Peake - Opening the doors of perception: the key to cosmic awareness

Anthony Peake studied sociology and history at the University of Warwick and completed a post-graduate management qualification at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a member of the Society for Psychical Research, the Scientific and Medical Network and the International Association of Near-Death Studies. A prolific author, he has written two previous titles for Watkins. His books have been translated into a number of languages including French, Russian, Spanish and Polish.

By the same author:

Is There Life after Death?: The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When We Die

The Daemon: A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self

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

Making Sense of Near-Death Experience: A Handbook for Clinicians (editor)

The Labyrinth of Time: The Illusion of Past, Present and Future

The Infinite Mindfield: The Quest to Find the Gateway to Higher Consciousness

A Life of Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Remembered the Future

The Immortal Mind: Science and the Continuity of Consciousness Beyond the Brain (co-authored with Ervin Lszl)

ANTHONY PEAKE

OPENING THE DOORS
OF PERCEPTION

THE KEY TO COSMIC
AWARENESS

Foreword by Whitley Strieber

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would
appear to man as it is, Infinite.

William Blake

Contents

FOREWORD

Anthony Peake has been on a long and captivating journey from the conclusions he drew in his first book Is There Life After Death to those he now draws in Opening the Doors of Perception.

Is There Life After Death proposed that the brain, at the point of dying, produced a flood of glutamate, which slowed down time perception and allowed it to carry out the life review commonly reported by those who have survived a journey to the edge of death.

However, over the subsequent years of research and writing, he has gradually come to believe that the brain is a transceiver rather than the exclusive generator of consciousness. In the current volume, he explores the possibility that consciousness not only exists outside of the brain, but that it is a universality of which the individual is a part and, holographically, the whole.

Here, Peake explores the nature of this external consciousness and our role in it, with fascinating and extremely provocative results. He references the proposal by Nick Bostrom that was put forward in his groundbreaking 2003 article in Philosophical Quarterly Are You Living in a Computer Simulation, now known as the simulation argument, and also David Chalmers famous hard problem in which he stipulates that science cannot determine how the brain could generate self-referential consciousness.

He addresses the fact that recent discoveries by a scientific group at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, suggest that the universe is made up of digital information that it is, as David Bohm and others have previously speculated, a huge hologram. Other recent studies further suggest that it is a two-dimensional surface and that what we perceive as reality is that hologram, projected into three dimensions.

Beginning with the proposition that Orchestrated Objective Reduction, which argues that the brain is essentially a biological machine that filters consciousness, which originates outside of it, Peake embarks on what I see as a groundbreaking exploration of perception and its substrate, consciousness.

Peake addresses the issue of the location of consciousness by analyzing the unusual brain states that give rise to distorted or revelatory perceptions, ranging from migraine through autism to schizophrenia and Alzheimers disease. These various illnesses, by the different ways they distort perception, also open a door to what is actually happening not only to those beset by them, but to all of us.

I am, for personal reasons, particularly interested in all this. In 1985 I began having what has become a lifetime of close encounter experiences. But what were they, really? What are they? Among my initial theories was that I was a victim of the seizure disorder known as temporal lobe epilepsy. Yet when I not only tested negative for this, but was found to have an unusually seizure-resistant brain, I was left at a loss.

While Opening the Doors of Perception does not solve the mystery of experiences such as mine, it does offer a possible direction for further study, which involves looking at the brain as a filter, and attempting to discover what it is filtering and why.

For somebody with a life experience like mine, Opening the Doors of Perception is a rich resource for expanding and deepening the question of what is actually happening that causes the extraordinary perceptions that have become my life experience. For example, I not only engage regularly with what appear to be aliens; like so many people who do this, I also engage with the dead.

Since my wifes passing in August 2015, this has become a profound journey, filled with complex witness to her presence involving myself and others that leave me unable to believe that some aspect of her being does not still exist.

In Opening the Doors of Perception, Anthony Peake points out that the belief and it is no more than that, a belief so general among scientists and many academics, that there can be no consciousness outside of biological structure, is an insufficiently robust explanation for who we are, where we are and what we are.

This book not only opens the doors to perception, its careful attention to scholarship and exceptional intellectual clarity throws them wide open.

Whitley Strieber

Author of Communion and co-Author with Dr Jeffrey Kripal of Super
Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

Copyright 2016, Walker & Collier, Inc.

INTRODUCTION

The Doors of Perception

Weyburn is a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada. It is around 70 miles from the provincial capital, Regina, and just over 40 miles north of the USA border. With the exception of the fact that it is a major railway junction for the province, the only other fact of note about Weyburn is that it was, until 2006, the location of the Souris Valley Mental Health Hospital, an institution opened in 1921 which was, at that time, the largest building in the British Empire. At its peak it was home to around 2,500 patients. For decades it had an outstanding reputation as one of the most advanced hospitals in the world with regard to the experimental treatment of individuals with mental disabilities. This reputation attracted some of the worlds top researchers in the field of mental illness. One such researcher was the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. In 1951, with his associate John Smythies, Osmond had moved to this isolated community with the intention of using the facilities to understand if the similarities between early-stage schizophrenia and the psychological states created by substances such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) were more than a simple coincidence: could something of significance be learned from them and used in a search for a cure? Osmond was aware that he would be allowed considerable freedom to conduct experiments on human subjects under carefully controlled conditions.

Osmond and Smythies, together with a biochemist, Abram Hoffer, worked almost exclusively with alcoholics. They were all both pleased and surprised at how successful their research was. After being treated with LSD, between 40 per cent to 45 per cent of subjects had not returned to drinking after a year. The team were also delighted by the results of their work with schizophrenics. In April 1952 Osmond and Smythies published a controversial paper asserting that schizophrenia may be caused by the body creating its own hallucinogenic compounds. A hallucinogen is a chemical substance that can change how the brain functions and, in doing so, can bring about increased or decreased sensory perceptions and generate hallucinations. Osmond and Smythies advocated that in order to treat schizophrenics effectively, physicians and psychiatrists need to experience the schizophrenic world for themselves, adding that this is possible to do quite simply by taking mescaline.