Matrixial Deja-vu - sort of.

I have recently stumbled upon a curious tract by some character called Anthony Peake.

The title - "Is there life after death" - is somewhat misleading however. Mr Peake (no relation to Mervyn I believe) hypothesizes that our brains on the brink of a knowing dissolution, project a premiere of our lives via some kind of neurological theatrical contraption which he calls the 'Bohmian IMAX'- after the quantum theorist David Bohm.

Interesting stuff, I'm sure you will agree.

Mr Peake proposes that every single perception - audible, sensory, olfactory, visual and so on - is recorded in its entirety during our lifetimes, and at the penultimate moment of brain death, we experience our lives again in their minutest totality.

In a similar fashion to the idea depicted in the Matrix movies, when we experience Deja-Vu, we are in a real sense feeling the resonance of a perception that has been lived out once before, or indeed, many times before.

Drawing on the experiences of certain epileptics, who's experience of time is extraordinarily extended during seizures, Peake proposes that on one level, what appears to the near death subject as a 'flashback' is experienced on another level/subjectivity as a real time life experience again.

There is an allusion to Zeno's time paradoxes here of course, strengthened and developed via bringing quantum theory into the hypothesis.

Everett's 'Many Worlds' theory of quantum mechanics allows a certain amount of free will to intercede into the experiential prison of Nietzche's 'Eternal Return'.

If consciousness is depicted as a fractal landscape, then our lives over many returns may be seen to iterate and bifurcate to infinity depending on the choices we make at each possible branch.

We are still uniquely 'us' but each life is subtly different on recall, and eventually radically different, although we would be unaware of course. The only clue we have to our regenerations are the testimonies of 'Flashbackers' and our common experience of Deja-Vu.


I find the theory fascinating of course,and it does resonate with a feeling that has always occupied my mind since childhood - the feeling of connection, and the vast subliminal knowing of the secret of being and nothingness and my place in the cosmos.