My favourite parts from an interview with Graham Hancock published on Omtimes.com earlier this month. Incredible. Please read the whole thing here: http://omtimes.com/2014/09/graham-hancock
Graham Hancock: Much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that’s taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.
I’ve got nothing against the entities our species presently calls “aliens”. These entities are real, in my view, although I don’t think we’re anywhere near understanding exactly what they are or where they come from. That being said, though, the fact is that I don’t need “aliens” – whatever they are — to explain any mysteries in our pre-history. Honestly I don’t need a single alien for the great pyramids or the Mayan calendar. I just don’t. What I need is a more advanced level of human civilization in that period than is recognized by historians. But let me be clear about this. We are dealing with something extremely interesting in the so-called UFO/alien phenomenon. It’s just that we don’t know yet exactly what lies at the source of that phenomenon and may be jumping too quickly to the conclusion that it is something as simple, and as relatively un-mysterious, as high-tech beings a bit like us but from other planets. In my book Supernatural, I looked at the similarities at the level of phenomenology, at the level of experience, between what were construed as abductions by faeries in the Middle Ages, and what are construed as abductions by spirits by shamans in the Amazon rainforest, for example, and what are construed as abductions by aliens in the technologically developed countries today. Whatever is going on – and I repeat there may be no single, simple explanation — it is the same thing in every case; I’m really very clear on that. One of the problems I have with the whole ancient alien lobby is that at one level it operates like a religion or a cult, by which I mean its believers are resistant to, and often get furiously angry about, other possible explanations that challenge their faith. But at another level members of the “ancient astronaut cult” are also crassly materialistic, seeking to reduce everything to a simplistic material reference frame, projecting our present and imagined future levels of technology onto what are in fact deeply mysterious and unexplained phenomena, and sticking their heads in the sand when it comes the implications of the latest research into altered states of consciousness – for example Rick Strassman’s groundbreaking work with DMT and human volunteers. I’m not saying altered states of consciousness explain everything about the UFO/alien phenomenon. I am not saying there are no physical aspects to the UFO/alien phenomenon, because there are. I’m simply saying that if we neglect altered states of consciousness and focus solely on the physical, we will never solve the UFO/alien mystery. My research for The Sign and the Seal taught me that we don’t always have to trust absolutely what academics tell us about our past; they can be biased, they can be prejudiced, and they can be wrong. Really, as we go further back – particularly as we go back beyond five thousand years ago into epochs for which we have no written documents whatsoever – the stories historians tell us become less and less about facts and more and more about just their opinion. So I felt there was room for a thoroughly researched alternative point of view. By seeking to understand our past better, I could also, perhaps, in some way, shed some light on the human predicament today. Lemuria is actually a 19th century idea and there is no ancient text that refers to Lemuria. Lemuria is about the fact that fossils of a species of animal, the lemur, are found on both sides of the Indian Ocean. The suggestion was that there must have been some joining continent at one point between Madagascar and India. At any rate, I repeat, and this is my point – there’s no ancient testimony for the existence of a place called “Lemuria”. The ancient testimony from Mu is also extremely dubious, since it rests on a 19th century mistranslation of a Mayan text popularized by Augustus Le Plongeon and then subsequently elaborated by James Churchward in the 1920’s and 1930’s. But never mind the names, the fact is that we do have genuinely ancient traditions of lost civilizations and lost lands all around the world. That’s why I find Lemuria and Mu a bit of a distraction, because Mu rests on a mistranslation of an ancient text and Lemuria is entirely a 19th century idea. Atlantis, on the other hand, is a genuinely ancient idea for which the earliest surviving written reference comes down to us from the fifth century BC in the works of the Greek philosopher Plato who told us that Atlantis was an advanced but arrogant civilization that was destroyed by floods and earthquakes in “a single, terrible day and night” 9,000 years before the time of his own ancestor Solon who lived around 600 BC – so therefore around 9,600 BC in our calendar. We find exactly the same notion with exactly the same dates in southern India, where the lost land is called Kumari Kandam, also said to have been swallowed up by the sea around 11,600 years ago. Indeed we find this notion of a golden age ended by a cataclysmic event all around the world. It’s testified to in thousands of myths and traditions.We have all the credentials to be the next lost civilization, in mythical terms.
I don’t think that any of this is inevitable; I think we have the power of choice. I think we can choose a new path; we don’t have to go down the murderous and self-destructive path we’re walking right now. It doesn’t have to happen. There is a new awakening of consciousness; people all around the world are waking up. They’re refusing to put up with the bullshit of the state and the big corporations and the endless hatred and fear and division that is sown amongst us. People are finding their voices and are waking up to a new consciousness. And I take great hope from that. I feel very positive, actually.
There is a whole avalanche of new material on consciousness suggesting that the materialist-reductionist model is completely wrong, and that consciousness is non-local, that it is not generated by the brain. Yes, there is a relationship between consciousness and the brain, but maybe it’s more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set. The brain is in a sense a transceiver or a receiver of consciousness rather than the generator of consciousness. And if that’s the case, then when we’re dead, consciousness goes on, because it isn’t made by our brains or our bodies, it’s just manifesting, incarnating in this body for a particular period of time. And that fits, of course, with almost all ancient spiritual traditions.
…and there’s more i want to share with you, but am afraid of breaking copyright rules. Read the rest here: http://omtimes.com/2014/09/graham-hancock
Peace!