark in the next body. He also found that typically these children died young and reincarnated rapidly into a family quite close by — usually in the same village, state, or country — and came back with very active memories of the other person's life, which would gradually fade. Generally once a child hit around age five, those memories would start fading into the background. Before that, these kids were providing extraordinarily detailed information about families they should have known nothing about, and had a profound emotional connection to them. When those families got to meet them, the recognition was genuine and overwhelming.
There are people who follow Stevenson's line of work and try to reduce it to the individual merely picking up information from the field — which is still interesting — but I think it's reductionist. You're taking this amazing topography of psychological and psychic connection and flattening it. If you've done your esoteric homework, you realize there are many aspects to a human being, many aspects to consciousness and mind. It's not simple. Then you have to ask: what is it that actually correlates these two personalities through space and time, when we know that linear time is an illusion? Esoterically, you have the atman — the spark of the Divine — which sheathes itself in the finest form of matter that exists. That sheath is the monad. The monad then repeats the process at a more dense level to form the causal body, then the mental body, then the astral body, and so on. There's an identity principle, an identity aggregate, that binds these lower-level expressions in time and space and correlates them in a non-local way.
[45:00] Christ, Religion, and Personality Worship
Alec: I want to speak specifically to Christianity and what you think of the figure of Christ. Some say this story of God coming into flesh, born of a virgin, has been told time and time again throughout history — therefore Jesus probably never existed. The other end of the spectrum is the fundamentalist position: Christ is the only way, confess your sins, profess him as lord and savior or go to hell for eternity. Where do you fall in that spectrum based on your research?
Brendan: I don't know where to start. I was a Christian as a kid — I had some indoctrination in primary school, someone would come in once a week for what they called scripture class. And I think hitting kids with that before they've developed an analytical mind is a problem. There are always seeds of truth, even if they're swimming in an ocean of nonsense, and that's true across all the Abrahamic religions. But what I've noticed is that a significant portion of Born Again Christians have abandoned logic, reason, and evidence — and also abandoned themselves in the process, because those things are part of who and what we are. They've fixated on the external personality of Jesus, and any form of personality worship, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as the nature of reality, your fate, your destiny — that is a bad idea. You are abandoning yourself at a fundamental level, and that simply isn't how reality works.
The Western materialist scientific worldview and fundamentalist Christianity are supposed to be at war with each other, but they actually have a lot in common. Both are stuck in the realm of the lower mind. Science is encumbered by materialism and can't go beyond it. Fundamentalism operates in the lower mind too, just with a different worldview. As long as any individual stays in that realm and doesn't penetrate deeper into the nature of themselves — which is the nature of reality — they'll fall prey to very small-picture thinking.
What you have with Jesus is an actual historical figure, or possibly multiple figures, who have been turned into something inflated and blown up. Even in the Bible itself there are extraordinary statements attributed to Jesus — "these things you shall do yourselves, and more." That's a remarkable statement coming from someone considered God in the flesh. So what are we doing obsessing with a personality? Anyone who has penetrated beyond the lower mind to any significant depth knows that historical figures and personalities are not the point. What he represented and symbolized is what matters. He represents the archetypal man, God manifesting as humanity. The purpose was to recognize that we are not separate from the creator. He made that abundantly clear if you're paying attention. The only difference between him and us is like the difference between you and your three-year-old daughter — you may be the same in essence, but that doesn't mean she has the same body of knowledge or wisdom you do.
Unfortunately it's been twisted and inverted to the point where people use it to disempower themselves — to sit and wait for Jesus to save them because they were born into original sin. Salvationist religion is a huge spiritual fraud, and it has mangled a lot of people's psyches. You see the same thread in the New Age with perpetually waiting for some extraterrestrial race to come back and save humanity.
[58:00] Hell States, Conditioning, and the Hypnotic Regression Evidence
Alec: Are you of the opinion that in most cases of people experiencing hell in their NDEs, what they saw was a product of their own conditioning — that a strongly conditioned Christian who carries deep shame and believes they are not good enough to be saved will experience exactly that, both at a conscious and subconscious level, and then come back and filter that experience through the religious lens they already had?
Brendan: There's a lot to unpack there. One of the unfortunate things about people having only a scientistic worldview or an exoteric religious worldview is that when they come back from an experience like that, it doesn't fit any established categories. So they try to shove the round peg into the square hole of heaven and hell theology. There is a level of conditioning at work. If the only framework you have is Christianity, you're going to reach for that language to describe a fundamentally non-physical experience in a completely different realm.
What's interesting to me is that those sorts of culturally specific experiences — meeting Jesus, encountering hell — tend to occur mainly in the early stages of consciousness shifting from the physical into what we'd call the spirit world. They're happening in the intermediate layer, where the subjective imprint of one's conditioning is still very active. What's telling is the Michael Newton Institute's research — hypnotic regression work with an estimated fifty thousand people from all walks of life as of around 2019. When they go into deep theta state, they completely bypass all the religious programming. And what does everybody in that state report? Essentially the same experience. That tells you something definitive. Leaving the body, going through a tunnel or toward a light, being greeted by friends and family, experiencing reunion — consistently positive, consistently structural. The exceptions are people who are severely traumatized or severely deviant in their behavior; they have a different experience, a more difficult one involving life review.
[1:05:00] The Architecture of the Afterlife
Alec: Can you expand on the different astral realms and the different bodies as much as you can?
Brendan: The astral is typically referred to as the emotional body — that's the first layer or level beyond the physical. Most people, from what I've gathered, have a fairly easy transition. If you die peacefully in your sleep, there's no stress, no trauma, no fear, and you typically wake up with someone from the other side — a family member or a spouse — there to meet you.
There's a common misconception about souls getting stuck, which I'll touch on briefly. Some of what gets reported as a ghost or a haunting I think is essentially an etheric record — an Akashic imprint playing out over and over. Certain intuitively sensitive people tap into the field in that way. But it could also be one of the aspects of the lower mind shed by the soul in its passage. The ego — in the esoteric sense — has moved on, but in moving on it has to shed the lower vehicles: the physical, the etheric, the astral, the lower mental. What remains might be a kind of energetic remnant, mechanically repeating familiar behavior, essentially a mindless automaton. The true center of consciousness has left the building. The building is running on autopilot.
Above the astral is the mental plane, which esoterically corresponds to the heaven realms. What's fascinating is that most NDEs seem to occur when someone arrives in a subplane of the astral — somewhere in that intermediate layer — and they are already completely blown away by how blissful it is. I'll say something about this: it's remarkable how many NDE accounts describe standing in a field of tall wheat or grass. Vinnie Tolman described seeing grass and described a sound coming from it that he couldn't put into words — and as he was describing it to me he started crying just thinking about it. Because in those realms, everything is made of sound and light in a way that isn't obvious here. People are blissed out, they can't believe how good existence suddenly is — and that's just the mid-to-upper astral. They haven't even touched what esoterically would be considered heaven yet.
Every layer — and we'll call them nested spheres, because that's the esoteric language and that's what they are to non-physical perception — is more expansive than the last. The etheric is a double of the Earth but slightly larger, encompassing it. The astral is expanded again. The mental is even more so. Charles Leadbeater, the Victorian-era theosophist and clairvoyant, described the astral double of the Earth extending at its maximum roughly halfway to the moon. That's just to give an idea of the scale. Within that non-physical dimension you have the potential for a whole other ecosystem of intelligent entities and beings that can occupy that space — same for the etheric double — and I think a lot of what we call alien contact and UFO sightings, particularly the orb-based phenomena, originates from the etheric level of the Earth. Sometimes more rarely from the astral level as well.
[1:21:00] The Soul Trap and Archon Theory
Alec: I want to touch on something that comes up quite a bit in the truth community — the idea that we're living on a prison planet controlled by archons, that reincarnation is real but it's a trap, and that when you die you shouldn't go toward the light. These ideas are shared by Howdie Mickoski, David Icke, and others. Many claim it comes from Gnostic traditions. I know you wrote an article recently on the reincarnation soul trap.
Brendan: David Icke's fundamental message is the same as mine — we are infinite consciousness. That's also Mickoski's message, to his credit. But then they add that we're being tricked into staying in a hellish realm, and I don't think the evidence supports that. I don't think this is a hellish realm. It's inherently challenging, yes — but it's supposed to be, and that's a whole other discussion.
The simulation theory angle is worth unpacking. We've just come out of centuries of gross materialism — consciousness doesn't exist, everything is deterministic and Newtonian. We're coming out of a deep amnesia, and what were the dominant ideas before that? Exoteric, illogical religious ideas. So we've gone from hardcore religiosity to hardcore reductive science, and both worldviews are wrong if you carry them far enough. Now we're in this germinal recovery phase, trying to articulate that there's something beyond this physical reality, and we're doing it in some very clunky ways. Philip K. Dick would call this process anamnesis — the opposite of amnesia, the process of remembering. Like a little kid learning to stack blocks, the tower keeps falling because they can't yet line them up properly. Simulation theory is a step in the right direction if you don't take it to its dumb extreme, which is that we're literally inside a computer program. That's not helpful.
The soul trap idea is fundamentally disempowering. The moment you adopt it, you've made yourself a victim. You're a victim of creation, a victim of a creator who has apparently abandoned you. And I'd ask anyone attached to that idea: how is it serving you? Is it making you happier, more fulfilled, less angry? From what I've seen it tends to produce more anger, not less. A lot of what happens in the truth movement is driven by the emotional reaction of realizing you've been deceived and manipulated. People are understandably angry, and if life is hard, it becomes easy to adopt the idea that you're trapped.
But beyond the individual level, there's a co-creative dimension to this. If millions of people around the world ardently believe in the soul trap and pour massive amounts of psychic energy into that belief system, then at an astral level they are building a corresponding dreamscape — a collectively constructed reality that, when someone peers into it, will look exactly like the nightmare they've been programming. This is also, in my view, part of where some of the soul trap mythology originates: people having altered-state experiences through an active nervous system rather than through actual physiological death. There's a filtering mechanism when the mind operates through the nervous system rather than being fully separated from the body. That creates a distortive lens, a kind of fog through which you might misread what you're perceiving.
What I call the astral fantasia is this bubble layer of the collective unconscious — not a localized thought form, but more like a whole egregore reality, a collectively constructed dreamscape of considerable scale that has been fed by decades or centuries of fear, conspiracy, and religious imagery. People can tune into that, have experiences that feel completely real, and mistake them for objective post-mortem reality.
[1:40:00] Free Will, Incarnation, and Why We Forget
Alec: One of the things people who subscribe to the soul trap idea say is that it doesn't make sense for us to forget our past lives if Earth is a playground we chose. Why would we be programmed to forget?
Brendan: There's a quote I love from The Red Lion, one of the best books on alchemy I know, where the author describes what it would actually mean to remember all of your past lives — every trauma done to you and every harm you did to others across multiple lifetimes. That alone would be crushing. But beyond the emotional weight, if you could access that level of awareness — what esoterically would be called the causal level of perspective — you would also have access to the full context of your current life's experiences before they happen, and you would naturally want to avoid the difficult ones. But those difficult experiences are precisely why you're here. They're part of your growth cycle. If you already knew your landlord was going to rip you off, you'd avoid it, and then you wouldn't have the experience you were meant to have. The forgetting isn't a bug, it's a feature. It has a constructive purpose and a basic survival function. The background noise of the human mind — the constant radiation of thought energy and emotional energy — would overwhelm a soul still operating at its full expanded perception. The condensation and restriction of consciousness as it enters the physical system is part of how this works, and Bruce Moen explains that process in certain ways that I also discuss in my book.
Alec: A case in point you were telling me about in the car earlier — that woman who had seventeen NDEs.
Brendan: Yes. She was born into a family of generational sadism and was essentially tortured from the beginning of her life. Over the course of seventeen death experiences, she received massive downloads of information and came to understand that she had made a choice from the non-physical realm — from the other side of the veil — to incarnate into that specific family with the mission of interrupting the pattern. Breaking the cycle of generational abuse and sparking healing for people who were on their way to becoming what I would call, from an esoteric perspective, evolutionary dead-ends — personalities that have become so deviant they will eventually simply cease to exist at that level of expression. She saw the true nature of who they were from the non-physical realm, and chose to enter that situation out of compassion. That is a Christlike sacrifice if there ever was one.
And that's essentially the conclusion of virtually anyone who has a genuine NDE or who, as an esotericist, consciously explores the non-physical realms. Whether it's Michael Newton's theta-state regression research or direct esoteric exploration, the verdict is the same: we are here by choice. We don't always like the results. It's not always fun, especially when we forget. But the choice is real.
[1:55:00] The Indonesian Girl and the Nature of Reality
Alec: I want to share the context of Tia — the Indonesian girl from Lyall Watson's book — because it ties directly into the nature of reality and who and what we truly are.
Brendan: Lyall Watson was a biologist and anthropologist who spent considerable time in Indonesia with local tribes, learning their customs and traditions. One of the people he encountered was a girl named Tia — young, one of the shamanic or mystic types, someone who in the Hindu tradition would be said to have the siddhis, the activated superpowers. One day Watson was out walking and stumbled upon Tia in an olive grove with a younger girl. Tia was making strange gestures with her hands. After a while, all of the olive trees in the grove — not just one tree, but multiple trees, enough to create shade — simply weren't there anymore. They had vanished. The little girl who was watching started jumping and dancing, completely stunned by what she'd just witnessed. Watson also couldn't believe what he was seeing, and the little girl's reaction confirmed that they were both perceiving the same thing. Then Tia made some more gestures and the trees reappeared. She repeated this procedure several times. Watson just lost his mind. That experience broke something in his materialist framework in the best possible way.
Alec: It's the same feeling as seeing the blindfolded kids reading in person — you may already believe it's possible, but witnessing it changes you.
Brendan: Exactly. And those kids who can read blindfolded — their mom pointed out to me that it's become so innate to them that it's not special anymore. It's like riding a bike. And she and my friend Dr. Edith both emphasize that this is something all children can learn, at least up to around age twelve or thirteen. It's not that these abilities are inherently rare — it's that they're uncommon because we've forgotten who and what we are, and surrounded the mystery in religious dogma and fear. These are innate human abilities. Major Ennio Nimborski — who died a few years back — was teaching military personnel these techniques, and they'd be bending spoons in a single class. These things are learnable. We've simply buried them.
[2:08:00] Ether, the Information Field, and Non-Local Phenomena
Alec: I want to get into ether now — that's why I had this hat made. When it comes to theoretical and quantum physics, I acknowledge that we can glean useful information from those fields, but really they're pointing back to things esoteric and occult traditions have been describing for thousands of years. What quantum physics might call dark matter or the quantum field, I prefer to contextualize as ether. When you put the ether back in, all these seemingly paranormal phenomena — Eileen's remote tuning sessions, Veda Austin's water intention work, groups meditating to lower crime rates — suddenly make sense. There's an information field we're all swimming in that we can access and transmit through. I'd love to hear you go deeper on that.
Brendan: A useful analogy: think of us as fish in a fish tank, and the water between us is the etheric medium. It's a real connecting principle, not a material substance — it's actually the source of material substance, a virtual substrate. The two fish in the tank can't see the water, but it's there, and it's the thing that allows them to exist and potentially to communicate. From a theoretical quantum perspective there's no sending and receiving per se — it's a non-local correlation, instantaneous. But from an esoteric perspective there are different layers and densities of the ether, and that's usually not a concept the people who popularize these ideas work with.
What Leadbeater and Annie Besant did — these Victorian-era theosophist clairvoyants — was investigate what atomic and subatomic matter actually was at its foundation, using clairvoyant vision. The siddhi involved is basically the power of magnification — the ability to reduce your consciousness to an incredibly tiny scale to perceive things at the micro and submicro level. What they found at the roots of matter was not the little billiard-ball particles of Newtonian science, but these tiny, unbelievably small vortices — essentially mini tornadoes spinning at extraordinary speeds in the etheric medium. And what's at the center of a vortex? Nothing. Emptiness. The roots of matter is actually emptiness. Einstein was onto this too — he eventually came back around to the ether as a necessary concept, stating that you can't get along without it in theoretical physics because you need some continuous field substrate to account for the existence of what we call the material world.
So all matter at the atomic and subatomic level is just the formation and rearrangement of these vortex points — nodes of rotation in the etheric field. Geometric distortions in the field. That's where all sacred geometry comes from. It's emptiness rearranging itself into patterns, and at sufficient scale the human body can detect the frequency waves being put out and interprets them as solid matter — but they're not. It's spinning emptiness.
Alec: And that's the connection to non-local phenomena — ether as the medium through which intention transmits.
Brendan: Exactly. All of that non-local phenomena — the water intention experiments, the different types of psi tests, remote viewing — has been done hundreds of thousands of times and the results are unequivocal. The mind can influence things at a distance. Part of the challenge is we're used to thinking in an atomized, reductionist way — I'm over here, you're over there. The ether helps people move into a broader paradigm, because now there's something connecting us. If you go back to the root of the mystery, the heart of creation, everything is a projection of the one mind. Everything is inextricably linked because it's essentially the same thing. You're a manifestation of the same source I'm a manifestation of — you're the version called Alec, I'm the version called Brendan. It's all the same thing imagining itself in different ways.
What this means for intention is interesting. My Divine Trinity, as I'd call it — consciousness, information, and meaning — and you can't talk about one without invoking the others. If you're conscious, there's meaning present. If you have a sense of meaning, you have to be conscious to have it. Information ties in because information means something. The etheric medium facilitates the instantaneous transmission of an intention. Your wife can sense when you're coming home, but the guy down the street who's also connected to you doesn't know, because it means nothing to him. Meaning is at the core. Intention and meaning determine what gets transmitted and received.
[2:28:00] Co-Creation, the Truth Community, and the Maharishi Effect
Alec: This makes me so fired up, because right now with everything going on politically — what I'll call a selection season — there are so many people in the truth community so obsessively focused on what "they" are doing, perpetually afraid. I genuinely believe that if even just the relatively small number of people who comprise the truth and holistic health communities understood what we're talking about and took it to heart, we could transform this reality. That's all it would take.
Brendan: That's right, and it is just a choice. What gets in the way is people's conditioning and dogmatism. But we know from the Maharishi experiments — chapter eleven in my book, if I recall correctly — that it only takes the square root of one percent of a population, sitting in coherence with a common intention, to measurably reduce crime across an entire city. The square root of one percent of Austin could basically eliminate crime for as long as they sat and meditated. The effect even precedes the beginning of the experiment in some cases, which is remarkable in itself. The power that we have collectively is enormous, which is why memes like the soul trap gaining momentum are so unhelpful. Millions of people pumping psychic energy into that belief system are actively co-creating more of what they fear. Most of what happens even at the conspiracy level is unconsciously driven — people going through the motions, not knowing any better, limited perspective. But the effect is real.
[2:35:00] Psychosomatic Reality and the Power of Belief
Alec: This connects to something you wrote about in the book — the man with the experimental cancer drug.
Brendan: Roy Tass covers this case in his book. This man had severe cancer, was given an experimental drug, and was full of hope and optimism. His tumors started shrinking and essentially disappearing throughout his body. Then he found out that actually the drug wasn't as effective as initially believed. Overnight his cancer returned worse than before. The doctors realized what was happening — the information they'd initially given him was incorrect, and he was experiencing placebo and nocebo effects. So they gave him a saline solution and told him it was a new improved version. His cancer essentially disappeared again, close to a cure. Then he heard something on TV saying the experimental drug was a bust. Shortly after, his cancer came back and he died. That is placebo and nocebo in sequence in a single person. He was a one-man proof. And it happened entirely because of belief. If a young Indonesian girl can make a grove of olive trees disappear in broad daylight, do you think your beliefs and feelings might have some influence on your own body?
[2:45:00] New Age Traps, Fundamentalism, and Finding Your Center
Alec: I want to touch on the trend of people waking up, dipping their toes into New Age ideas, going down some absolutely nonsensical rabbit holes within that space, and then swinging back hard toward fundamentalist Christianity. What do you make of that pattern?
Brendan: On an individual level, someone following that pattern doesn't know who they are. They don't have a center. They're constantly looking for an external solution, an external anchor. You're susceptible to just about anything when you've abandoned yourself. On a sociological level, we're in a time of profound uncertainty and transition. The established order is falling apart, people don't know what's coming next, they're traumatized and afraid — for completely valid reasons, I want to be clear. A lot of people find their way to Christ through hitting absolute rock bottom. And on an archetypal level, that's completely understandable. The Rescuer archetype is powerfully embedded in the psyche. Jesus embodies it to the nth degree in salvationist theology — he is literally the rescuer of humanity. If someone's sufficiently broken down, the inner wounded child will be drawn to that surrogate parent figure. Given that the religious backdrop for most of the English-speaking world we're exposed to is Christianity, of course that's where many end up. It's an understandable trauma response.
But then there's the informational dimension. Every belief system exists as a thought form in the thought-form layers of the astral plane and, if there's intellectual content, at the mental level as well. If you put millions of people together who share the same belief and visualize the same heaven or the same throne of God, they create that experience. The belief system becomes an experiential reality you can actually visit — and Monroe, Moen, Jurgen Ziewe, and others have all gone and encountered heaven realms made by Christians in the afterlife. But more than that, a belief system fed by that much collective emotion over centuries is not merely an idea. At the quantum field level, the information system, you have something operating like an entity — an artificial elemental of considerable power to influence. This is where the only valid virus exists: in the mind. A mind virus. And like any virus, its survival depends on propagating to the next mind, and the next. Its basic survival drive is to continue existing, which means finding new hosts. People who don't have their center, who are vulnerable and uninformed in certain ways, are susceptible. The information systems in the field — what Vadim Zeland in Reality Transurfing calls the alternative space — are constantly looking for a home in somebody's mind.
[3:05:00] Why Are We Here?
Alec: The last question I have for you is a big one. Why are we here? What's the point?
Brendan: The mystics and esotericists call the creator the great mystery, and from that level, who the hell knows. You're not supposed to know — not completely. But as far as I can tell, we are the result of something like this: the creator doesn't have free will in any meaningful sense. It has to create. It has to create infinitely. Every potentiality has to be manifest somewhere and experienced somewhere, and the mystery of its own creations has to be explored and experienced, which means yet more creations. The physical universe esoterically is actually the result of the preceding non-physical worlds — the so-called fallen world is the end product of a long chain of proceeding non-physical levels.
Joseph Campbell talks about a statue he encountered from an Eastern culture of a weeping god or goddess. And it makes sense if you think about it. The creator created everything — all the suffering, all the joy, the entire spectrum. And it knows, as it watches the creation, that its participants — the holographic fragments and projections of itself — are going to suffer in order to have the experience. So creation is no longer a mystery. On that level, the creator had to create and had no choice, and created a free will experience for everybody — which is somewhat ironic, because at that level of primordial being there is no choice about it whatsoever.
What else would you do if you were an infinite being existing everywhere, unable to go anywhere? You'd want to create fragmented versions of yourself that forget who and what they are, so that you can interact with them. So that the full depth of what you are becomes experiential rather than just theoretical. Bliss without its opposite has no depth. The vast Infinity needs the experience of smallness, of forgetting, of suffering and recovery, to know itself fully. We're not supposed to be stuck in blissful stagnation indefinitely. The esoteric traditions have concepts of time and creation so vast they make simulation theory look like kindergarten — cycles of manifestation and unmanifestation, the out-breath and in-breath of existence, going on eternally, because how could they not? At the level of the creator, there is no time whatsoever. I don't see how it has any choice other than to create, and it has to create the experience of lessness because it already is the fullness. These tiny little creations are its children. It watches with compassion, knowing what they'll go through, because it had no other option than to send them out into the world.
[3:20:00] Evolve Yourself
Alec: I want to give you a moment to touch on your Evolve Yourself program, which is linked in the show notes.
Brendan: This will probably be the last year I take new people on. It's not a program in the conventional sense — there's no homework, no assignments. It's transformationally oriented. We work with sound, and there are three core initiatory experiences, each spaced out over a timeline, which is explained in the free webinar people can access through the link. It's a form of sound healing with a definite evolutionary thrust to it. I used it on myself a long time ago and it helped me move my life in the right direction. It addresses the physical, the non-physical, the astral, the mental, and the spiritual levels — a comprehensive holistic modality that initiates a process in the body running on its own intelligence. The webinar goes into considerably more detail. If anyone is looking for that kind of experience, check it out.
Alec: Thank you so much for joining me, Brendan. This was such a fantastic conversation.
Brendan: It's been amazing. Thank you for having me.