Atlas's Substack Podcast

About Atlas's Substack Podcast

Practical wisdom for spiritual awakening and inner transformation. atlasrelics95.substack.com (https://atlasrelics95.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Atlas Reed

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

26 Jan 2026

Latest episode

2 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

31 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   2 Aug 2026

   The Home You Left, and the Home You Return To

   There is a man who has spent decades learning how to leave his body on purpose. Not through drugs. Not through trauma. Through a controlled, repeatable practice of shutting the body down just enough that something else in him, something he calls the soul, steps outside of it. He describes the state as identical in texture to a near-death experience, except he can enter it again and again, deliberately, and come back to report what he found. What he found, after all those years, was simple enough to say in one sentence: this place is not our home. He does not mean that as poetry. He means it as a fact he has verified from the inside, over and over, the way a diver verifies the ocean floor by touching it. The moment he leaves the body and looks back at it lying there, he says, the illusion collapses instantly. The body was never him. It was a container, and containers are not the same thing as what they hold. The fear of losing a self that was never lost Ask most people what they are most afraid of, underneath all the smaller fears, and it traces back to one thing: losing themselves. Losing the body, losing the people they love, losing the sense of being someone at all. He says this fear rests on a misunderstanding. On the other side, he insists, the personality does not dissolve. You remain exactly who you are, except now you remember more of what you actually are underneath the personality. Nothing is subtracted. Something long forgotten is handed back. What is handed back, in his account, is staggering in scope: memory of a state of total freedom, a state where touch is not mediated by skin and distance but felt directly, where one soul can feel another’s emotion the moment they meet, without translation and without walls. He calls it a kind of nakedness, not of the body but of everything the body normally hides. And crucially, he says the suffering of this life does not follow you there. It ends the instant you remember what you are. A deliberately unfinished world Here is where his account gets stranger, and more interesting. He describes each soul, in its natural state, as something close to all-powerful. Not powerful over others, but powerful as a creator, able to will things into experience simply by wanting them, the way you might imagine a lucid dreamer shaping a dream. On the other side, in what he calls the great infinite beyond, a soul that wants to experience a particular kind of creation can simply create it. So why leave that behind for a life like this one, filled with scarcity, grief, and limitation? His answer is that this reality was built, deliberately, as the first of its kind to give souls something they could not get anywhere else: the temporary experience of not being total love. Not as punishment. As contrast. He argues you cannot know what love is at its fullest unless you have also known its absence, and that this world exists to supply that absence on purpose, briefly, so the return to love means something. It is a strange kind of comfort. Not “the suffering is meaningless,” but “the suffering is the exact shape of what makes the returning possible.” Why the crossing feels like hell for some If the other side is unconditional love, why do so many near-death accounts describe encounters with darkness, or fear, or something like judgment? His explanation is that nothing simply vanishes when you leave the body. Every thought form you have ever carried, every fear buried below conscious awareness, is still there, still part of your field. Crossing over does not erase it. It presents it to you. He describes going through this himself for years: a recurring sense of being pursued, of something trying to harm him, a residue of fear he could not out think his way past. What finally broke it, he says, was not courage in the conventional sense. It was surrender. A point where he stopped fighting and stopped fearing, simply because he had nothing left to fight with. He says the moment he genuinely stopped caring what happened to him, the threatening forms dissolved like smoke, and what appeared instead was someone he loved, arriving to greet him. His conclusion is blunt: nothing has authority over a soul except the fear that soul is still holding. Let go of the fear completely, and there is nothing left for the fear to attach to. A different way of thinking about God He also pushes back, carefully, on the idea of God as a single ruling figure sitting outside creation, handing down judgment. His view is closer to this: every soul is already made of the same substance as whatever people call God. Not equal to it in the sense of replacing it, but continuous with it, the way a wave is continuous with the ocean rather than separate from it. He suggests that fear-based religion, the version built on threats of punishment, is a distortion layered over a simpler and more generous truth: that the source of everything loves every part of itself equally, without conditions, because there is nothing else for it to be. He is careful to add that this does not excuse cruelty or harm done here. But he frames even the worst human behavior as a kind of distress signal, a child in pain lashing out because it cannot find the love it is actually asking for. Not an excuse. A diagnosis. Abilities he says are dormant, not missing Toward the end of his account, he turns to something more immediately practical: what he believes ordinary people are already capable of, without needing to leave the body at all. He points to intuition as an early, small form of the same sensing ability he uses in full when he is out of the body, the capacity to tune into another person’s emotional signature the way you might learn to recognize a particular instrument in an orchestra. He talks about the heart’s electromagnetic field, well documented in physiology, as the seed of something most people never learn to develop further. He even brings up the physics of ordinary standing, the way atoms never actually touch, as evidence that a small, constant repulsion is already happening between us and the ground beneath our feet, something he suggests could, in principle, be intensified. Whether or not each of these claims holds up under scrutiny, the underlying theme is consistent and worth sitting with: he does not believe extraordinary states are reserved for a rare few. He believes they are underused faculties everyone carries, the same way a muscle exists whether or not it has ever been trained. Where this leaves the rest of us You do not have to accept every claim in an account like this to find something useful in its shape. The core suggestion is not really about the mechanics of leaving a body. It is about where a person locates their sense of safety. If safety depends entirely on holding onto things that can be taken, fear becomes permanent, because loss is always somewhere on the horizon. If safety instead rests on something that cannot be taken, whatever you want to call that, soul, awareness, the part of you that was there before any of the roles you currently play, then loss changes character. It stops being an ending and starts being a return. He puts it simply: nothing you are given here comes with you, and nothing you lose here was ever really yours to keep. What lives underneath all of it, he says, has never once been in danger. Believe that fully, even for a moment, and see what softens. Thanks for reading Atlas's Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Atlas's Substack at atlasrelics95.substack.com/subscribe (https://atlasrelics95.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   26 Jul 2026

   The Hidden Force You Were Never Taught to Use

   Episode Summary: What if your mind isn't just reacting to reality, but actively creating it? In this episode, we explore the science and philosophy behind energy, focus, and coherence, from the double slit experiment to the electromagnetic power of the heart, and lay out simple daily practices you can start using immediately to shift how you experience your own life. In This Episode: Why the double slit experiment suggests observation shapes outcomes, and what that means for your everyday thoughts The cat in the box thought experiment, and the idea that every version of your life already exists A sixty second exercise to rewrite how you see a stuck area of your life Why your heart's electromagnetic field may carry more influence than your thoughts alone The concept of coherence, and a simple breathing practice to activate it Why "what you focus on expands" isn't just a saying, it's rooted in how neural pathways form Your subconscious set point, and why changing it requires daily repetition, not a single decision Feeling energy directly: a simple palm exercise anyone can try The daily habits, sleep, sunlight, movement, hydration, and community, that quietly shape your energy Superposition and intention: working with the idea that focused attention keeps possibility open A Practice to Take With You: Place a hand over your heart. Breathe in for five seconds, hold for five, release for five. Repeat three times while holding a memory of real gratitude. Let that feeling radiate outward for sixty seconds. Try it daily for a week and notice what changes. Reflection Prompt for Listeners: Pick one area of your life where you feel stuck. Write down how you currently see it, then write the opposite as if it were already true. Sit with that feeling for sixty seconds today. Subscribe and Share: If this episode resonated, share it with someone who could use it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. Get full access to Atlas's Substack at atlasrelics95.substack.com/subscribe (https://atlasrelics95.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   8 Jul 2026

   The Seven Levels of Consciousness

   Consciousness refuses to make sense. Color, sound, scent, the ache of heartbreak, the warmth of love, none of it should exist the way it does. We have charted the observable universe, mapped every neuron in the brain, and built machines that speak and reason like us, yet the most basic fact of being alive, that it feels like something to be you, remains unexplained. Every person who has ever lived has experienced consciousness directly, and still it resists explanation. Mystics, scientists, and philosophers keep arriving at the same conclusion from different directions: awareness is not one flat experience. It moves through levels, and the further down you go, the stranger and more expansive it becomes. Level One: Deep Sleep This is the state we enter every night without a second thought, and it is also the strangest one of all. In deep sleep, the world dissolves completely. There is no self, no dream, no story, only a stillness so total that even the idea of stillness disappears with it. You cannot understand deep sleep by imagining it, any more than a sighted person can understand blindness by closing their eyes. All we know for certain is that awareness switches off and then, hours later, switches back on, and somehow you know that time passed even though nothing was there to witness it. Neuroscience calls this the delta wave state, a slow rhythm under four cycles per second where the body repairs tissue, resets the nervous system, and consolidates memory. But underneath the biology sits a genuine paradox. Something registers that nothing happened, otherwise waking up would feel like utter confusion rather than continuity. Ancient traditions named this state long before EEG machines existed. In Vedanta it is called sushupti, the self resting in its unmanifested form. Buddhist thought treats it as a glimpse of nirvana without the insight attached to it. Whatever the label, deep sleep functions as both an ending and a beginning, a nightly dissolving of the self that makes the next day’s waking possible. Level Two: Dreaming From that void, fragments begin to move. Images assemble themselves out of nothing, and suddenly you are somewhere else entirely, flying, falling, speaking to people who do not exist and yet feel completely real. Dreaming happens during REM sleep, when the body stays paralyzed but the brain lights up with activity. Emotion, memory, and imagination combine without any of the constraints that govern waking life. In a dream, you are simultaneously the author, the architect, and the character wandering through a world you built and immediately forgot you built. Cultures have interpreted this differently. Hindu philosophy calls the dream state swapna, a distorted mirror of waking reality. The Greeks read dreams as messages sent by the gods. Depth psychology treated them as coded messages from the unconscious mind. Modern neuroscience prefers to call it memory consolidation, the brain sorting the day’s residue into symbolic narrative. None of these framings fully capture the strangeness of it. A nightmare can spike your heart rate. A vivid dream can leave you shaken or comforted for days. For something built entirely out of imagination, dreams leave remarkably real footprints, and they hint at something unsettling: if the mind can construct a convincing world every single night, what guarantee do we have that waking life is any different? Level Three: Waking Then you open your eyes. Light, color, the weight of your own body, the layered sound of a normal morning, all of it floods back in at once. This is waking consciousness, the state where most of us spend the overwhelming majority of our lives, and the one we mistake for the full picture of reality. The brain is processing billions of signals every second, converting raw sensory noise into a coherent, three-dimensional experience convincing enough to navigate by. Researchers describe the mechanism that stitches this narrative together as the default mode network, the part of the mind responsible for the ongoing sense of being a single continuous person moving through time. But the longer you examine waking life, the less solid it looks. Optical illusions prove the senses are not reliable. Other species perceive entirely different realities: some animals see infrared light, others navigate by magnetic fields or echolocation, and people with certain forms of synesthesia see color when they hear music. If perception varies this dramatically across nervous systems, there is no single objective reality being revealed, only a version filtered through whatever equipment happens to be doing the perceiving. Philosophers reached similar conclusions long before neuroscience existed. Descartes wondered how anyone could be certain they were not dreaming right now. Kant argued that we never perceive the world directly, only a mental model shaped by the structure of cognition itself. Contemporary thinkers describe perception as an interface built for survival rather than truth, meaning the senses are not showing you reality so much as hiding it behind symbols useful enough to keep you alive. Waking life feels more solid than a dream mainly because of consequence and consensus. Other people appear to share the same sky, the same physical laws, the same continuity from one day to the next. But that shared agreement is itself a kind of collective construction, reinforced through language and memory rather than proof of anything absolute. Waking is not the opposite of dreaming. It is simply the most persistent dream, stable enough to convince everyone at once. For most people, the map of consciousness stops here. Waking, dreaming, and deep sleep make up the entire known territory. But there are deeper layers that only reveal themselves once the surface of the mind grows quiet enough to notice them. Level Four: Transcendental Consciousness Beyond the three ordinary states lies something that does not fit neatly into any of them. It is not sleep, not imagination, not ordinary alertness. In transcendental consciousness, the body and senses remain present, but thought slows dramatically and then falls away entirely. Attention turns inward and rests on awareness itself rather than on any object of awareness. Meditators across unrelated traditions describe the same experience: being without doing, awareness detached from the constant churn of thought. EEG studies of experienced meditators show something measurable happening here too. The usually asynchronous activity between the brain’s hemispheres begins to synchronize, waveforms aligning the way instruments do when they fall into the same rhythm. The Upanishads call this turiya, the fourth state beyond waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. Descartes built an entire philosophy on the claim that thinking proves existence, yet in this state, thinking dissolves and a sense of being remains anyway. Many describe it as a feeling of returning home, discovering that what they spent a lifetime searching for was the very awareness doing the searching. Level Five: Cosmic Consciousness Eventually the stillness stops fading when the eyes open. This is cosmic consciousness, the point where inner stillness and outer activity coexist rather than alternate. You can think, act, feel, and engage fully with life, while a quiet, unmoving awareness continues underneath all of it, untouched by the noise on the surface. Researchers describe this as sustained meta awareness, a steady activation of the brain’s monitoring systems that track internal and external experience at the same time. Philosophically, it marks the point where you stop mistaking your body, emotions, and personality for the whole of who you are. Emotions still arise, joy and grief included, but they move like waves across a much larger and calmer ocean underneath. Level Six: God Consciousness From here, the witnessing awareness that once observed the world from a slight distance begins to feel intimately woven into everything it perceives. The line between observer and observed softens. A tree stops being an object and starts feeling alive, vibrant, worth reverence. Neuroscience associates this shift with highly synchronized gamma activity, often observed during states of profound compassion or awe, where emotional and sensory processing begin to merge. But the deeper description is philosophical rather than mechanical: consciousness moves from simply witnessing the world to falling in love with it. Vedic tradition calls the resulting state sat chit ananda, being, consciousness, and bliss experienced as one. Christian mysticism speaks of union through love. Sufi poetry describes a divine passion that dissolves the sense of separateness altogether. Level Seven: Unity Consciousness At the final level, even the witness disappears. The boundary between self and world collapses entirely, and what remains is not a perspective on reality but reality itself, seamless and undivided. There is no longer an inside and an outside, only a single field of being that includes everything. Vedanta calls this the realization of Brahman, existence without a second. Mahayana Buddhism calls it sunyata, an emptiness that is somehow completely full. Time loses its grip here too, with past and future folding into a boundless present. This is not an escape from life but the recognition that consciousness was never divided from anything to begin with. One Awareness, Many Disguises Seen from a distance, these seven levels do not look like a staircase so much as a circle. We begin in the darkness of deep sleep, unaware of awareness itself, and end in a state so unified that even the sense of ascent disappears. Science measures the waves and frequencies along the way. Philosophy traces the same territory through language and metaphor. Both keep arriving at the same unspoken suggestion: consciousness is not something you possess. It is what you are. Perhaps the brain does not generate consciousness the way fire generates smoke. Perhaps the brain is only the instrument, and consciousness is the one playing it, moving through sleep, dreams, waking life, stillness, witnessing, love, and finally unity, only to discover it never actually left home. Ready to find out which stage you’re standing in right now? Pick up your copy of The Four Stages of Consciousness today, and start walking the path from To Me, By Me, Through Me, to As Me — at your own pace, with no judgment, just clarity. Your awakening doesn’t need to wait. Get the book and begin. Link in bio! Thanks for reading Atlas's Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Atlas's Substack at atlasrelics95.substack.com/subscribe (https://atlasrelics95.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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