All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 6, 2010 - Project Camelot
01:39:56
PROJECT CAMELOT INTERVIEWS GRAHAM HANCOCK - Maestro
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Transcription by CastingWords
Thank you.
Yeah, well here we are in sunny Los Angeles, which unfortunately is not sunny at all today.
Hi, I'm Carrie Cassidy from Project Camelot, and we are here with Graham Hancock, and he's a fabulous researcher and has really gone down the rabbit hole and investigated the pyramids, the background behind where we're coming from, really branching out.
So I'm not sure how far to go with this introduction, and maybe let's have you take over.
Sure, sure.
Well, you're right.
I am branching out and I like to think as a researcher and as an author that I'm always doing that.
I want to keep at the cutting edge and I want to keep what I'm doing fresh and original.
I don't want to just endlessly repeat myself on the same theme.
I got drawn into ancient mysteries Really quite by chance, well over 20 years ago.
I used to be a journalist very much mainstream.
I was the East Africa correspondent for The Economist based in Nairobi, Kenya and traveling around Africa reporting on wars and famines.
And all of economic and current affairs matters.
But I came across an extraordinary story in Ethiopia where I learned that Ethiopia claimed to possess the lost Ark of the Covenant.
And it was my investigation into that During the 1980s, which resulted in my book, The Sign and the Seal, a quest for the lost Ark of the Covenant, that took me right out of current affairs and into the investigation of ancient mysteries,
including, of course, the majestic, sacred mystery of ancient Egypt and its astonishing works of art and architecture and what all of these stand for.
And that line of investigation eventually led me to my book, Fingerprints of the Gods, which was published in 1995 and concerns the possibility of a lost civilization.
Could there be just a huge forgotten episode in human history?
This was really the focus of my research for many, many years, from the mid-90s through into about 2002, 2003, When I reached a point where I felt that I had done everything that I could humanly and usefully do with that investigation, the last part of it involved close to six years of scuba diving.
All around the world in sometimes extremely risky and dangerous conditions, looking for underwater ruins which would have been submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age.
And really after I'd completed that, I felt that I had definitely not only talked the talk, but walked the walk, and that it was time for me to move on as a researcher, And perhaps for others to take over where I'd left off with all the clues and trails of investigation that I had left open to them.
I'm not all that familiar with the undersea work that you've done, and I'm curious, did you ever go, for example, in the seas around Alexandria, in Egypt?
I've dived off Alexandria, and I've spent many hours underwater off Alexandria, doing two quite different things.
First of all, I had a look at the historic period ruins, so-called Cleopatra's Palace, Which lies underwater right off the lighthouse in Alexandria.
The area that's thought to have been the site of the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria.
And what's underwater there, really quite shallow at a depth of 15 feet, up to maybe 20 feet maximum, are ruins from the recognizable and relatively recent historic period.
You're looking at Roman ruins and late Greek Tolimaic ruins, which are underwater there.
So you're looking at stuff that's about 2,200 years old or even less, 2,100 years old.
And whatever submerged that, and whatever the story of the submergence is, it's not connected in my mind to the issue of a lost civilization.
It generally appears to be the case that the Nile dumped a lot of silts which built up along the coast, and that it may have been that buildings were Built on top of these, there was then a collapse which brought this material underwater because really there hasn't been significant sea level rise in the last 2,000 years.
But what I've always been interested in is the possibility of ruins at much greater depth than that.
Really once you get down to about 80 or 100 feet underwater, You can be absolutely sure that you're dealing with rising sea level at the end of the last ice age, and the science is pretty exact.
You can say when it was submerged.
So if I'm diving on structures that are 100 feet below sea level, I can be pretty sure that they're about 12,000 years old.
And what actually drew me to Alexandria wasn't the historic period ruins, although it was very interesting to see them, but local divers who had told me that they had seen gigantic ruin fields at much greater depth.
And I went with one of these local divers.
We went through the torturous process of getting permission from all the different branches of the Egyptian government that one must work with in order to do dives like this.
And then we went underwater and we started looking for the sites that our local contact had dived on as a technical diver in the past.
And after some days, we found one of these sites, which indeed does consist Of gigantic blocks of stone, true megaliths, which would weigh in the region of 100 tons each, laid out like just a vast carpet on the seabed.
And actually what it reminded me most of was the colossal paving stones that we see around the Great Pyramid of Giza, which we know are extremely ancient.
And I did try to draw attention to some of the archaeologists who are working in Alexandria to this anomalous ruin field that we had discovered.
But as far as I know, there's been no further follow-up to what is there.
But I did describe it in my book, Underworld, and we do include some photographs that my wife, Santa, who dives with me, took of this most curious, anomalous and unexpected ruin field in deep water out some kilometres from shore off Alexandria.
Okay, very interesting.
Would you say that it's possible that was part of what could have been Atlantis?
I have a view on Atlantis, and in fact, if you look at Plato, Plato is the earliest surviving source for the specific story of Atlantis, for the name of a civilization that was called Atlantis.
There are many, many other traditions and stories about lost civilizations that were destroyed in a global flood.
But if we take the specifics of Atlantis, the earliest documentary record we have was handed down to us by Plato.
And Plato actually spoke of two things.
Yes, he spoke of a continent-sized landmass, but he also spoke of a great empire that was spread out around the world.
And that's the view of Atlantis that I take, that we were looking at a maritime, seagoing civilization Which was, in many respects, highly advanced, which had charted and mapped the entire world, and which had settled, or at least created, outposts on coastlines all around the world.
And I would suggest very strongly that one of those outposts would have been off ancient Egypt.
Very interesting, actually, because if you look at the Plato story, which is reported in his Timaeus and his Critias Dialogues, You will find that he tells us a number of things.
Firstly, that he got the information about Atlantis from a relative of his, an elder relative, Solon, the Greek lawmaker.
And that Solon had visited Egypt and had talked with priests at a temple that no longer exists at Sais in the Delta.
And those priests had told him the story of Atlantis, how 9,000 years before the time of Solon, there had been a great civilization which had been destroyed in a single terrible day and night, a cataclysmic flood accompanied by earthquakes.
And so complete had the destruction been That mankind had been forced to begin again like children with no memory of what went before.
So, first of all, there is this Egyptian connection in the passing down of the story of Atlantis.
Secondly, the date is very interesting.
9,000 years before the time of Solon is approximately 9,600-9,500 BC, which means 11,500 years ago.
And that plugs us in.
If Plato made the story up, as many of his critics have claimed, then it's astonishing that he chose that date because modern science, geological science, tells us that that date was one of the times of peak flooding and cataclysmic meltdown of the great ice caps during the last ice age and a time of very rapid sea level rise.
So Plato picked a very interesting date and time.
What about Herodotus?
Didn't he also talk about, for example, the library under the Sphinx?
You'll have to forgive me because my recollection of the details of Herodotus are not that strong.
Was he before Plato or after him?
I recall Herodotus talking about the labyrinth.
Okay, yes.
And talking about a lost or concealed labyrinthine structure of great antiquity, but I don't find specific references to a lost civilization in my readings of Herodotus, but that may simply be because my readings of Herodotus are limited.
I've not studied him in perhaps as much depth as I should.
Oh, okay.
Because, well, my understanding is we interviewed Patrick Jarrell, and he went with a group into some ruins that are somewhere in Egypt, I'm not sure exactly where, where they are saying that the labyrinth has been found.
Yeah, I just don't have a view on that.
I don't have a view on that specific issue.
Okay.
Well, it is a very interesting area, and maybe you should go investigate that, because from what I understand, this is what they're claiming, is that within the labyrinth there was inscriptions that describe what's going to happen in 2012.
Right.
Well, let those who are investigating it investigate it, and let them reveal to us what they find.
So you're not...
To my mind at the moment, this particular issue of the labyrinth is, apart from the ancient authority in Herodotus, is really in the area of hearsay and rumour.
I would like to see more firm information, and I wouldn't like to just leap off to a conclusion about it based on a few whispers here and there.
I would like to have much more evidence, if this is indeed the case.
It should come out.
Okay.
But you say you went diving into ruins, and I know you've visited ruins in South America, Machu Picchu, and all late Titicataca, and all over the world, probably.
I have been privileged and lucky enough to travel very extensively over the 20 years or so that I focused my life on the mystery of a lost civilization.
And in terms of specific diving, I have dived incredibly extensively around the islands of Japan.
Hundreds and hundreds of dives, specifically at the extraordinary sights off the island of Yonaguni.
In southwest Japan, where we find gigantic stepped pyramid-like structures underwater.
In fact, a huge complex of clearly man-made ruins.
I have dived on the other side of the world in the Bimini Road off Florida around the Grand Bahama banks, a very, very interesting site.
I've dived all over the Mediterranean not only in Alexandria but around Sardinia and also extensively around the island of Malta where again we have both very intriguing gigantic megalithic structures above water Okay, and would you say that what's underwater in Malta might be of the same period of what you find off Alexandria?
Yeah, of the deep water ruins off Alexandria, I would say that the deep water ruins off Malta are of the same period, which puts us back Around 12,000 years ago, puts us back to the end of the last Ice Age, puts us in the frame for the time that Plato gave us for the destruction of Atlantis.
Now I've dived also elsewhere, I've dived very extensively around the coasts of India, both of Northwest India and Southeast India.
It's not well understood that during the Ice Age sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.
And the world looked completely different.
It was 400 feet lower because huge amounts of water that are presently in the oceans were locked up in gigantic ice caps on the Northern Hemisphere on top of North America and on top of Northern Europe.
Now these ice caps were up to two or even three miles deep.
And when they melted cataclysmically, you had just gigantic flows of water back into the ocean, which raised ocean levels.
So once you wind the coastlines back, as we can do with excellent computer simulations now, To the end of the last ice age, you find, for example, that India and the island of Sri Lanka, which are now separate, were joined together into one landmass.
And we found intriguing underwater ruins between India and Sri Lanka, which again, by their depth, close to 100 feet, would date to around 12,000 years ago.
And interestingly, India It has its own story of a great lost civilization and puts almost exactly the same date on it that Plato puts on Atlantis around about 12,000 years ago and suggests that India not only was joined to Sri Lanka, which turns out to be correct, but that India extended much further to the south than it does today, which also turns out to be correct.
So it was clues like this that led me to my diving adventures.
Were there local fishermen or local divers who had seen anomalous structures under water?
Was there evidence of rapid sea level rise in that area?
And sometimes, were there ancient maps?
Which showed features that no longer exist today.
And when I could bring all of these three together, then I would go diving.
I've dived also extensively across the Pacific Ocean, in Micronesia, around Tahiti, around Tonga, and in all of these places we have found anomalous structures underwater.
And I put all of Well, aren't they also
always searching for treasure?
Yeah, shipwrecks and treasure.
That's the focus of marine archaeology.
You know, there's a prejudice in mainstream archaeology, which is that there could be no lost civilization.
Archaeologists like to feel that they're pretty much in control of human history.
And so when you tell them to go and spend vast resources looking for It's a waste of time because there couldn't be such a thing.
So their preconception actually determines what they're willing to research and not research.
And it's why I and Santa had to go and do this research entirely on our own funding without any institutional support whatsoever because nobody else was doing it.
What about Michael Cremo's work, Forbidden Archaeology?
Have you gotten involved in that?
I know Michael.
I've got the highest possible respect for Forbidden Archaeology.
And what Michael shows in Forbidden Archaeology is that there is a kind of knowledge filter at work in the information that archaeologists are prepared to pass on to us.
And again and again, intriguing discoveries are made, which raise huge question marks over the picture and the pattern of history that is taught to us in schools.
And these question marks are completely ignored because they don't fit and actually even the documentation can disappear after a while.
One of the great things that Sir Michael Cremler did was to gather together a lot of documentation that otherwise wouldn't have been available to any of us, which proves that archaeology is deliberately ignoring Very,
very key evidence in order to maintain a specific picture of history that puts us at the apex and pinnacle of the human story and sees a nice, tidy evolutionary process up until ourselves.
Whereas, in fact, if you view the evidence dispassionately, you tend to get a picture of cycles of time operating and of a rise and fall of human civilizations.
And you understand that Plato was right when he called us a species with amnesia, effectively, who have no memory of what went before.
And I think part of my role has been to play a part in putting down the evidence that will help to recover that lost memory.
I have so many questions, and I know that we're going to have limited time here, so forgive me if I jump around, okay?
No problem.
And then if you want to sort of circle back to certain areas, feel free to sort of manage the situation a little bit.
But I know you've spent a great deal of time investigating Egypt, And I know that we have a timeline, and I've been working with Michael Tellinger, and I don't know if you're familiar with his work at all.
A little bit, yeah.
Okay.
And he's dealing with South Africa and some stone ruins that he has found there, or that some other people have found, but he has been bringing to the public attention, really.
And I took a trip down there and I filmed a small documentary that I'm editing at this time.
But the energy in the stones was really palpable.
It was amazing.
And I do feel energy in my hands and can go to different spots in Egypt, in the Great Pyramid and various pyramids and so on, and feel different energies.
And so I'm wondering whether or not you, in other words, in putting this picture together, and I know you have this new book, Entanglement, or Entangled.
Entangled, by the way.
Yeah, Entangled.
And I just started it, and it's fascinating, and kudos to you, because I know the transition from going from fiction to nonfiction is huge, really, I think.
At any rate, what we've got here is, because we're Project Camelot, we're interested in the big picture.
We're interested in how the different pieces link together.
And I'm wondering where you're getting to, because you've come now down a very long journey, as it were.
And you must be reaching a place where you're starting to put these pieces together in a very intriguing way, I would imagine.
Well, what's come to the fore in my research in more recent years is the issue and the mystery of human consciousness.
I mean, what are we if not consciousness, if not pure consciousness?
That is the essence of the human being.
And it's just a fact that science hasn't got the faintest idea what consciousness is or how, you know, with this few pounds of jelly inside our skulls that we call our brains, how we transmute experiences, feelings, sensation, emotion, how all of these intangibles and appreciation of beauty, love for a fellow human being, how all of this can manifest through this...
Object that we call our brains.
Science doesn't have the faintest idea.
They call it perhaps the most difficult problem in science.
And I've become very interested in consciousness.
And that interest in consciousness does of course go back into the earliest days of my work into lost civilizations.
I happen to believe that the ancient Egyptians were the inheritors of a vastly more ancient tradition.
And let's call the origin of that tradition Atlantis by any other name.
It may have been called many, many different names.
But the ancient Egyptians themselves never claimed that their civilization was totally their invention.
They saw their civilization as a legacy from the time of the gods, from the first time, as they called it, Zep-Tepi.
And I won't go into immense details here, but I and Robert Baval, working together using astronomy and architecture, have suggested very strongly that we should be able to put a date on this time, this mysterious time that the Egyptians called the first time, and that that date would be around 12,500 years ago, 10,500 BC, approximately, give or take a thousand years.
I see the ancient Egyptians as the inheritors of an ancient system of knowledge and that this system was very much to do with understanding the mystery of human consciousness and using the powers of human consciousness.
Are we stunned by the incredible achievements of the ancient Egyptians with the monuments that they created or inherited?
Yes, we are stunned.
And we don't understand how some of these gigantic stone complexes were put into place.
Least of all, how the Great Pyramid, which contains up in its core structure blocks of stone that in some cases weigh around 70 tons, How on earth this was done and how it was done in a monument with a 13-acre footprint that is almost perfectly, with really almost atomic accuracy, aligned to true north, south, east and west.
Well, that's because we're rooted and grounded in A technical notion of how matter may be manipulated.
We think that it has to involve physical advantage and leverage, mechanical leverage, and we don't understand how the ancient Egyptians got that leverage to work on these huge stone structures.
But if the ancient Egyptians were masters of a science of consciousness, If they could manipulate matter through the power of the mind, and I honestly believe that that is the case, then everything becomes much more clear.
Likewise, the sacred quest of the ancient Egyptians for the mystery of what it is to be alive.
No other culture except perhaps the ancient Tibetans Have investigated the mystery of death more deeply than the ancient Egyptians who put their best minds to work on the problem for 3,000 years.
Whereas we, in our culture, are frankly midgets in that study.
We don't even begin to make that study.
So we need to listen to what the ancient Egyptians have to say and what the ancient Egyptians say very, very clearly.
Is that consciousness does not end with death.
That death is an episode that we are incarnating in this body in order to learn and to grow and to develop.
That we may come back many times to learn the lessons that we need to learn here.
So, right from my earliest days of getting to grips with ancient Egypt and other ancient cultures, I was also getting to grips with the mysteries of consciousness.
But as my work has progressed, I would say that the study of consciousness has become far more important to me.
And I've begun to move away from the very hands-on interest in the ancient ruins themselves and the measurements and statistics and the numbers associated with those.
As I say, when I completed Underworld, In 2002, with all that diving behind me, I really felt, okay, I'm going to draw a line under this now.
There may be plenty more work for others to do, and I hope they go ahead and do it.
But I've made my contribution, and what I'm interested in now is consciousness.
And that's what led me on to my next and last nonfiction book.
Which is the book called Supernatural, Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.
And Supernatural looks at the mystery of rock and cave art all around the world.
How it appears after close to six million years of evolution, if you accept the official line, that our ancestors have made almost no progress at all.
And then suddenly Really quite recently, less than 40,000 years ago, it's like a light has been switched on in the human brain all over the world.
And we can see from the archaeological record that we are dealing with fully conscious creatures just like ourselves.
And what's interesting is those early humans, those ancestral humans who were anatomically modern and look just like you and I, left records of their experiences in the form of rock and cave art all around the world.
And there are certain specific aspects of that art Which tell us beyond a shadow of a doubt that those ancient artists were exploring and experimenting with altered states of consciousness.
They were getting out of the prison of the body and letting their spirit roam free.
In the wider reality that is normally closed off to our senses and very often they were doing so as shamans to this day still do by using what we would call visionary plants.
Plants that contain visionary properties which allow us to Dim down the material realm and turn up the lights on the non-material that surrounds us and interpenetrates us in everything that we do, but actually that most of us, most of the time, are not normally aware of.
And so I conducted a huge investigation into that subject.
And that investigation, in my case, involved personal experience because I I don't believe in just sitting in an armchair and theorizing about what I'm writing.
I have to put myself into my investigations, into my story.
And in this case, first of all, it involved going down to the Amazon jungle and sitting down with shamans in the Amazon and drinking the powerful hallucinogenic visionary brew known as ayahuasca.
And experiencing the seamlessly convincing parallel realms that it took my consciousness into.
And I began to realize that we do have a secret doorway inside our own minds, which certain techniques can allow us to open.
So that we can project our consciousness through into freestanding other worlds and where we may encounter their inhabitants who are interested in us.
And I suggest very strongly in Supernatural that it was these encounters with what I call the ancient teachers of mankind and what shamans call spirits that led to this vast leap forward in human progress.
Okay, well, and that's a substantial summary of where you've been going recently.
What I wanted to do was go back just a little bit and ask you, in terms of the pyramids and the moving of the stones and how you said that the consciousness is obviously the mind was going to interact with these stones in order to facilitate the building of these amazing monuments.
And what we are talking about, what we think, At least in Camelot and what we're coming across is basically, you know, sound technology.
In other words, the ability of sound and crystals and things like, I don't know if you're, you probably are aware of the Coral Castle in Florida.
And have, so did you find yourself coming into contact with evidence and interesting evidence?
Things like the fact that the ankh itself may be a tuning fork related to sound and so on.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that a sound technology enhanced by focusing consciousness was central to the moving of these gigantic blocks of stone and perhaps not only the moving but also the cutting.
There is a legend or an account One of the few, actually, which talks about gigantic blocks being moved into place.
And it states this very, very clearly.
I reported this in my book, Fingerprints of the Gods.
It states it very, very clearly that the priests gathered together and ushered up a chant.
And that the chant was what powered the movements of the stones.
And I think this is a very fruitful area of research into which much further work needs to be done.
And I'm glad to hear that you guys are doing it.
I can't actually say that we're the investigators, per se, or doing anything with regard to that technology, but basically what it all starts to point to is a form of What people are calling free energy.
There's a resonance.
I don't know if you're familiar with Wilhelm Reich's investigation into Orgone, and I don't know whether you've studied Eastern philosophy in terms of Kundalini energy and all of that, but that all sort of tends to come together when you're dealing with this area of using the mind And the energy in humans and generating the resonance.
And I know you've been working with or at least talking with David Wilcock to some degree, and he's very interested in the notion of the vortex that can be created and so on with these energies.
So I guess that dovetails with where you're going with this.
I would say that it dovetails, but it's not the particular line of inquiry that I'm following now.
I understand.
What I'm really interested in now is what you might almost call the philosophical issues about what it is to be a human being.
And the nature of good and evil and the nature of the wider reality in which we are immersed.
I feel that that is the area where I'm most likely to be useful to the world.
In the future, and that's really why I wrote my non-fiction book, Supernatural, and it's why I've written my first novel, Entangled, which is to try to bring these ideas concerning the mysteries of human consciousness into the attention of the general public because everything in our society today Conspires to suppress and limit human consciousness.
Absolutely.
It's really almost terrifying the power and effectiveness of the mind control techniques that operate in our society.
That's right.
So that most people most of the time don't even know that they are being controlled and manipulated.
I definitely see one of the agents of this mind control as the absolutely mind-numbing phenomenon called reality TV. And the fact that our children are being subjected 24 hours a day to this utter trivia with very low values attached to it.
And I believe that it's shutting down human consciousness in areas that we desperately need to be expanding into.
We can't any longer, you know, we think of ourselves as an incredibly innovative society.
But when I look at the long story of the human record, what I see is long periods of stasis where nothing new is being thought of or explored, followed by sudden revolutionary moments when everything is overthrown and new ideas come to the fore.
And I think that although we are indeed innovative with technology, we've got stuck in a rut with the idea of what technology is and what it should be.
And I think we're stuck in that rut and allowing ourselves to be stuck in it because of the control of our consciousness that our society operates on.
So that we will continue endlessly repeating the same patterns of behavior which allow large corporations to make huge sums of money And which allow powerful individuals behind the scenes, not necessarily in the forefront of government, to keep society running in their interests, not in our interests.
And so one of the main issues that I now seek to talk about and to express and to continue researching is the notion of personal sovereignty.
Over our own consciousness.
And I think this is the next step that we need to take.
We need to assert our sovereignty over our own consciousness and resist all efforts by the powers that be in society to take control of our consciousness.
And I think if we do that, then a magical realm can open up before us.
Because right now We are just tapping into a tiny, tiny fraction of our potential, as we have these incredible bodies and incredible brains, and we are just using a tiny, tiny fraction of it.
The ancients always said that it's a precious gift to be born in a human body.
And in the ancient Egyptian scheme, in what is called the judgment scene, where you see the weighing of the heart against the feather of truth, One of the things that's undoubtedly being weighed up there is what use did you make of this incredible gift that you were given?
Did you use it well?
Or did you waste it?
And some dark force in our society is deluding millions, billions of people not to use their lives well, but to waste them away on trivia and nothingness.
And we need to recapture the high ground in this area and explore the whole potential of human consciousness, which might do away completely.
This is where we come back to the issue of free energy.
It might do away completely with the present economic control that is exercised through the control of energy resources.
No doubt about it.
Once you get into this area, you're realising that you're talking about something very radical and very, very transformative if it's allowed to happen.
Well, let's go down that road a little bit in regard to dark energies, because you did write a book, I believe with Robert Buval, that is called Talisman, if I have it correct.
And in many ways you seem to have gone down the road of secret societies and information that's being withheld from the public.
Because ultimately when you're studying, whether you're studying current civilizations that have gone, have passed, or whether you're looking for, as you call it, a lost civilization, you're really talking about uncovering hidden knowledge.
And that also is really crucial to the nature of consciousness, right?
So if the Vatican, for example, has libraries, and I don't know if you've ever, you know, come across witnesses as we have that talk about the Vatican libraries where there are a great deal of, you know, scrolls and things that have never been made public and so on.
But I would be curious as to, in your travels, What you discovered in terms of the secret societies and how that works into this...
Actually comes right around to what our children are being shown and taught at this time and the mind control.
Yeah, well, of course, the essence of a secret society is that it should be secret.
So we don't know it exists.
Any secret society that isn't secret and that we really know a lot about, by definition...
Isn't a secret society, is it?
If we are truly dealing with vast forces working behind the scenes of history that are manipulating our lives, let's not expect to find a whole lot of evidence about them.
It's going to be a tough search.
To expose that and bring it to the surface.
And once you do, it's going to be a tough search to convince others that you're right.
Sure.
And I sometimes wonder whether the focus on Freemasons, on the Knights Templar and such organizations isn't actually a kind of distraction from the real game that is being played.
And the view that I take and that I expressed in Talisman, which I co-authored with Robert Bavar, We need to look in particular at a fascinating body of texts called the Gnostic texts, which were rediscovered at Nakamadi in Upper Egypt, having lain buried since the 4th century after Christ.
Right through until 1945 or 1946 when they were discovered.
And what those texts tell us is that there was a system for preserving and defending human knowledge and human consciousness, for helping us to find the right path.
And that that system was utterly destroyed by the Church.
Indeed, by the Catholic Church once it had become the Roman Catholic Church.
Once Christianity entered into a marriage with ancient Rome and with the powerful apparatus of state control that ancient Rome manipulated, I personally believe that Christianity lost its way.
And the Gnostic texts recover for us the true vision that later became treated as a heresy and for which you could be burnt at the stake for exploring those ideas.
Off camera, you and I were talking earlier about past lives and I sometimes wonder whether I had a past life as a Gnostic Because I feel so emotionally attached to that period and I feel so much pain about what happened then, about the mass scale suppression and destruction of a very fine idea and understanding of the mystery of existence.
And at the heart, of the Gnostic texts is the notion that spiritual forces are at work behind this suppression of mankind.
Not only secret societies, not only greedy or power hungry men and women, but enormous spiritual forces.
And in the Gnostic view of things, a number of things are turned upside down.
For example, the entity That we've been in the habit of calling God or Jehovah or Yahweh is seen by the Gnostics as an imposter.
Not as a God at all, but as a kind of demigod.
They call him an Archon who deliberately seeks to mislead humanity by presenting humanity with false information and leading us down false trails so that we never Really realize the purpose that we are on this planet to fulfill.
And in the Gnostic text, for example, again all of us read in the Western and the Christian tradition are used to seeing the serpent as the bad guy in the story of the Garden of Eden.
But in the Gnostic texts, as a matter of fact, the serpent is seen as the good guy because he is offering to Adam and Eve the possibility of knowledge and indeed of eternal life.
That these possibilities are open to them if only they will take the next step.
So the Gnostics have a very different take on this.
And I would say that my view is that that Gnostic analysis is correct.
And that in the realm that we call the spirit world, the spirit realms that surround us, there are both good and evil forces at work.
Absolutely.
And that in a way, mankind is the fulcrum of a cosmic struggle between good and evil.
The choices that we make are absolutely fundamental in how that struggle plays out.
Would it be a victory of the light or a victory of darkness?
Those choices ultimately are up to us and what the suppression of consciousness is doing in our societies.
The mind control and the brainwashing is doing is stopping us making those free choices in the right direction with disastrous consequences both at the material physical level when we see the terrible things that are being done in our world today and the grotesque cruelties that Humans inflict upon other humans and the absolutely awful and irresponsible destruction of the environment that is taking place due to so-called commercial pressures.
So definite physical, direct, obvious, measurable impact, but also a terrible spiritual impact as well from the way that our society is living now.
And are secret societies involved in this?
Can I put my finger on specific individuals or men and women who are doing it?
No, actually I can't, but I'm not surprised.
Because I wouldn't expect them to show their heads above the parapet.
But what my own investigations have shown me Is that the spiritual forces behind all of this are very real, and that we need to take them seriously.
Let's no longer listen to this fairy story that scientists tell us, that there is no such thing as good or evil, that there is no such thing as right or wrong, that all of these things are just culturally relative.
It's not so at all.
These are fundamental forces at work in the universe, and human choices for the light or for the darkness are of enormous importance.
Absolutely.
Couldn't agree with you more on that.
Okay.
But, you know, it's interesting to me that in some ways you started out in a very different place than people like Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna.
And yet, in a funny way...
You're actually starting to pick up the, I don't know, the baton, in a sense, and run with it from where they left off, if, you know, I could be so bold.
Yeah, I would thank you for that, because, you know, I have huge respect in particular for Terence McKenna, who I think was a great liberating force in this world.
And we lost a great man when Terence McKenna died so young and so suddenly.
Timothy Leary was much more Controversial character in many ways.
I think that Timothy Leary was irresponsible in the way that he promoted the use of psychedelics almost for recreational purposes.
For me, psychedelics are extremely serious business.
They're not something that ever should be used for recreation.
They are about opening consciousness and about dissolving artificial boundaries between us and the rest of reality.
They are about deep personal exploration.
But they can be incredibly difficult and challenging.
To work with and it's important I think for anybody who plans to work with psychedelics to enter into that process with respect and with suitable preparation and never to do so for purposes of recreation and certainly in this sense my experiences with ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle have shown me how positive and nurturing Psychedelics can be when used
for the right purposes rather than the wrong purposes.
And again, part of my argument about sovereignty over consciousness is I do believe that it is not the business of the state what I, as an adult, choose to experience within the sanctum.
Of my own mind.
As long as I don't get into other people's faces or cause troubles for others, I think it's not the business of the state to get involved in that at all.
And I'm in favor of adult Sovereignty and adult responsibility.
The two things come hand in hand.
One of the problems with the state apparatus in the West today is that it is more and more taking sovereignty out of the hands of adults and investing it in the state so that we feel almost unable to make any decision without referring to rules and regulations that have been laid down by the state.
The current obsession with health and safety, for example, is an example of that.
You know, really, there are many, many decisions which are being taken by the state.
Vaccinations, for example.
Vaccination campaigns, the notion that everybody must have this vaccination.
It's inculcating a habit of obedience and of unquestioning obedience into the citizen instead of a habit of responsible investigation and personal sovereignty.
Absolutely.
Well, I'm also very interested, from listening to your lecture last night at the Bodhi Tree, and I must say it was excellent in my view, where you're talking about the role of the shaman, what I say shaman, shamaness, in society, and it's been overlooked, obviously, in our world.
To a large degree, currently.
That's right.
And I also think it's been misunderstood, just from my point of view.
I often feel that some of the healers of society are actually not known as that.
So that people may be shamans and people don't realize they are.
I would suggest that certain musical personalities, for example, are actually shamans.
They're doing a healing job out there, and that may go for performers of various kinds as well, as well as artists of painters and filmmakers and so on.
And in this case, I think in a certain sense, The shaman played a role in tribal society as a guide into sort of going down that road, as you say, where you could be guided to some degree in the use of hallucinogenics, for example.
Yes, or other techniques to enter altered states of consciousness, because powerful visionary plants are not the only way to go.
And may not be right for everybody.
There is, you know, I would not be the last person who would either advocate the use of these plants or seek to encourage others to use them.
But I'm saying that for some people who approach the matter responsibly and seriously, they may be right.
But there are plenty of other techniques available, including, for example, Stan Grof's holotropic For example, certain kinds of rhythmic dancing, even meditation, even hypnosis can be very useful in getting into an altered state of consciousness.
But to my mind, and it's really a matter of semantics or definition, I would resist calling anyone a shaman.
Who is not working with altered states of consciousness.
To me, that's the common ground of all shamanistic figures, is that they have explored the visionary realms by whatever technique they use to get out of What I refer to as the alert problem-solving state of consciousness that is kind of the default mode in our society.
Shamans are those who have very deliberately, in a targeted way, altered their consciousness to experience the wider reality and to negotiate and work on behalf of fellow human beings with the spirit entities that live in those realms beyond daily experience.
So I would say that, first of all, alternate states of consciousness, and secondly, absolutely the healing mission.
This is part of shamanic work.
The shaman is a healer, and he is drawing on the resources of the universe to bring that healing to bear, rather than just on the resources of technology and pharmacology, which is the Western medicine way of doing things.
I mean, Western medicine has...
I don't wish to pour complete cold water on it, because it's done...
A number of wonderful things.
Antibiotics can be incredibly helpful in certain circumstances.
Let's not forget the horrendous epidemics of tuberculosis and other things that used to just take away the cream of society.
Just young men and women were just destroyed in the 19th century by such diseases.
So I don't want to completely say that everything about Western technology is wrong, but what I want to say is we as a culture need to find a way forward.
Where we can integrate the good things that our society has created with a new way of conceiving the world, of conceiving our mission and our role as human creatures, and indeed getting to grips with the issues of good and evil, which as I say are very real.
Right, and that brings us around to your latest book, Entangled, because I think that you seem to have chosen that format to sort of approach that question, if you will.
Because, you know, characters and things that are going on that have to do with dealing with the dark side, I guess you might say.
Entangled is absolutely a book about the battle of good against evil.
That's essentially what this novel is about.
And it's a battle of good against evil set against the frame of time because it's a battle that is unfolding in two different time frames.
One part of it is 24,000 years ago in the past and one of my two heroines is a young woman who lives at that time in the Stone Age and the other part is unfolding today in the 21st century and the second heroine of the book is a modern young woman who lives in the city of Los Angeles.
But both of them are caught up in the same struggle.
And I've come to realize that time is not at all what it seems to be.
That we have to abandon this notion that is foisted on us as part of the mind control system of our societies that time is an arrow.
Which goes from the past through the present to the future.
That for something to cause something else, it must have happened before it.
This is clearly no longer the case.
And unfortunately, quantum physics is moving very much in this direction.
That it may actually be possible to alter the past by things that we do today.
So what I'm envisaging is not an arrow of time, but two interconnected cycles of time.
And two characters who are entangled and who must work together, who are brought together in altered states of consciousness by a good, benign, supernatural being, who I call the Blue Angel, who are brought together to defeat the demonic force, the demon called Sulpa, who is carrying out atrocities in the Stone Age To enhance his psychic power so that he may jump and manifest fully in the 21st century.
And his mission in the 21st century is to destroy forever and utterly all human potential.
And my two young heroines, separated by 24,000 years of time but brought together in altered states of consciousness, their job is to work together to defeat him.
Because one point that I make very strongly in this novel is that the supernatural forces who work for the good The spiritual forces that are hidden behind us, they cannot intervene directly in the physical realm.
The only way that good can intervene directly is through human consciousness.
Humans must become the agent of the change.
We must not expect some angel to fly down from the heavens and simply rescue us from the dark forces.
We're going to have to rescue ourselves.
And all that the forces of good can do is put the idea into our minds and let us understand What's at stake and what we can do.
So this is the essential argument at the heart of my novel, Entangled.
And the reason that I've written it as a novel rather than doing yet another non-fiction book with yet more thousands of footnotes is that I feel that some ideas are so extraordinary that they are best carried forward to the public in the form of fiction.
In light of the book and in light of where you decided to go in having these protagonists deal with ultimately the evil that's on the earth at this time and then going also through a being that is in essence what we might call an E.T. however you want to term that person and I would say maybe inhabiting another dimension and In
essence, the interaction between them, and obviously I haven't read the whole book, I've just started it, and I don't want you to give away the plot, but I would like you to talk about how...
How you got the idea for the interaction with this blue being?
Did you have, for example, did you have an experience with ayahuasca in which you encountered such a being?
Yes, absolutely.
The inspiration for Entangled came about in a most curious way.
And I felt in a sense chosen and compelled to write this book.
Now I brought it on myself because I went down to the Amazon in 2006 with the notion that it was time for me to shift from Writing non-fiction to writing fiction.
It was something that I very much wanted to do, but I wasn't confident that I could do it.
I wasn't certain that I had the ability to do that.
And so I wanted to seek out inspiration.
Now one of the things that Ayahuasca has proved incredibly For many people is expanding or developing areas of their own creativity.
There are quite a number of artists, for example, working in the United States today whose artwork has been transformed by their creative encounters with ayahuasca.
Can you name some of those people?
Yes, for example, Robert Vinosa and Martina Hoffman, who work out of Boulder, Colorado, have produced majestic works of art, insights and visions into other realms and the intelligent entities that inhabit those realms.
Which have been inspired by their experiences with this mysterious South American brew.
For example, Alex Gray, another great North American visionary artist whose Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors now in upstate New York displays his incredible works of art, many of which are inspired by And I think all of these individuals would agree that ayahuasca has given them an enormous creative boost.
And in my case, I'm not a painter.
I don't express my ideas in a visual form.
I express them in the form of words.
And when you're working with ayahuasca, It's quite important to set an intent before the session begins.
That intent may often be to do with personal healing, it may be to do with wider issues in the world, or it may be to do with future directions in one's own life.
And at these five sessions in Brazil in 2006, And what that story might be.
And, intriguingly, over the course of the five sessions, I was given, as though a gift from the spirit world, the entire story that I now set before my readers in the form of Entangled.
I was given the two principal characters.
I was shown that they would both be anatomically modern humans like you and I. One of them living 24,000 years ago.
Her name is Ria.
And one of them living today in the modern age in Los Angeles.
And her name is Leone.
And I was shown that they would both be troubled young women with personal problems and difficulties to overcome.
And that they would be connected to one another by an angelic force.
And I saw that entity as a blue-colored angel.
Sometimes she appears as a woman.
Sometimes she appears as part woman, part animal in form.
She's a shapeshifter.
But her concern is the planet and her concern is the future of the human race.
And she's a kind of guardian angel for humanity.
And I was shown the dark demonic force that I call Sulpa.
In the story.
And I understood that the way that this demonic force could be defeated was by the influence that the Blue Ager would have on these two young women to bring them together in a struggle to defeat the demon.
And I was shown another thing, which is that the key Another feature or factor in the story is actually our cousins, the so-called Neanderthals.
There's a great mystery about the Neanderthals.
We know that Neanderthals were present in Europe.
They look a bit like us, but their features are more archaic.
Highly pronounced brow ridges.
They were stocky and massively strong.
We would have thought of them.
There would be a tendency for human beings to think of them as very ugly.
And in fact, in my story, that's the name that the humans give to them.
They call them the uglies.
But I was shown that these Neanderthals were, despite their physical appearance, were spiritually beautiful creatures who lived a gentle and nurturing and sustaining life, causing no harm and misery to others.
They had been in possession of Europe, and the archaeology proves this, for 350,000 years before any anatomically modern humans ever appeared in Europe.
But when the anatomically modern humans first came to Europe about 50,000 years ago, it's evident that the Neanderthals welcomed them and gave them all the secrets of how to live in this new land and nurtured them and cared for them and looked after them.
And for a long time, It seems that our ancestors and the Neanderthals lived side by side in peace.
And we know now, from the latest genetic evidence, that there was some interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans.
Because it's been established that the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced.
And we now know that about 4% of modern human genes are owed to our Neanderthal cousins.
So, inter-breathing went on as well.
And it seems that there was a long, peaceful coexistence, and then suddenly, around, very recently, around 24,000 years ago, exactly the time that my story is set, the Neanderthals disappear from the picture and become extinct.
And the question is, how did they become extinct?
What was it that led to the wiping out of the Neanderthals?
Was it us?
Did we kill them?
Did we kill them off?
And looking at human behavior today, we wouldn't be surprised at that possibility.
That it was a kind of early example of ethnic cleansing or ethnic genocide, so-called, that took place at that time.
But we don't know for sure.
And that's the central dilemma that I put in the story, because the demonic force, Surpa, He is seeking to manifest physically in the 21st century and in order to do that he needs to gain vast psychic power in the Stone Age 24,000 years ago and he seeks to gain that power by leading modern,
anatomically modern human beings astray to murder and wipe out the Neanderthals and that's what my young Stone Age character Rhea rises up to resist.
She rises up to defend the Neanderthals.
Yes, but before we go there, what you're talking about seems based to some degree on science.
In other words, it's science that is being uncovered as we speak.
It seems that you've gone down some road in terms of investigation with regard to what might have come to you in the ayahuasca experience.
Thank you for raising that point, because this is a very weird and Mysterious aspect of the work that I did with Ayahuasca and the visions that I had and the story that I subsequently set down to write.
For example, I considered the possibility that the Neanderthals might have been telepathic.
They are telepathic in my book.
And there's some new scientific research which suggests that that may very The Neanderthals as I depicted them, and I didn't know that research when the vision was given to me, I depicted the Neanderthals as having red hair.
Again, A year or more after I had had those visions, and after I had written them down, and written the story out, and begun to write the story of Entangled, it came out in scientific evidence, no scientist will now dispute it, that the Neanderthals were indeed red-haired.
As a matter of fact, the gene for red hair in modern human populations comes from our genetic relationship to the Neanderthals.
I considered the possibility of a love affair between Neanderthals and humans in my novel, Entangled.
At the time that I was writing that down, Science was totally against the notion that there had been any kind of interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans.
But as it turns out, the new genetic evidence tells us that Neanderthals and humans did indeed make love.
And perhaps most important of all, and this is just new evidence that's come out in the last couple of days, there's scientific research all over the internet now, Which proves from studies of the Neanderthals that they were filled with empathy and love and concern.
So that if a member of a Neanderthal group became sick, suffered a crippling illness, was no longer able to function, that individual wouldn't be left to die.
That individual would be looked after and cared for.
We have firm archaeological evidence for this.
So the latest story of the Neanderthals We have empathy and concern and love for one another and again that is the picture that I was told to paint in my story from the visions that I received with ayahuasca but the scientific research corroborating it didn't come out until much much later and there's another Element in the story which concerns the ultimate fate of the Neanderthals.
Were they wiped out by humans like you and I, led astray by a demonic force?
Or was there some other reason why they died out, which would mean that human beings didn't do that terrible thing?
And again, I have a solution to that.
I'm not going to share the entire plot with you.
But the solution that I have to that, which again I had written down and fully elaborated in my story, has also subsequently been confirmed by science.
So actually, no, I didn't investigate the science.
I reported or wrote out or channeled what I had received as a visionary experience.
But over the two or three years after I'd had that visionary experience, evidence that supported what I was saying Yes.
And I think that that's wonderful.
I don't think that that's that unusual a process, in other words, for artists to tap into something that later is revealed in science.
Yes.
And in fact, almost to lead the way even for scientists that have open minds in terms of areas worthy of investigation.
And it would be quite interesting if they would maybe have a more open mind in that regard and really go down that road more often.
Definitely.
Because it would expand their areas of investigation and possibly allow them to, or allow us as humanity, to grow...
Absolutely.
There's a real need to do this.
There's a real need to recognize the power of intuition and the power of visionary experience and its role in our society.
Again, I'll just make this point because I'm actually myself quite stunned by the way that the science is beginning to support what I started to elaborate as a purely fiction story.
A few years ago, the notion that the Neanderthals had any kind of empathy Or ability for love was completely dismissed by science when I actually started writing this book.
But the vision that I had seen of the Neanderthals was that they were filled with empathy and love.
And that's the story I wrote.
And now, I mean, we're speaking at the beginning of October.
In 2010.
And all over the internet today, this very day that we're talking, is a huge amount of new information about empathy and care and love in the Neanderthals.
So I have to say, I'm not putting any special authority on myself.
I have to say that I was given a glimpse of the truth in those visions and given the opportunity to write that You're absolutely right.
This is what's missing in science.
This is what's missing.
Science is way too focused on the alert problem-solving state of mentality.
The conviction that only that one kind of consciousness is useful for the scientific endeavor.
Even though many scientists, in their heart of hearts, Know that that's not true.
But it's not really from grinding through the research that they get the great and the brilliant ideas.
It often comes in a flash of intuition that's highly irrational and isn't based on a deductive reasoning of any kind.
And some of the very greatest scientific discoveries owe much to the visionary realm.
And to the intuitive realm.
Certainly Tesla.
I think Einstein.
I'm sure it's huge in terms of that.
Absolutely.
And the example that's dear to my heart and that I like to point out to people is the incredible story of Francis Crick, the discoverer of the double helix pattern of DNA, which for sure is one of the great scientific discoveries of our age.
And it was always thought until his death That Crick had arrived at that discovery through logical reasoning, deductive experimental processes.
But it turned out that he had confided to a close friend before his death that it was visionary experiences, in his case under the influence of LSD in the early 1950s, which at that time was legal in Britain where Crick worked,
in which he had first seen the shimmering pattern of the double helix and had understood that this was the secret that he was seeking to unveil so it came to him in a visionary moment not in And, you know, I'm not getting here into the issues of rights and wrongs of psychedelics.
I'm simply reporting a fact, confirmed by Crick himself, that his insight into the double helix came in a deeply altered state of consciousness, not in the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness.
And I think, you know, we have to consider all of this very, very carefully in deciding how we want to continue moving ahead into the future.
There's a danger that too much focus On the alert problem-solving state of mind is actually going to kill us all off.
It has its place, it has its role, but it shouldn't be allowed to expand to fill the entire universe of human experience.
And that's one of the mistakes we're making, is that science is literally prematurely closing its accounts with reality and insisting rigidly and dogmatically On a particular approach to research.
You know, in our society today, if you want to insult someone, you call them a dreamer.
But in ancient times, it was quite a different matter.
A dreamer was a highly regarded role.
Dreams were understood to be a vital path to true knowledge.
And we may be missing very, very important, essential developments in our own story by refusing to recognize the value of dreams and visions.
Absolutely.
Well, I would say that the visionaries are the leaders of society, although they're certainly not necessarily acknowledged for that.
But it's very interesting in terms of where you're going with your research.
And I have to say that John Mack...
Who you did mention last night.
Yes, John Mack was a friend of mine and a wonderful man.
Yeah, and I was very touched by him and I actually know someone who worked very closely with him and it's hopeful.
She actually has a book, his last book that he was working on before he died.
And that book is all about consciousness.
So we're actually moving into a juncture where the role of consciousness and human consciousness specifically is crucial into possibly saving Humanity and the planet.
And so it's fascinating that your book is dealing with a time when a race of beings could have been close to extinction and they were faced with a group of beings that may have been emphasizing a different realm.
So the people that will be best suited to this time to make it through with the most ease will be those who are more able to move into the right brain consciousness.
Yeah, and into the divine feminine.
And it's actually why I realize now, in the process of inspiration, It was very clear to me from the beginning that I would not have male heroes in this story, that the heroes would both be young women.
It seemed to me a very, very important point and aspect of the story.
I'm very interested to know, though, how these visions were given to you during that actual experience, and maybe you could also talk about how other explorations that you've done with ayahuasca specifically, or, in other words, when you say you were given this information, this book was downloaded to you in...
Sections or whatever, however, it happened.
In other words, I'm assuming that you weren't given words necessarily, but perhaps you were given words.
Were you given visions?
I was given...
I was given...
It was very curious because some of it happened at the conscious level and some of it happened at the unconscious level.
I was shown in physical form my two central characters.
I was shown the form that the demon takes.
I was shown the form of the blue angel.
I was shown that great battles would occur in order for evil to be defeated.
I was shown all of that visually in a very, very clear way.
But it became clear to me afterwards as I started writing this book that I had downloaded a whole lot more that I didn't even remember at the level of consciousness.
It was like there was an inner guide Working with me as I wrote the story and sometimes I would be typing away and unlike my nonfiction where intense intellectual focus was the center of it, in writing this novel it was best done when I defocused and allowed the material to come through and the more I tried to intellectualize it and actually think in terms of plot and structure and character,
the more I tried to do that the less true I told the story.
And there was an inner voice as I started down those roads from time to time I did.
My old habits reimposed themselves on my writing.
An inner voice told me this isn't right.
And I would type away and a day or two days would pass and I would get slower and slower and slower.
And I suddenly realized, no, I'm going in the wrong direction.
There was something inside me that knew what the right direction was.
And I then would back up through my story until I got to the point where I'd forked off And I would fork in another direction and suddenly it would all flow again.
Wow.
Delivering this internal body of material.
Fascinating.
Yeah, that was clearly stored.
And I call it downloaded.
It really did feel like a download.
And at the end of these five sessions with ayahuasca, I saw the form of the blue angel, who frankly I identify with the spirit of Ayahuasca.
And I do so in the story too.
In the Amazon, Ayahuasca is seen not simply as the mixture of two plants, which is what the brew is, but that there is an intelligence or an entity that lies behind these plants.
She is always seen as female.
Always.
Every culture in the Amazon is agreed on that and so indeed is every Westerner who's worked with ayahuasca enough.
And a shapeshifter who can appear in many forms, but one of those forms is as a blue-skinned woman.
And I saw that entity and she said to me, go away and write it.
Write.
Write it.
Write it.
And I felt A very strong compulsion after that to do what I was told.
To go away and write this story.
I felt I'd been charged with a mission.
And that it was an important mission to fulfill.
And I've learnt through long experience that the entity that we call Mother Ayahuasca, the spirit who lies behind the Ayahuasca vine, is pure love and goodness.
Sometimes it's tough love.
She will show you aspects of yourself, aspects of your own personality which you need to see but which may be uncomfortable to realize that you had that aspect.
Perhaps it's just a nasty way of behaving towards other people that you just do habitually without thinking it through.
Sooner or later in working with Ayahuasca you're going to be shown all those nasty sides of your personality With absolute unforgiving clarity, this is how you are.
Do you want to fix it?
Here's your chance.
You see the truth about yourself.
And something else, a tremendous love for the rainforest, and for the jungle, and for the great jungles that still persist, fortunately, in places on our planet like the Amazon, but that are terribly, terribly under threat.
And again and again, I've had a vision with ayahuasca, essentially the same visionary elements keep recurring, of our planet in terrible danger, some terrible darkness.
Closing it around.
And in those visions, I have seen Mother Ayahuasca herself in a form that she sometimes takes of a great Amazonian serpent, but as though she's broken or damaged.
And I've said to her, how can this be?
You are a supernatural being.
How can anything harm you?
And the answer has been that this darkness is so great that even I cannot stop it.
Only you, humans, can stop it by the choices you make.
That's very powerful.
Okay, I have a question that is coming a little illogically, and I am one of these interviewers who does follow my intuition.
So, I would like to know if you've ever swum with dolphins.
Yes, but only in...
But only in a captive environment.
I've not been able to swim with dolphins out in the open ocean.
Oh, that's very interesting.
That's what I would like to do.
That's actually an adventure that I would very much like to have.
Okay, because I have.
And one of the things that happens when you swim with dolphins is that if you're able to swim with them and interact with them, is that what I found is that you get into an altered state of consciousness.
You can, if you're open and so on, and you begin to communicate with them non-verbally, obviously.
And it's very powerful.
I mean, the state of consciousness that you can get to in swimming with dolphins.
And there seems to be a parallel between...
And I don't know anything about...
I've never taken ayahuasca, so I can't talk to that.
But I'm wondering if there was any feeling or information that came in regard to this being being aquatic at all and/or amphibious.
Yes, she's always aquatic because the kind of serpent that she's identified with in the Amazonian tradition is an anaconda.
An anaconda is a river snake.
Okay.
Which is always in and out of water, so there may be indeed something, some connection there.
Wonderful.
So, now, I'm also going to take another departure, and I'd like to know whether or not you've ever had sort of a, you know, you live in England, right?
So, have you ever had a UFO experience of your own?
I have had...
I have had a UFO experience, but that again occurred in connection with ayahuasca.
And that was when I was drinking ayahuasca in the Amazon in early 2004.
And it was actually the third or fourth session with ayahuasca that I had ever had.
And I suddenly found myself confronted by what seemed to be a funnel of light and up at the top of the funnel of light was a huge spinning flying disc and there was a presence or some kind of entity That I saw,
somehow off in the corner of the scene, who actually didn't like that much.
The image was a bit like the sort of image of the grey that we see in modern depictions.
And I suddenly felt, I don't want to be I don't want this.
And I resisted.
And I opened my eyes, which stopped the visions occurring.
You can sometimes do that with ayahuasca.
And I actually shouted out loud, no, no, I won't go.
Later on, I regretted that.
I felt that I should have explored that experience further.
I should perhaps have had more courage.
I didn't, and that experience has not occurred again.
But it is a curious thing that many of the Amazonian shamans, even those who live in extremely remote and isolated areas in the Amazon, who work with ayahuasca, Do repeatedly see flying saucers.
And the great artist-shaman Pablo Amarengo, who unfortunately died last year in 2009, Pablo Amaringo had had so many encounters under the influence of Ayahuasca with extraterrestrial beings.
And when we say E.T., we are not limiting ourselves to the notion that the extraterrestrial is simply from another planet in this physical universe.
We may be dealing with interdimensional beings.
Certainly.
I honestly believe that's actually what's going on.
And this is how Pablo saw it.
How he saw the flying saucers.
He saw them as vehicles for crossing between dimensions and that that's why they came into his visionary space because that's what he was also doing.
He was crossing between dimensions in altered states of consciousness.
He was quite adamant about that and it's been pointed out that In earlier times in the Amazon, shamans working with ayahuasca would also see vehicles.
They wouldn't necessarily depict them as flying saucers.
Sometimes it might be a boat.
Sometimes it might be some kind of spirit canoe that is flying through the sky.
Well, certainly Egypt, you know, they're using the boat to signify, you know, a vehicle.
A celestial journey.
Yeah.
For sure, for sure.
All the time.
And it's interesting.
If you look at the texts, for example, of the book of what is in the Duat, the Duat is the ancient Egyptian afterlife realm through which they believe that the soul makes a journey after death.
And during that journey we are tested on what we've done with our life.
And the vehicle for travel through the Duat is Yes.
Even though the Duat is located in the starry sky, the ancient Egyptians had no doubt about it.
They associated it with specific constellations.
It was a heavenly realm, and yet we travel through it in a boat.
Perhaps what's going on here is that Different cultures inevitably impose their own cultural spectacles on what they see, and what one culture may see as a flying saucer, another culture may see as a flying boat, but essentially it's a flying vehicle which is involved in an extraordinary journey, whether through space, whether through time, or whether across the veil that separates us from other dimensions.
Yes, absolutely.
Well said.
Okay, well, I mean, this is very interesting, and it's fascinating that you have decided to go on this trajectory after this substantial Scholarship.
I'm not sure how you would term it, but scholarship in sort of a scientific vein, where you're literally, as you say, footnotes to do with everything that you're putting forward and so on.
It's as if you've grown wings and you're willing to basically jump off into the abyss, as it were, in a metaphorical way.
Yes.
Way of speaking because that's what's required and it's often very interesting how lead-footed, so to speak, science and even everyday society is in their approach to reality when in fact sitting here now You know, magic doesn't just exist in or other dimensions in, you know, in ayahuasca experiences in South America.
In other words, it's here now and with us now.
And you are, we are multiple, multi-dimensional beings all the time.
And whether we can access that simultaneously with being in this reality and other realities and also be conscious, fully conscious of all of that is obviously the challenge.
That's the challenge.
Of the way forward for humanity.
Because we do live in an enchanted universe.
Exactly.
Enchantment and magic is the essence of the universe.
The ancient Egyptians were not in error when they depicted Isis as a master of magic.
The great high goddess, the mother of the divine child Horus, the consort of Osiris himself.
Isis is a magician.
And what she's working is good magic.
Magic that allows us to be what we can be.
And it's that magic, sadly, that's been systematically cut out from the world by the dry, dead tools of science and by the That seek to prevent us becoming what we can be.
And certainly, from my point of view as a writer, I feel that the best way I can address this mystery for the future And to embed in what hopefully is a fast-moving and exciting story, deep truths about the nature of reality.
It's a curious thing.
I feel liberated by what's happened to me.
I feel that I've been allowed to set down a great burden that I've been carrying.
For 20 years, I've been locked in conflicts with academic historians and archaeologists.
You know, when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, I had no idea the kind of storm that I was going to bring down on my head.
I really didn't.
I was quite naive.
I had no idea that by suggesting that something huge may be missing from our picture of history, I would excite so much anger and so much resentment from mainstream academics.
I just thought that there was part of the story that hadn't been told, and that maybe it would be useful to provide some facts and evidence that would allow us to reassess our pasts.
But it turned out that I became subject to just all manner of personal underhand attacks and to a kind of disinformation campaign.
I didn't know them, but I realized subsequently that there's actually an organization called PSYCOP. What a horrible name to give any organization.
The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
They're really, to my mind, like a diabolical force.
They have chapters all over the world, members in every little city and town.
And if anybody in that local area sticks their head up above the parapet and comes up with an idea that's contrary to the paradigm of mainstream science, they will get all their local guys to write to the media, to write to the press, to complain, to generally bring them into disfavor.
And again and again they're involved in attacking Not the ideas that are being put across, but the individual behind those ideas who's putting them across.
Absolutely.
I suddenly found that I was up against a gigantic force, and that force had huge resources of public money, whereas I myself had no resources whatsoever.
So I carried that burden for 20 years, and I did everything I could Everything in my power often taking huge physical risks in order to bring this information out and set it before the public and it was as though at a certain point I had gone as far as I could and I was allowed to set that burden down and to move in the direction of fiction where I can creatively express ideas,
extraordinary ideas in a new way Which I hope will still be satisfying to my readers and I hope that my readers will come with me on this adventure and it is an adventure and it's where I intend to spend whatever years are left to me on this beautiful and extraordinary planet that we call the Earth.
Wonderful.
Well, and kudos to you for being able to take that journey and to come out the other side in such good shape because it's not often easy and many people, I think, that attempt that journey end up getting stopped somewhere along the trajectory or, you know, either by mind control, physical illnesses, any manner of obstacles that are thrown in one's path.
Yeah.
Not to allow one to make the leap that you are now making.
And the other part of that is that in the Tarot, and I don't know if you've investigated the Tarot at all.
I don't know a lot about the Tarot.
But there is a card called Art.
And what it is, it does have the goddess, in essence, who would be Isis.
And she's pouring from two different vessels.
One is science and one is art.
And it's the combination of science and art that creates the new reality.
It's a marriage, and it's a much more balanced marriage.
And it's this that I think we're looking forward to in the future.
I completely agree with you.
This is the way forward.
The way forward is not simply to go back to a simpler time, because we're not going to be able to do that.
We need to go forward, but we need to go forward in a different way that integrates both halves.
Which integrates the masculine and the feminine, which allows space for enchantment and magic to re-enter the universe, because that is our true birthright.
At the moment, science imagines that it is standing in total opposition to magic, which is associated with superstition, but actually the salvation of science will come from a return To magic and enchantment.
And I'm already seeing it happen in the realm of quantum physics, where the leading edge, the cutting edge of science now is moving back in the direction of areas of inquiry that in ancient times were understood to be pure magic.
Absolutely.
And I have to say, as Project Camelot, we have a witness who is working in the world of science and NASA and in the NSA and so on, and he said something very revealing to us just recently.
He said, the higher I go in the hierarchy of science and NASA, he said, all I find are witches and warlocks.
The dark side.
But it's more than that.
It's magicians.
In other words, what we're talking about are people that are...
And this is the hidden society.
This is the hidden side of things.
In which there are areas where these...
And this is what we would call the Illuminati...
Have known the secret, this secret that we're now talking about that needs to be made into the mainstream society.
They've known that the salvation of science is in art or magic, as you call it, and that that's the only place it's going to come from.
And so they actually hold that for themselves.
They hold it for themselves and they keep it away from the rest of humanity.
Whereas...
Truly enlightened spirits would share everything and would allow all of us to move forward together.
I mean that's what great artistic and scientific leadership really should be about.
It's about not possessing Recognizing that we're all part of the human family and that we all have obligations of love to one another.
And that's the thing I would add to this, that that's the other ingredient which is horribly missing from the modern world alongside enchantment, which is also missing from the modern world.
Always waiting in the wings to come back in.
The other thing that's missing is love.
There's not enough love in the world.
There's too much fear and hatred.
And the tremendous human capacity for love and for nurture and for support of one another is being systematically eroded by dark forces within our society.
And we just need to take that other step.
The step into enchantment and the step into love.
Wonderful.
Well, Graham Hancock, I think that we've covered a huge gamut here, and I want to thank you for your time and your energy and your love that you're bringing back to the planet and your understanding of the magical processes that are going on behind the scenes and that can come into the forefront if we only allow them to.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I've really enjoyed it.
▲
Export Selection