Graham Hancock reveals how ayahuasca exposed his cannabis addiction’s toll, including a hip replacement surgery in 2023 after quitting in 2011, and links ancient psychedelic use—like Aztec human sacrifices (80,000 in four days)—to demonic manipulation. His novel War God (May 30 UK release) explores obsidian-lined weapons, Montezuma’s war god Huitzilopochtli, and Spanish conquest brutality, arguing psychedelics unlock hidden consciousness. Hancock critiques monotheism’s suppression of direct spiritual experiences while defending fringe theories like alien-seeded DNA, despite past missteps, and praises internet-driven education as humanity’s path to reclaiming love over oppression. [Automatically generated summary]
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But suddenly, something opened up for me, and I'm very grateful to the herb for that.
Again, I need to emphasize this.
I think the problem I eventually ended up having with cannabis, it's not the fault of cannabis, it's the fault of Graham Hancock.
I think my relationship became abusive with the herb.
It was not initially.
Initially it was something I would do evenings and weekends.
I would not try to write while I was actually stoned.
I would do my day's work and then chill out in the evening with a pipe or a joint.
That was how it was for me.
For quite a while.
And I went through my first big historical mystery book, The Sign and the Seal, which was published in 1992, with that pattern.
In other words, I would be smoking only after I downed tools at the end of the evening and I was ready to chill.
And that worked fine.
But then, when I started writing Fingerprints of the Gods, which was the biggest book I've ever done, a five million copy bestseller all around the world, when I started writing that, I thought I'll experiment.
Let's see if I can be stoned and write.
And I discovered that I could.
I could be stoned and write.
And I like being stoned so much that, in a way, It urged me to just write all the time because then I had this incredibly good reason to be stoned all the time.
I took away all the physical boredom of sitting there in my chair in front of my computer screen.
Just everything went away and I drifted into this space where I could explore ideas and manifest those ideas down on the page.
That's when I began What was to become, ultimately, an abusive relationship with cannabis.
That I would fire up, in those days, my joint or my pipe at 9 or 10 in the morning, and I'm a hard worker.
I work 16 hours a day very often when I'm writing, so come 2 o'clock the next morning, I'd still be there smoking away.
And as the years went by, this became a permanent daily pattern for me.
Whether I was writing or not, I would be stoned From the moment I got up until the moment I went to bed.
And most people who came by my house or talked to me on the phone, they would have had absolutely no idea because I was completely in control.
I didn't seem high.
I could hold a rational conversation.
I was just fine.
And I just felt really good.
And this is how it went on for many years.
And later on, around about 2005, actually, I think, perhaps a little earlier, one of my kids told me that, you know, this stuff, this smoke is You don't need to have combustion products.
Why don't you use a vaporizer?
So I bought myself a volcano on the internet.
And then I heard that the British government was going to ban all peripherals.
So I bought myself two more volcanoes.
Volcanoes are quite expensive, but that shows how dedicated I was.
And then I would be vaporizing from 9 in the morning until 2 o'clock the next morning, seven days a week.
And increasingly strong strains.
And this is one thing that I would say.
If we lived in a regime, an irrational regime, where there was no attempt by the government to police our states of consciousness, we could have much more choice in the kind of cannabis we get hold of.
For example, I would have liked to have cannabis with much more CBD and maybe less THC. But the varieties I was smoking were very, very THC loaded.
I mean, it depends how much you buy into the research on this, but a lot of good science has been done and the suggestion is that THC can promote or reveal...
I don't want to blame the herd for anything.
It can reveal certain psychotic tendencies in oneself.
And this is the well-known paranoia which many people associate with smoking cannabis.
The CBD Is an anti-psychotic agent.
So the natural herb is balanced with CBD and THC. And it looks after you very well.
But where we go into intensive breeding of the herb, focusing on the element that makes you really high, which is the THC, then we get a herb that is somewhat unbalanced as a result of the interference of humanity.
But you get more bang for your buck, you know.
That's a very...
That's a very strong herb.
And I began to like a particular variety called cheese.
I think it's called cheese because it smells like old socks or like a blue cheese.
I found a grower who lived local to me who just had amazing green fingers and I would buy from him and I would sometimes have five or six ounces of the herb in my house because I was blazing through this stuff at a tremendous rate.
So that's where the paranoia starts to become legitimate, you know, because actually they can break down your door and they can confiscate your home and take away your liberty and fuck you up forever.
You know, they can do that.
And so every time I heard a ring at the door or, you know, a car came up the street, I would, you know, get paranoid.
Look, what happened to me was that around about 2003, I started, for reasons of research initially, working with ayahuasca, the vine of souls.
This is the powerful psychedelic brew which has been consumed by shamanistic cultures in the Amazon for thousands and thousands of years.
And it's not called the vine of souls for nothing.
It's an extraordinary portal into other realms, and in some ways those realms are associated with death and perhaps what waits for us after death.
Nobody knows the answer to that, but in ayahuasca you have certain experiences relating to that.
And right from the beginning when I started to drink ayahuasca, I mean, this sounds nuts to anybody who hasn't done DMT or who hasn't drunk ayahuasca, but you do meet intelligent entities.
And more and more around the world, people drinking ayahuasca are meeting this goddess figure.
She might appear as a serpent.
She might appear as a woman.
She might appear as some kind of panther or jaguar.
A very powerful, tough love kind of lady who reveals to you the truth about yourself and just says, you know, you fucking deal with it because that's how you are.
And the truth that was revealed to me from quite early on was my relationship with cannabis had got out of balance and I needed to get it back into balance.
And of course, I ignored those messages completely because I was so...
I was so much in love with my cannabis relationship.
In fact, my wife said that really it was like I had a mistress, you know, who I spent all my time with was the cannabis rather than her.
And this went on for many, many years.
Now, the paranoia aspect, okay, I'm going to bare my heart here, and, you know, I believe in being honest.
The paranoia aspect began to affect my relationship with my beloved partner, Santa, who I just love from the bottom of my heart, and she is the The best, the most pure-hearted, generous-spirited, loving lady it's possible to imagine.
I started to develop all kinds of suspicions about her, which were completely groundless.
I started to imagine all sorts of stuff were going on, and then I started to act towards her as though those suspicions were real.
And all of this was also Related to my consumption of cannabis.
It was not caused by my consumption of cannabis.
I think this is a latent aspect of my own personality.
It was being revealed.
By this over-abuse of the cannabis herb.
And therefore, I was making my beautiful partner's life a misery sometimes.
Not every day, but sometimes.
And she was patiently putting up with this, but she was suffering.
And we went down to Brazil in October 2011. And if I had been told when we got on that plane and went down to Brazil that when I came back two weeks later, I would probably never smoke cannabis again, I would have laughed in the face of the person who told me that.
But the encounters that I had with the spirit of ayahuasca, whatever that is, I'm willing to accept that there is no spirit of ayahuasca, that it's all something we generate out of our brains.
But for me, she manifests like a goddess.
And the encounters I had with that, and I do think she's real.
That's just my personal belief system.
And those encounters that I had were incredibly powerful.
And she took me to a place that was something like hell.
And she took me to a place that was something like the judgment scene.
In the ancient Egyptian religion.
Now, the judgment scene is a place where your heart is weighed in the scales against the feather of truth and harmony and cosmic justice.
And you do not want your heart to be heavy in those scales.
You want to be able to look back on your life and say, I did good.
I did not add to the misery in the world.
I did something worthwhile with this incredible gift of life that the universe gave me.
And everything you've done, every second, every minute of your life is completely transparent.
Every thought, every action, everything you did from the moment you became conscious until the moment of your death is laid out before you and there's no hiding from it.
We're great at creating illusions about our own behavior and persuading ourselves that we're behaving just fine.
In the Judgment Hall of Osiris, which is also called the Hall of Mart, where the scene takes place, all of that's stripped away, and you confront the truth.
And I was put there, and I confronted the truth about myself, and I saw the way that I was behaving towards my partner, and I was shown that this had to stop.
Otherwise I was going to pay a huge price for it.
I had a series of terrifying, terrifying experiences which my partner Sanseth shared with me because we were drinking ayahuasca together and at a certain point entities came to her and she had the experience of her heart being pulled out of her chest and the entity said to her and she thought she was going to die and the entity said to her We're going to do this to you to teach Graham a lesson,
and Santa communicated that to me, and I would rank that as probably the single most terrifying night of my entire life, and I've had some terrifying nights.
That was just absolutely Scared, rigid.
And I came out of that with a feeling, a very clear feeling.
In Ayahuasca, we have sharings.
The next day after you've drunk the brew, you share with the rest of the group who you've drunk with, the experiences you had the night before, as much as you want to share.
And what I shared, because I still didn't believe that I could stop smoking cannabis, what I shared was that I was going to change my relationship with cannabis and to get to a place where cannabis was serving me again rather than me Serving her.
And that's what I believed.
But when I got back to England, long flight, What's the first thing I do?
I get out my vaporizer, get out my stash, fire up the vaporizer, and fill a nice bag of vapor.
So I fill up the bag, and I'm down there in my basement.
And I take the first draw and I'm suddenly filled with the most intense feelings of horror and loathing.
And it is exactly like I'm back in that space that Ayahuasca took me to.
And I try a second puff and I can't do it.
I physically could not continue.
I knew that I just could not continue.
I expressed the vapor out of the bag.
I crumpled up the bag.
I put it away and the next day I got rid of several ounces of cannabis.
I know, I know it's terrible.
It's a terrible thing to do, but for me it was the right thing to do.
24 years, non-stop relationship with cannabis, definitely abusing the herb.
I had got to the point where the only rational course of action was what I was shown in Ayahuasca, which was to stop.
And I don't know whether it was because There was way too much THC and not enough CBD, or whether it was just me not being responsible for my own behavior.
I go around saying that I believe in adult responsibility, and I do, but I don't think I was being responsible.
I don't think I was using the herb in a responsible way.
I don't think I was using it in a respectful way, and I paid a price for that.
Well, that's very honest and forthcoming of you to talk about it.
And it's very uncomfortable for people to discuss mistakes they've made or paths they've gone down that they didn't, for whatever reason, they got caught up in the momentum.
They didn't see where it was headed until they hit the wall.
It sounds like you have a legitimate chemical reaction to it.
It doesn't just sound like...
It doesn't just sound like an abusive relationship because the effect that it was having, the extreme paranoia effect and the unease.
It gives you like, to me, like, it gets rid of the excess and balances things out.
Like, you can, the reason why people have road rage and they're reacting so strongly to nothing, what a guy got in front of you and it's going to take you three extra seconds to get where you're going.
It's a bit like an epidural that women get when they're giving birth.
It's slightly different, but that's basically what it is.
And that freezes the lower half of your body.
You use the use of your legs, you're paralyzed, and there's no pain whatsoever.
But then, because they regard the surgery as a kind of scary procedure, They then give you a massive dose of sedatives, and you kind of go off into dreamland.
So I declined those.
They wouldn't actually let me look.
They put some kind of curtain device between my face and my hip, but I heard the sawing, and then I heard the hammering, and I felt like a piece of furniture on a carpenter's bench.
I heard them talking.
It was interesting.
It was an interesting experience.
But then very nice to come out of it, be fully awake afterwards and gradually the feeling comes back to your legs and I spent four days in hospital and initially I thought it was going to be very tough and I thought I'd be on sticks for a long time but I did the physio and I just carried on working at it and I'm okay.
And he was, you know, he was just a guy that was like tired of being a doctor.
Like really wasn't into people or whatever it was.
I mean, if he fixed my knee, it still fixes day.
It's a patella tendon graft where they take a slice of your patella and they open you up and take a piece of bone out of your shin and a piece of bone in your kneecap and they use that to replace your anterior cruciate ligament.
Right.
He puts it in there and moves my leg around and goes, well, better than it was.
That's what he said.
I was awake.
I don't know if he just forgot I was awake or thought I wouldn't remember, but I remember him moving around like, well, better than it was.
In a way, our bodies are like machines, and we've got this ball and socket joint in the hip.
And so the ball is on the end of the long bone, the femur, I think it is.
So they chop that off.
That comes off.
And then the socket, in my case, there were cysts in the socket, which were hollow spaces that had come in there because the ball joint was out of kilter and it was rubbing in the wrong way.
I was in severe pain for a year before this happened.
What they do is they put in a titanium unit there where the socket is, and they put a titanium shaft that they hammer down into the bone.
But then on the top of the titanium is ceramic, so the actual bearings, both the titanium socket is lined with ceramic and the bearing that That moves around in it that sits on top of the titanium shaft, that's also ceramic.
So there's no metal rubbing against metal, which has caused problems in the past.
People get fragments of metal into their bloodstream and so on.
Ceramic on ceramic bearings.
And it's very good.
It works well and I'm not in pain.
And that very bad period of not being able to walk more than a quarter of a mile without having to sit down and recover, it's all gone.
We are already getting bionic bodies, and this is one of the good things which medical science has done some terrible things, but one of the good things it's done is, I mean, if this had happened 50 years ago, I would have been crippled at the age of 62. I couldn't have gone on with my life.
Plus, I mean, since we're in the business of revelations here, the other thing that they have to do when you have the surgery for the 24 hours after the surgery is you have to have a catheter through the penis and into the bladder because for those first 24 hours you cannot get up out of bed and you can't lift up to use a bedpan.
So they stick in a catheter.
I felt I wanted that out as soon as possible.
I wanted it out as soon as possible.
I wanted it to return to autonomy over my body as quickly as possible.
I did not want it to be subject to the whims or fancies of others.
And I made a big fuss about this.
I wanted the catheter out the next morning.
And I literally was up on a Zimmer frame by midday the next day and hobbling to the toilet.
I'm very happy that I had it done and that I don't have to suffer the pain because I had severe osteoarthritis.
I don't know why.
I mean, we all think we're young, but I feel young.
I'm 62, and I don't know why I was afflicted with this at an age.
Most people who go for hip replacement, they're into their 70s, so I don't know why it hit me so hard.
I like the line from Creators of the Lost Ark, you know, where Indiana Jones is all beat up, sitting in the ship's cabin, in some cabin, and the lady with him comments on his appearance, you know, and he says, it's not the years, it's the mileage.
I have to say that I did wonder, and I still do wonder, whether the fact that I quit cannabis in October 2011 And started feeling severe hip pain just three months later in the early part of 2012,
whether there's some connection or whether the cannabis was either in some way protecting me from the onset of severe osteoarthritis or whether at least it was reducing my sensitivity to the pain of the osteoarthritis.
When you talked about the ayahuasca experience and you talked about the goddess coming to you and that you choose to believe that it's real, My thoughts on this whole what is real and what is not real thing, what I've been thinking lately is that it doesn't really even matter.
Because what it is, is it's about the experience itself.
And the best parts of psychedelic experiences are the learning parts.
It sounds like so boring to people because they think like, oh no, I thought I was going to see amazing things and I was going to watch elephants fly and it was going to be mad hallucinations, which, yeah, does occur sometimes, but that's not what it's really about.
What it's really about is about a learning experience.
I completely agree.
Massive leaps in development of your personality and your psyche, your worldview, your personal view, and these massive leaps that happen through psychedelics, they happen exactly the same way if you really do encounter a goddess or if this goddess is just conjured up by your imagination in incredibly vivid detail.
Either one is the same experience to you personally.
It's a very important point because, yes, it might be a hallucination, but it is immensely beneficial.
Or it might not be a hallucination, and we might not have a full account of what the fuck goes on in the human consciousness, especially during altered states.
And to go one way or the other, I think, is absurd.
Here is an incredibly valuable experience, which is available to us, and which, let's not forget, that humanity has had a long relationship with these plants.
This is, I think, one of the problems, again, caused by the war on drugs, which is that it sought to intervene in that relationship and demonize and make it It's dangerous to use them because you might get sent to prison.
You can get sent to prison for a very long time.
People live in fear.
What we need is a nurturing society which makes it possible for people to have these experiences in the safest, most loving environment.
Love is key.
If you're feeling threatened in your head at a particular time, if you're in a space that is uncomfortable or difficult for you, chances are the psychedelic experience will also be uncomfortable and difficult.
The more that you can control the space, the more that you can be surrounded by others who love you and have your best interests at heart, the more likely you are to have a very beneficial experience from that.
And those beneficial experiences can and frequently do include painful moments when you come to realization of actually who you are and what you are.
And this is absolutely fundamental with ayahuasca, is what I call the life review, where you You see the impact of your behavior on others, which previously you had insulated yourself from.
And when you see the pain you'd caused, you might have felt perfectly justified at the time.
When you see it, and you see it with that clarity, it makes you strongly motivated not to do that again.
And I've always felt like it's really ironic that law enforcement works against psychedelics because nothing would benefit law enforcement more than psychedelics.
But the best way to do that is through psychedelics.
And the people who are involved in the running of things most likely are ignorant to the experience.
And so what you're dealing with is someone who is 50, 60 years into a lifelong Closed-off ego trip of death and destruction, and they're the ones that are running the world.
We're not so fucked because humans are evil, and when you look around at all the nice people that you meet, you get really confused as to how the world can be so fucked up.
And the old boy network, the thing that comes into place when these guys, they're cronies and they all help each other out and hook each other up and communicate with each other.
And then there's lobbyists and special interest groups.
And they all want to make sure that this keeps going so they make sure that the laws continue to stay on the books, that allow them to do all the stupidity, especially when, like, Congress can't be guilty of insider trading.
So I thought, and I've made this proposal several times, that what I would like to see is anybody running for high office, first right off, they've got to do 10 ayahuasca sessions.
If everybody was doing ayahuasca, we could pull this world together with rapid quickness.
If they just broke out ayahuasca ceremonies all over the globe, if it became the next big thing, sort of like cell phones.
Everybody's got ayahuasca ceremonies on every corner.
You could change the whole world within our lifetime in an astounding, loving way where people would abandon so many of their ideas about business and so many of their ideas about controlling resources and killing people.
unidentified
You know, the amazing thing is that it is actually happening.
It is actually happening, admittedly on a small scale, but for me this is one of the mysteries of ayahuasca at a time when the Amazon jungle is under such terrible threat, that out of the jungle emerge these two plants, one of which is a vine, which then begins to spread her tentacles all around the planet and to call out to people.
And people are drawn to ayahuasca.
I can't tell you how often I get asked Where do I go for a good ayahuasca ceremony where I know I can trust the shaman?
It's happening everywhere.
It's happening in Japan.
It's happening in America.
It's happening in Germany.
It's happening all over the world.
And so you get a small but growing group of initiates who have had this shared experience, and we kind of know each other when we meet.
It's really a fascinating subject, the fact that something does exist to give you that experience.
I've always said about the DMT experience that if you could just show someone what you see, without taking it, if you could just show someone, they would want to do it.
They would want to go, wait a minute, and it doesn't hurt you?
Yeah, if we lived in that ideal world where we as adults had the right to make sovereign decisions about our own consciousness, I think most people wouldn't choose to do it.
Well, if you look at how it is in Holland, where marijuana is essentially legal, and nobody, you know, they look down upon people that get high all the time, and they also look down upon hard drugs.
Because of the fact that you can get most things, they understand with great clarity what's dangerous and what's not dangerous.
And you have to understand that some people will make mistakes and there will be problems, but that should not be an obstacle to what has to be a fundamental freedom.
I don't know whether or not I don't know whether or not there's a way to handle it where you get the maximum benefit.
I don't know whether it's making it illegal, decriminalizing it, making it so that people can't get prosecuted for using but they can get prosecuted for selling.
But if you were next door to a meth guy, you would not want that guy in your communities profiting off of enslaving people, chemically enslaving people.
So this is an area where more work has to be done.
But I think if we approach the problem from a spirit of love and from a spirit of respect for the sovereignty of other adults, it'll be a whole lot better than the way we're approaching the problem right now.
And as we know, making these Toxic substances, illegal, doesn't prevent their use.
It absolutely does not prevent their use.
The use has gone up and up and up and up and up over the decades.
And it's kind of unique, one of the properties of psychedelics, whether it's, like, for some folks, Ibogaine has a great...
It's a great result for curing addictions, and ayahuasca has a great result.
And the people that are doing these very things and selling these very drugs, both, participating in both sides, selling and dealing, could both benefit from ayahuasca.
Like, if you're a meth dealer, you're an asshole.
Like, what an asshole?
You're selling something that fucking kills people, makes them pull their skin off of their face.
And he came there in a state, he was just so wired.
And it came out, as we were discussing, as we were talking, it came out that he had a rival in love.
And he'd gone out and got a gun, and just before he left LA, the best decision he ever made was to leave LA and come down to Brazil and drink ayahuasca.
He was getting close to the point of murdering a fellow human being.
Two weeks in Brazil, five ayahuasca sessions, completely turned him around, completely turned him around, and he revolutionized his life.
And he became such a loving, positive, warm-spirited person, and all his anger was gone, and he moved on in his life in amazing ways.
And I've seen many, many, many, many, many examples of that.
I don't want to pretend, however, that it's all sweetness and light in the garden.
There are problems also with ayahuasca, and people should be aware of this.
There are shamans who are abusing their power.
You know, if you go to a place like Iquitos in Peru, You'll find there's two types of shamans.
One type are the curanderos.
They're the healers.
The other type are the brujos.
They're sorcerers, actually.
And they will use ayahuasca to gain power over others.
And there have been one or two horrendous cases that occur with this.
So I do think the intention of the individuals who are involved is also an important part of this.
And psychedelics I agree with you that the single one-stop shop to transform our society and make it a better place, a far better place than it can be today, is the correct use of psychedelics.
But I would be wrong to say that psychedelics are a magic potion, because they're not.
And there have been societies which have Misused psychedelics profoundly.
I would say that the Aztecs in Mexico were one of those.
Well, they used psilocybin, but they did not use it for gentle consciousness exploration.
The Aztecs used psilocybin preparatory to rituals of human sacrifice.
The Aztecs used psilocybin as a vehicle to communicate with their deities, and those deities included characters like Huitzilopochtli, who was the war god, who spoke to – Montezuma was the last Aztec emperor, and that's 1519 when Cortes appears in Mexico.
And Montezuma was in daily communication with the war god by means of psilocybin mushrooms.
And what the war god was telling him to do, you know, there's demons out there as well as angels.
What the war god was telling him to do was to kill people and to stretch them over a stone and cut out their hearts.
And there was a horrendous situation in Tenochtitlan, which was the capital city, which is now Mexico City as a matter of fact, when they inaugurated the Great Pyramid.
Now, this is a bloody awful thing that was going on there, and psychedelics were involved.
I'm not saying that psychedelics caused it.
And again, we come to this issue.
Are these entities that we encounter projections of our own minds?
Or is there some other realm or level of existence where non-physical entities that communicate with us at the level of consciousness exist?
Whichever it is, whether it's a projection of our own minds, as you rightly say, or whether those entities are real, is less important than the effects on our behavior.
But if what is being projected from our own mind is very dark and negative and wicked, or if those entities also include evil angels as well as good guys, then you can get cultures misled down this path.
And I do believe that's what happened with the Aztecs.
There's also recently, and again, I think truth is really important.
Truth is really important.
So let's be truthful about this also.
There have been some tragic cases with ayahuasca, most recently in Chile, which actually involved a human sacrifice, which actually involved the burning to death of a baby on the instructions of the so-called guru or shaman.
He formed a kind of death cult, but their sacrament was ayahuasca.
This is very rare, but it does happen.
And I think people should be aware when they enter ayahuasca space that one of the things ayahuasca does is it makes you more suggestible.
It opens your heart.
If a powerful, strong, negative personality comes along and says to you, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, you might just do it.
And that is also there possible.
So you have to be strong in yourself.
You have to be clear on your intent.
And if you're not going into this with good intent, then bad things also can happen.
They were a very dark and demonic culture, and unfortunately, that demonic aspect of Aztec culture was Without any shadow of a doubt, mediated by psilocybin mushrooms.
And they called them Teonanactyl, which means the flesh of the gods.
And they were used for communication with demonic entities.
And we cannot pretend that that was not so.
This was the case.
And indeed, if the Aztecs had not been those people, I mean, if you imagine a society which was run by serial killers and in the interests of serial killers, that's roughly Aztec society in 1519. So they would have neighboring tribes who they would prey on.
They could easily have completely defeated them, but they preferred not to completely defeat them.
They preferred to use them for warfare every year, make war on them, take captives, bring the captives back to Tenochtitlan, and cut out their hearts.
And this is why there's karma.
There's such a thing as karma.
This is why Montezuma was brought down.
I mean, 490 Spaniards turn up on the coast of Mexico and destroy a standing army of 200,000 men.
Why does that happen?
It happened because the neighbors of the Aztecs hated the Aztecs.
They utterly hated them.
And they were looking for liberation from that horror that was being inflicted on them.
Well, isn't that a better – I shouldn't say a better, but isn't a possibility that what you're dealing with is A bunch of sociopaths and a bunch of crazy people, and if you introduce psilocybin into their system in this insane warlike world, that what you're conjuring up is their imagination.
It is the desire to manifest these things that would ask them to do horrible things.
This is a core behavior pattern in human beings when they get in control of armies.
It's as though the body functions as a filter, and it removes certain impurities, which then allow the good stuff to remain, and that comes through in urine.
Apparently, you can pass it through seven human bodies.
I wonder if when a person goes completely psycho, when you're living in war, and one of the things about the Mexicans, the Aztecs, rather, is I don't even think they had horses yet.
This is one of the reasons, again, why a relatively small force of Spaniards were able to defeat them was because the horse had been extinct in the Americas for 12,000 years from the end of the last ice age.
And so when the Spanish turned up with actually only 16 horses, 16 heavy hunters that were trained for warfare, European armies had had thousands of years to develop strategies to deal with men on horseback.
And there were definite, specific tactics and responses that you used when you were charged.
But the Maya and the Aztecs, they had no idea what they were looking at.
They actually, if you look at their accounts, which I've done, you'll find that they initially thought that they were dealing with supernatural beings, which were part deer, actually, because that was the nearest animal that they could relate to a horse, part deer and part human.
And they didn't know how to handle these things.
And they're coming down at you at 25 or 30 miles an hour.
They're covered in armor, the horse and the man.
And it's a pretty terrifying prospect.
And they broke armies of tens of thousands of men, were just fled in terror at the sight of these entities charging down on them.
Eventually they learned.
And there's a famous case that one of the Tribes in Mexico that fought most vigorously against Montezuma were a people called the Tlaxcalans.
He used them for human sacrifice.
They're very independent-spirited people, great warriors.
And you would have thought when the Spanish came into Mexico that the first people who would become their allies would be the Tlaxcalans.
But in fact, the Tlaxcalans had a heroic character called Shikotenka, Who was their battle king.
And he saw the future.
And he saw what Spain would eventually do to Mexico.
And so initially, and very hard, he fought the Spanish tooth and nail.
For over a long campaign that lasted about six weeks.
And during that campaign, on one occasion, one of his warriors actually took the head off a horse with a single blow of their weapon, which was a bit like a sword.
It was made of wood.
It was called a, and it had flakes of obsidian lined along the edges of the blade.
And that horse was not wearing armor that day, and a horse was beheaded, shocked the Spanish.
It was the first time suddenly there was proof For the people in front of them that these animals were not supernatural, that they could be killed.
But eventually, Cortes was a terrorist.
He went around massacring whole villages.
He burned people at the stake.
He fed people to dogs.
And eventually the Tlaxcalans did the calculation, and they said, we better join this guy rather than carry on with this.
And so eventually they did join forces with him, and suddenly he had 100,000 auxiliaries who were Ready to take Moctezuma on.
And I have to say, although I really detest a lot of the things that the Spanish did, I have to say, those 490 men, they had balls of steel.
They had balls of steel.
I mean, to turn up on this distant coast with no resources, no reserves, nothing to fall back on, And to know that you're confronting an enemy that is a militaristic power, that has hundreds of thousands of men under arms, that sacrifices you if it catches you, and still to go for it, that takes tremendous courage.
Cortes actually scuttled all his ships so that his men could not flee.
So it's been interesting for me, because my latest writing effort has been a novel about the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
These days I do novels as well as non-fiction.
It's been interesting for me to get inside the head of a man like Cortez, to get inside the head of a man like Montezuma, and to figure out what drove them and what made these characters what they were.
And I have a witch in the story, a young Aztec witch, and I have a famous woman called Malinal, who became Cortez's lover, who had a grudge against Montezuma.
History doesn't tell us why.
But I give her a motive in the story, because he tried to sacrifice it.
You can do that with history, and you can do that with fiction.
She's a key player, not just in my story, but in the story of history, because she became Cortés' interpreter.
She was very clever.
She learned Spanish very, very fast.
So in the paintings from those days, you always see her standing beside Cortés, and coming out of her mouth is the glyph that means speech.
And she gave the whole story away to Cortés.
She told Cortés how to defeat Montezuma, and that was to play on the myth of Quetzalcoatl, of the Feathered Serpent who would return and bring in a new age and overthrow a wicked king.
And she had Cortez fill the boots of Quetzalcoatl.
When I was researching Fingerprints of the Gods back in The early 90s.
I traveled extensively and widely in Mexico as part of my research because Mexico is a fascinating place from the point of view of a lost civilization.
You know, we have the Olmec culture.
We have those gigantic stone heads from a site that's thought to be 3,500 years old.
I think it's probably much older than that on the Gulf of Mexico.
Heads in the form of African heads, which is very puzzling and weird.
But also images of people with very strongly Caucasian features with massive beards and definitely not American Indian faces.
And there they are.
So I was wondering, are these the remnants of some lost civilization?
Because history does not explain how individuals with that appearance ever turned up in Mexico.
And I inadvertently, as I was researching Fingerprints of the Gods in Mexico, I inadvertently traveled the route of Cortez.
And I found myself again and again crossing the path that Cortes had taken from the Gulf of Mexico up to what is now Mexico City.
And I began to realize there was a fascinating story to tell here and a story that had never been properly told.
And I used the accounts of some of the conquistadors, men like Bernard Diaz, who give us eyewitness accounts of Aztec society.
This helped me to – because the Aztecs They were latecomers in the civilization of Mexico, but they'd only existed as an empire for 200 years before Cortes came.
But they revered earlier cultures, and particularly the amazing pyramid site of Teotihuacan, 30 miles north of Mexico City, which means the place where men became gods.
So I was investigating the possibility of a lost civilization, but I was kind of imbibing The story of Cortes and of the Aztecs at the same time.
And I felt this kind of pall of sadness that hangs over Mexico, this feeling that something terrible happened there.
And what's at the heart of my story, without giving too much of it away, is this notion of demonic influence that Montezuma, and I accept it could be projection of the individual's mind because he's just a particularly wicked, evil individual, or it could be that there are real demons out there.
So Montezuma is communicated with and advised by Huitzilopochtli, the war god, and Cortes is well known, believed he had a special relationship with St. Peter.
And he, in dreams, encountered St. Peter, and St. Peter advised him to carry out some of the most horrific acts of genocide that have been ever recorded in the history of the Americas.
The speculation of the novel is that both The entity that appeared to Moctezuma as the war god and the entity that appeared to Cortes as Saint Peter were actually one and the same demonic entity seeking to multiply human misery because that's what demons do.
And if we think it was bad under the Aztecs, let's be honest and accept that it was a thousand times worse after the Spanish took over.
The population of Mexico It was calculated to be 30 million in 1519. Within 40 years, it was 1 million.
29 million people died.
Gigantic, horrendous genocide.
And the Spanish were monsters.
They would use people to test the edge of their weapons.
Let's just see if we can chop off somebody's arm here.
Let's see what this axe will do.
Oh, the dogs are hungry.
Let's just throw a bunch of people to the dogs.
That's where the phrase throwing them to the dogs comes from, as a matter of fact.
So they were awful people.
And it's been a dark story to write, but I've also found that in this world, in this realm at that time, there was the capacity for love.
I wanted to ask you about this because there's a guy on my message board, his name is Frodo Swaggins, and he sent me a cool link to this new thing that's been found under Teotihuacan.
They found a jade mask from an earlier era and some building, some work underneath there that they're investigating now that they believe was Olmec.
I think we're going to find that Teotihuacan actually goes way back, not just to the beginnings of the historical epoch, but far deep into prehistory.
And the Olmec, the so-called Olmecs of Central America may go back 10, 12,000 years.
They may not be – I don't think we should just limit them to the last 3,500 years.
So this is the case with many of these sites.
It's the same, by the way, if you go to Chichen Itza.
If you can get inside the pyramid of Cucucan, Chichen Itza, and Cucucan is just another name for Quetzalcoatl, you'll find that it's built on top of another pyramid, which is inside it, an older pyramid, and preserved completely inside it, and you can even get inside that older pyramid.
And I think it's the case all over the world that sites have been built on top of older sites, reincarnated in a way.
So there was an ancient sacred place, and later cultures came along and honored it and built new Monuments on top of it, but the mistake the archaeologists make is that the origins of the site are the later culture, and they don't take account of the earlier culture.
Well, that was one of the things that John Anthony West was suggesting about Egypt when you show the very different construction methods that coincidentally are below the ground.
Like you have to dig out the sand to pull these things up and, oh, lo and behold, they look different.
Yeah, and that's like the Osirion in Abydos in Upper Egypt, which is 50 or 60 feet lower than the Temple of Seti I and was actually covered with 50 feet of sedimentation.
His main thing was that he was closely associated with the Mubarak family, particularly with Susan Mubarak, the wife of the deposed president Hosni Mubarak.
And they protected him so he could do whatever he liked while Mubarak was running Egypt.
And therefore he was one of the closest to Mubarak in the Egyptian regime.
So when Mubarak fell and a whole new system came into play in Egypt, Zahir was one of the first to go.
It bears very characteristic erosion marks, both on its body and on the trench dug around it, and that those are the marks of precipitation-induced weathering, of exposure to thousands of years of heavy rainfall.
Cut a long story short, no such rainfall in Egypt in the last 5,000 years.
You have to go back 10,000, 12,000 years, end of the last ice age, to get that kind of climate.
So when John Anthony West and Robert Shock dropped this bombshell on Egyptology in roughly 1992, that the Sphinx actually might be thousands of years older than the Egyptologists imagine, there was a huge outcry.
And Egyptologists became very, very angry about it because they were threatened in the core of their being.
And one of the arguments they made, which they thought was the killer argument, was, look, you're saying this monument is 12,000 years old.
But there are no other large monuments anywhere in the world which are 12,000 years old.
Well, unfortunately for the Egyptologists, that's no longer true because just the most amazing site has been discovered in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe.
And that means that no later culture has tramped over it to confuse the dating record.
And therefore, we have a pristine site.
And when a site is pristine and it's approached by a mainstream...
Archaeologists such as Klaus Schmidt from the German Archaeological Institute, who's the excavator, he has to honestly put his hand on his heart and say, this site is 12,000 years old.
And if Gobekli Tepe is 12,000 years old, then there's no reason on earth why the Sphinx shouldn't be 12,000 years old.
And if the Sphinx and Gobekli Tepe are 12,000 years old, then I'm sorry, we have to rewrite the history books.
Whatever documentary it was that showed Robert Schock presenting his findings, because he's an academic, and he's the only one that they would allow to present.
He's a guy who's immersed himself in Egypt his whole life, but I don't know what his formal education is, but the fact that that guy hasn't been given some sort of, at least someone test him, And give the guy a fucking degree.
Because, like, who the hell knows more about ancient Egypt than John Anthony West?
I think John is an astounding person, and I think that he's brought a unique insight to ancient Egypt, and he's done far more for the exploration of the past than any...
And therefore, we're looking at a culture that 12,000 years ago was already capable of doing that.
We can't say that they just made that up overnight.
There has to be a long background to that that got them to the point where they could do that.
That is why Gobekli Tepe is the single most important archaeological site in the world because It could not have appeared by magic.
It had to be the result of a culture which had figured out how to work with large and heavy blocks of stone and to quarry them and carve them and move them around.
And our ancestors are supposed to have been hunter-gatherers, you know, living in small groups without any large-scale organization.
And there's a very sophisticated carving method employed on these beams, a three-dimensional carving method, where instead of carving the image into the stone itself, which is the easy way to draw something, they actually left the piece of stone, like if they drew a lizard, they would cut away everything else and leave the lizard to stand out.
I was watching that and the other thing was the other academic who he was communicating with, whatever that guy's name is, no need to even say it, such a cunty human being.
The way he was laughing.
What culture are we talking about that existed 10,000 years ago?
Archaeology is one of those areas of study which is very territorial and where scholars have staked their reputation on a particular view of the past and they get very angry when anybody Threatens that.
And they're very, very, very obnoxious to one another as well as to outsiders.
And in saying these negative things about Egyptology, I also do want to say that they also do great work.
There's a fantastic work that's been done by Egyptology, and I don't think that I could have written any of my books if I hadn't been able to draw on the huge amount of data that Egyptology has provided, but sometimes I put a different interpretation on it from the one that they put on it.
So I don't want to put them down completely.
They've done great work, but they're narrowly focused on a particular reference frame, a particular idea of how human history evolved, and they should let the evidence speak for itself rather than impose that And we should point out that there is a small group of people, not a small group, I shouldn't even say, I shouldn't quantify them.
Well, that's why Schoch has made a marvelous contribution to this whole field because he is a credentialed academic, he is a geologist, and he's been prepared to put his reputation on the line and say, I'm sorry, I think the Sphinx is really, really old.
My take on that part of the world, as a comedian, is that if that's the birthplace of civilization, that's the cradle of civilization, that those people, right now, that's the townies of the world.
That's the people that never left.
The people that literally are living with the echoes of the behavior of people that lived 10,000 years ago in that very same spot.
Who number out of 60 million, I believe, roughly 6 million are Copts.
So they are practicing a particularly ancient form of Christianity.
Their language is...
They're structurally very closely related to the ancient Egyptian language, and they are the direct inheritors of the ancient Egyptian tradition.
So when ancient Egyptians were converted to Christianity around about 300 or 400 years after Christ, that was the beginning of the Coptic Church in ancient Egypt, and the Coptic people are the true inheritors of the lost wisdom.
I think that all three of the world's monotheistic faiths, whether it's Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, have been responsible for just a vast amount of misery in the world.
And I think we're not going to move on as a human race unless we actually move on from that time where we don't accept that something is true just because our parents or some guy with a beard tells us that it's true, you know, where we look for direct experience.
Of the spirit and the divine.
This is the problem with all of those big religions.
I don't care whether they call themselves Christians, Muslims, or Jews, you know, is that they're hierarchies, they're bureaucracies, they're power structures, and they do not offer a direct experience.
That's why all of them persecute the use of psychedelics.
They don't want people to have direct contact with the divine.
Are you hopeful about things when you see like Arab Spring, people rising up and trying to remove dictators and what happened in Egypt, getting rid of Mubarak?
I am hopeful and I think it is happening all over the world and I think the internet has played a part with it and it's happening in America.
I come here as a foreigner.
I'm British.
I come to America often.
I have family here in America.
I feel very closely Connected with America.
And America is a paradox.
You know, it's a huge paradox because on the world stage, America is a very dark and malignant force, which does tremendous harm consistently and has done for a long time.
But at the individual level, there's a tremendous spirit of awakening in America.
Look just what's happening with cannabis laws in America.
In the last 10 years.
That's unimaginable in Britain.
We can't make changes like that.
Why is that?
Because we don't have this spirit of independence.
We don't have the structure where individual states can make decisions on key issues like that.
And of course, in America, there's a conflict between state law and federal law.
The federal government is not always respecting state laws and is seeking to persecute people who are using cannabis.
I think that that in itself, the fact that a number of states have decriminalized or even legalized cannabis, is a sign of a sea change that is underway at the moment.
And what it reflects is an awakening of the American people.
So even though huge negative forces are still at work, And are still sitting in the seat of power.
I think there's a tremendous hope for the future in America, and that comes from the awakening to consciousness of the American people.
And maybe it's small right now, but it's growing.
And in that sense, far more than any other, I believe America is leading the world, that there is this possibility for awakening here.
And maybe it goes back to the founding fathers and the frontier days and just the sense that That people should be able to make decisions about their own lives without government telling them what to do.
That's the step we all need to take.
We need to move ahead.
We need to set aside our commitment to these large monolithic religions.
We need to set aside our commitment to large monolithic states.
We need to run our own lives and make decisions for ourselves.
And it just happens that that is very close to the heart of what America is all about.
So there's this whole ethic that our lives are supposed to be about production and consumption and nothing else, that we define ourselves in terms of what we own.
We're prepared to go into huge debt to own a shiny car or a better house.
And that's supposed to be right and proper.
And then we're supposed to define ourselves in terms of our consumption.
And we must work hard.
We must go to the office every day.
All of these things are brainwashing.
And then there's the TV. We can have a little relaxation.
We can enjoy some fantasy.
Maybe we'll win the lottery one day.
All of these are mechanisms of control which keep people quiet in society.
Yeah, they're selling Tide or Toyota trucks or whatever the hell they're selling.
And, you know, they're just putting on this thing because it's a machine that they can press and it's like an automatic program that runs and extracts money.
That's exactly what Ted said when they banned my talk.
In one of their statements they said that we can't allow this talk to be on the air because some young man might go off to South America and drink ayahuasca.
And by the way, your issue was after Eddie Huang came in here.
Eddie Huang told his gross story that makes you just go, ew, Ted.
Apparently John Anthony West has a Ted story as well.
And I think that...
There's a lot of beautiful things that come out of TED, a lot of incredible, but it seems like any organization, once people get into power and once people have the ability to tell other people what's cool and what's not cool, it starts getting weird and you start telling Eddie Wong that he has to attend all these different things and meet all these donors and Like some kind of freaky cult.
Yeah, but that's what he felt like.
He felt like it was really strange.
Now, your thing got pulled, and what was the scientific explanation for why they got pulled?
Well, it was none.
You had an exchange with one of the guys on TED. I read the comments, and you presented all the things that he had said and said, please show your example of when I said this, I never said this.
What was the thing that he accused you of, and what was the response?
They read complaints and responded on the basis of those.
So when we challenged them, okay, please go through, in my case, go through my talk and find where I say that ayahuasca allows you to communicate with an ancient mother culture.
Because I was giving my personal story of, you know, why I gave up cannabis.
I changed that title because a lot of people pointed out to me that that's deeply disrespectful of cannabis and that for many people cannabis is a green goddess.
And cannabis was a green goddess for me and I accepted that.
I realized that there is in fact a cannabis orthodoxy as well, which by talking about my quitting of cannabis, I had upset this orthodoxy.
But when I looked at my talk, my talk was much more about the war on consciousness than it was about that.
That's what it was really about.
So, for example, I made the point that our society doesn't object in principle to altering consciousness.
I mean, what happens when you put a kid on Ritalin?
You know, that's a powerful pharmacological drug which is altering consciousness.
When you over-prescribe Prozac or Siroxat for conditions of depression, those drugs are altering consciousness.
We value alcohol.
We invest, you know, multi-billion dollar alcohol industry.
People don't primarily drink alcohol because of the taste.
They drink it because it alters their consciousness in a way that they like.
And so we don't object to altering consciousness in principle, but we object to altering consciousness in certain kinds of ways which threaten the status quo.
And that's what psychedelics do.
They alter consciousness in ways that lead people to ask profound questions about the nature of the society they live in.
And that appears to be the line that I crossed.
So Ted tried to dress it up as pseudoscience, and when I called them on that, in the end, because they realized, I think, that they'd got themselves into some kind of danger, And it's still there on the webpage.
Rupert and I call it their naughty corner.
They created a naughty corner of the TED website where our talks were put back online.
And with all their reasons why they'd taken them off.
So first thing they did was they crossed out all their reasons.
So you can find that everything they said has actually been crossed out.
Apparently, I think it was Barbara Streisand tried to stop some public statement that had been made about her, and it ended up multiplying the statement.
I said that 97% of DNA is defined as junk, and maybe it isn't.
And that there may be data stored on DNA. And as a matter of fact, this is now being done.
Data is being stored on DNA. So you just were misinformed?
I don't think that I was misinformed.
I think that I was exploring an interesting area of inquiry.
And it's true since I published on that in 2005 that some new work has been done on so-called junk DNA, and it is found to have an important biophysical function.
But what I reported, and this was in my book Supernatural in 2005, There was a study published in the magazine Science by Eugene Stanley, which looked at the language-like structure of junk DNA. The junk DNA has a structure very similar to all human languages.
There are certain patterns that repeat in languages that appear also in junk DNA. I simply wanted to speculate on this.
Is it possible that junk DNA is some kind of archive?
When I wrote Supernatural, I was looking at this connection with entities that people have in altered states of consciousness.
And I was saying that the kind of place I would bet on is that in some weird way these entities may be real.
That is, in itself, a very annoying statement to make to any materialist scientist.
But then I said, but maybe there's another possibility.
Maybe there's an archive of information stored on all our DNA all around the world, and maybe in altered states of consciousness we gain access to the archive, and that's maybe why people from all different cultures at different periods of history see the same thing.
And I cited The work of Francis Crick, who was the discoverer of the double helix form of DNA, in a book that he wrote called Life Itself, where Crick speculates that DNA did not evolve on this planet.
This is the Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick.
This is not Graham Hancock who's making this statement.
Crick suggests a phenomenon called directed panspermia, that the reason that life exploded so rapidly And amazingly, on this planet, within a hundred million years of the planet being cool enough to support life, roughly four billion years ago, the reason that it exploded so suddenly was that it came here from elsewhere.
And he suggested that there had been some advanced alien culture on the other side of the galaxy that faced annihilation.
Perhaps a supernova was going to go off in their vicinity.
And they looked desperately for some way to preserve life.
And their first thought was, could they get themselves off the planet?
And they realized that, yes, they could, but that they could not travel through interstellar space for thousands or millions of years to reach other possibly habitable planets.
So in the end what they did was they sent bacteria out into the universe on spaceships and they genetically engineered those bacteria to make them incredibly hardy.
The only thing I added to it was if his theory were right and that life spiraled up on this planet because one of those spaceships hit the ancient earth and spilled out its cargo of genetically engineered bacteria, Well, maybe they wrote a message on the DNA of those bacteria,
and maybe that message has been preserved, highly preserved, and there are certain strands of DNA that are preserved for hundreds of millions or billions of years and passed down into modern human beings, and maybe it's a message for us about that lost ancestor culture that made the DNA that Or rather didn't make it, but engineered the DNA and the bacteria that started life on Earth and that eventually evolved into us.
So I thought it was an interesting area to inquire into.
For me, I feel my role is to inquire into interesting things that are forbidden territory for scientists.
And when I inquire into them, it doesn't mean that I'm insisting this is a fact.
What I'm saying is this is something that we need an alternative point of view on.
And let's look at and consider what this might mean.
And I may be completely wrong, but I think the exploration is worthwhile.
That's the position that I take.
It does annoy scientists.
I think the other reason it annoys scientists is because I don't mean to pat myself on the back, but I'm not particularly lunatic on a day-to-day basis.
I'm not particularly kooky.
I'm moderately rational.
I can make an argument.
I can express things.
And I think if I was You know, an obvious nutcase.
They wouldn't need to get so angry with me.
But because I'm fairly reasonable and open to discussion and persuasion, I think it makes me a little bit more dangerous to them.
And it's the same with John Anthony West.
John is a very reasonable man.
You know, he's coming up with extraordinary ideas about the past.
But he's arguing them very, very well and very coherently and based on evidence.
There's plenty of quacks out there too, and they need to be exposed.
I'm doing this new show on the Sci-Fi Channel, it's called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and eventually I would like to get to the mysteries of ancient civilizations, whether or not there were Agreed.
Agreed.
I'm getting a massive dose of the reality of how many people are really kooky out there and have some really kooky ideas that they cling to like a cat stuck in a tree.
They won't let go of these fucking kooky ideas.
And no matter how many experts you bring in there that are true experts on whatever subject is at hand, if that person has a kooky idea that they've clung to, they are not letting that fucking thing go.
But we should, I think, be open to the view that there are other modes of inquiry into the nature of reality which should be Also considered.
It could even be done scientifically.
For example, psychedelics are a marvelous tool for inquiring into consciousness, this mystery of consciousness.
And we could have detailed scientific studies.
So here's the hypothesis.
With psychedelics, we retune the receiver wavelength of the brain, hypothesis mind you, and gain access to other levels of reality, parallel universes if you like, which are inhabited by intelligent beings.
Okay, let's explore that hypothesis scientifically.
How are we going to do that?
Psychedelics, the very best way, put people into deeply altered states of consciousness on cue, you know, and then get them to compare notes, get them to ask questions of those entities, see if any new information, any novel information comes back that couldn't possibly have been known.
That kind of thing.
It's being done, interestingly, with near-death research.
That's another area where most materialist mainstream scientists will say, nonsense, there's no possibility of any kind of survival of death.
But people report these astonishing near-death experiences, and they report seeing things that they should not have been able to see.
So now in operating theaters, in emergency rooms, in a number of hospitals in London, But also, I believe, in the United States as well, they have created shelves up at a high level where they have placed certain images, and they are recording the data right now.
When people have a near-death experience and they have had the sense of leaving their bodies and being up around the ceiling, have they seen these images?
If they've seen those images and it can be documented scientifically, then we have to think again about consciousness.
So when the guy comes back, when he flatlines and he's considered to be brain dead and they bring him back to life, this is happening more and more with advanced resuscitation techniques, many of them report having experiences out of their body.
Well, now here's a scientific way to test that.
Is that imagination or is there something real going on?
There's some quite compelling data but there's an elusive nature to the phenomenon Which is that very often when somebody has a near-death experience, they've had it in the one theater that didn't have the images on view.
They're looking for a way around this, which might involve using, like, iPad devices, which can be moved around very rapidly and placed in certain spots.
As a matter of fact, it's one of the reasons, amongst many, why I've started to write fiction as well as non-fiction.
Because if I explore extraordinary ideas in the realm of fiction, I'm not actually there making a claim that this is fact.
Nevertheless, the ideas are there to be explored in what I've written.
So it becomes possible to enter into an inquiry into the nature of reality without having to create this huge superstructure of defense against attacks by scientists.
And I think it's a very useful way forward, as far as I'm concerned, because I did find that writing nonfiction more and more, because I've become this Target figure for scientists required me to bulletproof my arguments in ways that make them, frankly, a bit boring to read, you know.
And I quite like the liberation of not having to do that.
That book, Fingerprints of the Gods, got me looking at so many different aspects of our culture and then questioning how we got to this point in the first place, how it is that I get up in the morning, I get in my car and I drive to work.
As I was doing this after reading your book, I was thinking how strange it is that we live in this society where I was born in 1967. The cities have been here since I was a baby.
Cars have been here.
I've assumed that they've always been here.
But then, when you really stop and think about what a short period of time 2,500 BC is, or what a short period of time even 30,000 BC is, that's nothing, man.
As I'm getting on in life, one of the things that makes me feel good is the feedback that I do get from people who've read my books, which I've...
I've sweated blood in order to write, and I've taken a lot of attacks from doing that.
But I find this a new thing for me.
You know, Facebook.
I mean, I'm a novice at Facebook, but I've started...
To interact really quite strongly on my Facebook pages.
I enjoy the interaction that I get there.
I enjoy the new ideas that are put to me by others.
And yeah, frankly, it's really nice when some kid in his 20s writes to me and says he read Fingerprints of the Gods and it changed the way that he looks at the world.
That makes me feel I've done something right anyway.
In all the mistakes I may have made, I've done something right.
But one of the things I think that you haven't done yet that you could totally be amazing at is your own podcast.
You're a wind-up guy.
I could press you.
I could start you up.
What's this ayahuasca stuff?
Bang!
Press play, and you will do the dance and captivate with amazing...
The descriptions and this very entrancing way of communicating.
I think people like that are really important in culture and most scientists are boring as fuck.
And even though they're doing amazing work and we wouldn't be communicating if it wasn't for some boring scientist, the reality is you're not going to excite people with that shitty personality of yours.
Now that I've kind of initiated myself into the internet world and got talking to people on Facebook and so on, and my website, you know, all of these things are...
And the one thing I haven't done, I do have a YouTube channel, but what I don't have is a podcast, and it might be something I... Massively important.
Well, there's also the ones that don't believe that and haven't clearly defined what consciousness is, but say, if psychic abilities do exist, Show them.
One is, this is an odd thing to ask because I've been very successful as a non-fiction author.
But I am hoping that people will pay attention to my fiction and that people will listen to my fiction.
It's very, very difficult for me to be published as a novelist.
The publishing industry want me to stay in my box as a successful non-fiction author, and they don't want me to explore the fictional side of things.
So I've managed to get a British publisher for my novel, which we talked about earlier, War God, about the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
But so far I don't have an American publisher.
And I have been helped a lot by my Facebook community, many of whom are Americans, who have gone to Amazon UK and bought the British edition of my book from America.
And it will be delivered to them here in America in a few days because the book is published on the 30th of May.
And if anybody's interested in that story, I would appreciate if they'd make the effort to go to Amazon UK and pick up the book because what that does then is it gives the book the possibility of some success in Britain.
And if it succeeds in Britain, then it will be picked up by an American publisher.
And I was able to bounce off the facts because the Aztec Society has been rightly described as the last magical civilization.
They were involved in magic and witchcraft in a huge way.
But they also persecuted witches, just as European society in the Middle Ages persecuted witches.
There are strong supernatural elements in this story, and in a way, I think it's only possible to understand what happened between 1519 and 1521 when you take the beliefs in the supernatural into account.
Because they wanted to present them to the god plump and desirable.
So they would fatten them for months on end.
And can you imagine living, that's your situation, you've been put in the fattening pen, they're feeding you this high-calorie diet, and at a certain date you're going to be marched up the pyramid and have your heart cut out.
Yeah, so an ancient Mayan pyramid is used as a construction material by some asshole firm who used diggers to just break down the body of the pyramid and use it to make roads.
But doesn't that short-sightedness, the pursuit of short-term goals, which might be immediately profitable, even though long-term massively damaging, doesn't that actually completely sum up everything that's wrong with global culture today?
I mean, if you wanted to take one act which kind of expresses it, that would be it.
But, you know, we don't think long-term.
We don't think in terms of the sacred.
We don't – the Amazon jungle.
Nobody considers, when it's being exploited as an economic resource, what that means for our planet in the long run, if all of those trees come down.
Well, the pattern is, the real issue with human beings is our ability to do things in large numbers that would be horrific if we did singularly.
The diffusion of responsibility that comes from acting as a corporation or acting as an army or acting where horrific things can be justified because you're only a part of one huge group of people that are doing these things.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of this podcast called Hardcore History that I talk about all the time.
But I've been listening to it.
Lately it's been talk about the Nazis and World War II.
But when you go back and pay attention to some of the things that happened in history and you see the amazing level of ruthlessness that people exhibited against their enemies just throughout the history of humans, there's been groups that flared up, whether it's the Mongols or the Nazis or the Romans.
happening now, I mean, you know, when a drone flies over a village in Afghanistan or Pakistan and 120 people get slaughtered, it's a bit remote, it's a bit distant.
We're not getting our hands dirty, but people are still being killed.
Well, apparently there's been a new scandal where four Americans were killed in a recent drone strike and now Obama is trying to restrict the use of drones and trying to say that they can't be used on Americans.
But whatever.
We live in strange times.
Is it because our humanity has not yet caught up to our technological capabilities that we are We've evolved technologically so much in the past several hundred years.
We've literally changed the world entirely, but yet the tissue, the DNA, the echoes of the past that lie in our language and in our cultures is really not caught up by any stretch of the imagination.
Isn't it funny that that would be one of the single most powerful changing elements in this culture, if all of a sudden ayahuasca centers started opening them up?
As long as those centers were run by good-hearted people who had the capacity to love and wanted The betterment of mankind rather than who were seeking personal gain or personal power through it.
I think that's a simple shorthand for it, just as there are also I think that the reality is much more complicated than we imagine, that there are huge unseen realms which impact upon us in important ways, and we are interacting with them whether we like it or not.
And in certain states of consciousness, that interaction can become conscious, and we can gain access to those realms.
And furthermore, I would say, I believe ultimately in the unity of all things, but right now in this particular learning experience that we're undergoing in a human incarnation, I think it's really useful that those choices exist.
What, after all, if everything was all good and rosy and perfect and that we're not possible to do wrong, what could we learn from this experience of life?
If we don't have the opportunity to make mistakes, if we are not faced with fundamental choices, what would we benefit from in living this life in a human body?
Lifespan, our 70 or 80 years or however many years we get, you know, a random element in that, we're going to step out and find ourselves in a room where we've been playing this game all along and then we'll be scored on what we did, you know?
And did we actually fulfill the objectives that we set out at the beginning of the game with?
There you get, actually, with that idea of a computer simulation, you find yourself coming full circle and meeting very ancient spiritual ideas, like that thing that I called the weighing of the soul in the ancient Egyptian system.
That's where you get scored on how you performed in the computer game.
Maybe how you performed was not how much money you made or how much power you had.
Is it possible that the sort of fractal nature of reality manifests itself in the idea of these demons being that you must reinforce good and you must punish bad?
And the only way these dumb people ever really completely understand it is if they feel a physical manifestation of the evil that they've caused, and that's what a demon is.
So it's just sort of a guide rail that you bump into, something that's supposed to steer you towards the positive.
The very reason why you evolve after a psychedelic trip, seeing the bad that you're doing, seeing the evil as manifested as an actual being.
Where it's most terrifying, your common enemies that you have in real life, whether it's predators or enemies, they're a physical manifestation.
I've always had an issue with the possibility of archetypes, too, that people have already established.
That archetypes that people already have in their head so that when you have an abduction experience, what you think is an abduction experience, you sort of fill in the blanks with whatever these entities are.
All of a sudden they become these grey guys with big black eyes because that's the cultural archetype that we've sort of subscribed to.
Well, particularly on the walls of, in fact, on a little alcove and a ceiling inside Peshmerl Cave in France, there's a fantastically recognizable depiction of what we would call a grey today.
And he is pierced through the body with a number of spears and he has this kind of high-domed forehead and narrow pointed chin and just a hint of large dark eyes.
Do you think that these things are actually physically visiting or do you think that there's a chemical doorway that's opened through psychedelics or through some technology and that that's how they're appearing?
That's what it feels to you when you experience you?
That's what it feels to me like, that I'm entering a seamlessly convincing And again, I want to stress the point that because you've had this experience, these true experiences, if they're just a hallucination, a byproduct of the mind that is impossible to prove, you're still having the exact same experience.
Yeah, you're still having the exact same experience.
And there you come back to the point we made earlier, that what do you then learn from that experience?
And if you grow in some way through that experience, it doesn't really matter whether it's Freestanding reality or whether it's something you projected.
And as we become more interconnected with our ability to communicate and our idea that the human race really is one gigantic superorganism, as we accept that idea more and more, it opens up a lot of other possibilities.
It opens up a lot of possibilities for just our overall view of things.
This is the new Copernican revolution that we're poised on the edge of.
At one time, it was considered that the Sun went around the Earth.
And that all the stars revolved around the Earth, and the Earth was fixed and still in the center.
And then some people started having experiences, or if you like, finding data which contradicted that, and eventually a whole world view was thrown away.
And I think we're at the edge of moving into a whole new revolution about the nature of reality, that it is just much more complicated than we've imagined.
That's a kind of sketch of the Peshmel figure.
That's not the original cave painting, and I'm afraid the only UFOs that are actually present are the ones above the individual's head.
I mean, the caves, this is one of the great experiences we can have as human beings, is to go into those painted caves and go in in silence and in darkness and just get a sense of the atmosphere.
They're transformative spaces.
They knew something about set and setting in those times.
And of course, I'm convinced they were using psychedelics.
This is the new discovery that some of the very oldest cave art was almost certainly done by Neanderthals.
So the Neanderthal image is due for a complete rehabilitation very, very, very soon.
The Neanderthals – the image that we have of Neanderthals is completely wrong.
But there's a thing I call six million years of boredom, which is from the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee through until well after the emergence of anatomically modern humans, our ancestors were very dull, judging by what they left behind, judging by what they produced.
They were not thinking laterally.
They were not creating.
They were not – they did not have spiritual concepts or ideas.
And it's rather like a light is switched on in the human brain all around the world somewhere after 100,000 years ago, really 40,000 years ago, that we get this amazing explosion of symbolic art and suddenly you recognize that the creatures are just like us and that we are dealing with people we could communicate with on a symbolic level.
So something happened.
And I made this case extensively in my book, Supernatural, that what happened to our ancestors was encounters with psychedelics.
That's what took us out of the dull and boring zone and put us into the realm of imagination and creativity and spirit.
I mean, for those who've never had a psychedelic experience, To put down others who have had it and to tell them that that experience is wrong, I mean, that's like a celibate telling somebody not to have sex.
The celibate has no experience of the thing that they're talking about.
But I think that people like you that are brave enough to speak out about this and, in fact, even write books about it, that's the ripples that sends out this information and the universe picks it up.
And the internet grabs it and duplicates it and throws it up on Twitter and then, boom, we're off to the races.
And new ideas are introduced into the minds of the young people who I think, that's what gives me hope.
That grew up with the internet and that are not going to put up with all that shit any longer that comes down from a hierarchical, controlling, dominator culture.
And I think we as a culture or certain members of our culture are jumping to the conclusion that creatures a bit like us, perhaps looking slightly different, In very high-tech craft are crossing interstellar space.
Are crossing interstellar space and are coming here in technology.
I personally think, again, I can't prove it, but I think it's more likely we're dealing with interdimensional contexts, that these entities are not high-tech aliens from a planet a bit like ours, but they're coming to us from literally the other side of reality.
Why do so many drugs, like whether it's ayahuasca or there's other ones that have archetypes that are built in like snakes and jaguars, what do you think that is?
Do you think that's the experiences of the people that have taken it before you?
Well, first of all, I don't think it's that we don't know what an archetype is.
There's this idea that the human brain has all these patterns and shapes just built into it archetypally.
I think just as possible is that there are other levels of reality in which entities are able to look like that, shape-shifting entities that can take on many different forms.
The experience is very universal.
For example, everyone who drinks ayahuasca, pretty much everyone, if they persist with it, will encounter serpents.
And those serpents aren't Like your everyday serpent, you know, they're 500 feet long with mouths the size of cars and richly colored and patterned and intelligent.
MR. Now, why is it that somebody who drinks ayahuasca in Tokyo and somebody who drinks it in New York and somebody who drinks it in the Amazon, that they all encounter these serpent, intelligent serpent entities?
MR. Well, I think that there's something out there which chooses to manifest in that form, and I think that it's being witnessed just as if Three different explorers went into the jungle and met the same previously uncontacted tribe and came back and drew us images.
And I think that there is some reality to it.
But I can't prove that.
I just think that that's what's going on.
And I've had Enough encounters.
So like Rick Strassman's work with DMT, which I know that you're familiar with because you presented the DMT, the spirit molecule documentary, that a number of his volunteers encounter entities who say to them, we're so glad you've discovered this technology.
And thank you to everybody that tuned into the podcast.
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We will be back on Monday with Dave Asprey.
A lot of people really enjoyed his first talk and he's got a lot of new information.
I know a lot of folks have questions about the whole Bulletproof Exec.
Go to BulletproofExec.com if you want to prepare for this and Find out what the fuck Dave Asprey's all about, but he's a brilliant guy, and we look forward to talking to him on Monday.