Anthony Peake and Patrick Harpur - Spirit and Soul

Have you ever experienced that much discussed near-death phenomena of your entire life ‘flashing before your eye’s? Experienced Déjà vu and pre-cognitive dreams and visions? Maybe you’ve felt a sense of the uncanny by a ‘meaningful coincidence’ or synchronicity as Carl Jung called it? If you have an unhealthy interest in Quantum Mechanics too, you might enjoy Anthony Peake’s book ‘Is there life after death? The extraordinary science of what happens when we die’.

According to Peake, at the penultimate moment of brain death our entire lives are resurrected and 'flash before us' - every sight, sound, taste, smell etc. Nothing is lost. But what appears to us on one level, as a rapid, kaleidoscopic flicker of images and sensations at death, is, on another level of our awareness, a ‘slowed down’ awareness, experienced in REAL TIME (It may be helpful here to remember the stories of Zeno's time paradoxes, for example, the arrow that takes forever to reach its target if its trajectory is plotted at each point).

Peake explains how this ‘slowing down’ mechanism may occur on a biological level by citing clinical and anecdotal evidence of temporal lobe seizure epileptics who often experience a violent flooding of the brain by certain neurotransmitters (including dopamine and glutamate) in the pre-seizure ‘aura’ state; imagine watching grains of sugar taking minutes to fall into a tea cup, while the people around you experience everything in real time.
The second, and most important example that Peake uses to bolster his argument, is the evidence gained from near-death experiences - again, both medical and anecdotal.

Research has shown that the same neurotransmitter flood occurs in the brains of those who believe or intuit that they are literally seconds away from death and so experience a ‘dropping out of time’ very similar to temporal lobe epileptics. The classic example that Peake uses is the car crash victim who watches, almost serenely, as the bonnet of their vehicle blisters and buckles in slow motion before the final impact.
To experience the past life recall in its entire, miniscule, real time detail (slowed down) indicates that our brains must record our complete lives like a DVD; and the research included in Peake’s book appears to show empirical evidence for this.
Studies done on stimulating certain memory area’s of the brain reveal how subjects will recall certain events from their lives, often mundane, in exquisite sensory detail – not like a dream, but identical to conscious lived reality.
When the artificial stimulation stops, the person is brought back to the present…when the stimulation is reapplied in precisely the same place, the previous memory will start off again from the exact point where it ceased before - like a You Tube clip restarted after a pause.

But, where does some modicum of free will enter this theory of consciousness? Wouldn’t we be condemned to a permanent ‘ground hog day’ forever if we could never change any details of the replay? Wouldn’t all the people around us be merely actors in our own unique, self-generated (or regenerated) world?
By expanding Hugh Everett’s Many worlds theory, David Bohm’s Holographic universe, and the ‘Participatory principle’ of John Wheeler; Peake illustrates how it might be possible for personal choice to intervene and change aspects of the replay through a process of ‘enfoldment’ and the splitting off of our narrative replays into parallel universes…I know, I know, it sounds like Sci-fi (which in a way, as a theory, it is) and is pretty complicated trying to hold all this stuff in your head!

The summation of all this theorizing is the postulation that we never in fact die, or reach death, but endlessly branch off or bifurcate into endless, eternal fractals of the original, primary blueprint of our lives. Like a fractal, we replicate into an identity that is self-similar but never identical.

Going back to the brain stimulation studies again, when the person who is being stimulated is supposedly reliving the past, they are in fact – according to Peake – actually there in that place now, living it in the present.

Peake explains this consciousness splitting with a discussion of Split-brain research, right/left hemisphere dominance and so on - we are never really a single unified being, but have two selves: the Eidolon, which is equivalent to the conscious ego, and a more hidden, instinctual aspect. Peake calls the latter the ‘Daemon’, after the creatures of Greek myth, similar to guardian angels, an aspect of self outside of the normal constraints of linear time and causality.

If you use the above as an overlay to an investigation of Déjà vu and/or precognition, it is possible to understand how we may experience an overlap of previously lived experience in our dreams and waking lives. This may explain those uncanny synchronicity’s that pop up in our lives now and again too.
Anthony Peake explains precognition by seeing it not as an indication of a future event, but as a 'memory' from a past life - as something that has already happened in the old consciousness and has sneaked into the newly replayed pre-death movie. We don't really see the future; we see the past.
According to him and philosophers like Nietzsche (who Peake discusses) our lives are cyclic and spin through many quantum/holographic ‘incarnations’ in what Nietzsche called 'The Eternal Return'.
But, as I explained earlier, Peake differs from Nietzsche in that he believes we still have something approaching ‘free will’: there is a continuity of self but it changes with each incarnation. Remember that this type of thinking drove Nietzsche insane eventually!

Something about Peake’s model of consciousness reminds me of something I read by Patrick Harpur in his book ‘The philosophers Secret fire: A History of the Imagination’. In the book Harpur talks about the importance of imagination and memory as the central creative motor between mind/ego and body/matter. Without memory we are nothing, just empty vessels, creatures of habit. By drawing on memory and imagination we commune with the soul of the world, the storehouse of the archetypes and mythical imagery from the present to antiquity (Harpur is a Jungian), we are possessed by the Daemons of yore to play out our unique life-paths in the here and now.

One thing from Harpur’s book that has really stuck in my mind in relation to Anthony Peake’s theory, is his retelling of the Greek myth pertaining to the River of forgetfulness.
Before birth, as the tale goes, we are made to drink from the waters of Lethe (the river of forgetfulness) and we spend the rest of our lives ‘re-collecting’ and relearning what we really already know.
Harpur’s ideas on the collective unconscious, the ‘Otherworld’, daemonic manifestations and the difference between literal reality and mythical reality may be developed even more by being filtered through Peake’s quantum prism.

I’d like to see Harpur and Peake collaborate on a book together - that would be really ‘hermetical’. Peake would broadly represent the healthy ‘Spirit’ (curious, open science, non judgmental empirical data – the horizontal axis), Harpur would represent ‘Soul’ (Depth, mythical verticality and the importance of imagination and memory in perception from an anthropological and poetic point of view).
Between the two, some kind of cultural Individuation may be achieved: the macrocosm meets the microcosm, ‘as above so below’.
Maybe Hermes could set up a meeting or a synchronicity?
I need my tea now, my brain hurts.

Just Words: The shamanism of Writing

Feeling inspired by a recent great blog post by The Domesticated Bohemian I've spent the last day or so trawling through my own memories of the profound significance that books have had on my own life.
Certain conjunctions or synchronicity's between a particular book I was reading at the time and a real world event most immediately spring to mind.

For example,I recall riding in a car with my sister and brother-in-law to visit my (almost 90 year-old) gran who was in hospital with pneumonia about ten years ago.
There was a feeling in the air, even though nothing was said, that this could be the last time we see her. I was reading Dostoevsky's 'House of the dead' at the time - I know, something of a portent! When we finally stepped blinking into the brightly lit hospital ward after the long dark car journey, my uncle greeted us with tears in his eyes: she had just died about twenty minutes before.

The impact that Dostoevsky's tale of the gulag was impressing on me at that time, coupled with the experience of my Gran's death have been inextricably entwined over the years, so that now, whenever I recall that specific bereavement or hear or read something or other about Dostoevsky, I find that I'm caught by an auto-cascade of imagination and memory - the nocturnal car journey to the hospital, my Gran's serene face in death, and the bleak 'prison diary' of the old Russian writer, and last but not least - the olive green cover with an old oil painting reproduction of some Dickensian looking characters lost in their existential trauma.

Another extreme association between a book and one of the more darker moments of my life occurred when my mum was first diagnosed with cancer around six years ago (apologies for the bleakness - but it does get a bit lighter in a minute honest- well sort of.)
I remember going to the hospital with her for the results of a biopsy; it was freezing cold day and we'd been told that, yes there was a malignant tumour in her bowel, but with treatment (chemotherapy and a colostomy that could be reversed after 6 months or so), her prospects for full remission were reasonably good. We had a pot of tea and a cigarette together in a little cafe in town later.
Our too fast, nervous, freakishly optimistic conversation hid the sizzling hysteria that lay just below the surface - and we both knew it of course.
"At least they caught it early"

"Yeah that's the important thing, so lucky really"

"Yeah, thank god eh, doesn't bear thinking about"

"Its all positive when you think about it"

"Yeah, quick op and finished, over and done with"

We could both see the fear and sadness in each others eyes, but were ferociously determined to remain upbeat. It was that or go insane.

A couple of days before, I'd started reading Niall Griffiths' Novel 'Grits'. Set in the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth; it is a dark, many-voiced tale of outsiders, junkies, the alienated, the lonely and the lost. Through the technique of using multiple first-person narratives, Griffiths exposes the secret fears, guilt, neuroses and often bizarre and contradictory hopes and dreams that saturate the psyches of those many would call the 'underclass' (I loathe that word.)
Also, the book had a further resonance for me: that coastline was the site of many family caravan holidays in my youth.

In our society, being diagnosed with the big 'C' is about being de-classed, de-skilled, pushed to the side, hushed up, labelled as 'unclean', stained, a burden - all those unspoken, but inherent implications that cloud the air of the ill person like a malignant white noise.
You become a Chemo-junky, A 'user', your hair falls out, you lose weight, you can't hold down a job, you need people to care for you, you become incontinent and mentally 'disturbed'.
Griffiths' characters consoled me at that point in my life (as his characters continue to do in all his books.)
Their sense of anger, day-to-day isolation and de-realisation from the mainstream of what passes for 'normal' life, helped me to understand and appreciate how my mother must have felt in the cold, dark outer-space that her diagnosis had ejected her into.
My mum had her operation and the chemo, but they never managed to totally kill the cancer, and it inevitably spread and killed her a couple of years later.
Literature did its bit though, once again, to keep me sane and enable me to help her as best I could - by being strong and sensitive at the same time.

Unsurprisingly I suppose, I cannot remember what I was reading during the last horrible months of her life, or what I was reading when she died - and I WAS reading something, I need it like oxygen - but I guess that the physical and mental fatigue had by then washed away my imaginative capabilities for a while.

Another really powerful conjunction of literature and life for me was being literally half-way through Don Delillo's ‘Mao II’ when a a couple of planes flew into the World Trade Center in September 2001.
Like most people on the planet at that time, I was transfixed by the unfolding of events of that day: the constantly recycled video of each plane hitting its tower, the ball of orange flame and black smoke, the terrified, running dust-coated figures, the jumpers spiralling out of the blue like discarded bus tickets.

Delillo's Mao II is a novel about the loss of individuality to mass events, the symbiotic power of the media and the crowd to spawn a third space; a space where the self ceases to exist and only the spectacle of the many has any emotional impact. Be it Diana's funeral, The Gulf War, Moonie Weddings, earthquakes and tsunami's, 'Live' Charity rock concerts, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the latest terrorist 'outrage'; - rolling TV news and the Web have desensitized us to such a degree, that our myth's are no longer generated via the artist, the poet or (especially) the novelist - the individual voice of the shamen has been lost to the High definition immediacy of the media channelled EVENT.
As Delilllo writes in the book, "The future belongs to the crowd".

The irony for me, is that the mass public event to top all mass public events, 911, was virtually predicted almost ten years earlier in 1991 by one individual tapping away on his word processor. The book is spooky in its similarities to the events surrounding 911, and the way that day was, and still is, mythologized via the media circus that was impossible to escape.

The twin towers appear very early on in the book, as the two main characters – a famous but elusive J.D. Salinger style novelist and a photographer – gaze out over their coffees at the New York skyline.
The photographer wants to complete a series of author pictures in an attempt to capture the ‘essence of the writer’ – that supposedly powerful single voice that is able to speak for a generation and change the world in the process. The author is cynical though, and believes that it is the terrorist who has now usurped the role and myth making power of the lonely, scribbling genius.

‘The Terrorist’, who always had an affinity with ‘The Writer’, can change the consciousness of a society in a much more dramatic and immediate way - with the help of the global media – by creating an iconic, real-time ‘spectacle’ that far surpasses the clunky, time intensive and very private narrative device of the author.
There’s a section in Mao II where the author is sitting in his London hotel room after flying in from the States, and remarks to himself how lax British customs are as he scrutinizes a little hunting knife (a sentimental keepsake) that he unwittingly brought over with him, and remained undetected by airport security. Very sobering stuff to read at that time as it became apparent as to how the 911 ‘bombers’ had used ‘craft knives’ to rest control of the planes from pilots and passengers.

As Delillo foretold, a decade before the event, the terrorist became the new mythmaker on that day in September. To watch the event at home on the TV, or wherever was to forget the ego-centred self for a while and dissolve into a pure horrified spectator, a member of the crowd, both in New York and around the world.
Try reading Delillo's 'White Noise' too, another great novel.

The profound synchronicity of witnessing 911 as it happened via the TV coverage along with millions of others, and reading Delillo’s brilliant thesis, convinced me once and for all, how we must really listen and re-read our greatest authors, our Shamen, because those loners locked away with their typewriters and word processors channel the future for us as well as the past.
The novelist is still as important today as ever. Even if they cannot offer us inspiration they will always provide consolation.

When I’m skint, lonely and feeling angry at the world, I’ll dip into Bukowski’s ‘Last Night of the Earth’ poems or ‘Ham on Rye’; Beckett’s ‘The Malloy Trilogy’, Henry Miller and Orwell, Hakim Bey, Robert Anton Wilson, Raoul Vainegem and Penny Rimbaud.
When I want to look at my everyday world more objectively, like an anthropologist witnessing the oddness of an alien culture, I’ll read Iain Sinclair’s Psychogeographical journeys through the urban jungle; learning from him how to read the graffiti on the bus shelter walls, the unique history, architecture and custom’s pertaining to place, the invisible ley-lines of energy that constitute meaning and significance to a locale…and my locale too if I care to look a little deeper.

When I require a little ‘heads up’ at the profound strangeness and wonderful weirdness of being conscious at all in this vast cosmos of the mind blowingly large and unfathomably small ; of matter as energy, Black Holes, time-warps and parallel universes - I read Paul Davies, Kip Thorne, David Deutsche, Danah Zohar and David Bohm.
When my soul starts to cry out for the great myths that structure our psyches, I grab for Patrick Harpur, Carl Jung, James Hillman – and even a bit of Colin Wilson can educate and illuminate at these times.

Three books that I will never sell and have always stayed close to my heart are: ‘The William Burroughs Reader’ Edited by James Grauerholz; Roland Barthes’ little book of essays on the semiotic myths that underlie popular culture called ‘Mythologies’, and Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ – a brilliantly dark and personal interpretation of one man’s coming to terms with the horror of war…god bless Kilgore Trout.
Of all the literary shamen, I think Burroughs is the Great Magus and truth teller of our times. He should be read and re-read by every one.
Maybe one day, his beautifully rich musings on the ‘societies of control’, escaping the ‘Reality Studio’, intentional ‘Pirate communities’ and the ‘animistic universe’ will be on every school syllabus.
Remember: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”.

A man just drowning not waving - A fictional tale

I’m paddling again.
Apart from the warm little rock pools, the water is freezing. I can feel the huge flexing muscle of the sea. I feel nuzzled and indulged, dabbed and stroked by the dark archaic energy humming through my body.

It’s so black this water, so real and surreal at the same time. Then, in sudden lurches, like flashlights in the dark - the massive vaulting sky.
The sky does not know me like the sea, it just doesn’t care.
The sea understands everything and says its okay, always and forever.

There’s the noise too, all that water, the roar of Neptune and his fluid dynamics.
The incessant sizzle of the great voice.
You hear the great voice in all true wilderness areas, but it’s in a dying language that you can never translate into banal human terms, even the poets know their limits and those that don’t go insane.
What is this shit. Why have I been left here, isolated and alone? Is it cultural, financial, familial?
Basically yes to all of the above. Plus, I admit, I have to shoulder the blame somewhat for my inability to ‘fit in’, to be a productive member of my society.

School was…okay, I’ll come to that later maybe.
I’d rather keep that repressed at the moment.
I have psychoanalysed myself at great length over the years; I have coached myself, paid exorbitant fees from my admittedly bottomless existential account.
I have a Gold card for this account believe me.
I’m always withdrawing, throwing the cash around, being exceptionally generous to myself and heaping great wads of angst on any poor bastard who will listen.

This is the question, why don’t more people investigate it? I mean seriously investigate it: trawl the soggy seabed of their souls - of the collective soul - scrape the Mariana’s Trench of social perversity and have a long hard, deep look at life in the raw, hideously objectified and naked.
Bit too painful for most folks I guess…and me too.

We’re all locked inside our little egotistical submarines bumping around in this ocean of uncertainties called reality. Furnishing our interiors with as much ‘stuff’ as we can handle – or bear to look at, at any one time.
The other stuff, the moth eaten cardigans, the paint splattered jeans, the nylon Y-fronts, we hide away in the cupboards and draws.

We’re hoarders, gleaners, vultures and hyenas. We have a damn good shot at butterfly collecting. But our butterflies are counterfeit more often than not. To be human is to acquire stuff, and most of the stuff we acquire is other people’s cast offs, their jaded fashions and polyester ideas. All the old, borrowed and blue.

The only time we escape the submarine is when we die.
The pressure of life with its depths and currents erode and finally crush the thin shell of our understanding. We watch passively as the first cracks appear, and then attempt to seal the wounds with the cheapest, most readily available gunk that comes to hand: shopping, sex, drugs and alcohol.

But most of the time we just hope our vessel is well made and we maintain it as best we can.
Sometimes though I think the vessel just falls away, like shedding an old skin. We’re suddenly exposed to the freezing waters, reality floods in and the lights go out.

Here I am lost and alone in the water. Real water now.
Fuck its cold. The ‘Great work’ as the alchemists call it: the experiment to create a work of art of one’s life, to transcend the ego - has encountered certain problems.

Admittedly, these were foreseeable problems, but my foresight has been one of my most neglected faculties for a while now.
Hence my current predicament of feeling like shit and treading water in the Big Bad North Sea.
Here it comes, another black roller, lifting me and shunting me further out into the abyss. The brilliant fruit of the sun is being sliced to oblivion by the black knife of ocean. Day is peeling away again.

I’m numb now. Hypothermia? What are the symptoms?
Genuinely not caring about me anymore? Actually welcoming death? Or rather being unafraid of death and letting that ‘old friend’ cliché wash over me like the sea.

Not really sure if I’m hot or cold now.
I wonder briefly if my core body temperature is having some kind of last ditch microwave moment: the dying of a star. Going nova I will burst into death and illuminate the world with an unseen flash of radiation.
I’m such a narcissist, even when I’m dying, the facts of my death are important to me.

I’ve researched all the stuff on suicide; I’ve ruminated and cogitated at length. I’m just a wounded animal at heart - a very predictable wounded animal…I lash out and mistrust everything.
Time to throw in the towel methinks; give up the ghost; kick the bucket; reap what thou sows.

But the nagging doubt.
That long semester spent studying the human body, the biological psychology of man. The central nervous system, the rods and cones of the eye, axon’s, dendrites, sodium gates opening and closing, the peculiarities of the visual cortex, DNA, split brain research, kinaesthesia.
I know I’m a machine, but that’s exactly the problem – but not in the way you might think.

I’m starting to feel warm now, funnily enough.
I guess this would be termed a very bad thing according to the medicine men: the initial euphoric glow, the burst of dopamine as the brain begins closing down before death.

I’m quite looking forward to the past life flashback and the white tunnel – I spent a wad of cash on all those books, now its payback time.
If you’re not going to provide ‘The Classic’ experience, then please God, can I at least have some kind of divine intervention…what about a guardian angel? A UFO?
Shit I’m bottling out, STOP IT!

Definitely feel like I’m in the bath now, its rather fun actually. I feel really cosy and snug.
I do enjoy a hot bath, and one of the few consolations I have had in life - no matter what utter bollocking mess I’ve got myself into, regardless of all the shit jobs, sublime toss pots, crazed females I have had to endure in my ‘normal life’ - the bath tub has always been my philosophical refuge, my steamy academy of metaphysical repose.

Some writer once said on ‘The South Bank show’ with Melvyn Bragg (that means its supposed to have gravitas), how they always experienced vivid, psychedelic style dreams when sleeping near a large body of water - something to do with lunar gravity, tidal pulls and the high water content in the human body.
Hmmm maybe.

Funny, but talking of water…I always needed a bath to sluice off the crap of the day. I mean psychological as well as physical. It’s like polishing a stone, or bleaching the bog, heaving the cooker out and scraping up that last blackened chip that evaded the fryer.

There’s something immensely satisfying in doing these things for me. I’m absolutely sure its not OCD, just me ordering my mind by ordering my little space’s.
I know where all my shit is, no loose ends, no niggling little pebbles in the shoe of my consciousness. Just lace up and go, keep walking in smooth confident (appearing) strides.
I’ve tripped and stumbled a few times, arse over tit. Slid like a nipper on the ice of other’s words and ways. But it was a set-up job from the start of course, it always was for me.

Just a little longer now…stop moving…numb…goodbye all…aaaaah.