Graham Hancock is a writer, researcher and explorer who has spent the last 30 years or so trying to find the Ark of the Covenant, a relic of a lost era of humanity that he believes may have been discovered in Ethiopia. In this episode, he tells us how he stumbled across it, and why it s so important to him that he spent so much of his life looking for it. He also explains why he thinks it s the most important artefact in the world, and how it may have come to be worshipped by the Ethiopian people as a holy relic, even though they don t practice it in the way we do. And why they worship it in a way that s a little different from the rest of the world. This episode was produced by Alex Blumberg and edited by Matthew Boll. It was mixed and produced by Annie-Rose Strasser. The theme music was made by my main amigo, Evan Handyside, and the sound design was done by Ian Dorsch, with additional mixing and mastering by Matthew Keys, and additional editing by Ben Koppel, and music production by Daniel Gulati, with help from Matthew Boll, and Matthew Ward, and a little help from James Pape, and our editor-in-chief of The Old Man and the Old Man's Notebook. It was edited and mixed by Matthew Brodsky. Music by Ben Kaufmann, Matthew Boll and Matthew Keyser, and mixed and mastering of music by James Ward, with assistance from Ben Kipps, and Bobby Lord, and edited and editing by Jack Williams, and Annie-Anne-Rose Shaw, and Ben Kellett, and Rachel Goodman, and Alex Chippen, and Mike McLennan, and Robert Meegan, and Patrick O'Donnell, and with additional assistance from Rachel Ward. Additional mixing by Matthew Kuchar, and James Rook, and Jack Williams. Thank you to Rachel Ward for the excellent sound design, and for his editing and editing, and Dan Turner for his excellent mixing, and editing and mastering, and his excellent editing and mixing and mixing skills, and mastering and mastering services, and background music, and thanks to our excellent mixing and sound effects, and all the excellent editing, which were provided by Matthew Coughlanlanlan, and also our excellent mastering of the mixing and editing assistance, and some extra editing by Rachel Rhodes, and Paul Korte, and Andrew McKinnon, and Jonathan Goldstein.
00:00:17.000The internet has been a very fascinating thing for me in the many years that I've been on it, but one of the most fascinating things about it is the ability to get in touch with people that, if you were younger, you know, like a long time ago, there was no chance I would be able to sit down with you and do a conversation.
00:00:34.000You would just be some, you know, author whose books I admired, but now, because of this crazy thing, this podcast, here we are sitting down.
00:00:43.000And if you don't know who Graham Hancock is, Graham Hancock is probably the one guy who's influenced my view of history more than anybody ever.
00:00:52.000It's from this book, Fingerprints of the Gods.
00:00:54.000And Fingerprints of the Gods is, what is it, so like five million copies or something crazy like that?
00:01:01.000It's an amazing book that basically challenges our view of history.
00:01:06.000And you have spent an enormous chunk of your life uncovering all these different structures and all these different monuments and all these different things that you attribute to a lost era of humanity.
00:01:21.000And one of my favorite Terms that you use is that we're a species with hypnosis.
00:02:03.000And when I got through university, I kind of drifted towards writing, current affairs, journalism, and it was While following journalistic stories, my last journalistic role was as the East Africa correspondent for The Economist, quite a serious newspaper.
00:02:25.000And I was based in Nairobi in Kenya, and I was covering wars and famines and politics and all of that stuff.
00:02:42.000I flew into a city that at the time was in the middle of a war zone in a DC-3 that kind of dived down out of the sky to avoid the machine gun nests in the surrounding hills and landed in the airport.
00:02:56.000And this was an ancient city called Axum and it had incredible history.
00:03:02.000It had a palace supposedly of the Queen of Sheba.
00:03:06.000Had an ancient cathedral, the most ancient Christian cathedral in Africa dating back to 300 after Christ.
00:03:13.000And in the grounds of that cathedral, in a chapel, outside the chapel, I meet a monk and he tells me in the conversation we have that he's got the Ark of the Covenant in that chapel.
00:03:28.000This was, I had heard that the Ark of the Covenant was important to Ethiopia, but now I'm sitting in front of a monk with cataracts in his eyes, and he's telling me behind him in that chapel, but I can't go there, is the Ark of the Covenant.
00:04:03.000And I discovered that, actually, Ethiopia is the only country in the world which has a living veneration, almost worship, of the Ark of the Covenant.
00:04:12.000Ethiopia has ancient Christianity, but it also has ancient Judaism.
00:04:17.000There's a Jewish community in Ethiopia called the Falashas.
00:04:36.000This is weird and this is exciting and what can I find out about this?
00:04:40.000Then I went to the academics and they said, ah, it's all rubbish.
00:04:44.000Those Ethiopians, they just made it up to make themselves look big.
00:04:50.000Okay, but then why is it the case that in every single church in Ethiopia, more than 20,000 churches, there's a replica of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies?
00:05:01.000And sometimes, actually, they reduce the replica to simply two tablets, which are supposed to represent the tablets of stone inside the Ark of the Covenant.
00:05:08.000But the Ark of the Covenant is not a Christian object.
00:06:22.000I neither thought nor didn't think that.
00:06:24.000I was impressed by the Ethiopians themselves, and I was impressed by the purity of their belief and the passion with which they held it.
00:06:32.000And the fact that here, after thousands of years, this object disappeared from the Bible at the time, well, around about 650 years before Christ.
00:06:42.000It's not mentioned again in the Bible after that.
00:06:53.000And as I dug deeper, I began to realize that actually there was a real possibility they did have the Ark of the Covenant and that it is connected to the mystery of the Ethiopian Jews.
00:07:04.000And that the story they themselves tell about it, which connects it, it's a very romantic and lovely story.
00:07:11.000They say, in brief, that the Queen of Sheba, famous Queen of Sheba, was an Ethiopian queen.
00:07:16.000And that she, when she travelled to Jerusalem to meet Solomon, which is described in the Bible, big episode in the Bible, she didn't only exchange wisdom with him, she also exchanged bodily fluids, and she became pregnant.
00:07:30.000With King Solomon's son, who was to be called Menelik, which actually means the son of the wise man.
00:07:38.000And pregnant, she left Jerusalem, returned to Ethiopia, gave birth to her son Menelik there.
00:07:45.000At the age of 20 or 21, he wanted to visit his famous father in Jerusalem.
00:07:50.000He traveled north, went to Jerusalem, spent a year there, and at the end of the year, contrived to steal the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem.
00:08:19.000I got into that speculation myself at some length, because as I started to investigate this subject, not only was the Ethiopian side of it fascinating and mysterious, but the object itself is quite extraordinary.
00:08:30.000I mean, it dominates the Bible at the beginning of the story.
00:08:34.000From the time they're in Sinai, the Exodus, there's a tremendous role for the Ark of the Covenant, and they follow it through the wilderness, and it's marched around the city of Jericho.
00:08:47.000The Temple of Solomon is built with only one function, and that's to serve, and this is a quote, as an house of rest for the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord.
00:08:57.000That's the only reason that the Temple of Solomon is built.
00:08:59.000It's like, at a certain point, it's got to be placed out of the public view.
00:09:05.000As they're carrying it, It strikes people dead.
00:09:09.000If somebody touches it by chance, a bolt of fire comes out of it.
00:09:13.000Actually, I mean, Spielberg and the Indiana Jones movie, the way they portrayed the ark was spot on how it's described in the Old Testament, as an absolutely devastating, deadly instrument.
00:11:23.000And for people who don't understand what you're talking about here, your premise or a big part of it is that there is somewhere around, what is it, 10,000 years ago, somewhere around then, towards the end of the last ice age, humanity was probably mostly wiped out or wiped out in a big way and we had to rebuild from there.
00:11:43.000We had to rebuild and I believe that we lost a civilization at that time.
00:11:49.000Yeah, which has not been recorded by history and that it went underwater with the rising sea levels.
00:11:55.000And what led me to this, the reason I became interested in pursuing that line of inquiry was the Ark of the Covenant because it seemed to me like a piece of technology that was out of its place in history in the way that it was described.
00:12:08.000I'm not wishing to put down the spiritual aspects because they are there.
00:12:12.000But there were definite technological aspects to this device.
00:12:15.000And then I had to ask myself, well, where could that knowledge have come from?
00:12:19.000And through Egypt we then start to find that Egypt itself looks back to an older time.
00:12:24.000The ancient Egyptians didn't regard themselves as the beginning of their story.
00:12:28.000They regarded themselves as quite a late point in their story.
00:12:31.000And they look back to the time of the gods, which they called Zeptepe, the first time, when there was a golden age.
00:12:37.000And they speak, and there are texts, the Edfu building texts, which speak of the gods living on an island, a gigantic flood coming.
00:12:44.000Most of the gods are killed, odd thing to happen to gods.
00:12:47.000And then they come and settle in Egypt.
00:12:50.000The survivors come and settle in Egypt.
00:13:03.000I support that view, and I was astonished when you had Robert Shock and John Anthony West, when they brought their findings about the erosion on the Temple of the Sphinx.
00:13:14.000They brought these findings to these academics and just the tone of their voice, the way they were approaching the information, the mocking attitude that they had of it.
00:13:25.000Well, where is this civilization you speak of?
00:13:27.000Because they're talking about a civilization that was possibly, what, 10,000 BC or something like that?
00:13:32.000Yeah, I would put the figure right about 10,500 BC. If you don't know the story behind it, there's water erosion on the edge of The temple where the Sphinx is done, that could only be attributed to thousands of years of rainfall.
00:13:47.000The last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was...
00:13:50.000This is the breakthrough work that John Anthony West and Robert Schock did.
00:13:53.000The initial observation came through John, who is an astonishingly knowledgeable man about ancient Egypt.
00:14:01.000He's not an official Egyptologist, but he spent his whole life working in ancient Egypt.
00:14:06.000And through his research and his background, he came to realize that The erosion patterns on the Sphinx are really odd.
00:14:13.000And he then went to Schock, Robert Schock at the University of Boston, who is a geologist and an open-minded one.
00:14:20.000And he said, would you come to Egypt with me and give me your geological opinion on this monument?
00:14:24.000So Schock went there and it was immediately clear to him that this monument had been subjected to thousands of years of heavy rainfall at some point in its history.
00:14:32.000That's where the mystery begins, because the study of ancient climates is quite well advanced, and we know that 5,000 years ago, 4,500 years ago, when the Sphinx is supposed to have been built, Egypt was as bone dry as it is today.
00:14:47.000And you have to go back some thousands of years before that, at least to about 9,000 years ago, To get the very heavy rainfall that would have caused the erosion of the Sphinx.
00:14:58.000But that only means that the Sphinx was standing there 9,000 years ago to be rained on.
00:15:23.000And that's where Robert Boval and I were able to take the matter on a little further with the astronomy of the Giza Plateau.
00:15:34.000And you find there's just this stunning thing that happens in the sky.
00:15:38.000I mean, this is one of the great things.
00:15:41.000I have some problems with technology, but I have to say one of the great things about computer technology is the way that it can speed up Access to information in an incredibly efficient way.
00:15:51.000And there are computer programs now which will show you exactly how the stars were positioned at any time in the last 30,000 years over any point on the Earth's surface.
00:16:01.000You can literally wind back the ancient skies and see them.
00:16:19.000Eventually, the stars will all return to starting point and begin the cycle again.
00:16:22.000And because of that, we can say that the Sphinx was gazing at his own celestial counterpart, the constellation of Leo, at dawn on the spring equinox in 10,000 BC, while 90 degrees away, due south, Orion was lying on the meridian in exactly the pattern of the pyramids on Orion was lying on the meridian in exactly the pattern of the And doesn't John Anthony West go even deeper?
00:16:44.000He believes it's like 30,000 BC or something crazy.
00:17:11.000And again, this is the area where the Egyptologists, the academic Egyptologists, are incredibly annoying because they will not listen to what the ancient Egyptians themselves had to say.
00:17:21.000It's as though they, the academics, know more about ancient Egyptian history than the ancient Egyptians did themselves.
00:17:27.000And the ancient Egyptians were really very clear.
00:17:30.000They pushed their history back well plus 30,000 years.
00:18:39.000Obviously I'm not a geologist, but when I look at it and you say that that's wind and sand, and then they show extreme examples of wind and sand erosion, it doesn't look the same.
00:19:17.000It looks like two phases of construction, one very ancient, one more recent, and they've got muddled up in the academic's mind.
00:19:23.000Watching Dr. Schock try to talk to the Egyptologists about that was a fascinating thing because the guy got super defensive and he was like, where is this civilization you're speaking of?
00:19:37.000One of the classic remarks was Mark Lehner, who's an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute in Chicago.
00:19:44.000And one of the lead Western archaeologists working in Giza, his remark, which we quote often, was, you know, show me the potsherd.
00:19:52.000Where is the potsherd from this lost civilization?
00:19:55.000Well, the argument was, at that time, that the Sphinx cannot possibly be of that age, because there's nothing else in the world of that age.
00:20:03.000How could there just be this one unique thing, which is twelve and a half thousand years old, or maybe older, This amazing monument.
00:20:12.000Show me the potsherds of the rest of that civilization.
00:20:14.000Well, some years later, those potsherds have started to turn up, and they've turned up in Turkey in the form of Gobekli Tepe, a gigantic megalithic circle, which dates back to precisely 12,000 years ago.
00:20:30.000And it even has carvings of animals that don't exist anywhere near Turkey on this thing.
00:20:35.000And they're trying to attribute it to hunter-gatherers, which is hilarious.
00:21:08.000The Romans were the end of it for Egypt.
00:21:10.000The Egyptians thrived through the Greek period.
00:21:14.000When the Greeks arrived in Egypt, what happened was the Egyptians colonized the Greek mind and the Greeks became Egyptians.
00:21:21.000But when the Romans took over, it was a different story. - That's my people.
00:21:25.000they fucked everything up and worse still worse still yeah when the Romans made this alliance with Christianity and the the Christian church pulled on the jackboot of Rome it was Christians who really wanted to take Egypt apart They wanted to destroy everything and the Egyptian priests themselves, rather than let their temples fall into their hands in that way, they went around and destroyed certain things in the temples and they did so quite deliberately to remove that power from the others who were going to come and take it in.
00:22:09.000And it is so hard to wrap your head around.
00:22:13.000Even the established timeline of 2500 BC, when you're looking at these structures, it's so hard to wrap your head around when you're looking at a beautiful golden-covered sarcophagus that had King Tut inside of it.
00:22:29.000You know, what kind of a weird alternative way to live did these guys figure out?
00:22:34.000Where they, thousands of years ago, figured how to build these almost perfect geometric structures of 2,300,000 stones, where if you fuck up just a little bit here or there, by the time you get to the top, it's done.
00:22:48.000And they're like, well, they did screw up a few of them.
00:24:00.000And this leads to, it certainly led me to conclude that academic history is part of a This sounds a bit paranoid but part of an overall system of kind of mind control that operates.
00:24:16.000There are certain things that we're allowed to think and certain parameters that we're allowed to think within in our society and when it comes to the past those parameters are set by academics and they get so territorial and so defensive when you try to break out of that and suggest other possibilities.
00:24:32.000See I thought naively when I got into this at first That those who were specialists in this field would welcome some new ideas.
00:24:41.000They might throw them out in the end, but they would want to see whether there was any merit to the ideas.
00:24:45.000And so initially I was really shocked that the attitude is, oh, this idea doesn't agree with us.
00:24:50.000We are going to destroy this idea in any way we can.
00:24:53.000And not only that, we're going to destroy the individuals associated with this idea.
00:25:11.000They have their power base in a particular view, and they defend that view to the death.
00:25:17.000Now, when you say that Dr. Schock is very conservative, you're not joking around about that.
00:25:22.000And I always wonder, when I hear some of the things that he says about other ancient structures, I always wonder, wow, I wonder if he took too much heat from the Sphinx, and now he backs off on stuff.
00:26:18.000My wife, Santa, who's a photographer, and I have done more than 200-plus dives on the Yonaguni Monument.
00:26:28.000We went through the process of learning to dive and really getting the skills.
00:26:32.000To be able to handle that kind of current, which is literally going to rip your mask off your face and take your regulator out of your mouth.
00:26:39.000It's like swimming in a river against the current, actually.
00:26:43.000So what I would say is that I think Schock was a little premature with that conclusion.
00:26:47.000And I think I have huge respect for Robert Schock.
00:26:50.000I have huge respect for his openness of mind and his geological acumen.
00:26:54.000But not enough time was spent on the monument to reach that decision.
00:27:00.000Further north, settles it for me, off Okinawa, which is about 400 or 500 miles north of Yonaguni, there is a majestic stone circle 110 feet beneath the water, which again, Santa and I have dived on extensively, which shock has not seen, which is there is just no way on earth...
00:28:26.000And 110 feet beneath the sea tells us that it was made at least 13,000 years ago, because that's the last time that 110 foot level was above sea level.
00:28:37.000So that makes sense with Robert Schock about the Japanese ruins, because there's one of them that really freaked me out.
00:29:20.000It's laid down in layers, and some of the layers are soft and some of them are hard.
00:29:25.000And their argument is that the sea battering against these layers selectively removed the soft layers and left the hard layers producing this stepped effect.
00:29:34.000The problem with that is that if that happened, then you would expect to see the very large amount of rubble which was created by removing all these layers.
00:29:43.000You'd expect to see it lying in a disorganized mass down at the bottom of the monument.
00:29:50.000From top to bottom, the monument's about 70 feet high.
00:29:53.000So 70 feet down, and all of it's underwater, because the bottom is about 110 feet below the sea.
00:29:59.000So you would expect to find that rubble lying at the base of the monument.
00:30:03.000Actually, what you do find is a beautiful path cut out of solid rock at the base of the monument, and all the rubble cleared to the side, pushed away, forming a bank.
00:30:13.000Which is no way on earth that could have been done by nature.
00:30:24.000So it's little details like that, plus the fact that there isn't just one monument, there's actually about five, along a good four miles of the coast, makes it impossible for me to accept that it's a natural phenomenon.
00:30:38.000I guess the question comes up, when you talk about ancient monuments or ancient civilizations from 14,000 plus years ago, how much really would be left?
00:32:11.000Wiping out, literally wiping out the past.
00:32:14.000That's why it was such a big deal to find that Iceman, because he had fallen into a crevice, and so the glacier had passed over him and never touched him.
00:32:53.000But what's incredible is that if Graham's view of history is true, then this guy, 5,000 years ago, was really like some dude who survived some horrible cataclysmic event The civilization moved forward, people relearned things, relearned hunting, relearned making skins and turning them into fabric or turning them into clothes.
00:33:16.000What's your theory of where it all started?
00:33:23.000Well, I think that I'm not against the academic reconstruction of the human family tree.
00:33:32.000I think they've done some quite good work.
00:33:34.000So, to answer your question, I'll have to go back quite far to the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee, which is about six million years ago.
00:33:44.000And then from then, you get a gradual emergence of a creature who begins to look more and more human.
00:33:52.000And by two and a half million years ago, that creature is making stone tools.
00:33:56.000The first sign of real intelligent activity.
00:33:59.000I'm going to turn the air conditioning on.
00:34:05.000And once the creature has invented them...
00:34:08.000It doesn't change for the next million years.
00:34:11.000The stone tools stay exactly the same.
00:34:14.000So we know that they're passing down cultural information and we also know that they're extremely rigid in their thought patterns and they're stuck in that.
00:34:22.000Then a new type of stone tool is introduced and that one sticks for another million years as well.
00:34:29.000And during this time, our ancestors are looking more and more like us.
00:34:34.000And finally, the earliest surviving, fully anatomically modern human skeleton comes from Ethiopia, as a matter of fact, and it's 195,000 years old.
00:34:46.000That's just short of 200,000 years old.
00:34:49.000Before that, the creatures were closely related to us, but they didn't look quite like us, and their brains were not quite like ours.
00:34:56.000But by 195,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans have evolved.
00:35:03.000Their behavior is stuck in that archaic period, and they're still using the same limited, unimaginative stone tools that were being used a million years before.
00:35:13.000And then a really extraordinary thing happens, and it's within the last 50,000 years, is that you just get this incredible surge forward in human behavior.
00:35:24.000The dawn of spiritual beliefs, they're very, very clear because they started burying food and water with the dead.
00:35:31.000Anybody who does that, they definitely believe that some aspect of the individual continues after death.
00:35:36.000And they created the great cave art, the amazing, amazing paintings, stunning works of art.
00:35:41.000All of this symbolic behaviour seemed to just switch on kind of overnight, somewhere after 50,000 years ago.
00:35:49.000So I would start the clock about there, where suddenly you've got these incredibly intelligent, artistic, creative creatures on the planet who are us, and they are doing this stuff.
00:36:00.000And I believe that some of them stayed in the hunter-gatherer mode all the way through.
00:36:08.000And those were the cave artists of what's called the Upper Paleolithic.
00:36:12.000And I think some of them moved in another direction and formed a civilization.
00:36:17.000And just as today, in our 21st century world, we have highly advanced technological civilizations coexisting with hunter-gatherers.
00:36:27.000You do still have traditional hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, in Botswana, for example.
00:36:31.000I believe it was the same in the world then.
00:36:34.000And I think that what I think of as the lost civilization was largely a maritime civilization, living along coastlines, living on the best lands during the Ice Age, because inland it was arid, it was cold.
00:36:50.000Very very difficult to live but on the coasts things were much better and it was precisely the coasts that were inundated when mysteriously and suddenly the ice age ended and all that ice started to melt down and went back into the ocean and the sea levels rose.
00:37:07.000And you think that, I mean, I've read all your books.
00:37:10.000I read Supernatural as well, which is one of my more favorite, or what I found more fascinating, because you really stepped out on some serious limbs on that one.
00:37:22.000Yeah, I mean, you come from the journey from being a journalist who was covering this thing in Ethiopia to...
00:37:29.000Supernatural, which insinuates that humanity has probably learned a good deal of what we are and what we become because of psychedelic drugs.
00:37:40.000And I think that with the current demonization of psychedelic drugs in our society, it's a huge mistake.
00:37:48.000How much resistance have you felt from that book?
00:37:50.000Well, I've had an enormous amount of resistance to it because we have had a mind-programming exercise called the War on Drugs for the last 40 years, which has been designed to create an internal enemy in our societies and convince people that there are these evil, wicked groups who are doing these terrible, sinful things, smoking these drugs and doing this and that, and this very dark image has been created around it, and people get very upset, irrationally, about this whole issue.
00:38:18.000And actually, what's been forgotten In all of this, and for me it's become, I regard it as an extremely important issue, is that when the state sends us to prison for essentially exploring our own consciousness, This is a grotesque abuse of human rights.
00:38:40.000If I, as an adult, am not sovereign over my own consciousness, then I'm absolutely not sovereign over anything.
00:38:47.000I can't claim any kind of freedom at all.
00:38:49.000And what has happened over the last 40 or 50 years under the disguise of the war on drugs We have been persuaded to hand over the keys of our consciousness to the state.
00:39:00.000The most precious, the most intimate, the most sapient part of ourselves, the state now has the keys.
00:39:07.000And furthermore, they've persuaded us that that's in our interests.
00:39:13.000There was an article that was recently published about people and creativity.
00:39:19.000Everyone says they love creative ideas, but the truth is, amongst non-creative people, creative ideas make them confrontational, make them upset, make them defensive.
00:39:28.000When you start talking about experiences like psychedelic experiences, one of the things that always freaks me out is people's inability to even consider that there's a difference between a psychedelic experience on drugs and And a drug that's going to ruin your life.
00:39:44.000They're not even interested in considering that possibility.
00:39:53.000Let's remember that funded with our money, our taxpayers' money, there has been 40 years of programming, more than 40 years on this subject, to make us all develop a kind of aversion of fear, hatred, horror of drugs.
00:40:10.000It's just fundamentally wrong in so many ways.
00:40:12.000Look, quite a number of illegal drugs are actually really bad and really dangerous, and they will totally fuck you up in all kinds of ways.
00:40:24.000I believe that the sovereignty of the adult over his or her own body and his or her own mind trumps everything else.
00:40:32.000And we must have the right to make our mistakes.
00:40:34.000You know, we already have laws in our society for punishing bad behavior.
00:40:39.000If somebody on drugs goes out and gets in somebody else's face and causes them trouble, we already have laws to deal that.
00:40:46.000We don't need new laws that control our consciousness and rigidly place it in a prison and actually place us in prison.
00:40:52.000Such an important point, what you just said, that we already have laws to keep you from doing bad things.
00:41:11.000If that's what you want to do, if that's your adult decision, that's your choice.
00:41:15.000What does liberty mean if it doesn't mean that?
00:41:18.000People will get into this ridiculous, just obey the law, why is it such a hard time, what are you, a druggie, you need drugs, get through this life.
00:41:25.000And I always say, this is such an illogical argument, because imagine if we were on an island, we were the only people on the planet, and there was only four of us.
00:41:31.000There was only four of us, and one of us wanted to smoke pot.
00:41:34.000And we said, we've got to lock this guy up in a fucking cage.
00:41:53.000It's an extraordinary thing and you have to consider what it's led to in our society in all kinds of ways.
00:41:58.000It's led to the creation of huge armed bureaucracies.
00:42:02.000Who have the right to break into our homes, smash down our doors, humiliate us in every possible way, ruin our lives with criminal records.
00:42:55.000You never got sent to jail for smoking tobacco.
00:42:58.000You never got your life ruined or your front door broken down.
00:43:01.000But some years ago, people cottoned on to the notion that tobacco actually may be making you pretty unwell if we're smoking a lot of tobacco.
00:43:08.000It seems to be a connection with lung cancer.
00:43:14.000Look what's happened with tobacco in the last 20 years.
00:43:17.000Millions, millions and millions of adults all over the world presented with that information have taken a personal sovereign decision to stop smoking cigarettes.
00:43:27.000I took that decision when I was 38 years old.
00:43:56.000It definitely did help, as does marijuana.
00:44:00.000But the fact is that there is – the point that I want to make is that if the state was really interested in helping us – this is how the war on drugs is presented – we're concerned about your health, so we're going to send you to prison.
00:44:15.000We're concerned about the harm this drug is doing to you, so we're going to send you to prison.
00:44:19.000What's more harmful, the harm the drug is doing or being sent to prison?
00:44:22.000It seems to me pretty obvious that being sent to prison is a much more harmful thing that's being done.
00:44:29.000If the state was really concerned about harm, then the solution is not to criminalize people for taking drugs.
00:44:38.000The solution is to present them with very good information which they believe.
00:44:41.000Part of the problem is that the state has become to be regarded as so corrupt that any message emanating from the state about drugs is not believed anymore, completely disbelieved.
00:44:51.000So, you know, once again, we come to this issue of adult sovereignty over consciousness.
00:44:57.000And our right also to make mistakes with our own body if we do that.
00:45:01.000I believe we're here on this earth to learn and to grow and to develop.
00:45:04.000And we have to have adult responsibility to do that.
00:45:07.000It always astonishes me in America where you have the Republican Party, which is strongly in favor of individual freedoms, that it's often Republicans who are the ones who are most anti-drugs.
00:45:20.000I think that any true Republican should absolutely champion the right of every adult individual, if they choose to do so, to explore their own consciousness with any drugs they choose.
00:45:32.000Yeah, there's no real parties anymore.
00:46:41.000And it's been going on for a very long time and it happens that the current victims are drug users.
00:46:49.000It's interesting that language itself has been deployed in this war so that you very rarely find the word drug separated from the word abuse.
00:46:57.000You never find the notion of a responsible use of drugs.
00:47:00.000You find only the notion of abuse of drugs.
00:47:03.000And so it's become impossible almost to speak about drugs without incorporating this notion that some abuse is taking place.
00:47:10.000Yeah, and the idea that you can actually benefit from them is an alien thought.
00:47:14.000Completely alien, very much hated by our society.
00:47:18.000And yet, you know, the research is coming through.
00:47:21.000We've had the research in the last year with psilocybin, easing anxiety of terminal cancer patients, MDMA with post-traumatic stress disorder, fantastically successful result.
00:49:09.000Sometimes we go down to Brazil sometimes to drink ayahuasca, and sometimes late in an ayahuasca session as you're beginning to return to this reality, it's nice to play a bit of music or a little bit of voice, and sometimes we play Terence McKenna.
00:49:24.000And I just remember one line was about how psychedelics dissolve boundaries.
00:49:29.000And he says, you know, they'll dissolve boundaries between you and your cat, even between you and your washing machine.
00:49:37.000No, he had wonderful ideas, and he very intuitively, very far ahead of his time, grasped the notion that this sudden advancement of humanity had to do with psychedelics.
00:49:50.000What it did was it broke our rigid behavior patterns that we were stuck in and unable to change, and it opened us up to new possibilities.
00:49:58.000And you see this remarkable event taking place after 50,000 years ago, definitely to do with psychedelics.
00:50:03.000Now, since that time, there's a parallel track, which is the academic work on, Cave art and psychedelics, which is Professor David Lewis Williams of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.
00:50:13.000And he has absolutely taken it beyond intuition and totally proved without any doubt whatsoever that all of the cave art was inspired by visionary experiences on psychedelics.
00:50:24.000There's just no doubt about it at all.
00:51:05.000That's from the Greek therion, which means wild beast, and anthropos, which means man.
00:51:09.000And this is one of the definitive aspects of deep visionary experience, is encountering entities who communicate with you and who are often encountered in this half-man, half-human form.
00:51:25.000So it's interesting that work done in the 1960s with, for example, mescaline, Wow.
00:51:40.000That was an entity that had come and spoken to him in the trance-like state, no different from the man with the head of a lion and the body of a human being that you find in Hollandstein Stadel Cave in Germany from 32,000 years ago.
00:51:53.000So what do you think is going on there?
00:51:55.000Do you think that you're dealing with entities that don't really have a form that we can understand, so they present themselves in some cartoonish combination of things that we're aware of?
00:52:05.000I think that, and I'm going out on a limb here, but I think that we're dealing, I don't believe consciousness is generated by the brain.
00:52:13.000I believe the brain is more of a receiver of consciousness.
00:52:16.000I think that's a really important distinction.
00:52:19.000The mainstream model of consciousness That we have in our society today definitely sees it as produced by the brain, the same way a factory makes cars.
00:52:29.000So if you smash up the factory, the cars stop being made.
00:52:35.000Ergo, if the person dies, the brain dies, consciousness just blinks out, gone, finished.
00:52:42.000But the other view, that the brain is a transceiver or receiver of consciousness, that it's the junction box that's manifesting consciousness on the physical realm, that raises whole different possibilities.
00:52:55.000Then when you destroy the receiver, the signal is still there.
00:53:03.000And you get into all kinds of possibilities from that.
00:53:08.000So the suggestion that I derive from that is that consciousness is fundamentally non-physical, but that for certain reasons, and they may be very deep and very mysterious, consciousness has created realms in which it is possible to manifest physically because in a physical realm, you have all kinds of consequences to your actions that you would not have in a non-physical state.
00:53:30.000A physical realm may be a very useful place to spend time if you're...
00:53:36.000An ancient soul who wishes to learn and grow and develop further.
00:53:43.000And that's how all ancient spiritual traditions see it, that we incarnate in these bodies in order to have the experience of life on Earth.
00:53:51.000But we don't die when these bodies die.
00:53:54.000These bodies are like a suit of clothes that we're wearing for this incarnation.
00:53:57.000I've always subscribed to the idea that creativity, when I'm at my best and most creative, and when I'm performing, doing stand-up comedy, at my best and most creative, I feel much more like a passenger than I do a driver.
00:54:09.000I feel like when I write my best stuff, I have no idea where it's coming from.
00:54:15.000I'm just moving my fingers and it's coming to me and it's not even me doing it.
00:54:18.000And it sounds ridiculous and you could say that, well, it's because really the ego gets in the way of creativity because you're always worrying about yourself.
00:54:25.000And if you could just put the ego aside, then your mind can work better.
00:54:28.000And I see that argument, but it feels like it comes to me in these great bursts of ideas that I never considered before.
00:54:38.000Maybe that's really something that I'm figuring out a way to tune in.
00:54:43.000Yeah, you're tuning into it and you're becoming a channel for the material, for your own material.
00:54:48.000Your consciousness is running the show, but your consciousness is not limited to this realm.
00:54:55.000And it's drawing down material from elsewhere.
00:54:58.000I've had the same experience with my writing.
00:55:00.000The more that I intellectualize the process, and that's particularly true since I've turned to fiction, the more that I intellectualize the process, the harder the writing becomes.
00:55:10.000And the sooner I let It's so strange how it comes in waves, though.
00:55:18.000It's almost like you can't keep tuned into the spiritual realm for any long period of time.
00:56:24.000I mean, I have been a non-fiction writer all my life.
00:56:29.000I started out, as I mentioned, in journalism.
00:56:31.000I moved into ancient mysteries, but it was always non-fiction.
00:56:34.000You look at a book like Fingerprints of the Gods or Underworld, the book about our diving adventures, you'll find that there's 2,000 footnotes, you know?
01:00:06.000That I didn't want to go on with the investigation of the lost civilization subject anymore, not because I'd lost interest in it or because I'd turned against it, but because I felt that I'd taken it as far as I personally could.
01:00:19.000After Santa and I had done six years of scuba diving all around the world and literally put our lives on the line and had revealed a great deal of stuff underwater that people didn't know about, I felt, actually, I don't know where I take this next.
01:00:32.000There are a lot of young, energetic people out there.
01:00:36.000I would like them to take it on now, where I took it from.
01:00:40.000And I wanted to look for a change of direction, and I wanted to challenge myself as a writer.
01:00:45.000And I'd always wanted to write a novel.
01:00:48.000So down in Brazil, over a series of five ayahuasca sessions, I asked ayahuasca, can I write a novel?
01:00:57.000And if so, what would I be writing about?
01:01:21.000It was very clear that I was to write a story and that it would involve...
01:01:25.000Two young women, one in the Stone Age, one in the modern times, and that they would be entangled, that they would be connected through consciousness, and that they would be involved in a battle of good against evil.
01:01:37.000And certain scenes came through very, very clear to me and stuck vividly in my mind.
01:01:42.000So as soon as we'd finished in Brazil, I went back to England and started writing.
01:01:46.000So when you ask ayahuasca, can you do it and what would it be about, do you think that ayahuasca wants you to do this?
01:01:55.000Because if you do something like that, I always think of any work that I put out, whether it's even writing a blog or putting something, a funny thing up on Twitter, you send out this signal and then this signal is going to affect who knows how many people in a positive way.
01:02:10.000Especially something that they really enjoy reading, like a book.
01:02:13.000And people can say, like, why would I want you to write a book?
01:02:16.000Because some books are fucking awesome.
01:02:55.000They often say there's a song that, I forget the song, you know, the Rolling Stones, you don't always get what you want, you get what you need, you know.
01:03:51.000Nymphaea serelea, which is a potent psychedelic.
01:03:55.000And William Embedon at the State University of California has published detailed research on the blue water lily and on its psychedelic properties.
01:04:26.000And they were coming back and giving a detailed report about what they encountered there.
01:04:30.000The first I'd ever heard of any of that was from John Anthony West's work and the work on the Temple of Man, which is really fascinating that there's a temple and each area of the temple signifies like a part of a human being.
01:04:44.000And there's a whole area about the pineal gland and the Egyptians were, you know, they called it the seat of the soul and that they believed that, you know, the pineal gland was your connection to To the afterlife.
01:05:12.000But something in our bodies, and the pineal gland is the most likely suspect, is generating DMT. Because the presence of DMT in the human body is not in dispute.
01:05:33.000Particularly, yes, since the pineal gland was originally a sense organ.
01:05:39.000And so the suggestion would be that it's still a sense organ.
01:05:43.000It's a kind of sixth sense, which the lens that it uses is DMT. And what people don't realize is that in reptiles, in certain reptiles, it actually has a retina and a lens.
01:06:06.000And I would still say, you're right, it's not proved, I would still say the most likely candidate for the generation of DMT. Well, Strassman is working on figuring that out right now.
01:06:17.000They're working on more detailed studies to try to exactly pinpoint the location where it's created.
01:06:25.000I mean, you know, the point that you were making just now, I think that...
01:06:30.000I think that by cutting these ancient plant allies out of our life and by demonizing them and creating this atmosphere of fear and hatred around them, this is a suicidal path that our society is taking and we only need to look at the past in order to realize that that is true.
01:06:49.000There is a danger in human species that we get locked into a particular frame.
01:06:54.000And right now, we are locked into the technology frame.
01:06:58.000Of course, we're advancing technology very, very, very fast.
01:07:02.000But that doesn't mean we aren't locked.
01:07:04.000We're locked into one frame, and we're not thinking outside of that frame.
01:07:08.000And we can see the consequences of being locked into that frame, which is our world is in chaos.
01:07:13.000Our world is in a state of hatred and fear and suspicion right now.
01:07:17.000There's all this horrible stuff going on.
01:07:21.000And we are literally on the edge of destroying ourselves.
01:07:24.000And there's never been a time in the human story when we've more needed to break out of our rigid patterns of behavior and start thinking about things from a different point of view.
01:07:33.000And nature has provided us with the means to do so.
01:07:40.000It's a fascinating concept, and the concept that human beings are working against themselves, and they're working to keep things fucked up and make them more...
01:07:51.000And that the only way to sustain a society as complex and large and invasive as the one we currently live in, the only way is to do it the way we're doing it.
01:08:00.000And that if all of a sudden psychedelic drugs were introduced and the materialism was, you know, sort of pushed in the back burner and spiritualism was something that people, you know, started really understanding and appreciate their connection more.
01:08:32.000Any society that can stand back while the Amazon jungle is burnt down at the sort of country-sized rate every year, this is an insane society.
01:08:40.000We obviously live in a demented society, completely insane.
01:08:43.000A lot of people aren't even aware of how crazy that looks.
01:08:46.000If you watch it, you see documentaries online of the mass amounts of forests that they're chopping down.
01:10:27.000They knit the exact things you were saying that are on the cave walls, like the honeycomb patterns and stuff.
01:10:34.000So they create these beautiful quilts that are just incredible depictions of what apparently the ayahuasca visions of the geometric aspect of that.
01:10:45.000Do you ever think of how much you play a part of that?
01:10:49.000I mean, your instincts obviously were to produce this book and to talk about it very openly and honestly and to do interviews like this and have discussions like this where you talk about it.
01:10:58.000And this right now is going to reach half a million people.
01:11:01.000They're going to consider what you're saying and they're going to look into it and they're going to go, whoa, do you really think that there's some fucking vine that you can take from the jungle that allows you to communicate with the spirit world?
01:11:10.000I feel some responsibility in this area.
01:11:13.000Let's explain to people what it does for noobs, for people who are not aware of what ayahuasca is.
01:11:18.000The first thing I'd like to say is that ayahuasca, and as a matter of fact all psychedelics, are a very serious business.
01:11:25.000I personally do not believe that psychedelics are appropriate for recreational activity.
01:11:29.000I think if somebody chooses to do that, that's their body, that's their choice, but I don't think it's the right thing to do.
01:11:35.000We need to treat these amazing substances with respect.
01:11:40.000And anybody who's worked with psychedelics will know absolutely that the set and setting in which the psychedelic is consumed is as important as the psychedelic itself.
01:11:49.000What you are looking for from the experience and the company in which you take it and the reason for which you take it are definitely going to color and affect the experience.
01:11:59.000I think it's a mistake to use these powerful agents of consciousness work for recreation.
01:12:07.000There are other great things for recreation and other great sensual substances, but the psychedelics are not for that purpose.
01:12:17.000And if somebody wants to have A really bad trip and have truly horrific experiences with psychedelics.
01:12:24.000Take it in the wrong setting and you can be pretty sure that's going to happen to you sooner or later.
01:12:28.000So first thing I would say to people with all psychedelics is be careful.
01:12:36.000This is a very serious thing you're engaging on.
01:12:38.000Therefore, find a space that can be protected.
01:12:44.000Find somebody who knows what they're doing, who can sit with you and who can oversee this and bring a ceremony to the table.
01:12:52.000Let's not just sit down disrespectfully and consume the substance.
01:12:58.000Let's bring a ceremonial aspect to it.
01:13:00.000And I would say with ayahuasca, I know that quite a number of people now have started to get the ingredients on the internet and brew up their ayahuasca.
01:13:15.000More and more Westerners are being trained by those shamans.
01:13:18.000Those Westerners are returning to Western countries and are creating a new form of shamanism relevant to the urban and industrial context of the West.
01:13:27.000If you really want to work with ayahuasca, seek out somebody like that.
01:13:30.000Better still if you can get the funds together, go down to Brazil or go down to Peru and work with the masters.
01:13:36.000How do you find the masters if you want to do that?
01:13:43.000I'm often reminded of sort of underground sects at the end of the Roman Empire, like the Gnostics, you know, being persecuted by mainstream Christianity, where everything was done by word of mouth.
01:14:07.000But there are also some very good people and do some serious research first and look into the subject and find the right person, somebody who's deeply experienced, who understands the vine and work with them and you can be sure you're going to have a much more worthwhile experience.
01:14:21.000Whatever series of events led you to go there and take those substances and have these visionary experiences and then relay them, do you ever feel as if you were compelled, that you were brought to it like this is, like you have a purpose?
01:14:37.000If so, it's like the rest of the course of my life, a series of accidents.
01:14:42.000Like I flew into that city in northern Ethiopia in 1983 and found myself in front of a monk who said he had the Ark of the Covenant behind him.
01:14:51.000Okay, I decided that after I published Underworld, which was my last book on the lost civilization issues, I had always been interested in human origins, and that's why I decided to write Supernatural.
01:15:03.000But when I got into the subject, I found that the story didn't get interesting until 50,000 years ago, and it got interesting because of psychedelics.
01:15:11.000And then, so it was an accident that led me to that.
01:15:13.000Then, well, obviously, the next research conclusion was I had to go take some psychedelics, and to do so in a shamanic setting, and learn about it.
01:15:21.000A series of accidental decisions kind of led me to that process, so I guess I don't feel called or chosen, but I found myself in the hot seat.
01:15:30.000Do you feel obligated, though, because you know so much about it?
01:15:33.000I feel obligated, and I feel a responsibility, which is to share with others that these agents can be transformational and that they can be incredibly helpful, but that they are also extremely powerful and that they must be treated with respect.
01:16:39.000When people mock mushrooms, I even talked to Michio Kaku, who's this amazing physicist and this really brilliant guy, and I was on the Opie and Anthony show, and I asked him, have you ever done mushrooms?
01:17:09.000If I told you that there was some real thing and you take it and you're going to be in communication with some insanely wise entity from some parallel or constantly surrounding you dimension, would you just try it?
01:17:25.000That's the problem that we're talking about here is because Michio Kaku, he is a genius, but he's also been conditioned.
01:17:34.000And so imagine if a genius came in contact with something.
01:17:38.000Because right now, this spirit, whatever you want to call it, it's right now, the majority of, a lot of the people it's contacting are like 16-year-olds in trailers who are like playing Xbox.
01:17:50.000It's like, I am trying to communicate high-level information.
01:17:53.000Why are you sending me These idiot kids!
01:17:56.000To be fair, I have to say that I'm not sure that's the case with ayahuasca.
01:18:39.000There's proved archaeological evidence for the use of ayahuasca going back more than 4,000 years in the Amazon.
01:18:44.000And so somehow or another, 4,000 years ago, out of hundreds of thousands of different plants, right, they figured out how to combine the vine of one with the leaves of another.
01:18:54.000It's a sophisticated piece of chemistry that they're doing.
01:19:22.000And with that, with DMT you have a problem because DMT is not orally active.
01:19:29.000And the reason that DMT is not orally active is that we have an enzyme in our stomachs called monoamine oxidase.
01:19:35.000And monoamine oxidase switches off DMT on contact.
01:19:41.000What they did in the Amazon jungle was that they found out of, actually, you're right, there's 150,000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon.
01:19:50.000They found the one other that contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
01:19:58.000The vine actually does not contain the psychedelic ingredient.
01:20:00.000It contains the ingredient that allows the psychedelic to become orally active.
01:20:05.000So do you think they just ate the two of them at the same time once and had some crazy experience and went, whoa, write this down?
01:20:10.000When I ask shamans about this, they all say the same thing.
01:20:13.000The spirits taught our ancestors to do this.
01:20:15.000When these guys are getting blasted on ayahuasca for decades upon decades, though, do you think they can really recall exactly how they learned all this?
01:20:22.000Well, no, they didn't learn it in their lifetimes because it was already old knowledge to them.
01:20:55.000It's an amazing thing that they've combined.
01:20:58.000Do you think that it's not orally active because it's in so many different plants that if it was, that people would just be eating it and getting high on DMT all the time?
01:21:27.000I, of course, 100% agree with you that you should go to a shaman if you're going to do this experience, but if you did have that leaf that you were talking about and just a classic MAO inhibitor, whatever it was, and you took that and ate the leaf, would you then have the experience?
01:21:44.000Yeah, it's a kind of dodgy thing to do.
01:21:46.000But there are what they call ayahuasca analogues, and even Pharma-wasca is being spoken of now, which does precisely that, which uses a pharmacological MOAI with DMT. I think personally we don't need to go there because nature has provided us with this beautiful and incredible possibility in the ayahuasca brew, in these two different plants.
01:22:14.000Interestingly, it's not impossible to drink ayahuasca legally in the United States because the battle is already being fought here.
01:22:26.000In Brazil, the ayahuasca shamanism has come out of the jungle and into the cities and it's taken form of several what you would call syncretic churches which are mixing elements of Christianity with elements of traditional shamanism.
01:22:45.000So the best known are the Santo Demi and the Unia de Vegetal which both use ayahuasca as their sacrament.
01:22:54.000I've sat down with the Uniada Vegetal group in Brazil and drunk ayahuasca.
01:22:58.000They were the most charming, thorough, professional, hardworking people I could ever have hoped to meet.
01:23:05.000They bring their children to the sessions.
01:23:06.000They start their children on ayahuasca at the age of 14. They have a completely different view of psychedelics to the view that we have.
01:23:12.000They believe that it's a really helpful and important experience for humanity to have this.
01:23:17.000And fortunately, the government of Brazil agrees with them, and it doesn't persecute them for doing this.
01:23:22.000So they have formed established churches, and those churches have members in the United States.
01:23:30.000The matter was taken up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, yes, if you're a member of the União do Vegetal, you can drink ayahuasca legally.
01:23:37.000That actually, for somebody who wants to work with ayahuasca, is something that I would recommend.
01:23:42.000I'm not drawn to established churches of any kind.
01:23:45.000I believe that spirituality doesn't require a church and a hierarchy.
01:23:50.000But the fact is that the Unia de Vegetal and the Santo Demi both know what they're doing with ayahuasca.
01:23:58.000They absolutely know what they're doing, and they are present in the United States, and they are drinking ayahuasca legally in the United States.
01:24:06.000Strassman told me he met with them in New Mexico and he said they're all wearing outfits and they're drinking ayahuasca and singing songs about Jesus.
01:24:13.000And he's like, they're on these really, really strong ayahuasca trips and they're singing songs about Jesus.
01:24:18.000And he was like, what the fuck are you people doing down here?
01:24:30.000But, I mean, interestingly enough, if we separate Christ off from the monstrous bureaucracy called the church, you do find an interesting spiritual teacher at work.
01:24:44.000And I suspect through ayahuasca they're getting closer to the true spiritual teachings.
01:24:49.000And more important, ayahuasca is not mediated by a priesthood.
01:24:55.000Ayahuasca is your own direct experience of the spirit realm.
01:25:01.000Whereas in most mainstream religions, the priesthood is telling you what to think.
01:25:05.000They are the intermediary between us and the divine.
01:25:08.000In the case of ayahuasca, the brew is the intermediary and it plugs us straight into the divine.
01:25:13.000That sounds like a badass church to join.
01:25:16.000I love taking acid in college and reading the New Testament.
01:25:21.000That was one of my favorite things, is getting really, really high, tripping and then reading the Gospels, because it is a very, very psychedelic text.
01:25:32.000The Book of John, it's hard enough to read when you're sober.
01:25:38.000But when you're tripping, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh.
01:26:27.000In fact, there are even depictions of the tree in the Garden of Eden, and those depictions show a mushroom.
01:26:36.000They show specifically an Amanita muscaria mushroom, not a psilocybin.
01:26:40.000An Amanita muscaria also a hallucinogenic mushroom.
01:26:45.000So, you know, when the entity called, you know, Yahweh or Jehovah or whatever he calls himself, you know, drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he was driving them out of the Garden of Eden because they'd done a mushroom trip.
01:27:01.000And then the apple, the apple, even the word for apple also means red, and that the mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, was a red mushroom, and that this is what they ate.
01:27:11.000I mean, it makes sense, the food of the gods, you know, and the forbidden fruit.
01:27:15.000And actually, I don't believe that we can understand any spirituality without dealing with altered states of consciousness.
01:27:24.000This is again something that's been lost in the modern world.
01:27:28.000You don't find in most of the mainstream religions much altered state of consciousness going on.
01:27:33.000But if you go back to the origins, you find altered states of consciousness are deeply involved.
01:27:39.000And I'm not saying that those altered states of consciousness were always caused by psychedelics.
01:27:43.000There's other ways to get into deeply altered states of consciousness, including starving yourself, fasting, austerity, certain kinds of rhythmic dancing.
01:27:51.000But definitely altered states of consciousness were involved.
01:27:54.000So, in the case of Christianity, it's St. Paul on the Damascus Road.
01:27:58.000You know, he has this blinding revelation which completely turns his life around in a totally different direction.
01:28:05.000Benny Shannon, who's the professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has made a very powerful case that Moses, in front of the burning bush, It's really a psychedelic experience that's being described there.
01:28:16.000You're sitting in front of this bush, and it's kind of moving and glowing, and a voice is coming out of it and speaking to you.
01:28:24.000It's a very psychedelic experience, and he even further argues that Moses may have been drinking an ayahuasca analog, Syrian rue and mimosa hostilis.
01:28:33.000I think these are two plants which contain the same ingredients I've even heard scholars connect the acacia tree or the acacia bush with a potential source of psychedelic experience because apparently it's rich in dimethyltryptamine and a burning bush.
01:29:00.000You know, like, somehow or another, like, this was, you know, they had synthesized DMT from this and burned it, and then he has this experience.
01:29:19.000And so you begin to realize that when you scratch the mainstream religions, you get down to base ground before the money men and the bureaucrats stepped in and took it over.
01:29:29.000You find visionary experiences are at the heart of it.
01:29:33.000And then later on, those visionary experiences become banned and illegal and nobody's ever allowed to have them again.
01:29:40.000Now, I want to go back to something you said earlier, that you said you have problems with technology.
01:29:45.000And I think a lot of people subscribe to the idea that technology, even though it brings people together and it connects people, it's sort of pushing people apart, too.
01:29:55.000And it's making people become sort of desensitized to a lot of things.
01:29:58.000and they alienate themselves and sit at home and play video games.
01:30:02.000Do you ever consider the possibility that technology is a life form in and of itself?
01:30:07.000Do you ever consider the possibility that we are somehow or not locked in some symbiotic relationship to we are the worker bees creating this new life form?
01:30:17.000And that technology, artificial intelligence, which we're absolutely working on creating, will eventually be the next stage, something that's not hindered by the monkey flesh that really cannot evolve as quickly as the technology can.
01:30:29.000I see no reason why that should not be the case.
01:30:32.000I think that since I personally believe that consciousness is not generated by the brain, but is an independent entity which chooses to immerse itself in physical form, I don't see why that entity shouldn't choose to immerse itself in mechanical form either.
01:30:46.000In any highly organized system, I don't see why consciousness should not manifest through that system.
01:30:51.000Why are we thinking that it only is going to work in a collection of bacteria and cells?
01:30:55.000This bag of bacteria is the only one that works.
01:30:59.000A relationship between who knows how many different types of things in your body.
01:31:05.000E. coli and all these different things on your skin and viruses that you carry for your entire life.
01:31:12.000Have you seen the, it's on the internet, it's a video where they took the two artificial intelligence machines and let them have a conversation with each other.
01:32:26.000There's a video we've talked about before about watching traffic go back and forth on a high-speed camera, slow motion, or sped up, rather, throughout the day, that it looks just like cells and blood cells going down an artery.
01:32:52.000I think that the conclusion I'm coming to is that the universe manifests organization and life wherever it can as a As a medium in which consciousness can immerse itself, and that this may take many different forms and shapes, but the key that was driving it is consciousness and the need for consciousness to manifest on the physical plane.
01:33:19.000I mean, I'll make a trivial example, but I think all of us have had this experience, you know, with our computers, where somehow there's some kind of interaction between you and your computer in some ways.
01:33:34.000I had just got a new computer, and my old computer had increasingly annoyed me because when I had finished the document on Microsoft Word, it told me that I'd made new changes which I needed to save, which I hadn't done.
01:33:49.000It kept saying, do you want to save the changes that you've just made?
01:34:36.000That we have manifested in human bodies because we've got this body with its equipment is an incredible opportunity for learning and growing and developing and we've got much better opportunity to learn and grow and develop than a fruit fly or a cockroach does.
01:34:51.000Have you ever looked in any of Rupert Sheldrake's work?
01:35:30.000He's studying that in a very scientific way, and he's producing statistically significant results which show that these phenomena definitely do exist.
01:35:37.000Boy, do people fight him tooth and nail.
01:35:40.000I've read some of the critiques of his work.
01:35:45.000People get very angry because, again, it's kind of throwing the existing paradigm upside down, throwing it in the air and saying that we're all connected by these morphogenetic fields.
01:35:54.000And it's not showing a perfect connection either.
01:37:06.000I do think Cydonia is extremely interesting.
01:37:11.000My part of that book was mainly about cosmic cataclysms.
01:37:15.000It's clear that the planet Mars has been subjected to the most horrific disaster and that there is some scientific evidence which suggests this may have been pretty recent, like the last 20,000 years.
01:37:26.000I mean, half of the planet is like a mile higher than the other half.
01:37:30.000So if you imagine you take a A little ball and you cut a line round its equator and then you peel off the outer layer of the lower half and then you leave the upper half as it was.
01:37:45.000There's a cliff a mile high that runs all the way round Mars.
01:37:48.000And something dramatic and disastrous happened to that planet.
01:37:53.000There was definitely water on that planet, flowing water, and something took it away.
01:37:59.000Very, very horrible cosmic cataclysm occurred, struck by a gigantic asteroid or comet most likely.
01:38:07.000And we have these odd ruins, or what look like ruins, which NASA behaves very oddly about on the planet Mars.
01:38:16.000And I just think it's an extremely interesting mystery, and I decided to try to put my mind to work on this mystery and see if I could add anything to the debate.
01:38:32.000So NASA has consistently ridiculed the notion that there might be intelligently created artifacts on Mars, and that seems to be a most unscientific proposition.
01:41:12.000And there's something to be poked fun at, especially a guy who believes there's a face on Mars and all that.
01:41:16.000There's some of the things that I think are very compelling.
01:41:19.000Five-sided pyramids or some other structures.
01:41:21.000I'm not saying he's right or he's wrong.
01:41:23.000I'm saying the question needed to be asked, and it needed to be asked forcefully, because it's up against resistance.
01:41:28.000And it needed to be asked in a way that would engage the public imagination.
01:41:31.000And when you say what you said earlier, it doesn't seem unreasonable at all.
01:41:35.000If you say that half of Mars is, like, literally destroyed a mile lower, well, obviously something cataclysmic happened.
01:41:42.000And then the absolute proof, they've already found that there's water on Mars and there has been flowing rivers, there's all sorts of evidence of that.
01:42:09.000It's a question, and I'm glad that somebody was prepared to devote, you know, half of his life to exploring and investigating, even if he's wrong.
01:42:17.000I'm glad that he was prepared to do that.
01:42:44.000I mean, the worst was really being set up by the BBC in 1999. I saw that.
01:42:50.000I was going to bring that up if it came up.
01:42:52.000In a way, I suppose it's a kind of oblique honor that BBC Horizon, which is their flagship science program, chose to spend three quarters of a million dollars destroying my reputation.
01:43:36.000And he said, the best thing you can do is just not do that show.
01:43:39.000So when they rang me up, I immediately said yes.
01:43:42.000What was their motivation for destroying you?
01:43:44.000Well, the motivation was clear, and I learned about this afterwards, which was a group of academics from various universities in Britain had written to the BBC and said, this man, Hancock, is leading our students to question our archaeology.
01:47:11.000Get hold of John West's Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt, which is by far, by a planetary distance, the best guidebook that's ever been written on Egypt, because that will plunge you into the mystery of Egypt in a way that no other book does.
01:48:02.000But the BBC thing, the reason I bring that up is because it's not as though you're just studying foggy pictures or you're just looking at or reading information and then...
01:48:19.000I've put my life on the line and I've made an honest and sincere attempt to provide some balance to the grotesquely imbalanced picture of our history that is presented by mainstream archaeology.
01:48:33.000This is what I fundamentally see my role as being.
01:48:38.000You know, I'm portrayed by the BBC as this person, you know, who's selling these wild theories to the public through, I don't know, some kind of glib magic.
01:48:47.000But actually what I see myself as is somebody who's saying, hang on, there might have been another way.
01:48:55.000The way that we're being told things were...
01:48:57.000There's enough problems with that to raise some questions and I'm going to look at those questions and I'm going to document them and examine them and let's see what they come to.
01:49:05.000I do not insist that there was a lost civilization.
01:49:54.000The fingerprints of the gods really just changed the way I looked at everything.
01:49:58.000Changed the way I looked at human history.
01:49:59.000Changed the way I looked at the academic study of human history and what people are willing to believe and not believe and how much they're willing to throw everything that they've learned aside or push it aside or everything that they're teaching.
01:50:48.000And what is the explanation, the academic explanation for that?
01:50:52.000They say that that temple was built by the Romans as a temple of Jupiter and that the Romans moved those big stones.
01:50:58.000I would say that what happened was that a much older culture created that big stone structure and that on top of it the Romans built the temple of Jupiter.
01:51:08.000So 10,000 plus years ago something happened?
01:51:15.00012,500 years ago was the end, not the beginning.
01:51:17.000That was the time when the meltdown of the Ice Age was at one of its most extreme periods.
01:51:24.000The actual meltdown of the Ice Age took 10,000 years to unfold, but within that 10,000 years, there were three or four episodes of gigantic flooding where you had 30-foot rise of sea levels very rapidly, virtually overnight.
01:51:37.000You consider what a 30-foot sea level rise would do to our civilization today.
01:51:43.000I mean, look, America is still reeling from Hurricane Katrina.
01:51:47.000Imagine what would happen if every coastal city went under 30 feet of water.
01:51:51.000It is enough to destroy any civilization.
01:51:54.000Is it a climate change thing, you think it was?
01:51:56.000Yeah, it was certainly a climate change.
01:51:57.000But, you know, the cataclysmic explanation of ice caps is to do with pole shifts and to do with the mechanism called earth-crust displacement, which was first proposed by Charles Hapgood, good and i go into this at some length in in fingerprints of the gods
01:52:16.000the notion that that the outer crust of the earth rather like the sort of skin of an orange could move around the fruit the inner core of the earth that the core the crust could move and therefore in hapgood's theory ice forms on areas of the crust that are close to one or other pole that makes sense the poles are cold
01:52:36.000but when the crust shifts it moves that cold area into a warm area moves it closer to the equator makes all the ice melt and meanwhile new ice starts to form on the new pole So that theory explains the meltdown of the Ice Age not as a result of climate change, but as a result of cataclysmic Earth movements.
01:52:58.000And that explains also ancient maps of Iceland and Greenland.
01:53:21.000And he tells us actually in his own handwriting on the fragment of the map that has survived, that he based his, it was a world map, we've only got one corner of it, that he based it on more than a hundred source maps, none of which have survived.
01:53:34.000This was the case with the Orontius Phineas map and some of the Mercator maps as well, that they were drawing on ancient maps, which no longer, which didn't come down to us.
01:53:42.000So these maps were drawn within relatively recent history, within the last thousand years, but they were copying much older maps.
01:53:52.000And so it's very interesting when we find anomalies on these maps.
01:53:55.000For example, our culture discovered Antarctica in 1818. Before that, maps that were being drawn around 1800, they showed an empty hole where Antarctica is.
01:54:09.000But if you go back to the 1500s, the 1400s, when they were copying these older maps that haven't come down to us, you find Antarctica on every single one of them.
01:54:19.000And it's kind of a bit bigger than it is now, and it comes close to and almost touches South America, just as it did during the last Ice Age.
01:54:27.000You find off the coast of Ireland, a little circular island...
01:54:33.000With the legend on it, it's called High Brazil.
01:54:36.000That island is about 120 miles west of the West Irish coast.
01:54:42.000If you look at sea level rise, you find that 12,000 years ago and earlier, an island of exactly that size and exactly that shape existed in exactly that spot.
01:54:55.000And it was covered by rising sea levels 12,000 years ago.
01:54:59.000And it shows up on this map like a ghost.
01:55:01.000And that has to mean that somebody was around 12,000 years ago who had at least developed sufficient technology to explore the world and map it accurately.
01:55:18.000Like I say, I'm not here with a belief system.
01:55:21.000I'm here with anomalies and problems in the mainstream model.
01:55:27.000And what the evidence suggests to me very strongly is that those cataclysmic earth changes at the end of the ice age, and even regardless whether a pole shift or a crustal displacement was involved, nobody can dispute that the meltdown of the ice age was a cataclysmic event.
01:55:43.000It involved huge amounts of volcanic activity, and it involved these tremendous releases of water.
01:55:48.000So the ice would actually accumulate in glacial lakes for thousands of years.
01:55:52.000It would melt, slowly, slowly melt, and then suddenly, this is the mainstream model, suddenly the banks of the ice dam that held back that water would burst, and the whole mass of 4,000 years of meltwater would pour down into the world ocean in one moment.
01:56:10.000And the water descending from the top of the ice cap would reach speeds of 600 miles an hour and a wave height of close to a thousand feet.
01:56:18.000It then tears across the landscape that lies below the ice cap.
01:56:22.000And you see this still, the scab lands of New Jersey, the Finger Lakes of New York State.
01:56:27.000These are the results of those massive outburst floods that then tear across the land and then pour into the water and whoosh, up goes sea level.
01:57:26.000The Atlantis story comes to us from the Greek philosopher Plato.
01:57:30.000He is the earliest source of the Atlantis myth, if it's a myth.
01:57:35.000And he sets out information about Atlantis in two of his dialogues, the Timias and the Critias.
01:57:41.000And what he says is that this information came to him through an elder figure who's called Solon, a Greek lawmaker who existed about a hundred years before the time of Plato, but was in Plato's family.
01:57:51.000And the information had been passed down to Plato.
01:57:55.000Solon had received the information from priests in Egypt.
01:58:32.000What a beautiful way of putting it that we are a species with amnesia.
01:58:36.000And it's really almost, I mean, when you stop and think about it, how does one keep records over 12, 15,000 years with giant cataclysmic events where people are, for many generations, scratching and scrounging, just trying to stay alive like animals?
01:58:52.000And monumental architecture may be one way of doing it.
01:58:56.000You know, the notion that the pyramids and the Sphinx were laid out on the ground to model an ancient sky and thus define a date using four constellations, which were Leo, Aquarius, Draco, and Orion, using those four constellations to define a date, seems like a kind of exotic idea.
01:59:14.000But we have that right here in the United States in the Hoover Dam.
01:59:18.000There is a star map built into the architecture of the Hoover Dam.
01:59:21.000And that star map freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam at the moment the Hoover Dam was completed.
01:59:28.000And the purpose of putting that star map there by the man who originated it was precisely this.
01:59:33.000He said, in 10,000 years time, if our civilization is lost and our language is lost and nobody can read our documents, when they come across this structure by looking at the star map, they will be able to know when it was created.
01:59:50.000And it's all based on the procession of the equinoxes.
01:59:53.000It's based on the procession, which gives you this universal, beautifully mathematical cycle.
01:59:58.000And we've got to think that if people think like that today, they must have thought like that back then.
02:00:02.000that civilization had in some totally different and alien way than our own.
02:00:06.000I mean, so alien that their writing was images.
02:00:08.000Egypt, that's one of the things that really got out of John Anthony West's DVD series, is he really kind of gets you to understand how different their culture and society was than ours.
02:00:43.000For me to remember about the ancient Egyptians is this was a culture that devoted its best minds for 3,000 years to considering the mystery of life, what this is about, and the mystery of death.
02:00:55.000We lost so much in that burning of the library of Alexandria, right?
02:01:04.000We're left with this framework, these stone things to try to deconstruct the past, and even people, I mean, they have a certain amount of information, and they say, we're done, we're done, we figured it out, we figured it out.
02:01:16.000Just the idea that they can put a date to it.
02:01:18.000Haven't they dated the pyramids just sort of based on carbon and things that were left behind?
02:01:34.000You can't carbon date stone, but you can carbon date organic material.
02:01:39.000And in the mortar between the stones, there's some organic material.
02:01:42.000And the carbon dating on that is really puzzling.
02:01:46.000It doesn't make the pyramid 12,000 years old, but it makes it 1,000 years older than it's supposed to be at the top and 400 years older than it's supposed to be at the bottom.
02:02:30.000Is that the original site was laid out around 10,500 BC by the survivors of a lost civilization.
02:02:39.000The subterranean aspects of the Great Pyramid, specifically the subterranean chamber, was created at that time.
02:02:46.000The gigantic megalithic structures, the valley temple, the so-called mortuary temples that stand beside the pyramids, which seem so different in terms of their architecture, which have in some cases blocks of stone weighing 200 tons and many blocks of stone weighing 100 tons in them.
02:03:06.000And that then I would suggest what happened was that those survivors of a lost civilization...
02:03:15.000Established something like a monastery at Giza and they then started to recruit from the local population so that within a generation or two they were all Egyptians anyway but they were trained in a system of knowledge and that they kept that system of knowledge close and tight and passed it down for thousands of years.
02:03:36.000The idea of knowledge being transmitted for 4,000 years is actually not too difficult to take.
02:03:41.000We've had that We have that with some of our existing religions, which go back close to 4,000 years.
02:03:45.000There's no reason why it shouldn't have happened.
02:03:47.000And then at a certain point, this monastic institution switched Egyptian civilization on with all the high knowledge that they had preserved.
02:03:56.000And that's why it's so perfect at the beginning.
02:03:58.000And no one else was able to do that at that time anywhere else in the world?
02:04:12.000I've been privileged to climb it five times.
02:04:15.000I've been into every known chamber and passageway in the Great Pyramid.
02:04:20.000Tell me about the King's Chamber, because that is the freakiest thing of all.
02:04:23.000And for people that don't know, they've proven that some of the stones in the King's Chamber were from a quarry, how many hundred miles away?
02:05:08.000And to do it again and again and again and again and again and to do it with incredible precision and to align the whole structure that you're building within three sixtieths of a single degree of true north, that's really hard to do.
02:05:20.000So no, from that quarry to the pyramids, there wasn't a paved road.
02:06:59.000I would love to see Egypt in its prime to see what the fuck was going on there.
02:07:03.000What was that like when it was in full bloom and the pyramids had just been created and this strange civilization, a super advanced civilization, had just risen far and beyond anything else on the planet.
02:07:19.000Let's build that time machine right now.
02:07:23.000And with that note, thank you very much, sir.
02:07:25.000This has been an amazing conversation, a huge honor.