Typical Skeptic Podcast
Mapping Consciousness: The Architecture of the Afterlife
Brendan joins Rob Kalil on Typical Skeptic Podcast to explore what happens to consciousness beyond the physical body, and whether the architecture of the afterlife can be mapped. The conversation covers consciousness beyond the brain, multidimensional reality, altered states, and where ancient mystical concepts are beginning to meet modern consciousness research.
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[1:37] Introduction
Rob: Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Typical Skeptic Podcast. I'm really excited about my guest today. He's a friend of Sol Luckman, so if you guys have seen Sol on my show — I have with me Brendan Murphy, and he's a consciousness researcher. What happens when consciousness goes beyond the physical body, and can we actually begin to map the afterlife? Today on the Typical Skeptic Podcast I welcome Brendan D. Murphy, consciousness researcher and author of The Grand Illusion, for a deep dive into the nature of reality. Brendan's work explores consciousness, metaphysics, the nature of reality itself, altered states, and the evidence suggesting that our everyday perception represents only a fraction of a much larger reality. His work has received praise from consciousness researcher and author Anthony Peake and Sol Luckman. We'll explore questions surrounding life after death, consciousness beyond the brain, multidimensional reality, altered states, the structure of the afterlife, and whether ancient mystical concepts are beginning to intersect with modern consciousness research. I'm bringing him to the stage now and I'm really excited about this. Brendan, thanks so much for coming on.
Brendan: Good to be here, man. Thank you.
Rob: And congratulations on your book. You're the author of the book The Grand Illusion, one and two, right?
Brendan: Yeah. I'm just finishing up number two. Hopefully it'll be out really shortly.
[2:57] How Brendan Began Questioning Reality
Rob: Wow. So what made you start questioning your reality? Take us into it a little bit.
Brendan: So, the origin story.
Rob: Yeah.
Brendan: As a kid, I guess, and as a teenager as well, I was really interested in — well, not actively, but just curious about the paranormal and weird stuff, the unexplained. I was always drawn to that. So I watched all those types of shows, the unexplained mystery type shows and The X-Files and all that sort of thing. I have a younger brother who's three years younger than me, and if we fast forward a little bit to my awakening moment, he had come home from school one day after having a guest at the school who was a young entrepreneur giving a talk. He was supposed to be talking about business, but he kept going off topic onto this amazing book that he'd read about the nature of reality, and my brother thought that I might be interested in this book. Long story short, six months later I went and read it and it just absolutely blew my mind. My sort of vague ideas about reality and how it all works, just from the mainstream scientific worldview and then a little bit of religious programming off to the side — all that stuff was just blown to pieces. That book was Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe, which a lot of people know about.
Rob: Yeah.
Brendan: So that lit the fire for me. That triggered the curiosity, and shortly after that I started having my first experiences with altered states. I had an experience lying on my bed waiting to go to sleep one night where suddenly it was like someone flipped a switch and I was infinite consciousness. That grounded the conceptual framework that Talbot had laid out in his book, the premise of which was that consciousness is the ground of existence. So I experienced that firsthand, and from there I took up meditating, and so on and so forth. So that was the origin story.
[5:06] Leaving Australia for Mexico
Rob: Wow, that's awesome. It sounds like you're either British or Australian — I'm guessing Australian — and you moved to Mexico. Did you go there to explore the further mysteries of reality?
Brendan: [section omitted] We left Australia at that point when it was getting really batty.
Rob: Yeah, it was really crazy, right? So do you like Mexico?
Brendan: Yeah, man. We've only lived in two different places in Mexico. I've been a few other places, but it's great. The people are really warm and welcoming and friendly. They bring you in like you're family. It's fantastic.
[5:51] Book One: The Grand Illusion
Rob: That's awesome, man. Hell yeah. Well, okay, so take us into your book, The Grand Illusion, because if you're being praised by Anthony Peake and Sol Luckman, this book has to be pretty dynamite. Does it get into the Soul Trap? Is that what we're looking at here?
Brendan: I get into that in book two.
Rob: Okay. So take us through book one. What can we expect? I'm excited about this.
Brendan: Well, okay. That was published at the end of 2012, so it's been a while since I've been in the material, but it's basically a post-materialist thesis of what the nature of reality is. What motivated me or drove me to this line of work was obviously Talbot's book, and then my experiences with infinite consciousness, and then wanting to convey that and share that with people, and do so from as many different interesting angles as possible. I kind of wrote a version of — it was like The Holographic Universe version 2.0, twenty years later. Maybe arguably even more fringe than Talbot. But that was the gist of it: to investigate the nature of reality. It was a little bit more based in the parapsychological and paranormal. I still got into a little bit of the afterlife stuff, definitely the mysticism, all that sort of thing, but it's much more one foot in this world, one foot in the next world, whereas book two is both feet firmly in the next world.
[7:20] Mapping Altered States of Consciousness
Rob: Yeah, that's awesome. And when you say we can map consciousness, what exactly are we mapping, would you say?
Brendan: Yeah, so essentially I'm mapping altered states of consciousness into a kind of taxonomy of consciousness. So really just different states of mind, if you like, or states that even go beyond what we call mind. That's a short answer to that question, if that makes sense.
Rob: Yeah. And you've had your own altered state experiences, like with psychedelics, I'm guessing. Is that what made you really start wanting to question your reality and map consciousness?
Brendan: So no, my first one — I just touched on it briefly. I was just lying in bed waiting to go to sleep one night. I think I was still twenty years old at the time. This was not long after reading Talbot's book. And I think some part of me was reaching out for validation or verification of this, reaching out into the beyond. All I can say is instantaneously I was just a field of infinite consciousness. It was kind of like the classic Atman–Brahman experience, almost void-like. And so that was just spontaneous. People tend to be kind of incredulous when I tell them that, because they're like, "What? No substances involved, no meditation, none of that?" And I don't know what to say other than that was just how that first one happened. Then I took up meditation after that and I did that quite a lot for a couple of years, so I had further experiences along those lines. I've got to say, I've done a variety of different substances in ceremonial settings or what have you, and my most powerful experiences have always been without substances.
[9:05] The Holographic Universe, DMT and the Matrix Code
Rob: Yeah, that's awesome, dude. That's really cool. And I want to tell you, Michael Talbot's book motivated me too. I used to follow this guy named Gerald Clark, before Jason Breshears came out with Archaix. There was this guy Gerald Clark — he died — and he was talking about the Anunnaki, but he wouldn't just talk about the Anunnaki. He would talk about conspiracies and the holographic nature of reality, and he was the first one that pointed me to Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe. That book blew me away. It really changed my perception. And that, and a DMT experience. So I'll tell you, I had a DMT experience, and I know you said a lot of your experiences came without drugs. Well, mine happened with. What happened was my audience, my fans, sent me a DMT pen, so I was like, I'm going to try it, because I always wanted to try it. I was taking a couple of puff hits every other day or whatever, and I would go into this altered state, and then as I'd be coming off of it, everything on my desk would look holographic, you know what I mean? To me it seems like we're in a biological universe but with a simulated overlay — like the base of this reality is a simulation or a code or something like that. I think that's where we get the Matrix coding, the ones and zeros, binary code. I don't know. What do you think about what I just said?
Brendan: Yeah, I get it. I agree. And it's funny, because I've heard this report come up over and over from people who have had — it might be MDMA, maybe also DMT, don't quote me on that — people who were saying, "Yeah, on this drug, while I was high, I literally saw the Matrix code." And I'm like, okay, so this is becoming a universal experience. And there's a guy actually doing some really interesting research into this code idea, from a slightly different angle. I forget his name now, but they've been looking at this using laser light, and they're finding people staring at where the laser is are seeing this code, and different people see the same exact code. It's invariant. So that's a very interesting thing. That suggests to me that there is some kind of, if you like, underlying informational substructure that is, in a sense, an objectively real thing — the underlying code of the hologram, so to speak.
And like what you were saying about your DMT stuff — someone in a DMT trial with Rick Strassman mentioned that as they were coming out of it, I think it was a high dose, back into so-called physical reality, they realised they had the understanding they were creating it as they were coming back. They were literally creating the holographic physical realm, and they felt like everybody in it, the people running the trial and all this, were their children. They really felt that was so real in that moment. They were creating it as they were coming back into it.
[12:20] What Lies Beyond the Hologram
Rob: So what do you think about where we're at outside of this? Do you think we exist outside of this matrix? Do you think we're in pods somewhere and we're all designing this as we go, or do you think there are coders to the simulation and we're just code or something like that? What do you think lies beyond this?
Brendan: So what I have in book two is, as I said, a taxonomy of altered states of consciousness. It's kind of like a vertical structure, right? You start here in the physical layer and then you go up, and I utilise the terminology and some of the concepts of some of the esoteric schools. I use the etheric and the astral and the mental and the causal, and then we get up to the Buddhic and the Atmic. As you ascend, it becomes less representational, less form-based, and more and more abstract, until you hit the point of total and utter non-duality and pure, raw beingness. As you get up to those layers, those are the layers that to me answer the question of what are we? What creates the hologram? And it's all just altered states of consciousness. If you take the starting point of the infinite or the absolute — total and utter non-duality, non-executing, nothing happens, just pure beingness — how do we end up downstream in physical reality? It's essentially a very dramatic shift in the state of consciousness, where the only available option, when you start with pure non-duality, is to dream duality into existence. So in a sense I look at physical reality as an altered state of consciousness as well. That's where the hologram comes from.
Rob: That's amazing. Holy [expletive]. So we're creating this as we go, kind of?
Brendan: 100%.
[14:16] Physical Reality as a Dream
Rob: Wow. Do you think we even create the negative experiences, and all the bad stuff that happens? Do you think that's part of the game here or something?
Brendan: Yeah. I always use the analogy of a dream. We've all had dreams at some point — I think most of us at least have a vague memory of some dream. And it's the same principle as going into a dream at night when you're sleeping. You don't have to try to create it. It just happens, it just exists. When we're in the dream, it seems really real. It's this amazing, very convincing, immersive holographic experience, and you've got people or entities, beings, intelligences, and all of it is created completely automatically and unconsciously by you. And I'm just saying, well, this is the same thing on a larger scale, a more transpersonal scale.
[15:10] Is the Brain a Receiver for Consciousness?
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. So what do you think consciousness actually is? Do you think the brain's a receiver for consciousness, too?
Brendan: Yeah, I can't make sense of it any other way. The human body and the brain are just a local coalescing of the field of potentiality into something that's —
Rob: Oh, what?
Brendan: Sorry.
Rob: Oh, good. Sorry.
Brendan: No worries. So where were we?
Rob: We were talking about what consciousness is, and is our brain like a receiver for it, you know?
Brendan: Yeah. I think that's what comes out of the consciousness research, the parapsychology, and all these different fields. Dozens and dozens of different fields all dovetail into this same conclusion: that consciousness is the foundational base reality — transpersonal, non-local — and then the brain is just something that tunes into a little localised rendering of that, a personal rendering of reality.
[16:26] Magic and Manifestation
Rob: Yeah. I haven't read your book yet, but I plan on it. I was wondering about magic and manifesting, and why these things seem to work. People can do magic with a K — not just rabbit-in-the-hat magic, but ceremonial magic or whatever, white magic, not dark magic. I mean, dark magic seems to work for people that do it too. But white magic, and then manifestation techniques, affirmations, subliminals. Do you think this is because we can train our brain to do things? What's your opinion on that?
Brendan: Yeah, totally. If you can focus your attention and intention in a laser-like way, and create a resonance with whatever your target experience might be, you can absolutely draw that to you, or you can reach the mind out into external reality and phase-lock it to something else.
[17:27] What Is the Grand Illusion?
Rob: That's cool. So what is the grand illusion in your work? Would you say it's the fact that we are physical and we're living in a non-physical universe?
Brendan: Yeah, I would say you've kind of nailed that. My initial intention with that was, well, wow, this is this amazing holographic dreamscape that we're in. Kind of real, but also not kind of real — this amazing grand illusion. And I figured if I went with that title, I could use it in lots of different ways in the future.
[17:59] The Soul Trap and the Being of Light
Rob: I love that. And then you said in book two you get into the Soul Trap a little bit. What are your feelings on that?
Brendan: Yeah, it's one of those things that's such a huge can of worms, and it's got a lot of emotional charge around that subject. It's chapter nine, the last chapter of the book, and one of the reasons that I've put it at the back of the book is because you need a lot of context in the lead-up to tackling that sort of stuff. There are certain principles that people need to have in place to actually start making sense of that. It's very in-depth and multi-layered, so I can touch on points of it in an interview, but I can't replicate the methodical, structured approach that's in the written form in the book.
But one of the key things that we have to realise is that a lot of this stuff is coming from people in altered states — certain OBE experiences or NDEs, maybe even DMT or whatever — and they have this encounter with a being of light, or some being who approaches them and says, "Hey, it's not your time. You've got to go back into your body," or whatever. And people are like, "No, I don't want to. I want to stay here. I'm done with that." And they interpret — and again, the key word is interpret — this figure as being some kind of external, autonomous entity that is part of some larger superstructure of control and manipulation.
One of the issues with that is that these are generally low-level, early interface states. The mind is rendering an environment around it as a way to try to stabilise itself, because there's no more physical anchorage point. We're no longer interpreting the physical data from the world, the light reaching our eyes — that's all gone. So with no physical body, the mind is on its own in the field of consciousness, and it has to orient itself. And it does that, in certain instances, to a large extent automatically, by conjuring entities and beings. It continues to orient itself according to the concepts that people have had during life, the level of knowledge or the ideas that they've come across, and that gets projected as the external reality.
What a lot of people simply don't talk about is the fact that these beings and entities are largely — I'm not going to say 100%, because there are notable exceptions, but largely — unconscious projections of the mind. They're tools, they're thought-form entities. It could be that the ego structure, again because it has to render the environment around it to orient itself, is doing so with beings, and it's narrativising the whole event: "Oh, well, this happened, then this happened, and this being had a conversation with me. They tried to persuade me to go back. I think it was a deceptive archon trying to keep me in the Soul Trap." All this kind of thing. So there are a few initial thoughts for you. I could go off on a lot of different tangents there, but maybe I'll let you jump in.
[21:06] The Architecture of the Afterlife
Rob: No, that's amazing. And do you believe there's an architecture to the afterlife?
Brendan: Yeah, there is, in a sense. It's very tempting to talk about it like it's geographical — locations in space and time that we could walk to or drive to or fly to — but really it's just operational contexts of consciousness. Consciousness is rendering different environments, and some of them are individual, more solipsistic, solo environments, and some of them are more collective group environments. As you go up the architecture, my tiered structure, it gets more abstract, and it gets more integrated as well. We can go up into the astral and mental planes, where we have what the Newton corpus refers to as soul groups or soul clusters. We can go up higher into the causal and upper causal realms, where we have what some people call the Oversoul architecture, which is, if you like, the part of you or the version of you that integrates all of the different personalities that you've ever been, across time. That Oversoul is the architect, hypervisor, supervisor of the whole endeavour.
Up above that we approach the transpersonal layers, which are Buddhi and Atma, and that's where people start to have experiences that are extremely blissful. That's actually also critical in the architecture and the framework I've got in book two, in many respects, including relating to the Soul Trap. Because when you get up to the transpersonal, where the lower mind effectively stops operating, what people are finding — and this has been reported across centuries and different sources — is that there's a loss of what we are accustomed to in terms of free will and agency at these higher levels, because the lower mind essentially stops functioning there. It's not operational there.
So you have a structure where now, at the Buddhic level — very elevated, very blissful, luminous — you hear reports like, "Everybody was there, everybody who has ever lived, and we were all there in this amazing unity bliss, just blissed out, and I didn't want to leave." Obviously every person who's ever said that has left, because they've come back to their bodies and given us that report. So there's a non-agentive quality to that tier, which I think also plays into these reports of the Soul Trap, which gets rendered because the mind doesn't operate up there. If there is this contact, what the lower mind then has to do sometimes is fill those gaps and try to make sense of something that it can't really parse properly. Those contacts with the really rarefied states of mind don't really qualify as episodic memory. It's not like memories of "I got up this morning and I brushed my teeth and I had breakfast, and this happened and that happened." It's not like that.
So there's almost a translational gap, and a translational error that happens between these very high-level states and the low-level states of the lower mind, which is having to make sense of something that it really doesn't grasp. And that's where we get people filling in the gaps. I'm not saying it's dishonesty, or even intentional at all. What the mind does is it tries to fill these gaps by creating some kind of narrative to account for, well, how did I go from this heavenly realm where I didn't want to leave into this lower state of earth, where I don't particularly want to be?
Rob: So we fill the gaps with —
Brendan: Archons, and beings of light telling us we've got to go back, and this and that. But really there's a translation error happening.
[24:55] Are the Archons Thought Forms?
Rob: Yeah, that's cool. So do you think the archons are thought forms that we create? Or are the archons a separate entity of the matrix itself, would you say?
Brendan: I characterise them in a few different ways in the book, because I think it needs to be approached from a few different angles. One of them is that they are essentially an emergent phenomenon within the collective unconscious or collective consciousness field. So something that has happened as a projection of the human mind or the human soul. And essentially, when you do that, these entities that emerge from the unconscious can seem very autonomous. They can seem like they're completely independent intelligences. Carl Jung even acknowledged this many years ago. The Tibetan Book of the Dead also tries to coach people through the death process by stabilising them and saying, "Don't worry about the appearances and the visions and the wrathful deities and the peaceful deities. Ignore that. Those are all emerging from your own mind. Don't get distracted by that stuff." So in a sense I'm not really saying anything that's particularly new. Is that making sense so far?
Rob: Yeah, it does.
[26:12] Why Near-Death Experiences Share Patterns
Rob: Let me see here. Near-death experiences often describe tunnels, beings of light, deceased relatives, life reviews, and incredibly vivid environments. Why do you think certain patterns repeat across experiences, if you had to guess?
Brendan: Yeah. Across centuries and millennia we do have a lot of repetition, and I think it's really because there are certain structural processes that happen in consciousness that are essentially invariant. When someone's body dies, that's a universal event all around the world through all time. The human body dies, and then consciousness — if we accept that it can exist without the brain — then we have to acknowledge, well, okay, it's going through some kind of transitional process, and it has to orient itself, stabilise itself, and get familiar with its new surroundings, so to speak. So that aspect of it is universal. But what happens is people, through their different cultural experiences and life experience, essentially overlay that imagery, those ideas — the religious figures, the saviours and heroes or whatever — onto the field of consciousness, and it becomes the way that the interface manifests to their minds. The peaceful and wrathful deities were what the Tibetans were talking about, and now we've got deities and we've got Jesus and we've got aliens and we've got all sorts. That becomes available, and virtually all of it emerges from the unconscious.
[27:52] Shared Realms and Personal Afterlives
Rob: That's interesting. And could the afterlife be an objective realm that exists independently of us, or does consciousness participate in creating what it experiences there, would you say?
Brendan: Yeah, it's actually kind of both. There are environments that are essentially group or consensus environments. You could still go and visit Egyptian afterlife realms, and modern NDE reports do contain that kind of thing. Mellen-Thomas Benedict is a pretty well-known NDEr, and he had this massive tour of all these different afterlife realms during his NDE. He went through some Christian heavens and found them very boring and childlike. He went through a whole variety of them, including the Egyptian ones, which he found very fascinating and interesting. So these are all rendered consciousness constructs, but they're quite stable as well, and they can persist for a long, long time. Even if there's not a lot of energy being put into them now, if there has been a lot of energy put into them, they can hang around for a long time.
Rob: So does that mean two people could die and enter radically different realities based on their beliefs or expectations or state of consciousness?
Brendan: Yeah, 100%. Because even though there are certain things that the death process has in common from one person to the next, your belief system and my belief system, or my expectations and your expectations, can be radically different, and so we end up in a radically different experience. It may be possible that family members from the same family who die in an accident of some sort initially do not experience themselves together, and it may be the case that they're not together for some time. They might find each other later on. But yes, the individual mind dictates to a large extent how that process unfolds initially.
[29:49] Entities as Thought-Form Projections
Rob: I don't know if you tackled the extraterrestrial concept in your book, or the concept of entities and stuff like that, but what are your thoughts on some of the entities that interact with us, or that interact with experiencers — from ETs to shadow people and demons and all that? Would you say they're all different, or do you have an opinion on that?
Brendan: I like to assess things on a case-by-case basis, so I'm not just making blanket assumptions. But what I've found doing the work that I've been doing is that a lot of this stuff is essentially thought-form projection, and it can become very autonomous or independently operating, or at least look like it. So it becomes hard to tell. Any time somebody has a thought, that thought exists on an electrical level in the brain, but it also exists on the astral level as a thought form, and maybe on the mental level at the same time as a completely different thought form. So if you have a thought of hostility towards somebody, that can manifest in those subtle planes as an entity — maybe a horrible monstrous entity, or a demon, or an alien-type figure, or a zombie — and it can then be unconsciously, and I stress unconsciously, projected towards the person who you have those feelings for. And if they're psychic or sensitive, they might actually perceive that they are under attack by this entity, which in reality is just an unconsciously projected thought form. I think that accounts for a massive amount of what goes on — these unconsciously projected thought forms — and it just doesn't get discussed enough.
[31:36] Attachments and Resonance
Rob: I find that fascinating, because I'm sensitive, and I feel like I pick up entities around people. If I'm around someone and they have entities, I'll pick up their entities. I'm starting to learn that, because I've had an ongoing issue with attachments or whatever, and I'm trying to figure out what they are, what it was. And I'm wondering if a lot of it's thought forms — somebody has negative thought forms, they manifest an entity, and then it projects onto someone else that's sensitive, like you said. What do you think?
Brendan: Yeah, I think so. And I would look at what it is in your system that might be creating the resonance conditions for something to phase-lock with you and become an attachment. I don't know you personally on a deep level at all. I'm just saying, if it was me, I'd be going, okay, if I'm getting these attachments happening, what are the internal resonance conditions that I'm carrying with me that might correlate to this other person and their internal conditions, and the thought forms that they are unconsciously shedding, this energy that's coming off them? Where am I creating a vulnerability or an entry point for that?
Rob: Yeah. Little Johnny says, "I would recommend the Kachina entities. They are very helpful if you want support." I've never heard of that before. Have you heard of this?
Brendan: It rings a bell, actually, but it's not something I know a lot about.
[33:08] What Happens to Personal Identity After Death
Rob: Okay. So what happens to our personal identity after death? Does Rob remain Rob, or does the individual entity merge into a larger consciousness field?
Brendan: To me, I think it's largely a matter of what Rob's internal content really is psychologically. What does he want? What is he attached to? What unresolved emotions is he carrying? What unfinished business does he feel he has in the earth realm? Or is Rob a very philosophical, high-minded kind of guy, like Plotinus from the third century, who just never thought about anything except for the One, the infinite, the absolute? Someone like Plotinus is most likely going straight back to non-duality to hang out there. Whereas most people are not like that. They're not disposed that way. So they're going to be largely carrying their personality into the afterlife realms. They'll probably experience what a lot of the regression clients of Michael Newton and these other regression therapists have brought to us in terms of that continuity of personality through the astral and mental planes — the reunion with family, the reunion with soul clusters. And there's no right or wrong in any of it, really. It's just a matter of that internal makeup. What do people prefer to experience? It's like choose your own adventure. Where do you want to go next?
[34:49] Reincarnation and the Oversoul
Rob: That's a good point. I love that. And how does reincarnation fit into your model? Do we all reincarnate, would you say?
Brendan: Yeah, it's interesting. It's very hard to talk about reincarnation because time, as you would know, isn't really what it seems to be. So reincarnation looks different depending on the level of consciousness that you're addressing it from, whichever level or tier you're looking at in my structure. At the lower levels, where we still have that personality continuity, like the astral and mental planes, it tends to look pretty linear. We have lots of reports of people leaving their body and immediately looking around: okay, how do I get back into a new body as quickly as possible? And if you don't do that, if you don't let those attachments take you over, you can go a little deeper into the post-mortem integration process and have those reunions with the soul cluster, the soul group. You can go up into the slightly more abstract states of consciousness and perhaps make contact with the Oversoul entity, which is a completely different paradigm.
They say that the astral planes are very different to physical, and the mental planes are even more different, to the point where it's almost impossible to even talk about them. At the highest reaches of the Manasic corridor, or the causal corridor, you have a very rarefied, integrated state of consciousness where the Oversoul intelligence operates from. At that level, reincarnation doesn't exist in the sense that time is very simultaneous. All these different personalities are here, all networked into this overarching, unifying intelligence. And it can essentially design a new personality and go, "Hey, maybe I want to have an experience in my database from thirteenth-century France as a Cathar. So I'm going to design a few basic aspects of personality here, and I'm going to inject that into the video game in thirteenth-century France, and we're going to have a little lifetime there." But at that level it can also be seen as everything happening simultaneously as well. So it depends where you answer the question from.
[37:20] Merging with the Oversoul
Rob: That's a really good point. And if we can merge with the Oversoul, which you said is the highest level of consciousness, what does that even look like, do you think?
Brendan: It's much less commonly reported than the lower levels. Robert Monroe went into it in some detail. The Seth Speaks book touches on it. Bruce Moen touched on it. It's a very non-form-based, non-representational state of very expanded, very fluid, open, integrated consciousness. It's very abstract. People talk about feeling themselves merging into other people, other consciousness units, in a very fluid, abstract way. And at that level there's no more lower-mind symbolism. There's no more of this representational, indirect knowing. It becomes very direct, immediate. You become the thing that you observe, so to speak. Your perception is now actually through identification, if that makes sense.
But that's not the so-called highest level of consciousness. It's still operating with the highest reaches of the Manasic principle — the mind or soul principle, the human soul principle. If you take it up a step and you merge the highest aspects of the human mind principle with the Buddhic principle, in this massively networked transpersonal layer, then you have a completely different state of consciousness, which is even more unified and more abstract. And that's where we start to actually lose our sense of individual agency and control, and that's partly, as I said before, where we derive some of the Soul Trap mythology from.
[39:15] Dream Realms, Comas and Parallel Lives
Rob: Wow, that's amazing. And when it comes to consciousness, can it exist simultaneously in multiple realities or incarnations? Do you think there are parallel realities — for example, the dream space? Do you believe the dream space is alternate realities? I do. I think it is, because I'll tell you my experiences. I haven't told you this yet, but I've told my audience, and I've been trying to figure out what it is. When I dream, I go to other realities. I'm gone for a long time. I'll be gone for five or six weeks at a time, but I've only slept five hours. So it seems like time isn't linear in these other realms or the dream realm. And it seems like that's another part of my consciousness existing in another realm or another world. A lot of times it's a bad life. It seems like my consciousness has shown me a bad life that I've had, or mistakes that I've made in other lives, because I always die in them. What do you think about what I just said?
Brendan: Yeah, I kind of agree with you. They're just different operational contexts for the mind and for consciousness to work in. I've got a few different tangents going. You reminded me also of this phenomenon of people who are put into medically induced comas, and some of them are reporting coming back having lived a lifetime — a parallel lifetime, an alternate version of themselves — in immense depth and detail. There was a French woman — I've got an article about this on my Substack — a nineteen-year-old French woman who was in a coma for roughly three weeks, I think, if memory serves me. But in the coma, with her body and brain effectively offline — that's the key — she lived seven years of this other lifetime. In this other lifetime she had a family. She had three children. She went through a very normal, day-in, day-out, time-based physical reality. And then when her brain and body came back online and she woke up from the coma, the medical staff had to explain to her, "You don't have children. That wasn't real." And she was devastated, because that was so absolutely convincingly real to her. She was devastated by the loss of her children, and she needed counselling and all this.
So the difference I've noticed over time, between a lot of the stuff that happens while our brains are still online and active, like in the dream space, versus the NDE realm, where they're largely offline, or what we could call clinically dead, is that we get a clearer signal in the offline mode than we do in the online mode. We get more mental interference and overlay, and a lot more Hollywood projection of aliens and all this kind of thing, in the brain-online dreamscapes. A lot of that I put under the banner of what I call the Astral Fantasia in the book, whereas the NDE stuff tends to filter most of that out and gives us, if you like, a cleaner signal, in a sense.
There were a couple of other things I wanted to add there. You reminded me also of sim theory — simulation theory has this idea that we might be running alternate versions of reality as the field of consciousness tries to look for the best possible outcomes. When it goes down one path — "Oh, I don't like how that turned out" — it kind of winds back and goes, "Okay, no, we won't go down that road. We'll try this instead." And so you get this alternate version of yourself living what we think of as a parallel life. Really, it's just the field of consciousness maybe trying to explore its best possible avenues.
[43:16] Where the Research Goes Next
Rob: I love that. This has been a fascinating conversation. We're going to have to do a part two. I have a lot more questions for you; I'd love to do a part two if we could. But where has your research taken you now that you've written two books? Where would you like to see this go — not just your research, but the research of consciousness in general?
Brendan: Well, in what sense? What do you have in mind when you're asking me that?
Rob: As far as reincarnation, Soul Trap, altered states — exploring consciousness and finding out what really happens when we pass, and the nature of reality itself.
Brendan: Yeah, this is really where I'm at in book two. This is the focus of it. I go into that stuff in a lot of detail and a lot of depth, and I'm trying to cover it from different perspectives and make sense of things from different angles, in ways that I haven't seen people do, so that we can get a clearer, more logical picture of what's going on. I haven't seen anybody put forward what I would consider, just for example, a really robust, rigorous case for the Soul Trap idea. I can pull it apart top to bottom, no problem, but I haven't seen other people do it. So I wanted to do that. I wanted to fill that gap and that void. I'm doing this work at a forensic level of detail, and approaching it in a way that I haven't seen other people out there approach it.
Rob: Yeah, I love it. I think that's why people like Anthony Peake co-signed you, because I like the fact that you're not glued to one outcome either. It seems like you're exploring all outcomes, and you're saying, let's put the puzzle pieces where they fit and we can figure it out and go from there. Would that be a good metaphor for where you're going with this?
Brendan: 100%. The primary focus of book two is phenomenology. What are people actually experiencing? And if we have all these different experiences, how do we make sense of all of them? If this is contradictory with this, how do we make sense of that? Those points of tension are really what interests me a lot of the time, because I see this unresolved tension and nobody's answering the question. What happens if you can resolve that? That's what I've tried to do: provide a framework that actually helps us to do that across many different situations. Not just answering one question, but maybe a host of different questions, and finding, oh, okay, maybe there isn't really a paradox or a contradiction. It's just that we're not addressing it from the right layer of the consciousness architecture, so to speak.
[46:14] Ordering Book Two
Rob: Absolutely. Wow, this was fascinating. Is book two out now, and how can people get it?
Brendan: Yeah, people can put orders in through my website, which is brendandmurphy.com. Hopefully we can drop that in the show notes; I'll give you the exact link. We're taking orders now, and I'm planning on having it in people's hands as quickly as humanly possible.
Rob: I'm going to put this right here. brendandmurphy.com, guys — go check out his website. And thank you so much, Brendan, for coming today. This was awesome. I know we had to reschedule here and there, but this was fascinating. I love talking about the nature of reality. This is one of the reasons why I started my podcast. I just love talking about this.
Brendan: Yeah, man. Look, I'm happy to do it again any time, and I appreciate you having me on.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you, guys. I'll be live again today at 3:00 and 6:00. And thank you, Brendan. I'll see you guys later on.