Anthony Peake - The Out of Body Experience: The History and Science of Astral Travel

Anthony Peake is a graduate of The University of Warwick and studied at postgraduate level at The London School of Economics and The University of Westminster. He is a member of the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS), the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD), the Scientific & Medical Network and the Society For Psychical Research (PSR).

He runs a very active international web-based Forum in which his ideas and hypotheses are discussed and debated. This can be found at http://www.anthonypeake.com/forum

By the same Author

Is There Life After Death? The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When You Die

The Daemon A Guide To Your Extraordinary Secret Self

THE OUT-OF-BODY

EXPERIENCE

THE HISTORY AND SCIENCE
OF ASTRAL TRAVEL

ANTHONY PEAKE

First published in the UK and USA 2011.
This edition published in 2016 by Watkins, an
imprint of Watkins Media Limited, 19 Cecil Court
London WC2N 4EZ

Text Copyright Anthony Peake 2011

Anthony Peake has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Designed and typeset by Jerry Goldie Graphic Design

Printed and bound in Finland

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN: 978-1-78028-021-9

www.watkinspublishing.co.uk

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Dr Arthur Funkhouser and Tom Campbell for their advice and technical assistance regarding the quantum physics; the fantastic guys on my Forum; the Walker Group and last, but not least, my wife Penny for her continuing and unselfish support of me and my Daemon.

Foreword

Anthony Peake has written the most incredibly lucid and comprehensive book on the most incredibly complex and mysterious subject. It is a pleasure to write a few words to preface it and suggest that it should be read read by everyone who has ever asked herself or himself whether what we perceive in the everyday world is really that world. And whether there are perceptions that are entirely beyond that world.

The answer to the first question is no, and to the second, yes. No, the world is most unlikely to be simply the way we perceive it, and yes, we also can perceive the world very differently from ordinary perceptions. (Bertrand Russell made short shrift of the first question. He said Common sense, if true, leads to physics. Physics, if true, shows that common sense is false. Therefore common sense, if true, is false. Therefore its false.)

In light of modern science, physics in particular, the answer to the first question is reasonably unequivocal. But there is no clear answer to the more difficult question: what is the true nature of the world? And also, how is it that we can perceive the world so very differently? Not only from within our brain and body, but even from beyond... These are questions that have intrigued people through the ages, and they remain as important today as ever. They dont go away for being ignored, as modern people do when they adopt the facile and fashionable stance of down-to-earth scepticism.

Peake faces these difficult questions, for he has had experiences that he could not, and certainly did not wish to, ignore. He recounts in this book his own experiences, as well as a wide repertory of experiences by others, some anecdotal, others carefully tested. They are inexplicable in the context of down-to-earth pragmatism, yet they are insistently real. They are not even unusual, just frequently repressed and generally under-reported and under-investigated. It appears that our mind and brain can communicate with the world in strange and wonderful ways. And that the world itself is strange and wonderful in ways that nobody other than mystics and poets could envision.

Peake refers to my theories in tackling these questions, and I should add a few words on this score. Yes, I did say that the all-encompassing information- and memory-sea I call the Akashic Field is rooted in the universes zero-point field (ZPF). But in the last few years I modulated this simple, and perhaps all-too-simple, hypothesis. The ZPF is but one of the many physical manifestations of the deep structure of the universe. At the bottom of it all is very likely the field of fields that includes the ZPF with its zero-point energy, but includes far more than that. It also includes all universal and quantum fields, and the as yet little-understood holographic field that I believe conveys the non-local connection underlying micro- as well as macro-level entanglement. But all that I earlier claimed for the ZPF is valid for this super-grand-unified field. It is the in-itself unobservable matrix that grounds the observable universe. We cannot define it as a separate reality because every definition we could offer would be in terms of things fields, forces, relations or entities that are not only produced by this field, but are actually in this field. Or, more radically, are this field.

It is not as though there was the manifest world, and a fundamental field that grounds that world. World and field are one. This one-world is non-local; all of its elements are subtly but effectively linked. Microtubules, Bose-Einstein condensates, holograms, the implicate order, the ZPF, and the super-grand-unified Akashic Field are as many hypotheses for understanding its nature and its dynamics, and the possibilities for understanding it.

Peake offers a conscientious and comprehensive review of the relevant evidence for unusual and commonsensically inexplicable experiences, together with clear reasoning regarding the possible explanations. He brings us closer to understanding the mystery of the real world, and of the many ways that we can apprehend it. This is what this book is all about. It is about a great deal, as much or more than any book I have ever read. Reading it is a mind-expanding experience that must not be missed.

Ervin Laszlo

Prologue

Suddenly I was not too sure about this. What had seemed a good idea back home in England was looking less enticing as I watched her inventor coax Lucia into life. Lucia sat in the corner of the room almost insect-like, her single eye waiting to hold me in her gorgon-like gaze. Indeed I was reminded of the UFOs that wreaked destruction on mankind in the original 1950s movie War of the Worlds.

I was at the home of writer Evelyn Elsaesser-Valarino on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. I had been invited over by Evelyn to meet Austrian psychologist Dr Engelbert Winkler and his associate, neurologist Dr Dirk Proeckl. Dr Winkler had read both my previous two books and was aware that I was part way through writing the book you are now reading. He was also aware that the subject matter of this book was the out-of-body experience and, as such, he was keen for me to experience, for myself, how such a state can be created at will.

The night before, over a wonderful meal in Geneva, Dr Winkler had explained to me in some detail how Lucia worked her magic. He told me that by combining stroboscopic light with differing brightness levels, he and Dr Proeckl had found a way whereby the brain wave patterns of a subject placed in front of the LL-stimulator can be changed to reflect the level normally seen in individuals who have spent years practising deep meditation techniques. However, because light was being used to stimulate reactions within the brain, Lucia sometimes also engendered transcendental experiences similar to those reported during near-death experiences and other altered states of consciousness.