Mapping The Spirit And Our Ancient History w/ Graham Hancock | AMP #394

GRAHAM: We're the next lost civilization. That's what our civilization is today. We don't have to be. Choices need to be made. We have to change the path that all the big, industrialized technological countries are on right now. Otherwise, it's not even going to take a cosmic disaster, we're going to bring ourselves down, collapse and destroy our civilization, lose all the support systems that we've relied upon, and be put in a place where we have to rely only on ourselves again. That will be very difficult. That's why I think our civilization today is fragile. It looks strong. It's capable of incredible technological feats, but psychically it's very fragile, and not ready to confront the chaos that may come.

AUBREY: I've been looking forward to having a podcast with Graham Hancock for over a decade now, since I first became familiar with his work. This podcast did not disappoint. We talked about everything I wanted to talk to Graham about, including some of the information that I received from Matias de Stefano, which posits the actual mechanism behind some of these magnificent megaliths that he's been researching as an investigative journalist. We go through that whole story, and really share and converse with what I've received from Matias and what he's discovered from being on the ground and all the research that he's put into it for, really, his life's work in a big way, in addition to the great fiction works that we also discuss, and also the surprising blowback that he's received from mainstream culture, which is both surprising and not surprising, given the current zeitgeist. We also talk about psychedelics and posit the potential reality of darker forces that exist that have been pointed to from the gnostic traditions which he's very familiar with. This is a wide-ranging conversation that covers a variety of different topics and I'm just thrilled to be able to share it with all of you, so please enjoy this podcast with Graham Hancock. Graham Hancock. This has been a while in the making such a pleasure to have you on the show.

GRAHAM: Nice to be with you, Aubrey. I wish I could visit with you in-person but this has just been a hectic trip across the US for me.

AUBREY: I understand. I understand. Your show is such a hit. Congratulations. I mean, number one show on Netflix.

GRAHAM: Thank you. Yeah. It's called "Ancient Apocalypse". It has been doing very well. I'm happy that it's held up because Netflix releases hundreds of new shows every week. What was particularly pleasing was that, for a while, it was number two of all television shows on Netflix, including dramas like "The Crown", which are enormously popular. It's unusual for a docu-series to get that much attention. But obviously, I'm happy about that. At the same time, it's brought down a shitstorm of criticism on my head.

AUBREY: Yeah, it's simultaneously the vindication of people who are highly interested and really enjoying your work and then the establishment that is obviously aroused into some rancor here.

GRAHAM: Indeed, so.

AUBREY: If you could, our audience is probably pretty familiar with your theory and your work. So just so people have a landscape, quickly, about what your primary thesis is... In this "Ancient Apocalypse" also was the topic of magicians, of the gods, which I remember reading when it came out. Outstanding, both of those bodies of work, but if you could, just give a brief summary for those people who either want to be refreshed or aren't familiar with the thesis that you're talking about in these works?

GRAHAM: Well, what I've been looking into for the past 30 years, plus, has been the possibility of a major forgotten episode in the human story. That is a lost civilization that flourished during the Ice Age that was almost completely destroyed in the series of cataclysms that brought the Ice Age to an end between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. In geological terms and, indeed, human terms, that's very recent. I'm not talking about a high-tech civilization, certainly we should not be looking for ourselves in the past. I'm not talking about cell phones, I'm not talking about rockets going to the moon, I'm talking about a civilization that mapped the earth, that explored the world, that was primarily based upon coastlines, which are now flooded beneath the 400 foot sea level rise that took place at the end of the Ice Age and which had a deep understanding of astronomy and geometry, I would say at least equivalent to Western civilization's understanding in the mid to late 18th century. I want to be clear I'm not talking about what we might regard as an advanced civilization in terms of technology. I'm talking about an advanced civilization in terms of a level of knowledge that is not normally attributed to Ice Age populations. I'm also suggesting that I'll use the word advanced, that advanced civilization coexisted with the hunter-gatherer populations who we know for sure were also present in the world at that time. This is often assumed to be a rather bizarre idea until we remember our own civilization today, if we can even call it a civilization anymore, our own civilization today, coexists still with hunter-gatherer peoples, particularly in the in the Amazon rainforest, where there are hunter-gatherer groups who don't even know that we exist, but also in places like the Namibian desert, where the San hunter-gatherers pursue a very different way of life to our own, yet these life ways coexist. I'm suggesting that this was the case during the Ice Age as well.

AUBREY: When you go through and you watch "Ancient Apocalypse" and go through each of these different sites, it becomes very difficult to imagine how the evidence that you're presenting is actually refuted. This is the interesting thing about your work: is it's so persuasive when you actually start looking at everything collectively and start to weave this global picture of what happened, that it's consistently surprising to me to see people attacking it. It's not surprising from a psychological perspective, I understand it. But the preponderance of evidence that you're providing is really enormous as you go through all of these different sacred sites. There's the black layer of death that you find in the rocks. There's so many different things but if you had to steelman their argument, the mainstream narrative argument, if you had a steelman it and say, "All right, this is the best. This is the best refutation of this collective thesis that I have," what would you say is their steelmanned argument?

GRAHAM: I haven't seen a really effective refutation. By the way, I'd like to add that the "Ancient Apocalypse" docu-series builds upon more than 30 years of work in my books. Inevitably, when you're making a docu-series, where episodes are half an hour long, even in eight episodes, it's not possible to represent the entire body of evidence upon which I rely. It's interesting that the reactions to it by the mainstream have not, by and large, got to grips with what I'm proposing, but have simply been a deluge of insults and ad hominem attacks, particularly accusing me of promoting racism and white supremacy. Although race is not mentioned ever in "Ancient Apocalypse", that is the most common attack that is made on my work. I find that personally hurtful, since I'm married to a woman of color and since I have seven mixed-race grandchildren who will be exposed to these kinds of lies that are that are being spread about me in order to cancel me, in order to get people to just turn off and not even give my work a chance. I think that shows a desperation and also lack of moral rigor on the part of those who wish to see my work shut down.

AUBREY: This seems to be symptomatic of something that's in society right now, where actual discourse between opposing sides has been completely forgotten, this old idea of the Marquess de Queensberry of debate. There's none of that anymore. It's just whatever the lowest blow, whatever the most hurtful thing that one side can say without even addressing the issue. It seems like we've been in this race to the bottom. Archaeology is typically a cool corner of the science debate and of popular culture but even in this, it seems like you challenge empire or the narrative, you challenge the mainstream anywhere, and they take it as a threat everywhere, it seems, is what we're experiencing.

GRAHAM: That's right. Although in some ways you're right to say that archaeology is a cool corner of this, there's not been too much heated debate, it's important to remember that archaeology claims to hold the keys to the human past. It claims to hold sole ownership of the human past. I think this is part of the reason why the reaction to my work has been so intense. I'm not an archaeologist and I've never claimed to be an archaeologist, I'm a journalist, with an interest in investigating subjects that some people prefer to avoid. In my case, that subject has been the prehistory of humanity. Somehow, it seems outrageous to the key holders, that an outsider should come in and say, they may have missed something incredibly important. They often claim that I'm claiming that there's some sort of conspiracy in archaeology. In addition to being told that I'm promoting racism and white supremacy, I'm also being told that I'm promoting conspiracy theories. But I don't claim any conspiracy in archaeology. I think archaeology is simply working the way that most disciplines work, that they get locked into a particular point of view. The right word for that is a paradigm, that that paradigm governs how they react to new data, that the tendency, once you're locked into a particular worldview, and a particular paradigm is to defend that to the death in every way that you can. Your career depends upon it. The applause of your colleagues depends upon it. Research funding depends upon it. There are so many examples. I give many of them in my 2019 Book, "America Before". There are so many examples of archaeologists who have stepped outside the narrow bounds of accepted theory in archaeology such as Jacques Cinq-Mars in the Bluefish Caves in the Yukon, who, back in the '80s, was proposing that human beings had been in the Americas at least 24,000 years ago. This went against the then prevailing narrative that was called Clovis First, which held that there had been no humans in the Americas until around 13,400 years ago. Well, instead of actually investigating Jacques Cinq-Mars findings, the academy turned upon him viciously. All his research funding was stripped away. He was humiliated at conferences. Former friends would pass him by in corridors and completely ignore him. He was snubbed in every possible way, and huge efforts were made to discredit his work. But you know what? He was right. Back in 2021, the evidence came out that he'd been absolutely right at Bluefish Caves that human beings had been there 24,000 years ago. Now, of course, we know that the whole Clovis First narrative is bust and complete nonsense, that human beings have been in America even longer than 24,000 years ago. I cite evidence in that 2019 book, "America Before" humans being in the Americas 130,000 years ago, 10 times as long as the so-called Clovis culture. That evidence doesn't actually come from outside archaeology. It comes from a leading group of archaeologists at the University of San Diego, and it's on display in the San Diego Natural History Museum. They found evidence of human tool use, slaughtering and butchering a mastodon 130,000 years ago, just south of San Diego. Again, rather than consider the implications of this, the response of the rest of archaeology has been to dismiss it, sneer in it, deny that it's possible on the grounds that okay, we were wrong about Clovis, but we don't accept that human beings have been in the Americas for more than 30,000 years. So somebody's saying, humans have been in the Americas for 130,000 years has just got to be wrong. It's just so unfortunate that there's this aspect of science, which, instead of responding with curiosity to new evidence and new claims, just tries to shut those down. This is greatly to the disadvantage of science in the long run. I'll complete this long rant in a moment but in the long run, it is the case with all paradigms, that eventually, the evidence that cannot be explained by the paradigm builds up to such a level, that it becomes ridiculous to keep faith in the old paradigm. That's when paradigms shift and we have a revolution in science taking place. That has happened a number of times in the past. I believe it's going to happen over our understanding of the prehistory of humanity as well.

AUBREY: Yeah, it evokes the image of tectonic plates that are stuck and they want to move, they want to move but they're frozen and the paradigm frozen. They finally move and there's a big earthquake and it frees it up and everything shakes and a lot of things topple and then everything settles on the backside of that.

GRAHAM: Then a new paradigm forms and that becomes the conventional wisdom, the accepted knowledge for a period of time. Eventually, that new paradigm will also be overthrown by--

AUBREY: I just have a feeling, though, that if someone comes to overthrow your paradigm with new evidence and you're a great grandfather out there somewhere, you won't look at them the same way that the narrative currently is looking at you. I think there's a flexibility of mind that we really need to evolve as a species because what you're talking about has been seen in every different field of science. Take the example of Ignaz Semmelweis who worked in OB/GYN and noticed that hand washing had a significant impact on the survivability of mothers and children in this process. He was literally thrown in an insane asylum and beaten to death, dying of sepsis, probably from the wounds that weren't cleaned from dirty hands! The irony of this! Then given a Nobel Prize posthumously for his work. There's so many examples of that, where someone comes up with a theory and they're just completely, completely ousted and attacked. This is symptomatic of something that needs to shift.

GRAHAM: I hope, if somebody presented compelling evidence that I'm wrong that there may have been another kind of civilization present in the world during the Ice Age as well as hunter-gatherers, I hope that if somebody came up with really compelling evidence on that, then I would be open to consider it. I'm human, I'm filled with error also. I also get stuck in my own rut, there's no doubt about that. But I would want to be open to that. The problem is that no such compelling evidence has been presented. It's just really straightforward dismissals, appeals to authority, saying, "Hancock doesn't know what he's talking about. Hancock isn't an archaeologist. How dare he even suggest this?" A journalist in the Guardian newspaper in England asked actually why Netflix had allowed the series as though people are not capable of making up their own minds. This is part of the problem with this outlook of the so-called experts in our society, is that they despise the man and the woman in the street and don't believe that they're capable of reaching rational decisions about things without being told what to think. I find myself more and more embroiled in this. It's a much bigger debate than just the debate about the possibility of a lost civilization. It's a debate about free thinking and free speech in our society today.

AUBREY: Yeah, absolutely. It almost seems like there's this energy that you could almost, if you wanted to, if you wanted to take some of the mythological minds of our past, you could deify it, and it would be this stuck, judgmental demonic entity. I'm not suggesting that this exists, actually but there's this energy that people are participating in, that is actually an energy that needs to deeply, deeply evolve. And really, it has to evolve in all of our minds as we participate in that energy ourselves to whatever small degree that we do. It seems like if we don't, society is going to really suffer.

GRAHAM: Absolutely, I think we are at one of those turning points in the human story right now. What is needed is a more loving, more open, more caring view, rather than just these constant attempts at character assassination from anybody who disagrees with the mainstream. Look where the so-called experts have got us over the years, whether they're experts in science, whether they are so-called political leaders, who are just a bunch of absolute assholes, not qualified to lead anything but stirring up hatred and fear and suspicion in our society. We need to move on from this tribal mindset. There may have been a time when a tribal mindset was a good thing to have, but in this interconnected world that we live in today, it's leading to real horrors taking place. I want to make clear that I'm completely against government, and especially I just don't see the point of government at all. So many of the problems in our world are caused by very bad leadership. I'm especially against the notion of a one world government. I detest and hate that idea. I want to see as little government as possible. If I were to characterize myself as anything, I would say I'm an anarchist, which literally means without government. What is needed is, rather than having this tribal and nationalistic mindset, let's recognise the beauty and the diversity of human culture. Let's recognise that this diversity is a wonderful thing, that it adds to the depth and value of the human experience. Let's not go on defining our tribe as the best and every other tribe as the worst. Let's not set ourselves up against one another in this way. It's been my privilege to travel the world extensively for almost all my adult life, and to live in a number of different countries, and to get deeply acquainted with a number of different cultures. What I found and it should be commonplace, this, that the people are absolutely the same all over the world. Skin color is completely unimportant, even gender is unimportant. People are fundamentally the same, we have the same hopes, the same dreams. We all love our kids in the same way. We all want to make something of our lives. It doesn't matter whether you're a hunter-gatherer in Namibia or a banker in New York, fundamentals are all the same. I think it's time that we stopped using tribal mentalities and recognise that we're all part of one great human family. Rather than patriotism, we should have loyalty to the whole human race and I repeat that does not mean a one-world government. That means much less government and human beings relating to each other, rather than allowing governments and leaders to stir up hatred and fear and suspicion amongst us.

AUBREY: It seems that people who might be skeptical of the human goodness, and whether we have the consciousness to actually live peacefully amongst ourselves, without government... We may be underestimating the impact that the structures of empire that government is actually having on degrading our own goodness and degrading our own consciousness by enforcing their tyranny and actually enforcing these crazy laws and rules and then stirring up this divisiveness and hatred and patterning for us the most deplorable behavior. We may be actually underestimating the impact that government is having and then also underestimating the goodness of people if we actually removed this force. I'm not saying remove it like go Antifa. I know you're not saying that either. It's not like attack the government. It's the opposite of that. It's just saying, let go of the talents that you have into the goodness of humanity.

GRAHAM: Of course, it's in the interests of all governing powers, to persuade us the people that we can't function without them. They very cleverly use our money in PR campaigns in order to persuade us of that. I've found that many people take for granted that the human race just couldn't function without governments. That, in my view, is simply not true. We are being told a story here. Far from keeping the peace, I see governments as generating war. That's in their interests. If they make us hate our neighbors, if they make us hate other cultures and fear other cultures, then that strengthens their hand.

AUBREY: So I'm going to tell you a wild story and if people accuse you of wild stories, then they're going to accuse me of even wilder stories. So maybe I can take a few arrows here for you and take a little pressure off of people slinging rocks at you. I've become quite close friends with a gentleman named Matias de Stefano. He remembers many of his past lives, the most notable of which was he was a mother in a civilization he calls Khem, which was in the Nile Basin.

GRAHAM: [inaudible 24:27] Egypt.

AUBREY: Yep. He was there roughly at the end of the final spasms of the Ice Age, 9,600 BC. He was there right as civilization started to repopulate after the floods and after the cataclysms. He wasn't there in Atlantis, but his descendants were Atlantean. To him, there was one Central Atlantis, but there was many actual outposts in different cities, water regions. They were a seafaring culture and they were in a variety of different places. Everything that he remembers, all the stories that he was told: they would make written maps of the stars and do so many things that actually corresponded with everything you were saying. But as you were saying, the meteors came, and they started striking the earth in many different places, and the water started to rise. There was some immediate destruction, but most of the Atlantean culture was able to spread and disperse. I think we see images on movies and TV where Atlantis was just destroyed in a minute. Actually, a lot of them, thousands, tens of thousands were able to get onto boats and travel to different sites around the world, higher ground sites. He describes the civilizations as megalithic but not advanced. They were still riding around in donkeys, but they had these giant megaliths. The technology that they had was a spiritual technology. They had four different guilds that were correlated to the elements. This is what passed down from the Atlantean culture: they had the water guild, Earth guild, the air guild, and the fire guild. They practiced in these deep spiritual training with psychedelic compounds and with all of the different advantages that they had. He was a part of the water Guild and what the water guild would do was the water guild was involved in actually cutting the stones. They would drip water in a line across the stones. And then they would form resin. They would get in resonance with the water and actually use the water to actually cut the stones. So some of the smooth cuts of these stones that don't look like they had chisel work, the explanatin from him was...

GRAHAM: [inaudible 27:08]

AUBREY: Yeah, they were using water. Of course, this is wild and our field of belief wouldn't even open--

GRAHAM: It's only wild because we'd been schooled to think that such ideas are wild. There's actually nothing particularly wild about it. We are really quite ignorant of the mystery of consciousness and what it is to be a human being. Many mainstream scientists will say, "Gosh, somebody's speaking about reincarnation. What rubbish? There's no such thing as reincarnation. But how can they possibly know that?"

AUBREY: Also the University of Virginia has over 2,000 case studies that they--

GRAHAM: Ian Stevenson, I think, was the lead figure in investigating that. Our culture, Western culture, is profoundly materialistic. It utterly rejects any idea of reincarnation, because that implies that there's some non-material aspect of consciousness which can survive death and can be reborn in a body. That just flies completely in the face of the whole materialistic bias of Western culture. As a result, children brought up in Western culture are subjected to this ideology of materialism from a very early age. But what Ian Stevenson found is that up to the age of about seven, and he documented this in an extremely scientific way; "Children Who Remember Past Lives" is the title of the book; up to the age of about seven, many children in many different cultures have memories of past lives. But in Western culture, those memories are discouraged by their parents and by their education system. So Stevenson went to India, where there is not this discouragement of belief in past lives. He began interviewing young children there and he found astonishing evidence, again, it's fully published and fully documented in his book, "Children Who Remember Past Lives", he found absolutely compelling evidence that reincarnation did take place. Kids who would remember being born in a village 300 miles away, who would know of a certain objects hidden under the eaves of a house in that place where they had once lived, he was able to go and test that. And again, the establishment, the academy, has just reacted to this with derision, because it doesn't fit their paradigm. But what did they know and what do we really know about the human creature? We're just beginning to scratch the surface. Consciousness is such a huge mystery of science. And, fundamentally, when we talk about reincarnation, we're talking about consciousness surviving physical death and passing on. To me that makes a great deal of sense. I don't think it should be sneered at. I think it's something that's worthy of further investigation. So I'm very interested to hear the story that you're telling about Matias de Stefano particularly since what he's remembering accords very much with good geological evidence of what happened at the end of the Ice Age. Particularly so, since I also think that Atlantis wasn't one place. It was distributed around the best real estate on Earth, the coastal lands, during the Ice Age. It may have taken a principled position not to interfere with the lives of other cultures that it coexisted with, or to have minimal contact with them. But when the cataclysm came, when those coastlines were flooded, when that civilization began to go down, there certainly were survivors, large numbers of survivors. The places that they took refuge were amongst hunter-gatherer populations. I've made this point a number of times before but if our civilization today were to collapse, and I think that's a real possibility, if it were to fall apart completely, because it's such a fragile civilization, really; very few people in our civilization have the faintest clue about how to survive I'm one of them, actually; the only people on planet Earth who really have got the business of survival in adverse circumstances totally nailed down are the hunter-gatherers. They're the ones who actually know how to survive. It would be quite natural for survivors of our so-called advanced civilization to take refuge amongst hunter-gatherer populations, and learn from them and at the same time, perhaps teach them some of what we know. That's really all that's being said about Atlantis in my argument. So I'm fascinated to hear that Matias de Stefano has had past life experiences in this realm.

AUBREY: Yeah, absolutely, and just to go back on the idea of the existence of a discordant element of who we are, I went into my first psychedelic ceremony, this vision quest, which I was very blessed to be linked up with a proper shaman when I was 18, just graduated high school.

GRAHAM: Lucky man.

AUBREY: I was super anti-religion at that point. I'd gone to Texas and I'd seen how none of the religious doctrines that had been pushed towards me had made any sense. I had been to the dungeons of the Inquisition in Italy on a family trip and was horrified. I was like, "This is all nonsense." I was very much materialist, rationalist, reductionist. I went and did my first journey, which was a combination of psilocybin and MDMA and I felt my body completely evaporate. There was no other word I had for what remained, then the soul, the unborn, the undying element of who I am beyond this one lifetime, that changed everything for me. There was no way I could dispute it. I stayed up all night that night. It was a rainy, windy night, stayed up all night just writing in my journal, because it was that moment of a radical earthquake paradigm shift--

GRAHAM: And that paradigm shift, if I may intervene, came from an experience that you had. It didn't come from something you were taught in school or in university. It came from a direct personal experience, so much more valuable.

AUBREY: No one can ever tell me what it was and what it wasn't. I was there, I felt it. I think this is one of the advantages of psychedelics is they give you the opportunity for gnosis, to actually experience what you're thinking about and philosophizing about.

GRAHAM: I completely agree. Again, psychedelics are a subject that has been for far too long demonized in our society. We're beginning now to wake up to the incredible therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, that people who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or depression can be very quickly healed with just a relatively small number of deep psychedelic experiences whereas, the Big Pharma drugs do nothing for them. There's a beginning of an awakening, which is shifting the paradigm on psychedelics, but they're still regarded as in, some way, hazardous or dangerous. But let's ask ourselves, why are they so effective in curing PTSD and depression? In both cases, PTSD and depression, the affected individual is locked into a very rigid frame and can't see beyond it. They get trapped in a recurring loop of unpleasantness. What the psychedelics do is they break that grip, they allow them the mind to reset and to contemplate possibilities that hadn't been contemplated before. It's also true with people who are experiencing anxiety of the prospect of death, typically, people with terminal cancer diagnoses. They've also had their their last weeks or months transformed by experiences with psilocybin. Those experiences have shown them that the death of the physical body is really nothing, that it's not the end, that it might be the beginning of another great adventures and what we are, fundamentally, is consciousness. That's why I regard our society's reaction to psychedelics until this relatively recent research has begun to get a toehold, our society's reaction to psychedelics and still the case in most countries or most states has been to make psychedelics illegal, to demonize them, to threaten those who use them with prison, and to defame their names. Again, this is a point that I regard as extremely important. If we're not sovereign over our own consciousness, then we're not sovereign over anything. And it's impossible to speak about freedom when the government holds the keys to our consciousness and tells us what we may or may not experience. Then, of course, the flack will come back and they'll say, "Oh, but psychedelics lead people to do things that are dangerous to others." Well, actually, first of all, they don't. Secondly, we already have laws that deal with people who do dangerous things to others so we don't need laws that patrol the inner sanctum of our consciousness. There's just so much wrong with the way this issue has been handled in the modern world. My only hope is that it doesn't get completely taken over by Big Pharma, that that other dead hand doesn't step in. I know already that pharmaceutical companies are taking up patents on slightly tweaked molecules in order to make it their own when nature provides it free of charge to all of us.

AUBREY: Yeah, so many powerful thoughts. I absolutely, unequivocally, agree with you in all of this. There's an upside down way of thinking. They think of it is not being sober when actually, on these medicines, it feels like hyper-sobriety, like you've woken up from the delusional dream that you've been in in your waking reality. So it's almost not being sober. It's actually being more sober than you ever were. And it's not I may harm other people. It's not: I may harm other people. It's actually every time you've been an asshole is then shown right in your face, right in your face and you have to deal with every time you've said something mean or hurt somebody or been thoughtless. It's your conscious, it's your consciousness--

GRAHAM: These plant and fungi medicines are real teachers. They teach us the mistakes we've made, which we've normally blocked out, because we don't want to hear about our own mistakes. They force us to confront them. That gives us the opportunity not to repeat those mistakes in the future. These are incredibly helpful, helpful medicines. And apropos of the word sober, look at the one consciousness altering drug that's particularly valued and glorified in our society, which is alcohol. Alcohol is truly a dangerous drug. It leads people into very aggressive behavior. It gets them into fights, it leads to car smashes, it destroys the liver, it's a huge health risk and, fundamentally, people do not drink that glass of wine or that beer because of the taste. They may like the taste, but they're fundamentally drinking it because of the brief alteration of consciousness that it brings to them. The most boring drug on the planet is glorified by our civilization, and it's a consciousness-altering drug, but yet other consciousness-altering substances, which lead us to question the mainstream narrative, and psychedelics are paramount amongst those substances, those have been demonized for so long. I hope we're going to see the end of that period of suppression, but I suspect it's still several years away.

AUBREY: I think the psychedelics are playing a role in this as they become more adopted mainstream. The mental health of our society has been in a steady decline, and these psychedelics are providing a solution. So people may go in to work on their depression or their anxiety or their PTSD say, "Oh, I'm going to go get this treatment. Whoops, I just met with God. I just found the eternal existence of my soul as a side effect of my anxiety, which I totally forgot about, because now my whole world is different. And I don't think I'm going to die and go to nothing anymore." I think this is going to happen more and more where people are going to treat some medical condition which will be proven to be able to be treated by these things. But as a side effect, they're going to encounter the ineffable, numinous nature of reality, and that's going to start to shift this paradigm one by one.

GRAHAM: And everybody one by one who's taken the risk of breaking these draconian laws and experimented with psychedelics themselves, the vast majority of such people have had these life-transforming experiences also. It is indeed leading to questioning of the mainstream narrative, which is exactly what we need in the world today. We need this harmful, hateful mainstream narrative to be questioned and, in fact, overthrown. It's passed sell by date. It's doing more harm, much more harm than good. We need to change everything about the way that things function in our societies today. Psychedelics offer this realization that we're not just meat robots, we're not just here to work and produce and consume. We're here to have the full in-depth human experience, with all that that involves. We're here to face the challenges, and to answer the questions that our lives confront us with, rather than to be numbed and dulled down by alcohol, and TV shows that just encourage more production and consumption. This is a transformative moment in the human story, it'll be interesting to see how it works out. I'm 72 years old now. I'm not sure how much longer I've got to see this happen but I hope very much to come back in my next life, and find the world very, very much changed. One of the mysteries of past lives or perhaps the interesting point of it is that when reborn in a new body, part of the deal is that you forget your past life, you may remember it as a child up until the age of seven, then it gradually drifts away, particularly in societies like ours. That makes sense to me because if you knew the rules of the game, if you knew that this was a theater of experience that you're here to learn and to grow and to develop, then you might not play the game straight. But if you're not clear on what exactly is going on, you are going to play the game straight and you're going to have to deal with the choices you make and learn from them. I think physical life in a physical human body is an incredible privilege that the universe has given us. It's tragic to see how our society conspires, and I'll use that word quite deliberately here, conspires to diminish that privilege and to limit our potential, rather than to open it up.

AUBREY: Amen. Amen. It's also imagining how difficult it is to hold on to a dream when you wake up. You can wake up in the morning and be like, "I had this unbelievable dream," and then by noon you're like, "What the hell was I dreaming about?" The world is such a compelling and vibrant and alive dream that we're living in anyways. To hold on to a dream within the dream is very difficult.

GRAHAM: Very difficult indeed. You're reminding me of DMT, dimethyltryptamine and the short, fast journey that smoked or vaped DMT produces, which is typically about 12 minutes, is so overwhelming that it's very hard... You know that something major has happened. There's often a sense of a massive download of information. But it's hard to remember the precise details. Little glimpses come through but you know much more was happening than that. I've talked quite a bit recently about this new project that's taking place at Imperial College in London, led by Dr. Chris Timmermann, where they are giving DMT to human volunteers with a new technology. See, DMT is not normally orally accessible. It becomes orally accessible in the ayahuasca brew, because the second element of the ayahuasca brew contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that switches off an enzyme in our gut that normally stops us absorbing DMT orally. The best way to experience DMT is to smoke it or to vape it, then it gets past the blood brain barrier straight into the brain, or to put it into the bloodstream. Tat's what they're doing at Imperial College. They've developed a new technology that allows the DMT to be administered effectively by drip, and to keep the volunteers in the peak DMT state for an hour plus. I've talked to quite a number of these volunteers. I must say I would find the prospect of being an hour in the peak DMT state pretty alarming, but it gives you the chance to get to grips with, I can only call a realm, that other realm that you find yourself in. It gives you better hope of remembering it. Quite often, the team who are running the study will sit by a volunteer and ask that volunteer what they're seeing, what they're experiencing as it goes through. They'll even put them in MRI scanners to see what's happening in the brain. Again, this is something I find hard to imagine is peaking on DMT and being in an incredibly noisy, claustrophobic MRI scanner. That would take some courage to deal with that. Nevertheless, I have actually tried to volunteer for the study at Imperial College. But unfortunately, I suffer from grand mal epilepsy. It came on, suddenly, when I was 67 years old. They ask a whole series of questions and one of the things that automatically rules you out is epilepsy, not because they fear that there's any likelihood that epilepsy will be triggered by DMT. Quite the contrary, they just don't want to run that risk of getting their project closed down because somebody has an epileptic fit during this experience. Unfortunately, I won't be able to volunteer for that but I think it's a highly worthy study. And the purpose of the study is not primarily to look at the therapeutic potential of DMT. It's to look at the potential of DMT for exploring other levels of reality and trying--

AUBREY: It's almost like spiritual cartography.

GRAHAM: Exactly, beautiful phrase. It's like spiritual cartography to go and map that realm. These volunteers are coming back with astonishingly similar experiences, and particularly of accounts with entities who offer them teachings. For the mainstream just to dismiss all this is nonsense, is very, very stupid. Most scientists who do dismiss the DMT experience as nonsense have never had a DMT experience themselves. I don't think anybody is qualified to put down these experiences unless they've had those experiences themselves, in which case, they would not be putting them down anymore.

AUBREY: It would be like somebody commenting on an orgasm if they've never had one. What do you really know?

GRAHAM: It's like getting advice on the best positions for sex from a celibate priest, you know?

AUBREY: Exactly, exactly. Thanks for your theory. I have a bit of experience here in this--

GRAHAM: Exactly. Experience is the fundamental thing and I think that's partly what the mainstream is afraid of with psychedelics is that it is cutting out the intermediary. We don't need the priest or the rabbi or the mulla to tell us what to think. We have the experience directly, and we can make it what we wish.

AUBREY: Yeah, and it's not just the scientific empire-driven, and I say empire in the corporatocracy that's just looking to maximize profit above everything else, is really this force that is very impressive in that regard and it's woven in with the political but there's also empire weaving its way through religious structures as well. This is what you were referring to. It's the same idea of, basically, they're another type of corporation, just what they're selling is access; they're selling access to the divine, at least, that's what they are pretending to sell.

GRAHAM: They're all about control. You mentioned Gnosticism earlier, that psychedelics give us a gnostic experience. That's true because Gnosticism was fundamentally about direct revealed experience, rather than about teachings. There's no doubt that the early gnostics and many other ancient societies were using psychedelics extensively, in order to mediate these experiences. Of course, that's why Gnosticism, the Gnostic branch of Christianity was the first bit of Christianity to be persecuted when the Roman Catholic Church came to power under the reign of Constantine and pulled on the jackboots of the Roman Empire. The very first people they started to burn at the stake were the Gnostics. It's not often realized how diverse Christianity was in its early days, and how there were many different factions within Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church was just one of those factions. But it gained political power, and since then, has been very reluctant to lose it. I'm sure there are many wonderful Catholics but the record of the Catholic Church over the last 1,500 years or so has been a record of cruelty, of suppression, of burning of all the documents in Mexico, for example, of the Maya, keeping the Mayan codices up into huge bonfires, thousands of them and burning them or burning them to nothing. So no wonder we're a species with amnesia, when these power groups in our society have systematically set about rubbing out the memories of other cultures.

AUBREY: It's weaving in two threads, one of the threads of religion and also the other thread about entities. I read your fictional book, "War God", and really enjoyed it. I definitely wanted to bring it up and this sounds like a good segue for this. I've had several hundred DMT experiences from a variety of different ways, ayahuasca thirtysome times, and then a snuff called Vilca, which comes from a seed that contains N,N-DMT-5-MeO-Bufotenin. I've smoked it from Mimosa extracts. I've been trained in how to facilitate 5-MeO-DMT. I don't do it but I went through the whole initiation, to learn the ins and outs of it. So very, very familiar with the space. Obviously, with that much experience, innumerable encounters with entities, which are far, far more clever than my imagination. So if it is some deeper, inner, recessed archetype of me than me, must be like the "Kybalion" says, "All is mind. The universe is mental." I must be participating in the all inside me. So actually, the idea of whether the entities are coming from me or out there doesn't really matter to me, because the depth of wisdom that's coming through is far beyond what my conscious rational mind could ever conjure. So whether it's outside or inside, it's beyond my grasp. It's beyond the pale of what my rational mind could ever do, in so much of a way that it just consistently both make me laugh, draw insights, point out things that I couldn't possibly understand. I'm very, very much familiar with this concept of entities. And the thesis of "War God" is basically saying that, and I'll let you comment on this, of course, it's your book, but basically saying that the conquistadors led by Cortés and actually, the Aztecs, who were led by Moctezuma were both engaging in human sacrifice in worship of the same demon entity going under different names. I thought that premise was like, "Man, that's fucking..." It's, of course, fiction but--

GRAHAM: Yeah, it's fiction although it's based on quite detailed research about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. You've nailed it. That's exactly what I'm talking about, that the entity that appears to Cortés as St. Peter, and the entity that appears to Moctezuma as hummingbird, the War God is actually the same entity in different disguises, and that the purpose of that entity is to maximize human misery. And my God, if there was ever an enterprise that maximized human misery, it was the Spanish conquest of Mexico bringing in its wake the horrendous curse of smallpox, and leading to the annihilation of millions of people across the Americas. I can't help seeing this as a demonic intervention in human affairs. That's what demons are in the business of doing. They're in the business of maximizing misery, and maximizing suffering. The Spanish conquest of Mexico was a huge instrument of misery and suffering, which affected, of course, not only Mexico, but went on to destroy the great civilizations of the High Andes in Peru and in Bolivia, and then went on to destroy the civilization that we now know existed in the Amazon, not that they went into the Amazon with swords and spears and guns, but the diseases that they brought spread into the Amazon. It's now known from very intriguing Lidar studies, which had been followed up with boots-on-the-ground investigation, that there were huge cities in the Amazon in prehistory. They existed up until the time that the Spaniards appeared bringing these diseases with them. Those diseases just spread like wildfire across South America and wiped out these populations, which became empty and deserted within 100 years. We're just now finding their remains. Lidar is a non destructive way of investigating what's under the Amazon rainforest canopy. It is revealing not only the evidence of enormous populations, but also the evidence of highly sophisticated geometrical structures. All of this was brought to a sudden horrific end as a result of the conquest. What a pity! I have to say, by the way, nobody reads my novels. I'm only known for my nonfiction books, and I still got a fourth volume of "War God" to write because there's been so many developments in the lost civilization field that have absorbed my energies for the past few years. What I wanted to do in that series was to get inside the heads of the main players and understand what drove them and what motivated them. That's one of the things that fiction allows a writer to do, which is difficult to do in nonfiction. I found that by being able to put myself into the heads of my characters, I began to understand what happened during the Spanish conquest of Mexico much better than I did before. If I may add on that, the impetus to begin writing some fiction came from an ayahuasca experience. In fact, five ayahuasca experiences. I've had about 70 plus journeys with ayahuasca over the years starting in 2003. But in 2007, in Brazil, a series of five sessions over two weeks were entirely focused on giving me the plot of a novel. That novel I wrote before I wrote "War God", and that novel is called "Entangled". And again, it posits a demonic force that is trying to maximize misery, and that travels through time. There is a young woman in the 21st century and a young woman 24,000 years ago, who are literally entangled. They have to cooperate together to fight this demonic force and not allow it to succeed. I got all of that. I didn't even know I could write a novel. I got it all in a series of images and instructions during these ayahuasca sessions. At the very end of it, I was told very firmly to go away and write it. So I set down my nonfiction writing, and I went away and wrote it, and then I carried on and began to write the "War God" series. What that says to me amongst many things, is that these psychedelic experiences can also be enormously creative, that they unlock creative sides of ourselves that we might not even have known existed. That idea of the demonic force, of course, is also central to Gnosticism, where that force is referred to as the archons whose whole project is to make the human races miserable and fail to reach our potential as much as possible. No wonder that the Gnostics were very familiar with altered states of consciousness.

AUBREY: I encountered an entity in an ayahuasca session. I work with a Quechua healer Maestro Orlando Chunjandama. I've encountered many dark entities, of course, and many light entities and beautiful--

GRAHAM: That's true, Aubrey. It's not all sweetness and light in ayahuasca.

AUBREY: Yeah, if you're going for Candyland, you picked the wrong cup.

GRAHAM: [inaudible 57:24] every time I do anyway.

AUBREY: Of course, of course.

AUBREY: I encountered this being, it was technological in nature. It was absolutely demonic. I was like, "What are you?" I had other guidance. They called it the Mecca archon. It was like the archon that was working through technology to actually undermine our own faculties of thought and our own consciousness. We can see this and, obviously, everybody's aware of the dangers of the cell phones and the social media and our addiction to technology and all of these different ways. But it actually appeared to me embodied as an entity. It was quite interesting and it's allowed me to start thinking about any aggregation, archetypal aggregation of energy... I alluded to this earlier, you could, if you wanted, to deify that and make it a demon or an angel or something like that. It may or may not be what we call, quote, real, but the energy is real, that's behind it. It starts to allow you to think about these things, not as like fairy tale superstitions, but just like this is the aggregation of archetypal energy. Does that, actually, when it's aggregated in that particular form, does it have consciousness itself, and also choice? That's where it gets very, very interesting. To me, the answer is yes, based on the experiences that I've had, but either way, it's quite interesting. What I've also realized is, we can look at even ancient Greek and ancient Roman Pantheon, the Olympians, of course and say, "Great stories, great stories." But I've had encounters with those beings. It's totally shocking. Who is this? Mercury? And where did I feel it? I felt this hot energy moving through my ankles and I was like, "Oh, they always put wings on the ankles." And I'm just like, "Mercury?" And then it was like, "Yeah?" I was like, "Whoa! Mercury. I didn't think that was real being." I thought that was just like a story.

GRAHAM: Not a story, an experience. It's fascinating when you look at the ancient Egyptian pantheon, and indeed many others around the world before we got into this top-down controlling system of the monotheistic faiths, which have sought to attribute everything sacred to one entity. When we look at these older, spiritual and religious systems, as in the case of ancient Egypt, you'll find that almost every single one of the ancient Egyptian deities has what's rightly referred to as a therianthropic appearance, from the Greek therion which means wild beast and Anthropos which means man. There's a combination of animal and human characteristics. Think of the god Horus with with his Hawk head. Think of Thoth with the head of an ibis. Think of a Anubis with the head of a jackal. These are not things that one sees in the normal, alert, everyday problem-solving state of consciousness, but they are things that we routinely see in deeply-altered states of consciousness. And many of the entities that I've encountered in ayahuasca visions, and indeed, in smoked DMT visions as well have had this very anthropic quality. What's interesting with DMT in pure form is precisely what you mentioned, although you got it from an ayahuasca experience, which is DMT, mediated through [inaudible 1:01:14] is the technological element of the entities that are often encountered. That's rarer in ayahuasca experiences, but it does happen. The ayahuasca experiences, it's interesting that there are these differences. In the Amazon, they say that the difference is precisely caused by the ayahuasca vine, that the ayahuasca vine, which itself is not consciousness altering or not particularly so, is the master plant, and that it's harnessing the leaves that contain the DMT to give us this experience. So it's interesting that when mediated with the ayahuasca vine, the realm that one enters is often very jungly and full of serpents and full of jaguars and panthers. A very jungly, organic realm, whereas quite often with smoked DMT, it's a very mechanical realm where the entities seem like machines, powerful machines, by all means, but machines still have this trickster, this trickster quality about them. There have been times on my Ayahuasca journeys where it's flipped over into a very technological DMT type of dream. I just don't know what these things are or what is going on. I don't think anybody does. But I think it merits much further investigation. That's why I celebrate what's happening at Imperial College in London now, because these experiences, I think, have been fundamental to human culture, over tens of thousands of years. For our society, which is really just the fingertip on the end of the long arm of human culture, for our society to write off all those experiences and to demonize them and rubbish them is a terrible mistake.

AUBREY: I think one of the things that I really celebrated about "War God" as well is I think you can get into this mindset that all primitive cultures or all non-western cultures were better in every way and that psychedelics are always helpful, they're a panacea, they're always good. But you tell the story very clearly and inside the minds and hearts and thoughts of the priests of of Moctezuma who were taking psychedelic mushrooms they call it [foreign language 1:03:30] or something like that, taking psychedelic mushrooms and cutting the hearts out of people by the thousands.

GRAHAM: Committing horrific murders on a gigantic scale, in honor of this demonic entity that they regarded as somehow worthy of worshiping. That's why I also present the balance to that in the book because a lot of Christians will condemn those cultures for carrying out human sacrifice, forgetting that Christianity itself carried out human sacrifice repeatedly over hundreds and hundreds of years. The last witch burnings took place in England in the 18th century. That's really not very long ago. Burn somebody at the stake in the name of your deity and what you're performing is an act of human sacrifice, which is no different from the acts of human sacrifice that were carried out by the Aztecs. It's the same end result. In fact, if I were given the choice as to which way I'd rather go, I'd rather have a quick knife thrust to the heart and be slowly burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno, hung upside down and was allowed to suffer for 24 hours before he died. The cruelty and wickedness of the Christian church over the years... We often hear so many great things about the Christian church, and that's fine, but to be real, we have to accept the fact that this religion has been has been the source of so much division, and so much cruelty in the world over so long that we really need to ask ourselves, what is that thing that we're calling God? The Gnostics were very clear that that entity called Yahweh or Jehovah was not a God at all. He was an imposter. He was a demon. His purpose was to mislead the human race and if that was His purpose, then He certainly succeeded in doing so.

AUBREY: When you say the word God-fearing, you know that you're upside down. When you actually experience God, it can be overwhelming in all of the consciousness of life. It contains all the light and all the dark, but it is not something you fear. It's the overflowing eminence of love, emanation of love that's going everywhere. It's the opposite. You want more, not less of this being. It just points to the upside down nature that we've been in. We're not only a culture of amnesia, but we're a culture that's been like Giordano Bruno, who was actually hung upside down when he should have been turned right side up and put on a pedestal and said thank you to it. He was upside down, just like the whole structure of everything was upside down. I can only imagine, from my understanding of Yeshua and the deep mystical power of His teachings, what has been done in the name of Yeshua and in the name of Jesus is the absolute upside down thing of everything that He stood for.

GRAHAM: I completely agree with you. And again, the Gnostics saw the figure of Jesus as a Gnostic teacher. They didn't see him as divine. They saw him as a teacher.

AUBREY: Well, as divine as all of us, which is what Jesus was trying to say all along.

GRAHAM: As all of us. Yes, yes. That's right. We're all the sons of God, in that sense or the daughters of God. Unfortunately, what we're dealing with in the big monotheistic faiths, I go with a Gnostic view, it's an imposter. It's an entity that seeks to mislead humanity. That can be shown from the works of these religions, and the harm and the damage that they've caused. I know that what I'm saying is going to be outrageous to large numbers of people, but just think about it. Think about stoning a woman to death, because she's unfaithful to her husband, which still happens today in Islamic cultures. Just think about the cruelty of the Christian Church and the burning at the stake of its opponents over centuries and centuries and ask yourself, can this really be excused? Can religion be excused for that? Many people say, "Well, that happened then, but it's not true Christianity." Well, I'm afraid it is true Christianity and if that religion cannot deal with its own baggage, then it's not going to go very much further.

AUBREY: I think the safeguards on all of these structures are actually, in many ways, these psychedelic experiences, the experiences of transcendence, where you get to actually encounter both imposters and the truth, and then you actually get to sort out from the inside, from what we feel, anthro-ontologically, what's happening in our body? Through my body, I vision God. This feeling of understanding what's actually happening, then allows you to set the world through your own gnosis. It allows you to become your own gnostic, and that's the safeguard for all of these atrocities that has been categorically removed.

GRAHAM: What I'd like to say to anybody who has not worked with these plant medicines, fungi medicines as well, is that they are teachers. They are teachers. It's a very strange thing, that plants which we regard as non-sentient, nevertheless, that the mixture of the two plants involved in the ayahuasca brew immediately puts us face to face with our own baggage and starts teaching us how to deal with that. Of course, we can't right the mistakes we've made in the past, but we don't have to keep on making those mistakes in the future. The real work begins after the session, I'm sure you'll agree. It's not a magic pill, which is suddenly going to transform your life. It's a medicine that's going to teach you stuff about yourself and give you the opportunity to change but integrating those lessons that you've learned into the life that you live on this plane, that's where the hard work really begins. Far from being a magic pill, it's a recipe for years of hard work and working on oneself to be a better and more nurturing and more positive and more useful person and not to harm others.

AUBREY: I'm with you, 100%. To weave back to the partially told story from Matias de Stefano, which people might want to hear.

GRAHAM: Yes, let's go back to that.

AUBREY: And also to understand that those cultures had no restrictions, no such restrictions on psychedelic medicine. But as Matias tells the story, in their understanding, at least, and what was told to him... The story of Atlantis and the Atlantean civilization was passed down through many generations by the time he got it. He doesn't remember a life in Atlantis, just one of the post-Atlantean civilizations. The story that was told, was both yes, the meteors that came down and they hit in a variety of different places, they melted the ice, there were floods. There was a causality that they attributed to it in that the Atlanteans had put up... All throughout their empire, they'd made structures where people, priests, could enter into consciousness, and the structures were resonant with the stars and they actually developed somewhat of a spiritual worldwide web of consciousness, like what Rupert Sheldrake would call the morphic resonance field. They were actually able to tap into that in a really profound way. They were holding a balance of the Earth. But actually, this idea of empire, or this demonic idea of control over other people, there was a faction that split off and said, "No, we don't want this centralized Atlantean control of our consciousness." There was a conflict. The Atlanteans tried to make a power move where they tried to actually use these technologies which were meant to hold balance and equanimity for the Earth for power. It disrupted the grid in a fundamental way and the disruption of the grid actually removed the protection that the Earth had, because it's not every 12,500 years or whatever that the meteors hit, it's just every once in a while. In their understanding, they were holding a protection over the Earth. That left because everything was in chaos because the desire for power had gotten into the Atlanteans, who'd lived peacefully for 4000 years or so before that. When that happened, that's when all the cataclysm began. There's a cautionary tale that he remembers of: this is what happens when you try to make that move for power, it throws everything out of balance. It's also another warning for us because we're in the same moment.

GRAHAM: We're the next lost civilization. That's what our civilization is today. We don't have to be. But choices need to be made. We have to change the path that all the big, industrialized technological countries are on right now. Otherwise, it's not even going to be a cosmic disaster. We're going to bring ourselves down, collapse and destroy our civilization, lose all the support systems that we've relied upon and be put in a place where we have to rely only on ourselves again. That will be very difficult. That's why I think our civilization today is fragile. It looks strong. It's capable of incredible technological feats but, psychically, it's very fragile, and not ready to confront the chaos that may come.

AUBREY: No doubt, no doubt. And these stories from the past are important. I think this is a point you make, it's a point that Matias makes as well. These stories of the past are important, to not only show us the classic, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” He actually had that woven into the story. So it was not only a particular time, but it was a particular mindset--

GRAHAM: In what state of consciousness is he when he has these past life experiences?

AUBREY: He has full access. He has a phone with a stylus and he takes notes to himself in Atlantean Cuneiform basically.

GRAHAM: So he's entering a [inaudible 1:13:51] state autonomously, without the need of --

AUBREY: He's like, "I'm a particular type of being that's like a memory cell. Whatever function that wipes out the memory and makes it like a dream for most people, I'm just built that I'm supposed to remember." He doesn't consider himself special or like it's a special gift. It's just like I'm a memory cell in this collective... One organ, call it the pituitary or whatever of all humanity, he's one cell in that particular gland that's able to remember. On my podcast, he sang some songs that he would sing to his daughter. He was a woman in that life. And this life, he's a gay man and he's living his life in this life and he loved his life then. He's singing songs to his daughter, this Lullaby and he sung that song. There was something so human that woke up in me, some ancestral memory when I heard this Atlantean lullaby. He's not a great singer. He's not trying to be a performing artist but he just sang like a mother would sing to their daughter. It was so powerful. Of course, I approach all of these things skeptically. I don't actually even believe in astrology and numerology. I'm open to it but I've never found anything compelling. I'm not super into all of these phenomenons but when I hear his song, and my body knows it as a real song and knows it, I know it is true. It's this interesting thing. Of course, all of his wisdom matches up--

GRAHAM: Resonates at heart level.

AUBREY: Exactly, resonates at the heart level. And everything he's saying correlates with everything that you're writing so the scientific evidence of the past. Then also, what he's talking about, the cosmos correlates with my 23 years of psychedelic adventuring, all of the entities and the dimensionality and all these experiences, there's so much correlation that I haven't found any dissonance between that which I know internally, and that which I've learned from individuals like yourself about the past. It's been a beautiful relationship to have. He's just a great human being. He can enter trance states as well and then channel other different types of energies. But he has waking access to that memory.

GRAHAM: What's often forgotten is that DMT is a natural brain hormone. It's present in all human beings, and in fact, in almost all animal life, but usually in sub-psychedelic quantities. Some people may have a bit more of it than others, and it may just open those doorways that are normally closed for most of us without the help of psychedelics. It's an interesting phenomenon, actually, that a natural brain hormone is illegal. But that's the world we live in today. What he was saying is also, really, strongly supported by Plato, who's the earliest surviving... Tradition of Atlantis is passed down to us by Plato, who makes it clear that his ancestor, Solon, learned the story in ancient Egypt and, indeed, speaks of how Atlantis was once a beautiful civilization but how it became cruel, and how it began to impose its will upon others, to use its technology to gain power, that it ceased to wear its prosperity with moderation. In response to that, the universe finally had enough and struck it down. I think the balance between human beings and the universe is something else that's ignored in our civilization today. We are part of the universe and our behavior and even our thoughts have universal implications that we are taught to ignore at our peril.

AUBREY: I couldn't agree more. So well said. To continue on with some of the things that you might find interesting; and I deeply hope that you guys are able to have a conversation at some point, I think it would be a beautiful experience for you guys to talk; he shares that he was actually part of the water guild as I said, that was cutting the stones. The air guild and the earth guild, they would go into a trance, they would get into like psychic resonance with the stones and they would be singing. Singing was pretty much part of all of the different guilds, they would use sound and sound healing, sound medicine technology, sound technology, through their own voice. They would get into resonance with the stones. They would actually then start to raise the octaves of how they were singing. They would make the stones lighter by how they would sing and how they would actually move the density of the stones through the octaves, which they would be elevating. This was part of the technology that answers the question: well, how the hell did they get all these stones up in the first place? How did they move them all? Well, they had people who were part of the air guild who could sing into the stone and then move it however they wanted and the water guild would cut the stones.

GRAHAM: Again, it makes perfect sense to me. There are a number of ancient Egyptian traditions that speak of these massive stones being lifted by the priests chanting. It's not an accident that singing is also a hugely important part of the ayahuasca journey, particularly in the Amazon, the ikaros that the shamans sing there guide the journey. They're like a road through that realm.

AUBREY: I'll just finish with the last bit of the story that I think you might find interesting. There's tales in many of the different mythologies of them being giants, these members of these other civilizations. He said, "Well, yes, we had these spiritual technologies and our consciousness was giant." They'd been using psychedelic plant medicines, and they'd been evolving but they also had different levels of nutrition, they had different levels of medicine. Just like you see, in a lot of cultures who've had that, who've had different access to protein and different access to... They were actually larger and they lived a lot longer. Their lifespan was 80 to 100 years just like ours, and they were healthy and strong and robust, and they had this spiritual breath so they were giants in a way, they lived several times as long. It was just the advancements of the culture.

GRAHAM: [inaudible 1:20:42]

AUBREY: For sure and slightly physically larger. As they re-civilized, repopulated and dispersed around the world, eventually, the question is what happened? Well, they started breeding and interbreeding with all the local populations until eventually--

GRAHAM: [inaudible 1:21:07] populations.

AUBREY: That's it. That's really how it went. They didn't decide we're only going to sleep with each other like the Targaryens or something. "Game of Thrones". They just dispersed, and they made love to all of the people of the different lands--

GRAHAM: They brought with them knowledge and that knowledge filtered down, and we can see evidence of it still existent in the world today and massively denied by mainstream science. There is a heritage that the whole human race has received, I believe, from a lost civilization of prehistory. I think Atlantis is a really good name for that lost civilization because fundamentally, it does come to us from Plato, the earliest surviving account of it. I've seen academics twist themselves into knots, trying to dismiss Plato's account. They can respect him in all other ways but the moment he starts talking about a lost civilization, he can't possibly be talking about something real. He repeats many times that this is a true story, based on facts. That's ignored. They say he's trying to set up some political model or make some sort of philosophical point, anything, rather than admit that he's reporting true history.

AUBREY: Yeah, indeed. You've been to more of these sacred sites than I ever have. But I've been to some of the ones down in Peru. It's unbelievably stunning the stonework that's there. When you hear this account from Matias of the way that they actually changed the weight of the stones... They still had to move them, they couldn't just totally levitate them, telekinesis with their mind, they still had to move them, but they could change the weight of them so that they were much easier to move by singing into resonance with them. They could cut them with water, instead of actually having to use chisels and things. Does this make sense from what you've seen on the ground and what you've been able to put your hand on these stones and see all over the world?

GRAHAM: It makes perfect sense to me. Of course, in saying that, I know that I'm handing a hostage to fortune. I'm giving my critics a stick to beat me with because, of course, to speak of anything like telekinesis or telepathic powers is regarded by the academy today as complete nonsense. In my books, I probably don't devote more than a page, across thousands of pages to that speculation, that their technology was very different from ours, that it was based on latent faculties of the human mind that have relapsed in our civilization today, but that were highly prominent in the past, and that the human mind is capable of far more than we give it credit for. It doesn't have to be mediated through machines, or leveraged in the way that it is in our society. The human mind can have a direct impact on physical reality. You mentioned Rupert Sheldrake earlier, a man for whom I have the deepest respect. Rupert is a real scientist but he's a rebel. He stood out against the academy. He stood out and presented solid scientific evidence, for example, for telepathy, which is very difficult to refute. And how do they refute it, they just ignore him and sneer at him and pour scorn upon him. So I'm very proud of Rupert that he's just kept on, kept on presenting the evidence, sticking with the facts and pushing it in their faces to the point where it becomes ridiculous to resist it. We've all had experiences of telepathy, and it isn't absurd to suggest that that ability could be magnified with training and with focus upon it. But it's difficult for it to be magnified in a society that despises such ideas, which is our society today.

AUBREY: It's difficult for several reasons according to Matias, since I've asked Matias, "Could we do this now with the proper training?" What he's saying is very much in accord with the ideas that Rupert proposes of this morphic resonance field. But he talks about this field of belief, that there's actually a field of belief that's necessary to actually hold the possibility of somebody able to do this. Now, of course, the critics and skeptics will say, "Oh, of course, that's a convenient excuse." But fundamentally the interconnectivity between belief and consciousness and reality, even in the quantum realms now, I think it was Hoffman who's talking about local realism is being challenged, the idea that our observation of something is actually necessary for that thing to actually be what it actually is. It builds upon the observer effect in quantum mechanics. Of course, this is beyond my pay grade.

GRAHAM: It's one of the exciting ways where there's a nexus with psychedelic experiences of other realms and quantum physics, recognizing the probability of parallel realms, parallel universes. What quantum physics hasn't got into yet is how do we explore and map those realms and maybe psychedelics are the answer.

AUBREY: Spiritual cartography, I'm into it. Ultimately, what he's saying is that the field of belief, the collective belief, all of the observations that believe that this is possible or not, that has to be softened to allow for the possibility for this to emerge. I actually think that this is going to return in our future as more and more people become open to these ideas. I think we're actually, in our lifetimes, going to see the return of what we would now call magic, but what they just did back then, this was a part of the laws of their reality that they lived in. We would call it magic now but it will become just part of the natural order of things and I believe that'll come in our lifetimes.

GRAHAM: Magic is just science we don't understand.

AUBREY: Well said. Well said.

GRAHAM: It's another one of those words that are sneered at by the academy. Any notion of magic is dismissed. But that's also dismissing human potential in all sorts of ways. Matias sounds like he's had some very important and very valuable experiences. I shall definitely learn more about him.

AUBREY: Happy to connect you guys or maybe, if you do make it down here to Austin, we could all get on a podcast together and I can just sit back and smile as you guys tell stories about the ancient past.

GRAHAM: I'm coming to it from a different point of view. I don't personally have strong past life experiences. Since my childhood, I've had an absolute horror of being burnt at the stake, something I get very emotional about. I do speculate sometimes, was I burned at the stake in a past life? Is that where this comes from? The way now that the academy is trying to burn me at the stake for my "Ancient Apocalypse" series, and for my books, pouring scorn upon me, presenting me as an enemy of society, the Guardian newspaper says it's the most dangerous show on television, this is the modern way to burn somebody at the stake, is to destroy them with attacks on their person, which when you investigate their turnout have no basis. The attack itself is enough to smear that individual in the eyes of so many who trust those media. You asked me earlier how I would react to definite proof that my hypothesis; my working hypothesis, which is always changing by the way; is wrong? My answer to that is I have changed my views extensively as I've gone along. My policy with books is I'll never change a single word of a book once I publish it. I don't want to whitewash the book. I I want it to be there on the record. I've updated a couple of books, but only in the way of adding a foreword and an afterword. I leave the original text present. There are things in "Fingerprints of the Gods" that I don't go with anymore. That was the first book I published on the possibility of a lost civilization. What I've done is I've written further books where I've explored those avenues that I didn't explore properly in "Fingerprints of the Gods". "Magicians of the Gods" and "America Before" are the most recent examples of that so that anybody who wants to critique my work can have a full view of everything that I've done since the 1990s. I won't go back and edit anything. As I say, I'll only add an afterword or a foreword to it. What puzzles me; but it doesn't really puzzle me, actually, because that's the world we live in; is that in most of the attacks that have been made on my work, the archaeologists and their friends in the media who are attacking me talk only about "Fingerprints of the Gods", which I published 27 years ago and don't talk a word about "Magicians of the Gods" or "America Before", because they know they're on more difficult ground there. I've been improving my game, continuously improving. I learn from my mistakes and I incorporate that learning into new work. But at the same time, I don't want to pretend that I didn't say something in the past. I did say it and it's there and I'll keep it on record forever, and let people make up their own minds.

AUBREY: We're in a fortunate time as well with all of these difficulties and challenges. We're in the fortunate time that you get to reach people without those filters of the guardians, guardian is an interesting word, but the guardians of the mainstream narrative, because you've been able to go on Joe Rogan's podcast and you're on my podcast now and obviously, that's not the size of Rogan's, but we're reaching hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

GRAHAM: You're reaching very large numbers of people. This is one of the great developments in the world we live in today. We've talked a lot about the negative things but the ability for people to speak freely, and communicate with other like-minded people has dramatically increased as a result of podcasts like yours and Joe's podcast. It's the first time I've appeared on your podcast, but Joe Rogan's podcast has been enormously important to me. The first episode I did with him was back in 2011. I think it was episode 147--

AUBREY: I remember that one.

GRAHAM: He certainly put my work in front of a whole new audience who weren't aware of me at all. That has definitely empowered me. So I'm grateful to the podcast realm for allowing me freedom of speech, and allowing me to get what I have to say across in a way that the mainstream media just will never do. The only story that the mainstream media wants to write about me is that Hancock is a crackpot, he's dangerous and he's misleading the public. That's the only story they want to tell. I've had a recent example, I won't name them, of a newspaper in Britain, who clearly wanted to go on that bandwagon as well, to gallop with the herd of pouring scorn upon me, but I insisted that we do a written interview. I gave them detailed written replies to all of their questions. At the end of the day, those written replies would not have allowed them to do the hatchet job they wanted to do, they just didn't publish the story.

AUBREY: This is the time we're in and there's a cautionary tale and a meta cautionary tale in the story that you've told. I just want to say personally, for me, just the deepest gratitude and thanks for your courage and for standing out both for what you've shared, again, about the evidence of ancient civilization, but also the way that you've stood on the meta-perspective, the way that you've stood and withstood these attacks, and been an example of someone with dignity, and integrity, and courage. This is a model that's invaluable even beyond the work that you've put out there, which is also invaluable. Just the utmost admiration and gratitude for you as a human and your incredible body of work.

GRAHAM: Thank you, Aubrey. One of the things that gives me hope is the way that young people and even young trainee archaeologists respond to my work. I often get private communications from people who say that my work has caused them to think again about everything. If I'm doing that, even with a small number of people, then I'm grateful for the ability for the opportunity to do that.

AUBREY: I think you have no idea about the positive impact you've had on the world and will continue to have on the world. It's probably even more enormous than your mind can even grapple with.

GRAHAM: Sweet of you to say that. Thank you.

AUBREY: I believe it wholeheartedly and, hopefully, as our journeys wend along their way, I would love to have another conversation with you. There's many, many more things to explore.

GRAHAM: Absolutely. I look forward to the next time, Aubrey.

AUBREY: Absolutely. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Thank you, Graham, and we'll see you next week. Thanks for tuning into this video. Make sure you hit Subscribe. Follow me: @aubreymarcus, check out the Aubrey Marcus Podcast available everywhere, and leave a comment. Let me know if this video resonated or what else you would like to hear from me in the future. Thank you so much.