skeptiko--2020-04-29--Anthony Peake, Is Real Reality Hidden? |447|

Anthony Peake integrates important frontier science into novel theories about reality .
Alex Tsakiris : Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers , thinkers , and their critics .
I ’ m your host , Alex Tsakiris , and today we welcome Anthony Peake back to Skeptiko to talk about his new and quite amazing book , The Hidden Universe : An Investigation into Non-Human Intelligences , a book that is very much about these extended consciousness realms that we talk so much about on this show .
Anthony , as many of you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ accomplished author and speaker , but as someone who truly in every way that I can tell , seems to be a researcher seeker , that is someone who you get the feeling is really trying to get somewhere with this stuff and isn ’ t just writing books , which are very entertaining and bring us all along on his journey , but that this is really a path of discovery for Anthony , and I really appreciate that .
His latest book , The Hidden Universe is no exception .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ amazing accounts and stories that you ’ re going to be quite surprised that you ’ ve never heard about before , but it ’ s also packed with a lot of cutting-edge science that Anthony believes backs up his theories .
Now , one other thing I should mention , and that is that Tony Peake is not someone who ’ s afraid to stick his neck out there regarding his theories .
I kind of like that really , because if you really listen to what he ’ s saying , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is not that he has all the answers , but more that , unless somebody sticks a stake into the ground and says , “ Hey , it ’ s not just about stories , here ’ s what I think this stuff leads to , ” unless somebody does that , we can ’ t really pull it apart .
So we all realize that we ’ re probably wrong about all this stuff that the greatest minds have thought about since as long as there ’ s been a human being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appreciate that he ’ s willing to stick his neck out there and say , “ Hey , here ’ s how I think it all fits together.
” So , Anthony , it ’ s great to have you back .
Thanks so much for joining me .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:00:00 ] Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers , thinkers , and their critics .
I ’ m your host , Alex Tsakiris , and today we welcome Anthony Peake back to Skeptiko @ @ @ @ @ @ @ amazing book , The Hidden Universe : An Investigation into Non-Human Intelligences , a book that is very much abo ut these extended consciousness realms that we talk so much about on this show .
Anthony , as many of you know , is not just a very accomplished author and speaker , but as someone who truly in every way that I can tell , seems to be a researcher seeker , that is someone who you get the feeling is really trying to get somewhere with this stuff and isn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ very entertaining and bring us all along on his journey , but that this is really a path of discovery for Anthony , and I really appreciate that .
His latest book , The Hidden Universe is no exception .
It ’ s packed , not just with amazing accounts and stories that you ’ re going to be quite surprised that you ’ ve never heard about before , but it ’ s also packed with a lot of cutting-edge science that Anthony believes backs up his theories .
Now , one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that is that Tony Peake is not someone who ’ s afraid to stick his neck out there regarding his theories .
I kind of like that really , because if you really listen to what he ’ s saying , I think what he ’ s saying is not that he has all the answers , but more that , unless somebody sticks a stake into the ground and says , “ Hey , it ’ s not just about stories , here ’ s what I think this stuff leads to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we can ’ t really pull it apart .
So we all realize that we ’ re probably wrong about all this stuff that the greatest minds have thought about since as long as there ’ s been a human being on this planet , but I do appreciate that he ’ s willing to stick his neck out there and say , “ Hey , here ’ s how I think it all fits together.
” So , Anthony , it ’ s great to have you back .
Thanks so much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ [ 00:02:24 ] It ’ s great to be chatting to you again , Alex , I ’ ve been looking forward to this .
It ’ s been really good .
And thanks for a wonderful introduction , that ’ s a really hard act to follow , I to say that .
But thank you for it .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:02:36 ] No buddy , do you totally deserve it .
So , I ’ ll tell you what , let ’ s dive into the book , kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ general terms what it ’ s about .
I love this quote and I forget what chapter it ’ s in , that really kind of resonates with something that we all know to be true , but we can forget until a book like this comes along and reminds us , and that is throughout recorded history , the belief that humanity shares this planet with a variety of other sentient beings has been persistent .
If you want to start from there , or if you want to start anywhere you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , The Hidden Universe .
Anthony Peake : [ 00:03:20 ] Yeah , that ’ s quite correct , and that ’ s been my overall reason for writing this book , and it ’ s a book I think has been inside me since the mid-1960s .
It ’ s the book I ’ ve probably always wanted to write because in the mid-1960s I came down with a bout of double pneumonia , and during that period I had a series of very profound hallucinations going through the crisis of pneumonia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at my 12-year-old mind , I was quite fascinated by the nature of the hallucinations I was seeing .
Were these things external to me , were these things internally generated or were they a mixture of both ?
And this very much has been something that has intrigued me all through my writing career , really , because time and time again I come across people who encounter entities in differing circumstances , in OBE states , in lucid dreaming states , people who encounter entities during close encounters of the third @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the fifth kind , that we ’ ve got at the moment .
So there seems to be an awful lot of information out there , but what nobody , I think has tried to do… Well , it ’ s not true , I mean , I ’ m not original in this .
Jacques Valleé tried to do it many , many years ago and various other writers over the years have tried to draw a link through history as to what these entities be , and this is what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you , you call my ideas a theory or a hypothesis , I ’ d probably say it educated speculation because a lot of these things we can never actually know and we can never really test .
Although I am working with people at the trying to test these things .
But the basis of the book is just if people have extraordinary experiences and encounter entities that seem to have an existence that , can we build up a neurological model , can we build up a psychological model , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ] model to actually explain what things are ?
And that ’ s what I attempt to do in the book .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:05:20 ] Tell us more though , because that ’ s a good starting point , but the book really jumps in with both feet about the entirety of this extended realm that does seem to crop up all over the place .
So whether it ’ s magic and spirits and shamans , like you said , or whether it ’ s afterlife experiences and near-death @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ET experiences .
I mean , you do kind of take us through this history , in order to get us to the point of some of the breakthrough science that you think is influencing you the most right now .
So where do you want to start with that ?
I think the magic and spirits and shamans thing is something that ’ s really interesting because it grabs a lot of people ’ s attention right now .
There ’ s a lot of people really interested in magic right @ @ @ @ @ @ @ interested in the occult right now .
And I got to say , I think that we haven ’ t quite thought that through all the way , particularly if we mash it into simulation theory and afterlife near-death stuff .
I mean , there are just so many things to pull apart here , I hardly know where to begin , so I ’ m kind of lost .
Anthony Peake : [ 00:06:40 ] Okay , I ’ m happy to do that .
The first thing I ’ d like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the starting point , the starting premise of the book involves an experience my mother had when she was still all seemed to develop Alzheimer ’ s .
One day she phones me up and she said she ’ d experienced a very strange incident on her way into the local village that we used to live in near Liverpool .
She said that she was walking back with my aunt , my aunt stopped to tie up her shoelace , and when my aunt was tying her shoelace , my mother looked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seeing a smoke ring hovering over a local factory .
She then said the smoke ring started to revolve and then shot off towards North Wales .
And she asked me what she ’ d seen , and I said , “ Well , I don ’ t really know mum.
” She ’ s not into UFOs , she never has been , it ’ s not the kind of thing she ’ s ever been interested in and she was a lady in her late 80s then .
And I said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t worry about it , ” and she didn ’ t for about two or three days .
And then one morning , three days later , she phones me up in a state of absolute terror .
Now , she ’ d woken up in the middle of the night in a state of sleep paralysis .
She said she couldn ’ t move , she couldn ’ t move properly but she was looking towards the door of her bedroom .
Now , she lives alone , she ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ here , the important caveat is that she ’ d lost her eye with malignant melanoma many years before and her other eye , she was developing various problems .
So she was partially sighted , which is important as I move on with this .
As she said she looked towards the bedroom door , she noticed her bedroom door was open , and then she saw , as she described it , three spindly fingers around the edge of the bedroom door and this creature pop its head around the door @ @ @ @ @ @ @ description is uncanny .
She said it had large black eyes like an insect , it had two holes for a nose and a split for a mouth and it looked at her and dodged back , as if it had seen her .
She wakes up and she said , “ Tony , what did I see ?
” And I said , “ Well , it ’ s intriguing , I really don ’ t know mum , ” because I didn ’ t want to worry her .
But clearly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or a hypnopompic state and in a state of sleep paralysis , her doors of perception had broken down to such an extent that she was perceiving something that ordinarily , under ordinary circumstances she wouldn ’ t have experienced .
But it was her description of it , and of course , I was immediately reminded of the book cover of the Whitley Strieber book Communion , because it was a classic grey , it was an archetypal grey .
Now , I then started to research into this and I was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I started to really research it I discovered some quite interesting facts , like , for example : In 2017 in Northern India there was a cave underneath villages in Northern India and this cave had not being opened for 10,000 years , they carbon dated various things to know this was the case , and the creatures that are depicted in this cave are the creature that my mother saw .
Then you go on about Graham Hancock and his book Supernatural , and in this he describes his own experiences in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in South Africa .
Here again we have very similar creatures that are actually drawn on the cave walls .
Now , what intrigues me here is that there ’ s an elderly lady in the UK , there are people in India and there are people in Southern Africa and then again , as Graham Hancock says himself , you look at the Lascaux caves and you look at Pech Merle , everywhere else , these entities seem to be drawn everywhere .
The counter argument to this is , they were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people , they didn ’ t know how to draw properly or they were doing idealizations .
Now , the argument here doesn ’ t stand up for me because these ancestors of ours , their brains were exactly the same size as ours .
Clearly they knew how to depict bison and other animals .
So clearly , whatever they were doing it was not just an abstraction , it was something more .
So the question for me was , what are these entities and what are these beings ?
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ find certain themes take place .
It seems to involve darkness , it seems to involve people in caves or in areas where darkness is around .
And I argue , this is because in darkness , the pineal gland generates melatonin .
And I argue that there is a good case to be made that the pineal gland actually synthesizes endogenous melatonin into another substance , and that other substance , I believe , is dimethyltryptamine .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:11:18 ] Let ’ s pause here for just a second @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what you ’ re saying , because I mean , there ’ s already 10 jumping off points from what you ’ ve talked about .
We ’ ll get to as many as we can .
But this is really interesting science that you bring out in this book and you connect it in some very , very powerful ways .
I don ’ t totally agree with all of it , but I ’ m taken aback and really have to pause with some of it .
So here ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for people and correct me if any of this is wrong .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:11:48 ] DMT .
Everyone ’ s heard of DMT , Rick Strassman , the Spirit Molecule , shamans , you know , figure out how to do it in the jungle , and then you can have ayahuasca trips and all the rest of this .
But the mystery has been twofold .
One is , the fact that we have DMT trips suggests that we have neurotransmitters in our brain that can process it , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to create it in our bodies , otherwise , we wouldn ’ t have that ability .
But the mystery has been , we don ’ t see DMT in human beings , so we don ’ t see that mammals are able to create that .
So with that as the mystery , fill us in on what the latest science is telling you about how that mystery is solved .
Anthony Peake : [ 00:12:35 ] Yeah .
Well , DMT is found in the human body .
DMT is in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the stomach , it ’ s in the blood , it ’ s in the spinal cerebral fluid , and everywhere else .
The question is why is it there ?
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:12:50 ] How does it there , because it dissipates really quickly .
Anthony Peake : [ 00:12:59 ] And it does , and that ’ s the problem that up until recent years , there ’ s been the argument , you know , you ’ ve never found DMT in the brain , although in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ amine-associated receptors , and these are receptors within the neurons .
And the receptor site is rather like a key in a lock , and it ’ s designed to work with particular neurotransmitters in the brain , you know , dopamine , serotonin , glutamate , these kinds of things .
But these particular trace amine-associated receptor sites were a great mystery because the neurologist and neurochemistry didn ’ t really understand what they ’ re there for .
But then there was a discovery made that actually they work with DMT @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there are receptor sites in the brain that clearly have been designed to work with this substance .
But what then happened was , around about three years ago there ’ s a researcher at the University of Michigan called Jimo Borjigin , and she did a series of experiments , quite interestingly two experiments .
One of which seemed to give evidence of near-death experience , which was intriguing in itself .
Rats died and then about 10 or 20 seconds after the rat had died , there was a huge amount @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intrigued me as somebody who ’ s in interested in near-death experiences .
But more importantly , in a similar experiment they discovered with in the pineal gland of live rats , dimethyltryptamine .
So for the first time dimethyltryptamine has been found in a form within the brain of a live mammal .
Now , this is fascinating because suddenly this changes all of the rules , because suddenly the idea that dimethyltryptamine is as Rick Strassman says , our reality modulator , we suddenly have evidence of it and suddenly it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us and we have evolved to be able to process dimethyltryptamine .
Now , if you look at the chemical structure of melatonin , now melatonin is the substance that is excreted or created by the pineal gland for us to go to sleep .
As we know the pineal gland is effectively an ossified eye , it is believed to be the case , and in fact there are animals like a Tuatara which is a lizard found in New Zealand that actually has a third eye that sits in the center @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s gone back into the center of the brain .
It sits in the center of the brain and it sits above something called the optic chiasma , where the light signals or the processed light signals , the electrical impulses going along the neurons , go along and it sits right above this .
So it ’ s very aware or it ’ s sensitive of the fact that the external world has gone [ unclear 00:15:34 ] .
And when the external world goes [ unclear 00:15:39 ] allowing it to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to sleep .
But melatonin can be synthesized and changed into what Beach Barrett , who ’ s a research in the States who ’ s worked with Rick Strassman calls METAtonin .
And METAtonin is endogenous , that is internally generated dimethyltryptamine .
Now , if this is the case and could be evidenced and it could be… You know my writings , I don ’ t just make these statements , I really go into the research .
There is a state that is known as khecarí mudrá and khecarí mudrá @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they do is , normally in India , but they train themselves to place the tongue , they flip the tongue back to the back of the throat and they want to do this because they want to taste what ’ s called the ambrosia nectar , the nectar of transcendence , which is an acidic taste they get at the back of the throat which then puts them into altered states of consciousness .
Now what ’ s intriguing here is that the 49th day gestation , the embryo in the womb @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 49th day of gestation is important in itself because if you look at Buddhist tradition , that ’ s when they believe the soul enters the body and enters the embryo .
At that time , the pineal gland and the pituitary gland are a single unit which sit at the back of the throat called the epiphysis .
From the 49th day of gestation it moves up the back , into the brain and then moves up to the center of the brain where then the two things part , where it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , so the pituitary and the pineal body and they become separate .
But with many what it leaves is something called Rathke ’ s cleft or Rathke ’ s pouch , which is kind of a slight opening that goes to the center of the brain .
Now , if the pineal gland does release dimethyltryptamine , this is likely to be the root where excess dimethyltryptamine may drip down to the back of the throat .
So is this what khecarí mudrá is all about ?
Is this something that individuals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ altered states of consciousness ?
Now , if this idea that the gland is related in some way , would explain many , many shamanic traditions .
Such as there ’ s a tribe in Northern Columbia , in the mountains of Northern Columbia and they train shamans , they take children from the age of about five or six and they place them in total darkness in caves .
And they do this for a reason because what they ’ re trying to do is to train the pineal gland to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is this what shamans are doing ?
And of course , shamans have long argued , and if you look at the writings of Benny Shanon in his book on ayahuasca , you will discover that ayahuasca was discovered , or technically has been known for many years and it ’ s a mixture of two different plants , banisteriopsis caapi and psychotria viridis .
Psychotria viridis contains DMT but banisteriopsis caapi doesn ’ t , but they mix these two plants together .
Now , there are 50,000 different types of plants @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shamans put the two together and mixed them in exactly the right way because you could eat as much of the leaves of psychotria viridis , even though there ’ s DMT in there and you would never get high .
And the reason you wouldn ’ t get high is that the leaves go into the stomach and the stomach excretes something called monoamine oxidase and it ’ s something that lines the stomach and stops the hallucinatory effects getting rough into the blood .
However , the banisteriopsis caapi contains harmaline @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So they put two plants together that work together to allow and facilitate it across the blood brain barrier to go into the brain to actually cause hallucinatory states .
When they were asked how they developed this , and this gets extraordinary , and this is directly pertinent to our conversation , they were asked and they said when they as shamans , in years gone by went shamanic traveling , that is when they went into the upper world or the lower world , the would encounter their shamanic totems @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would speak to them .
And [ unclear 00:19:58 ] plants literally told the shamans and said , if you go into the jungle and you take this plant here , and showed it to them in the hallucinogenic state or in the hypnagogic state or whatever we want to call altered states of consciousness , they showed them the two plants and said , put these two plants together in this way , and you will allow non-shamanic people neurotypicals for want of a better term , to be able to experience @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I asked the question in my own mind , this suggests sentience and it suggests intelligence .
Now , I ’ ll make a final point on this before we continue because this is very important .
A group of people I know are working at the moment at Imperial College in London , and they ’ re doing research into DMT .
It ’ s fully funded and it ’ s fully legal and they ’ re taking DMT intravenously .
One of my associates is a guy called Dr. Karl Smith @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that what they do is they take it intravenously , like Rick Strassman ’ s people did and he volunteered , and he took it and he found himself in what he calls the DMT zone .
It ’ s kind of the place you find yourself , rocketed out your body and you ’ re in this place , which is more real than this reality .
He said while he was there this entity came over to him and it eyeballed him , prodded him , and said , “ You @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Please do not do it this way .
This is the wrong way to do it , ” and it backed off again .
He then comes to .
Two weeks later , he takes another DMT trip , [ unclear 00:21:33 ] and says , “ I told you last time , do not do it this way.
” Extraordinary .
And he said to me , “ This means that this entity was doing things and had motivation which was counter to what I wanted to do , because I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all of my team wanted to do it this way , ” but this entity is saying , “ No , you can ’ t , you can ’ t do it this way , it ’ s the wrong way.
” Intriguing , and my idea is , what are these beings ?
Are they part of us ?
Are they part of our subconscious ?
Are they Jungian archetypes ?
But if they are , they seem to have a degree of independence and that ’ s where I come up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There is so much so , so , so much .
We ’ re just going to do the best we can .
I ’ m going to stop saying that because it gets a little old .
You know , one of the things that you touched on that I thought we might dive Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:22:24 ] Is the question of reality because we have to remind people that on this little journey that we ’ re on here , we are so past materialistic biologic robots and meaningless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ve left that completely .
Aside , which we should , but it ’ s interesting to know that that ’ s where we ’ re kind of held by our science .
Now , one of the things that you ’ re saying about reality , and we ’ ve had some interesting people on this show say the same thing , and that is we are somehow in some way , co-creators of that reality number one and that number two , something .
On the order of a simulation , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ word and we don ’ t really know what that would mean and simulation of what an infinite regress , but something on the order of a simulation in some way seems to better fit the reality information we keep coming back to .
I think there ’ s also the issue of augmented reality .
And augmented consciousness .
We ’ re technologically , we see through strong AI that we are right on the cusp of augmented consciousness and that we may be on the cusp of augmented reality , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think we ’ re going to have to pack back into this discussion .
I don ’ t know if now is the right time to do it .
Anthony Peake : [ 00:23:48 ] I think so .
This is something that has intrigued me for a long time .
I mean , from my book through to opening the doors of perception to this latest book .
This is very much a theme that ’ s been intriguing me .
And again .
I like to do the science of this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is coming to these conclusions that at its basic level reality for want of a better term , is digital in nature .
Um , why have we concluded that ?
Well , of course , the first question is that we need that space , the solid objects and 99.99999 ( 999 ) 999-9996 as you space .
And what is inside that empty space or literally Cokes , you know , effectively , you know , it ’ s an up , down , and it ’ s a down cork @ @ @ @ @ @ @ corks and one up cork or two .
What corks them on ?
Damn cork that makes up the proton and the neutral .
Then we have the electrons that are whizzing round , but with inside the atom , there ’ s mostly nothing .
And the only reason we don ’ t fall through the floor and everything else is electrostatic repulsion on the themselves .
I think the molecules , so we , when something brings something solidly together , and of course that ’ s human perception .
Now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:25:03 ] hold on , because that would , that might contradict with what you said before , right ?
And here ’ s where the backdoor materialism gets in .
And I really wanted to get your opinion on this because on one hand we can talk about the sentience .
In this extended realm , so I ’ m calling an extended consciousness .
You ’ re tall , you ’ re talking about something outside of consensual reality or con or a , we ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the , the one thing I wonder about is .
If we ’ re talking about that sentience , do we want to pack it back into that biological robot ?
This is how things work .
This is how we break everything down and we understand everything in this realm , and if we are going to do that , and we ’ re going to say there ’ s sentience out there in this extended realm , then what is our relationship to .
That sentence and what is our relationship @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Like when you ’ re talking about yogis who put their tongue on a bike , why , why ?
I mean , what is the , we have to get to kind of purpose and meaning kind of questions I think is where I ’ m headed .
But there ’ s not enough time in the day to get there .
Anthony Peake : [ 00:26:13 ] we rolled it .
We fall in city theology .
Now that we , and we , and this is one of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , of this kind of .
One minute was saying that somehow the chemicals in the brain are affecting consciousness and affecting our awareness .
But then we have the problem of jewel ism because the problem is how can a physical step of chemicals , albeit may of 99.9 % empty space effect .
Me if I not , if I ’ m some form of consciousness field or something , experiencing something within a consciousness field by reducing into my brain something that is a field .
So what we need @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back and go back lower to say , well , if we , we , we , we , we say like , um , David Boehme argues .
Yeah .
Anglo American physicist in his arguments about the Cubs next look at orders in some way .
It ’ s a deeper level of reality .
There is , there is a steel error and physical things and mental things of both .
Kind of , well , no , the say there ’ s the singularity , then there is consciousness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the physical world .
But the act of observation , because again , we could argue , couldn ’ t we ?
You know , the quantum physics , we know that from the Copenhagen and Hagan interpretation , we learned from the collapse of the wave function that some of atomic particles , until they are measured and observed , can be technically anywhere in the universe .
And there ’ s a statistical problems .
They could be anywhere , but when they are measured and they are then reducing what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a particular location , in space and time .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:27:54 ] Maybe people have heard that a million times , but I always think it ’ s worth repeating .
And that is the power of the double slit experiment .
What it means in terms of the observer effect .
And just to remind people , I ’ d like you to .
Explore this because the book does a nice job of talking about some of this quantum physics science that is really the bedrock of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ theories and formulas that have come out of that have been proven over and over again are rock solid .
They build , we build the engineer ’ s stuff off of those and even as uncomfortable as we are with the double slit experiment , cause again , we ’ ll , it ’ s remind people .
That the double slit experiment answers the Zen question .
If a tree falls in the forest and there ’ s no one there to hear it , well then the tree doesn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the tree doesn ’ t even fall because from a simulation hypothesis thing , it fits in with that and saying or seem to only be rendering .
What .
We are observing .
So , and I would just want to remind people that the double slit experiment has been repeated over and over and over .
And if you hear people say , well , it only works at a sub subatomic level , not true .
They ’ ve , they even have , have established and proved it at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ paddles , if you will , although they have to get them really cold to do it .
And then Dean Raiden .
PSI researcher has repeated it in a lab with a photon machine and a meditator .
So if anyone wants to go and look at the double slit experiment , it ’ s central to what we ’ re talking about it because it suggests that what we observe is .
Only only what makes things real .
And it ’ s an experiment and it ’ s repeated over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that , anything that I ’ ve left out .
Anthony Peake : [ 00:29:50 ] Well , the thing is the double slit experiment , as , as , as , as you so eloquently put there , you know , is , has been repeated many , many times .
We know that if certain subatomic particles are not observed , um , the POL schools go through the twins .
And they ’ re not observed and they actually create an interference pattern .
Whereas if you put a measurement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of the other sets , and you cite fire single photons or single electrons through , they go through one at a time as if they know they ’ re being alert and they ’ d be juiced .
point possible .
Now as you again , rightly say .
I mean , you know the great Tom Campbell , you know , as Tom all views , you know , we won ’ t be render what reality we need in order to exist .
Then this , again , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dangerous to calls use the term simulation because the simulation suggests that it ’ s , it is a simulation of something else and you get an infinite regress by doing that .
But if we ’ d say that the true nature of everything we perceive is actually information .
And that everything is made up of information .
And again , I ’ d strongly advise the writings of somebody like flack Kovar Drell is very useful in this .
He ’ s one of the top young quantum physicists that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but you don ’ t even need to read Vidrale .
You know , you just need to read some of the latest work of Stephen Hawking .
You only need to read some Hawking ’ s work on , um , on walking radiation .
The way in which information can not be lost with what happens if you throw a computer into a black hole .
Because it ’ s an enclosed system in there .
And we know that information is energy .
So the release huge areas now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But as , as Alex is , you , and I know this has been known effectively since 1900 when max plunk decided the quantity was only WebEx , certain behaviors and black body radiation .
But we also know say from 1925 1926 max borne of SRO during their equations , all these things build up to the fact .
The reality is definitely not what we think it is .
And there is a direct relationship .
And again , the idea is you again say that the way of facts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is nonsense .
You know , the guy called Anton Zeilinger at the university of Vienna has been doing work on this over the years and they may be doing the twins that experiment with buckyballs .
Well , those have 60 molecules in them .
These are big molecules .
These are things that are almost the size of a virus .
You know , I don ’ t know how they numbers , but they are still getting bigger and bigger , and we have still yet to find the borderline @ @ @ @ @ @ @ physics .
Of course .
Then we have the mystery , the quantum physics , and uh .
Einsteinian physics , which deals with the very big , they are work together .
Math doesn ’ t work together .
So the clean is a mismatch with what we think is really happening .
And the , the point really here is that I think that the major issue here is understanding that everything is a field .
And there ’ s a consciousness field , and I ’ m slipping here now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and I ’ ve contributed a couple of chapters to books on and deism and the idea that we ’ re all conscious experiencing itself subjectively and the were like emanations of a , uh , information of consciousness , which I wrote a book a few years ago with Ervin Laszlo .
And of course Laszlo has is his idea of the zero point failed .
The scaled , which again , you touched upon before , that these effects are actually seen just as you get slightly above absolute zero @ @ @ @ @ @ @ start taking place as well .
And the the zero point field suggests that empty space is not empty at all .
It ’ s not a vacuum , it ’ s a planet .
It ’ s absolutely full of seeding and things that are coming in and out of reality .
And again , you totally read the books on quantum physics these days we have what ’ s called virtual particles .
These are particles that don ’ t exist , come into existence for a second and then disappear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the university ’ s missing .
It ’ s dark matter or dark energy .
We know what it is .
That ’ s why we call it dark matter and dark energy .
So we are in a similar position in our science to wait the scientists where the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries , we are suffering from this , this , this hubris .
No , the , the guy Mickelson made a statement , he was opening up a new laboratory at the university of Chicago @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bible statements and he said , there ’ s really no need for science in the future .
Um , because there ’ s only one or two little issues we ’ ve got in the future .
Other than that , we know everything and all scientists are going to be doing is calculating .
So the six decimal points and then the next plan can December , 1900 .
Came up with these idea that energy was quantized and suddenly it all changed .
Then in 1905 sign comes with this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and flooded everything , but we ’ ll still know when they ’ re understanding , but now you still have scientists sounding .
You ’ re saying we understand things .
We Debbie , traumas , phone justness .
How does matter in my head , in Alex ’ s head .
How did reacting with electricity , how does it create Alex , his hopes he dreamed his aspirations .
Fears similar with phony .
Similar with all the listeners out there , it ’ s the hard problem .
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:35:18 ] Yep .
I totally agree .
And I , I just kinda always have to resist the hard problem .
What ’ s the easy problem .
There is no easy about it .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:35:28 ] I get your point .
I get your point .
But , Anthony Peake : [ 00:35:30 ] but the problem is how the brain works .
That was what he was pointing at this , the swell .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:35:37 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that is we don ’ t really understand how the brain works .
And we already kinda touched on that .
We have all this seemingly contradictory information .
We don ’ t know how memory works and our neurological models of memory fail .
A lot of other kind of alternative .
Explanations .
As you say , it ’ s all about white crows and black swans .
I love that quote in your book so you can bounce along with your little neurological model of memory per se .
Like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comes along with a theory that completely blows it out of the water , such as autobody experience or other provable .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:36:15 ] phenomena , you know , even take Dean Brayden ’ s six Sigma result on pre sentiment , it completely destroys our neurological model of memory .
So there is no easy problem .
But I ’ ll tell you what this , we are going to shift gears for just a minute because I want to shift focus over to the afterlife just as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same issues that we ’ re talking about .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:36:43 ] You have a lot of interesting things to say about the afterlife , and we ’ ve already talked about the DMT .
Connection to near death experience , but I did want to kind of pin you down and get your opinion on some ways that I kind of wonder whether that is a good fit for the data we have from the deer death experience science .
And I ’ d start by pointing out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I appreciate what they did at the university of Michigan .
I think it ’ s very important .
I think the way that you summed it up is the best that I ’ ve heard anyone else do it .
And the reason for that is because you have this expanded consciousness kind of worldview .
What I hear so many times with people who look at that data is they want to use it as a debunking exercise and jam things back into this kind of materialism , which clearly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if I look at , for example , the research of Dr. Jeffrey Long was one of the near death experience scientists , but all of them agree that there is an extended consciousness realm here .
But my point is that the near death experience data .
Is in the experiencers themselves , and we start hearing those accounts .
And in those accounts , I think there ’ s some important ways that we can ’ t completely resolve with the DMT explanation .
And I ’ d like to lay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then we can talk .
But the first one is the continuity of experience .
So a lot of people , a lot of the near death experience accounts begin before Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:38:21 ] they are during the death and it continue after the death and then our finally and even go after they returned to life .
So this doesn ’ t like complete , it doesn ’ t contradict your , your book or your conclusions , but it doesn ’ t fit well with the DMT burst @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the DMT experience , as we know , is outside of space time .
So now we have , but , but we can ’ t really pack that back in either because we can ’ t have it both ways .
We can ’ t say , well , it ’ s outside of space time .
So then it can transcend any kind of space time .
And then we can say , but also we found it in these rats here , and it ’ s 10 seconds after .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ you get What I ’ m saying there .
The second point I think is , is even more important and interesting and challenging at the same time .
And that ’ s that the accounts from the near death experience suggest a unique kind of journeying .
And I think you have some great information on the book , on some unique kind of journeying associated with , for example , certain shamonic experiences .
And you know , everyone sees .
The purple leopard , or everyone sees the snakes are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but in this case , everyone is having in that , you can ’ t say everyone , forgive me to people who won ’ t jump on me about everyone , but there seem to be unique .
Very common elements to the NDE journey , but here ’ s the kicker that I think I really want to interject into the conversation .
It ’ ll launch us off into , I think for me , one of the most important points in the whole thing , and it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ book , is that .
The journey of the near death experience suggests a hierarchy of consciousness , and I think you ’ re already there .
When you talk about the sentience that is in the shamans , it says , AIDS sick , these two plants together and something ’ s going to happen .
Well , in the near death experience , people say , I encountered God , and they say , well , I don ’ t have to call it God , but .
For all the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about God in my life .
This is it .
It ’ s a higher level .
It is something to inform and educate me , and that also says there is a moral imperative .
And there is something like a life review and what you do does matter and you do have free will .
So to me , these are the points that are the big takeaway here that either have to be , you know , worked out of it with other data that pushes him off the table @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that into .
Uh , beyond simulation hypothesis kind of thing .
Cause simulation hypothesis leaves us very stark and clinical and the near death experience doesn ’ t .
So I know I ’ ve laid a lot on the table there , but take over and let ’ s , let ’ s talk about the , the moral imperative in life review .
Anthony Peake : [ 00:41:34 ] We can do it probably systematically in the sense the , the first thing is about , um , near death @ @ @ @ @ @ @ argue it , no , people would criticize me on this .
The word that can be three words near death experience is the most important is Nia .
It ’ s a near death experience .
In my book , previous books , I actually used the term a real death experience or an RDA where somebody actually dies .
Now , I will stand corrected on this , but I , I know of no evidence where somebody actually has literally died , literally died and has died .
In the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ does that Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:42:14 ] mean to you when you say literal sense , cause I do that well , Anthony Peake : [ 00:42:16 ] this is the problem , isn ’ t it ?
When you , when you start discussing what do we mean by death ?
When does death take place within the brain ?
When does death actually happen ?
But there is a point where presumably the brain ceases to be able to process the information field .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:42:33 ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because here , here ’ s where I ’ ve , man , I ’ ve wrestled every skeptic in the world to the mat on this .
The best scientists on this is a guy named dr Sam Parnia formally at Cornell .
My Anthony Peake : [ 00:42:47 ] notes , my notes sound , and I know you actually know that Sam .
Sam ’ s experiments at Southampton university and the , his whole exercise that he did to discover out of body experiences and various other things that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remember what that was .
The acting project was called and it was delayed and delayed and delayed .
Results can come out because the results weren ’ t what were expected and .
I know it ’ s Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:43:11 ] the aware project and actually , you know , Anthony Peake : [ 00:43:14 ] that was it .
Yeah .
After resuscitation , wasn ’ t it ?
Yeah .
Right .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:43:18 ] And just to fill people in on the backstory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us are drawn to his work is that independent of him being a near death experience researcher , he ’ s one of the leading authorities in the world on resuscitation .
And as far as an area of medical science , we ’ d want to look to , to answer that question of did they really die .
A resuscitation expert would be the guy we ’ d look to .
Cause that ’ s what he does on a day to day basis for kind of standard mainstream medicine and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at what Sam has say is saying now as opposed to what he was saying two or three years ago , when I interviewed him , I was really on that .
I ’ ve held his feet to the fire , is that he has now come around to the idea that clearly the evidence from his aware study .
Suggest the consciousness extends beyond bodily death .
And he ’ s very emphatic about talking about that , that he kind of takes it .
Says what you ’ re saying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He says , I would not call these near death experiences .
These are death experiences in every way historically , and with our present medical science , we have these people .
Some of them , a large number of them are considered dead .
So what a lot of the .
Skeptics want to do is kind of do this pleading to the God of the gaps thing .
Well , at some time in the future we ’ ll find that the brain isn ’ t really dead or the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ll , you know , show that we do not have in our medical .
Uh , experience to this point .
Any indication that any of that Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:45:03 ] So that is just pure speculation and what we do have our brains that shouldn ’ t be able in any neurological model that we understand shouldn ’ t be able to produce consciousness .
And we have the experience of the autobody experience in the NDEs experience .
So that ’ s my read of where we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ [ 00:45:22 ] Yeah , I ’ m with you on that .
I mean , the technical term for what they ’ re doing here is called professory materialism .
You ’ ve got a promissory note to say that , you know , yes .
We don ’ t fully understand this , but what we will do in the future , I have a term for it .
Uh , and I , I , it ’ s , it ’ s , it ’ s even giving things Nass @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you get the nice Latin fate , like hallucination , you know , you , you ’ ve , you ’ ve explained it .
Or you call it outsiders , or you call it whatever Charles Bonnie syndrome .
But you ’ ve never actually explained anything .
You ’ ve just given it a label .
It ’ s labeled theory .
So the question is , you know , when Bendel ’ s death took place , or is it a transitory period ?
Now , if , if , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it is , Mmm .
Consciousness .
If consciousness is what create everything around us , the idea of death , bodily death .
Means nothing because you move into a place that ’ s completely different .
Now , the second point , because it was an interesting one , and you probably know , I wrote a book called the labyrinth of time many years ago , and the reason I bought librarian at the time was like st Augustine .
I really wanted to know what time was and exactly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a 380 pound , a 380 page book .
I caught the end of it and I still didn ’ t really know what time was .
I knew what time measured , but even I didn ’ t then I didn ’ t know what time actually measures , Anthony Peake : [ 00:46:49 ] okay .
At the point of death , something glorious comes with time as well .
You know , time is a subjective experience .
We know that some of them near death experiences , the moody @ @ @ @ @ @ @ traits various terms .
One of the things is this incredible slow amount of time as if time ceases to be the way we understand time to be .
So suddenly you move out of .
Normal linear time into what Philip K Dick called a fog and all time .
It ’ s kind of a .
So was it right angles to this time ?
But he ’ s just as big and it ’ s just as powerful .
So in which case you , you , your body dies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t die in times he died because he ran out of time .
Well , literally you do , you go somewhere else completely different .
And your consciousness moves in a totally different way because people talk about the near death expenses down , the edit , a timelessness , feeling , the re the thing that you can go back on your life and you can review your life .
You can have a panoramic life review .
You dodgy in anywhere , anywhere else .
And to me , this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re looking at a CD wrong , which contains , um , a computer game or for a third person computer game .
Well , you know , this whole storyline , or even better , an old vinyl record , you look at grooves in a vinyl record , and if you ’ re actually in the groove , you follow the groove .
But looking down at Recode , you can see the whole thing .
You know , you ’ re looking down as if you ’ re in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you can see everything is a single continuum .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:48:26 ] Well , you can bring it back to that material example , but what you do in the book , I think grabs us even more in that you point out , from the shamanistic in the spirit world and in shaman in the broadest sense of all different wisdom traditions , are all talking about being outside of space time and there are a lot of common characteristics .
And then E T , which we ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ minute , and hopefully dive into deeply , also seems to be outside of space time .
So , I mean , take the DVD thing , that ’ s fine , but I like what you were saying before about the ayahuasca when the shaman goes to the forest and says , “ Look , you ’ re back there in space time .
Now here ’ s how you can manipulate that a little bit and kind of get a little bit into my world.
” And then when you duck @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other story you told about the research being done in the UK , it does seem to be out of that and then we come back in it .
So that leads to a bunch of questions about , who we are inside of this consciousness , whether we are special , whether this moment matters , and the working hypothesis I ’ ve been having is that there ’ s a lot of room at the top .
You know , Richard Feynman , the inventor of a nanotechnology , made famous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lot of room at the bottom .
Well , I think when it comes to consciousness , there ’ s a lot of room at the top , and I think we have a tendency to put ourselves up on the heap , maybe , up on the ladder a little bit higher than we need to be , and there might be so many levels above us that we will take a long time to begin to explore .
What do you think about any one of those ideas ?
Anthony @ @ @ @ @ @ @ m totally with you .
I think that we interface with intelligences that are far greater than we are .
It ’ s like the Dunning-Kruger effect , you don ’ t know the level of your own ignorance because you don ’ t , you can , you can ’ t know what you don ’ t know .
And we use this term around , in people in politics and people in various ways .
But even well-educated people also do not know the level of their own ignorance .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of its own ignorance .
So what we ’ re doing a lot of times with our science is we ’ re almost like Aristotelians , where we ’ re building these Heath Robinson models to explain observed phenomenon , we ’ re making epicycles .
In years gone by when we had the idea that the universe was geocentric and everything revolved around the earth , we couldn ’ t explain the actual retrograde motion of the planets .
So we had all of these epicycles and that ’ s got more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ real .
And in some ways I think this is what we ’ re doing now .
We ’ ve got things that we really don ’ t understand , so we ’ re trying to explain them .
One of my favorite ones of this is , and again , I ’ m going to get slightly technical here , but in order to explain how the universe has expanded the way it is , they had to accommodate a period of hyperinflation in the first few billions of a second if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world .
And of course , this is utterly ridiculous , the idea the universe expanded at thousands of times the speed of light in order to accommodate it .
But it ’ s rather like how the elephant got its trunk , you know , it ’ s actually backwardization of ideas .
Instead of actually looking just at the facts and trying to find solutions , we shoehorn it more and more into the materialist reductionist model , and it ’ s creaking .
And it ’ s creaking because they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quantum mechanics and quantum physics and they go on and they say , “ Oh , you ’ re misunderstanding what you mean by the [ unclear 00:52:21 ] experiments .
You can ’ t do the math.
” No but we can do logic , there ’ s still logic involved here and some of the things are totally , completely illogical .
You know , these particles coming in and out from nowhere in order to accommodate the observed world .
So it seems that the universe is far more complex @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , come on , our science has only been around for about 350 years for crying out loud .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:52:50 ] I think the big question and I ’ ve kind of hammered on this for a while , is not even so much , is it so , you know , the biological robot in a meaningless universe , it ’ s how has that managed to be propped up and why is it being propped up the way that it is ?
Because it really fails on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saying .
It not only fails experimentally , but it fails philosophically too , it just doesn ’ t make any sense .
But I want to bring you back to this because I haven ’ t heard you talk enough about this , and it ’ s really something that I think you and I both think is central , and I have heard you talk about it in bits and pieces , but I want to give you a chunk of time to really address the whole thing .
And that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ near-death experience is something that , I don ’ t want to hang my hat on it and say that ’ s absolutely the way that it is , but it consistently comes up over and over again as we look at these accounts in whole , and it clearly suggests a hierarchy of consciousness .
When I say hierarchy of consciousness , that is kind of a God kind of thing , for lack of a better term and it suggests this moral imperative .
And we ’ re going to talk @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the whole magic and occult thing and do what thou wilt .
And with the near-death experience science , my read of it is , is that do what thou wilt is not a very good strategy to hang your hat on .
And a better strategy is , don ’ t be too consumed with this world and what you can get out of it , but love everyone , tell the truth , help your neighbor and do the right thing because you know what the right thing to do is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and I ’ m not a Christian , I ’ m not a religious person .
I always have to say that because it sounds so churchy .
But that seems to be my read of the near-death experience data .
What do you think about that ?
Anthony Peake : [ 00:54:46 ] No , I ’ m with you on this .
The idea there is a moral imperative somewhere .
When I was brought up , I was brought up with a Christian family and everything else .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the time about the idea of God in the Judaic Christian idea of this guy with a long beard and everything else as well , and it made no sense to me , and the Bible and the way in which the Bible makes no logical sense in certain areas .
But as I got older , I started to realize it ’ s more complex than that .
Far more complex .
It ’ s about morality and to do good , and in this I always cite the movie Groundhog Day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s a profound message in there .
By the way , I ’ ve interviewed on my own podcast , I ’ ve interviewed Danny Rubin who wrote it and Danny always says that the philosophy , he ’ s discovered the philosophy himself , but that wasn ’ t his intention in the first place .
But nevertheless , it has some very interesting ideas because you know , Connors , he lives the same day over and over again , and every day he has more knowledge about his environment , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and he uses that initially to his advantage to bed the girl and to do all of these things .
But then he goes in , it ’ s almost like Maslow ’ s Hierarchy of Needs .
He fulfills his sexual desires , then he needs to educate himself .
So he teaches himself foreign languages , how to play the piano , and he ’ s developing as a human being , he ’ s moving away from that kind of basic , I just want , want , want all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and he starts to educate himself and then he starts to realize that he can actually do good for doing good ’ s sake .
He can run around the town , he can be under the tree when the little kid falls out of the tree , and suddenly it ’ s as if he ’ s developing as a human being over many lives , he ’ s developing more as a human being , he ’ s playing the game , as it were , like a computer game and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time again and he ’ s getting it better and he ’ s getting better .
And you know , in my concept of the Cheating the Ferryman , I argue that this may be what life is , that you know that before we die , in the split seconds before we die , we run all the potential lives we could ever run in the same way as Groundhog Day .
But then the question has to be asked , and it has to be asked and it can not be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Connors is allowed to move on to the next day ?
It suggests that there is an intelligence outside of the simulation , you know , outside of The Truman Show , whatever we want to call it , that is somehow watching over and developing and judging in some way .
Not in a kind of judgmental God of the Old Testament way but judging almost ourselves because we know that when we do something good , you get that kind of feedback feeling that ’ s indescribable .
You know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who ’ s desperate some money , and you suddenly feel , and it ’ s not because you ’ re doing it selfishly , you just have this feeling .
And if we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively , if God is really what they say in pantheism , which is the collective everything that we all are and that we are all emanations of God , I ’ m going to be profoundly Gnostic here , that we are emanations of God , shards of the pleroma that are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ simulation , but we have forgotten who we are and we don ’ t know who we are .
But we can ’ t know who we are because if we do , we wouldn ’ t follow the route that we follow , we have to learn by our experiences and by our doing .
Now , one of the things I ’ ll be planning to do in your family ’ s home country , I ’ m a Grecophile by the way , I absolutely love Greece , this is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your background .
I got married in Greece and everything else and I go twice a year and I ’ ve been going once or twice a year for the last 40 years , 45 years .
My book is about to come out in Greek , two of my books are coming out in Greek in a few weeks ’ time , and what we ’ re going to do is try and recreate Plato ’ s Cave and the myth of Plato ’ s Cave in Greece .
And you ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the location that they based Plato ’ s Cave upon .
It ’ s just outside Athens in a hill called Lycabettus .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:59:09 ] Tony , pause for a second and tell people the story of Plato ’ s Cave , because I think a lot of people know that they should know , but don ’ t know the story .
So tell them about Plato ’ s Cave .
Anthony Peake : [ 00:59:22 ] Plato ’ s Cave is the idea that there ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of people , rather similar to the children I mentioned earlier on , with the tribe in Northern Columbia .
And their whole life they just existed in a cave and they ’ re chained to chairs , or whatever , and they can only look at the back wall of the cave .
They can ’ t move their heads and all they can see is a back wall .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 00:59:47 ] This is allegory .
We ’ re not saying this… Anthony Peake : [ 00:59:49 ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s an allegory , yes .
It ’ s Plato ’ s way of showing how our senses can fool us .
And what he says is , these people are chained and are looking towards the back of the cave .
Now behind them is a raised walkway , like a bridge , and people walk along that walkway with cardboard cutouts of shapes of horses and trees and cows and people and everything else .
And then the other side of that is then a source of light , like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can imagine what happens , is that the shadows of the people going across the bridge are actually reflected on the back wall of the cave .
So the people that are the prisoners see the shadows on the back wall .
Now , because they ’ ve never experienced anything else that ’ s what they believe reality is .
And in many ways , this is , I think , the trap of materialist reductionism .
We tend to think that the shadows on the cave , our actual reality .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that ’ s all we can see .
Anthony Peake : [ 01:00:49 ] It ’ s because all we know .
That ’ s what our senses tell us , but we know from research into how the brain functions , we know that the brain recreates , behind here at the back of the brain or the darkest part of the brain , the brain recreates the visual experience .
The visual experience is not one to one , to believe that is to be caught in the trap called naive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s not the case .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 01:01:12 ] We know that ’ s not the case .
We know you don ’ t see as well as a hawk and you don ’ t smell as good as a dog , and we don ’ t know what their experience is .
And we know your experience is different than someone who ’ s color blind , to take it down to a very basic level and then… Anthony Peake : [ 01:01:24 ] I call it electromagnetic chauvinism .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ we see , the tiny bits of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see is what is actually out there , and of course it isn ’ t .
So going back to the analogy .
What happens is , one of the prisoners manages to break his chains and looks around and gets up , walks past the bridge , walks past the fire and walks to the entrance of the cave and sees reality as it really is , sees what the Gnostics would call the pleroma , the reality behind the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have extraordinary experiences like near-death experiences , out of the body experiences , dimethyltryptamine experiences .
But then they come back , he comes back to the fellow prisoners and he says , “ Hey guys , this is not it .
I ’ ve seen what it ’ s really like.
” And of course they turn around to him and say , “ You ’ re insane .
You ’ re completely insane .
You ’ ve got it completely wrong .
You ’ re mad.
” And of course this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is we say these are hallucinations , another label .
You know , we don ’ t know what hallucinations are .
We don ’ t know why the brain creates hallucinations or anything .
So you can not say that somebody who has an extraordinary experience , like an out of body experience or a near-death experience , that that ’ s no more real than this is because technically they ’ re all brain creates it in one way or another .
But then we have the problem , brain created @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Because the brain is still empty space and the brain is inanimate and everything else as well .
So then we have the ghost in the machine .
Then we have Cartesian dualism .
We ’ d go down the Gilbert Ryle route and we have all of these problems .
But if consciousness is everything , we don ’ t have dualism .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 01:03:09 ] Real briefly then , the last topic I had , and we ’ re not going to have time to cover it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is extremely fascinating to me .
And I know there ’ s a lot of different ways to cut it and to look at that data .
On this show we ’ ve looked at it a cross-culture , cross time and it seems to hold up on .
Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke is somebody I ’ ve brought up on the screen and you know , native Americans and star people throughout time , multiple species , multiple agendas .
Also we have all sorts of accounts of basically the ancient alien @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t like , but seems to hold up well .
We have the involvement of our government in these programs , and I talked to Richard Dolan at length about that .
That seems to be , I mean , it ’ s documented in papers and thousands and thousands of release documents .
I also had an interesting interview with Diana Walsh Pasulka , which we won ’ t really have time to talk about , and Jacques Valleé .
So as we move to wrap things up , what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do you think is going on there ?
Do you accept that there is a nuts and bolts reality to it , in addition to a consciousness extended reality to it ?
Anthony Peake : [ 01:04:30 ] That ’ s the question .
I ’ ve been interested in UFOs ever since I was about eight or nine years of age , and this is the real thing that really puzzles me .
Like for instance , my mother ’ s experience .
What she saw was obviously in a hypnagogic state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of sleep paralysis , but it had been stimulated by something she saw in the sky .
Now , on top of that , it wasn ’ t just she said she saw this disk in the sky of smoke and it shot off towards Wales .
What I didn ’ t finish off deliberately in my description though was , I was subsequently contacted by a friend of mine , and she had actually seen the object about two miles away , and she ’ d seen it on exactly the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this is something that was out there in objective reality , seen by different people , which seemed to be associated in some way .
There ’ s something that was psychological or was using my mother ’ s brain to come through into this reality .
So clearly we ’ ve got something here , and I really am fascinated by this .
As you know , I don ’ t make up my mind about things .
I just look at the evidence and go where the evidence tells me , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I ’ m not trying to prove anything .
Like you , I just want to know , while I ’ ve got the time here to understand .
But it does seem that there is very much the kind of mythological elements of the entities , the way in which they seem to follow us through history , the way they seem to culturally , reflect our society in one way or another , as if they are actually emanations in some way of ourselves .
And this is why I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the term egregorial because it ’ s created by the brain , but it ’ s things that use the brain , an awareness to pull themselves through from somewhere else .
And in some way they need us and we need them .
They seem to be sort of part of us in some way .
How that works , I really don ’ t know .
And I don ’ t know whether we ’ ll ever have the mental capacity to fully understand this game because it does seem like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Terence McKenna says , you know , it ’ s kind of like a joke sometimes .
You know , sometimes the creatures seemed to be extracting the Michael , they seem to be playing with us , playing with our expectations .
Almost making the people who ’ ve had close encounters look like fools when they tell what happened , and yet these people , why would they make up such a ridiculous story ?
Except if the entities themselves are having fun with us in some way .
I genuinely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ m working with people .
We ’ re taking this forward now , this whole egregorial concept , we ’ re working with .
I ’ ll be writing a paper with an associate of mine over the next few months on this very theme .
She ’ s a lucid dreamer and and out of body experiencer , but she ’ s also an anthropologist .
So we ’ re working on this and I ’ m working with scientists and everything else as well , to try and take this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t we ?
We want to understand , but maybe we ’ re not supposed to .
Alex Tsakiris : [ 01:07:34 ] Maybe we ’ re not supposed to .
Folks , again , our guest has been the quite amazing Anthony Peake .
His new book that you ’ re going to want to check out is The Hidden Universe .
Tony , really quickly , tell folks what else is going on in your world .
You mentioned a couple of pretty amazing events you have .
What about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ things ?
Anthony Peake : [ 01:07:54 ] Okay .
We ’ re planning for events in Greece later on this summer when we ’ re going to be recreating Plato ’ s Cave .
I ’ m also , at the moment , it hasn ’ t been postponed yet or cancelled , but I ’ ll be speaking at this year ’ s Contact in the Desert , the last weekend of May in Indian… Anthony Peake : [ 01:08:12 ] Indian Wells , isn ’ t it ?
I said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And that will be taking place , if it ’ s still happening , but I ’ ll be doing a lecture and I ’ ll be doing a workshop and I ’ ll be doing some work and a panel discussion to people like Whitley Strieber and various other people .
If anybody wants to contact me , my website is anthonypeake.com .
If you are interested in linking up and discussing things with me , I ’ m very active on Instagram under Cheating the Ferryman 54 .
I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I will normally respond .
We have a large international community on both of those sites that discuss and debate these ideas .
And what else can I tell you ?
My books , you can get my books everywhere .
The books are in most formats .
In fact , I ’ m now working my way through the books in terms of Audible as well .
And my first book , The Daemon will be out on Audible and the book on time is out on Audible , and this book @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re discussing now .

Anthony Peake integrates important frontier science into novel theories about reality.
photo by: Skeptiko
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and today we welcome Anthony Peake back to Skeptiko to talk about his new and quite amazing book, The Hidden Universe: An Investigation into Non-Human Intelligences, a book that is very much about these extended consciousness realms that we talk so much about on this show.
Anthony, as many of you know, is not just a very accomplished author and speaker, but as someone who truly in every way that I can tell, seems to be a researcher seeker, that is someone who you get the feeling is really trying to get somewhere with this stuff and isn’t just writing books, which are very entertaining and bring us all along on his journey, but that this is really a path of discovery for Anthony, and I really appreciate that.
His latest book, The Hidden Universe is no exception. It’s packed, not just with amazing accounts and stories that you’re going to be quite surprised that you’ve never heard about before, but it’s also packed with a lot of cutting-edge science that Anthony believes backs up his theories.
Now, one other thing I should mention, and that is that Tony Peake is not someone who’s afraid to stick his neck out there regarding his theories. I kind of like that really, because if you really listen to what he’s saying, I think what he’s saying is not that he has all the answers, but more that, unless somebody sticks a stake into the ground and says, “Hey, it’s not just about stories, here’s what I think this stuff leads to,” unless somebody does that, we can’t really pull it apart. So we all realize that we’re probably wrong about all this stuff that the greatest minds have thought about since as long as there’s been a human being on this planet, but I do appreciate that he’s willing to stick his neck out there and say, “Hey, here’s how I think it all fits together.”
So, Anthony, it’s great to have you back. Thanks so much for joining me.
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Anthony-Peake
Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:00] Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and today we welcome Anthony Peake back to Skeptiko to talk about his new and quite amazing book, The Hidden Universe: An Investigation into Non-Human Intelligences, a book that is very much abo ut these extended consciousness realms that we talk so much about on this show.
Anthony, as many of you know, is not just a very accomplished author and speaker, but as someone who truly in every way that I can tell, seems to be a researcher seeker, that is someone who you get the feeling is really trying to get somewhere with this stuff and isn’t just writing books, which are very entertaining and bring us all along on his journey, but that this is really a path of discovery for Anthony, and I really appreciate that.
His latest book, The Hidden Universe is no exception. It’s packed, not just with amazing accounts and stories that you’re going to be quite surprised that you’ve never heard about before, but it’s also packed with a lot of cutting-edge science that Anthony believes backs up his theories.
Now, one other thing I should mention, and that is that Tony Peake is not someone who’s afraid to stick his neck out there regarding his theories. I kind of like that really, because if you really listen to what he’s saying, I think what he’s saying is not that he has all the answers, but more that, unless somebody sticks a stake into the ground and says, “Hey, it’s not just about stories, here’s what I think this stuff leads to,” unless somebody does that, we can’t really pull it apart. So we all realize that we’re probably wrong about all this stuff that the greatest minds have thought about since as long as there’s been a human being on this planet, but I do appreciate that he’s willing to stick his neck out there and say, “Hey, here’s how I think it all fits together.”
So, Anthony, it’s great to have you back. Thanks so much for joining me.
Anthony Peake: [00:02:24] It’s great to be chatting to you again, Alex, I’ve been looking forward to this. It’s been really good. And thanks for a wonderful introduction, that’s a really hard act to follow, I to say that. But thank you for it.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:36] No buddy, do you totally deserve it. So, I’ll tell you what, let’s dive into the book, kind of headfirst, and tell people in general terms what it’s about. I love this quote and I forget what chapter it’s in, that really kind of resonates with something that we all know to be true, but we can forget until a book like this comes along and reminds us, and that is throughout recorded history, the belief that humanity shares this planet with a variety of other sentient beings has been persistent. If you want to start from there, or if you want to start anywhere you like, tell us about the book, The Hidden Universe.
Anthony Peake: [00:03:20] Yeah, that’s quite correct, and that’s been my overall reason for writing this book, and it’s a book I think has been inside me since the mid-1960s. It’s the book I’ve probably always wanted to write because in the mid-1960s I came down with a bout of double pneumonia, and during that period I had a series of very profound hallucinations going through the crisis of pneumonia. And at that time, even at my 12-year-old mind, I was quite fascinated by the nature of the hallucinations I was seeing. Were these things external to me, were these things internally generated or were they a mixture of both? And this very much has been something that has intrigued me all through my writing career, really, because time and time again I come across people who encounter entities in differing circumstances, in OBE states, in lucid dreaming states, people who encounter entities during close encounters of the third kind and include the developing close encounters of the fifth kind, that we’ve got at the moment.
So there seems to be an awful lot of information out there, but what nobody, I think has tried to do… Well, it’s not true, I mean, I’m not original in this. Jacques Valleé tried to do it many, many years ago and various other writers over the years have tried to draw a link through history as to what these entities be, and this is what I try to do.
Now, you, you call my ideas a theory or a hypothesis, I’d probably say it educated speculation because a lot of these things we can never actually know and we can never really test. Although I am working with people at the trying to test these things.
But the basis of the book is just if people have extraordinary experiences and encounter entities that seem to have an existence that, can we build up a neurological model, can we build up a psychological model, and can we build a [unclear 00:05:15] model to actually explain what things are? And that’s what I attempt to do in the book.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:05:20] Tell us more though, because that’s a good starting point, but the book really jumps in with both feet about the entirety of this extended realm that does seem to crop up all over the place.
So whether it’s magic and spirits and shamans, like you said, or whether it’s afterlife experiences and near-death experiences, or whether it’s the ET experiences. I mean, you do kind of take us through this history, in order to get us to the point of some of the breakthrough science that you think is influencing you the most right now.
So where do you want to start with that? I think the magic and spirits and shamans thing is something that’s really interesting because it grabs a lot of people’s attention right now. There’s a lot of people really interested in magic right now, a lot of people really interested in the occult right now. And I got to say, I think that we haven’t quite thought that through all the way, particularly if we mash it into simulation theory and afterlife near-death stuff. I mean, there are just so many things to pull apart here, I hardly know where to begin, so I’m kind of lost.
Anthony Peake: [00:06:40] Okay, I’m happy to do that. The first thing I’d like to make the point is kind of the starting point, the starting premise of the book involves an experience my mother had when she was still all seemed to develop Alzheimer’s. One day she phones me up and she said she’d experienced a very strange incident on her way into the local village that we used to live in near Liverpool. She said that she was walking back with my aunt, my aunt stopped to tie up her shoelace, and when my aunt was tying her shoelace, my mother looked up and said what she described as seeing a smoke ring hovering over a local factory.
She then said the smoke ring started to revolve and then shot off towards North Wales. And she asked me what she’d seen, and I said, “Well, I don’t really know mum.” She’s not into UFOs, she never has been, it’s not the kind of thing she’s ever been interested in and she was a lady in her late 80s then. And I said, “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” and she didn’t for about two or three days.
And then one morning, three days later, she phones me up in a state of absolute terror. Now, she’d woken up in the middle of the night in a state of sleep paralysis. She said she couldn’t move, she couldn’t move properly but she was looking towards the door of her bedroom. Now, she lives alone, she’s a widow.
Now, what is important here, the important caveat is that she’d lost her eye with malignant melanoma many years before and her other eye, she was developing various problems. So she was partially sighted, which is important as I move on with this.
As she said she looked towards the bedroom door, she noticed her bedroom door was open, and then she saw, as she described it, three spindly fingers around the edge of the bedroom door and this creature pop its head around the door, and she described it and the description is uncanny. She said it had large black eyes like an insect, it had two holes for a nose and a split for a mouth and it looked at her and dodged back, as if it had seen her.
She wakes up and she said, “Tony, what did I see?” And I said, “Well, it’s intriguing, I really don’t know mum,” because I didn’t want to worry her. But clearly, in her state of hypnagogic, or a hypnopompic state and in a state of sleep paralysis, her doors of perception had broken down to such an extent that she was perceiving something that ordinarily, under ordinary circumstances she wouldn’t have experienced.
But it was her description of it, and of course, I was immediately reminded of the book cover of the Whitley Strieber book Communion, because it was a classic grey, it was an archetypal grey.
Now, I then started to research into this and I was aware of it earlier, but when I started to really research it I discovered some quite interesting facts, like, for example: In 2017 in Northern India there was a cave underneath villages in Northern India and this cave had not being opened for 10,000 years, they carbon dated various things to know this was the case, and the creatures that are depicted in this cave are the creature that my mother saw.
Then you go on about Graham Hancock and his book Supernatural, and in this he describes his own experiences in the Junction Shelter in the Drakensberg mountains in South Africa. Here again we have very similar creatures that are actually drawn on the cave walls.
Now, what intrigues me here is that there’s an elderly lady in the UK, there are people in India and there are people in Southern Africa and then again, as Graham Hancock says himself, you look at the Lascaux caves and you look at Pech Merle, everywhere else, these entities seem to be drawn everywhere.
The counter argument to this is, they were more primitive than we were, these people, they didn’t know how to draw properly or they were doing idealizations.
Now, the argument here doesn’t stand up for me because these ancestors of ours, their brains were exactly the same size as ours. Clearly they knew how to depict bison and other animals. So clearly, whatever they were doing it was not just an abstraction, it was something more.
So the question for me was, what are these entities and what are these beings? And if you start to carry forward you find certain themes take place. It seems to involve darkness, it seems to involve people in caves or in areas where darkness is around. And I argue, this is because in darkness, the pineal gland generates melatonin. And I argue that there is a good case to be made that the pineal gland actually synthesizes endogenous melatonin into another substance, and that other substance, I believe, is dimethyltryptamine.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:11:18] Let’s pause here for just a second to bring people up to date on what you’re saying, because I mean, there’s already 10 jumping off points from what you’ve talked about. We’ll get to as many as we can. But this is really interesting science that you bring out in this book and you connect it in some very, very powerful ways. I don’t totally agree with all of it, but I’m taken aback and really have to pause with some of it. So here’s the background I wanted to lay out for people and correct me if any of this is wrong.
Anthony Peake: [00:11:47] Yeah,
Alex Tsakiris: [00:11:48] DMT. Everyone’s heard of DMT, Rick Strassman, the Spirit Molecule, shamans, you know, figure out how to do it in the jungle, and then you can have ayahuasca trips and all the rest of this. But the mystery has been twofold. One is, the fact that we have DMT trips suggests that we have neurotransmitters in our brain that can process it, which suggests that we have the ability to create it in our bodies, otherwise, we wouldn’t have that ability. But the mystery has been, we don’t see DMT in human beings, so we don’t see that mammals are able to create that.
So with that as the mystery, fill us in on what the latest science is telling you about how that mystery is solved.
Anthony Peake: [00:12:35] Yeah. Well, DMT is found in the human body. DMT is in the liver, it’s in the stomach, it’s in the blood, it’s in the spinal cerebral fluid, and everywhere else. The question is why is it there?
Alex Tsakiris: [00:12:50] How does it there, because it dissipates really quickly.
Anthony Peake: [00:12:59] And it does, and that’s the problem that up until recent years, there’s been the argument, you know, you’ve never found DMT in the brain, although in the brain there are things called the trace amine-associated receptors, and these are receptors within the neurons. And the receptor site is rather like a key in a lock, and it’s designed to work with particular neurotransmitters in the brain, you know, dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, these kinds of things.
But these particular trace amine-associated receptor sites were a great mystery because the neurologist and neurochemistry didn’t really understand what they’re there for. But then there was a discovery made that actually they work with DMT, they work with dimethyltryptamine. So there are receptor sites in the brain that clearly have been designed to work with this substance.
But what then happened was, around about three years ago there’s a researcher at the University of Michigan called Jimo Borjigin, and she did a series of experiments, quite interestingly two experiments. One of which seemed to give evidence of near-death experience, which was intriguing in itself. Rats died and then about 10 or 20 seconds after the rat had died, there was a huge amount of brain activity. But then it intrigued me as somebody who’s in interested in near-death experiences.
But more importantly, in a similar experiment they discovered with in the pineal gland of live rats, dimethyltryptamine. So for the first time dimethyltryptamine has been found in a form within the brain of a live mammal.
Now, this is fascinating because suddenly this changes all of the rules, because suddenly the idea that dimethyltryptamine is as Rick Strassman says, our reality modulator, we suddenly have evidence of it and suddenly it seems that dimethyltryptamine may have evolved with us and we have evolved to be able to process dimethyltryptamine.
Now, if you look at the chemical structure of melatonin, now melatonin is the substance that is excreted or created by the pineal gland for us to go to sleep. As we know the pineal gland is effectively an ossified eye, it is believed to be the case, and in fact there are animals like a Tuatara which is a lizard found in New Zealand that actually has a third eye that sits in the center of its forehead, but it’s gone back into the center of the brain. It sits in the center of the brain and it sits above something called the optic chiasma, where the light signals or the processed light signals, the electrical impulses going along the neurons, go along and it sits right above this. So it’s very aware or it’s sensitive of the fact that the external world has gone [unclear 00:15:34]. And when the external world goes [unclear 00:15:39] allowing it to create melatonin to make my entity go to sleep. But melatonin can be synthesized and changed into what Beach Barrett, who’s a research in the States who’s worked with Rick Strassman calls METAtonin. And METAtonin is endogenous, that is internally generated dimethyltryptamine.
Now, if this is the case and could be evidenced and it could be… You know my writings, I don’t just make these statements, I really go into the research. There is a state that is known as khecarí mudrá and khecarí mudrá is when people train themselves and what they do is, normally in India, but they train themselves to place the tongue, they flip the tongue back to the back of the throat and they want to do this because they want to taste what’s called the ambrosia nectar, the nectar of transcendence, which is an acidic taste they get at the back of the throat which then puts them into altered states of consciousness.
Now what’s intriguing here is that the 49th day gestation, the embryo in the womb as it’s developing… now the 49th day of gestation is important in itself because if you look at Buddhist tradition, that’s when they believe the soul enters the body and enters the embryo. At that time, the pineal gland and the pituitary gland are a single unit which sit at the back of the throat called the epiphysis. From the 49th day of gestation it moves up the back, into the brain and then moves up to the center of the brain where then the two things part, where it becomes the pituitary and the pineal body, so the pituitary and the pineal body and they become separate. But with many what it leaves is something called Rathke’s cleft or Rathke’s pouch, which is kind of a slight opening that goes to the center of the brain.
Now, if the pineal gland does release dimethyltryptamine, this is likely to be the root where excess dimethyltryptamine may drip down to the back of the throat. So is this what khecarí mudrá is all about? Is this something that individuals can do and actually put themselves into altered states of consciousness?
Now, if this idea that the gland is related in some way, would explain many, many shamanic traditions. Such as there’s a tribe in Northern Columbia, in the mountains of Northern Columbia and they train shamans, they take children from the age of about five or six and they place them in total darkness in caves. And they do this for a reason because what they’re trying to do is to train the pineal gland to be more effective, in which case, is this what shamans are doing? And of course, shamans have long argued, and if you look at the writings of Benny Shanon in his book on ayahuasca, you will discover that ayahuasca was discovered, or technically has been known for many years and it’s a mixture of two different plants, banisteriopsis caapi and psychotria viridis. Psychotria viridis contains DMT but banisteriopsis caapi doesn’t, but they mix these two plants together.
Now, there are 50,000 different types of plants in the Amazon Basin, but the shamans put the two together and mixed them in exactly the right way because you could eat as much of the leaves of psychotria viridis, even though there’s DMT in there and you would never get high. And the reason you wouldn’t get high is that the leaves go into the stomach and the stomach excretes something called monoamine oxidase and it’s something that lines the stomach and stops the hallucinatory effects getting rough into the blood.
However, the banisteriopsis caapi contains harmaline and harmaline is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. So they put two plants together that work together to allow and facilitate it across the blood brain barrier to go into the brain to actually cause hallucinatory states.
When they were asked how they developed this, and this gets extraordinary, and this is directly pertinent to our conversation, they were asked and they said when they as shamans, in years gone by went shamanic traveling, that is when they went into the upper world or the lower world, the would encounter their shamanic totems but they would also encounter plants that would speak to them. And [unclear 00:19:58] plants literally told the shamans and said, if you go into the jungle and you take this plant here, and showed it to them in the hallucinogenic state or in the hypnagogic state or whatever we want to call altered states of consciousness, they showed them the two plants and said, put these two plants together in this way, and you will allow non-shamanic people neurotypicals for want of a better term, to be able to experience the things you experience. So then I asked the question in my own mind, this suggests sentience and it suggests intelligence.
Now, I’ll make a final point on this before we continue because this is very important. A group of people I know are working at the moment at Imperial College in London, and they’re doing research into DMT. It’s fully funded and it’s fully legal and they’re taking DMT intravenously. One of my associates is a guy called Dr. Karl Smith. And Karl was explaining to me that what they do is they take it intravenously, like Rick Strassman’s people did and he volunteered, and he took it and he found himself in what he calls the DMT zone. It’s kind of the place you find yourself, rocketed out your body and you’re in this place, which is more real than this reality. He said while he was there this entity came over to him and it eyeballed him, prodded him, and said, “You should not be doing it this way. Please do not do it this way. This is the wrong way to do it,” and it backed off again.
He then comes to. Two weeks later, he takes another DMT trip, [unclear 00:21:33] and says, “I told you last time, do not do it this way.”
Extraordinary. And he said to me, “This means that this entity was doing things and had motivation which was counter to what I wanted to do, because I wanted to do it that way and all of my team wanted to do it this way,” but this entity is saying, “No, you can’t, you can’t do it this way, it’s the wrong way.” Intriguing, and my idea is, what are these beings? Are they part of us? Are they part of our subconscious? Are they Jungian archetypes? But if they are, they seem to have a degree of independence and that’s where I come up with the concept of the egregorials.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:22:09] Yeah.
There is so much so, so, so much. We’re just going to do the best we can. I’m going to stop saying that because it gets a little old. You know, one of the things that you touched on that I thought we might dive
Anthony Peake: [00:22:21] into.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:22:24] Is the question of reality because we have to remind people that on this little journey that we’re on here, we are so past materialistic biologic robots and meaningless universe.
I mean, we’ve left that completely. Aside, which we should, but it’s interesting to know that that’s where we’re kind of held by our science. Now, one of the things that you’re saying about reality, and we’ve had some interesting people on this show say the same thing, and that is we are somehow in some way, co-creators of that reality number one and that number two, something.
On the order of a simulation, although that’s a really touchy word and we don’t really know what that would mean and simulation of what an infinite regress, but something on the order of a simulation in some way seems to better fit the reality information we keep coming back to. I think there’s also the issue of augmented reality.
And augmented consciousness. We’re technologically, we see through strong AI that we are right on the cusp of augmented consciousness and that we may be on the cusp of augmented reality, but this is one. Area that I think we’re going to have to pack back into this discussion. I don’t know if now is the right time to do it.
Anthony Peake: [00:23:48] I think so. This is something that has intrigued me for a long time. I mean, from my book through to opening the doors of perception to this latest book. This is very much a theme that’s been intriguing me. And again. I like to do the science of this. I like to know why it is coming to these conclusions that at its basic level reality for want of a better term, is digital in nature.
Um, why have we concluded that? Well, of course, the first question is that we need that space, the solid objects and 99.99999 (999) 999-9996 as you space. And what is inside that empty space or literally Cokes, you know, effectively, you know, it’s an up, down, and it’s a down cork. It’s either two down corks and one up cork or two.
What corks them on? Damn cork that makes up the proton and the neutral. Then we have the electrons that are whizzing round, but with inside the atom, there’s mostly nothing. And the only reason we don’t fall through the floor and everything else is electrostatic repulsion on the themselves. I think the molecules, so we, when something brings something solidly together, and of course that’s human perception.
Now. If you then hold on,
Alex Tsakiris: [00:25:03] hold on, because that would, that might contradict with what you said before, right? And here’s where the backdoor materialism gets in. And I really wanted to get your opinion on this because on one hand we can talk about the sentience. In this extended realm, so I’m calling an extended consciousness.
You’re tall, you’re talking about something outside of consensual reality or con or a, we’re really saying the same thing, but the, the one thing I wonder about is. If we’re talking about that sentience, do we want to pack it back into that biological robot? This is how things work. This is how we break everything down and we understand everything in this realm, and if we are going to do that, and we’re going to say there’s sentience out there in this extended realm, then what is our relationship to.
That sentence and what is our relationship to the biomechanics of what we experience? Like when you’re talking about yogis who put their tongue on a bike, why, why? I mean, what is the, we have to get to kind of purpose and meaning kind of questions I think is where I’m headed. But there’s not enough time in the day to get there.
But
Anthony Peake: [00:26:13] we rolled it. We fall in city theology. Now that we, and we, and this is one of the great questions, isn’t it, of this kind of. One minute was saying that somehow the chemicals in the brain are affecting consciousness and affecting our awareness. But then we have the problem of jewel ism because the problem is how can a physical step of chemicals, albeit may of 99.9% empty space effect.
Me if I not, if I’m some form of consciousness field or something, experiencing something within a consciousness field by reducing into my brain something that is a field. So what we need to do is to take one step back and go back lower to say, well, if we, we, we, we, we say like, um, David Boehme argues.
Yeah. Anglo American physicist in his arguments about the Cubs next look at orders in some way. It’s a deeper level of reality. There is, there is a steel error and physical things and mental things of both. Kind of, well, no, the say there’s the singularity, then there is consciousness and awareness and consciousness then brings about the physical world.
But the act of observation, because again, we could argue, couldn’t we? You know, the quantum physics, we know that from the Copenhagen and Hagan interpretation, we learned from the collapse of the wave function that some of atomic particles, until they are measured and observed, can be technically anywhere in the universe.
And there’s a statistical problems. They could be anywhere, but when they are measured and they are then reducing what point part of that is just in a particular location, in space and time.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:27:54] Maybe people have heard that a million times, but I always think it’s worth repeating. And that is the power of the double slit experiment.
What it means in terms of the observer effect. And just to remind people, I’d like you to . Explore this because the book does a nice job of talking about some of this quantum physics science that is really the bedrock of the world that we live in. The theories and formulas that have come out of that have been proven over and over again are rock solid.
They build, we build the engineer’s stuff off of those and even as uncomfortable as we are with the double slit experiment, cause again, we’ll, it’s remind people. That the double slit experiment answers the Zen question. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, well then the tree doesn’t make any noise.
Or maybe the tree doesn’t even fall because from a simulation hypothesis thing, it fits in with that and saying or seem to only be rendering. What. We are observing. So, and I would just want to remind people that the double slit experiment has been repeated over and over and over. And if you hear people say, well, it only works at a sub subatomic level, not true.
They’ve, they even have, have established and proved it at, at the level of visible little paddles, if you will, although they have to get them really cold to do it. And then Dean Raiden. PSI researcher has repeated it in a lab with a photon machine and a meditator. So if anyone wants to go and look at the double slit experiment, it’s central to what we’re talking about it because it suggests that what we observe is.
Only only what makes things real. And it’s an experiment and it’s repeated over and over again. Please add to that, anything that I’ve left out.
Anthony Peake: [00:29:50] Well, the thing is the double slit experiment, as, as, as, as you so eloquently put there, you know, is, has been repeated many, many times. We know that if certain subatomic particles are not observed, um, the POL schools go through the twins.
And they’re not observed and they actually create an interference pattern. Whereas if you put a measurement device on one of the slips or one of the other sets, and you cite fire single photons or single electrons through, they go through one at a time as if they know they’re being alert and they’d be juiced.
point possible. Now as you again, rightly say. I mean, you know the great Tom Campbell, you know, as Tom all views, you know, we won’t be render what reality we need in order to exist. Then this, again, I agree with you, it’s dangerous to calls use the term simulation because the simulation suggests that it’s, it is a simulation of something else and you get an infinite regress by doing that.
But if we’d say that the true nature of everything we perceive is actually information. And that everything is made up of information. And again, I’d strongly advise the writings of somebody like flack Kovar Drell is very useful in this. He’s one of the top young quantum physicists that is coming up at the moment, but you don’t even need to read Vidrale.
You know, you just need to read some of the latest work of Stephen Hawking. You only need to read some Hawking’s work on, um, on walking radiation. The way in which information can not be lost with what happens if you throw a computer into a black hole. Because it’s an enclosed system in there. And we know that information is energy.
So the release huge areas now, but people are starting to realize. But as, as Alex is, you, and I know this has been known effectively since 1900 when max plunk decided the quantity was only WebEx, certain behaviors and black body radiation. But we also know say from 1925 1926 max borne of SRO during their equations, all these things build up to the fact.
The reality is definitely not what we think it is. And there is a direct relationship. And again, the idea is you again say that the way of facts are only seen at silver type level is nonsense. You know, the guy called Anton Zeilinger at the university of Vienna has been doing work on this over the years and they may be doing the twins that experiment with buckyballs.
Well, those have 60 molecules in them. These are big molecules. These are things that are almost the size of a virus. You know, I don’t know how they numbers, but they are still getting bigger and bigger, and we have still yet to find the borderline Byrne utopian physics takes over and quantum physics. Of course.
Then we have the mystery, the quantum physics, and uh. Einsteinian physics, which deals with the very big, they are work together. Math doesn’t work together. So the clean is a mismatch with what we think is really happening. And the, the point really here is that I think that the major issue here is understanding that everything is a field.
And there’s a consciousness field, and I’m slipping here now into the writings I’ve done, and I’ve contributed a couple of chapters to books on and deism and the idea that we’re all conscious experiencing itself subjectively and the were like emanations of a, uh, information of consciousness, which I wrote a book a few years ago with Ervin Laszlo.
And of course Laszlo has is his idea of the zero point failed. The scaled, which again, you touched upon before, that these effects are actually seen just as you get slightly above absolute zero. Suddenly all kinds of weird effects start taking place as well. And the the zero point field suggests that empty space is not empty at all.
It’s not a vacuum, it’s a planet. It’s absolutely full of seeding and things that are coming in and out of reality. And again, you totally read the books on quantum physics these days we have what’s called virtual particles. These are particles that don’t exist, come into existence for a second and then disappear again somewhere else.
94% of the university’s missing. It’s dark matter or dark energy. We know what it is. That’s why we call it dark matter and dark energy. So we are in a similar position in our science to wait the scientists where the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, we are suffering from this, this, this hubris. No, the, the guy Mickelson made a statement, he was opening up a new laboratory at the university of Chicago in about 1894 and he made this Bible statements and he said, there’s really no need for science in the future.
Um, because there’s only one or two little issues we’ve got in the future. Other than that, we know everything and all scientists are going to be doing is calculating. So the six decimal points and then the next plan can December, 1900. Came up with these idea that energy was quantized and suddenly it all changed.
Then in 1905 sign comes with this wonderful year where he wrote three papers and flooded everything, but we’ll still know when they’re understanding, but now you still have scientists sounding. You’re saying we understand things. We Debbie, traumas, phone justness. How does matter in my head, in Alex’s head.
How did reacting with electricity, how does it create Alex, his hopes he dreamed his aspirations. Fears similar with phony. Similar with all the listeners out there, it’s the hard problem. We’re not even at first base on the .
Alex Tsakiris: [00:35:18] Yep. I totally agree. And I, I just kinda always have to resist the hard problem.
What’s the easy problem. There is no easy about it.
Anthony Peake: [00:35:25] Totally. No,
Alex Tsakiris: [00:35:28] I get your point. I get your point. But,
Anthony Peake: [00:35:30] but the problem is how the brain works. That was what he was pointing at this, the swell.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:35:37] And I guess my point on that is we don’t really understand how the brain works. And we already kinda touched on that.
We have all this seemingly contradictory information. We don’t know how memory works and our neurological models of memory fail. A lot of other kind of alternative. Explanations. As you say, it’s all about white crows and black swans. I love that quote in your book so you can bounce along with your little neurological model of memory per se.
Like we’re saying, until somebody comes along with a theory that completely blows it out of the water, such as autobody experience or other provable.
Anthony Peake: [00:36:14] Psy
Alex Tsakiris: [00:36:15] phenomena, you know, even take Dean Brayden’s six Sigma result on pre sentiment, it completely destroys our neurological model of memory. So there is no easy problem.
But I’ll tell you what this, we are going to shift gears for just a minute because I want to shift focus over to the afterlife just as another lens with which to look at the same issues that we’re talking about.
Anthony Peake: [00:36:42] Because.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:36:43] You have a lot of interesting things to say about the afterlife, and we’ve already talked about the DMT.
Connection to near death experience, but I did want to kind of pin you down and get your opinion on some ways that I kind of wonder whether that is a good fit for the data we have from the deer death experience science. And I’d start by pointing out a couple of things. Is that. I appreciate what they did at the university of Michigan.
I think it’s very important. I think the way that you summed it up is the best that I’ve heard anyone else do it. And the reason for that is because you have this expanded consciousness kind of worldview. What I hear so many times with people who look at that data is they want to use it as a debunking exercise and jam things back into this kind of materialism, which clearly doesn’t.
Fit. So if I look at, for example, the research of Dr. Jeffrey Long was one of the near death experience scientists, but all of them agree that there is an extended consciousness realm here. But my point is that the near death experience data. Is in the experiencers themselves, and we start hearing those accounts.
And in those accounts, I think there’s some important ways that we can’t completely resolve with the DMT explanation. And I’d like to lay out for those for you, and then we can talk. But the first one is the continuity of experience. So a lot of people, a lot of the near death experience accounts begin before
Anthony Peake: [00:38:19] death.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:38:21] they are during the death and it continue after the death and then our finally and even go after they returned to life. So this doesn’t like complete, it doesn’t contradict your, your book or your conclusions, but it doesn’t fit well with the DMT burst for. The mice, except that the DMT experience, as we know, is outside of space time.
So now we have, but, but we can’t really pack that back in either because we can’t have it both ways. We can’t say, well, it’s outside of space time. So then it can transcend any kind of space time. And then we can say, but also we found it in these rats here, and it’s 10 seconds after. We have to somehow massage that and you get
What I’m saying there. The second point I think is, is even more important and interesting and challenging at the same time. And that’s that the accounts from the near death experience suggest a unique kind of journeying. And I think you have some great information on the book, on some unique kind of journeying associated with, for example, certain shamonic experiences.
And you know, everyone sees. The purple leopard, or everyone sees the snakes are Terence McKenna. Everyone sees ELLs, but in this case, everyone is having in that, you can’t say everyone, forgive me to people who won’t jump on me about everyone, but there seem to be unique. Very common elements to the NDE journey, but here’s the kicker that I think I really want to interject into the conversation.
It’ll launch us off into, I think for me, one of the most important points in the whole thing, and it’s the big follow on question to the book, is that. The journey of the near death experience suggests a hierarchy of consciousness, and I think you’re already there. When you talk about the sentience that is in the shamans, it says, AIDS sick, these two plants together and something’s going to happen.
Well, in the near death experience, people say, I encountered God, and they say, well, I don’t have to call it God, but. For all the ways that I’ve always heard about God in my life. This is it. It’s a higher level. It is something to inform and educate me, and that also says there is a moral imperative. And there is something like a life review and what you do does matter and you do have free will.
So to me, these are the points that are the big takeaway here that either have to be, you know, worked out of it with other data that pushes him off the table, or we somehow have to work that into. Uh, beyond simulation hypothesis kind of thing. Cause simulation hypothesis leaves us very stark and clinical and the near death experience doesn’t.
So I know I’ve laid a lot on the table there, but take over and let’s, let’s talk about the, the moral imperative in life review.
Anthony Peake: [00:41:34] We can do it probably systematically in the sense the, the first thing is about, um, near death experiences themselves. Now, I would argue it, no, people would criticize me on this.
The word that can be three words near death experience is the most important is Nia. It’s a near death experience. In my book, previous books, I actually used the term a real death experience or an RDA where somebody actually dies. Now, I will stand corrected on this, but I, I know of no evidence where somebody actually has literally died, literally died and has died.
In the literal, what does that, what does that
Alex Tsakiris: [00:42:14] mean to you when you say literal sense, cause I do that well,
Anthony Peake: [00:42:16] this is the problem, isn’t it? When you, when you start discussing what do we mean by death? When does death take place within the brain? When does death actually happen? But there is a point where presumably the brain ceases to be able to process the information field.
Well
Alex Tsakiris: [00:42:33] luck what I was going to object because here, here’s where I’ve, man, I’ve wrestled every skeptic in the world to the mat on this. The best scientists on this is a guy named dr Sam Parnia formally at Cornell. My
Anthony Peake: [00:42:47] notes, my notes sound, and I know you actually know that Sam. Sam’s experiments at Southampton university and the, his whole exercise that he did to discover out of body experiences and various other things that took place.
I can’t remember what that was. The acting project was called and it was delayed and delayed and delayed. Results can come out because the results weren’t what were expected and. I know it’s
Alex Tsakiris: [00:43:11] the aware project and actually, you know,
Anthony Peake: [00:43:14] that was it. Yeah. After resuscitation, wasn’t it? Yeah. Right.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:43:18] And just to fill people in on the backstory, and the reason that both of us are drawn to his work is that independent of him being a near death experience researcher, he’s one of the leading authorities in the world on resuscitation.
And as far as an area of medical science, we’d want to look to, to answer that question of did they really die. A resuscitation expert would be the guy we’d look to. Cause that’s what he does on a day to day basis for kind of standard mainstream medicine and medical science. And if you look at what Sam has say is saying now as opposed to what he was saying two or three years ago, when I interviewed him, I was really on that.
I’ve held his feet to the fire, is that he has now come around to the idea that clearly the evidence from his aware study. Suggest the consciousness extends beyond bodily death. And he’s very emphatic about talking about that, that he kind of takes it. Says what you’re saying, but in a different way. He says, I would not call these near death experiences.
These are death experiences in every way historically, and with our present medical science, we have these people. Some of them, a large number of them are considered dead. So what a lot of the. Skeptics want to do is kind of do this pleading to the God of the gaps thing. Well, at some time in the future we’ll find that the brain isn’t really dead or the rats.
Then in Michigan, we’ll, you know, show that we do not have in our medical. Uh, experience to this point. Any indication that any of that
Anthony Peake: [00:45:02] will happen.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:45:03] So that is just pure speculation and what we do have our brains that shouldn’t be able in any neurological model that we understand shouldn’t be able to produce consciousness.
And we have the experience of the autobody experience in the NDEs experience. So that’s my read of where we’re at.
Anthony Peake: [00:45:22] Yeah, I’m with you on that. I mean, the technical term for what they’re doing here is called professory materialism. You’ve got a promissory note to say that, you know, yes. We don’t fully understand this, but what we will do in the future, I have a term for it.
Uh, and I, I, it’s, it’s, it’s even giving things Nass definitions or nice terms, and if you get the nice Latin fate, like hallucination, you know, you, you’ve, you’ve explained it. Or you call it outsiders, or you call it whatever Charles Bonnie syndrome. But you’ve never actually explained anything. You’ve just given it a label.
It’s labeled theory. So the question is, you know, when Bendel’s death took place, or is it a transitory period? Now, if, if, if at the base level, everything it is, Mmm. Consciousness. If consciousness is what create everything around us, the idea of death, bodily death. Means nothing because you move into a place that’s completely different.
Now, the second point, because it was an interesting one, and you probably know, I wrote a book called the labyrinth of time many years ago, and the reason I bought librarian at the time was like st Augustine. I really wanted to know what time was and exactly like saying, staying after actually writing a 380 pound, a 380 page book.
I caught the end of it and I still didn’t really know what time was. I knew what time measured, but even I didn’t then I didn’t know what time actually measures,
Alex Tsakiris: [00:46:48] but
Anthony Peake: [00:46:49] okay. At the point of death, something glorious comes with time as well. You know, time is a subjective experience. We know that some of them near death experiences, the moody tracks that they discussed and under gracing traits various terms.
One of the things is this incredible slow amount of time as if time ceases to be the way we understand time to be. So suddenly you move out of. Normal linear time into what Philip K Dick called a fog and all time. It’s kind of a . So was it right angles to this time? But he’s just as big and it’s just as powerful.
So in which case you, you, your body dies in time, but you don’t die in times he died because he ran out of time. Well, literally you do, you go somewhere else completely different. And your consciousness moves in a totally different way because people talk about the near death expenses down, the edit, a timelessness, feeling, the re the thing that you can go back on your life and you can review your life.
You can have a panoramic life review. You dodgy in anywhere, anywhere else. And to me, this reminds me analogously of if you’re looking at a CD wrong, which contains, um, a computer game or for a third person computer game. Well, you know, this whole storyline, or even better, an old vinyl record, you look at grooves in a vinyl record, and if you’re actually in the groove, you follow the groove.
But looking down at Recode, you can see the whole thing. You know, you’re looking down as if you’re in the mention of space, looking down and you can see everything is a single continuum.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:48:26] Well, you can bring it back to that material example, but what you do in the book, I think grabs us even more in that you point out, from the shamanistic in the spirit world and in shaman in the broadest sense of all different wisdom traditions, are all talking about being outside of space time and there are a lot of common characteristics. And then E T, which we’re going to talk about in a minute, and hopefully dive into deeply, also seems to be outside of space time.
So, I mean, take the DVD thing, that’s fine, but I like what you were saying before about the ayahuasca when the shaman goes to the forest and says, “Look, you’re back there in space time. Now here’s how you can manipulate that a little bit and kind of get a little bit into my world.” And then when you duck into that other world, like the other story you told about the research being done in the UK, it does seem to be out of that and then we come back in it.
So that leads to a bunch of questions about, who we are inside of this consciousness, whether we are special, whether this moment matters, and the working hypothesis I’ve been having is that there’s a lot of room at the top. You know, Richard Feynman, the inventor of a nanotechnology, made famous through the quote that there’s a lot of room at the bottom. Well, I think when it comes to consciousness, there’s a lot of room at the top, and I think we have a tendency to put ourselves up on the heap, maybe, up on the ladder a little bit higher than we need to be, and there might be so many levels above us that we will take a long time to begin to explore. What do you think about any one of those ideas?
Anthony Peake: [00:50:14] I’m totally with you. I think that we interface with intelligences that are far greater than we are. It’s like the Dunning-Kruger effect, you don’t know the level of your own ignorance because you don’t, you can, you can’t know what you don’t know. And we use this term around, in people in politics and people in various ways. But even well-educated people also do not know the level of their own ignorance. As humanity doesn’t know the level of its own ignorance.
So what we’re doing a lot of times with our science is we’re almost like Aristotelians, where we’re building these Heath Robinson models to explain observed phenomenon, we’re making epicycles. In years gone by when we had the idea that the universe was geocentric and everything revolved around the earth, we couldn’t explain the actual retrograde motion of the planets. So we had all of these epicycles and that’s got more and more turgid to keep them all real. And in some ways I think this is what we’re doing now. We’ve got things that we really don’t understand, so we’re trying to explain them.
One of my favorite ones of this is, and again, I’m going to get slightly technical here, but in order to explain how the universe has expanded the way it is, they had to accommodate a period of hyperinflation in the first few billions of a second if the big bang to accommodate the observed world. And of course, this is utterly ridiculous, the idea the universe expanded at thousands of times the speed of light in order to accommodate it. But it’s rather like how the elephant got its trunk, you know, it’s actually backwardization of ideas. Instead of actually looking just at the facts and trying to find solutions, we shoehorn it more and more into the materialist reductionist model, and it’s creaking. And it’s creaking because they are so terrified of the implications of quantum mechanics and quantum physics and they go on and they say, “Oh, you’re misunderstanding what you mean by the [unclear 00:52:21] experiments. You can’t do the math.” No but we can do logic, there’s still logic involved here and some of the things are totally, completely illogical. You know, these particles coming in and out from nowhere in order to accommodate the observed world.
So it seems that the universe is far more complex and far more fascinating. I mean, come on, our science has only been around for about 350 years for crying out loud.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:52:50] I think the big question and I’ve kind of hammered on this for a while, is not even so much, is it so, you know, the biological robot in a meaningless universe, it’s how has that managed to be propped up and why is it being propped up the way that it is? Because it really fails on so many levels like you’re saying. It not only fails experimentally, but it fails philosophically too, it just doesn’t make any sense.
But I want to bring you back to this because I haven’t heard you talk enough about this, and it’s really something that I think you and I both think is central, and I have heard you talk about it in bits and pieces, but I want to give you a chunk of time to really address the whole thing. And that is, the life review of the near-death experience is something that, I don’t want to hang my hat on it and say that’s absolutely the way that it is, but it consistently comes up over and over again as we look at these accounts in whole, and it clearly suggests a hierarchy of consciousness. When I say hierarchy of consciousness, that is kind of a God kind of thing, for lack of a better term and it suggests this moral imperative. And we’re going to talk in a minute, maybe, about the whole magic and occult thing and do what thou wilt.
And with the near-death experience science, my read of it is, is that do what thou wilt is not a very good strategy to hang your hat on. And a better strategy is, don’t be too consumed with this world and what you can get out of it, but love everyone, tell the truth, help your neighbor and do the right thing because you know what the right thing to do is. And that might sound really churchy, and I’m not a Christian, I’m not a religious person. I always have to say that because it sounds so churchy. But that seems to be my read of the near-death experience data. What do you think about that?
Anthony Peake: [00:54:46] No, I’m with you on this. The idea there is a moral imperative somewhere. When I was brought up, I was brought up with a Christian family and everything else. I used to argue with my mother all the time about the idea of God in the Judaic Christian idea of this guy with a long beard and everything else as well, and it made no sense to me, and the Bible and the way in which the Bible makes no logical sense in certain areas.
But as I got older, I started to realize it’s more complex than that. Far more complex. It’s about morality and to do good, and in this I always cite the movie Groundhog Day. And in Groundhog Day there’s a profound message in there.
By the way, I’ve interviewed on my own podcast, I’ve interviewed Danny Rubin who wrote it and Danny always says that the philosophy, he’s discovered the philosophy himself, but that wasn’t his intention in the first place. But nevertheless, it has some very interesting ideas because you know, Connors, he lives the same day over and over again, and every day he has more knowledge about his environment, whereas everybody else doesn’t, and he uses that initially to his advantage to bed the girl and to do all of these things. But then he goes in, it’s almost like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. He fulfills his sexual desires, then he needs to educate himself. So he teaches himself foreign languages, how to play the piano, and he’s developing as a human being, he’s moving away from that kind of basic, I just want, want, want all I can. And he moves in and he starts to educate himself and then he starts to realize that he can actually do good for doing good’s sake. He can run around the town, he can be under the tree when the little kid falls out of the tree, and suddenly it’s as if he’s developing as a human being over many lives, he’s developing more as a human being, he’s playing the game, as it were, like a computer game and he’s playing it time and time again and he’s getting it better and he’s getting better. And you know, in my concept of the Cheating the Ferryman, I argue that this may be what life is, that you know that before we die, in the split seconds before we die, we run all the potential lives we could ever run in the same way as Groundhog Day.
But then the question has to be asked, and it has to be asked and it cannot be avoided. Who decides in the movie that Connors is allowed to move on to the next day? It suggests that there is an intelligence outside of the simulation, you know, outside of The Truman Show, whatever we want to call it, that is somehow watching over and developing and judging in some way. Not in a kind of judgmental God of the Old Testament way but judging almost ourselves because we know that when we do something good, you get that kind of feedback feeling that’s indescribable. You know, you stop and you give somebody who’s desperate some money, and you suddenly feel, and it’s not because you’re doing it selfishly, you just have this feeling.
And if we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, if God is really what they say in pantheism, which is the collective everything that we all are and that we are all emanations of God, I’m going to be profoundly Gnostic here, that we are emanations of God, shards of the pleroma that are located within the kenoma, within the simulation, but we have forgotten who we are and we don’t know who we are. But we can’t know who we are because if we do, we wouldn’t follow the route that we follow, we have to learn by our experiences and by our doing.
Now, one of the things I’ll be planning to do in your family’s home country, I’m a Grecophile by the way, I absolutely love Greece, this is why I asked you earlier on about your background. I got married in Greece and everything else and I go twice a year and I’ve been going once or twice a year for the last 40 years, 45 years. My book is about to come out in Greek, two of my books are coming out in Greek in a few weeks’ time, and what we’re going to do is try and recreate Plato’s Cave and the myth of Plato’s Cave in Greece. And you’ll get this Alex, I found the location that they based Plato’s Cave upon. It’s just outside Athens in a hill called Lycabettus.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:59:09] Tony, pause for a second and tell people the story of Plato’s Cave, because I think a lot of people know that they should know, but don’t know the story. So tell them about Plato’s Cave.
Anthony Peake: [00:59:22] Plato’s Cave is the idea that there’s a group of prisoners, a group of people, rather similar to the children I mentioned earlier on, with the tribe in Northern Columbia. And their whole life they just existed in a cave and they’re chained to chairs, or whatever, and they can only look at the back wall of the cave. They can’t move their heads and all they can see is a back wall.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:59:47] This is allegory. We’re not saying this…
Anthony Peake: [00:59:49] It’s not real, it’s an allegory, yes. It’s Plato’s way of showing how our senses can fool us. And what he says is, these people are chained and are looking towards the back of the cave. Now behind them is a raised walkway, like a bridge, and people walk along that walkway with cardboard cutouts of shapes of horses and trees and cows and people and everything else. And then the other side of that is then a source of light, like a fire or something.
So you can imagine what happens, is that the shadows of the people going across the bridge are actually reflected on the back wall of the cave. So the people that are the prisoners see the shadows on the back wall.
Now, because they’ve never experienced anything else that’s what they believe reality is. And in many ways, this is, I think, the trap of materialist reductionism. We tend to think that the shadows on the cave, our actual reality.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:00:46] Because that’s all we can see.
Anthony Peake: [01:00:49] It’s because all we know. That’s what our senses tell us, but we know from research into how the brain functions, we know that the brain recreates, behind here at the back of the brain or the darkest part of the brain, the brain recreates the visual experience. The visual experience is not one to one, to believe that is to be caught in the trap called naive realism. We know that that’s not the case.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:01:12] We know that’s not the case. We know you don’t see as well as a hawk and you don’t smell as good as a dog, and we don’t know what their experience is. And we know your experience is different than someone who’s color blind, to take it down to a very basic level and then…
Anthony Peake: [01:01:24] I call it electromagnetic chauvinism. The idea that we believe that what we see, the tiny bits of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see is what is actually out there, and of course it isn’t.
So going back to the analogy. What happens is, one of the prisoners manages to break his chains and looks around and gets up, walks past the bridge, walks past the fire and walks to the entrance of the cave and sees reality as it really is, sees what the Gnostics would call the pleroma, the reality behind the reality. What people do when they have extraordinary experiences like near-death experiences, out of the body experiences, dimethyltryptamine experiences. But then they come back, he comes back to the fellow prisoners and he says, “Hey guys, this is not it. I’ve seen what it’s really like.” And of course they turn around to him and say, “You’re insane. You’re completely insane. You’ve got it completely wrong. You’re mad.”
And of course this is the human condition. The tragedy is we say these are hallucinations, another label. You know, we don’t know what hallucinations are. We don’t know why the brain creates hallucinations or anything. So you cannot say that somebody who has an extraordinary experience, like an out of body experience or a near-death experience, that that’s no more real than this is because technically they’re all brain creates it in one way or another.
But then we have the problem, brain created, how does the brain create anything? Because the brain is still empty space and the brain is inanimate and everything else as well. So then we have the ghost in the machine. Then we have Cartesian dualism. We’d go down the Gilbert Ryle route and we have all of these problems. But if consciousness is everything, we don’t have dualism.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:03:09] Real briefly then, the last topic I had, and we’re not going to have time to cover it thoroughly, but the whole ET thing is extremely fascinating to me. And I know there’s a lot of different ways to cut it and to look at that data. On this show we’ve looked at it a cross-culture, cross time and it seems to hold up on. Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke is somebody I’ve brought up on the screen and you know, native Americans and star people throughout time, multiple species, multiple agendas. Also we have all sorts of accounts of basically the ancient alien theory, which a lot of people don’t like, but seems to hold up well. We have the involvement of our government in these programs, and I talked to Richard Dolan at length about that. That seems to be, I mean, it’s documented in papers and thousands and thousands of release documents. I also had an interesting interview with Diana Walsh Pasulka, which we won’t really have time to talk about, and Jacques Valleé.
So as we move to wrap things up, what do you think about ET and what do you think is going on there? Do you accept that there is a nuts and bolts reality to it, in addition to a consciousness extended reality to it?
Anthony Peake: [01:04:30] That’s the question. I’ve been interested in UFOs ever since I was about eight or nine years of age, and this is the real thing that really puzzles me. Like for instance, my mother’s experience. What she saw was obviously in a hypnagogic state, she was obviously in a state of sleep paralysis, but it had been stimulated by something she saw in the sky.
Now, on top of that, it wasn’t just she said she saw this disk in the sky of smoke and it shot off towards Wales. What I didn’t finish off deliberately in my description though was, I was subsequently contacted by a friend of mine, and she had actually seen the object about two miles away, and she’d seen it on exactly the same time my mother saw it.
So this is something that was out there in objective reality, seen by different people, which seemed to be associated in some way. There’s something that was psychological or was using my mother’s brain to come through into this reality. So clearly we’ve got something here, and I really am fascinated by this.
As you know, I don’t make up my mind about things. I just look at the evidence and go where the evidence tells me, I don’t have any preconceptions, I’m not trying to prove anything. Like you, I just want to know, while I’ve got the time here to understand. But it does seem that there is very much the kind of mythological elements of the entities, the way in which they seem to follow us through history, the way they seem to culturally, reflect our society in one way or another, as if they are actually emanations in some way of ourselves. And this is why I use the term egregorial. I use the term egregorial because it’s created by the brain, but it’s things that use the brain, an awareness to pull themselves through from somewhere else. And in some way they need us and we need them. They seem to be sort of part of us in some way.
How that works, I really don’t know. And I don’t know whether we’ll ever have the mental capacity to fully understand this game because it does seem like a game, you know, was Terence McKenna says, you know, it’s kind of like a joke sometimes. You know, sometimes the creatures seemed to be extracting the Michael, they seem to be playing with us, playing with our expectations. Almost making the people who’ve had close encounters look like fools when they tell what happened, and yet these people, why would they make up such a ridiculous story? Except if the entities themselves are having fun with us in some way.
I genuinely don’t know, and I’m working with people. We’re taking this forward now, this whole egregorial concept, we’re working with. I’ll be writing a paper with an associate of mine over the next few months on this very theme. She’s a lucid dreamer and and out of body experiencer, but she’s also an anthropologist. So we’re working on this and I’m working with scientists and everything else as well, to try and take this forward because we want answers, don’t we? We want to understand, but maybe we’re not supposed to.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:07:34] Maybe we’re not supposed to. Folks, again, our guest has been the quite amazing Anthony Peake. His new book that you’re going to want to check out is The Hidden Universe. Tony, really quickly, tell folks what else is going on in your world. You mentioned a couple of pretty amazing events you have. What about those and what about books and other things?
Anthony Peake: [01:07:54] Okay. We’re planning for events in Greece later on this summer when we’re going to be recreating Plato’s Cave. I’m also, at the moment, it hasn’t been postponed yet or cancelled, but I’ll be speaking at this year’s Contact in the Desert, the last weekend of May in Indian…
Alex Tsakiris: [01:08:11] Indian Wells
Anthony Peake: [01:08:12] Indian Wells, isn’t it? I said Indian Springs earlier on to someone else. And that will be taking place, if it’s still happening, but I’ll be doing a lecture and I’ll be doing a workshop and I’ll be doing some work and a panel discussion to people like Whitley Strieber and various other people.
If anybody wants to contact me, my website is anthonypeake.com. If you are interested in linking up and discussing things with me, I’m very active on Instagram under Cheating the Ferryman 54. I’m also very active on Facebook and I will normally respond. We have a large international community on both of those sites that discuss and debate these ideas.
And what else can I tell you? My books, you can get my books everywhere. The books are in most formats. In fact, I’m now working my way through the books in terms of Audible as well. And my first book, The Daemon will be out on Audible and the book on time is out on Audible, and this book will be out in Audible we’re discussing now.