The Peake experience

Look out for a new author marking out his stamping ground in discussions about the metaphysical, paranormal and just plain weird stuff.

Anthony Peake is the perfect companion for people who love to speculate about all those things we haven't satisfactorily explained, and may never do so. He is a very twenty-first century heir to a tradition of ruminations on the nature of reality that goes back thousands of years. What makes Peake interesting is his ability to mix modern scientific knowledge and theory with ancient beliefs and philosophical positions.

If you haven't already encountered his misleadingly titled Is There life After Death  or The Daemon, and you're interested in exploring the evidence for Peake's claim that we never actually die, but actually go on repeating our lives over and over,  you could skip the rest of this blog and go straight to his: http://cheatingtheferryman.blogspot.com/ or his website , www.anthonypeake.com/ (and from the latter to his forum, in which various aspects of the Peake world view are discussed.

If you are familiar with the books or the ideas, I offer my own response to Is There Life After Death by way of contribution to the discussion.

As I read the book I was excited to discover that Peake had read several books which have been among my favourites. One was The Beginning of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of the Bicameral Mind. The others were An Experiment With Time by J. W Dunne and  The Death Of Forever by the late Darryl Reannie, who was born in New Zealand and later moved to Australia. Rather surprisingly, Peake mentions the Reannie book in passing but omits it from his bibliography. This is odd because Reannie is treading on similar Territory and making similar conclusions about their central subject of Time, and how it is perceived subjectively and scientifically. Reannie is also interested in the concept of parallel universes. We will speak more of Darryl Reannie in a  coming post - except to say that he makes fewer conclusions than Peake who appears to have decided that he has "proved" his hypothesis that none of us do die, despite appearances to the contrary (indeed the essence of Peake's theory is that death is something that happens to other people.

There are many threads in Peake's argument, which he tries to bring together at the end of his book. En route it's an interesting journey through the twilight zones of quantum physics, the science of the brain, and human experience, mostly documented by individuals and therefore "unproven."

Peake seems keen to prove that all of human experience takes place within the brain, which is in his view the seat of consciousness. But, in contrast with other materialists, Peake uses scientific evidence to argue that there is no death, as far as the individual is concerned. At the point of death, he argues, the chemicals in our brains which affect our perception of time slow that perception down to a virtual standstill. At this point our brains run through what he calls a Bohmian Imax (named for the physicist David Bohm) , creating a "virtual reality" replay of our entire lives. Everyone else watching us sees us die, but from our point of view we never do. 

I am of course oversimplifying a  theory that takes Peake several hundred pages to elucidate. But that is the nub of it. There are a number of  obvious queries that arise from it. The most obvious is the sheer solipcism of the whole thing. If  we are hallucinating our lives as we lie on the ground somewhere bleeding to death, what are we to make of the people with whom we imagine we are spending our lives ? How can they be anything more than 'sims'? If Peake or any of his followers sincerely believe that they are experiencing the Bohmian IMAX, how can they treat anyone else with the respect that a real human being might expect?

Peake claims to have dealt with this question in his book, but this reader at least didn't get it. At one point he brings in the concept of parallel universes, to suggest that when we die,  a new world branches off  in which we "escape" from the danger that kills us in one world. But this would appear to be a different road completely than starting our lives all over again "eternal return" style. Does he mean that we actually keep going on one road and start all over again on another? Peake claims somewhat annoyingly that parallel universes are a proven fact, but it's also a fact that a lot of physicists don't believe in them.

There are other problems. Do we always know when we are going to die, so that we can slow time down quickly enough (!) to live our lives over and over again? It is hard not to believe that there are many times in which sudden death would win the race with the brain chemicals. 

Peake argues that the "life review" which people who have near-death-experiences describe is proof of his theory. In my opinion, it's not. Descriptions of life reviews usually involve some sense of observation, whereas Peake's proposal involves a three-dimensional re-experience of one's whole life, repeated ad-infinitum.

On the other hand it must be said that Peake raises enough questions and highlights enough bizzare phenomena for us to at least be forced to admit that something is happening Mr Jones. Is There life After Death? is like a more erudite version of Ripley's Believe It Or Not. And his attempts at holism are admirable. He has since published another book, which I have not read, called The Daemon,  and he does say that he and a colleague are working on the original theory with a new line that seems to involve some sort of collective unconscious.

 How this would be sustained in his materialistic model of life I'm not sure. Peake rejects telepathy, ghosts, reincarnation and indeed anything outside the brain in  Is There Life After Death?, when I believe his model would be well-served by adopting the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake, and conceding that there are waves and fields which don't have a material existence and don't required the continued existence of brains to sustain them.

 

A Man And His Books Part Two

If knowledge hangs around your neck

like pearls instead of chains

you are a lucky man

 

from "Oh Lucky Man" by Alan Price

Alex has never stopped reading or collecting books, despite obstacles.  He moved to Alice Springs in the late sixties after numerous adventures in South America. Alex had left the church in Brazil, shortly after being ordained. His passion for books had achieved exactly what the church believed it would: an open mind. 

He began a series of  jobs, including working as an accountant on the Argentinian side of Tierra Del Fuego. Still single, Alex could think of nothing better in the world to do with his money than buy books. As he recounts in the videoed interviews accompanying this text, he made money by buying and selling gold dust collected by prospectors from the ocean shores ... and spent it all on books. As his book collection grew he carted it all over South America and eventually in crates to Australia. And still it grew. 

There are elements of compulsion and obsession in Alex's search. He is driven to search for answers, but is forever unsatisfied. Not only that, but any loss of memory and dimunition in his stores of knowledges causes him distress.

Despite abandoning organised religion, many of Alex's books are about theology and other religions. He subscribes to journals and annuals from the Jesuits and the Humanist Society. At one stage he embarked on a study of Prali - on top of the eight or nine languages he already had - so he could read original Buddhist texts.  He deplores Islam more than any other religions, but has read the Koran and numerous texts about it.  And although he ridicules religion,  at the end of his life he is frustrated that he is unable to say what he actually believes. Is he an atheist or an agnostic? More on that matter in a future blog.

I remember reading as a youth about the various paths open to the searcher. The path of knowledge, the path of experience, the path of devotion .. what were the others? The path of knowledge seems a lonely path,  although one meets many great minds.  But who is there to share it with?

Alex has a strange and wonderful mind.  His thirst for knowledge is so strong that it has a life of its own.  For a period of several months he was beset by bizarre hallucinations, which he described to me.  They consisted of hour-long or longer documentaries on subjects which he knew nothing about. One was about prostitution in China!  Alex's sensation was that these  "films" were mysteriously projected onto a screen "inside" his forehead.

For those who have lost their faith or never had it, it may be that we are compelled to acquire more and more knowledge in order to sustain interest in life and some sort of "happiness". I wonder if the reason that so many scientists seem to be agressively athestic is that they are sustained by this ongoing search for knowledge and the sense of excitement that it generates and snobbishly deplore other paths, such as devotion or experience. 

Of course not every scientist ends up like John Dawkins. Whether their excitement stimulates primarily a sense of wonder or one of power would seem to be a crucial difference among them. In some sense these two feelings can be considered opposites ... in the sense that wonder can be a positive experience of one 's own powerlessness.

I haven't asked Alex if he feels powerless. I guess he does, either often or mostly. He is beset by chronic pains: a benign growth in his stomach that should have been removed years ago, sciatica and arthritis, not to mention headaches, nightmares and random plagues. It is obvious that knowledge has not freed him from suffering. But his most painful moments are when he is unable to read, because of headaches, or recently because of his dry eyes, the cause of which is yet to be diagnosed by his doctor.

Ultimately I have to ask myself what I get from reading. My aversion to fiction is nowhere near as strong as Alex's, but I am also inclined to the same subjects as he is, which is why I am so happy to sit among his books. (In fact, just knowing that the books he has even exist makes me happy ... and more so that they exist in one place.)  In my own reading I experience both the power and the awe. Power of understanding, awe of amazement - as well as  befuddlement as I realise my tiny brain is unlikely to put all this together and hold it. Certainly not to remember it.

Just today I revisited another library .. that of my dad who died in the year 2000. My mother in law had kindly offered to keep them while we sorted out what to do with them, but now herself is concerned about what she should do with them.  When faced with this collection, much smaller than Prus's, but with its own potency, I find myself falling into a dither. Unless I were to retire now and take them with me to a cave, there is no chance that I could read all of them, but I find myself plotting how I could build a shed somewhere to store them. Could I let them go ... to Lifeline? To strangers, even the bin?

Most likely Prus will die close to his books, as my father did. You can't take it with you, not even knowledge. But, if in the process of accumulating knowledge, you have also gotten a little wisdom, is it possible the soul of your library will travel with you _ or at least sweeten your departure?

A Man And His Books Part One

A lot of sentimental nonsense has been said about books. But you have to admit they have something other media can't beat.

It's the package itself that is so enticing, with its promise of a hidden world more consistent and comprehensible than our own, fashioned by an intelligent creator and  contained between two small pieces of cardboard. For this we love the book as a form in itself, even before we begin to explore its contents.

Collections of books can enlarge that sense of mystery and promise, or betray it. What book lover has not felt cold and lost in a bookshop or library that fails to honour the authors, artists, editors and publishers who have created its contents? 

This honour is not simply a matter of efficiency - putting books in their right categories and keeping authors together. It's about choice, and character. The bookshop or library that tries to please everyone either becomes too meagre or too vast, and in either eventuality becomes nothing more than a collection of books. A great library reflects the soul of its owner or owners and has a collective story of its own.

Truly greater than the sum of its parts, the most wonderful library I have ever been in exists in a single bedroom public housing flat  in outback Australia. Its location is unimportant because wherever it was it would still create its own location, beyond time and space. Its story is of a man who has compulsively sought knowledge and meaning in his life. Raised to be a priest and forced to become a teenage resistance fighter, Alex's life story is one of both suffering and exploration, as he breaks free from the intense conditioning of the Catholic Church and discovers new worlds of philosophy, history, politics, science and religions.

Under his mother's tuition, Alex read his first books before he went to school, at the age of five. They were historical novels about Poland ... and among the very little fiction he has had time for.

As Alex's education progressed, much of it under Russian and German occupation, Alex's reading became increasingly limited to the confines of the Catholic Church. His mentor during the resistance was a Catholic priest, an intelligent and kindly man who nevertheless kept Alex on the straight and narrow road of the church, which proscribed the vast majority of books because they conflicted with its teachings. After the war, in a Polish seminary in Rome, Prus began tentatively exploring the world beyond, and by the time he was transferred to London he took on a job searching for unexploded mines in order to pay for his books.