Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Graham Hancock

Episode Date: December 5, 2015

Graham Hancock, author of MAGICIANS OF THE GODS, returns to the DTFH to tell us what happened to the Giant Beaver and to talk about his amazing new book. This episode brought to you by WEARSPASE.COM     More information on Magicians of the Gods:     Grahams WEB SITE: http://grahamhancock.com/   upcoming events: http://grahamhancock.com/events/    facebook page : https://www.facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Graham__Hancock

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Today's guest is Graham Hancock, the author, historian, philosopher, psychonaut, and mystic and doing some kind of long, rambling, opening monologue when Graham Hancock is the guest is similar to sitting in front of a sunset, staring at a picture of a sunset. There's no reason to do it. This is what podcasting is about, and anytime Graham Hancock comes on the show, it is an incredible moment for me because he gives me ideas that I get to think about for years to come. Very excited about this interview, we're going to dive right into it, but first, some quick

business. It's an eternal flow of consciousness that is temporarily manifested in a rapidly deteriorating meat body. From time to time, you have to ask yourself, why in the name of God am I standing in line to buy razors? There you are, a thing that 6 billion years ago was a singularity and now you find yourself in line surrounded by sneezing toddlers with gassy diarrhea, exploding what could potentially be ebola particles all over your sacred body temple.

If your atomic structure is composed of particles that were formerly in the hearts of exploding stars, then you should primarily be spending your time gulping down psychedelics, having as many orgasms as you possibly can, or studying the cosmos. Unstanding in front of razor displays, waiting for disgruntled managers who treat you as though you are a razor thief. Why are they locking up the razors when they could be having orgiastic, Dionysian, psychedelic, fueled love orgies and the great meadows of the earth, worshiping the earth goddess and praying to the great truth that lies behind all things?

If you say that to the store manager as they're unlocking the razors, there's an 80% chance that you'll be arrested that night. That's why you should go to harrys.com and order some razors in her promo code family hour and you'll get $5 off your order. I've used Harry's. They're great. They give you a wonderful shave. I know I have a beard, but I like to clean up around my cheeks.

It's embarrassing, but I don't want to look like I'm in the Taliban. So I sort of, I don't know, beards are, look, we've got pubic hair growing out of our face. I didn't invent that. You've got to do something about it. You've got exploding protein strands exploding out of our flesh and you've got to use special equipment if you want to keep that trimmed, or you could just turn into a monkey and go live in the forest and eat your own poop and drown in a river or die of gangrene because your arm gets stuck under a boulder that fell from an avalanche.

Go to harrys.com, avoid this terrible scenario. It doesn't have to happen to you because Harry's will ship razor blades for free to your front door. And for 15 bucks, you'll get a razor, a moisturizing shave cream and three razor blades, which is what they sent me. Go to harrys.com and her promo code family hour, you'll get $5 off. Starts at 15 bucks. If you want, you can add aftershave, you can add extra creams, extra foaming gels, extra

blades. It's a simple website. Go there no matter what you do. If you enter promo code family hour, you'll get $5 off. This isn't what it used to be like when you had to go walk down some dusty street to a dirty barber shop where a racist with Jen on his breath would be one World War II flashback away from slicing your juggler vein and rubbing your blood all over his body while he screamed about the Nazis.

Now you can be the man with Jen on his breath shaving your face in the sweet comfort of your Ebola free home. There's no reason for you to be treated like a razor thief by pigs when you could enjoy a nice package on your doorstep. Groom yourself, gentlemen. Make yourself beautiful. So the next time you go on a tender date, you have that soft presidential baby bottom skin that your sweet darling is going to want to stroke and caress and lick and rub olive

oil all over and strawberries and climb on top of and ride into the night howling as she rides your face like some demon riding through hell. Go to harrys.com in her promo code family hour. Support them. They support us. And it's a great company. You know me. I like the fact that the neural technological neural connections that are happening that

are turning the earth into one gigantic brain have as a side effect a return to the old convenience where a nice man would come and bring a cool bottle of milk to your door and rub your feet and put balm on your lips. Now we can have that with everything, including razors. Will the UPS man rub your feet when he drops Harry's off at your door? I don't know. It depends on who you are, what kind of energy you're putting out and what you want to manifest in your life.

But even if he doesn't rub your feet or rub balm into your lip or hold you as you weep about last night's Nancy Grace, he's still going to give you a nice box of high quality German engineered razors that you can use to transform that terrible, bushy, ISIS supporting face into something that could get elected as the great world leader who will unify the earth and who we will all worship forever. Be fancy. Go to harrys.com, order some razors, promo code family hour, support the podcast, support Harry's and support your face.

Hare Krishna. Also, if you want to support this podcast, you can go to dunkintrustle.com. The next time you're going to buy something on Amazon, go through the Amazon portal and they will give us a small percentage of anything you buy. We're also sponsored by Audible. You can go to audible trial forward slash family hour. If you sign up, you can download a free audio book and cancel the membership at any time. They'll give us 15 bucks.

You'll get a free audio book, but you won't want to cancel because audio books are fantastic. If you go to audibletrial.com forward slash family hour, you could even download and listen to fingerprints of the gods, which is a book by today's guest, Graham Hancock. I'm so excited that he appeared on the show. This is, I believe this is his third appearance on the podcast and every time he blows my mind, this is not an exception. Graham Hancock is an author who has some incredible theories about ancient civilizations, where we came from, why the pyramids are there, and he's just a brilliant person.

He's a world explorer, a kind of modern day Indiana Jones. And I just feel so lucky that I get to have these conversations with him from time to time. For those of you who are living in South Africa, I want to let you know that Graham is going to be out there October 18th to the 25th. He's doing a tour of South Africa. He's going to be in Johannesburg on October 18th. He's going to be in Cape Town on October 25th.

So you can go to his website and check this out. These are going to be full day seminars and you'll get a chance to hang out with this man. I wish I was in South Africa because I would love to go to one of these seminars. And if you happen to be out there, why not go to one, dive in and say hello to Graham and tell him that you were sent there by the Duncan Trussell Family Hour. You can find out everything you need to know about Graham Hancock by going to GrahamHancock.com. He's got a new book coming out or which has just come out and he makes a very special

offer about some book plates that you can hear on this podcast. You can go to Graham Hancock forward slash war god too to find out more about that. So now and all these links are going to be at DuncanTrussell.com on the comment section of this podcast. So if you want to connect with Mr. Hancock, all the information will be there for you in the form of sweet blue links. So now everyone please welcome to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, the great Graham Hancock.

Graham Hancock, welcome back to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. Thank you so much for appearing on the show again. Duncan, it's a delight to be with you again, always a pleasure. I'd like to start this discussion off with a big ridiculous question, but I think you're the perfect person to ask it to. Do you think the planet is experiencing a shift in consciousness or the shift in consciousness that all the New Age people and back in the 60s, the hippies and so many others have predicted what happened?

Yes, absolutely. I think we are undergoing a gigantic shift in consciousness and because we're in the middle of it, it's kind of difficult to see. It's kind of difficult to know it for sure, but I think in two 300 years time when the history of this epoch comes to be written, it's going to be recognized as a transformative moment in the story of humanity. I think huge undercurrents are at work and huge changes are taking place all over the planet.

People are waking up there, they're stopping sleepwalking and starting looking where they're going and thinking about what they're doing. You know, the light is faint at the moment. There are still overwhelming dark forces at work and we still face incredible opposition which seeks to shut us down and make us just sort of unthinking robots that produce and consume according to orders. But everywhere around the world that light is growing and people are waking up and rejecting that and refusing to put up with the bullshit that's been stuffed down our throats for so

many centuries and seeking self-determination and seeking sovereignty over consciousness. It's a tremendous moment to be alive. What do you think are some of the primary ways that this shift in consciousness is showing itself? What are some specific examples that you can cite that indicate that we're entering this period of awakening? Well, first and foremost, let's consider the medium in which you and I are communicating on at the moment, which is the internet.

The internet is a huge part of this because what the internet is doing is allowing like-minded people to connect all around the planet, to bypass the roots of communication that have been laid down for them by others, to bypass the big media and to communicate with one another directly. I think it's impossible to overstate the importance of this. For centuries, for thousands of years, really, we've been brought up with the model of nationalism or before that of tribalism, nationalism, patriotism. These have been the ways that the authorities have pressed our buttons.

They've pressed our buttons through the big religions where we all sit there and receive a sermon from the rabbi or the mullah or the priest. They've controlled the channels of communication. Now with the internet, where all of us can get at it and speak to one another directly, those controlling powers and authorities are losing their grip on us. More and more of us have lost faith completely in the big media. Personally, I don't even watch television anymore. I can't bear it.

It's just so repulsive, so ugly, so unpleasant. I know that more and more people feel that way. As I say, we're seeing the first glimmers of the light at the moment, but it's growing stronger every day. This possibility to communicate with one another directly, this helps us to realize that we all really are brothers and sisters. The buttons of fear and hatred and suspicion that the controlling authorities have pressed again and again with their appeals to patriotism.

See, I detest patriotism. I know that may be an unpopular view to some, but I see no merits in patriotism. I don't see why I should feel especially loyal to somebody because by an accident of birth, they happen to be born on the same piece of land as I was. I'm interested in their ideas, and that's what the internet allows. It allows the direct communication at the level of ideas, and it allows us to subvert established networks and communicate directly with one another. This is a very important development.

Another important development is the growing recognition of something I've been going on about for a long time, adult sovereignty over consciousness. This is a subset of the whole issue of our personal health and the control we take over our personal health. Again, we've been told for centuries that we must defer to the experts, to the leading authorities, to the doctor this or the doctor that, that our health has been in the hands of experts, and we've had almost go to them cap in hand in order to be told what to do with our own bodies.

This is rapidly, rapidly changing, and interestingly, it's changing most of all in the United States. The United States was the dark power behind the war on drugs, that madness, that insanity that gripped the world 50 or 45 years ago, and that spread around the world like wildfire and resulted in terrible injustices being perpetrated with hitchhikers being executed in Malaysia or Indonesia because they had some so-called drug upon them, huge prison sentences. Still, 700,000 or so people a year arrested in the United States for possession of cannabis, but here's where it's changing because state by state, we're now up to I think 23 states

where in the United States where cannabis is either available at least for medical purposes and we all know that that's a formality, it's very easy to get that medical license or it's available decriminalized, at least you don't face a prison sentence and the ruination of your life for smoking cannabis anymore, or actually in states like Washington, I've just passed through Washington state, it's completely free and totally legalized. Isn't that amazing? I was just there, saw my first pack of marijuana, of cannabis joints, have you seen that? I have, I have indeed seen that and as a matter of fact, although I'm renowned for having

given up cannabis three years ago, I made a big point of that and it was a big point for me because ayahuasca stopped me with a very abusive habit that I had with cannabis in October 2011, but our mate Joe Rogan smoked me up live on his show. Of course he did. A few weeks ago, I was talking, I was saying look after three years, because I hugely valued my cannabis in many ways and I was saying after three years of completely, I just haven't touched cannabis for three years now, and I was saying I thought maybe I'd reached a point where I could dip my toes back in the water, have an occasional joint, maybe

not even a whole joint, just two or three puffs, and approach it in perhaps a more reverential and sacred way instead of just abusing it 16 hours a day like I was doing. I was speculating about this on Joe's show, so he says, you know, why don't you start now? Well, you know, I thought, okay, why not? And I had three puffs on this very pleasant herb and enjoyed it very much, and Joe and I carried on talking afterwards. It's amazing actually when you haven't smoked cannabis for three years.

See, when I was a heavy smoker of cannabis, actually I vaporized it mainly rather than smoked it, but when I was a heavy user of cannabis, it was very hard to get stoned even with very strong stuff. I built up a huge tolerance to it, but my goodness, those three puffs, I was completely stoned. Joe and I talked for an hour and a half afterwards, I had to call my wife to come and get me. I couldn't drive home. Wow!

I was still, so, you know, what a tremendous value for money there, you know, I get stoned for like six hours on three puffs, it was really great. And so it occurred to me, well, you know, why not actually just do that occasionally just at the end of a day or over a weekend, not start at nine in the morning and smuggle all day long. I'm never going to do that again. Right. I don't want to be that person anymore.

I want to have the clarity that I have when I'm not stoned, but I have a feeling that I can manage my relationship with cannabis now. So, you know, I got hold of a couple of very nice joints in Washington state and as it should be, and when the sovereignty of responsible adults is recognized as it is in Washington state now. You know, we have labeling on the package. It tells us exactly what the CBD content is, exactly what the THC content is. You know, this is good.

We want this information. And this is how it should be. This is what the war on drugs has prevented. It's prevented people from making free rational choices. If you heard the Timothy Leary quote that the prohibition on psychedelics is not a prohibition on psychedelics, but actually a prohibition on the research of psychedelics, because people are going to continue to take psychedelics, it's just that the scientists aren't going to be able to study them anymore.

Exactly. And again, this is something that's breaking down also, because we're beginning to see those old taboos, that old demonization of psychedelics breaking down at least at the level of medical research and important new studies being done, which is showing the tremendous healing potential of these ancient plant allies, of plant and fungal allies of ours. Anyway, to return to my point, state by state, what's happening in the U.S. is that people are voting with their feet and they're saying, look, we are responsible adults and we refuse to be dictated to by central government.

And if we choose to smoke cannabis, then we're bloody well going to smoke it. And at the state level, the laws have been changed. The federal government still has not caught up with this, but I would suggest it's reeling with shock at what is going on. And all of the myths are going to break down, because wherever cannabis has been fully legalized or indeed generally made more available, we haven't seen the collapse of society that the war on drugs lobby predicted. Nor do we even see a massive increase in the consumption of cannabis.

It's just a fundamental freedom, the right of the adult to make choices over their own, his or her own consciousness. And since the United States led the war on drugs that caused so much misery all around the world, it's superb that the American people are leading this fight back against the war on drugs. And I predict that we're going to see many of these old barriers that cause so much misery crumble in the coming five years. And this is a result of the awakening to consciousness of huge numbers of people in the United States.

So I take this, and many people would say, oh, what's that? It's really trivial whether you smoke cannabis or not. Well, no, I don't think it's trivial at all, because I think that a very fundamental issue, which is the issue of cognitive liberty, the right of adults to make choices about what to experience in their own consciousness while doing no harm to others. That is the basis of freedom in our society, and we need to revert to that freedom. And again, this is a result of an awakening of consciousness. Same goes for the general issue of health.

We're no longer prepared to blindly trust our health to some so-called expert. We might choose to consult that expert, that doctor, that physician, but we're also going to look into the subject ourselves in great depth, and we might make choices that are different from the choices that the medical or indeed the psychiatric establishment seeks to foist upon us. These are a few examples of big changes in consciousness that are taking place, and this is just the beginning of the flood. It's going to, the floodgates are open now, and nothing's going to stop them.

Graham, to go deeper into the legalization or the decriminalization of cannabis as being a sign of this awakening and perhaps somewhat of a lubricant for this awakening, is there any credibility to things that I've read that cannabis was actually a sacrament in a great many of the world religions and was used ritualistically in ceremonies, and then that ritualistic use of cannabis got replaced with just burning incense or sage or burning non-psychoactive substances? Certainly the case. This has an ancient and revered history in India, for example, and indeed it's still

used for sacramental purposes by sadhus in India. There's evidence from prehistoric graves across Eastern Europe and into the Middle East of the sacramental use of cannabis and of cannabis being buried with the dead in a reverential way. I think there's no doubt that it was very widely used. The evidence came out that William Shakespeare, the great William Shakespeare, was a cannabis user in his house in Stratford on Avon in England. A cannabis pipe was found with residue in it.

He was a cannabis user. I think people have been getting inspiration and healing from this extraordinary medicine for thousands and thousands of years, and it's really only in the last century, really less than that, that we've had this ridiculous war on cannabis, which has led the charge of the war on drugs, which has really been a war on consciousness and a war against fundamental personal freedoms. That's why I feel it's so important that the change has been led at the grassroots level by Americans who have made the decision that they're not going to put up with that imposition

on their consciousness anymore, and they're just not going to accept it and have changed the laws. This will have an effect all around the world, and it's going to be very positive. Because again, the skeptics would say, well, who cares whether we're allowed to smoke cannabis or not? It's just a trivial recreational thing, but actually, I think it's a litmus test for the state of freedom in the society we live in. If that society supposes that it has a right to impose itself directly upon the consciousness

of individual adults and actually to send them to prison if they break the consciousness laws, then we have no kind of freedom at all. We need to sort this issue of freedom out before we start going on about all the other issues of freedom that are, of course, of great importance as well. Doesn't it feel as though this prohibition that's been going on for so long is an intentional suppression of a kind of alien consciousness that seems to be attempting to manifest itself on this planet? I think that if you mean an alien consciousness is attempting to shut us down, is that what

you're getting to? Well, no, I mean, no, it seems as though the information that comes not just from cannabis when you smoke enough of it or from dimethyltryptamine, from psilocybin, or from any psychoactive substance that has a historic use religiously or ceremoniously, that information that comes out has always been described either as communication with angels, recently Terrence McKenna coined the phrase self-transforming machine elves. But all these terminologies seem to be more of a reflection of whatever the highest technology is in existence at the time that the person has contact with these entities through the

psychoactive substance. And if that is the case, if people are really communicating with beings, and I think that anybody who has taken enough mushrooms will say that if they at least felt like they were communicating with something bigger than themselves, whether or not they believed it or not, then the prohibition would actually be an attempt to try to shut those beings out of this dimension by closing down the subjective portals that are opened up when a person takes a psychedelic. Yes, well, this is a complex issue, because reality itself is deeply nuanced and complicated. I've had plenty of experience over the years of communication with entities with intelligences

who appear to be non-physical in form, who communicate telepathically, and who I gain access to through smoking DMT or drinking ayahuasca, where the active ingredient is anyway DMT. Of course, psilocybin is highly effective in this area as well. But I think it's important to emphasize that as we open ourselves up to this wider reality, not everything on the other side of the veil is positive or benign. We should not pretend that. It's not like evil and darkness only adhere in the material realm. I think those forces are at work in realms beyond this realm as well.

I think we're always subject to their influence, whether we like it or not. What's important about altered states of consciousness is that we can begin to get to grips proactively with those influences. We can begin to make choices, not just in the material realm, but in the whole of what I would call the totality, the wider reality that surrounds us that we're immersed in, but that is often invisible to our senses. This is what is extremely important about shamanism, because the shaman is a person who seeks to engage with the realms beyond the veil in a proactive way and to control

and diminish the power of negative forces and to enhance the power of positive forces. So I would take your point just a little bit further. I would say that it is at least possible that there are forces and powers and entities beyond the veil which seek to keep our consciousness enchained and seek to prevent us from gaining full access to the potential of our consciousness and seek, as the ancient Gnostics put it, to snuff out the divine spark in man, actually to convince us that we are simply material beings and that there is nothing more to us than that. Once we are able to move beyond the veil, we enter a realm of much greater responsibility

and much greater choice, just as we must choose between good and evil, between dark and light, in this material world. So also, once we are confronting the wider reality that powerful psychedelics open up, and I do believe that's what they do, I don't think these are just illusions of the brain. Once we're confronting that wider reality, then we are also facing choices at that level. So it's important to recognize that not everything is sweetness and light in the garden. If you're a society like the ancient Aztecs, you might use Silo Sybin, as they indeed did, to communicate with demonic entities, and if you choose to accept and listen to what

those demonic entities are saying, if you choose to embrace the wickedness and cruelty that they're whispering in your ear, then the result can be true horror. So I think there's an issue of choice and responsibility here. Choice is what defines the human creature, that we always, at every level, even at the minutest level, and at the grandest level, involving reality as a whole, we always have the power of choice. Nobody should ever say, I had no choice in what I did. We always have the power of choice.

Well, I'm sorry to cut you off. Well, I was just going to say, it's those choices that define us, and they are not limited to the material realm. What the war on drugs has done has sought to force upon us the illusion that there is nothing more to reality than the material realm. In a way, the Garden of Eden story says it all, because what that is saying is that we, in the Garden of Eden, if you recall, Adam and Eve, I'm not a Christian, by the way, but this is an interesting point to look at, Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge

of good and evil, and it is the serpent which encourages them to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For the mainstream Orthodox Christianity, the serpent is seen as the bad guy, and God, who is so angry with Adam and Eve because they've eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is seen as the good guy. The ancient Gnostics turned that whole equation around, and they said that actually the entity who calls himself God isn't God at all. He's this minor, puffed up, egotistical, cruel, selfish, jealous supernatural who

seems to just utterly control humanity, they called him the demiurge, and that the serpent is actually the good guy because we must have knowledge of good and evil. If we are to progress at the spiritual level, we cannot be denied the right to make those choices. We must be able to make our mistakes and learn from them. If we are placed in a situation of pristine ignorance where we don't know the difference between good and evil, then there's no learning experience available for us in this or any other realm.

I think that this is an interesting point to consider because, especially since from the Gnostic point of view, the tree of knowledge of good and evil is almost always portrayed as a psychedelic mushroom, either as Silo Saibin or as Amanita Muscaria. That's what I think the psychedelic experience properly handled. Again, it's important to be clear. Psychedelics are a very powerful matter. Yes, people can use them recreationally if they choose to do so, but I personally don't go for that.

I think we're into very serious personal work with psychedelics. It's important to get the setting right. It's important to be in a safe, nurturing, loving space. It's important to realize that the hours or, in the case of DMT, the minutes ahead of you are minutes that may change your life and that you're going to undertake deep personal work during that time. I think if we approach that experience with reverence, with respect, with a sense of responsibility, a lot can be got out of it and we're confronted by the possibility of an infinite reality

far beyond the material realms that we are persuaded by the controlling forces of our society that our potential is limited to. In that infinite reality, we will also be confronted with choices between good and evil. Sometimes, engaging in altered states of consciousness, some societies have chosen the path of darkness with horrible consequences, so all I'm saying is let's not pretend it's all sweetness and light out there. Yes, this is what Ram Dass says in some lecture I heard him say, just because a being does not have a body does not mean it's telling the truth.

Exactly. I think a lot of people who get into channelers and stuff like that, they think that just because this extraordinary entity or force is coming through a person that therefore everything it says must be right and that it isn't functioning in the same way that human beings are, it actually, are you familiar with the Buddhist mandala, the samsaric mandala? Do you know about this? Not really, no. Tell me about it.

It's pretty cool. It's just a representation of the sort of way that the three cardinal hindrances, anger, aversion, and attachment sort of spawn the entire illusion of existence, but it's curious because in one of these rings is portrayed all the various forms of life, and there's animal life, there's human life, there's the hell realm, and then what's really curious is there's a realm of demigods and gods, but the realm of demigods are portrayed as being always at war with each other. It's curious just because it seems to coincide with this idea that there are not just good

entities out there, but there are also entities that are trying to enforce their will. It's really interesting to me that there seems to be, as you call it, a veil, that on both sides of the veil, it is being guarded by humans on this side and on the other side by malevolent beings who, for whatever reason, don't want humans who are functioning within this incarnation to be able to expand their consciousness enough to see how vast and beautiful the universe is. Why? I understand on this side of the fence why people might not want it to happen because

it's probably hard to sell cars to people who have awakened to the idea that we exist in such a beautiful and glorious and opulent universe, but why on the other side? What are these beings? What are these dark forces? What is their choice? Why are they making the choice to harm the world? That's a very good question, and I think it raises interesting points. You see, we don't know how rare and unique the physical manifestation of life is.

We don't know for sure, and until very recently, it was habitual to think that life on Earth was the only life in the universe. In recent years, we've become aware of other solar systems and other planets going around them that look capable of containing life. Sitting here right now in the 21st century on Earth, we actually don't know whether we are a unique experiment of the universe or whether we're part of something much larger, whether physical life manifests on every other planet. Secondly, we actually don't know whether physical life is simply one aspect of life.

I'm inclined to believe that consciousness comes first and that consciousness is fundamentally non-physical. What Shamans call the spirit world is not a physical realm, but it is real, nevertheless, and it is inhabited with entities that can take many, many different forms. We just don't know, at the moment, it's all a mystery. All we know is we're here, we are conscious, and certain experiences are possible. Now, it may be the case that the entire physical realm, whether it is confined just to this Earth, which I doubt very much, or whether it manifests through billions of star systems

all across this incredible, amazing, miraculous, almost impossibility called the universe. We don't know, but it may be that all of this is a creation of what Shamans call the spirit world. If consciousness comes first, if consciousness is fundamental, if it's as fundamental as gravity, for example, and yet is non-physical informed, it may be that conscious intelligence has sought to create physical realms in which it is possible to undergo experiences for which there are physical consequences where the choices you make have instant physical consequences upon you.

It may be that the whole duality of our realm is a teaching tool to enable us as spirits to learn, and grow, and develop, and just as there are jealous and wicked people who can't bear to see someone else succeed in this realm, it may be so in the non-physical realm as well. There may be envious, ugly spiritual entities who can't bear to see the growth of light and of shining beings filled with generosity and love, and who thrive on shutting that down, psychic vampires. Many of the ancient traditions of mankind suggest that this is so.

There may be a battle at work in the cosmos, as the Gnostics always suggested, between good and evil, between dark and light. It may be that this physical realm, whether it's confined to the earth or whether there are billions of inhabited planets around the world, the whole shooting match of physical realms may have a huge part to play in the outcome of that cosmic struggle that the choices that we make between darkness and light, between good and evil, how we define ourselves may have consequences far beyond ourselves into the cosmos as a whole. The cosmos may be in a process of constant growth and evolution, and there may be forces

which are invested in shutting that down, just as there are forces that are invested in growing it and filling it with light. I think these may sound like abstract or idle speculations, but I think we're confronted by so much mystery. Just the very mystery of being alive at all is so extraordinary if you stop to think about it. I mean, we take it for granted, but really it's incredible to have this consciousness, to be able to experience love, to be confronted by the fine choices that we have to make every

minute of every day. It's a miracle that we have that at all, and it may be that it's part of something far bigger than we have been persuaded to believe. Oh, yes, I think so, and this gnostic viewpoint or the viewpoint that you're talking about right now, it's different from some ideas, for example, in Hinduism, the idea that everything is just an expression of God, and that even the most ferocious of entities, or even the demonic entities that are written about in the various Hindu scriptures, even though Hinduism isn't the right word for what that is, but the symbols that they use are all

just representations of this divine, this play that's happening as God expresses God's self into the universe, but it sounds like what you're talking about in what the gnostics are saying is that in this battle, there is actually the possibility for the darkness to win out. Yes, that's precisely what the gnostics are saying, and what they're saying is that humanity has an important part to play in this, that as we were brought down into matter, and as we manifested in a material realm, we became a singularity, something unique in the universe. A divine spark was placed within us, and this divine spark carries the entire future of

the universe, and that if we allow that divine spark to be snuffed out, then there is nothing but darkness, and that the human mission is to recognize that divinity within us, and to nurture and grow it, and that's why the society we live in today has been so truly demonic, because whether it has been controlling us through the big mainstream religions, which now in some areas are losing their grip, although in other areas they are not, which have been telling us spirituality is only this way, only the way mediated by the rabbi, the priest, or the mullah, or whether it's manifested through the crass materialism of capitalist society, where we're told that we are just here to produce and consume, and

we must define ourselves in terms of our wealth, and seek to score points over others. All of this, whether it's under a spiritual disguise in the big mainstream religions, or whether it's the manifestation of the production and consumption ideology, all of this is shutting down the divine spark within us, is preventing us from recognizing and nurturing our own spirituality. After all, how can you nurture your own spirituality if you've been persuaded to believe that there is no such thing as spirituality, if you've been persuaded to believe that we are just these material things, we live, we consume, we produce, we consume some more, and we die, and our story's over.

I mean, that's the miserable philosophy of scientific materialism, and it manifests through a culture in which we are persuaded to define ourselves by how much money we have. That's fascinating to think that there is a religion that the members of the religion don't even realize that they are high priests in the religion, such as Dawkins, for example. Such as Richard Dawkins. I mean, he is a high priest of what my friend John Anthony West calls the Church of Progress. This is what it is. This is a religion when Dawkins says that there is no life after death.

It sounds like a scientific statement because it comes from a highly qualified scientist, but it's not a scientific statement. It's a statement of actually what is a religious belief, except an unevidence belief in a proposition that you have no proof for. The proposition that there is no life after death is not evidence. There's no evidence for that proposition. There's no proof that there is no life after death. Therefore, it's a religious statement, and it becomes a belief system, and many people

adhere passionately to this belief. I've noticed on the internet, often on Facebook, I have a very active author Facebook page, and there are many who come to that page. If you question Dawkins, actually, they get very upset, very angry. Just as a century or two ago, people got very upset or very angry if you question the dictates of the Church. It's a very fashionable attitude right now to be an atheist, and a lot of people are terrified of ... I heard this interesting interview with Sam Harris.

Are you familiar with him? Yeah, very smart guy. Very smart guy. He's getting in a little bit of trouble right now because he was on Bill Maher, and I guess they both tend to make these sweeping statements about Islam and Muslims in the world, and you can't do that. It's interesting. Sam Harris, in particular, is interesting because he is ...

Well, actually, you can do that. Let me do that. I mean, the death cult within Islam at the moment, this notion that it's actually okay to go kill people because they don't share your particular religious prejudices. That's obscene. That's absolutely not just ... That puts it. Of course. That is obscene.

There's a great interview. I'll email it to you. Maybe I'll put it on here with Reza Aslan. You know him? Yes. I don't know if you saw this fantastic interview where he just dropped these two reporters into a intellectual wood chipper as they tried to do the sweeping thing about how Islam is evil, and he's like, no, you're talking about Islamic countries.

You're talking about particular countries that have an extremist viewpoint of this religion, and such as Saudi Arabia, for example, who's executed God knows how many people for possession of drugs, and then he was pointing out other countries and showing how in these countries there are more women in positions of power than in the United States. Well, maybe so, but I have to say, I think that's in spite of the religion. I have no time for Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. I do not excuse them from the obnoxious, vile, disgusting behavior that is perpetrated by their followers.

I do not excuse them. I cannot say, oh, this is just some bad people who are exceptions to the beautiful rules of the religion. I don't believe that for a moment. I think there's something fundamentally corrupt about the program itself. But it's hard for me to find that. I don't know enough about it. I started reading the Quran, and in the Quran, I definitely found references, Old Testament,

desert religion style, war references, and also I found it pretty interesting that whoever is channeling through Muhammad keeps saying, we? Yeah, that's in the book of Genesis, too, when Adam and Eve eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and that horrible old demon called Jehovah drives them out of the Garden of Eden. He says that they must be prevented under all circumstances from returning to the Garden of Eden, lest they discover the tree of life and become gods like us. It's a really chilling moment.

Like us? Like us? See, I love that. Let's say become gods like us. Who are these multiple gods that the editor has forgotten to edit out of the text, revealing there for a moment of truth in what is actually going on here? Yes. You know, I think that when I read Christianity, the New Testament in particular, especially

on a psychedelic, it's a beautiful religion. And I don't... Well, is it? I mean, it has this Redeemer theology, this Salvationist mythology. I mean, consider the notion. Consider what it actually means when we say that a figure called Christ died for our sins. But that came after the... Is he doing us any favors?

But you're talking about Paulian theology. You're talking about everything after the Gospels. It really isn't splitting hairs because when you look at the Gospels themselves, and you particularly the book of John, which was... It starts with a beautiful... And I'm not a Christian either, by the way. It starts with a beautiful... In the beginning was the word.

And this is gnosis. They say this was like a Gnostic scripture. Because Gnostics were at the heart of early Christianity, then the religion got hijacked. That's it. That's it. By the bureaucrats and the moneymen wearing the jackboot of the state of Rome. That's it. But I think you can still go back to the Gospels, and you can still...

If you just stick with them, and stick with whoever, the writings of these people who claim to have encountered this being, or who have embodied this teaching in the form of a being, then it's hard for me to find stuff in there that could be translated into, and therefore, let's blow up people with bombs. But when you get into the other stuff, Paulian theology, when you get into the stuff that the people who are like, you know, the Christians who are, I think, burning down Gnostic churches, or resting the Gnostics, or... Burning the Gnostics at the stake.

Yeah. When you get into that stuff. And torturing them, destroying their books, so that we actually only know about Gnosticism from the Nag Hammadi Library, which was deliberately buried 1500, 1600 years ago, and recovered in 1945. I mean, they were seeking to stamp out that faction of Christianity. And it's true that many of the Gnostics saw the figure of Christ as a great Gnostic teacher. If we're going to recognize what is of value in the established and existing Gospels, then

we must read alongside them the Gnostic Gospels. We must go back to the Gnostic texts and read those as well. Because right now, when we read the Gospels of the New Testament, we are reading a highly edited text, which has been edited to serve the interests of a very narrow group. And in order to understand those documents in their full context, we need to sit down and also read the Gnostic documents, which now have survived as a result of the discovery at Nag Hammadi in 1945, and which are available to anybody to read, by the way. The Nag Hammadi Library, the Gnostic texts are available in good English translation

and well worth having a go at. That's right. And if you're raised a Christian and you read the Gnostic texts, I remember when I first encountered some of them that I've read, your heart almost wants to break as you realize that you've been only given a tiny portion of this beautiful philosophy that's so psychedelic and so... So psychedelic. Yeah.

Exactly. But let's also not forget that the God that is worshiped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims is fundamentally the God of Abraham. This is the God of the Old Testament. I mean, this is stated clearly in Christian theology as well. It's not like God suddenly becomes somebody else 2,000 years ago. Christianity is a direct continuation of Judaic tradition, albeit with many finesses and development. I like to think of it as a transmutation.

I like to think of it as a transmutation, a very important difference. Yeah. But what about that entity? Does he suddenly transmute just because people decide to transmute? I don't know. I mean, the God of the Old Testament is a real old bugger. He's extremely... He's a shithead.

Absolutely. He's awful. He's just persuading people to do the most terrible things, carry out massacres, to take over other people's lands, sacrifice 50,000 here. It's a dreadful thing. What's been done in the name of that entity down through the thousands of years is truly horrendous. I think that part of the waking up of the human race that's going on now is that we have to

separate ourselves off from that entrainment in that cult of... I actually think it's a cult of insanity. We have to separate ourselves off from it and find a new form of spirituality that is relevant to our future. There's a difference between disbelieving in the God of Abraham and disbelieving in spirituality. It is possible to disbelieve in the God of Abraham and still be a profoundly spiritual being. I agree with you.

This brings to mind someone that I met during this last podcast tour that I did, said something to me that I thought was very smart, which was, don't try to change your parents. Try to change your kids. Exactly. Exactly. It really is smart. If you look at it from the perspective of this loon... I call that God you're talking about, loon loon, a kind of psychotic, out of control,

maniacal, power-hungry, homophobic doom thing. And if you want to take the Christian version, or the fundamentalist Christian version of it literally and think that Jesus was actually literally the child of this being, then that means that this Christ really does have the chance to be the Redeemer. In the same way that if you take it to a personal level, anyone whose father or mother was an alcoholic, angry, fucked up shithead, they have, through their physical existence, a chance to take that energy that was passed down through that dark force that possessed their parents and probably way before their parents, whether it's alcoholism, whatever

it is that could be a genetic trait that gets passed down, you get this chance to redeem the pulsation of life that you represent that trails all the way back to the Garden of Eden or whatever happened way back when. And I think that's why Christianity, even though it would be easy to write it off based on its followers, the Phelps family and all the other freaks out there, it still presents a chance that this Abrahamic shit-god could be redeemed through his son. Well, this is an interesting question. Praise God, convert to Christianity, Graham Hancock, we don't want you to go to hell except

Jesus is your savior, please. Actually, Duncan beautifully put, that was a passionate statement and really quite profound, I have to say. Let me just add a little point to that. The notion of the Redeemer, the notion that somebody else dies for our sins is profoundly un-liberating in my view because it is alienating us from responsibility for our own choices. It's like, the cliche is the Catholic who carries out all kinds of horrendous acts of wickedness and then goes into confession, confesses to the priest and somehow is absolved

from all of that. This twisted, tortured figure on the cross who died for our sins, that may have had a role to play at some place in history, but I think if we're going to move forward as a species, if we're going to move forward and create a better world, we have to realize that we're each responsible ourselves for our choices. We cannot devolve that responsibility on some supernatural being. Well, I think we are the Christ on the cross of time and that we are a matter that's been crucified in this terrible nexus between infinity and the temporal timeline we're trapped in.

I love it. Duncan, you're turning into a poet. This is beautiful. Yay! Say more. Say more. You know, it's so funny that I find myself, I'm not a Christian and it's really funny to hear myself defending it, but I think we probably actually see things in a very similar

way. I suspect so. Listen, there's a lot of good stuff in all of those religions. Our predicament now as human beings is to choose the good and reject the bad and not be lured into the illusions that they create, particularly the illusion that anybody has a monopoly on the truth, which is at the heart of the notion that if somebody disagrees with our religious views, then we have a right to kill them. That's the wicked idea that is prevailing in the world since the Crusades, since before

the Crusades. And you've embodied these ideas in your book, War God. Yeah. I mean, War God for me, I'm best known as a writer of nonfiction and indeed I'm working on a sequel to my best known nonfiction book to Fingerprints of the Gods. I'm working on a sequel that will be published in 2015. That's great news. But in the meantime, I have also been writing novels and I've written a series of novels

called War God. The first one was War God Knights of the Witch that was published in 2013. And the second one, War God Return of the Plumed Serpent, is published on the 9th of October this year. And these novels are about a dramatic moment in human history. And I really felt that the only way I could write about this truly and properly was to do so in the form of a novel rather than in the form of a detailed, footnoted, nonfiction book.

And that is the Spanish conquest of Mexico. And at the heart of it, these novels are adventure stories. They're full of battles and courage and the choices that people have to make in extreme circumstances. But at the heart of these books is the notion that spiritual forces are at work behind history and that demonic forces have chosen certain moments in history to mislead humanity and to take us off the path of light and put us onto the path of darkness. And that's why the War God of the Aztecs, whose name Witzel O'Poshley means hummingbird

at the left hand of the sun, while I was very interested to discover that he manifested to Moctezuma, the emperor of the Aztecs, during Silo Saibin trances, Moctezuma would eat Silo Saibin and then he would encounter this entity who would speak to him and whisper in his ear and tell him to go cut out more human hearts and sacrifice more thousands of victims upon the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. Then I was intrigued to discover that Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who turned up in Mexico with 16 cavalry, 490 men and 100 dogs of war, armoured in steel and trained to relish human flesh, that Hernán Cortés had visionary encounters with an entity that he believed

was Saint Peter and Saint Peter constantly drove him on to ever more heinous acts of wickedness and violence and cruelty. And then really the heart of the novel is this, that the same entity that takes the disguise of hummingbird to mislead Moctezuma takes the disguise of Saint Peter to mislead Cortés and drives these two men into acts of dreadful madness and plunges the whole of Central America into a catastrophe which resulted in fact in the deaths of 29 million people within a period of just 30 years, 29 million people were killed as a result of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and it set the stage for many of the horrors that were

to emerge later in the world, the whole attitude of the European powers to Native American Indians, to Native Americans who were called Indians because the European powers initially stupidly believed that when they discovered the new world they discovered a new route to India, that the whole, pretty soon they realized they hadn't done that, they'd come to a new world and the whole attitude to Native Americans that they could simply be brushed aside, stamped out, exterminated, the destruction of the Native American cultures of North America, the Spanish conquest of Peru which followed soon after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the whole episode of colonialism, of slavery, all of that I believe we would have had a

different story, a very different story if the Spanish conquest of Mexico had not gone the way it did, if against all the odds Hernán Cortés with his 490 men and his 16 cavalry and his 100 dogs of war had not crushed the Aztec power and imposed his model upon the new world, how much better it would have been if those two cultures could have met in a spirit of love. That is mind blowing. What would that world be like? I've never thought of that. What a different world. So much that the Native American peoples had to teach the peoples of Europe, so much wisdom, so much knowledge, so much understanding of the natural realm,

so much beauty in Native American cultures and so much that the peoples of the old world brought as well. If they come together in the spirit of mutual tolerance and love, we would be living in a completely different world today. In fact, if Moctezuma and the Aztecs had treated their neighbouring peoples decently, if they hadn't marched them up the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlban and cut out their hearts by the tens of thousands, Cortés would never have won anyway because the reason that he was able to win those battles against the Aztecs was that many other Native American tribes, notably the Clascalans, joined forces with him to overthrow Moctezuma because Moctezuma was the big, big bully of the region. So I'm

hoping that little by little, I'm identified as a nonfiction author. I'm continuing to write nonfiction, but I'm hoping that little by little, people will give my fiction a chance. Take a look at the novels I'm writing. I've got, if people go to my website, which is www.grayamhancock.com, and go to the clearly marked War God page, there are chapters to read free online from volume one, and there's a couple of chapters to read free online from volume two, which is in fact published tomorrow. Congratulations. Thank you. And what I'm saying, and if they scroll, if you scroll down that page, you'll see a video trailer runs for about a minute, 30 seconds. And I'm also making a special offer at the bottom

of that page. I made it first on Joe Rogan's show a few weeks ago, and I'd like to extend it here on your show, which is that if people will buy, I'm going to give you a link to that. People will buy either volume one or volume two or both and write to me at the email address that I give there. I will send them at my own expense, a signed dedicated book plate or several book plates to place inside their books. And this also applies even if they buy the Kindle edition, but this offer is only open until the 17th of October. So to be clear, a book plate is a label, which is designed to go inside the book. The book itself or the books themselves will come direct from Amazon in the usual way. And all

the links are up there on my website. But what I will do when I return from my travels, which will be in November, because I'm on the road until the beginning of November, is I will sit down during November and I will send out at my own expense, signed dedicated book plates to place inside those books that you've bought from Amazon. And the only one other thing I need to say, because I made this offer last year with volume one, and I actually did correspond individually with everybody who wrote to me, I can't do that again this year, because I have a huge book to write. And before the end of November, I have to be sitting down and just writing nonstop 16 hours a day. And I hope people

will understand I can't correspond individually, but I will show me proof of purchase, send me above all else your postal address when you email me at the address given on the war god page on my website. And I will at my own expense site personally sign and dedicate the book plates, put them in an envelope and send them to you by email, you know, you're never going to you're never going to finish the new fingerprints of the gods. If you do this, you're going to be writing this until 2019. You're going to be sending book plates. I want a book plate as soon as we get off the finish recording, I'm ordering a book plate. I'd be pleasantly surprised if the response were that great. I found that by

my readers, many of whom are, you know, good, great supporters of my work and huge help to me, they somehow somehow don't want to read me as a novelist. That's why I've put free changes online up on that page. I'm not asking you to buy the book blind. You can look and see the kind of stuff writing and see whether it's for you or not. Guys, read everything that Graham Hancock writes. Please, you can see that he is a genius into you can't truth is in everything, including fiction. That's ridiculous that people are more inclined to read your nonfiction. That must be incredibly frustrating. It's been a real problem. The publishing industry doesn't want me to publish fiction. It only wants me to publish nonfiction

because the publishing industry has, you know, really deteriorated so radically in the last 10 years. I remember a time when I used to publish in the early 1990s when editors actually had courage and would back, you know, would back an unusual idea because they had a gut feeling that it could work. Now editors have no courage and no power at all. Everything's in the hands of the marketing department and the salesman and they think in terms of brands, you know, and I am branded as a nonfiction author, but I refuse to be confined within those narrow narrow limits. There are some ideas that are so extraordinary that they can only be really fully explored in fiction where you can get inside the heads of the characters who you're writing about. And I

actually love writing fiction. I have a ball when I'm writing fiction. I really enjoy it and I've learned more about history by writing historical fiction than I ever learned from studying it in a standoff nonfiction kind of way because for the first time I'm forced to imaginatively inhabit the heads of those characters and to see why they did what they did. Graham Hancock, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for as always blowing my mind and giving me something to think about until the next time we chat. You are such a wonderful human. Thank you so much for your time. Duncan, it's been an absolute delight talking to you and I'm looking forward to the next time we do this. Wonderful. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thanks for

listening, everybody. Be sure to go to GrahamHancock.com. If you're in South Africa, check out one of his seminars. And thanks to Harry Shave Club for supporting this podcast. You can go to Harry's.com, promo code Family Hour and get $5 off any of those razors. If you like us, please, please give us a nice rating on iTunes and bookmark our Amazon portal. We've got some great podcasts coming up and I'll see you real soon. Bye. Meet the Bed by Thuma, the perfect platform bed frame. Thoughtfully handcrafted from upcycled wood, the bed is strong, backed by a lifetime warranty, and ships directly to your door. Assembly takes five minutes, no tools needed. To get $25

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