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Nov. 9, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:07
Edition 495 - Anthony Peake
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, I'm still Howard Hughes and this is still the unexplained.
Well here in the northern hemisphere, we've had some real winter weather interspersed with little bits of spring.
Really weird.
We've had temperatures in the 60s Fahrenheit on some days and sunshine at 16 degrees Celsius.
We've also had some really cold nights and fog to go with it.
I guess you get fog when the temperature goes up and down.
I don't know, but I was out walking in the park and it was really spooky to see.
I've never seen this in my life outside of horror films.
The mist rolled like somebody rolling out a duvet or a carpet towards me.
And I just stood there with my camera, my phone, taking pictures of the mist as it rolled towards me.
And then the deer in the park became swathed in mist and looked like ghosts.
It was rather lovely and rather spooky, but also very cold.
So I cycled away from there as quickly as I could, got home and had a hot cup of coffee.
That's my life at the moment, as we're in lockdown, as many of us are.
That's a whole other issue.
We don't talk politics on this show.
I think by the time you hear that, the United States will have resolved the presidential election.
But I don't have the gift of foresight particularly, not in these issues.
And we don't talk politics here, so there's nothing I can say about that.
But the result will be out, I believe.
We'll see.
And I wish all of my friends, and there are many of them in the United States of America, everything good for the future in every possible way.
And all my friends around the world, for that matter.
The guest on this edition, a return visit to Anthony Peake, a man who thinks a great deal.
And it's worth hearing the benefit of Anthony Peake's thoughts.
Very popular guest on this show coming soon.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard continuing work.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
And thank you, above all, to you for all of your emails and thoughts and everything that you do for me simply by being there, especially now when a lot of us are kind of on our own and dealing with month upon month of uncertainty caused by this coronavirus situation.
And I'll say it one more time, I hope.
And part of me is sure that human ingenuity will find an answer to this sooner rather than later.
All right, let's go, I think, 40, 50 miles south of where I'm sitting at the moment.
And let's join Anthony Peake, old friend of this show, and say, Anthony, thank you very much for coming back on The Unexplained.
Absolutely wonderful as always to speak to you, Howard.
Now, Tony, look, how do you, let's just do a potted biography, because I don't think I succeeded with my cut-paste version, which is why we haven't used it.
How do you describe yourself?
How do I describe myself?
Probably somebody who has been fascinated since childhood about the really big questions of existence.
I mean, I know we all do this, and we all, in the deep, darkest periods of the night, we'll wake up and suddenly think, what am I?
Why am I here?
This kind of thing.
But for me, this has been a lifelong search.
Now, my approach has always been a very specific way.
I've now written 12 books.
I'm just embarking now upon, no, 11 books.
I'm now embarking upon my 12th.
But my approach to extraordinary experiences that people have has always been from science.
We all know we hear stories of people who have out-of-the-body experiences, people who have near-death experiences, people who lucid dream, people who have encounters with what possibly could be dead people, have encounters with entities, UFO abductions, all these things.
These are all extraordinary experiences that people have.
Now, the modern science are dismissive of them.
Modern science will just turn around and say, well, there's no point in researching them because they don't fit in with our present scientific paradigm.
We can't explain them using our scientific understanding.
Therefore, they don't happen.
They're not real.
I argue that these things are real.
If you have an extraordinary experience, it changes your life.
In fact, the person that's going to be writing the foreword for my next book is Professor Jeffrey Crapal.
And Jeffrey Crapal, fascinating guy.
He's a professor of the history of religion and philosophy at Rice University in Texas.
And he's written a series of books on lots of subjects.
But his latest book is called The Flip.
And in The Flip, he discusses this idea of people who have certain belief systems, scientists, whoever, and then suddenly they will have an experience that they cannot understand using everything they've believed in previously.
For instance, he cites a gentleman called Eben Alexander, who was a neurosurgeon who had viral meningitis a few years ago and suddenly found himself having a full-blown near-death experience.
Whereas before, he'd always dismissed near-death experiences as being just an hallucination.
Now, for me, these kind of things and Jeff Crapel's work are so important because what people like myself and Professor Crapelle argue is these are human experiences.
They are empirical experiences.
Empirical word means from experience.
So when somebody has something extraordinary, we can't just dismiss it because all it will do is frustrate these individuals.
Now, I know I've seen people recognize information.
I've actually witnessed somebody do that.
Have we discussed this one before in previous shows?
Because it happened in Aintree, in Speak in Liverpool a few years ago.
No, I'm not aware of that.
Go on.
Okay, okay.
One of the areas I'm fascinated in is how altered states of consciousness and how unusual perceptions are facilitated by the brain.
And in one of my previous books, Opening the Doors of Perception, I suggested something I called the Huxleyan spectrum.
This is in recognition of Aldous Huxley, who in 1954 wrote The Doors of Perception, the book.
And I've called my book Opening the Doors of Perception.
And Huxley argued that The brain acts as an attenuator.
There are extraordinary experiences that people have, but the brain cuts it out from us.
Now, I took that idea and I've come to the conclusion that we all have these abilities to perceive the extraordinary.
It's just that we're blocked away, we're locked away, we can't really perceive these things, except under certain neurological conditions.
And I cite the neurological conditions such as classic migraine or a state migraine, but also temporal lobe epilepsy.
Now, in my first book, I had a whole section on temporal lobe epilepsy, and I was contacted by a lady that lives in Liverpool.
I won't mention her name because, you know, it's her privacy, and I haven't agreed, you know, she hasn't agreed for me to talk about her.
So she probably will be happy to, but I won't use her name for now.
But she's been heavily involved in temporal epilepsy research and assisting other people who have TLE.
And I was living in the Liverpool area, and so was she.
So we arranged to meet one day in Speak.
There used to be a Borders store in Speak, a bookstore.
And I was doing a business contract in that area.
Speak is about six or seven miles outside of the city centre.
For my listener elsewhere, it's where John Lennon Airport is.
That's the perfect example.
It is exactly where John Lennon Airport is.
Now, we arranged to meet, but she lived in one of the suburbs of Liverpool.
Like most cities, it's like spokes of wheel.
You have to come in to go back out again.
Now, because she has TLE, she can't drive.
So she went from her suburb into the centre of Liverpool and then travelled out to speak to see me.
She was slightly late when she arrived.
Now, just to explain the layout of the border store in those days, the bookstore, this massive entrance to the bookstore, then there's the bookstore itself.
Then there's a mezzanine floor at the back, which overlooks the whole bookstore.
So you can view the whole of the bookstore and the entrance from the mezzanine floor.
And on the mezzanine floor, there was a Costa's coffee shop.
So we arranged to meet in there.
She comes over, explains she's late, and she said, I'm sorry I'm late, but I had to drop my son and his friend off in the city centre.
And after I leave you, I'm going to go back on the bus back to the centre of Liverpool and I'll pick them up and we'll go home from there.
And I said, okay, fine.
She explains this.
And as she does so, she suddenly goes into an absence seizure.
Now, absence seizures are classic seizures that people have when they experience temporal lobe epilepsy.
Somebody literally will just stare at you.
They will just go blank and they will just look at you.
And I've seen this effect many, many times.
Now, when people go into this state, I am told from my friends who have TLE that you can be away for days, weeks, months, and even years when you're in that state.
But it only takes about 10 seconds.
And then you'll shake your head and you'll come too.
And this is what she did.
She stared at me.
And then as she's staring at me, she turns her head over and she looks towards the entrance of the shop.
And she says to herself, in the fugue state, she says, what's he doing here?
He shouldn't be here.
He should be in the city centre.
What's he doing here?
And then she comes to.
She shakes her head and she comes to.
I draw breath to say to her, you've just had an absence seizure and this is what you said to me.
Before I had the opportunity to speak to her, she looked at me, then looked over and she said, what's he doing here?
He shouldn't be here.
He should be in the centre of Liverpool.
What's he doing here?
As her son and his friend walked in through the door.
That was the most extraordinary event of short-term recognition I have ever seen in my life.
Now, this lady has profound deja vu sensations.
It's one of the reasons she contacted me.
She has precognitive deja vu.
By that I mean that when she's in the deja vu state, she knows what's going to happen next.
And this, I think, is facilitated by certain neurochemicals in the brain.
It seems that certain individuals, their concept of the present spreads out wider than our normal concept of the present.
William James was an American psychiatrist, and he came up with a term he called the specious present.
And what he argued the specious present is, is that, you know, when we argue what is the present moment, what is the moment?
How long is the present moment?
Well, for some people, there's an argument that it moves, it's outward, it's actually longer.
It's maybe two or three seconds.
Now, recent research by a guy called Dylan Haynes in Germany has actually shown that the brain seems to work outside of time.
It seems that the brain anticipates things and makes decisions before we have actually decided to make them.
If anybody, again, is interested, if there's a guy called Marcus de Satoy, who's a mathematician, he's on the BBC, used to be on Horizon a lot.
And he went out to see Dylan Haynes a few years ago, and they showed him just how weird this effect is.
And they tested him, and he was shown that his brain had already decided to move his hand, because they had a brain scan on him, before he decided to move his hand.
Now, this is extraordinary.
This means effectively that what we consider to be normal time isn't.
And this is how precognition works, short-term precognition.
And I believe that this even can happen with long-term precognition.
It seems that there does seem to be this extraordinary state that certain people can get into during deja vu states where they know what's going to happen next.
Could that not just be something like we get with computer equipment all the time these days?
That thing called latency.
There is a delay between the command being executed and the command being received.
Very, very perceptive of you.
Yeah, there is something called the phi phenomenon.
And this suggests there's the phi phenomenon.
There's another experiment that was done many years ago called a cutaneous rabbit.
I haven't got time to go into details about these experiments, but if you look them up, they're really quite intriguing.
And they again talk about this idea of it seems we seem to be a wider awareness.
And the argument that is put forward, and it's quite a reasonable one, is that the brain buffers information before it presents it to consciousness.
So it holds back information till it has a full Picture of what it needs to do to take action.
And then consciousness is then told what is about to happen next, which then suggests that we're all lagging behind time.
External time, external to us, is already ahead of us.
So if you're constantly filtering in that way, it's not an awful big step, is it?
To suggest that maybe we're filtering out the unusual and the extraordinary.
And if we get into certain brain states, then those things are permitted and are allowed in and the switch is flipped up rather than down.
Correct.
So this is to do with this editing process that I've always kind of suspected but can't prove exists.
Oh, it does.
Well, this proves it exists.
The work of Dylan Haynes does, but people have been intrigued by this for a long time.
Way back in the late 19th century, there was a French philosopher called Henri Bergson.
And Henri Bergson argued the brain acts as an attenuator.
The brain isn't there to give us information.
The brain is there to take out information.
In other words, the informational field is far, far broader and far wider and far deeper than consciousness gives us, than our perception.
This is interesting for a specific reason, and I have a feeling that you will know about this, but let's see.
A week or so ago, there was a news story.
We tried to get the people behind this on the show, but it didn't happen.
University of Surrey, the idea has been postulated that consciousness as a thing is electromagnetic and exists around you, not within you.
Correct.
John Joe McFadden.
Yeah.
John Joe McFadden is a friend of mine.
It's Professor John Joe McFadden of the University of Surrey.
And in fact, John Joe and I got together over my work.
I'd read, I mean, it's not new.
John Joe has been writing about this for about six or seven years.
I mean, it seemed to explode everywhere about two weeks ago.
But I was writing about this and discussing this.
This again, sometimes I get vaguely frustrated.
It shows just how far ahead of the curve I am.
I get quite frustrated sometime that the world suddenly jumps on something.
And I've already done it.
Well, it is funny.
When I read that, and I think it appeared on BBC News or Sky, one of them anyway.
When I read that, I laughed and thought of you because you have been chewing that stuff around for a long time.
And it sort of makes me think.
Remember the old-fashioned trams that used to run in many places in London, in Liverpool, they all had tram systems.
Blackpool still does.
They pick up their motive power from overhead lines, rather like some trains do, via a sort of, what do they call those things, a commutator or whatever it is that does that.
Now, if we think of consciousness as being those electric lines and us being the tram, maybe that's how it's all working.
Or maybe that's just a simplistic and silly way of putting it.
I don't know.
Far from it.
John Joe's hypothesis is quite intriguing.
It's almost a variation on something called Ork-O-R, which is orchestrated objective reduction, which has been put forward by Professor Stuart Hammerhoff of the University of Arizona, who's a professor of anesthetology and aesthetics, and Roger Penrose, the Roger Penrose that recently won the Nobel Prize.
People talk about Roger Penrose winning the prize and everything else as a mathematician.
What they don't talk about, and the BBC deliberately ignored the fact, is that Penrose is also somebody that's very much in the kind of writing field that I am.
The idea that consciousness is quantum.
Consciousness is not processed by the brain directly.
It's used quantum effects is what brings about brain states.
Okay.
Very, very, very interesting stuff.
And if anybody's interested in the Hammer Hoff-Penrose model, check it out.
It's very, very intriguing.
All you need to do is pick up many of my books.
I've referenced this in many of my books, the whole Penrose thing.
So John Joe has used that.
And John Jo's ideas are really, really intriguing.
It's the idea that there is a field around the neurons, and it's within the field that consciousness is.
Now, this would explain many things, because within neurology, there's a big issue called a binding problem.
This is the idea of how it is we have a feeling of simultanearity, how it is we feel that everything is happening now in this moment, when different parts of the brain are processing different stimuli from the external world.
And they're a distance from each other.
And the signals within the brain, the signals take time.
They're not like light waves.
They don't travel at light speed.
They have, you know, a very slow speed.
But we feel that everything is happening now, which is again coming back to this buffering idea.
Now, going back to Henri Bergson, another guy then called C.D. Broad came along, an English philosopher, and he argued a similar idea.
And then ultimately, Aldous Huxley in 1954 argued the same thing.
So the idea is that when people are under certain stress states, when they are dying, when they are, it's as if the bandwidth gets broader and they attune in.
It's like a radio signal, but we are tune in much, much broader.
And when that happens, the real universe that is denied us from our normal senses, we start to perceive.
This is very much the equivalence, and I know we talked about this last time, the whole concept of Plato's cave.
The idea that there is a reality that's much broader, but we are locked within the cave, we're locked within our cave.
So all we see are reflections and shadows.
Correct, the reflections and the shadows on the wall.
And of course, what happens is somebody who has an extraordinary experience is like the prisoner who breaks his shackles, looks round and realizes that everything we're seeing are shadows on the cave, and realizes that outside the cave is a whole vast universe.
He then comes back to the rest of us, neurotypicals, and says, hey guys, you've got it wrong.
Your science is wrong.
Your science isn't measuring the right things.
We think they're insane.
They're not.
What's happened is their doors of perception are opened.
And I argue that certain people, the doors of perception are so open that they literally cannot deal with the overpowering amount of information coming in.
And they're schizophrenics, people who experience schizophrenia.
Now, again, in my book, Opening the Doors of Perception, I also had a section on autism.
Autism is exactly the same thing.
An autistic person Exists in this world of sensory overload.
They hear things everywhere.
They hear sounds, their senses, their sense of smell, everything is heightened.
We don't see this.
We don't perceive this.
Of course, you know, in those instances, it's an interesting theory, but medicine and science don't, well, medicine orthodox doesn't say that, you know, at this stage, and we have to make that point.
But, you know, I think the basic point of it all is that as a great man once said, or a number of people have once said, that there is much more in heaven and earth than we are perhaps on this plane aware of.
And that's where you and I definitely are intrigued, and we both agree.
Regular guest, Anthony Peake, is here.
So, Anthony, what you've decided to do for the 12th book is to revisit your work at the very beginning.
Why go back?
Because I've always wanted to.
I felt that my first book was misleading in many ways.
The title was, Is There Life After Death?
The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When We Die.
Misleading because the book doesn't talk about what happens when we die.
The book talks about what happens before we die.
And also, I felt that the title just wasn't right.
It raised anticipations that I wasn't able to fulfill at that time.
Now, what then subsequently happened, all my books subsequent to that, all follow a similar theme, the themes we've been talking about now.
But over the years, whereas when my first book, when I wrote it, it was originally written around 2001, 1999, 2000.
And at that time, I was a normal human being.
I was a business consultant.
My work and my associates, you know, were the kind of, it was business orientated.
But subsequent to writing the first book, which has now sold nearly 100,000 copies worldwide, it's proved amazingly popular.
And it's in so many different languages.
It's extraordinary.
In fact, I got an email from somebody only a couple of days ago who'd read the Russian version.
And this guy in Russia had contacted me out of the blue to say how the book had just blown his mind because everything I was saying in the book, he'd experienced in his life.
That was an aside, really.
This is a question I've always wanted to ask, and forgive me for it.
Don't answer it if you don't want to.
If you sell 100,000 books, does that make you wealthy?
No, not at all.
Far from it.
I have a feeling that might be the answer.
Not these days.
Not since the demise of the something book agreement.
Was it the net book agreement, something?
Netbook agreements, correct?
And it used to be that you would get a percentage of, and all books had to be sold at the price on the cover.
We now know that that doesn't take place.
So therefore, sometimes you can get literally pennies per book.
I mean, for instance, my original publisher negotiated a fantastic deal with one distributor, and they bought 6,000 copies of the first book.
But I got something like about 2p, 3p per copy.
So when everybody else takes their cut these days, so you have your publisher taking the cut, you have the editors taking their cut, you have the bookshops taking their cut, the distributors taking their cut, you end up with very little.
I mean, indeed, the very few of us earn enough to earn a living properly and to live off it.
And that's a point that I would just want to make to my listener.
The people we talk to here who write books, you know, most of them are not going to get rich off this.
They do this because they care.
And that's the case in your case.
So you're revisiting this work.
And everybody wants to know about immortality.
They want to know about the process of leaving here and maybe going somewhere else.
Or a lot of my friends say when we leave here, a switch goes and that's it.
It's fade to black and there's nothing beyond this.
Personally, just as my personal view and many of my friends, I certainly don't believe that.
But the big question is, then if you don't believe that, what is to come?
Well, this is it.
One of the things that the new book, as I was then leading into saying, so the subsequently, after I'd written the first book, suddenly people were coming to me.
So suddenly people, scientists, researchers, experiencers.
So over the last couple of decades, I've got a vast communication with lots and lots of people from around the world at all different levels.
And also over that period of time, I've invested a phenomenal amount of time reading all the latest academic papers I can get my hands on in terms of the subject matters I'm interested in.
And because my interest is so broad, I'm reading everything from neurochemistry to near-death experiences and quantum physics.
And I'm particularly fascinated by entheogens, dimethyltryptamine, these kind of things as well.
So it's very, very broad.
And it meant that the original idea that was presented in the first book is still valid.
But I have far more backup information now to throw at it to say, look, you know, this is far more powerful an argument than initially I put forward.
Also, my publisher has capitulated on this one and they have agreed to call it Cheating the Ferryman, which was what I wanted to call the original book.
But as you know, if you self-publish, it's up to you what you call your book and everything else.
But when you're old school published, that is you have a publisher, they pay you in advance, they pay for everything, that situation means the publisher has the rights for the cover.
They can even decide what the cover is.
They'll ask you, but ultimately they'll decide on the cover.
They'll decide on the title and everything else.
It's just the way it works.
Cheating the ferryman suggests in some ways, I don't know, that you have to do something in order to escape the process.
Correct.
Maybe that's a cause of some ambiguity.
I don't know.
What I mean by cheating the ferryman is an ancient Greek myth, sorry, an ancient Greek religion, when somebody died, they would place a tiny coin called an obelisk underneath the tongue or two obeli on the eyes of the corpse when they buried them.
And the reason they did this was that the idea was that the corpse, when the corpse found itself the other side, as it were, they'd become a shade, a spirit.
And they would find themselves on the edge of a river, the river Styx, actually, technically the Acheron.
And Charon the boatman would come through the mists and they'd pay Charon to Charon to take them over to Hades, to the land of the dead.
I argue you cheat the ferryman, the ferryman never takes you over because you never get there, because something curious happens to consciousness at the point of death, which I have profoundly strong evidence for as well.
Consciousness, something happens.
Now, again, quite excitingly, there was a series of experiments done in 2017 by a lady called Jimo Borjijin at the University of Michigan.
And it's quite brutal what they did, but they were doing work with rats and they killed the rats for some reason.
I don't know why, but they killed the rats.
They then discovered that around about eight to 10 seconds after the rat had technically died, the brain fired up again.
Literally, the brain just lightened up as if something else was happening in the brain.
That's the near-death experience.
there was evidence that rats were having near-death experiences.
Now, this is very intriguing because we can't I just want to get that clear.
You know, that could be just some kind of physical reflex.
No, that wasn't.
This was the thing.
She is a neurologist.
You know, had it just been that, they would have just thought it's just a reaction.
But it wasn't.
It was far more complex than that.
It was that the brain was active.
It was almost like a computer's died and then suddenly all the lights go on again for a short period of time.
And they were intrigued by this because this was used as an explanation of the near-death experience by people who don't believe that there's anything mysterious about it.
They were saying, well, this is evidence for it.
And it was fairly popular at the time in terms of this.
But that's an interesting aside, but it shows that the brain structures and the neurochemicals in the brain don't work in quite the way the same way we believe they do.
Now, what I believe is, is that by cheating the ferryman, what I mean is that just before we die, the brain seems to release a cocktail of neurotransmitters.
Now, initially, in my initial model, I thought it was glutamate, which is the main neurotransmitter of the mammalian brain.
I'm now coming to the conclusion that the near-death experience and the world we move into at the point of death, the illusionary world for want of a better term that's created by our brain, is actually facilitated by a substance called dimethyltryptamine.
And dimethyltryptamine is one of the most powerful hallucinogenic substances known to humanity.
It's in plants, it's virtually everywhere.
And it's also inside the human body.
It's been found in the liver, it's been found in the spinal fluid, and it's been found in various other places.
But it's never been found inside the brain because it's such a strange substance.
It's only active for a few seconds and then it evaporates and things.
But again, Gemo Borjigin in a separate experiment discovered in the pineal gland of rats, they found dimethyltryptamine, which means that dimethyltryptamine is created in the brain.
This hallucinogenic substance that is part of ayahuasca and everything else is in the brain.
They're still not sure why it was there, whether the pineal gland had actually produced it or whether it had moved from somewhere else in the body.
Could it not be just that we anesthetized ourselves at the point of death?
In other words, you know, to remove any pain, to remove any trauma, then naturally we are conditioned.
There has been an argument to say that a lot of the brain conditions that take place at the point of death is because endorphins are kicked in to make your drugs.
But you think there's more than that?
I do, because dimethyltryptamine is not an endorphin.
Dimethyltryptamine is an ellucing substance.
It's a substance that actually anybody who's out there who has experienced DMT, which is legal in other countries, by the way, it is not legal in the UK or the USA.
And of course, we are in no way advocating that these are the same.
We are in no way advocating this.
But having said that, there are people I know who I'm working with who are doing research at the present moment in time on DMT at the Imperial College in London, where they have a dispensation to be testing DMT.
And volunteers are taking it and reporting back the experiences they're having.
And these experiences, the people, are extraordinary.
I'm aware of that work.
I don't know any of the results of it.
Do you?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, very much so.
One of my associates, Dr. Carl Smith, is heavily involved in it.
And in fact, he's one of the subjects.
And I quote him in one of my latest book.
I quote him because when he went, and this is an extraordinary story, he took the DMT intravenously for the first time, found himself shooting out of his body as you do, and he found himself in, as he quoted, a reality that's more real than this one.
When you're in the DMT state, it's this reality that you realize is the dream.
Whatever you go to, that's the real place.
And he said he found himself in what's called a DMT cage.
It's kind of a location you find yourself.
And he said, while he was there, this entity, this being, came over to him and stared at him face to face.
And it went, and it prodded him and it said, you should not be doing it this way.
This is not how it should be done.
Please do not do it this way.
And then it backed off.
He then came back down again, came into this environment, woke up and said, that was most extraordinary.
One of the beings spoke to me.
Anyway, two weeks later, he then takes the drug again, finds himself in the DMT state.
The same entity comes across again and he said, I told you last time, you're not doing it right.
Now, as Carl said to me, he said, that was more than a figment of my imagination.
If it was just a figment of my imagination, it would reinforce my own wanting to do it.
It was saying quite the opposite and it remembered me.
That may just be, and look, We've all during this period of lockdown and the months of this, I certainly have had the most bizarre and in many cases unwelcome dreams.
And those things come from some part of me, whether it's just a chemical thing in my brain or whether, as I suspect, other things you might access when you're in that dream state.
But if other people had that same experience and came across that same character, that same being, demon, whatever it might be, then it would be believable, maybe.
People do.
I mean, again, I would suggest if anybody is cynical about this in any way, is that the original research that was done on DMT was done at the University of New Mexico in the 1990s, funded by the American government under the auspices of a guy called Dr. Rick Strassman.
And Strassman, in his book, DMT the Spirit Molecule, cites dozens and dozens of his subjects encountering these entities, coming back and saying exactly the same things.
Everybody that takes DMT has a similar experience.
As Terence McKenna, who was one of the major researchers into DMT once was said, you get elves.
Everybody gets elves.
They'll call them machine elves.
These are creatures that seem to be around.
They seem to be joking with the people who take DMT.
But to me, in my book, The Opening, The Infinite Mindfield, I talk about this in the Infinite Mindfield and also in my latest book about entities as well, which Cytrish will get to.
And again, I have to put this in here because we're broadcasting in the United Kingdom where there are regulations about these things.
Obviously, we're having a conversation about controlled scientific experiments.
Correct.
And we're not advocating that anybody, in fact, we're doing the complete opposite, you know, tries these things.
These are scientific experiments performed by people qualified to do them under controlled conditions.
And it is dangerous.
Effectively, you can go abroad and you can do it.
You go down to Latin America and you take ayah.
And we're not advocating that.
We're not advocating that either.
Exactly.
But all I'm saying is that these things can be very, very dangerous because you're dealing with what you said before, Howard, which is one of the things I'm fascinated by.
We talk and we say they're just dreams.
Well, my question is then I ask the additional question and say, okay, what is a dream?
When you have a dream, who is the bricoleur?
Who is the person that is creating that dream for you?
Because it sure as hell isn't you because you experience a dream just like you experience normal life.
Things happen in a dream.
I've only ever become loose.
I've lucid dreamt twice in my life.
And you tweeted this week, I think, about a lucid dream.
I'm happy to talk about it now, actually, if you want the second lucid dream, because people were really interested and I didn't talk about it.
I said I had had the lucid dream, but I didn't say what it was.
It was extraordinary.
It was extraordinary because I met my parents.
I was lucid dreaming, because what happens in a lucid dream?
It's a normal dream.
And then suddenly you realize you're dreaming.
And how I realized I was dreaming is I was talking to my mother and father.
And my mother was chatting to me.
And she looked like she was in her late 40s.
And my dad was looking much younger.
And they were chatting away.
And they were in this house and they were very, very happy.
And I was chatting to them.
And suddenly, my normal consciousness came in and said, your parents are dead.
How can you be talking to your parents?
And suddenly I became lucid.
And suddenly I realized I was dreaming.
So I turned around to them and I said, so where are you?
And they both smiled at me and they said, yeah, we're here.
And I said, but where are you?
Said, very difficult for you to explain.
And then suddenly, and this is what is really bizarre, suddenly the door opened and my father walked in again.
There were two of him.
Identical twins.
And then I suddenly remembered.
My father was an identical twin.
My father was called Eric and he had a twin brother called Peter who lived for about two hours and then died.
Okay?
I'd completely forgotten about this and my father turns around and says, this is Peter.
This is my twin brother.
So that either indicates that the mind is an amazing thing and during this time of lockdown when we're all having weird dreams, it can create even that.
Or it suggests that there is something else and dreaming is one of the things that allows us to connect to it.
I mean, I don't know, I've had the most bizarre dreams during this period that have frightened me, moved me.
And I wonder if dreams are so random and if they are controlled by yourself and what's in your head, then why do I see people in my dreams, one in particular, who I really do not want to see, either in a dreaming state or in real life?
And not only that, there are people who in dreams have the same character come over to them.
There's a friend of mine who has a regular dream and in the dream, there's always going to be a group of people and there will be this same person who will come over and threaten him.
And he said, this is really, I can't escape from him.
He's always there.
Now, again, it's quite important here.
One of my friends, one of my associate researchers, Samantha Treasure, she's Samantha Lee Treasure.
She's doing research into lockdown, not only lockdown dreams, but get this astronauts' dreams, people when they're in space.
And she's working with a Russian researcher about interviewing cosmonauts.
Because when people are in space, apparently they dream very differently.
The dreams work in a totally different way.
Now, again, why is this?
Is it because they're in zero gravity?
Is it because the neurotransmitters are working differently in the brain?
And this is an area that myself and our associates were pursuing.
We're saying, well, let's look behind it.
Let's just not turn around and say, well, it's just a dream.
Nothing is just a dream.
A dream is an experience in exactly the same way this is.
Because effectively, how do you know now that you're not dreaming?
How can you tell?
And indeed, Tony, what is reality?
Let's park it there for just a few seconds.
Anthony Peake is here.
We were talking, Anthony, about dreams and how dreams might connect you with something else.
It's a fascinating thought.
And a lot of people have come very close to observing this, to considering this to do with dreams because of the strange dreams that so many of us have been having during lockdown.
Mine are ongoing.
Seven months of the strangest dreams I've ever had in my life.
So it's well worth checking.
But I wonder if we'll be able to get proof that those weird dreams are more than just images that rotate in your brain, which is a remarkable machine, or whether it's connecting with something else.
You know, for a personal view, I think we're connecting with something else at times, but what do I know?
Well, it's the billion-dollar question, isn't it?
And the billion-dollar question, the hard problem of consciousness, as was suggested by an Australian philosopher called David Chalmers way back in 1999 at the University of Arizona, when he called it the hard problem of science.
And the hard problem of science is not understanding how the brain functions in the sense of its neurochemicals and everything else, but how it creates self-referential consciousness.
For a moment's reflection here, when you dream, you see things.
What are you seeing?
You're not using your eyes, but you're seeing things.
You see shadows.
You see reflections in dreams.
How are they being created?
Where are they coming from?
Are they, you know, it is far more complex.
People, they just, for instance, they use the term quite regularly, oh, it's just an hallucination.
There's no such thing as just an hallucination.
Nobody knows what hallucinations are.
Nobody has even the vaguest clue.
You know, there is an awful lot of hubris in science these days where scientists are arrogantly wandering around saying, oh, you know, we really know everything.
You know, it's, you know, the Brian Cox stuff.
You know, we know everything, really, you know, and anybody's an idiot who believes in anything that's incredibly strange.
Well, no, I'm sure, I mean, to be fair, I don't think Brian Cox thinks he knows everything, but he does know everything.
No, he does, but he certainly dismisses quite regularly, and he has certain terms he uses for people who have extraordinary experiences and people who do the kind of research I do that were somehow unscientific or somehow we've missed the clue.
I have to say, I've never heard him say that, but maybe I've been looking in the wrong way.
No, he has.
But I hear what you say.
But, you know, having said that, you know, one of his books has a title, said, everything that can happen will happen, which is an application of Everett's many worlds interpretation.
The idea that somewhere in the multiverse, there are trillions of Howard Hughes and Anthony Peaks having this very conversation now.
And each one of us is, some of them are very closely like us, and some of them are more and more different.
And they're all you.
They're all variations of you within the multiverse.
I find that very appealing as an idea.
But I wonder if we just create these things and connect with them as we get older because we're scared of dying.
No, no, no, no.
The Everett's many worlds interpretation is far more than just wishful thinking.
The Everett's Many Worlds interpretation and its recent iterations because it's developed since 1957 when Hugh Everett III put his PhD thesis forward.
And the reason that they believe that there are multiverses is for one very simple fact.
If this universe is the only universe that has ever existed, it's hardwired and fine-tuned for the evolution of self-referential conscious beings from the first few moments of the Big Bang.
It got everything right every single time in order for consciousness to evolve.
The only explanation for that is that there are trillions of other universes where it didn't happen for differing reasons.
And we happen to be in the one that was right for it by not by chance, but we couldn't be anywhere else.
If you see the logic, we couldn't be anywhere else other than the universe where we could evolve within.
It's also to do with what's called the collapse of the wave function.
In quantum physics, there seems to be a direct relationship between the act of observation or the act of measurement and all subatomic particles, before they're measured and observed, exist in what's called a statistical wave function.
They're a mathematical wave function.
They're not physically real.
The act of measurement or the act of observation makes them collapse into a point particle that's located somewhere in three-dimensional space-time.
This is a profound issue because it means that there seems to be a direct relationship between the observer and the observed.
If, however, the many worlds interpretation is true, the wave function doesn't collapse.
What happens is at every point of every subatomic particle, each subatomic particle follows a different path.
And each path creates a different universe.
And each universe then is independent of every other universe.
It's intriguing stuff.
It's an application again of Schrödinger's cat, the famous thought experiment, because of course this was what Schrödinger was trying to point out here.
The cat that is both dead and alive.
Both dead and alive, because of course that's the argument.
If the cat is not observed and its wave function is not observed, or the wave function of the poison pellet or the thing that causes the poison pellet inside the enclosed circumstance means that the cat is alive and dead until it's observed.
And Hugh Everett III argued that in fact when it is opened, there are two cats and there are two scientists observing the cat and there are two experimental circumstances, there's two laboratories.
And this happens all the time.
Now initially it was put forward as a thought experiment, but there seems to be more and more information suggesting that this may be the case.
There's a guy called David Deutsch, I think it's the University of Cambridge, and he's been writing some fascinating things.
And this brings us in now to my new book, because one of the applications of this very hypothesis was put forward by a guy called Professor Max Tegmark of Princeton University.
He's a Swedish-American.
And Tegmark has come up with a thought experiment called the Quantum Suicide Experiment.
Now, again, what I'd suggest is, again, guys, don't take my word for it.
Just go onto YouTube and look up quantum suicide.
There's some great material on there.
This will blow your mind.
This proves what I'm going to be doing in my book, and I'm applying other ideas as well, that you can prove using quantum physics and the evidence from quantum physics that in your universe, you can never die.
Within your own observer-created universe, you never die.
Other people see you die, but you never die.
And again, this is just an application of observed science.
It's very, very intriguing.
So, in other words, look, I've experienced, as you will have experienced, the loss of parents.
And I observed the fact that they'd gone.
From what you've just said, and as I've always hoped and prayed, they go on.
They go on.
They go on.
In other words, and again, I say this when I do lectures, and I say it semi-flippantly, but I always turn around to my audience and I say, don't you find it absolutely astounding that you've got to your age and lots of your friends have died and people you've loved ones have died, but you're still here.
And you have to be here because, well, it's not you have to be here, but we all are existing within our own Everett universes.
You know, this is the theory.
This is the theory.
And all I do is I apply this and say, well, could it be possible?
And if it can be possible, is there any evidence of it?
And can we prove it in any way?
And this is what the new book is going to be about.
I'm sorry that I'm kind of trivying you.
We've got about six minutes max here.
So the drama of our lives that we see unfold is for us, but it isn't all there is.
So the fact that we see things happen around us, people get older, people leave us, is part of our experience.
But in some other form of reality, a bigger reality, it's not like that.
Correct.
Again, I use movies as analogies many, many times.
And if anybody has seen the movie Interstellar, there's one section in there called a Tesseract sequence, where the main character looks back on the life of his daughter, and he sees all the outcomes of all the decisions she's made.
And of course, this is why it's called the Tesseract sequence, because a Tesseract is a hypercube.
It's a cube in an extra dimension of space-time.
And again, if you start looking at the mathematics of this, it gets quite interesting because it has now been argued that what we think is physical reality, we know it's 99.9 reoccurring empty space.
And what is physically there isn't really physical in any real shape or form.
We never interface with external reality.
You're sitting on a chair at the moment, but you're hovering above it.
Electrostatic repulsion.
You never touch anything.
But am I part, then if that is the case, am I part of your experience or are you part of my experience?
Both.
This is the thing.
I argue that this is kind of reciprocal.
We are all collapsing our own wave functions, but we're doing it collectively.
And by doing it collectively, we create what is termed consensual reality.
Consensual reality is something that we all agree is there, and we all see it, and it's there.
And it's steady and it's regular because of the way in which we are all building it.
And in my last book, and we can move on to this in a second, I argue that there are certain things we can create within our reality that we can collectively think about and bring into existence by the act of thought, which shows that reality is far more malleable than we think it is.
Now, again, latest research is suggesting that everything is digital, that what we think is solid reality, reality itself and matter at a much deeper level is literally information.
Information is the basis of everything.
And we are information processors.
Our brains process information.
And our brains process information just like a computer processes information to create three-dimensional realities.
You know, I've recently, and literally yesterday, I took delivery of one of the brand new independent virtual reality headsets, the new Oculus.
Oh, wow.
And you go into these worlds, you put an Oculus headset on, you are somewhere else.
Now, what is amazing about this latest one is, do you know it actually takes your hands?
It can actually reproduce your hand movements in the computer world.
You see your hands, and as your hands move, the hands in the computer world move.
So you then, once you're able to do that, and technology is doing that for us now, you begin to question the whole nature of what we perceive to be reality.
I mean, this is a great time of the day to be asking this question, but it's the deepest issue of all of the issues, isn't it?
The thing is that people who believe that there's a one-to-one relationship between what is externally out there and what your brain tells you are called naive realists.
This is the term that's used by consciousness studies people.
There isn't a one-to-one relationship.
Whatever is out there, it is not what we think it is.
Our brains internally create an internal visual world and a physical world from the data inputs, the data, the information that's brought in, our brain creates internally.
And if you don't think that such things are possible, I'm talking to my listener here.
Remember those experiments that they did in the 60s and 70s, I think it was, where they gave people spectacles that turned things upside down.
Their brains corrected the image to the right way up.
Well, even though we are capable of much more than we thought.
It's even more extraordinary, Howard.
We have a blind spot at the back of each eye where the optic nerve leaves.
We never see it.
And we never see it because our brain colours in the information around the blind spot.
Now, somebody will turn around to me, and an optician I once mentioned this to, and they turn around and say, I mean, this is above my pay grade, but sorry.
Yeah, and he turned around and he said, don't be silly.
He said, it's because we have stereo vision and it overlaps.
And I said, in which case, close one eye.
Why do you not see the blind spot then?
And the question is, you don't see the blind spot.
It's there.
But your brain fills in the information, the small bit of data information That's occluded by the blind spot, your brain fills in.
Now, if it can fill in that small amount with information, it can fill in the whole thing.
Everything you are seeing now is effectively coming from an image on the back of your eye, on your retina, which is postage stamp-sized and inverted.
From that, your brain, from the signals that then go down your optic nerve down your optic chiisma, down to the visual cortex at the back, darkest part of the brain, it takes that information, literally just information, digital pulses.
And from that, it creates the three-dimensional surround image that you have that you see.
It's still not fully understood how it does that.
Again, one of the world's leading authorities on visual systems is a guy called Richard L. Gregory of the University of Washington, a premeritus professor at the University of Bristol.
He wrote a book called Sight and Vision.
We don't understand even how vision works.
And there are so many things that we don't understand.
Tony, on the radio show, we're out of time.
What I'll do is, if it's okay with you, if you can just hold on for a second, we'll continue this conversation for the podcast because there are a couple of things, including a question from Mark.
Mark, I haven't forgotten your question.
I'll ask it on the podcast.
Well, that's the radio show, Tony.
Let's take it on from there then.
There was a question from Mark.
I've got to get this in.
And he says, my question for Anthony is, what are your thoughts on Rendlesham, Rendlesham Forest in 1980?
Mark asks, and I don't know whether you have any thoughts on this, but there were psychic aspects to this.
It wasn't just metal craft landing or anything, the traditional UFO sighting, if there is such a thing.
This is much more than that.
And Mark wants to know, was it a physical thing or potentially something psychological, something in the nature of what we've been discussing for this last hour?
Indeed.
In my last book, The Hidden Universe, I have a whole book on entities and including UFO encounters of various types.
Rendlesham Forest has long intrigued me.
And in fact, a friend of mine called Alan Bates has done a documentary and written a book on it and interviewed a lot of the major characters involved at Rendlesham.
Now, initially, when Rendlesham first came out, I know there were the explanations that the craft they'd seen was supposedly the South World lighthouse.
Yeah, which I think has just been demolished.
But yes, they thought it was the strobing light, the sweeping light of the lighthouse.
And yet, the characters involved seemed to encounter entities.
There were various other things.
Now, I argue that the entities themselves that we encounter in these circumstances, and I have to say, I'm not close enough to Rendlesham to say definitely.
It's a case I know.
I mean, I've been fascinated by UFOs since I was a child.
So I know a lot of the major cases.
And indeed, for instance, one of the people I'll be doing a big event next year, Contact in the Desert in California, where I'll be on stage with Willie Striber talking about his encounters with aliens.
That's an aside, really.
But it does seem that there seems to be psychological aspects here.
Now, people like Jacques Valley, in his book, Passport to Magonia, has argued long and hard that these entities are far more complex than simply aliens.
They're far closer to us.
And in my book, as I said, in the book, The Hidden Universe, I put forward an argument to say that we have a very, very close relationship with them.
And I call them egregors, the egregorials.
And I think yet again, the point I was making before that we seem to collectively create our own environment and we create things within that environment.
I think UFOs are a classic example of this.
For example, Carl Gustav Jung, way back in the 1950s, wrote a book called Flying Saucers, a modern myth of things seen in the sky.
It seems that UFOs, they seem to culturally match us, you know, from the UFO flaps, the airship flaps in the 1890s in America.
Then you had the Foo Fighters in the Second World War.
Then the entities themselves that people encounter seem to change depending upon our expectations.
You know, initially, in the original flaps in the 1890s, they were considered to be Germans.
They were Europeans that were in the flights in the craft.
But they were human.
Then as time moved on and we got into the Cold War, they started to change and morph into more kind of sci-fi type monsters.
Then you had the Hopsville Goblins, where they were like little goblin creatures.
Then we moved into the 60s and we got into the Greys and the way the Greys looked.
Then we had the Nordics, you know, who are basically quasi-human.
It seems that they cloak themselves in our own anticipations, just like the fairy folk have done, just like the Fae do, just like goblins do, just like these creatures that have been encountered for centuries.
They cloak themselves because they are part of our subconscious in some way.
And we pull them through from somewhere else into this reality.
We seem to create them in some way, but they are independent of us.
And I'm involved at the moment in a research project where we're looking at this very precisely.
And we're going to try and create egregorials.
We're actually working with people to see if we can create these things under control conditions.
Now, that's interesting because you also wanted to talk about a thing that I knew nothing of and have been researching today, just peripherally, a thing called the Philips experiment, where rather than access something that we are not aware of, we actually try and access something that we've created.
I put this really badly, a construct that we've made, almost like creating some kind of fictional character and then discovering that that fictional character actually exists.
Yeah, effectively, there was a group of researchers in the early 1970s, I think it was 1971 in Toronto, got together and created a completely fictional character, which they called Philip Aylesford.
And they then tried to do Ouija boards and various other things to bring him through.
And it started manifesting poltergeist activity.
The table they were using was levitating.
And these were researchers.
They weren't people who believed in any of this, but they found that all the effects that happened in a normal seance was taking place, created by an entity that they had created themselves with a backstory.
Or had they just discovered that entity and they thought they created it.
Correct.
The entity itself became aware of the fact of what they were doing collectively and their collective thoughts seemed to draw in the being from somewhere else.
Now, this is what magicians have been doing for centuries.
This is what Elisa Crowley was doing.
You know, these are things that it's a technique that is used by magicians.
For instance, particularly, there's a particular school of magicians called Enochian Magic.
And the Enochians are actually bringing forth entities.
It's what they're trained to do.
So clearly, we have this capacity to create, again, what I call the egregorial and the egregors.
And the Philip experiment was a classic example.
And what myself and some associates are planning to do is to reproduce it.
We're going to try and reproduce it, but in a very clever way, which I don't want to talk about at the moment because we want to keep it secret, but we're going to put a very interesting twist on it, which is going to make it slightly different.
And probably, and we've got a lot of big academics that are now interested in getting involved in this work as well, including some people who were originally involved in the Philip experiment and some people that were involved at Skull in Norfolk with the Skull experiment.
So it's getting quite interesting at the moment.
Right.
And are you able to do this, to see this through, bearing in mind all the problems and restrictions that we have to do with COVID?
Yes, we're trying to get around that at the moment.
There are one or two things that we think we can do.
And we're assuming that we should be able to get around these in one way because the very nature of the experiment we're doing needs people in isolation anyway.
So it's actually quite useful to us that they're in isolation because we want, you know, no, I can't say any more than that because my two associates, I can't, you know, sort of let them down on that because people might nick the idea, which we don't want to do at the moment.
But it's, look, it's very important stuff.
But I wonder whether, I'm fascinated by these discussions.
You know that because that's why we have them.
But whether we will, as human beings, we will ever be able to get the answers to any of this.
It's a million dollar question.
Are we programmed to get the answers?
Are we supposed to get the answers?
Indeed, as part of it, if we're living in a simulation, as it is suggested, how can we get the answers if we're within this simulation?
In fact, if that is the case, we'll end up like Neo in the Matrix breaking out, you know, and that we're not supposed to do.
But it's important, Tony, to keep asking the questions.
It is, absolutely.
It is.
Well, thank you for doing this.
And thank you also for doing this additional part for my podcast listeners.
If people want to discover you, maybe they've heard you for the first time here and want to know more about you, where would they go first?
Right.
If they go to my website, which is anthonypeak.com, that's Anthony with an H and peak, P-E-A-K-E dot com.
I'm also very, very active on Facebook.
You'll find me on Facebook under Anthony Peak.
Join in there as well.
I'm also on Instagram as CheatTheFerryman54.
Again, Cheat the Ferryman, which is the concept I was talking about before.
So, and if you have had experiences similar to the things I've talked about, I want to hear from you.
I want new experiences for the new book.
So if anybody's had time slips, anybody's had near-death experiences, any unusual altered states of consciousness, please let me know.
Totally, stay right there and thank you for this.
Well, there we are.
This is the show that I've started and ended twice, once for radio, once for the podcast here.
But so often, our guests are so good here that we want to do more than we're able to squeeze on the radio show.
So that's why I have the advantage of my podcast that has been running now for more than 14 years.
This has been The Unexplained.
My thanks to Anthony Peake, always a great guest on this show.
Thank you very much to you for being part of this.
And until next, we meet here on the online version of The Unexplained.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And please, especially during these crazy, crazy times in this world, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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