The Daemon and Cheating the Ferryman with Anthony Peake

Music.

Hello and welcome to the Evolving Spiritual Practice Podcast. My name's Ralph Cree. My website is bodyheartmindspirit.co.uk for more information about my stuff. In this episode I spoke to Anthony Peake about his book, which you can see here in the background, I'll just grab, called The Daemon, A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self. By Anthony Peake. We also talk about some of his other work including his book called Cheating the Ferryman.

So Anthony has written a lot about some subjects which I had some personal experience with and that's how I got into his work.

I had a temporal lobe seizure which is a kind of epileptic thing where time goes weird and you get lots of deja vu and that kind of thing and a friend of mine had read his book and said oh you ought to listen to this reader's book because he speaks a lot about temporal lobe epilepsy and he's got this very interesting hypothesis he calls cheating the ferryman which in a nutshell is uh that we never fully reach the moment of death when we reach the end of our life we actually relive

our life again kind of groundhog day style um there's a lot more to it than that um but that's just kind of the one sentence version and then his work about the daemon is that we have another part of ourselves called the daemon, he calls it daemon, which has lived our lives over and over again and knows what's coming in a lot of instances, and that's what déjà vu is.

So we had quite a wide-ranging conversation, talked a lot about psychedelics like DMT and ketamine and near-death experiences and the kind of parallels with those things and he's a very interesting guy he's got an incredible memory he knows so much about so many things and I'll just read a little bit from his bio just so you get an idea of who he is, So at university he specialised in Sociology of Religion, the theory of language development and art of the Italian Renaissance.

A postgraduate course in management led Anthony away from his calling as a writer and into a career as a manager in various UK businesses. His interest in the esoteric continued with a growing fascination for quantum physics and neurology developing over the years. It was in the year 2000 that his life was to change.

A fortuitous set of circumstances allowed him to take a year sabbatical from his business career and he decided that he would focus the fruits of his all his reading and research into writing a book exactly one year later he resurfaced he surfaced with the manuscript of his first book then entitled cheating the ferryman this book was a distillation of all his areas of interest quantum physics neurology ancient myths alter states of consciousness and the mystery of death However.

It was to take five years before this work appeared in prints. Thanks to the help of Professor Bruce Grayson of the University of Virginia, an article based on Anthony's cheating, the Ferryman hypothesis was to appear in the winter 2004 edition of the Journal of Near Death Studies, the academic periodical of the International Association of Near Death Studies.

A few months later in early 2005 british publishing house arcturus brought the rights to the book and a year later and after a substantial rewrite anthony's first book with the new title is there life after death the extraordinary science of what happens when we die was published the rest as they say is history this book has now sold over 60 000 copies worldwide and has been translated into various foreign language editions including spanish russian and polish

indeed anthony has now had books published in every major european language he's written eight books co-authored a ninth and co-edited a tenth all of them develop his cheating the ferryman hypothesis into ever wider areas of application his approach has always been to apply science to the mysterious and the enigmatic so i hope you enjoy this wide-ranging. Interesting conversation with and his bold hypothesis which i find really really intriguing.

Anthony peak welcome to the evolving spiritual practice podcast i'm absolutely delighted and really looking forward to our discussion it's gonna be good so it's a great great pleasure to host you, uh understand your your people that know you call you tony so so right absolutely yeah i have this i have this sort of dual personality whereby tony is me the the ordinary humble normal guy and anthony's this egomaniac that gets on stages and storms around and does all things my wife hates,

seeing me perform as she says because i'm a very different person so yeah but i'm tony today yeah well i mean that actually ties in a little bit with what we're going to be talking about today that we are more than oneself so and you know it's a good good thing in life to be able to make make use of you know have to be versatile to to use more than one one one identity and so.

We're mainly going to be discussing today this book here which i'll just hold up to the camera which is called you've written called the do you pronounce it diamond or damon i pronounce it damon to just differentiate but diamond diamond when they spell it with the i tends to be the pronunciation of diamond but i present it i say it as damon okay i think that the correct pronunciation i think from my knowledge of greek okay so called the damon a guide to your

extraordinary secret self by anthony peak and i'd never heard of your work before until a couple of years ago and what the reason why i came across your work is i had something called a temporal lobe seizure so because an epileptic seizure so for those listening you haven't heard of a temporal lobe seizure i'd never heard of one it's a kind of mini epileptic seizure in the region of your brain called the temporal lobes which are to do with time perception and i'll get

into the the the experience i had in a bit to describe that but i so i had that experience. And there's another experience, which is slightly different, which I'll get into as well. But a friend of mine, when he heard that I'd had this experience, he said, oh, you need to read this book. I've just read this book by this chap, Anthony Peake, and it speaks a lot about temporal lobe seizures. So I thought, well, I had to be a little bit careful.

The temporal lobe seizure really freaked me out. It was, it was a very disorienting experience and there was a lot of, there was a, quite an unpleasant dimension to it. So I was not, I was like, I had to be quite careful afterwards to, I became a bit hypervigilant of deja vu synchronicities, these kinds of things. And I was like, I, I, so I kind of didn't rush into reading your book. I took my time. And then when I started reading it, I read it very slowly.

As soon as I felt like, well, this is too much, it's kind of bringing it all back up. I had to kind of like take, take my foot. So I read it very, very slowly over probably six months or something like that. So that's how I came across your, your work. And I've listened, you've got tons and tons of stuff on YouTube and podcasts and those kinds of things. So I've listened to quite a lot of that.

The first thing I wanted to say is that to set this, this up is I'm someone who will freely admit I have not got a clue what is going on in life. I just do not know. It's complete mystery to me. That's my kind of starting point with everything. But I have to say, I love a bold hypothesis and playing around with ideas. And I find your.

Your hypotheses which we're going to look at today what do you call them theories i i've different hypothesis or theories no i definitely don't call them theories i use very much the scientific definition of these things i would argue that it is at best a hypothesis or the hypotheses but this is just as much speculation as anything else in the sense that it is it is it is to a degree unproven scientifically in that it is virtually impossible to reproduce a lot of the

things I discuss under laboratory control, laboratory conditions. However, I will argue that the speculation and the hypotheses work when I interface with individuals like you, who through the phenomenological experiences you have had and the experiential experiences you have, your experiences prove and support totally the ideas I put forward in my model.

So for me, i tend to use the word probably hypothesis but even that i'm ill at ease but it's it's not a theory yet maybe one day in the future we'll find ways and means whereby we can do that but not at the moment yeah sure and i i mean i rec there was a an instant recognition when i came across your hypotheses and i was reading about them i was like there's a there was a recognition for sure and i think what you know one of the things that over the years i've.

Been kind of reoriented my view that going against the grain of my education and stuff that actually now take my direct experience and the direct experience of other people seriously you know we're kind of in the schooling in england and you know europe and america sort of the modern secular world we're very much trained to doubt our direct experience and which i think is a. There's a valid point there, but it's also a great mistake to discount your

own direct experience because really that's the main thing you've got in your life. Well, that's the central argument I use in a number of my books is that really everything we experience is subjective. Everything we experience is presented to consciousness by the brain or by something that internally models the external world and the stimuli that's coming in through our senses.

And anybody, you know, there is a term that is used by consciousness studies individuals and researchers called naive realism. And naive realism is the idea that there is somehow a one-to-one relationship between the stimuli or the qualia, to use a technical term, that my brain presents to my consciousness with what is actually out there.

Because we know from consciousness studies that, for example, the whole visual system that we see is created by the brain from a postage stamp inverted image on the retina, which is converted from photon electromagnetic energy into an electrical stimuli. Which goes through the optic nerve down to the darkest part of the brain. The place at the back of the brain. And there it takes those images and recreates that postage stamp inverted image and turns it into this three-dimensional world.

And then it's presented to whatever consciousness is. It's extremely peculiar isn't it the idea that there is something inside your head that is created from the interaction of energy and chemistry and everything else that somehow at its lowest level is not only inanimate but it is dead because they are chemicals and these chemicals somehow come together in some form of configuration that creates a sentient being that that has a history, has anticipations, has hopes and has dreams.

And of course, this is impossible. It is impossible as anything you can imagine. And yet, modern science readily just accepts this. It's hubris. It's the idea of, I think it was in 1994, a young American Australian, philosopher called David Chalmers stood up at the University of Arizona at a big consciousness conference and said, of course, modern science, there is the soft problem of science, which is how the brain functions. The hard problem is how it creates consciousness.

You know, as I've said in one of my books, is it just the addition of one quark? Is it the addition of one electron, one photon, and suddenly consciousness just suddenly downloads from nowhere? You know, it's extraordinary. And people never, I always find that people never think that back further back. In other words, you know, we have this beautiful materialist reductionist explanatory model of reality. And, you know, we know that it works because you also understand how a system

works. You take it apart bit by bit. And then by reducing it, materially reducing it, you understand how it functions. You can't do that with consciousness. You can't do that with the way the brain works.

You know, it's just not possible, really. really yeah well it's a it's a good it's a good that's a good place to start idealism is it's been quite a theme recently in my podcast and i mean we won't get get into that because that's quite a nuanced topic but yeah what you know what is constant the the fact that consciousness can never be made into an object of study you know truly that is that is a very very difficult problem for an objectively oriented discipline

like science so you know that's who knows i mean there's a maybe completely new way of approaching things which is utterly inconceivable to us now that we're but you know at the moment we are where we are well let's let's let's get into let's get into it so i thought it'd be good to start with a brief if you do a brief description description of this dyad between what you call the edelon and the diamond which is kind of two.

Main aspects of who we are I believe there is a sort of a third component that we might get into later in the conversation but just at the moment restrict it to those two and then how that links up with, your hypothesis which you call cheating the ferryman which was from an earlier book you wrote. And i think the challenge for you is is to make this into the kind of elevator speech, version because i i have had the experience of of setting this kind of thing up before.

In in a podcast and suddenly half the time's gone i will try and reduce it i think i'm like mission impossible you're you wish yeah if you if you wish to accept yeah in this you know you have to um succinctly describe your hypothesis in 10 minutes or less and this message will now destruct so ethan it's up to you yeah effectively very very quickly i would argue that the greatest mystery we have is what happens to human consciousness at the point of death it is the

ultimate victory mystery and it is something that has engaged philosophers scientists and many other people for for for millennia because inevitably we are all sentient beings that are going to die and the question is what happens at death because it's one thing we know for certain death and taxes are the two things that we know a certitude so i was very interested in this model But I was interested in coming up with a hypothesis that made rational sense to science,

something that couldn't be scientifically dismissed. Because so many of the models depend upon mysticism and the idea of spirit and everything else as well. But I wanted a model that scientists couldn't just diss in any way at all. And in fact, what they haven't done, they haven't dissed it. They've just completely ignored it. And I think that's probably the reason why it has been completely ignored, because it is so difficult to dismiss as a scientist.

So what I argue, and again, it is interesting, I use the analogy that when I came across my cheating the ferryman hypothesis. It was not my intention to come up with a hypothesis explaining life after death. I wanted to explain déjà vu. I wanted to explain what déjà vu was as a phenomenon and what caused it. And it was only through starting research, I felt I was rather like Schliemann when he was discovering Troy in the Hill of Hislok.

You know, Frederick Schliemann had an idea that Troy was somewhere probably in northwestern Turkey as it is now, but he didn't know where it was. So he arbitrarily picked this hill, started digging, and then he started to find all the different levels of Troy there. And I felt I was like that. I was excavating this hypothesis. I wasn't discovering it. I wasn't creating it. I was excavating it. And more and more information kept coming to me as I started to read up.

So I didn't start off with a model and think I'll go out and prove it. I did quite the opposite. I started out with no idea where I was going, and I ended up with this incredible, I believe, hypothesis that to me is totally revolutionary. Okay. So the model, basically, and this will then explain the Damon and the Adelon dyad and how that works. So you need the first model.

Now, again, just to explain, in 2020, I brought out a new version of all the new science that supported my hypothesis, which I actually called Cheating the Ferryman. And that That book came out in 2020. So if anybody's interested in the latest research supporting my ideas, you'll find that there. Okay. So. The first thing is that there's something called near-death experiences, NDE's. And in NDE's, there are certain traits that were put together by a guy called Raymond Moody.

And people, when they describe near-death experiences, that's close brushes with death, they describe certain things that are consistent. And some of them are really quite interesting. People, for instance, say that time seems to dilate when you get into a near-death experience. People seem to have what's called a panoramic life review, where they see, quote, my life flash before my eyes.

They also feel they have a sensation, an out-of-body experience, where they're floating above their body, looking down at their body. They also encounter a tunnel. They also go to another place, another reality that seems to be a facsimile of this one.

But they also deal and come across something called the being of light which seems to be an entity that manifests to assist the dying person in the transfer over to whatever comes after death and this model is very similar as you know from your work at so us and your work with anthropology Apology, it's very similar to the shamanistic worldview and the way in which the shamanistic guide appears to people when they're in shamanic traveling.

Also, when people have experiences with dimethyltryptamine and know they're in theogens. So there's a lot of these things. So what I suggest is, I started looking into this. Well, is there a neurological model that can be applied to this? And I was surprised to discover that, yes, there is. And it is neurological. The near-death experience is created by the brain, but that doesn't explain it. Just like when we were discussing earlier on, neurology cannot explain consciousness

in the same token. It's an experience. So people report that they have all these sensations and I started to pull it together and I thought, well, what could this mean? And I was particularly interested in this idea of my my life flashing before my eyes. So I started looking into the processes of memory, how memory is processed, how the brain encodes memory. And I was surprised to discover that according to the latest research, it seems that memory works holographically.

It seems it's not located in one place in the brain. It's located everywhere in the brain.

And it's processed almost non-locally to use a quantum physics term in there seems to be instantaneous communication across various areas of the brain which funnily enough has recently been proven in some research that was done at the university of sussex about three or four years ago which we might touch a little bit upon but the place i went to university actually briefly oh really it's just down the road from here so i'm i live in west sussex so lovely location lovely location so the the so,

neurologically what's taking place because people when they have these panoramic life reviews interviews seem to be catapulted right back into a recreation of an element of their past where they say you know i saw my whole life flash before my eyes but some people argue that they don't just have their own flash before their eyes they actually relive those moments and i do my background research i cite a lot of the work of a guy called wilder penfield who was an american stroke Canadian,

well, he was based in Canada, but he was an American neurosurgeon who in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s did a series of experiments on the exposed brains of individuals, mostly. Epileptics, because they were wanting to model what happened in the brain when somebody had a seizure and such like.

And what he found was that if he placed, what he knew was that the brain doesn't feel pain so you can expose the cerebral cortex of a person with local anesthetic and you can stimulate the surface of the brain using it with a small electric pen and it will put an electric charge into the surface of the brain and it will make people feel things they'll see colors they'll see lights and he was able to describe an homunculus which shows which parts of the brain

generate which senses which was interesting but he worked his way around to the brain till he got to the temporal lobes. And when he placed the electrode onto the exposed temporal lobes of people, he was able to evoke past life memories, three-dimensional holographic past life memories, which were evoked instantaneously. When you say past life memories, do you mean autobiographical memories, or are you talking about memories of what seemed to be like different lives?

No specific autobiographical memories specific autobiographical design my model can explain that as well yeah but at that time they were purely autobiographical for instance there was one classic example where he places the electrode on this woman's brain and she goes oh my god i'm back in my kitchen 20 years ago or whatever and she could hear a conversation her next door neighbors were having literally word for word then she see here's her son calling her

and what penfield did is he took the electrode off the exposed temporal lobes this person and she said what did you just do it stopped and he distracted her spoke about her son and then without her knowing he placed the electrode back on the same point and took her back to the point again she said what did you just do the memories are back again now towards he reproduced this many many times and towards the the end of his career,

he argued that the human brain actually records every single sensation we have, but we can't access it. And as Penfield said, what is the principle of the brain using all this processing power to have memories that we can't recall? As you know, we have episodic memories. We have what's called charge memories.

These are sometimes where suddenly you'll be walking along the street and then suddenly for no reason whatsoever you're catapulted back to a period of your past and you just remember it and it's normally completely arbitrary it's not a moment in your past whereby somebody gave you news that your family had died it's normally a really prosaic incident in your past now esther salomon who was a russian psychologist call these things charged memories and in fact in

her book she her book is called a series of moments which is about how life is just a series of moments that are linked by our life narrative. They concluded that we seem to remember everything, but we can't access it under normal circumstances. Now, we know that these memories can be accessed using hypnotism because, for instance, in the book, I cite evidence from people taking hypnotic regression, where they can regress somebody back to a point in the past.

Like, for instance, I did an event last year and I will be doing another event in the Coachella Valley in California in a few weeks' time. And there was an incident that took place there, I think in 1973, where a group of school kids were hijacked and the driver was kicked out the bus and the bad guys drove these kids out into the desert and they buried the bus and kept the kids in the bus, which is an aside story.

But they needed to find out more about the what happened during the incident because they had the driver they hypnotized the driver back to the time when he was driving the bus and the driver was able to recall the car coming in front and recall the number plate of the car and from the number plate they were able to then go find out and rescue the kids now this means again that we have memories that are there and are active, but we can't access them.

So keep that in mind. So we have all our life memories in three dimensions that can be recreated like a simulation, like a virtual reality version of your life that you really think you're living it again. Now, the other thing I said in near-death experiences were that people have panoramic life reviews where they see their life flash before their eyes. Then we have the issue I I mentioned about time slowing down during incidents of fear or great stress.

Like I cite a lot of examples of the work of a guy called Albert Heim, who was a mountaineer in the 1890s in Zurich. And he did research on people who'd fallen off mountains, mountaineers who'd survived. And the vast majority had panoramic life reduces as they were falling. They nearly all reported they saw their past life in detail.

Tale so i thought to myself wait a minute what if when we if we link all these things the time slows down and it slows down to such an extent that in the final second of your life you could live a whole lifetime so imagine you know final second is 20 years now the reason i mentioned this again is a great instant interest to you i would imagine is the reason i came to this conclusion was, again, I have a term called serendipity.

Or synchronicity, sorry, whereby circumstances just seem to come to me when I need somebody, they appear in my life and they will give me information I need. And it's a really true story. I was working home in Horsham where I was living at the time. And I'd started writing the book and I didn't know where I was going with it. And I got particularly interested in Deja Vu. The phone rings, pick up the phone and it's a recruitment consultant.

Now I work at, or I used to work as and management consultant, compensation and benefits. And this lady phoned up, she was from an agency and she said, Tony, I don't know if you're available for work, but I've got a potential contract for you that you might be interested in. And I said, well, yes, I'd love to be, but I'm taking time out because I'm writing a book.

And she said, what are you writing about? And I said, well, I don't know where I'm going with it at the moment, but I'm really fascinated by temporal lobe epilepsy at the moment. It seems to be the driving thing is I'm focusing in on the neurochemical correlates of temporal lobe epilepsy. And she went really quiet and she said, can we meet up for a coffee? And I said, yes. And I met her at the Copthorne Hotel near Gatwick Airport.

And I met her and I walked in, she bought me a cup of coffee and she said, I couldn't mention in the office, but recently I've been diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy and everything you were telling me I've experienced. And I said, please tell me, how did you first discover it? and this is just extraordinary. She said it was the most weirdest event of her life. She was going to see a business client and she was in their canteen. And the business client went up, bought some tea, sat down.

And as the business client's sitting opposite the table, my friend who I call Margaret, it's a pseudonym, and Margaret is sitting and she feels a snap over her ear. And she looks out and the other woman had stopped moving. She'd literally stopped stop moving and she could hear this low humming sound and then she's looking around she's going what the hell has happened and then she looks at the other woman again and she realizes she hadn't stopped she was moving incredibly slowly.

And she said to me, and this was so important, she said to me, I watched as the tea came out the teapot, the spout, came down really slowly. I saw the surface tension as the tea hit the surface of the cup. And she said, I could have been there for days, weeks, months, years, a lifetime. I have no idea how long I was away for.

Then there was a snap over her ear. the person continued pouring the tea looked back and said are you okay she'd had a petty malabsence she'd been away for 0.5 of a second but she said it could have been a whole lifetime and then i turned around to her and i said and i just so you must be my daemon which will explain nation i must i turned around i said do you get deja vus and she said my god i get deja vus to die for and i thought her wording was fascinating and

she said i have deja vus that i know what's going to happen in for the next two seconds maybe and i'll come back to that later so i then put that together and i thought maybe when we die we go into a temporal lobe seizure whereby time dilates and the last second of your life could be a lifetime so what would fill a whole lifetime panoramic life review view so what if the panoramic life review that near-death experiences have is literally

a fast forward of a recording of your life because everybody says i saw it flash in front of my eyes. Imagine that in a real death experience the life doesn't flash it's literally a minute by minute recreation of your life from the moment of your birth to the moment of your death or your death circumstances. So what evidence would we have that when you're living that second life, that that's true? And I'd argue we have absolute evidence for it.

70% of the population of this planet have evidence for it. It's called déjà vu, or more accurately, déjà vécu, already lived. Because if you are living your life again in a simulation of your life, there will be times when you'll come across a set of circumstances that you've lived before that you remember from your previous life. That's a déjà vu. It's exactly what it says on the tin. It's exactly what people describe when they say, I felt that I'd been there before.

I had done this before and maybe many, many times. Now, what is even more intriguing is that I have people who who have contacted me subsequently that not only have deja vu sensations as part of their pre-aura seizure of people who have migraine and people who have temporal lobe epilepsy, but also these individuals tell me they know what's going to happen next. And there's one young guy who is literally a rocket scientist who contacted me. And he said to me, he has a tumor on his pineal gland.

And he said he had deja vus whereby he knows what's going to happen for the next next 10 or 15 seconds. I then asked him and said, well, why don't you do something? Why don't you say something? And he said something very pertinent. He said, if I did, I'd change the future. And he said to me, he said, for instance, if I'm having a deja vu now, and I know what you're about to say next, if I turn around to you and say, this is what you're going to say, you're not going to say it.

You'll say something completely different. So I've changed the future. And this is when I stopped bringing in Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, The idea of multiple universes, the idea of Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog's top-down hypothesis of quantum mechanics and cosmology. So the evidence is that we live our lives again. Now, again, I used to do a regular radio program on BBC Radio Merseyside, and I did a program on Deja Vu, and somebody phoned in.

This is fascinating. fascinating somebody phoned in live and they said what that person's talking about on the radio is so true and then what happened this guy he was watching tv and he knew what was going to be said next on the television and he walked out of the living room left his wife in the living room walked out the living room and then he had a glass front door and he said he watched somebody walk past and somebody walked past again and then he went upstairs and realized he could prove.

That he was perceiving the future so what he did was and it's fascinating he went back downstairs and stood outside of the living room door until he knew what his wife would say when he walked in through the door wrote it down on a piece of paper folded it walked it in she said the words and he handed her the piece of paper that to me is absolute evidence. If ever you needed it, that déjà vu can be precognitive. Not all déjà vus are precognitive, but some of them can be.

So we then have the idea we're living our lives again and again and again, because I argue at the end of the second life, the same thing happens. So what happens in reality is we cheat the ferryman. We never die. You know, the old Greek legend is that you have an oboli, which is a small coin that was placed under the tongue of the corpse or over the eyes of the the corpse. That was to pay Charon the ferryman, to take you over as a shade into the land of the dead, the Elysian fields.

And you had to pay the ferryman. I believe you cheat the ferryman. We all cheat the ferryman. We never get there. We never pay him. And again, it's fascinating that in Greek legend, when you went the other side, you could also go back and live your life again. You had had to drink from what was called the river of forgetting, the river Lethe, and you would drink water, which would wipe all your memories clean, and you'd go back and live your life again.

So this is a known thing, and it's been known throughout history. So what I then argue is we live our lives over and over again. And at the end of each life is then in a smaller piece of time, you live your life again.

But it gets more complex than that. And this is where we bring the daemon in because i use the analogy of a third person computer game okay remember years ago lara croft you'd pay tomb raider what happens is you start tomb raider you switch the computer on and imagine a virtual reality version of tomb raider where you know you're lara croft on the screen but you can also see around okay switch on lara croft is born she's what i call an edelon.

She's living the first life her consciousness has just started at the point of her birth or when the machine pitch switches are on you make her as the game player run down a corridor go into a room a big monster comes out and kills her so what happens in the gameplay then you start the game again don't you your on-screen entity has died your edelon has died and you start the game again and you start her life again as a brand new edelon who has no memory of her previous

experiences but you as the game player now have some memories of the previous life so you guide the edelon on screen to not go into that room where the monster is and you go down another corridor and you get eaten by another monster come back to the start this i believe is what is life life is a virtual reality simulation of your life that contains the The outcome of every single decision you can possibly make, it's already programmed in there.

And again, if people are going to be turning around and say, oh, this is utter kike, it's quantum mechanics. It's exactly Stephen Hawking in his top-down hypothesis, the last paper he wrote, he argued that everything that can happen is already programmed in to the universe digitally, mathematically. And all we do is we collapse the wave function of the particular reality that will anticipate and accommodate our decisions.

Now, again, if you know from quantum mechanics, all subatomic particles are either waves or particles. And when they're a wave, they are a statistical wave. They don't have any tangible existence. They are a mathematical statistical wave until they are observed.

And when they're observed or measured, the physicists call it collapsing the wave function, which is men means a an anticipatory potential becomes a point particle located in one position or another i believe this is how consciousness reacts to the external reality it it creates it collapses the wave function to fulfill your decision so your decision now might be this tony pete he's talking a load of rubbish and you get up and you storm off and you create a new reality now

now moving back imagine the scenario that you're dying and you're playing your game as an edelon the part of you that is your game player that remembers you've lived this before is your daemon your daemon is your immortal you your daemon is the version of you that's outside of the game that plays each game and each game it learns more about your life and each game it It knows more about its environment, and it can move the edelon to new lives, to new locations.

I mean, I'd argue, for instance, there'll be people out there, and I'm sure you've had that sense, and you meet somebody for the first time, and you know them. And you know they're going to have a great influence on you for good or evil. And there's this little voice in your head that's going, stay away from this person or try and find this person out. And occasionally we have glitches in the matrix where we remember or what actually I argue it's to do again with the structures of the brain.

Brain deja vu is effectively you as an edelon edelonic consciousness which ordinarily is in the in the dominant hemisphere of the brain accesses the the the the information field available to the daemon which is in the in the non-dominant hemisphere it's like feedback going across the corpus callosum and you suddenly get this memory and sudden recognition and you're You're accessing your own higher self's thought patterns.

So the daemon and the adelon are both you. In fact, the immortal you is the daemon. Now, where do I get these terms from? The daemon and the adelon are specific terms I use. They are from ancient Greek, which then moved into the Gnostics, which were a schismatic Christian group in the first few centuries after the death of Christ.

They had the concept of the daemon and the adelon. they argue that you have your own immortal self and you have this self that just lives life linearly they're the terms they used edelon comes from the greek edos or edelos which means icon same root word as in icon as in iconography and edelon is literally a facsimile copy and it's a facsimile copy of the immortal you which is the daemon now again in my book the daemon as you know, I discuss in great detail how

this model can be found in virtually every single culture on the planet. And in fact, not only this, but this model is the thing that people in esoteric teachings are taught. I've had access to a lot of magical groups, groups that do magic, you know, proper magic.

And they've approached me and said, my God, do you know your book has actually explained our models there's a group called the servants of the light as an example this is something that is known this is something that has been known for millennia and i'm writing about it now but i'm linking it now to science and i am the only person on the planet that's doing this and that's why i'm ignored well okay so well done for laying that out like that that's you've done a good job there

so in people people listening are watching this they've they've got this this is the context i'm talking about and a couple of things say you know to mention. Know from my own experience one of the things that i you know rep when i came across your work some of the things that seem unusual about it like this thing about time you know the very very subjective.

Nature of time that subjectively you can experience eternity in a moment there was a time in my life where i was quite into using ketamine and now that lasts about 10 minutes maybe 20 20 minutes maximum and at the end of it you're completely back to normal but within that, 10 20 minutes you are completely transformed it was you know it was the first time i had ever completely disappeared but still been there you know everything in the external world had gone completely apart from

light it's just sort of this really gorgeous light and i was there and still there and it was all very very peaceful and stuff i mean i've had also had experience where i've seen all sorts of bizarre things as well you know you do see things but it's ketamine is very unlike any other psychedelic it's had someone describe it if they're psychedelics were kind of family this is the kind of weird uncle you know that like i don't know radagast in lord of the rings you

know that kind of crazy wizard that's got hair full of bird poop and stuff. And so you know if i talk about one particular incident i it's quite a nice thing to put on music when you do ketamine music's incredible on ketamine and I put on a piece of music that I knew lasted about 18 minutes and I experienced it it's I mean it felt like eternity it's just absolutely eons eons of time.

But then I, you know, when it was all over, I knew it had only been 18 minutes maximum because of the length of the song. So I, you know, I know that you subject your own direct experience to time can be so massively changed that that's, you know, part of your hypothesis.

Well, what is it? It makes sense. I want to put him very much for a second and you continue, but ketamine, There was a neurophysiologist at the Maudsley Hospital who, in the late 90s, wrote a paper on ketamine and its association with the near-death experience. And he argued that although ketamine is a horse tranquilizer, effectively, and is synthetic, its chemical structure is very similar. It works with the NMDA receptors in the brain. And he argued, Carl, oh, I can't think of his surname now.

It'll come to me. And it was a very influential paper because he was the first person to argue that the near-death experience has so many similarities with the ketamine experience. And it's extraordinary. And in my latest book, which I'm literally finishing the next day or two, I focus in on this in greater detail, you know, the neurophysiological aspects of this.

This so ketamine i mean people have told me you know you have power and you have panoramic life you have time freezing you have all these incredible sensations that make you realize that the brain processes reality and certain substances can then play around with that processing and open up all kinds of vistas that you are not aware of and to just argue it's an hallucination i wrote a book called opening the doors perception a few years ago and i argued you know what people

turn around and say and dismiss it and say it's it's an hallucination that explains nothing it's a label i call it the labeling theory of science the idea give it a nice name make it latin or greek and it sounds even more impressive in fact i call it idiomatic idiomatic science.

In that you know if you have idiot you know idiomatic my brain's gone there yeah it but it's the idea that if you have an illness that has idio idiomatic on it on the front what the doctors are actually saying is they don't understand it they have no idea what it is and it's the same with hallucinations you know we until we know what a hallucination is, how can we say that hallucination is is anything but an alternate perception that's an alternate reality yeah

that the brain is processing you know we we argue that the definition of an hallucination is that it's sure it's one person but if two people share a hallucination they've got a wonderful term for that they call it a folio dirt yeah going back to your what you know you were talking about naive realism at the beginning of this conversation i mean idiopathic that's the word idiopathic yes that's right yeah you know when thinking contemplating things like naive realism most of

everything is a hallucination anyway so so i think what i'll do is uh if i i'll just describe my temporal lobe seizure because it kind of ties in quite a lot with this stuff so as i said i'd never heard this happens a couple of years ago i'd never heard of temporal lobe epilepsy or those kind of seizures didn't even know we had a part of the brain called the temporal lobe.

But i have had a lot of deja vu in my life tons of it you know and some really like long ones where you I mean right almost where you feel like oh I you could just describe what's just oh this is yeah but you never quite gets on the tippy tongue, interesting my wife said she's never she's never experienced deja vu so I. You know, I don't know what it's like. She's not done that because she's a first timer. Maybe. She's lived a wonderful, virgin life. People don't have Deja Vu.

30% of people don't experience it. Right. So I think when you've, I wonder what it's like, because I don't know what it's like to have never experienced Deja Vu, but for anyone listening or watching, if you've never experienced Deja Vu, it's not like you vaguely feel like this moment's happened before.

Is actually you know this has happened before and it's unfolding and you're just completely awestruck it's just the most extraordinary thing so there's nothing metaphorical about it and the word deja vu has become quite you know if something happens again you know you're back in the the same pub having the same conversation with somebody like oh deja vu we're back here you know it's become quite lax in common parlance but we're talking a strict here as well to make a differential.

Is that that is not that person the version they use there is not deja vu the definition of deja vu which was put forward by a guy called oh you see he's he's based in seattle it'll come to me again vernon nepe and vernon nepe is professor vernon nepe and i'm paraphrasing it now but the definition of deja vu is a memory of an event or a series of events that took place in an undefinable period in your past so in other words

it's undefinable in other words you can't remember oh we're back in the pub again specifically you don't remember where you remember it from and And that's so important. So please go on. Yeah. I've also, since the age of 19, had regular classic migraines where you get the kind of shimmering rainbow lattice. Where you get the break down of the stoma. The first time that happened to me when I was 19, you know, this little thing appeared and then it just grew.

And all of a sudden, half of my visual field had disappeared. And it was just a shimmering lattice of rainbow colors. And I just, I said to my friend, oh, this is weird things happening. And he said, oh, in about an hour, you're going to get a really bad headache. And I was like, yeah, whatever. And then I did, and I've had them about four a year ever since then.

And I think stress is a trigger, but one of the things I was talking to a doctor, friend of mine about temporal lobe seizures and an epilepsy, and she said, they're kind of like. The migraines are like baby versions of this. It's on a continuum. Yes, it's what I call, again, I'm sorry I keep jumping in here. In my book, Opening the Doors of Perception, I present what I call the Huxleyian spectrum.

And the Huxleyian spectrum explains very precisely the neurological correlates of classic migraine as the classic migraine moves into a temporal lobe epilepsy. Temporal lobe epilepsy then at its extreme levels moves into schizophrenia.

For you and there are overlapping areas for each of them where you're experiencing and what is happening is i argue that the doors of perception being open more and more each each level triggers now again i work with and have worked with many years now a number of temporal people who experience i always try to use the term people who experience temporal over epilepsy and one of them is a guy called myron dial who's a very famous american

artist and he has been experiencing temporal lobe epilepsy since he was six years old. And by the way, he has a daemon, and his daemon is called Charon, which we'll discuss later, because I also argue that what you're doing is when you're on the Huxleyian spectrum, your doors of perception are opening and the daemon is more imminent in your life. The daemon can more instruct because it can manifest more. I also argue, and I'm bringing into here autism, Gershwin syndrome.

And what's the other thing that I think is particularly relevant to this is is dementia and alzheimer's my my mum has really advanced alzheimer's at the moment i mean she's had it for about eight eight years i think she's pretty much at the end of her life we're kind of expecting her to to die yeah i don't know in a in a few months or something like that as well yeah yes i know i'm reading your book your mum had alzheimer's yeah so going back there's a it's a funny there's a there's such a

so many synchronicities with reading your book it's a bit a bit crazy really so yeah the the other experience i will get into after describe this one is i've had a couple of schizophrenic experience thankfully short-lived schizophrenic episodes so i'm i'm i'm right along your spectrum of yeah Yeah. So going back to the TLE. Yes. So the temporal lobe epilepsy. And the classic migraine. Yeah. Classic migraine. Never heard of these temporal lobe epilepsy things, but I had a lot of deja vu.

So I was cooking supper, started having deja vu, didn't think much of it because, you know, that had happened quite a lot before, but this didn't stop. And I started to think, you know, I don't know, this is a little bit weird. And I was, you know, I'm making supper for my wife and kids, took it out to them. And I said, I've been having deja vu now for like five minutes nonstop. And they were like, okay, all right. And then, and I said, I mean, I'm okay, but it's just a bit weird.

And then, you know, I was eating my supper, didn't stop. I play a musical instrument called a Cora, which is an African harp lute instrument, started playing that kind of to calm me down, I think, but it didn't stop. And I had 30 minutes of nonstop deja vu, which that was pretty disconcerting. And then I had this period of just, it was like a cascade of memories.

So you know that feeling where you're remembering a dream, you suddenly remember the dream you had last night, you know, oh, wow, I was doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I call it a cascade because it almost felt like I was downloading just so rapidly, tons and tons of memories, hundreds of memories. But they all had that flavour of remembering a dream. It was like remembering a dream I'd had. That was the flavour of it.

And most of them were not autobiographical. They had nothing to do with my life. Completely unfamiliar scenes and things. And it wasn't like I was remembering bits of my life, which is odd. And also some of them were abstracts. Things like abstract patterns and things that had the flavour of remembering things, which was going as really weird. Then I, and apparently this is, I learned later on, this is a classic symptom of temporal labour epilepsy.

I felt like the world was going to end any second. They call it the sense of impending doom. I mean, I was certain that, I'm not talking about like a nuclear bomb.

I'm talking about the fabric of reality ripping apart type of thing i and it was not a nice feeling i was kind of bracing myself for this really worried about my family and you know everyone i loved it i was like oh my you know but i didn't quite know how to i just i think i was saying i think something like really i probably didn't say that like didn't want to worry my kids but it was a horrible feeling and this is when i said earlier that i was a bit kind of shaken up by this experience,

all the deja vu and the weird memories and all that stuff, were disconcerting, but this was the thing that really freaked me out was that feeling that this, everything's going to end right, you know, in the next minute. Then I had this surge of rush through my body. It went down, whoosh, through my body. And I suddenly was like, oh my God, I'm going to throw up. And I ran to the toilet, nothing, I wasn't actually sick, nothing came out.

And so I was left at the end of this experience. The whole thing was like sort of 30, 35 minutes or whatever. I didn't know what on earth had just happened. And I just said, I've got to go and lie down and just kind of relax. Cause I just had this experience. I don't quite know what, what on earth it was.

When I was lying down, my wife sent me a message saying that she'd looked up on Google and found this thing called temporal lobe epilepsy, and she said, it sounds exactly like my mom's my wife's a real researcher she always loves getting on and looking things up and i was reading these descriptions these people i was like whoa, that's exactly what happened so then i phoned a doctor went to see a neurologist talked to him had an mri scan epilepsy one of

the tests where you know where you wear electrodes all over your scalp for 24 hours and those kind of things nothing came up thankfully you know i didn't have any of those i didn't have a brain tumor or those kind of things which was you know i was a bit worried i had that something like that so yeah and then this this friend of mine i was told them about that they they said oh you should read this book you know that you'd written the diamond damon,

and as i say you know i put off because i became hyper vigilant of deja vu because as you say the deja vu is an aura of a seizure. And for those listening, an aura is when you're about to have a migraine or a seizure, you start to, some phenomena happens like with the, with the migraine, you get the shimmering thing in your visual field. At that moment, if I take a couple of paracetamol and lie down in a dark room, I can actually stop a migraine from happening. I've got to act really early on.

So when I was having deja vu, I was like, oh man, is this going to turn into a seizure? and I became honestly quite paranoid about déjà vu. And since then, I've actually, I've had quite a lot, some, some large deja vu moments where it's felt like, Ooh, now this could, this could go into a seizure. But what I do is I, I reckon in that moment, if I just stop everything I do, go and relax somewhere and it doesn't go any further. So that was, that's my, my temporal lobe seizure.

You know a lot of other the descriptions I read in your book for example you know some people have some really awesome experiences with temporal lobe epilepsy epilepsy and they they have all sorts of blissful experiences I wouldn't say my it was like that was more kind of interesting but it had this horrible flavor of doom to it but there you go that's that's my my seizure there There were so many important points you were making there.

I mean, I have suffered, for want of a better term, classic migraine most of my life. And like you, I get the scotoma, I get the breakdown in my visual field, and I get the sensation of deja vu. And I sense I know what's going to happen next as soon as this starts. And I don't know about you, but I get tingling in the end of my fingers. Which is really weird, and tingling in my lips. And I just know. No, but I haven't had a headache for years.

It is literally, I just get the aura. So I now have classic migraine with aura and that's it. But it's one of the points you were making there I thought was particularly fascinating was the tuning in, and this leads us into the broader hypothesis now, the tuning in to other information that isn't part of your autobiographical memory that happens. For instance, once when I was in an Aura state, I was at work and I was working on the computer and suddenly...

I'm looking down at an elderly man reading a newspaper, and I realize I'm sitting in a tree about 20 feet above him, and then I hear a siren, and I look up, and it's this huge square, and I instinctively knew it was somewhere in Latin America, probably Buenos Aires, and there was an ambulance. I can see it in my mind's eye now, and there was an ambulance going along the

edge of the square. And then I came to, and it's like a hypnagogic image or a hypnopompic image where you go, well, what the hell was that? And then two weeks later, it was even weirder. I'm again working, and I'm looking up through a glass table at an elderly woman with dyed pink hair, and she's got a cup of tea, and she's putting the tea down on the table. And I can see through the table her putting the tea down, as if I'm a cat or something looking up.

Now this intrigued me because i thought what am i tuning into here and i experience quite regularly as i will guarantee you do and i guarantee a lot of people do hypnagogic imagery and hypnopompic imagery so hypnagogic imagery is just before you go to sleep you will see imagery normally it's faces in profile and they will turn and they may speak to you they may look at you and it kind of hits you in your kind of periphery sensor sensorium because you don't even necessarily appreciate

mentally it's happening you see it but you don't mentally appreciate and the moment you put your attention onto it it fades so you have to allow it to draw out now i've discussed this with a guy called andreas mavromatis who wrote the definitive book called hypnagogia he's a greek psychologist and his book is well worth reading it's absolutely extraordinary and it explains in great detail how hypnagogic imagery works.

But when you're seeing this, you are glimpsing as if you are attuning into somebody else's life, somebody else's world. Now, one of the major critics, I am going somewhere with this, by the way, I'm not off on a tangent. One of the major criticisms of my work is that people say your hypothesis of life after death cannot accommodate past life. Cannot accommodate hypnotic regression to past lives and past life memories.

Memories and it can't because if you're living your life over and over again you wouldn't you won't have past life memories because you've only ever been you but my new developing model which is within the new within the book cheating the ferryman is i argue and this to do the science that this is more difficult but i argue that there is the the the daemon well there's the on which lives one life then there's the daemon that lives multiple lives and plays

the game till it lives the perfect life and when it manages to live the perfect life it moves on to something else just like connor's does in groundhog day when he lives the perfect day yes such a good film i watched that with my kids just the other day i i interviewed funnily enough this is a great aside story the guy that wrote that book it's a guy called danny rubin people turn around and say it's the guy that did ghostbusters he didn't he adapted it from a story written by

a guy called gary rubin who's a lecturer at harvard and gary took the the his idea to the studios and then the guy from ghostbusters came along and wrote the story so it's not his original story but and again he i've interviewed him and he explained that he came across like my work like you did. And he gave a copy of my book to all his friends for Christmas about 15 years ago. Because he said, this is the guy that's done the science of Groundhog Day.

And in fact, the Russian edition of my first book is called Groundhog Life. It's amazing. But the idea is that, of course...

Shall I just say, people might be thinking this, that when you were talking about living one's life again, your life over and over again, you know the question might be people are asking well where does that lead and you were saying until you get a better and better version of your life until that's until what because in in groundhog day he relives it over and over again till he just becomes a super awesome person and then one day he wakes up and it's the next day and

his life moves on so in your hypothesis where is this all heading that's that is an area i i i have difficulty in going to because i genuinely don't know yeah what i what i'd like to believe is is that it it is akin to but not the same as the buddhist concept whereby over multiple lives you become an avatar but not an avatar a buddhist savra whereby you have lived the perfect life and then you can choose to go back into your life to help others. That would be an advanced person.

Of course, this all takes place in what the Tibetan Buddhists would call the Bardo state. Of course, I argue that when you have all these multiple lives, it's like the Bardo state. In my new book, I do the anthropology of it and the anthropology of near-death experiences. It's very equivalent to the Bardo state. You live the life many, many times till you live the perfect life. Then you're allowed to move on. And I argue you're then allowed to move on to whatever you anticipate will be next.

I was talking to a friend earlier on today about this. I call this egregorial life. Again, I'm off on a tangent, one of my other books now, but I have a concept, what I call the egregorial, which is the mind created fanaron, the mind created reality that is external to us that we project outwards.

And it was a guy called an american philosopher called charles pierce that came up with the concept of the fanaron and remember i was saying before about we collapse the wave function of our anticipations i believe we do that all through our lives we are you we are anticipating and creating the world around us as is everybody else so it doesn't mean you you can influence everything because everybody's co-creating it so when you die properly because remember at the end in the end the

ground groundhog lives at the end when you got all these hundreds and hundreds and as Danny Rubin told me he said his original plan was 6,000 lives I think that he was supposed to live 6,000 days and do it again and again and over and over so at the end you then move on to what you anticipate is next so if your your fan are on and your worldview means you go to the Christian heaven you will experience the Christian heaven if you believe in reincarnation

you will be reincarnated as somebody else it's all it's all a fact and how i explain this is is now moving on.

Because i argue that above the daemon is another consciousness which i call the uber daemon, And the uber daemon is my equivalent of the Jungian collective unconscious. It is the information field that holds all the data and information for everybody's lives, everybody's multiple lives, everybody's multiple lives all through history. And that itself is an entity.

And what happens is when you have past lives and you go back into earlier lives in other centuries, you're bypassing demonic consciousness which is your lives and you access total consciousness of humanity the oceanic consciousness and that consciousness is is where all that information is held i then argue that above that is a concept i call the godemon and the godemon is the or ain't sof that you have in the kabbalah it's the concept of brahman you know within hinduism and vedanta it's

the consciousness that is everything it is the consciousness field that creates the universe it is the consciousness field of the universe and certain advanced human beings can actually access that information field where they have total knowledge and people talk about this you know, where they suddenly feel they know everything. And for a split second, it's what Yahya Bomei used to talk about. You know, an EVE famous line, you could go insane by just looking at a pewter dish.

You know, the idea that the insanity leads here because we, our brains cannot take in all that information. But what I argue is that people who have temporal lobe epilepsy can access demonic consciousness of their own lives, but also can leech in to the uber daemon. Thank you. But when you get schizophrenia, you're accessing the mental capacity and the information field of the uber daemon and maybe even the godemon.

And it literally drives you crazy because the information is just flooding in from everywhere and you cannot handle it. Again, Rainer Johnson, who was an English physicist who became schizophrenic when he he was older, he came up with this wonderful analogy. And he said, becoming schizophrenic is like you've lived your life in one of those Irish round towers. And you've lived in the top of the tower and you have five windows that you look through, which are your five senses.

When you acquire schizophrenia, it's like you've found a trap door in the roof and you've climbed through and you're looking out at realities it really is.

And of course, we know from autism, we know this is the major problem autistic children have it's called the wild world syndrome, it's because if the information is coming in so great they go hysterical they scream they shout it's a guy again there's an american psychiatrist who's come up with this hypothesis called it the hyper world syndrome and i argue then the same happens with alzheimer's disease what happens in Alzheimer's disease,

as you know, is that the neurons of the brain are being destroyed by things called amyloid plaques, which get in the brain, and they literally explode the neurons. And by exploding the neurons, I argue they're opening that consciousness to a much wider information field. And that's why people, when they have Alzheimer's, they start to be rather like people who hold autism. They start to have other skills. My mother, it was uncanny.

And again, if anybody's interested, and you should read this with your mother. There's a friend of mine who's written a book called The Gift of Alzheimer's, a lady called Maggie Latorrelle. And she applies a lot of my models to her work. The experiences, her mother was psychic. Her mother was seeing things that were happening miles away.

She was seeing her dead daughter. her she she her mind was just melding out of her brain and accommodating everything so now we have a whole world view that everything is consciousness everything is made out of data everything is binary code everything is literally information so what we think is a physical reality out there we know for instance that the chair you're sitting on is 99.999999999996 empty space and the empty space that's there the physical bits within that are

quarks and electrons and quarks are point particles there are six of them and they're point particles which means they have no extension in space. The other objects, electrons are the same. They're point particles. So however much you zoom in on them, you never see a sphere. But the other objects that are in there are fields, which is also out there. And fields are created by things called bosons. And the classic boson is the photon, the photon of light.

Now, so everything you see out there is literally because photons of light are bouncing off objects. A photon of light can only ever travel at the speed of light. It cannot travel any slower. And it's a point particle. So A, it has no extension in space. And B, from its point of view, there is no time.

Because as you know from Einstein's theory of relativity and his theory of time, and his general theory of relativity, if you're traveling at the speed of light, you have zero mass, which a photon has, which means it's it's not physical and everything is a permanent now for it so there could be a photon of light that left a quasar three billion years ago that hits the eye if you're looking through a telescope or whatever and you see the light coming from a photo from a quasar as far

as that light is concerned it's the same second millisecond when it left the quasar and these odd objects are the things that create everything around us what is out there is not what we think it is and as bill hick said matter is just energy slowed down and we are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively there is one consciousness which is what irvin schrodinger argued and we are just watered down versions of that we are waves from that singular

consciousness And it goes through from the Edelon to the Daemon to the Uber Daemon to the Godemon. So this model can literally, I can explain absolutely everything. Now I'm either completely mad or my model works. And so far, nobody has been able to come along and criticize my science. My science is watertight. everything i've just told you is based upon academic work academic reviews peer-reviewed papers and absolute research.

Your description at the end reminds me of the tantric philosophy, philosophical description of consciousness. How can one consciousness be all of these different things, seemingly different things? Water can be a vapour, a liquid and a solid in ice, but it's all water.

They're completely different. you know ice is so different to steam for example and liquid but all the same thing, and something else you said i might come back to me well what what i'll just i'll just i'll describe this schizophrenic yeah please episode i had because this is interesting in relation to the.

Daemon the daemon again this is before i'd read your book so there's been a a couple of times in my life and the i think these this is cannabis induced i mean i've had got a lot of experience with a wide variety of psychedelics ayahuasca dmt ketamine mushrooms lsd and these.

Kind of things and nothing has taken me you know to the this kind of schizophrenic edge like cannabis has so i think cannabis some people are fine with it and some people aren't and i'm just one of those people that's i'm not okay with it so i you know there are sort of two five-year periods where i smoked a lot of cannabis you know sort of daily and after about five years both times i had a a kind of schizophrenic episode i had about 15 year break of no cannabis in between

those two periods the the first time the so this was this is my early 20s the tv and radio and stuff started talking to me about how i was going to die and all sorts of weird nasty coded messages and just fortunately i you know i moved out of london the social group i was in and in that i just stopped smoking cannabis and that for 15 years and i was fine never came back but then i had this this other ex this other experience which again was a couple of years ago and

it was just after i had the the seizure and i'd been ill so i hadn't hadn't smoked and i was vaporizing cannabis at the time in the eve every evening it's a kind of like evening ritual. And i i'd been ill so i hadn't vaped any cannabis for a few probably five days or something like that couldn't sleep one night one night and i thought i'm just gonna get really stoned and knock myself out because i just you know it was late and i just wanted to sleep.

So because I hadn't had any for a few days, you know, you kind of build up this tolerance to cannabis. If you take a few days off, you can get really, really stoned on an unusual amount. So, you know, I was really quite high. And I was watching this YouTube video with my wife. And there was this cut scene that happened twice in the video. And it was just like water going down a waterfall.

It was quite a distinctive cut scene and it happened twice and i was like oh no you know because i'd had the seizure fairly recently you know and i thought oh here we go i'm about to have a about to have another seizure basically i think i had a kind of a panic attack i mean my as you were saying i bet your fingers tingling my my fingers started tingling my hands were tingling and i was was very concerned i was going to have a another seizure and funnily enough the next day my wife when i

was able to tell my wife you know about all these things that had happened this evening i'm about to describe she said oh no that cut scene actually did happen twice in the thing so i didn't actually have deja vu this this damn thing did actually happen twice and it just caused this you know reaction in me but what happened was and this the everything, so as i say you know i've had a lot of experience with different psychedelics in my life.

I sound like a totally crazy guy but anyone who knows me well will probably say i'm they know me to be a very very grounded sane and earthy person so for anyone listening to this who doesn't know me, which is probably most people, I was familiar with non-ordinary states of consciousness. But this was unlike these other types of experiences.

And what happened was everything got collapsed into complete synchronicity.

Anyone who was speaking it was like this and when i later read about philip k dick and his valis thing i was like i was like oh my god so he you know i've written the biography of philip yes i do yeah i do so this what i was described at the time was an alien i couldn't i couldn't talk about this at the time because it i this was i was able to describe it you know the next day and because I was just completely overwhelmed by this experience.

An alien intelligence was talking to me through other people. So my wife or anyone, when they opened their mouth to speak, it wasn't them anymore. It was this alien, this other intelligence was literally talking to me in plain English through their voice.

And if I watched anything on YouTube or TV or my phone, it was this alien intelligence this other intelligence i call it god or an alien it felt like an alien intelligence something other was talking was talking to me through synchronicity symbolism through the video any audio i listened to any music or to calm me down my wife put on this kind of guided meditation thing on spotify that we put on for our kids you know this guy talking of that every action anybody did any sensation

in my body it was like all phenomena had been collapsed into communication direct communication with this other entity that was that sometimes was talking to me in plain english but most of the communication was just through synchronistic symbolism. I mean, I can't describe it any better than that, I'm.

Begin with i was fighting it and it was very unpleasant i was panicking and then i thought well what if this okay well this is clearly isn't working i'm working myself into state what if this actually is happening so there is another intelligence some alien intelligence god or whatever this thing is literally talking to me let's just go with that like i was thinking about shamanism i think well if you know i'm having a shamanic experience here what would a shaman do

where they'd be a shaman they'd be like okay well this is real i'm gonna just go with it see what see what's happening then when i stopped resisting it actually turned into a really quite an amazing experience that was very profound and wonderful but basically this entity was guiding me through this initiation which i couldn't really understand i just had to give into it basically and this went on for i don't know about three hours something like that then

i fell asleep and i woke up feeling okay but really shaken the next day immediately stopped cannabis that's it done for the rest of my life you know i haven't smoked cannabis for a year and a half or something. And i don't intend to ever again but i so i mean i woke up and i was the next day i was like i went right to the edge of madness there and you know it was not i didn't i didn't want to go mad you know i've got young kids so i was like there was it was a very interesting experience.

But the thing that was interesting about it as compared with other ones which made me think about schizophrenia was that there wasn't the expansive sense of say if you are tripping on ayahuasca or something you have this you know or dmt you have this you perceive vast spaces you know millions of miles across kind of thing this was very very claustrophobic and two-dimensional it was just there was nothing in the universe other than me and this other entity no

and nothing else existed so it felt very i don't know egocentric trick would be the word that came to me at the time so and it you know i've got friends that have.

Had schizophrenia or do have schizophrenia and you know i was describing this and it was all very familiar to them i think that's that's about it but you know i recognized it had the same flavor as this thing that happened to me in my 20s which was like okay well i know what's happening here I just yeah so there was that experience and when I read your book about the the Damon talking to people and communicating to people was like oh whoa this is kind of.

It felt like very much like that, but it was, this was not a clear community. They basically, the community, the communication was you're undergoing something here, which you, you can't understand. You just got to let go. And I trust this basically. So it wasn't like I got specific information about the, you know, anything like the future or precognitive thing.

Well to me one of the things here is a concept that i envisaged or discussed many years ago what i call the cacodemon you know and the argument that the the daemon is altruistic or the daemon has your own best interests at heart we've no way of knowing it might be morally completely ambivalent and you know there are certain daemons for instance i always used to think about the fact that when the Stauffenberg plot took place for the assassination of Hitler in 1944,

I think it was, and Klaus von Stauffenberg, and Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a particular location in the Wolfsleur or wherever it was. And Hitler quite by chance stood up, and his leg kicked the bomb behind the pillar. So when the bomb went off about five minutes later, The blast was taken by the pillar and didn't kill Hitler. That's crazy. So there you have a scenario of, was that Hitler's daemon ensuring the survival of its Eidolon? But that was not to the world's interests at all.

But it wasn't being altruistic. It was being totally egoistic in its approach, but it was still ensuring its own survival within the game.

And you know the argument like is dna is dna sentient and if dna and i have discussed this in one of my books if dna is sentient you know have you read um the cosmic cosmic serpent jeremy narby no okay it's a very interesting book on his experiences with dmt and ayahuasca and he argues that a lot of the symbolism when you take dmt particularly the snakes are actually symbolic of and are actual.

Entities that are effectively dna and it's the dna communicating with us now of course we know from the work of people like richard dawkins and the blind watchmaker and various other things you know that that we effectively are carriers of dna we we are the we are the the machines that allow DNA to be immortal. In other words, DNA needs us to continue existing in one way or another.

Now, could this, could again, the machine elves that Terence McKenna talks about, are these, again, forms of sentient DNA that we see? And I was reminded when you were talking earlier on there about 5-MeO-DMT, the Sonarion Toad and the effects that has.

Associates of mine who have taken both DMT and 5-MeO-DMT very much describe that whereas you seem to access the daemon during During DMT or maybe even the Uber daemon, when you take 5-MeO, you lose your whole sense of individuality and you become a singular entity. You realize that you are part of a much greater something that is you and that we are all differentials from that same huge sentience, whatever that may be. And a friend of mine was saying it took him ages to come down from our 5-MeO.

You know you really changed his world for you totally so i i interviewed a friend of mine on this podcast for maybe three years ago called donald clark if anyone is listening wants to go back to that but he took him about two years to recover from 5meo dmt it's actually it's not something i've tried you know before i die it's on the to-do list but i'm not in a rush.

It's very interesting because in my new book, I say the foreword's being written by Dr. Michael, and Pascal did a fascinating, wrote a fascinating academic paper last year where he interviewed Ibn Alexander, the NDE, the doctor that had meningitis and had a full near-death experience.

Proof of life. Proof of life. Yeah. Was it called proof of life? Proof of heaven. Proof of heaven. Proof of heaven. That's it. Yeah. Well, anyway, because he was interesting because he was a complete skeptic and didn't believe in life after death or near-death experiences. But what is fascinating is that Pascal did some research and discovered that he had also taken 5-MeO. So here we had a perfect person who'd had a near-death experience who'd taken 5-MeO-DMT.

Even Alexander had done 5-MeO-DMT before having them. So this is in my new book. Comparisons between his experiences. He's in the unique position of being able to compare the two. And it's really interesting. Well worth getting hold of Pascal's paper on this, but very interesting. He also, Pascal also has another paper he wrote with David Luke, also on somebody else who'd taken DMT and has had the similarities with DMT and these experiences.

I just want to say just quickly that when I, so I've read even Alexander's book. When I read that, so I have drunk ayahuasca a few times and smoked DMT.

When i read his description of his near-death experience it was like i it just sounded so like a dmt uh inspired thing i was like wow this is yeah you know you know it's whole the whole incident of the where he's in the mud, and he's bubbling in mud he's like an entity inside mud and you know this kind of visceral stinking foul world he finds himself in and then he rises above us and he has the bizarre sequence, where he's on the wings of a butterfly yeah and he meets his dead sister and

he or he meets initially this beautiful young woman who has the most startling blue eyes who talks to him And I don't know if you know the story, because then when he came to, he subsequently discussed with his parents this person, and he discovered he had this younger sister who died that he never knew about, or an elder sister who had startling blue eyes. And this very much convinced him that whatever he was experiencing, it was extraordinary.

And Eben helped. I had a chapter on his experience in one of my earlier books, and Eben actually proofread it.

For me to make sure i'd got the nuances correct now these things are evident that there's such a linkage between the dmt experience and again i have a whole chapter in the new book on dmt entities and ufo entities and ufo abductions and i have the wonderful opportunity in six weeks time to be doing work with whitley streber whitley wrote the introduction to one of my books but I've never met him, but I will be meeting him at contact in the desert.

And also with a guy called, oh geez, they made a movie of it called fire in the sky. He was a logger up in Oregon somewhere, I think, and he got abducted. And I'm going to be doing a, doing some work with him as well. And it'd be interesting to discuss the similarities with. Alien experiences and alien encounters, because I think the beings are identical. They're the same beings. They're just manifesting in a different way. And I call these egregorials again.

And I believe that they are entities that have independence of us, but don't. They need us to come into existence.

They need our fear, for want of a better term, to manifest themselves in this reality which which is very intriguing this and also i believe that the near-death experience is directly facilitated by dmt for example are you aware of the work of jimo bojijin the university of michigan no okay jimo bojijin is a neuroscientist and in i think it was 2017 17 they were euthanizing rats they were they were actually testing rats and

the brain patterns and and what chemicals released in the brain of rats and they killed them and the the the brain then died and then about 15 seconds after the brain had died after they'd been beheaded the brain started again massive activity all over the brain and they believed this was the near-death experience. And then they discovered something extraordinary because doing a series of other experiments, they, for the first time, discovered DMT in the brain of a live rat.

For the first time, they discovered DMT in the brain. So when people turn around and say DMT has been found in the human body in various places, yes, it has, but it's now in the brain. pain. Not only that, but there seems to be a direct linkage between a release of DMT at the point of death and the near-death experience.

Again, in my new book, I have an extensive ... I don't know if you know, in my new book, I've read virtually every single academic paper that's been written on near-death experiences for the last 50 years. I've read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, and some of the research that's

been done. Again, I think. The only person that's actually drawing in from all these different sources the information and again the world doesn't listen to me because i don't know why the world is not interested in what i'm writing about because i i've got now in the new book i've got probably 40 pages of references 40 pages of academic papers that people can go back and read and make up their own mind as to whether the conclusions I'm coming to, I very much work upon the, the Marcello Trui.

Argument of extraordinary claims need extraordinary proofs, you know, and I believe that is the case, you know, we have to, you can't just make these statements, you've got to prove them. And yet there's other authors out there who make these wild, weird statements and the books sell by the shed load.

And I've already always thought, you know, what I should have done is pretend, pretended i was channeling this all from the planet thog yeah yeah and i was channeling it because then everybody believed me and i'd have sold shed loads of books and just made half of it but that's the world that's how the world works and i i still like to believe that i have i have the academic credibility in my work that you know people people cannot argue with my point of view they can't it you know

i have i have all the information i need at my fingertips and because i have a very weird memory i'm not a very easy person to argue with because i can normally close my eyes and remember the paper and the quote and everything else i picked that up you are definitely a memory mutant a walking wikipedia yeah it is rather weird.

So we're just because we're we've only got a small amount of time left i wanted to get this in that so you know we've talked about all of this stuff all of these these hypotheses you've come up with how has this changed the way you live so i know for example you know i've looked on your facebook a little bit and and you know listen to conversations and i know.

Synchronicity is something that is quite a big thing for you and you know my question about that is you know i've had quite a lot of synchronicities in my life but i but i've also know people that have kind of gone really deep into synchronicity to the point where, it's become ludicrous in my opinion i mean i that is a value judgment on my my behalf i think I think there's a level at which you can just become a genuinely mad person with synchronicity.

The other thing is that, you know, how is this understanding of the daemon? How does that inform your life? Has that changed your life in the sense of the way you live day to day? I'm chucking a few things out here. And also this thing about the groundhog day thing, living the perfect life, cheating the ferryman. I mean, what's the journey been like for you in terms of who have you become as a result of this? And how has your life changed?

That's an excellent question. question, and I need to unpack it in various ways. The first point I always make is that, do I believe in cheating the ferryman? Do I believe in the Damon-Adel-Ondaier? Do I believe in the Huxleyan spectrum? For me, they're intellectual exercises. For me, they are things that the evidence seems to suggest that this is a model that has sense to it and it has support.

To say I believe in it, I don't believe in anything in the sense I'm not a believer, I'm not religious, I don't have any ulterior motives in terms of my writing. Also, I'm also incredibly willing that if somebody comes along and points out that something I've said is wrong or incorrect, I just amend it. Because I'm a seeker after truth, I'm not trying to prove anything.

So that's the first thing. But then we start getting into how has it affected my life well in very strange ways in that there's things that have happened in my life, that I cannot explain, that have evidence to me of my own daemon. And you know from the introduction in the book, I have a section called Footprints in the Snow. And by that, I mean evidence of the existence of my own daemon.

And there were two things that happened that I immediately recall that still shake me to this day because it is just extraordinary. When I was researching the first book, I needed to understand about mitochondria. I was particularly interested in the cell structures and mitochondrial DNA, the way in which it carries through the female line. Now, I then went to my bookcase because I needed to reference mitochondria.

And I thought to myself, the only person I know that's going to have written anything about mitochondria is Richard Dawkins. And I have all of Richard Dawkins' books. I then looked at the books and And I thought, yeah, probably, let's check. I think he's probably going to have written about mitochondria, probably in The Blind Watchmaker. This is my copy of The Blind Watchmaker. I opened the book, and I suddenly noticed something I never do. I never dog-ear pages.

I went through the book, and I noticed that one page had been dog-eared. Okay? Now, I then remembered and suddenly I had a memory flashback and I remembered when I read this book and it was on a beach in Greece in around about, I don't know, the early 1990s. And my earlier self. I'd got up and my daemon, for no apparent reason, had dog-eared that page. Me, in the future, to find it. Because I read down the page and look.

Mitochondria, of which I've now highlighted. I then went to the back of the book. It's the only time that Richard Dawkins ever mentions mitochondria in any of his books.

So my earlier self had gone, I'm going to show you that I'm going to guide you, and I'm going to leave you a clue for your future self to find. Then I got so interested in synchronicities and strange events that I was interested in writing up about things. I got very interested in time, and I needed to get hold of a book called Man and Time written by J.B. Priestley. Now, as you know, I've written a book on J.B. Priestley subsequently. So this was 1999.

Couldn't find a copy of the book. So I went to my library in Horsham. And I went to Horsham Library and asked whether they could order a copy of Man and Time for me from any of the local libraries. They said, there is no copy of it in West Sussex. books, we're going to have to order it from the British Library in Boston Spa. We'll put an order in for it and then we'll let you know when the book has arrived.

So a few weeks go by and then I get a phone call from the library, the book's arrived, do you want to come and pick it up? So I go in and I pick it up, arbitrary, one day I just go and pick it up. Leave the copy, this is my own copy of the book by the way, not the original, of the one I'm talking about. I then left it in my study. And then one night I'm going to bed and something in my head said, pick up Man and Time. So I pick up Man and Time. Now, as you can see, this book has got.

319 pages in it so 319 pages in this book i start flicking through the pages at random so then i open the page and for some reason i stop at page 91 which is this page here okay yeah my wife's sitting in bed next to me and i start reading this at random so it's a random page random day and i start reading it and briefly he's trying to explain how time and light and time travels so you're seeing a star as it was this is what it right he writes this is clearly illustrated by

a figure and an explanatory based on by james a coleman in his relative relativity for the layman now this book was written in 1964 and relativity for the the book that he's quoting was written in 1957 this is the quote the cold that priestly took from coleman this figure shows the earth the star betelgeuse in the constellation orion the hunter and old aberron in taurus the bull betelgeuse and old aberron are 352 352 light years respectively from

the earth also old aberron is about 200 light years from betelgeuse or betelgeuse now suppose there's a a blowout on Orion on the night of March the 17th, 2000, caused by Betelgeuse exploding. I turned around to my wife and I said, what month is it? And she said, it's March. I said, what date is it? And she's looking at me as though I'm completely crazy. And she said, it's the 17th. I said, what year is it? She said, it's 2000. You know that. I said, what?

Said you're a mathematician can you explain to me how all the variables of me ordering the book me get them getting the book back to me from boston spa in yorkshire then then having the book for three or four days at the library me deciding to go in on one random day to pick the book up bringing the book back leaving it in my study for random for days on end then arbitrarily picking it up tonight on the evening on the night of march the 17th 2000 and then a random page opens to

give me the exact date and the time that to me was extraordinary so the next few days we we're in cheltenham visiting my brother-in-law we're in a bookshop and my wife turns around to me she goes i'm fed up with all these synchronicities you're talking about she said what book are you you looking for second half bookshop books piled everywhere and i said i'm looking for a biography of william blake is what i need and she went oh for christ's sake and it was in her

eye line a book by william blake she picked the book she threw it across the room and stormed out now that is the kind of thing that really i find are significant synchronicities they're significant they mean something and they're supplying something and then you get the really really weird thing of 1111. Now I've argued in my books, the 1111, the reason that people see 1111 all the time is it's a group of, of vertical lines.

You know, so you just notice it's, it's, it's, it's not that weird until my wife pointed out. And she said, you see, keep seeing 1111 everywhere. And I said, yeah. And she said, you don't see the main thing, do you? And I said, what? And she said, what's the title of your book in Dutch? Thank you. 11, 11, 11. It means life after life after life in Dutch. Wow. Then this weekend, it was my 70th birthday on Friday. We went up to my old university, Warwick.

We booked into the hotel and the room that we originally were booked into, we couldn't get into because the door was locked. The lock wouldn't work. So they changed our room. They moved us to room 11.

I then we then go outside to get the bus to the university because we said we wouldn't drive in we get the bus the next morning bus number 11 we then go into the university and i decide to go to the library and just have some look at the library and i wanted to take a photograph of the staircase in the library as i pick up my phone take the photograph of the library i see the time 11 minutes past 11 and i'm going is this just i'm noticing it or is it is

it more and i genuinely don't know and i find it fascinating but finally has my idea of the daemon and living your life over and over again influenced my life yes i'm now very aware of people that come into my life that are people that have come into my life over the last few years that i knew were going to be important to me and i knew it by just seeing them like there was somebody i was speaking at an event there was a young girl at the event and

i knew she'd speak to me and she's now become a really good friend of mine and it's these things that happen that makes you realize you've done this before and your daemon is guiding you you've just got to listen to the clues the hints get you through and i genuinely believe that is what is happening whether it's real whether it's genuine i don't know but it works for me but then again if this universe is my universe and i'm creating

it and i'm collapsing the wave function of this particular universe it's not at all surprising. That i can influence it because it's my universe and you're part of my fanaron. Well, it's been a real delight to speak to you, Tony. Thank you so much. It's been really, really good. We must meet up sometime. Really, really good. Yeah. And you must get along to a breaking convention. That's what I was thinking. Yeah, I need to get there. You'd love it. They now do it at the University of Greenwich.

Last year, it was at the University of Exeter. And I think they're probably going to start doing it at the University of Exeter. So you get hundreds and hundreds of people turn up. Yeah. You get all the real major, major lecturer, people from around the world speak there. Yeah. And I think, you know, for those listening, breaking conventions has a lot to do with psychedelics, but there's other stuff plugged into it.

And I think, you know, one of the things about your work, it, you know, I've also been very much into meditation for 30 years or so.

But it's the psychedelics stuff is what really connects with your work and there's a kind of recognition there and one of the last things i wanted to say this i'd written this down to say this is you know this is related to memory you were talking about memory a lot earlier in our conversation and one of the kind of hallmarks of of a psychedelic experience is i believe that the the word they use is an anemonesis of loss of the reliving of the regaining of memory yeah it's like holy shit this is

familiar you know you're having the most bizarre experience and if this is you know a substance you've never tried before or you've never tried psychedelics before your very first experience you're like oh my god you know it's it's the, No reference points to anything you've ever experienced before in your life, but at the very same, it's a complete paradox. Same time, you're like, this is so familiar.

It's platonic, isn't it? I mean, it's Plato that first came up with the concept of the loss of forgetting. And of course, Philip K. Dick discusses this extensively in his exegesis. And it is a fascinating idea. and i think it's very much the equivalent of drinking the waters of the leaf the river of getting you know you you you there's is it memnos sony the goddess of memory and myself there's somebody you need to get on this show from the office a friend of mine called sarah janes.

Who's written the most wonderful book on ancient greece and memory training and everything else as well and dream training she does dream work and she's going to be doing an event this summer in in athens and she did one last year as well really really fascinating it'd be well worth there's a number of people that i think that probably you might be interested in getting on yeah please do email me them you know like a contact detail we'll do

because they're all they're all part of the breaking convention circle as well we all need convention which happens every two years and i can introduce you to a lot of very interesting people there great wonderful for just at the end your website for anyone who wants to find out more about your work antonypeake.com yeah and Peake is P-E-A-K-E as in Mervyn yeah or Tim Peake the astronaut but yes wonderful all right thank you so much okay yeah okay see ya. Music.