Customer Reviews

Daemon

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I was already a fan of Anthony Peake, having read his first book ("Is There Life After Death?: The Extraordianry Science of What Happens When We Die", 2006) but I am if possible moreso now. "The Daemon" is an excellent text for anyone interested in our divided self. Using Binary Mind theory as his premise, and with a sophisticated and elegant drawing from classical philosophy, nuero-science, psychology, cognitive theory quantum physics, and literature, Peake reveals that we have a second, secret self which both partakes in, and is transcendent to, our daily self. This is the eternal part of us, which will live recurrently. the notion of eternal recurrence was advocated by the great Nietzsche, and Peake now fuses this theory with quantum physics, making the transcendent also empirically real.

In chapter 3, there is an examination of the Socratic daemon; and this dipping into antiquity, while standing firmly in 21st century quantum scientific theory, is the mark of Peake's superiority, and makes him a joy to read. Chapter 10 is a beautiful exploration of the 20th century Gnostic writer of high brow science fiction (with philosophical underpinnings), Philip K Dick. Peake is strongly identified with Mr. Dick, having been an impassioned reader and researcher of his texts in his youth, and bearing a name which is eerily similar to a character from one of Dick's own stories, about a man who would be the harbinger of a new afterlife theory: Anarch Peak.

I highly recommend this text, which in my opinion surpasses Peter Novak's wildly popular "The Division of Consciousness" and "The Lost Secret of Death" : if only because Peake is such a good writer, and is so modest in his premises, and yet delivers a theory which is sublime , exciting, and beautiful. I give it 5 stars, unreservedly.

If you have been in metaphysics for awhile then you already know about the 'higher self'. The breadth of the topic is wide and incompasses many ideas. When the author looks at the concept of the higher self being able to tap into timeless/precognitive awareness he is on pretty solid ground.

However, when he delves into the concept that we are all living personal ground-hog day lives over and over as the source of the precognitive information ('Recurrence' theory from the first book) is where he looses it. To imagine that the universe would waste so much creative potential by looping the same moments repeatedly is absurd. The universe is an engine of creativity not of monotony. The author also says the daemon (Eidolon) resides in the non-dominant hemisphere of the brain. Here we have shades of the dillusions of Descartes who taught that spirit is tangential to matter and the soul incidental to the body intersecting only at the pineal gland. One of the first rules of metaphysics is precision. The more precise you attempt to be in your theories and formulae the more likely you are whistling dixie.

If the author (or reader) can edit out some of these weaker points then you have something you can get into. But I would caution that merely discovering the poles of being is not enough. Getting beyond duality requires movement and communication. I'm not sure the author really developed these last points adequately. In the end I struggle with concepts of concepts in this book. Simply building castles of ideas on others ideas can be nothing but foundations of sand. What matters is experience not just theories.

This is Peake's second book and in some ways I think it's more important than his first. His first, 'Is There Life After Death?' looked at the physics of what must happen to you when you die. His second, 'The Daemon' brings on some interesting ideas about what you can do about it before it happens. Hugely accessible, hugely interesting, hugely stimulating. I've taken to buying copies for friends and I don't suppose you can give a book higher praise than that.

This book is a must read! Once I began reading, I couldn't put it down. While I can't say that I agree with everything that Peake has come to believe through the years, as a result of his experiences and research, most of this book gave me the answers that I have been searching for.

Many years ago, I had an experience with "TLE" (Temporal Lobe Epilepsy). Maybe, I should say - an experience that mimicked "TLE". It lasted for several days, but, it only happened once! Everyone around me during that time (and there were many witnesses) saw some of the "supernatural phenomena" that took place. I didn't know what had happened to me for many years, but what I experienced was profound. It changed me, and it changed many others, too.

As far as I know, this book is the only book that gives the correct information on this particular subject, and it helped me make sense of what my "Daemon" was trying to get across to me. Peake also helped me to understand that this experience happens to many people.

The world has become so materialistic that very few people actually recognize that we are spiritual beings, having a physical experience. Peake has courageously brought extremely important information to the world, and I hope that his work gets the positive attention that it deserves.

I am so impressed with Anthony Peake, that I ordered his first book, "Is There Life After Death?" before I even finished this one!

This book was really interesting. This is not about demons but about the higher self which was at one time called the Daemon. It describes, in this book, about how various, well-known people had realized that they had a higher self, as well as the regular self which needs the guidance of the higher self to get through things. Many religions have included these ideas but used other names for the selves. It gets a bit, just a bit wordy, at times, but you can't beat some of the information in this book.

First off, Peake gets the hypothesis of bicameralism by Julian Jaynes completely wrong. Peake states in his book that man evolved from single consciousness into bicameralism or dual consciousness. Using that reasoning, the disorders listed in Peake's book would be by-products of this evolutionary process. According to Jaynes, man evolved from a bicameral non-conscious (perhaps similar to schizophrenia) but sentient state to a sentient and conscious state in which the two halves of the brain were better integrated. Catastrophic events in our past may have helped along this evolution into full consciousness. So really, the voices, the schizophrenia, the temporal lobe epilepsy may be throwbacks or remnants of a period before mankind achieved consciousness.

Peake also discusses the idea of precognition but at least 3 of the examples he used were not very compelling to me. Two of the examples came from researchers and with these two, I don't think precognition is fully proved. In the first example, I got the impression the researcher was stating that the subject only thought she had experienced the events she was describing before and was possibly delusional. In the second, it was never ruled out that the subject hadn't heard the slight noise of the mop bucket. Delusions and hypersensitivity to sound is not uncommon among schizophrenics. The last example was the story of Phillip K. Dick and the situation with his wife Anne in 1960. Anyone who had spent time in Berkeley would have been exposed to the topics of mid-century feminism, including the idea of family planning (which had been around since 1912 with Margaret Sanger). As the pill was not approved for use until 1960 in the U.S., this was probably a fairly common scenario, and Phillip and his wife easily could have known other couples who were having to deal these issues. In fact, the book Revolutionary Road was published in 1961 and dealt with the very same topic.

I really wanted to like this book, but it fell short. He got bicameralism wrong, his examples were limited to an exceptional few found in old studies and some of his arguments were not adequately defended. I think the more important question that Peake completely misses is this: Did we create God or did God create us?