Is There Life After Death by British author Anthony Peake is a brilliant book. It is a very hard, but extremely interesting read and would be helped greatly by a table of contents and index. However, it is a must read by all people interested in this genre, absolutely and unequivocally.

In this book, Peake attempts to update the ideas of J.W. Dunne in the light of the latest theories of quantum physics, neurology and consciousness studies.

The basic premise is that nearing the point of death, you actually never die and the brain gushes with glutamate, as it did once before, during birth, and you re-live your current life again in a virtual reality generated by the brain (or something else) - a Groundhog Day existence, so to speak. This is due to the fact that time dilates and you literally enter a time-less state or at least a state where time is near endless. This is alluded to by the way your perception of time changes dramatically throughout your life for one reason or another - dreaming, playing, getting bored, endangered, excited, sad and so on. Dropping out of time is what Peake calls it.

Come the near time of your virtual reality death, the process is repeated, ad infinitum so it seems. The doctrine is called Recurrence and it seems the ancient Greeks and others alluded to it, so we find Peake uses Greek terminology for some of his concepts.

Peake uses the fact that time is not constant as well as the NDE, deja-vu, epilepsy and a host of neurological diseases to convince you to believe Recurrence. He does this quite well, but as with anything, the judgement is up to you. In fact, I found that some of the arguments materialists use to bludgeon a random and meaningless existence where they are the final arbiters of truth and the high priests of knowledge and wisdom, Peake uses to good effect in proving his point which is contra to theirs.

He uses quantum physics theory and its interpretation to convince us that the virtual life and all those thereafter are not exactly the same, as you have the freedom to choose and thus enter a different parallel universe with each choice you make. Deja-vu is a glitch in the system, when you actually remember the previous Recurrence of your virtual life. NDE is more or less another glitch in the system where your next Recurrence is prematurely triggered and you come back and call it a "Life Review". You're actually alive and the next virtual life starts running.

Prophecy alludes to Recurrence too, according to Peake and his argument here is that prophets like Nostradamus, are exceptionally good at predicting future events within the time span of their lives, but hopeless once past their date of death. That's because they're somehow remembering their previous Recurrence and can't gather information outside their existence. Get a young prophet is the message here as they should be able to see more years into the future, their future as well as yours.