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Thank you.

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Look, there's no way that the ancient Egyptians had the chemical knowledge to get the DMT out of the bark of the tree.

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And that's the moment to ask ourselves where we get the word chemistry from.

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It comes from the ancient name of Egypt, chemit.

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Alchemit gives us alchemy.

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Chemistry was an Egyptian thing.

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You know, I think of course they knew how to extract the vital principle from the tree of life.

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And therefore we can say that we know what the ancient Egyptians were smoking.

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And then this, the second shrine of Tutankhamun, stars in the sky.

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And we see the initiate connected through rays of energy or consciousness, connected to the star through the third eye, through the pineal gland.

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Very powerful image, very easy to pass it by when you're in the Egyptian museum.

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But these little subtleties really give us an insight into how the ancient Egyptians were thinking.

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And this is a meme that's out on the internet.

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But, I mean, frankly, it is fascinating how the eye of Horus so resembles the pineal gland.

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And this pinecone symbolism that still, of course, exists in the world today, you can even find it in the Vatican.

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So, what I'm saying is that we have this organ in our bodies called the pineal gland, which has been seen through ancient cultures forever as the third eye, as giving us access to other levels of reality.

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And here we seem to find it focused upon in the second shrine of Tutankhamun and in this imagery.

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We'll come back to that.

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But what is the supernatural?

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What are supernatural beings?

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If they exist, how can they be contacted?

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I'll come back to the Egyptian material, but I wanted to preface this with that material.

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Well, I mean, there's all kinds of supernatural encounters.

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You know, we have Joan of Arc.

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She was burnt at the stake for her supernatural encounters.

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We have Bernadette at Lourdes who encounters the Virgin Mary.

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Interestingly, she'd been eating some mushrooms just before she went into the cave.

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We have the miracle of Fatima.

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You can't explain that with mushrooms because 70,000 people see what goes down at Fatima, including something that looks like a UFO.

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And it's really extraordinary.

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And they all see the Virgin Mary.

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I mean, 70,000 people.

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You can't convince 70,000 people to see the same thing because there's something there, you know.

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And then, of course, demons and angels, all this very familiar landscape of the supernatural.

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And ghosts.

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What are they?

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Why do certain houses have this atmosphere?

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How do we know the moment we go in there that something went wrong there?

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There seems to be a presence, somebody there, a shadowy figure passes you, but you can't see them.

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I would say that if we're going to get to grips with this, what we don't need is a ghost meter.

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I do not think we need a ghost meter.

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I don't think that machinery is going to get us to the heart of this matter at all.

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But what we need is to look at ancient cultures and how they work.

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So, in Mozambique and Ghana and, indeed, in the West, we have people who are possessed by spirits or who channel spirits or who give voice to spirits.

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But more interesting to me are shamans because they're really masters of the technology of this.

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Shamans are not possessed.

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Shamans are not mediums.

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They don't use ghost meters.

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But they and their predecessors have developed a kind of, I would call it a psychic technology that makes it possible for them to make contact with what they certainly believe to be other realms and beings, the spirit world.

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And it's important to understand this.

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Shamanism is not fundamentally a body of law.

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Shamanism or doctrine, it's a range of abilities and techniques built up through long practical experiences.

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Sometimes the shamanic gift is inherited, but the common factor is altered states of consciousness.

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If somebody claims to be in the business of shamanism and they're in the normal, alert, problem-solving state of consciousness, then I cannot define them as shamans.

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A shaman must enter trance in order to encounter the supernatural realm.

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And just a few examples.

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I mean, this is an Inuit shaman.

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Shaman, he reaches trance through days of cold and fasting.

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And towards the end of the 30 days, there came to him a helping spirit in the shape of a woman.

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And, you know, the fasting was then repeated for such fasts at frequent intervals are the best means of attaining to knowledge of hidden things.

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What fasts are an excellent means of doing is putting yourself into a deeply altered state of consciousness if you continue to fast long enough.

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In Canada, shamans are often individuals who first experienced trance and encountered the spirit world during a severe illness.

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In Siberia, I'm citing Mershea Aliad here,

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For the Alteans, the shamanic gift is generally hereditary.

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While still a child, the future shaman proves to be sickly withdrawn contemplative.

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When a young man in the family is subjected to epileptic attacks, that's often taken as a sign that he has the shamanic gifts.

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And actually, our English word shaman, which is used all around the world because it's everywhere now, it has a specific origin.

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The word shaman comes from the Tungus Mongol, and it means one who knows.

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And what happened was that European ethnographers encountered Tungus Mongol shamans,

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and then they realized that other similar ritual functionaries were found in many other societies around the world.

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So they're all called shamans now.

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So the purpose of their trance journeys amongst the Tungus was, quote,

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discovery of the future, curing the sick, transporting souls back and forth from the underworld and managing them there,

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sacrifice to spirits, including those of animal masters, and initiating new shamans.

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Quote, some shamans eat narcotic mushrooms, and in their hallucinations visit the world of the spirits where they get answers to questions posed to them.

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It is not an accident that Father Christmas has the coloring of the hallucinogenic mushroom called the fly agaric.

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Far from it.

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So this is the point where I have to get a little bit graphic.

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Many of you will know this story, I suspect, but if you don't mind, I have to refer to how one consumes Amanita muscaria.

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One does not get the best journey on Amanita muscaria from eating it raw.

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There are many toxins which the body needs to filter out.

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The way to take Amanita muscaria is to drink it in urine.

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It's thought that they probably, the idea was probably got from seeing reindeer get a bit frisky when they were eating those mushrooms,

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and then somehow the idea gelled to collect their urine and drink it.

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And then another step further, very commonly the shaman will actually eat a huge quantity of mushrooms and then pee in the bowl,

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and then the rest of the community will come along and drink his urine, and they'll all have a journey.

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And actually this has been investigated scientifically, and it's been discovered that you can pass the active principle of Amanita muscaria

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through seven human bodies before it loses its potency.

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So this is a rather curious matter.

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So there's a Tungus shaman in flight on his supernatural reindeer, and there's Father Christmas.

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Even comes down through the smoke hole just like the Tungus shaman does.

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Can this be an accident?

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I don't think so.

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There's a northeast Siberia shamaness.

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Again, she's in the colorful Father Christmas colors.

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Use of Amanita muscaria for shamanic purposes is also documented amongst several Native American groups.

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Other substances, peyote, the main active ingredient is mescaline, used by the Huitzol and other Native American groups.

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Datura, used by the Zuni and other groups in the American Southwest.

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It doesn't only have to be plants.

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I mean, the austerities, the infliction of pain, undergoing suffering, the Sundance, this is also a situation in which one can enter a deeply altered state of consciousness.

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And in the Kalahari desert, they don't use drugs.

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The Bushmen of the Kalahari do what's called a trance dance.

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They will dance around a fire for 24 hours.

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And gradually, they enter an altered state of consciousness.

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They perspire heavily.

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And then the shaman will wipe his hand under his arm and go to another person and wipe the sweat on that person.

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And that person will instantly go into a trance.

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And then he will pass it on to another.

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And the whole group is suddenly deeply entranced in this dance and in direct contact as they construe it with the spirit world.

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You can see these dances in ancient rock art in South Africa.

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And this piece of ancient rock art clearly depicts one of two types of trance dances still practiced by the Kalahari San.

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Here is Maria Sabina.

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Everybody's heard of magic mushrooms, right?

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We all know what magic mushrooms are.

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Go back to 1952 and nobody would have known what magic mushrooms were.

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Except people like Maria Sabina.

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Maria Sabina was a Mexican shaman.

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And she performed her work with mushrooms.

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And Gordon Wasson was tremendously interested in mushrooms.

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He wrote lots of books about mushrooms and he went down to see her.

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And he participated in her mushroom ceremony.

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This is in the 1950s.

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And published it in Life magazine, May 13th, 1957.

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And the discovery of mushrooms that cause strange visions.

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That actually was the rediscovery of the psilocybin mushroom in the West.

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It had been completely lost from Western culture for a very long time.

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Iboga, the plant that enables men to see the dead.

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I've taken ibogaine.

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Excuse me.

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I do believe as a researcher that I have to, you know, experience what I'm talking about.

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I'm not in a hurry to take ibogaine again.

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I was given it in the form of a pill.

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If I were to do it again, I would go to Central Africa and eat it with the buiti.

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But I was given it in the form of a pill by a lady called Hattie in London who primarily works with drug addicts.

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Ibogaine is very effective at getting people off addictions to drugs.

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And I said I wanted to use it for consciousness exploration.

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And she said, okay.

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And she came along with a medical doctor and they took over our house for 48 hours.

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Because there is some minor physical danger with iboga.

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And boy, I mean, that was just the worst 48 hours of my life.

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I felt like I had been broken in pieces.

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It was truly the shamanic ordeal.

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I was just ripped apart and kind of rebuilt.

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My father had died just a few months before.

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And I hoped very much that I would have an encounter with him.

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Because that is actually one of the reasons it's used in Central Africa.

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That a lot of us have unfinished business with the dead.

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We would like to talk to him one more time, you know.

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To get, if only to say, I'm sorry dad, I wasn't there when you died, you know.

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But I did have a fleeting encounter with my father.

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Fleeting.

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It didn't totally nourish me.

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But it was meaningful.

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Oddly enough, Santa sees him all the time when we're drinking ayahuasca together.

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And he comes and puts his hand on her shoulder, you know.

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And then she keeps saying, go to Graham.

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He needs to see you.

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So, it's an extraordinary thing, Iboga.

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But certainly not a pleasure in any way.

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It's an agony to take.

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These are the Bwiti ceremonies.

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And now we're looking at the ayahuasca vine here.

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And the leaves of Cicotria viridis.

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Cicotria viridis is called chacruna in the Amazon.

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And it contains substantial concentrations of dimethyltryptamine, of DMT.

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That powerful hallucinogen.

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Now, the thing about the ayahuasca brew is that it is very ancient in the Amazon.

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There's archaeological evidence of the use of ayahuasca going back more than 4,000 years in the Amazon.

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It's a brew made of the Cicotria viridis leaf and the ayahuasca vine.

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And you can find it amongst just about every culture in the Amazon basin.

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And it's widely used.

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And it's called the vine of the dead or the vine of souls.

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Again, it's about encountering the realms beyond this realm.

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So, if you were to, let me just see what my next slide is.

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If you were to make a brew consisting entirely of the Cicotria viridis leaves, it would have no effect on you whatsoever.

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And this is because of the enzyme monoamine oxidase in the gut, which neutralizes DMT on contact.

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But the ayahuasca vine contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

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So, when you cook the vine together with the leaves, you get orally active DMT.

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DMT is not normally orally active.

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And instead of getting a 12-minute rocket ship ride to the other side of reality, which is what smoked DMT is,

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no negotiation with smoked DMT.

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I've had a number of journeys with DMT.

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On one occasion, I enter this space and a voice says,

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You're ours now.

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And I say, Shit, yes, but only for 12 minutes.

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With ayahuasca, you're in there for four hours, but there's more negotiation.

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You can't say, Enough! Too much! Pull back!

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You can open your eyes and often stop the visions.

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It's not the same as smoking DMT.

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It's a different experience.

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And in the Amazon, they say the real intelligence comes from the vine, from the spirit of the vine.

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And she is simply harnessing the light in the leaves to bring us, to communicate with us.

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So, you end up with this, you know, with this horrible-tasting, foul, dark brew.

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It really is disgusting.

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Worst smell, worst taste on the planet.

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You brace yourself, you know, to drink it.

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Even when you smell it before you drink it, it's nauseating.

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Chances are you're going to throw up and have diarrhea during the night.

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You may have some very uncomfortable experiences.

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You may be reminded of issues in your life that you would prefer to forget about.

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You're really put through the ringer sometimes.

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Sometimes you're not.

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Sometimes you're just given a beautiful, joyous, loving, wonderful, wonderful experience, despite the vomiting and the diarrhea.

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And, you know, so I've had something in the range of 70, 7-0 ayahuasca sessions since 2003.

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Every time I go, I have to brace myself.

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This is not an addiction.

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This is not something that I'm doing for fun.

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It's something because there's deep personal work involved in it.

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And it's been helpful to me in finding my shadow side and in trying to keep it out of the way, not be dominated by it.

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So, basically, whatever the system, whatever the plant, what is happening with shamanism is that altered states of consciousness are being induced, a deeply altered state of consciousness.

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And there's the hypothesis that I want to put forward, that in the normal, alert, problem-solving state of consciousness required for successful functioning in the everyday material world, supernatural experiences are just not possible.

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If we're going to access these so-called supernatural realms and beings, we must first enter altered states of consciousness, trance states.

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And it can happen accidentally, but down the ages, it's the shamans of hunter-gatherer cultures who've mastered the deliberate induction of the required altered states.

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Some are able to alter their consciousness and enter trance states spontaneously, but the majority resort to a range of time-tested shamanistic techniques, most commonly the use of hallucinogenic plants.

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It's interesting, this idea of shamanism as a technology.

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I should say this later in the presentation, but Rick Strassman's work at the University of New Mexico with DMT and human volunteers produced something very surprising.

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A number of the volunteers encountered entities who said pretty much the same thing to them.

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And what that was, was we are so glad you've discovered this technology.

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Now we can communicate with you much more easily.

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In other words, when shamans speak of spirit worlds, how far away are they from parallel dimensions and parallel realms?

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Is that what we're accessing here?

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And so this is the imagery of Pablo Amaringo, a great ayahuasca shaman depicting his visionary experiences,

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this connection with the beyond, with the underworld, with entities of light.

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The whole realm is just filled with magic and enchantment and everything is intelligent.

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The animals you encounter, the trees, everything communicates and speaks with you.

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So for those who have not drunk ayahuasca, this is a pretty good representation of an intense visual ayahuasca experience.

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The other mystery is the universality of shamanistic experiences.

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From all parts of the world, all periods of history, shamans are reporting the same thing.

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It doesn't matter if they've encountered one another or not, they haven't actually, but they're all saying the same thing.

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And in altered states of consciousness, it's very common for shamans to report encounters with intelligent supernatural entities,

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which are usually construed as spirits.

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Sometimes they take human form.

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More often, they appear in the form of an animal or a therianthrope.

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That's a phrase I use, a term I use a lot.

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It's from the Greek therion, which means wild beast, and anthropos, which means man.

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It's a beast creature, a beast-human creature, hybrid.

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And shamans of all cultures also report that they themselves transform into animals or therianthropes

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during their trance journeys in the spirit world.

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Shamans frequently claim to have been abducted by spirits to strange locations, sometimes in caves deep underground,

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sometimes underwater, sometimes in the sky.

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What's being depicted in this image is an individual being drawn down beneath the waters of the Amazon

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to a city that many in the Amazon believe exists, that lies beneath the waters of the Amazon that they call Encante,

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Enchanted, the Enchanted City.

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And it's mermaids, you know, part therianthropes, part fish, part human, that are drawing the soul down.

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Australian shamans, clever men, men of high degree, speak of celestial ascents to meet with the sky gods.

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You can see imagery in the Kalahari Desert of individuals climbing these threads up into the head, threads or ropes.

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And this is a very curious one, and it relates to testimony that's been given by the bushman,

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that he's climbing up into what he calls a well of metal in the sky.

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And it describes going through something metallic and getting inside it.

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The sand these days are unfortunately very extinct.

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There was a time until 1920 when the British authorities in South Africa could give somebody a license to hunt the sand for 50 British pounds.

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They were hunted like vermin.

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And the shamanic ordeal, the sense of being pierced, cut, dissected, surgically operated upon by spirits is very common for shamans.

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The pain and the trauma of initiation, but shamans go on to enjoy positive relationships with the spirit world.

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They frequently report having a wife or husband in the spirit world and the hybrid spirit children.

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They're taught useful knowledge, knowledge of the properties and combinations of plants, healing remedies for the sick.

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A common theme is for the shaman to return from the spirit world with a sense of mission.

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Maria Sabina, in her psilocybin trances, encountered a spirit who thrust a book into her hands and instructed her to use it to do her work better

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and help people who need help and know the secrets of the world where everything is known.

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Maria was illiterate, but she suddenly realized that she was reading and she understood everything that was written in the book.

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In one moment, I learned millions of things.

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I learned and learned, but the spirit didn't let her keep the book.

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It stayed there in the spirit realm.

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The witch hall, again, they generate these incredible sort of disks and the sense of a connection and an encounter with other realms.

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So, this is the moment where we come to the theme of contact in the desert and I just want to give you perhaps a slightly different take on it,

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although it's not as different as it seems.

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What are aliens and UFOs and ET abductions?

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Because it's just a plain fact at the level of phenomenology, when you look at the actual description of the experience

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and don't take account of where or from whom the experience comes, then many of the experiences that shamans report with spirits

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are incredibly similar to the encounters with aliens reported by tens of thousands of people in the West

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who believe they've been abducted by UFOs.

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So, we have great dossier of evidence on UFO abduction phenomenon.

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John Mack, I was privileged to know him.

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He was a friend, remarkable psychiatrist at Harvard University.

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When he started taking UFO abduction reports seriously, Harvard tried to fire him.

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They said that this was absurd and although he had tenure, they tried to fight him.

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And a great human rights lawyer called Daniel Sheehan defended him and he won the case and he kept his job at Harvard.

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But he said to me afterwards that it felt as though he had been banished to the epistemological wilderness.

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Nobody would speak to him.

280
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His colleagues would pass him in the corridors as if he did not exist because he was such a heretic.

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Bud Hopkins, another great author on the UFO abduction research, David Jacobs,

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from these researchers, we have a huge dossier of written evidence on the experience of UFO abductees,

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exactly what they've seen and encountered.

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And it's plain fact that the spirits shamans encounter first appear in the form of animals, birds or fish.

285
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But minutes before her abduction by small humanoids,

286
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Virginia Horton remembered talking with an intelligent grey deer

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and added there was a person inside this deer.

288
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Another American report seeing a deer looking through her window just before she's abducted.

289
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In another case, the abductee sees a wolf standing clearly, squarely on her bed

290
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and she remembers its fur and fangs.

291
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So John Mack summarizes his patient's reports.

292
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The aliens appear to be consummate shapeshifters,

293
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often appearing initially to the abductees as animals.

294
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Owls, eagles, raccoons and deer are among the creatures the abductees have seen initially.

295
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And then again, we have this issue of shamans being floated up into the sky, climbing threads of light.

296
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In the apparently completely different domain of alien UFO abductions, you have the same thing.

297
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There's Andrea reported that a line or thread of light extended from her navel to the beings who were abducting her.

298
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Another abductee, Arthur, saw a light like a thread, a spider's thread, that's lit extending down from the night sky.

299
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And he was told, don't be afraid or the thread will break.

300
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And then he found himself in the air.

301
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So although the domains seem to be different, the experiences are incredibly similar.

302
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Shamans abducted underwater or into caves.

303
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Why that happens to UFO abductees too.

304
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Betty Aho is taken into huge crystalline caverns.

305
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Filberto Cardenas enters a tunnel beneath the sea.

306
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Carlos Diaz sees a UFO floating over his head.

307
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It was made of millions of small dots of light.

308
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I tried to touch the object, but my hand went through the yellow light.

309
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And then he felt disoriented and suddenly the craft's inside a cave that was lined with stalactites and stalagmites.

310
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And here's this Kyrgyz shaman.

311
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Speaking of the shamanic ordeal, the piercings, the tortures that are inflicted on the shaman by the spirits.

312
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Literally disassembling them and reassembling them.

313
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Bizarre surgical procedures.

314
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Spirits who insert stones and rock crystals and other objects into their bodies.

315
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Well, that, of course, is also very common in the UFO and alien abduction field.

316
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Joe believed that a small silver pill-shaped thing had been implanted in his brain.

317
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Sandra Larson is abducted by a UFO.

318
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Beings removed her brain and set it down beside her.

319
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Yakut Shaman, sighted by Eliad, the spirits cut off his head, which they set aside.

320
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There's even bone counting is common between the shamanistic ordeal and the experiences of UFO abductees.

321
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Why would this be?

322
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Why would these similarities be there?

323
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Shamans constantly having sex with spirits.

324
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They have spirit children in the other world.

325
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They have spirit wives in the other world.

326
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I know a shaman whose wife has actually left him because of his affair in the spirit world.

327
00:26:19,180 --> 00:26:26,680
And again, UFO abductees report having sex with aliens and report having hybrid children with aliens

328
00:26:26,680 --> 00:26:29,380
and are re-abducted in order to nurture and nourish those children.

329
00:26:29,480 --> 00:26:33,280
I would say that we're looking at very similar experiences here.

330
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Given a book by a spirit, Maria Sabina.

331
00:26:36,600 --> 00:26:39,400
Betty Hill was also given a book by a spirit.

332
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Betty Andreessen was given a book.

333
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And in both cases, like Maria Sabina, they weren't allowed to take it back with them.

334
00:26:46,260 --> 00:26:54,260
And then the whole story of fairies and elves and why are they so similar to aliens?

335
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And why do they have so much in common with aliens and spirits?

336
00:26:59,020 --> 00:27:03,060
And I want to pay tribute to another speaker here, Jacques Vallée.

337
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And if you have the opportunity to attend his workshop or talk, I strongly urge you to do so

338
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because this man is an absolute genius.

339
00:27:10,340 --> 00:27:14,300
And he's the first person, as far as I've been able to establish,

340
00:27:14,580 --> 00:27:18,800
who drew the connection between fairies and aliens.

341
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And his book, Passport to Magonia, published in 1969,

342
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is just an absolute go-to, must-read for anybody who is interested in this phenomenon.

343
00:27:29,640 --> 00:27:38,040
In my book, Supernatural, published in 2005, what I did was I, first of all,

344
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reported Jacques Vallée's material and pay full tribute to him.

345
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And then I go on to report what's happened since 1969 because that's when this book was published.

346
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And actually, the argument and the case just gets stronger and stronger and stronger

347
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with the recent evidence.

348
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So, some brief points.

349
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From the Middle Ages until the middle of the 20th century, fairies, just like spirits and aliens,

350
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were renowned and feared for abducting people.

351
00:28:04,020 --> 00:28:07,860
This was a real worry for people who lived in rural areas in Europe,

352
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that they were going to get abducted by the fairies.

353
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And you did not want to get close to the fairy dance.

354
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There are accounts of how it's very magnetic.

355
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It draws you to it.

356
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But if you touch it, if you come to the fairy dance and touch these fairies dancing in a ring,

357
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then in an instant you'll be taken into another world.

358
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And that's fairy land.

359
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And in fairy land you may be entertained.

360
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Buxom fairy wenches may amuse you.

361
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Or handsome fairy men, if you happen to be a woman.

362
00:28:40,460 --> 00:28:44,220
And you may think that you spent three or four hours there.

363
00:28:44,220 --> 00:28:50,400
But when you come back, when they send you back, three or four hundred years have passed.

364
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Your village has completely changed.

365
00:28:54,040 --> 00:28:57,320
There's a vague memory of somebody who disappeared hundreds of years before.

366
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It's a bit like the missing time phenomenon with modern UFO abductees, but much longer.

367
00:29:03,760 --> 00:29:07,200
It's almost as though the technology behind this has got better.

368
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That they give us five minutes of missing time, not five hundred years.

369
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And that spinning, circling thing about the fairy dance,

370
00:29:18,020 --> 00:29:22,020
I'm just wondering, does that relate to flying saucers in some way, to UFOs?

371
00:29:22,020 --> 00:29:24,640
Are we looking at an earlier form of the same technology?

372
00:29:25,380 --> 00:29:28,140
So fairies could be cruel, they torture and hurt human beings.

373
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Just like aliens torture and hurt humans.

374
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But they also, just like aliens and spirits, they could be kind and they could give gifts to people

375
00:29:36,960 --> 00:29:38,940
and they could bestow healing powers.

376
00:29:38,940 --> 00:29:42,260
And just like aliens and spirits, fairies have the power of flight.

377
00:29:42,520 --> 00:29:47,160
They make use of aerial vehicles, which are construed in that epoch as flying boats,

378
00:29:47,280 --> 00:29:48,980
flying castles, flying carriages, etc.

379
00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:55,220
Fairy abductions take place underground and into caves as well as in the sky.

380
00:29:55,640 --> 00:29:59,620
Interestingly, in both these fairy abduction scenes, we do see a mushroom.

381
00:29:59,820 --> 00:30:01,120
There's Amanita muscaria.

382
00:30:01,480 --> 00:30:02,640
And these are mushrooms too.

383
00:30:02,740 --> 00:30:03,520
I wonder what sort.

384
00:30:03,520 --> 00:30:14,120
And yeah, I mean, like aliens, like spirits, sorry, like spirits, fairies take therianthropic form.

385
00:30:14,240 --> 00:30:17,440
They can become, they're part animal and part human.

386
00:30:17,600 --> 00:30:21,060
This is a woodcut from Holland, 14th or 15th century.

387
00:30:21,500 --> 00:30:24,620
Fairies dancing in a ring and they are classic therianthropes.

388
00:30:24,700 --> 00:30:29,560
They have the head and horns of some kind of goat and they have the bodies of human beings.

389
00:30:29,560 --> 00:30:31,700
Classic creatures of vision.

390
00:30:32,080 --> 00:30:39,800
Melusina feared medieval fairy, part serpent, part woman, feared for abducting human babies.

391
00:30:40,840 --> 00:30:46,220
There were many reports in 17th century Scotland of women being abducted to nurse fairy babes.

392
00:30:46,580 --> 00:30:50,760
They often described being brought to a grand lodging, sometimes on board a flying carriage,

393
00:30:51,200 --> 00:30:55,740
found themselves in an anonymous room with no exit, etc., etc.

394
00:30:55,740 --> 00:31:03,800
When the child is weaned, the nurse dies or is conveyed back or gets it to her choice to stay there.

395
00:31:04,160 --> 00:31:09,860
So I would say that we human creatures, interpretation is built into perception from the get-go.

396
00:31:10,360 --> 00:31:13,000
We can't see something without interpreting it.

397
00:31:13,440 --> 00:31:16,740
There's no such thing as random objective interpretation.

398
00:31:17,480 --> 00:31:19,460
We see it and we interpret it.

399
00:31:19,460 --> 00:31:27,060
And when we interpret it, inevitably we do so according to our culture, to the culture that we live in that has informed our every move and thought since we were born.

400
00:31:27,720 --> 00:31:35,100
And what I would say is that whether we're talking about spirits, whether we're talking about aliens, or whether we're talking about fairies,

401
00:31:35,600 --> 00:31:40,640
actually what we're looking at is the very same ancient and long-lived phenomenon of human experience

402
00:31:40,640 --> 00:31:45,320
witnessed through different cultural spectacles by different peoples at different periods of history.

403
00:31:46,320 --> 00:31:50,360
So the question is, are such supernatural beings nothing more than hallucinations?

404
00:31:50,500 --> 00:31:54,960
Are they mere phantasms of the mind, just meaningless artifacts of altered states of consciousness?

405
00:31:55,360 --> 00:32:02,660
Or could there be something much more significant that modern science has only just started to grapple with?

406
00:32:02,660 --> 00:32:06,080
And the mystery of consciousness.

407
00:32:06,260 --> 00:32:09,660
I'm going to put on a second talk.

408
00:32:10,340 --> 00:32:13,820
We'll continue with this, but this would be a moment if there are any questions.

409
00:32:14,460 --> 00:32:17,540
I would be happy to take some questions of where we've gone so far.

410
00:32:18,800 --> 00:32:20,840
Do we have any questions?

411
00:32:22,740 --> 00:32:24,080
Okay, go ahead.

412
00:32:25,080 --> 00:32:26,720
There's a mic somewhere in here.

413
00:32:30,340 --> 00:32:30,740
Yes.

414
00:32:32,660 --> 00:32:44,820
I've seen a gray alien in an ayahuasca vision.

415
00:32:45,820 --> 00:32:52,180
I think I'm going to reproduce my drawing of it here, actually, which is a really bad drawing.

416
00:32:52,640 --> 00:32:54,520
I hope I'm going to reproduce it.

417
00:32:54,620 --> 00:32:55,160
I might not.

418
00:32:55,240 --> 00:32:56,040
I'm not sure.

419
00:32:56,040 --> 00:33:08,780
But just in case I don't reproduce it, what happened was that I'm sitting on a bench in the jungle in the Amazon.

420
00:33:08,780 --> 00:33:12,140
I've taken a hefty dose of ayahuasca.

421
00:33:13,340 --> 00:33:14,200
I'm sitting there.

422
00:33:14,280 --> 00:33:15,220
We're under the open sky.

423
00:33:15,300 --> 00:33:16,160
There's trees around.

424
00:33:17,000 --> 00:33:25,520
I kind of look up, and I see this face of a gray with segmented eyes like some kind of insect.

425
00:33:25,520 --> 00:33:28,800
And it's menacing and awful, and there's another one.

426
00:33:28,860 --> 00:33:34,100
And then I see flying saucers, and I realize that they're going to abduct me.

427
00:33:35,280 --> 00:33:39,540
And I say, I open my eyes wide, and I say, no!

428
00:33:39,540 --> 00:33:46,480
Of course, I should have kept my eyes closed and said, yes!

429
00:33:48,100 --> 00:33:51,040
That's what I should have had the courage to do, but my courage failed me.

430
00:33:51,800 --> 00:33:54,120
So, I may come to that story.

431
00:33:54,220 --> 00:33:55,280
Another question?

432
00:33:56,700 --> 00:33:56,980
Yes?

433
00:33:56,980 --> 00:34:06,800
You could prove it if you go under ayahuasca and tell a secret to the mother got it, and someone else go under it, and have her give her that secret.

434
00:34:06,980 --> 00:34:07,220
Yes.

435
00:34:07,360 --> 00:34:08,420
And then they would prove it.

436
00:34:08,520 --> 00:34:09,440
You're absolutely right.

437
00:34:09,540 --> 00:34:11,580
There are ways to prove this.

438
00:34:11,580 --> 00:34:18,940
I have a couple of friends in Utah who, as a project, smoked DMT every night for a year.

439
00:34:19,340 --> 00:34:22,500
You don't get tolerance to DMT.

440
00:34:23,240 --> 00:34:27,360
Every night for a year, they'd go out into the desert, and they would smoke the pipe.

441
00:34:27,500 --> 00:34:31,720
And then they would meet each other on the other side, and actually journey through the parallel realm.

442
00:34:31,780 --> 00:34:32,680
They got so good at it.

443
00:34:32,740 --> 00:34:33,520
So, you're right.

444
00:34:33,580 --> 00:34:35,760
There is scientific work that could be done with this.

445
00:34:36,220 --> 00:34:41,880
Information could be entrusted, and if it were retrieved by somebody else, then we would be in a very interesting situation of proof.

446
00:34:42,280 --> 00:34:44,440
So far, the scientific work is not being done.

447
00:34:45,440 --> 00:34:50,040
Rick Strassman found it difficult enough just to get permission to work with DMT and human volunteers.

448
00:34:50,040 --> 00:34:56,200
But to do it, and he had to persuade the authorities that there might be some therapeutic benefit that would come out of it.

449
00:34:56,260 --> 00:35:02,820
But to do it for actually the exploration of the mystery of life is something I don't see the Drugs Enforcement Agency authorizing.

450
00:35:03,420 --> 00:35:04,460
But it's a great thought.

451
00:35:04,720 --> 00:35:04,960
Yes.

452
00:35:05,420 --> 00:35:05,880
Thank you.

453
00:35:06,120 --> 00:35:08,020
So, I'm talking about what happens when we die.

454
00:35:08,220 --> 00:35:08,420
Yeah.

455
00:35:08,420 --> 00:35:13,920
So, there's one of your colleagues that is on your show, is from the Monroe Institute?

456
00:35:14,440 --> 00:35:14,800
Yes.

457
00:35:15,580 --> 00:35:16,320
Not my show.

458
00:35:16,480 --> 00:35:18,180
I don't have a show.

459
00:35:18,280 --> 00:35:21,500
But the Monroe Institute, of course, has done detailed investigation of this.

460
00:35:21,580 --> 00:35:23,960
And by synchronicity, Santa and I were discussing it yesterday.

461
00:35:24,060 --> 00:35:31,220
I want to sit in front of the psychomanteum, where you sit sideways onto a mirror, and entities come out of the mirror and speak to you.

462
00:35:31,220 --> 00:35:34,920
So, but back to what happens when you die for death.

463
00:35:35,120 --> 00:35:35,300
Yeah.

464
00:35:36,520 --> 00:35:40,980
Basically, you said there's no scientific evidence for near-death experiences.

465
00:35:41,180 --> 00:35:41,740
No, I didn't.

466
00:35:41,900 --> 00:35:44,000
I didn't say that.

467
00:35:44,080 --> 00:35:50,200
I just said that hardline materialist scientists will regard it as anecdotal and therefore worthless.

468
00:35:50,540 --> 00:35:52,100
I don't agree with their perspective.

469
00:35:52,100 --> 00:35:52,460
Okay.

470
00:35:52,800 --> 00:35:58,960
So, in being near-death experience, what happens is whatever we believe.

471
00:35:59,760 --> 00:36:01,820
So, when you have a near-death experience...

472
00:36:01,820 --> 00:36:04,520
The only problem is if I don't believe that that's what happens.

473
00:36:06,240 --> 00:36:07,160
If I don't...

474
00:36:07,160 --> 00:36:08,300
You know, I...

475
00:36:08,300 --> 00:36:09,640
I have a finish saying what I'm saying.

476
00:36:09,640 --> 00:36:09,900
Yeah.

477
00:36:10,480 --> 00:36:11,440
You're saying that...

478
00:36:11,440 --> 00:36:14,520
If you would say that may be what happens, I'd be more receptive to it.

479
00:36:14,520 --> 00:36:14,800
Okay.

480
00:36:14,800 --> 00:36:18,200
What happens when we die is whatever we can help...

481
00:36:18,200 --> 00:36:22,720
Whatever happens when we're about to die is whatever is going to help us at that time.

482
00:36:22,820 --> 00:36:31,080
So, we're going to receive information that we're going to interpret into our relative, the light or whatever.

483
00:36:31,200 --> 00:36:32,200
But we don't die.

484
00:36:32,500 --> 00:36:35,520
So, what happens in a near-death experience is not what happens when we die.

485
00:36:35,520 --> 00:36:42,860
If we were to completely die, we would realize we were still existing, but not as ourselves.

486
00:36:43,000 --> 00:36:44,080
This is a bit of consciousness.

487
00:36:44,440 --> 00:36:44,620
Yeah.

488
00:36:44,940 --> 00:36:45,800
I agree with you.

489
00:36:45,840 --> 00:36:48,840
The McGraw Institute, they actually rescue souls.

490
00:36:49,020 --> 00:36:54,800
They have workshops where people come and pay to come and sit and go into...

491
00:36:54,800 --> 00:36:57,360
So, find souls that have you come over.

492
00:36:57,540 --> 00:36:57,820
Okay.

493
00:36:58,500 --> 00:37:00,620
That's very shamanic work, by the way.

494
00:37:00,800 --> 00:37:02,240
It's absolutely shamanic.

495
00:37:02,320 --> 00:37:03,640
I have a friend with Tom Campbell.

496
00:37:04,020 --> 00:37:04,460
Right.

497
00:37:04,460 --> 00:37:06,300
Not as far as Robert McGraw.

498
00:37:06,920 --> 00:37:07,540
It's good all day.

499
00:37:08,380 --> 00:37:08,780
Excellent.

500
00:37:08,940 --> 00:37:12,480
Well, I'm planning to visit it at some time reasonably soon.

501
00:37:14,060 --> 00:37:15,380
So, we'll continue.

502
00:37:16,700 --> 00:37:21,620
These are some of the common forms in which aliens and spirits and fairies appear.

503
00:37:22,620 --> 00:37:31,140
So, is it a coincidence that the oldest surviving cave art in Italy and Germany, France, Southern Africa, and recently in Indonesia as well,

504
00:37:31,260 --> 00:37:33,640
cave art that goes back almost 40,000 years,

505
00:37:33,640 --> 00:37:39,280
routinely depicts therianthropes, creatures that are part animal and part human in form.

506
00:37:39,360 --> 00:37:42,460
These are the diagnostic entities of vision.

507
00:37:42,460 --> 00:37:54,640
And they clearly belong to the same general type of supernatural beings described as spirits by shamans, as aliens by modern Westerners, and as fairies and elves in the European Middle Ages.

508
00:37:54,640 --> 00:37:56,140
Could there be a connection?

509
00:37:56,140 --> 00:37:57,700
This is Chauvet cave in France.

510
00:37:57,700 --> 00:38:01,020
This is Chauvet cave in France, and we see a bison man here.

511
00:38:01,680 --> 00:38:07,540
And indeed, bison men are found all over the painted caves for thousands and thousands of years.

512
00:38:07,540 --> 00:38:15,720
When we go closer to the Chauvet figure, which is about 32,000 years old, we see that bison man is actually straddling a woman.

513
00:38:15,720 --> 00:38:24,180
And that woman is headless, but then her right arm is transforming into the head of a lion.

514
00:38:24,180 --> 00:38:35,940
So it's bison man straddling lion woman 33,000 years ago in France, and what's depicted is clearly a moment of transformation or of shape-shifting.

515
00:38:35,940 --> 00:38:40,340
Where did they get the inspiration from that, for that from?

516
00:38:40,340 --> 00:38:44,820
Where did they get the idea that they would not see that when they're out hunting game?

517
00:38:44,820 --> 00:38:47,860
You don't see women turning into lions.

518
00:38:47,860 --> 00:38:54,820
You don't see a lion man like this carved out of mammoth ivory, part lion and part human in form.

519
00:38:54,820 --> 00:39:03,140
Here's a 27,000-year-old piece with some human and some animal characteristics from Apollo 11 cave in Namibia.

520
00:39:03,140 --> 00:39:19,780
Here from the Cedarburg in South Africa, thought to be about 4,000 years old, perched on a zigzag, humans transforming into antelopes in the Drakensberg, 8,000 or 9,000 years old.

521
00:39:19,780 --> 00:39:27,300
These two figures, human bodies, but they have the heads of antelopes, of elans, as a matter of fact.

522
00:39:27,300 --> 00:39:33,300
And then this one has got two feathers growing out of his back, as though he's about to sprout wings and take flight.

523
00:39:33,300 --> 00:39:43,300
And this one, all this lumpy stuff around his upper body, that's actually two serpents that are wrapped around his upper body, and each of the serpents has also got the head of an antelope.

524
00:39:43,300 --> 00:39:49,300
Well, I mean, it's way out, and you definitely don't see that in daily life.

525
00:39:49,300 --> 00:39:56,300
So, we have to ask ourselves, why is this imagery, this kind of imagery, coming up again and again in rock and cave art all around the world?

526
00:39:56,300 --> 00:40:06,300
There's the sorcerer in Trois Frères, 17,000 years old, part owl, part wolf, part stag, part human being.

527
00:40:06,300 --> 00:40:15,300
And then you have these flying vessels, you know, we can say this is flying from the sand rock art, because there's birds up in the sky above it.

528
00:40:15,300 --> 00:40:25,300
And then on the cave walls, the painted caves in Europe, you find these odd looking things that archaeologists have never been able to explain what they are.

529
00:40:25,300 --> 00:40:36,300
But actually, what they look like, what they look like a lot, is the flying saucers that Pablo Amaringo painted in his ayahuasca visions.

530
00:40:36,300 --> 00:40:43,300
Actually, Pablo Amaringo passed away, I did have the privilege of knowing him when I got permission to use his images.

531
00:40:43,300 --> 00:40:50,300
I spoke with him directly several times, and I asked him why his ayahuasca imagery is so full of pictures of flying saucers.

532
00:40:50,300 --> 00:40:55,300
And what's going on? Is this beings who are coming here from other planets to interact with us?

533
00:40:55,300 --> 00:40:58,300
And actually, what Pablo said was very interesting. He said, no.

534
00:40:58,300 --> 00:41:03,300
He said, those are vehicles for entering and leaving the spirit world.

535
00:41:03,300 --> 00:41:09,300
And when a shaman talks about entering and leaving the spirit world, he's just a whisker away from a quantum physicist,

536
00:41:09,300 --> 00:41:12,300
talking about parallel realms and parallel dimensions.

537
00:41:12,300 --> 00:41:19,300
So it's odd that these very similar images appear in the painted caves and in modern ayahuasca visions.

538
00:41:19,300 --> 00:41:28,300
And again, the owl is a very common feature of UFO abduction experiences and very common with shamans as well.

539
00:41:28,300 --> 00:41:38,300
This is from Angoulême in France, this curious high-domed forehead and hint of an eye and a nose and a narrow-pointed chin.

540
00:41:38,300 --> 00:41:42,300
And here in Peshmerl cave in France.

541
00:41:42,300 --> 00:41:47,300
Well, this one is in the Drakensberg in South Africa, this high-domed forehead, the narrow-pointed chin.

542
00:41:47,300 --> 00:41:53,300
And then in France, Peshmerl, 24,000 years old, some object in the sky.

543
00:41:53,300 --> 00:42:02,300
And then this little figure down beneath it, we can just make out the features, the eyes, the high-domed forehead, the narrow-pointed chin of that figure.

544
00:42:02,300 --> 00:42:12,300
And if we redraw it, well, we end up with something looking very like the sort of classic modern interpretation of the alien grey.

545
00:42:12,300 --> 00:42:20,300
And there's also piercing going on in this, rather like the shamanic ordeal.

546
00:42:20,300 --> 00:42:25,300
And, I mean, cut a long story short, I think there's a connection.

547
00:42:25,300 --> 00:42:34,300
But I don't think that such experiences are to do with physical aliens who've come here in flying saucers from other planets in this physical universe.

548
00:42:34,300 --> 00:42:40,300
I think they're the latest manifestation of a very ancient, spiritual, non-physical phenomenon.

549
00:42:40,300 --> 00:42:50,300
And to understand them, we first must understand the inspiration behind the rock and cave art that has preserved the earliest surviving depictions of such beings.

550
00:42:53,300 --> 00:42:55,300
Time is running out.

551
00:42:55,300 --> 00:43:07,300
I won't tell this story at length, but Sans de Soto Ola was a Spanish miner nobleman who found on his property an astonishing cave that's now one of the most famous cave art caves in the world.

552
00:43:07,300 --> 00:43:09,300
It's called Altamira.

553
00:43:09,300 --> 00:43:19,300
And at that time, no cave art had been discovered, but some physical objects, carvings in mammoth ivory and so on, had been discovered.

554
00:43:19,300 --> 00:43:31,300
And one day Sans de Soto Ola goes into this cave with his daughter and he's got a candle and she's looking up at the ceiling and she says, Daddy, look, cows.

555
00:43:31,300 --> 00:43:38,300
And he looks up and lo and behold, there are all these bison painted on the ceiling of Altamira cave.

556
00:43:38,300 --> 00:43:39,300
It was a great discovery.

557
00:43:39,300 --> 00:43:46,300
I mean, there's more of Altamira, the way they use the rock to bring a sort of spirit out of the wall, these curious geometries.

558
00:43:46,300 --> 00:43:50,300
But the sad story is what happened to Sans de Soto Ola.

559
00:43:50,300 --> 00:43:59,300
Because like any academic rebel, he was saying something that wasn't accepted at the time, that they were capable of astonishing art in the caves.

560
00:43:59,300 --> 00:44:03,300
And his reputation was utterly assassinated.

561
00:44:03,300 --> 00:44:05,300
He died a broken man.

562
00:44:05,300 --> 00:44:11,300
The two most who attacked him were Emile de Cartillac and Henry Broy.

563
00:44:11,300 --> 00:44:16,300
But the evidence eventually bore Sans de Soto Ola out.

564
00:44:16,300 --> 00:44:23,300
More caves were found, caves which had calcite imposed over the paintings.

565
00:44:23,300 --> 00:44:27,300
And there's no way that this could be a forgery, which is what they accused him of.

566
00:44:27,300 --> 00:44:29,300
And finally it was accepted.

567
00:44:29,300 --> 00:44:38,300
At that point, Emile de Cartillac, his fiercest persecutor, who called the Altamira paintings a fraud, becomes the world expert in the Altamira paintings.

568
00:44:38,300 --> 00:44:40,300
And pretty soon nobody remembers Soto Ola at all.

569
00:44:40,300 --> 00:44:43,300
It's all to do with Emile de Cartillac.

570
00:44:43,300 --> 00:44:45,300
I'm just going to skip through this.

571
00:44:45,300 --> 00:44:56,300
But basically the argument is that the evidence for the experiences that inspired this art are found in the art itself.

572
00:44:56,300 --> 00:44:59,300
It is the therianthropic figures.

573
00:44:59,300 --> 00:45:06,300
It is the appearance of geometry and curious wavy zigzag lines with the figures like this in South Africa.

574
00:45:06,300 --> 00:45:17,300
And here in the painted caves, the Cederberg, these curious sort of boat-like features, these inter-nested curved lines, Altamira.

575
00:45:17,300 --> 00:45:23,300
This elephant with a grid on its body.

576
00:45:23,300 --> 00:45:28,300
This grid between two ibexes at Lascaux.

577
00:45:28,300 --> 00:45:36,300
This sort of flow of dots running down the wall at El Castillo cave, 28, 29 thousand years old.

578
00:45:36,300 --> 00:45:40,300
Again, dots within a square in the Cederberg.

579
00:45:40,300 --> 00:45:44,300
More comparisons of the Drakensberg and Altamira.

580
00:45:44,300 --> 00:45:54,300
And even into Neolithic art, Gavrinis cave in the Gavrinis tomb chamber in Karnak in Brittany.

581
00:45:54,300 --> 00:46:01,300
Comparing it with recent Ayahuasca art from the Tucano in South America.

582
00:46:01,300 --> 00:46:09,300
So the question is how are we to explain these commonalities across tens of thousands of years amongst entirely unrelated cultures.

583
00:46:09,300 --> 00:46:16,300
And it's modern neuropsychological research into altered states of consciousness that gave the first clue.

584
00:46:16,300 --> 00:46:22,300
Back in the 50s and 60s, quite a lot of work was done with human volunteers and psychedelic drugs

585
00:46:22,300 --> 00:46:26,300
before the war on drugs stopped all of that research.

586
00:46:26,300 --> 00:46:32,300
And the researchers were able to establish a procedure, a three-stage pattern really,

587
00:46:32,300 --> 00:46:35,300
that occurred in many deeply altered states of consciousness.

588
00:46:35,300 --> 00:46:39,300
And in stage one, the volunteers would report seeing brightly colored scintillating patterns

589
00:46:39,300 --> 00:46:43,300
and wavy lines and geometry and zigzags and starbursts and spirals.

590
00:46:43,300 --> 00:46:45,300
Stage two, they would begin to take form.

591
00:46:45,300 --> 00:46:48,300
That zigzag might become a serpent.

592
00:46:48,300 --> 00:46:51,300
Then there's a sense of passing through a seamlessly convincing...

593
00:46:51,300 --> 00:46:56,300
through a vortex into a seamlessly convincing parallel universe

594
00:46:56,300 --> 00:47:02,300
where the volunteers then report encountering intelligent entities that communicate with them telepathically.

595
00:47:02,300 --> 00:47:12,300
And one of those 1960s volunteers depicted this entity, a man in a modern business suit, but with the head of a fox.

596
00:47:12,300 --> 00:47:19,300
That is absolutely the same thing as bison man and lion man in the painted caves.

597
00:47:19,300 --> 00:47:24,300
The patterns commonly seen in the first stage of trance are known as entoptic phenomena.

598
00:47:24,300 --> 00:47:30,300
They've been so well documented that there's actually sort of tables of the patterns that are seen.

599
00:47:30,300 --> 00:47:39,300
And it was Reichel Dormitov who first recognized that these patterns were turning up in the art of the Tucano after drinking ayahuasca.

600
00:47:39,300 --> 00:47:44,300
And indeed, virtually identical patterns.

601
00:47:44,300 --> 00:47:49,300
It seemed that an unexpected universal pattern of brain imagery had been revealed with Western volunteers

602
00:47:49,300 --> 00:47:53,300
and Amazonian Indians seeing the same hallucinatory patterns.

603
00:47:53,300 --> 00:47:57,300
And it's Professor David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand

604
00:47:57,300 --> 00:48:01,300
who really made the solid scientific breakthrough in this field.

605
00:48:01,300 --> 00:48:08,300
Before speaking of him, I must pay absolute tribute to the late, great Terence McKenna

606
00:48:08,300 --> 00:48:11,300
and his amazing insights in his book, Food of the Gods,

607
00:48:11,300 --> 00:48:16,300
where, as was so often the case, Terence was far ahead of his time.

608
00:48:16,300 --> 00:48:19,300
David Lewis Williams is another man who's ahead of his time.

609
00:48:19,300 --> 00:48:23,300
He began advocating his neuropsychological model as early as the 1970s,

610
00:48:23,300 --> 00:48:27,300
arguing that all of the cave art and rock art and its similarities can be explained

611
00:48:27,300 --> 00:48:30,300
if we understand that this is shamanistic art.

612
00:48:30,300 --> 00:48:34,300
That these artists were entering deeply altered states of consciousness.

613
00:48:34,300 --> 00:48:37,300
They were returning to the normal, alert, problem-solving state of consciousness

614
00:48:37,300 --> 00:48:41,300
and they were painting on the cave walls what they had seen in the visionary states.

615
00:48:41,300 --> 00:48:43,300
And because we all have essentially the same brains,

616
00:48:43,300 --> 00:48:48,300
that's how David explains the universality, the commonality of these experiences.

617
00:48:48,300 --> 00:48:50,300
And there are some of his books I highly recommend,

618
00:48:50,300 --> 00:48:55,300
The Mind in the Cave, Consciousness and the Origins of Art.

619
00:48:55,300 --> 00:48:58,300
So, we go back to the San Bushmen.

620
00:48:58,300 --> 00:49:02,300
David did a great deal of work amongst the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

621
00:49:02,300 --> 00:49:07,300
And then the Kozo shamans in the California Great Basin, if I'm correct.

622
00:49:07,300 --> 00:49:11,300
Kozo shamans often lived alone in the periphery of villages.

623
00:49:11,300 --> 00:49:17,300
The ritual usually began with stress, then a dream, a door like opening into the rock.

624
00:49:17,300 --> 00:49:25,300
And we know what Kozo rock art is about, that it's describing these visionary trance experiences

625
00:49:25,300 --> 00:49:32,300
because before Kozo culture was completely destroyed, Western ethnographers talked with Kozo shamans.

626
00:49:32,300 --> 00:49:34,300
And they got the picture.

627
00:49:34,300 --> 00:49:38,300
And this is the interesting thing.

628
00:49:38,300 --> 00:49:43,300
Entoptic phenomena, Western volunteers with psychedelic drugs.

629
00:49:43,300 --> 00:49:47,300
San rock art in South Africa, essentially the same images.

630
00:49:47,300 --> 00:49:50,300
Kozo rock art, essentially the same images.

631
00:49:50,300 --> 00:49:54,300
Upper Paleolithic art, essentially the same types of images.

632
00:49:54,300 --> 00:49:58,300
We can't go back and interview an Upper Paleolithic artist.

633
00:49:58,300 --> 00:49:59,300
They're all gone.

634
00:49:59,300 --> 00:50:08,300
But it's pretty clear that they're confronting the same kinds of experiences that are being documented in these other cases.

635
00:50:08,300 --> 00:50:15,300
And when we recall that modern lab volunteers put experimentally into altered states of consciousness,

636
00:50:15,300 --> 00:50:25,300
and shamans in surviving hunter-gatherer cultures routinely report visionary encounters with unearthly beings in the deepest stages of trance,

637
00:50:25,300 --> 00:50:29,300
these beings very frequently take the form of therianthropes.

638
00:50:29,300 --> 00:50:35,300
And I think it's obvious that David Lewis William is right, that the cave artists of Upper Paleolithic were shamans.

639
00:50:35,300 --> 00:50:39,300
They depicted very similar supernatural beings because they encountered them in visions,

640
00:50:39,300 --> 00:50:44,300
while they explored very similar altered states of consciousness.

641
00:50:44,300 --> 00:50:57,300
So, is this majestic art in the painted caves, is this just to be reduced to hallucinations?

642
00:50:57,300 --> 00:50:59,300
Is that all it is?

643
00:50:59,300 --> 00:51:02,300
Is it mere wanderings of the mind?

644
00:51:02,300 --> 00:51:05,300
That's actually how David Lewis Williams explains it.

645
00:51:05,300 --> 00:51:09,300
When I interviewed him, I asked him, have you ever taken a psychedelic yourself?

646
00:51:09,300 --> 00:51:13,300
He said, no, never, and I'm never going to. I don't want to fry my brain.

647
00:51:13,300 --> 00:51:16,300
He said, the research is enough for me to draw upon.

648
00:51:16,300 --> 00:51:21,300
I get his point, but, you know, he sees it as a trivial thing, really.

649
00:51:21,300 --> 00:51:25,300
It's not significant, the experience, even though it leads to this majestic art.

650
00:51:25,300 --> 00:51:32,300
But how can we explain that something so beautiful, which touches the soul so deeply as the rock and cave art of antiquity,

651
00:51:32,300 --> 00:51:38,300
could have arisen out of human experiences that are fundamentally trivial and worthless and without transcendent meaning?

652
00:51:38,300 --> 00:51:44,300
And why is it also that the creation of these meaningless images appears to coincide in the archaeological record

653
00:51:44,300 --> 00:51:48,300
with the single greatest leap forward in the evolution of human behavior?

654
00:51:48,300 --> 00:51:52,300
That's when our ancestors become recognizably modern humans in the way they behave.

655
00:51:52,300 --> 00:51:55,300
They're fully symbolic. They're leaving art. They believe in life after death.

656
00:51:55,300 --> 00:51:58,300
They bury food and grave goods with their deceased.

657
00:51:58,300 --> 00:52:01,300
Everything changes. Their stone tools get better.

658
00:52:01,300 --> 00:52:03,300
It's a huge leap forward.

659
00:52:03,300 --> 00:52:07,300
So, you know, are we just a rather unusual African ape?

660
00:52:07,300 --> 00:52:12,300
We're only 1.4% of genetic difference from gorillas.

661
00:52:12,300 --> 00:52:17,300
This is the evolutionary tree from the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee six million years ago

662
00:52:17,300 --> 00:52:19,300
to anatomically modern humans today.

663
00:52:19,300 --> 00:52:24,300
I call it six million years of utter and intense boredom.

664
00:52:24,300 --> 00:52:32,300
I mean, they didn't invent stone tools until about two and a half million years ago.

665
00:52:32,300 --> 00:52:40,300
But once they'd invented them, they stuck with them without any change for the next million years.

666
00:52:40,300 --> 00:52:46,300
So they're passing down cultural information and they're completely incapable of innovation or lateral thinking.

667
00:52:46,300 --> 00:52:50,300
They're locked in a rut, their particular technology.

668
00:52:50,300 --> 00:52:59,300
And when they do introduce a change, slightly better tools, they stick with that for a million years as well.

669
00:52:59,300 --> 00:53:03,300
Very dull. You would not want to have dinner with them.

670
00:53:03,300 --> 00:53:05,300
And then art begins to appear.

671
00:53:05,300 --> 00:53:13,300
The earliest is 100,000 to 77,000 years ago, this geometric pattern from Blombos Cave in South Africa, shell beads.

672
00:53:13,300 --> 00:53:22,300
And then between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, you get just this explosion of astonishing art all around the world,

673
00:53:22,300 --> 00:53:26,300
which accompanies this huge leap forward in human behavior.

674
00:53:26,300 --> 00:53:31,300
And you enter the majestic cathedrals of the painted caves of France.

675
00:53:31,300 --> 00:53:32,300
This is Lascaux.

676
00:53:32,300 --> 00:53:37,300
Picasso, when he came out of it, said, he was stunned after his first visit.

677
00:53:37,300 --> 00:53:38,300
He said, we've invented nothing.

678
00:53:38,300 --> 00:53:42,300
All those artists, they knew everything that we know today.

679
00:53:42,300 --> 00:53:46,300
They were brilliant, brilliant, guided, gifted geniuses.

680
00:53:46,300 --> 00:53:56,300
So, you know, whatever these substances are, I would say used properly, with respect, in the right setting, with the right intent,

681
00:53:56,300 --> 00:53:59,300
they are certainly not brain candy.

682
00:53:59,300 --> 00:54:03,300
These substances are instruments of personal transformation.

683
00:54:03,300 --> 00:54:09,300
Deep work can be done with them and it can lead us to encounters with the beyond.

684
00:54:09,300 --> 00:54:12,300
Now, what time am I out of here?

685
00:54:12,300 --> 00:54:13,300
Okay.

686
00:54:13,300 --> 00:54:16,300
Well, I'm going to just rush on to the next presentation.

687
00:54:16,300 --> 00:54:21,300
And then, which I'll try and get through really rapidly, and then we'll do more questions.

688
00:54:21,300 --> 00:54:22,300
Okay.

689
00:54:22,300 --> 00:54:36,300
So, yeah, you can put the slide back on the screen, if you like.

690
00:54:36,300 --> 00:54:38,300
Or not.

691
00:54:38,300 --> 00:54:39,300
It's okay.

692
00:54:39,300 --> 00:54:40,300
Yeah.

693
00:54:40,300 --> 00:54:43,300
You know, so that's the question.

694
00:54:43,300 --> 00:54:44,300
Is it just meaningless?

695
00:54:44,300 --> 00:54:45,300
Is it trivial?

696
00:54:45,300 --> 00:54:47,300
Is it ultimately not important?

697
00:54:47,300 --> 00:54:54,300
And why do these meaningless images coincide with the single greatest leap forward ever registered in human evolution?

698
00:54:54,300 --> 00:55:02,300
You know, hallucinations are conventionally explained as absolute trivia, repressed memory items arising within the brain itself,

699
00:55:02,300 --> 00:55:10,300
somehow derived from previously recorded perceptions, combination of cortical arousal and impaired or distorted information input.

700
00:55:10,300 --> 00:55:13,300
But what fragments of what memories?

701
00:55:13,300 --> 00:55:14,300
And which recorded perceptions?

702
00:55:14,300 --> 00:55:18,300
Where do we get this stuff from that is manifested in all of this art?

703
00:55:18,300 --> 00:55:21,300
It's hard to believe that there's some sort of brain module for that.

704
00:55:21,300 --> 00:55:25,300
Could we be looking at something real but not properly understood?

705
00:55:25,300 --> 00:55:33,300
Is it, I mean, to cut to the chase, is it that what these substances are doing,

706
00:55:33,300 --> 00:55:39,300
what the various techniques of entering altered states of consciousness are doing is retuning the receiver wavelength of the brain

707
00:55:39,300 --> 00:55:45,300
so that we tune out of channel normal and pick up some of the other channels that are equally real,

708
00:55:45,300 --> 00:55:49,300
that are broadcasting to us all the time, that we normally shut off from them.

709
00:55:49,300 --> 00:55:54,300
So here's the inventor of LSD or the discoverer, Albert Hoffman, talking about reality

710
00:55:54,300 --> 00:56:00,300
and how it's inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self

711
00:56:00,300 --> 00:56:04,300
the emanations of the exterior world become conscious.

712
00:56:04,300 --> 00:56:09,300
It's often in the propaganda said that, you know, if you take LSD it'll shorten your life.

713
00:56:09,300 --> 00:56:19,300
Albert Hoffman, after discovering LSD in the late 1940s, took LSD regularly, extremely regularly throughout his life.

714
00:56:19,300 --> 00:56:26,300
He stayed sharp as a pin and did not pass away until the age of 102.

715
00:56:26,300 --> 00:56:33,300
Maybe there's more to the exterior world than our senses even when extended by the finest scientific instruments are able to perceive.

716
00:56:33,300 --> 00:56:39,300
Blake, the doors of perception, this notion that we're actually seeing stuff through a clouded window

717
00:56:39,300 --> 00:56:42,300
and it needs to be cleared in order for us to see it properly.

718
00:56:42,300 --> 00:56:45,300
William James, nitrous oxide.

719
00:56:45,300 --> 00:56:51,300
No account of the universe in its totality can be final, which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

720
00:56:51,300 --> 00:56:54,300
Huxley sees the brain as a reducing valve.

721
00:56:54,300 --> 00:56:57,300
It's primarily there to cut out senses and experiences.

722
00:56:57,300 --> 00:57:04,300
And he sees the psychedelics as gratuitous graces that allows the reducing valve to be lifted

723
00:57:04,300 --> 00:57:08,300
and allows more of reality to come through to us.

724
00:57:08,300 --> 00:57:15,300
Hoffman again, the receiver, is tuned into another wavelength and that corresponding with normal everyday reality.

725
00:57:15,300 --> 00:57:18,300
Rick Strassman, amazing book, DMT, The Spirit Molecule.

726
00:57:18,300 --> 00:57:22,300
Rick's research at the University of New Mexico, fundamental breakthrough research.

727
00:57:22,300 --> 00:57:28,300
Anybody interested in the UFO and alien phenomenon should be reading this book.

728
00:57:28,300 --> 00:57:32,300
To add it to the other information that's available.

729
00:57:32,300 --> 00:57:40,300
It's not been absolutely proved that DMT is made in the pineal gland, but it certainly resides in the pineal gland.

730
00:57:40,300 --> 00:57:41,300
This has been proved.

731
00:57:41,300 --> 00:57:44,300
The scientific work is homing in more and more on the pineal.

732
00:57:44,300 --> 00:57:47,300
All of us in this room, every one of us is illegal.

733
00:57:47,300 --> 00:57:49,300
We all have DMT in our bodies.

734
00:57:49,300 --> 00:57:54,300
It is the only known endogenous psychedelic that the human body produces.

735
00:57:54,300 --> 00:57:57,300
Mostly in sub-psychedelic quantities.

736
00:57:57,300 --> 00:58:01,300
So it's found in blood, plasma, urine, cerebrospinal fluid.

737
00:58:01,300 --> 00:58:02,300
We don't know its function.

738
00:58:02,300 --> 00:58:08,300
But the pineal gland in evolutionary older animals, such as lizards and amphibians,

739
00:58:08,300 --> 00:58:10,300
it's called the third eye.

740
00:58:10,300 --> 00:58:13,300
Actually, it possesses a lens, a cornea and a retina.

741
00:58:13,300 --> 00:58:16,300
In humans, it's sunk much more deeply into the brain.

742
00:58:16,300 --> 00:58:24,300
It is no longer reactive to light, but maybe it's still forming the function of an eye.

743
00:58:24,300 --> 00:58:30,300
Maybe DMT is the lens on that eye that enables us to gain access to other levels of reality

744
00:58:30,300 --> 00:58:36,300
and other vibrations that are normally closed off to us.

745
00:58:36,300 --> 00:58:38,300
Widely found in nature.

746
00:58:38,300 --> 00:58:39,300
DMT-bearing plant.

747
00:58:39,300 --> 00:58:41,300
I'm just going to run through this.

748
00:58:41,300 --> 00:58:42,300
All kinds of ways of taking DMT.

749
00:58:42,300 --> 00:58:44,300
That's how they do it in the Amazon.

750
00:58:44,300 --> 00:58:46,300
They blast it up your nostrils.

751
00:58:46,300 --> 00:58:47,300
DMT snuff.

752
00:58:47,300 --> 00:58:48,300
Whoa!

753
00:58:48,300 --> 00:58:54,300
All these anadenanthera snuffs.

754
00:58:54,300 --> 00:58:57,300
I'm just having to rush through all of this.

755
00:58:57,300 --> 00:59:02,300
Before it was found in nature, DMT was synthesized by a British chemist.

756
00:59:02,300 --> 00:59:05,300
It became illegal in the US in 1971.

757
00:59:05,300 --> 00:59:11,300
It's actually very similar in structure to serotonin, but it has dramatic effects at the perceptual level.

758
00:59:11,300 --> 00:59:17,300
Alex Gray's paintings again and again feature typical DMT imagery.

759
00:59:17,300 --> 00:59:22,300
And very often you see eyes looking at you with DMT.

760
00:59:22,300 --> 00:59:27,300
So that's one of Alex Gray's paintings is on the cover of Rick Strassman's book.

761
00:59:27,300 --> 00:59:32,300
And just a few details from Rick's volunteers.

762
00:59:32,300 --> 00:59:35,300
This time I quickly blasted through to the other side.

763
00:59:35,300 --> 00:59:36,300
I was in a void of darkness.

764
00:59:36,300 --> 00:59:38,300
Suddenly beings appeared.

765
00:59:38,300 --> 00:59:41,300
They seemed pleased we'd discovered this technology.

766
00:59:41,300 --> 00:59:43,300
I went directly into deep space.

767
00:59:43,300 --> 00:59:50,300
They told me there were many things they could share with us when we learned how to make more extended contact.

768
00:59:50,300 --> 00:59:53,300
Another volunteer knew that we weren't alone in the universe.

769
00:59:53,300 --> 00:59:58,300
I thought the only way to encounter them is with bright lights and flying saucers in outer space.

770
00:59:58,300 --> 01:00:02,300
It never occurred to me to actually encounter them in my own inner space.

771
01:00:02,300 --> 01:00:03,300
Take this seriously.

772
01:00:03,300 --> 01:00:09,300
This may be a way of communicating with entities beyond more effective than the ones we're using now.

773
01:00:09,300 --> 01:00:12,300
Where we confine ourselves entirely to the physical model.

774
01:00:12,300 --> 01:00:14,300
Another volunteer.

775
01:00:14,300 --> 01:00:17,300
They were clinical researchers probing into my mind.

776
01:00:17,300 --> 01:00:19,300
They were sort of long fiber optic things.

777
01:00:19,300 --> 01:00:22,300
Carl sees a lot of elves.

778
01:00:22,300 --> 01:00:25,300
Ben has something inserted into his left forearm.

779
01:00:25,300 --> 01:00:29,300
Lucas sees a space station below him and to the right.

780
01:00:29,300 --> 01:00:31,300
He sees entities in the space station.

781
01:00:31,300 --> 01:00:33,300
They were doing some kind of routine technological work.

782
01:00:33,300 --> 01:00:35,300
Paid no attention to me.

783
01:00:35,300 --> 01:00:38,300
That's my awful drawing of the gray that I found.

784
01:00:38,300 --> 01:00:40,300
I've told you that story already.

785
01:00:40,300 --> 01:00:47,300
These encounters were just very frequently reported by Rick's volunteers.

786
01:00:47,300 --> 01:00:52,300
But we know that they were not physically abducted because they were on a hospital bed in the University of New Mexico.

787
01:00:52,300 --> 01:00:55,300
What appears to have been abducted was their consciousness.

788
01:00:55,300 --> 01:00:57,300
Their consciousness was abducted.

789
01:00:57,300 --> 01:01:01,300
And Rick, you know, feels surprised when he looks at his notes.

790
01:01:01,300 --> 01:01:05,300
Seeing how many of our volunteers were in contact with them or other beings.

791
01:01:05,300 --> 01:01:08,300
At least half did in one form or another.

792
01:01:08,300 --> 01:01:16,300
And Rick freely admits that he has such a hard time with these stories because they challenge the prevailing world view and my own.

793
01:01:16,300 --> 01:01:20,300
They are certainly not coming from the prevailing world view.

794
01:01:20,300 --> 01:01:27,300
Because before any UFO abduction experiences were reported, this gentleman conducted research with DMT and human volunteers.

795
01:01:27,300 --> 01:01:34,300
And they reported exactly the same kinds of encounters.

796
01:01:34,300 --> 01:01:36,300
And, sorry, yeah.

797
01:01:36,300 --> 01:01:45,300
He recognized the remarkable similarities between his volunteers' experiences and the experiences reported by UFO abductees.

798
01:01:45,300 --> 01:01:54,300
And what he's suggesting is that UFO abductees may be people who spontaneously overproduce endogenous DMT.

799
01:01:54,300 --> 01:01:59,300
He's not saying that that makes the experiences unreal.

800
01:01:59,300 --> 01:02:00,300
Quite the contrary.

801
01:02:00,300 --> 01:02:05,300
He's at pains to emphasize that in his view the experiences are absolutely real.

802
01:02:05,300 --> 01:02:16,300
By conceiving of the brain as a receiver of information, one can accommodate the biological model of changing brain function with a chemical.

803
01:02:16,300 --> 01:02:26,300
At the same time, it allows for the possibility that what is being received, while not usually perceptible, is consistently and verifiably existent for a large number of individuals.

804
01:02:26,300 --> 01:02:32,300
It may indeed reflect stable, freestanding, and parallel planes of reality.

805
01:02:32,300 --> 01:02:36,300
Now, because of time, I'm going to draw it to a close there.

806
01:02:36,300 --> 01:02:41,300
I would like to spend the next ten minutes, if we have them, or at least five, taking some questions.

807
01:02:41,300 --> 01:02:43,300
I'll take you next, yes?

808
01:02:43,300 --> 01:02:44,300
Is it possible?

809
01:02:44,300 --> 01:02:46,300
Yes, I believe that is possible.

810
01:02:46,300 --> 01:02:52,300
I think we are dealing with another level of reality with, indeed, a technology that is far beyond ours.

811
01:02:52,300 --> 01:02:58,300
But I don't think it's as simple as high-tech physical beings coming here across this physical universe.

812
01:02:58,300 --> 01:03:00,300
I think it's more mysterious than that.

813
01:03:00,300 --> 01:03:02,300
Much, much more mysterious than that.

814
01:03:02,300 --> 01:03:03,300
Yes?

815
01:03:03,300 --> 01:03:04,300
I would agree.

816
01:03:04,300 --> 01:03:05,300
Conscious...

817
01:03:05,300 --> 01:03:06,300
Indeed it does.

818
01:03:06,300 --> 01:03:07,300
It's liminal.

819
01:03:07,300 --> 01:03:12,300
It crosses the borderline between physical and non-physical.

820
01:03:12,300 --> 01:03:15,300
And I'm not ruling out the physical side of it.

821
01:03:15,300 --> 01:03:18,300
I'm intrigued by that, and I accept that that happens.

822
01:03:18,300 --> 01:03:24,300
What I'm saying is that here is another way for us to get into the phenomenon, and to explore the phenomenon,

823
01:03:24,300 --> 01:03:27,300
and to perhaps come back with reliable data.

824
01:03:27,300 --> 01:03:33,300
And the very elusiveness of the phenomenon is one of the things that suggests to me we're dealing with an interdimensional issue

825
01:03:33,300 --> 01:03:36,300
rather than a present space-time issue.

826
01:03:36,300 --> 01:03:37,300
Yes?

827
01:03:37,300 --> 01:03:38,300
I'll come to the other side in a moment.

828
01:03:38,300 --> 01:03:39,300
Yes?

829
01:03:39,300 --> 01:03:40,300
The tree of knowledge of good and evil.

830
01:03:40,300 --> 01:03:43,300
Well, if I'd had another two hours, I would have got there.

831
01:03:43,300 --> 01:03:52,300
But it's fascinating, okay, when the entity that we have been taught to believe is God drives Adam and Eve out of the garden.

832
01:03:52,300 --> 01:04:03,300
The entity gives an explanation for why, lest they discover the tree of life and become gods like us.

833
01:04:03,300 --> 01:04:10,300
It's a pretty spooky line in Genesis on that, you know, that there is a tree of life there.

834
01:04:10,300 --> 01:04:12,300
And we must be driven from the garden.

835
01:04:12,300 --> 01:04:17,300
We must never discover it, that entity says.

836
01:04:17,300 --> 01:04:20,300
That entity, in my view, is not a very nice guy.

837
01:04:20,300 --> 01:04:22,300
I'll take a question over here.

838
01:04:22,300 --> 01:04:23,300
Yes?

839
01:04:23,300 --> 01:04:25,300
Yeah, The Spirit Molecule is a movie, too.

840
01:04:25,300 --> 01:04:26,300
Great movie.

841
01:04:26,300 --> 01:04:28,300
Presented by Joe Rogan, as a matter of fact.

842
01:04:28,300 --> 01:04:30,300
Really good.

843
01:04:30,300 --> 01:04:32,300
I took a question from you earlier.

844
01:04:32,300 --> 01:04:33,300
Yes?

845
01:04:33,300 --> 01:04:43,300
Because it's a good guide in deep psychedelic work to overcome your fears,

846
01:04:43,300 --> 01:04:48,300
and to throw yourself into the experience rather than withdrawing from it.

847
01:04:48,300 --> 01:04:54,300
You're being offered an opportunity to explore something that is rare, and it's better to go with it.

848
01:04:54,300 --> 01:04:58,300
It will almost certainly not do you any serious harm.

849
01:04:58,300 --> 01:05:02,300
However, it's very important to be clear on a couple of things.

850
01:05:02,300 --> 01:05:05,300
Firstly, psychedelics are extremely serious business.

851
01:05:05,300 --> 01:05:07,300
They should be taken seriously.

852
01:05:07,300 --> 01:05:10,300
I do not believe psychedelics are for children under any circumstances.

853
01:05:10,300 --> 01:05:12,300
I think this is adult work.

854
01:05:12,300 --> 01:05:15,300
And secondly, all is not rosy in the ayahuasca garden.

855
01:05:15,300 --> 01:05:19,300
There are, you know, predatory shamans.

856
01:05:19,300 --> 01:05:26,300
There are psychic vampires who go around ayahuasca groups cultivating the vulnerability so they can get into other people's heads.

857
01:05:26,300 --> 01:05:29,300
I know it sounds weird, but it all happens in that realm.

858
01:05:29,300 --> 01:05:31,300
It's a very curious thing.

859
01:05:31,300 --> 01:05:40,300
And we had one session which was just terrible and filled with darkness, and we all felt it.

860
01:05:40,300 --> 01:05:46,300
And after the session, Santha and I were downstairs below the ceremonial space sitting by a fire,

861
01:05:46,300 --> 01:05:50,300
and this big German psychotherapist comes down the stairs, and he's kind of stumbling.

862
01:05:50,300 --> 01:05:54,300
He'd done the session, and he just says, what the fuck was that?

863
01:05:54,300 --> 01:05:56,300
You know, darkness comes in sometimes.

864
01:05:56,300 --> 01:05:58,300
The thing is not to invite it in.

865
01:05:58,300 --> 01:06:02,300
That's the role of the shaman, is to protect the space, and that failed on that night.

866
01:06:02,300 --> 01:06:07,300
To keep the vile stuff out, and to bring in what is good.

867
01:06:07,300 --> 01:06:11,300
And where you're vulnerable because you can't access the good side if you keep your shields up.

868
01:06:11,300 --> 01:06:13,300
You have to bring them down.

869
01:06:13,300 --> 01:06:18,300
No more questions this side? Yes?

870
01:06:18,300 --> 01:06:24,300
I think there is, and I think the study of chakras again is to do with vibrations and levels of encounter.

871
01:06:24,300 --> 01:06:29,300
I think we're again looking at an ancient science that got to grips with this kind of experience

872
01:06:29,300 --> 01:06:34,300
in a way that we're just absolutely infants in doing.

873
01:06:34,300 --> 01:06:38,300
A rose by any other name is still a rose.

874
01:06:38,300 --> 01:06:45,300
I think the, of course we must be cognizant that words carry power.

875
01:06:45,300 --> 01:06:49,300
And one of those words is drugs.

876
01:06:49,300 --> 01:06:54,300
I do prefer to refer to ayahuasca as a medicine, a medicine for the soul.

877
01:06:54,300 --> 01:06:57,300
I think that's what it is.

878
01:06:57,300 --> 01:07:02,300
But at the end of the day, a thing is what it is regardless of what we call it.

879
01:07:02,300 --> 01:07:10,300
And many of the other psychedelics that are sort of written off as drugs by the mainstream

880
01:07:10,300 --> 01:07:14,300
are also, can be, if rightly used, incredibly beneficial.

881
01:07:14,300 --> 01:07:15,300
Yes.

882
01:07:32,300 --> 01:07:47,300
So, that's a question that we all ask ourselves at some point.

883
01:07:47,300 --> 01:07:49,300
What happens when we die?

884
01:07:49,300 --> 01:07:54,300
It is, after all, the only other inevitable thing apart from taxes.

885
01:07:54,300 --> 01:08:03,300
So, the question is, is it the end of us?

886
01:08:03,300 --> 01:08:07,300
Or do we continue in some way?

887
01:08:07,300 --> 01:08:10,300
Does some part of us survive death?

888
01:08:10,300 --> 01:08:16,300
I would imagine that most people in this room have wondered about that at some point.

889
01:08:16,300 --> 01:08:19,300
It's a natural part of the human predicament.

890
01:08:19,300 --> 01:08:23,300
Well, here's Professor Richard Dawkins.

891
01:08:23,300 --> 01:08:29,300
He's the professor, formerly the Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

892
01:08:29,300 --> 01:08:32,300
He's the author of the book, The Selfish Gene.

893
01:08:32,300 --> 01:08:35,300
And also of the book, The God Delusion.

894
01:08:35,300 --> 01:08:41,300
Richard Dawkins appears to know what happens when you die.

895
01:08:41,300 --> 01:08:45,300
And the question, talk about a leading question, interviewer.

896
01:08:45,300 --> 01:08:49,300
How do you prepare for death in a world where there isn't a God?

897
01:08:49,300 --> 01:08:51,300
Well, there is.

898
01:08:51,300 --> 01:08:56,300
Dawkins, you prepare for it by facing up to the truth, which is that life is what we have.

899
01:08:56,300 --> 01:08:57,300
I agree with that.

900
01:08:57,300 --> 01:08:59,300
Life is what we have, and we should make the most of it.

901
01:08:59,300 --> 01:09:01,300
So, we better live our life to the full while we have it.

902
01:09:01,300 --> 01:09:04,300
Because there is nothing after it.

903
01:09:04,300 --> 01:09:06,300
That is not a scientific statement.

904
01:09:06,300 --> 01:09:08,300
When Dawkins says there is nothing after life,

905
01:09:08,300 --> 01:09:13,300
he is not reporting the results of experiments or studies or investigations.

906
01:09:13,300 --> 01:09:18,300
He has not died himself and found nothing and come back to report it.

907
01:09:18,300 --> 01:09:23,300
What he is actually doing is expressing his own religious faith,

908
01:09:23,300 --> 01:09:27,300
which is a dark and rather miserable faith in nothing.

909
01:09:27,300 --> 01:09:28,300
There is nothing.

910
01:09:28,300 --> 01:09:29,300
There is no purpose.

911
01:09:29,300 --> 01:09:30,300
There is no meaning.

912
01:09:30,300 --> 01:09:32,300
There is no transcendent goal.

913
01:09:32,300 --> 01:09:38,300
We are just lumps of meat, meat robots, functioning with our meat robot brains.

914
01:09:38,300 --> 01:09:43,300
And so, what is this thing called death?

915
01:09:43,300 --> 01:09:48,300
Well, I mean, the widely used legal definition of death is as follows.

916
01:09:48,300 --> 01:09:55,300
Complete cessation of brain function as evidenced by absence of brain wave activity on an electroencephalogram.

917
01:09:55,300 --> 01:10:00,300
To which I would say, yeah, but we are not our brains.

918
01:10:00,300 --> 01:10:03,300
We are our consciousness.

919
01:10:03,300 --> 01:10:05,300
That's what we are.

920
01:10:05,300 --> 01:10:08,300
We are little sparks of consciousness.

921
01:10:08,300 --> 01:10:13,300
And the question is, what is the relationship between consciousness and the brain?

922
01:10:13,300 --> 01:10:16,300
And it's a huge mystery.

923
01:10:16,300 --> 01:10:19,300
I mean, we definitely know that the brain is involved in consciousness.

924
01:10:19,300 --> 01:10:23,300
It would be very crazy to say that the brain is not involved in consciousness in any way.

925
01:10:23,300 --> 01:10:25,300
Of course it is.

926
01:10:25,300 --> 01:10:28,300
But what way is it involved in consciousness?

927
01:10:28,300 --> 01:10:30,300
How far is this established?

928
01:10:30,300 --> 01:10:34,300
So, the mainstream model, what I would call...

929
01:10:34,300 --> 01:10:39,300
God, this green slide situation is almost psychedelic.

930
01:10:39,300 --> 01:10:46,300
I suggest there is something wrong with the projector in here.

931
01:10:46,300 --> 01:10:51,300
This is the standard model of what I call materialist reductionist science.

932
01:10:51,300 --> 01:10:55,300
That the brain makes consciousness the way a factory makes cars.

933
01:10:55,300 --> 01:11:00,300
And if you ask one of these scientists, a man like Dawkins, you know, how do you know that?

934
01:11:00,300 --> 01:11:04,300
He'd say, well, look, if I damage part of your brain,

935
01:11:04,300 --> 01:11:10,300
or if a virus or some accident results in an area of your brain being damaged,

936
01:11:10,300 --> 01:11:13,300
an area of your consciousness is definitely going to be affected.

937
01:11:13,300 --> 01:11:14,300
And that's completely true.

938
01:11:14,300 --> 01:11:19,300
And from that, the deduction is made that our brains make consciousness.

939
01:11:19,300 --> 01:11:25,300
But there's another possibility, which is that the relationship of consciousness to the brain is...

940
01:11:25,300 --> 01:11:31,300
We're using analogies here, but it's more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set.

941
01:11:31,300 --> 01:11:34,300
There again, we can break our TV set.

942
01:11:34,300 --> 01:11:38,300
We can throw a rock at the screen, which often is a very good idea.

943
01:11:38,300 --> 01:11:43,300
And that will damage the picture.

944
01:11:43,300 --> 01:11:47,300
But the signal, completely unaffected, the signal continues.

945
01:11:47,300 --> 01:11:51,300
And actually, this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions.

946
01:11:51,300 --> 01:11:57,300
That we are incarnated in these bodies.

947
01:11:57,300 --> 01:12:04,300
That these bodies are vehicles for negotiating the physical and material plane.

948
01:12:04,300 --> 01:12:06,300
But that is not what we are.

949
01:12:06,300 --> 01:12:07,300
There's a driver inside.

950
01:12:07,300 --> 01:12:08,300
There's our consciousness.

951
01:12:08,300 --> 01:12:11,300
And that's been...

952
01:12:11,300 --> 01:12:14,300
Religions would call it our soul.

953
01:12:14,300 --> 01:12:16,300
So, there's two very different views here.

954
01:12:16,300 --> 01:12:21,300
And actually, there's nothing in neuroscience that I'm aware of that rules this possibility out.

955
01:12:21,300 --> 01:12:23,300
That consciousness is non-local.

956
01:12:23,300 --> 01:12:29,300
And that it manifests through the brain, rather than being manufactured by the brain.

957
01:12:29,300 --> 01:12:36,300
And I would say, actually, if we just examine this as a sort of bet in a casino,

958
01:12:36,300 --> 01:12:41,300
I would say that any reasonable person would have to say, life after death or not, it's a 50-50 shot.

959
01:12:41,300 --> 01:12:42,300
We don't know.

960
01:12:42,300 --> 01:12:44,300
Nobody really knows.

961
01:12:44,300 --> 01:12:48,300
If to be pure rationality, we can't say, no, there's no life after death.

962
01:12:48,300 --> 01:12:50,300
And we can't say, yes, absolutely there is.

963
01:12:50,300 --> 01:12:53,300
So, it feels like a 50-50 shot.

964
01:12:53,300 --> 01:13:03,300
It's interesting, in fact, in cultures that believe in reincarnation, the ancient Greeks put it beautifully, really,

965
01:13:03,300 --> 01:13:06,300
that when we are reborn into this life, we drink the waters of Leith.

966
01:13:06,300 --> 01:13:08,300
We drink the waters of forgetfulness.

967
01:13:08,300 --> 01:13:13,300
That's part of the deal in getting a material life, is that you forget your past lives.

968
01:13:13,300 --> 01:13:14,300
The deal doesn't quite work.

969
01:13:14,300 --> 01:13:16,300
Sometimes people do remember past lives.

970
01:13:16,300 --> 01:13:23,300
But if you knew what the whole game was about, then you perhaps would not be able to play it, you know, honestly.

971
01:13:23,300 --> 01:13:28,300
The fact that we don't know what the game is about, and we can't know, that's what makes it a real game.

972
01:13:28,300 --> 01:13:30,300
So, 50-50 shot.

973
01:13:30,300 --> 01:13:35,300
But then you have these anecdotal evidence, which materialist science rejects,

974
01:13:35,300 --> 01:13:39,300
including evidence of reincarnation.

975
01:13:39,300 --> 01:13:44,300
I would cite the work of Professor Ian Stevens at Virginia University,

976
01:13:44,300 --> 01:13:50,300
who went into the study of cases of claimed reincarnation and memories of past lives,

977
01:13:50,300 --> 01:13:53,300
determined to prove that there was no such thing.

978
01:13:53,300 --> 01:13:58,300
And after 15 years, he ended up proving that there is, much to his surprise.

979
01:13:58,300 --> 01:14:01,300
He was working primarily with children in India.

980
01:14:01,300 --> 01:14:08,300
He would, very, very frequently, those who remembered a past life had been killed violently in a previous life,

981
01:14:08,300 --> 01:14:12,300
and they would often have a mark where the injury had taken place.

982
01:14:12,300 --> 01:14:19,300
And they would remember their past lives, and they would be able to identify a house in a village 800 miles away,

983
01:14:19,300 --> 01:14:23,300
where something was hidden under the eaves, and it could go and be found.

984
01:14:23,300 --> 01:14:30,300
So, you know, by the time we take that into account, the anecdotal evidence, the near-death experiences,

985
01:14:30,300 --> 01:14:33,300
I myself have had a near-death experience.

986
01:14:33,300 --> 01:14:38,300
And maybe this is, maybe this is why I'm interested in this stuff.

987
01:14:38,300 --> 01:14:46,300
Because at the age of 17, I was, my parents went away for the weekend.

988
01:14:46,300 --> 01:14:48,300
I was living at home.

989
01:14:48,300 --> 01:14:51,300
And as 17-year-olds do, I had a party.

990
01:14:51,300 --> 01:14:54,300
It was a giant party, there were 300 people.

991
01:14:54,300 --> 01:14:58,300
The neighbors were, the neighbors went completely berserk.

992
01:14:58,300 --> 01:15:00,300
And the house was trashed.

993
01:15:00,300 --> 01:15:03,300
And then everybody just buggered off the next day and left me to look after it all.

994
01:15:03,300 --> 01:15:06,300
So, I'm going around, I'm cleaning up the house.

995
01:15:06,300 --> 01:15:07,300
The whole day passes.

996
01:15:07,300 --> 01:15:08,300
I got the hoover.

997
01:15:08,300 --> 01:15:09,300
I've done everything.

998
01:15:09,300 --> 01:15:13,300
And then, towards the evening, I'm in the kitchen.

999
01:15:13,300 --> 01:15:14,300
I'm in bare feet.

1000
01:15:14,300 --> 01:15:16,300
I'm washing dishes in the sink.

1001
01:15:16,300 --> 01:15:21,300
And I get this irrational urge to make sure that the refrigerator is plugged in properly.

1002
01:15:21,300 --> 01:15:23,300
So, I reach down my hand without looking.

1003
01:15:23,300 --> 01:15:26,300
And during the night, the back of the plug has been broken off.

1004
01:15:26,300 --> 01:15:31,300
And with wet hands, standing in a puddle of wet water, I contact the live wires.

1005
01:15:31,300 --> 01:15:35,300
And I get just an unbelievable electric shock.

1006
01:15:35,300 --> 01:15:37,300
And I lose consciousness.

1007
01:15:37,300 --> 01:15:38,300
I'm thrown across the room.

1008
01:15:38,300 --> 01:15:40,300
And I leave my body.

1009
01:15:40,300 --> 01:15:42,300
And I'm up there around the light.

1010
01:15:42,300 --> 01:15:46,300
And I see this slumped form on the floor, which is me.

1011
01:15:46,300 --> 01:15:49,300
And I think, ah, how interesting.

1012
01:15:49,300 --> 01:15:51,300
And then I'm back.

1013
01:15:51,300 --> 01:15:53,300
I don't have the relatives telling me it's not my time.

1014
01:15:53,300 --> 01:15:55,300
I don't have the tunnel of light.

1015
01:15:55,300 --> 01:15:57,300
But I was definitely out of my body.

1016
01:15:57,300 --> 01:16:01,300
So, this, I suppose, at the level of experience, has convinced me that consciousness is not confined

1017
01:16:01,300 --> 01:16:03,300
to or made by the brain.

1018
01:16:03,300 --> 01:16:06,300
That it can exist separately from the brain.

1019
01:16:06,300 --> 01:16:20,300
So, really, if we want to know about these mysteries, the last people we should ask are people like Richard Dawkins and materialist reductionist scientists.

1020
01:16:20,300 --> 01:16:24,300
Better that we go and see what the ancient Egyptians have to say about this.

1021
01:16:24,300 --> 01:16:31,300
They, after all, devoted their best minds for 3,000 years to the mystery of life after death.

1022
01:16:31,300 --> 01:16:34,300
That's what ancient Egyptian culture is all about.

1023
01:16:34,300 --> 01:16:38,300
How do we live this life to perfect our souls?

1024
01:16:38,300 --> 01:16:42,300
How do we live this life to move on to the next level?

1025
01:16:42,300 --> 01:16:48,300
They absolutely believed in reincarnation, but they believed in something beyond the physical realm as well.

1026
01:16:48,300 --> 01:16:52,300
And you can see this in the amazing art of ancient Egypt.

1027
01:16:52,300 --> 01:16:56,300
This is the god Osiris that we're seeing, seated on his throne here.

1028
01:16:56,300 --> 01:16:59,300
And Osiris undergoes a death.

1029
01:16:59,300 --> 01:17:08,300
He is murdered by his rival, his brother actually, Set, and 72 conspirators.

1030
01:17:08,300 --> 01:17:16,300
And his body's hacked into pieces and it's reassembled and revivified through the magic powers of Isis, the goddess Isis.

1031
01:17:16,300 --> 01:17:23,300
And in this scene, actually what you're seeing here is the corpse of Osiris.

1032
01:17:23,300 --> 01:17:30,300
Sorry, the red dot is not showing up, but the corpse of Osiris is lying here.

1033
01:17:30,300 --> 01:17:37,300
And hovering above his phallus is a swallow or a bird, sometimes a different species of bird.

1034
01:17:37,300 --> 01:17:39,300
And that is the goddess Isis.

1035
01:17:39,300 --> 01:17:43,300
And she has assembled the dismembered parts of Osiris.

1036
01:17:43,300 --> 01:17:50,300
And she is now going to receive his seed and give birth to the divine child Horus.

1037
01:17:50,300 --> 01:18:02,300
And every pharaoh saw himself as the Horus king and believed that on his death he would be transmuted to become one with Osiris in the heavens.

1038
01:18:02,300 --> 01:18:11,300
And with the great pyramid, you know, it's supposed to be a tomb and a tomb only as far as Egyptologists are concerned.

1039
01:18:11,300 --> 01:18:15,300
And it's supposed to be the tomb for this little chap down here.

1040
01:18:15,300 --> 01:18:18,300
That's the only surviving statue of Khufu.

1041
01:18:18,300 --> 01:18:21,300
It's two inches high.

1042
01:18:21,300 --> 01:18:32,300
So, it's hard to imagine that a man who left no surviving statues of himself apart from one that's two inches high had such a gigantic ego that he would build this thing as his tomb.

1043
01:18:32,300 --> 01:18:39,300
481 feet high, you know, 6 million tons, 30-acre footprint, perfectly aligned to true north.

1044
01:18:39,300 --> 01:18:41,300
Maybe it's something other than a tomb.

1045
01:18:41,300 --> 01:18:50,300
There is this piece of graffiti up in what are called the relieving chambers, right at the top above the king's chamber in the Great Pyramid.

1046
01:18:50,300 --> 01:18:57,300
And that piece of graffiti does bear the name of Khufu.

1047
01:18:57,300 --> 01:19:06,300
And for this reason, Egyptologists have been convinced that Khufu built the pyramid.

1048
01:19:06,300 --> 01:19:14,300
There's in fact compelling evidence that that is a 19th century forgery, not a genuine piece of ancient graffiti at all.

1049
01:19:14,300 --> 01:19:17,300
Apart from that, there's just no other inscriptions in the Great Pyramid.

1050
01:19:17,300 --> 01:19:19,300
It's completely bare.

1051
01:19:19,300 --> 01:19:22,300
It doesn't speak in written language to us.

1052
01:19:22,300 --> 01:19:25,300
It speaks in another kind of language.

1053
01:19:25,300 --> 01:19:35,300
So, this photograph, and by the way, I want to pay tribute to my wife, Santha, whose photographs are being butchered by the light in here.

1054
01:19:35,300 --> 01:19:48,300
And for all the amazing adventures we've had together, thank you for being a great photographer and wise guide.

1055
01:19:48,300 --> 01:19:50,300
So, this is a double exposure.

1056
01:19:50,300 --> 01:19:53,300
And on the right, what we're seeing is the Great Pyramid.

1057
01:19:53,300 --> 01:19:58,300
But on the left here, what we're seeing is the tomb chamber of the Pyramid of Unas.

1058
01:19:58,300 --> 01:20:01,300
Unas is a pharaoh of the fifth dynasty.

1059
01:20:01,300 --> 01:20:05,300
Two things happen when you go from the fourth dynasty to the fifth dynasty.

1060
01:20:05,300 --> 01:20:08,300
The quality of pyramids radically falls.

1061
01:20:08,300 --> 01:20:09,300
The Great Pyramid is unique.

1062
01:20:09,300 --> 01:20:12,300
It's right there, massive and unexplained.

1063
01:20:12,300 --> 01:20:16,300
The next dynasty, they're just little heaps of rubble.

1064
01:20:16,300 --> 01:20:21,300
But inside them are these amazing writings and images of stars on the walls.

1065
01:20:21,300 --> 01:20:23,300
And the walls are completely covered in hieroglyphs.

1066
01:20:23,300 --> 01:20:31,300
And those hieroglyphs, beautiful to look at in themselves, this is giving the name of the pharaoh Unas.

1067
01:20:31,300 --> 01:20:36,300
And it's amongst other things saying, expressing the hope that he has perfected himself as a soul,

1068
01:20:36,300 --> 01:20:42,300
and that he will become one with Osiris in the heavens, that he will live the life of millions of years.

1069
01:20:42,300 --> 01:20:49,300
And actually, these are called the pyramid texts because they were found inside the pyramids of the fifth and sixth dynasty.

1070
01:20:49,300 --> 01:20:55,300
But they're the earliest in a body of literature that goes all the way down through the ancient Egyptian story.

1071
01:20:55,300 --> 01:20:58,300
So the pyramid texts are the oldest.

1072
01:20:58,300 --> 01:21:00,300
Then we have the coffin texts.

1073
01:21:00,300 --> 01:21:03,300
Why? Because they're written inside the coffin lid.

1074
01:21:03,300 --> 01:21:06,300
Then we have the Book of the Dead.

1075
01:21:06,300 --> 01:21:12,300
The Book of the Dead is typically papyrus scrolls that are placed within the chest cavity of the mummy.

1076
01:21:12,300 --> 01:21:15,300
And then we have the Book of what is in the Duat.

1077
01:21:15,300 --> 01:21:23,300
The Duat was the ancient Egyptian afterlife realm through which they believed they must undertake a perilous journey after death.

1078
01:21:23,300 --> 01:21:28,300
And the Book of what is in the Duat describes that journey in great detail.

1079
01:21:28,300 --> 01:21:32,300
Get a chance to go to the Valley of the Kings, go to the tomb of Thutmosis IV.

1080
01:21:32,300 --> 01:21:37,300
There's a long climb up to it, then you enter, there's a deadfall covered by a bridge now.

1081
01:21:37,300 --> 01:21:38,300
And then you get into the tomb chamber.

1082
01:21:38,300 --> 01:21:44,300
And the whole text of the Book of what is in the Duat is inscribed around the walls of that tomb chamber.

1083
01:21:44,300 --> 01:21:49,300
So the ancient Egyptians believe we must make this journey.

1084
01:21:49,300 --> 01:21:52,300
It's through a kind of weird parallel universe.

1085
01:21:52,300 --> 01:21:54,300
At one level, it's definitely in the stars.

1086
01:21:54,300 --> 01:21:55,300
It's associated with stars.

1087
01:21:55,300 --> 01:21:58,300
But another level, it's three-dimensional, physical.

1088
01:21:58,300 --> 01:21:59,300
It's got corridors.

1089
01:21:59,300 --> 01:22:00,300
It's got passageways.

1090
01:22:00,300 --> 01:22:01,300
It's got galleries.

1091
01:22:01,300 --> 01:22:02,300
It's got gates.

1092
01:22:02,300 --> 01:22:04,300
There are monstrous creatures at the gates.

1093
01:22:04,300 --> 01:22:07,300
You must be able to answer the questions that they ask you.

1094
01:22:07,300 --> 01:22:08,300
You must be prepared.

1095
01:22:08,300 --> 01:22:12,300
Very like the Tibetan Book of the Dead in many ways.

1096
01:22:12,300 --> 01:22:20,300
What's happening is that all the wrong you've done in your life, you're projecting as you go through that journey, in a sense.

1097
01:22:20,300 --> 01:22:29,300
And on this terrifying journey, the jackal-headed mortuary god Anubis would sometimes act as a guide and companion of the soul.

1098
01:22:29,300 --> 01:22:39,300
And just notice that in Seti's hand, because this is the pharaoh Seti I, that in his hand is clutched the ankh, the symbol of immortal life.

1099
01:22:39,300 --> 01:22:46,300
And on the walls down into the tomb chamber, you can actually see this three-dimensional representation of the duat,

1100
01:22:46,300 --> 01:22:51,300
with this corridor system and a rising corridor and then another corridor there.

1101
01:22:51,300 --> 01:23:00,300
So, when we look more closely at these corridors, this is from the tomb of Thutmosis IV, these diagrams, these images here.

1102
01:23:00,300 --> 01:23:03,300
Very cartoon-like, actually, in a way.

1103
01:23:03,300 --> 01:23:08,300
They're sort of stick figures rather than the fully executed figures, but they're entirely symbolic.

1104
01:23:08,300 --> 01:23:11,300
But what's interesting is that this doesn't appear to be symbolic.

1105
01:23:11,300 --> 01:23:18,300
It's this rising gallery, which is just astonishingly like the Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid.

1106
01:23:18,300 --> 01:23:23,300
And, of course, a boat is the means of travel through the waterways of the duat.

1107
01:23:23,300 --> 01:23:30,300
And it's not there for an accident that a gigantic boat lies buried beside the Great Pyramid of Giza.

1108
01:23:30,300 --> 01:23:37,300
This is the subterranean chamber, deep, 100 feet vertically beneath the floor of the Great Pyramid.

1109
01:23:37,300 --> 01:23:43,300
And these are some shots from the 19th century of just how spooky and dark and weird this place used to look.

1110
01:23:43,300 --> 01:23:53,300
It's approached through a corridor that slopes down at 26 degrees, runs more than 300 feet down into this subterranean chamber,

1111
01:23:53,300 --> 01:24:01,300
which is 100 feet vertically beneath a monument that weighs 6 million tons in a country that suffers from earthquakes.

1112
01:24:02,300 --> 01:24:08,300
It's a terrifying place to get when the lights go out, but also instructive.

1113
01:24:08,300 --> 01:24:14,300
This corridor has a little gap in it, and actually that gap leads to what's called the well shaft,

1114
01:24:14,300 --> 01:24:20,300
another passageway that runs all the way from this corridor and joins it up to the base of the Grand Gallery.

1115
01:24:20,300 --> 01:24:25,300
I mean, it's astonishing, really, how they did that, how they managed to join these two up,

1116
01:24:25,300 --> 01:24:31,300
and the fact that the subterranean chamber is exactly placed dead center on the mass of the Great Pyramid.

1117
01:24:31,300 --> 01:24:36,300
So this is the corridor cut out of rock that you sort of go down to get to it.

1118
01:24:36,300 --> 01:24:45,300
And then, again, these rising corridors, and just to make my point, today it's lit.

1119
01:24:45,300 --> 01:24:49,300
When it was not lit, it was a much more terrifying place.

1120
01:24:49,300 --> 01:24:55,300
The Queen's Chamber, I really hate what this projector is doing to Santa's slides.

1121
01:24:55,300 --> 01:25:04,300
And the Grand Gallery, again, this is the Grand Gallery, and I suggest that that is what is depicted in the book of what is in the Duat.

1122
01:25:04,300 --> 01:25:14,300
And then, going up to the King's Chamber, this whole arrangement of corridors, of passageways above the King's Chamber, resembles the Jed Pillar,

1123
01:25:14,300 --> 01:25:18,300
which was another symbol of immortality, the backbone of Osiris.

1124
01:25:18,300 --> 01:25:22,300
And you eventually get up into this chamber, right at the top, with these huge blocks.

1125
01:25:22,300 --> 01:25:28,300
And that's another talk, but each of those blocks weighs 70 tons, and they're 350 feet above the ground.

1126
01:25:28,300 --> 01:25:32,300
And there's actually hundreds of them.

1127
01:25:32,300 --> 01:25:40,300
Then, when you go into the King's Chamber, just consider all the people who've been in there before,

1128
01:25:40,300 --> 01:25:44,300
all the others who've wandered into that place and felt that sense of mystery and that prickle down their spines.

1129
01:25:44,300 --> 01:25:49,300
So, this Victorian woman in the King's Chamber is almost like a ghost, you know?

1130
01:25:49,300 --> 01:25:53,300
And the ghosts of previous visitors and their curiosity and their sense of mystery.

1131
01:25:53,300 --> 01:25:55,300
That's what the Great Pyramid does more than anything else.

1132
01:25:55,300 --> 01:25:57,300
It initiates you into mystery.

1133
01:25:57,300 --> 01:26:02,300
The King's Chamber, not in our view, I and my colleagues who work on this field,

1134
01:26:02,300 --> 01:26:05,300
we do not think that this was a burial chamber for the Pharaoh at all.

1135
01:26:05,300 --> 01:26:11,300
We think it was a place of initiation, a place where those, particularly the Pharaohs,

1136
01:26:11,300 --> 01:26:16,300
who were being initiated into the deepest mysteries of the Egyptian quest for immortal life,

1137
01:26:16,300 --> 01:26:22,300
underwent a powerful experience, and that the sarcophagus was used for that powerful experience.

1138
01:26:22,300 --> 01:26:30,300
Now, the fifth division of the Duat is called Rostau in the Book of What is in the Duat,

1139
01:26:30,300 --> 01:26:32,300
and also the land of Sokar.

1140
01:26:32,300 --> 01:26:37,300
And it's not an accident that actually the name Rostau is one of the ancient names of Giza.

1141
01:26:37,300 --> 01:26:42,300
What I'm suggesting is that Giza is a three-dimensional model of the Duat,

1142
01:26:42,300 --> 01:26:44,300
of the journey that the soul was expected to make.

1143
01:26:44,300 --> 01:26:50,300
And I envisage certain individuals being placed within the Great Pyramid in total darkness

1144
01:26:50,300 --> 01:26:55,300
to find their way through its corridors and passageways, perhaps over a period of days.

1145
01:26:55,300 --> 01:26:57,300
An ordeal was undergone there.

1146
01:26:57,300 --> 01:27:01,300
So in the Duat, there is a pyramid, there is a sphinx,

1147
01:27:01,300 --> 01:27:07,300
and there is this sense of a chamber of revelation and transformation.

1148
01:27:07,300 --> 01:27:13,300
And again, just to make the point, there's that boat that's buried beside the Great Pyramid

1149
01:27:13,300 --> 01:27:16,300
and the use of boats to travel through the Duat.

1150
01:27:16,300 --> 01:27:21,300
Some kind of simulation was being done there, whatever else the Great Pyramid is about.

1151
01:27:21,300 --> 01:27:27,300
And then we come to the Judgment Hall of Osiris, and we see the soul coming up a slope,

1152
01:27:27,300 --> 01:27:29,300
and that's what you do to get to the King's Chamber.

1153
01:27:29,300 --> 01:27:33,300
You come up the slope of the Grand Gallery, and then you come into the Judgment Hall of Osiris,

1154
01:27:33,300 --> 01:27:41,300
which is really the moment that your whole life has been your opportunity to prepare for.

1155
01:27:41,300 --> 01:27:45,300
We are dealing, of course, with symbolism, but we are dealing with more than that.

1156
01:27:45,300 --> 01:27:50,300
These ancient Egyptians who explored this mystery, I believe they experienced this.

1157
01:27:50,300 --> 01:27:54,300
They were working from the level of experience, not simply from doctrine.

1158
01:27:54,300 --> 01:28:05,300
And what they're saying is, as they depict it, is that here's the soul being brought into the Hall of Mart.

1159
01:28:05,300 --> 01:28:07,300
That's one of the names for it.

1160
01:28:07,300 --> 01:28:11,300
The goddess Mart wears this feather on her headdress,

1161
01:28:11,300 --> 01:28:15,300
and that is the feather of truth and justice and cosmic harmony.

1162
01:28:15,300 --> 01:28:19,300
And the other name for this hall is the Judgment Hall of Osiris,

1163
01:28:19,300 --> 01:28:27,300
because at the other end of it is seated the god Osiris in Judgment.

1164
01:28:27,300 --> 01:28:34,300
And then you can see the scales here, where the soul actually will be weighed.

1165
01:28:34,300 --> 01:28:42,300
These are the scales of Mart. Again, they're overtopped by the feather of Mart.

1166
01:28:42,300 --> 01:28:46,300
And up here, we see these 42 little figures.

1167
01:28:46,300 --> 01:28:49,300
You can see them again in this shot.

1168
01:28:49,300 --> 01:28:51,300
These are the 42 negative assessors.

1169
01:28:51,300 --> 01:28:54,300
Each one of them is going to ask you a question,

1170
01:28:54,300 --> 01:28:58,300
and ideally you should be able to answer no to that question.

1171
01:28:58,300 --> 01:29:00,300
This is testing moral behavior.

1172
01:29:00,300 --> 01:29:02,300
It includes all the Ten Commandments.

1173
01:29:02,300 --> 01:29:04,300
Did you kill? Did you steal? Et cetera, et cetera.

1174
01:29:04,300 --> 01:29:07,300
And 32 others as well.

1175
01:29:07,300 --> 01:29:11,300
And ideally, you should be able to say, no, I didn't do that.

1176
01:29:11,300 --> 01:29:16,300
But the ancient Egyptians were, you know, they weren't sort of stuffy and moralistic.

1177
01:29:16,300 --> 01:29:19,300
They understood that human beings are frail.

1178
01:29:19,300 --> 01:29:25,300
And that our frailty is part of our learning experience at this level of existence.

1179
01:29:25,300 --> 01:29:30,300
So there is a forgiving aspect in ancient Egypt as regards the moral behavior of the soul.

1180
01:29:30,300 --> 01:29:39,300
And it's more like one would regard one's life as a work of art, a work of sculpture,

1181
01:29:39,300 --> 01:29:44,300
which you're working on for decades and decades, slowly, slowly etching it out.

1182
01:29:44,300 --> 01:29:46,300
And here and there, you make a hideous mistake.

1183
01:29:46,300 --> 01:29:51,300
But the project still continues, and you work around the mistake,

1184
01:29:51,300 --> 01:29:54,300
and you chip away at it until you smooth it off.

1185
01:29:54,300 --> 01:29:56,300
And at the end, you have a beautiful, beautiful work of art.

1186
01:29:56,300 --> 01:29:59,300
And that's what you should be able to do at the end of your life,

1187
01:29:59,300 --> 01:30:03,300
to be able to look back and say, I did wrong. I made mistakes.

1188
01:30:03,300 --> 01:30:09,300
But on balance, I did good. I settled my accounts with the universe.

1189
01:30:09,300 --> 01:30:15,300
This is the message that I take from the ancient Egyptian books of the dead.

1190
01:30:15,300 --> 01:30:19,300
But it's not only about moral behavior.

1191
01:30:19,300 --> 01:30:23,300
Because that scene is not called the weighing of actions.

1192
01:30:23,300 --> 01:30:25,300
It's called the weighing of words.

1193
01:30:25,300 --> 01:30:29,300
And it's as though some knowledge is expected of the individual.

1194
01:30:29,300 --> 01:30:32,300
And this definitely is not book learning.

1195
01:30:32,300 --> 01:30:35,300
This is not the stuff that you go study at school or university.

1196
01:30:35,300 --> 01:30:42,300
This is, the question really is, you were given the precious gift of life in a human body.

1197
01:30:42,300 --> 01:30:44,300
What did you do with it?

1198
01:30:44,300 --> 01:30:47,300
Did you use it well or did you waste it?

1199
01:30:47,300 --> 01:30:49,300
I think that's the question.

1200
01:30:49,300 --> 01:30:52,300
Did you get it? Did you get what it's all about?

1201
01:30:52,300 --> 01:30:53,300
And that's Gnosis.

1202
01:30:53,300 --> 01:30:58,300
That's the revelation and understanding of what it is we're all participating in here.

1203
01:30:58,300 --> 01:31:00,300
Very like the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

1204
01:31:00,300 --> 01:31:04,300
meditation, love, ethics, none of these alone can bring about enlightenment without wisdom.

1205
01:31:04,300 --> 01:31:11,300
Indeed, the duat is very much the bardo, the between, that the Tibetans talk about.

1206
01:31:11,300 --> 01:31:17,300
So, if you've lived, I mean, there are certain lives that are so heavy with sin

1207
01:31:17,300 --> 01:31:20,300
and so heavy with cruelty and wickedness towards others

1208
01:31:20,300 --> 01:31:24,300
that they are beyond redemption, even in the forgiving ancient Egyptian view.

1209
01:31:24,300 --> 01:31:30,300
And if one has lived a life inflicting horror and pain and suffering and misery on others,

1210
01:31:30,300 --> 01:31:36,300
what awaits you is this creature, who's part lion and part hippopotamus.

1211
01:31:36,300 --> 01:31:39,300
He's Amit, the eater of the dead.

1212
01:31:39,300 --> 01:31:42,300
And if you are eaten by Amit, your story is over.

1213
01:31:42,300 --> 01:31:43,300
You do not go on.

1214
01:31:43,300 --> 01:31:44,300
You do not come back.

1215
01:31:44,300 --> 01:31:49,300
You do not get another shot at the life of millions of years.

1216
01:31:49,300 --> 01:31:51,300
But, have you lived well?

1217
01:31:51,300 --> 01:31:57,300
Have you made the effort to perfect your soul, to get what this game is all about?

1218
01:31:57,300 --> 01:32:01,300
Then Thoth will write your name on his tablet.

1219
01:32:01,300 --> 01:32:04,300
And the deceased asks, how long have I to live?

1220
01:32:04,300 --> 01:32:09,300
And Thoth replies, thou art for millions of years, a period of life of millions of years.

1221
01:32:09,300 --> 01:32:12,300
So, one can get a sense of this.

1222
01:32:12,300 --> 01:32:17,300
And there's this moment of transformation when the soul rises up amongst the stars.

1223
01:32:17,300 --> 01:32:21,300
The serpent in the sky is actually the title of my friend John Anthony West's book,

1224
01:32:21,300 --> 01:32:23,300
taken from this image.

1225
01:32:23,300 --> 01:32:27,300
And that's ultimately, after many lifetimes, that was the goal.

1226
01:32:27,300 --> 01:32:29,300
That you would be reborn as a star.

1227
01:32:29,300 --> 01:32:31,300
You would become a star.

1228
01:32:31,300 --> 01:32:34,300
And you would shed light and life through the universe.

1229
01:32:34,300 --> 01:32:38,300
A very beautiful, beautiful idea that they have.

1230
01:32:38,300 --> 01:32:45,300
In these inquiries, the ancient Egyptians were undoubtedly aided by plant allies.

1231
01:32:45,300 --> 01:32:48,300
They made use of visionary plants.

1232
01:32:48,300 --> 01:32:54,300
William Emberdon has published this book, excellent book, called Narcotic Plants.

1233
01:32:54,300 --> 01:32:57,300
He's professor of biology at California State University.

1234
01:32:57,300 --> 01:33:01,300
I don't like the title because most of the plants are not narcotics, actually.

1235
01:33:01,300 --> 01:33:04,300
They're more of the line of psychedelics.

1236
01:33:04,300 --> 01:33:06,300
That's what we're talking about here.

1237
01:33:06,300 --> 01:33:08,300
He does address that in the book.

1238
01:33:08,300 --> 01:33:11,300
It's just a pity that this is the title of the book.

1239
01:33:11,300 --> 01:33:17,300
And amongst other plants that are shown, the Datura plant is shown in many scenes.

1240
01:33:17,300 --> 01:33:18,300
I don't have that slide with me.

1241
01:33:18,300 --> 01:33:23,300
But it's interesting how the blue water lily is featured again and again.

1242
01:33:23,300 --> 01:33:30,300
And you can sometimes see the pharaoh sniffing the beautiful aroma of the blue water lily.

1243
01:33:30,300 --> 01:33:35,300
But as anybody who's worked with plants knows, the blue water lily has got something else going for it.

1244
01:33:35,300 --> 01:33:37,300
It's a visionary plant.

1245
01:33:37,300 --> 01:33:45,300
And when it's tinctured into wine, it can produce quite a powerful psychedelic journey.

1246
01:33:45,300 --> 01:33:53,300
And so it's interesting that traces of a liquid extract from the blue water lily were discovered in alabaster jars stored in the annex of Tutankhamun's tomb.

1247
01:33:53,300 --> 01:33:58,300
The only reason to tincture it in wine is to use it as a visionary substance.

1248
01:33:58,300 --> 01:34:07,300
And then here we have the pharaoh Seti I.

1249
01:34:07,300 --> 01:34:10,300
This is on the wall of the temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt.

1250
01:34:10,300 --> 01:34:11,300
Here's the pharaoh Seti I.

1251
01:34:11,300 --> 01:34:13,300
And here's the god Thoth.

1252
01:34:13,300 --> 01:34:15,300
And again, Thoth is writing something.

1253
01:34:15,300 --> 01:34:20,300
What he's writing is the name of pharaoh Seti I on the tree of life.

1254
01:34:20,300 --> 01:34:25,300
This is the tree of life because Seti I has been justified in the judgment.

1255
01:34:25,300 --> 01:34:31,300
And what is interesting is that the tree of life has been identified by my good friend Dennis McKenna.

1256
01:34:31,300 --> 01:34:35,300
Dennis is the brother of Terence McKenna, the late, great Terence McKenna.

1257
01:34:35,300 --> 01:34:40,300
And Dennis is a full-fledged ethnopharmacologist teaching at the University of Minnesota.

1258
01:34:40,300 --> 01:34:42,300
Visionary plants are his thing.

1259
01:34:42,300 --> 01:34:52,300
And he's identified this as Acacia nilotica, which turns out to be a tree that's rich in dimethyltryptamine,

1260
01:34:52,300 --> 01:34:55,300
the most powerful hallucinogen known to man.