 Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cares, and today we welcome Anthony Peake back to Skeptico to talk about his new and quite amazing book, The Hidden Universe, an investigation into non-human intelligences. A book that is very much about these extended consciousness realms that we talk so much about on this show. Anthony, as many of you know, is not just a very accomplished author and speaker, but is someone who truly in every way that I can tell seems to be a researcher-seeker. That is someone who you get the feeling that is really trying to get somewhere with this stuff and isn't just writing books which are very entertaining and bring us all along on his journey, but that this is really a path of discovery for Anthony and I really appreciate that. His latest book, The Hidden Universe, is no exception. It's packed not just with amazing accounts and stories that you're going to be quite surprised that you've never heard about before, but it's also packed with a lot of cutting-edge science that Anthony believes backs up his theories. Now, one other thing I should mention, and that is that Tony Peake is not someone who's afraid to stick his neck out there regarding his theories. And I kind of like that, really, because if you really listen to what he's saying, I think what he's saying is not that he has all the answers, but more that it must somebody sticks a stake into the ground and says, hey, it's not just about stories. Here's what I think this stuff leads to. Unless somebody does that, we can't really pull it apart. So we all realize that we're probably wrong about all this stuff that the greatest minds have thought about since as long as there's been a human being on this planet. But I do appreciate that he's willing to stick his neck out there and say, hey, here's how I think it all fits together. So Anthony, it's great to have you back. Thanks so much for joining me. It's great to be to be chatting to you again, Alex. I've been looking forward to this. It's been really good. And thanks for a wonderful introduction. That's a really hard act to follow, I have to say. Thank you for it. But you totally deserve it. I mean, so I tell you what, let's dive into the book. I love this quote that really kind of resonates with something we all know to be true, but we can forget until a book like this comes along and reminds us. And that is throughout recorded history, the belief that humanity shares this planet with the variety of other sentient beings has been persistent. I mean, if you want to start from there, if you want to start from anywhere you like, tell us about the book The Hidden Universe. Yeah, I know that that is that's quite correct. And that's been my my overall reason for writing this book. And it's a book, I think, has been inside me since the mid 1960s. It's it's the book I've probably always wanted to write because in mid 1960s, I came down with about a double pneumonia. And during that period, I had a series of very profound hallucinations going through the crisis of pneumonia. And at that time, even at my 12 year old mind, I was quite fascinated by the nature of the hallucinations I was seeing. Were these things external to me? Were these things internally generated? Or were they a mixture of both? And this very much has been something that has intrigued me all through my writing career, really. Because time and time again, I come across people who encounter entities in differing circumstances in OBE states, in lucid dreaming states, people who encounter entities during close encounters of the third kind and include the developing close encounters of the fifth kind that we've got at the moment. So there seems to be an awful lot of information out there. But what nobody's I think has tried to do. Well, it's not true. I mean, I'm not originally this. I mean, Jacques Lee tried to do it many, many years ago and various other writers over the years have tried to draw a link through history as to what these entity be. And this is what I try to do. Now, I very much, I mean, you call my ideas a theory or a hypothesis, I probably say it's educated speculation, because a lot of these things we can never actually know and we can never really test although I'm working with people and I'm trying to test these things. But the basis of the book is just if people have extraordinary experiences and encounter entities that seem to have an existence of them, can we build up a neurological model? Can we build up a psychological model? And can we build up a logical model to actually explain what things are? And that's what I attempt to do in the book. Tell us more, though, because that's that's a good starting point. But the book really jumps in with both feet about the entirety of this extended realm that does seem to crop up all over the place. So whether it's magic and spirits and shamans, like you said, or whether it's after afterlife experiences and near death experiences or whether it's the ET experiences. I mean, you do kind of take us through this history in order to get us to the point of some of the breakthrough science that you think is influencing you the most right now. So where do you want to start with that? I think the magic and spirits and shamans thing is something that's really interesting because it grabs a lot of people's attention right now. There's a lot of people really interested in magic right now. A lot of people really interested in the occult right now. And I got to say, I think that we haven't quite thought that through all the way, particularly if we mash it into simulation theory and afterlife near death stuff. I mean, there's just so many things to pull apart here, Tony. I hardly know where to begin. So I'm kind of happy to do that. The first thing I'd like to make the point is that kind of the starting point, the starting premise of the book, involves an experience my mother had when she was starting to develop Alzheimer's. And one day she phoned me up and she said she'd experienced a very strange incident on her way onto the local village that we used to live in in Liverpool. And she said that she was walking back with my aunt. My aunt stopped to tie her shoelace and when my aunt was tying her shoelace, my mother looked up and said what she described to seeing a smokering hovering over a local factory. She then said the smokering started to revolve and then shot off towards North Wales. And she asked me what she'd seen. And I said, well, you know, I don't really know mum. You know, she's not into UFO. She never has me. It's not the kind of thing she's ever been interested in. And she was a lady in her late 80s then. And I said, well, we worry about it. And she didn't for about two or three days. And then one morning, three days later, she phoned me up in state of absolute terror. Now she'd woken up in the middle of the night in a state of sleep paralysis. You know, she said she couldn't move in. She didn't move properly. But she was looking towards the door of her bedroom. Now she lives alone. She's a widow. Now what is important here and the important caveat is that she'd lost her eye with malignant melanoma many years before. And her other eye, she was developing various problems. So she was partially sighted, which is important as I move on with this. She said she looked towards the bedroom door. She noticed the bedroom door was open and then she saw, as she described it, three spindly fingers from around the edge of the bedroom door. And this creature popped its head around the door and she described it. And the description is uncanny. She said it had large black eyes, like an insect. She had two holes for a nose and a slit for a mouth. And it looked at her and dodged back as if, you know, it had seen her. She wakes up and she said, Tony, what did I see? And I said, well, it's intriguing. I really don't know, mum, because I didn't want to worry her. But clearly in a state of hypnagogic or hypnoponic state and in a state of sleep paralysis, her door's perception had broken down to such an extent that she was perceiving something that ordinarily, under ordinarily circumstances, she wouldn't have experienced. But it was her description of it. And of course, I was immediately reminded of the book cover of the Whitby Street Book Communion because it was a classic grey. It was an archetypal grey. Now, I then started to research into this. And I was worried anyway, but when I started to really research it, I discovered some quite interesting facts. Like, for example, in 2017, in Northern India, there was a cave that was underneath the Fugolias in Northern India. This cave had not been able for 10,000 years. They carbon-dated various things to know this was the case. And the creatures that are depicted in this cave are the creature that my mother saw. Then you go on about, you know, Graham Hancock and Graham Hancock in his book, Subjects of the Natural. And in this, he describes his own experiences in the junction shelter in the Drake and Southampton, in South Africa. Here again, we have very similar creatures that are actually drawn on the cave walls. Now, what intrigues me here is that there's an elderly lady in the UK, there are people in India, and there are people in Southern Africa. And then again, as Graham Hancock says himself, you know, you look at the Laskow Caves and you look at Peshmer, everywhere else. These entities seem to be drawn everywhere. Now, the counter-argument to this is, oh, well, you know, they were more primitive than we were these people. They didn't know how to draw properly or they were doing idealisations. Now the argument here doesn't stand up for me because these ancestors of ours, their brains were exactly the same size as ours. Clearly they knew how to depict bison and other animals. So clearly whatever they were doing, it was not just an abstraction, it was something more. So the question for me was what are these entities and what are these beings? And if you start to carry forward, you find certain themes take place. It seems to involve darkness, it seems to involve people in caves or in areas where darkness is around. I argue this is because in darkness the pineal gland generates melatonin. And I argue that there is a good case to be made that the pineal gland actually synthesises endogenous melatonin into another substance. Let's pause here for just a second to bring people up to date on what you're saying. There's already 10 jumping off points from what you've talked about. We'll get to as many as we can. But this is really interesting science that you bring out in this book and you connect it in some very, very powerful ways. I don't totally agree with all of it, but I'm taking it back and really have to pause with some of it. So here's the background I wanted to lay out for people and correct me if any of this is wrong. DMT, everyone's heard of DMT, Rick Strasman, Spirit Molecule, Shamans, figure out how to do it in the jungle and then you can have ayahuasca trips and all the rest of this. But the mystery has been twofold. One is that the fact that we have DMT trips suggests that we have neurotransmitters in our brain that can process it. Which suggests that we have the ability to create it in our bodies. Otherwise we wouldn't have that ability. But the mystery has been we don't see DMT in human beings. So we don't see that mammals are able to create that. So with that as the mystery fill us in on what the latest science is telling you about how that mystery is solved. Yeah. Well, DMT is found in the human body. DMT is in the liver. It's in the stomach. It's in the blood. It's in the spinal cerebral fluid and everywhere else. The question is, why is it there? But more interestingly is... Or how does it get there, right? How does it get there? It dissipates really quickly. I mean, it's processed really. So I'm sorry. It's alright. It's alright. And it does. And that's the problem that up until recent years there's been the argument. You know, you've never found DMT in the brain. Although there are in the brain the things called the tracemine-associated receptors. And these are receptors within the neurons. And a receptor site is rather like a key in a lock. And it's designed to work with particular neurotransmitters in the brain. You know, dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, these kind of things. But these particular tracemine-associated receptor sites were a great mystery. Because the neurologists and the neuro chemists didn't really understand what they were there for. But then there was a discovery made that actually they work with EMT. So there's receptor sites in the brain that clearly have been designed to work with this substance. But what then happened was, around about three years ago, there was a researcher at the University of Michigan called Jimo Borjigin. And she did a series of experiments. Quite interestingly, two experiments. One of which seemed to give evidence of near-death experience in rats, which was intriguing in itself. Rats died. And then about 10 or 20 seconds after the rats had died, there was a huge amount of brain activity. But that in itself intrigued me as somebody who's interested in death experiences. More importantly, in a similar experiment, they discovered within the pineal gland of live rats, dimethyltryptamine. So for the first time, dimethyltryptamine has been found in a form within the brain of a live mammal. Now, this is fascinating because suddenly this changes all the rules. Because suddenly the idea that dimethyltryptamine is, as Rick Strassman says, our reality modulator, we suddenly have evidence of it. And suddenly it seems that dimethyltryptamine may have evolved with us. And we have evolved to be able to process dimethyltryptamine. Now, if you look at the chemical structure of melatonin. Now melatonin is the substance that is excreted by or created by the pineal gland, just to go to sleep. As we know, pineal gland is effectively an ossified eye. It is believed to be the case. And in fact, there are animals like a chuchura, which is a lizard found in New Zealand, that actually has a third eye that sits in the centre of its forehead. But it's gone back into the centre of the brain. It sits in the centre of the brain and it sits above something called the optic chiasma, whereas where the light signals or the processed light signals in the electrical impulses going along the neurons go along and it sits right above this. So it's very aware or it is sensitive to the fact that the visual world has gone dark. And when the external world goes off, the pineal gland goes right and only to create melatonin to make my entity go to sleep. But melatonin can be synthesised and changed into what Beach Barrett, who's a researcher in the States who's worked with restructants, calls metatonin. And metatonin is endogenous. That is internally generated dimethyltryptamine. Now, if this is the case, that it could be evidenced and it could be because, as you know my writings, I don't just make a statement, I really go into the research. And there is a state that is known as Kakaramudra. And Kakaramudra is when people train themselves. And what they do is normally in India, but they train themselves to place the tongue, they flip the tongue back to the back of the throat. And they want to do this because they want to taste what's called the ambrosia nectar, the nectar of transcendence, which is an acidic taste they get at the back of the throat, which then puts them in altered states of consciousness. Now what is intriguing here is that the 49th day of gestation, the embryo in the womb, as it's developing, now 49th day of gestation is important in itself because if you look at Buddhist tradition, that's when they believe the soul enters the body and enters the embryo. At that time, the pineal gland and the pituitary gland are a single unit which sits at the back of the throat and it's called epiphesis. From the 49th day of gestation, it moves up the back into the brain and then moves up to the centre of the brain, where then the two things part, where it becomes the pituitary and the pineal body, so the pituitary and the pineal body, and they become separate. But with many people, what it leaves is something called Rathke's cleft, or Rathke's pouch, which is a kind of a slight opening that goes to the centre of the brain. Now if the pineal gland does release dimethyltrytomy, this is likely to be the root where excess dimethyltrytomy may drip down to the back of the throat. So is this what kakaramudra is all about? Is this something that individuals can do and actually get themselves into altered states of consciousness? Now if this idea that the pineal gland is related in some way would explain many shamanic traditions, such as there are a tribe in Northern Columbia, in the mountains of Northern Columbia, and they train shamans, they take children from the age of about five or six, and they place them in total darkness in caves. And they do this for a reason, because what they're trying to do is to train the pineal gland to be more effective, and which case is this what shamans are doing? And of course shamans have long argued that, and if you look at the writings like Benny Shannon in his book on ayahuasca, you will discover that ayahuasca was discovered, or technically has been known for many years, and it's a mixture of two different plants, banisteriapsis capi and psychiatroviridase. Psychiatroviridase contains DMT, banisteriapsis capi doesn't, but they mix these two plants together. Now there are 50,000 different types of plants in the Amazon Basin, but the shamans pull two together and mix them exactly the right way, because you could eat as much of the leaves of psychiatroviridase, even though there's DMT in there, and you would never get high, and the reason you wouldn't get high is that the leaves go into the stomach, and the stomach excretes something called monoamine oxidase, and it's something that lines the stomach and stops the hallucinatory effect getting through into the blood. However, the banisteriapsis capi contains homoline, and homoline is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. So they put two plants together that work together to allow and facilitate it to cross the blood-brain barrier to go into the brain to actually cause hallucinatory states. When they were asked how they developed this, and this gets extraordinary, and this is directly pertinent to our conversation, they were asked and they said, when they are shamans, in years gone by went shamanic travelling, that is when they went into the upper world or the lower world, they would encounter their shamanic totems, but they also encounter plants that would speak to them, and they sent in plants, literally told the shamans and said, if you go into the jungle and you take this plant here and showed it to them in the hallucinogenic states or in the hypnagogic states or whatever we want to call the states of consciousness, they showed them the two plants and said, put these two plants together in this way and you will allow non-shamanic people, neurotypicals for want of a better term, to be able to experience the things you experience. So then I asked the question of my own mind, this suggests sentience and it suggests intelligence. Now I want to make a final point on this, but we continue because this is very important. A group of people I know are working at the moment at Imperial College in London and they're doing research into DMT. It's fully funded and it's fully legal and they're taking DMT intravenously. One of my associates is a guy called Dr. Carl Smith and Carl was explaining to me that what they do is they take it intravenously like Rick Strassman's people did and he said he'd volunteered and he took it and he found himself in what he calls the DMT zone. It's kind of a place you find yourself, rocketed out your body and you're in this place which is more real than this reality. He said while he was there, this entity came over to him and it eyeballed him, prodded him and said, you should not be doing it this way, please do not do it this way, this is the wrong way to do it. And it backed off again. He then comes to, two weeks later, he takes another DMT tray and says I told you last time do not do it this way. Extraordinary. And as he said to me, this means that this entity was doing things and had motivations that were counter to what I wanted to do because I wanted to do it that way. All of my team wanted to do it this way but this entity is saying no, you can't do it this way, it's the wrong way. Intriguing. And my idea is what are these beings? Are they part of us? Are they part of our subconscious? Are they young and archetypes? But if they are, they seem to have a degree of independence and that's where I come up with the concept of the aggregorials. Yeah. There is so much. So, so, so much. We're just going to do the best we can. I'm going to stop saying that because it gets a little old. You know, one of the things that you touched on that I thought we might dive into is the question of reality because we have to remind people that on this little journey that we're on here, we are so past materialistic biological robots and meaningless universe. I mean, we've left that completely aside, which we should, but it's interesting to know that that's where we're kind of held by our science. Now, one of the things that you're saying about reality and we've had some interesting people on this show say the same thing. And that is, we are somehow in some way co-creators of that reality. Number one. And that number two, something on the order of a simulation, although that's a really touchy word and we don't really know what that would mean and simulation of what an infinite regress, but something on the order of a simulation in some way seems to better fit the reality information we keep coming back to. I think there's also the issue of augmented reality and augmented consciousness where technologically we see through strong AI that we are right on the cusp of augmented consciousness and that we may be on the cusp of augmented reality. But this is one area that I think we're going to have to pack back into this discussion. I don't know if now is the right time to do it. I think so. Yeah. I think so. This is something that has intrigued me for a long time. I mean, from my book, the end through to opening the doors of perception to this latest book. This is very much a theme that's been intriguing me. And again, I like to do the science of this. I like to know why it came into these conclusions that at its basic level, reality for want of a better term is digital in nature. Why have we concluded that? Well, of course, the first question is that we know that space, solid objects and 99.99999999999996 empty space. And what is inside that empty space are literally quarks. You know, effectively, you know, it's an up-down and it's a down quark. It's either two down quarks and one up quark or two up quarks and one down quark that make up the proton and the neutron. Then we have the electrons that are whizzing around. But with inside the atom, there's mostly nothing. And the only reason we don't fall through the floor and everything else is electrostatic repulsion on the edges of atoms themselves and the molecules. So we with something brings something solidly together. And of course, that's human perception. Now, if you then hold on because that would that might contradict with what you said before, right? And here's where the back door materialism gets in. And I really wanted to get your opinion on this because on one hand, we can talk about the sentience in this extended realm. So I'm calling an extended consciousness. You're talking about something outside of consensual reality. We're really saying the same thing. But the one thing I wonder about is if we're talking about that sentience, do we want to pack it back into that biological robot? This is how things work. This is how we break everything down and we understand everything in this realm. And if we are going to do that and we're going to say there's sentience out there in this extended realm, then what is our relationship to that sentience? And what is our relationship to the biomechanics of what we experience? Like when you're talking about yogis who put their tongue in the back, why? I mean, what is the, we have to get to kind of purpose and meaning kind of questions. I think is where I'm headed, but there's not enough time in the day to get there. We fall into teleology now, don't we? And this is one of the great questions, isn't it? Of this kind of... One minute we're saying that somehow the chemicals in the brain are affecting consciousness and affecting our awareness. But then we have the problem of dualism, because the problem is how can a physical step of chemicals, albeit made up of 99.9% empty space, affect me if I'm not, if I'm some form of consciousness field or something experiencing something within a consciousness field by reducing into my brain something that is a field. So what we need to do is to take one step back and go back lower to say, well, if we say like David Beaumargue, the Anglo-American physicist in his arguments about the inputs and explicate orders, in some way at a deeper level of reality, there is a steel arrow, and physical things and mental things are both kind of well-known. They say there's the singularity. Then there is consciousness and awareness, and consciousness then brings about the physical world by the act of observation. Because again, we could argue, couldn't we? You know, that quantum physics we know that from the Copenhagen interpretation, we know from the collapse of the wave function that subatomic particles until they are measured and observed can be technically anywhere in the universe, and there's a statistical chance they could be anywhere. But when they are observed or measured, they are then reducing what point particles exist in a particular location in space and time. Maybe people have heard that a million times, but I always think it's worth repeating, and that is the power of the double slit experiment. What it means in terms of the observer effect. And just to remind people, I'd like you to explore this because the book does a nice job of talking about some of this quantum physics science that is really the bedrock of the world that we live in. The theories and formulas that have come out of that have been proven over and over again. Our rock solid, they build, we build the engineer stuff off of those. And even as uncomfortable as we are with the double slit experiment, because again, let's remind people that the double slit experiment answers the Zen question. If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, well, then the tree doesn't make any noise. And I would just want to remind people that the double slit experiment has been repeated over and over and over. And if you hear people say, well, it only works at a subatomic level, not true. Please add to that anything that I've left out. Well, the thing is the double slit experiment as you so eloquently put there, you know, is has been repeated many, many times. And we know that if certain subatomic particles are not observed, the particles go through between sits and they're not observed and they actually create an interference pattern. Whereas if you put a measurement device on one of the slits or one of the other slits and you fire single photons or single electrons through, they go through one at a time as if they know they're being observed and they're reduced to point particles. Now, as you again rightly say, I mean, you know, the great Tom Campbell, you know, as Tom argues, you know, we render what reality we need in order to exist in this. Again, I agree with you. It's dangerous to use the term simulation because the simulation suggests that it is a simulation of something else and you get an infinite regress by doing that. But if we'd say that the true nature of everything we perceive is actually information and that everything is made up of information and again, I'd strongly advise the writings of somebody like Vlatko Vdrel is very useful in this. He's one of the top young quantum physicists that is coming up at the moment. But you don't even need to read Vdrel. You just need to read some of the latest work of Stephen Hawking. You only need to read Hawking's work on Hawking radiation. The way in which information cannot be lost and what happens if you throw a computer into a black hole because it's an enclosed system and we know that information is energy. So there are these huge areas now that people are starting to realise. But as Alex, as you and I know this has been known effectively since 1900 when Max Planck decided that quantum was the only way to explain certain behaviours of black body radiation. But we also know say from 1925, 1926, Max Bourne, Schrodinger equation. All these things build up to the fact that reality is definitely not what we think it is. And there is a direct relationship and there is a direct relationship. And again, the idea as you again say that these weird effects are only seen at sub-type level is nonsense. You know, as I called Anton Zylinger at the University of Vienna that's been doing work on this over the years. And they've been doing the Twinsett experiment with boccy balls. Boccy balls have 60 molecules in them. These are big molecules. These are things that are almost the size of a virus. You know, I don't know what the numbers, but they are still getting bigger and bigger. And we have still yet to find the borderline where Newtonian physics takes over. And quantum physics. Of course, then we have the mystery that quantum physics and Einsteinian physics which deals with the very big they all work together. The math doesn't work together. So there clearly is a mismatch with what we think is really happening. And the point really here is that I think that the major issue here is understanding that everything is a field. And there's a consciousness field. And I'm slipping here now into the writings I've done and I've contributed a couple of chapters to books on Andeism. And the idea that we're all conscious-experiencing itself subjectively. And there were like emanations of information of consciousness which I wrote a book a few years ago with Irvin Laszlo and of course Laszlo has his idea of the zero point field, the achilles, which again you touched upon before, that these effects are actually seen just as you get slightly above absolute zero suddenly all kinds of weird effects start taking place as well. And the zero point field suggests that empty space is not empty at all. It's not a vacuum. It's a plenum. It's absolutely full of seething things that are coming in and out of reality. And again you read the books on quantum physics these days. We have optical virtual particles. These are particles that don't exist coming to existence for a second and then disappear again somewhere else. 94% of the universe is missing its dark matter or dark energy. We don't know what it is that's why we call it dark matter and dark energy. So we are in a similar position in our science to where the scientists were at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. We are suffering from this hubris. The guy Mitterson made a statement he was opening up a new laboratory at the University of Chicago in about 1894 and he made this incredible statement and he said there's no need for science in the future because there's only one or two little issues we've got in the future other than that we know everything and all scientists are going to be doing is calculating to the sixth decimal point and then the next plan in December 1900 came up with his idea that energy was quantized and suddenly it all changed then in 1905 Stein comes with his wonderful year where he wrote three papers and exploded everything. But we still know we're near understanding but now you still have scientists standing up saying we understand things. We don't David Chalmers, consciousness how does he matter in my head, in Alex's head but how do we reacting with electricity, how does it create Alex, his hopes, his dreams, his aspirations, his fears, similar with only here, similar with all the listeners out there. It's the hard problem. We're not even at first base understanding. I totally agree and I just kind of always have to resist the hard problem. What's the easy problem? The problem is how the brain works and I guess my point on that is we don't really understand how the brain works and we already kind of touched on that. We have all this seemingly contradictory information. We don't know how memory works and our neurological models of memory fail as you say it's all about white crows and black swans. I love that quote in your book so you can bounce along with your little neurological model of memory until somebody comes along with a theory that completely blows it out of the water such as out-of-body experience or other provable side phenomena. You know, even take Dean Raiden's Six Sigma result on pre-sentiment. It completely destroys our neurological model of memory. So there is no easy problem but I tell you what we are going to shift gears for just a minute because I want to shift focus over to the afterlife just as another lens with which to look at the same issues that we're talking about because you have a lot of interesting things to say about the afterlife and we've already talked about the DMT connection to near-death experience but I did want to kind of pin you down and get your opinion on some ways that I kind of wonder whether that is a good fit for the data we have from the dear-death experience science and I'd start by pointing out a couple of things is that I appreciate what they did at the University of Michigan. I think it's very important. I think the way that you summed it up is the best that I've heard anyone else do it and the reason for that is because you have this expanded consciousness kind of worldview. What I hear so many times with people who look at that data is they want to use it as a debunking exercise and jam things back into this kind of materialism which clearly doesn't fit so if I look at for example the research of Dr. Jeffrey Long who is one of the near-death experience scientists but all of them agree that there is an extended consciousness realm here but my point is that the near-death experience data is in the experiencers themselves and we start hearing those accounts and in those accounts I think there's some important ways that we can't completely resolve with the DMT explanation and I'd like to lay out four of those for you and then we can talk about but the first one is the continuity of experience so a lot of people a lot of the near-death experience accounts begin before death are there during the death and it continue after the death and then are finally and even go after they return to life so this doesn't like it doesn't contradict your book or your conclusions but it doesn't fit well with the DMT burst for the mice except that the DMT experience as we know is outside of space-time so now we have but we can't really pack that back in either because we can't have it both ways we can't say well it's outside of space-time so then it can transcend any kind of space-time and then we say but also we found it in these rats here and it's 10 seconds after we have to somehow massage that and you get what I'm saying there. The second point I think is even more important and interesting and challenging at the same time and that's that the accounts from the near-death experience suggest a unique kind of journey and I think you have some great information on the book on some unique kind of journey associated with for example certain shamanic experiences and you know everyone sees the purple leopard or everyone sees the snakes or Terence McKenna everyone sees elves but in this case everyone is having you can't say everyone forgive me people won't jump on me about everyone but there seem to be unique very common elements to the NDE journey but here's the kicker that I think I really want to interject into the conversation it launches off into I think for me one of the most important points in the whole thing and it's the big follow-on question to the book is that the journey of the near-death experience suggests a hierarchy of consciousness and I think you're already there when you talk about the sentience that is in the shamans it says hey stick these two plants together and something's going to happen well in the near-death experience people say I encounter God and they say well I don't have to call it God but for all the ways that I've always heard about God in my life this is it it's a higher level it is something to inform and educate me and it also says there is a moral imperative and there is something like a life review and what you do does matter and you do have free will so to me these are the points that are the big take away here that either have to be you know worked out of it with other data that pushes them off the table or we somehow have to work that into beyond simulation hypothesis kind of thing because simulation hypothesis leaves us very stark and clinical and the near-death experience doesn't so I know I've laid a lot on the table there but take over and let's talk about the moral imperative and life review we can do it probably systematically in the sense the first thing is about near-death experiences themselves now I would argue and I know people would criticize me on this the word that in the three words near-death experience is the most important is near it's a near-death experience in my previous books I actually use the term a real death experience or an already where somebody actually dies now I will stand corrected on this but I I know of no evidence where somebody actually has literally died literally died and has died in the literal what does that mean to you when you say literal sense this is the problem isn't it when you when you start discussing what do we mean by death when does death take place within the brain when does death actually happen but there is a point where presumably the brain ceases to be able to process the information field man I've wrestled every skeptic in the world to the mad on this the best scientist on this is a guy named Dr. Samparnia formerly Cornell you actually know that Sam's experiments at Southampton University and his whole exercise that he did discover out of body experiences and various other things that took place what it was the actual project was called an aware project yeah awareness after resuscitation wasn't it yeah right and just to fill people in on the backstory and the reason that both of us are drawn to his work is that independent of him being a near death experience researcher he's one of the leading authorities in the world on resuscitation and as far as an area of medical science we'd want to look to to answer that question of did they really die a resuscitation expert would be the guy we'd look to because that's what he does on a day-to-day basis for kind of standard mainstream medicine and medical science and if you look at what Sam is saying now as opposed to what he was saying two or three years ago is that he has now come around to the idea that clearly the evidence from his aware study suggests that consciousness extends beyond bodily death and he's very emphatic about talking about what you're saying but in a different way he says I would not call these near death experiences these are death experiences in every way historically and with our present medical science we have these people some of them a large number of them are considered dead so what a lot of the skeptics want to do is kind of do this pleading to the god of the gaps thing we'll at some time in the future we'll find that the brain isn't really dead or the rats in Michigan will you know show that we do not have in our medical experience to this point any indication that any of that will happen so that is just pure speculation and what we do have are brains that shouldn't be able in any neurological model that we understand shouldn't be able to produce consciousness and we have the experience of the out-of-body experience and the NDE experience so that's my read of where we're at yeah I'm with you on that I mean the technical term for what they're doing here is called promissory materialism you get a promissory note to say that you know yes we don't fully understand this but we will do in the future I have a term for it and it's giving giving things nice definitions or nice terms and if you give a nice Latin phrase like hallucination you know you've you've explained it or you call it Alzheimer's or you call it whatever Charles Barney syndrome but you've not actually explained anything you've just given it a label it's label theory so the question is you know when does death take place or is it a transitory period now if at the base level everything is consciousness consciousness is what creates everything around us the idea of death bodily death means nothing because you move into a place that's completely different now the second point because it was quite an interesting one you probably know I wrote a book called the Labyrinth of Time many years ago and the reason I wrote the Labyrinth of Time was like St Augustine I really wanted to know what time was and exactly like St Augustine after actually writing a 380 page book I cut the end of it and I still didn't really know what time was I knew what time measured but even then I didn't know what time actually measures at the point of death something curious happens with time as well you know time is a subjective experience we know that some of the near-death experiences the moody traits that they discuss and the gracing traits near-death experience terms one of the things is this incredible slowing amount of time as if time ceases to be the way we understand time to be so suddenly you move out of normal linear time into what Philip K. Dick called orthogonal time it was at right angles to this time but it's just as real and it's just as powerful so in which case your body dies in time but you don't die in time you feel afraid he died because he ran out of time but literally you do you go somewhere else completely different and your consciousness moves in a totally different way because people talk about in near-death experiences that timelessness feeling the thing that you can go back on your life and you can review your life you can have anaerobic life review you can dodge it anywhere else and to me this reminds me analogously of if you're looking at a CD-ROM which contains a computer game a third person computer game where you know this whole storyline or even better an old vinyl record you look at grooves in a vinyl record and if you're actually in the groove you follow the groove but looking down at the record you can see the whole thing you know you're looking down as if you're in the fifth dimension of space time looking down and you can see everything as a single continuum well you can bring it back to that example but what you do in the book grabs us even more in that you point out from the shamanistic in the broadest sense of all different wisdom traditions are all talking about being outside of space time and there's a lot of common characteristics and then ET which we're going to talk about in a minute hopefully and dive into deeply also seems to be outside of space time so I mean take the DVD thing or you know that's fine but I like what you were saying before about the ayahuasca when the shaman goes to the forest and says look you're back there in space time now here's how you can manipulate that a little bit and kind of get a little bit into my world and then when you duck into that other world like the other story you told about the research being done in the UK it does seem to be out of that and then we come back in it so that leads to a bunch of questions about who we are inside of this consciousness whether we are special whether this moment matters and the working hypothesis I've been having is that there's a lot of room at the top you know Richard Feynman the inventor of nanotechnology made famous the quote that there's a lot of room at the bottom well I think when it comes to consciousness there's a lot of room at the top and I think we have a tendency to put ourselves up on the heap maybe up on the ladder a little bit higher than we need to be and there might be so many levels above us that we will take a long time to begin to explore. What do you think about any one of those ideas? I'm totally with you on that I think that we we interface with intelligences that are far greater than we are and you know it's like the Dunning-Kruger effect you don't know the level of your own ignorance because you don't because you can't you can't know what you don't know and we use this term around into people in politics and people in various ways but even well educated people also do not know the level of their own ignorance and humanity doesn't know the level of its own ignorance so what we're doing a lot of time with our science is we're almost like astatelians we're building these Keith Robinson models to explain observed phenomenon that actually we're making epicycles you know in years gone by when we had the idea that the universe was geocentric and everything revolved around the Earth we couldn't explain the actual retrograde motion of the outer planet so we had all these epicycles as well and that's got more and more surged to keep the model real and in some ways I think this is what we're doing now we've got things that we really don't understand so we're trying to explain them and one of my favourite ones of this is and again I'm going to get slightly technical here but in order to explain how the universe has expanded the way it is they had to accommodate a period of hyperinflation in the first few billions of a second of the big bang to accommodate the observed world and of course this is obviously ridiculous the idea of the universe expanded at thousands of times the speed of light in order to accommodate it but it's rather like how the elephant got its trunk you know it's actually backwardization of ideas you know instead of actually just at the facts and trying to find solutions we shoehorn it more and more into the materials reductionist model and it's creaking and it's creaking because they are so terrified of the implications of quantum mechanics and quantum physics and they go on and they say oh you're misunderstanding what you mean by the twin-slate experiment you can't do the maths no but we can do logic you know still logic involved here and some of the things that are totally completely illogical you know these particles coming in and out from nowhere in order to accommodate the observed world so it seems that the universe is far more complex and far more fascinating I mean come on our science has only been around for about 350 years for crying out loud how has that managed to be propped up and why is it being propped up the way that it is because it really fails on so many levels like you're saying it only fails experimentally but it fails philosophically too it just doesn't make any sense but I want to bring you back to this because I haven't heard you talk enough about this and it's really something that I think you and I both think is central and I have heard you talk about it in bits and pieces but I want to give you a chunk of time to really address the whole thing and that is the life review of the near-death experience is something that I bring my hat on it and say that's absolutely the way that it is but it consistently comes up over and over again as we look at these accounts in whole and it clearly suggests a hierarchy of consciousness when I say hierarchy of consciousness that is kind of a god kind of thing for lack of a better term and it suggests this moral imperative you know we're going to talk in a minute maybe about the whole magic and occult thing and do what thou wilt and near-death experience science my read of it is is that do what thou wilt is not a very good strategy to hang your hat on and a better strategy is don't be too consumed with this world and what you can get out of it but love everyone tell the truth help your neighbor and do the right thing because you know what the right thing to do is and that might sound really churchy and I'm not a Christian I'm not a religious person I always have to say that because it sounds so churchy but that seems to be my read of the near-death experience data what do you think about that? No I'm with you on this the idea that there is there is a moral imperative somewhere you know when I was brought up you know I was brought up with a Christian family and everything else I used to argue with my mother all the time about the the idea of God in the Judea Christian idea of this guy with a long beard and everything else as well it made no sense to me and the Bible and the way in which the Bible makes no logical sense in certain areas but as I got older I started to realize but it's more complex than that far more complex it's about morality and to do good and in this I'm always I always cite the movie Groundhog Day and in Groundhog Day there's a profound message in there by the way this I've interviewed my own podcast I've interviewed Danny Rubin who wrote it and Danny always says that the philosophy there he's discovered the philosophy himself but that wasn't his intention in the first place but nevertheless it has some very interesting ideas because you know Connors he lives the same day over and over again and every day he has more knowledge about his environment whereas everybody else doesn't and he uses that initially to his advantage to bed the girl and to do all these things but then he goes in it's almost like Maslow's hierarchy of needs he fulfills his sexual desires then he needs to educate himself so he teaches himself foreign languages how to play the piano and he's developing as a human being he's moving away from that kind of basic I just want want want and all I can and he moves in and he starts to educate himself and then he starts to realize that he can actually do good for doing good sake he can run around the town he can be under the tree when the little kid falls out of the tree and suddenly he is as if he's developing as a human being over many lives he's developing more as a human being he's developing he's playing the game as it were like a computer game and he's playing it time and time again and he's getting it better and he's getting it better and you know in my concept of the cheating the ferryman I argue that this may be what life is you know that before we die in the split seconds before we die we run all the potential lives we could ever run in the same way as ground hook day and in which case but then the question has to be asked and it has to be asked and it cannot be avoided who decides in the movie that collars is allowed to move on to the next day it suggests that there is an intelligence outside of the simulation you know outside of the Truman show whatever we want to call it that is somehow watching over and developing and judging in some way not in a kind of judgmental god of the Old Testament way but judging almost ourselves because we know that when we do something good you get that kind of feedback feeling that's indescribable you know you stop and you give somebody who's desperate some money and you suddenly feel and it's not because you're doing it selfishly you just have this feeling and if we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjective if god is really what they say in pandeism which is the collective everything that we all are and that we are all emanations of god I'm going to be profoundly nostic here that we are emanations of god shards of the pluroma that are located within the in the canoma within the simulation but we have forgotten who we are and we don't know who we are but we can't know who we are because if we do we wouldn't follow the route that we follow we have to learn by our experiences and by our doing now one of the things I'll be planning to do in your family's home country I'm a greco file by the way I absolutely love Greece this is why I asked you earlier on about your background got married in Greece and everything else and I go twice a year and I've been going once or twice a year for the last 40 years 45 years I've got my book it's about to come out in Greek two of my books are coming out in Greek this in a few weeks time and what we're going to do is to try and recreate Plato's cave and the myth of Plato's cave in Greece and I found the get this Alex I found the location that they think Plato's cave Plato based Plato's cave upon it's just outside Athens in a hill called Lycobates and it's the cave pause for a second and tell people the story of Plato's cave because I think a lot of people know that they should know but don't know the story so tell them about Plato's cave Plato's cave is the idea that there's a group of prisoners there's a group of people rather similar to the children I mentioned earlier on with the tribe in Northern Columbia and they the whole life they just existed in a cave and they're chained to the chairs or whatever and they can only look at the back wall of the cave they can't move their heads and all they can see is a back wall this is allegory we're not saying it's not real it's an allegory yes it's Plato's way of showing how our senses can fool us okay and what he says is these people are chained and they're looking towards the back of the cave now behind them is a raised walkway like a bridge and people walk along that walkway with cardboard cutouts shapes of horses and trees and people and everything else and then the other side of that is then a source of light like a fire or something so you can imagine what happens is that the shadows of the people going across the bridge are actually reflected on the back wall of the cave so the people that are the prisoners see the shadows on the back wall now because they've never experienced anything else that's what they believe reality is and in many ways this is I think the trap of materialist reductionism we tend to think that the shadows on the cave are actual reality now because that's all we can see that's what's most because all we know that's what our senses tell us but we know from research into how the brain functions we know that the brain recreates in the behind here at the back of the brain or the darkest part of the brain the brain recreates the visual experience the visual experience is not one to one you know to believe that is to be gone in the trap called naive realism that's not we know that that's not the case I call it electromagnetic chauvinism the idea that we believe that what we see the tiny bit of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see is what is actually out there and of course it isn't so going back to the analogy what happens is one of the prisoners manages to break his chains and looks around and gets up walks past the bridge walks past the fire and walks to the entrance of the cave and sees reality as it really is sees what the nostics would call the pluroma the reality behind the reality what people do when they have extraordinary experiences like near-death experiences out of the body experiences dimethyltrine and dimethyltryptrine experiences but then they come back he comes back to hit the fellow prisoners and he says hey guys this is not it this is what it's really like and of course they turn around and say you're insane you're completely insane you've got it completely wrong you're mad and of course this is the human condition the tragedy is we we say these are hallucinations another label we don't know what hallucinations are we don't know why the brain creates hallucinations or anything so you can't say that somebody who has an extraordinary experience like an out of body experience or a near-death experience what the myth is because technically they're all brain created in one way or another but then we have the problem brain created how does the brain create anything because the brain is still empty space and the brain is inanimate and everything else as well so then we have the ghost in the machine then we have Cartesian dualism we go down the Gilbert-Ryle route and we have all these problems but if consciousness is everything we don't have dualism real briefly then we're not going to have the time to cover it thoroughly but the whole ET thing is extremely fascinating to me and I know there's a lot of different ways to cut it and to look at that data on this show we've looked at it across culture, across time and it seems to hold up Dr. Artie Sixkiller-Clark is someone I've brought up on the screen and Native Americans and star people throughout time multiple species, multiple agendas also we have all sorts of accounts of basically the ancient alien theory which a lot of people don't like but seems to hold up well we have the involvement of our government in these programs and I talked to Richard Dolan at length about that that seems to be I mean it's documented in papers and thousands and thousands of release documents I also had an interesting interview with Diana Walsh-Pesulka which we won't really have time to talk about and Jacvelay so as we move to wrap things up what do you think about ET and what do you think is going on there do you accept that there is a nuts and bolts reality to it in addition to a consciousness extended reality to it that's the question I've been interested in UFOs ever since I was about eight or nine years of age and this is the real thing that really puzzles me like for instance my mother's experience what she saw was obviously in a hypnagogic state she was obviously in a state of sleep paralysis but it had been stimulated by something she saw in the sky now on top of that it wasn't just you know she said she saw this disk in the sky of smoke and it shot off towards Wales what I didn't finish off deliberately in my description though was I was subsequently contacted by a mutual a friend of mine and she had actually seen the object about two miles away and she'd seen it on exactly the same time my mother saw it so this is something that was out there in objective reality seen by different people which seem to be associated in some way with something that was psychological or was using my mother's brain to come through into this reality so clearly we've got something here and I really am fascinated by this as you know I don't make up my mind about things I just look at the evidence and go where the evidence tells me you know I don't have any preconceptions I'm not trying to prove anything like you I just want to know you know while I've got the time here to understand but it does seem that there is very much the the kind of mythological elements of the entities the way in which they seem to follow us through history the way they seem to culturally reflect our society in one way or another as if they are actually emanations in some way of ourselves and this is why I use the term egregorial I use the term egregorial because it's like it's kind of a it's created by the brain but it's things that use the brain in order to put or awareness to pull themselves through from somewhere else and in some way they need us and we need them they seem to be sort of part of us in some way how that works I really don't know and I don't know whether we'll ever have the mental capacity to fully understand this game because it does seem like a game you know as Terence McKenna says you know it's kind of like a joke sometimes you know it's sometimes the creatures seem to be extracting the Michael they seem to be playing with us playing with our expectations almost making the people who've had close encounters look like fools when they tell what happened and yet these people why would they make up such a ridiculous story except if the entities themselves are having fun with us in some way I genuinely don't know and that's what I'm working with people we're taking this forward now this whole egregorial concept we're working with I'll be writing a paper with an associate of mine over the next few months on this very theme I mean she's a top she's she's she's a lucid dreamer and body experiencer but she's also an anthropologist so we're working on this and we're working and I'm working with scientists and everything else as well to try and take this forward because we want answers don't we we want to understand but maybe we're not supposed to maybe we're not supposed to folks again our guest has been the quite amazing Anthony Peake his new book that you're going to want to check out is the hidden universe tell me really quickly tell folks what else is going on in your world you mentioned some kind of a couple of pretty amazing events you have what about those and what about books and other things okay we're planning for the event in Greece later on this summer when we're going to be recreating Plato's Cave I'm also at the moment it hasn't been postponed yet or cancelled but I'll be speaking at this year's Contact in the Desert at the last weekend of May in Indian Indian Wells Indian Wells isn't it I said Indian Springs earlier on somewhere else and that will be taking place if it's still happening but I'm going to be I'll be doing a lecture and I'll be doing workshop and I'll be doing some work and a panel discussion with people like Whitby Streeper and various other people if anybody wants to contact me my website is Anthonypeake.com if you are interested in linking up and discussing things with me I'm very active on Instagram under cheating the ferryman 54 I'm also very active on Facebook and I will normally respond we have a large international community on both those sites that discuss and debate these ideas and what else can I tell you my books you can get my books everywhere the books are in most formats in fact I'm now working my way through the books in terms of Audible as well my first book and my book The Damon will be out in Audible and the book on time is out in Audible and this book will be out on Audible Are you recording? Pardon? Are you recording the voice? I had to audition for them as well Awesome! I had to audition but yes I passed the audition so I'm both the talent that reads my book and the author as well I think that adds so much to audio offerings because there's no substitute for the for the author Have you done your Audible? Your book in Audible? No, no Your work has always fascinated me anyway and I think you are one of the most important people in this field because of the approach you take and I think you are a breath of fresh air because of that and you are very important within this and that's why your credibility is so high and it's well it's the way it should be so thank you very much for some excellent questions as well Well that's super nice of you to say it's been an absolute delight we'll have to do it again much sooner because there's so many things we still have that we didn't get a chance to talk about but we've already extended your time limit and my apologies to your wife and I respect the fact that you realize that you have family issues so no matter I totally get that and respect that so my apologies or my gratitude to her for allowing us to take a little bit of your time today Anthony Then for easy Alexi then for easy Ali Niktar bye bye