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Good afternoon, folks.
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It's good to see you all here, and it's good to be here.
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And if I collapse on stage from a heart attack, don't be too surprised,
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because I got in at midnight last night with hours of jet lag,
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and I'm feeling a bit floaty at the moment, but I'll do my best.
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I'll do my best to keep it all together.
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The ancient texts from many different cultures
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say that it's an incredible privilege to be born in a precious human body
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and to live on this beautiful gem, this garden, this delight of a planet.
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What a gift we were all given when we were given the opportunity
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to incarnate here, now, on this planet, at this time.
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We live at a crossroads. There's no doubt. We all feel it. We all know it.
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There's something coming down the track, and we have to figure out how.
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We're going to respond to that, how we're going to turn it into an opportunity
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for growth rather than an opportunity for destruction.
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I don't think it's the first time that mankind has stood at such a crossroads,
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but here we are now, facing it and, hopefully, dealing with it.
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A precious opportunity which should not be wasted.
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Today, I'm going to talk about some traces of, perhaps, a lost civilization.
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These will look primarily at scientific traces
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and also at spiritual traces of that civilization all around the world.
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I believe we are a species with amnesia.
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I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins.
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I think we are quite lost in many ways, and we live in a society
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that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy
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in ensuring that we all stay lost.
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A society that invests in creating unconsciousness,
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which invests in keeping people asleep so that we're just passive consumers or producers
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and not really asking any of the questions.
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I've found, for me, the study of the past and the mysteries of the past
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has been a liberating process in terms of looking at the present.
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This is the world, of course, as it looks today.
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We're very concerned about such issues as global warming, climate change,
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and coming Earth changes, which many have intuited.
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But if you go back 21,000 years, you will find that the world looked very different.
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There were gigantic ice caps covering the major land masses.
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The ice over North America, this huge ice cap, was actually two miles deep.
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Can you imagine that? Two miles of ice sitting on top of New York City?
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Well, I don't know, but that's how it was.
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Same in Come Closer.
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Just an extraordinary thing. Nobody could live there.
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Any traces of whatever was underneath it were ground to dust by the weight of that ice.
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Europe, the same story, a gigantic ice cap bigger than Antarctica
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covering the whole of Northern Europe.
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Just an extraordinarily different world.
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This is our world today with its familiar contours and outlines.
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This is the world at the end of the last, not the end, but at the last glacial maximum, 21,300 years ago.
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There was no Red Sea. There was no Arabian Gulf.
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The Indian coastline was greatly extended. Sri Lanka joined onto the tip.
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Southeast Asia was a whole continent that is now underwater,
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just reduced to the Malaysian peninsula and the Indonesian islands.
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Altogether, 10 million square miles of land were above water then that are underwater now.
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And 10 million square miles of land, that's the whole of Europe and China added together in terms of area.
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So this was a very serious change that took place in the earth when we went from that to this.
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And it was a change which unfolded over a period of about 10,000 years, but sometimes it was extremely cataclysmic.
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It wasn't just a slow drip, drip, drip of the ice sheets.
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What would happen on top of those two mile high ice caps is that you would get a gradual accumulation of meltwater
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in glacial lakes on top of the ice caps.
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And this would perhaps accumulate for four or five thousand years before the boundaries surrounding it broke.
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And the huge explosion of water poured down off the ice caps, reaching speeds of a thousand kilometers an hour,
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coming down, tearing over the land, destroying the landscape, rushing into the sea and raising sea level.
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30 foot, 40 foot rise in sea level overnight happened twice during the last ice age.
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You can imagine what a 30 or 40 foot rise in sea level would do to our civilization today if it were to happen overnight.
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I believe it would bring it instantly to an end.
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Now we have traditions, myths, stories from all around the world of an all destroying global flood.
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And the tendency of academics is to say that these stories are just what happened was there was some little local flood
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and the people in that area imaginatively elaborated it into a global flood.
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I don't think I need such an explanation when I know that there were global floods at the end of the last ice age,
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when the whole world was flooded again and again and again.
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And I do believe that the flood myths from all around the world,
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amongst which, of course, I include the story of Atlantis, are a memory of real events recorded in myth and tradition.
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It's rather interesting that Plato, who is the earliest surviving source for the story of Atlantis,
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tells us that he got it from his relative Solon, who in turn got it from the ancient Egyptians.
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And that they spoke of a time 9,000 years before the time of Solon.
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That's 9,600 BC or 11,600 years before the present,
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when the wonderful civilization of Atlantis was destroyed in a single terrible day and a night by flooding and earthquakes.
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Academics think that Plato made it all up, but if Plato made it all up,
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it's extraordinary that he chose that date and that time, around 12,000 years ago,
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because that was absolutely at the peak of the meltdown of the last ice age when there was indeed global flooding.
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The story is all over the world. In India, it's the story of Manu, the Indian Noah, rescued from the flood by Vishnu.
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In Greece, it's the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha.
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The same thing, a couple who regenerate mankind, surviving the flood, riding it out in a box that rides along the waves.
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The Maya, too, had this story of the end of the last world age,
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and the whole Mayan concept of cyclical time and what goes around, comes around, fits in with this very, very strongly.
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Here's the story of Noah from the Bible.
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And if you want to find the origins of the story of Noah, you need to go to Sumer, the land that is now Iraq,
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where the epic of Gilgamesh, almost 5,000 years old, tells essentially the same story that is told in the Bible,
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of a warning, one man warned, the gods are angry with mankind, they're going to send a flood, you must save what you can.
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It's the story of the Gilgamesh epic.
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Interestingly enough, if you go to the Arabian Gulf, where the Gilgamesh epic comes from,
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and you look at the situation at the end of the last ice age, this was the Arabian Gulf at the last glacial maximum.
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This is not sea. This is a river.
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This is the combined streams of the Tigris and the Euphrates running through the otherwise completely dry Arabian Gulf,
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which formed a kind of Garden of Eden.
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It was one of the most wonderful places to live on earth at that time,
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when most of the rest of the world was extremely arid and very inhospitable.
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And then around 12,000 years ago, very, very quickly, the whole Arabian Gulf became flooded.
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So I think that if we see a flood story from that region talking of a global flood,
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it's pretty easy to understand where it came from.
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It came from what happened. It's a memory. It's not a myth.
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Australia, that's how it was at the last glacial maximum 21,000 years ago,
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with that gigantic tip of Southeast Asia nearby.
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That's how it is today.
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And again, the Aborigines of Australia, who've been in Australia for 50,000 years,
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have myths and traditions of global floods.
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There was a great flood serpent which ate up the land.
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It's put into symbolic language, but again, it's a memory of what happened at the end of the Ice Age.
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Now, one of the things, when I first began to explore these mysteries, 20 plus years ago now,
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one of the first things that struck me was what I call the mystery of the maps.
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That there are certain maps that have come down to us from antiquity
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which show the world not as it looks today, but as it looked during the last Ice Age.
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And whenever you look into the story of these maps, you find that they were copied from older source maps,
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typically between the 13th and 17th centuries.
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So the maps that we look at are relatively recent.
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They date from the 13th to the 17th centuries.
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But when you find their origins, you find that the map makers drew on many source maps
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which are no longer available to us.
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And these ancient maps seem to record the world as it looked 20, 15,000 years ago.
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This was the level of map making technology in the 7th century in Spain, and indeed in the 13th century.
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These are called T.O. maps because of the shape.
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They're quite pretty, but you definitely would not want to navigate by them.
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They're really bad for navigation.
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Actually, east is up on these maps.
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This would be Jerusalem, center of the world.
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This is the Mediterranean. Here's Spain. Here's North Africa.
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And as I say, pretty but useless.
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However, that map's from 1283, and round about that time, end of the 13th century,
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flooded into Europe a whole new set of maps, and nobody really knows where they came from.
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Ptolemy's maps, we know of Ptolemy, of course, but he himself, 2000 years ago,
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was drawing on earlier source maps when he created his maps.
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And those maps disappeared during the Dark Ages.
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They were preserved in monasteries, and they came to the attention of mariners
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at the end of the 13th century.
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They're not as good as modern maps, but they're very good, and you can navigate by them.
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Another mysterious group of maps appeared at that time, and these are the so-called Portolands,
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the Portolan cartographic tradition.
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This is the Pisan Chart from 1280. It's the earliest surviving example.
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That's Italy there. You're coming into Spain and North Africa here,
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and the Holy Land there.
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What's remarkable about these maps is that they incorporate incredibly precise latitudes and longitudes.
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Now, latitude is a relatively easy thing to do, simply by measuring the height of the sun or stars
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above the horizon, but the pole star above the horizon specifically.
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But longitude requires technology.
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It requires a chronometer that can maintain accurate time as the earth spins.
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And our civilization was not able to do longitude until the late 18th century.
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And that's why many mariners before the longitude problem was cracked
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would end up bumping into coastlines that they didn't expect to be there,
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because they'd done their calculations wrong.
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But weirdly, in these older maps, highly accurate longitudes.
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How do we explain that other than as a heritage from an earlier map-making tradition?
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Charles Hapgood, his work on the maps of the ancient Sea Kings,
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is really the best source on this material.
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And he's suggesting that the Portolan tradition came through a predecessor of Ptolemy,
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Marinus of Tyre, perhaps through Ptolemy, stored in the Library of Alexandria.
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When the Library of Alexandria was burned down, some of those maps went to Constantinople.
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Crusaders went into Constantinople and took away some of those maps and reintroduced them to the world.
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That's roughly the suggestion here.
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I think everybody's heard of the Piri Reis map, which is a Portolan map.
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And here we see South America's east coast, to be compared there, the west coast of Africa.
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And down here at the very southern tip of South America, a continuous landmass
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that appears to be Antarctica, on a map dating from 1513.
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And it's really a puzzle if you find Antarctica on maps from the 16th century,
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because our civilization didn't discover Antarctica until the early 19th century.
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Here's Antarctica as it looks today, and here's Antarctica as it looked around the year 1800,
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in this map from Russia, which shows no Antarctica at all.
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And it's not there because we haven't discovered it in 1800. We didn't discover it until 1818.
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Yet if you go back to the 1600s and the 1500s, Antarctica is all over ancient maps.
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There it is, in this beautiful work of Orontius Phineas,
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a rather accurate depiction of the continent of Antarctica.
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And here again, a map by Mercator, the famous, everybody's heard of the Mercator projection, a great map maker.
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Here again, Antarctica, present in that map.
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Both of those maps, the Orontius Phineas map and the Mercator map, drew on earlier source maps, now lost to us.
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Is it possible that those earlier source maps may go back to an earlier civilization,
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one that had the technology to explore the entire globe,
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to map it mathematically in a way that we can recognize today as highly sophisticated,
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because that's what these maps seem to show.
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Here's one of those Ptolemaic maps, not quite so good as the Porta Lands, but still pretty good,
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and interesting really to look at Southeast Asia
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and how Southeast Asia is represented in this huge landmass here,
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and to compare that with, well, there's Southeast Asia today, there it is on that map,
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and here's how it looked 21,300 years ago.
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And I find a really remarkable similarity between what the geologists now tell us Southeast Asia looked like 21,300 years ago.
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And what it looks like on this map, even with the tip of the Australian landmass coming into the image right there.
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Another Ptolemaic map from 1513.
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Off the British Isles and off the island of Ireland is a little island here.
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Can you see it?
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This little island is called High Brazil.
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Lots of people believed in the existence of High Brazil.
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I know personally of two expeditions that were sent out from Bristol, which is a town very near where I live, to look for High Brazil.
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But they couldn't find it because they didn't need a ship to find it.
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They needed a time machine.
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You have to go back 13,000 years to find High Brazil.
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And that's where it was.
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The geology shows us quite clearly with lower sea levels at that time.
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This landmass was exposed around 13,000 years ago.
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The landmass that is shown on that map.
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And let's go back to the Pirie Rees map again.
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On it, right up here, there's an island which doesn't exist.
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Not today, anyway.
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And on that island, there's these curious stones side by side.
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Do you see them there?
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That island is in exactly the place where Bimini is today.
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And under water off Bimini is the famous Bimini Road.
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I think that that's what's shown on this image here.
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How it looked before it was flooded at the end of the Ice Age.
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Now, if we are looking at the faint fingerprints and traces of a lost civilization
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that explored and mapped the world more than 13,000 years ago,
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what other traces are there?
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Well, I wrote a whole book about this called Fingerprints of the Gods,
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so you'll find it all in there.
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I want to concentrate on the fact that the
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But I want to concentrate on the spiritual side of things,
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because there is an astonishing spiritual continuity all around the world.
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And I'm going to speak of it today with specific focus to ancient Egypt,
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but also with a secondary focus on Cambodia.
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Again, the Pirie Rees map.
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It actually turns out to be drawn on a very modern projection,
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which is an azimuthal equidistant projection,
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and it's based on Cairo, where Giza is, where the pyramids of Giza are.
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So this seems a good opportunity to go to Giza.
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And here we find the majestic, the incredible, the mysterious great Sphinx,
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speaking to us in riddles down the ages,
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this beautiful and majestic monument, and the pyramids themselves.
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My wife, Santha, took all of these photographs.
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She and I have been privileged to visit Egypt times beyond counting.
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There is something truly magical and mysterious about that site.
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It is a very special place on the world.
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It isn't the only special place, but it is extraordinarily special,
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and it touches the soul, and it touches something deep in us,
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and I believe that that's because it was designed to do that.
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The three great pyramids of Giza standing there in the desert,
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like three stars brought down to earth.
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Now, one thing about the great pyramid you can tell immediately,
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even though you might not know anything else,
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is that astronomy was involved in creating it.
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The great pyramid is stunningly accurately aligned to true north, south, east, and west.
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It's actually within three-sixtieths of a single degree of true north,
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and that is an incredible accurate alignment,
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especially when you're dealing with a monument with a footprint of 13 acres.
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It would be very hard to do it today.
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We probably could do it, but it would be difficult,
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and the architect would want to know why.
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I mean, why do you want to do that?
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We can build you this amazing huge monument,
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but must it really be within three-sixtieths of a single degree of true north?
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That's making the problem really, really huge.
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So it tells us not only were astronomers involved to get that level of accuracy,
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but also that it was important to them,
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it really mattered to them to be precise, to be on the button in that way.
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And a second thing, which just will not go away at Giza,
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no matter how angry the archaeologists become,
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no matter how they swarm out of their nest and leap all over anybody
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who dares to criticize the existing paradigm,
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what will not go away is the hint of much greater antiquity
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surrounding the entire Giza complex.
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That's what won't go away,
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and that's what I want to look into a little bit just now.
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This is from the temple of Seti I in Abidas,
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and we see the pharaoh Seti showing his young son, Ramesses II,
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a list of all the kings of Egypt who ruled before them.
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And that list goes back through the historical pharaohs who we know about,
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back to round about the date that we would call 3000 BC,
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when Egyptian civilization is supposed to have begun,
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but it doesn't stop there.
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It keeps on going back.
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It goes back thousands and thousands and thousands of years before that,
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until the time of the gods,
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the time that the ancient Egyptians called Zephtepi, the first time,
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when the gods brought civilization to Egypt.
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That's what the pharaoh is showing his son,
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a connection to the gods going back thousands of years into the past.
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And from the tomb of Seti I, again, we see this idea.
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It goes right the way back to the god Osiris.
25:19.260 --> 25:23.260
Here showing the way to the future Horus kings of Egypt,
25:23.260 --> 25:26.260
how they should live, how they should create a kingdom,
25:26.260 --> 25:31.260
how it should be in harmony between earth and heaven.
25:31.260 --> 25:34.260
Everything goes back to the first time, to the time of the gods,
25:34.260 --> 25:37.260
to the time of Osiris.
25:40.260 --> 25:42.260
Sorry.
25:42.260 --> 25:44.260
Temple of Horus at Edfu.
25:44.260 --> 25:49.260
Horus is the son of Osiris in the traditions of the ancient Egyptians.
25:49.260 --> 25:55.260
At this temple of Horus, there are whole walls covered with texts.
25:55.260 --> 25:59.260
Those texts are known as the Edfu building texts.
25:59.260 --> 26:01.260
This is what they look like.
26:01.260 --> 26:04.260
And they're very mysterious.
26:04.260 --> 26:06.260
Many people, many archaeologists will tell you
26:06.260 --> 26:08.260
that there is no flood tradition in Egypt.
26:08.260 --> 26:09.260
This is absolute nonsense.
26:09.260 --> 26:12.260
They clearly have not read the Edfu building texts.
26:12.260 --> 26:17.260
Because the Edfu building texts speak of a homeland of the primeval ones.
26:17.260 --> 26:19.260
They say it was an island.
26:19.260 --> 26:21.260
They say it's where the gods lived.
26:21.260 --> 26:26.260
They say there was a great flood there, which utterly destroyed it.
26:26.260 --> 26:34.260
And that those gods who survived came to Egypt, settled in Egypt,
26:34.260 --> 26:38.260
and started to reestablish what they had had before.
26:38.260 --> 26:42.260
They built what were called primeval mounds all over Egypt,
26:42.260 --> 26:48.260
which were to be the sites of all future temples and religious structures in Egypt.
26:52.260 --> 26:55.260
Is it possible that some of the monuments of ancient Egypt
26:55.260 --> 26:59.260
are actually much older than the Egyptologists tell us?
26:59.260 --> 27:06.260
Here's the Osirion in Abydos, named after the god Osiris.
27:06.260 --> 27:11.260
It's a very curious structure, gigantic blocks of stone.
27:11.260 --> 27:14.260
100-ton weights are very common in the Osirion.
27:14.260 --> 27:23.260
And weirdly, it's close to 100 feet lower than the nearby temple of Seti I.
27:23.260 --> 27:27.260
Now, Egyptologists attribute this monument to Seti I.
27:27.260 --> 27:34.260
But it actually appears to have been built at a much earlier phase.
27:34.260 --> 27:36.260
It's just so much lower down.
27:36.260 --> 27:39.260
It's like there's been an accumulation of silt on top of it.
27:39.260 --> 27:43.260
And then thousands of years later, Seti I came along and built his temple.
27:43.260 --> 27:45.260
And then when the archaeologists excavated it, they said,
27:45.260 --> 27:48.260
well, that's by Seti I. This is nearby.
27:48.260 --> 27:51.260
Ah, it must be by Seti I.
27:51.260 --> 27:56.260
There's no good evidence connecting it to Seti I at all.
27:56.260 --> 28:00.260
The great sphinx of Giza.
28:01.260 --> 28:04.260
I'm not going to go into detail into Robert Schoch's
28:04.260 --> 28:11.260
and John Anthony West's extraordinary work on the rainfall erosion of the sphinx.
28:11.260 --> 28:14.260
But it has thrown a real spanner in the works of Egyptology.
28:14.260 --> 28:18.260
And the Egyptologists are still very upset about it.
28:18.260 --> 28:22.260
How dare a geologist suggest that the sphinx actually might be
28:22.260 --> 28:25.260
thousands of years older than it's supposed to be.
28:25.260 --> 28:27.260
Because that is what Schoch and West are suggesting.
28:27.260 --> 28:32.260
That these erosion patterns in the trench surrounding the sphinx,
28:32.260 --> 28:35.260
which we would have seen on the body of the sphinx too
28:35.260 --> 28:39.260
if it had not been restored again and again down the ages,
28:39.260 --> 28:44.260
that this erosion pattern can only be caused by exposure
28:44.260 --> 28:47.260
to thousands of years of heavy, heavy rainfall.
28:47.260 --> 28:51.260
And no such rainfall fell in Egypt in 2500 BC
28:51.260 --> 28:53.260
when the sphinx is supposed to have been built.
28:53.260 --> 28:56.260
You have to go back to the end of the last ice age
28:56.260 --> 29:00.260
to find that massive precipitation that could have caused this level
29:00.260 --> 29:03.260
of weathering in Egypt.
29:03.260 --> 29:07.260
And these extraordinary temples that stand in front of the sphinx
29:07.260 --> 29:11.260
were created from the limestone that was quarried out
29:11.260 --> 29:14.260
around the body of the sphinx to create the body.
29:14.260 --> 29:16.260
Therefore they are as old as the sphinx.
29:16.260 --> 29:20.260
If the sphinx is 12,000 years old, then so are these temples.
29:21.260 --> 29:29.260
And these temples, like mighty memorials of a forgotten past,
29:29.260 --> 29:34.260
are really hard to explain.
29:34.260 --> 29:40.260
There are blocks of stone, again, in the range of 100 tonnes in these temples,
29:40.260 --> 29:43.260
and they just have been built up as though it's an easy thing to do,
29:43.260 --> 29:47.260
as though it's easy to manipulate 100 tonne blocks of stone.
29:47.260 --> 29:54.260
Now, the three great pyramids standing above the modern city of Cairo.
29:54.260 --> 30:01.260
That atmosphere of strangeness and mystery cannot be escaped.
30:01.260 --> 30:07.260
Let's take a quick flight around the great pyramids of Giza.
30:07.260 --> 30:13.260
We're looking from the east side here over the village of Nazlet al-Saman.
30:13.260 --> 30:18.260
The great pyramid, the pyramid of Keferin, supposedly the pyramid of Manchurian.
30:22.260 --> 30:24.260
We'll come around again.
30:24.260 --> 30:26.260
We're swinging around to the west side now.
30:26.260 --> 30:29.260
This is the north face of the great pyramid.
30:29.260 --> 30:31.260
The second pyramid, the third pyramid.
30:31.260 --> 30:33.260
Can you see the sphinx, by the way?
30:33.260 --> 30:36.260
This is the sphinx down here.
30:36.260 --> 30:41.260
The sphinx is 270 feet long and 80 feet high.
30:41.260 --> 30:43.260
But it's dwarfed by the pyramids.
30:43.260 --> 30:45.260
It almost disappears from view.
30:45.260 --> 30:50.260
And here's the valley of the Nile, off to the east.
30:50.260 --> 30:57.260
So let's just come in closer and closer to these amazing monuments.
30:58.260 --> 31:05.260
The top of the great pyramid, 480 feet above the ground,
31:05.260 --> 31:10.260
a flattened area on top of the great pyramid there.
31:10.260 --> 31:13.260
And there I am on top of the great pyramid.
31:13.260 --> 31:19.260
Now I'm not showing this picture for, well, that's how I used to look in those days.
31:21.260 --> 31:23.260
Ah, sweet bird of youth.
31:23.260 --> 31:26.260
How quickly does she fly?
31:28.260 --> 31:35.260
We climbed up the southwest face there, the southwest corner.
31:35.260 --> 31:39.260
And actually I've climbed the great pyramid five times.
31:39.260 --> 31:45.260
Three of the climbs were legal and two were illegal.
31:45.260 --> 31:48.260
This was one of the illegal climbs.
31:48.260 --> 31:52.260
And on one of the climbs when I had more time,
31:52.260 --> 31:56.260
because I was up there legally and the police weren't going to arrest me,
31:56.260 --> 32:00.260
Sainthe and I, we spent some time looking around at the graffiti on top of the great pyramid.
32:00.260 --> 32:01.260
It's astonishing.
32:01.260 --> 32:03.260
There's graffiti going back hundreds of years up there.
32:03.260 --> 32:07.260
Even Mercator, that map maker, he left his graffiti up there.
32:07.260 --> 32:11.260
Loads of people have been climbing the great pyramid and leaving their graffiti.
32:11.260 --> 32:15.260
Including, I found, and this was an astonishing moment for me,
32:15.260 --> 32:20.260
one step down, just behind me there, is a piece of graffiti that says,
32:20.260 --> 32:25.260
P. Hancock, April 5th, 1916.
32:25.260 --> 32:29.260
Hmm, my grandfather was called Philip Hancock.
32:29.260 --> 32:33.260
Ha, he was in Egypt in 1916.
32:33.260 --> 32:36.260
After we got down off the pyramid, I called my dad, he was still alive then,
32:36.260 --> 32:38.260
and asked him to look at my grandfather's diary.
32:38.260 --> 32:41.260
What did he say for the date of April 5th, 1916?
32:41.260 --> 32:45.260
One single line, climb the great pyramid today.
32:45.260 --> 32:50.260
It was an extraordinary moment for me.
32:50.260 --> 32:55.260
And there's something about this place.
32:55.260 --> 32:58.260
It's like flying on a magic carpet above the city of Cairo.
32:58.260 --> 33:04.260
It's just, it's such a privilege, such a gift, to be able to go there.
33:04.260 --> 33:06.260
I don't want to bore you with statistics.
33:06.260 --> 33:09.260
It's just 13.1 acres, it weighs 6 million tons,
33:09.260 --> 33:12.260
it's got 2.3 million blocks of stone,
33:12.260 --> 33:17.260
it's 481 feet high, it just is the most amazing thing.
33:17.260 --> 33:20.260
You know, it's just, you can look at it and just kind of miss it,
33:20.260 --> 33:22.260
and then you look at it closely and you begin to realize
33:22.260 --> 33:24.260
you're looking at something that's utterly impossible.
33:24.260 --> 33:26.260
I just want to take you on a quick journey around
33:26.260 --> 33:30.260
some of the interior of the great pyramid.
33:30.260 --> 33:37.260
And I think we'll start down here in the so-called subterranean chamber,
33:37.260 --> 33:40.260
which is something that's been used in the last few decades
33:40.260 --> 33:45.260
subterranean chamber, which is 600 feet vertically beneath the apex of the pyramid
33:45.260 --> 33:49.260
and about 100 feet beneath the base.
33:49.260 --> 33:54.260
And it's carved out of solid rock.
33:54.260 --> 34:00.260
They went 300 feet, a sloped corridor, sloping at an angle of 26 degrees.
34:00.260 --> 34:06.260
You have to go 300 feet down it, and then you reach this chamber at the bottom.
34:06.260 --> 34:09.260
So they had to make that chamber, they had to cut down through the rock 300 feet.
34:09.260 --> 34:12.260
It's about three feet, six inches high and the same wide.
34:12.260 --> 34:15.260
So you're going to go down like this all the way down.
34:15.260 --> 34:20.260
And you get to the bottom and here's this rock-hewn chamber, deep, deep underground.
34:20.260 --> 34:23.260
And here's a couple of likely lads in the rock-hewn chamber.
34:23.260 --> 34:26.260
That's me and my friend Robert Boval, the author of the Orion Mystery,
34:26.260 --> 34:30.260
just to give you a sense of the size of the room.
34:30.260 --> 34:37.260
Now, coming out of the subterranean chamber, let's go back up this passageway,
34:37.260 --> 34:42.260
which leads to it, there it is, cut from solid rock, as I described.
34:42.260 --> 34:48.260
And then you come to this junction here and you go up the so-called ascending corridor
34:48.260 --> 34:52.260
and along a horizontal passage that leads you to the so-called Queen's Chamber.
34:52.260 --> 34:55.260
We don't know what the builders of these pyramids called these chambers.
34:55.260 --> 34:58.260
All these names are modern attributions.
34:58.260 --> 35:03.260
Let's just take a quick look inside the Queen's Chamber.
35:03.260 --> 35:05.260
The statistics are there.
35:05.260 --> 35:10.260
There's these curious little shafts in the walls of the Queen's Chamber.
35:10.260 --> 35:15.260
Up until the 1870s, this shaft was not visible.
35:15.260 --> 35:17.260
It was covered by a block of stone.
35:17.260 --> 35:20.260
When they completed the chamber, they closed it.
35:20.260 --> 35:24.260
But a British freemason called Wayman Dixon,
35:24.260 --> 35:28.260
who'd noticed that there were shafts in the chamber above, the King's Chamber,
35:28.260 --> 35:30.260
wondered if there might be shafts in the Queen's Chamber,
35:30.260 --> 35:33.260
and he went around tapping the walls.
35:33.260 --> 35:36.260
And he found these hollow points, cut out the stone,
35:36.260 --> 35:38.260
and sure enough, there's these shafts.
35:38.260 --> 35:44.260
And my friend Robert Boval has established the astronomical connections of these shafts.
35:44.260 --> 35:48.260
The Queen's Chamber shafts point to the southern shaft.
35:48.260 --> 35:56.260
This one points to Sirius, and the northern shaft points to Beta Ursa Minor.
35:56.260 --> 36:02.260
Very curious thing, especially since these shafts actually do not exit on the outside.
36:02.260 --> 36:06.260
The ones from the King's Chamber do, but these ones don't.
36:06.260 --> 36:11.260
And back in 1993, a German robotics engineer, Rudolf Gantenbrink,
36:11.260 --> 36:14.260
sent a little robot up that shaft.
36:14.260 --> 36:20.260
And 165 feet up the shaft, the robot came to this door with two metal handles.
36:20.260 --> 36:25.260
Rudolf Gantenbrink was immediately banned from doing any further work in Egypt,
36:25.260 --> 36:27.260
and was sent away.
36:27.260 --> 36:30.260
The project was taken over by the Egyptian government.
36:30.260 --> 36:37.260
Some years later, Zahi Hawass sent another robot up the shaft
36:37.260 --> 36:42.260
with a mission to drill through that door and find out what was on the other side.
36:42.260 --> 36:47.260
And there we go. There's the drill. There's the door.
36:47.260 --> 36:49.260
There's the hole that they made.
36:49.260 --> 36:51.260
You know what they found on the other side?
36:51.260 --> 36:53.260
A space and another door.
36:53.260 --> 36:57.260
It's like an invitation.
36:57.260 --> 36:59.260
The invitation, search me.
36:59.260 --> 37:01.260
The pyramid is saying, search me.
37:01.260 --> 37:03.260
But I'm not going to make it easy for you.
37:03.260 --> 37:06.260
You're really going to have to figure this thing out.
37:06.260 --> 37:10.260
We still don't know what's at the end of that shaft.
37:10.260 --> 37:12.260
Okay, so we're going to come out of the Queen's Chamber,
37:12.260 --> 37:14.260
back along the horizontal corridor.
37:14.260 --> 37:16.260
Now we're looking up the Grand Gallery.
37:16.260 --> 37:20.260
153 feet long, 28 feet high.
37:20.260 --> 37:22.260
This is called a corbel vault.
37:22.260 --> 37:25.260
Each level protrudes slightly over the level below it
37:25.260 --> 37:28.260
and narrows up towards the ceiling.
37:28.260 --> 37:31.260
While these blocks weigh about 70 tons each,
37:31.260 --> 37:34.260
they're laid at an angle of 26 degrees.
37:34.260 --> 37:37.260
You can't get a sheet of paper between the joints.
37:37.260 --> 37:40.260
They're unbelievably precise.
37:40.260 --> 37:44.260
It's like being compared to opticians' work on a scale of acres.
37:44.260 --> 37:48.260
An astonishing feat of construction.
37:48.260 --> 37:51.260
The work of giants, really.
37:51.260 --> 37:54.260
At the top of the Grand Gallery,
37:54.260 --> 37:57.260
there's an entrance to the King's Chamber.
37:57.260 --> 37:59.260
This is the King's Chamber here.
37:59.260 --> 38:01.260
And above the King's Chamber,
38:01.260 --> 38:04.260
not known until the early 19th century,
38:04.260 --> 38:08.260
are one, two, three, four, five more chambers.
38:08.260 --> 38:11.260
And getting into those chambers is really fun.
38:11.260 --> 38:13.260
I'll come to that in a moment.
38:13.260 --> 38:19.260
But let's first of all go into the King's Chamber.
38:19.260 --> 38:22.260
And this is what the King's Chamber looks like.
38:22.260 --> 38:24.260
There are two shafts again.
38:24.260 --> 38:28.260
This is the northern shaft, the southern shaft on this side.
38:28.260 --> 38:30.260
One pointing to Orion's belt,
38:30.260 --> 38:33.260
and the other again pointing to one of the second polar stars.
38:33.260 --> 38:35.260
It's a beautiful geometric room.
38:35.260 --> 38:37.260
It's made of granite blocks.
38:37.260 --> 38:39.260
The Great Pyramid is a limestone monument.
38:39.260 --> 38:42.260
These granite blocks were brought about 500 miles from Aswan.
38:42.260 --> 38:45.260
They were lifted to a height of hundreds of feet above the ground
38:45.260 --> 38:48.260
and put into position in this extraordinary chamber
38:48.260 --> 38:50.260
in the heart of the pyramid.
38:50.260 --> 38:53.260
There is a sarcophagus in it.
38:53.260 --> 38:57.260
I and my colleagues believe that this is not a sarcophagus
38:57.260 --> 39:01.260
that ever contained the body of the pharaoh Khufu, or of any pharaoh.
39:01.260 --> 39:05.260
We think that it was involved in some kind of process,
39:05.260 --> 39:07.260
some kind of initiation.
39:07.260 --> 39:09.260
I'm going to talk about that a little bit.
39:09.260 --> 39:11.260
But because there is a sarcophagus in it,
39:11.260 --> 39:13.260
immediately the assumption has been made
39:13.260 --> 39:17.260
that this must have been the burial chamber of Khufu.
39:17.260 --> 39:19.260
Let's look at this setup again here.
39:19.260 --> 39:24.260
The king's chamber and the so-called relieving chambers up above it,
39:24.260 --> 39:26.260
rather similar to the Jed pillar,
39:26.260 --> 39:29.260
the symbolic backbone of Osiris,
39:29.260 --> 39:31.260
which is a symbol of resurrection and rebirth
39:31.260 --> 39:33.260
in the ancient Egyptian religion.
39:33.260 --> 39:37.260
It seems that they were creating a symbol of resurrection,
39:37.260 --> 39:42.260
of rebirth, within the Great Pyramid.
39:42.260 --> 39:44.260
To get into those rooms, here's what you do.
39:44.260 --> 39:48.260
You put a ladder 30 feet high up against this wall,
39:48.260 --> 39:51.260
and you lean it up against that side there.
39:51.260 --> 39:55.260
There's a little hole just a bit wider than me,
39:55.260 --> 39:58.260
which fortunately a rope now hangs out of.
39:58.260 --> 40:01.260
You grab hold of that rope, haul your body into it,
40:01.260 --> 40:04.260
pull yourself through, and then you get into a narrow tunnel.
40:04.260 --> 40:09.260
That leads you eventually into all five of these chambers.
40:09.260 --> 40:12.260
I'll just take you to the top chamber.
40:12.260 --> 40:15.260
That's that one up there.
40:15.260 --> 40:20.260
Again, these extraordinary huge blocks of stone.
40:20.260 --> 40:23.260
These are in the range of 100 tons each,
40:23.260 --> 40:27.260
which form the floor of this chamber.
40:27.260 --> 40:32.260
Indeed, all the other chambers, again, have these gigantic blocks of stone,
40:32.260 --> 40:36.260
which are almost impossible to move, really.
40:36.260 --> 40:38.260
But there they are.
40:38.260 --> 40:40.260
More graffiti inside.
40:40.260 --> 40:45.260
Sister M.T. Martin, 6th of February, 1915.
40:45.260 --> 40:50.260
Oh, there's me with one of my kids, Leila.
40:50.260 --> 40:55.260
Again, just to show you the size and the scale of the thing.
40:57.260 --> 41:00.260
We'll go back to the pyramids.
41:00.260 --> 41:05.260
Here is the only evidence that Egyptologists are able to cite
41:05.260 --> 41:09.260
which connects the Great Pyramid to the Pharaoh Khufu.
41:09.260 --> 41:14.260
That is a cartouche, which appears to say the name Khufu,
41:14.260 --> 41:19.260
that is found in that very topmost relieving chamber that I showed you.
41:19.260 --> 41:22.260
It's round about over here somewhere.
41:22.260 --> 41:27.260
There are no other inscriptions whatsoever inside the Great Pyramid.
41:27.260 --> 41:29.260
Not one.
41:29.260 --> 41:33.260
But this graffiti, as it's referred to,
41:33.260 --> 41:36.260
is supposed to be what's called a quarry mark
41:36.260 --> 41:40.260
that was put on the blocks by the gangs of construction workers
41:40.260 --> 41:44.260
who were quarrying out the blocks that would be built into the Great Pyramid.
41:44.260 --> 41:48.260
And they said, this is Khufu's block, or something like that.
41:48.260 --> 41:53.260
It's not very convincing evidence that the pyramid was built by Khufu or for Khufu.
41:53.260 --> 41:58.260
There is a hint of doubt over the authenticity of the cartouche itself.
41:58.260 --> 42:03.260
Could it have been forged by Howard Weiss, who founded it in the early 19th century?
42:03.260 --> 42:07.260
But one thing's for sure, if Khufu was the builder of the pyramid,
42:07.260 --> 42:12.260
he had a pretty small ego for such a big monument.
42:12.260 --> 42:16.260
This is the only statue of Khufu that's ever survived.
42:16.260 --> 42:19.260
It's about two inches high.
42:19.260 --> 42:23.260
You would have thought he'd have put his name all over this thing,
42:23.260 --> 42:28.260
instead of just on some bit of graffiti up in a block in a chamber that nobody's ever going to see.
42:28.260 --> 42:31.260
But he didn't. It's absolutely bare. There are no texts.
42:31.260 --> 42:34.260
There's nothing in there that tells you what's going on.
42:34.260 --> 42:39.260
However, if you go down to Saqqara, about 15 miles south of Giza,
42:39.260 --> 42:44.260
you will come to a group of pyramids dating from the 5th and 6th dynasties,
42:44.260 --> 42:48.260
not the 4th dynasty, which this one supposedly dates to.
42:48.260 --> 42:51.260
And those pyramids are filled with text.
42:51.260 --> 42:56.260
Now, just showing this overlay, actually I'm going to give away Santa's secret.
42:56.260 --> 42:59.260
She did this by accident.
42:59.260 --> 43:02.260
We were at Giza. Santa took a shot of the pyramids of Giza.
43:02.260 --> 43:06.260
Then we went down to Saqqara and we went into the pyramid of Unas.
43:06.260 --> 43:08.260
And Santa took a photograph of the pyramid of Unas,
43:08.260 --> 43:14.260
and we got this double exposure, where the pyramid of Unas is overlaid on the Giza pyramids.
43:14.260 --> 43:19.260
And here are the so-called pyramid texts, the star-covered ceiling of the pyramid of Unas,
43:19.260 --> 43:22.260
and the pyramid texts on the walls.
43:22.260 --> 43:29.260
And these pyramid texts are the earliest surviving recensions
43:29.260 --> 43:33.260
of what we now know as the Books of the Dead, the ancient Egyptian Books of the Dead.
43:33.260 --> 43:38.260
And they concern the mystery of life and death and what it is we're doing on this planet.
43:38.260 --> 43:41.260
They're very deep. They're very profound.
43:41.260 --> 43:47.260
And it seems to me that they were putting in writing there
43:47.260 --> 43:50.260
what the Great Pyramid does in architecture alone.
43:50.260 --> 43:54.260
The Great Pyramid does it entirely symbolically in architecture.
43:54.260 --> 43:58.260
In the later pyramids, they expressed it in texts.
43:58.260 --> 44:04.260
And all of these texts, whether it's the pyramid texts, which are the oldest surviving,
44:04.260 --> 44:08.260
the coffin texts, because they're written inside the lids of coffins,
44:08.260 --> 44:12.260
the Book of What Is in the Duarts, which you'll find painted on the walls
44:12.260 --> 44:16.260
of many of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings,
44:16.260 --> 44:22.260
and the Books of the Dead, which were papyrus scrolls that were placed with the deceased inside the coffin.
44:22.260 --> 44:27.260
All of these seek to prepare us for the journey that the ancient Egyptians believed
44:27.260 --> 44:32.260
that we will face, that we will confront on our own deaths.
44:32.260 --> 44:40.260
And the ancient Egyptians regarded the issue of life and death as extremely important.
44:40.260 --> 44:44.260
Our civilization kind of avoids the subject of death, really.
44:44.260 --> 44:49.260
We don't want to know about death.
44:49.260 --> 44:55.260
And we try to shove it away to the margins and not think about it.
44:55.260 --> 45:02.260
And least of all, to prepare ourselves psychologically and spiritually for that moment that will come to us all.
45:02.260 --> 45:10.260
The ancient Egyptians put their best minds to work for 3,000 years on considering the mystery of death
45:11.260 --> 45:16.260
and what we may or may not confront when we die.
45:16.260 --> 45:22.260
And when it comes to these matters, I would rather listen to the ancient Egyptians than any bloody modern scientist,
45:22.260 --> 45:27.260
because the modern scientists are just pygmies, you know, they're infants, they're children.
45:27.260 --> 45:32.260
They may be able to weigh, measure, and count brilliantly, but they know nothing of matters of the spirit.
45:32.260 --> 45:36.260
We need to turn to civilizations like ancient Egypt, the ancient Maya,
45:36.260 --> 45:42.260
and to surviving shamanistic cultures around the world to understand really the mysteries of life and death.
45:42.260 --> 45:46.260
So let's have a little bit of a look at the Egyptian story.
45:46.260 --> 45:49.260
These are the souls of Pei and Naken.
45:49.260 --> 45:56.260
They're a mysterious brotherhood that was entrusted with transmitting the religion of Osiris to the future.
45:56.260 --> 46:04.260
So important was it that it had to be preserved and passed down from generation to generation.
46:04.260 --> 46:09.260
Osiris was the first king. He lived in the legendary first time.
46:09.260 --> 46:13.260
He was the civilizer. He brought civilization to Egypt.
46:13.260 --> 46:19.260
And he was murdered by his antagonist, Set, and 72 conspirators,
46:19.260 --> 46:28.260
and his body was hacked to pieces and reassembled and revivified through the magic of Isis, the goddess Isis.
46:28.260 --> 46:40.260
And here we see that what happens next is Osiris is brought back to life so that he can inseminate Isis.
46:40.260 --> 46:47.260
She hovers over him in the form of a bird, of a kite, and receives his seed,
46:47.260 --> 46:54.260
and produces their son Horus, who continues the divine line.
46:54.260 --> 47:03.260
And here we see Horus performing the rituals that bring about the resurrection of his father in the heavens.
47:03.260 --> 47:09.260
Horus comes to you, O King, that he may do for you what he did for his father Osiris,
47:09.260 --> 47:16.260
so that you may live as those in the sky live, that you may be more extant than those who exist on earth.
47:16.260 --> 47:19.260
Raise yourself because of your strength.
47:19.260 --> 47:21.260
May you ascend to the sky.
47:21.260 --> 47:24.260
May the sky give birth to you like Orion.
47:24.260 --> 47:29.260
May you have power in your body, and may you protect yourself from your foe.
47:29.260 --> 47:32.260
That's from the pyramid texts.
47:32.260 --> 47:41.260
And again, this image from the tomb of Seti I, Osiris riding on his boat of stars,
47:41.260 --> 47:45.260
showing the way to the future pharaohs of Egypt.
47:45.260 --> 47:51.260
Nobody disputes that when the ancient Egyptians looked at the constellation of Orion,
47:51.260 --> 47:55.260
they saw it as the figure of Osiris in the sky.
47:55.260 --> 47:58.260
This is not a controversial statement.
47:58.260 --> 48:03.260
Orion ruled over the celestial afterlife kingdom of the Duat,
48:03.260 --> 48:07.260
and the Duat had very specific astronomical coordinates,
48:07.260 --> 47:45.260
roughly between the constellation of Orion and Leo and Divine
47:46.260 --> 47:49.260
to the future pharaohs of Egypt.
47:49.260 --> 47:56.260
Nobody disputes that when the ancient Egyptians looked at the constellation of Orion,
47:56.260 --> 48:00.260
they saw it as the figure of Osiris in the sky.
48:00.260 --> 48:03.260
This is not a controversial statement.
48:03.260 --> 48:08.260
Orion ruled over the celestial afterlife kingdom of the Duat,
48:08.260 --> 48:12.260
and the Duat had very specific astronomical coordinates,
48:12.260 --> 48:16.260
roughly between the constellation of Orion and Leo and divided by the great river,
48:16.260 --> 48:21.260
the Milky Way, which the ancient Egyptians called the winding waterway.
48:24.260 --> 48:28.260
And again, all of this is laid out in the books.
48:28.260 --> 48:30.260
A lot of this is the work of Robert Baval.
48:30.260 --> 48:33.260
He and I worked together on the message of the Sphinx.
48:33.260 --> 48:39.260
When you look at the layout of the pyramids on the ground,
48:39.260 --> 48:42.260
of course everybody in this room is familiar with the Orion correlation theory,
48:42.260 --> 48:44.260
Robert Baval's extraordinary discovery,
48:44.260 --> 48:48.260
which has really revolutionized our understanding of Egypt.
48:48.260 --> 48:54.260
You find that the three pyramids are representing the three stars of Orion's belt.
48:54.260 --> 48:57.260
The Nile is just right for the Milky Way.
48:57.260 --> 49:00.260
I'm not suggesting that the ancient Egyptians built the Nile.
49:00.260 --> 49:04.260
I'm suggesting that Giza was put where it was because the Nile was there,
49:04.260 --> 49:09.260
and it happened to reflect a celestial item that they wanted to draw down.
49:09.260 --> 49:13.260
And then we have this lion-bodied monument and constellation of Leo,
49:13.260 --> 49:17.260
which I'm going to speak about a bit later.
49:17.260 --> 49:22.260
So Osiris ruled in the first time,
49:22.260 --> 49:29.260
and we shouldn't be surprised that the astronomical layout contains hints of very ancient origins,
49:29.260 --> 49:32.260
and I'll come back to those in a moment.
49:32.260 --> 49:34.260
I want to talk about the journey through the Duat,
49:34.260 --> 49:39.260
this strange parallel realm, which is at once a place in the heavens
49:39.260 --> 49:46.260
and also a kind of underworld with narrow corridors and passageways
49:46.260 --> 49:52.260
and strange chambers that you find yourselves in and monsters and demons,
49:52.260 --> 49:55.260
and you have to be prepared for every challenge that you will face there.
49:55.260 --> 49:58.260
In fact, that was what your life was for.
49:58.260 --> 50:05.260
It was to prepare you for that moment when you make the journey through the afterlife realm.
50:05.260 --> 50:10.260
Sometimes the god Anubis would act as your psychopomp, as your guide,
50:10.260 --> 50:14.260
leading you through the afterlife.
50:14.260 --> 50:21.260
The texts make it clear that there was a great secret in the fifth division of the Duat,
50:21.260 --> 50:26.260
which is referred to as the land of Sokar and of Rostar,
50:26.260 --> 50:31.260
and it's not an accident that Rostar was one of the ancient names of Giza.
50:31.260 --> 50:34.260
In fact, in this image from the book of what is in the Duat,
50:34.260 --> 50:41.260
we see a pyramid, we see a sphinx, and we see a hidden chamber
50:41.260 --> 50:45.260
with this curious figure, three-headed serpent here,
50:45.260 --> 50:49.260
a winged serpent very familiar from this part of the world.
50:49.260 --> 50:51.260
Go back inside those chambers and corridors.
50:51.260 --> 50:53.260
There's the grand gallery of the Great Pyramid.
50:53.260 --> 50:56.260
Here's an image from the book of what is in the Duat.
50:56.260 --> 51:01.260
A boat, a huge boat, is buried on the south side of the Great Pyramid.
51:01.260 --> 51:09.260
We find boats used in the navigation of the Duat, the narrow corridors and passageways.
51:09.260 --> 51:15.260
Strange chambers here with star gods seated.
51:15.260 --> 51:19.260
And the king's chamber.
51:19.260 --> 51:27.260
What I'm suggesting is that the Great Pyramid was your journey through the Duat in stone.
51:27.260 --> 51:32.260
It was a place where you prepared for that journey.
51:32.260 --> 51:39.260
And I think that this room probably has something to do with this scene,
51:39.260 --> 51:41.260
and this is called the judgment scene,
51:41.260 --> 51:48.260
and it takes place in the fifth division of the Duat in the Hall of Marts.
51:48.260 --> 51:52.260
Mart is the goddess of cosmic harmony, of truth, of justice,
51:52.260 --> 51:56.260
and she is symbolized by this feather.
51:56.260 --> 52:00.260
And here we see the deceased, in this case one of the Ptolemaic pharaohs,
52:00.260 --> 52:04.260
because this is from Der Almedina on the west bank at Luxor,
52:04.260 --> 52:10.260
being ushered into the Hall of Mart, which is also called the Judgment Hall of Osiris.
52:10.260 --> 52:16.260
And here in the background we see a set of scales, and there are the scales.
52:16.260 --> 52:21.260
Here is the god Thoth writing on a tablet.
52:21.260 --> 52:25.260
This monster is called Amit, the eater of the dead.
52:25.260 --> 52:30.260
He is part crocodile, part hippo, and part hyena.
52:30.260 --> 52:37.260
And here is Osiris sitting in judgment.
52:37.260 --> 52:42.260
The weighing of the heart is the central aspect of this scene.
52:42.260 --> 52:49.260
And what we see here, weighed against the feather of truth, of harmony, of justice,
52:49.260 --> 52:54.260
is this symbol representing the heart of the deceased.
52:54.260 --> 53:01.260
You would not want your heart to weigh heavy with sin.
53:01.260 --> 53:09.260
You would not want that to happen, because then you might have to face the eater of the dead,
53:09.260 --> 53:14.260
and you definitely do not want to do that.
53:14.260 --> 53:18.260
It is as if your whole life is weighed up in this moment.
53:18.260 --> 53:22.260
These figures here are amongst the 42 assessors in the Judgment Hall of Osiris.
53:22.260 --> 53:28.260
They ask you questions. Did you kill? Did you steal?
53:28.260 --> 53:32.260
Actually all the Ten Commandments are there, and another 30 as well.
53:32.260 --> 53:37.260
And you are supposed to be able to answer all of them, no, I did not do that.
53:37.260 --> 53:44.260
You are supposed to be able to answer in the negative.
53:44.260 --> 53:47.260
So this is moral behaviour.
53:47.260 --> 53:52.260
But there is a sense that the judgement of moral behaviour in the Ancient Egyptian judgement scene
53:52.260 --> 53:54.260
is only part of the story.
53:54.260 --> 53:59.260
As though it is necessary to lead a good life, but not sufficient.
53:59.260 --> 54:03.260
It is not alone enough just to lead a good life.
54:03.260 --> 54:08.260
It is as though these texts, these ideas are recognising what I said at the beginning
54:08.260 --> 54:12.260
that comes down to us from many ancient traditions,
54:12.260 --> 54:15.260
that it is a precious gift to be born in a human body.
54:15.260 --> 54:18.260
And the question that is being asked of you there, not only is,
54:18.260 --> 54:21.260
did you behave morally and decently towards your fellow humans,
54:21.260 --> 54:25.260
but also, did you use that opportunity?
54:25.260 --> 54:28.260
You were given an opportunity. Did you use it well? Did you live?
54:28.260 --> 54:31.260
Did you really live that life that you were given?
54:31.260 --> 54:33.260
Or did you waste it away?
54:33.260 --> 54:36.260
That is the second aspect of the judgement scene,
54:36.260 --> 54:40.260
and the more difficult and the more complex one.
54:40.260 --> 54:48.260
So, Thoth records the verdict.
54:48.260 --> 54:51.260
If your heart outweighed the feather,
54:51.260 --> 54:56.260
if your life was lived inflicting misery and cruelty and pain on others,
54:56.260 --> 55:03.260
if it was, if your spiritual potential was utterly frittered away and wasted,
55:03.260 --> 55:06.260
this is what you would face.
55:06.260 --> 55:11.260
Annihilation. Never to be born again, never to come back.
55:11.260 --> 55:16.260
Your story is over. It's rubbed out from the Book of Life.
55:16.260 --> 55:24.260
If you've lived your life right, then something wonderful is being proposed,
55:24.260 --> 55:27.260
and that's the life of millions of years.
55:27.260 --> 55:32.260
And I just want to read a passage from the Noman Di Ellis translation
55:32.260 --> 55:37.260
of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.
55:37.260 --> 55:41.260
I stand before the masters who witnessed the creation,
55:41.260 --> 55:45.260
who were with Ra that morning the sun rolled into being,
55:45.260 --> 55:50.260
who were with Osiris in the grave as he gathered himself together,
55:50.260 --> 55:56.260
and burst from the tomb white with heat, a light and shining god.
55:56.260 --> 55:59.260
Hail Thoth, architect of truth,
55:59.260 --> 56:05.260
give me words of power that I may recall my years and weave together my history.
56:05.260 --> 56:08.260
Hail Thoth, architect of truth,
56:08.260 --> 56:13.260
give me words of power that I may form the characters of my own evolution.
56:13.260 --> 56:17.260
I stand before the masters who witnessed the generation,
56:17.260 --> 56:21.260
who were the authors of their own forms, who rolled into being,
56:21.260 --> 56:25.260
who walked the dark, circuitous passageways of their own becoming,
56:25.260 --> 56:30.260
who saw with their own eyes their destinies and the shapes of things to come.
56:30.260 --> 56:34.260
I stand before the masters who witnessed the working of magic,
56:34.260 --> 56:38.260
who were with Isis the evening she became the swallow,
56:38.260 --> 56:40.260
and her lamentations filled the air,
56:40.260 --> 56:43.260
who were with her as she shook down her black hair
56:43.260 --> 56:46.260
and veiled the god's transformation in secret,
56:46.260 --> 56:49.260
who witnessed the conception of the divine child,
56:49.260 --> 56:52.260
though his coming was yet unrevealed.
56:52.260 --> 56:55.260
Hail Thoth, architect of truth,
56:55.260 --> 56:58.260
give me words of power that when I speak the life of a man,
56:58.260 --> 57:01.260
I may give his story meaning.
57:01.260 --> 57:05.260
I stand before the masters who know the histories of the dead,
57:05.260 --> 57:07.260
who decide what tales to hear again,
57:07.260 --> 57:13.260
who judge the books of lives as either full or empty,
57:13.260 --> 57:16.260
who are themselves authors of truth,
57:16.260 --> 57:20.260
and they are Isis and Osiris, the divine intelligences.
57:20.260 --> 57:24.260
And when the story is written and the end is good,
57:24.260 --> 57:27.260
and the soul of a man is perfected,
57:27.260 --> 57:30.260
with a shout they lift him into heaven.
57:30.260 --> 57:33.260
Hail Thoth, architect of truth,
57:33.260 --> 57:37.260
give me words of power that I may complete my story
57:37.260 --> 57:39.260
and begin life anew.
57:39.260 --> 57:41.260
I stand before the masters
57:41.260 --> 57:44.260
who witnessed the transformation of the body of a man
57:44.260 --> 57:46.260
into the body and spirit,
57:46.260 --> 57:48.260
who were witnesses to the resurrection,
57:48.260 --> 57:51.260
when the corpse of Osiris entered the mountain
57:51.260 --> 57:55.260
and the soul of Osiris walked out shining.
57:55.260 --> 57:58.260
He gathered his heel and his leg,
57:58.260 --> 58:00.260
he gathered his arms and his backbones,
58:00.260 --> 58:04.260
he gathered dreams crackling inside the dark cave of his skull,
58:04.260 --> 58:07.260
he knitted himself together in secret,
58:07.260 --> 58:11.260
he came forth from death, a shining thing,
58:11.260 --> 58:14.260
his face white with heat.
58:17.260 --> 58:21.260
Perhaps these monuments formed a sacred landscape
58:21.260 --> 58:25.260
in which the afterlife journey was prepared to,
58:25.260 --> 58:28.260
the ultimate goal of joining Osiris in the sky,
58:28.260 --> 58:32.260
winning the life of millions of years.
58:32.260 --> 58:35.260
It's part of an ancient spiritual system,
58:35.260 --> 58:38.260
and what it celebrated and nurtured above all else
58:38.260 --> 58:41.260
was the gift of life.
58:43.260 --> 58:46.260
And yes, the ancient Egyptians sought immortal life,
58:46.260 --> 58:50.260
but they did not take it for granted.
58:51.260 --> 58:53.260
Here is Thoth,
58:53.260 --> 58:57.260
writing the name of Ramesses II on the tree of life.
58:57.260 --> 59:00.260
The life of millions of years.
59:00.260 --> 59:03.260
If you ask the ancient Egyptians where this religion came from,
59:03.260 --> 59:05.260
they tell you it came from the gods,
59:05.260 --> 59:09.260
in Zephtapi, the first time,
59:09.260 --> 59:12.260
when the gods came to Egypt.
59:12.260 --> 59:18.260
And here's the second pyramid on the equinox,
59:18.260 --> 59:20.260
on the spring equinox.
59:20.260 --> 59:23.260
You can see the ancient Egyptian gods,
59:23.260 --> 59:26.260
on the equinox, on the spring equinox.
59:26.260 --> 59:29.260
You can see the shadow, it's like a gnomon,
59:29.260 --> 59:33.260
shadow running absolutely due west.
59:33.260 --> 59:37.260
Clues as to when the first time might have been
59:37.260 --> 59:41.260
are actually contained in the monuments themselves,
59:41.260 --> 59:44.260
and they require us to understand a little bit
59:44.260 --> 59:47.260
about a complicated astronomical phenomenon
59:47.260 --> 59:50.260
called the precession of the equinoxes.
59:50.260 --> 59:53.260
It's accepted that the ancient Egyptians
59:53.260 --> 59:56.260
had pretty good observational astronomy,
59:56.260 --> 01:00:00.260
but most mainstream astronomers today
01:00:00.260 --> 01:00:02.260
would absolutely reject the notion
01:00:02.260 --> 01:00:05.260
that the ancient Egyptians had any knowledge at all
01:00:05.260 --> 01:00:08.260
of the precession of the equinoxes.
01:00:08.260 --> 01:00:12.260
Certainly, astronomy in ancient Egypt
01:00:12.260 --> 01:00:17.260
was a spiritual rather than a scientific pursuit.
01:00:17.260 --> 01:00:19.260
There's no doubt about that.
01:00:19.260 --> 01:00:21.260
The second shrine of Tutankhamun
01:00:21.260 --> 01:00:23.260
is particularly interesting in this respect.
01:00:23.260 --> 01:00:26.260
You can see these initiates connected
01:00:26.260 --> 01:00:30.260
through the third eye to a star in the sky.
01:00:30.260 --> 01:00:33.260
It's somehow as though the study of the heavens
01:00:33.260 --> 01:00:36.260
is part of our fulfilling ourselves
01:00:36.260 --> 01:00:39.260
as individuals on this planet.
01:00:39.260 --> 01:00:42.260
But precession of the equinoxes, no.
01:00:42.260 --> 01:00:46.260
The scholars say they couldn't possibly have known that.
01:00:46.260 --> 01:00:48.260
It's a process that we think is caused
01:00:48.260 --> 01:00:50.260
by the pull of the sun and the moon on the earth.
01:00:50.260 --> 01:00:53.260
It causes the earth to wobble like a top,
01:00:53.260 --> 01:00:57.260
which is slowing down, and that wobble takes 26,000 years,
01:00:57.260 --> 01:01:02.260
actually 25,920 years, to complete one great cycle.
01:01:02.260 --> 01:01:08.260
And it unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years.
01:01:08.260 --> 01:01:10.260
Each of the 12 constellations of the zodiac
01:01:10.260 --> 01:01:14.260
gets 30 degrees along the ecliptic, the path of the sun,
01:01:14.260 --> 01:01:17.260
and the precession runs in the opposite direction
01:01:17.260 --> 01:01:19.260
to the normal direction of the zodiac.
01:01:19.260 --> 01:01:23.260
It goes backwards. It's precessing backwards.
01:01:23.260 --> 01:01:30.260
And you have roughly 2,160 years in each house of the zodiac,
01:01:30.260 --> 01:01:33.260
and these are thought to define the age.
01:01:33.260 --> 01:01:38.260
So this is why we say we live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius,
01:01:38.260 --> 01:01:41.260
because in our time, the sun is moving out of Pisces
01:01:41.260 --> 01:01:45.260
on the spring equinox and moving into Aquarius.
01:01:45.260 --> 01:01:49.260
It isn't quite there yet. We're not in the age of Aquarius.
01:01:49.260 --> 01:01:53.260
We're perhaps not even on the cusp another 100, 200 years,
01:01:53.260 --> 01:01:56.260
and we'll be much closer to the beginning of the age of Aquarius
01:01:56.260 --> 01:01:58.260
than we are today.
01:02:04.260 --> 01:02:07.260
Also from the second shrine of Tutankhamun,
01:02:07.260 --> 01:02:09.260
this rather mysterious image,
01:02:09.260 --> 01:02:12.260
Mehen, the Enveloper, the Serpent of Cyclical Time,
01:02:12.260 --> 01:02:14.260
he who hides the hours.
01:02:14.260 --> 01:02:16.260
I think this is one of many references
01:02:16.260 --> 01:02:19.260
to the secret knowledge of precession in ancient Egypt,
01:02:19.260 --> 01:02:24.260
and the Sphinx is part of the way that we can reveal this,
01:02:24.260 --> 01:02:28.260
a marker on the clock of time.
01:02:30.260 --> 01:02:34.260
The Great Sphinx, it looks perfectly due east.
01:02:34.260 --> 01:02:38.260
It's aligned absolutely perfectly to due east.
01:02:39.260 --> 01:02:43.260
And Santa took this photograph from the back of the Sphinx.
01:02:44.260 --> 01:02:48.260
Looking in the direction of the gaze of the Sphinx.
01:02:48.260 --> 01:02:53.260
And this photograph at dawn on the spring equinox
01:02:53.260 --> 01:02:55.260
from the back of the Sphinx.
01:02:55.260 --> 01:02:57.260
And there you can see the proof.
01:02:57.260 --> 01:03:00.260
The Great Sphinx gazes directly at the rising sun
01:03:00.260 --> 01:03:02.260
on the spring equinox.
01:03:02.260 --> 01:03:04.260
Summer solstice, the sun is way over here.
01:03:04.260 --> 01:03:06.260
Winter solstice, it's way over here.
01:03:06.260 --> 01:03:10.260
Spring equinox, dead in line with the gaze of the Sphinx.
01:03:10.260 --> 01:03:15.260
And I'll just take another moment to do another short reading
01:03:15.260 --> 01:03:19.260
about the ancient Egyptian concept of the sun.
01:03:19.260 --> 01:03:25.260
Men praise thee in thy name, Ra, and they swear by thee,
01:03:25.260 --> 01:03:27.260
for thou art lord over them.
01:03:27.260 --> 01:03:33.260
Thou hearest with thine eyes, and thou searest with thine, sorry,
01:03:33.260 --> 01:03:37.260
thou hearest with thine ears, and thou searest with thine eyes.
01:03:37.260 --> 01:03:39.260
Millions of years have gone over the world.
01:03:39.260 --> 01:03:43.260
I cannot tell the number of those through which thou hast passed.
01:03:43.260 --> 01:03:47.260
Thou dost pass over and dost travel through untold spaces
01:03:47.260 --> 01:03:51.260
requiring millions and hundreds of thousands of years to pass over.
01:03:51.260 --> 01:03:54.260
Thou passest through them in peace, and thou searest thy way
01:03:54.260 --> 01:03:58.260
across the watery abyss to the place which thou lovest.
01:03:58.260 --> 01:04:01.260
This thou doest in one little moment of time,
01:04:01.260 --> 01:04:05.260
and then thou dost sink down and dost make an end of hours.
01:04:05.260 --> 01:04:09.260
Astonishingly sophisticated notion of the big numbers
01:04:09.260 --> 01:04:13.260
and distances involved in the sun.
01:04:13.260 --> 01:04:18.260
So the sun gazes, the Sphinx gazes at the rising sun
01:04:18.260 --> 01:04:23.260
at dawn on the spring equinox, and it does that every year in all times.
01:04:23.260 --> 01:04:28.260
What changes is the stellar background against which that sunrise is occurring.
01:04:28.260 --> 01:04:32.260
That's what's changed by the possession of the equinoxes.
01:04:33.260 --> 01:04:40.260
And processional drift occurring at the rate of one degree every 72 years.
01:04:40.260 --> 01:04:44.260
Thirty degrees gives you 2,160 years.
01:04:44.260 --> 01:04:51.260
The whole process, 12 houses of the zodiac, takes you 25,920 years.
01:04:51.260 --> 01:04:57.260
And using the science of procession, looking at the monuments of Giza,
01:04:57.260 --> 01:05:01.260
I can tell you that this diagram on the ground,
01:05:01.260 --> 01:05:06.260
the Sphinx and the three great pyramids, maps the sky not as it looked in 2500 BC,
01:05:06.260 --> 01:05:09.260
but as it looked in 10,500 BC.
01:05:09.260 --> 01:05:15.260
12,500 years ago, when the constellation of Leo housed the sun on the spring equinox,
01:05:15.260 --> 01:05:20.260
and the great Sphinx gazed at her celestial counterpart in the heavens,
01:05:20.260 --> 01:05:25.260
the Milky Way and the Nile, the three stars of Orion's belt and the pyramid.
01:05:25.260 --> 01:05:28.260
Very strange, this.
01:05:28.260 --> 01:05:34.260
Does this tell us that the ancient Egyptians knew that date and wanted to memorialize it in stone,
01:05:34.260 --> 01:05:39.260
or does it suggest actually that some of these monuments may actually go back to that very ancient time,
01:05:39.260 --> 01:05:43.260
long, long, long before the pharaohs of Egypt?
01:05:43.260 --> 01:05:47.260
I'm going to move a little quickly, but the work on procession of the equinoxes,
01:05:47.260 --> 01:05:52.260
the fundamental work is Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschend.
01:05:52.260 --> 01:05:55.260
It's a tough read.
01:05:55.260 --> 01:05:59.260
Giorgio de Santillana was a professor of history of science at MIT,
01:05:59.260 --> 01:06:05.260
but what they document in that book is global, worldwide knowledge of procession of the equinoxes
01:06:05.260 --> 01:06:10.260
recorded in myth, a series of numbers that keep coming up again and again and again,
01:06:10.260 --> 01:06:15.260
all over the world, in every part of the world, which only can arise from procession.
01:06:15.260 --> 01:06:19.260
And Santillana and Von Deschend, hidden in the little paragraph right in the middle of the book,
01:06:19.260 --> 01:06:25.260
they traced it back to some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization of remote antiquity.
01:06:25.260 --> 01:06:31.260
72 is the heartbeat of the cycle, lots of numbers. 72 divided by 2 is 36.
01:06:31.260 --> 01:06:35.260
72 plus 36 is 108. Half of 108 is 54.
01:06:35.260 --> 01:06:38.260
All these are what I call the precessional numbers,
01:06:38.260 --> 01:06:43.260
which are derived from and related to the process of procession of the equinoxes.
01:06:43.260 --> 01:06:48.260
And you find them in myths, in Viking myths, in Indian traditions,
01:06:48.260 --> 01:06:55.260
the story of Osiris and his 72 assailants, the number of stanzas in the Rig Veda.
01:06:55.260 --> 01:07:01.260
It's just all over the world in myth everywhere, the story of procession of the equinoxes in numbers.
01:07:01.260 --> 01:07:09.260
Now, the Great Pyramid, Egyptologists know this, but they say it's a coincidence,
01:07:09.260 --> 01:07:14.260
is a mathematical scale model of the northern hemisphere of the Earth.
01:07:14.260 --> 01:07:19.260
It's quite simple. If you take the base perimeter measurement of the Great Pyramid
01:07:19.260 --> 01:07:25.260
and multiply it by a specific number, and that number is 43,200,
01:07:25.260 --> 01:07:29.260
you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth.
01:07:29.260 --> 01:07:34.260
And if you take the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by the same number,
01:07:34.260 --> 01:07:38.260
you get the polar radius of the Earth.
01:07:38.260 --> 01:07:42.260
As I say, Egyptologists know this, but they say it's a coincidence.
01:07:42.260 --> 01:07:50.260
Actually, if it were any other number than 43,200, I might have to accept it could be a coincidence.
01:07:50.260 --> 01:07:54.260
But 43,200 is one of those precessional numbers.
01:07:54.260 --> 01:08:01.260
It's one of those numbers that is derived from the sequence that evolves from one degree every 72 years.
01:08:01.260 --> 01:08:06.260
72 times 30 equals 2,160, that's one house of the zodiac.
01:08:06.260 --> 01:08:10.260
2,160 by 20 gives you 43,200.
01:08:13.260 --> 01:08:17.260
Let's jump to Angkor in Cambodia.
01:08:17.260 --> 01:08:25.260
Turns out that from Giza to Angkor is exactly 72 degrees of longitude.
01:08:25.260 --> 01:08:30.260
Weird, that. Another one of those precessional numbers.
01:08:30.260 --> 01:08:39.260
And makes me think of a whole worldwide project establishing sacred sites at certain positions of longitude around the globe
01:08:39.260 --> 01:08:43.260
and creating them for a very specific reason.
01:08:43.260 --> 01:08:51.260
And I think Angkor and Giza are intimately connected, although they seem to stem from very different periods of history.
01:08:51.260 --> 01:08:53.260
Angkor what?
01:08:53.260 --> 01:09:00.260
By the way, Angkor means life to the Horus in the ancient Egyptian language.
01:09:00.260 --> 01:09:04.260
That's another one of those coincidences, according to the scholars.
01:09:04.260 --> 01:09:06.260
Here's the Angkor Wat temple.
01:09:06.260 --> 01:09:08.260
Look at this amazing axis running all the way through it.
01:09:08.260 --> 01:09:14.260
Actually, it just disappears, we're slightly off the screen here, but it disappears right over the horizon, miles and miles away.
01:09:14.260 --> 01:09:20.260
It's an east-west axis, rather pyramidal form of all of the temples in Angkor.
01:09:20.260 --> 01:09:24.260
And here's what happens on the spring equinox at Angkor.
01:09:24.260 --> 01:09:32.260
Stand on that causeway, look at the central tower, stand in the middle, and you'll see that it starts to rise,
01:09:32.260 --> 01:09:40.260
and then it slowly slides up the tower, nears the top of the tower, and then, bingo.
01:09:40.260 --> 01:09:45.260
The whole place just lights up like a fairy tale kingdom.
01:09:45.260 --> 01:09:56.260
It's an amazing experience, and you suddenly realize that this monument, this temple, was built to connect sky and ground at that moment.
01:09:56.260 --> 01:09:58.260
At that exact moment, it comes alive.
01:09:58.260 --> 01:10:00.260
That's what it's all about.
01:10:00.260 --> 01:10:04.260
It's an equinoctial marker, just like the great sphinx.
01:10:04.260 --> 01:10:09.260
There are 72 major temples at Angkor.
01:10:09.260 --> 01:10:15.260
There are curious pyramidal hills in the background at Angkor.
01:10:15.260 --> 01:10:20.260
There are these amazing structures.
01:10:20.260 --> 01:10:28.260
This bridge over to Angkor Thom, 54 figures on each side of the bridge, another processional number.
01:10:28.260 --> 01:10:34.260
54 plus 54 equals 108. 108 is 72, plus half of 72, 36.
01:10:35.260 --> 01:10:39.260
The churning of the milky ocean, a relief at Angkor.
01:10:39.260 --> 01:10:46.260
That's the same thing that's represented in sculpture here. It's represented in a relief here.
01:10:46.260 --> 01:10:52.260
You see the serpent Vazuki, gods on one side, demons on the other.
01:10:52.260 --> 01:10:55.260
Actually, these are the demons. These are the gods.
01:10:55.260 --> 01:11:00.260
They're pulling on Vazuki, the serpent, like he's some huge piece of rope.
01:11:00.260 --> 01:11:04.260
He's wrapped around Mount Mandera.
01:11:04.260 --> 01:11:08.260
It's a churning process.
01:11:08.260 --> 01:11:14.260
They're whipping up the milky ocean, and they're churning Amrita, the elixir of immortality,
01:11:14.260 --> 01:11:19.260
the very same gift that is sought by the ancient Egyptians.
01:11:19.260 --> 01:11:26.260
That's what's produced by this churning of the milky ocean.
01:11:26.260 --> 01:11:33.260
If you trace the major temples of Angkor, you find that they too represent a constellation on the ground.
01:11:33.260 --> 01:11:38.260
That is the constellation of Draco in the northern sky.
01:11:38.260 --> 01:11:46.260
To cut a long story short, the only time that the correlation works perfectly is in 10,500 BC,
01:11:46.260 --> 01:11:51.260
exactly the same time that the correlation at Giza works perfectly.
01:11:51.260 --> 01:11:56.260
I'm not saying the temples of Angkor were built in 10,500 BC. They certainly weren't.
01:11:56.260 --> 01:12:01.260
They date from about 1100 AD, but archaeologists are finding that there's layers and layers of construction
01:12:01.260 --> 01:12:08.260
underneath the temples that we see today, as though they're reincarnations of earlier temples.
01:12:08.260 --> 01:12:13.260
So we have enigmatic ancient sites and religious ideas widely distributed around the world,
01:12:13.260 --> 01:12:18.260
extraordinary similarities pointing back to a remote date 12,000 years ago.
01:12:18.260 --> 01:12:23.260
We have ancient maps that seem to document the meltdown of the last ice age.
01:12:23.260 --> 01:12:28.260
Are we looking at the traces of a forgotten episode in human history? I think so.
01:12:28.260 --> 01:12:32.260
I think that's what's going on here.
01:12:32.260 --> 01:12:39.260
Because we've forgotten it, because we are a species with amnesia,
01:12:39.260 --> 01:12:44.260
because we are so much a mystery to ourselves,
01:12:44.260 --> 01:12:52.260
and we're so lost and troubled today, so haunted by the sense of something missing,
01:12:52.260 --> 01:12:57.260
something that we need to know about ourselves.
01:12:57.260 --> 01:13:05.260
For the ancient Egyptians, the essential mystery of human existence concerned our spiritual essence.
01:13:05.260 --> 01:13:13.260
We are participating in this theatre of experience that we call life and the world in an immense endeavour
01:13:13.260 --> 01:13:18.260
aimed at the perfection of the soul. That's what we're here to do.
01:13:18.260 --> 01:13:23.260
Virtually identical ideas were explored at Angkor.
01:13:23.260 --> 01:13:32.260
Well, in the modern world, sad to say, few such mysteries concern us.
01:13:36.260 --> 01:13:38.260
This is it.
01:13:38.260 --> 01:13:44.260
Our culture today, we have a thing about consciousness.
01:13:44.260 --> 01:13:51.260
Our culture, it admires, it venerates, it almost worships one single state of consciousness,
01:13:51.260 --> 01:13:58.260
and that is the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness that's useful for science and business and commerce and war and such things.
01:13:58.260 --> 01:14:03.260
And then we allow ourselves some downtime with absolute drunkenness and stupidity and abandon.
01:14:03.260 --> 01:14:06.260
That's also accepted by our civilization.
01:14:06.260 --> 01:14:13.260
But any other kind of state of consciousness is absolutely no-no and not allowed and not encouraged at all.
01:14:13.260 --> 01:14:19.260
It's as though the world is conspiring to trivialise life, to trivialise us,
01:14:19.260 --> 01:14:27.260
to bring everything down to the absolute lowest possible level of hedonism and consumption,
01:14:27.260 --> 01:14:32.260
with nothing else at all being projected as worthwhile.
01:14:33.260 --> 01:14:45.260
I've talked with shamans in the Amazon, with whom I've many times drunk the mysterious brew ayahuasca.
01:14:45.260 --> 01:14:53.260
And when I've asked them, what do you think is the problem with the world? What's the problem with the West?
01:14:53.260 --> 01:14:58.260
They say it's very simple. You've severed your connection with spirit.
01:14:58.260 --> 01:15:05.260
You've cut the link. And you have to restore that link if you're going to move forward from here.
01:15:05.260 --> 01:15:11.260
You can't move forward from the place you're in if you don't restore the connection to spirit.
01:15:11.260 --> 01:15:19.260
And that seems to me the most fundamental task that all of us now face.
01:15:19.260 --> 01:15:30.260
Not these exterior trappings of power that have brought such horror and misery to the world.
01:15:30.260 --> 01:15:40.260
What's happening in the Amazon is just beyond belief. It begs belief.
01:15:40.260 --> 01:15:45.260
It almost makes you suspect that some kind of demonic force is at work in the world.
01:15:45.260 --> 01:15:52.260
That we would take literally the lungs of the planet and just hack them to pieces.
01:15:52.260 --> 01:15:59.260
That we cut down old growth rainforests, the most extraordinary resource of biodiversity on the planet,
01:15:59.260 --> 01:16:05.260
155,000 different species of plants and trees, and replace them with soybean farms.
01:16:05.260 --> 01:16:11.260
You know, soybean farms, which will only be functional for 10 years because rainforest soils are not very fertile.
01:16:11.260 --> 01:16:16.260
They're made fertile by the constant fall of leaves.
01:16:16.260 --> 01:16:20.260
Soybean farms to feed cattle so we can eat hamburgers.
01:16:20.260 --> 01:16:25.260
What a bad deal we're getting from this whole thing. It's very, very crazy.
01:16:25.260 --> 01:16:32.260
I did it back of an envelope calculation. Six months expenditure in Iraq at its height would have solved the problem of the Amazon forever.
01:16:32.260 --> 01:16:36.260
But we can't make that choice. We can't say to the people of the Amazon,
01:16:36.260 --> 01:16:40.260
we recognize that you have an incredibly precious and irreplaceable resource.
01:16:40.260 --> 01:16:45.260
We would like to take away your economic problems. Please just look after that resource for us.
01:16:45.260 --> 01:16:49.260
We seem incapable of doing that. We can spend that kind of money on wars,
01:16:49.260 --> 01:16:58.260
but we can't spend it on saving the most majestic natural resource on the planet.
01:16:58.260 --> 01:17:05.260
I'm going to close with a reading from the Hermetica, from the Hermetic texts.
01:17:05.260 --> 01:17:09.260
Hermes was the Greek version of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth.
01:17:09.260 --> 01:17:12.260
The Romans knew him as Mercury.
01:17:12.260 --> 01:17:22.260
And in a dialogue, the Hermetica, many of them are dialogues between Thoth, Hermes, and various pupils of his.
01:17:22.260 --> 01:17:29.260
And in one called the Asclepius, a lament is presented.
01:17:29.260 --> 01:17:37.260
And it's like a prophecy. It's a bit like the Mayan prophecy.
01:17:37.260 --> 01:17:43.260
Egypt seems to stand as a metaphor for the whole world in this.
01:17:43.260 --> 01:17:52.260
And to my mind, for the world in our time, this lament, this prophecy is speaking directly to us.
01:17:52.260 --> 01:17:57.260
So it's Hermes speaking, and he's saying to Asclepius this.
01:17:57.260 --> 01:18:01.260
Do you know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven?
01:18:01.260 --> 01:18:10.260
Or to speak more exactly, in Egypt, all the operations of the powers which rule and work in heaven are present in the earth below.
01:18:10.260 --> 01:18:17.260
In fact, it should be said that the whole cosmos dwells in this, our land, as in a sanctuary.
01:18:17.260 --> 01:18:23.260
And yet, since it is fitting that wise men should have knowledge of all events before they come to pass,
01:18:23.260 --> 01:18:28.260
you must not be left in ignorance of what I will now tell you.
01:18:28.260 --> 01:18:36.260
There will come a time when it will have been in vain that Egyptians have honored the Godhead with heartfelt piety and service.
01:18:36.260 --> 01:18:41.260
And all our holy worship will be fruitless and ineffectual.
01:18:41.260 --> 01:18:45.260
The gods will return from earth to heaven.
01:18:45.260 --> 01:18:47.260
Egypt will be forsaken.
01:18:47.260 --> 01:18:55.260
And the land which was once the home of religion will be left desolate, bereft of the presence of its deities.
01:18:55.260 --> 01:19:05.260
Oh, Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe.
01:19:05.260 --> 01:19:12.260
Nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety.
01:19:12.260 --> 01:19:20.260
And in that day, men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and worship.
01:19:20.260 --> 01:19:28.260
They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which he has built,
01:19:28.260 --> 01:19:36.260
this sum of good made up of many diverse forms, this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which he has made,
01:19:36.260 --> 01:19:39.260
ungrudgingly favoring man's welfare.
01:19:39.260 --> 01:19:48.260
This combination and accumulation of all the manifold things that call forth the veneration, praise, and love of the beholder.
01:19:48.260 --> 01:19:55.260
Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life.
01:19:55.260 --> 01:19:57.260
No one will raise his eyes to heaven.
01:19:57.260 --> 01:20:00.260
The pious will be deemed insane.
01:20:00.260 --> 01:20:07.260
The impious wise, the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good.
01:20:07.260 --> 01:20:17.260
As for the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you,
01:20:17.260 --> 01:20:22.260
all this they will mock, and even persuade themselves that it is false.
01:20:22.260 --> 01:20:27.260
No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven, will be heard or believed.
01:20:27.260 --> 01:20:34.260
And so the gods will depart from mankind, a grievous thing, and only evil angels will remain,
01:20:34.260 --> 01:20:40.260
who will mingle with men, and drive the poor wretches into all manner of reckless crime,
01:20:40.260 --> 01:20:47.260
into wars and robberies and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul.
01:20:47.260 --> 01:20:53.260
Then will the earth tremble, and the sea bear no ships.
01:20:53.260 --> 01:20:57.260
Heaven will not support the stars in their orbits.
01:20:57.260 --> 01:21:00.260
All voices of the gods will be forced into silence.
01:21:00.260 --> 01:21:03.260
The fruits of the earth will rot.
01:21:03.260 --> 01:21:09.260
The soil will turn barren, and the very air will sicken with sullen stagnation.
01:21:09.260 --> 01:21:12.260
All things will be disordered and awry.
01:21:12.260 --> 01:21:15.260
All good will disappear.
01:21:15.260 --> 01:21:22.260
But when all this has befallen Asclepius, then God, the creator of all things,
01:21:22.260 --> 01:21:30.260
will look on that which has come to pass, and will stop the disorder by the counterforce of his will, which is the good.
01:21:30.260 --> 01:21:34.260
He will call back to the right path those who have gone astray.
01:21:34.260 --> 01:21:39.260
He will cleanse the world of evil, washing it away with floods,
01:21:39.260 --> 01:21:44.260
burning it out with the fiercest fire, and expelling it with war and pestilence.
01:21:44.260 --> 01:21:48.260
And thus he will bring back his world to its former aspect,
01:21:48.260 --> 01:21:55.260
so that the cosmos will once more be deemed worthy of worship and wondering reverence.
01:21:55.260 --> 01:21:59.260
And God, the maker and maintainer of the mighty fabric,
01:21:59.260 --> 01:22:04.260
will be adored by the men of that day with continuous songs of praise and blessing.
01:22:04.260 --> 01:22:07.260
Such is the new birth of the cosmos.
01:22:07.260 --> 01:22:14.260
It is a making again of all things good, a holy and awe-inspiring restoration of all nature,
01:22:14.260 --> 01:22:22.260
and it is wrought inside the process of time by the eternal will of the creator.
01:22:22.260 --> 01:22:27.260
I don't know whether we're going to face some terrible global catastrophe in 2012 or not.
01:22:27.260 --> 01:22:30.260
I certainly hope not.
01:22:30.260 --> 01:22:37.260
I hope it will not come down to misery and horror and awful, awful things.
01:22:37.260 --> 01:22:40.260
There's enough of that in the world already.
01:22:40.260 --> 01:22:43.260
But I do remember what all the ancient texts say.
01:22:43.260 --> 01:22:44.260
There isn't a single flood myth.
01:22:44.260 --> 01:22:49.260
There isn't a single story of the destruction of past civilizations
01:22:49.260 --> 01:22:52.260
that don't implicate humanity in the story somewhere.
01:22:52.260 --> 01:22:57.260
Our own behavior and what we do is part of what we're bringing down on the world right now.
01:22:57.260 --> 01:23:03.260
What we are manifesting in the world, that is what is coming towards us.
01:23:03.260 --> 01:23:09.260
We are the authors of this thing, and we can change the story if we want to change it.
01:23:09.260 --> 01:23:12.260
I firmly believe that.
01:23:12.260 --> 01:23:16.260
This is the moment of crossroads that we stand at.
01:23:16.260 --> 01:23:21.260
None of us can affect changes on a macro level.
01:23:21.260 --> 01:23:24.260
It's impossible to do so.
01:23:24.260 --> 01:23:28.260
But we can make changes on a micro level.
01:23:28.260 --> 01:23:30.260
We can make changes in our own lives.
01:23:30.260 --> 01:23:34.260
We can make changes in our immediate surroundings.
01:23:34.260 --> 01:23:35.260
Changes for the better.
01:23:35.260 --> 01:23:41.260
Changes driven by love and by hope.
01:23:41.260 --> 01:23:45.260
I'm a deeply flawed human being.
01:23:45.260 --> 01:23:54.260
I have tremendously bad habits and lots of bad aspects to my personality.
01:23:54.260 --> 01:23:59.260
Over the last decade or so, I've come to look at some of those things objectively.
01:23:59.260 --> 01:24:06.260
I've been very much helped by Ayahuasca, the brew that I mentioned from the Amazon in doing this.
01:24:07.260 --> 01:24:15.260
I'm working hard to change my life, to try to be a more nourishing person to people around me.
01:24:15.260 --> 01:24:17.260
I'm not saying that I'm succeeding.
01:24:17.260 --> 01:24:20.260
I fail every day, but I'm still trying to do that.
01:24:20.260 --> 01:24:30.260
And that's really all I can say when we confront something so huge and so overwhelming as the notion of global destruction.
01:24:30.260 --> 01:24:36.260
No, I can't stop that, but I can stop what I'm doing to contribute to it.
01:24:36.260 --> 01:24:42.260
And if we all do that, then I believe a huge change in consciousness will come.
01:24:42.260 --> 01:24:44.260
And the world can move on.
01:24:44.260 --> 01:24:49.260
And we can look forward to a future for our children and our children's children.
01:24:49.260 --> 01:24:54.260
And once again, bring this bright, beautiful, jeweled garden of a planet.
01:24:54.260 --> 01:24:57.260
Bring it back to the place it should be in our lives.
01:24:57.260 --> 01:24:59.260
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
01:25:00.260 --> 01:25:02.260
Thank you.