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Nov. 15, 2012 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:22
Edition 96 - Anthony Peake

This time we meet British author Anthony Peake – and get his unique take on consciousness,life-after-death, near death experiences and what we call time.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Thank you for keeping the faith with my little show here, which seems to be growing amazingly.
Lots and lots of emails coming in.
Great email traffic.
Thank you very, very much for your emails.
I'm going to mention some of you soon.
I do get to see every email, and of course, I react and act upon each of those emails.
Thank you.
They're vital to what we do here.
I like to think of the show as being interactive.
And as I have said before, the nice thing is, if you go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv and send me an email, you know that I am going to get to see it.
It won't go to somebody in some production department somewhere and get forgotten, which is what happens in some broadcast outlets, we have to say.
The website www.theunexplained.tv designed by Adam Cornwell and seems to be booming right now.
Please visit the website if you haven't, and if you'd like to make a donation.
Thank you so much.
The money is vital to keep this work going and if you've made one recently, a number of people have.
Thank you very, very much for caring about this show.
Let's get to some of your emails now.
The last show we did, I think, was a very important one about Hurricane Sandy.
Had a great deal of response about that cataclysm that entered some people's lives and have changed certain lives forever, it seems.
The most recent email I got was from Grilloink, who's in Brooklyn.
Hope you came through it okay.
Also a New Yorker who is actually originally a Los Angelino, James Sklar.
Thank you for your email.
I know that you came through it all okay.
A man in Japan, originally from New York, hearing this show and telling me that this was the only way that he could get information on what it was like for real people there and a discussion of the climate change issue.
That was good to get.
New listener, Ed Puckett, thank you for your email.
Patrick, thank you for yours.
John thinks that I should do a show soon about the Illuminati.
Of course, we have talked about that with David Icke, but we will return to the subject.
Steve Payne, thank you for your email.
Julian Hall suggesting Amrit Goswani, a very interesting man, and I've tried to track his people down.
They tell me he's in Brazil now, but it looks like we're going to get him on.
Jim Fisher emails me with a great anecdote about the billionaire Howard Hughes.
Apparently Howard Hughes went to a business meeting and if I'm telling this right, Jim, stood up and said, I'm going to London, and then disappeared.
Whether he went to London, I don't think we know.
But strange and brilliant man.
Anna Boo in Australia.
Anna, thank you for your email.
David in America, suggesting a show about EVP and spirit box research.
I know Art Bell was very big about spirit box research and had a guest on or two about that.
Ben McGowan suggesting Jordan Maxwell.
Ben Goodcall, I do need to be doing Jordan Maxwell, you're right.
Joe and Neil Catamole.
Hello, Joe and Neil.
They fall asleep.
At least Joe does during my podcast.
Are they that riveting, Joe?
Anyway, nice to have you both there.
Burke Bronson, who thinks that I should be on an American show called Coast to Coast AM.
Burke, it's not for the want of trying.
Stickman in Mobile.
Thank you for your nice comments.
Liam McCallan in Ireland.
Tom Townsend.
Nick.
Nick emailed and said he liked Richard Lenny.
Lot of you did, the man using night vision technology to spot apparent UFO dogfights in the sky.
Donald Worthington, hello.
Chris Jimerson, thank you for your email.
Sue Brook, good to hear from you.
Brian McCord in America.
And George with a first email from the Sunshine Island of Cyprus.
Also, Will in Liverpool, thank you for your email, mate.
And Kathy, emailing about HAARP and the subject of weather control.
We have done weather control, but we will get back to that subject.
But I have done a show about weather wars with a man who runs the website weatherinfo.com, I believe it's called.
But anyway, check back on my past shows.
You will see that we've talked about that.
But HARP, this over-the-horizon radar thing that's caused all kinds of problems, yes, we need to get into.
I've had a few emails as well about my tinnitus problem that, as you know, has dogged the months from, what, March, April this year right up to now and meant for a good long period.
I couldn't work.
I'm now back trying to get work and hopefully we'll be able to.
But I think a few of you got the impression that I got a cure for tinnitus.
I haven't.
I haven't found one because I don't think there is one.
But what they do teach you and sometimes what you have to learn just by reading about this thing, this ringing in the ears, mine came to me after a virus earlier this year and has caused me tremendous problems.
You learn ways to try to live with it.
And I think that with the state of knowledge at the moment is the best we can do.
But I'm also investigating the possibility of some biofeedback devices because I've heard they can be quite useful.
If you've tried one, let me know.
This time around, we're going to talk to Anthony Peake.
Now, Anthony Peake is a British writer, a man who's been quite prolific recently and has been doing a lot of traveling and speaking and videos.
And he talks about what a lot of us would regard as the good stuff.
Things like life after death, out-of-the-body experiences, near-death experiences, the nature of time, and crucially, consciousness, which more and more people seem to be studying.
What is consciousness?
How does it affect this thing that we think is a life that we're leading?
So Anthony Peake in the UK will get on to in just a moment.
As I say, thank you very much for your emails and your support.
www.theunexplained is the website.
Please go to the website, register a hit on it.
That's vital.
However you're hearing this show.
And if you'd like to make a donation, that would be great.
Thank you very much to Martin, by the way, for the theme tune.
Martin, do get in touch.
Maybe we should revise the theme tune at some point, but people do seem to like it, even after a couple of years, which is good.
Okay, crossing now to Anthony Peake in the UK.
And Anthony, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
I'm absolutely delighted to be on your show, Howard.
I've been looking forward to this for so long.
Well, we both have, haven't we?
Because we had some communication problems back in the summer.
They are now resolved.
So we can now talk in crystal clear digital quality, which is really nice.
Over the months that we haven't spoken since our first contact, I've had even more emails about you.
And it seems to me that you're very much an up-and-coming writer.
You seem in a way to have grabbed the spirit of the time.
The things that you're talking about seem to be the things, especially in this year of 2012, seem to be the ones that have grabbed people's, for want of a better word, consciousness.
It does seem to be that case.
It's one of the things that I've looked back over the years and always thought, if I'd have written my books earlier, would it have been better for me in the sense I would have been a younger man?
But I then look back and think, well, no, the way in which I can communicate using the web and various other broadcasting tools is the way of getting messages across.
And indeed, I was surprised last week I was over in Zagreb in Croatia doing a double book launch.
And I was staggered that the amount of TV stations and radio stations that were literally queuing up to interview me.
And indeed, my publishers and myself were quite surprised when we did the book launch in the center of Zagreb last Wednesday night.
We were turning people away.
We had over 250 people turn up, which was simply staggering.
And I think it's because people relate to what I write about because they can relate directly to the experiences they have in their lives.
And all I'm trying to do is structure those experiences and try to make sense of them and coming up with a philosophy or an explanation as to what these things are really about.
You told me you had a great response in Zagreb.
I don't doubt that at all.
And in other countries, do you find it's a bit of a struggle in this country?
I know that you've done things like you've spoken at the famous paranormal bookstore Watkins, which is opposite the place where I used to work until very, very recently, off the Charing Crossroad.
Is it harder here in the UK?
To a certain extent it is.
But it's the old argument, isn't it, about people never really recognise you in your own backyard.
And to a certain extent, that has been true.
I mean, for instance, I had over 300 people turn up to hear me speak in New York, what, four years ago.
Whereas here, I mean, the largest audience I've had here has probably been about 150 or 200.
And I think it's because I don't know whether it's necessarily that the British are not open to these ideas.
It is just simply that it's just much harder to break into the mainstream here than it probably is in many other countries.
You know, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
I think a lot of this is about scepticism.
And the scepticism is not among the people.
You've only got to go back through the emails that I receive every week here.
Go back through the back catalogue of emails, and you'll see that there are many people in the UK who are very interested in these things.
The problem is the gatekeepers, the people who control the media, the people who control publishing, the broadcast media in particular, there is an innate skepticism about all things and it's good to be skeptical and I hope that I always will be as a journalist.
But I think if the scepticism goes to the point where you close those gates or you make those gates less easy to open for some people than others compared with others, that is when we start to have a problem.
And I think that's where we are in the UK.
In America, I think they're more open-minded.
I have many, many listeners in America.
And I think in other countries.
But I think in the UK, it's not the public, but I think we have a problem with our media.
Very much so.
Not only that, I think we have a problem with academia as well.
I mean, for instance, last month, I was invited up to give a lecture at Edinburgh University Philosophy Society.
They approached me and then they contacted me a few days before the event was about to take place to turn around and say, sorry, you can't come and talk because we're not allowed to have you.
We're not allowed to give you platform.
And I thought, good Lord, this is amazing when you think that when I was a student, approaching 40 years ago now, if we'd have been told by the authorities and the university authorities we couldn't have a speaker at our own society, there would have been a riot.
And whereas these guys just accepted it.
And I think the problem is individuals like me are a danger.
And the reason I'm a danger is I'm not a new ager.
In other words, I'm not saying I'm channeling this information from the planet Tharg.
I'm not talking to 30,000-year-old Atlantean priests.
I'm not doing any of that.
All I am is somebody who's pulling together hard science.
And this is the thing I stress here.
There is nothing I don't write about that you won't read about in the pages of Scientific American, a new scientist.
But the difficulty is that many, many people in this country are stuck in a scientific paradigm that is 110 years old.
You know, they're still taught Newtonian physics, which is important.
I totally agree, because Newtonian physics is what makes the world around us work.
But effectively, there's a whole world of quantum physics that people simply reject because it just doesn't make rational sense.
And of course, the problem with quantum physics is it has again been hijacked by the stranger fringes of the New Age movement as well and been misinterpreted.
Well, the problem with them is that they will seize on anything like quantum physics or any new idea to say, okay, this is it.
Let's all get on board, lads.
Let's back this.
And you can't do that.
If you're trying to be rational and objective, you have to stand back from all things, including quantum physics.
A couple of years ago on radio, I had a conversation with Michiu Kaku, the famous physicist, scientist, man of media.
And we talked a lot about quantum physics.
And he's great at putting things in language that ordinary people can understand.
And he just basically put it in a way that I got.
He said, this will change everything.
It will allow us to do things that we didn't think we could do before.
They'll be smaller, faster, lighter, better.
We will work on a plane that we have not been able to function at before.
Now, I understood that.
That crossed over into the mainstream for me.
No, absolutely.
The thing is as well, though, what I find peculiar is the way in which, for instance, I've noticed now that the mass media in the last two weeks have been full of articles about Stuart Hammerhoff and Roger Penrose's hypothesis, which is called Orc R, ORCOR.
And this is a model of applying quantum physics to the structures of the brain and how indeed we generate consciousness.
Now, what I find amazing is I think it was the Daily Mail or one of the popular newspapers picked this up and ran with it as if it was brand new news.
Now, I wrote about ORCR in my very first book that came out seven years ago, and it's suddenly all over the news.
And yet I was writing about it seven years ago.
And, you know, certain people were interested in what I was writing about, but not a great deal.
I also cite the example of there's a guy called Anton Zeilinger, who is a professor of physics at the University of Vienna.
The work this guy has been doing with subatomic particles, you would not believe.
You know, he's been applying some of the latest ideas in particle physics and making them work in terms of applications.
And it's simply incredible.
He has been able to show that there's something called wave-particle duality, when a particle can be a wave unless it's observed, and then it becomes a point particle.
And he's been doing this not only with electrons and photons, but he has shown that large atoms, atoms like buckyballs, Buckminster Fullerene, which is 60 atoms in size, these things are waves until they are observed by a conscious observer or they are measured, and then they become a point particle.
Is this the idea, and I think I did see something about this, but not very much, that an object can be in two places at once?
Correct.
Yes, it's the objects can be in two places at the same time.
Not only that, but objects can actually immediately communicate with each other immediately across any distance.
Now, if you extrapolate that to what we all know sometimes happens in our own lives, then suddenly rationality as we've known it goes right out of the window.
Oh, totally.
That's the whole problem with leading edge of quantum mechanics and quantum physics, is that it makes no sense at all to our rational worldview.
Richard Feynman was one of the world's top particle physicists in the 1980s, and he used to open up his lectures with postgraduate students doing particle physics.
And he used to say, the things I'm going to teach you now, you will find impossible, but you cannot reject them because this is the most successful form of science we have ever known.
And yet it is completely counterintuitive in every single sense.
I mean, effectively, how can a particle be in two places at the same time?
But they are.
How come I can take one particle or two particles, do something called entangle them, then send one particle literally to the other side of the universe I could, and then do something with the first particle I have in the laboratory, and the other particle would react instantaneously.
For instance, around three years ago, I had a meeting with Professor Jeff Forshaw.
Now, Jeff Forshaw is the guy that now writes books with Brian Cox.
In fact, Jeff was Brian Cox's PhD tutor.
Brian Cox being the hottest media scientist, physicist, broadcaster that we have at the moment in this country.
For those who don't know outside the UK, I think they probably even know in places outside the UK.
But just to clarify that.
Hugely popular guy, used to be a rock musician with a band called D-Reem and used the money he made as a rock star to actually take himself off to do a PhD, I think, in astrophysics.
But effectively, Jeff and I were both invited to do a platform event at the National Theatre in London about three years ago.
And we were discussing time on the stage at the National Theatre.
And Jeff and I met up for a cup of coffee a few weeks before just to plan how we were going to approach the subject matter.
And during the conversation, Jeff just dropped into the conversation and he said, of course, we know that every electron in the universe knows the location of every other electron.
Now, that is incredible.
And it's a statement.
And Jeff is probably the leading expert in particle physics in this country.
And in fact, the new book that he's written with Brian Cox, I think, is called How Can an Object Be in Two Places.
No, I think everything, it's called Everything That Can Happen Will Happen.
And if you think about this in terms of the philosophies that we've had down the years and still have, if you think about Hinduism, and one of the first things that I remember interviewing a Swami in Bath years and years ago, a guy called Swami Avyaktananda, who I think was about 100 years of age then and was an amazingly wise man.
And he said to me, all life, everything is one.
And I have to say, it gave me a headache to think about what he meant.
And I had to, as I was going away from the place, really concentrate on the words that he'd said to me in the interview so that I clearly understood what he was getting at.
What he was telling me is that everything, all things are connected.
Very much so.
And this is in my next book, which actually, funnily enough, I'm putting the finishing touches to today, which will be out next year.
This is exactly one of the subjects I'll be discussing because somebody I'm working with in certain ways is a guy called Professor Bernard Haish.
And Bernard Haish is a profoundly successful astrophysicist over in California.
And Bernard is one of the guys that's got a grant from the American government to find ways and, or he's working on finding ways and means of drawing up information from something called the zero point field, which we can touch on later.
But Bernard has written an amazing book called The God Theory.
And in this, he suggests exactly the same thing.
Effectively, we are all one single consciousness.
As Bill Hicks, the American comedian, once said, we are all a single consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.
In other words, we are, for want of a better word, the Godhead.
And we are elements of the Godhead.
What we are doing is effectively existing in a three-dimensional holographic recreation or creation of the mind.
And in this, we are like beings in a soap opera in the sense that we are not aware of our true selves.
Now, again, this is something that has been known as you turn around.
The Vedanta has said this for Centuries.
It's a central premise of Buddhism.
It's a central premise of Hinduism.
It's also a central premise of most of the Western religions, because if you start looking deeply into the more esoteric regions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, i.e., into Sufism, into the Kabbalah, and into Gnosticism, you will find that this concept is what is generally believed to be the case.
It is also the case for most mystical traditions as well.
This is one of the great secrets.
Now, the thing is, what I'm trying to do is to do the science of this, to show that there are scientific ways of showing that this is a strong possibility.
And if you think of a pint of water, within that pint of water, there'll be millions and millions of little bugs.
And they will all be in the water together.
They're all separate.
But they're united by the fact that they're all in the water.
It's that kind of thing, isn't it?
You're saying that we are all human beings.
We're all in our water, which is the experience of this planet Earth that we have.
And we're all interpreting that experience.
But nevertheless, it is the same experience.
We're all having the same experience.
And it's our...
I'm putting this badly, but life is what we make of it, in other words.
But it's all the same thing.
Well, effectively, this is the great mystery.
One of the things that if you, And the first one is the thing I touched on before, the observer problem, the way in which the act of observation seems to bring about the physical reality we see around us.
This is something that was applied as a try-to-put-down of it by Erwin Schrödinger in his famous Schrödinger's cat experiment.
It is something that Einstein turned around and once said, I cannot believe that the moon isn't there when I don't look at it.
But the reality of the fact is that all the empirical research in quantum physics shows that this is in fact the case.
Now, if consciousness has a powerful effect upon external reality, this suggests that consciousness is the basis of reality.
In other words, consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of matter, but matter is created by consciousness, by the act of observation.
Now, if this is the case, this puts human consciousness or any form of consciousness at the baseline of the reality we live within.
Now, the second issue that scientists have a profound problem is, it's something that Australian philosopher David Chalmers calls the hard problem.
And the hard problem is how it is that basic electrical signals in jelly in my brain can create the concept of Howard Hughes or Anthony Peake.
In other words, you and I both have hopes, fears, anticipations, love, hates.
We have an inner world that we think about, that we anticipate everything else.
Now, we know we are entities that have an inner life.
There is something called eliminative materialism, which is put forward by people like Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett and quite a few other famous neurological scientists who claim, believe it or not, that we're fooling ourselves, that in fact, there is nothing going inside.
There is no inner life at all.
We literally are robots that think we are conscious.
In other words, we are being fooled.
But my central response to that is, how can you fool something that's not conscious?
In other words, you have to be self-reflective to be fooled in the first place.
True, you have to be able to come up with the idea that you are being fooled to be fooled.
Exactly.
And this is a central premise.
Whereas these limited materialists genuinely, I mean, for instance, Daniel Dennett wrote a wonderful book.
It is a great book called Consciousness Explained.
And in this, he argues that even he is not a sentient reflective being.
Who on earth wrote the book?
I have no idea.
And indeed, who is spending the royalties of that book?
I have no idea.
So in order to make that concept work, you have to deny what is.
You have to deny the fact.
In order to make his concept work, you have to deny the fact that he's a thinking, feeling being.
Exactly.
You have to deny the fact.
For instance, one of the arguments I use in terms of the deeper philosophical aspects of the material I write about is the word empirical.
It's bandied around by scientists continually.
We have to empirically prove this.
The word empirical means from experience.
Now, effectively, everything I experience is processed by my brain and is presented to my consciousness inside my head.
What else I can possibly know from my experience except my own experience of it is zero.
Everything you are looking at now, everything you are perceiving, for instance, how the visual cortex works.
Effectively, everything you're seeing now as you're looking out of your eyes is being created and processed from a small inverted image the size of a postage stamp on the back of your retina.
That is then turned into electrical stimulus that goes down your optic nerve to the visual cortex of the brain where it is recreated by the brain and is then sent somewhere whereby the little homunculus in the brain that calls itself I or me suddenly sees it.
But the vision you are seeing now is not that little small postage stamp image on the back of the retina, but an all-encompassing three-dimensional wraparound image that you see from your eyes.
You know, and the whole thing is a mystery.
The question of vision, there's a guy called Richard L. Gregory, who's an expert on visual sciences and how the brain processes vision.
And it's one of the greatest mysteries, yet it's the most immediate sense we have.
And we don't even understand that.
And I often think in my more reflective moments, the world that I see and the things that I see, we know that some people don't perceive colors in the same way as others.
I often wonder, do you see what I'm seeing?
How can I know that?
How can I know that you see the world as I'm seeing it?
That it's the same, that they're the same objects.
It's the same park outside the flat that I live.
How can I know that?
You can't.
You can't know that because you cannot share the concepts and perceptions of another human being.
And yet we are all connected.
Yes, and not only that, but you can't even convey it.
I turn around to people and I say, okay, explain to me the color red.
You see the color red.
You explain to me exactly what you see when you see red.
And all you can do is say, well, it's a kind of a reddy color.
Well, my red, I might perceive red as green.
And of course, in the ultimate physics of it all, red doesn't exist.
Red is just a certain vibration of the electromagnetic spectrum that our visual field perceives as this kind of red colour.
Now, on top of this, this is another great mystery of neurology.
It's called qualia.
Qualia are those things, the intensities of perceptions we have.
The idea that red is red is nonsensical.
In my first book, I use the analogy of the movie Schindler's List.
And in Schindler's List, there is a section, the whole movie is in black and white, you may recall, except for one small section where there's a little girl in a red coat.
And you see her running down a street in Poland, Warsaw or somewhere.
And then later in the film, you see that red coat in a pile of bodies.
Okay, terrible, powerful way of putting it across by Steven Spielberg.
But effectively, I say to people, when you watch that movie on your TV screen from a video, where is the red?
Was the red in the coat when it was first filmed?
Was it then superimposed when they redid the film in black and white and put it into color?
Is the red in the DVD that you're playing?
Is the red in the laser beam that is actually reading the DVD?
Is the red on the screen of your TV as you watch it?
Is the red in the retina of your eye?
Or is the red in the brain?
And the answer is the red is nowhere.
The red is just, it's a qualia.
It's like pain.
If there were no beings, sentient beings in the universe, pain wouldn't exist.
Pain is a sensation, but it doesn't exist in three-dimensional reality.
Thought does not exist in three-dimensional reality.
So a big, big thing derives from what you're telling me, and that is, using the example of red, but anything really.
Red is red because we all believe it is.
So you can apply that to just about anything.
And if we started to believe differently about anything, then the something that we're believing about or thinking about would become different.
In other words, we can create our own reality.
It's been said before, it's become a cliché.
Maybe this is the proof.
We do create our own reality.
I think an example of creating our own reality is what happened this morning to me.
I expect my computer to not work.
I particularly expect my computer not to work when we get together.
And this morning, I switch on my laptop and lo and behold, it decides to load 17 updates.
And it continued loading the updates till a minute to nine.
Then I had to switch it off and we were due to call at nine o'clock.
Now, these are the things I use.
I call it the photocopier effect.
If you're at work and you have a big meeting and you have to get the photocopies done for the meeting, the photocopier will cease to function.
This is as if the universe around you is picking up your negativity and you impose that negativity on the world around you.
So somebody's been in my lowest points with this tinnitus problem that I've had this year, which of course has affected something very fundamental to me, and that is my hearing, which I use as a broadcaster.
Somebody's been trying to explain to me that what you think is what you get, and if you keep thinking the same thing, you'll get more of it.
So if you think your way out of the problem, magically, you will find your way out of the problem.
There are loads of examples in my very small life, but I can remember being a fat teenager at school in Liverpool, and I didn't like it.
And I made a conscious effort to become a thinner teenager.
And in a miraculously short period of time, and I'd been fat for 10 years, age 17, I went from being plump to being extremely thin, and it took about three months to happen.
And yes, that was partly changing the way that I ate.
But I changed my mindset.
I simply rejected the idea of me being fat.
And I think that period of 12 weeks to lose as much weight as I did, I think that was probably abnormally fast.
But I passionately, passionately changed my belief system.
And I got that.
And I can give you, and I won't bore you with them, countless examples from my own life where I've changed my belief system about something and whatever it is has been delivered to me.
Or I've wanted something.
I've tended to find, by and large, the things that I've wanted, I've tended to get.
And this is where another cliché comes into play sometimes.
When you get the thing that you want, you realize that you really didn't need it.
But such is the nature of life.
But that makes the whole game really fascinating.
It brings so many things into sharp relief.
Things like one of the first people I talked to on this program was the author Birbel Moore, who'd written this book called The Cosmic Ordering Service that was in the news four years or so ago.
Noel Edmonds, people like that had used it apparently to improve their career.
The whole idea of if you perceive it and if you conceive of it, you can achieve it.
You can make things happen because reality is not set in stone.
That's the wonderful thought that flows, I think, from what you're telling me.
To an extent, I mean, I don't go as far as the concepts of the cosmic ordering service and such like, because I think that, for me, goes too far into what I would consider rather lightweight new age.
I want it and I will get it and it's really wonderful and we can all be millionaires.
I think that it's more subtle than that.
And it has to be, because effectively, if we were all manipulating our own reality, we'd all be millionaires in different ways or we would get what we want out of life.
I think there is a more spiritual aspect to this.
It's the idea of becoming a better human being by manipulating the world around you.
I cite an example of this.
One of my associates is a research scientist in Geneva.
And I did a talk over in Geneva around about six years ago.
When he was driving me back to the airport, he explained to me that he had, a few years ago, he went through a very, very good phase in his life.
And it was then he realized that he had not seen for three or four months a red traffic light.
And the very next set of traffic lights were green, were red.
And this is because he was just going with the flow and his environment was reflecting his positivity.
So to a certain extent, I believe if you apply certain elements of quantum physics that it is an observer-based universe, and if we are the observer of our own universe, and in fact, this is not as crazy as it sounds, I suggest that if people out there think I'm talking nonsense on this, to check out something called the quantum suicide experiment that was suggested by a guy called Professor Max Tegmark, who's a Swedish quantum physicist, I think at the University of Princeton.
And in this, he applies the applications of something called Schrödinger's cat and the observer issues of reality to a hypothetical scientific experiment.
And he can prove scientifically that within our own universe, it can be argued that we're all immortal.
And in fact, if you apply that, I put this challenge out to everybody out there who's listening to this show.
Isn't it weird that in your life, other people die?
Other people do die.
You don't.
And you will continue to not die in your universe because your universe needs you to be the observer of your universe.
Ah, but hold on.
We're all getting older and some of us get health conditions along the way that may affect the quality of our lives and ultimately end our lives.
Can you really say that, yes, you do observe people around you dying, but eventually that fate will befall you and it's part of a natural process.
Yeah, it's an interesting point here.
And it's one of the things I discuss in my first book is The Life After Death, The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When We Die.
And in this, I suggest that aging, we age because of something called inertia and is time.
We exist within time and it is a part of living in time that our body gets older and older.
And like anything else in the universe, it goes from a section of order to disorder.
Okay.
And it's the known fact.
Okay.
But the difference is that is if you exist within time.
I suggest that at the final seconds of our lives, something very, very peculiar happens.
And in fact, it is time that changes.
And I use the analogy here.
I turn around and I say, most of us have had this experience.
You're involved in a car crash, a car accident.
You're given bad news.
Time slows down.
It seems to just slow down.
The reason for this is time is an internal construct.
There was a philosopher called Henri Bergson who pointed this out and said there are two forms of time.
There's external time and internal time, Lang and Dury.
Internal psychological time is the way we perceive time passing.
Okay?
You wake up in the morning, the alarm clock goes off.
You put it on snooze.
You're having a dream.
In the period when the snooze is on, you can have a dream that can last for hours and hours and hours.
This is because you are existing in subjective time in dream states.
I think when you die, you fall into a subjective dream state that is time dilates to such an extent that in the final seconds of your life, a whole new lifetime can be lived.
And at the end of that second lifetime, another lifetime can be lived.
So you never die.
And does this mean that the people around you who experience your apparent death, that is their way of rationalizing the fact that you're not around anymore?
Correct.
You die.
In their universe, you die, because, of course, they continue in their time.
It's a term I use.
It's a philosophical term called the Phaneron.
And the Phaneron was put forward by a guy called Charles Pierce, an American philosopher.
And this is the idea that we all exist within our own perceptual universe.
There's the phenomenal world out there, which is the world of perception, but there's the internal universe that we all live within, our universe, our Phaneron.
Within our Phaneron, we never die, but we see other people die in their phanerons, because effectively we are observers of them, and they are observers of us.
But we have graveyards full of people who've died.
No, no, Howard.
No, Howard.
You have graveyards full of people who die in your universe.
This is the important point.
But for them, they have not died because they're existing in a different perception of time.
These are wonderful thoughts to get into, but how can we ever prove this?
This is going to be the ultimate thing we can't prove.
Great explanation.
Fantastic paradigm.
How could you prove it?
Okay, how do we prove it?
Empirically.
Look back at all the reports or many of the reports of people that have near-death experiences.
Okay, I'm a professional member of the International Association of Near Death Studies.
So I'm fairly aware of the science and the philosophy behind near-death studies.
And in fact, interestingly enough, I wrote a book or I edited a book last year with two Australian consultant psychiatrists called Making Sense of Near Death Experience.
This book was nominated for the Psychiatric Book of the Year at the British Medical Association.
We didn't win, but we were highly commended.
So this again shows that this information is being taken on board.
Okay, so near-death experience.
What do people say?
They turn around and they say that I feel a sensation of floating outside of my body.
They feel that they go towards a white light.
They feel that time slows down.
But they also feel something else, something called a panoramic life review.
My life flashed before my eyes.
This has been reported for centuries.
People who drown, people who are skydivers, well, it would have been skydivers centuries ago, but skydivers, people who fall off cliffs that survive.
My life flashed before my eyes.
Some people claim they see their whole life like a movie super fast in front of their eyes.
These are empirically reported.
These things are all brought about by the release of a particular neurotransmitter in the brain called glutamate, which is the major neurotransmitter of the mammalian brain.
It is known that glutamate floods the brain at the point of death.
It is also known that glutamate brings around certain psychological states, including time slowing down.
These are known scientific facts of what happens within the dying brain.
Therefore, there has to be a function for these chemicals that are being released.
I also suggest in my next book that another chemical gets released in the brain at the point of death, something called dimethyltryptamine, DMT.
DMT is the most powerful known hallucinogenic.
It's hallucinic drug, yeah.
Yeah, I don't term it hallucinogenic.
I call it an entheogen.
It's a drug that actually allows you to become aware of the God within.
And this is a term I don't use.
It's a term that anthropologists use.
There's anthropologists such as Jeremy Narby and various other individuals who've been out working with shamans out in Latin America.
Ayahuascaros.
These are people that take a particular drug called ayahuasca, which effectively is DMT mixed with another plant.
Now, again, these individuals, when they take DMT, they have out-of-the-body experiences, they have time slowing down, they have meetings with alien beings.
This is all because it's within the brain.
And I argue that they go inside their brain and they actually draw up information from something that has been known for centuries called the Akashic field, the Akashic record, something that has been known in Hinduism.
And indeed, this Akashic field and this Akashic record is something, again, I touched upon earlier called the zero-point field, zero-point energy.
I haven't got time to go into the science of this, but it is believed that just above absolute zero, there is a form of energy where there should be no energy.
In fact, at absolute zero, and the scientists out there will know this, at 272.15 degrees Kelvin, there is no energy.
That is why it is absolute zero.
There's no movement, and yet energy is perceived at that level.
This energy is being drawn up from the areas between subatomic particles themselves.
This is a C. It's called a quantum vacuum.
And it's not a vacuum, it's the opposite.
It's a plenum.
It's full of energy.
This energy is encoded energy, and encoded within it digitally is information.
This information is the information of everything we perceive.
In other words, we are living in a huge computer program.
A computer program and we are processors.
Our brains are processors of a computer program.
This computer program is what everything runs upon.
And this computer program has within it everything that can ever happen and everything that will happen and everything that has a potential to happen.
Now, again, people will turn around and say, this is scientific drivel.
And I'll turn around to people and say, okay, don't take my word for this.
Read the latest papers by Stephen Hawking.
Hawking has been working with a guy called Thomas Hertog, who's a research scientist at CERN.
Hawking and Hertog have brought up a new theory of quantum physics.
And in this, they argue that every potentiality is out there encoded.
And it is there.
And as we perceive things, we collapse one wave function to bring about one reality.
But all the other potential realities that could be brought about by the collapse of different wave functions are still encoded within the field.
So Anthony, what kind of a difference do you think that it would make to people's ordinary everyday lives as they perceive them here?
If we were able to plumb and mine this zero-point field, if we were able to actually get in there, which you say we're starting to do, unlock it, and perhaps change or understand more the realities within?
How could we change this world, the one that we think exists around us?
I think it's to do with collective consciousness.
I think effectively, if more and more human beings start to realize that this is how the universe works.
Now, all I'm saying is this is supposition and hypothesis.
It's me pulling together information I've got from other sources.
So please don't take my word for this.
This is my search.
My books are all about my search of understanding.
They're almost autobiographical.
So don't say, you know, this is what I think could be.
But effectively, one could argue that if we all, because we all carry around in our heads the greatest mystery of the universe, as I said before, consciousness and self-referential consciousness.
It's the greatest mystery.
Science is not even on the first base of explaining it.
This new model of science attempts to explain how this works.
If this is the case, and it means that we all start to realize that our reality is in some way, not a created reality, but it is a reality that we can influence because every outcome of every decision we make is already encoded in there.
We can be par more positive about our lives and make things happen for us in different ways.
Now, I wonder whether there will be a catalyst when more and more people become aware of this.
And when they do, there will be some form of change in human consciousness itself, maybe even the way we are.
Maybe we'll start to realize that we are actually, in fact, spiritual beings having a physical life rather than physical beings having an eternal spiritual life.
And do you believe that proof of that that process that you just told me about has perhaps started is the fact that you and I are having this conversation.
We think we are now.
Oh, definitely.
I think that the groundswell, the very fact of the more and more people that are being attracted to my writing, and I'd like to, well, I'd not like to believe it sounds incredibly vain, but people who know me know I'm not.
But I think I'm the only writer in the world that's writing about this stuff in this way.
I'm the only writer, I think I'm correct in saying, that's applying everything from I'm discussing the Kabbalah with a Kabbalah scholar, one of the world's leading experts in Kabbalah, and the models of how the Kabbalah describes reality.
I'm discussing issues with Sufis, but I'm also discussing things with neurologists, quantum physicists, some of the leading researchers in these fields, and drawing it all together to try and bring up a new picture of a new reality.
My latest book will be on the pineal gland and how the pineal gland seems to access information from alternate realities.
And I'm attempting to do the science of how the pineal gland does this.
You know, so this is the real deal.
This is something really I'm so excited about.
This is the gland, the part of the brain that experiences things like it's activated in springtime, for example.
It is somehow aware of sunlight and that sort of thing, isn't it?
It's a sort of a sensation center.
Correct.
It's one of the great mysteries as to how the pineal gland excretes something called melatonin.
And melatonin is the substance that makes you go to sleep.
Now the pineal gland is deep within the brain.
In fact, it's one of the few structures that is not repeated in the brain.
As you probably know, you have a right and left hemisphere, but you also have a right and left amygdala and hippocampus and various other structures in the brain.
But the pineal gland sits alone and it sits in the dead center of the brain.
In certain animals, the pineal gland is an ossified eye.
In fact, in certain animals, it has a lens, it has a retina and everything else.
It's long been believed that the pineal gland is, in fact, our own third eye that's actually moved back into the head.
Now, if it has and it has certain elements of an eye, it processes light.
But it's deep within the brain.
So the light it is processing is not the light from the external world.
It's another form of light.
And in my new book, I suggest that this light is something called biophotons.
It's light bioluminescence.
It's light that's given off by the cells.
Not only this, it's light given up by something very, very profoundly important called DNA.
DNA gives off light.
This is the light that comes up from our own DNA.
And again, as fellow scousers, one of the things, there was a guy called, I think it was Fritz Albert Popp, who was a German research scientist at the University of Liverpool.
And he was the first guy, I think I'm right in saying, that first discovered the existence of biophotons.
In fact, get this, recent research I've read actually has shown there's a guy called Bokken, who I'm now in contact with.
I swapped emails with him a couple of days ago, who's a research scientist, I think, in Hungary.
And he has evidence that the eyes give off light.
In other words, the eyes don't just take in light.
They send light out into the external world.
So up until now, the process that we've been through as we've got cleverer, as we've built what we think is an industrial society and thereby polluted the planet and done all the rest of it, but we think that we've improved things.
But what we've actually done is we've moved away from all of this.
And so when we stand there at Stonehenge and we think to ourselves, how the hell did they do this and what did it mean?
The things you're talking about could be the answers to those questions.
Those people were actually not as stupid as we think they were.
They were in fact cleverer than we are.
Oh, totally.
I mean, in my next book, I trace how certain ideas traveled along the Silk Road from ancient Summer.
And in fact, these particular concepts seem to suggest that there was a civilization that seeded Summer.
And I believe this civilization was the civilization that was aware of the pineal gland and the power of the pineal gland.
Not only that, but I think the intelligence that guides us all is our own DNA.
It is DNA.
We are literally beings who exist in this three-dimensional universe of whatever nature it is in order for DNA to continue.
It's DNA that's sentient.
It's DNA that's intelligent.
It's DNA.
Sorry, do you believe that DNA, because a lot of people have talked to me over this last year or so about DNA and its nature, is something that maybe was given to us by, for want of a better word, extraterrestrials, and at the moment is being manipulated and changed by them?
It is said that our DNA is changing.
Yeah, the DNA, yeah, no, I believe that whether there's the extraterrestrial hypothesis, there's the concept of the Anukai, the lizards that were supposedly the people who started off the Sumerian civilization.
Now, I think the symbolism of the serpent and the lizards is quite precise because people, when they have DMT experiences, consistently see snakes.
It's the snakes who is the, and the snakes are a symbol of DNA because, of course, the DNA, the spiral of DNA.
Did you know, for instance, that Francis Crick, when he discovered DNA, had great problems in trying to understand how the structure of the atom worked?
He took an LSD trip, and in an LSD trip, he saw snakes swirling around each other.
When he came to, he realized how the structure of DNA worked.
In other words, DNA told Crick how its structure worked.
Wow.
And if you think about it, I know people who've maybe taken too many tranquilizers to try and get off to sleep.
And they've had an experience like that.
And they've said, I saw snakes climbing up the wall.
It's such a common thing.
It happened to me.
It happened to me.
In fact, we haven't got time now, but I work with two Austrian researchers.
One's a consultant neurologist and the other is a consultant psychologist.
And they have developed something called the Lucid Light Device.
And this machine stimulates the endogenous, that is the internal excretion of dimethyltryptamine within the pineal gland when you use it.
Now, funnily enough, Howard, we will have that machine in Liverpool on the 2nd and 3rd of March next year when I'm inviting these guys over.
I'm doing an event in Liverpool.
And we will have a Lucid Light Machine with us.
And people can come along on that day and contest it for free.
I think I'd like to be back home on that day.
On those two days.
This machine will change the world.
This is the facilitator, I believe, of the opening of the Aina Chakra, the opening of the third eye for most of us.
Now, you mentioned pop and work that had been done in Liverpool and the fact that we are both scousers.
I have this theory about Liverpool, apart from being one of the most creative places on the planet, second only, I believe, to New York.
Liverpool is one of the most open-minded places.
So if ever there was a crucible for thinking differently about who we are, what we are, and what everything is, Liverpool is that place.
It's just a fact.
And this isn't Mersey Pride speaking, because I've lived away from Liverpool for 20 odd years now.
It just, as I reflect on my home city, which I often do, it's just a fact, an objective fact, that this is such a creative melting pot of ideas.
Do you know, I moved back.
I was away.
I moved away to go to university back in 1973.
And I moved back around about eight years ago.
And I lived around for seven years back at home.
And I was amazed at Liverpool as a place.
It was vibrant.
It was creative.
And I made some fantastic friends up there.
And indeed, a group of individuals up there, which we now call the Walker Group, because we used to consistently meet the Walker Art Gallery in the tea room there.
And we now know it as the Walker Group.
If you go onto Facebook and look up the IT Lad Walker Group, we're still dining out, and they still meet.
And we used to meet and discuss the ideas put forward in my books.
And indeed, you probably know I was a regular on BBC Radio Merseyside with Billy Butler.
I was on every fortnight with Billy putting forward a lot of my ideas.
And the responses I used to get from my fellow scousers were phenomenal.
And that is because they have a certain open-mindedness.
Yeah, it's incredible.
But without being cynical, people will argue really heavily with you.
You know, they're not stupid and they have no truck with the sillier aspects of this movement.
At least they're honest enough to be the first to tell you if they think it's a load of old garbage.
They certainly do in certain terms, absolutely.
I can remember years ago interviewing the open-mindedness of it and the ability of Liverpoolians to accept everything, I think, is reflected a lot through art.
I remember one of the first interviews I did.
Was with a Liverpool artist who talked like that.
I mean, he really did sound like Ringo Starr.
Wasn't Arthur Dooley.
Very famous.
I don't think Arthur Dooley's with us anymore, but what a fantastic.
If you remember Arthur Dooley, look him up.
But he was amazing.
This guy was certainly very much after Arthur Dooley's thought process.
To make up a point on all kinds of levels, he'd nailed a chicken to a crucifix.
And of course, I went along as the reporter and said, you know, why do you want to go and do that sort of thing?
And he explained to me very cogently why this was a very good idea for getting a point across.
And I'll never forget the last question that I asked him.
I said, do you plan to do anything like this again?
And he just looked at me and he said, always, always.
But a great crucible of ideas.
What are you working on at the moment?
You told me there is a new book in the pipeline.
You gave me a little sketch of that.
Yeah, very excited.
The new book, the new book that will be out beginning of next year at the moment is roughly entitled The Gateway to Infinity.
And this will be my take on how we are opening up the pineal gland.
And it will be a full research of the pineal gland historically, anthropologically, scientifically, neurologically, physiologically, the whole thing.
I'm reviewing the whole thing.
And the information I have got from this is stunning me.
This book will be out next year.
And after that, my next project, which I'll be starting tomorrow, is going to be a biography of the American science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick.
Really?
I've heard a lot about Philip K. Dick.
this guy is...
I'm in touch with...
I'm in touch with two of them at the moment, two of them that are still alive.
I'm also in touch with quite a few of the people that physically knew Phil during his life.
Now, there have been around about maybe four or five biographies of Phil, but mine's going to be different because I'm going to be looking at the influences on him and his subsequent influences on modern culture.
Because the amount of people that acknowledge him, even if people aren't aware of Philip K. Dick as a writer, they'll know the movies.
They'll know movies like Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau.
But they'll also realize that the Wachowski brothers who did The Matrix claimed specifically it was Philip K. Dick that influenced him.
He was interested in the nature, what we've been discussing today, reality.
What is reality?
What it is to be human?
What is it to be an android?
You know, in Blade Runner, one of his most famous movies, the idea of what's it to be conscious?
Can we be conscious or not?
You know, can we tell whether an android is alive or not?
And you're right.
So many people that I've talked to over the years doing this show and shows like it have referenced Philip K. Dick.
But it will be interesting for you to find out where the source of a lot of these people's inspiration, the man himself, where he got his inspiration.
Oh, he got his inspiration from the most peculiar of places.
He had something called 2374.
And 2374 were a series of events that took place in February and March of 1974 where he had what he called his theophany.
And his theophany was what he called his encounter with God or his encounter with his own higher self.
Now in my second book, The Daemon, A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self, I discuss this concept of the higher self.
Philip K. Dick experienced every single phenomenon that I write about in my books.
This guy was it.
Now on top of that, he had experiences where he perceived himself in his own past.
He was totally precognitive.
A lot of the things that happened in his life, he even precognized the circumstances of his own death in a letter that I've got that he wrote to somebody in Alaska six years before it happened.
He described in detail how his body would be found.
How did he die?
He had a huge problem with his brain.
My brain, my brain's now gone.
He had a stroke.
He had a massive stroke and he was living on his own at the time.
And his neighbors knocked the door down to find him lying head down between a settee and a coffee table in his apartment in Fullerton.
I think it was in Fullerton in LA.
In the letter, he never properly regained consciousness.
Although Tessa Dick, who was his last wife, who's now a really good friend of mine, Tessa, lovely, lovely lady, she has informed me that he did become conscious towards the end.
And I think he was found on the Wednesday and I think he died on the Sunday, something like that.
But the interesting thing is in his letter to a lady called Gloria Bush, Gloria Krentz Bush, her pen friend, in this original letter, he says, I've just had a hypnagogic dream.
Hypnagogia are those kind of feelings when you're half awake, half Asleep.
And he said, in the hypnagogic dream, I saw a middle-aged man lying flat on his back or flat on his stomach or head down between a table, between a chair and a glass table.
He was seeing his own death sequence.
Wow.
That's it is amazing.
He was a fascinating.
How could he have done that if he wasn't tapping into something?
How could he have done that?
Well, the thing is, what is fascinating how it is that if you read his novels, for instance, I always say to people, read Valis, read Ubik, and then read my first book, Is The Life After Death.
He does the fiction of it, but this gets even weirder.
People have told me he predicted me.
Now, get this.
If I'm writing a biography of him, there will be a book in existence sometime in the future.
We'll have the name Philip K. Dick and Anthony Peake on the same cover.
Okay?
Philip K. Dick wrote a novel, I think in 1968, called Counterclockworld.
In Counterclockworld, there is a character who is involved in time running backwards.
He's been reborn and everything else.
Philip K. Dick could have called this person anything, couldn't he?
He makes up names, he makes up a name.
He called him Anarch Peak.
My name is Anthony Peak.
And is that your real name, Anthony?
Yes.
And the first two letters, A-N, of my name and Anarch Peak, would be the same.
If he'd had a flash of a future image of a book cover with his name and my name on it, he could have misinterpreted that and thought it was Anarch Peak.
I'm a Scouser.
I think that's more than coincidence, but there will be people who will tell me it is not.
Wow, that's fascinating.
Oh, it is coincidence because, and it is coincidence, but it's fascinating.
But on top of this, it gets weirder because Anarch Peak, his real name is Thomas.
Okay.
Now, in the book, he discusses in great detail the mysteries of twins.
He's fascinated by the idea of twins.
And Phil is fascinated by this because his sister, Jane, died soon after they were born.
He was a twin, and his sister died in, I think it was February 1929, and they were born in December 1928.
For the rest of his life, he had this thing about being a twin and about his sister and whether his sister was still inside him and talking to him.
Now, what is really freaky, and I find this really weird, and this is a coincidence, is my own father was an identical twin, and his brother died about a month after they were born.
And his brother who died, my father thought his brother was in him in some way.
And his name was Thomas Peake.
And Thomas Peake is the name of Anarch Peake.
And by the way, the name Thomas is a version of the word name Didymus.
And Didymus means twin.
You've sold me.
Anthony Peake, fascinating to talk to you.
And I'm glad that after all these months we've been able to have this conversation.
And I'll see you in Liverpool next March then.
Thank you very, very much for making time to talk to me here on The Unexplained, Anthony.
If people want to know about you, where do they go?
What do they do first?
Okay, the best place to find me if you go onto www.anthonypeak.com.
That's Peak with an E on the end.
That's Peak with an E on the end, like Anarch Peak that doesn't have an E on the end.
And there there are lots of links to lots of material.
I'm on YouTube a lot.
There's YouTube stuff about my material that I did last week in Croatia, which is already up there.
But also join me on Facebook.
Look me up on Facebook.
I have two Facebook pages, Anthony Peak and Anthony PeakWriter.
Also, if anybody is wanting to get to the Liverpool event, please get along.
It's going to be huge.
We're hoping to have Graham Hancock there and various other people.
And this will be the weekend of the 1st and 2nd of March, 2013.
I've been trying to get Graham Hancock on this show for a long time.
He is quite an elusive man.
He doesn't have that many gaps in his diary for interviews.
If you're in contact with him, please put a word in for me because I have a lot of listeners who keep on asking me for Graham Hancock on this show.
I think 2013 is going to be a big year for you, Anthony.
Thank you very much for making time for me.
Thank you very much, Howard.
Wonderful to talk to you.
Well, a man who I think is going to be a big name quite soon, already very prolific, Anthony Peake.
And if you want to find out more about Anthony Peake, go to my website, www.theunexplained.tv, and there will be a link to his website.
Thank you very much for supporting me and the show.
Thank you to the great Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for devising the website and also getting the show right out to you.
Above all, though, thank you to you for your continued support.
Please spread the word about this show, which is called The Unexplained.
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