Jill V. Mangino • 1 year ago • 1 Comments
This interview originally appeared in Om Times.
A real life “Indiana Jones”, international,
bestselling author Graham Hancock has traversed the planet investigating
ancient mysteries including the origin of humankind, archeological anomalies,
the realms of consciousness and beyond. An unconventional thinker he is always
on the forefront redefining our history. His new novel, War God: Return
of the Plumed Serpent, will be released next month. He was so gracious
to spend an hour with me on a phone to talk about everything from his views on
aliens, Atlantis, ayahuasca and much more, including his theories on the
world’s most ancient “unsolved” mysteries and the future of our planet.
JVM: I am a huge fan of the TV series Ancient
Aliens, you always have amazing commentaries to share on that series.
GH: I’ve got nothing against the entities
our species presently calls “aliens”. These entities are real, in my view,
although I don’t think we’re anywhere near understanding exactly what they are
or where they come from. That being said, though, the fact is that I don’t need
“aliens” – whatever they are — to explain any mysteries in our pre-history.
Honestly I don’t need a single alien for the great pyramids or the Mayan
calendar. I just don’t. What I need is a more advanced level of human
civilization in that period than is recognized by historians.
But let me be clear about this. We are dealing
with something extremely interesting in the so-called UFO/alien phenomenon.
It’s just that we don’t know yet exactly what lies at the source of that
phenomenon and may be jumping too quickly to the conclusion that it is
something as simple, and as relatively un-mysterious, as high-tech beings a bit
like us but from other planets. In my book Supernatural, I
looked at the similarities at the level of phenomenology, at the level of
experience, between what were construed as abductions by faeries in the Middle
Ages, and what are construed as abductions by spirits by shamans in the Amazon
rainforest, for example, and what are construed as abductions by aliens in the
technologically developed countries today. Whatever is going on – and I repeat
there may be no single, simple explanation — it is the same thing in
every case; I’m really very clear on that. One of the problems I have with
the whole ancient alien lobby is that at one level it operates like a religion
or a cult, by which I mean its believers are resistant to, and often get
furiously angry about, other possible explanations that challenge their faith.
But at another level members of the “ancient astronaut cult” are also crassly
materialistic, seeking to reduce everything to a simplistic material reference
frame, projecting our present and imagined future levels of technology onto
what are in fact deeply mysterious and unexplained phenomena, and sticking
their heads in the sand when it comes the implications of the latest research
into altered states of consciousness – for example Rick Strassman’s
groundbreaking work with DMT and human volunteers. I’m not saying altered
states of consciousness explain everything about the UFO/alien phenomenon. I am
not saying there are no physical aspects to the UFO/alien phenomenon, because
there are. I’m simply saying that if we neglect altered states of consciousness
and focus solely on the physical, we will never solve the UFO/alien mystery.
How did you go from being a mainstream investigative
journalist, to exploring the hidden mysteries of our origin on planet
Earth?
For me it was a process. I was very much focused on
current affairs during the 1970s. But in the early 1980s, I bumped by accident
into a historical mystery – the mystery of Ethiopia’s claim to possess the lost
Ark of the Covenant. I was visiting Ethiopia as the East Africa correspondent
of The Economist on a current affairs story, and found myself
in a war zone, face-to-face with the monk who claimed he was the guardian of
the Ark. And since I’d recently seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, I was
naturally intrigued, and I thought, “There’s a story here, but perhaps not a
story for The Economist.” So I began to investigate it, pretty much
on the back burner for a number of years during the 1980s, and gradually the
evidence began to build up. Academics were dismissing the Ethiopian claim to
posses this extraordinary biblical relic, but I kept finding more and more
evidence that supported it – so much evidence that eventually I ended up
writing a book about it called The Sign of the Seal: The Quest for the
Lost Ark of the Covenant. That’s the first book I ever wrote on the subject
of a historical mystery.
My research for The Sign and the Seal taught
me that we don’t always have to trust absolutely what academics tell us about
our past; they can be biased, they can be prejudiced, and they can be wrong. So
just as I brought investigative skills into my current affairs journalism, I
thought it was worth bringing those investigative skills to the ancient past of
mankind. Really, as we go further back – particularly as we go back beyond five
thousand years ago into epochs for which we have no written documents whatsoever
– the stories historians tell us become less and less about facts and more and
more about just their opinion. So I felt there was room for a thoroughly
researched alternative point of view. By seeking to understand our past better,
I could also, perhaps, in some way, shed some light on the human predicament
today. So following The Sign and the Seal, which took me to
Israel, to Ethiopia, and repeatedly to Egypt, I became aware that there were
whole areas of our past that we were being given a very one-sided story on. I
began to consider the possibility that there might be a huge forgotten episode
in human history, a lost civilization, really. And I decided that would be my
next project and I spent several years on the investigation that became Fingerprints
of the Gods, which is by far my best-known book.
One of my favorite books for sure is Fingerprints of
the Gods, it inspired my first trip to visit the Mayan Ruins. You
really are a true pioneer in that field. And didn’t the Sphinx book
come after that?
Yes. The Message of the Sphinx came
out in 1996, a bit over a year afterFingerprints of the Gods. I
co-authored Message with my friend and colleague Robert
Bauval. Again, there is an orthodox story of the Sphinx, that
it was created in 2500 B.C. by the Pharaonic Egyptians, and there’s an
alternative story, which is based in part on astronomy, namely that the Sphinx
is leonine in form and gazes due east. In other words its gaze targets the
rising sun on the spring equinox. It so happens that 12,500 years ago, i.e. in
10,500 B.C., we were in the age of Leo, when the constellation of Leo housed
the sun on the spring equinox. If the ancient Egyptians did make the Sphinx,
they would have had to have been astronomically illiterate to create an
equinoctial marker in the form of a lion in 2500 B.C. because that was the age
of Taurus. If the Sphinx was made in the age of Taurus, it should have had the
form of a bull.
Actually the iconography of ancient Egypt in 2500 B.C.
was all about bulls, showing us that they understood the constellations of the
zodiac very well. So it’s anomalous that they have this lion-bodied monument
looking at the rising sun on the equinox; it would make much more sense if that
monument were created in the age of Leo 8,000 years earlier. Secondly, there is
all the work that Robert Schoch and John Anthony West did on the geology of the
Sphinx, which suggests very strongly that the Sphinx is geologically much older
than 2500 B.C. Quite possibly what happened was that the head of the Sphinx was
re-carved by the pharaohs, but the body of the Sphinx remains the body of a
lion. So we have a leonine equinoxial marker with geological indications that
it’s much older than 2500 B.C. That set the stage for the book that Bauval and
I called The Message of the Sphinx.
I remember the NBC special The Mystery of the Sphinx with Charlton Heston.
Were you in that show?
I was. That show was one of John Anthony West’s, put
together by Bill Cote. That was an excellent film, and it had a huge impact at
the time. It launched a whole new epoch of questioning the past, and doing so
in a rational way based on good evidence rather than simply on wishful
thinking.
Is there one particular discovery you came across in
your work that forever changed your perspective about this planet, about our
origin?
Again, it has been a process more than a single
moment. It has been years of inquiry and investigation that have led me to this
point of view. There are a number of key issues. One is ancient knowledge of
astronomy and the phenomenon of copying the patterns of constellations on the
ground, which we find for example at Giza, and we find at Angkor in Cambodia,
in a number of Mayan sites, some of the stone circles in Britain – it’s all
over the world. And it feels like a shared idea; it doesn’t feel like sort of
accidentally all these different cultures are doing this. Because there’s an
idea behind it: “as above, so below,” the marriage of heaven and earth. And
that idea is also expressed in religious and spiritual traditions all around
the world, in cultures that are not supposed to have had any connection with
one another. They have a shared spiritual idea and they express it in the same
types of monuments all around the world, which suggests to me very strongly
that we are looking at a remote common influence, at an ancestor civilization
which passed down an influence to all these later civilizations. That for me is
one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for a lost civilization, a global
civilization, that we find the same idea and the same kinds of monuments all
around the world, and those monuments are expressing that very idea.
Do you believe ancient advanced civilizations existed?
Like Atlantis and Lemuria?
Well, let’s get Lemuria out of the way first. Lemuria
is actually a 19th century idea and there is no ancient text
that refers to Lemuria. Lemuria is about the fact that fossils of a species of
animal, the lemur, are found on both sides of the Indian Ocean. The suggestion
was that there must have been some joining continent at one point between
Madagascar and India. At any rate, I repeat, and this is my point – there’s
no ancient testimony for the existence of a place called “Lemuria”. The
ancient testimony from Mu is also extremely dubious, since it rests on a 19th century
mistranslation of a Mayan text popularized by Augustus Le Plongeon and then
subsequently elaborated by James Churchward in the 1920’s and 1930’s. But never
mind the names, the fact is that we do have genuinely ancient traditions of
lost civilisations and lost lands all around the world. That’s why I find
Lemuria and Mu a bit of a distraction, because Mu rests on a mistranslation of
an ancient text and Lemuria is entirely a 19th century idea.
Atlantis, on the other hand, is a genuinely ancient
idea for which the earliest surviving written reference comes down to us from
the fifth century BC in the works of the Greek philosopher Plato who told us
that Atlantis was an advanced but arrogant civilization that was destroyed by
floods and earthquakes in “a single, terrible day and night” 9,000 years before
the time of his own ancestor Solon who lived around 600 BC – so
therefore around 9,600 BC in our calendar. We find exactly the same notion with
exactly the same dates in southern India, where the lost land is called Kumari
Kandam, also said to have been swallowed up by the sea around 11,600 years ago.
Indeed we find this notion of a golden age ended by a cataclysmic event all
around the world. It’s testified to in thousands of myths and traditions.
Do you feel like we’re heading towards that again?
I feel that we have all the credentials to be the next
lost civilization, yes. If you look at these myths, these traditions from the
past, they always implicate humanity in what happened. Take the Atlantis story,
or the biblical story of Noah, what you have here is a scenario in which
humanity has behaved so wickedly, has become so arrogant, has become so cruel,
that we have lost our connection to the universe provoking the universe to
respond by punishing us in some way. This story is repeated again and again all
around the world. So I can’t help but reflect that if ever there was an
arrogant, cruel and debased civilization, that would be our civilization today.
In mythological terms, therefore, we do indeed look like the next lost
civilization.
I’m not preaching doom and gloom, so please don’t make
me sound as though I am! That is totally not my view. On the contrary, I don’t
think that any of this is inevitable; I think we have the power of choice. I
think we can choose a new path; we don’t have to go down the murderous and
self-destructive path we’re walking right now. But you know, we don’t need
another comet impact or an asteroid or earth-destroying earthquakes to end our
civilization, we’re perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. And we’re on our
way to doing so, but it doesn’t have to happen. There is a new
awakening of consciousness; people all around the world are waking up. They’re
refusing to put up with the bullshit of the state and the big corporations and
the endless hatred and fear and division that is sown amongst us. People
are finding their voices and are waking up to a new consciousness. And I take
great hope from that. I feel very positive, actually.
One of the things that you talk about is, what you
call the “materialists” or “reductionists” like Richard Dawkins, who I assume
is sort of a nemesis, so to speak, for lack of a better word.
You’re referring to the notion that everything can be
reduced to matter – that consciousness, for example, is what materialist
scientists like Richard Dawkins call an “epiphenomenon of brain activity”.
Their case is that we humans needed our big brains to make us fitter survivors
in the Darwinian struggle, and an accidental byproduct of that evolutionary
process was that we got this mysterious thing called consciousness. That is the
view of materialist science. It sees consciousness as being generated by the
brain, in other words, manufactured, made by the brain, and therefore it sees
no possibility that consciousness could exist outside the brain. So from the
point of view of scientists like Richard Dawkins, when we’re dead, we’re dead,
we’re just meat, there’s nothing more to the story, everything is over. But
there is a whole avalanche of new material on consciousness suggesting that the
materialist-reductionist model is completely wrong, and that consciousness is
non-local, that it is not generated by the brain. Yes, there is a relationship
between consciousness and the brain, but maybe it’s more like the relationship
of the TV signal to the TV set. The brain is in a sense a transceiver or a
receiver of consciousness rather than the generator of consciousness. And if
that’s the case, then when we’re dead, consciousness goes on, because it isn’t
made by our brains or our bodies, it’s just manifesting, incarnating in this
body for a particular period of time. And that fits, of course, with almost all
ancient spiritual traditions.
What do you think of the concept of reincarnation?
To me, there’s nothing illogical or strange about the
idea of reincarnation. It makes perfect sense. Indeed without it, all of this
seems like a huge waste, really. This gigantic universe, and this beautiful
planet, and life and consciousness – when you look at all that, reincarnation
just makes so much sense. And of course it makes sense to many ancient
spiritual cultures, but it doesn’t make sense in the technological West. And
the reason it doesn’t make sense in the West is because we’ve bought in, hook,
line, and sinker, to the materialist ideology of science. And it is an
ideology; it’s not a fact that everything can be reduced to its material
components. A human being is more than the sum of his or her parts. I find many
make this mistake of thinking that the materialist frame of reference is a fact
when it’s not a fact; it’s a frame of reference through which they view
reality. And it doesn’t account for all kinds phenomena. Reincarnation has been
very thoroughly documented by, for example, Ian Stevenson at the University of
Virginia. Excellent work. He ended up with some amazing science saying,
effectively, “I look at this body of evidence now and the only reasonable
conclusion I can come to from the evidence is that there is reincarnation.” And
this is thirty years of in-depth scientific study put out there in multiple
different, thoroughly referenced books that he published. Really solid work,
and completely ignored by materialist science, although he was scientist
himself. And there are so many other phenomena as well that support the notion
that we go on. Those of a materialist persuasion like to say, “Oh you people
who believe in reincarnation, you believe in life after death, you’re just
doing that because you find it comforting. It comforts you to imagine that life
might go on.” To that, I would reply, “What utter nonsense.” It’s not
comforting at all. On the contrary, it’s more comforting to imagine that there
are no consequences. The materialist view is actually the comforting
one! The view of reincarnation and the notion you must account for the life
you’ve lived, and that there will be consequences for it, is a deeply
disturbing notion, as a matter of fact. And it requires you to examine the life
you lived very, very closely and very, very carefully. So I think there’s a lot
of nonsense talked around this subject. And I try in my work to shed some
alternative light on it.
In my view, the material aspect of life is secondary,
and the spiritual aspect is primary. But I think we should say it’s a blessing
to be born in a human body. We’re so fortunate to have this opportunity and
that’s why we shouldn’t waste it. That’s what is so really demonic about modern
society – that it conspires to persuade us to waste the opportunity, to think
it’s all about production and consumption and material things, and not to
nurture the spirit in any way. This is the real conspiracy of modern society. It
wants to make us forget that life is a gift, a precious, precious gift not to
be wasted.
I was going to ask you “If you had thirty seconds to
summarize your life’s work, what would you say?: But I think that was it!
In further answer, I would hope that what I’ve done is
encourage the asking of questions, to persuade my readers never to accept
anything at face value – including, of course, my own work! We need to engage
our own brains, and investigate matters for ourselves. That’s what the new
awakening in the world is, in part, about. You know, we suffer from a
veneration of so-called “experts” in the West – a bad habit of veneration and
deference dupes us into relying on others, the so-called “experts”, for many of
the key decisions in our lives – when in fact who can be more of an expert on
our own lives than we ourselves? That’s one of the things I see changing.
People, particularly young people, are no longer willing to hand over their
personal responsibility for themselves to others, and now actively want and
demand sovereignty over their own lives, over their own consciousness, and over
their own health. More and more of us, young and old, are refusing give our
power to “experts,” and bureaucrats and scientists. We prefer to grow up and
make our own decisions and resist those who seek to take decisions for us.
Do you have any heroes that influence your work? Or
any people that inspired you?
So many. So many, really. He’s not well known, but I’d
like to mention Giorgio De Santillana, who was Professor of the history of
science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He wrote an amazing book
called Hamlet’s Mill about advanced knowledge encoded in
ancient myth. He’s got to be right up there near the top. I rate
even higher the late, great Terence McKenna, author of Food of the Gods,
who sadly passed away in the year 2000 but whose amazing gift of powerful
speech lives on and thrives and propagates daily on the internet. I have huge
respect and appreciation for Terence McKenna’s work and rate him amongst the
greatest liberation thinkers of the past five hundred years. Right at the very
top of my list, however, I’m going to put my own wife and partner the
photographer Santha Faiia whose courage, decency, intellectual honesty and
capacity for unselfish love have taught me the most important lessons I have
learned in this life.
I do want to ask you about Ayahuasca, which is becoming very popular.
These medicines have an incredible potential for
healing. There’s so much else as well. I’ve been involved with Ayahuasca since
2003. I began to drink it as a research project, as a matter of fact, because I
was starting work on my book Supernatural, which concerns shamanism and
altered states of consciousness. I’ve always believed I have to experience what
I’m writing about, so I went down to the Amazon and had my first eleven
sessions with Ayahuasca. After that, it stopped being research and became a
regular spiritual exercise for me. I’ve continued to drink Ayahuasca and
every year I try to set aside a two-week period where I have five sessions of Ayahuasca because
I’ve found it incredibly helpful in encouraging me to pay attention to
important issues in my own life. Ayahuasca helped teach me, I hope, to be a
better, more nurturing, more thoughtful person than I used to be. I’ve received
some severe kickings from Mother Ayahuasca to drive home her point, and I’ve
taken those lessons to heart. It’s very difficult to change a lifetime of bad
habits but Ayahuasca gives us the opportunity to recognize what we need to fix.
The rest is up to us.
Does it show you a lot of your shadow stuff that you
need to heal?
It totally does. It totally, relentlessly does. I’ve
been encouraged to work on that, but it also shows me so much more about the
mysterious nature of reality, that “the real” is by no means limited to the
physical realm. There’s so much more beyond this material plane, and we are in
contact and connection with other intelligences and they’re there whether we
like it or not. Shamanism is an ancient system for managing these influences;
it’s proactive and actually does something about them rather than simply
ignoring them, which is the Western way. So I’ve found Ayahuasca an incredibly
important and valuable part of my life. Ayahuasca compels you to address your
ego. The more ego you’ve got, the more she compels you. I think this is helpful
to a lot of people; it certainly has been to me! It’s not a path without
problems of course. There are many bogus shamans offering Ayahuasca. We are
going to confront problems with Ayahuasca. My advice to anybody thinking about
Ayahuasca is to realize this is a very serious matter. And very sacred. Don’t
go into it lightly. Do a thorough investigation. Talk to other people who have
worked with Ayahuasca, talk to the people they’ve drunk Ayahuasca with, and get
a sense of a place that’s right and safe and secure for you.
I just want to talk to you
a little bit about the Psyche and Matter symposium with the highly publicized
banning from TEDx and what you and Rupert Sheldrake will be talking about
during the symposium next week in Joshua Tree…
First, to be clear about TEDx – these are conferences
organized outside of TED, but licensed by TED and thus part of what TED sees as
its “franchise”. The conference Rupert and I both spoke at was organized by a
group of students from London specifically to look at consciousness issues. I
was pleased to be invited to speak at it. I’d always felt very good about TED.
I thought it was a very open forum. So I went along and gave my talk, and
Rupert gave his talk. Mine was on the issue of ayahuasca, and the way that at a
certain point in my life a series of ayahuasca experiences stopped me smoking
cannabis. Rupert’s talk was about what he calls “the science delusion”. So they
were very different talks, but what they had in common was a non-mainstream
view of consciousness. We were both looking at consciousness as a non-local
phenomenon, as something not generated by the brain, but rather something
that’s manifested through the brain. And both our talks were very popular and
started to spiral up large numbers of Youtube hits.
This annoyed a body of scientists who advise TED, who
are all of the materialist persuasion and thus unwilling to contemplate the
possibility that consciousness might be a mystery, that it might not be
generated by the brain at all. And they lobbied TED to delete our talks from
TED’s Youtube channel. And TED did so. They got a huge backlash from that.
Because TED’s argument was that they needed to keep the public safe from our
unorthodox views. The world today is full of intelligent thoughtful people who
are perfectly capable of making up their own minds. They felt patronized and
offended by TED and the result was that lots and lots of people independently
uploaded our talks on their Youtube channels. Just on three Youtube channels
alone, my talk has had well over a million views. It’s still up. You can see
one of them here.
Likewise, Rupert’s talk has had huge numbers of views
as well since TED banned us. So by banning us, TED achieved an opposite effect
to the one it wanted. I think it wanted to shut us up and hoped we’d just go
away and that the whole issue of non-local consciousness that we’d raised would
just go away. Instead there was this gigantic outcry on the internet with the
result that many more people are aware now that consciousness is a
mystery and that no scientist can really claim to know exactly what it is.
Certainly we should not be taking dogmatic views about it but rather inquiring
in a very open-minded way.
Hasn’t quantum physics shown that everything is energy
and vibrating?
The new science of consciousness has a lot to do with
quantum physics. And quantum physics is an area of science that has many
parallels with shamanism.
Thank you for your time.
My pleasure.
Graham Hancock is the author of The Sign and the
Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, Message of the Sphinx, Heaven’s
Mirror, Supernatural and other bestselling investigations of
historical mysteries. His books have been translated into twenty-seven
languages and have sold over nine million copies worldwide. His public lectures
and broadcasts, including two major TV series, Quest for the Lost
Civilization, and Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age, as well as
his active presence on the internet, have further established his reputation as
an unconventional thinker who raises controversial questions about humanity’s
past. Written with the same page-turning appeal that has made his non-fiction
so popular, the fantasy-adventure, time-travel novel Entangled is
his first work of fiction. His second novel, War God(http://www.grahamhancock.com/wargod/) adds a supernatural twist to the epic story of the
Spanish conquest of Mexico.
Website: www.grahamhancock.com.
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