Episode 127 – Graham Hancock on The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization, America Before

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you are listening to the human experience podcast my name is Xavier katana we’ve got such an amazing show for you guys today a lot of preparation behind this show my guest today is mr. Graham Hancock he is the investigative author of a number of best-selling books that look at a range of topics from the Ark of the Covenant to the very origins of civilization Graham it’s a pleasure pleasure to welcome welcome you back to hxp my

friend thank you so much for being here nice to be with you say be a nice to be back so so Graham I mean you’ve got this new book here we’re definitely to get into that but first before we do that I want to talk about some of the the health issues that you’ve been going through you were in the hospital for a little bit right yeah well okay so the new the whilst researching the new book which is called America before I was traveling all over North America and

with my wife Santa who’s a photographer and and she and I had a particularly arduous trip in the southwest in Arizona and New Mexico in May 2017 getting baked every day in the Sun out looking at those extraordinary ancient sites in the southwest and one night it during during May in New Mexico I kind of felt unwell when I went to bed late at night and then I what I remember is waking up during the night thinking I was going to

throw up going to the bathroom and then that’s the last thing I remember and then the next information comes from my wife Santa who finds me writhing on the floor out she notices I’m missing from the bed she finds me right writhing on the floor between the bathroom and the hallway unconscious blood pouring from my mouth quite a dramatic scene she turns my head on the side so I don’t choke on my own blood and then calls the cause the calls

at nine nine one one the ambulance service and and the paramedics and I’m rushed to rush to hospital about 20 miles away from where we were staying and I don’t remember any of this about about 24 hours later I come back to I come back to consciousness and nobody really understands what’s happened to me initially the diagnosis actually that I was given was was wrong but understandable they discovered that I have a condition called atrial

fibrillation which is an irregular beat of the heart that can cause strokes and the initial conclusion was that I’d had some sort of mini stroke this was not the case in fact what I’d had was an epileptic seizure and this became much clearer at two months or three months later in England in August 2017 when again the same precursors feeling slightly nausea s– occurred and then suddenly I I had a root rouille massive series of seizures which were completely

unstoppable it took to ambulance crews to get me into the ambulance again I don’t remember apparently I was roaring and shouting the ambulance was bouncing from side to side with me inside it I was writhing and in a state of constant convulsion they take me to the hospital the convulsions get worse they try all kinds of interventions they can’t reduce the convulsions Santa’s taken aside by the medics and told look this is really

bad news we think you’re going to lose your husband he’s almost certainly going to die if he lives he’s going to be severely brain-damaged compulsions go on finally they put me into a an induced coma they they put a ventilator down my throat again I remember nothing of this they put a ventilator down my throat put me into a deep induced coma total blackness just no no memory of it just darkness and 48 hours later they bring me out of the coma and I don’t know

where the hell I am and I wake up in hospital I still got the ventilator down my throat I think what the is this you know I don’t understand I feel like I’ve been violated I look around I see I see my children my children who who traveled all the way from America you know my son Sean who lives in Los Angeles my daughter Shanti who was then in New York there by my bedside I can’t understand why my other kids are there the ones who live in the UK are there as

well it’s it’s is this a complete mystery to me what’s what’s going on and then gradually the fog begins to clear they take the ventilator out I’m breathing for myself and and the whole story is told to me that I’ve had this this massive set of epileptic seizures grand mal seizures and but it was a closed thing well that’s a lesson for me you know I brings home to me how how flimsy the veil is between life and death how we’re all living on borrowed

time whether we like it or not and and at any moment we can we can we can leave this beautiful garden of a planet and find ourselves well who knows where that’s one of the mysteries I addressed in the new book is the mystery of life after death but it also it also said to me value this life loved every minute of it appreciate every moment of it learn everything you can try to contribute in whatever way you can to making things

better rather but rather than worse it was it was a profound it was a profound lesson for me and and I’m still at risk of seizures I did have a minor seizure this year knocked me out only for a few minutes and that was that was my own stupid fault because I’d stopped I’d reduced my dose of anticonvulsant medication on just on a whim I felt I was taking too much of it and I reduced the dose and within three days I had another seizure so needless to say I’m

back on the meds now and keeping myself as fit as I can trying to avoid stress where possible although it’s very difficult to avoid stress on an extremely long eight-week book tour across the United States which I’m in the middle of at the moment yes so no I mean there’s only there’s only one Graham Hancock on the planet we we can’t lose you I mean you’ve pioneered a lot of this work that it’s true but I mean you’ve done so much we all have we all

have our part to play in our role our role to play on this planet and yeah III you know I’ve got my thing and I do my thing but I don’t think it makes me special it’s just the same everybody else humble I like that I mean and we were talking about this a little bit in the pre-show I mean you’ve your perspective has changed in in my regards of my experience of you you’re you’ve always been a fierce person you’ve always been highly intense charged and

kind of like a Raging Bull okay you know like you just sort of attack things and now something I’ve noticed in you is there’s a little bit more of a patient or give just it’s an understanding it seems of the human condition you know the human body thank you for that maybe it’s just getting older you know and having haven’t gone through having gone through these experiences yes you’re right I have been I have been very intense all through my

writing career but particularly since the late 1980s early 1990s when I got into this whole mystery of a lost civilization struck me as an intriguing fascinating mystery from our from our past and and I was I was initially surprised at the amount of vitriol and hatred that my idea stirred up amongst archaeologists and amongst their friends in the media and generally amongst mainstream Orthodox thinkers in general I was treated from the outset like an

enemy I was treated like a pariah I was I was attacked I was vilified ideas were attributed to me that I never held and then those ideas were attacked as though I did hold them and I guess it made me very defensive and I began to feel I began to feel that I’m in some kind of I’m in some kind of battle here this is not just this is not just an exchange of ideas this is not this is not simply me trying to contribute what I think might

be useful to a to an intelligent and constructive debate this is actually an ideological war where I’m up against where I’m up against people who wish to misrepresent me in any in any possible way in order to diminish the impact of the ideas that I’m that I’m putting forward so I I really took my cue from that I felt attacked and and I guess I went into attack mode myself maybe philosophically that was a mistake I was a younger man there

but that’s that’s how III took it if people if people are gonna fight me I’m gonna fight them back that was the kind of attitude that I took and I guess I did become you know a bit of a bit of a fighter in this field and I’m sure I’ve said some harsh words and you know maybe I should reflect on on all of that just because you know some asshole in some University says harsh words about me it doesn’t mean I have to say harsh words

back though perhaps these are the lessons that I’m learning yeah I mean it Graham so it’s a perfect segue into your work and the the nature of the the mystery behind some some of the history that that is part of the human story and why do you think why do you think that your work has been vilified why why do you think that just the the sort of exploration of these ideas is is such a subject of such controversy I think I think there’s a complicated set of

reasons for that and part of it is to do with this the way that science and within science as a sub-discipline of science archaeology defined itself in the in the 19th century there were a lot of very sloppy ideas in around in the 19th century people bought fully into the biblical narrative there was a lot of superstition people believed that the earth was only 6,000 years old and you know like that and and science actually did need to get rid of all that

baggage it did need to get rid of the the superstitions and the uh thought-out arguments and the UH Neva dense claims and it did need to replace them with solid evidence but in the in the process I think that science through the baby out with the bathwater and it became a very very narrow focused field which was based on weighing and measuring and Counting and in the case of archeology of interpreting often very thin and limited quantities of of data however

the role of the archaeologists may seem obscure but it is in fact extremely important because ha what archaeologists are they’re the profession they’re the so-called experts who we have entrusted with the role of interpreting our own past to us we have handed that role over to them just like we hand over to the surgeon the role of removing our appendix because the surgeon is an expert in removing appendices so also we we hand over the role of interpreting

our past to the archaeologists because they’re supposed to be the experts in in our past but you know an appendix is a little bit different from the human past an appendix there are our appendix or any other organ of the body does not cause us to define ourselves in certain ways whereas our notion of our past is fundamental to our understanding of our present and to our definition of who we are and and if we’ve got the past radically wrong then that is a that is a

very serious error which which is not simply academic but but impacts our whole notion of what the human adventure is about and what we’re doing here and what our what our story really is and I think that this is where ideology enters into the picture and where someone such as myself or or colleagues like John and the late great John Anthony West or Robert Bauval ended up getting attacked was because we were we were offering an

alternative view of the human past and we were not doing so in the way that archaeologists would have liked us to do so archaeologists would have liked us to do so with flimsy arguments with on evidenced speculations fantasy and and woowoo whereas actually what we did was we presented solidly documented evidence we backed up our our findings in our research well and and this is this has been my project from from the beginning is to present a thorough coherently

argued alternative view of the human past which leaves room for an extraordinary possibility and that is that we may be a species with amnesia that we may have lost a whole chapter of the human story and that in losing that whole chapter of the human story art geologists are implicated because of their approach and their research methods and they’re rather dogmatic insistence that the past is a certain way and cannot be any other way

really the whole archaeological profession will without really thinking about the matter just as an automatic knee-jerk reaction will reject and despise and pour scorn upon the notion of a lost civilization of the Ice Age because if that notion is correct then the whole foundations of the archeological profession and much more importantly the whole foundations of our understanding of our past as the human species are wrong and archaeology bears

a heavy responsibility for that so rather than and I think it’s perfectly understandable but but it’s just that it’s just the way things are people do defend their territory rather than saying ok well let’s look at these ideas let’s see if there’s something to them from the very beginning those professional interpreters of our past who we call archaeologists have reacted to my work by saying even though they often have not read a word of it have

reacted to my work by saying this is complete rubbish this man is trying to mislead the public he’s a fantasised he’s a liar he’s he’s making things up and obviously when you’re at the receiving end of that kind of after a while it makes you it makes you angry especially when as is as is the case with me as was the case with John Anthony West as is the case with with Robert Bauval we are honestly and genuinely trying to give the public our

take on the past we’re not trying to delude anybody or mislead anybody we’re saying that there may be serious problems with the archaeological representation of the past this is what we think the problems are here and here is the documentary evidence to prove it take this away go think about it and maybe what you’ve been taught in school is not something that you will just accept at face value any longer yes yes I feel that feel that so Graham okay so

now let’s move into America before I’ve got this book in my hand right now I mean it’s a dense read it’s not your casual everyday I mean it’s it’s packed full of information you talk about so much you talk about this idea that perhaps America was you know also related to the Pyramids of Giza you mentioned the the site and Mount villainville Alabama where you point to similarities between this Native Americans site and you know something

that that Giza is pointing to what was what was that simulator what’s the connection this is clear about this firstly as to the density of the book which which I hope is also nonetheless makes a good read because it’s my personal story and it’s my my adventure through the through the Americas but but I feel it again it’s important not to be flimsy my project is to in my most ambitious moments I would say that my project is ultimately perhaps not in my

lifetime but through through the ideas that my work and the work of others have contributed is to bring about a rewriting of the prehistory of the human species and since we are dealing with a prehistory of the human species that has pretty much been set in stone for the last hundred and fifty years and that is defended by a powerful group of so-called experts named archaeologists in order to do that it’s essential to put forward solid thoroughly based

evidence based arguments which which can which can weigh in on that on that battlefield so I don’t shy away from that it’s necessary I do and I don’t patronize my readers either I think that I think that my readers are intelligent questioning people and that they’re and that they’re capable of working through the evidence as I as I present it and that’s why that’s why the book is is thoroughly documented has 1500 footnotes and and includes interviews and many

encounters with mainstream scientists from many different fields not just archaeologists but also for example geneticists and then secondly the the the the situation in the in the Americas is particularly dire as regards archaeology nobody until very recently and perhaps perhaps I’m perhaps I’m amongst the first has really seriously considered the possibility that the origins of civilization may actually be in the Americas in the so called new world

rather than in the so called old world it’s something that we almost take in with our mother’s milk we’re taught this outlook from from childhood in school and on through university wherever we live in the world we are taught that civilization is an old world invention that it began somewhere in the Fertile Crescent typically the ancient civilization of the Sumerians is cited as the origins of civilization there’s even a book called history begins at

Sumer and it’s thought that about 6,000 years ago after 4,000 or so four or five thousand years of gradual preparation of developing agriculture of developing stable communities that about 6,000 years ago the first real cities emerged in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers and this became the Sumerian civilization and it was supposedly the first civilization of history and then civilizations spread out across the old world but the fixed

and firm view is that there was no such thing as a great city based civilization in the Americas until much much much much much later than that this this was the fixed view and the notion that the notion that actually the whole idea of civilization could have originated in the Americas has been completely rejected by archaeology and regards it totally as old world property and what I’ve set out to do in America before is to show that that is not correct and

that the Americas have been particularly badly served by archaeology American American archaeology is a sub-discipline within the global discipline of archaeology and of course archaeology largely deals with prehistory when we’re dealing with written documents it’s more a matter to do with history rather than archaeology but when we’re dealing with interpretation of artifacts and of and of for example megalithic sites around the world where there are

no written documents that that tends to be the discipline of archeology and of course archeology is a subject that’s studied in virtually every country in the world but in the Americas there has there has for a very long time been a very rigid fixed and firm view about the origins of civilization and American archaeologists have simply refused adamantly refused to consider the possibility that civilization might have had much more ancient origins and then

they suppose and furthermore that those origins might not have been in the so-called old world but might have been in the new world and see this that we can see underlying this a kind of dogma admittedly now within the last within the last seven or eight years archaeologists American archaeologists have begun to fess up and to and to admit to the public even you know prestigious institutions like the the Smithsonian have now put this in writing

that unfortunately unintentionally without it being deliberately so archaeology archaeology American archaeology has grotesquely misled the public about the story of the peopling of the Americas once you start talking about civilization you must first ask yourself when did people arrived in the Americas that’s the fundamental question kind of any kind of civilization until you have people living in the Americas and right through into the 21st century

it’s only they’ve only really begun to admit that they got it all wrong since about 2009 2010 right through into the 21st century it was the firmly held view of archaeologists this view took root round about the 1960s and it held for 50 years for half a century that there had been no human beings in the Americas before thirteen thousand four hundred years ago a very specific date there and that date connects to a culture that archaeologists call the

Clovis culture we don’t know what the people of the Clovis culture called themselves that’s a name that archeologists have given to that culture which we know almost everything we know about them we know from their stone tools that they left behind the reason why they’re called the Clovis culture is very very simple and and and worth bearing in mind because because it indicates the UM the unstated things about our past we here the Clovis

culture a lot of us think oh that’s what they call themselves no it’s not what they call themselves it’s what archeologists call them and the reason that archeologists call them the Clovis culture is that the first major Clovis so-called type site to be excavated was Blackwater draw in new mexico and the archaeologists there back in the 60s who were excavating that site they couldn’t get beer at Blackwater draw but 20 miles down the road at

Clovis New Mexico they could get beer and that’s why we now call this culture who were supposedly the first Americans we call them the Clovis culture and round this evolved a Dogma called Clovis first which adamantly claimed that the Clovis culture were the first Americans they arrived thirteen thousand four hundred years ago there were no human beings in the Americas before that I mean if you pause to think about it that’s such a weird idea because the

because the large animal species the megafauna that are found in in Northeast Asia in Siberia for example our walls were also found in in the Americas for hundreds of thousands of years before that obviously animal species were going back and forward but somehow archaeologists became convinced that human beings weren’t doing so so it became the and I will use that word quite deliberately and specifically without any apology it became a dogma of

archeology as powerful as any of the dogmas of the Catholic Church it became a dogma of archaeology that there were no human beings in the Americas before thirteen thousand four hundred years ago and any archaeologists who dared to question that Dogma who had the misfortune to stump across a site with evidence that human beings had been present there much earlier for example Jacque sank Mars a Canadian archaeologist at bluefish caves

in the Yukon finding evidence of human beings there 24,000 years ago for example our Goodyear who’s professor of archaeology at the University of South Carolina excavating the topper site in South Carolina finding evidence that humans had been there 50,000 years ago for example dr. Tom Desmarais who’s the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum who published a major paper in the rigorous peer-reviewed journal Nature on the 26th

of April 2017 concerning the excavation of a site called the cerruti mastodon site evidencing human presence in the americas 130,000 years ago all of these individuals who were proposing a notion that was not accepted by archaeological dogma have found themselves under massive attack from the rest of the archaeological profession so not only not only was there a dogma that there were no human beings here before thirteen thousand four hundred years ago

but there was also a kind of Clovis police which ideologically policed evidence and ideas in this area and thoroughly worked to expunge and destroy any ideas that question the dogma and this went on for far too long it’s a shame to the archaeological profession some of them are now denying that it even happened but it happened and prestigious institutions such as nature such as the Smithsonian Institution have at least had the honesty to admit this

in the last in the last ten years you know it’s it’s often the case with with archaeology when they get things wrong that they kind of try to rewrite the story later and say wow this is what we believed all the time and some of them are saying it now but the record is clear and I document that record thoroughly in America before this is a shame to the world of archaeology that this dogma was allowed to hold in place for so long in the Americas and it has

held back grievously our understanding of the human path because the result was that no funding was available for archaeologists who wished to look in older deposits you know in our key ology where the the closer something is surface the younger it is and the deeper down you dig the the older it is because because these strata are laid down in layers on the on the Earth’s surface and for a long time it was it was held to be ridiculous that

any archaeologist would risk would seek research funding to dig beneath the clovis layer because archaeology supposedly had already established that Clovis were the first Americans and therefore what was the point of spending money looking deeper well the answer is now we have the evidence from all over the Americas of vastly more ancient sites not only in North America but also in Central America and in South America evidence of sites going back tens of

thousands of years and for so long this evidence was missed or minimized or shoved off to the side simply because of that almost fanatical religious dogma called cold Clovis first and I’ll call it as I see it archaeology has failed the world public when it comes to the story of the peopling of the Americas and it is only now waking up to the absolute magnitude and depth of that failure but the implications about failure don’t only concern the issue of

when people first came to the Americas and now the evidence is very strong that that was at least 130 thousand years ago which is twice as long as human beings were present in Europe for example and twice as long as they seem to have been present in Australia we have a human presence in the Americas twice as long as that ten times as old as Clovis what was happening during those hundred and thirty thousand years where adamantly

for so long archaeologists simply refused to look and it’s my case that we’ve missed a really important part of the human story in the Americas as a result of that archaeological dogma but also there’s more to it than that the Americas did suffer a gigantic Cataclysm between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago and that Cataclysm too played a part in sweeping the record clean Wow it’s it’s a lot it’s a lot of

information to take in grandma now you know I appreciate your thoroughness I appreciate your your Ament the immense amount of research and collection of information that you’ve connected the dots for us you know so I want I really want to bring up this the relationship between the Giza site in Egypt and the The Book of the Dead the Duat and the C I’m recalling now but it all it all it all ties together in a certain way yes as I was researching America before I

was I was very surprised to discover that certain really fundamental and very distinctive and idiosyncratic ideas that are part of the ancient Egyptian spiritual system are also found in almost identical form amongst the ancient cultures of the Mississippi Valley in in North America and and as I was as I dug deeper in this and again the full reasoning behind this and the evidence behind this is given in the book as I as I dug deeper into this it

became clear to me that this was not coincidence nor was it evidence of some kind of ancient Egyptian missionary expedition to North America in ancient historical times or vice versa nor was it evidence of an ancient American missionary expedition to the Nile Valley in ancient historical times this is evidence that goes back deep into prehistory this evidence goes back to the last ice age the reason for these similarities and I’ll go into some of

them in a moment reason for these similarities is that both the cultures of the Mississippi Valley and the culture of ancient Egypt inherited a shared legacy from a remote common ancestor just as to individuals today who don’t actually know they’re related in any way if their DNA testing is done it can be found that 50 generations back actually they did have a common ancestor the signal is still there in the DNA so it is with cultural

material and and and in the cultural DNA of the ancient Egyptians and in the cultural DNA of the Mississippi Valley are certain distinctive ideas and the only way that those ideas can be explained is that both of these widely separated cultures received them as a legacy from a much earlier culture that influenced both regions and that must have done so before 12,000 years ago in other words during the last ice age so we’re looking at a legacy here and that

and that legacy just to give you a few examples which you find both in the Mississippi Valley and in ancient Egypt appears to be the legacy of a very ancient religion and I believe that this was a it’s not the only aspect of the legacy geometry astronomy all kinds of Sciences are part of that that as well but this was a this was I believe the religion of the lost civilization and it concerned a deep investigation into the mystery of life after death so both in

ancient Egypt and in the ancient Mississippi Valley the the constellation of Orion was incredibly important the ancient the ancient Egyptians saw Orion as the celestial excuse me as the celestial figure of the god Osiris the god of resurrection and rebirth and for the ancient Egyptians the notion was that the soul of the deceased would make a kind of leap to the heavens would rise up to the sky after death and would would enter a kind of portal in the

constellation of Orion and would pass through that portal to the Milky Way where it would then make a journey along the Milky Way which was in the heart of what the ancient Egyptians called the do earth the afterlife Kingdom and on that journey along the Milky Way the soul would be held to account for the life that he or she had lived and would face challenges and ordeals that were appropriate to the good things or the bad things that had been done during the

course of the life that was given to that to that soul so I was very surprised when I came to Moundville in Alabama with no prior knowledge of this to find exactly the same set of ideas there and anybody who cares to go to Marvel can see all this written up in great detail on noticeboards around the site and and in the museum where certain artifacts are shown again the constellation of Orion plays a key role in the Mississippi Valley it’s not represented

as a man in the sky it’s represented as a hand and forearm in the sky the three stars of Orion’s belt form the wrist of the hand other stars form the thumb and the fingers and there is a portal in the palm of that hand which corresponds with the Orion Nebula that lies in the sky directly beneath the three stars of Orion’s belt and again just as in ancient Egypt there’s this concept of a of a leap a soaring leap to the sky passing through that portal in Orion and

then making a journey along the banks of the Milky Way where the soul will be held to account and faced with challenges and ordeals generated by the life that that individual has lived on earth and and that there are many many many remarkable similarities between the ancient Egyptian afterlife realm and the Mississippi Valley afterlife realm for example both of those afterlife realms are filled with gigantic winged serpents in both cases there is a feline creature

it’s called the underwater panther in the Native American tradition it’s called the Sphinx in in in Egypt we still have of course a giant Sphinx on the Giza Plateau it has a human head now but when it was originally made more than 12,000 years ago as I and my colleagues have long argued it had also the head of a lion that head was heavily eroded over thousands of years and was carved down into a human head wearing the classic Nemus headdress of the

ancient egyptian pharaohs in historical times around about 4,500 years ago because the exist the previous lion head had been so badly damaged by erosion it’s very curious that on the path of souls in the Native American tradition the underwater pan that we have surviving representations of the underwater panther and it looks exactly like the great sphinx of giza right down to intimate details like the positions of its paws and the way that its tail

curves curves around its curves around its back and and there are many many many more examples of this sort that I go into in great detail you know one or two of them could be a coincidence but when you start adding them all together I’ll give you another another example a match concerns the the entity called the Birdman in Native American tradition the bird man is a hero deity in the Mississippian religious system he represents the triumph of life over

death and he is depicted as a man with with a human body but with the head of a hawk and we have an identical figure playing an identical role in ancient Egypt and he’s the god Horus he’s the hero deity he represents the triumph of life after death and he also of life over death and he also is represented with a figure that the body of a man and the and the head of a hawk and I could go on endlessly about this but that’s why I wrote the book and those who want

the detail on this and why I must conclude that this is the result of a legacy that’s more than 12,000 years old rather than any kind of missionary expedition during historical periods the evidence for that is is set out in detail in America before yes yes yes it’s in the book we’re in but grandma I really want to ask you you know these are these are cultures that are separated by both geography and time but yet the end you mentioned it just now

there are these coincidences that come up over and over and over and it seems like there is some sort of message that we’re being indicated towards or led to and perhaps even you know based on corporate interest or something else you know based on maybe the conditions of the system here the earth life system but this information is kept from us so that there almost seems to be two groups of people people who are in the know people who know about this and people

who don’t about this so you know how how can all these different cultures be pointing at the same thing at different points in time separated by thousands of years and that’s precisely why I argue that it’s a legacy rather than the result of direct contact I mean there couldn’t possibly have been direct contact between Moundville in Alabama which is a thousand years old and the ancient Egyptian civilization which vanished from history at the end of the Roman

period about 600 years before Marvel was even created if we if we find as we do and again it’s thoroughly documented in the book if we find these astonishing range of similarities that cannot be a coincidence then we have to explain it and we can’t explain it by direct contact we the only way to explain it is that both of these cultures inherited a legacy which was passed down culturally over hundreds and thousands of generations which manifested in Egypt in

a certain way which manifested in North America in a certain way there are many differences between these cultures and those differences makes sense when you realize that these cultures have been evolving separately for tens of thousands of years but there are many many striking similarities as well and those are what I call the cultural DNA that these cultures share that they inherited from a remote common ancestor that was carefully preserved and passed

down and then was brought into play in symbolism in architecture in in great earthworks or or all over the world was was manifested it was always waiting there to be manifested and at different times in different places it was manifested when you get to grips with it when you get right down to the details you find that the shared cultural DNA is there that the same fundamental ideas the same fundamental mysteries are being are being explored

in the same way using the same iconography and this simply cannot be a coincidence the best explanation is that what we’re looking at is a global legacy it wasn’t only passed down in the mists bevarly and in ancient Egypt it was passed down in many many other parts of the world as well it was passed down in South America and I go into that in detail there it’s it’s integrated with the consumption of the mysterious visionary brew called ayahuasca and it’s

not accidental that ayahuasca means the vine of the Dead or the vine of souls it was passed down in Mesopotamia Mesopotamia was not the origin ancient Sumer was not the originator of civilization it also was a recipient of this legacy from a civilization that was destroyed at the at the end of the last ice age but nonetheless a civilization from which there were survivors in that Cataclysm that unfolded on the earth between twelve thousand eight hundred

and eleven thousand six hundred years ago geologists call that Cataclysm the Younger Dryas there were survivors yes their civilization was destroyed but there were survivors and they made it their business to wonder the world and to seek to restart civilization and to implant their fundamental ideas amongst the then hunter-gatherer cultures with whom they settled and took refuge and this legacy once being passed on then came to fruition at different times in

different places the the manifestation of the legacy did not always occur at the same time everywhere around the world although I have to say there is a striking manifestation that does occur between five and six thousand years ago we see it in Sumer we see it in ancient Egypt and we see it in South America for example with the civilization of corral that great complex of pyramids that lies about 60 miles to the north of Lima in

in Peru which also dates to around five thousand years ago so it seems that there was some there was some guiding force behind the scenes in history that shows certain moments to manifest this legacy and in quite a number of parts of the world that legacy manifests between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago but in other parts of the world it takes longer to manifest I believe it manifested in North America earlier earlier as well you can trace back the origins of the

so-called mound builder cultures way beyond Moundville in Alabama you can trace them back at Poverty Point in Louisiana to 2500 years ago you can trace them back to watson break in Louisiana to 5,500 years ago and other other sites in the lower Mississippi Valley going back eight 9,000 years all sharing the same geometry and the same system of ideas and if only North America had not been so intent on destroying the Native American legacy

which unfortunately is the case the Native American legacy of great sites and earthworks and structures in North America was subjected to terrible destruction in the 19th century and through into the 20th century so just while archeologists were seeking to destroy the cultural ideas by giving only minimal importance to Native American cultures in the 19th and early 20th centuries I’m not saying that’s what archaeology are doing now they’re

much more enlightened now and they recognized the value of ancient American civilizations but in the 19th and 20th 20th centuries the whole project was to justify the anglo-saxon conquest of North America and the land grab that that was part of it they’re taking away of the lands from the indigenous inhabitants also included destroying all traces that those indigenous inhabitants were in fact highly civilized and that’s why 90% of the mound builder and

earthworks sites that have that were documented in the 19th century are now completely gone they’ve been plowed under for agricultural land they’ve been replaced with housing estates or with industrial parks the site’s themselves many of them documented in the 19th century are now just completely gone there’s nothing there for archaeologists to work with at all you know and no wonder we’re a species with amnesia if we’re so willing

to wipe out our past and no matter how much we regret it now the fact is in North America that so much of that past was deliberately swept away and destroyed and we’re left with really a tiny remnant to work with today yeah it’s so profound your words Graham I really find the potent potency of them so accurate and you mentioned something that I really wanted to touch on because I find I osku you I find that you know your work dovetails this it’s it’s as if

you you know you explore these two things in your work ayahuasca and these ancient civilizations but in in America before you use you could start to connect these dots for for this ancient brew or this brew medicine of the soul and these ancient civilizations what what is the connection there between this this vine and and this leaf being combined together and these ancient civilizations can you connect that for us there’s a lot of points to make here

the first is the first the first is a point concerning the character of the lost civilization that I’ve made it my my project to to attempt to bring back to public attention over the last quarter of a century or so and I believe that that civilization had a very different character from our own that it was less focused on material things more focused on on what our real purpose is on this planet I can’t prove that this is the case but I I think our real

purpose on this planet is to grow and develop and nurture the soul so that we pass through the experience of life this an incarnation in a human body and we learn and grow and develop from it and are able to move on to another level perhaps after many different lifetimes that’s my personal belief system but it also appears to have been the belief system of a civilization of remote antiquity and a belief system that was as I said passed down as a legacy in in

many different parts of the world and one of the things that was different about this civilization from our own was that is that it made use of visionary experiences our civilization rejects visionary experiences we despise and I mean you know if you want to insult somebody mildly you might call that person a dreamer well frankly speaking in the ancient world to be a dreamer was a really good thing because because dreaming was regarded as

one of the valid gateways to true knowledge if we understood and explored our dreams carefully we would learn very important truths in the modern world that’s completely despised and dreams are regarded as just completely meaningless fictions of knowing of no importance whatsoever and and also in the modern world again there’s a new awakening now the younger generation is waking up and are changing things but for most of the 20th century and well

into the 21st psychedelics were demonized by our society and those who chose to exercise their sovereign right as adults to explore their own consciousness or to or to manage their own health through using these ancient medicinal teacher plants that profoundly alter our state of consciousness anybody who sought to do that risked a jail term risked imprisonment risked having their lives ruined by the authorities the lost civilization I’m in visiting will had a

completely different focus it regarded these experiences in altered states of consciousness as absolutely fundamental to the human project and that if we cut ourselves off from these experiences and deny these experiences to ourselves we’re going to lose track of a very important part of what of what we are and we’re also going to fail to benefit from the insights and the creative understandings that come in altered states of consciousness yes the state of

consciousness our society values which I call the alert problem-solving state of consciousness does have a role it’s an important state of consciousness I’ve said this many times before and I’ll say it again when I get on an airplane I would like the pilot to be in an alert problem-solving state of consciousness and I would like he or she to remain in that elite problem-solving state of consciousness until they land me safely at the airport I’m going to after that I

don’t care what they do with their consciousness but the alert problem-solving state of consciousness is appropriate to certain human activities but the mistake is to believe it’s the only valuable state of consciousness whereas in fact we are vastly diverse creatures with enormous potential and that potential can be realized through exploring other states of consciousness either through meditation either through fasting either

through the use of the teacher plants like like ayahuasca or the fungi like psilocybin or the cacti like peyote or San Pedro using these using these plants brings us into a different state of consciousness which is not the alert problem-solving state of consciousness but which is a state of consciousness in which we may have fundamental insights and fundamental creative discoveries that we would not make otherwise and which is also a state of consciousness

in which healing becomes possible self-healing becomes possible you know I mean I’ll give you an example it’s not an accident that Steve Jobs and and and what was niak who founded Apple regarded LSD is very fundamental to their project that Apple probably would never have been started without LSD that’s enough proof proof alone that that that these altered states of consciousness can result in extraordinarily important creative insights and for a society to

deny itself that based on some kind of ideological dogma which which elevates the alert problem-solving state of consciousness to a kind of monopoly that’s a that’s a huge mistake and I think the lost civilization that I’ve been trying to bring back into public consciousness was it was a civilization that valued and nurtured altered states of consciousness and understood how to amplify and magnify those for the benefit of the whole population so the

Great Pyramid of Giza is not the tomb of a Pharaoh the Great Pyramid of Giza is a consciousness amplifying engine and anybody who has the opportunity to spend time alone inside the Great Pyramid even thousands of years after it’s built will will realize that’s the case sorry I’m going on at great length but there was another aspect to your question and that concerned the ayahuasca brew hmm and the fact that it has more than one

ingredient mm-hmm this is extremely important because it’s proof of an ancient science in the Amazon a science that’s extremely old it’s a simple fact that there’s about a hundred and fifty thousand different species of plants and trees and vines in the Amazon but if you want to make ayahuasca you’re going to have to select just two of them neither of which is psychoactive on its own one of them is the bush that but botanists call

psychotria viridis it’s called Shatrughna in the amazon its eaves contain dimethyltryptamine and the other ingredient is the ayahuasca vine now many in the West and the game there’s a resurgence and interest in this have experienced dimethyltryptamine DMT many in the in the modern world have have experienced this mysterious substance called DMT arguably the most powerful hallucinogen known to science and and typically in Western industrialized

societies this is experienced through smoking or vaping DMT and when that happens I guess I’ve had maybe fifteen or sixteen trips with vaped DMT when you hit the right dose you are you are taken out of your body there’s no argument there’s no discussion if you hit the right dose you are you’re your consciousness is just ripped out of your body and you’re taken off to a seamlessly convincing utterly overwhelming parallel realm where things

happen very fast although consciously they may seem to be very slow and and the overwhelming deluge of impressions is so much that it’s often difficult to remember anything that happened you know that you had a profound experience you have the sense that you downloaded something of great importance but you don’t really know what it is you come out of it often in a state of confusion I’m not saying everybody does but it’s very very commonly the case so this the

vaped DMT trip is a really is in fact in in terms of real minutes a very short journey it’s eight to twelve minutes that you’re in there and then you’re out and back back into your everyday state of consciousness and wondering actually what the hell happened to you it’s so rapid so overwhelming it’s very difficult to integrate the experiences so what you’d like is a way to make the power of DMT last longer for it to be more accessible and perhaps a little

more gentle with you than the vaped DMT is and that’s what they’ve discovered in the Amazon by making the DMT in the leaves of the shekinah plant orally active if you take if you made a tea out of hundreds of Shakuni leaves and drank all of it yes you’d be drinking a lot of DMT but it would have no effect on you because there’s an enzyme in the gut mono a mean oxidase switches off DMT on contact what you need to make it orally

active is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor and that is found in the ayahuasca vine so go figure how that was done by trial and error neither the vine nor the leaf are psychoactive on their own but bring them together and you get an orally active brew that sends you on a journey that is in some ways similar to the DMT journey and in some ways radically different because the the the mother vine ayahuasca is also bringing something incredibly important to the experience

but the most important thing is that it unfolds over four or five hours it unfolds more slowly more gently it’s very organic you have you have the opportunity to really think about what you’re experiencing and to remember it and to integrate it and you emerge you emerge from the journey with profound teachings that it then becomes your next project is to integrate those teachings into into your daily life well I would call this science in the Amazon to to

put these two plants together which don’t work on their own but only work in combination and to create this brew which is honestly changing the world all over the world today the ayahuasca the the ayahuasca experience is no longer limited to the Amazon jungle it’s come out of the rainforest it’s spread all around the world you can drink ayahuasca in Tokyo or London or New York or Chicago or wherever you happen to be you can drink it in Cairo

you can you can drink it in Istanbul you know it’s it’s available everywhere under the radar illegal but available because there’s something in it that calls to people that people realize there’s an important experience that they have been denied by their societies which they need to have and in this sense the teacher plant ayahuasca the teacher brew ayahuasca which is as I said a mixture of two plants is having an impact all around the world at the

moment and I would say again we’re looking at a legacy here this is knowledge from a lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity and it’s not by the way the only evidence of science in the Amazon there’s a great more mmm-hmm yeah indeed I mean it’s anyone who explores this Avenue of thought I think will be very surprised at how much information there is around this plant and the usage of it you know how far it goes back and how much it can change

your life but moving forward and I just want to remind everyone we’re about an hour deep we have about 30 minutes left with grams so if you want to ask your question we’re taking text questions you can join the discord server you’ll see that link at the bottom of your screen and and Graham I do have some questions here for you have one more of my own okay so you know something that I noticed Graham in your work and I’ve been reading your work for more than

five years is that there seems to be you know between your fiction and nonfiction because you’re you write in both of these styles and it seems if I could just jump in okay yes I do write novels but almost nobody reads them they are published I’ve written a series of three novels about the Spanish conquest of Mexico called war God and I’ve written the first of two novels of a time slit novel called entangled and for me this is a

it’s a fascinating writing exercise my my main writing project is my nonfiction work books like fingerprints of the gods books like magicians of the gods and my latest book America before these are all non-fiction factual books but as a writer I found it challenging and interesting to also dabble in fiction on the side because for example when I came to tell the story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in my war god series it was very important for me to get

inside the heads of those real historical character and I found that in writing in that way I was able to understand more about the historical events than if I’d approached them solely as a nonfiction writer but I am fundamentally a writer of factual non-fiction books and I’m just blessed that I’ve had the opportunity from time to time to write some novels as well I mean it near the end grandma of the of America before that you tie in ESP and

the possible use of telekinesis to move around these these large blocks and what I noticed in your in your fiction work is it does get you know somewhat sci-fi in in your book so I’m just I’m wondering you know if there’s something you might be holding back you know from obviously since I’ve been since I’ve been on a kind of quest for a lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity for more than 25 years now I have I have developed some ideas and some notion of

of what the what the character of that civilization was and as I said earlier I think it was very different from our own I think it did enshrine the use of psychedelics sort of the teacher plants as a fundamental part of the character of that civilization but I also think it did tech it did technology in a very different way from the way we do it and I’ve cut I’ve received a lot of sneering and dismissive criticism from the mainstream for even contemplating that

there may be innate and untapped human abilities which we in modern society are not using but which ancient civilizations and particularly the lost civilization that I address myself to had mastered fully we have gone down a particular technological Road with modern industrial civilization and that’s what I call the Road of leverage and mechanical advantage if we want to get stuff done we invent machines to do it on our behalf we divest the direct manipulation

of matter to mechanical devices and we’re very very good at that particular kind of tech of developing and deploying mechanical devices and we’re we’re so confident of their utility and so satisfied with what they do for us that we invest all our efforts and ingenuity and intelligence in making ever better more sophisticated cleverer machines and there’s there’s nothing wrong with that but I would suggest that in the process because we

have become we have come to rely on machinery as the intervention between us and the world of matter we may have allowed other innate faculties of the human creature to lapse or to go dormant and I although I will be despised for saying this and although there will be many of a materialist frame of mind who will simply mock me without considering further for saying this I think that powers such as telepathy touches such as telekinesis which we have much anecdotal

evidence of today and which are utterly despised and rejected by the mainstream I think they’re part of the human legacy too just as just as we have the ability to turn our brains to making very clever machines to manipulate matter so it may also have been in the past that we were able to manipulate matter directly through the power of the mind and as I say this I can just see the sneering and rejecting comments that come up but

these are matters that we should investigate and where you have for example the the Institute of noetic science is looking into issues like this in a serious way Graham we lost you there for a second I think you might be covering your microphone okay you’re back I’m just saying that rather than reject and despise the notion that human beings may have psychic powers may have telepathic powers may have the ability to manipulate matter as in telekinesis

through the power of the mind we should we should look more seriously into that rather than just automatically knee-jerk rejecting it and my suggestion is that the lost civilization I’m interested in had amplified those kind of powers to a high degree so that those who were confronted by them would almost feel they were confronted by magic but it’s not magic it’s an innate human faculty that unfortunately in the modern world we have allowed to lapse

mm-hmm Oh Graham we’ve got we’ve got a bunch of questions that I want to get to I promised everyone listening that we would get to these questions so this one the first one comes from Enki he asks or he or she asks in your research did you come across the haplogroup X to a subject and if you did what were your thoughts group XTA to be honest is something I don’t know that much about okay fair enough moving forward Starchild asks hello mr.

Hancock I am Starchild the comic-book hero you met in Seattle could you talk about the significance of the pinecone in ancient history slash American history well the argument is that the the pinecone represents the pineal gland which is regarded as the third eye in many different cultures around the world the third eye which gives us a sixth sense if you were that integrates us with the universe beyond this universe and and it’s interesting that that very

substance dimethyltryptamine DMT that is fundamental to the ayahuasca experience is a natural brain hormone all human beings have DMT usually in sub psychedelic quantities in their bodies and while it would be premature to claim that DMT is actually made in the pineal gland there’s evidence that it’s that lungs also play a part in the generation of DMT in the human body it’s certainly found in the pineal gland and the suggestion is that the pinecone

represents this power of insight into realms beyond this realm hmm thank you thanks Graham for answering that Sean asked what are your thoughts on the work at structure in Mauritania rishaad structure is is a structure of circular rings in West Africa in Mauritania it’s a very interesting structure there’s been a lot of good material put out about this on the internet in in recent months pay tribute tour to a YouTube channel called bright

insight who I think were the first to really draw attention to the research structure what’s interesting about it when you view it from from aerial imagery is the this series of circular concentric rings which of course are exactly how Plato described the lost city of Atlantis and this is why the site has attracted so much attention I think the site is interesting I think the evidence that has been put forward for it is at least justifies a thorough

excavation and investigation of that site the very first thing we have to do is to rule out weird geology geology is an amazing thing you know the the Earth’s natural features often have a way of presenting themselves as though they are man-made when they are not so we need to be sure that that’s not the case with the Rochette structure and we’ll only be sure of that with boots on the ground and an excavation if it is not weird geology if it is archaeology

and we’re not there yet but if it is our key ology then it has the potential to rewrite human history it’s a fascinating fascinating site and I’m certainly keeping an eye on it and seeing what’s developing there ok addy Craig asks hi Graham are you familiar with the work of Chan Thomas specifically the Adam and Eve story yeah people keep kept drawing this to my attention while I’ve been on the road in America no the answer is I’m

not familiar with that I’m only one person and I’m not familiar with everything I I do I do the best the best that I can to document what I know but this Adam and Eve story seems to be a YouTube channel and perhaps there’s a book behind it somewhere this is what this is what I’ve been told is something that I intend to investigate when I get home to England after this this long tour around America okay interesting someone asks mr. Hancock what kind of

experience have you had with salvia divinorum if any I’ve had experience with savvy salvia divinorum I’ve had a couple of smoked journeys with with salvia in both of them an intense sense of disassociation of entering another realm of sitting on a sort of pinnacle with vast drops beneath me as though I’m as I’m sitting on a barstool that’s 20 miles high and I’m looking down at the earth below most of all the feeling of disassociation and of being of

encountering a parallel realm that I don’t fully understand I’ve only as I say had a couple of experiences with with salvia it’s certainly very intriguing I would say it’s another one of those teacher plants that that that Nature has kindly gifted us indeed tripped here’s an interesting one he asks he or she or they ask what what do you think about the modern religions all the modern religions being connected or interpreted as the same

flood survivors knowledge I think that’s I think that’s a very reasonable speculation the the way that the notion of a global flood is most widely known still in in the world today is through the biblical story there which has been preserved by the Abrahamic religions Christianity Judaism and Islam the story of the flood of Noah and and poorly worked out big big big biblical chronologies you know used to put that event at just a few thousand years ago

but there was no global flood a few thousand years ago but there was a massive global flood both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas and this is the Cataclysm that I go into in great depth in America before between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago eleven thousand six hundred years ago you have what geologists call meltwater pulse one B it’s when the last of the North American

and European ice caps just collapse into the sea and massively raise sea level and if we’re looking for a moment in history that can be described as the global flood it would be then it would be eleven thousand six hundred years ago it would be meltwater pulse one B and it’s not an accident that eleven thousand six hundred years ago is exactly the date that Plato gives us for the destruction and submergence of the lost civilization of Atlantis Plato is

often accused of making Atlantis up by archaeologists they say he fabricated fabricated the whole story for a political motive Plato is the earliest surviving source of the Atlantis tradition but if you go into the dialogues of Timaeus and Critias and the back story you’ll find that Plato is telling us that Atlantis was destroyed and submerged by flood eleven thousand six hundred years ago from our time a date that we would call 9600 BC which

was 9,000 years before the time of the Greek lawmaker Solon who visited Egypt in 600 BC and first received the story of Atlantis which was then passed down in the family line to Plato so if Plato made the whole thing up he was astonishingly on the money with the latest geological information about massive sea level rise eleven thousand six hundred years ago and I think that there the more than 2,000 so-called flood myths that we find around the

world are all memories of this cataclysmic event that brought the last ice age suddenly and dramatically to an end last one from the audience guys if if I miss your question I apologize the remaining that came through mark-ass grandma have you have you seen the very unique and widely unknown pyramids ruin ruins above tonalá Chiapas Mexico no I’m only one person I stretched myself pretty thin I’ve seen a lot of the world I’ve seen some amazing and majestic and

mysterious pyramid sites all around the world but I haven’t seen those ones they think you know everything I mean the earth you’re here I just know a little and I tried to put it together and to back it up with evidence yeah I mean you’ve done that in a mirror before and I mean it’s it was such a great read to go through how to had some help going through it I mean it it’s a lot of material I was actually in the jungle and looking through the book so

it was really surprising that you know you connected these dots about this sort of migration into North America and and then also you know this somebody somebody asked earlier about about haplogroups and this is this is the language of genetics okay I do actually go into genetic issues in in great detail in America before just not to bring this up yet start into haplogroup x2a but what is what what particularly intrigues me about new

evidence from the science of genetics and the study of ancient DNA is a very curious DNA signal that is found only in two parts of the world one part of the world is Australasia Papua New Guinea the Melanesian peoples of Papua New Guinea and Australian Aborigines and the other part of the world is right in the heart of the Amazon jungle where you this same DNA signal rings out very very loudly and we know it’s been in the Amazon jungle from the discovery of

ancient skeletal remains that have been DNA tested we know it’s been there since the end of the last ice age is extremely ancient and it implies that somebody was capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean and bringing a reproductively viable population from Australasia to the Amazon jungle during the last ice age this is really intriguing because it completely contradicts again than the mainstream view that our ancestors during the Ice Age were not capable of

crossing a ocean if if they had come by land you would find that DNA signal in North America and in Central America as well but the fact that you only find it in South America and in Australasia indicates that an oceanic voyage of a reproductively viable population was undertaken and furthermore it indicates that that voyage was from Australasia to South America because the signal is much stronger in Australasia than it isn’t South America mm-hmm yeah I mean this is

this question is in my list and it’s like you’re reading my mind’s amazing so so there was a the DNA signal can you be a little bit more precise what does the signal mean what does it tell people well what it tells what it tells people again it’s this issue of a of a legacy and in this case a very specific genetic legacy very a very specific cluster of DNA that is only found in Australasia and in the Amazon jungle the the the you

should find it all the way through the Americas if the the traditional story of the peopling of the Americas were correct and the traditional story of the peopling of the Americas is that it all came overland through a lot from Siberia across the Bering Straits when the Bering Straits were a land bridge through an ice-free corridor between the North American ice caps down into North America thence onwards into Central America thence onwards into South

America if that were the only story then this same very distinctive Australasia DNA signal would be found all over the Americas but to find it only in South America and only amongst certain tribes in the Amazon jungle is indicative that it must have resulted from an oceanic voyage during the Ice Age and not only a voyage but a voyage of a reproductively viable population who were settled in the Amazon and oddly enough the Takano

who are an ayahuasca drinking culture of the Amazon have an origin myth which speaks of exactly such a settlement mission they tell of how their ancestors in the remotest past were not originally from the Amazon that they were brought to the Amazon by a group of quote-unquote superhumans who included the daughter of the son who taught them the use of fire and who taught them horticulture and the a superhuman helmsman who steered the serpent shaped

canoe with which their ancestors were ushered into the Amazon River system and shown which were the best places for them to settle and to plant their fields and to make their villages and to and to hunt and then those so-called superhumans left the ancestors of the Takano there and they’re still there to this day and their culture that their descendants are still there to this day and their culture revolves around the use of ayahuasca and they preserve this memory

of having been settled in the Amazon a very long time ago and on the other side of the world in in Egypt there’s a very similar story in the Ed foo building texts which also speak of that which speaks specifically of the destruction of a former civilization of its survivors and of how they tried to restart the civilization by wandering the world and bringing their ideas to many different cultures around the world it’s fascinating that there’s this such

a huge tie-in to this Sankar T that I mean and and also that you know so much of this history has been erased it’s it’s as if you know there’s there’s some sort of I don’t know I hate to point in the direction of some large massive conspiracy but maybe even a cover-up of you know what’s really truly going on because it seems as if these ancient civilizations that were probably as advanced if not more advanced than we are today they were pointing at some

macro cosmic perspective of the journey of the soul what’s happening here in the human experience as we sort of evolve and grow very much so you know I mean what is that what is the purpose of life is there a purpose at all the many mainstream scientists who are very much of the materialist frame of mind and who seek to reduce everything to matter who even regard consciousness as quote-unquote an epiphenomenon of brain activity in other words that there’s a

materialist base to consciousness individuals like that for example Professor Richard Dawkins who’s the author of The Selfish Gene and of and of The God Delusion they will seek to persuade us that there is no meaning or purpose to human life at all that we are simply accidents of biology and chemistry that it’s entirely random and that there is no there’s no purpose whatsoever and you know they could be right I I can’t prove them wrong but my strong gut instinct

and the legacy that we’ve received from many ancient civilizations see like the ancient Egyptians they they put their best minds to work for thousands of years on what happens to us when we die our our civilization tries to avoid that Richard Dawkins and his like will tell you that nothing happens to us when we die we’re just gone and that’s the end of an heir story but the vast testimony of the ancient world is that we are in

can’t we are souls incarnated in these material bodies and that we’re here to learn and to grow and to develop if that’s the case then our mission here on earth is not simply to accumulate material goods not simply to increase our wealth not simply to compete with and and out-compete others not to define ourselves in terms of what we own but to define ourselves in terms of who we are and of what we do with this life and with this what is regarded in the eighth

by the ancients as this incredible opportunity to have been born in a human body there are certain experiences at this level of vibration that can only be had at this level of vibration where there are direct physical consequences and once you start taking all of this on board and open yourself to the possibility that our life on Earth may be a theater of experience that our particular purpose here is to learn and to grow and to develop and to manifest

love rather than hatred and fear and suspicion then you begin to realize that the whole ethic of the modern world may be misleading us may be taking us down a track that isn’t helpful to us that Professor Richard Dawkins when the time comes may find himself confronted by an extraordinary mystery that he’s completely unprepared for because his whole life experience has persuaded him that there’s no meaning to life may suddenly find himself having to account

for every second of the life that he has that he has lived if that were the case and the testimony of the ancients is that it is the case then perhaps we would be living life in a different way on this planet we would not be defining our worth in terms of our economic value in terms of how much we earn or what kind of motorcar we own or what sort of washing machine we own the tendency of the modern world is to persuade us to define ourselves purely in those

material terms if there’s so much more to life than that if we’re really here to learn and to grow and develop then those material things well they have their place but fundamentally if we focus too much upon them they’re gonna get in the way of our journey and they’re going to prevent us from doing what we came here to do so that we have to keep on coming back and doing it again and again and again until we get the lesson and that’s where you where

you begin to realize that ancient teachings such as Gnosticism which which argue that that there are entities on this planet that the whole purpose of which is to mislead us and to divert us from our true course the Gnostics called them the archons who served the Demiurge who’s whose project is to snuff out the divine spark in inhumanity you begin to realize that that maybe maybe possible and when we look around the modern world

we can see those archons at work and we can see them at work in the advertising industry seeking to persuade us that the whole purpose of our lives is how much material stuff we can accumulate and seeking us to pursue aid us to congratulate ourselves because we have more material stuff than our neighbour what a trivial waste of the glorious experience of life on this majestic beautiful garden of a planet what a waste we are being seduced into wasting

the opportunities we’ve been given and the ancients would say we are being seduced by negative entities such as the archons who are jealous of the divine spark within us and wished to shut it down and my goodness unfortunately they’re doing a very good job but on the other side they are shutting down the divine spark in humanity you see it happening all around the world the mainstream religions are implicated in this as well it’s not just commerce but

on the other side of the story you have an awakening and I’m aware of this awakening taking place particularly amongst the younger who I have the privilege of meeting very often at the events and talks that I give and awakening a refusal to put up with the any longer a refusal to accept voices of authority that tell us what to think and a willingness to think for ourselves this is growing in the world it’s a small flame right now

and the archons the iconic forces are seeking in every possible way to shut it down but people are waking up they are resisting this and at the leading edge of this resistance and again the mainstream would seek to present this as trivial whereas in fact it’s incredibly important at the leading edge of this resistance is our relationship with plants that alter consciousness you know with plants and fungi that alter consciousness proves for too long we

just bought into the mainstream narrative that these teacher plants are negative and unhelpful but people are finding out for themselves that ayahuasca psilocybin peyote a San Pedro and other other teacher plants and fungi are incredibly positive and very helpful for our personal development and that’s why I celebrate what’s happening in America where there has been this overarching governmental control of the war on drugs and which young people in

state after state are rejecting and turning over and saying we will not accept what these Authority the false lies that these authority figures give to us we will not accept them any longer and the latest development of that is the decriminalization of psilocybin in Denver which resulted from from a citizen’s initiative III it’s encouraging to me when I see citizens taking power into their own hands and refusing to be told what to think and

what to do with their own bodies and with their own consciousness by some you know governmental authority they have no right to tell us what to think and what to do with our own bodies and our own consciousness and that that’s reassertion of individual sovereignty over consciousness is a very healthy development we’re seeing it happening state-by-state in America with the the growing legalization movement for Cannabis all of the arguments from

making cannabis illegal are based on lies and falsehoods that were deliberately spread to mislead the population and I’m encouraged in America that step-by-step state-by-state people are taking the matter into their own hands sticking one finger up to government and saying what we do with our bodies and our consciousness while we do no harm to others is entirely our business this is a hugely important development in the human story and I’m

pleased that the people of America are at the spearhead of this change even though the government the federal government America is still trying to keep it suppressed hmm so it’s so profound grandma you’re such a wonderful guest to have on because we touch on so much of this and it’s it’s so profound to hear you speak because it’s it’s poetic the way you put this I mean there’s nothing better than a Graham Hancock rant it’s perfect

yes and and Graham I mean we want you to be healthy we want you to take care of yourself so you know we’re so where are you now you’re in Chicago and in Chicago flying – flying to Phoenix tomorrow for a series of events that I have in Sedona I’m giving a big talk in Sedona on the 16th about America before the details are up on my website Graham Hancock comm go to the talks and events page and you’ll see all my events both the ones that I’ve now completed in

North America and the ones that still remain after Sedona we’re going to go to a very amazing place in Utah Boulder Utah not Boulder Colorado but Boulder Utah where I’m going to be giving a seminar a discussion with quite a small group of people and then onwards from there to Massachusetts I’m doing an event up in Massachusetts I’m then going to be doing a couple of events in New York and then finally back to back to the west coast

and before returning to England on I think the fourth of June so all the details are up there on the talks and events page my website and I hope people will will join I’ve had some amazing events in America great audiences wonderful questions and a lot of love and support which makes me which makes me feel very grateful because I have been a controversial figure I have taken a lot of flack from the archaeologists and their buddies in the media but I’m also

aware that I am given a lot of love and a lot of support by my readers and I’m enormous ly grateful for that and I need to say this as a writer I would be nowhere without my readers writing has no impact unless it’s read and unless those readers then take the ideas out there and work with them themselves and do their own thing with them and I’m pleased to say that seems to be what’s happening with my work and I I’m just grateful gratitude to my readers indeed

indeed and I mean I think you mentioned I’m wrapping this up but in I think you mentioned that some of your like after after lecture signings are taking up to seven hours and you stay with your readers to make sure that every single one of them gets a chance to you know get your signature maybe even shake your hand absolutely and take and take photographs I I still don’t understand why anybody would want to take a photograph with

this old man but I’m very willing to stand up and take photographs this is my opportunity to give back I owe everything to my readers I will never leave an event until the last of my readers and the last of those attending the event have left I will always stay there it’s run me down I’ve got I’ve got very exhausted physically it’s very demanding but emotionally it’s very satisfying to be able to it makes it real for me to talk to talk to those who read my

work to spend time with them to honor them and to respect them and and I commit to always doing that because I always have to keep this in perspective I’m just a writer the writing doesn’t matter unless it’s read and unless those readers then take action and talk to others about what they’ve what they’ve read in my books I owe everything to my readers and and I want to give back and that’s what I’m here to do indeed indeed my friend thank you so much Graham the

guys the book is called America before Graham Hancock is my guest America before the key to Earth’s lost civilization it’s on shelves you can go and get the book I highly recommend this I recommend reading it more than once there’s a lot of information here if you enjoyed this show please subscribe share the show with your friends if you’re listening to it on YouTube you can subscribe and get notifications when go live if you really

like this show buy us a coffee that would be great otherwise Graham any closing statements here man I think I think the only closing statement I have is to say this life is a mystery we are immersed in a mystery we live in an enchanted realm let’s remember that the enchantment and the mystery and the magic that’s what it’s all about it’s not about material possessions and wealth and power it’s about recognising the magic of being alive at all and of

having this opportunity to live however many years we give it in a human body with the capacity to learn and to grow and to develop indeed Graham thank you so much so much for your time my friend guys we’re gonna get out of here you we’re back on Thursday this week with our guest Kostas danzo’s and here we go see you later this week