[Luke] What led to your spiritual awakening? How did you get interested in the non-physical realm?

[Brendan] So I have a younger brother who's about three years younger than me. He was still in school. I had left school a couple of years earlier. And yeah, he came home from school one day saying, "Hey, we had this young entrepreneur in to talk about business, but he kept veering off topic and talking about other stuff and the nature of reality in this book that blew his mind," which was of quite a well-known book called The Holographic Universe, which I'm sure you've at least heard of, if not read. And a lot of people have. And so he tells me this guy was just going on and on about these tangents to do with this book that blew his mind. So I thought I should mention that to you. And so I sat on that for about six months. I didn't go and chase it up. I just kept it in the back of my mind. But eventually, you know, the, I had to scratch the itch and go and, go and read this thing. And that was kind of like the beginning of the rest of my life. You know? It was one of those watershed moments where it was like just, oh, like everything that I've sort of assumed about how things work, it was nonsense you know? Like, although, 'cause I was brought up with like a not in the home, but at school I went to an Anglican school, so I had a certain amount of like religious kind of indoctrination. But then that also competes with, you know, your scientific worldview that we're all indoctrinated into at the same time. So I had these weird sort of vague ideas about, you know, scientific, religious, how life works, and that all just got blown to pieces. And so that lit the fire. That was the thing that got me really curious.

[Luke] So it was coming from a place more of curiosity and open-mindedness than some sort of existential crisis? Yeah, I'd say the crises have followed.

[Brendan] That was, that was the... Yeah, it was just pure curiosity, absolutely. so that gave me like a conceptual idea of things, like a model or a framework, and then from there I started to have experiences like infinite consciousness, and so I was able to ground the concepts in lived experience, which was really... You know, that's the other piece of the puzzle.

[03:01]

[Luke] And what ways were you finding to start to explore consciousness after having that door opened by that book?

[Brendan] Yeah, I mean the first thing that happened was I was just, actually just lying in bed waiting to fall asleep and that was... It was like someone flicked a switch and I was just infinite. And so that Really? That was... I don't, yeah. I don't know why other than I think that the book, Talbot's book actually, because it opened my mind so much, that laid like the foundation for me to have those types of experiences. But yeah, people people sometimes seem incredulous that's how that happened. But it, you know, I was just lying in bed waiting to go to sleep. Next thing I know I'm infinite consciousness. I've got like the Atman-Brahman experience happening, like the point of awareness within the infinite sea of awareness and and you know, I realize that's kind of like, that's what things are. That's the nature of reality kind of thing. And so I took up meditation somewhere around that time. I started hanging out with the local spiritualist church. And so, you know, I was around a lot of psychic types and a lot of you know, different types of meditation, this kind of thing, that kind of thing. And I started meditating quite a lot you know, a few times a week and having other experiences along those lines, you know, a little bit more sustained and controlled and what, whatnot. But yeah, so for two years solidly I was meditating a lot, going to these you know, developmental things, hanging out with all the fun psychics and all that jazz. Yeah, that was kind of the... That was where a lot was happening for me at that point in time.

[Luke] I find both of those aspects of your story interesting, one being that you weren't in a place of, you know, abject suffering that led you to finally surrender and accept that there's more to reality than we typically believe, and also that you weren't exerting a lot of energy or will in order to facilitate that kind of awakening experience. That's, I think that's somewhat rare. You know? Usually it's like someone's working with psychedelics or doing some super intense yogic practice or breathwork and poof, you can pop through. I mean, I had a little one this morning just doing a little breathwork after I meditated, and I was like, "Oh, I love it here." And then I was like, "Oh, no, I got a podcast." Why invite the guy? But I mean, it, you know, it took a little bit of effort, and then poof, I popped through for a second. Yeah. It was like, "Oh, yeah, home."

[Brendan] Yeah, right.

[Luke] You know?

[Brendan] Exactly. Yeah.

[Luke] But I find your experience interesting. It's kind of like, um... I mean, there have been a few big ones, like Eckhart Tolle and some other people who were just normal people and sitting on a park bench one day, and all of a sudden, peow. Yeah. All illusion is shattered, and they're in a different frame of mind and being from that point on.

[Brendan] Yeah. I, yeah. I, that's all I can say is I would attribute it to the mind opening of that book kinda just laying the foundation. 'Cause I had the interest after that point. You know, like, some part of me was obviously kinda, like, reaching out. So yeah, that was just how that happened.

[06:03]

[Luke] What's the premise of that book? It's one that's, you know, kind of on the long-term to-do list like many others that I've heard about for so long, but I've not read it myself.

[Brendan] Essentially, I guess it's you know, a lot of what I thought were really interesting ways of looking at the question of... Well, like, essentially trying to demonstrate the truth of that mystical insight from as many different angles as possible. so, you know, investigating a lot of different fields of research and different disciplines you know, from parapsychology through to you know, psychical history and clairvoyant phenomena and all sorts. You know, all the different human abilities, so to speak, you know that connect into the basic kind of everything is fundamentally born of this infinite ground of consciousness. and so that was kind of the premise of the book. It's a post-materialist thesis, I guess you could say, on some level. and yeah, so book two leads off from where that one kind of stops.

[Luke] So kind of the intersection of psi phenomena and consciousness.

[Brendan] Yeah. Like I wanted to frame it within that larger kind of field rather than just being like, "Oh, isn't this interesting that somebody... We, you know, we have e-evidence," sorry, "of of psychic ability and, you know, someone sent a telepathic message to somebody. Isn't that fascinating?" Like, it is interesting, but, you know, there's a bigger picture.

[Luke] Right.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] Yeah, like how and why. Yeah.

[Brendan] And what's it all about?

[Luke] What was it like being in Australia throughout the, or however long you managed to last there, throughout the COVID era and What was it like to try and express your views during that time?

[Brendan] Yeah, it was, it was a very strange time to be an Australian at that point. I thought-- I think I thought we were further ahead than we really turned out to be. You know, like, I've had that conversation with Amy, my wife, a couple of times about how, you know, you think the consciousness level is, you know, here, but then something happens and you realize where people are actually at, and that was really actually very... I found that very disturbing because 99% of people did not ask any questions. They didn't they didn't investigate anything. Were the claims being made by the media and the government based in anything? none of that stuff. So I found it really infuriating as well. Like, I actually got I was quite angry for a while because of the way that everybody just kind of just went along with it, like, you know, in this sort of hypnotized state and you know, just watching life get engineered around us by people, by a network of people who, I mean, like you and I both know are psychopaths doing all of this. So I found that really infuriating. and it was, it was-- Yeah, not a lot of people were on the, on the same page there. It was, it was kind of like, you know people just wanted you to go along with it and kind of shut up. And even out in where we were living, kind of in, at that point in time, it was the capital almost of Australian, like, the alternative kind of scene. People who are, like, you know, questioning things, let's say, open to questioning things and, you know, very health conscious and that kind of stuff. uh, but even in those regions yeah, people fell over. They fell in line and it was really-- That's why we didn't last very long. You know, I think we were-- It was November 2021 when we left and it was only, like, a month or two before that when I was, we were in town, or Amy and I were in town, and and I was just sort of looking around going, "You know what? I don't know that Australia's the place for us anymore. I don't know that this is it." and then we packed up very quickly and left after that. so yeah, it was, it was-- There were a lot of things that led to us leaving Australia, but I feel like that was kind of the, like the last straw. It was kind of like, well, you know, cost of living's going the wrong way. Everything's, like, pushing us out, but this COVID thing is, like, a real litmus test of, you know, what things might be like if the poop hits the spinning blades in Australia.

[09:55]

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] You know, I don't wanna be stuck here on this island with, you know, people being, you know, in the way that they were functioning at that point in time. I think a lot of people have kind of woken up since then to some extent. But yeah, it was just a lot of things just kind of pushing us to try something else.

[Luke] I was kind of surprised by-- I mean, of course, I wasn't there, so I'm only seeing social media and a bit of the mainstream media. But I found it surprising that The Australians were as docile as they appeared to be or gullible maybe. You Right... in America, we kind of, we think of you know, Crocodile Dundee, right? I mean, we think of Aussies as, like, beer-chugging badasses, you know, like wilderness, outdoors people and obviously I'm grossly generalizing here and kind of being stereotypical but I don't know. I've always thought of Aussies as a bit tough, you know?

[Brendan] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Luke] I mean the, you know, former prison colony kind of idea and all of that. Yeah. And yeah, watching on social media and seeing people just kind of roll over was counterintuitive.

[Brendan] Yeah. It was-

[Luke] As with so much during that, you know, you know. I mean,

[Brendan] Nothing made any sense at that

[Luke] Point. I mean, same thing in California and even in the-

[Brendan] Right

[Luke] Kind of spiritual communities. it, the PSYOP really hit the boomers hard, you know. Yeah. Like the meditation centers and spiritual- Oh... teachers for whom I had previously had a lot of respect were, you know, ultimately turned out to be a bunch of bootlickers, you know? And I was like, "You guys were the counterculture of the '60s." Yeah. Yeah. Like, what happened? And I'm curious to get your take on that, but it seems to me, you know, looking back now with a little hindsight And you have a kind of a segment of the population that are geared toward compassion, and that-

[Brendan] Mm. That's it...

[Luke] The compassion was weaponized by the parasitic class who are highly sophisticated in their understanding of the human mind and the human ego and what drives us. So it's like, okay, you've been meditating for 40 years. You're a good person. You're kind. The kind thing to do is not kill granny. Yeah, exactly.

[Brendan] Yep. Yep. No one wants to be a granny killer.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] The... I think the same exact thing happened in Australia as well with especially that generation. And it was kind of this weird, twisted irony in that 'cause in the region we live in where a lot of those boomers who were pioneers in founding like, those towns and the culture, which was a counter- counterculture kind of a thing, you know, very health-oriented, very, like, eco-oriented, you know, like, forward-thinking. They wanna, you know, they wanna protect the environment. They wanna do good by people. You know, they have the mentality. It's a very ethical, conscientious mencha- mentality, and they all wanna do the right thing. The problem is they've also bought, you know, through just being born into this, you know, civilization that we're born into, they've bought, they've inherited a lot of the programming around things like germ theory and, you know, viruses and all this kind of stuff. And unfortunately, that's all layered on top of each other so that it forms this paradigm that's kind of just invisible to them. It's like a fish in water, you know, has, they've never known anything but water. So if you come along and you say, "Hey, man, you're actually in this thing called water," they're gonna go, "What the hell are you talking about, you crazy conspiracy theorist? Like, there is nothing here. It's invisible" You know? Like, it doesn't, it doesn't compute because their baseline reality for how things are, like that unconscious programming, just, it can't be confronted head-on in that way because they're, you know, in, effectively in a sort of a trance. And so we watch people, the exact same phenomenon with that age group in particular. They were the ones who were most keen to go and, you know, get the shots and get the boosters and all that sort of stuff. And it's, you know, it's it was really sad to watch that, you know, such quality people become effectively, like, essentially some of the more dangerous people in a way because they got on the... You know, they turned out to be the bootlickers. Yeah... it's okay. It's none of my business what somebody does medically to themselves, but when they start getting on board with this kind of like communist, Stalinist or, you know, fascist kind of collectivist, "We all have to do this. Otherwise, you know, we're gonna, like, we're gonna, like, go on these witch hunts for the people who aren't, you know, towing the line," that's when people become dangerous. And, you know, like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You know, we don't wanna kill granny, but if we think you might kill granny, we're gonna lynch you kinda thing. Right. You know, it's a weird, twisted mentality, but they got really... A lot of people got quite unhinged and aggressive about it, and it was really, it was, it Yeah Disturbing.

[14:25]

[Luke] Yeah, there was there was quite a bit of that in California too. Mm. I left around the time you left Australia, a little before. And Yeah, just it, I think it just stopped feeling like home, you know? It was just difficult to find people with whom I related outside of my little inner circle because people were just so easily psyoped. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I was just like, "What the hell?" Yeah. It was just shocking to me. You know, I go into my little local health food store, yoga class, or something like that, and I'd be getting yelled at by some teenager to put a diaper on my face. It was just like, "Okay, yeah, no, this is not working."

[Brendan] Yep.

[Luke] What do you think it is about The human psyche that makes some of us so susceptible to that kind of propaganda and manipulation

[Brendan] The kind of like do-good kind of, the, that, the veiled, you know, that disguising of it or

[Luke] Any of it. I mean, even now, right? I mean, there are many people who are still in this country, for example, who still believe that there are two arms of government- Right... and that there are two sides when from where I'm sitting, I've been sitting for quite a long time, and I'm not trying to be superior, I just, I just look at history Yeah. It's like psychopathic people tend to gravitate toward those power structures.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] And I don't think it matters if they wear a red or blue hat, you know? Mm. It's just like the people that seem to be drawn to that type of institution are people who really enjoy power-

[Brendan] Totally...

[Luke] Um, more than they enjoy freedom.

[Brendan] Yeah. And they need for that to work for them, they need the majority of people to be kind of a follower mentality. And you know, I found Julian Jaynes' work, if you haven't looked at his what's it called, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, something like that. He did a groundbreaking study into ancient history, ancient human history and the archaic kind of mentality that we, according to his research, we used to have, and it was a very, a very different, um... The way the brain worked in his thesis was very different. So the hemispheric connection was, it played out quite differently. One hemisphere communicating an instruction to the other hemisphere got interpreted as voices and visions. So they would have these, like, under duress, in situations where they couldn't just autopilot their way through something unconsciously, where they had to make a choice like a novel situation, they would have auditory or visual hallucinations of a god or goddess telling them, "Do this, do that." Like given the answer by something divine, so to speak. so there's this, like, kind of legacy in his way of, like, framing it. We've got this follower mentality where we used to follow the gods and the goddesses, and they used to tell us what to do. and we really haven't, it seems, progressed very far past that point where we're always looking for the external, you know, the figurehead, the the demagogue, the leader, the cult leader, the political leader, somebody to tell us what to do. And because it's easier You don't have to make the choice, and you don't have to be accountable, and you don't have to bear the, you know, the responsibility of making the choice, the consequences that come with it. 'Cause if somebody else makes a choice for you, well, you can just point the finger at them and blame them and be angry about it. But, you know, it's much... It's actually much more taxing in... And it's obvious. You know, it's just easier if you can coast and let somebody go, "Just don't worry about it. Just do this. Just put the nappy on your face and everything will work out. Trust me. Trust me. We know. We're the experts. We're listening to panels of experts. We know exactly what we're doing. Just wear your diaper." And it's like that is a much more appealing proposition, I think, to a lot of people 'cause it's easier. It's the path of least resistance. So we wanna follow, and we also have this herd mentality being social creatures. Like, nobody wants to be the, you know, the bison and the buffalo that gets left behind. We know there's sort of safety in numbers, and so these are some of the things that the psychopath class exploit because they know all this and, you know, they've put in billions of dollars into think tanks that study human psychology and these people are... I mean, just resources you... that are almost unimaginable. So they know all of this stuff better than most people do, and they know exactly how to exploit it. So we're still watching that play out, I think, on a many fronts, many fronts, politically, you know, and medically and all the rest of it.

[18:56]

[Luke] For me at this point pretty much any major world event strikes me as a PSYOP.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] I've been PSYOP'd for so long in so many different variations of it that I really don't trust anything unless I have direct experience or my intuition strongly indicates that someone or something is worthy of trust- Mm... and credence.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] I mean, it's like especially with AI it's like we're gonna be in a place very soon where, I mean, it's difficult to tell reality from falsehood now.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] But it's only going to get worse.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] Or better, depending on how you look at it. but to your point, That makes a lot of sense wherein if someone doesn't have a direct relationship with themselves as a spiritual being and don't have a direct line of communication with a higher power, that something or someone is going to need to fill that position, right? Because you're inherently disempowered if you don't know your own-

[Brendan] Mm.

[Luke] You know, your own innate wisdom and strength. And this is something I butt up against when I riff with people regarding my thoughts that I think the world would be a lot better place without any government anywhere whatsoever. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And the answer's always, "Well, who's gonna protect us? Who's going to, you know, who's gonna take care of the bad guys?" Yada. And I don't, I don't have the problem of like, you know, how to make anarchy work solved by any stretch. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. As it's above my pay grade. But I do have eyes and ears, and I see that this, the parasitic nature of these institutions is not only prevalent, but has been going on for a very long time based on... I think it's like a hallucination that we have that a certain sect of people have an inherent right to rule over other people, and I think that's the premise that I have a difficult time-

[Brendan] Mm-hmm...

[Luke] Accepting.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] Because you say you have some sort of title or you're waving some sort of flag, then I'm gonna let you subjugate and exploit me or physically harm me-

[Brendan] Mm-hmm

[Luke] Because you were born of a certain bloodline or a certain number of people checked a box at the local voting booth or whatever. It's like I just don't believe in that. Yeah. I believe in true equality, right? Yeah. It's just everyone is equal, and obviously certain people are going to have skills and are going to be more adept at some things than the other. Yeah. I'm never gonna be a mathematician.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] I'm good at the things I'm good at, so I think society has a way of sort of ordering us, and there are going to people, be people who earn a certain level of authority because of their expertise or their wisdom, right?

[Brendan] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Luke] But when we look at the people who have somehow managed to gain control of the entire civilization, typically they're the least qualified and least intelligent Yeah And because they have some sort of uniform or title, we just kind of blindly follow along.

[22:14]

[Brendan] Mm.

[Luke] And I think it's basically born out of what you described. It's just, man, if I don't... How could I ever be autonomous or sovereign if I don't believe in myself?

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Right? It's like then I feel like I need protection or guidance or something like that.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] But I imagine, like, and I don't know this to be true, but if I just imagine, say, a few hundred years ago, a few thousand years ago, a hunter-gatherer tribe, 50, 60 people. If someone becomes psychopathic they're going to be removed from the group, right? Or I'm, meet some sort of punishment just by majority rule. Mm-hmm. Like, we don't need a police force or a military to handle that person because the consensus is going to be we take care of one another because our survival depends on it, and it just feels a lot better right? Yeah. It seems like when at the advent of agriculture, then all of a sudden you have resources that you can store up, and so therefore you need a police or military class to protect said resources because you're no longer, you know, nomadic.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Seems to be that was kind of the root of it, speaking broadly, and out of that, of course, there's going to be people within that tribe that aren't physically fit enough to protect their resources, et cetera. So yeah, okay, bring in the big guys and we'll create an army and then if we run out of resources, we'll go over there to the other land and take their shit right?

[Brendan] Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke] It's just like, I don't know. I always wonder, like, where did that seed of naivete come from and that disempowered experience within ourselves that leads us to not only believe, but almost demand that we're ruled-

[Brendan] Mm-hmm

[Luke] By other people

[Brendan] Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I mean, like, our politicians now are kind of like stand-ins for the gods of yesteryear, you know? Like, you were talking about the divine right to rule. and it's kind of, we've got this weird, like, tribal... Like, politics is a very tribal thing even though, you and I would both agree that it's two wings on the same bird. But for people who are not operating there and they're in the system thinking, "Oh, well, my team's better than your team," it's kind of like you've got one tribe going to war against another tribe, and the, you know, the chieftain or the warrior that's chosen by their tribe go out to duke it out kind of thing and fight. And it's this weird continuation, like this legacy of this old tribal mentality or tribal system that probably used to actually work quite well. you know, like when I've spoken to the, some of the originals clever fellows or aunties, uncles of the Aboriginal culture, like in our, in our country, you know, well, they'll tell you how their traditions used to work and how things used to be. And it, you know, it didn't require government. It didn't require all the things that we've got now because they had social contracts that they adhered to. Everybody kind of knew to chip in. They had their, you know, the men's business and the women's business, and they didn't, you know, interfere with each other. They, you know, gave each other space to do their thing, and they figured it out. Like, even now, you know, you talk about you know, how do we make anarchy work? I mean, I don't know, I don't know the answer. That's not my focus. But in, there are pockets of, you know, Mexico, for example, where people have taken over the town. They've reclaimed the town from cartels, or they've reclaimed the town from crooked police, and they've, you know, they've gathered together the people. The grandmas have brought their guns out to the front porch kind of thing, and they've scared off the people who were making life miserable for them. So I mean, you know, it's just communities self-organizing, you know, making a way forward, just improvisation. Like, we've just always had to figure it out 'cause there is no kind of template for us to follow. yeah, we've, I think we've gotten pretty deep in confusion at this point. Like, we're kind of following these legacy programs, but they've been hijacked and diverted into weird things like politics and, you know, partisan politics and this kind of stuff. So it doesn't work anymore, but yeah, we have to find a way to snap out of the trance somehow, one way or another.

[26:31]

[Luke] It certainly is a trance. That's a good way to put it. Yeah, it's like a daddy syndrome.

[Brendan] Right. Yeah. Freud would probably have a lot to say about it. Yeah, it really is.

[Luke] So let's talk about... I mean, you have you know, some expertise in areas about which I'm extremely fascinated in. And I was telling you earlier, man, I've always wanted to do shows about X, Y, and Z, and I'm just kinda waiting for someone who has done enough research and really has enough to say about it. so I wanna talk about NDEs. I wanna talk about telepathy, things of the, you know, psi phenomenon nature, and reincarnation. Mm-hmm. These would be some topics that I'm really fascinated by. specifically reincarnation. Maybe we can, maybe we can start there, actually. that's the one that lit me up out of all those areas of interest. I've gotten to a place where I'm not terribly attached to this particular lifetime. Mm-hmm. This incarnation, right? I mean, I don't wanna die. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy my life, and I don't wanna be separated from my wife and the people I love. I mean, I'm terrified of our dog dying. My dog's, like, 12. And my wife and I, we don't have kids, so it's like our kid. And I'll look at the dog and I'm like, "Wait, how many more years?" You know? Yet at the same time, I've had numerous experiences that have proven to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that death is a fallacy, that death, as we commonly think of it and hold it, is actually a non-reality.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] So I know that I don't die. I know when the dog dies, the dog doesn't really die. It's sort of like, I don't know, I think about, say, my body and mind as a radio.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] And right now, there's a signal from consciousness being transmitted through this unique radio they call Luke Story. When the radio battery dies, whatever was projecting its transmission into the radio is still there.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Right? My greatest fear now, more so than death, is... I mean, my greatest fear, it's not like I lay awake at night and, you know, worried about it per se. But if I had, like, one existential concern, maybe not a fear, but just like, eh, is this idea of cyclical reincarnation into this purgatorial realm in which we live. And that doesn't mean that it's not devoid of beauty, but it's definitely like the school of hard knocks. Mm-hmm. Right? The earth realm is not heaven. Yeah. It's like I see a lot of value in it. I've been able to evolve a lot in this lifetime born out of a lot of pain and, you know, aversion to that, and then got to a place maybe where you started, which was like, "Oh, wow, this actually feels really good to start to open my mind and to start to have a relationship with the non-physical realm." But the crux of this is for me is that As you were talking about politicians, right? That they're just sort of puppets or fronts for something behind them. There's an agenda that's being pushed forward. and my best guess is that whomever is pushing this agenda forward, this sort of parasitic system, is likely non-physical. You know? Like, everything is physical and non-physical. So I have this idea that when you leave your body, that it's possible that the same psyop sort of mechanism that's been controlling you in your life in the physical realm could also then dupe you into coming back here into this realm so that they can continue to siphon your energy, right? Your productivity, your creativity. Because that force, to me, really lacks creativity.

[30:36]

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Which is why everything is inverted and everything is a mirror and everything is copied and everything they seem to do is very parasitic in nature. So that's kind of the existential, like, "Oh, man, I hope I have the discernment I need when I, when I leave the body." And I've contemplated this a lot, and where I've arrived at this point is this. The very fact that I'm aware of, that is a potentio- potentiality probably means by the time I get there, I'll know what to do. You know what I mean? And that I won't be duped. Because the souls who are completely unaware that's a possibility to kind of be put back in this recycling system if they don't, you know, want to be, which I don't think I want to be. I feel like I'm pretty complete here. They wouldn't even be thinking like that. They wouldn't even have that question, right? So they would cross over and they would see a projection of their granny, and Granny's like, "No, you gotta come back." You know? And they follow this false light. So the fact that one is aware that there is at least the potential for light and false light when you leave the body and you enter these other kind of etheric realms, that you would probably be able to take care of yourself in there and make an autonomous, self-guided decision about which direction you wanna go.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] So I don't even know if there's a question in that But these are the kind of things that I, you know contemplate as I just think about my life and what happens afterward.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] I don't know. Where do you wanna go?

[Brendan] Well,

[Luke] A lot happens. 'cause I know you've gone so deep into all of this, but I think the reincarnation piece is one that is and many people don't even believe in it. Mm-hmm. Right? many people have had past life experiences, past life regression, things of that nature. I've only had that happen once in a meaningful way. but even prior to that, it just, I don't know, because the timeless nature of consciousness, it just seems strange to me that there would be a beginning and an end-

[Brendan] Mm-hmm

[Luke] Of a person who is also just an expression of consciousness-

[Brendan] Right...

[Luke] Of which there is no beginning and no end.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Right? So it's like, what happens in the, in the middle of that infinity? Yeah. Do we keep spinning around? And if we don't really feel like we want to keep spinning around and coming in and out of this plane, do we have a choice?

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] That's kind of where I'm, you know-

[Brendan] So...

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[34:56]

[Brendan] As you were talking, I had so many little thought bubbles happening because I write in a lot of detail about that. And I've spent a big chunk of the second book really drilling into reincarnation, what it looks like, what drives it, why it happens, and but from... I have a tiered structure, like with different sort of layers, labeled layers of consciousness. It's like a taxonomy of consciousness on a spectrum. So, you know, we have like the physical level us. We're like the physical devices child nodes connected to parent nodes, which, you know, we have also the in-between layers, like a step up, which is like Michael Newton, you know, all the regression material from all the various hypnotherapists who've gone and excavated that stuff. And we have like that part of us, the soul that is ostensibly you know, having this great sort of life in between the human incarnations. It's doing a little bit of planning for its next life. It's going off having adventures. It's in a social environment, hanging out with all its loved ones, all this kind of stuff. Then another level or two above that, we have something that some people refer to as the over soul, which is a collective intelligence of every single incarnation that I call it like a virtual neural server like a cloud-based kind of parent node. So that's connected to like every incarnation it's ever spawned into physical existence. All of those kind of all those different personalities are kind of united in this over soul intelligence. It's a multiplex so many identities in one. and then If you get above that, you have what some esoteric traditions refer to as buddhi or the buddhic consciousness which is kind of like the luminous aspect of source or the one, the one, the atma, whatever, you know, language you wanna call it which is just pure beingness at the top, at the top of the, you know, chain, just pure beingness, which is kind of that Atman Brahman type experience. So depending on how you look at, you know, which level you look at reincarnation from, it looks different from every one of those tiers. I

[Luke] Understand.

[Brendan] So it's kind of a very multi-layered answer, and I can't... There's no way I can possibly excavate it all here in conversations. Yeah. It's not gonna happen.

[Luke] It takes a 1,200 page book. So

[Brendan] It takes...

[Luke] Or a series of them.

[Brendan] Yeah. It takes a lot of words, and to be able to do it methodically and address it in a, like a logical kind of an order. But and then I finish... So the, in the back half of the book, it's very... A lot, there's a lot of reincarnation-related material, and I'm laying out the structure of the multilayered reality stack of the different tiers of consciousness. And the final chapter is actually a very granular deep dive into this reincarnation trap idea and, you know, why we, why it even emerges in the first place. Like, what makes people think that maybe it's a, it's a trap or we're being forced to come back and that kind of stuff. So I've excavated that in a way that you know, I haven't, I haven't seen anybody take it on in that, in that way, at that level of detail. So, you know, my answer is, gets kind of like a roundabout way of saying like, "I have a lot to say about it, but I need to know which kind of thread to pull on at any given moment," you

[38:02]

[Luke] Know? So, okay. So starting from the model of this strata of consciousness or awareness, which you could simplify by saying there isn't just one version of Right Of anyone. There's multitudes of you because you're infinite, right? Right. Which means your unique expression of consciousness can and does manifest in a multitude of ways, in a multitude of dimensions. So there's an interdimensionality to all of reality, and we're inclusive of that reality. So the living, breathing, you know, sort of flesh-bound version of a person, there isn't just one like you and then your soul when you die, right? Mm-hmm. There's a strata. Is that a, is that a-

[Brendan] Yeah...

[Luke] Adequate way to kind of Yeah.

[Brendan] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Luke] Okay.

[Brendan] Absolutely.

[Luke] So talk to me about what you've discovered around the reincarnation trap aspect, 'cause I think that's really the crux of where my mind is drawn Uh-huh Generally.

[Brendan] Yeah. Good. Well, you're really going to enjoy this book. so the reincarnation thing is... There's a lot of... There are some key aspects to it. I wanna say, one of the things I wanna say anytime I hear people talk about this is if you look at any of the great contemplative traditions like Buddhism or any version of the Indic religions, you know, the Hindu traditions, you know through to the modern era, someone like a mystic occultist like Rudolf Steiner any of the, you know, Helena Blavatsky, anyone you look at who has a deep metaphysical knowledge and is a mystic/clairvoyant type who has, you know, that background they uniformly do not let's say they uniformly do not advocate a, like a trap mechanism kind of, that kind of scenario. You know, Steiner would tell you that we are drawn back largely unconsciously into the realm of manifestation because we have our own internal you know, attachments predilections and things that we really enjoy about being physical and embodied. and so that draws us back 'cause in certain, you know, like in his work, for example, part of the afterlife is spent actually unconscious effectively, and that's actually, that's actually mentioned by other people as well. Like we may actually alternate through periods of consciousness and unconsciousness, and I think maybe the goal essentially in the long run is to actually remain fully conscious and therefore being able to make a conscious choice at every possible, you know, instant in the process. but yeah, so there was a also, there's a book that's kind of been doing the rounds over the last few years called The Kybalion, which is by William Walker Atkinson, who wrote it under the pen name of Three Initiates. And he-- I remember a couple of pass-passages in in that, and I've read a few of his kind of close together, so I might be blurring the different books together. But he talked about, you know, people who are saying, "Oh, like, I'm done with this life. Like, I don't wanna come back here. This kinda stinks. I'm not into it." and, you know, he's saying, well, as an initiate and an esotericist, that's all well and good at the personality level. At the conscious level, people may feel that way, but it's immaterial. It doesn't matter because when they're no longer physically embodied, all of their suppressed or repressed attachments and desires and urges are gonna kick back in, and that's what pulls people back into the mechanism of reincarnating again. And Steiner was saying something similar. you know, the Hindu traditions, you know, saying similar things. You know, the Tibetan system had a, like a liturgical sort of prayers for people who are in the p-process of dying so that they could actually stabilize their mind as they left the body and help them to remain, you know, coherent and oriented so they didn't get carried off with their own internal kind of like, you know, perceptions of gods, the wrath-wrathful de-deities and the peaceful deities and all this sort of stuff. Like, because the Tibetans understood when you are no longer physically embodied, you exist in a field of consciousness which then the phenomena you're experiencing, at least in that transitional stage, are largely your own unconscious projection. and so that's one of the things that I think gets kind of overlooked in that discussion, is that people who... And I'm not, I'm not including you in this, I'm just saying from what I've seen in, like, the social media realm usually when people advocate the-- there's a, like a nuts and bolts mechanism for trapping people or forcing them back you know, they overlook these kinds of things. And there literally cannot be a mechanism to do that because it's a field of consciousness, and what you know, make of yourself in that is really what it, what it comes down to. Which is why the Tibetans had their prayers for the dying person to help them remain lucid and coherent and not get distracted by their internal, you know, hallucinations of gods and demons or whatever happens to be the, you know, the case. Now, we're not just seeing gods and deities and demons. It's like all sorts. It's a panoply. It's a zoo. You know, we're seeing all sorts of creatures and critters and aliens and, you know, the list just goes on and on now. But nobody talks about the fact Actually, you're in a thought responsive environment which means that the so-called environment around you is being carved out by your largely your unconscious content, and that's what's really showing up in that transitional phase. That interface period is largely people's unconscious mind contents. And even, you know, people like Carl Jung had things to say about that sort of thing as well. So it's not new. I'm not proposing anything drastically new, but I'm applying that, you know, lens to the current sort of contemporary discourse or conversation or whatever.

[44:10]

[Luke] Yeah. Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. It's like And correct me if I'm not understanding you, but if you haven't worked through your attractions and aversions here, which is, I think, a good part of the curriculum, right, is to be in a place of neutrality and surrender and not controlled by fear and desire. If you've not evolved through that, then you're going to be taking an element of that with you which is going to play out when you're in the bardo or wherever you are, where these kind of decisions seem to be made or by you or by, you know, whatever force is making those decisions. Is that, is that-

[Brendan] Yeah

[Luke] Part of what you're describing?

[Brendan] Yeah. It is part, it's part of it. Yeah. Okay. It is part of it. And you know, I had a few different thoughts there. I was just gonna say my friend Cathy McDaniel has been doing the podcast circuit talking about her NDE where she had... she was in an induced coma and it turns out a lot of people have very powerful NDEs and some very disturbing ones when they're induced into a coma. So there's this whole movement now against, you know, putting people into a coma unless it's absolutely necessary. and she was in a coma for something like a week or so. sorry, Cathy, if that's not quite right. But she was in a quite a protracted period of being comatose and she went through initially several stages of very harrowing, traumatizing experiences in that NDE condition that she was in. And then eventually after working through these horrible stages, she ended up with a reunion with her deceased husband. and it was all, that was all wonderful and then she had to come back to her body. But the, what she realized in hindsight thinking about why she had all those really disturbing experiences, was basically what she realized every single stage of that NDE, the, like the hellish NDE side of it, was based off memories of actual events that had happened to her in her life. So it was, it was unmetabolized emotional charge that then created her, essentially her field of reality. and the thing is, it can be unbelievably real. I mean, you know, remote viewers know this. people who've had NDEs know this. People who are veteran out-of-body explorers know that you can be in these kind of virtual reality spaces, and it can be absolutely as tangible and realistic as this. And and when it's unpleasant, it's really unpleasant. Like she had really nightmarish experiences, and it was, it was all unconscious content in her mind that had not been, if you like resolved Yeah... worked through.

[Luke] Wow. Yeah. That's as if we needed another motivator to do our work. To do our healing work. On the, on the reincarnation tip what empirical evidence, or what's the most compelling evidence to support the idea that we do continue to come back over and over again? I've seen things such as, I mean, this doesn't prove anything per se, but, you know, a video of a four-year-old kid playing Beethoven on the piano just on the fly. You know, just things- Mm-hmm... that you just you just can't explain. There's no, there's no rational way to explain that. Particularly, I think the ones that get me is when a really young child is gifted beyond all comprehension.

[47:41]

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] I mean, you brought that in from somewhere. You know what I mean? Yeah, maybe not. Maybe, you know, maybe some phenomenon are just instantaneous, right? And poof, like, you have this, you know, transcendent experience just chilling at home, and all of a sudden, life is very different. I mean, there are infinite possibilities, but I've seen clues that kind of go, hmm, intuitively that feels like they've been here before, and they brought some of-

[Brendan] Mm-hmm

[Luke] What they had with them.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] What have you witnessed that's been most kind of convincing to you?

[Brendan] Well, I mean, there's been a lot actually because it does make, it does make a lot of sense of certain things. you know, Edgar Cayce said that you inherit most of what you are from yourself. Charles Leadbeater, the theosophist clairvoyant said the same thing. Basically, like, if you know, you're talking about prodigious talents and skills and stuff, mostly inherited from yourself, like from another lifetime. Those guys particularly the theosophists, they took a very linear view of reincarnation like Steiner did as well. but you know, Ian Stevenson did a lot of really good work, just field work, going overseas. He traveled, I think he said fif- 50,000 miles a year investigating cases of largely children who remembered being somebody else. and so he would go to the village and, you know, interview them and interview the family, and then he would, he would go and investigate this other town where they remembered having their previous life, and he'd interview that family, and you know, he would just do this over and over and over again, and basically try to effectively debunk or disprove what the kid was saying. Except that he very largely actually verified what they were saying time and time again, so the information they had was correct and accurate, and they had very strong feelings for these other, this other family who they would remember, "Oh, well, that's my sister, this is my..." That they've really felt it too. It wasn't just that they knew things about them. They actually really had an emotional connection to them. and you know, he was investigating the physiological sides of it as well, like birthmarks and you know, wounds, for example, that You know, say somebody remembered, I, you know, I had I was shot or something, you know, and or maybe they didn't remember it, but he would look at, "Okay, who's this other person this child is talking about? I'm gonna go on and investigate this. Oh, okay, there's a... This individual was shot here, you know, at, the bullet entry wound is here, the exit wound's over here somewhere and that actually happens to match up with these birthmarks on this child, and this child's never seen this other..." Or, you know, like, these things that can't be explained through a local, you know, consciousness model essentially. Like, he effectively, even if you don't accept reincarnation as the explanation, you have to accept a non-local field of consciousness where people are all interconnected in this field of information. And these kids were coming up with accurate information and he was able to corroborate birthmarks with where the person was injured in the last life and the way that they died, whether it was a spear or a bullet or whatever, and, you know, the the birthmarks correlated to unbelievable degrees, like not coincidental in the, in the slightest. So he verified it on a nuts and bolts kinda physical level as well as far as you could possibly take it. Like, it's technically you can't say it's a proof of reincarnation, but it's about as close as you can physically get to having a proof, 'cause it can't be explained in any other way other than, well, consciousness is non-local. Yeah. We have to... That's, like, the bare minimum conservative thing you can say is, like, "Okay, well, we're telepathy, super telepathy. It's all this information's being picked up. The kid's correct. They've got this accurate information, but I don't wanna believe in reincarnation. But I still have to admit all the rest of it because it's, it stands up under scrutiny."

[51:21]

[Luke] I've wondered about phobias. You know, people seem to just come into this world with Extreme and very specific phobias. Some people are afraid of heights, others are afraid of snakes, afraid of water and drowning. I mean, I see this on... I watch reality shows, you know, like survival shows. Those are my favorite. And yeah, people just have strange fears of spiders and it's like, why isn't everyone afraid of the same thing? which to me would be the things that are in actuality and in truth, the most threatening, right? People are afraid of things that are totally irrational, and the degree of fear they have is also beyond rationality. So I've always wondered, you know, it's like, okay, you mentioned, you know, the kid was shot in a past life and now has corresponding scars. Is the person who is you know, has a phobia of water and never wants to learn how to swim, did they drown? And there's something, there's an imprint of that's carried over. Have you seen any evidence that corresponds to that phenomenon?

[Brendan] Yeah. I think, I think I have along the way. It's... It definitely comes up because that's part of the, you know, like the reincarnation. Like the hypno- hypno- hypno-regression sort of field is it tends to show that kind of stuff up. and I think that if memory serves me, Brian Weiss's client, Catherine, had some stuff like that going on, and she had these regressions done and she, you know, went into these other lifetimes and you know, one of them, I think she was drowned or this and that. And as a result of those experiences, she had, you know, whether or not we accept literal reincarnation, as a result of those regressions, she had massive healing of all sorts of... I mean, she was beset by chronic anxiety and all sorts of things that just didn't make any sense. She was just a wreck. And the more she went through these past life regressions, the more of that she just shed and got rid of, and she ended up being completely healed and just completely like normal and functional. Whereas when she went in to see him in the first place, she was an absolute mess psychologically and physically. And so it does come up. I've got an example in the book of, it's not quite exactly what you're asking, but as opposed to a phobia there was a case of, supplied by a Dr. Stan Grof, who had one of his clients who came to him with massive sinus problems and massive nasal discharge, and she would have these constant coughing fits, and it would drive her husband crazy and all this kind of thing. And she went into a regression with him and found that if memory serves me correct, it's in the book, so the details are correct in the book. her husband in that, in that current lifetime had been part of a, like a group that had effectively targeted this woman as a witch in a past life, and they had, you know, tied her to a board and drowned her in a, in a pond that had like algae. It was just like really nasty water, you know, algae and all sorts of stuff, like really murky. And so as she's drowning, she's inhaling and breathing all this murky, disgusting algae-filled water And so this is like, oh, this is the revelation for her. This is where her lifetime, current lifetime symptoms are coming from. And then the result of that, while she's in the session with Stan Grof, she's suddenly, all this green mucus starts pouring out of her face. like unbelievable copious amounts of green mucus coming out of her face.

[54:42]

[Luke] Masks and

[Brendan] Stuff. It was like the algae coming out. It was bizarre. And so she gets through this session and at the end of it, as a result, like all her, you know, allergies and all this kind of stuff, all the coughing and the mucus and the sneezing and all that's just done. It's gone. And that was the end of it. And yeah.

[Luke] Wow. Fascinating. Fascinating. Yeah. another trippy thing about the idea of reincarnation and having have lived past lives is when you look at The way we experience time and how we're so sort of stuck in this experience of linear time. I had a guy on the show a few months ago who was able to break it down. I should go back and listen to that episode 'cause it was so mind-blowing. But he was talking about how time is essentially a creation, a construct that's only possible relative to the speed of light.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Right? And so therefore, if there was no light, there could be no time. You know, so like light is the thing that creates time in a way. Mm-hmm. Right? Again, I'm not doing it justice, but it made sense to me enough where I thought, "Hmm, I mean, I'm already not a believer in time as we hold it," and it's made my life actually quite challenging because I-... I really struggle with calendars and clocks and-

[Brendan] You should live in Mexico.

[Luke] Yeah, totally. You know, someone's like, "Hey, can you meet at 2:00 tomorrow?" I go, "I don't know what I'm gonna feel like at 2:00 tomorrow." I mean, we had a, we had a podcast at 2:00 today, so you know, I need to be accountable. But I'm more of like, "Let's meet around when the sun's right there tomorrow-ish," you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. It's like I feel like these these timekeeping systems have been sort of foisted upon us, and we're all slaves to these clocks and calendars. And don't even get me started on the Gregorian calendar, which is one of the biggest psyops ever and I think why many of us like me are so out of sync even with the existing calendar-

[Brendan] Yeah

[Luke] Versus just following the celestial calendars that be.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] So that is to say, okay, let's just take it for granted that time as we experience it is a construct. So there's a simultaneity of reality wherein everything is happening all at once ad infinitum.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Therefore, you know, I did... As I said, I had one pretty strong past life vision. And it was with the assistance of 5-MeO-DMT. Mm. So you know, you can't really hang your hat on it 'cause in that space, who knows what's real, right? But it was the only one I've ever had, and it was quite clear, and it wasn't so much like I wasn't, you know, Napoleon or, you know, some figure. I was just basically like a spiritual seeker, a peasant in India. And it wasn't just like I saw one lifetime. It was a succession of lifetimes, just bzzz, just like flipping through a deck of cards, just voof, you know, dozens or hundreds of lifetimes- Mm... seeking God and burning on the Ganges kind of thing, you know? But it was, it was clear and meaningful, but it didn't have a lot of specifics. Mm. It was more just kind of the essence behind it. So I would think of that and the way most people hold the idea of reincarnation as a past life. But if there is no past right, then that would just be another life-

[58:17]

[Brendan] Mm-hmm...

[Luke] That is simultaneously going on, kind of what you were saying earlier, like in the strata, right? Mm-hmm. It's like versions of what I believe myself to be happening all at once-

[Brendan] Yeah...

[Luke] In an, in a infinite field. This eternal field with no beginning and no end. So if reality or consciousness itself never started, and therefore can't and never will end, and I'm an aspect of that consciousness, it kind of debunks the premise of a past life.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] It's like subsequent stacking of lives.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] What's your take on that? I mean, do you think it's my other lives or ones truly past lives, that they're sequential in time, or are they all just happening, you know, in a, in a in a in a stack of simultaneous experience?

[Brendan] It's kind of all of the above. Damn it. Yeah. I mean, you know, like a non-dualist, like a Vedantin would say you know, forget about, forget about all of that. There's only, there's only Brahman. There's only Atman-Brahman, the single field, and ultimately everything that seems to be happening or, you know, everything time-bound is ultimately an illusion anyway, so don't, so don't worry about it. Their focus is on the one unchanging reality.

[Luke] Yeah. It's funny, I've been getting back into Nisargadatta Maharaj, the book I Am That, which is the first spiritual book I ever had. It was gifted to me when I was in the throes of addiction and was totally incapable of reading it, but I just hung onto it all these years. I mean, this was 35 years ago or something, someone gave me that book, and it made no sense to me at all. I mean, it makes no sense to most spiritual seekers, you know? If you really get into the pure non-dual kind of Vedic perspective, I mean, the mind just, it... the mind hates it.

[Brendan] Yeah. '

[Luke] Cause the mind cannot operate in that Space. Yeah... and that understanding. But I've been really into that lately, just over the past couple weeks, kind of revisiting that, 'cause that perspective to me is the one that has rung the most true-

[Brendan] Mm-hmm...

[Luke] For the longest period of my life. So if I follow that, to your point, it's like, dude, it's only your mind that cares about this and is trying to figure it out, which isn't even real

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] You know? So just surrender, don't worry about it. Be in the beingness of I am. Mm-hmm. Right? Uh-

[Brendan] Yeah. And like I support people who wanna take that approach. Like it makes sense. There's a foundation for it. That's why there's a tradition that's so old, because it's grounded in people's actual lived experience in altered states of consciousness. And then, you know, the goal as far as at least some of these traditions are concerned is to actually be able to sustain yourself in that which is a whole other thing. but yeah, I mean, because I have like a... In book two I'm really very phenomenological. I wanna look at what people's lived experience is to kind of build a map, like a really comprehensive map of post-mortem existence, and the processes, and the dynamics, and rules that are involved with that. So I'm not actually, even though I guess you could say I kinda started as a Vedantin in a sense, I am not pushing any one philosophical or religious or whatever doctrine because I wanna just look at, okay, like what is the tapestry of possibility here for discounted consciousness? obviously there's a lot of evidence that consciousness is not created by the brain. So, you know, like that was kind of the premise of book one. I'm not rehearsing that again in book two. That's taken for granted. And then what are people experiencing and how do, how do we map that? How do... You know, if someone reports such and such, where does that belong in the tiered structure that I've got? And, you know, how do those tiers relate to each other? do they relate at all? And so yeah, the time, the time question is very, obviously very relevant for us here in this particular paradigm. it's also quite, I would say, quite relevant in a lot of afterlife contexts because people are working through what are known, you know, esoterically as the astral planes or the mental planes, where we are still essentially carrying the same psychological makeup with us, the same psyche. And it tends to recreate environments that are based on earth life, largely, to a large extent. and then if you go up a level into what are known as the causal planes, the causal states of consciousness, that's where it gets a little more murky and a little less time-bound. It's sort of like, oh, now we're kind of, we don't know quite where we are. And then that's, you know, if you go deeper into that higher causal where you have the oversoul multiplex, that intelligence doesn't play in time really. like it doesn't experience linear time. That's an artifact of the fact that we have these spacesuits, the, you know, human bodies that we're carrying around. And from the multiplex higher causal self, it's A vast field of potentiality that just goes, "Well, you know, maybe I maybe I feel like having an experience as a, you know, 13th century Cathar in France," or what have you. And so it injects, it's like it sends out a ray to use the esoteric term, or it injects itself into this kind of virtual reality you know, dream essentially. And then has this hallucination of linear time. You know, I'm born, I live, I die, and all this kind of stuff. But it can experience things very much more simultaneously. So that, and then, you know, you're on the brink, you're on the verge there of going up into, well, everything and everyone who's ever existed is here and now, and that's like the Buddhic threshold kind of thing. And this is reported by multiple different sources, which all say essentially the same thing. One of the, one of them was a guy on ketamine who lost his wife in a house fire, and he had an NDE trying to rescue her. And and later on took ketamine to try to recapture that NDE and the realization. And he found himself in a place where everybody who has ever lived was present there, and that's kind of like that Buddhic massively integrated consciousness right on the threshold of just pure beingness. Yeah. Which is, has nothing to do with any multiplicity whatsoever. It's just the one. The one. Yeah. The one infinite awareness and that's it.

[1:04:39]

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] And then there's obviously the concept of time is absolutely irrelevant at that point.

[Luke] Yeah. I think wow, there's so many fascinating ideas in there. This is fun. I love this. Thank you. Love talking to people like you. All right, you charge your phone, laptop, and some people, your electric car every day, right? Well, what if you could charge the things that keep your body alive, too? Let's start with water. It's literally what we're all made of. Every cell, organ, and system depends on it. And if you're like me, you filter the contaminants from your water supply, re-mineralize your drinking water, and do all the things that makes your water as good as it can possibly be. But clean water is just the beginning. I keep a quantum block from Leela Quantum Tech on my kitchen island, where I use it to charge my drinking water with coherent quantum energy. Now, I realize that sounds a little woo-woo, but it's also woo-true. Leela has done some fascinating research on their technology, showing measurable changes in water structure, heart rate variability, and cellular ATP production. And I also put my supplements, fruit, and various food I'm eating inside the block too to charge it up in the same way. But here's what's really cool. The block also generates a coherent energy field that extends 20 feet around it. So while I'm charging what I consume, I'm also creating a more coherent environment in my home. So to get some more quantum energy in your life, here's what you do. Go to lukestory.com/LeelaQ and use the code Luke10 for 10% off your first order. Every electronic in your house already has a charger. Well, now your water has one too. That's lukestory.com/LeelaQ, and don't forget that code Luke10. Yeah, so back to the idea of the other lives or the past lives and using that sort of strata model that you've, you know, created or adopted or put together. It's like I guess at the end of the day, it doesn't matter, right? 'Cause it's like, what is your intended purpose of this earthly experience?

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] And if your experience is to wake up to the truth of what you are, not even who you are, but beyond and above that, what you are, right, which is you are consciousness. You're one aspect of God, and if our intention is to get to that Buddhic field sort of passageway where you merge into the totality of existence and you're not differentiated in any way from it, you're just God that can't experience itself, right? Kind of thing. It's like, okay, maybe worrying about all this stuff doesn't really matter. Like, let's just aim for that. But when I aim for that, which seems like a really worthy endeavor The ego goes, "Mm-mm. You're talking about non-existence." Mm-hmm. And non-existence to the ego is infinitely more terrifying than death.

[1:07:44]

[Brendan] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Luke] Yeah. It's like non-existence is rough for the ego. Yeah.

[Brendan] It's, that's the absolute worst possible outcome. I think the from what I've gathered, the Egyptians had a very strong aversion to that idea, that non-existence idea. yeah, they preferred to come up with other things, anything but that. you know, the fires of hell and this kind of, this kind of thing, you know, the second death. Actually, oh, sorry, I'm getting off on a bit of a tangent there. one of the things like I found really interesting about like, you know, you talk about these specific cases of past life regressions. You know, why does somebody even heal from having a regression done? Like, how does that even make sense? Like, why should that experience heal somebody on any level? Like, it doesn't kind of add up. And so what's happened in the like I said, the last, I guess, 40 years or so is people in, who are, you know, in the realm of science or adjacent to science who've tackled this kind of stuff, they've kind of gone, "Okay, well, we've got this field of consciousness. We've got, we can call it like the Akasha or whatever we wanna call it. and we're all interconnected in it, so everybody's information is available to everybody. and so, you know, we're tapping into this field which stores information from the full library of the past and the future. It's all here and now. And so you can tap into anybody's information at any point in space, wherever you are. This is the holographic principle." and so they kind of flatten out the, like the ontology of it by going, "Well, you know, it just doesn't really mean that much 'cause you're just connecting to somebody else's information." But I thought, "Well, why should that heal you?"

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] That doesn't make... Nobody talks about that 'cause it's, the next step is that you're going, you think you've solved the problem, but actually you're just raising another series of questions. Like, if that's the case, why is this woman healed of these chronic conditions that she's carried her whole life? So to me, like stripping- Every personal element from it was kind of unsatisfying, which is, you know, the opposite I guess, of what a Buddhist or a Vedantin would do. but I'm trying to kinda look at things in a way that makes sense. Like, why would you be healed by a past life regression at all if it's just somebody else's information? Who cares? Like, Yeah... you don't get... You don't watch TV and go, "Oh, I'm healed now of my you know, like, lymphoma because I saw this guy on TV." Like, it doesn't work like that. So what's happening there in the field and you know, ultimately, yes, it is everybody's information on that level, at the level of just total unity. And then on the other level, I wanted to just kinda like dig into the wrinkles of it and go, well, okay, but we do have a lot of this information that suggests maybe we shouldn't kinda be so dismissive of it and go, okay, there's something very interesting happening here. Maybe it is, there is a more personal connection. Maybe it's a correlation that just happens. Maybe it's like a resonance thing and it's not so much that it was your past life. Technically, all lives are your... All the past lives are your lives 'cause of the infinite connected field. But maybe it's maybe it's something a little more personal. Maybe it's a resonance condition. You've tuned into somebody else's experience in the field. They had something similar going on. by recapitulating their experience in the field, that is actually healing you and helping you to integrate that. I mean, maybe you've inherited that from the field and that's why you've got these problems. And so going and recapitulating that material is actually integrating it for you, so you know, you no longer have to carry that unresolved charge with you.

[1:11:19]

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] Something like that. So I talk about it in other ways in the book as well, but you know, there's a few thoughts.

[Luke] I mean, that makes a lot of sense if you think about the challenges that we experience within one lifetime. For me, the key to freedom has been looking in the past, right? It's like going back to birth, childhood, then this happened, then that happened. You know, all the ways in which I was disconnected from myself and from reality as a whole- Mm... and going back and retrieving versions of myself and embracing them and healing them, but also breaking patterns that keep me stuck in creating the past over and over and over again.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] So it makes sense on a, on a linear level that if you could access experiences you've had before, it's almost like you're getting, you're getting another shot at taking the test, right? Mm-hmm. It's like for whatever reason, you weren't able to embody or integrate those challenges in lives that you've lived as someone else, because they're still accessible through this sort of Akashic record that some people seem to have the ability to take other people there and facilitate that, and then sometimes it's a spontaneous like, whoa, I had a vision like I did, which wasn't intentional at all. But even in mine, actually, now that I think about it wasn't so much... Yeah, it wasn't an unfinished business thing. It was a self-love thing.

[Brendan] Yeah, right.

[Luke] It was like a patting myself on the back of just going, "Dude, you f*cking did it. You know? You did it." Oh, yeah, there was another part to it Totally forgot about this. This is beautiful. Thank you for eliciting this memory. Thanks for

[Brendan] Sharing.

[Luke] So yeah, so I'm having this vision and just seeing that I was just a devotee, you know, just a devoted soul who was seeking God. And I remember asking myself, "Why do you keep going?" Like, "Why do you keep doing this over and over again, the seeking of God," you know? And and then I answered... Ah, this is so awesome. I wish I would've put this in my book. This is a good one. I answered, and I might have even whispered this, you know, as I was coming out of the experience, I said, "Because I want it all." And then the Voice, capital V, said, "You already have it all."

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] It's like, you already are where you think you need to get to.

[Brendan] Right.

[Luke] And that was such a massive affirmation, right? It was just like, oh God, like, I don't have to work so hard at this shit. Like, there has been a lot of progress made already. Not that I'm gonna rest on my laurels and let it, you know, go to my head or become complacent or something, but that like, oh, I need God, you know? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's like you can't not be with God. Right. That's your problem- Yeah... is just acknowledging and accepting what's always been present, you know? So it was, it was a huge realization for me. So much so that I kind of forgot it and compartmentalized that part of it.

[1:14:22]

[Brendan] Yeah,

[Luke] Fascinating. I think the more alluring part was that it was the only time I've really had any inclination that there were things that I've experienced before as other people.

[Brendan] Yeah, right.

[Luke] Yeah. But now that I'm looking at the real value, to your point, was, okay cool, that's a reference point that gives you some insight to who and what you are today- Yeah... in this lifetime, in this persona, and there's a real gift in there of just self-acknowledgement.

[Brendan] Mm.

[Luke] And just to be able to relax-

[Brendan] Yeah

[Luke] And not take the whole journey so seriously.

[Brendan] Right. Yeah. It's Exactly...

[Luke] You don't need to strive so hard toward this thing. It's like the thing you think you're after already lives within you.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] That was, that was kind of the experience of that.

[Brendan] Yeah, that's great. I think that's also... That circles us back to you know, this idea of like the reincarnation trap or this prison planet idea because like the reality is that the highest spiritual principle never descends from heaven. It never leaves heaven. It never leaves source, God, whatever you wanna call it. so that part of us that is the immortal part, or what some people would say the only real part of us, that part never leaves- It never descends. It's the undescended soul of Plotinus. It's always there so to think that you're anywhere else is a form of kind of hallucination. And what you were just saying was perfectly, you know, that was the teaching of Buddha. You know, he was saying, "You don't become enlightened, you just stop being deluded." Yeah. You know?

[Luke] Exactly.

[Brendan] That's it.

[Luke] Exactly.

[Brendan] And that was it. So it's like if we actually connect, even if it's just conceptually, to the fundamental roots of what we actually spiritually are at ground level, it just automatically kind of melts away a lot of the other, the concerns and the like, the conceptual constructs, and the things that we've worried about, and the mythologies that we're inventing and reifying right now about you know, this malicious trap that we're stuck in on Earth and all this kind of thing. You're like, arguably, this isn't even happening. You know? Right... it's a it's a perceptual thing- Right... because the Atman or the source consciousness has i, in a sense, like, had a daydream or hallucinated itself into a reality construct, a hologram or a virtual reality game, a video game, and it's only in that, then it then forgets where it where it came from or what it really is or where it originated from. And so you have just this temporary amnesia, this, or delusion, and if you just at any given moment, like, the, at any given moment, the potential is there for somebody to go, "Oh, I'm actually, I can, I'm gonna connect back to..." It's, I never left. Yeah... it's we're pervaded by the field of Brahman. We're pervaded by it. Source is with us. It's the thing that sustains us. You know, you can call it the Aether or the Akasha or whatever. It doesn't really matter, but, you know, there's something there that never changes and never and we never left. Yeah. The highest parts of us never descended.

[1:17:26]

[Luke] The undivided self. That makes me think of the phenomenon of dreaming, right? You ever been dreaming and you're having a nightmare, and then you awaken from the nightmare? But you don't, you prevent yourself from falling back asleep right away because you know you could jump back into it.

[Brendan] Uh-huh. Yeah.

[Luke] I mean, I've had this happen so many times in my life. I'm just like, "Ah, I'm gonna hang out for a few minutes and just become a little more wakeful so if I fall back asleep, I can start a new timeline," right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's like put on an, you know, a different film in the projector, so to speak. But that is a really strange thing because obviously, when you're in the dream, it's just as real as us sitting here right now. Same thing with psychedelics. I mean, I've been in some spaces, and-

[Brendan] Mm...

[Luke] When it's over, I go, "What am I doing here?" Like, this is all a fabrication.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] The place I just was the real place, you know? Yeah. And I have that same kind of thing with dreams, right? It's like when we have a dream, whether it's pleasant or not, we don't then wake up and take a shower and be afraid that we're gonna fall into another dream tonight, right? Right. It's like, "Ah, that was a dream. I'm cool. Everything's back to normal." Mm-hmm. "I'm back in the realm of materiality." And I mean, to be afraid of the dream you had last night is ridiculous.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] So what I'm getting from you is perhaps, you know, this whole sort of puzzle begging to be solved of like, "Ah, I wanna make sure when I die I do it right." You know, it's like when you die is also a dream-

[Brendan] Yeah...

[Luke] In a way, right?

[Brendan] Yeah. It kind of is in a way. and so, you know, like to me it's about, it's not about adopting a like a doctrine or a dogma about this is what you should do, this is how you should do dying, or this is how you should live or whatever. It's about what are the possibilities? And, you know, the possibilities essentially seem infinite and at the end of it under- underlying all of that is the unchanging source field which we fundamentally are, which there's nothing stopping us from reconnecting with at any given moment. and that's something that I think is, I mean, to me, I think that's kind of reassuring in a way. Like, you know, if we get too distracted by all this talk of reincarnation or I don't wanna be here, or someone's making me be here, all this kind of stuff, it's like, well, it only takes a very like one little shift in your state of consciousness to connect to something, a radically different paradigm and there's nothing in between you and source. Like that, the idea that we gotta go somewhere is like the height of delusion really. It's internal. and that's what we fundamentally are. Like we're just having these little dreams as Luke and Brendan, and that's all fun and games and it's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just, it's just a temporary dream that the infinite one is having because if you were the infinite one, what else would you do? I mean, like I don't this is why I don't have any opposition to the concept of being embodied or having other lifetimes or different types of manifest experiences because fundamentally you are a field of infinite being and why not? Why not explore, why not create these other realms to just see, okay, like if I just inject myself into this, what happens? What if I invent this thing called humankind and I inject myself into one of these little human bodies and have a bit of a play and see, you know? Like the problem, the only problem is that we forget we have the amnesia that comes with it, but there's nothing malicious about it or wrong, morally wrong or whatever. It's just a, it's just a little exploration and that's actually one of the things that came out in my research from different sources, multiple different sources who are writing about their experiences connecting with the oversoul level is that at that level That's like the highest level where mind or the mind principle or the soul principle, like individuation is actually functional at that level. And they all say this, essentially the same thing. It's like in their own wording, in their own vocabularies, is essentially at that level it's just curiosity and it's just play and it's just running experiments. It's just like, well, but I wanna, I wanna have infinite like experience. I wanna know what's possible. I wanna... I have to... Like, I'm not just gonna sit here in the oneness. I've gotta find out like-

[1:21:40]

[Luke] Yeah...

[Brendan] What happens if I create these parameters and then dive into that, and that... 'cause otherwise how would it know? Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, it's-

[Luke] Yeah. It's like the, uh-... a weird thing It's like the principle that the eye can't see itself.

[Brendan] Yeah,

[Luke] Exactly. Like sans a mirror, the eye can't see itself. Like you can look down and look at your arm, but you can't see your eyes 'cause you're seeing through your eyes.

[Brendan] Exactly.

[Luke] Right?

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] That kind of thing. It's the it's like the cosmic giggle, you know, the Godhead wanting to experience itself, therefore it has to become others-

[Brendan] Right

[Luke] Other things-

[Brendan] Yeah...

[Luke] To experience itself because it just is one thing.

[Brendan] Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] So from an absolutely undifferentiated state of being, the only possibility is differentiation.

[Luke] Right.

[Brendan] So that's how we, it end up here.

[Luke] Right.

[Brendan] Wow.

[Luke] Your body has somehow been managing to heal cuts and scrapes your entire life, but somehow we got duped into thinking we need disinfectants that sting or burn to make the process work better. It's crazy, especially when you find out the body already produces one of the most powerful tools for supporting damaged skin. It's called hypochlorous acid, and it's what your white blood cells make as part of your natural immune response. It fights pathogens, calms inflammation, and supports tissue repair. So I'm thinking, why not put that same biology to work on the outside? And that's the whole idea behind Active Skin Repair. Their medical-grade formula helps cleanse, soothe, and support healing without discomfort or disrupting healthy tissue. And this stuff is ridiculously versatile. I'm talking cuts, scrapes, burns, breakouts, bug bites, rashes, irritated skin. You just spray it on and let your body do what it already knows how to do. So to get your skin issues fixed up, here's what you do. Go to lukestory.com/skinrepair and use the code Luke at checkout to save 20% off your order. 'Cause sometimes the smartest health technology isn't about overriding your biology. It's about working with the intelligence that's already built in. So again, hit up lukestory.com/skinrepair, and don't

[Brendan] Forget the code Luke to save that 20%.

[Luke] So I get the feeling you're not someone who's interested in holding a dogmatic position, let alone bringing other people to your side. Right. It seems like your work is like, "Here's a menu of options that are interesting," you know, choose-your-own-adventure kind of thing. Uh-huh. Ah, that said, what would you say to someone who is of the materialist ilk and believes that consciousness is a byproduct of the brain or the mind? What evidence do we have or what subjective experience do you have that would support the converse of that perspective?

[1:24:42]

[Brendan] Oh, man, I mean, that was really, that was really the focus of book one in a, in a big way. So I mean, we have so many fields of research around that. if you go back 100, 150 years, you've got, like, the psychical research, mediumship research that moved into parapsychology, where, you know, the standards of research became very exacting and very pedantic. Also you've got telepathy, you've got psychokinesis experiments and tens of thousands of trials. ugh, and the dream-related stuff, you know, of influen- influencing someone's dreams implanting ideas or material into their dreams. Those studies have been done. I mean, there's so, there are so many different variations on those themes that yeah, thousands of sources that have produced positive results that simply can't be explained by someone by a materialist or reductionist kind of framework.

[Luke] Kind of goes back to the analogy I was using earlier about the radio.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] And the, you know, the source of the transmission and the carrier wave reaching the radio. It seems, I mean, if you just look at it from a kindergarten perspective, it seems unlikely that the radio is the thing producing the signal, you know what I mean? Right. Then how do you change channels, you know? Right, yeah. If there are, there's this bandwidth of different possibilities of data from those channels, then if it was being produced by this thing, how come you can tune it into something that is non-local out there?

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Just like you can tune your own awareness to different things, right?

[Brendan] Yeah, that's it, and it's largely focus and intent you know, which is I think why Robert Monroe called his different levels of consciousness focus levels because, you know, what you focus on and intend is what essentially renders your experiential reality in a sense.

[Luke] With the near-death experience, Do you think of it as a final destination or a departure lounge?

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] Is the departure lounge your language?

[Brendan] I, yeah, it sounds like me. it's more, it's more of a departure lounge sort of thing than a destination because most of what people are experiencing is first of all, they're coming back to their body. So it's a, it's a kind of like a in and out. It's like a little, a little brush, a little preview. you know, the experiences are pretty varied in terms of the content of them, so that's a very, that's a very personal kind of a thing. Some people go into a, you know, they experience a light. They go into the light. They emerge into a different world. Some people visit a remote city, you know, a glorious city of crystal or gold or... I mean, like, the experiences are really kind of diverse. So you get glimpses of these other dynamics or other worlds, other states of consciousness, but you're not allowing the individual to stabilize in it and to really actually get oriented. And that's where you need to look at other research, you know, like the past life regression, but also the mediumistic communications and anything adjacent to that because they all essentially dovetail and produce a very similar kind of a reading, which is for most of us anyway, the part of us that is mental mind-based, soul-based we go on to have these other, Stages of the journey where we're metabolizing our unprocessed emotional content. We have life reviews. We have to look at ourselves and the way that we've lived the way that's affected other people. We experience the other people's points of view in relation to us. and then, you know, we go into any number of different potential stages that follow from that. A lot of the time, I think we-- for most people, I think there's a-- the ultimate attractor is kind of earth life. So I think most people, you know, they spend a certain amount of time in the sort of postmortem afterlife realms, and then they essentially turn back to physical existence 'cause that's what seems to seem mo-make the most sense to a lot of people. you know, like you were saying, you know, you didn't under-understand or relate to that book that you had read, you know, initially. That's, I think, real for a lot of people. It is, it's very hard to connect with what seems like such an abstract thing as, you know, Brahman or what have you. but again, without a body weighing you down you have, I think, a lot more leeway. the constraints are looser when you're in discarnate states. So you could potentially, if you had the mindset for it and the intent, you could have those types of experiences much more easily.

[1:29:21]

[Luke] Another phenomenon I find really interesting is where highly evolved beings, mystics, saints, sages, gurus, et cetera, reach a level of consciousness wherein they have a conscious choice as to whether or not they're going to stay here. I mean, there are these stories these folklore, some of which I'm sure are true, and perhaps some of them aren't But that they could just decide to leave at any given moment, but they stay as an act of service, or there's something further for them to evolve into.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] And that when some of them cross over, even though they've kind of graduated from this curriculum, they go, "Ah, man, you know, I'm gonna go back and serve," and they come back again, you know?

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] As the case with kind of the chosen one, the child that is deemed to be, you know, a successor in a lineage of gurus and this kind of thing. I find that to be really fascinating. It's like some souls kind of take one for the team, you know?

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] You know, like, "I don't really wanna go back into the physical realm, this Earth school, but I'm willing to do it because you know, the, because of love." Yeah. Right? Because of love for humanity. I find that to be really interesting, these stories of people just kind of evaporating- Mm... you know, out of their body and things like that.

[Brendan] Right. Yeah.

[Luke] It's really trippy.

[Brendan] Yeah, the bodhisattva who you know, puts off nirvana to, you know, hang out and help humanity, that kind of thing.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] I think that I think that happens a lot and the, and it's probably, you know, there's probably an aspect of, you know, at that point where, you know, people could integrate into, you know, the one. There might be that little part of them that just doesn't want to. And, you know, so they're like, "Well, if my choice is to reintegrate or to hang out and see if I can be of service, I'll hang out and I'll try and be to, be of service." And, you know, 'cause what else? You know, it's like we've got infinity on our hands anyway. It doesnRight... it doesn't matter.

[Luke] It's not like you're out of time. No. It's

[Brendan] Like, "I'm due back at the infinite one an hour, and so I can't, I can't..." Yeah. You know, it's like it doesn't really matter. I think I think, a lot of Westerners even are kind of reaching that point, maybe not a lot, but a certain, an increasing number. Robert Monroe, the pioneering out-of-body out-of-body experience guy who founded the Monroe Institute, he died in I think it's 1995. And, you know, since then, multiple people have had, you know, shared reports about interacting with him in their out-of-body adventures Oh,

[Luke] Really?

[Brendan] Yeah. And and one of them was Bruce Moen. And and it seems like Robert had, you know, essentially kind of made the... He'd, he sort of hit that bodhisattva kind of turning, like, fork in the road where he was like, "Oh, you know, I-" I'm still kind of interested in how things pan out for humanity, so I'm gonna hang around a bit and try to help out. But I, you know, I could... I'm also got one foot-... in the, in the infinite one kind of thing. I

[Luke] Mean, just curiosity, right? If I left today, I'd probably wanna see what's gonna happen with AI in 50 years.

[Brendan] Yeah. Yeah. It's

[1:32:21]

[Luke] Like-

[Brendan] Yeah...

[Luke] What are these humans up to? I just gotta see it, you know? Yeah. Just out of morbid fascination- Right If nothing else. Have you ever been compelled to go do the Monroe Institute training? Uh-

[Brendan] I haven't had a chance yet. I'd like to.

[Luke] You would?

[Brendan] Yeah, I'd like to. I probably

[Luke] I've had a couple people on the show who've done it.

[Brendan] Okay. Yeah.

[Luke] I kind of had a lapse of awareness that even existed- Right For a long time. Back in the late '90s, I used to listen to his Hemi-Sync programs and things like that. But I didn't know there was, like, a whole body of research- Mm-hmm... and an active, you know, center and community- Yeah... of people doing that kind of work. Yeah. But that's when I first heard that name, and it kind of just fell out of my awareness for a long time.

[Brendan] Yeah. A lot of people have had amazing experiences doing that, like going in person to, you know, have those, you know, do the workshops and stuff.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] Yeah, phenomenal.

[Luke] Yeah. I don't know. one part of me is like, I don't know, this world is... This reality's scary enough. Yeah. It's like I don't know if I wanna be able to bilocate and things like that. It's like it's hard enough just to stay in my body and just accept life as it is sometimes here.

[Brendan] Right. Yeah. No, I get that. I get that. You don't wanna accidentally make it more complicated than

[Luke] It already is. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. in your research of NDEs, what are some of the most compelling pieces of evidence to support it. Some basic ones that come to mind for me, for example, would be, you know, someone's in an operating room, and they flatline for a period of time, and they describe themselves as this sort of open, broad awareness that's up here in the corner of the room witnessing the phenomenon of the medical team and the emergency, and then come back into their body and describe to the people in the room what they just saw.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] And the doctors and, you know, clinicians in the room are of course shocked and awed by the fact that they were accurate in their assessment even though on an empirical level they were flatlined, heart wasn't beating, they're dead, right? Right. That's a good one for me. Yeah. You know? That's like-

[Brendan] Solid.

[Luke] Okay, you read a few of those, and you get the sense that the people aren't delusional or dishonest 'cause what would motivate them to come back with these stories? So what stories like that have you come across that have stayed with you?

[Brendan] Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of that kind of thing. Let me think. Some of the more powerful ones I think are the what are known as the Peak in Darien cases, so where someone has gone into an NDE experience and encountered somebody who they didn't know actually existed. you know, for example they might have had a brother or a sister born before they were born but who, you know, died in childbirth or died, you know, very young in life. And the parents never told them about it. They have an NDE, and they suddenly meet this you know, brother or sister who's been in the spirit world, and they, you know, they come back and they go, "Oh my God, that was amazing, Mom and Dad. Like, I met, I met little Johnny. He was telling me all about it." You know. And they're like, "Oh my God. How did, how did you know about... You know, we never, we never told about little Johnny." that kind of thing happens more than a lot of people would care to admit. And you know, it's very difficult to explain away when these kids are coming back with accurate information about people they didn't even know existed at all. And it's correct.

[1:35:43]

[Luke] Wild.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] Is it pretty universal that people that have NDEs don't experience time when they're outside of their body? Like, someone might be, you know, clinically dead for six minutes or so, then they come back, and what they experienced exceeds that Earth time period.

[Brendan] Yeah. I think actually the best example of time not matching up is the people who are coming out of induced comas and having essentially what we would- would call NDE experiences. Because, let me think I had a Substack article I posted not that long ago about a French woman who had been induced into a coma for I think it was roughly three weeks, and in the coma she was actually living an alternate life which went for seven- seven years. So she experienced seven years of linear time in this alternate reality where she had children, she had, like, three children, had a family, was just going through the day-to-day normal life. And then when she was snapped out of the coma and the, you know, the medical staff were there, they were like... She was like, "Where's my, where are my kids? Where are my, where's my family?" And they were like, "You don't, you don't have any kids. What are you talking about?" kind of thing. And she was actually devastated because it was so absolutely real for her for seven years. Like, her experience her experience was seven years of time, linear time, in the space of three weeks. so that's kind of like the opposite of instead of no time or losing track of time, it's, like, very crisp-

[Luke] Wow...

[Brendan] Crystal clear time. yeah, so that's kind of-

[Luke] She's, like, watching her kids grow up and become seven-year-olds?

[Brendan] Actually- Oh my God... that was what she experienced. Yeah. Holy shit. And so you can imagine, like, I mean, she was, she had to go to counseling, all sorts. She was absolutely devastated.

[Luke] Have you ever been present as someone died?

[Brendan] I don't think I have actually in... I don't think so. No. No

[Luke] Yeah, I've always wondered what's, what that's like, and I got to experience it last year when my dad died. He was, he was in a coma for a couple days, and I'd always imagined it to be, I don't know, much more dramatic, if not theatrical. Mm. I just imagined that you would have a very strong feeling in the room, right? That it's like, whoa, there's a big transition happening- Yeah... which I experienced once on a hunting trip when I shot a big pig and it got really weird. Oh. When it, you know, that consciousness left the Wow... it was, it was potent. Hmm. Things got super trippy. So I was like, well, if that's what happens when a pig dies, can imagine what happens when a human dies, let alone someone that you love deeply. Yeah. You know? And it was, you know, it was a powerful experience, but not in the way that I ever imagined it. Mm. It was somewhat non-eventful- Mm... in terms of consciousness is held in the body, and then it leaves the body. There wasn't like a big fireworks display, so to speak - Yeah,

[1:38:49]

[Brendan] Yeah...

[Luke] When that moment happened, you know? It was just very time kind of slowed down, right? And it was like, whoa, this is happening. But there wasn't, there wasn't a strong feeling that something supernatural was happening. Yeah. It was actually kind of ordinary.

[Brendan] Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke] Extremely sad and all of that, obviously, but it wasn't extraordinary. It was just kind of, okay, things felt one way, now they feel a bit different, and there's some emotions obviously that are asking to be processed and dealt with and faced and all of that. But yeah, I always imagined it to be kind of a big blow your hair back-

[Brendan] Mm...

[Luke] Moment, you know?

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] And maybe there will be others, you know? Yeah. Maybe it's that way for some other people, but it was... I don't wanna say like, it was disappointing. it was surprising.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Right. Very surprising. You know? I was like, huh, that's it?

[Brendan] Right.

[Luke] You know? I really had always felt that it would be a much bigger experience-

[Brendan] Mm. Yeah...

[Luke] In the kind of supernatural way. It was a big experience on a personal level, but not really... The field didn't seem to change all of that much in the room.

[Brendan] Interesting. I mean, yeah, for some people those deathbed experiences can get, you know, like you said with the, with the pig very interesting and strange. I kinda wanna ask you about the pig thing now. What happened with the, that made it weird?

[Luke] Well, I'd never taken the life of a large animal before. That was part of it, so I'm sure some of it was just kind of the emotional shock and overwhelm and the intensity and the adrenalized-

[Brendan] Mm...

[Luke] Moment of the experience. But as I got close to the animal I was just completely overtaken by emotion and it was a cacophony of emotions that were inclusive of all of them.

[Brendan] Mm.

[Luke] So there was some guilt, there was some sadness, there was joy, there was awe. Probably mostly awe.

[Brendan] Right.

[Luke] And my visual field got very ephemeral-

[Brendan] Mm...

[Luke] And trippy, like I had taken medicine or something. Mm. You know? It was like, "Whoa." And I was just really just overwhelmed with with emotion and just crying, but not crying in association to one specific emotion. Right, yeah. You know, it was just like, "Whoa, man, I gotta breathe. This is just intense. It's just intense." You know, just that moment, and it was so clear, like the moment of departure. It was just, "Whoa,- Mm... man, some big energy just moved." Yeah. It was like, yeah, it was a transitory moment of big energy-

[Brendan] Right. Yeah,

[Luke] Yeah... that also moved through me at the same time.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] And it was, yeah, it was really intense. Fascinating. I mean, life-changing, and also Revelatory in the sense that it was so clear to me that this is gonna sound weird to like a PETA activist or something, but I didn't just kill that being. The, you can't kill anything.

[1:42:05]

[Brendan] Right.

[Luke] Right? It's like the consciousness that was animating that animal Is not something that can be killed.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] Move, yeah, it went somewhere you know? It's not in there anymore. Now that's bacon. Yeah. Not to be, you know, crass. But that body had very little relevance once that transition had happened.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Luke] Which was similar, being in the room with my dad, too. You know, it was like I was looking at his body, and it's kind of not my dad anymore.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] But it was much more pronounced in that particular experience.

[Brendan] Yeah, that's interesting.

[Luke] Yeah. It was it was very moving. And I always imagined, and I've never been present at a birth other than my own which I don't remember much of, obviously. But I've always imagined that when a baby's born, that people in the room probably experience something similar, even though that being is already alive.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] But I've always imagined there's something about when the oneness between mother and baby hits that moment of separation, that there's some big energy there, too.

[Brendan] Yeah,

[Luke] Yeah. I've interviewed a lot of doulas and birth keepers and things like that, and they describe it in that way for the most part.

[Brendan] Hmm.

[Luke] But I think these transitions in life really have a lot to teach us if we're paying attention.

[Brendan] Yeah. I can't help but wonder if that might be, your experience with the pig might be really similar to what you know, traditional you know, hunter gatherer or nomadic people might have actually experienced on a regular basis when they were hunting. You know, 'cause they had a completely different mentality towards the relationship with the animal-

[Luke] Yeah...

[Brendan] On a fundamental level. And also, in the past, I think we were just, we were just a little more open on that level.

[Luke] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think the indigenous traditions were obviously much more tapped in, right, to the cycles of life and death, and also in communication with the natural world in a way that we're largely divorced from.

[Brendan] Hmm.

[Luke] I actually had a similar situation. I went to a bison harvest. I don't know if you've ever seen a bison, but they are a massive and powerful animal. I mean, they are a force of nature. And same kind of thing, you know. It was shot from a distance maybe about 50 yards, and when a bison dies, at least in this case, its nervous system is still full of charge, right? So it's kind of like running in place Oh... its side, but its brain died five minutes ago, you know? So it's still, the heart's still beating, the body's still heaving up and down. You're kind of tentatively approaching it because you feel like it could get up and-

[Brendan] Mm-hmm

[Luke] You know, like, or run you over. You know what I mean? The sniper who was a, you know, like a military sniper that took the shot, he explained that you know, taking into consideration the speed with which the bullet travels, that by the time we heard the crack of the bullet ignite, the animal was already brain dead.

[1:45:19]

[Brendan] Wow.

[Luke] You know, it's that fast. Yeah. 4,000 feet a second or something like that, right? So there's no chance in the... Scientifically, that there was any life left in that animal.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Yet there still was the electricity, right?

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] It was still present. It was, it was really interesting. But same kind of thing, you know? It's like, whoa, I gotta breathe, and, you know, a few of us went up and just said prayers and offered tobacco and just had a moment with that-

[Brendan] Mm-hmm

[Luke] Just majestic, beautiful animal, you know? Yeah. But interesting thing about both those experiences, despite, like, kind of the overwhelm of emotion, sadness wasn't the prominent emotion. It was just, I don't know, there's gratitude in there, too, and all kinds of different feelings. You know, with the bison, there was much more of that, I think because I wasn't the one that pulled the trigger, too. Right. So there was less emotional investment in it-

[Brendan] Mm-hmm...

[Luke] Uh, as a witness than participant or causal force. Yeah. You know? But yeah, I think that, I think these kind of experiences really have a lot to offer. so you as someone who's obviously, like, really into exploring the nature of reality and consciousness, I mean, for someone listening who maybe is thinking, like, "What are these guys talking about? Why does it matter?" You know? What... Which I don't, I doubt there are many that are still with us at an hour 40 minutes, but what value do you see in, you know, for you or other people in contemplating these big ideas and just exploring consciousness in whatever way one feels called to do so?

[Brendan] Yeah, I mean, I think that I... You know, my wife has asked me that many times, you know? Like, why? Why do we care? What's, why should we be interested, you know, this kind of thing. And to me it's just much more, it just reframes the, you know, the physical human lifetime in a, in a really profound way. I mean, why would you wanna have that very small sort of vision of, I'm just this little human meat sack, and well, you know, one day I'll die, and I'm gonna that's, that'll be when I stop existing, and that's the end of my story, and, you know, lights out. As opposed to, you know, widening the frame and expanding the picture a bit and going, "Well, ah, actually this is just one possibility playing out right now, and there's an infinite infinitude of other possibilities that are open to me at any given moment, even more so at the point of death." And so, you know, th... rather than being so bleak about it or, you know, and fatalistic or nihilistic and just going, just seeing it as an adventure amongst a series of adventures. and, you know, maybe we don't have to be so afraid of dying. Maybe we don't have to take it all so seriously. I think there is a lot of, there are a lot of, you know, positives that come out of like a genuine interest in these topics. And you know, people have said to me, "Wow, like after I read your book, I, you know, like what was I... I thought, what was I doing with my life? Like, if this is what's possible, what am I, what am I doing? I could be so much more," kind of thing. And that to me is like, it's like the human potential aspect that I think interests me a lot. You know? It really opens the the range of possibilities up. You know, you don't have to stick with whatever role, you know, might have been assigned to you or whatever role you thought you were given. you know, you're a lot bigger than that. And you're just like, you know, you're kind of like a great cosmic puppeteer, and you've just you know, you're just puppeteering. You've got your hand up Brendan's backside, and you know, you're just making him, you know, say some words for a little while and do some things, and then, you know, he'll run out of energy, and you'll, you know, hop over to the next little you know, puppet show kind of thing. It's like-

[1:48:58]

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] Yeah... it's not really that big of a deal in a way.

[Luke] I think for me, that very much describes the benefits that I've derived from just thinking about, feeling about, talking about these kind of things. It's like the burden of seriousness in life gets lighter.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] You know, when you start to realize that youcompletely insignificant and the most significant thing there is at the same time. You know what I mean?

[Brendan] Yeah. '

[Luke] Cause it's not like a, it's not like a futile or like apathetic point of view. No. It's just like, "Oh, God, I can just relax a little bit, man." It's like, whoa, I'm never gonna know all there is to be known, so why don't I just have fun knowing what I can and not worrying about it?

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] You know, it's just kind of, yeah, I think you describe it well. This is sort of just playing the role in life that I've been given with as much authenticity and love and integrity as I possibly can. Like, what else is there to do?

[Brendan] Right.

[Luke] You know?

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] And in my experience, the longer I've done that, the less I suffer.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] You know? But I'm not, I'm not trying to avoid suffering per se, it's just, it's a net consequence, meaning consequence. It's the next thing that happens if you're oriented the way that I am.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] And when I was oriented differently, I lived with a lot more fear.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it's that, it's that egoic kind of delusion like I'm just this little ego, this little character. And you know, it's kind of like, I don't know, I just had the analogy of discovering that you... Imagine if you discovered that you were, like, a hair on your head. Like, you're that one hair, and you're like, "Oh my God, I'm a hair." You know, like, "I exist." You know, but it's like, yeah, you've... There's lots of other hairs. It doesn't matter. You know? Yeah. Like, you're just... It's not that big of a deal. Like, yes, you're valid, and you're real, and you're valid, but you don't have to take it so seriously, and it's not the be all and end all. Like, you know, you're part of something much larger than that one thing. And so there, yeah, to me, there's a, you know, like, that macrocosm, this kind of cosmic process that we're all just, we're all just part of. We're all just little ripples on the surface of the ocean and, you know, we have a little lifetime, a ripple here and a ripple there, and it's, you know, the really... Losing sight of the ocean is kind of what gives us so much of our suffering, I think.

[Luke] Yeah. And you have a kid or kids?

[Brendan] Yeah, I got one.

[Luke] How old?

[Brendan] Nearly six.

[Luke] Nearly six. Do you ever ask your kid existential questions out of curiosity?

[Brendan] No. I try, I actually try to not open those cans. Okay. 'Cause I, yeah, I mean, sometimes, you know, you get caught with a question where you're like, oh, you're put on the spot. Like, how can I answer this in an age-appropriate way? It's not always easy. So I'd like, I'll, you know, if she raises it's okay, but I don't feel the need to try to, like, prompt her, you know? Sometimes she says stuff that's like, wow, that's so... She's so switched on. But I'm not, I'm not trying to, like, tease it out of her, you know?

[1:52:04]

[Luke] Sure.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] So you just sort of pay attention and bear witness if she says something that's beyond her years.

[Brendan] Yeah, and I'm not trying to, like, make her be more Do

[Luke] You remember your past life, Sunny?

[Brendan] Yeah, believe me, I was watching out for that. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. But yeah, no, I'm pretty, I'm pretty, like, laid back about that kind of thing.

[Luke] Yeah. You're a normal dad who thinks about the paranormal things.

[Brendan] Yeah, something like that.

[Luke] When we were you know, really gearing toward being parents this idea did not pass by the wife, needless to say, but I had the idea, what if we just don't name our kid And just be like, "Hey, you," until we can ask them, "What is your name?" Just to see what they come up with. Yeah. To see if they're like, "Oh, of course, I'm Jonathan," or whatever. Yeah. I mean, just to give, like, to give incarnated soul just complete autonomy to self-identify- Mm-hmm... so to speak, right? It's just like I'm not going to impose who I think you are, who I want you to be on you. Like, reveal who you are to me. Mm-hmm. I always thought that was a really interesting idea. Yeah. Probably impractical 'cause, you know, someone has to call them something, but.

[Brendan] Right.

[Luke] That was one of my hair-brain ideas that I never got to actually experiment with.

[Brendan] Maybe next life.

[Luke] Yeah, exactly. In my other life. Maybe I'm doing it right now. Tell me how Jesus, relatives, angels, aliens, or archetypes perform the same underlying function differently.

[Brendan] Oh, okay. okay, so a lot of that stuff shows up in the transitional kind of phase of someone separating from the body, even just in an, like, an out-of-body context or maybe plant medicine context or what have you. It's like, so I call it in my model, in book two, I call it interface imagery. So it's not necessarily something that we wanna be taking at face value or literally. It might just be the way that our mind presents itself to our perception. and you know, it's very much based on... It's largely informed by someone's experience in life, their, you know, religious indoctrination or you know, that life experience and knowledge base from their belief system. So you know, for different people, it'll look like Jesus or Buddha or, you know. And I'm not dismissing the significance either of actual literal surviving you know, souls or ancestors, family members, what have you. That's actually a legitimate category in itself. But in the early stages of post-mortem existence or non-physical existence, we have a process of needing to kind of stabilize consciousness so that we perceive things correctly or clearly and not with, like, our projections being overlaid on top of them, and that was something Bruce Moen talked about. He called it in one instance a fear a fear mask, which was something that, you know, he was helping a guy who was having an issue with out-of-body situations and there was another being, a friend of his actually, trying to connect with him in this non-physical environment. But the guy was projecting this fearful kind of imagery onto him, and so he looked like this monstrous kind of half-man, half-beast thing. And Moen called it a fear overlay, so he helped him understand, oh, you're actually making him look like that. You're perceiving him like that. It's not his fault. He's not actually that. There's something underlying that you're not, you're not perceiving correctly. So there's a process of having to kind of stabilize awareness to see things clearly, if you like, if you can put it that way. And so, yeah, that has a few other ideas that come with it, like, you know, that ties back into some of the soul trap stuff ideas about manipulation and archons and people trying to, you know, send you back to your body when you don't wanna go back to your body. but a lot of this stuff- 'Cause

[1:55:56]

[Luke] They wanna keep taxing you?

[Brendan] It's the IRS. The out-of-body IRS agents. Yeah. yeah, so, you know, there's a lot of stuff that actually we need to look at in a different way rather than the accepting the narratives that have become established or that are now proliferating. yeah, so...

[Luke] I used to think burnout was just the price you had to pay for being productive. Then I found something that helps me stay focused for as long as I need without feeling smoked afterward. It's called NuCalm. It uses a neuroacoustic software to help shift out of fight or flight and into deep recovery in, like, 10 minutes. And the cool thing is there's no gadgets to buy or haul around. You just throw on headphones, open the app, and within minutes you start to downshift or upshift if that's what you're looking for. I've been busy writing a book for the past couple years, and it's one of the most mentally demanding things I've ever done. I'm talking hours and hours of deep focus, revisiting old memories, and organizing a ton of ideas. So before I start a writing session, I'll use one of their flow state tracks to get me into zen. Then I'll lock in with a focus track for the next few hours of writing. And I'll tell you what, my wife can attest to this. When I have those headphones on, it's literally impossible to distract me. I'm like a machine. Then afterward, I'll use Recharge or Rescue to help my brain and body recover from hours of intense work. Just 20 minutes of that feels like a full nervous system reset, and NuCalm science supports that. I highly recommend you check out NuCalm, and here's how you do it. Go to lukestory.com/nucalm to start your free seven-day trial. That's free seven-day trial, folks. You'll also save 15% off your subscription. So whether you need better sleep, sharper focus, or a fast reset, NuCalm has a track for it. And again, here's the link, lukestory.com/nucalm. That's N-U-C-A-L-M

[Brendan] To get that 15% off. And whether or not you buy it, I highly recommend you at least give yourself seven days for free

[Luke] Going back to the the PSYOP topic that we were covering earlier, what's your perspective on the idea of loosh harvesting? L-O-O-S-H.

[Brendan] I'm glad you've asked that, actually.

[Luke] Um- 'Cause it-- I mean, like, on its face, you would look at the system, the matrix, and you could see on a surface level that they're going to use fear and terror as a tool of coercion and control.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] But there's another level that I've heard people speak of around this loosh harvesting, that the energy of those potent emotions holds value You know, in some realms to some beings and Yeah... that some of what the chaos that they create in the world is designed for is to actually create energy that they can then transmute into whatever their plan is.

[1:58:59]

[Brendan] Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a few different things there, and I think that, you know, basically they're happening like that in different ways. you know, there's... If you look at the sort of networks of the, you know, like the Epstein class, you're dealing with organized networks of Satanists dark occultists who are involved in manipulating the masses, large groups of people to essentially, yeah, do exactly that, to harvest energy, to redirect it into something else. So that goes on. It's not something that I focus on in my work. It's not really overly something to be concerned about in terms of our discussion about, like, living and dying and post-mortem existence and that kind of thing, but it does happen. It's just, like, more of a Earth-level kind of a thing. The loosh idea specifically came from Monroe and that was something that he really... He wrote, he published three books and the second one was the one where he really reified that loosh idea, and it came from... and again, coming back to the idea of stabilizing consciousness and out-of-body perception, and it came from his early kind of adventures where he was getting these vague kind of perceptions of human energy is somehow valuable to someone somewhere. And it kind of, if you look at the way he was wording his reports on it has this really mythical, mythological flavor to it. Like, almost like this distant figure, this distant god or creative figure planted the, like, created the human garden and and, you know, that was... He called them something like someone somewhere. That was, like, you know, the vague kind of placeholder name that he gave them. then, you know, people took that idea, and he called it loosh. He called it loosh, and people took that idea, and they basically, for the most part, seemed to stop reading him at that second book. which is unfortunate, because if you read his third book, he, his journey and his perception has developed and actually gotten clearer, and he's reporting now. He actually, he completely leaves the loosh idea behind. so he's gone from someone somewhere finds human emotion really valuable and useful and and it's important. I can't quite kind of pin it down. I'm gonna call that entity someone somewhere, and very mythological flavor. And then over here in the third He he's dropped the whole loosh concept entirely and is reporting from, like, a higher vantage point where he's actually started to connect his perception to that oversoul layer and you know, in his system it's called Focus 3435/35, and this is the oversoul kind of intelligence level. It turns out that oversoul level of us, that collective networked intelligence, is what values the human loosh, the human emotion, and it actually value, values the entire spectrum, not just the-

[2:01:59]

[Luke] Oh, interesting...

[Brendan] This is the thing. The soul trap crowd have latched onto this loosh idea, and they've actually twisted it and made it, oh, they're harvesting our negative, like, low-frequency emotions, and that's what it's all about. It's, like, trying to prompt us into being, like, looshed. but actually, what Monroe was showing in his third book when he actually stopped using the term and he moved on from his mythological framing, like the human kind of farm was kind of how he kind of framed it in the second book.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] Yeah. And he moved on from that and completely dropped it.

[Luke] I need to read that. Yeah.

[Brendan] Make sure you read two and three.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] And three is really the one that people miss, and that's the most important one because that's where his perception becomes clearer and he gets the view of, oh, I'm part of this really amazing, incredible, networked intelligence surrounding the world. All these oversoul intelligence is connected and it's they who have seeded, you know, essent- in a sense, seeded, like, this experiment and getting so much value from it because it's like this amazing play experiment, what have you. Like, it's an exploration. Like we were saying earlier, like, there's nothing else to do from a point of utter non-differentiation except for differentiation. And so the oversouls find this to be this incredible experiment and experience, and they find it really valuable, every single aspect of it. And that's what I think a lot of people will struggle with is that they, at that level, at that ontological level, there is no rejection of any facet of human life. Like, none of it's seen as negative or bad or whatever. It's all valuable, and it's all because it's experience for the sake of experience. and so that's where, you know, Monroe quietly put away the kind of loosh idea and the sort of human farm idea and just... He didn't officially retire them. He just kind of quietly left them behind and moved on. And if people don't get that last installment, they kind of have tended to get stuck in this kind of, you know, paranoid, "Oh, we're part of this human farm. We're being looshed." Like, there is, there is massive manipulation- Yeah... like you were saying. You know, there's multiple different ways people are manipulated. But it's not quite what... You know, in the non-physical, it's not quite the soul trap thing that people have made it out to be, and Monroe's contribution to that was kind of unfortunate.

[Luke] Interesting. Yeah, interesting. that kind of explains a correlation to the conspirituality archetype and mindset. It's like many people I've noticed, especially in the past few years, but, you know, I was into conspiracy theories long before the plandemic just kind of as a hobbyist, you know? Just, I don't know, a lot of it sounds pretty far out and not true, but some of it is obviously true. But I think the people who are Interested in, oriented toward consciousness and spirituality are sometimes more susceptible to, I don't know, becoming obsessed and preoccupied with the darkness in the world.

[2:05:02]

[Brendan] Mm.

[Luke] Because you want to be, you wanna be an aware and awake person, right? Which means you know, you have the courage to go look into the shadows, but the shadows can also be quite a trap.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Whereas your average person is just watching TV, drinking Yeah... you know, 9:00 to 5:00, just doesn't sit around contemplating these big ideas.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] Is probably in a sense living a more peaceful life.

[Brendan] Right. Ignor- ignorance is bliss.

[Luke] Right? That than someone who really starts to explore the, you know, to push the edges of their reality and their understanding of the nature of this universe. we seem... And I'm including myself in that 'cause I've definitely fallen prey to that and found myself living in a lot of undue anxiety and fear.

[Brendan] Wow. Yeah.

[Luke] Because you start digging and you go, oh, man, wow, things... As beautiful as life can be, the equal polarity is also real, too.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] But it's kind of I don't know, it's almost a Luciferian temptation in and of itself. Mm. It's like, oh, you want to, all the love and light, and you wanna understand the nature of reality? Cool. Well, there's this part of it, too. Yeah.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] Yeah. And in my own life, I mean, I've derived a lot of growth and benefit from exploring the, you know, the unexamined parts of myself and bringing them to light in order to heal them and all of that. But like one can do in the sort of microcosm of your own life, if you're so preoccupied with what's wrong with you, it's very difficult to see what's right. In the same way, you can navigate the world in the same Yeah... and get really trapped in, you know, the idea of the loosh and the human Mm... and all of these things. There's kind of a it's a little bit of a, it's a risky territory for some of us.

[Brendan] Yeah. it's almost like a rite of passage in some ways. Like, you almost have to... I think a lot of people go through that, where they get kind of stuck there for a while, and they're kind of spinning their wheels. They're, like, really kind of bogged down in the heaviness of it and the darkness of it, and then you're like, "Oh, there's this agenda." And then you can, you start looking ahead. Oh, here's what's coming, here's what's planned, and you can really, you know, get yourself in trouble doing that. And it's really, it's, to me, you have to at some point, you have to prioritize the internal work over the external, you know, conspiracy research or whatever, because that is a never-ending rabbit hole. I mean, it doesn't end, and you can stay in it for your entire life. You can be consumed by it and no good will ultimately come of it. Like, at some point, it's like, yes, awareness is good. We don't wanna be ignorant. We value being knowledgeable and understanding at least something of what's going on. So yeah, I mean, I respect the mentality of wanting to research and understand, but at the same time, you can lose yourself in it very very easily. And it's, you know, I've watched people do it and, you know, kind of destroy themselves, and they have, they have no life, and they're miserable. And it's like, well, you know, you gotta be here anyway so why not try to make the most of it instead of making yourself miserable with... It's almost like too much, too much information that you can't metabolize, and it's, like, overwhelming, it's overpowering. Problems you can't possibly solve as an individual, and you're just swimming in it. So it's really, it actually gets really unhealthy, potentially.

[2:08:30]

[Luke] Yeah. Yeah. I've experienced it myself. Yeah. I would, I would vouch for that perspective. It's just tricky because if you're someone who's just geared toward learning and understanding and growing, you have to at some point, as you said... I guess it can be a stage. I mean, I'm hoping that's what it's been for me. It's just like, I don't know. If you, if you want to be if you want to be a positive contribution in this human experience, I don't know. I think some of us have the impetus that we wanna fight the darkness, you know? And ultimately It can be dangerous and counterproductive because it's, it, that darkness is drawing you in, and now you hate the people that hate people.

[Brendan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Yeah. It's like, "Wait, I thought I was fighting hate, but, like, I really hate Yeah... because they're hateful," right? Mm-hmm. It's like, it's like acts of violence against violent people, that kind of thing. Yeah. It's this hurt people hurt people cyclical trap that ultimately is probably counterproductive when taken to the extreme.

[Brendan] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And yet I think you were you're kind of verging in this direction. Like, a lot of those people who are also kind of metaphysically or spiritually inclined, they then, they take that sort of idea of the manipulation and the control, and they extrapolate it into the nonphysical realm, and they superimpose this, like, kind of structured machinery of slavery, like spiritual slavery, which is, you know, I mean as if it's not bad enough now we're making, you know, the nonphysical realm this hell where we can't escape kind of thing. And it's really uh, certain people are drawn to it, and I don't think that there's any talking you know, certain people down from that. Like, they're gonna have to figure out in their own time that perception isn't always ontology. Perception is not always reliable. What you see isn't necessarily what's actually happening. You might be seeing a representation of something that's actually much more subtle or much more abstract, nonphysical, some kind of informational process that is being presented to your mind's eye as you know, beings, archon- archons running a, you know, a soul farm or something. Yeah. This, you know? Yeah. It's like, but if you get behind that, which they never seem to wanna do it's actually much more interesting 'cause now you're talking about the underlying mechanics of perception and consciousness and nonphysical existence instead of getting stuck at the surface level of, "Oh, well, what I saw must be reality," 'cause that's not how it works. And many different esoteric authors, metaphysicists, occultists, have warned us over the last 200 years, to say nothing of the Buddhists and the Vedantists who are just gonna say it's all illusion anyway. Yeah. Yeah... many occultists have warned us that perception in the astral realms is massively liable to being hallucinatory and deceptive. And the reason for that is because people take their unconscious content, their unconscious unresolved emotional content, their unconsciously held beliefs and that then becomes their rendered perceptual reality because- Right... you're no longer anchored in a physical, you know, physical space to, you know, couches and chairs and things that are solid to hang onto. You don't have any of that. All the furniture's stripped away. Your mind has to furnish the environment, and that's where people- Right... lose the plot because they forget that, and now you're in trouble.

[2:12:02]

[Luke] Right. Right. It's like a... Ramana Maharshi was quoted as saying "Don't bother trying to change the world because the world you see doesn't even exist." Right. Right? It's like the world you see is a projection of your own awareness and focus, right? So it's like if I'm focusing on deluge harvesting, and the reincarnation trap, and the human farm, and that I'm gonna be taxed even when I'm out of a body, you know what I mean? It's like, okay, that starts to get really grim-

[Brendan] Yeah

[Luke] Quickly, you know? Uh-huh. And I've, and I've gone down that too. I mean, I'm sure a lot of my questions have revealed that it's like, eh, you know, I'm still a little nervous about this whole thing, right? Right. Yeah. It's like, you know, things are progressively getting more free for me in my life, but because I choose to be aware of the full spectrum of the experience you know, there's a lot of spooky stuff out there. So do I wanna just be aware of everything? Okay, noted, check, but not put all of my eggs in that basket. Yeah. And all of a sudden, you know, the basket's overflowing with rotten eggs.

[Brendan] Right, exactly. Yeah.

[Luke] Yeah. Well, I love your perspective, dude. I can't wait to read... Do you do audiobooks of your books?

[Brendan] I will make this one an audiobook.

[Luke] Oh, cool. Yeah. I'm much better unfortunately at listening to books than than I am reading them. Mostly just due to time. Like, you can drive around and listen to a book, and-

[Brendan] Yeah...

[Luke] To sit with a book is a great experience, but it's, it takes dedication.

[Brendan] Right. Yeah.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] I know what you mean. I mean, I have a five-year-old, so I don't do nearly as much as I'd like to.

[Luke] Yes. so let's see, what have we got here? I forgot to mention the show notes. that'll be lukestory.com/nde. I'm glad we discussed that 'cause we talked about so many things that would have not been a great show notes plug there. for details and discounts on Brendan's books and offerings, including his Evolve Yourself program and masterclass, you can go to brendanmurphy.com/lifestylist, and we'll also put that in the show notes to make it easy and clickable. Tell people how they can interact with you more and learn more from you. I've not looked into your programs and offerings and things like that, so give me a pitch.

[Brendan] Yeah, well, okay, the masterclass does explain the what the Evolve Yourself program is and consists of. Okay. so it's, it the page where the masterclass is also has the info, so if people don't have the time to watch the video, they can just read the info. It's basically it's a way that I work with a particular type of sound-based modality which is a little bit different to normal sound healing modalities. It's got a, kind of an evolutionary kind of flavor to it. so it's different. We do four distinct ceremonies spaced over a 27-month timeline, and it it's aimed at essentially the spiritual evolution and self-realization, I guess you could say. As opposed to, you know, like a sound healing where we just wanna, you know, Relax... nice and relaxed. Yeah. And maybe hope that our stress level or blood pressure drops or something like that, you know? Right. not that I'm knocking that, 'cause that's also awesome. so yeah, the, all the information's on that page. I think it's brendandmurphy.com/lifestylist.

[2:15:16]

[Luke] Oh, okay.

[Brendan] Um...

[Luke] Oh, I had missed the D.

[Brendan] That's all right. Everybody

[Luke] Misses it. Brendan D. Murphy. We'll put, we'll put it in the show notes for an easy link. Yeah. So these... This program and the ceremonies that go that happen throughout the duration of the program, are those online or in person?

[Brendan] We generally connect with a Zoom call.

[Luke] Okay,

[Brendan] Got it. So people don't have to join the Zoom call, they can just tune in remotely. but the Zoom call's available, Cool... it's like a, it's like 30 minutes and, Cool... pretty, yeah, it's very convenient.

[Luke] Epic. And how did you come upon this particular aspect of sound as a tool?

[Brendan] I connected with a guy in the States, I think it was 2011 who's a fellow author in a adjacent, working in an adjacent area. His name's Sol Luckman. super interesting guy if you ever wanna get him on the show. And so he had developed this sound-based modality after going through a dark night of the soul for a decade. He actually had he'd had severe vaccine damage and it ruined his life for, you know, 10 years. He was trying to find a solution to get back to normal and heal himself. And so, you know, without getting too much into the nitty-gritty, the end result of that search and that journey was these codes, essentially these sequences of vowels that constitute the the activation, like the content of the activation kind of just appeared in his mind's eye, fully formed on four separate occasions. And-

[Luke] Oh, wow...

[Brendan] So each one is a separate you know, activation ceremony essentially. And so he realized he needed to vocalize and chant these. and there's actually one line gets chanted out loud and the other line gets done mentally, just silently mentally. So you're doing kind of a bit of multitasking. But he realized, "Okay, I need to, this is, this is my medicine." Mm-hmm. And so when he did this in a ceremonial setting, he used it on himself. and that began his healing process back Wow... back to normal. So he ended up successfully reversing all of the horrific, you know, damage and whatnot, and actually realizing that he was actually developing himself and expanding himself. He wasn't just undoing physical level damage. So he realized, "Oh, I've got this evolutionary modality here that's kind of, you know, expanded me." and so that was, that was kind of how that was born. And so I connected with him in 2011 and learned about it and did it on myself and then realized, "Oh, well, this is having an effect on me, so obviously I need to share this." And, you know, just took it from there.

[Luke] Beautiful.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] I wonder if his evolutionary process was actually primary to the healing.

[Brendan] How, explain.

[Luke] Well, you know, he, you know, he got this download and connected the idea that it could help him heal, and then as you described it, after the fact, realized that he was going through an evolutionary process.

[Brendan] Mm.

[Luke] But perhaps the evolutionary process was primordial, right? That was the substrate of the actual healing.

[2:18:16]

[Brendan] Right.

[Luke] You know?

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] I mean, which came first, the chicken or the

[Brendan] Egg? Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Luke] It's just, it's interesting, you know? And I... 'Cause in my own life, I've had experiences where, you know, I'm working on healing something in particular, and I kind of forget about it and end up having some other revelatory experience, and then this byproduct of that was the thing was healed. Right. Even though I kind of forgot that's what I even went to work on. Yeah. Yep. It's like there's a, an overarching healing presence or energy or modality or whatever that supersedes the symptomatic- Mm... expression of that particular thing you think you're trying to heal.

[Brendan] Yeah. Yeah,

[Luke] There is. There's like, there's a more universal or global healing taking place.

[Brendan] Yes.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Brendan] Yeah, I think there's something- Super cool, man... like that going on.

[Luke] Well, dude, this has been a really illuminating and fascinating conversation. I was really excited for this one. I talk about a lot of different things on this show, and I can find myself interested in enjoying all of them. But the realm of consciousness and just the infinitely fascinating world of what a human is and what makes us tick is really my lifeblood you know? So yeah, I'm really glad we had an opportunity to sit down and chat about all this stuff, and I'm excited to check out your stuff. I wanna do the sound thing. I'm like, "I need that." As if I... Just when I think I've tried everything, you know? I meet someone like you, I'm like, "Ah, shit, I gotta do this thing," you know? I just gotta see. I'm a curious person.

[Brendan] Yeah. Just one more.

[Luke] Yeah, exactly. And then I remind myself of what I experienced, you know, that the guy who wants to go all the way is already there, you know? So that's part of it, too. Yeah. But I'm still gonna keep doing stuff.

[Brendan] Yeah.

[Luke] All right, last question for you. Who have been three teachers or teachings in your life that have most impacted who you are today?

[Brendan] Oh, man, that's really putting me on the spot. Um-

[Luke] Well, you've referenced a ton of people that you've studied- Uh And learned from already. So just top of mind, you know?

[Brendan] I mean, the

[Luke] Biggest- Intuitive answer...

[Brendan] Okay, the most obvious one is the guy who kinda kickstarted me, which was Michael Talbot with his book. So that was, that was the seminal kind of awakening moment. the... I would say, actually, in, if people read book two, they'll see the name of my colleague and friend, Nick Sandbrook show up a few times. And you know, when I connected with him, when he actually found me through my first book in 2014 through a, kind of synchronistic happening. and you know, I realized he had a very advanced understanding of certain things that was very compelling and kind of motivated me to, you know, pull on those threads a little more. So he his influence there has been really actually quite significant in terms of where my work has gone. so that's two people off the top of my head. I don't know if I can think of a third. but there's definitely those two. And then, you know, somewhere in the thousands of footnotes and citations I could probably pick out a third one. I don't know. Not sure. Off the top of my head, I don't know. I can't think of one.

[2:21:21]

[Luke] That's okay. Two's fine. there's no rules here. Only suggestions. when does your book two come out?

[Brendan] So we're hoping to get it to print pretty soon in the next few months. It's gonna Okay... we've actually, we've, we're taking pre-orders, and we are taking orders.

[Luke] Okay,

[Brendan] Great. so yeah, if you have people actually go to that link, they're not gonna, you know, hit a blank page. They're gonna be able to see it. And if they want to, they can put an order in.

[Luke] Epic.

[Brendan] So we're gonna get it out as soon as we possibly can.

[Luke] How much Earth time went into book two? If you can quantify. I know it's difficult

[Brendan] I can't say exactly, but I think I mean, I know for a fact that we're talking thousands of

[Luke] Hours. Thousands of hours, yeah.

[Brendan] Yep.

[Luke] Yeah. 'Cause your books are quite long, right?

[Brendan] Yeah, I mean, they're longer than average, but I mean, the amount of, like, study and just thinking and collating and organizing, like, just thousands of hours of actual work has to put the material together like it is. You know, it's a just a only, if you saw it, you would have to say only a madman would do something like that. So yeah, it's one of those things you do when you're obsessed with something or it's just like this is your calling or whatever, you know. Like, you know when something's trying to express through you don't really feel like you're even in charge or in control of it. Yeah. It's more like you're just, like, you know, I'm just kind of like the vessel for something that's trying to be expressed. and so it's kind of dominated my life for the last 23 years. So, you know, I mean, probably pushing- Wow... 20,000 hours at this point.

[Luke] Wow.

[Brendan] It's a lot.

[Luke] Yeah, I ask having just finished a book, and it's just given me a whole new respect for people that write books, especially books that are really deep and substantial. You know, like some of my favorite books. Oh my God. I wouldn't wish that upon anyone-... you know? 'Cause it's like I know what it takes, and I'm sure it takes a lot more if you're really, you know, teasing apart big ideas as you are.

[Brendan] Yeah. Yeah, it's... I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

[Luke] Yeah. Yeah. How has your, you know, your family held up to your, you know, your mission?

[Brendan] Oh, my wife's, Amy's very supportive.

[Luke] Yeah?

[Brendan] I couldn't have, I couldn't have done better. Cool. Yeah, no, she's cool. She's very cool.

[Luke] Great.

[Brendan] Great. Yeah.

[Luke] All right, man. Well, thanks for joining me today. I can't wait to do it again.

[Brendan] Thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it.

[Luke] All right, family, thanks for tuning in to The Lifestylist and making me part of your day. Now for a quick reality check. If social media pulled the plug on me tomorrow, how would we stay connected? I've been battling the Chinese Communist Party for years as they keep banning me on TikTok, and you never know how the tide might shift with Instagram or YouTube either. One wrong word and the algorithm can shut you down. That's why I've been proactive. I'm doubling down on email as one of my most reliable long-term channels of communication. But there's one new twist. Instead of me blasting the same content to everyone on my email list, now you get to choose exactly what shows up in your inbox and what doesn't. So whether it's biohacking, truth, wellness, spirituality, or my uncut take on current events, whatever lights you up the most is what you'll get. So I highly recommend you get to lukestory.com/privatehouse, set your preferences, and enjoy a content stream based on your most important interests. There's no middleman, no algorithm, no censorship, and no spam. It's where I can speak freely and share what I actually think, and no one but you and me decides what gets seen. So again, that's lukestory.com/privatehouse, where you can enjoy a tailored experience with bonus content you won't get anywhere else. And there's no need to even memorize that link or save it for later. You're gonna see it right in this episode description on your podcast app. So hit it before you quit it. And I'll see you all in my private house

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