Review of ITLAD & The Daemon in the SMN "Network Review"

[Anthony Peake]

At long last a review of both my books has now appeared in Network Review. This is the journal of the Scientific & Medical Network. A handful of FORUM folk are members of the SMN including myself, Dr. Art Funkhouser and Steve Taylor. This magazine is distributed to all SMN members across the world.

I would like to thank Bob Charman of the Society For Psychical Research for both a very fair review and an excellent precis of my Cheating The Ferryman hypothesis. As a small correction the Wikipedia comment about me was taken down many months ago .... but it does come back sometimes. Clearly somebody out there does not like me!

The review is as follows (with acknowledgement to the SMN)

Groundhog Day in Perpetuum?
Robert Charman

IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH? The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When You Die
Anthony Peake (SMN)
Arcturus Publishing Ltd, 2007, 416 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-572-03227-2
THE DAEMON; A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self
Anthony Peake (SMN)
Arcturus Publishing Ltd. 2008, 336 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-84837-079-1

(Published in the Winter 2009/10 issue of Network Review – The Journal of the Scientific & Medical Network – Jan 2010. Pages 57 to 59)

Wikipedia tells us that ‘Anthony Peake (1954 - ) is a pseudoscientist and parapsychologist’. To be one is bad enough, but to be both together! Before he went to the academic bad Peake obtained a dual honours degree in sociology and history from the University of Warwick, with subsequent postgraduate qualifications in personnel management and labour law. He is a qualified psychometrician, working in business over many years. His stated interests do include parapsychology, along with the sociology of religion and the sociology of language, but in these two books he also undertakes a masterly, fully referenced, review of the wider fields of the neurosciences, clinical psychology, particularly concerning strange experiences in epilepsy, parapsychology, OBEs and NDEs, the nature of time and the implications of quantum physics before putting forward an intriguing, and therefore controversial, theory as to our continuing existence. The following summary does not do justice to his gift for lucid exposition.

Although we each experience ourself in the singular as ‘I’, a wealth of research in clinical psychology and the neurosciences, especially in split brain research, has demonstrated beyond all doubt that we are composed of two separate selves, one based in the left hemisphere of the brain and the other in the right hemisphere. The two hemispheres communicate through a transverse bridge of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum. This bridge is cut in split brain operations for some forms of intractable epilepsy, and it has been found that each hemisphere remains as a separate, conscious, self. Peake has called our everyday self the Eidolon or ‘lower self’, from the Greek eidos meaning ‘form’ or ‘phantom’. The Eidolon lives in our chattering, rationalising, organising, getting things done, left hemisphere. This is the ‘I’ of everyday life that interacts with the left brained ‘I’s’ of everyone else. The quieter, non chattering, musical, artistic, spatially perceptive, intuitive, right hemisphere houses, says Peake, the Daemon or Higher Self, from the Greek daimon, meaning ‘knowing spirit’, as in Socrates’s daimon that he would often turn to for advice. The Daemon is the all seeing, all understanding, all remembering partner of the Eidolon who plays a crucial role in his theory of repeated survival.

Mind, says Peake, is not a separate entity from brain. Mind as a noun may be convenient shorthand, but it is a misnomer, implying a static object, whereas it should be the verb ‘minding’, as in walking. Mental activity is a continuing process generated by the brain and dependent upon the brain. Peake supports Karl Pribram’s theory that the function of the brain is to convert sensory input into the changing imagery of a subjective hologram that is our immediate reality because it is, quite literally, us. Pribram links his theory with David Bohm’s proposal that the universe itself is an ever changing, informational hologram, in which each is related to all. We take time, especially clock time, as a given, comprised of past, present, and future in endless flow, and it is true that we have various brain and body clocks that synchronise our body’s metabolic functions in a daily cycle. Physicists, however, talk of time as a dimension, not as a flow because


time, like length, breadth and height, just is. Peake explores the fascinating literature of case histories and psychological research demonstrating beyond all reasonable doubt that ‘time’ is a very variable form of subjective experiencing, controlled by the changing chemistry of the brain. In sudden danger time can ‘stand still’. Alternatively, when we are absorbed in something it can pass ‘in a flash’.

Central to Peake’s survival hypothesis is the Many Worlds, or Multiverse, interpretation of reality in which there is not just one universe but an endless plurality of universes whereby whenever a quantum choice is made in one universe, the alternative is worked out in other universes and so ad infinitum. Peake quotes physicist De Witt as saying ‘Every quantum transition taking place on every star, in every galaxy, and in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on earth into myriad copies of itself’. Many experiments appear to confirm this statement. Schrodinger’s Cat is alive in one universe and dead in another as at the point of death in one universe, the universe splits into two for life in another universe. The multiverse interpretation is now a mainstream hypothesis in theoretical physics, especially in cosmological speculation. Allied to this theory is physicist Wheeler’s 1983 proposal known as ‘Wheeler’s Participatory Universe’ whereby the conscious observer brings about the universe they are conscious of, even to the many preceding events that must occur to make this possible. This gives consciousness a central role in the universe. These interpretations run counter to the commonsense given-ness of our everyday world in which time flows, night follows day, and cause is followed by effect.

Now we turn to Peake’s controversial theory of repeated personal survival. To the age old question of ‘Self and Death -What Survives?’ There are two age old answers - ‘Nothing’, because death equals total extinction, or ‘A disembodied self’, the latter allowing for endless speculative variants on possible outcomes from ghosts, communication through mediums, spiritual journeys, heaven, hell, or reincarnation. Peake has proposed a third answer to the effect of ‘Nothing in this universe but everything in another universe, and another, and another’. Peake’s theory, therefore, stands or falls in the first instance upon whether the many-worlds, or multiverse interpretation of the quantum universe is correct. As conscious beings we are an integral part of the universe, says Peake, so this interpretation must apply to ourselves at the moment of death. We can never die because the option of not dying must be realised in another universe. Our brain and body will die and dissolve back into its constituent material elements, but we will ‘die out of’ this universe to be reborn in another universe. Contrary to spiritualist belief we have no ability to operate in a brainless, bodiless state as we are dependent upon our brain, so we need to integrate ourselves into a new brain and body, and we will find that in a parallel universe that operates on the same physical principles, looks the same as this one, and is at a parallel moment in time as our conception and birth.

How is this life-preserving transition from one universe to another achieved? What happens when we are seen by observers as about to die in this universe? During the brief moment preceding brain death the brain releases a flood of opioid neurohormones that causes a dramatic slowing down of subjective time to a point of suspense where we disengage from, or ‘fall out of’ (Peake’s description), the timeline of conscious observers in this universe to realise the option of life and a new timeline in another universe. At the moment of brain death and psychic transition the Daemon comes into its own, rewinding its Eidolon’s Life Review into a new beginning in which it is ‘transported back to the point where the embryo becomes a person’ and the you-to-be becomes the baby-to-be in another universe. In this universe your life sequence from birth to brain death will operate in subjective real time as it does now. You will relive the same sequence of your life as if for the first time with, for most of us, no memory of a previous life. The Daemon that silently shares your life unwinds from its memory your Life Review in a new real time but can intervene to provide opportunities for change.

To recapitulate. In this universe your body and brain die in the sense that they stop functioning and so, to living observers, do you. Your funeral takes place because, as far as your friends, relatives, and the community are concerned, you have disappeared from this universe and are therefore ‘dead’, but in another universe you, as combined Eidolon and Daemon, are reborn from brain A into brain B as a new you. Referring to Greek myth Peake terms his theory ‘Cheating the Ferryman’. The film Groundhog Day, in which weather man Phil Connors endures endless 7am repeats, but whose options change during each rerun, affords a useful analogy.

The Daemon, as richly explored in his second book, guides and prompts our life, and is the agent of repeated survival. Psi, in all its forms, is a function of the Daemon. Precognitive and déjà vu experiences, or an apparently irrational urge to do A instead of sensible B which, in retrospect, turns out to have been the right course of action, are when the Daemon intervenes in this life from its memory of what happened in the previous life. It feels like precognition but is actually memory. From the many examples of Daemon intervention as Peake interprets it, I will quote one intriguing instance. In 1749 the opera composer Christolph Gluck was visiting friends in Ghent and had enjoyed a very convivial meal at the local tavern. Bidding his friends good night he started to walk back to his lodgings and suddenly noticed a strangely familiar figure walking not far ahead of the same height and shape as himself and wearing the same clothes. His rising sense of uneasy alarm turned into outright fear as he saw, in a momentary full glimpse, that it was his double. He then saw his double take out a key and enter his lodging house. Rushing back to the tavern he told his friends what he had seen and begged a bed for the night from one of them. Next morning they met and made their way to his lodgings, only to find a large commotion going on inside with people peering into his bedroom. As they looked in they saw a massive hole in the ceiling through which a huge roof beam had fallen and crashed onto his now smashed bed. According to Peake, Gluck’s Daemon remembered that in his previous life it had been the real Gluck who had met this untimely death. To avoid this fate and allow him to fulfil his musical potential the Daemon had created in Gluck’s mind an image of his Doppelganger to frighten him into returning to his friends and seek a bed elsewhere. In 1749 Gluck was 35, had not yet married, and had not yet fulfilled his creative potential in reforming the rather moribund opera of his time by composing his Orfeo ed Euridice, Alceste, and Iphigénie en Tauride masterpieces. In this life, thanks to his Daemon, he lived to do so.

Peake’s Cheating the Ferryman theory challenges our traditional thinking on life, death, and possible thereafters, and will raise many questions in your mind. For example, does this multiverse theory apply to all animals, whether apes, mice, birds or fishes? It should do in principle as the final option is the same for them as it is for us. Alexander the Great must, surely, ride Bucephalus again. Does it really account for apparent mediumistic communication? Whatever your views I do urge you to read his two books because, whether his theory stands up to scrutiny or not, his ability to present and explain findings drawn from across the sciences and interweave them with fascinating case histories is truly impressive. Maybe Wikipedia needs to revise its somewhat dismissive assessment of his academic standing and, by association, its similarly dismissive assessment of parapsychology.

[Hurlyburly]

Anthony, I think that the fact your work can be criticised so thoroughly and have a summary such as the one below is a real testomy to all your hard work.

Peake’s Cheating the Ferryman theory challenges our traditional thinking on life, death, and possible thereafters, and will raise many questions in your mind. For example, does this multiverse theory apply to all animals, whether apes, mice, birds or fishes? It should do in principle as the final option is the same for them as it is for us. Alexander the Great must, surely, ride Bucephalus again. Does it really account for apparent mediumistic communication? Whatever your views I do urge you to read his two books because, whether his theory stands up to scrutiny or not, his ability to present and explain findings drawn from across the sciences and interweave them with fascinating case histories is truly impressive. Maybe Wikipedia needs to revise its somewhat dismissive assessment of his academic standing and, by association, its similarly dismissive assessment of parapsychology.

I agree, in particular, with this final statment.