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.