Summary:
- Anthony Peake, an author of 12 books on topics such as consciousness, reality, and spirituality. Anthony shares how he became interested in these subjects and what his main influences were.
- Hallucinations and Deja Vu: Anthony shares his personal experiences with migraine auras, hallucinations, and deja vu, and how they led him to research the neurophysiology and psychology of these phenomena. He also explains how they are related to temporal lobe epilepsy and near-death experiences.
- Synchronicities and Manifestations: Anthony talks about his fascination with synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences, and how they seem to reveal a hidden order or intelligence behind reality. He also explores the idea that we can create thought forms, or egregores, that can influence or appear in the physical world, such as ghosts, poltergeists, or tulpas.
- Science and Spirituality: Anthony discusses how he tries to balance a rational and scientific approach with an open-minded and mystical one, and how he finds inspiration from quantum physics, Gnosticism, Buddhism, and other sources. He also mentions some of his books and how they relate to his worldview.
- The author discusses the concept of non-duality and how it relates to quantum physics, cosmology, and consciousness. He argues that everything is one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, and that there is a hidden reality beyond our perception.
- He introduces his hypothesis of Cheating the Ferryman, which suggests that at the point of death, we enter a timeless state where we relive our lives over and over again, making different choices and exploring different potentials. He calls this part of us that survives the Daemon, and the part that dies the Eidolon.
- He explains how his hypothesis is based on various scientific theories, such as Planck’s quanta, Einstein’s relativity, Wheeler’s participatory universe, Bohm’s implicate order, Hawking’s top-down cosmology, and Kramer’s transactional interpretation. He also draws on near-death experiences, deja vu, panoramic life review, and DMT as evidence for his model.
- He also compares his hypothesis with other spiritual and mystical traditions, such as Buddhism, Vedanta, Gnosticism, Platonism, and Priestley’s plays. He acknowledges the similarities and differences, and tries to keep a rational and scientific approach.
- The role of the Daemon: The author and the interviewer discuss the idea of a higher self or a guiding entity that can influence people’s creativity, intuition, and decisions. They give examples of famous writers, artists, and scientists who claimed to have received inspiration or guidance from such a source. They also mention cases of people who have precognitive dreams or telepathy, and suggest that the Daemon may be using future memory to help them.
- The nature of hallucinations: The author and the interviewer explore the possibility that hallucinations are not just random or meaningless phenomena, but rather windows into other realms of reality that are normally filtered out by the brain. They talk about the effects of drugs like DMT, the experiences of people with Alzheimer’s or Charles Bonnet syndrome, and the consistency of certain entities or visions across cultures and times.
- The interaction of science and spirituality: The author and the interviewer express their frustration with the materialist worldview that denies or dismisses anything that cannot be explained by conventional science. They argue that science and spirituality can and should complement each other, and that there is a lot of evidence for phenomena that challenge the current scientific paradigm. They also mention some of their associates who are doing research on topics like sleep paralysis, autism, and seeing without eyes.
Full transcript:
Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people and about spiritual topics and sometimes science and spirituality. We’ve done nearly 700 of them now. And if this is new to you, and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu, where you’ll see them organized in about four different four or five different ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on the site. And there’s a page explaining alternatives to PayPal. And when I say listeners and viewers is because this exists as an audio podcast, on all the various podcast feeds, as well as a video on YouTube. My guest today is Anthony Peake. And I first became aware of Anthony a few months ago when I interviewed Penny Sartori. And there were some events or something that she and he did together. And I really liked listening to him speak and I thought I’d like to interview that guy, too. So here we are. Anthony is the author of 12 books. He has lectured across the UK and Europe and has also given talks in New York and Melbourne, Australia. He’s appeared on national TV in Germany and France, and has been interviewed on numerous BBC local radio stations and nationally on BBC Radio “Five Live.” So that doesn’t tell us too much about your Anthony. But I thought I might start by asking, you know, what was it about your formative years that led to the kinds of things that you’ve been thinking and writing about in all of your books, many of which we’re going to discuss today?
Anthony Peake: Hello, Rick, it’s lovely to talk to you and everything else, and very much been looking forward to this. And it’s wonderful that you had chatted with Penny, who is one of my favorite people. She’s an absolutely wonderful researcher in near death experiences. I’ve always been interested in the relationship between consciousness and external reality. And ever since I was a child, it’s something that’s intrigued me, you know, I used to lie in bed and I used to wonder about the universe, what my role in the universe was, and exactly what I was, you know, I was this piece of sentience that seemed to just be there. You know, I didn’t ask to be there, I just was. And I came from, well, a reasonably religious family, I would say, not overtly. So but you know, I was brought up in a spiritual tradition in many ways. But I never really took to the standard religion viewpoint, and I was always a rebel. But at the same token, I thought you can’t throw the baby out with the dishwater with the bathwater, because you’ve got to understand that there’s more to life than just science and everything else. And when I was 12, I had double pneumonia. And I was quite seriously ill. And during that time, I had a series of very, very powerful hallucinations. And those hallucinations even at 12 years of age made me think, you know, what, what’s happening here? Where are these things, these hallucinations seems to be projecting out into three dimensional reality around me, coming from my brain, but they seem to be out there. And I became so intrigued by that when I recovered, I started to buy a weekly magazine that used to come out the turn into an encyclopedia in the UK and it was called Man, Myth and Magic. And Man, Myth and Magic took you through from anthropology to magic to in a in a fairly academic way, I have to say rather than a sensationalist, as you’d expect, and that really developed my interest in sociology developed my interest in psychology, psychiatry, and I then had the opportunity when I went to university I decided like an idiot, I would do a dual honours degree, which meant I had to do two degrees at the same time in parallel, which was not the cleverest of things to do really at the time. And I did a dual honours degree in sociology and history. And that gave me the opportunity to study in depth, the development of ideas, the development of I was particularly interested in the religious movements during the English Civil War. I was interested in the religious movements that took place after the 30 Years War in Germany, for instance, and subsequently the esoteric traditions that developed within Europe, during the, from the Renaissance onwards, you know, the rediscovering of ancient Greek philosophies and everything else as well. And that moved me into areas of interests in magic interested in esoteric systems. And also I became interested at that stage on in terms of ghosts hauntings, poltergeists and the UFO phenomenon. But I’ve always taken a very rigidly rationalist approach to it. My philosophy is always start with the science start with a proof and work your way from the proof to the speculation. And I was in the position that I then did postgraduate at the London School of Economics and I had a career in business. But I always wanted to write. And in 1999, I had the opportunity to take a year out to write a book and my wife was very accommodating. And she said, you’ve been wanting to write this book for years, you’ve been reading around the subject you have seem to have a an encyclopedic knowledge of your subject matter, both from the science, from the quantum physics to the psychology to the neurophysiology and everything, just do something. And I started to write a book and the book initially I didn’t even know what I was gonna be writing about, now one of the things I’ve always suffered from is classic migraine. It’s one of the things that’s always been through my life and I get aura states and I was sitting in front of the….
Rick Archer: You better explain what aura states are.
Anthony Peake: Ok. Aura States are of the prodrome they are the the sensations you have before you have a proper migraine state. So ordinarily, when people have migraine, they just get a headache. But when you have classic migraine, you get aura states as well. And it’s a really weird feeling…
Rick Archer: A.U.R. A? Like you’re seeing something or….
Anthony Peake: Yeah, you see what happens with me is that my, I get that what starts is normally my fingertip starts going numb, then my lips start to go numb. And then my visual field breaks up. So what I will do is I’ll have a series of the things that are called scotomas, which are like jagged edges and fizzies. It starts as a kind of fizzing in my visual field that gets bigger and bigger. And I literally cannot say it just completely wiped out my visual field with these kinds of zigzag shapes. It’s called castellation is the technical term for it. But also, when I was doing this when I was about to start writing, one of the other things that I always used to have in an aura state was profound deja vu sensations. You really get this overpowering shiver of recognition that you’ve done this before. So when I came out of the state, I realized that’s what I needed to write about. I wanted to write about deja vu, or what it was; how it functioned. And I was fortunate enough to make contact with a gentleman called Dr. Arthur Funkhouser, who is a quantum physicist by background. He’s an expert in holography. He is an American guy that lives in Switzerland and now he’s a Jungian analyst. And Art had written a couple of papers on deja vu, which were intriguing and fascinating. One of them is called the Dream Theory of deja vu. And his argument is that when you’re having a deja vu sensation, you’re remembering the dream you’ve had recently and you are reliving the dream. It’s a kind of like a precognition. And I thought that was very intriguing. And I decided to start looking into the neurophysiology of the deja vu state. And I made links between (not me, but) the research had made links between that and another illness, another illness another altered state of consciousness if you want for better term linking with temporal lobe epilepsy. And people who have temporal lobe epilepsy have even more extreme Aura States and even more extreme pre cognitive deja vu states. I then discovered that there was a neurological link neuro chemically between those two states and the near death experience. And that certain neurotransmitters – neurotransmitters are the chemicals that facilitate the communication between the neurons in the brain. And in the body.They’ve discovered over 100 different neurotransmitters and they modulate our behavior, like serotonin and dopamine and various other things. But one of them is known as glutamate. And glutamate is a linkage between temporal lobe epilepsy near death experiences and migraine auras. And I then realized I then had the basis of a book because I started to research I joined the International Association of near death studies. And fortunately, Professor Bruce Grayson, who at that time was the the main man at the IANDS was very interested in my work.
Rick Archer: Whom I’ve interviewed if people want to check that out, go ahead.
Anthony Peake: He’s a lovely man Bruce, he was so helpful. He really was. He went out of his way to help me. There were certain quotations I couldn’t get for the paper he was peer reviewing of mine. And he went out of his way to try and find quotes at the source of the quotations for me, which was wonderful. And he said: Look, write a paper for IANDS and write for the journal. And that was published in 2005. Now, at that time, also, I was in contact with a lady also you might know of a lady called Phyllis Atwater. PMH. Okay, she was, again, very helpful. And she read the first draft of the book. And she was very helpful. She turned around and said: okay, you’ve now written the book for you. Now go and rewrite it for your readers, which I thought was great advice. And in fact, PMH and I did the event in Melbourne together in Australia. So I met her in Australia. But at that stage, I’d written the paper, but I hadn’t got a book deal. Because I then gone back to work and I, you know, the book had been written, then I rewrote it again, I managed to get an agent. And the agent, tried to get me one book deal with the publisher. But quite by chance, I heard of a publisher called Arcturus in London. And I sent in my manuscript to them. And, you know, they get tons of manuscripts and publishers do and what happened.. and this is again, an area I’m really interested in, was that the the Managing Director, Ian, was flying to New York for a business meeting. And he literally went into his office and picked up a manuscript at random that was just on his desk, which happened to be mine. And he read it while he was on the flight over to New York, and he landed in New York, had read the manuscript and said, We’ve got to have this book. Can you contact the author bring him in? And they did. And they, they took the book, and it came out in 2006. And the rest is history.
Rick Archer: That’s great. It and there’s lots of nice little nuggets in that whole account, but even him randomly as if anything were random, picking up that particular manuscript and reading it on the plane. I mean, I don’t believe in accidents. We’ll probably get into that.
Anthony Peake: Yeah, it is. It’s just these these little, I call them: synchrondipties. You know, it’s an amalgam of serendipity and synchronicity, serendipity. And I think that these things do happen for a reason and a purpose. Because it’s happened too often. I’m also very into Jung and Jung’s concept of synchronicity, Wolfgang Pauli’s idea of synchronicity, but also the way in which synchronicities seem to be like almost the Jungian library angel, you get the information when you need it. And I felt all through my writing career that has happened.
Rick Archer: You know, I often feel like I’m watching a play that’s been scripted by this brilliant playwright. And as things unfold, I think, well, that’s an interesting, I didn’t see that coming, but I can see now why that happened. And I wonder if it’ll lead to this. And then, and then there’s a plot twist, and, and or whatever, but you know, it’s not like rigidly scripted, because I have some improvisational latitude as an actor in this play, and can kind of tweak it this way and that and then, and then the circumstances of life, adapt accordingly. You know, it’s maybe I’m making it too dualistic and maybe I don’t have that latitude but that’s the way I proceed
Anthony Peake: Always amuses me doesn’t it? When you get these synchronicities, that are rooted you know, as Camera called them, you know, they’re the roots coincidence, and synchronicities. Arthur Koestler wrote about it as well. And the idea that sometimes you get these series of synchronicities, and then you see the joke. There’s a joke you haven’t seen there. There’s a kind of a double pun taking place. And you go, Oh, yeah, I know why you did that now. Yeah, very funny. And I love that. And it’s like, you know, that sudden, shimmer, that reality isn’t what it seems that it’s nested, and it’s rooted. I’ve just finished watching in America, a German TV series on Netflix, called “Dark.” And that is fascinating, because that has this whole idea of the Everett’s many worlds interpretation, the idea that there’s multiple paths that we follow, and we choose one path or the other.
Rick Archer: You probably saw that movie ‘Sliding Doors’ with Gwyneth Paltrow
Anthony Peake: Oh, yes.
Rick Archer: You see that?
Anthony Peake: Uh, yeah, I argue that. … and I’m in negotiations with one of my publishers now because I’ve got four different publishing houses that publish my work, but one of them I’m really interested in writing a book on the parallels between my writings and movies. Because there are so many and I argue that it’s part of the Zeitgeist or the Veldt Geist, it’s something we instinctively know and writers bring it out and it’s becoming more and more …there are so many series at the moment deal with these things.
Rick Archer: There can be a great book, I mean, because it touches upon so many interesting things that are in so many great movies, everything from extraterrestrials, to, you know, altered states to, you know, precognition, all kinds of things. So you could like dip into dozens of hit movies and, you know, spin off all kinds of deep insights, that’d be great.
Anthony Peake: That would be fun. I mean, because as we mentioned, before we started I’ve also written a biography of the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and of course filled Phil Dick’s books have been adopted and adapted into so many different movies. But his ideas permeate things like The Matrix and everything else as well. And clearly it is, again, this idea of this underlying system of belief that people have about the true nature of reality. And I think what is happening now is that there’s a movement away from this kind of absolute materialist, reductionist worldview, that everything is just physical and there is nothing else to an understanding that there is a symbiotic relationship between consciousness and reality, the consciousness bringing the the wavefunction into existence, collapsing the wavefunction in quantum mechanics, and the idea that we are much closer to involving it’s almost by like, by his bootstraps, we are …we are co creating this reality. And in one of my recent books, The Hidden Universe, I come up with a concept I call the egregorereal which is the idea that we, in some way, our anticipations, create the reality around us, and we co create that. And I call that egregoreal reality. And that we bring into existence, for instance, the amount of times that some quantum physicists would go, you know, we need a particle here. And lo and behold, they find it like the classic example was when they discovered the muon. They had thought there should be a particle there. And then one day, they found it. And there was the Nobel Prize winner, II Raby, who was a top quantum physicist. And. when they discovered the muon, his actual first thing was who ordered that, you know, the same lines as if it was a pizza that somebody had ordered. And, you know, right through history, there’s always been this, as if the scientists themselves, the anticipation, the scientists have seemed to bring about the science in order to accommodate and this is why we have now this problem with we know as the particle zoo, because we have so many subatomic particles, and we need to reduce them down. And it seems that our science and it could be this is why religious beliefs now, you know, within Buddhism, you know, is the concept of the tulpa. You know, and the Belgian French explorer, Alexandra Neil, when you know, she created a tulpa when she was in, in Tibet in the 1920s. A Tulpa is a thought form. Okay, so in Tibetan Buddhism, very much the Tibetan Buddhism of the Bon tradition in the Tibetan plateau, which is very much come out of the shamanic tradition of that area. They believe that you can create thought forms. And what happened was Alexandra Neal and a group of her monk friends were wandering around that area. And they decided to create a thought form. And they worked on it and concentrated and they manifest this little monk, and he was round, and he was jovial, he was very convivial, and he followed them around. But as time went on, he became more independent of the, and became far more malevolent. And in the end, they had to dissipate him….they had to destroy him, because he was taking on a life of his own. Now, of course, there’s a counter argument here to say, This is what happens with poltergeists This is what happens with certain ghost manifestations. It could be the genesis of the jinn, within Islamic tradition they they seem to use….. they seem to come from somewhere else, but they seem to use our anticipations to come into this reality in some way. Now, again, there’s an American friend of mine,
Rick Archer: Excuse me, I keep thinking of Ghostbusters, where I think it might have been Bill Murray, who thought of the Stay Puft marshmallow man that came marching down the street.
Anthony Peake: It’s so true, you know, because you probably know in 1970 in Toronto in Canada, there was an experiment took place with a group of academics, English academics, who were affiliated to the University of Toronto, and they became very interested in Ouija boards. And they decided as psychologists they were interested in what was taking place when the Ouija glass moved, and they thought it must be us doing it, but we’re doing it subconsciously. And what they decided to do and it was extraordinary, they decided to create a ghost and one of them went away and created a whole mythical backstory fictional backstory of a character called Philip Aylesford. And Philip Aylesford, the lady decided was an English nobleman who lived in the 1680s, after the aftermath of the English Civil War, he was in a loveless marriage. He was an outsider because he was a Roman Catholic, and he fell in love with a gypsy girl. He then his wife finds out and he commits suicide by jumping off the battlements of the castle. That was the backstory. But it started to manifest. And it started to manifest within the group and initially it was why the Ouija board, but then it started to be able to table turn there were table turnings taking place. And if you go online, they there was table turning taking place on a live TV studio in Toronto at about 1971 where you actually see the table move. Now to me, this was again evidence of the power of the egregoreal, the power of anticipation. Now there is an American friend of mine, which you would find interesting to interview is a guy called Paul Eno. He is he’s a relative of Brian Eno that used to play for Roxy Music. And he used to be a Catholic priest. And he got defrocked because him and his mates these Catholics training great priests are wandering around New England ghostbusting. And obviously, the Catholic Church didn’t like this. So he ceased to be a priest. But he has a very interesting theory about manifestations and ghosts. He’s done some extraordinary work. And he argues it’s to do with plasma. And these entities use plasma electricity to manifest themselves in this reality. And again, it’s very similar to my hypothesis, he wrote a wonderful book called Dancing Past the Graveyard, which was about some of his experiences with hauntings. So what I’m arguing is that the, my hypothesis is so broad and so deep, I think I can explain most unusual phenomenon in different ways. And I think I can start with the starting point of the science. I think I’m rambling, I should stop rambling.
Rick Archer: That was a good ramble. As you were talking…. few thoughts I want to bring in. But I was reminded of the fact that there are many stories in the Vedic literature of pundits, or whoever they were, you know, doing rituals in order to bring some entity into existence to serve a certain purpose, go fight a battle, or kill a demon, or any various things like that. And if they do the ceremony correctly, the Yagya correctly, then this being arises out of the flames or something, I think there’s probably a lot of myths like that in various cultures. And, and another thought, as you were speaking, I was wondering, you know, do these things exist in some kind of astral realm or something, and it’s through our intention or ceremony or Ouija board or whatever, that gives them a portal through which to manifest. And one other thought, I’ll throw it and then let you ramble some more. You were talking about earlier how, when you were younger, things sort of had to pass the test of science in a way. But I’m reminded of that quote, who was it Einstein, or somebody who said that the universe is not only stranger than we imagined, but stranger than we can possibly imagine. And so I think that the kinds of things we’re talking about today, are necessarily going to rub up against the limitations of science over the coming decades. And there’ll be this mutual benefit, I think, where science gets its boundaries broken and stretched over and over and over again. And on the other hand, esoteric stuff, and spirituality is made to be a bit more rigorous and less prone to flights of fancy.
Anthony Peake: I agree with you totally. I mean, I find myself and there’s a group of academics I work with over the years, and we’re a growing group at the moment. Particularly, there’s a lot of young academics coming up now in the early 30s, who are very much more open minded. But I’m always reminded, you know, that you’d be open minded, but not as open minded that your brain falls out. And I think that is the issue really, that you, it’s very easy to get drawn into these things. But as long as you you keep an eye on the science on logic and common sense, but at the same token, realizing that you know, quantum physics is telling us that there is something extraordinary going on, we don’t fully understand so many things, you know, 94% of the universe is missing. It’s dark matter and dark energy. And we call it dark matter and dark energy because we don’t know what it is, you know, then we have the mystery of black holes we have the idea of zero point energy, there are so many things and this is why a number of the the top quantum physicists who started the whole thing in the 1930s in the 1940s from Wolfgang Pauli to Heisenberg to Schrodinger -all of them, all of them – move towards the mystical now for instance, I mean Schrodinger, towards the end of his life wrote this wonderful book called “What is Life?” We know that Niels Bohr very much that the idea of the mystical and, and even Werner Heisenberg, they all were interested in the implications of what quantum physics was telling us. Subsequently, we’ve discovered now you know, there are subatomic particles that come in flit in and out of existence from the ether, or for want of a better term, the zero point field. And we don’t even know even now how in and I argue this in my books, how inanimate matter reacting with electricity in your brain creates Rick Archer, all your hopes, your dreams, your personality, that’s all created out of inanimate matter and inanimate matter that is 99.999999999996 empty space. So when we say that there’s a physical universe around us, we are so far wrong, it is an illusion, the only reason you don’t fall through the chair you are sitting on now is because of electrostatic repulsion. Because the atoms in your backside are negatively charged, and the electrons whizzing round the perimeter of the nucleus of the atoms in the chair, are also negativelycharged, which means light, like magnets, like charges repel. So you’re hovering above the chair, just like whenever you think you touch something, you never touch anything, because you’re never in contact with anything at any time.
Rick Archer: I’ve heard you say that and your book and one of your interviews that I was listening to and I had a question which you can probably answer, which is that just as the negative charges prevent me from falling through the chair, what prevents what enables all the atoms in my body to congeal or cling together as opposed to being thrown apart by their, you know, negative charges?
Anthony Peake: Right? Well, the first thing is there are in terms of the forces in the universe, there’s, as well as gravity, there’s the strong force and the weak force. And these are the forces that actually take place at at the atomic level. So we have gravitation, which affects everything. But at smaller levels, there are subtle differences. So when subatomic particles are around each other, they’re never in contact themselves. So it’s an illusion, people think that a table is made up of atoms that are all right in contact with each other and as a solid mass of atoms. And that’s not the case, the atoms themselves, it’s to do with valency… and it’s how atoms attract other atoms, depending upon how many electrons they have in their shell. Now, obviously, if they have an even number of electrons, and there’s another atom that has an even number of electrons, they’re going to repel each other. But if they have an odd number, and another one has an even number, they’re going to attract each other, because the overall it’s negative or positive. So it means that certain atoms can come together to create molecules, which then of course, then create the elements. So the, it’s just more complex than that, in terms of how it works. But we have to understand that the subatomic particles themselves, as I said, are mostly empty space, the atoms themselves are mostly empty space. But even the electrons are really tiny. So there’s an equivalent to say that, you know, the nucleus is like at the middle of a big baseball stadium and the nucleolus would be a tennis ball at the middle, and the atoms would be grains of salt, or the electrons would be grains of salt whizzing round the distance and the rest of it is empty space. Now, on top of that, you then have the problem that the electrons are known as point particles. That means that however close you’re getting to them they’ll still be a point particle, okay. Then you have the nucleus where all that the real mass of the atom is, which is the nucleous, which is the proton and the neutron. They themselves are not basic particles, they’re made up of quarks. And depending upon whether there’s an up quark or a down quark, everything is depends on what the status of the subatomic particles are, will quarks themselves appoint particles? So we’re now getting into the point of exactly what these things really are. Then you have the mystery of size. Because people think that you know that you can go down into reality and go into smaller and smaller sizes. And eventually, you will, you will find the smallest possible size. Now the smallest possible size is something called a planck lens, or the planck square. Now, I read recently, that it’s analogous to imagine the whole universe is an atom, the plank square, would be the equivalent of a tree on the earth to the whole size of the universe. That’s how small the planck length is. And from the planck length, there is nothing. So at that size, even space is not continual. There are gaps between it. So what is in those gaps? And this is where the mystery starts to start as to where, for instance, people think you know, the color red is out there, the red, there’s no red is nowhere red is a qualia. Red is something that your brain interprets a certain wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, it interprets as the color red, but there is no red out there, there is no blue, there’s no green, there are no colors. These are what’s called qualia. These are things that the brain takes the information and create something internally and it internalizes a whole model of the world. You know, really, everything you’re now seeing is created out of basically photons, which are particles of electromagnetic energy, hitting your eye, going through your eye and without going into detail, the photons themselves, transfer energy, each photon hits another photon. So it transfers energy. So they’re not even the same photons. So when you look out of a window, the light that’s coming, the other side of the window is not the same light was coming in through the window, it’s very strange. So these photons, they hit, go through your eye, and they hit your retina, which is a tiny postage stamp inverted, or sense of sensitivity, they then get converted into an electric signal, which then goes down the optic chiasm of the optic nerve, to the darkest part of the brain down here. And when the brain where the processing takes place there, when it gets enough picture together, or idea of these impulses, it then creates an image from the information it’s been given. Now the information it was given, remember, was on the retina, now the retina was postage stamped, is postage stamp size, bent and inverted. But from that information field, the brain creates this three dimensional visual field that surrounds you completely. And it takes that.. it creates that information. Now, the big point here, and it’s so profoundly important is that at the back of your eye, where the optic nerve leaves, there’s something called a blind spot, you have a blind part, which you can do if you close your eyes, and you’ve got two dots on the screen, you bring them to at 1.1 of the dots will disappear. That’s your blind spot. The brain fills in the information area it doesn’t have around the blind spot. Now I’ve argued that if it fills in that bit, it can fill in everything else. So when we have hallucinations when somebody says that I saw a ghost, what is going on there, because the brain is already creating internally a facsimile world that we think is the visual world outside. But sometimes it populates within that visual field anomalous things, hallucinations. And where do they come from? Where did dreams come from? Who is the burglar, who is the person that is plotting your dreams for you. So there’s this kind of inner narrative that sort of feeds out to the external world. And people who believe there’s a one to one relationship between the external world, and the things you receive through your eyes, through your taste, through your touch, are called naive realists. This is the literal term that is used by people who study consciousness and perception, because they know that whatever is out there, it’s not quite what we think it is. Nobody’s arguing that there isn’t an external reality out there. But that external reality itself is created by somebody observing it. Again, in quantum physics, there’s something called the twin slit experiment. And we know from the twin slit experiment, that subatomic particles before they are measured are literal waves of probability. They are statistical waves. They’re not even a physical wave. Max Born came up with this idea, I think 1931. They are waves of probabilities like a crime wave. It’s not like a wave in water. And these waves are just waves of probability of the chance of a subatomic particle being found in one place rather than another. When they are measured that probability wave collapses, it’s called collapsing the wavefunction and collapses it into a point particle in one location or another. And, of course, this is the basis of Schrodinger’s cat, it’s the basis of so many things. So again, when we think there is a physical world out there, not only the subatomic particles incredibly strange and tiny, they’re also dependent upon them being measured, or perceived by a consciousness. So suddenly, we have external reality suddenly, is both a projection of ourselves and an internalized self. Now you’d like this that one of the stories I was dying to tell you this one, because it is wonderful, in particular, because you’re interest in buddhism. A few years ago, I was going out shopping, and an email turns up in my inbox. And it’s from a family living in Serpentine in Western Australia. And the email says: the most extraordinary thing just happened. We were settling down, or a few hours, a few minutes or anything, we were settling down to have our lunch. And it was knock on the front door. They went to the front door, and there was a Buddhist monk standing in the doorway. And he was holding a piece of paper with an email address on it. And he turned around and he said, I live in a monastery out in the outback, I’ve walked here, because I need you to email this gentleman with this email address. And I’ll come back next week. And he can give me his address because I need to send him some material. So the monk walks off goes down into the Outback, and the people go, what the hell was that? They contact me. It was my email address. So I’m puzzled. So what I do is I send them back my address and everything. And a week or so later, two weeks later, I get a letter back. And it’s from a guy called ecchi Gatto bhikkhu who is a monk in the Bonner Hindu Mana into monastery in Serpentine. And he was a member of the Thai Forest Tradition, which are a very austere group of monks. And he told me and he said that your work, he said, I’ve read one of your paper, your academic paper, and he said, it’s blown me away. He said that you have defined the science of Buddhism. He said, I am i It’s extraordinary. So anyway, we then start turning around and writing to each other regularly. So he turned around and he said, I’m coming over to the UK. I’m, we’re going, I’m going to live the Buddhist monastery near Rugby in the Middle English Midlands. And he said, I’ll be there for Buddha’s birthday. Do you want to come to the monastery? So I meet him and he’s an American. Not only isn’t it is he an American used to be a roadie for the Grateful Dead? Real Cool. That’s
Rick Archer: great. Really cool, dude.
Anthony Peake: And he asked me, he said, You’re not going to believe how I came across your paper. So I said, Okay, how did he do that? He said, Well, we have huts out in the in the in the monastery, and he said, there’s only about five or six of us monks, and there’s the the main monk. And he said that we occasionally have our huts decorated. And we need to move to another nother hutt, take a vacant hut, he said, I’ll go into this vacant urt. And he said, in the middle of the hut was a table. And somebody had placed a piece of folded paper underneath because the table had a wonky leg. And he knew, I would argue his Damond said, You need to read that piece of paper. And he said, I went over to the piece of paper, pulled it out. And it was your paper. Somebody had folded your paper up and left it in a hut in the outback in Australia. So he reads it and that’s why he became interested in my work. And this is where it gets so funny. I wrote a book a few years ago on near death experiences with two consultant Australian consultant psychiatrists and one of them is a guy called Mahindra Pereira and he and I decided that we’d write this book together. When I was visiting Sri Lanka,we decided to make this deal, right in the jungles of Sri Lanka in an eco hotel, we decided we met up we thought we’ll do this book toge we edited it and we all contributed chapters, and it was nominated for the psychiatric book of the year, the British Medical Association. We didn’t win, but we were highly acclaimed for it. So I meet him. He’s over in the UK, and I meet him for for dinner one evening, and we’re chatting away. And I told him that story. And again, we talk about synchronicities. He goes, I think I know how that got there… the article. And I said, why? He said, Because I sent it. And I said, What? And he said, Yes, the guy who runs that monastery is a quantum physicist. And he was a professor at Cambridge in quantum physics and became a Buddhist and set up that monastery. And he said I knew him. So I sent him your paper. Now the the trick in the tail is, well, he must have been so impressed with the paper that he folded it up. Keep a chair leg straight, or a table leg straight. But those are the kinds of wonderful synchronicities that I just love. I just adore them, you know, and it happens all the time. You know?
Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s great. I love those things. Let’s see. So based upon what you Well, one thing I want to we’re gonna have to talk about the Damon, but we’ll get to that. And there was something from earlier where you talked about the fact that scientists are so keen on finding new particles that maybe they’re bringing them into existence like the muon. And I wondered about that, because it seems to me that muons must have been around since the beginning of the universe or something, and, and is it that we’re sort of anticipating new particles, because we’re on the brink of finding them, rather than that we’re creating them. So there’s that point, and then keep track of these points, because there’s several different ones, but then also, about how the world is definitely not what it appears to be to any of us. But there is some kind of inner subjective agreement. I mean, a bat and a cow and us might all see a tree and we’re all seeing something very different. But there’s something we all agree that there’s something there. And so if it’s consciousness or the mind or whatever, that brings the world into existence, whose consciousness or whose mind, because there is some kind of objective reality, even though our individual filters filter it all very differently. So can you follow all those?
Anthony Peake: I can do this very interesting question. One, I think I can attempt to answer I think. In the book, I have a concept which I call the Daemon/Eidolon dyad. By the Daemon/Eidolon dyad, I mean that we all have – for want of a better term – a game player that guides us through life. It’s literally somebody who’s lived our life before and we can touch upon that later but for the moment, just bear in mind that we are dual beings. And we have within ourselves a part of us that is what the Gnostics would call the shard something from the Pleroma something that is greater than ourselves. And of course, I’ll
Rick Archer: And just put it in simpler terms for people who are listening can we say higher self lower self as
Anthony Peake: we can we say higher self lower self
Rick Archer: Yeah Daemon/Eidolon, because those names are unfamiliar to people.
Anthony Peake: Yeah. Okay.
Rick Archer: So you can use them now that we’ve defined them.
Anthony Peake: The terms I’m using there because they’re literal Gnostic terms. So the precise terms that the Gnostics use, but we can you can use lower self and higher self. Now, what I argue is that the Damon or the higher self is that your game player, it’s somebody who’s lived your life before. Rather like Connors in Groundhog Day, you know, the each day he learns more, and I argue that we reincarnate in an equivalent of the, the Bardo state of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But I argue that in that period of time, between death, and either rebirth or whatever we want to call it, we can live a myriad of lives. And we do, I argue, and I do the science of how that can be. But I also argued that so we have the daemon, which is are the highest self, which I’ll use the diamond term because the terminology makes sense higher up. So what we have is we have the aid of the needle on the lower self that lives one life and dies. Then we have the daemon that lives multiple lives, as you many lives and develops and grows over many lives, and ultimately comes a bodhisattva. Just like Connors does in Groundhog Day. In Groundhog Day, you know Connors initially starts off and he realizes he has an advantage over everybody else, because he knows what happened the previous day. And he carries the memory forward. He’s like an embodied daemon, rather than needle on. So remember, he tries to bed the girl, he tries to do all the selfish things. But he finds that’s not enough for him. So over myriad of days, he always
Rick Archer: ended up getting slapped in the face, because he makes gross mistakes
Anthony Peake: He does mistakes. Funnily enough, I interviewed Danny Rubin, the guy that did Groundhog Day. And he told me that he he’s an academic at Harvard. And he said he said he my first book he gave to all his mates and said, This guy’s done the science of Groundhog Day, which was rather nice. He’s such a funny guy. He’s He’s incredibly funny. But anyway, so going back so as Conners lives the day, the days over and over again, he then wants to educate himself. He’s becoming a kind of a higher human being. And he wants to learn languages. He still wants to learn languages in order to impress the girls so he can bed are you still doing the same thing
Rick Archer: becomes a jazz pianist.
Anthony Peake: Jazz pianist doesn’t it? Yeah. And then then he uses his knowledge of the previous date to say, you know, you know, my favorite music is this. And of course, you’ve got to have got How do you know that? Oh, You know, very clever, but then at the end, he’s running around town doing Good For God’s sake, isn’t he he’s, he
Rick Archer: does Heimlich maneuver and somebody who’s choking and he knows exactly where to be and all that stuff.
Anthony Peake: So what he’s become is an advanced human being, he’s become a bodhisattva, he’s become the idea of somebody who, in Buddhist terms would choose to go back into the Kalachakra wheel to help somebody and go back and help other people. That’s what I argue is what the daemon is. But I’ve then come to the conclusion that above the daemon is another entity, which I call the Uber daemon. And the Uber daemon is the collective unconscious of mankind. It’s the Jungian collective unconscious, it’s the memories of all humanity. It’s probably carried in the DNA, I don’t know. But it’s, it’s kind of the over self, you know, so there’s the highest self and there’s the over self. Then above that, I believe there’s a concept I call the godom en, and the Go demand is from the Vedas, you know, the idea of Brahman, yeah, my subject, let me throw in
Rick Archer: a quote here. Don’t lose your train of thought. This was from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, he said, Jiva, which I think was the Eidolon in your terminology, is the individualized cosmic existence, is the individual spirit within the body, with its limitations removed. Jiva is Atman, transcendent being. When the individuality of the Jiva and universality of the transcendent self, the Atman, are united and found together on one level of life, then there is Brahman, the all embracing cosmic life, the individual Jiva, in its essence, is Atman. does that jive with what you think?
Anthony Peake: Totally, completely and utterly in my new book, I have a whole section on that particular terminology. And I’m particularly fascinated by an even more interesting model, which is an adaption of that which the Kashmiri shave just use as well. Yeah. Which is even more intriguing. So the idea that there is this kind of over consciousness, which is for want of a better term, the consciousness of everything, I contributed a chapter a few years ago to a book on pandeism, panpsychism is that there’s the soul is in everything. And it’s everything’s conscious. But pan deism is that everything is God, right? That everything is god. And it’s very much.
Rick Archer: That’s where I stake my claim.
Anthony Peake: I mean, absolutely, yeah. And it’s the I think the most succinct description of my worldview was made by the American comedian, Bill Hicks. And Bill Hicks does this monologue, which you can check on Facebook, or YouTube, it’s very famous. And he’s trying to juxtapose the silliness with the greatness, and he has a guy doing a news program. And he turns around, and he said, breaking news, young man on acid, discovers that matter is just energy slowed down to walking pace. And we are all one single consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Now over to Bill for the weather. It’s very, very funny. And of course, that is true. You know, it’s the idea that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, the idea that if you were a singular consciousness, what would you do in order to make yourself not be bored, you’d create your own soap opera, and you’d embody yourself in soap opera, and you would become individuated consciousnesses. And you would forget that your God.
Rick Archer: And one thing to throw in here is if you’re all one consciousness, at that fundamental level, then what is there to perceive? Nothing. This is nothing, you’re the only thing down there. And so but you have, you’re conscious, though, and so you’ve got to be conscious of something. And so you automatically set up the self referral dynamics, where, you know, an observer observed and process of observation dynamics is set up. And so suddenly, from one you have three, actually, or two, depending on if you want to leave out the process of observation, and how but how can there be three because there’s only one, and yet, there’s three, and there’s one and there’s three and this one. So this infinite frequency gets set up, which creates this vast dynamism at the foundation of creation. And then from that dynamism, the whole thing arises in greater and greater complexification occurs, and we have the whole whole catastrophe to quote Zorba the Greek Anyway, go ahead.
Anthony Peake: Because that’s it, isn’t it? You know, the idea that and of course, then that indirectly answers your other question, because, you know, there was the very famous Bishop Barkley, you know, when Barkley was going on about his idealism. And he argued, you know, that there is nothing other than the observer. And then the argument is, well, who? If I’m not in a wood and a tree falls is there any sound? And of course there isn’t because sound is just vibrations in the air, which we interpret that’s the answer to that. It’s easy. But the idea is, you know, who is keeping the wave function working, if I’m not there, and there’s no observers. Well, the counter argument is that the ultimate observer is God. Yeah. You know, the the primum mobile – the first mover,
Rick Archer: and who kept the show running in the universe for billions of years before there could possibly be biological life. Well, correct
Anthony Peake: now, and it gets even more interesting, because then it’s the idea. Well, you know, the observer is observing and there’s this very famous Roland Knox, who was a Catholic theologian, came up with this very wonderful poem. And I can’t quote it, but it’s the idea, you know, how does the tree continue to be in the quad when I’m not there. And that’s the first verse paraphrase. And the second verse is something along the lines, the tree continues to be, because I’m always there as yours – sincerely God. So it’s the idea of that. Everything is thought everything is crystalline thought. It’s the idea that thought is manifest in physical reactions. Now, the point you were making about the muon, and the muon have been in existence, since I don’t know, 303,000 years after the Big Bang, or whenever muons first came into existence, the argument there was put forward and it’s brilliantly put forward by a guy called John Archibald Wheeler.
Rick Archer: I actually saw him speak one time, go on. He was a mentor to a fellow whom I instructed in meditation when he was in high school. And then he was invited to a university here in my town, where that fellow that I instructed is now the president. And but this was, like, 35 years ago or something. Anyway, go ahead. All right.
Anthony Peake: So Wheeler, has as you know, he had a term called the participatory universe. And his argument was rather like taking the writings of people like Teilhard de Chardin, you know, the idea of we’re moving forward to a singularity where, you know, there’s reason behind everything. And he said, collapsing the wavefunction when you do an experiment, but how do you explain the existence of quasars that, you know, sort of were created 10 billion years ago, and we see them now. But of course, we’re seeing them as they were 10 billion years ago, because it takes like 10 billion years to get to us. So that Quasar may no longer be there. But we observe it down here. And he did an application of the twin slit experiment, a thought experiment where he was using something called gravitational lensing. And that’s the idea that light bends around the space is curved is warped and curved, by a large object, like a galaxy. You know, this is Einsteinian physics. So the idea is that or LightWave, could be travelling towards the Earth, and it comes across a galaxy, and the light wave is bent around either side of the galaxy.
Rick Archer: We’re seeing photos of that now with the web, you know, Oh, yeah. Because the
Anthony Peake: telescope. Yeah, they are called Einstein crosses,
Rick Archer: it looks like little pancakes that are all bloopy…
Anthony Peake: Yeah, no, they’re bent. Yeah. And the first time they came across, it was quite intriguing. Because when they first started seeing quasars, they discovered they thought there’s four quasars in like a cross. How can that be? And then they realized that the light it was from one Quasar and the light had bent round a galaxy, or some dark matter, or a black hole. And it had given the impression that there were four. So we know the gravitational lensing does happen. Now, what Archibald Wheeler said was, imagine if you use that light to a twin slit experiment, and you put the two the twin slits, it would mean that the opposite the act of observation of a scientist now brings into existence light that has existed for 10 12 billion years, which means that there’s something here that’s different. Now, I’d argue I wrote a book a few years ago called The Labyrinth of Time. And in that I just focus in on time, what time actually is. And I really genuinely believe that the big thing we are all missing out on here is time. Time is relative. Time dilates, time expands. In which case, when we’re saying we’re looking at something from 13 12 billion years ago, that’s relative to how time flows. Now, you remember in the book, I have this whole section on the relativity of time that they’re discovering now, in terms of even the location of stellar objects and galaxies…. two observers, in slightly different locations in the universe will measure the location of the galaxy completely differently, even though it’s the same galaxy. And this is all to do with how we perceive and how time flows and how time is warped by gravity, by the way time, because we know, time and matter are the same thing. You know that as as you get towards the speed of light objects expand. It’s called the Lorentz contraction, and the Lorenz expansion. So it means that objects themselves don’t even have a consistent shape, because relativity changes their shape. As you get faster and faster towards the speed of light, time slows down. So at the point of the speed of light, there is no time. Now what I then say to people is accepting the fact that at the speed of light, there is no time, the light waves that you see, and the photons that stimulate your visual field at the moment, as I said before, the photons hit your eye hit your retina and create the image that you see…from the point of view of a photon. There is no time.
Rick Archer: Right? It got here from that quasar? instantaneously. Yeah.
Anthony Peake: So from that point of view, there is no time. Yeah, there’s no space, right? Because time and space, that the same thing, I didn’t mean matter, I meant time and space. So time and space are the same thing. Which means that where does then space go, you know, so suddenly, we’ve got this really weird world view of what is really happening out there.
Rick Archer: Well, yes, I think maybe the question is, is one of those perspectives more valid in some way than another? Our perspective as a stationary object versus the photons perspective, going at the speed of light? Who’s right? Or are both right? And it’s a both and kind of consideration?
Anthony Peake: Well, that’s where it gets even stranger because it’s the reason Einstein came up with his idea of relativity was he wants it, he wondered, as a kid, what it would be like to be traveling at the speed of light, looking at a light beam, right, would that just stop. And it wouldn’t, because from the observer’s point of view, light always travels in 186,000 miles per second, irrespective of whether it’s going away from you, or coming towards you. It always travels at 186,000 miles per second. Now, as I’ve argued in one of my books, so when a light beam leaves a light, it doesn’t accelerate to 186,000 miles per second, as the photons leave, they become 186,000 miles per second, instantaneously. It’s all they can do, they can’t go any slower. So it means how do they start and accelerate from their light source, then we have the issue that the way in which light works and the way the universe works, you know, that there’s some very strange anomalies like the Big Bang. For the first microseconds of the Big Bang, the universe expanded hundreds of times the speed of light. Now we argue that light is the fastest thing that can possibly be, but the universe expanded 1000s of times or hundreds of times the speed of light, because it’s literally space is being created, right? And where is the space coming from where does you know space is space.. space is empty, you know, Ernst Mach, the, the great German physicist argued that if, if you had just to, and I think Hegel argue this, Hegel, Schopenhauer, I can’t remember the idea that if you had just two planets in the universe, surrounded by space, if one planet, one of the planets suddenly disappeared, would the space around it disappear, and it would just shrink to around that planet, because space, by definition is nothing. But we now know that space apart from being empty, is full of something called Zero Point Energy, the quantum vacuum. So suddenly, I mean, this recent announcement made about the discovery or discovery, but the way you nuclear fision and nuclear fusion or how we can have limitless energy, this is drawing energy up from where no energy should be. There seems to be this limitless field of energy. And it’s this energy part of a greater universe, that we cannot perceive that are our measuring devices, the way we perceive things. In one of my books, I use the analogy I call us electromagnetic chauvinists. And by this I mean, and I use the analogy in one of my books, I had great fun doing this, I said and I did the calculation, and I said imagine that the electromagnetic spectrum from gamma rays, to radio waves is the length of the Mississippi River, which starts in a tiny lake in Minnesota, works its way down the center of the states, and then comes out in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, if that was the electromagnetic spectrum, what we believe is the visual universe. Everything we believe is out there is an inch and a half, eight miles south of Hannibal, Missouri. And that’s it,
Rick Archer: which is not far from me, actually. But anyway go ahead.
Anthony Peake: all right. So you’re close to the visual field.
Rick Archer: I can see it from my like, Sarah Palin, I can see Alaska from my porch. I mean, Russia. Go ahead.
Anthony Peake: So so the question then arises, you know, that, if that is the the limit of what our perceptual fields are, there is so much out there, we don’t know, we know, for instance, you know, If string theory is to be believed, the dimensions of space time, there’s more dimensions than four, you know, the three spatial dimensions and time, there’s more than that, there are more there are there is, you know, the concept of the Tesseract. You know, the idea is that, you know, in terms of geometry, you know, you have a point. And if you extend a point out, you have a line, which is one dimension, then if you draw a right angle from that line, you end up with a square, don’t you. And then if you draw a right angle from the four corners, you get a cube. But you can’t, you don’t have to stop there, you could then draw out from all of the Nexus points to create what’s called a tesseract or a hypercube, which is a square, both in time and in space. Now, if that is the case, and there’s no reason why we should be restricted to just three or four dimensions there could be greater dimension, they think there’s 10 or 12 if string theory is to be believed. So our perceptual even our perceptual idea of space, science is telling us it’s different. It’s not, but this is every most people out there, through no fault of their own, are stuck in the science of 125 years ago, because the stuff that they discovered when Max Planck stood up and made his famous speech in Berlin in December 1900 and came up with the concept of quanta. That is the energy is in little packets, the revolution started there. Then in 1905, Einstein comes over with a great year where he, he wrote three papers, all of which brought in some completely new ideas. Then 10 years later, he comes up with his general theory of relativity. And suddenly, everything changed in the 1920s, all these amazing things were being discovered into the 1930s. But most people still think the world works using clockwork is relational to the fact you have to be in contact with something to make it move. And the idea that Newtonian physics is everything. Newtonian physics only works at our size, anything bigger, and you get the weird theories of cosmology and anything smaller, you get quantum mechanics, and the three of them don’t work. Not only that, but the maths that used to be in cosmology and in relativity, which is big objects, doesn’t work for quantum physics. So we have two completely conflicting structures in the same universe. Now, these are all things that modern scientists pretend aren’t an issue. They pretend that they understand everything they pretend that you know, it’s only as, as somebody said, I think it was Mitch Wilson in about 1894, when he was opening up a new place at the University of Chicago and he said that we know everything now. All we need to do is fine tune to the fourth or fifth decimal point. There’s only three dark clouds on the horizon, but we’ll sort them out. It was those three dark clouds that ended up changing everything it was blackbody radiation, the ultraviolet catastrophe, and something called the photoelectric effect. And Einstein explained two of them and and Plank explained the other one, which changed everything. But 99% of humanity don’t know that. I mean, for instance, the world’s greatest discovery, in my opinion, took place in Paris in 1981, when a guy called Alain Aspect, and another guy called Dalibard proved something called nonlocality – proved that if you take two subatomic particles, you entangle them into the same quantum state, then you put them apart at great distances, and you do something to one particle, the other one reacts instantaneously.
Rick Archer: Right. And the distance could be opposite sides of the galaxy, which means there’s no kind of 100,000 years for a signal to get across – it means instantaneously
Anthony Peake: correct, which means that
Rick Archer: no speed of light limitation
Anthony Peake: which means at a deeper level of reality – everything is one. Everything is a unity. It’s non dual. You know, as I know you guys like it, you know there’s non dual, there’s no duality here. There’s no spirit and body and physical, it’s all the same thing. These are all emanations of a deeper reality, what Einstein called the hidden variables. But again, the American physicist, David Bohm, you know, we have something called the implicant and explicate orders. And again, it’s the same argument because Bohm was very intrigued by this concept of nonlocality. And of course, sadly, it was Einstein that brought this all about by his EPR thought experiment in 1937. I think it was the Einstein Podolsky Rosen experiment. But it means that things are unity. And I think this is where I come with my model of the holographic universe. And the idea that this is a hologram; that we are existing within an information field. And it’s holographic in nature. And you probably know that one of the extraordinary things about a hologram is the parts contain the whole. And of course, this goes back to Buddhism again, doesn’t it? You know, it’s again, the wisdom of the East, Buddhism, Vedanta, you know, there are things they were aware of, they were using different analogies. They were using the language of the time. But you know, it’s not being a new age woowoo pointing out that there are parallels here, and not saying, you know, that the dancing, whoo, why masters was correct. I’m not saying that. The other books on this work correct. But you’ve got to take into account, they were using analogies that they had to use in order. … And was there a deeper knowledge here somewhere? Yeah, I don’t know. So one key point from all that, probably are many. But one thing that’s foremost in my mind at the moment is that the more manifest things are, the more restricted they are and the more fundamental we go, then the more it becomes a field of all possibilities. So you know, this, what is it called complementarity must be happening at an ultimately fundamental level or close to it, in order for instantaneous influence to be possible. And so a lot of your, your whole thing about the daemon and the aileron and the daemon possessing some sort of omniscience and prescience, and so on, suggests to me that the daemon or our higher self is a reality that is more fundamental than the gross material, corporeal reality, and that, at that level, a much greater degree of omniscience or prescience is normal. And that, that we can sort of strengthen our relationship with that level of life, such that that kind of, even though as you know, manifest human beings, we don’t have access, conscious access to omniscience, we can begin to gain the benefit that would be had, were we to have that omniscience and, you know, life can flow in such a way that totally unfair, unforeseeable circumstances, come to our aid or play in our favor. Because we’re in tune. at a fundamental level, even though we don’t know the details, with some level of life, which in some way does know all the details and our work and can work them out for us if we’re willing to cooperate and able to flow with it. Well, I think if if the, if my Cheating the Ferryman hypothesis is correct. And again, people turn around to me and say, Do you believe it? It’s not a question of belief. It’s a question of Fwhat the information and my research concludes. And I very much use the analogy here that when I was developing the hypothesis, I felt rather like I was Schliemann when he was discovering Troy, you know, he, what he did was…Frederick Schliemann was a German archaeologist. And he knew about the ancient Greek legends about the wars and and the siege of Troy. But at that time, it was only a fiction. Nobody believed it actually happened historically. But he believed that he sensed that was the city of Troy and it had been besieged. So he invested a lot of money and time and effort in trying to discover where Troy was located. And from Homer, I think it was Homer, he managed to isolate what it was likely to be, and he thought it was going to be on the Turkish coastline in the north, west coastline of Turkey, South of the Dardanelles, and he started digging at a hill called the Hill of Hissilic and as he started digging, the excavation started discover a city. And then they found another city. And I think they found seven in the end, all built upon each other. And there was one of them that showed signs of burning, which meant they had been a siege. So he effectively proved that this is where Troy was. And I felt that I was rather like that when I was doing my research, I found that an awful lot of the information came to me it was given to me, I’d need a book and it would suddenly be there for me, I’d need to be in contact with somebody, a researcher, and I’d find them. So I felt I was excavating, I wasn’t looking for a theory, I wasn’t looking for a model, I just wanted an understanding of what Deja Vu was and near death experiences. But as I got more into it, I was thinking now that makes sense. And then that makes sense. And suddenly, this picture started, no little piece and I put that there and that fits, and then that had fit. And then suddenly, I’d go off on a tangent, and I’d be looking into cosmology, and then I’d bounce off and I’d be into neurology and neuro chemicals, neuro chemistry, and all of them just worked and the pieces came together. And that was the end of the time, I had this complete hypothesis, which I call Cheating the Ferryman. And I argue that this model, and since then, that the model is developed rapidly. It’s insane. It’s so wide and so deep, it terrifies me. The implications of this hypothesis are extraordinary, If only more people would listen. And again, I do the science. So when you read my books, everything is referenced back to academic papers. I very much work on the Marcelo truly concept of extraordinary claims need extraordinary proofs. I never say to my readers except what I’m saying. I say make up your own mind. This is my interpretation of the facts, you go back and read the original papers. And come back to me if you think my interpretation is wrong, if you think my interpretation of quantum mechanics is wrong, have I misunderstood Schrodinger’ss cat? These kinds of things, you know, you know, Everett’s many worlds interpretation. Am I right? Paolis exclusion principle, am I right on that in the way I understand it, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, these kinds of things. So, I allow my readers to feed back to me. And if a reader comes along and says: You’re wrong about that, I’ll go fine. It’s not a problem to me. I am not a believer in it. All I know is that it seems to make sense. So cheating. The ferryman is the argument that at the point of death, we go in what Buddhists would argue, is the Bardo state. And it’s this kind of timeless place. Now, again, I wrote a book on JB Priestley, the English playwright, and he did a wonderful play called Johnson over Jordan, which was only performed four times I think, in about 1939. But it’s about the Bardo state. He’d read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and he wanted to make a play based upon the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He was such he was so advanced Priestly, he was extraordinary. And I keep saying to people, you really need to read this guy’s work. He was incredible. But anyway, so the idea is when you start to die, what happens is, there are chemicals released in the brain certain neurotransmitters Initially, I thought it was glutamate. But I’m now concluding it’s in darkness that is internally generated Dimethyltryptamine. And I think it’s excreted by the pineal gland. I think the pineal gland synthesizes from melatonin, something myself and my associates called metatonin, which is this substance that is, as Rick Strassman, the guy that wrote the famous book DMT, the spirit molecule, he’s a professor at the University of New Mexico. He argued that DMT is our reality modulator. That’s what our reality is. That’s what it’s attuned in in some way. So I argue that as we start to die, these chemicals are released in the brain, what do they do? They act non locally. So they instantaneously cover the whole brain. And they bring about a falling out of time. They bring about a sensation, that time is dilating. And again, I do the physics of how time can dilate using Einstein and Minkowski and various other people. So time dilates. Now you have report after report in near death experiences. What it’s one of the Moody traits, and it’s one of the Grayson traits. It’s something called Bruce Grayson. And what it is, is effectively, that time dilates in a near death experience is one of the things people talk about, you know, time slows down, as he does in car crashes and everything but people, particularly people who have a sudden death, mountain climbers, Haim, who was, I think he was Einstein’s mathematics teacher was a mountaineer, and he collected stories of people who had survived falling off the Alps. And all of them tell about time dilation. So this is chemicals released in the brain. But why do that? Why does the brain do that? Well, then I use the next part of the Moody traits, the panoramic life review, where people turn around and say my life pass before my eyes, if you put the time dilation bit to the panoramic life review bit and I’m thinking I’m the only writer that’s done this has said, right? Put the two together, what do you get, you get a panoramic life review that happens in the right amount of time subjective to you. So in which case, in a real death experience, your panoramic life review doesn’t happen in an instant, it doesn’t flash in front of your eyes. It’s a literal minute by minute life, that you live minute by minute, and you get catapulted back to the moment of your birth, and you live your life again. And at the end of that life, in an even smaller piece of time, external, public time is even smaller, but in your subjective time is still another lifetime. And another one, and another one, it’s Groundhog Day. But it’s alive. The Russian verrsion of my book was called Groundhog Life. A chronicle of personal immortality. So you’re in smaller bits time, but this is the Bardo state. So you’re in the Bardo state. But unlike the Bardo state, which says in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Evans- Wentz translation turns around and says, you know, the, you see all these monstrous things, and they’re all terrible, they’re all frightening, but they’re all created by your subconscious. I argue it’s more subtle than that. You live your life, again, within these states. And the information field that generates these reliving of your lives, again, are all different, because they’re all created holographically. They’re all created from information. They’re all created from the data field, that holds the information of everything. And again, I do the physics of this. One of the last papers that Stephen Hawking wrote was with a guy called Thomas Hertog of CERN, and they came down with something they call the top down hypothesis of quantum mechanics. And effectively, what they argue is that, from the moments of the Big Bang, every outcome of every subatomic action has a potential to exist. And the wave function is collapsed to follow that particular path. But all the paths are in potentiality. And can be collapsed. This is Stephen Hawking, not Anthony Peake, not the guy down the pub. This is Stephen Hawking. There is then something called the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics by a guy called John Kramer. And Kramer argues that there are two types of waves. There are advanced waves and retarded waves. And effectively advanced waves are waves of energy, or wave functions that are going forward in time, like we do, but they’re also wave functions going backwards in time. So there are information going in the other direction. And I argue in my book, that the present moment is literally the interaction of those two wave functions that are interacting and causing a hologram. Because of course, that’s what holograms are, you know, they’re just light wave functions causing an interference pattern. So that means that the future in potentiality is all there. And the past in potentiality, is all there. So as you move through this, every decision you make, then collapses for you. So when you’re in this dying state, you can live your life again. But like Connors does in Groundhog Day, he makes decisions that are different every day, he follows every path that he possibly can do. And I believe this is what we do in the final moments of life. We live a myriad of lives, we fulfill all our potentials, we follow all the patterns we can possibly do. And we learn each life we learn more like Conners does we learn to be more human, we learn to be more advanced to become a Buddha, in effect, life after life after life, as we do this, and we become more perfect. And then at the end of a myriad of lives, you then die, and then you move on to whatever it may be reincarnation, whatever your belief system fulfills maybe. So the argument here is that part of you, the part of you that survives life to life to life is your Daemon, your Eidolon dies, your Eidolon is like an on screen sprite in a computer game. It just exists for one game and it dies. But the daemon goes back to the start of the game with all the knowledge it had from the previous game and helps you go through this life. It’s the voice in the head that warns you; It’s the voice that says this person is dangerous for you – don’t go near them. It’s the voice in the head that says don’t go out today don’t get on that plane, because it’s going to crash. And the communication channels depend how they’re open – depends upon what I call your position on the Huxleyian spectrum, how open your doors of perception are. And I wrote a book on this called Opening the Doors of Perception to do the neurological aspects of how the communication channels work. And I argue that people who have temporal lobe epilepsy, people that have migraine, classic migraine, people who have autism, people who have got alzheimers, the channels of communication are more open with the daemon, which means the daemon can more manifest in their lives.
Rick Archer: And you might also include mystics and Yogi’s
Anthony Peake: That’s what they do= the mystics and Yogi’s trained themselves
Rick Archer: Because of course, without having to have epilepsy, they can correct it, they can
Anthony Peake: just do it. And of course, this is the thing, isn’t it? What do people what is all the mystical traditions are all to find the God within, to find your higher self, to commune with your higher self, this is what I’m saying, Your God within your higher self is your Daemon, it is you. And it is you that carries your memories forward. And this is why I think why I have issues with the standard interpretation of reincarnation, the standard interpretation is you die, all your memories are gone, and you’re reborn as somebody else, which makes rational sense, and everything else. But
Rick Archer: hold on. Let me interject here, because I heard you say that in your book, too. And, you know, I’ve been at this game myself for 54 years and read a lot of books and thought a lot thought a lot about things. And I don’t understand that as the standard interpretation. But correct me if you feel I’m wrong, but yes, we were born without really remembering our past lives, although some children before they get too old. can remember them? Yeah, suppose, you know Ian Stevenson, and
Anthony Peake: that I’ve written I, with all due respect, I know people who knew Ian Stevenson,
Rick Archer: and then Jim Tucker has
Anthony Peake: Jim Tucker as well. There’s a lot of wishful thinking going on here. Okay. But anyways.
Rick Archer: So my understanding is that, it wouldn’t really be valuable to remember all the details of your past lives. But you, in fact, it’s like knowing all the answers to a test that you’re going to take in school or something, you don’t study for the test. And you don’t learn as much as if you have to really study and, you know, confront the problems as they’re shown to you. But nonetheless, we do evolve, just as you were saying, over successive lives, and some deeper wisdom accumulates, which and we’re, we’re confronted with situations in life, which, you know, might test us in ways that we failed the previous time. And now we have an opportunity to, you know, try them again, and perhaps learn this time and grow. And the whole thing is to move toward higher and higher levels of consciousness. And if you’re saying that, I guess what you’re saying, Yeah, you just said it, that it’s not that each human lifetime, or whatever life form we take on is a Groundhog Day repetition of the previous one, you and I might have been women last time we might have been born in China or Africa or someplace else. So our external circumstances may be very different. But somehow the sum total of, of evolutionary development that we have attained in a previous life, or in all of our previous lives up until now, we start out we resume, we, we start where that left off, you know, and we continue it, hopefully from here. So how is that different from what you’re saying? Or isn’t it?
Anthony Peake: Well, I suppose for me, I suppose the thing is, I mean, I’ve always had a soft spot for reincarnation, I always think that for me, intellectually, it’s the most satisfying alternative to life after death, you know, so let me start with you know I’m somebody that’s on the team, in terms of, but I think my problems have been over the years is that, you know, and I’ve read extensively about reincarnation, I’ve read the Ian Stevenson books I’ve read took her I’ve had a lot of books on the subject. And I feel there are certain logistical issues that I can’t get over, in my own mind. Now, the first one is that if reincarnation is a standard factor of life, why is reincarnation so different in different cultures? And people turn around and say, Oh, no. Reincarnation is the same in all cultures. No, it’s not. If you look at what the Druze believe in terms of reincarnation to Tlingit Indians in, or the Tlingit Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, to the Buddhists, they all have very different interpretations of what happens after you die. Either you’re born immediately after you die, or you’re born weeks after or months after. You’re either born in the same tribe or you’re not born in the same tribe, these are all things that to me suggest that there’s a cultural bias to this.
Rick Archer: There is a cultural bias and and all the things you just said might be possibilities. In fact, in the Vedic perspective, you might be born really quickly. Or, as it says in the Gita, you might send to some heavenly realm and live there for a long lapse of time, and then we’d be reborn. So there’s all kinds of possibilities.
Anthony Peake: In which case, then that would be well, why don’t you remember being in the higher realm?
Rick Archer: Maybe some do?
Anthony Peake: Maybe they do. I mean, it’s possible, but then I have the issue of the the actual science of how something that is processed in the brain, then transfers to something else. Who makes the choice?
Rick Archer: Because like a computer, you know, there’s a lot of stuff happening on my computer. But if I buy a new computer, then maybe I, you know, put everything on my computer into the cloud, and then download it to the new computer. So and even now, maybe our, maybe we’re uploading constantly to the cloud, you know, like a backup system. And it’s not just stored in the brain and easily transferable to another meat puppet.
Anthony Peake: But it’s a question there of agency. I mean, you quite rightly say that, you know, you buy a new computer, you then upload everything to the cloud, and then you download it to your new computer. So when I die, who or what is uploading everything that’s me? And what is deciding which computer to then download my information to?
Rick Archer: Well, I could give you some speculative responses to that if you want or you could keep going.
Anthony Peake: No, no, no, I’m genuinely interested. Have you ever read Michael Newton books. Michael Newton. Yeah, I know of Michael Newton. Yeah.
Rick Archer: yeah. So life between lives. And he hypnotized, because zillion people and they all and there was a lot of agreement among his subjects as to the topography of, of the other side, so to speak. And it involves some kinds of guides or beings or whatever, who helped us sort of assess how we did this last time and help us figure out, you know, what we want to do next time in order to have the optimum learning experience and all that business.
Anthony Peake: But again, you know, the, the description of the other side is not consistent,
Rick Archer: It is in his books anyway. But But again, maybe there are multiple other sides. I mean, according to Vedanta, there are seven hills and seven heavens, and, you know, each of those is quite different.
Anthony Peake: The problem I have I guess I’m too rational, and too grounded in science. I want to know the process, you know, that just because people are hypnotized. You know, we know hypnotism I work with professional hypnotists. Yeah, they have told me that people will fulfill what the hypnotist wants you to say.
Rick Archer: Well, I think you might have been careful not to suggest a whole lot. But But no, but let me grant you the appreciation for your rational rationality and scientific nature. But as I said, an hour ago, I think that science may have to really evolve a lot to understand what’s really going on. And I’m not dogmatically arguing, you know that this is the way it is. And science is stupid if it doesn’t get it, I’m just saying there’s a lot of merit in this kind of hypothesis Science is nowhere near understanding exactly what’s going on. But if, but if we are, I suppose, I just have a great feeling of Ill easiness about the kind of the New Age movement, and some of them self evident nonsense Me too! Believe me, I, I get exposed to a lot of it, you should see some of the people who apply to be interviewed,
Anthony Peake: So to me, I always want to keep my rational hat on. Yeah, as best I can. But I can sympathize. And I can see how one could interpret these things. And my heart, it’s always my heart and my head with me, what my heart wants to believe and what my head allows me to believe. Two different things. But I think that the idea that you know, we live our lives over and over again, in my model, but then at the end of that life, we then move on to whatever your belief system is almost, you know, because if we’re creating this fanerol, as Thomas Pierce said, you know, the idea that it’s a kind of a, there’s much more of a symbiotic relationship between us and the external world is that you know, that we’re all progressing in some way. And there are different routes is the famous statement, isn’t it? You know, there’s many paths up the mountain, but the view from the top is still the same. And it’s just that when I read books on reincarnation, and I read books on hypnotic regression. And like, for instance, the vast majority of Stevenson’s cases, were people of lower class, lower caste claiming to be upper class. There were very few cases that went the other way. Right. Just to me, there’s a pecuniary issue here.
Rick Archer: Yeah, you’re right about that one. You know, everybody was Joan of Arc which I want to talk about with Joan of Arc, you have a great thing about her in your book, or everybody was, you know, Cleopatra, or whatever, but, and who was janitor, you know, there weren’t enough janitors back then. But you know, this thing about experiencing… getting to experience whatever we anticipate after we die? My sense is that, you know, maybe that’s the initial maybe that’s the waiting room, where are you? You know, the Hindus get to see Krishna and then the Jews get to see Moses and the Christians get to see Jesus and so on. But then after a while, what if reincarnation really is a thing, and after a while is – Okay, folks, they didn’t teach you this in church, but everybody reincarnates and so get in line, here’s your next.. here’s your next gig, you know,
Anthony Peake: In that matter, I’m always reminded of, did you remember the science fiction writer Philip Jose Farme. He wrote a wonderful series of books called the River World. And that is basically everybody, you die. And you find yourself bring being reborn, totally naked, at 25 years of age on a riverbank. And there’s this planet, there’s a river that runs all the way around the planet from the North Pole to the South Pole. And all the way along the river there is 20% from one civilization or one period of time and 20% of another, and they all intermingle. And it’s brilliant, it is superb. Now, as I understand it, Jose Farmer was I think he was a Mormon. I think maybe or from a background of that, I think, possibly, but it’s a wonderful idea. Again, the idea that we’re all born, we die, but we’re all born as 25 year olds, and we grow our hair back and
Rick Archer: do high school again, hey, that’s great.
Anthony Peake: Get all the things right that we got wrong last time, that’s what Cheating the Ferryman tries
Rick Archer: of course, you get arrested right away, because you’re standing naked by a river,
Anthony Peake: But everybody else is.
Rick Archer: You might find an interview that I did with a fFather Thomas Castle, I think his first name was Thomas, his last name was Castle. And he somehow stumbled upon this ability to help stuck souls move on. And it first happened when he had some kind of vision or dream of, of this guy sitting on a car radiator or sitting on the edge of a car, and then the car bursting into flames and the guy died of the fire. And it turned out that there apparently was an actual guy who had had that accident. And he found himself in touch with this person on the other side, who was stuck in some kind of anti chamber or something and couldn’t move on. And it was all resentful and bummed out and everything. And then he goes through dozens of these stories in his book. But in every case, somehow through his help and intervention serving as that function, they get to a point where they’re ready to move on, and then inevitably, somebody shows up, who is like, ready to their guide or their usher to take them on to the next place they need to go to, but you know, throw that into your, into your stew of ideas and see…
Anthony Peake: I’ve heard that so many times, people tell me, you know that people get stuck. And you know, that there’s a lot of friends of mine who I mean, I work very, very closely with mediums. I work very closely as again, with past life regressionists. You know, so I do invest the time in, in following up on these things. And this trapped soul bit is a really interesting one of the concept of soul rescue, you know, and the idea you don’t know you’re dead, you know, and again, it’s coming back to the Bardo state again, isn’t it, and again, in Johnson over Jordan, that’s the problem with the central character, when the play starts, it’s a funeral. And there’s people around the funeral. And there’s this guy wandering around on the stage that nobody’s reacting to, and it’s the guy whose funeral it is. And of course, he flashes back to his past and everything else as well. And in the end, he’s allowed to move on. Extraordinary and the ending of the play was cost a lot of money, apparently, and it was really Ralph Richardson took off the role. Really, really good. It’s only been done I think, once I’m a member of the JB Priestley society, and one of the masters of Bradford grammar school, told me that they did a production of it. The school did a production of it around about 10 years ago. But really, really interesting. But it’s the idea
Rick Archer: that one could die abruptly or in some dramatic way where they don’t realize they’re dead. Are they are dead, but they’re they’re clinging to the world, they just left and refuse to move on. And, and you know, who knows? It’s it seems to me that it fits into my whole concept of how it all works. But as we’ve been saying that’s subject to revision, but seems to make sense to me. Okay, well, I’m bouncing, I’m talking more than I was earlier in the interview and kind of bouncing things off you a little bit.
Anthony Peake: That’s the whole point of the interview.
Rick Archer: Yeah, well, sometimes I talk too much. But anyway, you’ve been saying such great stuff. I just wanted to listen. But where should we go from here?
Anthony Peake: Well you mentioned Joan of Arc?
Rick Archer: Yes tell that story. That’s, and you know, before you tell that story, I just want to preface it by saying I’m fascinated by how some people seem to have a mission in life. And it seems that there’s from my perspective, again, subject to revision, there seems to be some kind of higher being or higher knowledge, which maybe your Daemon or maybe something else, which wants them to do a certain thing and knows they’re capable of it. And it’s not only people like her, but like, you know, Steven Spielberg, some of the movies he’s made, where did some some of it’s like, we needed to have the knowledge of extraterrestrials or something introduced into the society more than it had been. And so he’s inspired to make a movie. But it wasn’t just his brain, it was him being a instrument of some higher knowledge or being or wisdom or something that wants to channel itself into human consciousness. Or even people like Einstein and other scientists who come up with these brilliant ideas out of nowhere, apparently. It’s time for that idea to come to humanity, and somebody’s got to do it. So this guy here seems to have the capability let’s light a fire under him and give him the idea to propagate. Anyway. So go ahead. And the concept
Anthony Peake: is very much the subject I discussed in my second book, The Daemon, a Guide to your Extraordinary Secret Self. Yeah. Because the number of people that approached me to say that they had been guided through their lives by something else. And I’m particularly reminded of a person that again, you need to interview because he’s extraordinary. is a guy called Myron Dyall.
Rick Archer: who write these down, you’re gonna have to tell me later. Okay. Tell me later.
Anthony Peake: Okay. But this guy called Myron Dyall who is an artist based in CA in Los Angeles And Myron approached me, it’s quite an extraordinary story again. I received an email from him, but it wasn’t from him. And the email read something along the lines of this is the most extraordinary email you’re ever likely to receive this first time that you will have communicated directly with the Daemon. Because I’m the Daemon of somebody called Myron Dyall and my name is Charon. And I’ve been with him all his life. And I’m opening up communication with you. And then Myron then contacted me, and it’s extraordinary. His Daemon manifested itself when he was four years of age. And he has been a bicameral personality to use the term of Julian James, ever since. And this entity guides him.. it takes him to other places. It is his spiritual guide.
Rick Archer: Does he go into some trance state and doesn’t even know it’s happening?
Anthony Peake: He’s temporal lobe epileptic was again, so the temporal lobe epilepsy was very much in element. But there was various cases where he’s also a modern day Shaman. He’s had the whole trip where his body’s been dismembered and been put back together again. But he’s also an extraordinary artist. He’s almost like, do you know Giger the artists that did? Aliens? The alien?
Rick Archer: No, I mean, I know the film, but I don’t know.
Anthony Peake: Okay, he was the artist that did the designs of the alien, the alien entity. He also did the cover of Brain Salad Surgery, the Emerson Lake and Palmer cover, but Myron’s paintings and his sculptures are like that they are extremely disturbing. They’re very, very scary. And these are all imagery that he brings back from the places he goes when he’s in his aura states. And he said he’s been guided and there was one occasion he told me whereby his younger self, he saw an older man, at that time he wasn’t an artist or anything, but he saw an older man in a studio surrounded by these sculptures, and everything. And then 40 years later, he’s sitting there and he goes, and he recognizes where he was and realized he was probably his younger self was standing behind him. Mm. Looking at him. Now again. Philip K. Dick had exactly the same things happened to him. He had a series of dreams when he was a youngster about a man standing, an older man standing at the end of his bed looking at him. And then when he got into his 40s, he started having dreams of standing at the end of the bed looking down as a young boy in a bed. And again, I argue that Philip K Dick, if you read a lot of his novels, his Daemon was very much manifest in his life. He argued that he was a split personality that there were all these things happening. So it seems that this creativity comes through. And I’ll give an example here of just how extraordinary it can be, is that would Rudyard Kipling, the British writer, poet and everything else…. he had a very active Daemon. And in his autobiography, Something of Me, he describes this. And he turns round, and he advises his readers to listen to the daemon and listen to what the daemon says. And he gave an example. And he said, One day he was writing a story called The Old Men of Pevensey. And it was based on in Pevensey, in East Sussex, and it was during the invasions the Norman invasions in 1066. And in the story, the fictional story he has he’s placed two elderly men, the old men of Pevensey, in Pevensey castle, and he’s placed them inside one of round turrets of the castle, and they can’t get out, they’re trapped, because all the Norman troops are all round outside. And like many writers, he’d written himself into an impasse. He didn’t know how to get them out the castle. So he goes walking in his gardens in Bateman’s beautiful house not far from here. And he’s walking in the gardens. And the daemon comes to him. And the daemon turns around to him and says, Do you know that story you’re writing? He said, I’ve got a way you can have a solution. And he turned around to the Daemon. And he said, Well, there’s a voice in his head, and the voice said, make out that they find some loose stones, and they take the stones out or the bricks, and they found there is a sea well, in the in the lining of the tower, and they climb down and there’s a boat there and they can escape and they can go into the moat, and they can escape. Kipling turns around to his Daemon said, Yeah, but that’s ridiculous. There isn’t one. And the daemons said we’ll write it anyway. So he did, he wrote it 10 years later, there was excavations done in the actual tower that he chose. And they found the sea well, who factly in the location, he said it would be. And as he says, In his autobiography, he says, what was going on there? Was that my future self talking to me, to help me guide me write a book, write a story. And he gave very much other examples. And again, you have then people like Kekulé, who was a German chemist, who was having great problems with benzene, the atomic structure of benzene how the molecules are the atoms linked in benzene. And he’s sitting there and there’s a roaring fire, and he’s sitting there and he starts to go off to sleep. And as he does so he sees a snake chewing its own tail, and spinning. And he comes to and he goes, that’s how the ring structure works. And he was right. Yeah, ring structure of benzene was discovered. The same with Niels Bohr. He saw, he couldn’t understand how the atom the structure of the atom worked. And he had a dream of racehorses running around a circular track. And he woke up and yep, that was the structure. That’s what he needed. So it seems that we have this kind of guide to us, that manifests in the right time, and makes things happen to seem to move us on. And I argue it’s using future memory. It already knows what you’ve done. And it back feeds the information to help you make the right decisions this time, or to create the things you need. Again, and again, citing the TV series: Dark that’s well worth watching, because it points out about free will. And are we trapped in doing the same things? Can we escape from free will? Because it’s a very clever time travel story, very sophisticated. But it’s again the idea you know that we can go back into our own past and guide ourselves. But will we make the same errors, which is exactly what Joan of Arc. I wrote a play on it called The Voice because, you know, Joan of Arc argued that she had spirit guides and they guided her and they guided her right from the start of her career when she was fighting the British. But she refused to follow the guidance at one stage because she tried to escape from a tower and the guide said don’t do it but she did it. She jumped and she broke her leg, and she was recaptured. And that’s what her ended up being burned at the stake. But the voice is very much told her what she needed to do. And I’d argue again that the voices were her own Higher Self that had lived the life before guiding her to say, Whatever you do, don’t make this mistake this time. Don’t jump from the tower. And of course she did. And the voice said, I will sod you that you’ve made the mistake again. Let’s, let’s get it right next time. And of course, this whole principle is central to a comparatively famous novel written by a guy called Peter Ouspensky, who was a Russian philosopher (doing with Gurdjieff or something.) That’s right. He was the associate of Gurdjieff. And they split up later in life. But he was very much Gurdjieff’s acolyte. And Ouspensky, wrote a novel called The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. And again, it’s a young man who loses his girlfriend, and then is given the opportunity to go back and relive the last 10 years of his life. And he makes the same mistakes as he made last time, exactly the same mistakes. And it’s almost as if you know, we are doomed. Those of us who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And it does seem that sometimes the Daemon gets quite hacked off with us because we don’t follow what they’re supposed to do.
Rick Archer: A couple of thoughts on this, my, you know, listen to your whole Cheating the Ferryman book and half of your, the Daemon book over the last couple weeks. And my the sticking point that I keep keeps coming to mind when I hear you describe the Daemon, is that I think, okay, it may be this way, it might be some kind of higher self that knows our future and, and is not bound by time, the way our Jiva is, there or Eidolon. But I also very much believe in the idea of celestial beings or subtle beings who are not human at all, and who operate on subtler levels and intervene or involve themselves in human affairs, attempting to guide individuals and cultures this way and that, and so, you know, and maybe on some level, those two things are synonymous. But, you know, I have friends who claim to be able to see people’s guardian angels hovering around them doing something, who knows what. And that kind of idea, like you said, Joan of Arc believed in her spirit guides, that kind of idea is common in various cultures. So it’s just a hypothesis that I think we should keep in the mix.
Anthony Peake: Yeah, we shouldn’t exclude it. I mean, for instance, you know, I know from my own research, you know, some curious stories about, like the Scole experiment. And I know people who were physically there who witnessed the phenomenon, you know of that?. Okay. It was a series of experiments done trying to communicate with other beings, be it dead people, or whatever that took place in, I think, the 1990s in a small village called Scole in Norfolk in the UK.
Rick Archer: I interviewed David Spangler, by the way, who was one of the founders of Findhorn and a lot of people associated with that have been doing this kind of thing for a long time
Anthony Peake: yeah, I’ve got a friend who lives in Findhorn, and I keep meaning to go up to visit her, actually, I mean, she’s an extraordinary lady in her own right. But the whole Scole experiment was quite interesting, because they, they got communication with something or a group of some things. And they got some quite interesting information and friends of mine, two people I know, witnessed the visual effects that were taking place in that cellar of that house. And they assure me that what they saw was impossible, they couldn’t have reproduced the things they did. And these were individual entities that were not that were not Daemons, they weren’t they were personalities. And the same goes with Imperator and Rector, which were a series of experiments very similar that were done in the 1890s I think it was by the Society for Psychical Research. And again, they had communication with other entities. And again, I argue, you know, that all these Egregores that I was talking about earlier on, you know, these entities that seem to come through to to either guide us or play with us, you know, is it they’re trying to help and of course, we then move into the UFO phenomenon
Rick Archer: Which is a whole other thing. Yeah, I would also argue that there would be hierarchies of entities..there could be, you know, little ones, like, you know, that are properly represented as being fairies or elves or whatever that might be involved in or responsible for, you know, plant life or something like that. And then bigger ones that might be associated with our individual life and then ones that might govern a whole planet or galaxy or whatever, take it out to whatever and then others that might govern or be the intelligence that expresses itself as various laws of nature or natural phenomenon, and so on. And I’m not coming up with these ideas. I mean, this is what people have said. And I kind of find it interesting to contemplate.
Anthony Peake: No, so do I, I mean, this thing that the more you get into this, the more it becomes fascinating. And the people you meet, this is the wonderful thing about I find doing writing.. is the people I’ve met, over the last two decades, have become really good friends of mine. And we all share the same interests. I mean, I’m really quite fascinated, for instance, about DMT entities.
Rick Archer: Oh, yeah. What do they call them- machine elves or something like that?
Anthony Peake: I mean, for instance, there are a couple of my associates one, particularly, who is one of the researchers that are doing the research at the Imperial College in London at the moment about DMT entities and the things he’s been experiencing.
Rick Archer: But you know, is the drug just producing those out of nothing? Or are we actually ….or is the drug sort of tuning us into a realm at which they actually exist?
Anthony Peake: In my book, The Infinite Universe, I argue that it is a tuning us in these entities. For instance , my associate told me that he took the DMT intravenously, found himself in a place, an entity comes over to and tells him You shouldn’t be doing it this way, tells him off, he then comes back into this reality goes back to week later, the same entity came over and said, I told you last time, you shouldn’t be doing it this way. And this shocked him because as he said to me, he said, this was something if it was a part of my own psyche, it was telling me something I didn’t want to hear. Yeah. And he said, I am absolutely sure that this entity was independent of me, it wasn’t a creation of my subconscious. And other friends of mine who have 5-MeO-DMT tell me that when you do that, it’s even more extreme, because you then move into almost Brahman state, you know, you actually become unity with with everything. So again, the argument is, you know, why do these substances exist? Why does DMT exist in virtually everything? You know, why it’s in plants? It’s, you know, what is it created for? Why does it come about, that it can work psychoactively with the human brain in the way it does, unless there’s some kind of a plan, or, you know, that’s when it gets …
Rick Archer: I have friends who feel and I may agree with them that these substances have already played and may yet play a very great role in transforming the consciousness of humanity in an accelerated way, which might not happen if we just needed everybody to learn to meditate or something like that.
Anthony Peake: I think again, you know, from the you know, the Vedic traditions and the concept of Soma. Again, it goes right back into the traditions and these, you know, the very fact, you know, again, I feel that scientists and a lot of the researchers don’t think far enough or they don’t, they don’t realize the real impact of what they’re analyzing, you know, for me, okay, so these drugs create hallucinations. But we don’t know what hallucinations are. So we do a causality and we make an explanation by giving it a label, you know, in other words, we call it an hallucination, and therefore, we’ve explained it, but of course, as the great Oliver Sacks in his very last book, Hallucinations, where he particularly talks about such things as Charles Bonnet syndrome, he argues that we have no idea what hallucinations are. And I’ve used the argument to say that, you know, if I have an hallucination, that’s me hallucinating, if you and I collectively have a hallucination and see something in three dimensional space outside of ourselves, it’s a folie a deux. What does that French word made? Folie a deux means a folly of two. In other words, we’re both fooling each other. We’re concurrently fooling each other into seeing something external, then you have, you know, collective hysteria,
Rick Archer: or you have things like the Lourde’s phenomenon or the Phoenix lights or you know
Anthony Peake: that’s the specific example is Lourdes and Fatima you know, when 1000s of people saw the sun spin in the sky, now, something happened there and it was you to just say it was a collective hallucination suggests that you’re using potentially telepathy to explain something you don’t like so you’re used you’re using something you don’t like to explain something you don’t like even more Yeah, and that’s bad science. Come on, you know for crying out loud you know, you don’t don’t think we see the the card trick going on there and the sleight of hand so to me, what are these hallucinations? Where do they come from? Why are they consistent? Why do people see grays? Why did my mother see a gray in her bedroom when she was developing Alzheimer’s and Charles Bonnet syndrome, which she did.
Rick Archer: Interesting.
Anthony Peake: And she described it as a little gray being with huge black eyes, a slip for for a mouth and two holes for a nose and it came around the door in the bedroom, looked at her blinked and dodged back again.
Rick Archer: Interesting
Anthony Peake: Now, and she’d seen a UFO about three days before that she didn’t know was a UFO. She said she saw something in the sky. Now my mother.
Rick Archer: And she was developing Alzheimer’s you said.
Anthony Peake: she was developing Alzheimer’s.. She was developing Charles Bonnet syndrome.
Rick Archer: Which doesn’t necessarily mean she was totally losing it. It could mean I mean, I have a friend, I had a friend she’s died. But she had early onset dementia, I guess you would call it she she kind of deteriorated and kind of became really vegetative, even in her might have been late 50s or early 60s. But as that began to happen, you know, she began just having this incredible love for people and you know, feeling like she could see you know, auras around people. And something began opening up which, you know, her deteriorating brain perhaps was not producing as a hallucination, but rather was allowing was losing its filtering ability to prevent such things from happening, just as psychedelics are said to do
Anthony Peake: That’s what I argue and again, being me I do the neurophysiology of it. What is taking place there is there are things called amyloid plaques. And what they do is the proteins that that destroy the microtubules within the brain, they explode the microtubules. Now, the microtubules are interesting in that they are the central thesis of something called orchestrated objective reduction, which is being put forward by Stuart Hamerhoff and Roger Penrose. And they argue that these micro structures, these tubulin structures within the microtubules of the neurons are the things that bring up the information field, that create this reality, okay. Now, when they get destroyed, what I argue is that the filtering what Henri Bergson used to call the the brain attenuator, the brain attenuates, it takes information out, it stops the brain’s ability to attenuate, which means that suddenly the person as they’re declining into Alzheimer’s, their perceptual field gets wider, and they start to see things that we can’t see. And I’ve got so much evidence of this again, Maggie Laterellh who is the lady that is it at Findhorn at the moment, she wrote a book called The Gift of Alzheimer’s, and I quote her in one of my books, she’s a good friend of mine. And her work she describes about her mother’s deterioration, and a mother was pre cognitive, she was seeing things she couldn’t possibly know. But her brain was going, and I think what happens is the doors of perception, theBlake doors of perception, the idea of, you know, of Aldous Huxley they start to break down. And I witnessed this in my mother, you know, where she suddenly started seeing things that weren’t there. I mean, one day, I’m sitting there, and she turns around to me, and she says, Tony, the little, little children that sing to me, they’ve stopped singing, they don’t sing to me anymore. And I said, what children? He said, Oh, they follow me around when I’m shopping, and they follow me around in the house. And I said, Oh, dear, and I thought is she letting kids into the house? And then she said, but they’re not as friendly as the old man in the kitchen. And now what? And she said, yeah, he smiles at me. He never speaks. But he’s very friendly. And this was when I realized what was happening because she was partially sighted. She’d lost an eye with malignant melanoma about 15 years before and she was losing. She had cataracts in the other eye. So it’s a classic Charles Bonnet syndrome scenario, because this is what happens when you start to go blind, the brain starts to bring in other information. Now, again, somebody you might be interested in interviewing is a friend of mine, Dr. Neil Rushton who is an archaeologist, and he is going blind, and he gets profound Charles Bonnet syndrome. He sees things everywhere. He sees entities he sees fairies, he sees goblins are all around him all the time.
Rick Archer: Incidentally, I watched the other night I watched the documentary about people who see without eyes and it showed that they can train people to do this. It showed kids with blindfolds on that were really good blindfolds, they weren’t peeking, playing ping pong, riding a bicycle through an obstacle course. You know, sorting out colored plastic cups into the right, you know, groups of the same color. A guy who could read a newspaper and tell you what the pictures are in it. He had trouble with small fonts but he could do headlines and and all… who was blind. So anyway it relates to what we’re saying,
Anthony Peake: Oh totally I mean there’s there’s an associate of mine who’s whose names escape me for the second I’ll remember in a second. She’s a psychiatrist, psychologist – a neurologist based somewhere in the States. Her name will come to me, but she’s working with children who have profound autism, who are profoundly telepathic. And she gave me one example one of her cases, and this is extraordinary. And this happened in an under controlled conditions. This kid was in India, and the mother, who was a mathematician, believed that her her daughter was a mathematical genius. Because how she could answer some mathematical questions she asked her, even though she hadn’t been trained in mathematics. So she contacts a guy called Darold Treffert, who, again, I featured on my podcast and Darold died sadly, about two years ago, but Darold was the technical advisor for Rain Man, the movie. And he worked with Kim Peek for years, so he was the guy that everybody Kim Peek and how amazing Kim Peek was, who’s the guy that Rain Man was based upon? He lived in Salt Lake City, Utah proceeded. But anyway, what happened was that she, the lady in India contacted Derold. And Derold felt he needed to contact this other researcher, this lady friend of mine, and they brought the kid over. And they tested her at the university. And they discovered the other kids, the kid was very good mathematically. So they could give the kid any kind of mathematical equation. And the kid could answer it. Because they’d have a mathematician working with the kid, the mathematician would see what the equation was and the kid would get the answer. As they were doing some of the tests, one of the training, one of the graduate mathematicians that was working there got bored. And I think I’m right in saying that what she did was she thought the question in binary code, rather than normal, decimal point notation, so zeros and ones, now the child doesn’t speak, but used the keyboard. And the keyboard, the kid typed 1010111, or whatever it was, onto the keyboard. And the person that was doing the experiment said: how did they know that? They picked up my thoughts? And then she turned around, she said, if you’re reading my thoughts, type, I love you in German, and the kid typed Ich Liebe Dich. And they realized that the child wasn’t a mathematical savant. She was just telepathic. And it was the child was picking up her mother’s thoughts, and they were picking up everybody. And Diane Hennessy Powell, is one of these.
Rick Archer: Oh, yes. I’ve interviewed her. Oh, Diane, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And of course, you know, I mean, and that’s amazing enough in itself, that all those things can happen. And so once again, it should really shake the worldview of a materialist, and if they were cared to look at it,
Anthony Peake: but what they do is because their science can’t explain it, therefore, it’s impossible. And that’s the logic, you know, people compromise.
Rick Archer: So that, you know, I don’t want to look at your research because it can’t be true. So you know,
Anthony Peake: You know, it is like the Daryl Bem, you know, the work he did you know, then the idea is we don’t look at your results. Because we don’t agree with them.
Rick Archer: Yeah, yeah. Which is why we have the so called Galileo Commission, which I think you’re part of, or you’re on the mailing list, or something’s part of the medical network. Yeah.
Anthony Peake: It’s so important. You know, we can’t we’re throwing things out, that could really help science develop, you know,
Rick Archer: yeah.
Anthony Peake: And I find it quite frustrating because I know myself and my associates, we feel like we’re on a bridge. We’re in the middle of the bridge, and the scientists are throwing stones at us from one side and the New Agers that want to believe all kinds of nonsense are throwing stones from the other but dodging the stones and saying look guys, we’re just trying to make you lot think more logically and you lot to think and say you’re denying things that you’re going to regret because sooner or later it’s going to come out and you are in denial of it.
Rick Archer: It’s so good. I’m so happy you mentioned that point because that’s and we kind of mentioned at the beginning also but that’s that’s been one of my main things is that you know, science and spirituality can really help each other science can get this you know, bitch slap the New Agers into more sensibility and and the woowoo stuff. … a lot of it is true in and science has gotta look at it or it’s not science, it’s gonna have a limited, you know, worldview.
Anthony Peake: Well, we know that we I know I’ve had precognitive dreams. I know I’ve had precognitive deja vu sensations. I know people who have had I’ve witnessed somebody have a pre cognitive deja vu sensation. It was somebody who contacted me who had had parts of her brain removed for temporal lobe epilepsy. And we arranged to meet. What happened was I was living in Liverpool at the time. And she and her son traveled into the center of Liverpool and she left us on in the centre of Liverpool, and got the bus out to where I was working the place called Speke near Speke airport, about six or seven miles out the city centre. We met in a Border bookstore. Now the Border store particular Border store in question, had the shop the floor with all the books down in one level, and then there was a mezzanine floor at the back that had Costa’s coffee shop. I met her in the coffee shop. So you’d imagine the scenario. She and I are sitting there overlooking the shop and there’s the entrance in the front. we are six miles outside of the city, her son should be in the city center. So she’s talking to me, and suddenly she goes into an absent state, the petit mal absence state where she just stares at me. And I knew for a second, she was just going into a pre seizure state and I didn’t bother her. And she just suddenly looks round. And she looks around at the front of the shop and she goes, he shouldn’t be here. What’s he doing here? You shouldn’t be here now. And then she snaps out of it. And I’m just about to say to her that you’ve just had an absence seizure. When she looks at me looks over and goes, he shouldn’t be here. What’s he doing here? He shouldn’t be here as her son walked in through the front door.
Rick Archer: She saw it happening a few seconds for a second. Okay, well, this is great. I can easily talk to you all day long. But there’s a couple of questions that came in. Let me just ask those. And, you know, try not to go too long on each answer. But take your time to say what you want to say. And then I definitely would like to do another one with you one of these days. Yeah, that’d be wonderful. So because there’s so much we could talk about that we haven’t. So here’s the first one. This is from Sarah McDougal in Maine – the State of Maine. Several years ago, I had a terrifying experience during sleep paralysis, a faceless figure dressed in black dressed in a black cloak appeared a tremendous amount of fear and darkness overwhelmed me. I came across a documentary and realize this was an actual phenomenon regarding shadow people or the hat man. Do you have any knowledge or understanding of this experience? And what it might mean?
Anthony Peake: I do indeed. Yes. Sleep Paralysis is fascinating. Just very quickly, what happens in sleep paralysis is that in order when you’re dreaming, if your body could move properly, and you were having a dream and having a fight, you’d end up damage yourself by fighting and pushing and punching or damage or hurt somebody that sleeping next to you. So what the body does is that it paralyzes the limbs, so you can’t move while you’re dreaming. But sometimes what happens is that you come out of the sleep state while the sleep paralysis is still in effect. So you have the sensation of being trapped with something sitting on your chest. And again, there’s a very famous painting by a guy called Fuseli called The Nightmare and there’s a lady lying in a bed and she’s got something sitting on her chest. So that’s the that’s the neurological aspects of it. But the hag phenomenon really intrigues me because ordinarily, what people report seeing is normally a cowed figure, normally sitting in the corner, in profile, or the more modern phenomena of the hat man. And the idea is that this seems to be an entity that we can perceive when we’re in these sleep paralysis states. Now, what fascinates me is it’s very consistent. Now there’s, there’s a friend of mine, Samantha Lee Treasure, somebody else you need to interview who’s researching this phenomenon has got a book coming out next year is going to be published by Inner Traditions on this very subject. And she’s she’s just finished her master’s degree in outer body experiences. And she’s just about to start a PhD in the subject. And she tells me that, you know, these are consistent. I mean, she’s out in South Korea, researching it out in South Korea, and it’s still consistent in terms of everything. Just bear with me a second.
Rick Archer: Here, my wife is saying the same thing. We’re gonna wrap it up.
Anthony Peake: Okay. So the idea is that it’s consistent, so within certain cultures, and the question is what is taking place here and I think what is happening is when we’re in these liminal states between sleep and awake, what’s called hypnagogic or hypnopompia, our perceptual field broadens again, and we perceive the kind of the liminal sensations either side of our psyches outside of our perceptual field and I think that’s what’s happening with the hat man. And with with the hag.
Rick Archer: Here’s one more question. One final question from Austin Brooks in the UK, if time collapses at the time of physical death, and the person then experiences their lives again and again, but with the possibility of making different choices – are these lives in the imaginal realms only? If not, how are other people in our lives created in these experiences? Might we currently be enacting one of these alternative timelines?
Anthony Peake: That’s a very good question. Excellent question, in fact, I would argue that because of the higher level, we are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, it means effectively, all the human beings that you interface with, are just as real. And again, I would I would cite the examples of the Everett’s many worlds interpretation, the idea of these concurrent timelines, but they’re all inhabited by individuals in the same way. In other words, this is not solipsism. This is not an argument to say that you’re the only conscious personality because ultimately, you are part of a greater consciousness that you are, you are part of, as it were. But the question of the roles of other people is that we all live the alternate timelines. And again, I would strongly suggest if you watch again, Dark, I think although it’s a fiction, it really gets across the ideas of how multiple personalities can exist, that are all individuated. In the same way, he does that very, very well. But that’s an excellent question. In the book, I explained that in great detail, by the way, and put forward various hypothesis for it. But excellent question. Thank you.
Rick Archer: Okay, great. So um, we have to wrap it up. But I will have a page on BatGap about you and listing the four books that you recommended to me is most important for our discussion. Is There Life After Death Cheating the Ferryman, the Daemon and the Hidden Universe. And you as you mentioned, you have a dozen books altogether. So people can always go to Amazon or whatever, and, you know, look at ones that might interest them.
Anthony Peake: book shops as well.
Rick Archer: Yup good old book shops. Those still exist. And anyway, I’ve really enjoyed this, this conversation I hope others have as well. I’ve really enjoyed listening to books and We’ll all meet again, and it will give me an excuse to finish the books that I haven’t listened to yet.
Anthony Peake: Thoroughly enjoyable, Rick, I’ve really enjoyed it. Yes, yes. I’ve met yet another another friend that I have. Yes. Which is wonderful. So thank you for that.
Rick Archer: Well, that’s what I love. One thing I love about this doing this is I built this network of amazing friends all over the world. Absolutely.