328 - In Praise of Ayahuasca

Program Notes

[NOTE: All quotations are by Graham Hancock.]

“There are all kinds of ways to challenge ourselves. Some people do it by climbing a mountain or scuba diving. The most profound and challenging ordeals is to drink Ayahuasca. It is in a way the ultimate adventure.”

“I think that ayahuasca requires us to confront the truth about ourselves. That’s one of the fundamental, universal experiences of anybody who has drunk the sacred visionary brew of the Amazon.”

“All across the world we have a venal class of dishonest, self-serving bureaucrats who are using the power we give them to impose themselves upon us.”

“You have to understand that we’ve had more than 40 years now of massively financed propaganda called the ‘War on Drugs’.”

“Do we as adults have the right to make decisions about what we put in our own bodies and what we experience with our own consciousness without reference to the powers of the state, or must we seek permission from the state in order to explore our own consciousness?”

“I don’t think it’s an accident that I started smoking cannabis at round about the time I started researching “The Sign of the Seal”, which is the first book I wrote on a historical mystery. And I don’t believe I would have actually written that book if I hadn’t had this nudge from this curious plant ally called cannabis.”

“What ayahuasca does is to allow us to make accessible to our senses areas of reality that are normally off limits to us. I believe that those are real, not fiction of the brain. What the shamans call ‘the spirit world’, what quantum physicists might call parallel universes or parallel dimensions, I think they exist.”

“The model I use is that the brain is a receiver, or a transceiver, of consciousness rather than a generator of consciousness. And that as such, as a transceiver, the receiver wavelength of consciousness may be adjusted. And I think that’s what happens with ayahuasca, and I think that we gain access to other levels of reality and the intelligences that inhabit those other levels of reality, which, for some reason, are interested in the human race.”

“We ought to be able, in a responsible society, as responsible adults, to gain good information. If we want to experiment with our consciousness we should be able to gain good and reliable information easily. Instead it’s very difficult. We have to go underground. We have to stay out of the mainstream if we want to learn about ayahuasca.” And, “What ayahuasca does is to allow us to make accessible to our senses areas of reality that are normally off limits to us. I believe that those are real, not fiction of the brain. What the shamans call ‘the spirit world’, what quantum physicists might call parallel universes or parallel dimensions, I think they exist.”

LondonReal.tv
Graham Hancock’s Official Web Site

Graham Hancock’s YouTube Channel

The Joe Rogan Experience with Graham Hancock

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1932857400/190-7163455-9799955

Transcript

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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And again, I want to start out by thanking our fellow salonners who either made a direct donation to the salon or who purchased a copy of one of my books.

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I really appreciate your support in keeping these podcasts coming your way each week.

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every week. Hopefully, as the weather gets cooler, I’ll be a little better about doing a podcast every seven days and not letting it slip a day or so like I’ve been doing lately. Now, this week’s

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program features a man who I’ve wanted to have on the salon for a long time, but to tell the truth,

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I thought that I’d miss my opportunity for a podcast with him. The man I’m talking about, of course, is the writer

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and researcher of ancient knowledge, Graham Hancock, who, if you are also a regular listener

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to Joe Rogan’s podcast, you already know a lot about. In fact, after Joe interviewed him a while

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back, I more or less gave up on my longtime thoughts about doing a podcast that featured

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this intelligent and

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very engaging man, since I figured that you already heard about him and were now following

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him on his personal website at grahamhancock.com, which I’ll link to in the program notes for

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this podcast in case you’re interested.

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You see, it was back in 2006 at the annual conference on precession and ancient knowledge

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that I asked him if he would agree to do a podcast for the salon.

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But at that time, he wasn’t quite ready to step up so prominently on the psychedelic stage.

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At least that’s how I took it, because at the time, his book Supernatural had just been published,

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and at the end of the day on Saturday of the conference,

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there was an announcement that Graham would give an unscheduled lecture that evening

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based upon some of what he had written about in his new book.

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Looking back now, it seems a bit funny, but at the time,

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and remember, this was the time of little Georgie Bush’s lockdown American police state.

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Well, at the time, it was still more or less professional suicide to openly admit to using psychedelic substances.

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So, we were all told to turn off our recorders,

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and the people who had been doing a professional videotaping of the other lectures

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were also told that they could not videotape Graham’s remarks.

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Now, if you’ve read Supernatural, you know that it’s one of the best journeys through

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historical shamanism that’s ever been written.

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In fact, along with Jim Fadiman’s new book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, I think

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that Supernatural is an absolutely essential requirement for your psychedelic library.

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It’s that important, in my opinion.

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So, for over an hour, way back in 2006,

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we were privileged to listen to Graham talk about the research he conducted as he worked on his book.

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And after his talk, like an excited little schoolboy,

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I rushed up to him and told him about the Psychedelic Salon podcast,

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which at the time were only a little more than a year old.

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And while he was very courteous, he nonetheless declined to, at that time, make so public an expression about his expanding explorations into realms of consciousness that we often feature here in the salon.

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However, he did tell me to keep in touch and that at some later date he would be

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more than happy to accommodate me. And then, in my typical fashion, I neglected to follow up.

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Since that time, and particularly in recent years, Graham has made quite a few appearances,

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giving lectures and interviews that can be found on his YouTube channel and elsewhere.

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So, I was content in knowing that his story was reaching quite a wide audience. Thank you. until Graham Hancock’s appearance on that video podcast, well, I wasn’t aware of that podcast.

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But after surfing over to their website and watching some of their other programs,

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well, I’m hooked.

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It’s a really terrific show, and I highly recommend it.

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Anyway, I watched their interview with Graham

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and found it to be one of the best interviews of him that I’ve come across.

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You know, it’s right up there with his visits on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which I also highly recommend.

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And after listening to Brian and Nick’s conversation

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with Graham on London Real,

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my plan was to promote it in my next podcast

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and encourage you to watch it for yourself.

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Then, very much to my surprise,

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I received an email from Manjari Kulkarni,

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who is the Public Relations Coordinator for

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London Real, and Manjari offered to let me podcast the audio version of the interview

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here in the salon.

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Needless to say, I jumped at the chance.

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So buckle up your seatbelt and get ready for this exciting ride with one of the most exciting

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minds around today, Graham Hancock.

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This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. This is Nick Gabriel.

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And joining us in studio today is writer and journalist Graham Hancock,

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who’s the author of Fingerprints of the Gods, Supernatural, and Entangled.

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Graham, welcome.

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Thank you. Good to be here.

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It’s a real pleasure having you here. I heard once that you had said that all politicians should be required to drink ayahuasca 10 times before taking office. Did you say that? I did say that. And I actually do believe

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that to be the case. I think that ayahuasca requires us to confront the truth about ourselves. That’s one of the fundamental

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universal experiences of anybody who has drunk the sacred visionary brew of the Amazon.

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And confronting the truth about yourself in absolute honesty and clarity I think is a useful exercise for anyone

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but I think it’s a particularly useful exercise for anyone who wishes to present themselves as

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a leader of others. I think the leadership role is one that really does call for honesty,

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and that is what is absolutely lacking amongst our politicians in the world today.

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I mean, all across the world,

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we have a venal class of dishonest, self-serving bureaucrats

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who are using the power we give them

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to impose themselves upon us.

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And I think if they were obliged to confront the truth about themselves,

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they might do a better job.

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I’m trying to envision Mitt Romney taking ayahuasca or Obama taking ayahuasca.

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It’s not going to happen.

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I always wonder if they might not even want to run for office after taking ayahuasca.

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It might well change their view that they don’t want to run for office at all.

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They might feel that they don’t want to do that anymore. It is a life-changing experience, and it calls for inner resources

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of courage and determination and will to go through with an ayahuasca journey. And it

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does make you think

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about the world you live in

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and your place in it

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and your impact upon other human beings.

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And that’s what’s,

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contrary to what they tell us about themselves,

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that’s what’s really lacking,

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I think, in the political class

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around the world today.

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I find that when I tell people

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about our ayahuasca journey,

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which we’ve documented

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and we’re very serious about,

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is that a lot of people just quickly kind of tune out when you start talking to them about that.

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Well, you see, you have to understand that we’ve had more than 40 years now of massively financed

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propaganda called the war on drugs. And ironically, we ourselves, the taxpayers around the world, have paid for

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that propaganda to be beamed at us with our taxes. And this has been a systematic effort

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to persuade us that any consciousness-altering drug, other than alcohol, caffeine, or tobacco,

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which are all consciousness-altering drugs,

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of course. Any consciousness-altering drug which is not channeled to us through the

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large pharmaceutical companies, because, of course, Ritalin is a consciousness-altering drug,

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and Seroxat is a consciousness-altering drug, and Prozac is a consciousness-altering drug,

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but all of those you know are

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supposed to be okay because they come to us through big pharma but any consciousness altering

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plant or substance which may have been in use in human cultures for thousands and thousands of

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years such as such as ayahuasca has been subjected to 40 plusplus years of extremely negative, demonizing propaganda,

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which we take in with our mother’s milk.

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And it is extremely difficult to overcome the knee-jerk reaction to that.

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It’s become so internalized.

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In a way, it’s a very Orwellian world that we live in,

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where language is being used against us to control and manage the way that we think

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about things. So it’s almost impossible to approach the issue of quote-unquote drugs without

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immediately linking it to the notion of abuse or of frivolous irresponsible behavior or of danger

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or of threat or of damage. All of these concepts have been added together in the propaganda of the war on drugs, and it really messes up people’s thinking about what really is an extremely serious and fundamental issue of human rights, which is do we, as adults, have the right to make decisions about what we put in our own bodies and what we experience with our own consciousness

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without reference to the powers of the state? Or must we seek permission from the state

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in order to explore our own consciousness? And that is the very unfortunate state of affairs

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that we find ourselves in today, where certain states of consciousness, doing no harm to others in the privacy of one’s own home or in a ceremonial

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shamanic circle with reverence and respect to the universe and to nature that such a thing

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is considered abhorrent and wrong and we must not even be allowed to think about doing that this is

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the way that our minds are controlled in the society we live in today. And it’s so subtle and so clever

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and so deeply ingrained that we actually think these thoughts are coming from us, that they’ve

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not really been programmed into us. Is that conspiratorial or do you think it’s, I mean,

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are there people that are pulling on the strings to make this happen? I think there’s, I think

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there’s certainly people who’s pulling on the strings. I mean, the question of where the conspiracy comes from is an interesting one.

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I’m not big on the Illuminati and all of that stuff.

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It doesn’t actually ring any huge bells for me.

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I think it’s actually perhaps more mundane than that,

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that once you get a large bureaucracy set up with a particular objective and funded

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with public money, that that bureaucracy over a period of time becomes a self-serving,

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self-perpetuating entity. Any large bureaucracy will have its public relations arm. And the

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main function of that public relations arm is to convince the public who

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fund the bureaucracy in the first place through their taxes, is to convince the public that

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that bureaucracy is needed and is necessary. So we have a huge investment in our society,

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you know, whether through the police or various drugs control agencies or indeed the social

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services, we have a huge investment in our society in a world in which the use of any kind of drug is illegal and is considered to be harmful and

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damaging and dangerous. And huge bureaucracies, tens of thousands of jobs are tied up in

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perpetuating this war on drugs. And those tens of thousands of jobs are bolstered and

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supported by public relations operations, again funded by ourselves to persuade us that it’s right

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and just and true and proper that it should be so. In such a climate where, you know, no investment

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is being put into the alternative point of view, considering is there in fact perhaps a responsible

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and useful function for the things that we call drugs,

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which in the Amazon they don’t call ayahuasca a drug.

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Ayahuasca is a medicine.

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It’s an instrument and an agent of healing and of self-knowledge. But our society won’t allow those terms to be applied to such substances.

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So we have a situation where the very tools with which we think

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have been taken out of our hands, and the language itself has been so corrupted and so abused that

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it’s very difficult to think clearly on these subjects. And I find again and again that you get

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these instant knee-jerk reactions. Oh, they’re talking about a drug. This isn’t for me. They must be in some way

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bad or damaged or dirty people whose thoughts may be damaging in some way to me. And the person

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switches off, switches off their mind instantly. And then right there, right then, the government,

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the state, the big bureaucracies have won the battle. They’ve won it. Before any fighting was

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ever done, before any argument was ever engaged in, before any discussion was ever involved, they’ve won right there at the beginning.

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People just switch off their minds. That is the victory of bureaucracy.

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Maybe that’s ultimately one of the barriers that people seeking the truth have to face is that huge opposing pressure from the government

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and this brainwashing that we all face about ayahuasca.

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Maybe that’s one of the first tests you have to pass

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to be able to see through that.

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Do you know what I mean?

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I do know what you mean.

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It is indeed one of the first tests that you have to pass.

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You have to be a person who is prepared to some extent

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to go against the conventional wisdom.

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You have to be a person who is prepared to think for himself or herself.

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If you’re not prepared to do that, then you’re not going to be drawn towards ayahuasca.

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It’s like it’s part of the self-initiation process with ayahuasca

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that many, many people are never drawn to it at all because

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it involves taking that step over an invisible line, which we have been taught since childhood

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that we must not transgress. You have to be willing to do that just as the very first step.

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Once you do that, once you investigate ayahuasca, perhaps by talking to others who’ve worked with ayahuasca

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and finding out how reasonable and deeply thoughtful they often are as people,

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and once you work with the brew itself, it will begin further to help you to decondition yourself

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from these mental controls that operate on us in society.

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And that fundamentally is why it is regarded as so dangerous by the bureaucracy

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because it is a deconditioning agent.

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It’s very difficult to undergo a series of ayahuasca experiences

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and feel just the same as you felt before about the nature of society,

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the nature of the world, the nature of reality itself.

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For the people that don’t know out there,

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how did you come to your first time taking

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ayahuasca?

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I know it was quite a path.

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It was a path, yeah.

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I mean, first off, I actually wasn’t much of a user of so-called illicit substances

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in my youth.

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so-called illicit substances in my youth.

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I smoked a bit of ganja, a bit of cannabis in my late teens, early 20s,

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but it just drifted out of my life. And I had one LSD trip totally by accident in 1974 at the Windsor Free Festival.

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Somebody just gave me some, and I was with three friends, and I just took it.

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I didn’t even really think about what I was doing.

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I have to say I had the most amazing night.

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It was incredible.

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I spent 12 hours just walking around this amazing festival.

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It was like somehow I felt I’d journeyed back in time.

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It was a very powerful, extremely positive experience.

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But when I came out of that experience the next

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morning, I’m 24 years old at this point

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the

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thought I had was

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this experience was

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so powerful

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supposing it had gone the other way

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supposing that had been

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a very negative night

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for me as it happened to be for one of my

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three friends that I took LSD with that night.

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And I thought, actually, I’m not going to do this again.

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And I didn’t.

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I went on for many, many years without any contact with psychedelics at all.

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I did, in my 30s, around the age of 37, re-encounter cannabis and I found it a helpful agent and a helpful ally to me at I think it helped to free me up from an over-materialistic,

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over-rational, over-intellectualized view of the world

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and loosened off some connections.

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And I believe it actually played quite a fundamental role

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in turning me from a current affairs journalist

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into somebody who was studying ancient mysteries

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and interested in writing an alternative take

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on the view of the past.

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I don’t think it’s an accident that I started smoking cannabis

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at roundabout the time that I started researching

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The Sign and the Seal,

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which was the first book I wrote on a historical mystery.

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And I don’t believe I actually would have written that book

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if I hadn’t had this nudge

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from this curious plant ally called cannabis.

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I’m actually going to round that story off

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because a year ago in October 2011,

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after 24 years of continuous smoking of cannabis i mean i don’t do things by half measures

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you know i was i was smoking a very great deal of cannabis for 24 years

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in the latter years i used a vaporizer This is something that I would urge anybody who

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smokes cannabis to consider, by the way, because the combustion products of smoking the stuff,

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of lighting it and burning it, are actually quite harmful to the lungs. Whereas a vaporizer,

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where effectively you’re inhaling steam, is much less harmful to the lungs.

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Yeah, I just found that the vaporizers just got me too high.

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Well, they do.

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They do.

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But when you’ve been smoking nonstop for 24 years,

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it takes quite a lot to get you very, very high.

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And I found my last five years as a cannabis user,

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because I’ve stopped using cannabis now,

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my last five years as a cannabis user, I was using a vaporizer.

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And I found it very helpful. And I’d fire up the vaporizer at nine in the morning and I’d

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still be puffing away at two o’clock the next morning, seven days a week, you know, 52 weeks a

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year. Um, I’ve got off the ayahuasca a little bit, but I’m going to come back to it because it really

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connects to this. Um, in October last year, October,ober 2011 i made a journey to brazil and um

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and i had five ayahuasca sessions in brazil and during those ayahuasca sessions the intelligence

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whatever it is the mysterious entity that lies behind ayahuasca spoke to me very very directly

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and made it absolutely clear to me that my journey

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with cannabis needed to come to an end. That I had stepped over the line from sacred use

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of a helpful plant ally into daily abuse of that plant and that it was making me a toxic and unhelpful person

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to others who were close to me um and i i i had it had become clear to me in my last

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three or four years of cannabis use that this that this was the case for example i mean everybody

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knows this but it is one of the well-known side effects of cannabis i did become very paranoid when you become paranoid it makes you it makes you very

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unhelpful to people around you because instead of trusting and trust is the most fundamental

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valuable social you know skill it’s something we really do need to trust others it makes you

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untrusting and that’s and that’s not good So although I’d been drinking ayahuasca since 2003,

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it never addressed my cannabis habit.

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But in 2011, at exactly the point where cannabis really had ceased to serve me

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and I had started to serve it,

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ayahuasca stepped in a big way,

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and I was just kicked about for the whole five sessions you know shown all

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kind of really in very deep symbolic language why i needed to stop doing this and i needed to stop

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doing it straight away and and i actually couldn’t believe i expressed the intent we have a sharing

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after every ayahuasca session as i’m sure sure you know, and where we share our experiences. And I expressed the intent in those shared experiences to alter my relationship with cannabis. I did not believe

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after 24 years, it was intimately tied up with my writing. I felt that how could I possibly write

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without cannabis? I expressed the intent to alter my relationship with cannabis, to use it less,

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but I didn’t believe I would remove it entirely from my life. When I came back to England after those five sessions in Brazil, which were the most profound,

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the most earth-shaking, the most overturning of all my journeys with ayahuasca, when I came back

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from those five sessions, the very first thing I did after getting off the plane, exhausted,

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was go out of my office and fire up the vaporizer. And no,

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I fired up the vaporizer and I filled the bag and I took a puff and I started to feel awful.

00:23:13 ►

And I took a second puff and I was filled with such feelings of horror and self-loathing,

00:23:22 ►

such feelings of jeopardy, the sense that I was poised on the edge of an abyss

00:23:27 ►

over which if I just continued doing this one more day,

00:23:31 ►

I would step forever,

00:23:33 ►

that I expressed the vapor out of that bag,

00:23:36 ►

I switched off the vaporizer,

00:23:38 ►

and since that night, I haven’t touched cannabis again.

00:23:42 ►

I got rid of everything that I had.

00:23:43 ►

I no longer use it. I had. I no longer use it.

00:23:45 ►

I had no cravings to use it.

00:23:47 ►

Far from diminishing my writing,

00:23:49 ►

my writing has definitely improved.

00:23:52 ►

I’m not patting myself on the back.

00:23:54 ►

Others recognize this as well.

00:23:56 ►

And my output has improved.

00:23:58 ►

I used to struggle sometimes to do 300 words a day.

00:24:02 ►

I can write 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 words a day now. I’m much clearer.

00:24:07 ►

And

00:24:08 ►

the paranoia, the negative

00:24:10 ►

feelings that had been making

00:24:12 ►

me a toxic individual to be around,

00:24:14 ►

they’ve all cleared away, just

00:24:16 ►

gone. So I’m

00:24:18 ►

it’s astonishing that

00:24:20 ►

one plant

00:24:21 ►

intervened to stop me

00:24:24 ►

working with another plant.

00:24:27 ►

I think I needed to make that stop.

00:24:29 ►

I think I had gone with cannabis to the point where it was no longer helpful to me.

00:24:33 ►

I’m not saying that I’ll never smoke it again.

00:24:35 ►

Perhaps a day will come when it’ll be okay.

00:24:37 ►

I’ll know when that day is.

00:24:39 ►

But right now, it’s not something that serves me.

00:24:42 ►

And when I say that, I don’t wish to put down others who smoke cannabis

00:24:45 ►

because cannabis is an incredible medicinal plant.

00:24:49 ►

It’s a sensual plant.

00:24:50 ►

It’s a plant that opens many creative links in the mind.

00:24:55 ►

But it is a plant that can be abused.

00:24:57 ►

And it is a plant that can be overused.

00:24:59 ►

And I definitely was overusing it.

00:25:02 ►

I actually think we should approach

00:25:03 ►

all of these ancient sacred plants as sacred

00:25:05 ►

objects. I don’t think we should

00:25:08 ►

regard them as something

00:25:10 ►

that we must depend on 24 hours a day.

00:25:12 ►

There should be ritual, there should be

00:25:14 ►

ceremony, there should be reverence,

00:25:16 ►

there should be respect. And I was not doing

00:25:18 ►

that. And ayahuasca

00:25:20 ►

just intervened. And made it,

00:25:22 ►

it took the matter actually out of my

00:25:24 ►

hands. You know, I went back,

00:25:25 ►

as I told you, I fired up the vapor, I couldn’t smoke it. I was physically stopped. And for this,

00:25:32 ►

I have to thank ayahuasca. So for anybody who says, oh, ayahuasca is just another drug. Remember

00:25:38 ►

that ayahuasca actually is a teacher and that ayahuasca has been used in many different countries

00:25:46 ►

is a teacher and that ayahuasca has been used in many different countries to get people off harmful severe drug addictions for example heroin and cocaine addictions and it does so through

00:25:52 ►

presenting you with a revelation about yourself just as i was presented with a revelation about

00:25:56 ►

my overuse and abuse of of cannabis and and so i wanted to make that point, first of all, as to your question, how did I get

00:26:07 ►

into ayahuasca? Rambling discourse, but I was mentioning that I didn’t have a lot of contact

00:26:13 ►

with psychedelics in my youth, my early years. What happened is, as a researcher, I believe

00:26:20 ►

that I should not sit in an armchair and pontificate and just read books. I have to get into the subject I’m investigating.

00:26:27 ►

And it happened from about 2002 onwards

00:26:32 ►

that what I was investigating was shamanism

00:26:35 ►

and the role of shamanism in the origins of human culture.

00:26:39 ►

And that investigation led me to the fact

00:26:42 ►

that many shamans around the world use visionary plants as a means to get into the shamanistic trance.

00:26:49 ►

I was actually looking at cave art and the cave paintings

00:26:52 ►

and the new research which indicates strongly that that was the work of shamans

00:26:55 ►

who had experienced altered states of consciousness

00:26:58 ►

and were manifesting what they saw in visions on the cave walls.

00:27:01 ►

And I suddenly realized, I don’t just have to read about this.

00:27:05 ►

I can actually do this because there are still shamans in the world today. And that’s when I

00:27:10 ►

found out about ayahuasca, that there were shamans in the Amazon who were working with this powerful

00:27:15 ►

visionary agent, which is a mixture of two plants together with water, and who indeed often

00:27:20 ►

afterwards were painting their visions, just as the ancient cave artists painted their visions on the walls of caves. So I could have that experience. That led

00:27:29 ►

me in 2003 to go down to the Amazon and have my first 11 journeys with ayahuasca in the

00:27:35 ►

context of the Amazon jungle itself. And at that point, it was a research project for

00:27:40 ►

me. But I found the lessons that I was taught by ayahuasca and the experiences that I

00:27:48 ►

underwent and really a complete shift in my understanding of the nature of reality so

00:27:54 ►

valuable and so useful to me that despite the many difficulties involved in drinking ayahuasca,

00:28:01 ►

despite the fact that it is hard work physically, it does make you

00:28:05 ►

feel ill, and it does put you through the ringer psychologically. You really have to confront,

00:28:11 ►

you know, your own inner demons. Despite that, I felt that it was something that was teaching me

00:28:17 ►

valuable lessons. And so I made the decision to brace myself about once a year and usually to go down to Brazil

00:28:26 ►

if I can manage to do so

00:28:28 ►

and have five ayahuasca sessions

00:28:31 ►

over a period of two weeks in Brazil

00:28:32 ►

once a year or once every 18 months or so

00:28:35 ►

and learn what I can from those sessions.

00:28:39 ►

I was going to ask you about how often you did it.

00:28:41 ►

I mean, this time when you went last year of October,

00:28:44 ►

do you start to dread it a few weeks out or a few months out or is it something you kind of know you

00:28:48 ►

need to do yeah i’m i’ll tell you now because i’m going to be doing it in brazil again in january

00:28:53 ►

and uh and i am actually dreading it now i’ve got a trip booked um for peru in in december yes i’m

00:29:01 ►

just hearing you i’m terrified yeah. Yeah. It’s scary.

00:29:05 ►

You know, there are all kinds of ways in this world for us to challenge ourselves.

00:29:10 ►

Some people might do it by climbing a mountain.

00:29:12 ►

You know, some people might do it by scuba diving.

00:29:15 ►

Well, I’ve done that, actually, deep scuba diving.

00:29:17 ►

Some people might do it by jumping out of an airplane and hoping the parachute will open.

00:29:23 ►

You know, there’s lots of ways to challenge ourselves.

00:29:22 ►

jumping out of an airplane and hoping the parachute will open.

00:29:24 ►

There’s lots of ways to challenge ourselves.

00:29:29 ►

But actually, one of the most profound and challenging ordeals is to drink ayahuasca.

00:29:32 ►

It is, in a way, the ultimate adventure.

00:29:40 ►

But it’s an event like any adventure

00:29:42 ►

in strange and difficult and sometimes dangerous territory.

00:29:46 ►

You really have to brace yourself for it.

00:29:49 ►

Have you ever felt sometimes on an ayahuasca trip that you weren’t going to make it back?

00:29:52 ►

Yes, I have.

00:29:53 ►

I felt that I’m not going to make it back.

00:29:55 ►

And that’s why for anybody who’s thinking of working with ayahuasca,

00:30:00 ►

I would urge you don’t buy the ingredients on the internet and sit at home

00:30:05 ►

and drink it. Work with an experienced, knowledgeable, goodwill shaman, and a network will tell you

00:30:12 ►

who is good and who is not. Because there are, like any other area of human endeavor,

00:30:17 ►

there are people working in the ayahuasca field who are negative and who are not good. You know, this is, I’m afraid, human nature.

00:30:31 ►

Ayahuasca, I believe the substance, the brew itself,

00:30:36 ►

is a vehicle for contact with the realm of spirit and with profound and beautiful truths.

00:30:43 ►

But the realm of spirit is not without jeopardy.

00:30:46 ►

And when you open the door and enter that realm,

00:30:50 ►

people who have not had this experience

00:30:51 ►

may well think that I’m nuts in saying this,

00:30:54 ►

but there are intelligences out there.

00:30:56 ►

And not all of those intelligences are filled with light.

00:31:00 ►

Some of those intelligences are very, very, very dark

00:31:02 ►

and they seek to exploit human weakness.

00:31:06 ►

And unfortunately, they connect with negative human beings who sometimes present themselves as shamans.

00:31:13 ►

So there are bad shamans as well as good shamans.

00:31:16 ►

It’s important to know this.

00:31:18 ►

And so it’s important to do your groundwork very, very carefully before you go.

00:31:23 ►

And I would say never to drink ayahuasca alone it’s not something it’s something to be done in a social context in a ceremonial

00:31:28 ►

context uh with a with a knowledgeable and experienced guide do you have any rituals um

00:31:34 ►

prior to an upcoming um ceremony that you participate in like say meditating or i mean

00:31:41 ►

obviously you follow the diet for a few weeks before is anything you do

00:31:45 ►

to prepare yourself um I do I do a number of things so first first of all I cut alcohol out

00:31:50 ►

of my life um alcohol and ayahuasca are not good companions and it’s a good idea not it’s a good

00:31:56 ►

idea to be clean of alcohol for for at least a month prior to that um I just try to go into a still place in my mind and say, okay, I have an ordeal

00:32:08 ►

coming up and I have to prepare myself mentally for that to be as resolute as I can.

00:32:16 ►

And what am I looking for when I go into, what is my intent?

00:32:21 ►

Do you feel that’s important to have a, um, well thought out set of

00:32:26 ►

questions or, um, set of objectives before you actually, I do. I think it’s, I think it’s,

00:32:30 ►

I think it’s really, it’s really important to do that as anybody who’s, you know, worked with

00:32:35 ►

ayahuasca a lot will, will know, you know, what you intend for the session may not be what you

00:32:41 ►

get, but, but, uh, you know, what you get ultimately in the broad scheme of things was what you get oh yeah but but uh you know what you get ultimately in the broad

00:32:47 ►

scheme of things was what you needed you know find that out graham i’m really interested to know why

00:32:52 ►

um why you keep going back i mean surely you’re uh you’ve learned all that you need to learn in

00:32:59 ►

that realm or well no apparently not um you know because last, because last year’s sessions brought about a radical life change for me after many years of drinking ayahuasca.

00:33:11 ►

We have huge resistance. It’s very strong. It’s very built in. We fight against this. school which is teaching valuable lessons it’s worth spending time learning that and trying to

00:33:27 ►

not only learning the lesson but trying to implement them into the action of one’s own

00:33:32 ►

one’s own life that’s the hardest thing actually it’s to come back and integrate the lessons you’ve

00:33:37 ►

learned into daily practice and not to slip back into old and bad habits um so, no, I don’t feel I’m done with ayahuasca yet

00:33:47 ►

or that ayahuasca is done with me.

00:33:51 ►

But I do have to say that the experiences I had last year

00:33:54 ►

which led me to give up cannabis were so earth-shaking

00:33:58 ►

and utterly terrifying in certain ways.

00:34:14 ►

I mean, the shaman who I work with had to spend a lot of time with me during one of those nights because I was in a deeply fragile and emotionally disturbed state.

00:34:20 ►

Were you under attack from a negative entity?

00:34:22 ►

I felt that I was under attack from a negative entity? I felt that I was under attack from a negative entity. I felt that I was being shown the negative entity that I had invited in

00:34:32 ►

through my own negative use of cannabis over a very long period of time.

00:34:40 ►

Interesting. That is very interesting.

00:34:42 ►

I felt I was being shown that, and this is actually what it is.

00:34:45 ►

This is the thing that’s dancing all over you

00:34:47 ►

and really in the process

00:34:49 ►

of drawing you down into the abyss.

00:34:52 ►

Confront it.

00:34:52 ►

Deal with it.

00:34:54 ►

I mean, boy,

00:34:55 ►

I really had a very grueling,

00:35:00 ►

not just one night,

00:35:01 ►

but series of nights.

00:35:03 ►

So I’m absolutely apprehensive about going back and doing this again.

00:35:10 ►

I hope that I have integrated the lessons, that I have learned the lessons.

00:35:16 ►

I would be very grateful if Mother Ayahuasca gives me a gentler journey the next time.

00:35:20 ►

As I’ve had gentler journeys in the past, I would not like to be put through the mill again.

00:35:25 ►

No one wants that but it’s usually the best thing for us.

00:35:28 ►

It is the best thing and I’m able to serve as a living example of that because

00:35:33 ►

I have actually made a change in my life which is measurable, which is really there, it’s

00:35:39 ►

a real thing. I’ve changed a fundamental area of my life which I never believed that I would

00:35:44 ►

change.

00:35:46 ►

Wow. How do you describe to other people what happens, say, when you drink ayahuasca? I know

00:35:52 ►

we’ve got a bunch of other things to talk about as well, but how do you describe it to people?

00:35:56 ►

Is there a spirit involved? Is there some other entity involved?

00:35:59 ►

Well, I think, first of all, I don’t want to presuppose anybody else’s experience.

00:36:06 ►

I can only say what I feel is the case.

00:36:09 ►

And I’m not claiming that what I feel is the absolute truth.

00:36:14 ►

This is just my experience of the extraordinary and mysterious ayahuasca journey.

00:36:19 ►

It’s my reading of it.

00:36:21 ►

It’s my interpretation of it.

00:36:23 ►

I think that I’ve thought about this a lot, and I feel that what ayahuasca does is to allow us to make accessible to our senses areas of reality that are normally off-limits to us. that those are real, not fictions of the brain, what the shamans call the spirit world, what

00:36:49 ►

quantum physicists might call parallel universes or parallel dimensions. I think they exist.

00:36:55 ►

And I think that we as a species and as a social animal conditioned in, particularly

00:37:02 ►

in Western technological society, have been brought up from

00:37:07 ►

childhood to shut ourselves off from those other areas of reality the areas that are actually

00:37:13 ►

accessed in dreaming and visionary states we’ve been taught to despise them to regard them as

00:37:18 ►

aberrations and to regard them as fictional just made up by the brain. I don’t think they’re made up by the brain.

00:37:31 ►

And I always, the model I use is that the brain is a receiver or a transceiver of consciousness rather than a generator of consciousness. And that as such, as a transceiver,

00:37:36 ►

the receiver wavelength of consciousness may be adjusted. And I think that that’s what happens

00:37:41 ►

with ayahuasca. And I think that we gain access to other levels of reality

00:37:45 ►

and the intelligences that inhabit those other levels of reality

00:37:49 ►

which for some reason are interested in the human race

00:37:53 ►

and some of them in a very dark and negative way

00:37:57 ►

and some of them in a very positive and nurturing and helpful way

00:38:00 ►

and many have had the experience of mother ayahuasca

00:38:04 ►

of a female spirit of an entity who experience of mother ayahuasca of a female spirit of an

00:38:05 ►

entity who lies behind the ayahuasca vine for me she’s an angel who is who is gaining access to us

00:38:14 ►

through the ancient shamanistic technology of the leaf and the vine and water brought together

00:38:21 ►

that’s how she gains she’s never gained access to us in the normal, alert, problem-solving mode of consciousness

00:38:27 ►

with which we confront daily life.

00:38:29 ►

We have to be in an altered state of consciousness

00:38:31 ►

to access those entities.

00:38:33 ►

And amongst them is the entity

00:38:34 ►

that many have come to call Mother Ayahuasca,

00:38:37 ►

who is concerned with the jungle,

00:38:40 ►

who is concerned with the environment,

00:38:42 ►

who is, in a way, I called her an angel,

00:38:44 ►

but the mother goddess of our planet,

00:38:47 ►

and who realizes that the human race need help right now.

00:38:52 ►

We need help.

00:38:53 ►

Just as we are in the process of raping and destroying and burning down the Amazon jungle,

00:38:59 ►

it’s interesting that a spirit has come out of the Amazon jungle through the medium of the ayahuasca vine

00:39:04 ►

and started to speak to people all over the world and saying, whoa, you know, hang on guys,

00:39:09 ►

what you’re doing is not smart. You need to think again about what you’re doing. This is, this is

00:39:15 ►

another one of the universal experiences of working with ayahuasca. So what do, how would I

00:39:20 ►

describe the ayahuasca experience? First of all, brace yourself. It tastes horrible.

00:39:25 ►

It smells horrible.

00:39:26 ►

It most often will give you nausea.

00:39:28 ►

Most often will give you vomiting, sometimes diarrhea, make you sweaty, make you dizzy.

00:39:34 ►

Physically, it’s no fun.

00:39:38 ►

And secondly, prepare yourself to be confronted with a life review.

00:39:43 ►

Look at the place that you’ve played in the world amongst those who are close to you, amongst those who love you and those who you love, and just consider how you’ve acted and related to them.

00:39:53 ►

And you will be presented with the truth about that.

00:39:57 ►

It’s not an accident that many people find themselves in floods of tears in ayahuasca sessions because they suddenly realize that they’re not such a nice guy as they thought they were and and and it’s it’s that that sense of wasted opportunity that

00:40:10 ►

i wasted my time being so hurtful and toxic towards others when i could have been just so

00:40:15 ►

much better that leads to those those floods of tears very very often um but that’s a that’s

00:40:20 ►

painful but that’s an opportunity that’s look, we can’t change the past,

00:40:25 ►

but we certainly can fix the way we behave in the future.

00:40:28 ►

It’s giving us that revelation.

00:40:29 ►

Some people have said it’s like 20 years of psychotherapy in one night.

00:40:33 ►

Are you quoting me from my article?

00:40:35 ►

No.

00:40:35 ►

Well, maybe.

00:40:36 ►

I mean, that’s a well-known saying with ayahuasca,

00:40:38 ►

because as a matter of fact,

00:40:40 ►

quite a number of psychotherapists have taken ayahuasca,

00:40:42 ►

and they know that this ayahuasca will bring you to revelations

00:40:47 ►

that psychotherapy might take decades to bring you to.

00:40:52 ►

It’s really extraordinarily difficult,

00:40:56 ►

but you are being offered the opportunity to make changes in your life,

00:40:59 ►

and that is an incredibly valuable opportunity

00:41:01 ►

because most often it’s difficult to make changes

00:41:03 ►

because you simply don’t see they’re needed.

00:41:05 ►

Ayahuasca, sooner or later, she will show you what you need to do.

00:41:09 ►

Whether you do it, that’s up to you, but she will show you.

00:41:11 ►

And then beyond that, there’s the enchanted realm of vision.

00:41:15 ►

There’s the sense of a magical universe

00:41:19 ►

that we are actually not caught up in something mundane

00:41:24 ►

and physical and down-to-earth only,

00:41:28 ►

but in something that’s deeply enchanted and magical in this adventure of life,

00:41:34 ►

and in the incredible opportunity to be born in a human body

00:41:39 ►

and to undergo the teaching and learning experiences that life in a human body involves,

00:41:43 ►

undergo the teaching and learning experiences that life in a human body involves, and to live on this beautiful garden of a planet surrounded by the majestic wonder of the universe,

00:41:53 ►

to look up at night and see that and be part of that and wonder where we are in the scheme of things,

00:41:59 ►

that there is behind all this not just dead physical processes,

00:42:04 ►

is behind all this not just dead physical processes,

00:42:08 ►

but a profound magical intelligence,

00:42:10 ►

which is at work in the universe.

00:42:12 ►

Ayahuasca will show you that sooner or later,

00:42:16 ►

more clearly than anything else you could ever experience.

00:42:16 ►

It’s a wonderful description.

00:42:18 ►

You’re very outspoken about it.

00:42:20 ►

Obviously, we’ve talked about it on the show.

00:42:21 ►

We’ve written articles about it.

00:42:24 ►

Is there more we should be doing? Or do you think

00:42:25 ►

there’s only so much? Is the communicating is what we can do? We’re in a very interesting time here.

00:42:31 ►

I sometimes think, in my studies of history, there was a time in early Christianity when there was a

00:42:40 ►

thing called Gnosticism, which was a very different take on Christianity.

00:42:48 ►

It didn’t even see Christ as a physical being.

00:42:50 ►

It saw him as a spiritual entity, a teacher,

00:42:54 ►

whose purpose was to bring Gnosis,

00:42:57 ►

understanding, revelation of the meaning of life to us.

00:43:00 ►

And that Gnosticism, which was knitted in with early Christianity, was jumped upon by the Roman

00:43:09 ►

Catholic Church and the power of the state of Rome and utterly devastated and destroyed. And people

00:43:14 ►

right back then, 300, 400s AD, were being burned at the stake, something that the Christian religion

00:43:19 ►

did continue to do for many centuries after that. And for a long time, people who practiced Gnosticism had to do so underground.

00:43:29 ►

And they had to, and by the way, there’s strong evidence that Gnostics used visionary plants,

00:43:33 ►

particularly psychedelic mushrooms, in order to gain access to the divine.

00:43:40 ►

That there were underground groups which passed knowledge by word of mouth,

00:43:44 ►

which met secretly, which, this is rather like it is with ayahuasca today.

00:43:49 ►

It’s a whole alternative way of approaching the meaning and the mystery of life.

00:43:53 ►

And it, it can’t be done on the surface.

00:43:55 ►

It has to be done, particularly in the West.

00:43:58 ►

It has to be done under the radar.

00:44:01 ►

And this is, this is, is difficult because uh because you know and this is caused by this

00:44:07 ►

moronic thing called the war on drugs this this evil and wicked misuse of public money

00:44:13 ►

we ought to be able in a responsible society as responsible adults to gain good information if we

00:44:20 ►

want to experiment with our consciousness we should be able to gain good and reliable information easily.

00:44:26 ►

Instead, it’s very difficult.

00:44:27 ►

We have to go underground.

00:44:33 ►

We have to stay out of the mainstream in any way in order to learn about ayahuasca.

00:44:39 ►

So we live in a time where if people want to work with ayahuasca in the West, they have to break a law.

00:44:44 ►

And therefore, that requires a certain amount of discretion. And it’s difficult to get all the information that you need.

00:44:49 ►

You know, Graham, I wanted to ask you quite an open-ended question.

00:44:59 ►

You are obviously someone who’s had a very keen observation of the world

00:45:06 ►

for pretty much your whole life, it seems.

00:45:08 ►

You’ve looked into all these different systems.

00:45:10 ►

You’ve got a degree in sociology.

00:45:12 ►

You’ve done archaeology.

00:45:14 ►

You’ve traveled the world exploring.

00:45:17 ►

And I personally have heard many different theories

00:45:20 ►

on why or how we came to be here, the human species.

00:45:25 ►

And I’d really like to know what your theory is.

00:45:29 ►

Why do you think we’re here?

00:45:30 ►

Where did we come from?

00:45:31 ►

I know it’s quite a powerful question, but the layman’s answer, I guess.

00:45:35 ►

That’s a big one.

00:45:37 ►

I’ve been very lucky.

00:45:40 ►

I feel I’ve been blessed.

00:45:43 ►

I’ve lived a blessed life.

00:45:44 ►

I’m grateful to the universe for giving me the chance to live this life.

00:45:50 ►

I can’t give you any facts.

00:45:52 ►

I can only give you my view.

00:45:55 ►

Which is exactly what I’m interested in.

00:45:56 ►

Which is that this world is a theater of experience,

00:46:00 ►

that consciousness is fundamentally a non-physical thing.

00:46:06 ►

It’s one of the fundamental forces of the universe, like gravity, like electricity.

00:46:11 ►

Consciousness is a fundamental force of the universe.

00:46:14 ►

And I think that consciousness has chosen to manifest in physical form

00:46:18 ►

and perhaps has invested in a very long process of manifestation in the earth,

00:46:25 ►

a four and a half billion year process,

00:46:29 ►

using evolution.

00:46:31 ►

I am not against evolution.

00:46:33 ►

Evolution is obvious.

00:46:35 ►

It’s obvious.

00:46:36 ►

It’s a fact.

00:46:37 ►

It’s there.

00:46:38 ►

But it doesn’t mean there is no spirit.

00:46:40 ►

It’s wrongly used.

00:46:41 ►

People like Richard Dawkins say,

00:46:43 ►

I’ve demonstrated that evolution exists

00:46:45 ►

therefore there’s no meaning to life

00:46:46 ►

I don’t get the logical link that leads him to say that

00:46:48 ►

I would say that the spirit world

00:46:51 ►

for want of a better phrase

00:46:53 ►

has used evolution

00:46:55 ►

00:46:56 ►

manifest

00:46:58 ►

physical entities in which

00:47:00 ►

consciousness can emerge

00:47:03 ►

and express itself and learn lessons

00:47:04 ►

this world is a theater of experience.

00:47:07 ►

We are here to learn and to grow and to develop.

00:47:11 ►

We’re here to learn lessons, lessons that can only be taught in a physical realm.

00:47:16 ►

So it’s an incredible opportunity to be born in a human body.

00:47:21 ►

The whole biosphere is here to support us. Four billion more or more years

00:47:27 ►

of evolution have led us to this point where we can make these very fine distinctions between

00:47:33 ►

good and evil, between darkness and light, where we can make choices that will impact

00:47:40 ►

upon us and upon others in profound ways. This is an extraordinary opportunity.

00:47:47 ►

So I would say, don’t waste it.

00:47:51 ►

You were given this chance to be born as a human being.

00:47:53 ►

This is why society is so demonic today,

00:47:56 ►

because it exists to switch people off,

00:47:58 ►

to bombard our consciousness

00:48:02 ►

with meaningless messages of production and consumption

00:48:06 ►

that never get to the fundamentals of anything and to seek to persuade us that we’re just meat,

00:48:13 ►

you know, just accidents of physics and chemistry and that our only purpose is to produce and

00:48:20 ►

consume as much as possible. And when we die, we’re dead, and that’s the end. I don’t believe that for a moment.

00:48:26 ►

I think we’re part of a very, very long journey.

00:48:29 ►

I think we may come and manifest in human form

00:48:33 ►

on this earth many times.

00:48:35 ►

To me, reincarnation makes perfect sense.

00:48:37 ►

I absolutely think it makes sense.

00:48:40 ►

And there are consequences.

00:48:43 ►

If you live a wicked and evil life, if you don’t learn

00:48:46 ►

the lessons you’ve been given the opportunity to learn, if you detract from others’ sovereignty,

00:48:52 ►

if you add to the misery in the world, that will have consequences for you beyond this realm.

00:48:59 ►

Don’t ever imagine that it won’t. Really, we need to be very careful about what we do with this opportunity we

00:49:06 ►

were given and and but the first thing is to realize that that’s what it is it’s an opportunity

00:49:11 ►

for spiritual growth the ancient egyptians type to typecast it as as um the perfection of the soul

00:49:18 ►

that they that that’s what we’re here to do we’re here to take this this rough diamond and and turn

00:49:24 ►

it into a polished and

00:49:25 ►

glowing jewel. That’s the opportunity

00:49:27 ►

we’ve been given in the 70

00:49:29 ►

or 80 or 90 or 100 years.

00:49:31 ►

Whatever chance we get, it’s a random

00:49:33 ►

element in life. Whatever years

00:49:35 ►

we get, use them well

00:49:37 ►

to grow

00:49:39 ►

as a spirit and to help

00:49:41 ►

others to grow. There has to be

00:49:43 ►

a spirit of love behind this.

00:49:46 ►

If everything is selfishness and greed and me, me, me,

00:49:49 ►

and I’m looking after my interests,

00:49:51 ►

and I’m going to do down everybody else’s interests,

00:49:53 ►

well, that may serve you for a few years.

00:49:55 ►

But in the grand scheme of things,

00:49:57 ►

in the immortal, in the eternal scheme of things,

00:50:00 ►

it doesn’t serve you at all.

00:50:02 ►

It diminishes you and limits you and closes

00:50:05 ►

you down. Why waste that opportunity

00:50:07 ►

to grow? That’s what I

00:50:09 ►

think we’re here to do. I think we’re here to grow

00:50:11 ►

as spirits and the

00:50:13 ►

demonic nature of modern society

00:50:15 ►

is that it has severed our connection

00:50:17 ►

with spirit and even persuaded us

00:50:20 ►

that there is no such thing as spirit.

00:50:22 ►

You know, Brian, I think you should follow that

00:50:23 ►

and the best answer ever.

00:50:25 ►

Yeah, I was just like, wow.

00:50:27 ►

Wow, that was amazing.

00:50:29 ►

I want to find out about your new book.

00:50:32 ►

Can you talk about it?

00:50:33 ►

I know you’ve been working on it.

00:50:35 ►

So I’m known for these big non-fiction investigations

00:50:40 ►

of historical mysteries,

00:50:42 ►

of which The Law, I mean,

00:50:43 ►

There Was Fingerprints of the Gods is my best known book.

00:50:46 ►

And one day I may revisit the lost civilization quest that was behind Fingerprints of the Gods in another nonfiction book.

00:50:55 ►

But another thing that ayahuasca has done to me, and also myself, you know, I’m 62 years old now.

00:51:04 ►

I know that my stay on this planet is limited, as it is for all of us.

00:51:09 ►

We’re all here temporarily. Nobody lives forever.

00:51:12 ►

I believe it goes on. I believe something comes.

00:51:15 ►

But I want to make the best and the most of the years that I have here.

00:51:18 ►

And my particular gift, at whatever level it’s at, is writing.

00:51:24 ►

And I came to feel very strongly

00:51:27 ►

that I was done with non-fiction for a while, with the big historical investigation, and

00:51:33 ►

particularly so since my non-fiction writing had become more and more defensive because

00:51:37 ►

my work was so much attacked by academics that I needed to erect barriers of protection

00:51:42 ►

around every argument that I put and thousands of footnotes

00:51:45 ►

and detailed arguments just to make sure that the academics couldn’t twist and distort it in

00:51:49 ►

in any way I don’t like writing defensively and I came to the realization that actually

00:51:54 ►

where I want to exercise myself as a writer is in fiction and again ayahuasca played a huge role in

00:52:03 ►

this because my first novel which which was called Entangled,

00:52:08 ►

which is in fact the first volume of a series of two,

00:52:11 ►

was inspired by a series of ayahuasca visions.

00:52:14 ►

I was given the essential dilemma, the basic characters,

00:52:17 ►

the story that I was to tell,

00:52:20 ►

which is a story of the battle of good against evil,

00:52:23 ►

which has one character in the Stone Age 24,000 years ago

00:52:26 ►

and one character today in the 21st century,

00:52:28 ►

both young women who are brought together outside time

00:52:34 ►

by a being that I call the Blue Angel,

00:52:37 ►

who’s really Mother Ayahuasca,

00:52:38 ►

to do battle with a demon who travels through time

00:52:42 ►

and who works on the negative side of human consciousness.

00:52:47 ►

Now, I may want to exercise myself as a writer,

00:52:51 ►

but it seems that my readers don’t particularly want to read my novels

00:52:54 ►

because, you know, contrary to my non-fiction,

00:52:57 ►

which has always done pretty well,

00:53:00 ►

my first novel has been completely ignored,

00:53:04 ►

which is fine.

00:53:05 ►

I completely accept that.

00:53:08 ►

I have chosen, perhaps perversely,

00:53:11 ►

to reinvent myself in my 60s

00:53:13 ►

and to become a different kind of writer.

00:53:15 ►

Why should I expect my readers to come with me on that journey?

00:53:17 ►

Why should I expect them even to open my book

00:53:19 ►

or even consider what might be in it?

00:53:21 ►

But no one’s ever done what you’ve done,

00:53:22 ►

purely non-fictional work,

00:53:24 ►

and then flipped into a fiction.

00:53:26 ►

No, it’s kind of a strange thing to do.

00:53:27 ►

I mean, everybody in publishing would tell you

00:53:29 ►

this is a really bad career move, you know.

00:53:31 ►

But I feel that it’s the move that I need to make.

00:53:34 ►

And also that in the realm of fiction,

00:53:38 ►

I can explore extraordinary ideas

00:53:41 ►

without having to, you know,

00:53:44 ►

bolster them up with huge amounts of argumentation and

00:53:46 ►

facts and figures and documents and numbers. I feel it’s an area of freedom as a writer for me.

00:53:54 ►

So I will come back and write the second volume of Entangled. The first volume was published in

00:53:59 ►

2010, and I’ve written about 100 pages of the second volume but I haven’t completed it yet because I’ve got drawn into another novel

00:54:09 ►

of which I’ve written two out of three volumes

00:54:11 ►

and the first of those will be published in England

00:54:16 ►

in April 2013

00:54:19 ►

and it will be called War God

00:54:21 ►

and it is a novel about the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

00:54:26 ►

Wow, that sounds cool.

00:54:27 ►

And about the spiritual forces at work behind history.

00:54:30 ►

Because the thing that intrigues me about, you know, when I was researching Fingerprints of the Gods, I traveled very extensively in Mexico.

00:54:41 ►

and look at the ruins of ancient Mexico,

00:54:43 ►

and look at the cultures of ancient Mexico, without realizing that the people who we call the Aztecs,

00:54:46 ►

who called themselves the Mexica,

00:54:48 ►

had been drawn very far into the dark side.

00:54:52 ►

These were…

00:54:53 ►

Human sacrifice and whatnot.

00:54:54 ►

Terrible.

00:54:55 ►

I mean, there is a very clear documentation,

00:54:59 ►

on one occasion, of the sacrifice of 80,000,

00:55:02 ►

8,000 human beings-0-1000 human beings

00:55:05 ►

over a period of four days

00:55:07 ►

to inaugurate the Great Pyramid at Tenochtitlan

00:55:09 ►

so that the entire city

00:55:11 ►

was just filled with human blood.

00:55:15 ►

This is…

00:55:16 ►

The society they created is like…

00:55:19 ►

If you gave the worst serial killers in history

00:55:22 ►

a license to create the kind of society they wanted, it would have been Aztec, Mexica society.

00:55:29 ►

I have no idea.

00:55:30 ►

Absolutely horror.

00:55:32 ►

True, true horror. was actually in daily contact with a demonic entity, with an entity that they called Huitzilopochtli, the war god,

00:55:48 ►

who was luring him into ever more violent and awful and hideous human behavior.

00:55:55 ►

And right at that time, appears on the coast of Mexico,

00:56:01 ►

500 Spaniards in a little armada of ships led by a man called Hernan Cortes,

00:56:07 ►

who’s also in contact with a spirit entity who he happens to construe as St. Peter.

00:56:13 ►

And that spirit entity is telling him to do awful and hideous things. It’s like the demonic realm

00:56:21 ►

got involved in the human world and said, we’ve made things really bad in Mexico already.

00:56:26 ►

How can we make them even worse?

00:56:28 ►

Bring in the Spaniards.

00:56:30 ►

And in a karmic sense, I mean, the Aztecs deserved Cortez.

00:56:35 ►

It was divine retribution almost.

00:56:36 ►

But in just sheer numbers and horror,

00:56:41 ►

things got even worse after the Spanish came.

00:56:44 ►

The population of

00:56:45 ►

the Valley of Mexico went from 30 million to 1 million in the 50 years after the conquest.

00:56:50 ►

29 million people died. I mean, this is genocide on an extraordinary scale.

00:56:56 ►

Is that through disease as well?

00:56:56 ►

Yeah, it is. The smallpox was deliberately introduced to Tenochtitlan by the Spanish

00:57:00 ►

as one of the first deliberate uses of biological warfare. So I thought actually

00:57:05 ►

this is a fascinating arena in which to set a novel. And you can’t deny the courage and

00:57:14 ►

the spirit of adventure of the people involved. And that is part of the story. There’s also

00:57:21 ►

fascinating female characters. There was a woman called Malinal,

00:57:26 ►

who for some reason had a grudge against Montezuma,

00:57:30 ►

and history doesn’t speak why that reason is,

00:57:34 ►

but I’ve been able to explore those possibilities in the novel,

00:57:37 ►

who becomes the interpreter for Cortes.

00:57:42 ►

He acquires her, is given to him as a slave, and she rapidly learns

00:57:46 ►

Spanish and becomes his interpreter. And it’s clear that she uses him as a weapon to destroy

00:57:53 ►

Montezuma, that she is using Cortes to get her revenge. So there’s a fascinating human story

00:58:00 ►

to tell here, and the relationship between Cortes and and Malinal. They did eventually have a child. Then he dumped her and left her in the most awful situation. But there’s a tremendous

00:58:11 ►

human drama. And in a way, it’s the last immense struggle of the ancient world. It’s more like the

00:58:16 ►

time of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar than it is like the modern world. And yet it’s only

00:58:21 ►

500 years ago. We are coming up close to the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest

00:58:25 ►

of Mexico. So I’ve written two

00:58:27 ►

out of three volumes of that. The first will be

00:58:29 ►

published in April next year, the next one

00:58:31 ►

about six months after that and the next one

00:58:33 ►

about six months after that.

00:58:35 ►

Perhaps my readers will pay some

00:58:37 ►

attention to those. I don’t know.

00:58:40 ►

I’m trying to tell

00:58:41 ►

the best story I can but

00:58:43 ►

fundamentally I’m writing for me,

00:58:45 ►

and I hope other people enjoy it.

00:58:47 ►

I’ll be first in line to buy that book.

00:58:49 ►

That sounds amazing.

00:58:50 ►

That sounds fascinating.

00:58:51 ►

Wow.

00:58:52 ►

Yeah.

00:58:53 ►

Was it difficult to decide on this as a topic,

00:58:55 ►

or was it really calling you?

00:58:55 ►

No, it’d been calling me for a long time.

00:58:58 ►

Ever since I did my travels in Mexico

00:59:00 ►

and got the sense of that dark, heavy weight of horror

00:59:04 ►

that lies over Mexico and inherited from history

00:59:08 ►

and found myself accidentally pursuing the route of Cortes

00:59:13 ►

and seeing the lands through which he travelled

00:59:16 ►

and the really quite extraordinary things that he did.

00:59:20 ►

And one can’t put that down because he turned up with 500 men

00:59:24 ►

and he confronted a standing army of 200,000 and he did. And, you know, one can’t put that down because he turned up with 500 men and he confronted

00:59:25 ►

a standing army of 200,000 and he won. It was really extraordinary thing to do. But he would

00:59:32 ►

not have won if the Aztecs hadn’t been evil. The reason the Aztecs ultimately were defeated was

00:59:38 ►

that all their neighbors hated them. The Tlaxcalans, for example, who became Cortes’ most important

00:59:42 ►

allies, were used as a human farm by the Aztecs.

00:59:46 ►

They just raided them to take people for human sacrifice.

00:59:50 ►

And when they figured out, here is this guy, this Cortes,

00:59:54 ►

we can use him to get rid of the Aztecs.

00:59:56 ►

If the Aztecs had been decent to their neighbors,

00:59:59 ►

if they’d operated with a spirit of love to their neighbors,

01:00:02 ►

then Cortes could have been stopped at the border and never brought in,

01:00:08 ►

and the whole history of the world would have been different because the conquest of Mexico set the pattern for everything else that happened in the Americas soon afterwards

01:00:12 ►

the conquest of Peru and later on the genocide in North America that whole pattern was set by

01:00:17 ►

what Cortez did in Mexico so actually it’s a pivotal moment in in human history have you seen

01:00:22 ►

the film Apocalypto I have have seen the film Apocalypto.

01:00:25 ►

That challenged my world view. I mean, I just was thinking

01:00:27 ►

of people actually went through experiences

01:00:30 ►

like that, had their family, like they were

01:00:31 ►

in their village farming and this

01:00:34 ►

tribe would just come in and take

01:00:36 ►

their family. And this happened.

01:00:38 ►

I mean, my novel begins in the Fattening

01:00:40 ►

Pens in Tenochtitlan, where

01:00:41 ►

prisoners were brought. I have a young

01:00:44 ►

woman with supernatural powers,

01:00:46 ►

a witch who’s there as a prisoner, Tozi, and Malinal is there as a prisoner. And they are

01:00:52 ►

fattened. They feed them special fattening food so that they’ll be desirable to the god on the

01:00:56 ►

day they march them up the pyramid and cut their hearts out. Can you imagine being in a fattening

01:01:01 ►

pen for weeks and weeks and weeks and knowing that the end of it you’re going to be marched up a pyramid and somebody’s going to cut your chest open with

01:01:08 ►

a black obsidian knife and remove your heart that’s what we do to cows and pigs all the time

01:01:12 ►

right yeah that’s what we do to cows and pigs all the time and we should consider our our karma

01:01:17 ►

yeah all of these it’s something i think about a lot when i eat meat but the problem is i know

01:01:21 ►

my body works better on meat and i don’t have the money to go and get venison that’s been shot with a bow and arrow somewhere you know what i mean it’s just

01:01:29 ►

like just do less how do you mean just do less meat that’s a start i don’t know i think i think

01:01:35 ►

i i it’s totally up to every individual what they do with meat and don’t do with meat or fish or

01:01:40 ►

anything like that i think this is it’s totally a personal choice i wouldn’t wish to preach to

01:01:44 ►

anybody but perhaps we’d over-consume it.

01:01:47 ►

Perhaps it’s possible to reduce its role

01:01:50 ►

in our lives. And maybe that’s

01:01:52 ►

a good thing. Certainly good for the planet.

01:01:54 ►

I mean, anybody who believes in global

01:01:55 ►

warming has got to know that

01:01:57 ►

the huge herds of cows and

01:01:59 ►

cattle that we rear are

01:02:02 ►

actually

01:02:02 ►

vast producers of methane.

01:02:05 ►

Yeah, it’s crazy.

01:02:06 ►

So we could just be a bit more moderate in these things.

01:02:12 ►

But I wouldn’t wish to preach.

01:02:15 ►

I eat shellfish myself.

01:02:17 ►

You don’t eat any other meat?

01:02:19 ►

I don’t, no, since 1986.

01:02:22 ►

I was a vegetarian, complete vegetarian for a long time,

01:02:24 ►

but to be honest, I got bored.

01:02:25 ►

Okay.

01:02:26 ►

And, you know, probably when I get to the end of this life, I’ll find that the one thing that you’re really not allowed to eat is shrimps and scallops.

01:02:35 ►

They’re the most highly evolved life form.

01:02:37 ►

Yeah.

01:02:38 ►

That’s funny.

01:02:41 ►

That’s crazy.

01:02:42 ►

Graham, I was curious, what drives you as a person especially now

01:02:45 ►

I mean it was probably different

01:02:46 ►

20 years ago or 30 years ago

01:02:48 ►

but what is important to you

01:02:51 ►

well what is important to me

01:02:53 ►

is I’ve touched on it already

01:02:55 ►

it’s not to waste this blessing

01:02:57 ►

I’ve been given of a life

01:02:59 ►

not to waste it

01:03:00 ►

vegetating and not thinking

01:03:02 ►

but rather to challenge

01:03:04 ►

and explore and find out

01:03:07 ►

everything I can

01:03:08 ►

and hopefully

01:03:10 ►

you know to leave it

01:03:12 ►

a better person than I was when I came in

01:03:15 ►

and hopefully to leave

01:03:17 ►

behind me good memories

01:03:18 ►

where people will say

01:03:20 ►

he helped me

01:03:22 ►

he was nice to be around not he hurt me he was nice to be around

01:03:25 ►

not he hurt me

01:03:26 ►

he was awful to be around

01:03:28 ►

I’d like to leave that

01:03:30 ►

legacy behind

01:03:32 ►

that something

01:03:33 ►

positive that people would think well of me

01:03:36 ►

when I’m gone

01:03:38 ►

and that they would think well of me because I did right

01:03:40 ►

and

01:03:42 ►

you know I’m blessed with

01:03:44 ►

six children.

01:03:48 ►

They’re an incredibly important part of my life.

01:03:51 ►

I’m blessed with a wonderful wife and partner in life,

01:03:55 ►

Santha, who I share every adventure with,

01:03:58 ►

from, you know, the diving to the Amazon jungle.

01:04:00 ►

She does your photography.

01:04:01 ►

She does all the photography,

01:04:02 ►

and we share these adventures together.

01:04:05 ►

And, you know know she’s brought

01:04:07 ►

a spirit of intelligence

01:04:09 ►

and wisdom and nurture

01:04:11 ►

and gifted that to our

01:04:12 ►

children because you know I’ve been

01:04:15 ►

married twice before and I have two

01:04:17 ►

children from each of my two previous marriages

01:04:19 ►

and Santa has two children

01:04:21 ►

from her previous marriage but Santa’s managed

01:04:23 ►

to bring all these six kids together

01:04:25 ►

into a beautiful family of siblings

01:04:28 ►

who care for and support each other

01:04:30 ►

and have a great time together

01:04:31 ►

and have a great time with us.

01:04:33 ►

I feel good about that.

01:04:34 ►

I feel right there is a legacy that’s worthwhile.

01:04:37 ►

And is that different from, say, the 22-year-old Graham Hancock

01:04:40 ►

or the 32-year-old?

01:04:41 ►

Yeah, the 22-year-old Graham Hancock

01:04:43 ►

had an awful lot to learn.

01:04:44 ►

Was he driven by ego?

01:04:45 ►

I would say so.

01:04:47 ►

And I don’t deny that I’m driven by ego still.

01:04:50 ►

You can’t get rid of it.

01:04:52 ►

It’s not something you can just totally get rid of.

01:04:53 ►

I’m not Buddha, you know.

01:04:55 ►

I’m not a bodhisattva.

01:04:56 ►

I’m a human being like everybody else.

01:04:59 ►

But I think I have understood the perils of ego

01:05:02 ►

and I try to deal with that consciously as best as I can.

01:05:08 ►

I don’t always succeed by any means, but I do try to deal with it.

01:05:13 ►

I think a little bit of ego is healthy. I really do.

01:05:15 ►

Do you?

01:05:16 ►

I do. I think it makes you do your best. It makes you have pride in your work.

01:05:19 ►

I think it makes you get things done that maybe you wouldn’t otherwise, as long as you can check that in some way.

01:05:24 ►

You have to check it in some way.

01:05:26 ►

You could be right.

01:05:27 ►

Or look at it from a different perspective.

01:05:30 ►

I was starting to read Supernatural,

01:05:32 ►

and you started off with talking about Iboga,

01:05:37 ►

I think, which you took at your place in Bath.

01:05:38 ►

And I just had to ask you about that.

01:05:40 ►

I was going to ask the same thing.

01:05:42 ►

Because it’s something that I haven’t done,

01:05:44 ►

and I don’t necessarily plan on doing

01:05:46 ►

it and i just wanted to get your thoughts on it yes um well uh so iboga uh is the root bark of a

01:05:55 ►

of a bush that grows in central africa um and it’s called there the plant that enables men to see the

01:06:02 ►

dead it’s rather like uh in a sense, ayahuasca,

01:06:06 ►

which is the vine of souls or the vine of the dead, rather similar function. It’s a

01:06:12 ►

very powerful visionary agent. Its use was probably originally developed by pygmy cultures

01:06:20 ►

in Central Africa and then picked up by neighboring people. So the use is quite

01:06:25 ►

widespread in Cameroon, in Gabon, for example, just as ayahuasca is part of daily life in the

01:06:33 ►

countries surrounding the Amazon basin. Because that’s, by the way, one thing to make clear about

01:06:38 ►

ayahuasca. The ayahuasca may be shunned and demonized in the West and may be illegal in the

01:06:43 ►

West, but it is totally

01:06:45 ►

legal throughout the countries surrounding the Amazon Basin. And not only legal, but

01:06:50 ►

its use is protected under laws of religious freedom. This is considered a fundamental

01:06:55 ►

religious right of the individual to work with ayahuasca should they wish to do so.

01:07:01 ►

Same with iboga in Central Africarica i didn’t go to central

01:07:05 ►

africa to take ibogaine which is the active ingredient of iboga the extract uh in the way

01:07:11 ►

that i went to the amazon to drink ayahuasca um i took ibogaine here in england and i and i

01:07:18 ►

took the precaution because because ibogaine it doesn’t just challenge you psychologically, it challenges you physically much more than ayahuasca does.

01:07:27 ►

And it can actually kill you,

01:07:30 ►

especially if you have a compromised liver in any way.

01:07:35 ►

So I worked with a healer, a lady here,

01:07:39 ►

who gives Ibogaine to drug addicts.

01:07:45 ►

That’s her primary function.

01:07:47 ►

Ibogaine is astonishingly successful

01:07:50 ►

at getting people off addictions to hard drugs.

01:07:52 ►

More so than ayahuasca as far as I’m concerned.

01:07:54 ►

I would say more so than ayahuasca, yeah.

01:07:56 ►

Apparently when a heroin addict is serious about quitting,

01:07:59 ►

they take Iboga.

01:08:00 ►

They take Iboga.

01:08:00 ►

And Iboga will put you through the mill

01:08:03 ►

but help you through that process of ending an addiction to heroin.

01:08:09 ►

And it’s thoroughly documented. I mean, there are a massive amount of examples of this.

01:08:13 ►

It does do that. And it does do so in the same way by confronting you with the truth about yourself.

01:08:18 ►

So she helps drug addicts get off drug addiction by using Iboga.

01:08:24 ►

And she works with a medical doctor.

01:08:27 ►

She will not do a session unless a medical doctor is also present.

01:08:32 ►

And she agreed, I was not addicted to heroin or cocaine,

01:08:37 ►

but she agreed to give me Iboga for consciousness exploration purposes.

01:08:42 ►

And so I had a session with Ibogaine in my home.

01:08:49 ►

Why did you do this?

01:08:51 ►

Well, it was, again, part of the research for Supernatural.

01:08:54 ►

Just for the same reason I went to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca,

01:08:57 ►

I felt it was important to also take the plant that enables men to see the dead.

01:09:02 ►

And the fact that my own father had died very shortly before that

01:09:06 ►

and that I felt I had unfinished business with him,

01:09:09 ►

that I was not at his bedside when he passed,

01:09:12 ►

something that I feel very sad about to this day.

01:09:21 ►

I should have been there, and I wasn’t. I’d been with him the week before.

01:09:28 ►

I’d been assured that he had many weeks left. And I went away to do some work. And while I was away,

01:09:34 ►

he died. And one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made in my life, it’s a sacred duty to

01:09:42 ►

see those we love through the transition and i should have been

01:09:47 ►

there and i wasn’t have you always felt that no i’ve come to understand this i don’t think i

01:09:52 ►

understood it properly then which was in 2003 um i it’s something i’ve come to understand we need

01:09:57 ►

to be there we need to we need to be there for those for those we love and i hadn’t really

01:10:01 ►

thought about that dude every single day i mean i guess

01:10:05 ►

this is probably a symptom of some sort of psychological low-level paranoia or something

01:10:10 ►

but every day i try to prepare myself for the death of my parents it’s something that i’m

01:10:14 ►

terrified of but i know we all have to face it if we’re lucky enough to have parents that are

01:10:18 ►

yeah you know we all we all have to face it and and and it two things. It’s a sacred duty to see a loved one through the transition.

01:10:28 ►

And it’s also a tremendous gift that that loved one gives to us.

01:10:34 ►

It’s the opportunity to learn from that transition and to understand what it means.

01:10:42 ►

And I wasn’t there for my dad.

01:10:46 ►

So the fact that iboga is used in Central Africa

01:10:52 ►

quite specifically for that purpose,

01:10:54 ►

to contact the spirits of the dead,

01:10:56 ►

who it’s recognized we often have unfinished business with

01:10:59 ►

that has been abruptly terminated,

01:11:01 ►

and that it offers the opportunity to contact them beyond the veil.

01:11:09 ►

That was the other motive, really, for taking Ibogaine. And in fact, I did have some sense

01:11:17 ►

of, it was very fleeting and it was very tantalizing. I felt myself to be surrounded by a crowd of, I can only call them ghosts,

01:11:27 ►

of figures which were all around me. And right out on the edge of that circle, just walking

01:11:36 ►

by, limping by, was my father and a sense of almost a connection.

01:11:46 ►

It was healing for me.

01:11:47 ►

I would have preferred it if it had been more intimate

01:11:51 ►

and there had been more some kind of exchange,

01:11:54 ►

some kind of parting of the ways.

01:11:58 ►

The one thing I’m glad about is that in his last weeks

01:12:01 ►

I did have the opportunity to tell him I loved him,

01:12:06 ►

which was something I had never told him before.

01:12:10 ►

I never said that to my dad in all my years.

01:12:13 ►

But I did manage to say that.

01:12:16 ►

At least I said that.

01:12:18 ►

Okay.

01:12:18 ►

So you had a bit of closure with the abogus?

01:12:21 ►

Yes, it helped me.

01:12:22 ►

It did help me.

01:12:23 ►

It did help me with closure, and it did help to penetrate the veil but uh but i also came out of the session with

01:12:30 ►

a firm determination never to take it again i was put through 48 hours of absolute physical hell

01:12:37 ►

really is 48 hours yeah i was it was devastating physically physically devastating way beyond

01:12:43 ►

anything that ayahuasca made ayahuasca

01:12:46 ►

look tame yeah made ayahuasca look tame in terms of in terms of the physical physical effects um

01:12:51 ►

it was it was really i mean massive uh and i was i mean i thought i was dying i was really

01:12:59 ►

really ill um but would you get rid of it were you ultra ultra conscious and in the moment did

01:13:04 ►

you kind of know what was happening

01:13:05 ►

no there were times when I wasn’t in the moment

01:13:07 ►

there were times when I drifted away

01:13:10 ►

if I ever did

01:13:12 ►

contemplate working with Iboga

01:13:14 ►

again which is most unlikely

01:13:16 ►

I would go to Central Africa and take it there

01:13:18 ►

in a shamanic context

01:13:20 ►

and in the way

01:13:22 ►

that I’ve been to the Amazon to work

01:13:24 ►

with ayahuasca you think that

01:13:25 ►

would make a different experience i think it would yeah okay yeah graham if you’re really a tough guy

01:13:29 ►

you take i was ken aboga yeah i’ll leave that i’ll leave that for someone else to do yeah yeah

01:13:36 ►

that’s crazy is have you do you think you’ve explored all the the substances for this point

01:13:42 ►

in your life that those kind of… I’ve done some work with…

01:13:47 ►

You know, the active ingredient of ayahuasca is DMT,

01:13:50 ►

dimethyltryptamine.

01:13:53 ►

I’ve done some work with pure DMT as well.

01:13:57 ►

I’ve done 11 journeys with pure DMT.

01:14:02 ►

And this guy’s a black belt in psychedelics.

01:14:05 ►

We’re just like the white belts, right?

01:14:07 ►

We considered that before ayahuasca, but I think we

01:14:09 ►

correctly waited and decided to go for this.

01:14:12 ►

Well, here’s the thing. With ayahuasca,

01:14:14 ►

there’s some negotiation.

01:14:16 ►

You drink it.

01:14:17 ►

It takes about 45 minutes or an hour

01:14:20 ►

to onset. And it’s very

01:14:22 ►

rare to completely lose

01:14:24 ►

contact with this realm. you kind of know who you

01:14:27 ►

are and where you are it’s true that with a very large dose of ayahuasca you can actually

01:14:31 ►

lose connection to this world for a while but but usually you have some control over the process

01:14:39 ►

you kind of come in and out and you kind of come in and out it comes in waves and that’s why i say

01:14:43 ►

there’s some negotiation with ayahuasca it’s in a way although you have these harsh physical effects it’s kind of gentle

01:14:50 ►

and organic with smoked dmt there’s no negotiation at all dmt takes no hostages i mean you know you

01:14:59 ►

are you are going to inhale that smoke from the, and it is going to just leap into your brain within seconds.

01:15:07 ►

You are going to be on the business end of a rocket ship

01:15:12 ►

flying into a completely other reality.

01:15:16 ►

And you are going to stay there until DMT lets you go,

01:15:21 ►

which fortunately is only about 12 minutes, 12 or 15 minutes, as against several

01:15:26 ►

hours of the ayahuasca journey. You’re in and out of a DMT journey in 12 or 15 minutes.

01:15:32 ►

It is massively powerful, psychedelic. And again, the sense of contact with intelligences,

01:15:42 ►

far more powerful than yourself, who are out there, usually invisible to us,

01:15:48 ►

is very strong with DMT.

01:15:50 ►

And I would urge anybody who’s interested in this

01:15:52 ►

to read The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman,

01:15:56 ►

because he’s a doctor at the University of New Mexico

01:15:59 ►

who got federal approval to do a study with DMT and human volunteers.

01:16:06 ►

And he gave DMT over a period of four years to 50 or 60 volunteers.

01:16:11 ►

And their extraordinary experiences are documented in Rick Strassman’s book, The Spirit Molecule.

01:16:18 ►

And it’s very instructive to read that and to realize that people who weren’t comparing notes

01:16:25 ►

were actually meeting and having communication

01:16:28 ►

with the same intelligent entities in the DMT space.

01:16:32 ►

But something about the DMT space is much more mechanical,

01:16:35 ►

it’s much more constructed, even oddly technological,

01:16:40 ►

than the ayahuasca space.

01:16:42 ►

Is it introspective or not as much?

01:16:42 ►

than the ayahuasca space.

01:16:44 ►

Is it introspective or not as much?

01:16:50 ►

I wouldn’t say that there’s much real introspection going on.

01:16:55 ►

It’s really like you have just been plucked out of this world and dumped down in another one,

01:16:57 ►

which is just utterly different from anything you’ve ever experienced before.

01:17:01 ►

And it can be utterly terrifying. I’ve had gentle journeys with DMT where I

01:17:09 ►

felt that I was being healed, where entities were working with me and making me healthier

01:17:14 ►

than I was before. But I’ve also had terrifying journeys.

01:17:18 ►

What about being confronted by demons or…?

01:17:22 ►

The most terrifying journey that I had with DMT was, there’s a thing in ancient Egyptian

01:17:28 ►

mythology called the Hall of Mart, or the Judgment Hall of Osiris, which is a place of absolute

01:17:35 ►

clarity and truth, where you are, they symbolize it as the weighing of the heart. The heart is the soul, is the symbol of the soul,

01:17:47 ►

and it’s weighed in the scales against the feather of truth,

01:17:50 ►

the feather of cosmic harmony, the feather of Mart.

01:17:53 ►

And every action and every thought and every instant of your life

01:17:58 ►

is accounted for there in the Hall of Judgment.

01:18:01 ►

And my most terrifying DMT journey

01:18:04 ►

was like being in the Judgment Hall of Osiris

01:18:07 ►

and of having a sense that some cocoon body

01:18:12 ►

that surrounded my body was just being torn and ripped apart

01:18:15 ►

and that the real me was being exposed

01:18:18 ►

and scanned with absolute honesty and clarity.

01:18:26 ►

And a sort of dark, shadowy room

01:18:28 ►

with strange kind of engines around the side

01:18:30 ►

and little beings running around.

01:18:34 ►

And something demonic about it, actually.

01:18:36 ►

It was like a journey to hell, in a way.

01:18:42 ►

But it was also something I needed at that time.

01:18:45 ►

It’s intense, Brian. But it was also something I needed at that time.

01:18:46 ►

It’s intense, Brian.

01:18:50 ►

It was extremely intense and I’m not sure if I’ll smoke DMT ever again.

01:18:52 ►

I’m not sure.

01:18:53 ►

There’s apparently a psychedelic or

01:18:55 ►

hallucinogenic that

01:18:57 ►

is found on the back of a frog. It’s called

01:18:59 ►

Quambo or something.

01:19:01 ►

There is Bifortanine.

01:19:02 ►

There are psychedelic frogs,

01:19:05 ►

psychedelic toads,

01:19:07 ►

which is closely related to DMT.

01:19:10 ►

Oh, I see.

01:19:11 ►

5-MeO-DMT.

01:19:12 ►

Excuse me, I’m not an expert on this,

01:19:14 ►

but there is a secretion from a frog

01:19:16 ►

which you can actually smoke

01:19:18 ►

and which is extremely powerful

01:19:22 ►

and molecularly related to DMT.

01:19:27 ►

Okay. I was going to ask if you’ve tried that.

01:19:29 ►

No, I haven’t.

01:19:31 ►

It’s on the to-do list.

01:19:32 ►

Well, no. I don’t feel one must endlessly explore these areas.

01:19:38 ►

I feel that my teacher is ayahuasca and that I have a lot of lessons still to learn

01:19:44 ►

and I’m going to go on working with ayahuasca and that I have a lot of lessons still to learn and I’m going to go on working with ayahuasca.

01:19:48 ►

And I’m not sure whether I need or want

01:19:52 ►

to do any more other substances.

01:19:55 ►

Fair enough.

01:19:56 ►

And that’s one of the things

01:19:57 ►

that I would also like to be understood in our society

01:20:00 ►

is that these decisions

01:20:02 ►

should not be devolved upon the state.

01:20:05 ►

These decisions are decisions that we should reach as responsible adults

01:20:08 ►

to decide what is right for us and what is not right for us,

01:20:11 ►

so long as we do not get in the face of others and cause harm and damage to others.

01:20:15 ►

I think the term you used was psychic sovereignty, which I really liked.

01:20:18 ►

Psychic sovereignty.

01:20:19 ►

I feel that that’s the fundamental abuse of human rights in our society,

01:20:23 ►

that our society is a society under the guise of all kind of propagandistic bullshit, which is denying us the right to sovereignty over our own consciousness. and all the so-called freedoms of our society, are complete illusions when that society does not allow us

01:20:45 ►

to make fundamental decisions

01:20:47 ►

about what we wish to explore

01:20:50 ►

or not to explore with our own consciousness.

01:20:53 ►

That’s what we are.

01:20:55 ►

We are consciousness.

01:20:57 ►

We are not these bodies.

01:21:00 ►

We are not matter.

01:21:03 ►

We are consciousness,

01:21:04 ►

pure consciousness manifested in physical form.

01:21:08 ►

And if we can’t make decisions about that, then everything else is just a bad joke.

01:21:14 ►

Powerful.

01:21:15 ►

Wow, very.

01:21:15 ►

Do you think you’ll be drinking ayahuasca for the rest of your life, annually?

01:21:21 ►

I’m not sure.

01:21:22 ►

I’ll take that lesson from ayahuasca.

01:21:23 ►

I know people who’ve worked with ayahuasca for many years and ayahuasca has said to them that was your last

01:21:29 ►

session yeah that’s enough time to stop when you when you asked him if if he had you know done

01:21:34 ►

enough or seen enough i was just thinking that we probably never have and i always think that i’ll

01:21:37 ►

probably have to be reminded every year potentially of the things that i’m not focused on you know

01:21:43 ►

yeah and that’s a good reminder to have.

01:21:46 ►

It’s a good reminder to have.

01:21:47 ►

Wow.

01:21:49 ►

You know, we’re off on October 2nd to go visit Mr. Joe Rogan.

01:21:51 ►

And I know you were there, what, a year ago

01:21:53 ►

or a year and a half ago?

01:21:54 ►

Yeah, I was actually with Joe

01:21:56 ►

very shortly before I went down to Brazil

01:21:58 ►

and had my ayahuasca sessions.

01:22:00 ►

I was with Joe at the end of September or early October

01:22:02 ►

and then I went down to Brazil

01:22:03 ►

and got kicked about for five sessions.

01:22:05 ►

That was the before.

01:22:06 ►

And gave up cannabis.

01:22:09 ►

Did you get stoned with Joe because one of our fans has asked us if we’re going to get high with him, and Brian doesn’t want to, and I kind of want to.

01:22:15 ►

Actually, to be completely honest, Joe and I did not get stoned together.

01:22:20 ►

I’d been at a conference down in Irvine, and then I drove up to where Joe lives in part of Los Angeles,

01:22:27 ►

and we sat down.

01:22:29 ►

I got there a bit late, and it was late at night,

01:22:32 ►

and we sat down and did the podcast.

01:22:35 ►

Looking at the comments, because Joe kindly allowed me

01:22:39 ►

to host that podcast on my YouTube channel,

01:22:41 ►

and lots of people think when Joe gets up

01:22:44 ►

that he’s going off to take a puff on the bong

01:22:47 ►

or, you know, these guys are totally stoned.

01:22:49 ►

But actually, no, we weren’t.

01:22:51 ►

We weren’t stoned.

01:22:52 ►

We were completely straight during that session.

01:22:54 ►

But Joe is just such a lovely, wonderful human being

01:22:58 ►

with an incredibly open and inquiring mind

01:23:01 ►

and just very, very gentle,

01:23:06 ►

and very, very intelligent.

01:23:07 ►

That’s cool.

01:23:08 ►

And I loved talking to him,

01:23:10 ►

and I definitely got high on the conversation.

01:23:12 ►

We were both so excited to meet him.

01:23:13 ►

It’s great.

01:23:14 ►

You’re going to have a wonderful time.

01:23:16 ►

He’s a great human being,

01:23:17 ►

and you’re really going to love it.

01:23:19 ►

It was the first time I’d ever heard about Graham,

01:23:22 ►

and the first time I think I’d ever heard about ayahuasca was on that show.

01:23:22 ►

Right, right.

01:23:23 ►

And it was a great show, because you talked about your work, and I think at the end you ever heard about ayahuasca was on that show. And it was a great show because you talked about your work,

01:23:27 ►

and I think at the end you started talking about ayahuasca.

01:23:28 ►

Yeah, we got into these issues quite late in the show.

01:23:31 ►

So it was really interesting because you make a lot of assumptions about Graham

01:23:34 ►

when you see him and he talks about his passion at work,

01:23:36 ►

and then he just goes somewhere else.

01:23:39 ►

But he’s built up so much credibility with his knowledge

01:23:42 ►

that you’re like, okay, I want to listen to this.

01:23:45 ►

It’s a good thing about you by spreading all these different messages, I think.

01:23:48 ►

Thank you.

01:23:49 ►

Because you appeal to a lot of people.

01:23:50 ►

Thank you.

01:23:51 ►

I know you’re on a speaking tour soon, and I wanted to know how can people find out about that or get in touch with you?

01:23:55 ►

Well, my website is the first obvious portal, www.grahamhancock.com.

01:24:02 ►

And there’s a tours, events and lectures page

01:24:05 ►

on that website

01:24:06 ►

and it happens that in October, November and December

01:24:10 ►

I am doing quite a bit of speaking.

01:24:13 ►

I’ve been off the radar for more than a year

01:24:15 ►

because I’ve been writing intensely

01:24:17 ►

but having finished these two volumes of War God

01:24:20 ►

I’m taking a bit of a break.

01:24:22 ►

I’m going to go and do some speaking.

01:24:23 ►

So I’m going to be speaking in the U.S. in early October,

01:24:28 ►

in Australia through mid-October to about 23rd of October,

01:24:33 ►

and then back in the U.S. again in December.

01:24:36 ►

And all the details of that are on my website.

01:24:41 ►

And I also have a Facebook personal page

01:24:44 ►

and a Facebook author page, easy to find.

01:24:47 ►

The information is on there. I have a YouTube channel. I try to keep people informed.

01:24:54 ►

Yeah, your YouTube channel is very good. I mean, you had a lot of great videos there.

01:24:58 ►

And this show is going to be on your, it’s GrahamHancock.net, right?

01:25:01 ►

Well, it’s GrahamHancock.com, D-O-T-C-O-M

01:25:05 ►

yeah

01:25:06 ►

you can find it easily

01:25:07 ►

and you’re on Twitter

01:25:08 ►

at Graham

01:25:09 ►

double underscore

01:25:09 ►

yeah

01:25:10 ►

Graham underscore Hancock

01:25:11 ►

I’m not sure if it’s

01:25:12 ►

double underscore

01:25:12 ►

I think it might be

01:25:13 ►

but I’ll check on that

01:25:14 ►

and I’ll post it on the

01:25:16 ►

on the video

01:25:17 ►

you know

01:25:18 ►

01:25:19 ►

you know what I was

01:25:21 ►

going to say

01:25:21 ►

after the show

01:25:23 ►

I might as well say it now

01:25:23 ►

is that exceeded all my expectations and my expectations were really high.

01:25:29 ►

Well, thank you.

01:25:30 ►

I have to agree. I watched a large amount of your videos beforehand, just a kind of preparation.

01:25:36 ►

But you’re a very powerful man in person.

01:25:39 ►

Thank you.

01:25:40 ►

Well, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

01:25:42 ►

Time has flown.

01:25:43 ►

It reminded me of my discussion with Joe, actually.

01:25:46 ►

Nice, relaxing, positive, enjoyable feeling.

01:25:49 ►

That’s because Brian and I popped a couple of pills before we came.

01:25:55 ►

Relaxing with like-minded people.

01:25:57 ►

It’s good to talk about things.

01:26:00 ►

I’ve really enjoyed it.

01:26:01 ►

Yeah, I think it’s going to be a great conversation.

01:26:02 ►

People are really going to enjoy it.

01:26:03 ►

So thank you so much for coming

01:26:05 ►

I appreciate you

01:26:06 ►

making the trip

01:26:06 ►

my pleasure

01:26:07 ►

to London

01:26:07 ►

my pleasure

01:26:08 ►

thanks for having

01:26:08 ►

me on the show

01:26:09 ►

okay and until then

01:26:10 ►

it’s about the journey

01:26:11 ►

alright

01:26:11 ►

it’s about the journey

01:26:12 ►

thank you guys

01:26:13 ►

cheers

01:26:14 ►

bye bye

01:26:14 ►

you’re listening to

01:26:21 ►

the psychedelic salon

01:26:23 ►

where people are

01:26:24 ►

changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:26:28 ►

Before I say anything else, I want to re-emphasize what Graham said a few minutes back about not buying ayahuasca over the internet and don’t drink it at home alone.

01:26:41 ►

And this is as important a bit of information as you’re ever going to get here in the salon.

01:26:46 ►

I guess it was several years ago now when Max Freakout was hosting the Psychonautica podcast over at dopefiend.co.uk, better known as the Cannabis Podcast Network.

01:26:59 ►

Well, back when that show was still in its early days, Max was talking about doing just that,

01:27:05 ►

getting some ayahuasca and drinking it at home. So he and I began a somewhat long discussion,

01:27:11 ►

mainly through the email, but also in our podcasts every once in a while, with my doing my very best

01:27:18 ►

to convince him to do it in a circle, and most definitely not alone. Well, cutting to the chase here,

01:27:26 ►

Max eventually connected with a good ayahuasca circle somewhere on the continent,

01:27:30 ►

and eventually became even more outspoken than I was

01:27:33 ►

about the benefits and value and necessity of only taking ayahuasca in a group,

01:27:39 ►

and one that had an experienced ayahuasquero as its facilitator.

01:27:44 ►

In fact, you can still go back and listen to some of Max’s podcasts after he found that group,

01:27:50 ►

and you will hear a young but very highly experienced psychonaut

01:27:54 ►

say the same thing that Graham Hancock and I are also saying.

01:27:58 ►

And don’t worry, when the time’s right and you are ready,

01:28:02 ►

I’m sure that Lady Ayahuasca will tap you on the shoulder and invite you into her magical and mystical realm.

01:28:10 ►

So be polite and don’t try to crash her party.

01:28:13 ►

She’ll let you know when she’s ready for you.

01:28:16 ►

One other thing that I’d like to pass along to you is that should you ever have an opportunity to attend one of Graham Hancock’s lectures in person,

01:28:26 ►

be sure to do so, particularly if you’ll be showing some of the photographs that his wife, Santa, has taken.

01:28:32 ►

They are, to put it mildly, spectacular.

01:28:36 ►

And I suspect that with the Internet being what it is,

01:28:39 ►

many of us have most likely now seen at least a million pictures in our day.

01:28:44 ►

And out of all the photos that I’ve seen in my life, Many of us have most likely now seen at least a million pictures in our day.

01:28:50 ►

And out of all the photos that I’ve seen in my life, several of Santa’s remain the most memorable.

01:28:53 ►

In fact, there’s one that I’ll never forget.

01:29:01 ►

Somehow she arranged for permission to be standing on the back of the Sphinx during a sunrise on a solstice. And to see the sun come up exactly in line with the Sphinx gave me a deeper

01:29:07 ►

understanding of the celestial expertise of the ancients than reading dozens of books, including

01:29:14 ►

Graham’s, I should add. It’s just an amazing photo, and one that I obviously will never forget.

01:29:22 ►

Also, I have to admit that I was quite fascinated by Graham’s

01:29:26 ►

story just now about how during an ayahuasca circle he learned that his long journey with

01:29:32 ►

cannabis as his ally had come to an end, and that he was now going to quit using that magical plant.

01:29:40 ►

And my reason for being so intrigued by this story has to do with my own relations with cannabis and ayahuasca.

01:29:48 ►

In the ayahuasca tradition that I used to participate in, it was our custom to refrain from smoking cannabis for at least one week prior to participating in an ayahuasca circle.

01:30:00 ►

Now, I know that some daime churches and others have no problem with even smoking cannabis during a circle.

01:30:07 ►

So, I asked our shaman about this restriction.

01:30:10 ►

Now, this man is a Peruvian Ayahuasquero who had been a full-time apprentice to a master shaman for, I guess, 14 or more years before he began leading circles on his own.

01:30:21 ►

In other words, I really trusted his knowledge on the subject.

01:30:26 ►

circles on his own. In other words, I really trusted his knowledge on the subject. And what he told me was that the spirits of both ayahuasca and cannabis were feminine, and that they were

01:30:31 ►

jealous of one another. So I honored that. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered

01:30:39 ►

how two such powerful entities could succumb to such a low human emotion as jealousy. And so on my next

01:30:47 ►

ayahuasca journey, which was my last by the way, I asked her if this was so. Was she actually jealous

01:30:54 ►

of the spirit of the cannabis plant? Well, the answer she gave me was quite unexpected. Basically,

01:31:02 ►

she said, you have learned all that I can teach you for now.

01:31:07 ►

Should you ever need to come back into the shadow of my teaching again, I will let you know.

01:31:12 ►

And I was more or less, and sort of rudely I thought, dismissed. It was as if one of my

01:31:20 ►

grammar school teachers was tired of my questions and just told me to shoo.

01:31:28 ►

Now, I’ve thought about this quite a bit.

01:31:32 ►

And it has, as I said, now been over a year since that happened.

01:31:37 ►

And it was the last time that I participated in an ayahuasca circle.

01:31:42 ►

And for what it’s worth, I’ve seen that happen to several of my friends who were even more committed to Lady Ayahuasca than I was.

01:31:45 ►

In fact, Graham Hancock even mentioned that in his talk.

01:31:49 ►

And sure, I’ve also thought that maybe it’s just because I’m getting old and soft

01:31:54 ►

and don’t want to go through the physical difficulties that often are experienced when taking Ayahuasca.

01:32:00 ►

But to me, the message was clear.

01:32:03 ►

Stand down, at least for a while.

01:32:06 ►

Another thing that I’ve considered, of course, is that, like in the early part of the last century,

01:32:11 ►

when tobacco shamans claimed that the widespread use of tobacco as a recreational drug had weakened the power of its spirit,

01:32:20 ►

well, I wondered if maybe that isn’t now true about ayahuasca.

01:32:24 ►

It’s so prevalent around the world right now.

01:32:27 ►

But I can still remember when I first learned about it, back when I read the Yahé letters by Burroughs.

01:32:34 ►

And even though his take on it was far from positive, I nonetheless felt drawn to it

01:32:39 ►

and at that time began trying to figure out how to have an authentic ayahuasca experience.

01:32:44 ►

and at that time began trying to figure out how to have an authentic ayahuasca experience.

01:32:49 ►

Well, it took me more than ten years to at last make a connection and eventually become a member of a long-standing and authentic circle.

01:32:55 ►

In fact, I still think of these people as my close family.

01:32:58 ►

Not extended family, but blood brothers and sisters,

01:33:01 ►

as you can only become after making it through dozens and dozens of adventures on the high planes of consciousness.

01:33:09 ►

And yet it was during that last ayahuasca circle that I participated in,

01:33:14 ►

when I realized that the last few times I joined our circle,

01:33:18 ►

well, it had been more to be with my dear friends than it had been to have the experience itself.

01:33:24 ►

So that revelation, coupled with my rather curt dismissal by Lady Ayahuasca,

01:33:30 ►

well, I’ve decided that since she found me when I most needed her advice before,

01:33:35 ►

should I ever be in that situation again,

01:33:37 ►

I’m sure that she will again seek me out, as she did the first time.

01:33:41 ►

And so now I have renewed my long time and loving commitment to my wonderful ally, cannabis.

01:33:48 ►

And for what it’s worth, Graham, I’ll do my best to pick up the slack that you left

01:33:53 ►

when you were told to let go of the herb.

01:33:56 ►

And from what you just said in this interview,

01:33:58 ►

well, that slack is apparently quite considerable, if you know what I mean.

01:34:04 ►

And so for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:34:09 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

328 - In Praise of Ayahuasca

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Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

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