Graham Hancock and Duncan Trussell explore ancient mysteries, from Ethiopia’s Ark of the Covenant—linked to 10,500 BC civilizations via Egyptian magic—to submerged ruins like Yonaguni (Japan) and Baalbek’s 1,000-ton megaliths. Hancock argues Egypt’s precision (e.g., Great Pyramid’s true-north alignment within 0.05 degrees) stems from survivors preserving lost knowledge, citing anomalies in carbon dating and Orion correlation theories. Psychedelics like ayahuasca, he claims, reveal suppressed truths about humanity’s advanced past, critiquing the "War on Drugs" as a tool to control consciousness while dismissing mainstream timelines as flawed. Their discussion hints at a forgotten era of global sophistication, buried by cataclysms and societal amnesia. [Automatically generated summary]
The internet has been a very fascinating thing for me in the many years that I've been on it, but one of the most fascinating things about it is the ability to get in touch with people that, if you were younger, you know, like a long time ago, there was no chance I would be able to sit down with you and do a conversation.
You would just be some, you know, author whose books I admired, but now, because of this crazy thing, this podcast, here we are sitting down.
Graham Hancock has joined us.
And if you don't know who Graham Hancock is, Graham Hancock is probably the one guy who's influenced my view of history more than anybody ever.
It's from this book, Fingerprints of the Gods.
And Fingerprints of the Gods is, what is it, so like five million copies or something crazy like that?
It's an amazing book that basically challenges our view of history.
And you have spent an enormous chunk of your life uncovering all these different structures and all these different monuments and all these different things that you attribute to a lost era of humanity.
And one of my favorite Terms that you use is that we're a species with hypnosis.
Well, everything that's happened in my life has happened kind of by a series of accidents.
I never planned out anything, except I kind of knew when I was young that I had one gift, which was some ability to write.
And the other thing about me was, all through my childhood, I always felt I was on the edge of things, not in the middle of things.
Other people were in the middle, I was on the edge.
I just always felt that way.
And when I got through university, I kind of drifted towards writing, current affairs, journalism, and it was While following journalistic stories, my last journalistic role was as the East Africa correspondent for The Economist, quite a serious newspaper.
And I was based in Nairobi in Kenya, and I was covering wars and famines and politics and all of that stuff.
And on my beat was Ethiopia.
And I used to go to Ethiopia quite regularly.
It was in the news a lot.
And on one journey to Ethiopia...
I flew into a city that at the time was in the middle of a war zone in a DC-3 that kind of dived down out of the sky to avoid the machine gun nests in the surrounding hills and landed in the airport.
And this was an ancient city called Axum and it had incredible history.
It had obelisks.
It had a palace supposedly of the Queen of Sheba.
Had an ancient cathedral, the most ancient Christian cathedral in Africa dating back to 300 after Christ.
And in the grounds of that cathedral, in a chapel, outside the chapel, I meet a monk and he tells me in the conversation we have that he's got the Ark of the Covenant in that chapel.
This was, I had heard that the Ark of the Covenant was important to Ethiopia, but now I'm sitting in front of a monk with cataracts in his eyes, and he's telling me behind him in that chapel, but I can't go there, is the Ark of the Covenant.
And I said, you know, can I go?
Can I see it?
And he said, no, no, nobody can see it.
Even the former emperors were never allowed to see the Ark of the Covenant.
You know, the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie had come out only like a couple of years before this.
This was in the early 80s.
And so I left that place impressed by this man, but not really believing it.
And then I started to look into it.
And I discovered that, actually, Ethiopia is the only country in the world which has a living veneration, almost worship, of the Ark of the Covenant.
Ethiopia has ancient Christianity, but it also has ancient Judaism.
There's a Jewish community in Ethiopia called the Falashas.
They call themselves the Beta Israel.
How did they get there?
They practice a very ancient form of Judaism.
They don't have rabbis.
They have priests.
They perform sacrifice.
Other Judaic peoples do not.
It's like an Old Testament world frozen in the highlands of Ethiopia.
So I started to get interesting.
This is weird and this is exciting and what can I find out about this?
Then I went to the academics and they said, ah, it's all rubbish.
Those Ethiopians, they just made it up to make themselves look big.
Okay, but then why is it the case that in every single church in Ethiopia, more than 20,000 churches, there's a replica of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies?
And sometimes, actually, they reduce the replica to simply two tablets, which are supposed to represent the tablets of stone inside the Ark of the Covenant.
But the Ark of the Covenant is not a Christian object.
It's a pre-Christian object.
What's it doing in all these churches?
Where does this all come from?
Why do we have the black Jews of Ethiopia practicing their very ancient form of Judaism?
So I really started to dig.
And it was the first time I realized that you don't want to listen to academics all the time.
Professor X and Dr. Y may be very, very impressive people with their credentials, but they have prejudices.
They have a...
Fixed view of the past, which they're going to stick to come what may.
And as I started to investigate this, this is what drew me out of current affairs and into ancient mysteries.
I found that here was a real investigation, a story that had never been told.
Could this remote country in the Horn of Africa really have the Ark of the Covenant?
And if so, how could it have got there?
And I spent several years of my life trying to answer those questions.
And by that time, By the time I got to the end of that investigation, I had left current affairs behind.
I was impressed by the Ethiopians themselves, and I was impressed by the purity of their belief and the passion with which they held it.
And the fact that here, after thousands of years, this object disappeared from the Bible at the time, well, around about 650 years before Christ.
It's not mentioned again in the Bible after that.
It vanishes.
And yet here is its worship in 20th century Ethiopia today.
How do we explain this?
And as I dug deeper, I began to realize that actually there was a real possibility they did have the Ark of the Covenant and that it is connected to the mystery of the Ethiopian Jews.
And that the story they themselves tell about it, which connects it, it's a very romantic and lovely story.
They say, in brief, that the Queen of Sheba, famous Queen of Sheba, was an Ethiopian queen.
And that she, when she travelled to Jerusalem to meet Solomon, which is described in the Bible, big episode in the Bible, she didn't only exchange wisdom with him, she also exchanged bodily fluids, and she became pregnant.
With King Solomon's son, who was to be called Menelik, which actually means the son of the wise man.
And pregnant, she left Jerusalem, returned to Ethiopia, gave birth to her son Menelik there.
At the age of 20 or 21, he wanted to visit his famous father in Jerusalem.
He traveled north, went to Jerusalem, spent a year there, and at the end of the year, contrived to steal the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem.
And take it off to Ethiopia.
And there it's been ever since.
That's the Ethiopian story.
I believe behind that legend there's a true history of how it really got there.
And that's in the end what I ended up writing my first book of historical mysteries about, which was The Sign of the Seal.
I got into that speculation myself at some length, because as I started to investigate this subject, not only was the Ethiopian side of it fascinating and mysterious, but the object itself is quite extraordinary.
I mean, it dominates the Bible at the beginning of the story.
From the time they're in Sinai, the Exodus, there's a tremendous role for the Ark of the Covenant, and they follow it through the wilderness, and it's marched around the city of Jericho.
It knocks down the walls of Jericho.
It's hugely important.
The Temple of Solomon is built with only one function, and that's to serve, and this is a quote, as an house of rest for the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord.
That's the only reason that the Temple of Solomon is built.
It's like, at a certain point, it's got to be placed out of the public view.
It's always a dangerous object.
As they're carrying it, It strikes people dead.
If somebody touches it by chance, a bolt of fire comes out of it.
Actually, I mean, Spielberg and the Indiana Jones movie, the way they portrayed the ark was spot on how it's described in the Old Testament, as an absolutely devastating, deadly instrument.
So the Israelites use it in battle.
There's accounts of it flying into the air.
Rushing towards the enemies of Israel, emitting a moaning sound.
They all fall down dead.
Then there's a later account where the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant.
They take it off to the city of Ashdod.
Then they make the huge mistake of opening it, and they treat it like a tourist object.
People walk by.
The Bible says 50,000 died.
And how did they die?
Cancerous tumors.
That's what's actually described in the Bible.
Right.
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The Ark of the Covenant is supposed to contain within it what's left of the Ten Commandments.
And for people who don't understand what you're talking about here, your premise or a big part of it is that there is somewhere around, what is it, 10,000 years ago, somewhere around then, towards the end of the last ice age, humanity was probably mostly wiped out or wiped out in a big way and we had to rebuild from there.
Yeah, which has not been recorded by history and that it went underwater with the rising sea levels.
And what led me to this, the reason I became interested in pursuing that line of inquiry was the Ark of the Covenant because it seemed to me like a piece of technology that was out of its place in history in the way that it was described.
I'm not wishing to put down the spiritual aspects because they are there.
But there were definite technological aspects to this device.
And then I had to ask myself, well, where could that knowledge have come from?
And through Egypt we then start to find that Egypt itself looks back to an older time.
The ancient Egyptians didn't regard themselves as the beginning of their story.
They regarded themselves as quite a late point in their story.
And they look back to the time of the gods, which they called Zeptepe, the first time, when there was a golden age.
And they speak, and there are texts, the Edfu building texts, which speak of the gods living on an island, a gigantic flood coming.
Most of the gods are killed, odd thing to happen to gods.
I support that view, and I was astonished when you had Robert Shock and John Anthony West, when they brought their findings about the erosion on the Temple of the Sphinx.
They brought these findings to these academics and just the tone of their voice, the way they were approaching the information, the mocking attitude that they had of it.
Well, where is this civilization you speak of?
Because they're talking about a civilization that was possibly, what, 10,000 BC or something like that?
Yeah, I would put the figure right about 10,500 BC. If you don't know the story behind it, there's water erosion on the edge of The temple where the Sphinx is done, that could only be attributed to thousands of years of rainfall.
The last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was...
This is the breakthrough work that John Anthony West and Robert Schock did.
The initial observation came through John, who is an astonishingly knowledgeable man about ancient Egypt.
He's not an official Egyptologist, but he spent his whole life working in ancient Egypt.
And through his research and his background, he came to realize that The erosion patterns on the Sphinx are really odd.
And he then went to Schock, Robert Schock at the University of Boston, who is a geologist and an open-minded one.
And he said, would you come to Egypt with me and give me your geological opinion on this monument?
So Schock went there and it was immediately clear to him that this monument had been subjected to thousands of years of heavy rainfall at some point in its history.
That's where the mystery begins, because the study of ancient climates is quite well advanced, and we know that 5,000 years ago, 4,500 years ago, when the Sphinx is supposed to have been built, Egypt was as bone dry as it is today.
And you have to go back some thousands of years before that, at least to about 9,000 years ago, To get the very heavy rainfall that would have caused the erosion of the Sphinx.
But that only means that the Sphinx was standing there 9,000 years ago to be rained on.
It may be much older than that.
Schock is cautious and he will not push the date back beyond what the hard evidence suggests.
He does accept that the Sphinx may well have stood there before the heavy rains began.
But how long before is a matter that he cannot be...
Certainly not.
And that's where Robert Boval and I were able to take the matter on a little further with the astronomy of the Giza Plateau.
And you find there's just this stunning thing that happens in the sky.
I mean, this is one of the great things.
I have some problems with technology, but I have to say one of the great things about computer technology is the way that it can speed up Access to information in an incredibly efficient way.
And there are computer programs now which will show you exactly how the stars were positioned at any time in the last 30,000 years over any point on the Earth's surface.
You can literally wind back the ancient skies and see them.
And the skies do change.
Because the Earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars.
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There's a wobble on the axis of the Earth called procession.
And the wobble takes 26,000 years to complete a cycle.
So it's a cyclical process.
Eventually, the stars will all return to starting point and begin the cycle again.
And because of that, we can say that the Sphinx was gazing at his own celestial counterpart, the constellation of Leo, at dawn on the spring equinox in 10,000 BC, while 90 degrees away, due south, Orion was lying on the meridian in exactly the pattern of the pyramids on Orion was lying on the meridian in exactly the pattern of the And doesn't John Anthony West go even deeper?
And again, this is the area where the Egyptologists, the academic Egyptologists, are incredibly annoying because they will not listen to what the ancient Egyptians themselves had to say.
It's as though they, the academics, know more about ancient Egyptian history than the ancient Egyptians did themselves.
And the ancient Egyptians were really very clear.
They pushed their history back well plus 30,000 years.
And in all fairness, Robert Schock's depiction of the erosion, there have been dissenters.
There are dissenters.
I'm sure there are.
They seem very illogical to me.
I looked at it myself.
I know what water erosion looks like.
Obviously I'm not a geologist, but when I look at it and you say that that's wind and sand, and then they show extreme examples of wind and sand erosion, it doesn't look the same.
Watching Dr. Schock try to talk to the Egyptologists about that was a fascinating thing because the guy got super defensive and he was like, where is this civilization you're speaking of?
One of the classic remarks was Mark Lehner, who's an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute in Chicago.
And one of the lead Western archaeologists working in Giza, his remark, which we quote often, was, you know, show me the potsherd.
Where is the potsherd from this lost civilization?
Well, the argument was, at that time, that the Sphinx cannot possibly be of that age, because there's nothing else in the world of that age.
How could there just be this one unique thing, which is twelve and a half thousand years old, or maybe older, This amazing monument.
How can that be alone?
Show me the potsherds of the rest of that civilization.
Well, some years later, those potsherds have started to turn up, and they've turned up in Turkey in the form of Gobekli Tepe, a gigantic megalithic circle, which dates back to precisely 12,000 years ago.
By the way, the ancient Egyptians themselves decommissioned some of their temples when they knew their system was going down.
They knew it was going down.
The Romans were the end of it for Egypt.
The Egyptians thrived through the Greek period.
When the Greeks arrived in Egypt, what happened was the Egyptians colonized the Greek mind and the Greeks became Egyptians.
But when the Romans took over, it was a different story. - That's my people.
they fucked everything up and worse still worse still yeah when the Romans made this alliance with Christianity and the the Christian church pulled on the jackboot of Rome it was Christians who really wanted to take Egypt apart They wanted to destroy everything and the Egyptian priests themselves, rather than let their temples fall into their hands in that way, they went around and destroyed certain things in the temples and they did so quite deliberately to remove that power from the others who were going to come and take it in.
I've never been to Egypt, but I've been to one of the Museums of Fine Arts in Boston had an Egyptian exhibit.
They had all this amazing old shit.
And it is so hard to wrap your head around.
Even the established timeline of 2500 BC, when you're looking at these structures, it's so hard to wrap your head around when you're looking at a beautiful golden-covered sarcophagus that had King Tut inside of it.
You know, what kind of a weird alternative way to live did these guys figure out?
Where they, thousands of years ago, figured how to build these almost perfect geometric structures of 2,300,000 stones, where if you fuck up just a little bit here or there, by the time you get to the top, it's done.
And they're like, well, they did screw up a few of them.
There's a few of them that lopsided.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But they got them right, too.
Who knows who the hell was doing the screw-up ones?
And this leads to, it certainly led me to conclude that academic history is part of a This sounds a bit paranoid but part of an overall system of kind of mind control that operates.
There are certain things that we're allowed to think and certain parameters that we're allowed to think within in our society and when it comes to the past those parameters are set by academics and they get so territorial and so defensive when you try to break out of that and suggest other possibilities.
See I thought naively when I got into this at first That those who were specialists in this field would welcome some new ideas.
They might throw them out in the end, but they would want to see whether there was any merit to the ideas.
And so initially I was really shocked that the attitude is, oh, this idea doesn't agree with us.
We are going to destroy this idea in any way we can.
And not only that, we're going to destroy the individuals associated with this idea.
Now, when you say that Dr. Schock is very conservative, you're not joking around about that.
And I always wonder, when I hear some of the things that he says about other ancient structures, I always wonder, wow, I wonder if he took too much heat from the Sphinx, and now he backs off on stuff.
My wife, Santa, who's a photographer, and I have done more than 200-plus dives on the Yonaguni Monument.
We went through the process of learning to dive and really getting the skills.
To be able to handle that kind of current, which is literally going to rip your mask off your face and take your regulator out of your mouth.
It's like swimming in a river against the current, actually.
So what I would say is that I think Schock was a little premature with that conclusion.
And I think I have huge respect for Robert Schock.
I have huge respect for his openness of mind and his geological acumen.
But not enough time was spent on the monument to reach that decision.
And it's not just one monument.
It's a whole complex of monuments.
Further north, settles it for me, off Okinawa, which is about 400 or 500 miles north of Yonaguni, there is a majestic stone circle 110 feet beneath the water, which again, Santa and I have dived on extensively, which shock has not seen, which is there is just no way on earth...
And 110 feet beneath the sea tells us that it was made at least 13,000 years ago, because that's the last time that 110 foot level was above sea level.
I mean, the beauty and the perfection of the thing is part of it, but part of it which needs to be taken into account.
I can understand why some geologists feel that it must be natural.
And this is the reason.
The stone is a sedimentary stone.
It's laid down in layers, and some of the layers are soft and some of them are hard.
And their argument is that the sea battering against these layers selectively removed the soft layers and left the hard layers producing this stepped effect.
The problem with that is that if that happened, then you would expect to see the very large amount of rubble which was created by removing all these layers.
You'd expect to see it lying in a disorganized mass down at the bottom of the monument.
From top to bottom, the monument's about 70 feet high.
So 70 feet down, and all of it's underwater, because the bottom is about 110 feet below the sea.
So you would expect to find that rubble lying at the base of the monument.
Actually, what you do find is a beautiful path cut out of solid rock at the base of the monument, and all the rubble cleared to the side, pushed away, forming a bank.
Which is no way on earth that could have been done by nature.
It had to be done by man.
That's what people do.
They clear away rubble, tidy it up, and leave a nice-looking site.
And that's what is there.
So it's little details like that, plus the fact that there isn't just one monument, there's actually about five, along a good four miles of the coast, makes it impossible for me to accept that it's a natural phenomenon.
I guess the question comes up, when you talk about ancient monuments or ancient civilizations from 14,000 plus years ago, how much really would be left?
That's why it was such a big deal to find that Iceman, because he had fallen into a crevice, and so the glacier had passed over him and never touched him.
And he died there and froze and was covered with snow immediately.
And then he was preserved.
And then some hikers found his body.
It's an amazing story, man.
But what's incredible is that if Graham's view of history is true, then this guy, 5,000 years ago, was really like some dude who survived some horrible cataclysmic event The civilization moved forward, people relearned things, relearned hunting, relearned making skins and turning them into fabric or turning them into clothes.
So we know that they're passing down cultural information and we also know that they're extremely rigid in their thought patterns and they're stuck in that.
Then a new type of stone tool is introduced and that one sticks for another million years as well.
And during this time, our ancestors are looking more and more like us.
And finally, the earliest surviving, fully anatomically modern human skeleton comes from Ethiopia, as a matter of fact, and it's 195,000 years old.
That's just short of 200,000 years old.
Before that, the creatures were closely related to us, but they didn't look quite like us, and their brains were not quite like ours.
But by 195,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans have evolved.
But their behavior has not evolved.
Their behavior is stuck in that archaic period, and they're still using the same limited, unimaginative stone tools that were being used a million years before.
And then a really extraordinary thing happens, and it's within the last 50,000 years, is that you just get this incredible surge forward in human behavior.
The dawn of spiritual beliefs, they're very, very clear because they started burying food and water with the dead.
Anybody who does that, they definitely believe that some aspect of the individual continues after death.
And they created the great cave art, the amazing, amazing paintings, stunning works of art.
All of this symbolic behaviour seemed to just switch on kind of overnight, somewhere after 50,000 years ago.
So I would start the clock about there, where suddenly you've got these incredibly intelligent, artistic, creative creatures on the planet who are us, and they are doing this stuff.
And I believe that some of them stayed in the hunter-gatherer mode all the way through.
All the way through history.
And those were the cave artists of what's called the Upper Paleolithic.
And I think some of them moved in another direction and formed a civilization.
And just as today, in our 21st century world, we have highly advanced technological civilizations coexisting with hunter-gatherers.
You do still have traditional hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, in Botswana, for example.
I believe it was the same in the world then.
And I think that what I think of as the lost civilization was largely a maritime civilization, living along coastlines, living on the best lands during the Ice Age, because inland it was arid, it was cold.
The ice meant there was no rain.
No rain.
It was totally desert.
Very very difficult to live but on the coasts things were much better and it was precisely the coasts that were inundated when mysteriously and suddenly the ice age ended and all that ice started to melt down and went back into the ocean and the sea levels rose.
And you think that, I mean, I've read all your books.
I read Supernatural as well, which is one of my more favorite, or what I found more fascinating, because you really stepped out on some serious limbs on that one.
Yeah, I kind of did, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you come from the journey from being a journalist who was covering this thing in Ethiopia to...
Supernatural, which insinuates that humanity has probably learned a good deal of what we are and what we become because of psychedelic drugs.
Well, I've had an enormous amount of resistance to it because we have had a mind-programming exercise called the War on Drugs for the last 40 years, which has been designed to create an internal enemy in our societies and convince people that there are these evil, wicked groups who are doing these terrible, sinful things, smoking these drugs and doing this and that, and this very dark image has been created around it, and people get very upset, irrationally, about this whole issue.
And actually, what's been forgotten In all of this, and for me it's become, I regard it as an extremely important issue, is that when the state sends us to prison for essentially exploring our own consciousness, This is a grotesque abuse of human rights.
It's a fundamental wrong.
If I, as an adult, am not sovereign over my own consciousness, then I'm absolutely not sovereign over anything.
I can't claim any kind of freedom at all.
And what has happened over the last 40 or 50 years under the disguise of the war on drugs We have been persuaded to hand over the keys of our consciousness to the state.
The most precious, the most intimate, the most sapient part of ourselves, the state now has the keys.
And furthermore, they've persuaded us that that's in our interests.
There was an article that was recently published about people and creativity.
Everyone says they love creative ideas, but the truth is, amongst non-creative people, creative ideas make them confrontational, make them upset, make them defensive.
When you start talking about experiences like psychedelic experiences, one of the things that always freaks me out is people's inability to even consider that there's a difference between a psychedelic experience on drugs and And a drug that's going to ruin your life.
They're not even interested in considering that possibility.
Let's remember that funded with our money, our taxpayers' money, there has been 40 years of programming, more than 40 years on this subject, to make us all develop a kind of aversion of fear, hatred, horror of drugs.
And this is...
It's just fundamentally wrong in so many ways.
Look, quite a number of illegal drugs are actually really bad and really dangerous, and they will totally fuck you up in all kinds of ways.
I believe that the sovereignty of the adult over his or her own body and his or her own mind trumps everything else.
And we must have the right to make our mistakes.
You know, we already have laws in our society for punishing bad behavior.
If somebody on drugs goes out and gets in somebody else's face and causes them trouble, we already have laws to deal that.
We don't need new laws that control our consciousness and rigidly place it in a prison and actually place us in prison.
People will get into this ridiculous, just obey the law, why is it such a hard time, what are you, a druggie, you need drugs, get through this life.
And I always say, this is such an illogical argument, because imagine if we were on an island, we were the only people on the planet, and there was only four of us.
There was only four of us, and one of us wanted to smoke pot.
And we said, we've got to lock this guy up in a fucking cage.
He's crazy.
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It's nice to reduce it to four, then you really see the dynamics.
It's an extraordinary thing and you have to consider what it's led to in our society in all kinds of ways.
It's led to the creation of huge armed bureaucracies.
Who have the right to break into our homes, smash down our doors, humiliate us in every possible way, ruin our lives with criminal records.
And all because what?
We're smoking some natural herb, which affects our own consciousness in some way.
So again, I say, if we get into the faces of others, the state may have a role to play.
And it does.
And it already has elaborate rules for dealing with that.
But for the state to have transgressed the consciousness of free, sovereign adults is a grotesque abuse of human rights.
And it doesn't work.
This is the other thing.
If the state could turn around and say, the war on drugs has worked.
We have reduced the consumption of this, that.
It's not true.
They haven't reduced the consumption of any drugs.
The consumption of all illegal drugs has gone up, up and up and up and up and up.
Let's take another drug, tobacco.
You never got sent to jail for smoking tobacco.
You never got your life ruined or your front door broken down.
But some years ago, people cottoned on to the notion that tobacco actually may be making you pretty unwell if we're smoking a lot of tobacco.
It seems to be a connection with lung cancer.
And this information was put forward.
Look what's happened with tobacco in the last 20 years.
Millions, millions and millions of adults all over the world presented with that information have taken a personal sovereign decision to stop smoking cigarettes.
I took that decision when I was 38 years old.
I'm 61 now.
I used to smoke 40 cigarettes a day.
And I was a journalist, you know, cigarette hanging out the mouth typewriter.
I was a heavy smoker, but I took the decision.
I came to the conclusion this is not good for my body.
But the fact is that there is – the point that I want to make is that if the state was really interested in helping us – this is how the war on drugs is presented – we're concerned about your health, so we're going to send you to prison.
We're concerned about the harm this drug is doing to you, so we're going to send you to prison.
What's more harmful, the harm the drug is doing or being sent to prison?
It seems to me pretty obvious that being sent to prison is a much more harmful thing that's being done.
done.
If the state was really concerned about harm, then the solution is not to criminalize people for taking drugs.
The solution is to present them with very good information which they believe.
Part of the problem is that the state has become to be regarded as so corrupt that any message emanating from the state about drugs is not believed anymore, completely disbelieved.
So, you know, once again, we come to this issue of adult sovereignty over consciousness.
And our right also to make mistakes with our own body if we do that.
I believe we're here on this earth to learn and to grow and to develop.
And we have to have adult responsibility to do that.
It always astonishes me in America where you have the Republican Party, which is strongly in favor of individual freedoms, that it's often Republicans who are the ones who are most anti-drugs.
I feel drugs is a Republican issue.
I think that any true Republican should absolutely champion the right of every adult individual, if they choose to do so, to explore their own consciousness with any drugs they choose.
And yet, you know, the research is coming through.
We've had the research in the last year with psilocybin, easing anxiety of terminal cancer patients, MDMA with post-traumatic stress disorder, fantastically successful result.
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And cancer, apparently.
Have you seen that, where they're saying that super doses of MDMA may treat cancer?
Sometimes we go down to Brazil sometimes to drink ayahuasca, and sometimes late in an ayahuasca session as you're beginning to return to this reality, it's nice to play a bit of music or a little bit of voice, and sometimes we play Terence McKenna.
And I just remember one line was about how psychedelics dissolve boundaries.
And he says, you know, they'll dissolve boundaries between you and your cat, even between you and your washing machine.
No, he had wonderful ideas, and he very intuitively, very far ahead of his time, grasped the notion that this sudden advancement of humanity had to do with psychedelics.
What it did was it broke our rigid behavior patterns that we were stuck in and unable to change, and it opened us up to new possibilities.
And you see this remarkable event taking place after 50,000 years ago, definitely to do with psychedelics.
Now, since that time, there's a parallel track, which is the academic work on, Cave art and psychedelics, which is Professor David Lewis Williams of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.
And he has absolutely taken it beyond intuition and totally proved without any doubt whatsoever that all of the cave art was inspired by visionary experiences on psychedelics.
It's rich with what are called entoptic phenomena.
Certain patterns, zigzags, grids, hexagons, honeycomb patterns, internested curved lines.
The caves are covered in all of these.
Go around to the rock canyons in Utah, you'll see the same thing.
Rock art all over the world is influenced by visionary experiences.
And then classically, the absolute defining characteristic is the appearance of beings or entities in the art.
And those entities are typically half human and half animal.
It's called a therianthrope.
That's from the Greek therion, which means wild beast, and anthropos, which means man.
And this is one of the definitive aspects of deep visionary experience, is encountering entities who communicate with you and who are often encountered in this half-man, half-human form.
So it's interesting that work done in the 1960s with, for example, mescaline, Wow.
That was an entity that had come and spoken to him in the trance-like state, no different from the man with the head of a lion and the body of a human being that you find in Hollandstein Stadel Cave in Germany from 32,000 years ago.
Do you think that you're dealing with entities that don't really have a form that we can understand, so they present themselves in some cartoonish combination of things that we're aware of?
I think that, and I'm going out on a limb here, but I think that we're dealing, I don't believe consciousness is generated by the brain.
I believe the brain is more of a receiver of consciousness.
I think that's a really important distinction.
The mainstream model of consciousness That we have in our society today definitely sees it as produced by the brain, the same way a factory makes cars.
So if you smash up the factory, the cars stop being made.
Ergo, if the person dies, the brain dies, consciousness just blinks out, gone, finished.
That's the mainstream view.
But the other view, that the brain is a transceiver or receiver of consciousness, that it's the junction box that's manifesting consciousness on the physical realm, that raises whole different possibilities.
Then when you destroy the receiver, the signal is still there.
is still there.
And you get into all kinds of possibilities from that.
So the suggestion that I derive from that is that consciousness is fundamentally non-physical, but that for certain reasons, and they may be very deep and very mysterious, consciousness has created realms in which it is possible to manifest physically because in a physical realm, you have all kinds of consequences to your actions that you would not have in a non-physical state.
A physical realm may be a very useful place to spend time if you're...
An ancient soul who wishes to learn and grow and develop further.
And that's how I've come to see it.
And that's how all ancient spiritual traditions see it, that we incarnate in these bodies in order to have the experience of life on Earth.
But we don't die when these bodies die.
These bodies are like a suit of clothes that we're wearing for this incarnation.
I've always subscribed to the idea that creativity, when I'm at my best and most creative, and when I'm performing, doing stand-up comedy, at my best and most creative, I feel much more like a passenger than I do a driver.
I feel like when I write my best stuff, I have no idea where it's coming from.
I'm not even really there.
I'm just moving my fingers and it's coming to me and it's not even me doing it.
And it sounds ridiculous and you could say that, well, it's because really the ego gets in the way of creativity because you're always worrying about yourself.
And if you could just put the ego aside, then your mind can work better.
And I see that argument, but it feels like it comes to me in these great bursts of ideas that I never considered before.
And I'm like, well, where is that?
Maybe that's really something that I'm figuring out a way to tune in.
Yeah, you're tuning into it and you're becoming a channel for the material, for your own material.
Your consciousness is running the show, but your consciousness is not limited to this realm.
And it's drawing down material from elsewhere.
I've had the same experience with my writing.
The more that I intellectualize the process, and that's particularly true since I've turned to fiction, the more that I intellectualize the process, the harder the writing becomes.
And the sooner I let It's so strange how it comes in waves, though.
I mean, I have been a non-fiction writer all my life.
I started out, as I mentioned, in journalism.
I moved into ancient mysteries, but it was always non-fiction.
You look at a book like Fingerprints of the Gods or Underworld, the book about our diving adventures, you'll find that there's 2,000 footnotes, you know?
They are...
I hope they're readable, but they're also detailed, researched documents.
And that was the kind of writer I was until I encountered ayahuasca.
And when I encountered ayahuasca...
I started working with ayahuasca in 2003. And the reason I started working...
I had had one psychedelic experience in 1974 with LSD. And after that, it was an amazing experience, by the way.
I had a most incredible night at the Windsor Free Festival in England.
I spent the whole night wandering around.
I kind of traveled back in time.
It was like being in a sort of medieval encampment.
It was just incredible.
But when I came out of that experience...
I thought to myself, hmm, I guess I was 24 then.
I thought, if that went the other way, that was a really powerful experience.
If that went the other way, I'm not sure how I would handle it.
I thought it might really fuck me up.
And I got a bit scared.
And I'd heard stories of others who'd had scary experiences.
And I thought, I'm not going to do that again.
And I didn't.
I didn't take any psychedelics from the age of 24 until, let's see, 2003 when I was 53 years old.
And the reason that I started taking psychedelics again was because initially it was my research project.
I was writing Supernatural.
It was clear that the cave art had been influenced by psychedelics.
Here was something I could experience for myself.
I've always felt as a writer.
I shouldn't be writing something if I'm not in it myself.
And ended up doing huge numbers of dives all around the world.
It's the way that I work.
And therefore it was logical for me to investigate psychedelics once I started to write Supernatural.
And I wanted to investigate them in a shamanic setting.
And I looked around and researched the subject and it became clear that the Amazon was the place to go.
And ayahuasca, with thousands of years of indigenous use in the Amazon, was a very, very interesting substance indeed to investigate.
So...
I went down there and started to drink ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca worked changes on me in quite a number of ways.
It's made me a more thoughtful and reflective person in some ways about my behavior and the impact of my behavior on others.
I've still got a long way to go on that.
They say in the Amazon that ayahuasca is a school.
Don't expect, you know, instant enlightenment.
Actually, all enlightenment is hard work.
And the hard work with Ayahuasca is integrating the revelations that it gives you.
Because it will, one of the things that Ayahuasca does is she does show you Where you've been cruel and hurtful and unkind to others.
And she shows it to you from the other person's point of view.
It's a lesson that you learn.
But then integrating that into your own behavior in daily life is actually really difficult.
Lifetime of bad habits are very hard to change.
And work has to be done in order to do that.
So Ayahuasca has helped me to begin on that path.
I do not claim to have reached any form of perfection.
Very far from it.
I'm a very imperfect, frail human being.
But I have at least been set on the path that I believe is a more positive one.
But then something else Ayahuasca gave me.
And it happened because I asked for it.
I'd reached a point where I felt...
That I didn't want to go on with the investigation of the lost civilization subject anymore, not because I'd lost interest in it or because I'd turned against it, but because I felt that I'd taken it as far as I personally could.
After Santa and I had done six years of scuba diving all around the world and literally put our lives on the line and had revealed a great deal of stuff underwater that people didn't know about, I felt, actually, I don't know where I take this next.
There are a lot of young, energetic people out there.
I would like them to take it on now, where I took it from.
And I wanted to look for a change of direction, and I wanted to challenge myself as a writer.
And I'd always wanted to write a novel.
So down in Brazil, over a series of five ayahuasca sessions, I asked ayahuasca, can I write a novel?
And if so, what would I be writing about?
And something amazing happened.
In those five sessions, I was given the entire story of the novel that I ended up writing, which is a novel called Entangled.
The whole story.
The characters, their dilemmas, the time travel aspect of the story.
It was very clear that I was to write a story and that it would involve...
Two young women, one in the Stone Age, one in the modern times, and that they would be entangled, that they would be connected through consciousness, and that they would be involved in a battle of good against evil.
And certain scenes came through very, very clear to me and stuck vividly in my mind.
So as soon as we'd finished in Brazil, I went back to England and started writing.
So when you ask ayahuasca, can you do it and what would it be about, do you think that ayahuasca wants you to do this?
Because if you do something like that, I always think of any work that I put out, whether it's even writing a blog or putting something, a funny thing up on Twitter, you send out this signal and then this signal is going to affect who knows how many people in a positive way.
Especially something that they really enjoy reading, like a book.
And people can say, like, why would I want you to write a book?
Because some books are fucking awesome.
That's why.
And that feeling of getting really hooked into a book and really just loving it.
I haven't read a good novel in a while.
The Strain was the last one that I really liked for a while, but then hated.
You know, I love the beginning of it.
That's that vampire one, the Guillermo del Toro book.
Anyway, my point is, that feeling, there's a lot of positive energy associated with something that's really entertaining and gripping.
They often say there's a song that, I forget the song, you know, the Rolling Stones, you don't always get what you want, you get what you need, you know.
Ayahuasca does that.
She tends to give you what you need, not always what you ask for.
I have set intents at the beginning of sessions and I found myself going in a totally different direction.
The first I'd ever heard of any of that was from John Anthony West's work and the work on the Temple of Man, which is really fascinating that there's a temple and each area of the temple signifies like a part of a human being.
And there's a whole area about the pineal gland and the Egyptians were, you know, they called it the seat of the soul and that they believed that, you know, the pineal gland was your connection to To the afterlife.
But something in our bodies, and the pineal gland is the most likely suspect, is generating DMT. Because the presence of DMT in the human body is not in dispute.
It's a kind of sixth sense, which the lens that it uses is DMT. And what people don't realize is that in reptiles, in certain reptiles, it actually has a retina and a lens.
And I would still say, you're right, it's not proved, I would still say the most likely candidate for the generation of DMT. Well, Strassman is working on figuring that out right now.
I mean, you know, the point that you were making just now, I think that...
I think that by cutting these ancient plant allies out of our life and by demonizing them and creating this atmosphere of fear and hatred around them, this is a suicidal path that our society is taking and we only need to look at the past in order to realize that that is true.
There is a danger in human species that we get locked into a particular frame.
And right now, we are locked into the technology frame.
Of course, we're advancing technology very, very, very fast.
But that doesn't mean we aren't locked.
We're locked into one frame, and we're not thinking outside of that frame.
And we can see the consequences of being locked into that frame, which is our world is in chaos.
Our world is in a state of hatred and fear and suspicion right now.
There's all this horrible stuff going on.
And we are literally on the edge of destroying ourselves.
And there's never been a time in the human story when we've more needed to break out of our rigid patterns of behavior and start thinking about things from a different point of view.
And nature has provided us with the means to do so.
It's a fascinating concept, and the concept that human beings are working against themselves, and they're working to keep things fucked up and make them more...
And that the only way to sustain a society as complex and large and invasive as the one we currently live in, the only way is to do it the way we're doing it.
And that if all of a sudden psychedelic drugs were introduced and the materialism was, you know, sort of pushed in the back burner and spiritualism was something that people, you know, started really understanding and appreciate their connection more.
Who the fuck's going to go to work?
Who's going to be killing all the chickens we need for Chicken McNuggets?
Do you ever think of how much you play a part of that?
Does that ever focus in on your mind?
I mean, your instincts obviously were to produce this book and to talk about it very openly and honestly and to do interviews like this and have discussions like this where you talk about it.
And this right now is going to reach half a million people.
They're going to consider what you're saying and they're going to look into it and they're going to go, whoa, do you really think that there's some fucking vine that you can take from the jungle that allows you to communicate with the spirit world?
The first thing I'd like to say is that ayahuasca, and as a matter of fact all psychedelics, are a very serious business.
I personally do not believe that psychedelics are appropriate for recreational activity.
I think if somebody chooses to do that, that's their body, that's their choice, but I don't think it's the right thing to do.
We need to treat these amazing substances with respect.
And anybody who's worked with psychedelics will know absolutely that the set and setting in which the psychedelic is consumed is as important as the psychedelic itself.
What you are looking for from the experience and the company in which you take it and the reason for which you take it are definitely going to color and affect the experience.
I think it's a mistake to use these powerful agents of consciousness work for recreation.
There are other great things for recreation and other great sensual substances, but the psychedelics are not for that purpose.
And if somebody wants to have A really bad trip and have truly horrific experiences with psychedelics.
Take it in the wrong setting and you can be pretty sure that's going to happen to you sooner or later.
So first thing I would say to people with all psychedelics is be careful.
Find somebody who knows what they're doing, who can sit with you and who can oversee this and bring a ceremony to the table.
Let's not just sit down disrespectfully and consume the substance.
Let's bring a ceremonial aspect to it.
And I would say with ayahuasca, I know that quite a number of people now have started to get the ingredients on the internet and brew up their ayahuasca.
I honestly think that's a mistake.
There are people who are enormously experienced working with ayahuasca.
They are the shamans from the Amazon.
More and more Westerners are being trained by those shamans.
Those Westerners are returning to Western countries and are creating a new form of shamanism relevant to the urban and industrial context of the West.
If you really want to work with ayahuasca, seek out somebody like that.
Better still if you can get the funds together, go down to Brazil or go down to Peru and work with the masters.
unidentified
How do you find the masters if you want to do that?
I'm often reminded of sort of underground sects at the end of the Roman Empire, like the Gnostics, you know, being persecuted by mainstream Christianity, where everything was done by word of mouth.
It's like that with ayahuasca now.
Generally speaking, if you feel drawn to the vine, do some serious research on the subject and you will find your way to the right.
There are some charlatans working in this field.
There are in all fields.
But there are also some very good people and do some serious research first and look into the subject and find the right person, somebody who's deeply experienced, who understands the vine and work with them and you can be sure you're going to have a much more worthwhile experience.
Whatever series of events led you to go there and take those substances and have these visionary experiences and then relay them, do you ever feel as if you were compelled, that you were brought to it like this is, like you have a purpose?
If so, it's like the rest of the course of my life, a series of accidents.
Like I flew into that city in northern Ethiopia in 1983 and found myself in front of a monk who said he had the Ark of the Covenant behind him.
It turned the direction of my life.
Okay, I decided that after I published Underworld, which was my last book on the lost civilization issues, I had always been interested in human origins, and that's why I decided to write Supernatural.
But when I got into the subject, I found that the story didn't get interesting until 50,000 years ago, and it got interesting because of psychedelics.
And then, so it was an accident that led me to that.
Then, well, obviously, the next research conclusion was I had to go take some psychedelics, and to do so in a shamanic setting, and learn about it.
A series of accidental decisions kind of led me to that process, so I guess I don't feel called or chosen, but I found myself in the hot seat.
I feel obligated, and I feel a responsibility, which is to share with others that these agents can be transformational and that they can be incredibly helpful, but that they are also extremely powerful and that they must be treated with respect.
When people mock mushrooms, I even talked to Michio Kaku, who's this amazing physicist and this really brilliant guy, and I was on the Opie and Anthony show, and I asked him, have you ever done mushrooms?
And he said like I was a fool.
He was acting like I was a fool, like I was a silly person.
No, I need my mind to be intact and all this stuff so I can work on physics.
If I told you that there was some real thing and you take it and you're going to be in communication with some insanely wise entity from some parallel or constantly surrounding you dimension, would you just try it?
That's the problem that we're talking about here is because Michio Kaku, he is a genius, but he's also been conditioned.
And so imagine if a genius came in contact with something.
Because right now, this spirit, whatever you want to call it, it's right now, the majority of, a lot of the people it's contacting are like 16-year-olds in trailers who are like playing Xbox.
unidentified
It's like, I am trying to communicate high-level information.
And so somehow or another, 4,000 years ago, out of hundreds of thousands of different plants, right, they figured out how to combine the vine of one with the leaves of another.
And with that, with DMT you have a problem because DMT is not orally active.
And the reason that DMT is not orally active is that we have an enzyme in our stomachs called monoamine oxidase.
And monoamine oxidase switches off DMT on contact.
What they did in the Amazon jungle was that they found out of, actually, you're right, there's 150,000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon.
They found the one other that contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
That's what the vine contains.
The vine actually does not contain the psychedelic ingredient.
It contains the ingredient that allows the psychedelic to become orally active.
When these guys are getting blasted on ayahuasca for decades upon decades, though, do you think they can really recall exactly how they learned all this?
Do you think that it's not orally active because it's in so many different plants that if it was, that people would just be eating it and getting high on DMT all the time?
I, of course, 100% agree with you that you should go to a shaman if you're going to do this experience, but if you did have that leaf that you were talking about and just a classic MAO inhibitor, whatever it was, and you took that and ate the leaf, would you then have the experience?
But there are what they call ayahuasca analogues, and even Pharma-wasca is being spoken of now, which does precisely that, which uses a pharmacological MOAI with DMT. I think personally we don't need to go there because nature has provided us with this beautiful and incredible possibility in the ayahuasca brew, in these two different plants.
Interestingly, it's not impossible to drink ayahuasca legally in the United States because the battle is already being fought here.
In Brazil, the ayahuasca shamanism has come out of the jungle and into the cities and it's taken form of several what you would call syncretic churches which are mixing elements of Christianity with elements of traditional shamanism.
So the best known are the Santo Demi and the Unia de Vegetal which both use ayahuasca as their sacrament.
I've sat down with the Uniada Vegetal group in Brazil and drunk ayahuasca.
They were the most charming, thorough, professional, hardworking people I could ever have hoped to meet.
They bring their children to the sessions.
They start their children on ayahuasca at the age of 14. They have a completely different view of psychedelics to the view that we have.
They believe that it's a really helpful and important experience for humanity to have this.
And fortunately, the government of Brazil agrees with them, and it doesn't persecute them for doing this.
So they have formed established churches, and those churches have members in the United States.
And I think it started in New Mexico.
The matter was taken up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, yes, if you're a member of the União do Vegetal, you can drink ayahuasca legally.
That actually, for somebody who wants to work with ayahuasca, is something that I would recommend.
I personally don't...
I'm not drawn to established churches of any kind.
I believe that spirituality doesn't require a church and a hierarchy.
But the fact is that the Unia de Vegetal and the Santo Demi both know what they're doing with ayahuasca.
They absolutely know what they're doing, and they are present in the United States, and they are drinking ayahuasca legally in the United States.
But, I mean, interestingly enough, if we separate Christ off from the monstrous bureaucracy called the church, you do find an interesting spiritual teacher at work.
And I suspect through ayahuasca they're getting closer to the true spiritual teachings.
And more important, ayahuasca is not mediated by a priesthood.
Ayahuasca is your own direct experience of the spirit realm.
That's really important.
Whereas in most mainstream religions, the priesthood is telling you what to think.
They are the intermediary between us and the divine.
In the case of ayahuasca, the brew is the intermediary and it plugs us straight into the divine.
That was one of my favorite things, is getting really, really high, tripping and then reading the Gospels, because it is a very, very psychedelic text.
The Book of John, it's hard enough to read when you're sober.
But when you're tripping, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh.
And again, this is another thing that has been erased from history.
But the fact of the matter is that if you go into early Christianity, what you find is a mushroom cult.
No doubt about it whatsoever.
No doubt about it.
In fact, there are even depictions of the tree in the Garden of Eden, and those depictions show a mushroom.
They show specifically an Amanita muscaria mushroom, not a psilocybin.
An Amanita muscaria also a hallucinogenic mushroom.
So, you know, when the entity called, you know, Yahweh or Jehovah or whatever he calls himself, you know, drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he was driving them out of the Garden of Eden because they'd done a mushroom trip.
And then the apple, the apple, even the word for apple also means red, and that the mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, was a red mushroom, and that this is what they ate.
I mean, it makes sense, the food of the gods, you know, and the forbidden fruit.
And actually, I don't believe that we can understand any spirituality without dealing with altered states of consciousness.
This is again something that's been lost in the modern world.
You don't find in most of the mainstream religions much altered state of consciousness going on.
But if you go back to the origins, you find altered states of consciousness are deeply involved.
And I'm not saying that those altered states of consciousness were always caused by psychedelics.
There's other ways to get into deeply altered states of consciousness, including starving yourself, fasting, austerity, certain kinds of rhythmic dancing.
But definitely altered states of consciousness were involved.
So, in the case of Christianity, it's St. Paul on the Damascus Road.
You know, he has this blinding revelation which completely turns his life around in a totally different direction.
Benny Shannon, who's the professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has made a very powerful case that Moses, in front of the burning bush, It's really a psychedelic experience that's being described there.
You're sitting in front of this bush, and it's kind of moving and glowing, and a voice is coming out of it and speaking to you.
It's a very psychedelic experience, and he even further argues that Moses may have been drinking an ayahuasca analog, Syrian rue and mimosa hostilis.
I think these are two plants which contain the same ingredients I've even heard scholars connect the acacia tree or the acacia bush with a potential source of psychedelic experience because apparently it's rich in dimethyltryptamine and a burning bush.
You know, like, somehow or another, like, this was, you know, they had synthesized DMT from this and burned it, and then he has this experience.
And so you begin to realize that when you scratch the mainstream religions, you get down to base ground before the money men and the bureaucrats stepped in and took it over.
You find visionary experiences are at the heart of it.
They're at the essence of it.
And then later on, those visionary experiences become banned and illegal and nobody's ever allowed to have them again.
Now, I want to go back to something you said earlier, that you said you have problems with technology.
And I think a lot of people subscribe to the idea that technology, even though it brings people together and it connects people, it's sort of pushing people apart, too.
And it's making people become sort of desensitized to a lot of things.
and they alienate themselves and sit at home and play video games.
Do you ever consider the possibility that technology is a life form in and of itself?
Do you ever consider the possibility that we are somehow or not locked in some symbiotic relationship to we are the worker bees creating this new life form?
And that technology, artificial intelligence, which we're absolutely working on creating, will eventually be the next stage, something that's not hindered by the monkey flesh that really cannot evolve as quickly as the technology can.
I think that since I personally believe that consciousness is not generated by the brain, but is an independent entity which chooses to immerse itself in physical form, I don't see why that entity shouldn't choose to immerse itself in mechanical form either.
In any highly organized system, I don't see why consciousness should not manifest through that system.
Have you seen the, it's on the internet, it's a video where they took the two artificial intelligence machines and let them have a conversation with each other.
There's a video we've talked about before about watching traffic go back and forth on a high-speed camera, slow motion, or sped up, rather, throughout the day, that it looks just like cells and blood cells going down an artery.
I mean, you get to the issue of the origins of life.
And, of course, you're touching on deep religious issues.
So were we created in some way?
I think that the conclusion I'm coming to is that the universe manifests organization and life wherever it can as a As a medium in which consciousness can immerse itself, and that this may take many different forms and shapes, but the key that was driving it is consciousness and the need for consciousness to manifest on the physical plane.
I mean, I'll make a trivial example, but I think all of us have had this experience, you know, with our computers, where somehow there's some kind of interaction between you and your computer in some ways.
It seems that...
I remember once I had...
It was the most curious thing.
I had just got a new computer, and my old computer had increasingly annoyed me because when I had finished the document on Microsoft Word, it told me that I'd made new changes which I needed to save, which I hadn't done.
It kept saying, do you want to save the changes that you've just made?
And I hadn't done that.
And finally, with other glitches on the machine, it got so annoying, I decided to get myself another computer.
And that computer was working fine.
And I was sitting in front of it one day and I was thinking how awful it would be if it started manifesting that same fault.
And instantly, the same fault came up on my computer.
But it was reacting to, nevertheless, the way it reacted to my thought was odd.
And, you know, animals, most people would argue perhaps humans have a soul, but animals don't have a soul.
I think we're all soul.
I think soul consciousness is the essence of everything.
And I think it manifests in all forms.
We're just incredibly lucky.
That we have manifested in human bodies because we've got this body with its equipment is an incredible opportunity for learning and growing and developing and we've got much better opportunity to learn and grow and develop than a fruit fly or a cockroach does.
People get very angry because, again, it's kind of throwing the existing paradigm upside down, throwing it in the air and saying that we're all connected by these morphogenetic fields.
My part of that book was mainly about cosmic cataclysms.
It's clear that the planet Mars has been subjected to the most horrific disaster and that there is some scientific evidence which suggests this may have been pretty recent, like the last 20,000 years.
I mean, half of the planet is like a mile higher than the other half.
So if you imagine you take a A little ball and you cut a line round its equator and then you peel off the outer layer of the lower half and then you leave the upper half as it was.
There's a cliff a mile high that runs all the way round Mars.
And something dramatic and disastrous happened to that planet.
There was definitely water on that planet, flowing water, and something took it away.
Very, very horrible cosmic cataclysm occurred, struck by a gigantic asteroid or comet most likely.
And we have these odd ruins, or what look like ruins, which NASA behaves very oddly about on the planet Mars.
And I just think it's an extremely interesting mystery, and I decided to try to put my mind to work on this mystery and see if I could add anything to the debate.
So NASA has consistently ridiculed the notion that there might be intelligently created artifacts on Mars, and that seems to be a most unscientific proposition.
All we have are photographs.
And on the basis of those photographs, it's not good to assume that they are monuments or that they are not monuments.
We need to keep an open mind.
We were talking earlier about the Yonaguni underwater monument.
I mean, you can actually bring two geologists to that monument.
You can put them in front of it for half an hour and they'll come away with completely different opinions about what it is.
So how can we form really useful opinions on the basis of photography alone?
And when you say what you said earlier, it doesn't seem unreasonable at all.
If you say that half of Mars is, like, literally destroyed a mile lower, well, obviously something cataclysmic happened.
And then the absolute proof, they've already found that there's water on Mars and there has been flowing rivers, there's all sorts of evidence of that.
In a way, I suppose it's a kind of oblique honor that BBC Horizon, which is their flagship science program, chose to spend three quarters of a million dollars destroying my reputation.
But that's what happened.
Now, six weeks before I heard from them, I got a call from a friend in television.
And he said, Graham, you're going to get a call from Horizon.
And they're going to ask you to appear in an interview on a show about you.
And here's my advice.
Say no.
They're going to stitch you up.
The whole thing is intended from the beginning as an operation to destroy you.
Well, the motivation was clear, and I learned about this afterwards, which was a group of academics from various universities in Britain had written to the BBC and said, this man, Hancock, is leading our students to question our archaeology.
And he's totally irresponsible.
And he's just writing popular books for the public.
But he's having such an impact.
He needs to be stopped.
And we need a program about him which really shows how full of shit he is, basically.
That's what we've done.
So that was the agenda of the program from the beginning.
It was not to give a fair hearing to the ideas that I'd explored, but to demonstrate that I was full of shit.
And it was very difficult to get any kind of fairness in that situation, especially when in the cutting room dirty tricks were played.
And that's why Robert Bavala was also on that program with me, and he and I took the BBC to the Broadcasting Standards Commission.
And it was the first time in 35 years of broadcasting of Horizon that they were found at fault.
They were found to have produced an unfair program.
We listed 10 points of unfairness.
Only one of them was accepted as unfair by the Broadcasting Commission.
Nevertheless, it was the first time in the history of that program that they were actually found to have been deliberately unfair.
Get hold of John West's Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt, which is by far, by a planetary distance, the best guidebook that's ever been written on Egypt, because that will plunge you into the mystery of Egypt in a way that no other book does.
But the BBC thing, the reason I bring that up is because it's not as though you're just studying foggy pictures or you're just looking at or reading information and then...
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Coming up with some idea.
You're down under the water looking at this stuff firsthand.
I've put my life on the line and I've made an honest and sincere attempt to provide some balance to the grotesquely imbalanced picture of our history that is presented by mainstream archaeology.
This is what I fundamentally see my role as being.
You know, I'm portrayed by the BBC as this person, you know, who's selling these wild theories to the public through, I don't know, some kind of glib magic.
But actually what I see myself as is somebody who's saying, hang on, there might have been another way.
Things could have been different.
The way that we're being told things were...
There's enough problems with that to raise some questions and I'm going to look at those questions and I'm going to document them and examine them and let's see what they come to.
I do not insist that there was a lost civilization.
I think it's highly probable.
I think it has been missed by the mainstream and so what I tried to do was provide balance to a very biased picture.
Rather than try to completely overthrow the picture, I'm simply trying to balance it.
And that's never been seen.
And I feel in that area I was treated very unfairly.
But hey, the BBC Horizon experience was a really good learning experience for me.
The fingerprints of the gods really just changed the way I looked at everything.
Changed the way I looked at human history.
Changed the way I looked at the academic study of human history and what people are willing to believe and not believe and how much they're willing to throw everything that they've learned aside or push it aside or everything that they're teaching.
It's amazing.
It's amazing work.
For people that are skeptical, you need to just look at some of the photographs.
They say that that temple was built by the Romans as a temple of Jupiter and that the Romans moved those big stones.
I would say that what happened was that a much older culture created that big stone structure and that on top of it the Romans built the temple of Jupiter.
That was the time when the meltdown of the Ice Age was at one of its most extreme periods.
The actual meltdown of the Ice Age took 10,000 years to unfold, but within that 10,000 years, there were three or four episodes of gigantic flooding where you had 30-foot rise of sea levels very rapidly, virtually overnight.
You consider what a 30-foot sea level rise would do to our civilization today.
It would wipe out every coastal city.
I mean, look, America is still reeling from Hurricane Katrina.
Imagine what would happen if every coastal city went under 30 feet of water.
But, you know, the cataclysmic explanation of ice caps is to do with pole shifts and to do with the mechanism called earth-crust displacement, which was first proposed by Charles Hapgood, good and i go into this at some length in in fingerprints of the gods
the notion that that the outer crust of the earth rather like the sort of skin of an orange could move around the fruit the inner core of the earth that the core the crust could move and therefore in hapgood's theory ice forms on areas of the crust that are close to one or other pole that makes sense the poles are cold
but when the crust shifts it moves that cold area into a warm area moves it closer to the equator makes all the ice melt and meanwhile new ice starts to form on the new pole So that theory explains the meltdown of the Ice Age not as a result of climate change, but as a result of cataclysmic Earth movements.
I think the maps are a very important question, which I do not see any academic providing a good answer to.
There are maps.
Almost always these maps turn out to be copies of earlier maps.
The Piri Reis map is a famous example.
He was a Turkish admiral.
And he tells us actually in his own handwriting on the fragment of the map that has survived, that he based his, it was a world map, we've only got one corner of it, that he based it on more than a hundred source maps, none of which have survived.
This was the case with the Orontius Phineas map and some of the Mercator maps as well, that they were drawing on ancient maps, which no longer, which didn't come down to us.
So these maps were drawn within relatively recent history, within the last thousand years, but they were copying much older maps.
And so it's very interesting when we find anomalies on these maps.
For example, our culture discovered Antarctica in 1818. Before that, maps that were being drawn around 1800, they showed an empty hole where Antarctica is.
But if you go back to the 1500s, the 1400s, when they were copying these older maps that haven't come down to us, you find Antarctica on every single one of them.
And it's kind of a bit bigger than it is now, and it comes close to and almost touches South America, just as it did during the last Ice Age.
You find off the coast of Ireland, a little circular island...
With the legend on it, it's called High Brazil.
That island is about 120 miles west of the West Irish coast.
If you look at sea level rise, you find that 12,000 years ago and earlier, an island of exactly that size and exactly that shape existed in exactly that spot.
And it was covered by rising sea levels 12,000 years ago.
And it shows up on this map like a ghost.
And that has to mean that somebody was around 12,000 years ago who had at least developed sufficient technology to explore the world and map it accurately.
I'm here with anomalies and problems in the mainstream model.
And what the evidence suggests to me very strongly is that those cataclysmic earth changes at the end of the ice age, and even regardless whether a pole shift or a crustal displacement was involved, nobody can dispute that the meltdown of the ice age was a cataclysmic event.
It involved huge amounts of volcanic activity, and it involved these tremendous releases of water.
So the ice would actually accumulate in glacial lakes for thousands of years.
It would melt, slowly, slowly melt, and then suddenly, this is the mainstream model, suddenly the banks of the ice dam that held back that water would burst, and the whole mass of 4,000 years of meltwater would pour down into the world ocean in one moment.
And the water descending from the top of the ice cap would reach speeds of 600 miles an hour and a wave height of close to a thousand feet.
It then tears across the landscape that lies below the ice cap.
And you see this still, the scab lands of New Jersey, the Finger Lakes of New York State.
These are the results of those massive outburst floods that then tear across the land and then pour into the water and whoosh, up goes sea level.
Well, Atlantis for me is one of thousands of traditions.
It's about a high episode of human civilization in remote antiquity destroyed when that civilization angered the gods.
That is a universal story.
It's told everywhere.
And the Atlantis story is better understood as part of that worldwide tradition rather than viewed in isolation.
It's very interesting.
The Atlantis story comes to us from the Greek philosopher Plato.
He is the earliest source of the Atlantis myth, if it's a myth.
And he sets out information about Atlantis in two of his dialogues, the Timias and the Critias.
And what he says is that this information came to him through an elder figure who's called Solon, a Greek lawmaker who existed about a hundred years before the time of Plato, but was in Plato's family.
And the information had been passed down to Plato.
Solon had received the information from priests in Egypt.
They told him about Atlantis.
This is how Plato tells the story.
And when Plato tells the story, he actually puts a date on the submergence of Atlantis.
And that date is 9,000 years before the time of Solon.
That means 9,600 BC. That means 11,500 years ago.
And we're right there in that window.
When the Ice Age is melting down and hell is being unleashed on Earth.
And if Plato made it all up, I really need to understand how he got the date right.
What a beautiful way of putting it that we are a species with amnesia.
And it's really almost, I mean, when you stop and think about it, how does one keep records over 12, 15,000 years with giant cataclysmic events where people are, for many generations, scratching and scrounging, just trying to stay alive like animals?
And monumental architecture may be one way of doing it.
You know, the notion that the pyramids and the Sphinx were laid out on the ground to model an ancient sky and thus define a date using four constellations, which were Leo, Aquarius, Draco, and Orion, using those four constellations to define a date, seems like a kind of exotic idea.
But we have that right here in the United States in the Hoover Dam.
There is a star map built into the architecture of the Hoover Dam.
And that star map freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam at the moment the Hoover Dam was completed.
And the purpose of putting that star map there by the man who originated it was precisely this.
He said, in 10,000 years time, if our civilization is lost and our language is lost and nobody can read our documents, when they come across this structure by looking at the star map, they will be able to know when it was created.
And we've got to think that if people think like that today, they must have thought like that back then.
that civilization had in some totally different and alien way than our own.
I mean, so alien that their writing was images.
Egypt, that's one of the things that really got out of John Anthony West's DVD series, is he really kind of gets you to understand how different their culture and society was than ours.
Just the way they read things.
They read things, you know, it was all like Shell, Nike, Reebok.
I mean, they saw things in images.
That was their language.
Their language was images.
It's such a bizarre and different way to even think about existence.
For me to remember about the ancient Egyptians is this was a culture that devoted its best minds for 3,000 years to considering the mystery of life, what this is about, and the mystery of death.
We're left with this framework, these stone things to try to deconstruct the past, and even people, I mean, they have a certain amount of information, and they say, we're done, we're done, we figured it out, we figured it out.
Just the idea that they can put a date to it.
Haven't they dated the pyramids just sort of based on carbon and things that were left behind?
That doesn't necessarily mean that...
People didn't move into the pyramids at 2500 BC. Do they know the exact date?
You can't carbon date stone, but you can carbon date organic material.
And in the mortar between the stones, there's some organic material.
And the carbon dating on that is really puzzling.
It doesn't make the pyramid 12,000 years old, but it makes it 1,000 years older than it's supposed to be at the top and 400 years older than it's supposed to be at the bottom.
Go figure that out.
You'd think they'd build from the bottom up, not the other way down.
And this says nothing about the core structure of the pyramid.
I don't think we can take the pyramid away entirely from the ancient Egyptians.
The ancient Egyptians were massively involved in the pyramid project.
But I think the pyramid project is one of those two-phase projects.
And the view I put forward is that...
Is that the original site was laid out around 10,500 BC by the survivors of a lost civilization.
The subterranean aspects of the Great Pyramid, specifically the subterranean chamber, was created at that time.
The gigantic megalithic structures, the valley temple, the so-called mortuary temples that stand beside the pyramids, which seem so different in terms of their architecture, which have in some cases blocks of stone weighing 200 tons and many blocks of stone weighing 100 tons in them.
But this was the first phase.
And that then I would suggest what happened was that those survivors of a lost civilization...
Established something like a monastery at Giza and they then started to recruit from the local population so that within a generation or two they were all Egyptians anyway but they were trained in a system of knowledge and that they kept that system of knowledge close and tight and passed it down for thousands of years.
The idea of knowledge being transmitted for 4,000 years is actually not too difficult to take.
It's already happened.
We've had that We have that with some of our existing religions, which go back close to 4,000 years.
There's no reason why it shouldn't have happened.
And then at a certain point, this monastic institution switched Egyptian civilization on with all the high knowledge that they had preserved.
And to do it again and again and again and again and again and to do it with incredible precision and to align the whole structure that you're building within three sixtieths of a single degree of true north, that's really hard to do.
If there was a time machine, what time would you like to go back?
We went back and forth from caveman days.
I'd like to see some cavemen.
Two, Egypt.
I think I'd like to see Egypt.
I would love to see Egypt in its prime to see what the fuck was going on there.
What was that like when it was in full bloom and the pyramids had just been created and this strange civilization, a super advanced civilization, had just risen far and beyond anything else on the planet.