An Interview with British author Anthony Peake

Surprising discoveries about the world of Déjà vu and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy by Brent Raynes Anthony Peake is the author of Is There Life After Death? The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When You Die. A free download of this book is available to U.S. readers at: www.wowio.com. Peake delves deeply into neurology, quantum physics, temporal lobe epilepsy, déjà vu and precognition, and discovers an incredible duality of consciousness that may scientifically help to explain how we survive death, a thought-provoking theory Peake calls Cheating The Ferryman. For additional information, readers are directed to the following Internet sites: Anthony Peake’s website: www.anthonypeake.com Anthony Peake’s blogsite: http://cheatingtheferryman.blogspot.com/ Something called a LibraryThing: http://www.librarything.com/groups.php?group=cheatingtheferryman&sent=1 On December 5, 2007, Mr. Peake will be appearing at 2230 (UK time) on the British radio station KERRANG, and then sometime in January he’ll be back on and people will be able to call in. His interview will be heard on the internet at: www.kerrangradio.co.uk Editor: Let’s start with a little about your background and what stimulated you to explore these areas and to write the book that you wrote. Anthony Peake: I’ve always been interested in human psychology and how the human brain works. My first degree was in sociology and history at the University of Warwick. I followed that up with post-graduate study at London’s School of Economics. I’ve always been very much a social scientist but I have always been fascinated by particle physics and neurology. I’ve also always been interested in the mysteries of the mind, and one particular area has always fascinated me, and that is the phenomenon known as déjà vu. Around about 5-6 years ago I was in the fortunate position of being able to take a year’s sabbatical from my normal occupation as a management consultant to write a book. My initial plan was to write a book just about déjà vu and I started reading on the background of the déjà vu phenomenon and I was surprised to discover that there has been very scant work done on it. There was a book written by a guy in Seattle named Vernon Neppe, and in Switzerland Dr. Arthur Funkhouser has proposed some fascinating ideas with regard to déjà vu, dreams and precognition. I am also pleased to say that recently Dr. Chris Moulin from the University of Sheffield has been doing a good deal of interesting work over here in the U.K. Effectively, there’s no real explanation for it. There are various neurological based suggestions, all of which seem very, very inadequate to explain the phenomenon of the feeling that “I have lived this moment before” in some past life, or in a past incarnation. Or, the counterargument is that somehow I am perceiving the content of my immediate future. Both of which are rather strange ideas. So I started looking into the neurology and the background to déjà vu and I was surprised to discover ­ and it’s quite interesting because I was looking at your website and you have an interview with Todd Murphy who works with Michael Persinger ­ and I started to read more and more about temporal lobe epilepsy and the linking between temporal lobe epilepsy and déjà vu. I was fascinated to discover that déjà vu is part of the pre-seizure aura sensations that occur just before a temporal lobe seizure. So clearly there seems to be some form of linkage between TLE and déjà vu, and indeed I then started looking into the background of things that people in history who have had TLE, people like Alfred Lord Tennyson and Philip K. Dick, and all of them also describe other sensations, such as the slowing down of time and also the idea that they’re not alone in their head, this idea that there is another presence in the brain. This is quite interesting because then having subsequently found the work of Persinger, where Persinger has something called “the sensed presence,” which they’ve been able to observe by stimulating the temporal lobes, clearly there is something quite peculiar happening and there seems to be a linkage between TLE and déjà vu. But then a link was made from another source, linking it to near-death experience. The culprit seems to be a particular neurotransmitter in the brain called glutamate. It’s a known fact that glutamate is the major neurotransmitter of the brain and it’s particularly effective in the temporal lobes and it seems that at the point of death there is an effect called the glutamate flood whereby the brain is literally flooded by glutamate, and indeed that brings about the classic near-death experience, which, as you know, is the idea of having the out-of-body experience, of your life flashing before your eyes, and the idea again of meeting with other beings. Particularly a phenomenon known as the being of light. So I started putting all of these together, but I didn’t know where I was going with it. I genuinely didn’t. There were things that I had read over the years from my interest in ufology right through to my interest in psychology, psychiatry, and this type of thing. But I didn’t know where I was going with it until one day I received a phone call from a lady who ran a recruitment consulting service and she asked me if I was interested in doing any work as she had a potential contract for me, and I said, “Yes, I would be interested, but at the moment I’m taking a year sabbatical to write a book.” She said, “What are you writing about?” I said, “Well, I don’t know where I’m going with it, but at the moment I’m interested in temporal lobe epilepsy.” She went incredibly quiet and then she said, “Look, I need to meet up with you.” So I arranged a meeting near London Gatwick Airport and she said, “Tony, the reason that I needed to speak with you is that I’ve recently been diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, and everything you were describing was sending shivers down my spine because it’s effectively what happens to me.” So I said, “Could you explain to me the first time that you discovered or that you realized that you had TLE?” She said that she was sitting in a restaurant at work with a friend and that as she was doing so and as that friend was about to pour a cup of tea she felt a snap over her right ear and suddenly she looked at her friend and her friend had frozen in time and space. Literally had stopped moving. She looked around the restaurant to find that everybody else in the restaurant had also stopped moving. They were literally frozen in time. She could hear this low humming sound behind her and she realized then, to her horror, that her friend had not in fact frozen but was moving incredibly slowly and she realized that the humming sound that she was hearing behind her was in fact people talking because the metabolic rate in her body had speeded up to such an extent that time had slowed down for her and she was literally trapped in this temporal fugue, for want of a better term, for hours and hours and hours. She watched her friend pour the tea and she said that she never realized what surface tension in a liquid was till she saw the tea hit the surface and watched it bounce up and down. Then after hours and hours she felt another snap over her ear and she came to and her friend looked at her and said, “Are you okay?” She had literally been away for about .5 of a second. She had a classic TLE absence, and this fascinated me, and for some reason, and I don’t know why even to this day, but I said, “Do you get déjà vu’s?” She said, “Oh good Lord. I get déjà vu’s to kill for.” She said she got déjà vu’s where she knew what was going to happen for the next ten minutes. I said, “Why don’t you just say something to somebody?” She said, “Because I feel that if I do I’ll change the future or I’ll change the way things are planned to be.” It must be peculiar being in a situation where you feel you know what’s going to happen next and you know that by saying something that you’ll stop that event from happening. I was quite intrigued by this because I then checked and discovered the link between déjà vu and TLE. It’s quite well known, but I then found that there are other areas of TLE that are interesting, such as an area that you’re interested in. Abductions, and in fact, Whitley Strieber and I have been in contact and Whitley has requested a copy of the book because he’s quite intrigued about the implications of the things that I’m writing about in terms of TLE and the idea of abductees in such a light. Editor: Right. I know that in Communion that was one of the areas that he was exploring at the very beginning. Anthony Peake: Yes it was. Very much so and in fact he’s gone much further on now into the TLE side of things, because clearly it quite fascinates him as well. I don’t know if he’s been diagnosed as having temporal lobe epilepsy, but it’s clear that he has a lot of the symptoms. Do you watch the TV series House, with Hugh Laurie? They had a fascinating show on a few months ago here in the U.K. where a little boy was having abductions and indeed they did experiments on the child and he had temporal lobe epilepsy. Now, strangely enough, the thing that intrigued me, at this stage was the thing when people have a near-death experience and they say that their life flashes before their eyes, and that fascinated me so much because I thought, “What does that really mean?” I started looking into the neurology of the brain and the way that the brain records information, and I was amazed to discover that the research is very much showing that the brain records information and it buffers it, rather like a computer does or like when you’re down loading files from the web. It buffers the information, gets all of the information and then presents it to consciousness. There have been a lot of experiments done on this, and the idea is that this buffering is recording reality. So the implication is that if the brain records reality then the implication is that that recording is kept somewhere in the brain. I then discovered the work of Wilber Penfield who was able to evoke memories by placing an electrode on to exposed temporal lobes of patients while they were conscious, and he was able to evoke three dimensional memories of the individuals past, to the extent that they could remember things that they had long forgotten. One lady recorded that she remembered and was reliving being in her kitchen again many years before and could hear her son calling outside and indeed reheard a whole argument that her neighbors had over the fence. Penfield, towards the end of his life, because he reproduced this particular effect on many occasions, came to the conclusion that the human brain records everything, and a neuro-surgeon named Jose Delgado continued it in the 1970s. In fact, I was fortunate enough to be in contact with a Professor Karl Pribram at the University of Georgetown, and Karl believes that memory works like a hologram, is a holographic recording, and indeed he emailed me and said that he had many conversations with Penfield and Penfield was convinced that not only did the human brain record everything but that it recorded it on holographic principles and under given circumstances those memories could be re-evoked in a three dimensional recreation of reality that you could not distinguish from the actual events. So I started thinking could it be that this past life review in a real life scenario, you could actually fall out of time and relive your life in a three dimensional recreation of your life, from the moment of your birth until the moment of your death. There is the old Gnostic idea and the old Stoic idea, and the old Neitschian idea of something called The Eternal Return, which is the idea that you live your life over and over again. Indeed this is what the film Groundhog Day was based upon. The film was based on a book written by a Russian philosopher Petyr Ouspensky, called “The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.” Editor: I’ve seen the movie, and of course on your website you quoted the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas that said that “Two will recline on a couch. One will die. One will live.” Anthony Peake: My second book is due to go to my publishers this week and I’ll be focusing in on this other aspect that I deal with in my theory, which I call the Daemon-Eidolon Dyad. And remember that I hinted before this idea that when somebody has a near-death experience, or in a temporal lobe epileptic sense that there is somebody else in their head, that they are dual beings. It’s been quite phenomenal. The book has sold over 20,000 copies worldwide in a year and I get emails from temporal lobe epileptics around the world. One young lady in Canada bought eighteen copies of the book and given to every single friend she has saying that this book is the most accurate representation of what’s happening in her head. What I argue is that at the point of death human consciousness splits into two personalities. The higher being, which I call the old Gnostic term of the daemon and the lower being, which is called a eidolon, and I believe that when we live our lives again in this three dimensional recreation of our lives, that when you live that life there is part of you that knows what is going to happen next, which is the daemon, and the daemon warns you. You know, when people have precognitive dreams or they have hunches or things like this. I have so much information that virtually proves that this is happening. I’ve done about 50 talks in the U.K. and in Europe over the last six months and people come along to my talks and empirical, subjective information I’ve been given by regular people who for the first time have been able to talk to somebody and say, “Oh my God, that’s happened to me.” They hear voices in their head. There was one woman who said she was walking along one day and a voice in her head said, “That man over there you’re going to marry him. Speak to him now.” She did so, and she married him. She said it was amazing. She had never heard this voice before. It was something inside her that knew what she had to do. This reality, this illusion that we could be living in, if I’m correct, the statistics show that seventy percent of the people experience déjà vu. Thirty percent of the people haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about. I believe that the seventy percent of us that do get déjà vu are living our lives again. The thirty percent of us who don’t are putting down the memories for the first time. I also say that the reality that we live in, this illusion, is very similar to The Matrix that’s put forward in The Matrix films. I term it the Bohmian Imax. Have you ever come across the theories of Professor David Bohm? Editor: Right. The physicist. Anthony Peake: Right. He was a quantum physicist. He worked with Einstein and Oppenheimer, and he fell foul of the McCarthy problems in America in the 1950s, and after teaching in Brazil for a short time he moved over to the U.K. and he worked at Birkbeck College. He came up with the most phenomenal alternative theory to quantum physics, which he called the Implicate Order. Did you know that there was a very famous experiment that took place in Paris in the early 1980s, called the Paris experiment, and it proved something called the EPR paradox? The Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paradox, and basically what it showed was that if you take two particles and you entangle them and you set them off in different directions, and you do one thing to one particle the other particle knows about it immediately. There’s instantaneous communication, and what Bohm argued was that the reason why there was instantaneous communication is that at a much lower level of reality the particle is the same thing, and at a much lower level of reality everything interlinks, and that’s what he calls the Implicate Order. But he also argues that the Implicate Order works upon a holographic principle, and its holograms. Now I argue that if you take this idea about memory being a hologram and if you take what David Bohm says about reality being a hologram, you have a brain hologram processing an external hologram, which is reality, as a recording, and I believe that this recording that we all live within is that kind of principle, and I call it the Bohmian Imax because there’s a famous philosophical concept called the Cartesian Theater which was suggested by a Professor Daniel Dennett. And that’s the idea that we process reality as an internal in an internal theater as it were. You know the ideas of Rene Descartes, the French philosopher who came up with the famous phrase “I think, therefore I am” (cogito et ergo sum)? He argued that the only thing that a conscious being can know with absolute certainty is that they exist. Everything else is mere supposition. I extrapolate that idea and take it out into quantum physics and say that with quantum physics we can show that we are all living in this eternal generated reliving of our own lives, but, and this is quite important, even though we’re living in inwardly generated illusion it’s a recording, but we can change it. The daemon can warn us of events in our lives and make us change which route we take, and that works on the principles of another element of quantum physics called the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics proposed by Hugh Everett III in 1957. This postulates that there are literally trillions of versions of us having this very conversation in trillions of alternative universes, and the upshot of that is that any possible event that can take place has or will take place somewhere in this temporal/macroverse. There is a version of you and a version of me who will fulfill every possible thing that we can do in our lives. It’s just a question of which one of us is us. Which one of those trillions of individuals is myself, and I argue that we can swap universes, and the brain can make us do that. Therefore, every time the daemon warns you to do something or not do something, you make something like an evolutionary change and you move into a different version of yourself whereas the old version of yourself continues along the old path. Editor: Well, that’s a lot to take in. So with like the near-death experience, are you saying that at that point, when they’re having the life review that actually this information is being downloaded for safe keeping for your linkage to another world? Anthony Peake: Yeah. In effect, the theory that I’ve got, I call Cheating the Ferryman, and it postulates that at the point of death a cocktail of neurotransmitters flood the brain and in doing so it slows down the subjective experience of time. Time slows down. People report this, like in car accidents, people will say that the time slowed down. As the time slows down what happens is that the memories of your life are reconfigured again and you literally go back to the first moment of your birth and you go back to that point and you relive your life again, in real time. In the final split second of your life you live your whole life again. Now occasionally, and I’m not sure which of these angles it is, but either there is literally a jittering in the recording process, which makes you see something twice, rather like happens to Neo in the film The Matrix where there’s a cat which he sees going in front of him and he sees the cat going in front of him again, and he’s informed by the other characters in the film that that’s the changing of the matrix. That the matrix has been changed. Or, it could literally be that you have some deep rooted memory, that you remember you’ve done this before, so déjà vu is literally what it seems. I’ve done this before, and that explains it, and as you live this life again you will follow the same life pattern, because it’s a recording, but there will be occasions when your own higher self, your daemon, will influence your decisions and make you possibly change. I have case after case of people who have had precognitive dreams or have had warnings, literally voices in their heads telling them not to do something, and it saved their lives, and I think that is the point where they swapped universes. And there will be one universe where they go on and they die and there’s the other universe which is the universe you’re in at all times where you survive. There is a very interesting theory being put forward by a Professor Max Tegmark. Tegmark proposes something very similar to what I am suggesting, which he calls the quantum suicide experiment. He applies the theory of Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment, and he shows that scientifically it can be proven that within your own universe you will never die because the circumstances will always arise that you will survive. The logic being that you create your own universe, so therefore the universe that you are creating and that you are observing cannot exist without you observing it. Editor: Wow! Anthony Peake: The theory is quite amazing. I’m getting emails from around the world. If you go on to Amazon.Com and you look at the comments that have been made by people who are reading the book you can see the enthusiasm by which my readers approach the theory. I had an email message from an Australian family about six months ago and they said the strangest thing just happened. They lived on the border of the Outback of Western Australia and they said, “We just had a knock on our front door and we opened the door and there was a Buddhist monk standing there clutching your email address,” and he requested could they email me so that I could send them my address so that he could write to me. He had read the article that you had read, in his Buddhist monastery in Australia, and the article had blown him away so much that he wrote to me and he said, “Do you know that your article is scientifically proving Buddhism,” and indeed he traveled over ­ he was coming over to England for personal reasons and he arranged to meet me in a Buddhist monastery in the Midlands, in England. We sat down for three hours and he talked through my theories and their applications to Buddhism. I’ve been invited to do a talk at a Sufi monastery in northern Cypress because some Sufi’s consider that my theories support what they believe in about human duality. I’ve had people who were into the Kabbalah saying that a lot of what my book was saying was Judaic mysticism. So it seems like suddenly I’m hitting this really incredible interest and it seems the time is just right. People see different things in the book This can be seen in some of the amazing discussions that are taking place on my blogsite (http://cheatingtheferryman.blogspot.com/). This is a very exciting time right now. The reason I like doing interviews such as this is because I feel that this theory is of profound importance and I am not alone in this belief. I want as many people to know about this as possible. Indeed in the USA the book is available for free download on www.wowio.com. It is important for people to come to their own opinion about this theory, because after all that is all it is, a conclusion drawn from observed scientific information. Editor: And it seems to connect with so many historical and mythic tales of the Greeks, Egyptians and Gnostics. Anthony Peake: Oh yeah. It even amazes me the amount of supporting material from the most disparate areas. A classic example is that in my next book there will be a whole chapter on the writings of Philip K. Dick, the American science fiction writer. He supposedly had temporal lobe epilepsy, and if you read his novels and watch the films that have been adapted from his writings and you read my book, it’s mind blowing. He wrote a book called U Bick and in U Bick the central theme is that all of the characters are living in the final seconds of their life in a three dimensional recreation of their lives, which is what I say. But the real creepy one is that he wrote a book called Valis, and in Valis you read my book and read Valis, it’s a fictionalized version of my book. The reason is that he was writing about his temporal lobe epilepsy. It’s quite staggering. I’ve read three or four of the major biographies of him, but the really freaky thing, and you’ll love this, is they’re making a film at the moment of the life of Dick and I think that it’s going to be provisionally entitled The Owl In Daylight, and I’m in contact with the script writer of this film. We’ve swapped emails. Now one of the things that I pointed out to him is that a group of Philip K. Dick’s letters went on E Bay about six or seven months ago, because towards the end of his life he started correspondence with a young student in Anchorage, Alaska, and I’ve managed to get hold of photocopies of these letters that were posted on the web, and they are mind-blowing. The guy was having amazing precognitions, and there was one of the letters where he says, “I’m going crazy. I’m starting to be able to see the future.” And then, get this, he describes “Last night I had the most incredible dream that I saw a man lying on a floor dead, face down, between a coffee table and a couch.” Literally two or three weeks later, Philip K. Dick was found, on the floor of his house in California, and he’d had a massive stroke. I argue that he had had a precognitive experience of his own death, and even the guy who was writing the screenplay was not aware of this. I wrote him, “Really you need to be aware of this, because this is exciting stuff,” and he’s trying to put me in touch with Phil Dick’s daughter. In Minority Report he has creatures which are called precogs, and in fact precogs are one of the central themes of all of his short stories and novels. Precogs are people who can see a very short time into the future, and I have people who email me now, and I’ve got one young lad, and I noticed this on your website something about this as well, this one young lad I’m in contact with who has a birthmark on his pineal gland and this lad gets even greater déjà vu sensations than this lady I was talking about. He tells me that when he has a potential seizure situation and starts getting déjà vu he knows what’s going to be happening for the next hour or so. What he does, to stop himself from going absolutely mad, he speaks in his mind the things as people say them to him, literally word for word in his head because he remembers the last time around the things that they said to him. And again, I said to him, why do you not say something, and he said because ‘I can’t do it. I can’t change the future, because if I do I’ll change things irrevocably,’ which is exactly what Philip K. Dick was writing about. Time and time again, he wrote about this sensation. In fact, have you seen Vanilla Sky? Editor: No, I haven’t. Anthony Peake: People were emailing me when Vanilla Sky came out and saying, “My God, have you seen this film? It’s your book!” Again Vanilla Sky, the character, is living the final seconds of his life in this three dimensional recreation of his life. Now I am genuinely convinced that the whole of this book seems to be written for the right time. Eternal Sunshine and The Spotless Mind, people were emailing me over that, and Fight Club. There has been film after film. I can go on and on about the films that all seem to be dealing with my theory but in a small partition of it. Now what I argue is that in our lives the Daemon is always in there and it is deeply rooted in the non-dominant hemisphere of the brain and in deep hypnotic trance situations people can encounter that being. And because the being keeps all of the memories of the past life, the daemon knows the future always, and it keeps itself dormant except when it’s really needed or when people hypnotize. In my latest book I’ve got some fascinating stuff about this. Daemon and eidolon are Gnostic terms, but it carried right through into the Cathars, and they had this idea of duality. There was another Gnostic teacher called Mani who lived in Persia in the 6th century. He believed that he was two people. I believe that mystics are people who are more in tune with this higher being, this higher self. Some people can actually bring together the two, and this is what my Buddhist friend was telling me, that Buddhism has this idea. I turned around to him and said, “Buddhists believe in reincarnation,” and he replied, “Yes, but we also have this concept of to die before you die.” Editor: I know that I was reading about the Hopi and this is the fourth world in which they’ll live and they’ll live on other planets, in other worlds, and it’s a progression thing, and once they get it they don’t have to come back here. They just go on to the next one. Anthony Peake: Really. That’s fascinating as well. I am a member of an organization called the Scientific and Medical Network, which is a group of scientists and doctors who are interested in bringing together spiritual beliefs and science. I did a talk in Switzerland and I met a guy over there who had been trained as a Kahuna in Hawaii. On his suggestion I started reading up about the Kuhuna and their belief system. I was amazed to discover that yet again their theology has large elements of my theory. They are convinced that all human beings in fact have three parts to them ­ a lower and higher self and the subconscious. It seems that the more one looks into it the more it becomes apparent that many belief systems of a lot of civilizations are aware of this incredible secret. I believe, for instance, that the Holy Grail idea is something everybody has wrong. The Holy Grail is nothing to do with the bloodline of Christ, nothing to do with Chalice. It is to do with human duality. That’s why the Cathars were such a problem. A close reading of the events that took place at Montsequr in 1244 clearly suggests that the secret of the Cathars was a belief in the real existence of two elements to the human soul. There is now a good deal of excitement about the film “The Golden Compass” that will be released in early December. This is based upon a series of books written by British writer Philip Pullman. This film, although fiction, contains nearly all the elements of my theory. For example, in both the film and the book all the characters have a higher self called a daemon. This daemon manifests as an animal. So certain characters will have a daemon which will be a snow leopard or an owl. They’re always with these people, and that’s their daemon, their higher self. Editor: Wow. I had an experience years ago where I was trying to find myself spiritually and I just said that I was going to leave it up to God to show me what I need to see and it was these little balls of light that came together as a small four legged white animal or being. Anthony Peake: Wow, really? That’s what I find so exciting about this book and I genuinely get so excited about it because everybody I speak to like yourself, discovers elements of it that relates personally to their experiences. I’ve done lots of radio interviews now across the U.K. and for web based sites in the states as well, and whenever I talk to people like yourself we find so much similarity of experiences. For instance, I’m re-reading Carlos Castaneda and the teachings of Don Juan. This is because somebody recently emailed me from the States to say that my book is a scientific explanation of the teachings of Don Juan and the writings of Carlos Castaneda. In fact, if you look on my blog site I think that there’s something there about this. In February I did a talk in Switzerland and in the audience were a couple of guys from CERN, the particle research laboratory. The talk was a presentation about the quantum physics behind my theory, Cheating the Ferryman. Had I known that these people were in the audience I would have died a million deaths! At the end the guys approached me and congratulated me. To my absolute relief they said, “Your science works. Your science absolutely works.” In support of this I suggest that your readers take a look on Amazon with regard to the “readers reviews.” Many of the comments lodged say that “the science works.” But as I said the book touches a very broad spectrum of readers. I have mediums who come to my lectures ready for an argument, but because I explain about the higher self I give a possible explanation of their spirit guides. Indeed I even had a group of Mormons who attended a book signing and talk that I gave in Leicester a few months ago. Again they were prepared for an argument. After my talk they came over and said, “There’s lots of what you’re saying in Mormonism, you know.” One of them went to his car and he annotated sections of the Book of Mormon that supported my theory. I’m going wow! Editor: Yeah, you can’t make anybody mad. (laughter) Anthony Peake: Incredible. Scientology is another area. Scientology has this idea of something called the Operating Thetan. I argue that this being is another name for my ‘Daemon.’ Indeed the ultimate aim of scientology is to become a ‘Clear.’ For me this is the psychological joining together of the higher (Daemonic) and lower (Eidolonic) consciousnesses. The whole principle of Scientology is to try and find this inner being and get it out. It’s the Daemon! As times goes on the evidence from personal experiences of my readers becomes stronger and stronger. A guy who I’m working closely with who had a really profound near-death experience ­, he fell in the sea, and in doing so he became attuned to both his Daemon and the real nature of reality. He and I are planning to come over to the States at some time in the future to do a series of lectures. I will discuss the evidence from science and neurology and he will discuss the evidence from his own very real personal experience in the sea of the South Coast of England. Editor: Well it’s been a real interesting interview and I want to thank you. Anthony Peake: Well Brent it’s been fantastic. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. Your thing about John Keel is mind-blowing [this portion of our interview was covered in my Reality Checking column, November issue] and I have a term I call synchrondipity where you have a synchronous event that is also fortuitous. In my opinion a series of chance meetings and discussions brought about this interview, maybe influenced by our respective Daemons Editor: I spoke with John Keel on the phone last Wednesday, by the way. Anthony Peake: This is fascinating. He is one of my all time heroes. Do mention my theories and ideas to him because I would love for John Keel to be aware of them. Way back in the late 60’s and early 70’s Operation Trojan Horse was a cult book for myself and my hippy friends. You can tell John that there were a group of guys living near Liverpool who absolutely loved that book. We talked about it for hours on end. I am sure that it was a major influence on my wanting to write something similar. I would love to believe that I have managed to do so.