Graham Hancock : Maestro
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I had the great pleasure to interview Graham Hancock, well known author of Fingerprints of the Gods and many other highly regarded books. His books have sold more than five million copies worldwide and have been translated into 27 languages. He is an author, lecturer, explorer and journalist and has appeared on hundreds of radio and numerous television shows reaching millions with his work. Recently he released a new and fascinating book called Entangled, a novel that involves the story of two strong women, time travel and the battle between good and evil. I was fortunate to be able to catch up with him when he came by Los Angeles on his book tour across the U.S.
Graham is a pre-eminent researcher and investigator with an uncompromising vision into our real history and the powers behind the secrecy that keep humanity blind to its true potential. We spoke of his early dives of discovery into the mystery of Atlantis, Egypt, his new book Entangled and his experience with Ayahuasca that led him on a fascinating journey into the deepest recesses of his own mind. Ultimately, after years of writing superb nonfiction he now turns to fiction as the place to bring to light the mysteries of consciousness.
Graham is a frank, open and dynamic conversationalist, who will expound on his new and latest theories on global consciousness rising at the Awake and Aware 2011 conference on September 23, 24 and 25 in Irvine California. While he is erudite and highly educated he is not an arm-chair investigator. Instead, he has boldly lived the spirit of his passion whether diving in the seas in search of ruins or climbing through jungles in the Amazon. In his new work he follows in the footsteps of the late Terrence McKenna, a brilliant writer and shaman, investigating the nature of consciousness and pushing the boundaries of what is known and accepted in search of the true nature of what it means to be human.
Kerry Cassidy
Project Camelot
Los Angeles, CA
Visit Graham Hancock’s website
Interview Transcript
Graham Hancock: Entangled & Consciousness ‘Maestro’
GH : Well, here we are in sunny Los Angeles, which unfortunately today is not sunny at all …
KC : Hi, I’m Kerry Cassidy from Project Camelot and we are here with Graham Hancock. He’s a fabulous researcher and has really gone down the rabbit hole and investigated the pyramids, the background behind where we are coming from, really branching out. So I’m not sure how far to go with this introduction and let’s have you take over.
GH : Well, you’re right. I am branching out and I like to think, as a researcher and as an author, that I’m always doing that. I want to keep at the cutting edge and I want to keep what I am doing fresh and original. I don’t want to just endlessly repeat myself on the same theme. I got drawn into ancient mysteries really quite by chance well over 20 years ago. I used to be a journalist, very much mainstream. I was the East African correspondent for The Economist based in Nairobi, Kenya, and traveling around Africa reporting on wars and famines and all of economic and current affairs matters. But I came across an extraordinary story in Ethiopia, where I lived, that Ethiopia claimed to possess the lost Ark of the Covenant and it was my investigation into that, during the 1980s, which resulted in my book: The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
That took me right out of current affairs and into the investigation of ancient mysteries including, of course, the majestic sacred mystery of ancient Egypt and its astonishing works of art and architecture and what all of these stand for. That line of investigation eventually lead me to my book, Fingerprints of the Gods, which was published in 1995 and concerns the possibility of a lost civilization. Could there be just a huge forgotten episode in human history? This was really the focus of my research for many, many years from the mid 90s through into about 2002/2003 when I reached a point where I felt that I had done everything that I could humanly and usefully do with that investigation. The last part of it involved close to 6 years of scuba diving all around the world, in sometimes extremely risky and dangerous conditions, looking for underwater ruins which would have been submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age. After I had completed that, I felt that I had definitely not only talked the talk but walked the walk and that it was time for me to move on as a researcher and perhaps for others to take over where I had left off with all the clues and trails of investigation that I had left open to them.
KC : I’m not all that familiar with the undersea work that you’ve done and I am curious, did you ever go, for example, in the seas around Alexandria in Egypt?
GH : I dived off Alexandria.
KC : Okay.
GH : I’ve spent many hours in the underwater off Alexandria doing two quite different things. First of all, I had a look at the historic period ruins, so-called ‘Cleopatra’s Palace’, which lies under water right off the lighthouse in Alexandria; the area that’s thought to have been the site of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria. And what’s underwater there – really quite shallow at the depth of 15 feet up to maybe 20 feet maximum – are ruins from the recognizable and relatively recent historic period. You’re looking at Roman ruins and late Greek Ptolemaic ruins which are under water there. So you’re looking at stuff that is about 2200 years old or even less: 2100 years old.
Whatever submerged that and whatever the story of the submergence is, it’s not connected in my mind to the issue of a lost civilization. Generally, it appears to be the case that the Nile dumped a lot of silts which built up along the coast and that it may have been that buildings were built on top of these and there was then a collapse which brought this material under water, because really there hasn’t been a significant sea level rise in the last 2000 years. But, what I’ve always been interested in is the possibility of ruins at much greater depth than that. Really, once you get down to about 80 or 100 feet under water, you can be absolutely sure that you are dealing with rising sea level at the end of the last ice age and the science is pretty exact. You can say when it was submerged. So, if I’m diving on structures that are 100 feet below sea level, I can be pretty sure that they are about 12,000 years old.
What actually drew me to Alexandria wasn’t the historic period ruins, although it was interesting to see them, but local divers who had told me that they had seen gigantic ruin fields at much greater depth, and I went with one of these local divers. We went through the tortuous process of getting permission from all the different branches of the Egyptian government that one must work with in order to do a dive like this, and then we went underwater and we started looking for the sites that our local contact had dived on as a technical diver in the past. And after some days we found one of these sites, which indeed does consist of gigantic blocks of stone – true megaliths – which would weigh in the region of 100 tons each, laid out like just a vast carpet on the sea bed; and actually what it reminded me most of was the colossal paving stones that we see around the Great Pyramid of Giza which we know are extremely ancient. I did try to draw attention to some of the archeologists who were working in Alexandria to this anomalous ruin field that we had discovered, but as far as I know there has been no further follow up to what is there. But I did describe it in my book Underworld and we do include some photographs that my wife, Santha who dives with me, took of this most curious, anomalous and unexpected ruin field in deep water out, some kilometers, from shore off Alexandria.
KC : Okay, very interesting. Would you say that it’s possible that was part of what could have been Atlantis?
GH : I have a view on Atlantis and in fact, if you look at Plato, Plato is the earliest surviving source for the specific story of Atlantis or the name of a civilization that was called Atlantis. There are many, many other traditions and stories about lost civilizations that were destroyed in a global flood, but if we take the specifics of Atlantis, the earliest documentary record we have was handed down to us by Plato, and Plato actually spoke of two things. Yes, he spoke of a continent-sized land mass, but he also spoke of a great empire that was spread out around the world and that’s the view of Atlantis that I take; that we were looking at a maritime sea going civilization which was in many respects highly advanced, which had charted and mapped the entire world, and which had settled or at least created outposts on coastlines all around the world.
I would suggest very strongly that one of those outposts would have been off ancient Egypt. Very interesting actually because if you look at the Plato story, which is reported in his Timaeus and Critias dialogues, you will find that he tells us a number of things. Firstly, that he got the information about Atlantis from a relative of his – an elder relative – Solon, the Greek lawmaker, and that Solon had visited Egypt and had talked with priests at the temple that no longer exists at Sais in the Delta; and those priests had told him the story of Atlantis: how nine thousand years before the time of Solon there had been a great civilization which had been destroyed in a single terrible day and night. A cataclysmic flood accompanied by earthquakes and so complete had the destruction been, that mankind had been forced to begin again like children with no memory of what went before.
So first of all there is this Egyptian connection in the passing down of the story of Atlantis. Secondly, the date is very interesting: 9000 years before the time of Solon is approximately 9,600/9.500 BC, which means eleven and a half thousand years ago and that plugs us in. If Plato made the story up, as many of his critics have claimed, then it’s astonishing that he chose that date because modern science, geological science, tell us that that date was one of the times of peak flooding and cataclysmic meltdown of the great icecaps during the last ice age, and the time of very rapid sea level rise, so Plato picked a very interesting date and time.
KC : What about Herodotus because isn’t there…didn’t he also talk about, for example, the library under the Sphinx?
GH : You’ll have to forgive me, because my recollection of the details of Herodotus are not that strong.
KC : Was he before Plato or after him?
GH : I recall Herodotus talking – he was after – I recall Herodotus talking about the Labyrinth and talking about a lost or concealed labyrinthine structure of great antiquity but I don’t find specific references to a lost civilization in my readings of Herodotus. That may simply be because my readings of Herodotus are limited. I have not studied him in perhaps as much depth as I should.
KC : Okay, because my understanding is, we interviewed Patrick Geryl and he went with a group into some ruins that are somewhere in Egypt, I’m not sure exactly where, where they are saying that the Labyrinth has been found.
GH : I don’t have a view on that specific issue.
KC : It is a very interesting area and maybe you should go investigate that because, from what I understand, this is what they’re claiming: that within the Labyrinth there were inscriptions that describe what’s going to happen in 2012.
GH : Well let those who are investigating it, investigate it. And let them reveal to us what they find and we shall see. To my mind, at the moment, this particular issue of the Labyrinth is, apart from the ancient authority and Herodotus, is really in the area of hearsay and rumor. I would like to see more firm information and I wouldn’t like to just leap off to a conclusion about it based on a few whispers here and there. I would like to have much more evidence, if this is indeed the case, that evidence should come out.
KC : Okay, so you say you have dived. You went diving into ruins, and I know you visited ruins in South America, Machu Picchu and lake Titicaca and all over the world probably.
GH : I have been privileged and lucky enough to travel very extensively over the twenty years or so that I have focused my life on the mystery of a lost civilization. In terms of specific diving, I have dived incredibly extensively around the islands of Japan – hundreds and hundreds of dives – specifically at the extraordinary sites off the island of Yonaguni in southwest Japan where we find gigantic steps, pyramid like structures under water. In fact, a huge complex of clearly man made ruins. I have dived on the other side of the world in the Bimini Road, off Florida; around the Grand Bahama Banks, a very, very interesting site. I’ve dived all over the Mediterranean not only in Alexandria, but around Sardinia and also extensively around the island of Malta, where again, we have both very intriguing gigantic megalithic structures above water and equally intriguing structures underneath water.
KC : Would you say that what’s underwater in Malta might be of the same period of what you find off Alexandria?
GH : Yeah, the deep water ruins off of Alexandria I would say [as well] that the deep water ruins off of Malta are of the same period, which puts us back around 12,000 years ago; puts us back to the end of the last ice age; puts us in the frame for the time that Plato gave us for the destruction of Atlantis. Now, I have dived also elsewhere. I have dived very extensively around the coasts of India, both off northwest India and southeast India. It’s not well understood that during the ice age sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today and the world looked completely different. It was 400 feet lower because huge amounts of water that are presently in the oceans were locked up in gigantic ice caps all along the northern hemisphere, on top of North America, and on top of northern Europe. Now these icecaps were up to two or even three miles deep and when they melted cataclysmically, you had just gigantic flows of water back into the ocean which raised ocean levels. So once you wind the coastlines back, as we can do with excellent computer simulations now, to the end of last ice age you find, for example, that India and the island of Sri Lanka which are now separate, were joined together into one land mass. And we found intriguing underwater ruins between India and Sri Lanka which again, by their depth close to 100 ft., would date to around 12,000 years ago.
Interestingly, India has its own story of a great lost civilization and puts almost exactly the same date on it that Plato puts on Atlantis, round about 12,000 years ago, and suggests that India not only was joined to Sri Lanka which turns out to be correct, but that India extended much further to the south than it does today, which also turns out to be correct. So it was clues like this that lead me to my diving adventures: where there were local fisherman or local divers who had seen anomalous structures under water; was there evidence of rapid sea level rise in that area, and sometimes, where there were ancient maps, which showed features that no longer exist today. When I could bring all of these three together, then I would go diving. I dived also extensively across the Pacific Ocean, in Micronesia, around Tahiti, around Tonga, and in all of those places we have found anomalous structures under water, and, I put all of this together in a gigantic book called Underworld with about 1400 footnotes. It’s thoroughly documented and referenced in great detail as a resource for future researchers who want to take this investigation further. The problem I have with marine archeology is that marine archeologists, to this day, are primarily interested in shipwrecks, not in lost civilizations because they don’t believe in lost civilizations.
KC : Well, aren’t they also always searching for treasure?
GH : Yeah, shipwrecks and treasure. That’s the focus of marine archeology, and there is a prejudice in mainstream archeology which is that there could be no lost civilization. Archeologists like to feel that they are pretty much in control of human history and so when you tell them to go and spend vast resources looking for gigantic ruins underwater they’ll say ‘no, it’s a waste of time because there couldn’t be such a thing’. So their preconception actually determines what they are willing to research and not research and it’s why I and Santha had to go and do this research entirely on our own funding without any institutional support whatsoever because nobody else was doing it.
KC : What about Michael Cremo’s work, Forbidden Archeology ? Have you gotten involved in that?
GH : I know Michael. I have got the highest possible respect for Forbidden Archeology and what Michael shows in Forbidden Archeology is that there is a kind of knowledge filter at work in the information that archeologists are prepared to pass on to us. And again and again intriguing discoveries are made which raise huge question marks over the picture and the pattern of history that is taught to us in school, and these question marks are completely ignored because they don’t fit. Actually, even documentation can disappear after a while. One of the great things that Michael Cremo did was to gather together a lot of documentation that otherwise wouldn’t have been available to any of us which proves that archeology is deliberately ignoring very, very key evidence in order to maintain a specific picture of history that puts us at the apex and pinnacle of the human story and sees a nice tidy evolutionary process up until ourselves. Where as in fact, if you view the evidence dispassionately, you tend to get a picture of cycles of time operating, and a rise and fall of human civilizations, and you understand that Plato was right when he called us a species with amnesia, effectively, who have no memory of what went before. I think part of my role has been to play a part in putting down the evidence that will help us to recover that lost memory.
KC : I have so many questions and I know that we are going to have limited time here, so forgive me if I jump around, and then if you want to sort of circle back to certain areas feel free to sort of manage the situation a little bit. I know you have spent a great deal of time investigating Egypt and I know that we have a timeline and I have been working with Michael Tellinger, and I don’t know if you are familiar with his work.
GH : A little bit.
KC : He’s dealing with South Africans and stone ruins that he has found there, or that some other people have found, but he has been bringing to the public attention really, and I took a trip down there and I filmed a small documentary that I am editing at this time. But the energy in the stones was really palpable. It was amazing and I do feel energy in my hands and can go to different spots in Egypt and the Great Pyramid and various pyramids and so on and feel different energies. So I’m wondering whether or not you, in putting this picture together – and I know you have this new book Entangled – and I just started it and it’s fascinating and kudos to you, because I know the transition going from fiction to non-fiction is huge really, I think. At any rate, what we’ve got here is because we’re Project Camelot, we’re interested in the big picture. We’re interested in how the different pieces link together and I’m wondering where you’re getting to. You’ve come down now from a very long journey, as it were, and you must be reaching a place where you’re starting to put these pieces together in a very intriguing way, I would imagine.
GH : Yes, well what’s come to the fore in my research in more recent years, is the issue and the mystery of human consciousness. I mean, what are we if not consciousness? If not pure consciousness? That is the essence of the human being and it’s just a fact that science hasn’t got the faintest idea what consciousness is or how, you know – with this few pounds of jelly inside our skulls that we call our brains – how we transmute experiences, feelings, sensations, emotion? How all of these intangibles and appreciation of beauty, love for a fellow human being… How all of this can manifest through this object that we call our brain. Science doesn’t have the faintest idea. They call it perhaps the most difficult problem in science and I have become very interested in consciousness, and that interest in consciousness does, of course, go back into the earliest days of my work into lost civilizations.
I happen to believe that the ancient Egyptians were the inheritors of a vastly more ancient tradition, and let’s call the origin of that tradition Atlantis. It may have been called many, many different names. But the ancient Egyptians, themselves, never claimed that their civilization was totally their invention. They saw their civilization as a legacy from the time of the gods, from ‘the first time’ as they called it, ‘Septepy’. I won’t go into immense details here, but I and Robert Bauval, working together using astronomy and architecture, have suggested very strongly that we should be able to put a date on this time, this mysterious time, that the Egyptians call ‘the first time’ and, that [that] date would be around twelve and a half thousand years ago: 10,500 BC approximately, give or take a thousand years. So I see the ancient Egyptians as the inheritors of an ancient system of knowledge, and that this system was very much to do with understanding the mystery of human consciousness and using the powers of human consciousness. Are we stunned by the incredible achievements of the ancient Egyptians with the monuments that they created or inherited? Yes, we are stunned. We don’t understand how some of these gigantic stone complexes were put into place, least of all how the Great Pyramid, which contains up in its core structure blocks of stone that in some cases weigh around seventy tons. How on earth that this was done; and how it was done in a monument with a thirteen acre footprint that is almost perfectly, really with atomic accuracy, aligned to true north, south, east and west.
Well, that’s because we are rooted and grounded in a technical notion of how matter may be manipulated. We think that it has to involve physical advantage and leverage, mechanical leverage, and we don’t understand how the ancient Egyptians got that leverage to work on these huge stone structures. But if the ancient Egyptians were masters of a science of consciousness, if they could manipulate matter through the power of the mind – and I honestly believe that this is the case – then everything becomes much more clear. Likewise, the sacred quest of the ancient Egyptians was for the mystery of what it is to be alive. No other culture, accept perhaps the ancient Tibetans, have investigated the mystery of death more deeply than the ancient Egyptians who put their best minds to work on the problem for three thousand years, where as we and our culture are frankly, you know, midgets in that study. We don’t even begin to make that study so we need to listen to what the ancient Egyptians have to say.
What the ancient Egyptians say very, very clearly is that consciousness does not end with death; that death is an episode; that we are incarnating in this body in order to learn and to grow and to develop; that we may come back many times to learn the lessons that we need to learn here. So right from my earliest days of getting to grips with ancient Egypt and other ancient cultures, I was also getting to grips with the mysteries of consciousness.
As my work has progressed, I would say that the study of consciousness has become far more important to me. I’ve begun to move away from the very hands-on interest in the ancient ruins themselves and the measurements and statistics and the numbers associated with those. As I say, when I completed Underworld in 2002 with all that diving behind me, I really felt ‘okay, I’m going to draw a line under this now’. There may be plenty more work for others to do and I hope they go ahead and do it, but I’ve made my contribution. What I’m interested in now is consciousness, and that’s what lead me on to my next and last non-fiction book which is the book called Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachings of Mankind.
‘Supernatural’ looks at the mystery of rock and cave art all around the world, how it appears after close to six million years of evolution, if you accept the official line, that our ancestors have made almost no progress at all and then suddenly, really quite recently, less than forty thousand years ago it’s like a light has been switched on in the human brain all over the world. We can see from the archeological record that we are dealing with fully conscious creatures just like ourselves. What’s interesting, is those early humans, those ancestral humans, who were anatomically modern and looked just like you and I, left records of their experiences in the form of rock and cave art all around the world. There are certain specific aspects of that art, which tell us beyond the shadow of a doubt that those ancient artists were exploring and experimenting with altered states of consciousness. They were getting out of the prison of the body and letting their spirit roam free in the wider reality that is normally closed off to our normal senses; and very often they were doing so as shamans, to this day, still do. By using what we would call visionary plants, plants that contain visionary properties which allow us to dim down the material realm and turn up the lights on the non-material that surrounds us and interpenetrates us in everything that we do, but actually that most of us most of the time are not normally aware of.
I conducted a huge investigation into that subject, and that investigation, in my case, involved personal experience because I don’t believe in just sitting in an armchair and theorizing about what I’m writing. I have to put myself into my investigations, into my story. In this case, first of all, it involved going down to the Amazon jungle and sitting down with shamans in the Amazon and drinking the powerful hallucinogenic visionary brew known as ayahuasca and experiencing the seamlessly convincing parallel realms that it took my consciousness into. I began to realize that we do have a secret doorway inside our own minds, which certain techniques can allow us to open so that we can project our consciousness through into free standing other worlds, and where we may encounter their inhabitants who are interested in us. I suggest very strongly in ‘Supernatural’ that it was these encounters with, what I call the ‘ancient teachers of mankind’ and what shamans call ‘spirits’, that lead to this vast leap forward in human progress.
KC : Okay, and that’s a substantial summary of where you’ve been going recently. What I wanted to do was go back just a little bit and ask you in terms of the pyramids and the moving of the stones, and how you said that the consciousness is obviously the mind that is going to interact with these stones in order to facilitate the building of these amazing monuments, and what we are talking about, what we think at least in Camelot and what we’re coming across, is basically sound technology. In other words, the ability of sound and crystals and things like, I don’t know, you are probably aware of the Coral Castle.
GH : Hmm, I am yeah.
KC : In Florida. So did you find yourself coming into contact with evidence and interesting things like the fact like the ankh itself may be a tuning fork related to sound and so on.
GH : Yeah, I’m pretty sure that a sound technology enhanced by focusing consciousness was central to the moving of these gigantic blocks of stone; and, perhaps not only the moving, but also the cutting. There is a legend or an account from ancient Egypt, one of the few actually, which talks about gigantic blocks being moved into place and it states this very, very clearly – I reported this in my book Fingerprints of the Gods – it states it very clearly that the priests gathered together and ushered up a chant, and that the chant is what powered the movements of the stones. I think this is a very fruitful area of research into which much further work needs to be done. I’m glad to hear that you guys are doing it.
KC : I can’t actually say that we’re the investigators per say, or doing anything with it in regards to that technology, but basically what it all starts to point to is a form of what people are calling ‘free energy’. There’s a resonance, there’s a … I don’t know if you’re familiar with Wilhelm Reich’s investigation into orgone, and I don’t know whether you have studied eastern philosophy in terms of kundalini energy and all of that, but that all sort of tends to come together when you are dealing with this area of using the mind and the energy in humans and generating the resonance. I know you’ve been working with, or at least talking with, David Wilcock, to some degree and he’s very interested in the notion of the vortex that can be created and so on with these energies. So I guess that dovetails with where you are going with this.
GH : I would say that it dovetails, but it’s not the particular line of inquiry that I’m following now. What I’m really interested in now is what you might almost call the philosophical issues about what it is to be a human being, the nature of good and evil and the nature of the wider reality in which we are immersed. I feel that this is the area where I’m most likely to be useful to the world in the future and that’s really why I wrote my non-fiction book Supernatural. That’s why I’ve written my first novel, Entangled, which is to try to bring these ideas concerning the mysteries of human consciousness to the attention of the general public because everything in our society today conspires to suppress and limit human consciousness.
It’s really almost terrifying the power and effectiveness of the mind control techniques that operate in our society so that most people most of the time, don’t even know that they are being controlled and manipulated. I definitely see one of the agents of this mind control as the absolutely mind numbing phenomenon called Reality TV, and the fact that our children are being subjected 24 hours a day to this utter trivia with very low values attached to it. I believe that it’s shutting down human consciousness in areas that we desperately need to be expanding into.
We think of ourselves as an incredibly innovative society, but when I look at the long story of the human record, what I see is long periods of stasis where nothing new is being thought of or explored, followed by sudden revolutionary moments when everything is overthrown and new ideas come to the fore. I think that although we are indeed innovative with technology, we’ve got stuck in a rut with the idea of what technology is and what it should be. I think we are stuck in that rut and allowing ourselves to be stuck in it because of the control of our consciousness that our society operates on, so that we will continue endlessly repeating the same patterns of behaviour which allow large corporations to make huge sums of money and which allow powerful individuals behind the scenes, not necessarily in the forefront of government, to keep society running in their interests, not in our interests.
One of the main issues that I now seek to talk about and to express and to continue researching, is the notion of personal sovereignty over our own consciousness. I think this is the next step that we need to take. We need to assert our sovereignty over our own consciousness and resist all efforts by the powers that be in society to take control of our consciousness. I think if we do that, then a magical realm can open up before us. Right now, we are just tapping into a tiny, tiny fraction of our potential. We have these incredible bodies and incredible brains and we are just using a tiny, tiny fraction of it.
The Ancients always said that it’s a precious gift to be born in a human body. In the ancient Egyptian scene, in what is called the Judgment Scene where you see the weighing of the heart against the feather of truth, one of the things that is undoubtedly being weighed out there is what use did you make of this incredible gift that you were given? Did you use it well, or did you waste it? And some dark force in our society is deluding millions, billions of people not to use their lives well, but to waste them away on trivia and nothingness and we need to recapture the high ground in this area and explore the whole potential of human consciousness, which might do away completely – this is where we come back to the issue of free energy – might do away with completely with the present economic control which is exercised through control of energy resources. Actually, once you get into this area, you realize that you are talking about something very radical and very transformative if it’s allowed to happen.
KC : Let’s go down that road a little bit in regard to dark energies because you did write a book, I believe with Robert Bauval, that is called Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith, if I have it correct. In many ways you seem to have gone down the road of secret societies and information that is being withheld from the public, because ultimately whether you’re studying current civilizations that have gone or have passed or whether you are looking for, as you call it, lost civilization, you are really talking about uncovering hidden knowledge and that is also really crucial to the nature of consciousness, right? So if the Vatican, for example, has libraries and I don’t know if you’ve ever come across witnesses as we have that talk about the Vatican libraries where there are a great deal of scrolls and things that have never been made public and so on, but I would be curious as to in your travels, what you discovered in terms of the secret societies and how that works into this, which actually comes right around to what our children are being taught at this time and the mind control.
GH : Well of course the essence of a secret society is that it should be a secret so you don’t know it exists. Any secret society that isn’t secret and we really know a lot about? By definition isn’t a secret society, is it?
KC : Okay.
GH : If we are truly dealing with vast forces working behind the scenes that are manipulating our lives, let’s not expect to find a whole lot of evidence about them. It’s going to be a tough search to expose that and bring it to the surface, and once you do, it’s going to be a tough search to convince others that you’re right. And I sometimes wonder whether the focus on Freemasons, the Knights Templar, and such organizations isn’t actually a kind of distraction from the real game that is being played. The view that I take and that I expressed in Talisman that I co-authored with Robert Bauval, is that we need to look, in particular, at a fascinating body of texts called the Gnostic texts which were rediscovered at Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt, having lain buried since the fourth century after Christ right through to 1945 or ’46, when they were discovered.
What those texts tell us is that there was a system for preserving and defending human knowledge and human consciousness for helping us to find the right path, and that that system was utterly destroyed by the church. Indeed, by the Catholic church, once it had become the Roman Catholic church. Once Christianity entered into a marriage with ancient Rome and the powerful apparatus of state control that ancient Rome manipulated, I personally believe that Christianity lost its way. The Gnostic texts recover for us the true vision that later became treated as a heresy for which you could be burned at the stake for exploring those ideas.
Off camera you and I were talking earlier about past lives, and I sometimes wonder if I had a past life as a Gnostic, because I feel so emotionally attached to that period and I feel so much pain about what happened there …the mass scale suppression and destruction of a very fine idea and understanding of the mystery of existence. At the heart of the Gnostic texts is the notion that spiritual forces are at work behind this suppression of mankind. Not only secret societies, not only greedy or power hungry men and women, but enormous spiritual forces, and in the Gnostic view of things a number of things are turned upside down. For example, the entity that we’ve been in the habit of calling ‘God’ or ‘Jehovah’ or ‘Yahweh’ is seen by the Gnostics as an imposter; not as a god at all but as a kind of demigod.
They call him an ‘archon’ who deliberately seeks to mislead humanity by presenting humanity with false information and leading us down false trails so that we never really realize the purpose that we are on this planet to fulfill. In the Gnostic texts again, for example, all of us reared in the western and the Christian tradition are used to seeing the serpent as the bad guy in the story of the Garden of Eden, but in the Gnostic texts as a matter of fact, the serpent is seen as the good guy because he is offering to Adam and Eve the possibility of knowledge and indeed of eternal life; that these possibilities are open to them if only they will take the next step. So, the Gnostics have a very different take on this and I would say that my view is that Gnostic analysis is correct; that in the realm that we call the spirit worlds – the spirit realms that surround us – there are both good and evil forces at work.
That in a way, mankind is the fulcrum of a cosmic struggle between good and evil and, the choices that we make are absolutely fundamental in how that struggle plays out. Would it be a victory of the light or a victory of darkness? Those choices ultimately are up to us. What the suppression of consciousness is doing in our societies, and the mind control and the brainwashing is doing, is stopping us making those free choices in the right direction with disastrous consequences both at the material physical level when we see the terrible things that are being done in our world today, the grotesque cruelties that humans inflict upon other humans, and the absolutely awful and irresponsible destruction of the environment that is taking place due to so-called ‘commercial pressures’. So definite, obvious, physical , measurable impact but also a terrible spiritual impact as well from the way that our society is living now.
Are secret societies involved in this? Can I put my finger on specific individuals or men and women who are doing it? No, actually I can’t, but I’m not surprised because I wouldn’t expect them to show their heads above the parapet. What my own investigations have shown me is that the spiritual forces behind all of this are very real and that we need to take them seriously. Let’s no longer listen to this fairy story that scientists tell us that there is no such thing as good or evil, that there is no such thing as right or wrong, that all of these things are just culturally relative. It’s not so at all. These are fundamental forces at work in the Universe and human choices for the light or for the darkness are of enormous importance.
KC : Absolutely, couldn’t agree with you more on that! It’s interesting to me that in some ways you started out in a very different place than people like Timothy Leary and Terrence McKenna, and yet in a funny way you are actually starting to pick up the baton, in a sense, and run with it from where they left off, if I could be so bold.
GH : Yeah, I would thank you for that because I have huge respect in particular for Terrence McKenna, who I think was a great liberating force in this world. We lost a great man when Terrence McKenna died so young and so suddenly. Timothy Leary – a much more controversial character – in many ways, I think that Timothy Leary was irresponsible in the way that he promoted the use of psychedelics almost for recreational purposes. For me, psychedelics are an extremely serious business. They are not something that should ever be used for recreation. They are about opening consciousness and dissolving artificial boundaries between us and the rest of reality. They are about deep personal exploration, but they can be incredibly difficult and challenging to work with. And it’s important I think for anybody who plans to work with psychedelics, to enter into that process with respect and with suitable preparation, and never to do so for purposes of recreation.
Certainly, in this sense, my experiences with ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle have shown me how positive and nurturing psychedelics can be when used for the right purposes rather than the wrong purposes. Again, my argument about sovereignty over consciousness is: I do believe that it is not the business of the state what I, as an adult, choose to experience within in the sanctum of my own mind. As long as I don’t get into other peoples faces or cause troubles for others, I think it’s not the business of the state to get involved in that at all. I’m in favor of adult sovereignty and adult responsibility -the two things come hand in hand. One of the problems with the state apparatus in the west today is that it is more and more taking sovereignty out of the hands of adults and investing it in the state. So that we feel almost unable to make any decision without referring to rules and regulations that have been laid down by the state. The current obsession with health and safety, for example, is an example of that. You know really that there are many, many decisions which are being taken by the state. Vaccinations, for example, vaccination campaigns with the notion that everybody must have this vaccination. It’s inculcating a habit of obedience and of unquestioning obedience into the citizen, instead of a habit of responsible investigation and personal sovereignty.
KC : Absolutely! I’m also interested from listening to your lecture last night at The Bodhi Tree – and I must say it was excellent in my view…
GH : Thank you.
KC : …And where you were talking about the role of the shaman. When I say shaman/shamaness in society, and it’s been overlooked in our world to a large degree, currently.
GH : That’s right.
KC : And I also think it’s been misunderstood, just from my point of view. I often feel that some of the healers of society are actually not known as that, so that people may be shamans and people don’t realize that they are. I would suggest that certain musical personalities, for example, are actually shamans. They are doing a healing job out there and that may go for performers of various kinds, as well as artists, painters and film makers and so on. In this case, I think in a certain sense, the shaman played a role in tribal society as a guide into, sort of, going down that road, as you say, where you could be guided to some degree in the use of hallucinogenics, for example, in expanding…
GH : Or, other techniques to enter altered states of consciousness because powerful visionary plants are not the only way to go and may not be right for everybody. I am the last person who would either advocate the use of these plants or seek to encourage others to use them, but I’m saying that for some people who approach the matter responsibly and seriously, they may be right. But there are plenty of other techniques available including, for example, Stan Grofs’ holotropic breath work. For example, certain kinds of rhythmic dancing, even meditation, even hypnosis can be very useful in getting into an altered state of consciousness. To my mind, and it’s really a matter of semantics or definition, I would resist calling anyone a shaman who is not working with altered states of consciousness. To me, that’s the common ground of all shamanistic figures is that they have explored the visionary realms by whatever technique they use to get out of what I refer to as ‘the alert problem solving state of consciousness’, that is kind of the default mode in our society. Shamans are those who have very deliberately in a targeted way altered their consciousness to experience the wider reality, and to negotiate and work on behalf of fellow human beings with the spirit entities that live in those realms beyond daily experience. So that I would say first of all, altered states of consciousness, secondly, absolutely the healing mission; this is part of shamanic work.
The shaman is a healer and he is drawing on the resources of the universe to bring that healing to bear, rather than just using the forces of technology and pharmacology which is the western medicine way of doing things. I mean western medicine, I don’t wish to balk or pour cold water on it, because it’s done a number of wonderful things. Antibiotics can be incredibly helpful in certain circumstances. Let’s not forget the horrendous epidemics of tuberculosis and other things that used to just take away the cream of society. Young men and women were destroyed in the nineteenth century by such diseases so I don’t want to say that everything completely about western technology is wrong, but what I want to say is that we, as a culture, need to find a way forward where we can integrate the good things that society has created with a new way of conceiving the world, of conceiving our mission and our role as human creatures, and indeed, getting to grips with the issues of good and evil which, as I say, are very real.
KC : Right. And that brings us around to your latest book, Entangled, because I think that you have chosen that format to approach that question, if you will, because you have characters and things that are going on, that have to do with dealing with the dark side, you might say.
GH : Entangled is absolutely a book about the battle of good against evil. That’s essentially what this novel is about. It’s a battle of good against evil set against the frame of time, because it’s a battle that is unfolding in two different timeframes. One part of it is 24,000 years ago in the past, and one of my two heroines is a young woman who lives about a time in the stone age, and the other part is unfolding today in the 21st century, and the second heroine of the book is a modern young woman who lives in the city of Los Angeles, but both of them are caught up in the same struggle. I’ve come to realize that time is not at all what it seems to be; that we have to abandon this notion that is foisted on us as part of the mind control system of our societies that time is an arrow which goes from the past, through the present to the future. That, for something to cause something else, it must have happened before it –- this is clearly no longer the case, and fortunately quantum physics is moving very much in this direction that it may actually be possible to alter the past by things that we do today.
So, what I’m envisaging is not an arrow of time, but two interconnected cycles of time and two characters who are ‘entangled’ and who must work together, who are brought together in altered states of consciousness – by a good benign supernatural being who I call ‘the blue angel’ – who were brought together to defeat the demonic force, a demon called Sulpa, who is carrying out atrocities in the stone age to enhance his psychic power, so that he may jump and manifest fully in the 21st century. And, his mission in the 21st century is to destroy forever and utterly all human potential, and my two young heroines separated by 24,000 years of time but brought together in altered states of consciousness, their job is to work together to defeat him.
The one point that I make very strongly in this novel is that the supernatural forces who work for the good – the spiritual forces that are hidden behind us – they cannot intervene directly in the physical realm. The only way that good can intervene directly is through human consciousness. Humans must become the agent of the change. We must not expect some angel to fly down from the heavens and simply rescue us from the dark forces. We’re going to have to rescue ourselves and all that the forces of good can do is put the idea into our minds and let us understand what’s at stake and what we can do. So, this is the essential argument at the heart of my novel Entangled. And, the reason that I’ve written it as a novel rather than doing yet another non-fiction book with yet more thousands of footnotes, is that I feel that some ideas are so extraordinary that they are best carried forward to the public in the form of fiction.
KC : In light of the book and in light of where you decided to go in having these protagonists deal with ultimately the evil that’s on the earth at this time; and then going also through a Being that is in essence what we might call an ET, however you want to term that person; and I would say maybe inhabiting another dimension; and in essence, the interaction between them and – obviously I haven’t read the whole book, I’ve just started it and I don’t want you to give away the plot – but I would like you to talk about how you got the idea for the interaction with this blue being. Did you have, for example, did you have an experience with ayahuasca in which you encountered such a being?
GH : Yes, absolutely. The inspiration for Entangled came about in a most curious way. I felt in a sense chosen and compelled to write this book. Now, I brought it on myself because I went down to the Amazon in 2006 with the notion that it was time for me to shift from writing non-fiction to writing fiction. It was something that I very much wanted to do, but I wasn’t confident that I could do it. I wasn’t certain that I had the ability to do that and so I wanted to seek out inspiration. One of the things that ayahuasca has proved incredibly fruitful and positive for, for many people, is expanding or developing areas of their own creativity. There are a number of artists, for example, working in the US today whose artwork has been transformed by their creative encounters with ayahuasca.
KC : Can you name some of those people?
GH : Yes, for example, Robert Pinosa and Martina Hoffman who work out of Boulder, Colorado, have produced majestic works of art; insights and visions into other realms, and the intelligent entities that inhabit those realms which have been inspired by their experiences with this mysterious South American brew. For example, Alex Gray another great North American visionary artist, whose Chapel of the Sacred Mirror is now in upstate New York, displays his incredible works of art, many of which are inspired by ayahuasca. I think all of these individuals would agree that ayahuasca has given them an enormous creative boost. In my case, I am not a painter. I don’t express my ideas in a visual form. I express them in the form of words.
When you are working with ayahuasca, it’s quite important to set an intent before the session begins. That intention may often be to do with personal healing, it may be to do with wider issues in the world, or it may be to do with future directions in ones own life. These five sessions in Brazil in 2006, I went down with the intent of finding out whether I had a story to tell and what that story might be. Intriguingly, over the course of the five sessions I was given, as though a gift from the spirit world, the entire story that I now set before my readers in the form Entangled. I was given the two principal characters. I was shown that they would both be anatomically modern humans like you and I. One of them living 24,000 years ago, her name is Ria, and one of them living today in the modern age in Los Angeles and her name is Leoni.
I was shown that they would both be troubled young women with personal problems and difficulties to overcome. That they would be connected to one another by an angelic force. I saw that entity as a blue colored angel. Sometimes she appears as a woman; sometimes she appears as part woman-part animal in form. She’s a shape shifter, but her concern is the planet and her concern is the future of the human race. She’s a kind of guardian angel for humanity. I was shown the dark demonic force that I call Sulpa in the story, and I understood that the way that this demonic force could be defeated was by the influence that the blue angel would have on these two young women; to bring them together in a struggle to defeat the demon.
I was shown another thing, which is that the key feature or factor in the story is actually our cousins, the so-called Neanderthals. There is a great mystery about the Neanderthals. We know that Neanderthals were present in Europe. They look a bit like us but their features are more archaic. They have highly pronounced brow ridges, they were stocky and massively strong. We would have thought of them –- there would have been a tendency for human beings to think of them — as very ugly. In fact, in my story that’s the name that the humans give to them. They call them the ‘Uglies’. I was shown that these Neanderthals, despite their physical appearance, were spiritually beautiful creatures who lived a gentle and nurturing and sustaining life causing no harm and misery to others. They had been in possession of Europe, and the archeology proves this, for 350,000 years before any anatomically modern humans ever appeared in Europe
When the anatomically modern humans first came to Europe about 50,000 years ago, it’s evident that the Neanderthals welcomed them and gave them all the secrets of how to live in this new land and nurtured them and cared for them and looked after them. For a long time, it seemed that our ancestors and the Neanderthals lived side by side in peace. We know now from the latest genetic evidence that there was some interbreeding between the Neanderthals and humans because it has been established that the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, and we now know that about 4% of modern human genes are owed to our Neanderthal cousins. So interbreeding went on as well, and it seems as though there was a long peaceful co-existence then suddenly, very recently around 24,000 years ago, exactly at the time that my story is set, the Neanderthals disappear from the picture and become extinct. The question is how did they become extinct? What was it that lead to the wiping out of the Neanderthals? Was it us? Did we kill them? Did we kill them off?
Looking at human behavior today, we wouldn’t be surprised at that possibility. That it was a kind of early example of ethnic cleansing or ethnic genocide so called that took place but we don’t know for sure. That’s the central dilemma that I put in the story because the demonic force, Sulpa, is seeking to manifest physically in the 21st century. In order to do that, he needs to gain vast psychic power in the stone age 24,000 years ago and he seeks to gain that power by leading anatomically modern human beings astray to murder and wipe out the Neanderthals. That’s what my young stone age character, Ria, rises up to resist. She rises up to defend the Neanderthals.
KC : Yes, but before we go there, what you’re talking about seems based on science. In other words, it is science that is being uncovered as we speak. It seems that you’ve gone down some road in terms of investigation with regard to what might have come to you in the ayahuasca experience.
GH : Yeah, thank you for raising that point because this is a very weird and mysterious aspect of the work that I did with ayahuasca, and the visions that I had, and the story I subsequently set down to write. For example, I considered the possibility that the Neanderthals might have been telepathic. They are telepathic in my book, and there is some new scientific research which suggests that that may very well have been the case, that the Neanderthals could have been telepaths. I didn’t know that research when the vision was given to me. I depicted the Neanderthals as having red hair. Again, a year or more after I had had those visions and after I had written them down in my story – I had written the story out – it came out in the scientific evidence, no scientist will now dispute it, that the Neanderthals were indeed red haired. And, as a matter of fact, the gene for red hair in modern anatomic human population comes from our genetic relationship to the Neanderthals.
I considered the possibility of a love affair between Neanderthals and humans in my novel Entangled. At the time that I was writing that down, science was totally against the notion that there had been any kind of interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans. But as it turns out, the new genetic evidence tells us that Neanderthals and humans did indeed make love. Perhaps most important of all in this, is just new evidence that has come out in the last couple of days – there is scientific research all over the internet now – which proves from studies of the Neanderthals that they were filled with empathy and love and concern, so that if a member of a Neanderthal group became sick, suffered a crippling illness, was no longer able to function, that individual wouldn’t be left to die. That individual would be looked after and cared for. We have firm archeological evidence for this. So the latest story of the Neanderthals is that they were full of empathy and concern and love for one another, and again, that is the picture that I was told to paint in my story from the visions I received with ayahuasca, but the scientific research didn’t come out until much, much later.
There’s another element in the story that concerns the ultimate fate of the Neanderthals. Were they wiped out by humans like you and I lead astray by a demonic force or was there some other reason why they died out? Which would mean that human beings didn’t do that terrible thing, and again, I have a solution to that. I’m not going to share the entire plot with you, but the solution that I have to that, which again, I had written down and fully elaborated in my story, has also subsequently been confirmed by science. So actually, no I didn’t investigate the science. I reported, or wrote out, or channeled what I had received as a visionary experience. But over the two or three years after I had had that visionary experience, evidence that supported what I was saying came out in science; quite the reverse of the normal investigative process that I put myself into.
KC : I think that’s wonderful. I don’t think that that’s so unusual a process. In other words for artists to tap into something that later is revealed in science. In fact, almost to lead the way even, for scientists that have open minds in terms of areas worthy of investigation. It would be quite interesting if maybe they would have a more open mind in that regard and really go down that road more often because it would expand their areas of investigation and possibly allow them or allow us – as humanity – to grow faster.
GH : Absolutely, there is a real need to do this. There is a real need to recognize the power of intuition and the power of visionary experience and its role in our society. Again I’ll just make this point, because I’m actually myself quite stunned by the way that the science is beginning to support what I started to elaborate as a purely fiction story. You know a few years ago, the notion that the Neanderthals had any kind of empathy or ability for love was completely dismissed by science when I actually started writing this book. But the vision that I had seen of the Neanderthals was that they were filled with empathy and love and that’s the story I wrote. And now, we’re speaking at the beginning of October 2010 and all over the internet today, this very day that we’re talking, there’s been huge amount of information about empathy, care and love in the Neanderthals! So, I have to say I’m not putting any special authority on myself, but I was given a glimpse of the truth in those visions, and given the opportunity to write that truth down and express it. To pick up your point, you’re absolutely right, this is what’s missing in science. Science is way too focused on the alert, problem solving state of mentality. The conviction that only that one kind of consciousness is useful for the scientific endeavor, even though many scientists know in their heart of hearts that it’s not true. That it’s not really from grinding through the research that they get the great and brilliant ideas. It often comes in a flash of intuition that’s highly irrational and isn’t based on deductive reasoning of any kind. Some of the very greatest scientific discoveries owe much to the visionary realm and to the intuitive realm.
KC : Certainly Tesla and I think Einstein, I’m sure it’s huge in terms of that…
GH : Absolutely, and the example that is dear to my heart that I like to point out to people is the incredible story of Francis Crick, the discoverer of the double helix pattern of DNA, which for sure is one of the great scientific discoveries of our age. It was always thought, until his death, that Crick had arrived at that discovery through logical reasoning, deductive experimental processes. But it turned out that he had confided to a close friend before his death that it was visionary experiences, in his case under the influence of LSD in the early 1950’s which at that time was legal in Britain where Crick worked. In which he had first seen the shimmering pattern of the double helix, and he understood that this was the secret that he was seeking to unveil. So it came to him in a visionary moment not in, and I’m not getting here into the issues of rights and wrongs of psychedelics I’m simply reporting a fact confirmed by Crick himself, that his insight into the double helix came in a deeply altered state of consciousness, not in the alert problem solving state of consciousness.
I think we have to consider all of this very, very carefully in deciding how we want to continue moving ahead into the future. There’s a danger that too much focus on the alert, problem solving state of mind is actually going to kill us all off. It has its place. It has its role, but it shouldn’t be allowed to expand to fill the entire universe of human experience. That’s one of the mistakes we’re making. Science is literally, prematurely, closing its accounts with reality and insisting rigidly and dogmatically on a particular approach to research. You know, in our society today if you want to insult somebody you call them a dreamer, but in ancient times [it] was quite a different matter. Dreamers were a highly regarded role. Dreams were understood to be a vital path to true knowledge and we may be missing very, very important, essential developments in our own story by refusing to recognize the value of dreams and visions.
KC : Absolutely. I would say that the visionaries are the leaders of society, although they are certainly not necessarily acknowledged for that.
GH : Yes.
KC : It’s very interesting in terms of where you’re going with your research, and I have to say that John Mack, who you did mention last night…
GH : John Mack was a good friend of mine and a wonderful man.
KC : …And I was also very touched by him, and actually know someone who worked closely with him and it’s hopeful…She actually has a book, his last book that he was working on before he died. That book is all about consciousness. So we’re actually moving into a juncture where the role of consciousness and human consciousness specifically, is crucial into possibly saving humanity and the planet. It’s fascinating that your book is dealing with a time when a race of beings could have been close to extinction and they were faced with a group of beings that may have been emphasizing a different realm, so that the people that will be best suited to this time to make it through with the most ease, will be those who are more able to move into the right brain consciousness.
GH : And into the divine feminine and it’s actually why I realize now, in the process of inspiration that lead to Entangled, that it was very clear to me from the beginning that I would not have male heroes in this story; that the heroes would both be young women. It seemed to me a very, very important point and aspect of the story.
KC : I’m very interested to know, though, how these visions were given to you during that actual experience; and maybe you could also talk about how other explorations you’ve done with ayahuasca specifically or, in other words, when you say you were given this information in this book was downloaded to you in sections or whatever, however it happened, in other words. I’m assuming you weren’t given words necessarily, but perhaps you were given words or visions?
GH : It was very curious because some of it happened at the conscious level and some of it happened at the unconscious level. I was shown in physical form my two central characters. I was shown the form that the demon takes. I was shown the form of the blue angel. I was shown that great battles would occur in order for evil to be defeated. I was shown all of that visually in a very, very clear way. But it became clear to me afterwards as I started writing this book that I had downloaded a whole lot more that I didn’t even remember at the level of consciousness. It was like there was an inner guide working with me as I wrote the story, and sometimes I would be typing away – and unlike my non-fiction where intense intellectual focus was the center of it – in writing this novel it was best done when I defocused and allowed the material to come through and the more I tried to intellectualize it and actually think in terms of plot and structure and character, the more I tried to do that the less true I told the story.
There was an inner voice, as I started down those roads from time to time when my old habits re-imposed themselves on my writing, an inner voice told me ‘this isn’t right’. I would type away and a day or two days would pass and I would get slower and slower and slower. I suddenly realized ‘no, I’m going in the wrong direction’. There was something inside me what knew what the right direction was… and I then would back up through my story until I got to the point where I had forked off, and I would fork in another direction and suddenly it would all flow again, delivering this internal body of material that was clearly stored. I call it downloaded. It really did feel like a download.
At the end of these five sessions with ayahuasca, I saw the form of the blue angel who, frankly I identify with the spirit of ayahuasca, and I do so in the story too. In the Amazon ayahuasca is seen not simply as the mixture of two plants, which is what the brew is, but there is an intelligence or an entity that lies behind these plants. She is always seen as female, always –- every culture in the Amazon has agreed on that and so, indeed, has every westerner who has worked with ayahuasca — and a shape shifter who can appear in many forms. One of those forms is as a blue skinned woman. I saw that entity and she said to me: “Go away and write it, write, write it, write it …!”
I felt a very strong compulsion after that to do what I was told, to go away and write this story. I felt I’d been charged with a mission and that it was an important mission to fulfill. I’ve learned through long experience that the entity that we call Mother Ayahuasca, the spirit who lies behind the ayahuasca vine, is pure love and goodness. Sometimes it’s tough love. She will show you aspects of yourself, aspects of your own personality which you need to see but which may be uncomfortable to realize that you had that aspect. Perhaps it’s just a nasty way of behaving towards other people that you just do habitually without thinking it through.
Sooner or later in working with ayahuasca, you are going to be shown all those nasty sides of your personality with absolute unforgiving clarity: This is how you are. Do you want to fix it? Here’s your chance…you see the truth about yourself and something else, a tremendous love for the rainforest and for the jungle and for the great jungles that still persist, fortunately, in places on our planet like the Amazon, but they are terribly, terribly under threat. And again and again I’ve had a vision with ayahuasca, the same essentially, the same visionary elements, keep recurring of our planet in terrible danger, some terrible darkness closing in around.
In those visions, I have seen mother ayahuasca herself in a form that she sometimes takes of a great Amazonian serpent, but as though she’s broken or damaged, and I’ve said to her: “How can this be? You are a supernatural being, how can anything harm you?” And the answer has been that: “This darkness is so great that even I cannot stop it, only you, humans, can stop it by the choices you make.”
KC : That’s very powerful. I have a question that is coming a little illogically and I am one of those interviewers that does follow my intuition, so I would like to know if you have ever swum with dolphins?
GH : Yes, but only in a captive environment. I’ve not been able to swim with dolphins out in the open ocean and that’s what I would like to do. That’s actually an adventure that I would very much like to have.
KC : Because I have, and one of the things that happens when you swim with dolphins if you are able to swim with them and interact with them, is that what I have found is that you get into an altered state of consciousness. You can, if you’re open and so on, begin to communicate with them non-verbally obviously, and it’s very powerful. I mean, the state that you can get to in swimming with dolphins. There seems to be a parallel between…and I don’t know anything about ayahuasca. I’ve never taken ayahuasca so I can’t talk to that… But I’m wondering if there was any feeling or information that came of this Being being aquatic at all, and/or amphibious?
GH : Yes, she’s always aquatic because the kind of serpent that she’s identified with in the Amazonian tradition is an anaconda, and the anaconda is a river snake which is always in and out of water, so there may be indeed be some connection there.
KC : Wonderful. I’m also going to take another departure and I’d like to know whether you have ever had – you live in England right? So have you ever had a UFO experience of your own?
GH : I have had a UFO experience, and that again occurred in connection with ayahuasca, when I was drinking the ayahuasca in the Amazon in early 2004. It was actually the third or fourth session with ayahuasca I had ever had, and I suddenly found myself confronted by what seemed to be a funnel of light, and up at the top of the funnel of light was a huge spinning flying disc. There was a presence or some kind of entity that I saw somehow off in the corner of the scene who I actually didn’t like that much. It was a bit like the image of the Grey that we see in modern depictions, and I suddenly felt I don’t want to be taken up through that funnel of light, I don’t want this. I resisted and I opened my eyes which stopped the visions occurring. You can sometimes do that with ayahuasca. I actually shouted out loud ‘no, no I won’t go’. Later on I regretted that.
I felt that I should have explored that experience further, that perhaps I should have had more courage and allowed it to evolve and develop as it was going to do. But I didn’t and that experience has not occurred again. But it is a curious thing, that many of the Amazonian shamans, even those who live in extremely remote and isolated areas in the Amazon who work with ayahuasca, do repeatedly see flying saucers. The great artist shaman, Pablo Amaringo – who unfortunately died last year in 2009 – Pablo Amaringo had had so many encounters under the influence of ayahuasca with extraterrestrial beings… When we say ‘ET’ we are not limiting ourselves to the notion that the extraterrestrial is simply from another planet in this physical universe, we may be dealing with interdimensional beings. I honestly believe that’s what’s actually going on.
This is how Pablo saw it. He saw the flying saucers as vehicles for crossing between dimensions and that’s why they came into his visionary space because that’s what he was also doing. He was crossing between dimensions in altered states of consciousness. He was quite adamant about that and it’s been pointed out that in earlier times in the Amazon, shamans working with ayahuasca would also see vehicles. They wouldn’t necessarily depict them as flying saucers. Sometimes it might be a boat. Sometimes it might be some kind of spirit canoe that is flying through the sky.
KC : Well certainly, Egypt, they are using a boat to signify a…
GH : …a celestial journey, for sure.
KC : All the time.
GH : It’s interesting if you look at the texts, for example in a book of what is called the Duat. The Duat is the ancient Egyptian afterlife realm through which they believe that the soul makes a journey after death. During that journey we are tested on what we’ve done with our life. The vehicle for travel through the Duat is very often, indeed almost always, a boat. Even though the Duat is located in the starry sky, the ancient Egyptians had no doubt about it. They associated it with specific constellations. It was a heavenly realm. Yet we travel through it in a boat. Perhaps, what’s going here is how different cultures, inevitably, impose their own cultural spectacles on what they see. What one culture may see as a flying saucer, another culture may see as a flying boat. But essentially it’s a flying vehicle which is involved in an extraordinary journey whether through space, whether through time, or whether across the veil that separates us from other dimensions.
KC : Yes, absolutely. Well said. This is very interesting and it’s fascinating that you have decided to go on this trajectory after this substantial scholarship – I’m not sure how you would term it – but scholarship in sort of a scientific vein where you’re literally, as you say, ‘footnotes’ to do with everything that you’re putting forward and so on. It’s as if you’ve grown wings and you’re willing to basically jump off into the abyss, as it were, in a metaphorical way of speaking because that’s what’s required. It’s often very interesting how lead footed, so to speak, science and even every day society is in their approach to reality. When in fact, sitting here now, magic doesn’t just exist in, or other dimensions just exist in, ayahuasca experiences in South America. In other words, it’s here now, and with us now. We are multiple/multidimensional beings all the time and whether we can access that simultaneously, with being in this reality and other realities and also be conscious, fully conscious, of all of that, is obviously the challenge.
GH : That’s the challenge of the way forward for humanity because we do live in an enchanted universe.
KC : Exactly.
GH : Enchantment and magic is the essence of the universe. The ancient Egyptians were not in error when they depicted Isis as a master of magic. She, the great high goddess, the mother of the divine child Horus, the consort of Osiris himself. Isis is a magician. What she’s working is good magic, magic that allows us to be what we can be. It’s that magic, sadly, that’s been systematically cut out from the world by the dry dead tools of science and by the negative spiritual forces that seek to prevent us [from] becoming what we can be. Certainly from my point of view, as a writer, I feel that the best way I can address this mystery for the future is to stay in the realms of what is called fiction. To embed in what, hopefully, is a fast moving and exciting story, deep truths about the nature of reality.
It’s a curious thing…I feel liberated by what has happened to me. I feel that I’ve been allowed to set down a great burden that I have been carrying for twenty years. I’ve been locked in conflicts with academic historians and archeologists. You know when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, I had no idea the kind of storm that I was going to bring down on my head. I really didn’t. I was quite naïve. I had no idea that by suggesting that something huge may be missing from our picture of history I would excite so much anger and so much resentment from mainstream academics. I just thought that there was part of the story that hadn’t been told, that maybe it would be useful to provide some facts and evidence that would allow us to reassess our past. But it turned out that I became subject to just all manner of personal underhand attacks and to a kind of disinformation campaign.
I didn’t know then, but I realized subsequently, that there is actually an organization called CSICOP – what a horrible name to give any organization – The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. They have – they really are to my mind like a diabolical force – they have chapters all over the world, members in every little city and town. If anybody in that local area sticks their head up above the parapet and comes up with an idea that’s contrary to the paradigm of mainstream science, they will get all their local guys to write to the media, to write to the press, to complain to generally bring them into disfavor. And again and again, they are involved in attacking the – not the ideas that are being put across – but the individual behind those ideas who’s putting them across. I suddenly found that I was up against a gigantic force and that force had huge resources of public money whereas I, myself, had no resources whatsoever.
I carried that burden for twenty years and I did everything I could, everything in my power, often taking huge physical risks in order to bring this information out and set it before the public. And it was as though at a certain point I had gone as far as I could and I was allowed to set that burden down and to move in the direction of fiction where I can creatively express ideas, extraordinary ideas, in a new way which I hope will still be satisfying to my readers. I hope that my readers will come with me on this adventure, and it is an adventure, and it’s where I intend to spend whatever years are left to me on this beautiful and extraordinary planet that we call the Earth.
KC : Wonderful. Kudos for you for being able to take that journey and to come out the other side in such good shape because it’s not often easy and many people, I think, that attempt that journey and end up getting stopped along the trajectory either by mind control, physical illnesses, any manner of obstacles that are thrown in ones path, not to allow one to make the leap that you are now making. The other part of that is that in the Tarot, and I don’t know if you’ve investigated the Tarot at all…
GH : I don’t know a lot about the Tarot at all.
KC : But there is a card called, ‘ART’ and it does have the goddess in it who would be Isis in essence, and she’s pouring from two different vessels –- one is science and one is art –- and it’s the combination of science and art that creates the new reality. It’s a marriage and it’s a much more balanced marriage and it’s this I think we’re looking forward to in the future.
GH : I completely agree with you. This is the way forward. The way forward is not to go back to a simpler time because we’re not going to be able to do that. We need to go forward, but we need to go forward in a different way that integrates both halves of the brain, if you like, the left and the right, which integrates the masculine and the feminine, which allows space for enchantment and magic to reenter the universe because that is our true birthright. At the moment, science imagines that it is standing in total opposition to magic which it associates with superstition, but actually, the salvation of science will come from a return to magic and enchantment, and I’m already seeing it happen in the realm of quantum physics where the leading edge, the cutting edge of science now is moving back in the direction of areas of inquiry that in ancient times were understood to be pure magic.
KC : Absolutely! And I have to say as Project Camelot we have a witness who is working in the world of science and NASA and the NSA and so on, and he said something very revealing to us just recently. He said: “The higher I go in the hierarchy of science and NASA,” he said, “all I find are witches and warlocks.”
GH : The dark side.
KC : But it’s more than that, it’s magicians. In other words, what we’re talking about are people that are -and this is the hidden society, this is the hidden side of things in which there are areas and this what we would call the illuminati – have known this secret; this secret that we are now talking about that needs to be made into the mainstream society. They’ve known that the salvation of science is in art or magic, as you call it, and that’s the only place that it’s going to come from, and so, they actually hold that for themselves.
GH : They hold it for themselves and they keep it away from the rest of humanity, whereas truly enlightened spirits would share everything and would allow all of us to move forward together. I mean, that’s what great artistic and scientific leadership really should be about. It’s about not possessing, not growing one’s own ego with the material, but rather generously sharing and recognizing that we are all part of the human family; and that we all have obligations of love to one another. That’s the thing I would add to this, that that’s the other ingredient which is horribly missing from the modern world, alongside enchantment, which is also missing from the modern world but always waiting in the wings to come back in; the other thing that’s missing is love. There’s not enough love in the world. There’s too much fear and hatred and the tremendous human capacity for love and for nurture and for support of one another is being systematically eroded by dark forces within our society. We just need to take that other step, that step into enchantment and a step into love.
KC : Wonderful. Well Graham Hancock, I think that we have covered a huge gamut here, and I want to thank you for your time and your energy and your love that you’re bringing back to the planet; and your understanding of the magical processes that are going on behind the scenes and that can come into the forefront if we only allow them to.
GH : Thank you, thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.