Inside The Near-Death Mind

What if dying feels less like a blackout and more like pressing restart? Stan welcomes author and researcher Anthony Peake for a mind-bending tour through near-death experiences, deja vu, and the possibility that consciousness is more fundamental than the matter that seems to produce it. We trace his early fascination with hallucinations to a rigorous, science-first approach that challenges the default “it’s just hypoxia” explanation and asks a deeper question: how does the brain generate a self that can witness anything at all?

We dive into veridical NDEs, EEG spikes after flatline, and why time can stretch into lifetimes in a single instant. Along the way, Anthony connects the panoramic life review to memory architecture and neurochemistry, showing surprising overlap with experiences triggered by ketamine, DMT, and psilocybin. His provocative daemon–eidolon model frames deja vu as a memory from previous “runs” of your life, while many‑worlds and simulation logic offer a physics‑literate way to imagine branching choices rendering new realities on demand. The conversation widens across cultures: from children encountering cartoon guides to shamanic initiations and New Britain accounts that mirror modern abduction narratives, the motifs of guidance, review, and transformation persist even as their costumes change.

Grounded in neuroscience yet alive to anthropology, information theory, and the holographic principle, this episode asks whether consciousness is a field we tune into, not a byproduct we produce. If entities on DMT remember you and virtual worlds can feel more real than real, how certain are we that everyday life isn’t a curated rendering? Come curious, leave challenged, and bring your best questions about what a self is, where it goes, and why our most private experiences look so strangely universal. If this conversation expands your sense of what’s possible, follow, and share with a friend.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Consciousness And Death
• 4:58 Childhood Hallucinations To Academic Inquiry
• 9:35 Science, The Hard Problem, And NDE Basics
• 15:24 Is Reality An Hallucination?
• 19:39 Veridical NDEs And Eben Alexander
• 25:03 Dying Brain Activity: Rats, Scans, And Paradox
• 30:12 Time Dilation, Chemicals, And Life Review
• 36:42 Deja Vu, Precognition, And The Daemon
• 44:05 Many Worlds, Simulation, And Choice
• 49:08 Consciousness As Field And OBE Framing
• 51:36 Anthropology Of NDEs Across Cultures

Transcript

0:00

Hi everyone, I'm Stan Mallow. Welcome to Paranormal Yakker. My guest today, Anthony Peake, is a best-selling author, lecturer, broadcaster, & leading thinker in the area of consciousness studies. His ideas apply scientific reasoning to some of the greatest mysteries of the universe, including what happens when we die. He's a member of the Society for Psychical Research,& his work has been published in the prestigious Journal of Near-Death Studies. He'll be talking

about his book, Near-Death Experiences: 0:38

the Science, Psychology,& Anthropology Behind the Phenomenon. Anthony Peake, welcome to ParanormalYakker. A very welcome, Stan. Thank you very much. I'm really looking forward to our chat. When, Tony, did your scientific & esoteric curiosities & expertise mesh, & your interest in wanting to explore the phenomenon of near-death experiences was ignited,& by any chance did any event or events occur in your life which triggered that interest? I've always been interested in the magic of the fact that whatever I am, I am generated by the brain. So effectively, Anthony Peake, Stan Mallow, everybody else that's listening to this interview& this discussion is aware of the fact that they are a sentient something that's perceiving an external world. All that perception is created effectively by inanimate atoms working within fields, & ever since I was a child that has always intrigued me. But much more, I've always been fascinated by hallucinations. When I was 16, sorry, when I was 12 in 1966, I had double pneumonia,& at that period, because my mother was a nurse, she nursed me from home, but I went through the crisis of pneumonia & I had a series of very, very powerful hallucinations. & I was quite intrigued as to how my brain was creating imagery that was moving, was then being projected into the external world around me as if it was part of my perception field.& yet I knew it was an hallucination, but to me it was real. & when I went to university, I became quite interested in psychic phenomena, became quite interested in why people believe things they do. & in fact, I specialized in the sociology of religion & the sociology of language, because I was particularly interested in this. But over the years, my interest has developed broader& broader & deeper& deeper in that over the years, I met people who'd had out of body experiences & near-death experiences, precognitions, these kind of things. & they always intrigued me & interested me, but I have a very, very rational logical mind. & my starting position is always the science. So I very much work upon the statement made by a famous Swedish philosopher by the name of Marcello Truzzi, who said that extraordinary claims need extraordinary proofs.& I've worked under that assumption. If you're going to make an incredible claim, you have to prove it in some way. & the only way I can prove experiences to other people is through science. I can claim I've had an out of the body experience. I can claim many, many things, but you have to prove them. & this has been my lifelong journey. So when in 1999, I had the opportunity to take some time out, it was then I decided to write my first book.& I became interested in near-death experiences, which I'll explain later. I became fascinated by the phenomena of déjà vu, the idea that you are in a location or in a set of circumstances you know from some time in your past.& I'd spent a year writing the book. I then completed the book. & that book came out in 2006, which was taken by a publisher. I'm not self-published. I'm not vanity published. I'm traditionally published. Publishers actually give me an advance to write books, which means that my books get everywhere around the world & into many, many different languages. I've had many, many strange experiences, but I've never had a near-death experience. I've never had an out of body experience. I've had lucid dreams. I've had hypnagogic imagery, but nothing powerful. It's what other people have told me of their experiences that really interest me & the background as to why these experiences happen. In your book, Tony, you examine the latest neuro-scientific hypotheses concerning the physical& psychological aspects of near-death experiences. What are those hypotheses? When people normally have near-death experiences, the standard explanation is it's an hallucination. & this seems to be the standard modern scientific position when it comes to extraordinary, what's called ASCs, extraordinary human experiences. Now, for me, the science has got to look further. It's got to look, as I said before, about the mystery of consciousness, how inanimate matter creates consciousness, self-referential consciousness. Even that is a great mystery to modern science, in that we don't know how the brain creates consciousness or perception. & indeed, I think it was in 1994, 1995, a young Australian philosopher called David Chalmers stood up at the University of Arizona & turned around& said, Modern science, in relation to the brain, has two problems, the soft problem, which is understanding how the brain works in the sense of how neurotransmitters work, how neurons communicate. But the hard problem is how the brain creates you & I, & it creates this perceiving something that's inside the head. Now, we know that that perceiving something seems to occur at birth& then disappears when we die. The body stops functioning& consciousness just disappears. So the modern scientific position is that because consciousness disappears when somebody dies, therefore consciousness is part of the brain. It's what's called an epiphenomenon of brain actions. Now, modern neurology, taking that position, has looked into near death experiences & it has concluded that near death experiences are, an hallucination, created by the dying brain. In other words, it's the dying brain accommodating the fact that the body is dying. They argue that the hallucinations are brought about by something called hypoxia, which is lack of oxygen in the brain. & as soon as the brain starts being starved of oxygen because the blood stops circulating& everything else as well, hallucinations start. But what they can't explain is why those hallucinations start. It's easy to turn around & say, Well, you know, the dying brain just creates this kind of hallucination of floating outside of the body, an hallucination of having a panoramic life review, the hallucination of meeting people that you have known have that have died in your life. But the question is, how does the brain create that? In fact, even bigger question, how does the brain create the idea that there is an external world anyway? Because we know that what is outside of us, what we think is the external world, is 99.999999999996 empty space. In other words, when we think objects are physical & we think we touch things, you know, if you place your hands on the table in front of you now, you feel the table. But you're not actually feeling the table at all. What is actually taking place is there is that each atom of the substances that make up the table that you're touching has at the end end edge of it an electron whizzing around. & that electron is negatively charged, or a number of electrons.& the same is with your fingers. So what happens is literally is when you try to touch something, a negatively charged particle & the negative charged particles in your finger repulse each other. But you get the sensation of touch. But you're not actually touching anything. & then you're told, Well, there is an external world out there. Well, there isn't actually. There's no actual proof that there is an external world out there. The reasoning being quite simple. Your brain takes information from your eyes, electrical signals from your eyes, & from those electromagnetic signals which have been converted into electrochemical signals, it internally creates a model of what the external world should look like. So there is an argument to say that the everyday world we live in is also an hallucination in exactly the same way that a near-death experience is an hallucination. So what we have to do then is to find other ways of proving that the external world is real. & you & I will know that the external world is external to ourselves because I will turn around to you & say, Oh, look at that object behind you. Look at the alien gray that you have behind you. I can see that. You know it's there. Therefore, we are agreeing that there's something in external space that we are both perceiving. Therefore, it's logical to presume that that external space is therefore real. However, there are many, many cases of individuals that have out of the body experiences & near-death experiences where they share with other people those perceptions. It's called being veridical. Now, if that is then the case, the proof we use to say that the external world is real is exactly the same proof that can be used to prove that near-death experiences are real. Because there are cases after cases after cases of individuals that meet other individuals in near-death experiences. Like for instance, there's a classic case which I always love which is a guy called Eben Alexander who probably many of you are aware of. & Eben Alexander was a neurosurgeon who had a very bad case of viral meningitis. & while it hit him, he went into a state called status epilepticus which is effectively a series of seizures within the brain.& effectively, he flatlined while this was happening. Literally, the brain activity stopped for him or for the people witnessing him. When he came to a few days later, he turned around to his parents & his friends & he said, I went somewhere else completely. When I was flatlined, when there should have been no brain activity, my brain wasn't only active, but I was perceiving these incredible things. He claimed that he came to & he was covered in mud & he climbed out of the mud & then suddenly he finds himself on the wings of this huge beautiful butterfly. That in itself sounds strange. It sounds like a dream sequence. But get this. Sitting on the wing with him was a young woman & the young woman starts talking to him& Alexander starts talking back to her. & the one thing he noticed about it was that she had the most incredible color blue eyes. Very dark, powerful blue eyes. So when he came to, he starts explaining to his parents about this& he says, you know, that I saw this girl who had beautiful blue eyes & his parents went really quiet & they said, Oh, there's something we've never told you. You had a baby sister who died before you were born & the one thing that was strong about it was her color of her eyes & she had these incredible blue eyes. How did Eben Alexander know that? Who was the entity that was talking to him? So suddenly there's information people are bringing back from these experiences that suggest that this reality is just as real. Now to me, this is powerful evidence that near-death experiences are real. Now in recent years, there's been a series of discoveries made that the people who want to say that near-death experiences, hallucinations, have jumped upon. & basically there's a lady called Jimo Borjigin at the University of Michigan.& in 2017, she did a series of experiments whereby they euthanized rats. They killed rats. They gave them heart attacks & killed them. & the interesting thing was that there was brain activity seconds after the rats had been killed. Now this is odd because the brain is dead, the rat has gone & yet the brain suddenly starts triggering activity. Now this was intriguing& it fascinated a lot of people& the suggestion being that this effectively is evidence of the near-death experience being the final actions of a dying brain. But then they made one or two other discoveries which was even weirder.& there was a case in 2023, I think it was, of an American guy living in Germany. & he was a guy in his late 80s & he fell off a ladder& he was rushed to hospital & they put him under a brain scanner to check his brain activity. As they did so, he died. So for the first time, somebody actually died whilst their brain was being monitored. & exactly the same thing as Jimo Borjigin’s rats took place. There was a delay & then suddenly the brain started massive activity again. Now again they use the argument that that proves that dying or dead brain is doing. Well I have two points here. The first one is the brain is dead. So what is stimulating that activity in a dead brain? But more importantly, if you say that is the near-death experience, from the point of view of the person experiencing whatever is going on in the brain, they're already dead. They've already died. But suddenly they're conscious again. Now again there was a series of other experiments done in, I think it was, a lady called Clementina van Rijn.& this took place in the Netherlands, I think it was.& they beheaded rats. They again beheaded rats. & again they had the same brain activity with a beheaded rat. So suddenly we've got this really interesting area of thought. Now I argue that what is actually taking place here is far more fascinating. What it means is at the point of death we fall out of time when near-death experiences were first reported properly & written about, which was a guy called Raymond Moody wrote a book called Life After Life. I think it was in the the early 1970s. & some doctors really became quite interested in this near-death phenomenon. & Moody came up with a series of sort of experiences that people reported that he felt were consistent. Like a feeling of time slowing down, a feeling of floating outside of the body, a feeling of seeing your life flash before your eyes, the meeting with entities or beings, like the being of light. & all these things that he said these are standard things that people near-death experience have. & a few years later a guy called Bruce Grayson, the University of Virginia, who by the way wrote the foreword to my first book, Bruce Grayson came up with what he called a Grayson scale, which is again these experiences. So when somebody's had a near-death experience you ask them& say did you float out your body? Did you see what was happening around you when it happened?& they tick them off & then depending on how many you've got is how powerful the near-death experience is. Now I've always been fascinated by this because what does this tell us about what is really happening in the brain at the point of death? & I'm particularly interested in two or three of these things like the time dilation feeling, the feeling that time is slowing down. People say this all the time that when I was in my near-death experience I felt that I'd been away for hours, weeks or years. I'll guarantee that there will be people watching this program who will have had that experience in real life. It normally happens when you're given bad news, when you fall, when you're in a car crash. It's as if time suddenly slows down. Now this again is because of a release of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, chemicals in the brain, that seem to slow down how time flows internally. Now a few years ago I wrote a book called The Labyrinth of Time where I discuss this in greater detail, the science behind this, as to why some people time seems to slow down for them. So imagine at the point of death for the person dying or the person watching somebody die it could be a split second, but for the person dying the time spans out to an incredible amount. Now if that happens what does this tell us? It tells us that the time expansion is something that is reported by people who take substances called entheogens. These are substances like dimethyltryptamine & ketamine& psilocybin. All of these substances that people can take in real life also cause this time dilation effect & indeed it was so interesting that many years ago a young researcher at the Maudsley Hospital in London called Karl Janssen noticed the similarities between near-death experiences& people who take a substance called ketamine. & he came to the conclusion that there is a substance that's released in the brain at the point of death that mimics ketamine & mimics what ketamine does. So when somebody takes ketamine effectively they are having a near-death experience in exactly the same way. So it's brain chemicals. But if the time is slowing down why does it do that?& I argue it does it because you have to experience something called a panoramic life review. Now the panoramic life review is another of the Moody traits or the Grayson traits & that's when people turn around & say I saw my life flash before my eyes. It's reported I think in about 17% of cases of people that survive a near-death experience. Now this is intriguing & it's intrigued me for a long time because if you see your life again how can that be? It suggests that your life has been recorded. It suggests that your brain has an ability to store all your life experiences because you can't just have your life flash before your eyes unless it's a recording or it's been recorded in some way or other. Now people will turn around & say that sometimes when they have the panoramic life review they see incidents from their past that they're right back living it again as it was in the past. Other times people say that they see themselves from outside a position in their body living their lives again & other people claim that they also sense what happened to other people around them& see other people's pain & things they do. Now I'll give an example of this. There is a guy who contacted me many years ago after my first book came out. A guy called Bill Mirtha& Bill Mirtha fell into the sea. He was cycling his bike along one cold winter's day & a wave hit him& whipped him into the sea & he was drawn out into the sea& he was dying of hypothermia & he explained to me as he was dying of hypothermia he suddenly he was back running across the street in east London when he was seven years of age & he's in his body running & he looks up& he sees a car come at him& the car hits him & it was an incident that happened in his childhood when he broke his leg so he's lying on the ground in pain with his leg & then suddenly he's no longer in his body he's looking down through the eyes of a woman who's looking down at her leg & she's got a ladder in her stocking & her fingers are playing with the ladder of the stocking. She then looks up& she's driving a car to see a little kid run across the road. That was Bill & she hits him& Bill felt all the pain she felt when she came out seeing this kid with a broken leg & then he's out of his body he's back in again in the sea going through dying so it seems that we have this ability to have snapshots of our previous lives or our life before. This is significant because I believe that when we really die rather than near death experience you relive your life again from the moment of your birth you get rocketed back& you live your life again& when you live that life again there is part of you that remembers you're living it again it's a part of you that remembers that you've lived your life before. I call that entity the Daemon& the Daemon I believe is that voice in your head that tells you not to do things, your guiding spirit, your whatever you want to call it & I argue that that Daemon guides you through life as best it can & warns you about things but sometimes when you're living your life again in the final seconds of your life you suddenly remember that you've lived this before there's suddenly a realization that you've done this before. The thing is with déjà vu it's very very strange isn't it & it's the most common psychic experience in the world at least 70% of people will have at least one déjà vu experience in their life across the world & it's universal it's in every society in every culture. Now I became interested in this & I thought well why do we have a why do we have déjà vus but more importantly why in certain circumstances& it was interesting because I then did some research& I came across the work of a guy called Dr Arthur Funkhouser who's an American that lives in Bern in Switzerland & he's a Jungian analyst but he's a quantum physicist by PhD by the way so he's a scientist & he has this incredible hypothesis he calls the dream theory of déjà vu& in that he argues that when you have a déjà vu sensation it's because you've recently had a dream a precognitive dream where in the dream you see your own future then in normal waking state you start to encounter the dream circumstances & you think where do I know that from I've done this before. Now Art is now a good friend of mine & when he came up with his hypothesis which he wrote again in an academic paper many years ago I pointed out to him & said yes but this suggests precognition so how does your brain create a dream about circumstances that have yet to happen & Art said no you're quite right I don't know& this is where my hypothesis comes in & it's because it's a memory it's not a precognition it's the opposite you are remembering something you've done before & you start to experience that. Now I used to do a regular radio show on the BBC, BBC Radio Merseyside & every fortnight we'd have a phone in & I'd pick a theme & people would phone in about their experiences& I did one show on déjà vu & this guy phoned up live radio& he said what Anthony's saying here has proven something that's mystified me for years& he had explained to us on live radio & he said he was watching television with his wife& while he was watching the television what was happening on the television he was hearing twice he was hearing it & seeing it& then he'd see it again & he got so disturbed he got up from his wife & he left his wife in the living room went outside into the hallway as he did so he saw somebody walk past their front door which has made a glass twice then he realized that he could prove he was being precognitive this is astonishing what he did was he had a piece of paper & a pen & he waited until he heard in the déjà vu what his wife said to him as he walked into the living room & then he walked into he wrote it down walked into the living room& as she said the words he handed her the piece of paper with the word she was going to say written on it & he said I know that I was seeing about three or four seconds in the future now over the years I've been approached by many people from around the world that have this effect & many of them experienced something called migraine classic migraine or temporal lobe epilepsy & now to me this is intriguing because it means that it is something to do with how the brain functions during classic migraine experiences& during temporal lobe experiences particularly the aura state which takes place before they come about so it's a neurological effect but it suggests something else because if I can perceive what is going to happen next it means I've experienced it before in a past life. Now the classic definition of déjà vu was put forward by a guy called Vernon Nepay who is a professor of psychiatry in Seattle & Vernon Nepay argued that déjà vu is that feeling you have where something has happened& an ill-defined time in your past that you cannot identify. Now my argument is if we everybody who gets a déjà vu is actually reliving their lives that's why we get this sensation. Now there are various neurological exp there are 72, funnily enough, there are 72 known explanations for déjà vu. Mine is one of them. There was a book written a few years ago that listed them all & this is mine is one of the models but the major neurological explanation is something called the visual pathways hypothesis which was put forward by a guy called Robert Effron in 1962& that is basically that literally part of your eye sees because we've got two hemispheres to the brain & it's as if one part of the brain processes a bit of information from the external world a split second before the other one. But that fails to explain precognitive déjà vu sensations& in fact it was disproven in I think 2016-2017 by a guy called Akira O'Connor at the University of Leeds here in the UK when they found people who were deaf have a déjà sound sensation where they hear something& they hear it again. So clearly whatever déjà vu is it's not what we think it is & I argue it is basically what you feel& I'd love to have responses when you're posted it here people out there that you've had déjà vu sensations do you genuinely believe it's just because one of your eyes has seen something a split second before. It's because you have this overall feeling don't you it's kind of a feeling of strangeness, a kind of feeling of sickness in your stomach & I believe it's because you're remembering your past life & I call this concept cheating the ferryman because I believe we cheat the ferryman. We never pay the ferryman his fee to take us over to the world of the dead because we all live our life another life in the final second of our lives & at the end of that life we live another one & another one & another one. So effectively we are immortal & we live not life after life after life again & again with this guide taking us through the lives because each life is different because remember in your life you make decisions all the time every second you'll make a decision like like Stan you might turn around & say this Anthony Peake's a complete not job I'm not even continuing with this interview I'm walking out you could make that choice but there'll be another version where you sit continuing listening this is called the ever its many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is something that is known within quantum mechanics. It's a very, very powerful theory of how the universe works. Now if that means that there are millions of versions of each of us in the hyperverse it means that each one of each one version of us or collectively will live every outcome of every decision you can possibly make won't it be logical they they will all have subtly different lives & I believe that it's what is really taking places it's like we're in a computer game we're like we're in a simulation of our lives & within the simulation is a program that has& will render the reality of every decision you can make so the moment you make a decision what's called the wave function in quantum mechanics there's something called the statistical wave function. Effectively subatomic particles until they are measured or observed don't exist. They are a wave of probability & the moment they are observed the wave of probability collapses into a point particle in a particular location which means there's a direct relationship between the observer consciousness& the external world which means then every decision you make a new world is rendered which is rendered to accommodate the decision you just made & go you go through your life & you make hundreds thousands millions of decisions but each one of them puts you into a different universe or into a different scenario or a different computer game for want of a better term & I believe that's what happens when we die& near-death experiences are just part of that introduction to that hypothesis. I would argue for instance that near-death experiences like the outer body experience when people have outer body experiences near-death experiences it's as if their consciousness raises above their body& they can see around them & this is again because of the way the universe is structured. It's the way the universe works. We think we are one consciousness don't we we think I'm me I'm I whereas I argue we're not consciousness is out there it's a field & we can attune into that field & we can move outside of our bodies & view the field from different locations. You also explore in your book how anthropological studies& spiritual beliefs have contributed to our understanding of near-death experiences. Could you elaborate a bit on that? Yeah it's quite intriguing is that one of the things that is fascinating about near-death experiences is that every culture has them. There are no cultures that have been discovered on the planet that don't have descriptions of what we would call near-death experiences. Not only that but throughout time near-death experiences have been reported. I mean for instance the the oldest near-death experience that is generally cited was an ancient Greek story of the myth of Er a guy called Er E-R & he dies on a battlefield & he finds himself floating outside of his body. He meets people that are dead & he wanders around this world & he comes back into his body again. Now that's 3,000 years ago that they were describing these things. So the question is then that it's everywhere but each culture interprets it differently. So for instance one of the things I mentioned one of the Moody traits & one of the Grayson traits it's something called the being of light & the being of light is the entity something that you meet after you've died you die & suddenly there's this being standing next to you & it helps you & guides you. Now within Western cultures it tends to be somebody that we know & love that has died but different cultures have different beings of light depending upon the cultural aspects of them. In the western world for instance it might be Jesus or something like that or one of the saints or whatever, In other cultures it will be a could be a representative of that religious group. It could be one of the Indian pantheon of gods in India in japan they have different ghosts or beings that come to them so clearly it is culturally based but the phenomenon is still the same but it's how it presents itself to the dying person. So this suggests that there is a reality behind it but depending on your cultural norms is how the near-death experience will pan out initially. Now again I can give examples of this just how fascinating this is is that young children when they have near-death experiences they also have a being of light that comes to them& on many occasions because young children don't tend to know many people who have died because of course they've only had a short life so maybe their grandparents maybe but usually if you're six or seven years of age no real people in your life has died. So guess what? The being of light that appears are their school friends or their school teachers or cartoon characters. So clearly this is anthropologically fascinating. Why cartoon characters so clearly it's what you get what you expect. Now there is then some very interesting areas that I find really intriguing is how it can be linked to the world of the great gentleman behind you because as you probably know for the last four years & it will be five years next year I've spoken a thing called Contact in the Desert which is the world's biggest UFO thing & in my books I write about the links between near-death experiences & UFO experiences & I've discovered some fascinating links it's really extraordinary. I mean for instance there's a lady called Dorothy Counts & she was a Canadian anthropologist from the Laurentian University I think she's based in Ontario she was based in Ontario Dorothy Counts& she did a lot of research with people in New Guinea or in fact a place called New Britain which is an island off New Guinea& she interviewed lots of people there about their belief systems& everything else. Now you will probably know from history that in New Guinea in the Second World War because the American army came in there & the Australian army there was a cult that started called cargo cults which were people who believed the locals saw the Americans landing & bringing goods from America & building airstrips & then from the airstrips all these goodies would come off the plains. The locals come to the conclusion that if you prayed hard enough you could make the cargo come from the sky& the cargo cults became quite an interesting area anthropologically for people & this is why Dorothy Counts was out there but she then started talking to people she discovered there were individuals who'd had near-death experiences & there was one guy who has this near-death experience where he rises out of his body, he finds himself walking along a road & he meets another lady from the village & he's surprised why she's there & it was only when he came back subsequently he found that she died without him knowing so that was weird in itself but he then feels himself being drawn up & he finds himself in this house but he described the house as saying it was revolving & it was hovering above the ground & it was a house that was hovering in the air& he then leaves it& there's a ladder comes down & he leaves it & he meets beings in there that talk to him & they do things to him while he's inside this hovering craft & then he comes back again to life. That is an alien abduction. It's a classic abduction scenario, it's Travis Walton, it's what happened to people like Whitley Strieber. It's the same kind of thing & the entities seem to play around with him in one way or another now this again is incredible because this guy wouldn't know a flying saucer. It's not in their culture& yet he described it specifically& there was a number of other cases that were very very similar which leads me to believe that near-death experiences& alien abductions are part of the same phenomenon & I can link them directly in terms of anthropological reasons because there's something else in anthropology that also links with this shamanism & there's something called shamanic traveling whereby a shaman will dance themselves into a like a near-death experience where they'll then come out of their body & they will meet beings who will guide them they'll go to the upper world or the lower world. Now these entities are regularly described as being insectoid& what do the entities do when the shamans meet them? They dismember the shamans there's something called shamanic traveling& shamanic initiation where the beings tear you apart they take your innards out they examine you. This is exactly what happens to people like Betty & Barney Hill. You have the same tropes now if you start looking at this & the reason that my writing is unique I think I'm one of the few writers in the world that's going near-death experiences alien abductions DMT experiences Ayahuasca experiences they're all the same thing & if you start joining the dots you start to realize that it's a universal phenomenon & I will guarantee that you will find this phenomenon is worldwide& has been throughout history. Anthropologically then I mean for instance in the book I discuss near-death experiences within Zoroastrianism, within the Indian community within the Japanese community. I mean there are places in Japan that's called the, the shining light group. Part of their religious belief is near-death experiences & outer body experiences where they find themselves outside of their body so there is something bigger here I believe& in the book I describe all this in great detail. If the folks from the Cambridge or Merriam Webster dictionaries approached you, said they were working on an esoteric dictionary& wanted you to provide the descriptions, the meanings of life death& near-death as you view them in the context of your research what Tony would you write to describe those words? What I would say is that death is something that happens to other people, something that never happens to you because you can never be aware that you have died logically& I use the analogy when I do lectures I always say to people don't you find it extraordinary that in your life people die but you remain you continue you continue being the observer of your universe & I argue this is because we've got consciousness wrong. We misunderstand how the universe functions. Can I prove this? No, but I've got a lot of neurological evidence to point out this could be the case. What I believe is taking place is that we are all a singular consciousness which I call an Eidolon & an Eidolon lives one life is born& dies. However there is another version of you that I call the Daemon which is your game player. So imagine a scenario that life as I said before is like a computer game. So, there's this the on screen sprite that is the Eidolon that lives one life & goes through life like a computer game but the game player when that sprite dies when that Eidolon dies the game player starts the game again as we do in computer games you know you start the game again& you've got a new Eidolon& that Eidolon then follows a certain course of action & gets killed again. Now this time the Daemon the game player knows a little bit about that person's life, the life on in the game so over hundreds of games the Daemon understands how to manipulate the life of the person. This is like the movie Groundhog Day by the way in fact the Russian language edition of my book Groundhog Day was called Groundhog Life & also Danny Rubin the guy that wrote Groundhog Day is aware of my work as well he bought my first book to all these friends at Harvard because he said that this guy's done the science of Groundhog Day. So the Daemon then is the person that can live all your lives but I argue that behind the Daemon is another consciousness which I call the Uber Daemon& the Uber Daemon is the Jungian collective unconscious for want of a better word. It is the consciousness of all human beings that have ever lived & that Uber Daemon remembers every single life & when people are hypnotized sometimes & this explains things like hypnotic regression because I argue when people are hypnotized into past lives remember they go back& they're a french 17th century French peasant or whatever I think what happens is is that consciousness moves up from the Eidolon into demonic consciousness into the Uber Daemon& it attunes in like a radio attunes into a signal & it suddenly can attune into a frequency& the frequency it tunes into could be a 17th century French peasant & it remembers the life of that person but then I argue from there behind the Uber Daemon is then something I call the Godman & the Godman is the equivalent of what the Vedantist would call Brahma what the Kabalists call the or Ein Sof. It's everything, everything is consciousness consciousness is prime& the consciousness that runs the universe is what I call the Godman & it's what we would call God for want of a better term now the reason I say this is that this explains why reality& quantum mechanics is so strange. It explains why as I said before it's 99.99 reoccurring empty space it's because there's nothing out there. We are creating our brains are collectively creating the external world we experience. You & I at the moment are, are creating this bit of the universe& every other observer is creating its little bit of the universe but then there is the universe that's looked down upon by the Uber Daemon which is observing everything & is collapsing the wave function effectively of the human universe. Then we have the Godman collapsing the wave function of the whole universe. So, everything in its base state is literally data, it's information. It does have physical existence. It literally is data we live in a hologram. Now again some people may say that's absolutely crazy. Well, if you invest a little bit of time in reading up on the holographic principle many, many top quantum physicists & cosmologists believe this is the only answer to how the universe is behave & how the universe behaves at the very large & the very small. It's to do with black holes, it's to do with information theory. As we develop into our knowledge of AI & as we develop into our knowledge of computer systems& how computers work & how we can generate information we'll start to realize that this is the case. All the evidence is pointing in this direction. In other words what I then would paraphrase& I'd end the article by paraphrasing the great American comedian Bill Hicks. He did a very famous comedy sketch where he turns around & he's trying to show how newscasters zone in on the ridiculous & he says breaking news, young man on acid realizes that reality is just light slowed down to a very small pace & we are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Now, over to Bill for the weather.& that is so powerful because I believe we are one single consciousness experiencing itself subjectively & I'd use as a final example here the writings of a guy called Philip K Dick American science fiction writer who I wrote a biography of a few years ago & this is the central thesis of all of Philip K Dick's writings. This is an illusion this is Maya as they would call it. This is what the gnostics would call the Kenoma. This is the creation, it's a creation that we live we live within it's a facsimile reality & again if you go back to the gnostics belief system, the gnostics the schismatic Christian sect in the first century ad taking their ideas from ancient Greek beliefs argued that this is a fake reality created by something called the Demiurge what Yaldabaoth & the Demiurge has created this simulation & there is a reality behind this reality which they call the Polaroma the fullness & we are emanations of that greater something that's behind this the reality behind the reality or the world behind the world or as my great friend Miguel Connor calls it the God behind God. It seems in recent years more & more people have been reporting near-death experiences. To what do you attribute that? Good question. Well, there's a number of features. The first one is that the near-death experiences become better known which means that people when they have near-death experiences have a kind of terminology they can use. They know they're not experiencing it on their own because I would guarantee for years many people have had these experiences but have been too scared to talk about them. Can you imagine a scenario in 1830 when you have a close with death & you say I floated outside my body & I saw my dead grandmother& my life. I saw my life flash before my eyes nobody's going to believe you or they're going to say it conflicts with our belief system. So, you're going to keep schtum but as time has developed people are more at ease now so they know that when they have this experience when they come back they'll say god I've just had a near-death experience or even an out-of-body experience. It's the same kind of thing so they are calmer about it& they feel they won't be ridiculed. The second point I think is the development of medical science which is now so sophisticated that we can bring people back from the point of death. Our doctors can save people's lives that ordinarily people would have died so there are more people surviving near-death experiences to be able to come back & report them so it is not at all surprising that the numbers are increasing. Like anything else it's when people become more aware of something they have a category that they can place themselves upon. I also believe that it is to do with the way in which, the way in which we see the universe is changing. We're moving away from the straightforward materialist reductionist worldview that everything that is physically out there is just physically there & everything is real& there's nothing outside of our perceptions. It's something I call electromagnetic chauvinism, the idea that you only believe what is out there because it's light waves hitting your eyes & we know that the colour red doesn't exist out there. We know that insects see the world in a completely different way. We know that bats see the world in a completely different way but we believe because our senses present to us a reality we believe that's what that reality is. It's called naive realism by the way there is a technical term for that believing that what you perceive is really out there because it isn't. So, as time goes on we're starting to realize this & as technology develops& as we see more & more things with AI as we see virtual reality now. Can you imagine 35 years ago me explaining my analogy of the computer game to people who've never you've never seen a computer game & never put virtual reality headset on whereas now when I turn around to people& I say well if you put a virtual reality headset on then you placed yourself in turn to a haptic feedback suit that your movement was within the simulation within the 3D world of the the VR & it looked as if you were moving as you move. How could you tell if something then wiped out all your memories of who you were & you were inside the game how could you tell that you were not in a game. Now, the answer is you couldn't, you see virtual reality things now. They are hyper real. In fact they don't make them as hyper real as they can for the very real reason the people if they did when they went into virtual reality real would lose all concept of what is really happening& in those virtual worlds you meet other people. Now again this is intriguing & again as this is an aside some of my associates are doing research into dimethyltryptamine an imperial college in London & they're people volunteering to take DMT& when they get into the outer body state when they take this fantastic hallucinatory substance they go to places that are more real than this & not only are those places more real than this they meet entities there & the entities remember them the end is as if the entities are independent of them. They're not part of an hallucination. That's their world that we go to when we're in out-of-body states, near death experiences or whatever. So suddenly we realize the universe is nested. The universe is far more interesting than we can ever imagine& this is why more people are reporting it & because of shows like yours. You know you're getting the message out there. More people are consuming this stuff. I'm doing analysis at the moment I mean for instance in the last few years I've done analysis of how many people have watched on YouTube my interviews like this& it's running at around about 2 3/4 a million. The message is getting out there& I'm far from famous so you can imagine the really big boys that are in this field, they're getting out there. It's getting into the Zeitgeist & there will be a point where so many people will realize what is happening something's going to curious is going to happen with reality of that I'm sure. Should viewers of Paranormal Yakker want to buy

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The Science Psychology and Anthropology Behind the Phenomenon & also learn about the other books you've authored how Tony can they do that? You can order my books from any bookshop around the world. You can go onto Amazon & you can order the books from Amazon. You can download the Kindle versions of my books, all of them. You can also download the audible versions of all my books with me reading them. There are three books that I don't read, the Philip K Dick book I don't & there's two other books I've written but all my others I had to audition to read my own books by the way which is astonishing but apparently I have the right kind of voice& I could read properly so they were quite happy with that. But also & this is very important for me is that I'm not here to sell books. I'm here to get ideas out there so I say to people please if you want to buy my books that is wonderful you can also buy them off my website if you want but for me what's greater is if you went into your local library & asked for my books because even if they don't have my books on the shelves they can order them for you in which case you get the book for free & you can read it for free& that makes me very very happy I want the ideas out there you know I don't need the money, that's not my motivation. My motivation Is I really genuinely believe that my work has validity & I think if you read all 13 of my books hey you'll probably go insane but if you did you'd really see how my ideas develop back from 2000 when I first the first book in 1999 2000 which came out in 2006. So if you read them in chronological order you can see how my ideas get broader & deeper& start to bring in other areas& you can see how the ideas develop& you can then follow my path& my journey to understanding. Now what I also say to people is I make myself extremely approachable I'm on Facebook, I'm on YouTube, I'm on Instagram, I have my own website. You can communicate with me there. I probably I will try & respond but I get so many emails a day now it's very difficult so don't think if I'm ignoring you it's just I've got I've got a lot I don't have secretaries& people working for me it's just me. So sometimes I can't always respond but I will try if I can. Get along to my events I've literally breaking news & this is the first time I'll be announcing this is that I've agreed to be on Contact in the Desert next year, next year which will be the last week in May to June in Indian Wells in Southern California & I'll be there for the full five days & when I'm at that event I'm there & available I talk to people all the time& if you go to that event you can meet lots of other world famous writers & people interested in the the UFO phenomenon things. So just come along, contact me talk to me, tell me your experiences. Anthony Peake, I thank you for being my guest on Paranormal Yakker. Yakking with you has been a truly wonderful experience. Thank you. Yeah thank you very much Stan that has been really good.