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Thank you.

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Right ladies and gentlemen, and this brings us to the very last speaker of this wonderful

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event, Megalithomania South Africa, Johannesburg, 13 March 2011, and it gives me personally

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an absolute thrill to be able to announce a very special guest, Graham Hancock, who

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has played a very large role in inspiring me and in the work that I'm doing right now.

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And I must tell you, Graham, that without you, I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm

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doing today. So a huge, huge word of gratitude to you and the immense work that you've done

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in this field. Thank you very much.

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There's no doubt that Graham's persistent work and research, and I trust these wives,

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Santha has been there as a supporting pillar of strength all the time as these things go.

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And the photographer, I've been told. And you've seen the spectacular photographs.

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So the amount of dedication and information that Graham has been able to share with the

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world is absolutely staggering. And tonight, the presentation title itself is just so absolutely

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intriguing and provocative. Elves, angels, aliens, and ayahuasca. Need I say more? Ladies

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and gentlemen, Graham Hancock.

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Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Before I begin my talk, I think we all know

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that terrible events have unfolded in Japan over the last days.

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Terrible events. And as each hour passes, it becomes clear how awful this disaster

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is. Upwards of 10,000 have died, if not more. The Earth's axis has been shifted several

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inches out of line as a result of this earthquake. Nuclear power plants are melting down, and

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so many human lives have been lost. So I would like to begin with one minute of silence.

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As we put ourselves in spirit with the Japanese people and wish them for the best.

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Thank you.

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Thank you. If I've had any role as a

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researcher and as a writer, it's been to push the envelope, to stand on the edge of

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things and look at things from a perspective that is not mainstream. I've been running

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against the current for a very long time, and that is expressed in the body of work

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that I've put before the public concerning the possibility of a great forgotten episode

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in human history. I like to think that the same perspective, bringing a non-mainstream

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but reasoned out view of mysteries also enlightens what I'm going to talk about tonight. Many

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have found my change of direction in my work disturbing, particularly since the new work

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does touch profoundly on altered states of consciousness. And altered states of consciousness

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are a taboo subject in our society, which many people are very unwilling to think about

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and discuss, but they're central to what I'm going to talk about tonight. And I'm

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going to be talking about ayahuasca, the vine of the soul, which is used by shamans

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in the Amazon to enter the spirit world and communicate with entities in that realm.

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During and after the research for my book, my last non-fiction book, Supernatural, I

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was given a series of visions by ayahuasca in a series of five sessions with ayahuasca

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in Brazil, where I was given a whole, I was given a story, and I was told to go away

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and write that story. And that story is my first novel, Entangled, which concerns very

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briefly two young women, one living 24,000 years ago in the past. Her name is Ria, and

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another living today in modern Los Angeles. Her name is Leonie. And they are brought

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together by supernatural forces to do battle with a demon who travels through time and

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who seeks to divert humanity from our inherent goodness and turn us towards evil. So I'm

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sure it's a book about the battle of good against evil, and it's a book about time

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travel. They believe in the Amazon that when your spirit leaves your body, you are free

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to move through all dimensions and through time itself. And the possibility has recently

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been raised within quantum physics that time may not be an arrow, that it may be a series

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of spirals and loops that interconnect with one another, that it may even be possible

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for us to change the past just as we can change and choose the future. And all of

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these ideas and concepts came to me through the work that I did with Ayahuasca and writing

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supernatural. So I'm not going to talk about the novel tonight, but what I'm going to

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talk about is the research background behind the novel, which is laid out in depth in my

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book, Supernatural. And I personally hope that some of my readers will come with me

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into this new journey into fiction. I've had a lot of my readers are very angry with me

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that I've written a novel. I've received some incredibly insulting and offensive emails

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about this. But I feel very strongly, I felt very strongly called to write this novel,

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and I feel that my path for however many years I have left is to explore extraordinary ideas

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in the realm of fiction rather than in the realm of nonfiction. One benefit of doing

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that at least is I don't have to argue with the academics anymore. I don't have to write

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books with 1,400 footnotes. And you know, if they get upset with me about it, I can

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say, just relax guys, it's just fantasy, you know. And it's allowed me to return to a

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place of freedom in my writing that I was really last in when I wrote Fingerprints of

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the Gods. After that I felt my work became more and more defensive because of the academic

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attacks and it's nice to be free again. These creatures that we're looking at here, well

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this one of course is, they're very common in popular culture today. This is Anthony

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Hopkins done up in makeup as the wolf man. Of course Batman here. Creatures that are

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part animal and part human in form. The technical term for these creatures is therianthropes

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from the Greek therion which means wild beast and anthropos which means man. Here's a Japanese

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snake woman down here. Of course a mermaid, a bull man, a lion man. Very familiar images

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in popular culture today. But let's just see how far back in the human story such images

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go. I think everybody's familiar with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur from ancient

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Greece. The Minotaur is a therianthrope. He's a human body and the head of a bull. And

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over here from Akkad we see a creature with the hind legs of a bull and the upper parts

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of a human being dated to 1800 BC. Of course the deities of ancient Egypt are almost all

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therianthropic in form. Part animal, part human. Thoth for example is part bird and

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part human, an ibis headed man. The guide of souls, Anubis, part jackal and part human.

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The great sphinx of course is a therianthrope whether he's a dog and a man or a lion and

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a man. Robert and I can disagree on such matters but the fact is it's still a therianthropic

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image. And here we see from one of the tombs of the nobles on the west bank of Luxor the

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deceased confronting her own soul and the soul is depicted as a human headed bird with

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the same features as the deceased. In fact such imagery is incredibly ancient. The very

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oldest piece of art to have come down to us from anywhere in the world, at least that

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is accepted by mainstream scholars, is this one. And this is from Fumani cave in Italy

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and it has the hind legs and body of a human being but the head of some kind of bull that

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would have been an auroch in that case. And this is the most important piece of art in

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the world. And here from the cave in Germany carved out of mammoth ivory, this piece is

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about knee high. We have a lion headed man also with the paws of a lion. Now we go to

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Chauvet cave in France which is 33,000 years old and we see a bison man with the head

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and shoulders of a bison and the hind legs of a human being. And in fact very similar

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images continue to appear in the painted caves for thousands of years after Chauvet. They

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are found in a great many of the painted caves of southern Europe. Like this piece

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for example, this is a redrawing of the original, the sorcerer from Trois-Fraires in France,

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combines the characteristics of a human being, of a horse, of a stag, of an owl and of a

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wolf, an extraordinary hybrid animal. And this is a very important piece of art. And

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needless to say such things are not seen in everyday life, they are not part of natural

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observation. So I think we need to ask ourselves since these are the oldest works of art known

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to mankind and since they remain with us in human culture today, what was the original

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inspiration behind such ideas? Where did these ideas come from? And if we draw back from

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that image from Chauvet cave, we can see there's more to the picture than I showed

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you. Here's the bison man, but he's straddling a large female human figure. But interestingly

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that female human figure is headless, headless. However, her right arm is captured by the

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artist in the moment of transformation into the head of a lion, like these lions down

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here. So let's not waste time by trying to argue that these are depictions of human

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beings dressed up in skins. That's not what's going on here. This is a depiction of shape

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shifting. This is depiction of transformation and the ancient artist has caught that transformation

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as it occurs in this image here. Now the images I'll show you tonight come almost

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entirely from Southern Europe and from your own country, South Africa. Santa and I were

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able to do a wonderful trip in South Africa guided by just an excellent person and friend

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of ours, Bocca de Troyes, who took us around the Sederberg and the Drackensberg and took

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us to some of the remotest corners where the majestic rock art of the San is to be

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found. I could illustrate this talk with rock art from almost anywhere in the world because

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one of the mysteries of the rock art is its transpersonal qualities. The fact that cultures

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that were not in contact with one another again and again depict almost identical imagery

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and identical themes. They may be separated by tens of thousands of miles and by tens

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of thousands of years, but the imagery is eerily the same. In this case, this piece

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from the Sederberg, what we see perched on a zigzag are humans captured in the moment

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of transformation into antelopes. It's another one of those shape shifting images. And here

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from the Drackensberg, I particularly love this amazing work of art thought to be about

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8,000 years old, which depicts two therianthropes side by side, human bodies and they have

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the heads of elans. But there's more to it than that. If you look at the figure on the

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left here, you'll see that he's got two feathers growing out of his back as though he's about

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to sprout wings. And this figure has got two serpents wrapped around his body. That's

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what all this is about. That's the bodies of the serpents wrapped around his upper body.

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And these serpents also have the heads of antelopes. So a really very extraordinary

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set of ideas is contained in this South African image from the San of human bodied antelope

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headed creatures, one sprouting wings, the other with two antelope headed serpents wrapped

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around his body. How do we explain this? Certainly the artist did not see this in daily life

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and then paint it on the cave. This is not realism from daily life. What is it that we're

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dealing with here? It's an incredible privilege to go into the painted caves of southern Europe.

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Santa and I were able to visit 30 of them. There are more than 300, but the rest are

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closed to the public, these incredible and amazing, transformative sacred spaces and

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are reserved exclusively for archaeologists. I think of them as underground cathedrals.

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The moment you enter into one of these caves, often through winding circuitous passageways,

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and you hear the water dripping down the walls, you can sense the stalactites and stalagmites

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forming. There's a coolness in the air, a hush descends. It's an extraordinary privilege

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to be in these places. And by the way, they were never lived in by our ancestors. The

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idea of cavemen is completely incorrect. Our ancestors did not live in these caves. They

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used them as sacred spaces. They were often visited by very few people in repeated visits

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over thousands and thousands of years. And there was no question of our ancestors living

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in them. So some kind of communion with spirit realms was going on in these caves.

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Now there's a lot of recognisable animals painted around the walls of the cave, but

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some of them are a little strange. Like this one over here, which we'll take a close-up

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on. This one, in their wisdom, the archaeologists choose to call the unicorn, even though he

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has actually got two horns, very plainly. What exactly he is, is not at all clear,

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but I'll show you another image later from a completely other part of the world, which

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I believe ties in with this image. And then look at this stag with these incredibly elaborate

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antlers. And something else we need to explain about this art. Down here, this, this is a

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geometrical pattern. This rectangle appears below the throat of the stag. And we can

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see going quickly through a number of other pictures that these sort of geometrical patterns,

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grids, squares, rectangles, straight lines appear again and again in the rock art. So

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if we're going to explain the rock art, we need to explain all elements of it, including

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these geometrical patterns. Like here, for example, this grid separating two ibexes

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from southern Europe. Or here from the Cederberg, dancing women. They were not originally headless,

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by the way. It's just that the heads were painted in a lighter pigment, which has faded

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out. But what's interesting is the zigzag lines overlaying these figures and this pattern

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of diamonds down here. They are part of the original work of art. Why are they there?

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How do we explain this? And cross-cultural similarities. These kind of patterns from

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the Cederberg and very similar patterns from Altamira Cave in Spain. El Castillo Cave in

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Spain, a flow of dots runs down the wall. More geometrical patterns appear. This is

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a thought to be close to 33,000 years old, painted in red ochre. And everywhere you

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go, hand prints appear on the walls. That's true of South Africa and it's true of southern

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Europe and it's true of rock art all around the world. Sometimes the artist applied the

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paint to his or her hand and slapped it on the wall. Sometimes they would place their

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hand against the wall and spit paint around it. So the hand becomes a stencil, as in this

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case. The more of these sites that I visited, the more an eerie impression began to dawn

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on me. That the cave wall was a membrane separating me off from another realm. And that those

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hands, they were coming through the wall from the other side, from the other side of that

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membrane. There's a sense of intimate contact with a human being long gone. And that sense

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of also coming through the wall we see here from Altamira Cave in Spain, where the ancient

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artist has just tweaked a little bit with a little bit of paint, a natural rock feature,

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and we see this strange face pushing through the rock wall. And overlooking them all,

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everywhere you go, these therianthropic beings, part animal, part human in form, shifting

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shape, changing their appearance. All of this we have to be able to explain. It's not often

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that I find myself in agreement with mainstream archaeologists. But on this issue, how we

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explain the rock art, its specific characteristics, and its universal characteristics, I want

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to pay tribute to the fantastic work of a major, major South African scholar. And that's

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Professor David Lewis Williams of Witwatersrand University, of the Rock Art Research Institute.

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When David first proposed his neuropsychological theory of rock art, he was attacked by virtually

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every archaeologist on the planet. Archaeologists hate new ideas. They just can't bear them.

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But David's work is so incredibly well documented and thoroughly supported and researched with

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enormous dedication and skill that gradually, over the last 20 plus years, he has won over

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all his colleagues. And his neuropsychological theory of rock art is now universally accepted.

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It's the mainstream theory of rock art. And to cut a long story short, I don't have time

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tonight to lay out the evidence. It is all in my book, Supernatural, that David is arguing

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that this is an art of visions. It's an art of altered states of consciousness. Specifically,

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it's an art of shamans. That shamans entering trance states experienced visions which they

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then returned to a normal state of consciousness and depicted on the cave walls or rock shelters

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what they'd seen. And this issue of visions really is the underlying factor that explains

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all of this rock art. Here are some of David's very important books, which I would highly

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recommend that you have a look at, particularly The Mind in the Cave, which is really a work

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of genius. And a lot of David's work, the scientific evidence for it, is drawn from

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scientific studies of altered states of consciousness that were done with modern volunteers and

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very frequently using hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, dimethyltryptamine, mescaline,

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psilocybin and so on, although some other techniques such as bombardment with electromagnetic

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fields, sensory deprivation and so on, even rhythmic drumming, will induce the necessary

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altered state of consciousness to have these experiences. And precisely what these experiences

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are, I'll try to come to a little later on. Now, the in-depth scientific studies of altered

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states of consciousness have come up with a broad schema of how the trance state unfolds.

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And typically, this is what happens. It's not every time exactly like this, but often

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it is. That in the early stages of trance, scintillating patterns, often geometrical

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patterns are seen, and zigzag lines and starbursts and spirals and grids are seen. And then

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moving deeper into trance, these tend to be construed in certain forms. Then there's

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a sense of passing through a vortex and of emerging on the other side of the vortex

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into a seamlessly convincing parallel universe. And that parallel universe is frequently

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inhabited by intelligent entities who the volunteers reported communicated with them

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telepathically. This was from a mescaline study in the 1960s. And as you can see, as

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well as the zigzag lines and the dots, the volunteer drew a man in a modern business

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suit but with the head of a fox. This is what he had seen. And it's obvious that it's

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very, very similar in concept to those images of therianthropes from the painted caves

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tens of thousands of years ago. Again, with the scientific studies, it's been possible

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to draw up a chart, actually, of the patterns that everybody sees and reports in these altered

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states of consciousness. And these patterns are called entoptic phenomena. And these are

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the most common patterns that volunteers all over the world drew again and again. David's

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work is strengthened with reference to the San of South Africa and the Koso of the California

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Great Basin. Although the San are now an extinct culture, of course, their relatives, the

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Kalahari Bushmen, continue, but the San of South Africa are an extinct culture. Although

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they're an extinct culture, back in the late 1900s and early 20th century, their last

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survivors were approached by Western ethnographers who asked them, actually, specifically, what

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is this rock art that you guys have been doing for thousands of years? And they told them,

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very straightforwardly, it's the work of our shamans. They enter trance through the trance

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dance. They travel out of body into the spirit world. And they return and document what they've

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seen on the rock walls. And the same goes for the Koso in the California Great Basin.

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They reported that these patterns also were seen by their medicine men, their shamans,

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in a state of vision. So although we cannot actually go back and interview the artists

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of the Upper Paleolithic, the fact that those same universal images also appear in their

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art, tell us, really, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that we were, that it is an art of

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altered states of consciousness and an art of shamans. And indeed, the essence of shamanism

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is altered states of consciousness. If somebody says they're a shaman and they remain in

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the normal, alert, problem-solving state of consciousness that we use for daily life,

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I would say that that person is not a shaman. I would say they may be many wonderful things,

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but they're not a shaman. Shamanism, the definition of shamanism, involves always altered states

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of consciousness. And in these states, in these trance states, shamans report encounters

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with entities, which they usually construe as spirits, which sometimes take human form,

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sometimes appear as part animal, part human, or animal in form. And the shamans themselves

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report transforming into animals as they enter the spirit world or into Therianthropes.

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This English word, this word that we now use, shaman, is borrowed from a particular

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culture and that's the Tungus Mongol. When ethnographers first started to travel amongst

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them, they noticed that they had ritual functionaries who went into trance states and communicated

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with what they construed to be spirits and came back with healing remedies for members

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of their tribes. And as Western ethnographers continued to travel around the world, they

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found that very, very many cultures around the world, particularly tribal and hunter-gatherer

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cultures had similar ritual functionaries. So that Tungus Mongol word, shaman, meaning

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one who knows, was transposed to these other cultures. Of course, they called their shamans

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by different names, but what they were doing was exactly the same thing. Now, Weston Labarre

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put his finger on the issue with the Tungus Mongol shamans and how they get into altered

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states of consciousness. They eat, he said, narcotic mushrooms and in their hallucinations

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visit the world of the spirits where they get answers to questions posed to them. Actually,

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the Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, is by no means a narcotic. It's misdescribed as

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a narcotic. It's a powerful psychedelic, a hallucinogenic mushroom. And it isn't an accident

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that the fly agaric colors are the same as those of Father Christmas. Because hidden

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in the Father Christmas story is an ancient shamanistic body of experience. I have to

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say something a little bit disgusting here, but the Amanita muscaria mushroom as a changer

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of consciousness is not efficient when consumed directly. What they noticed in Siberia was

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reindeer eating these mushrooms. And I don't know how they worked it out, but if they

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collected the urine of the reindeer and then drank the urine after they had eaten the

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mushroom, then they would immediately enter a deep trance-like state. And actually the

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chemistry of this is that passing through the filter of a body, the impurities are

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removed from the mushroom and its pure psychedelic elements remain. And indeed the shamans themselves,

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sorry about this, urinate into bowls which members of the tribe then drink. And in fact

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it's been demonstrated that the potency remains strong, passed through seven human bodies.

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Now, back to those reindeer and the reindeer consuming the mushrooms and the shamans drinking

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their urine. Very frequently when the shamans leave their bodies, they experience themselves

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flying through the sky on supernatural reindeer. And they then, when they return to their

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hut, they return through the smoke hole, the chimney hole in the chimney and come back

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to a normal state of consciousness. I think it's obvious that we're dealing with the

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same iconography with the Father Christmas story here. And the use of Amanita muscaria

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is quite widespread. It's found also in North America. And again, these colors keep cropping

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up again and again. Peyote is another important visionary plant used by the shamans of the

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huichol and other Native American groups. And datura, used by the Zuni for vision quests,

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a powerful and sometimes extremely dangerous hallucinogen. It's not only visionary plants.

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Various physical techniques will induce the necessary altered state of consciousness.

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In the case of the Native American Sundance, it's pain, it's austerity, which affects

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the necessary changes in the brain. And amongst the Kalahari Bushmen, who also do not use

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drugs, it is a dance, the trance dance, which I'm sure many in this room are familiar with,

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where the shamans of the Kalahari Bushmen will dance for hours, 12, 24 hours, around

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a fire, becoming intensely dehydrated until at a certain point they sense their spirits

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leaving their body and rising up into the heavens where they communicate with the spirits

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and come back with information that is valuable to their tribe. Well, we all know about magic

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mushrooms, which have been popular amongst youth in the West for quite a while, but not

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for that long. Although magic mushrooms have always existed in Europe, their use was forgotten

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until 1957, when this man, Gordon Wasson, a mycologist, heard of a mushroom cult in

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Mexico. And he went down to Mexico and he met Maria Sabina, a shaman who used psilocybin

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mushrooms to enter a deep trance state and do her work in the realm of the spirits.

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And so she gave the mushrooms to Gordon Wasson and he had a series of extraordinary and

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life-changing experiences, which he came back and reported in Life Magazine on May 13,

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1957, the discovery of mushrooms that cause strange visions. It's due to that magazine

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article that the explosion of interest in magic mushrooms in the West occurred. In Africa,

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it's iboga in Central Africa, iboga, the plant that enables men to see the dead. I need to

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add here, I've always felt as a researcher that it's pointless for me to write about

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something if I don't experience it myself. I can't sit in an armchair. That's why Santha

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and I did nearly seven years of scuba diving looking for underwater ruins. I can't just

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talk about these things without experiencing them. So I have naturally worked with virtually

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all of these visionary plants. But one of them that I definitely won't be working with

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again is iboga, which made me so ill for 48 hours that I literally couldn't move. I had

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to be lifted and carried wherever, wherever I had to go. I was in a great deal of pain.

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I felt that my body had been literally torn apart and slowly, gradually as the effect

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wore off, began to be reassembled. But I did have one powerful visionary encounter during

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that experience, and that was with the spirit of my recently deceased father. It was a

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tantalizing encounter, but it was incredibly important to me. It helped me to get closure.

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I had not been with my father at the moment that he died. And I beat myself up for a long

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time after that. But this encounter with my dad under the influence of iboga was enormously

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healing for me. And it's used for that purpose in Central Africa too, because often when

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we lose a relative, we do not have closure with them. There are issues that remain to

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be discussed, and that's why they call it the plant that enables men to see the dead.

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It's part of a widespread religion in Central Africa now in Gabon and Cameroon. As a matter

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of fact, the president of Gabon is a member of the Buiti who use iboga. In the Amazon,

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it's ayahuasca, which means the vine of souls or the vine of the dead, a rather similar

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idea to iboga. It's extremely ancient use in South America throughout the Amazon Basin.

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It's used by more than 70 different indigenous cultures, and we have archaeological evidence

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of its use going back more than 4,000 years in the Amazon. And although ayahuasca contains

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the Schedule I drug dimethyltryptamine, an extremely potent hallucinogen which is highly

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illegal in all Western countries and virtually everywhere else in the world, throughout South

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America the use of ayahuasca is totally legal, and not only legal, but protected as a cultural

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treasure by all governments in that region. They hold the view that this is an ancient

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ceremonial right of human beings, that it is a fundamental right of human beings to

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drink and work with ayahuasca, so they've resisted pressure from the United States

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government to make ayahuasca illegal, and they protect its use as a national treasure.

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It's come out of the jungles, it's found its way into the cities where it has taken

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form of churches. Here we have the Santo Demy Church here of Brazil, which mingles shamanism

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with Christianity, and they use ayahuasca as their sacrament. And here the Unia de

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Vegetal, another of these syncretic churches, which again they use ayahuasca as their sacrament.

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And more and more Westerners are traveling to Peru, to Brazil, to drink ayahuasca with

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the shamans there, in an environment that is free of fear of legal persecution, and

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where they are in the good hands of people who are enormously experienced with these

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mysterious plants. And I want to emphasize at this point I am not here to advocate drugs,

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that is not my purpose. Actually I'm here to advocate adult responsibility. And one

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of the things that I object to about Western governments is that they are more and more

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stepping into the role of the responsible adult, and telling us what to think and do.

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We need to take responsibility for our own lives, and that includes, thank you, thank

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you, includes responsibility for what we put into our bodies. And it's important to understand

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that these visionary plants, these hallucinogens, are extremely serious business. They have

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no business being used for recreation. If they are used for recreation, the consequences

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can be disastrous. These plants have to be treated with respect, deep respect. They

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are part of an ancient sacred ceremony throughout the history of the human race. And it's important

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to have the guidance of somebody who knows what they're doing, and that is what the

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shaman is. He's a person who is deeply versed in altered states of consciousness. If we're

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going to work with these plants successfully in the West, we need to create a Western form

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of shamanism. And I hope that that's something we will see in due course. In fact, it's

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already emerging. So here I am in the Amazon with Francisco Monteschuna, a shaman, and

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he's having me pick leaves from this bush. And this bush is called chacruna in the Amazon,

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and it's known as Cicotria viridis. That's its botanical name. And its leaves contain

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pharmacologically pure form of DMT, dimethyltryptamine, that very powerful hallucinogen, which is

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going to be brewed into a tea and drunk. However, if you were to brew the leaves on their own

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into a tea, you could drink 100 gallons of it, and it would have no effect on you whatsoever.

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The reason for that is that there's an enzyme in our stomachs called monoamine oxidase,

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which switches off DMT on contact. But in the Amazon, they found a way to make it work

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in a beverage. And the way is this. It involves this other plant, and this is the ayahuasca

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vine, behind which the shamans of the Amazon believe lies an intelligent spirit, an entity

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who loves and cares for the human race. And they say that she has chosen to work with

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the leaf from the other plant in order to reach us. This vine contains a monoamine

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oxidase inhibitor, which allows the DMT in the leaves to be absorbed orally, producing

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a four-hour journey. So it's a mixture of the leaves of Cicotria viridis and the vine

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Banisteriopsis carpi that goes into the ayahuasca brew. Lengths of the vine are broken up by

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the shaman placed into an iron pot. Three hundred leaves of Cicotria viridis are placed

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on top. More lengths of the vine on top of that. Boil it down for hours and hours. Pour

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off the residue, usually into plastic bottles these days. And finally, you're left with

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about a liter of this dark and sinister-looking brew. This is the ayahuasca brew. I'm sure

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some in this room have drunk ayahuasca. They'll probably agree with me that it is amongst

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the worst tastes on the planet. If you envisage a pile of old socks, some sulfur, some raw

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sewage, a little battery acid, and just a hint of chocolate, that would about sum up

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the taste of ayahuasca. Let's not pretend that anybody's going to do this for fun. This

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is not recreation. It is a shudderingly awful taste. You have to brace yourself to swallow

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it. And then you have to accept the next thing. It's not called the purge in the Amazon

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without good reason. It is a powerful purgative. You will have diarrhea. You will have vomiting.

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And all of this will unfold in a fairly public setting, sitting in a circle in the jungle,

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for example. First time I had to go jump behind a tree, I was very embarrassed, you know.

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I mean, we're very inhibited in Britain. But that was the first lesson that the ayahuasca

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vine taught me, is that our bodies are actually the least important part of ourselves, and

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what is the most important part of ourselves is our consciousness. And what is happening

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at the level of consciousness with ayahuasca is truly extraordinary. It's truly extraordinary.

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Martina Hoffman is an American artist living in Boulder, Colorado, who works a lot with

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ayahuasca, and she's depicting here an experience with the ayahuasca vine. The ayahuasca vine

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is, as I mentioned, is an entity, an intelligence, a spirit, who sometimes appears as a human

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woman, sometimes as a jaguar, very often as a serpent. And Martina is depicting the only

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possible attitude that one may take towards mother ayahuasca, which is an attitude of

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complete surrender, and let her work with you, which is what she does. And very often

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she will cause you, I speak of her as a she, because mother ayahuasca is a female entity.

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She will work with you, she will show you episodes from your life where you've been

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hurtful or damaging to other people. She will give you the opportunity to fix that behavior.

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I found myself again and again in floods of tears during ayahuasca sessions, as I've

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seen the pain that I've caused to others, sometimes inadvertently or thoughtlessly.

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And it takes years to overcome a lifetime of bad habits, but I am working on overcoming

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my many, many bad habits. I haven't yet got nearly there, but I feel that it's an important

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part of my life's work, is to make myself into a better human being, and ayahuasca has

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taught me that. The other thing that happens with ayahuasca is these encounters with non-physical

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intelligences, and the sense of entering into an enchanted realm. And here is the

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work of Pablo Amaringo, a great Amazonian shaman who unfortunately passed away last

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year. And for those who have not drunk ayahuasca, his artwork really sums up beautifully the

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ayahuasca experience, this sense of a vibrant, sentient, organic jungle realm will be experienced

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by drinkers of ayahuasca, whether they're in the middle of New York City or the middle

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of the Amazon itself, and with the animals gazing at one with this fixed, burning, intelligent

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gaze. Sometimes you might experience yourself lifted up into the sky and carried off into

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that enchanted realm. You may be provided with a vehicle here, birds, in this painting

395
00:44:33,460 --> 00:44:40,260
of Pablo Amaringo's. Sometimes you may be carried below the ground into an underworld

396
00:44:40,260 --> 00:44:46,860
of spirits. Sometimes there's a sense of going underwater. We here see the shaman being drawn

397
00:44:46,860 --> 00:44:52,140
beneath the rivers of the Amazon by two mermaids, of course they're therianthropes, and carried

398
00:44:52,140 --> 00:44:58,060
down to Encante, the enchanted city that everyone in the Amazon knows lies beneath the waters

399
00:44:58,060 --> 00:45:02,660
of that great river. You'll never find Encante by scuba diving, you're only going to find

400
00:45:02,660 --> 00:45:09,660
it by drinking ayahuasca. And there are astonishing universals in the experiences of people all

401
00:45:09,820 --> 00:45:14,540
around the world who've drunk ayahuasca, and the most universal of all is that everyone

402
00:45:14,540 --> 00:45:21,540
sees serpents during ayahuasca visions. And these serpents may be very small or very large,

403
00:45:22,580 --> 00:45:28,340
sometimes they loom in front of you with their jaws open. What the shaman says, do not fear,

404
00:45:28,340 --> 00:45:32,860
throw yourself into that open mouth, you will not die in that realm, don't hold back

405
00:45:32,860 --> 00:45:36,300
from the experience. But it's one thing to be told that, and believe me it's another

406
00:45:36,300 --> 00:45:43,300
thing to do it when you're confronted by a 300 foot long serpent. But there you go.

407
00:45:43,940 --> 00:45:49,380
Again just more of those images. And another universal is the appearance of therianthropes

408
00:45:49,380 --> 00:45:56,380
in ayahuasca. Here, feline bodies and human heads. And here again from Pablo's art, a

409
00:45:58,340 --> 00:46:05,340
crocodile headed man, a bird headed man. And from Martina Hoffman's art, this amazing

410
00:46:06,860 --> 00:46:11,780
therianthropic image came from an ayahuasca session. If you want chapter and verse on

411
00:46:11,780 --> 00:46:16,180
this, Professor Benny Shannon is the professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in

412
00:46:16,180 --> 00:46:22,660
Jerusalem. He's one of the leading world experts on ayahuasca. He's drunk ayahuasca

413
00:46:22,660 --> 00:46:29,660
more than 400 times himself, which takes some stamina, believe me. And he's interviewed

414
00:46:31,300 --> 00:46:35,500
hundreds and hundreds of drinkers of ayahuasca all around the world and he's compared and

415
00:46:35,500 --> 00:46:41,660
contrasted their experiences very, very, very usefully. And he's demonstrated astonishing

416
00:46:41,660 --> 00:46:46,140
universals that come up from people who've never compared notes. They all appear to be

417
00:46:46,180 --> 00:46:51,460
looking in to the same realms and meeting the same entities. And just on that theme

418
00:46:51,460 --> 00:46:57,820
of universals here from South Africa, an extended human figure with a great serpent wrapped

419
00:46:57,820 --> 00:47:02,980
around it. Here from one of Pablo's ayahuasca visions, a serpent wrapped around a human

420
00:47:02,980 --> 00:47:09,980
leg. Here the panel of the spotted horses from Pechmerle in France. Here a spotted

421
00:47:10,260 --> 00:47:16,180
bull, very similar kind of idea from the ayahuasca visions. That strange animal from

422
00:47:16,180 --> 00:47:23,180
Lascaux, almost identical animal was drawn in 1958 by a Jivaro shaman from eastern Ecuador

423
00:47:23,820 --> 00:47:30,820
after an ayahuasca session. I'm not saying that they were drinking ayahuasca in Lascaux

424
00:47:31,740 --> 00:47:37,320
or here in South Africa because ayahuasca is indigenous to South America and it never

425
00:47:37,520 --> 00:47:43,080
originally grew in any other part of the world. But I am suggesting that psychedelic

426
00:47:43,080 --> 00:47:50,080
mushrooms were used in Europe. I believe it was psilocybe semulanciata and psilocybe

427
00:47:50,080 --> 00:47:55,800
hispanica which were the main instruments of our Stone Age ancestors. And indeed New

428
00:47:55,800 --> 00:48:00,640
Scientist magazine has just announced on the 6th of March 2011 the earliest evidence for

429
00:48:01,040 --> 00:48:08,040
mushroom use in Europe where we see psilocybe hispanica on the walls of this painted cave.

430
00:48:10,600 --> 00:48:17,600
Whether it's psilocybes or ayahuasca or DMT in pure form, the experience is one of boundaries

431
00:48:17,800 --> 00:48:24,440
breaking down, of a connection to a wider universe, to a wider realm. And that's why

432
00:48:24,440 --> 00:48:29,480
I want to just show you the context now of this therianthrope up here in Pablo Amaringo's

433
00:48:29,480 --> 00:48:36,480
painting What Do We See? A Flying Saucer. What's that doing there in an Amazonian shaman's

434
00:48:36,840 --> 00:48:43,840
painting from 1986? I asked Pablo about his flying saucers and I said what's all this

435
00:48:46,140 --> 00:48:52,580
about Pablo? Why are you painting flying saucers? Have you been watching the X-Files? And he

436
00:48:53,300 --> 00:48:59,620
said no, no, these are not about what you call extraterrestrials. He said these are

437
00:48:59,620 --> 00:49:06,620
vehicles for entering and leaving the spirit world. That's what flying saucers are. And

438
00:49:07,060 --> 00:49:12,380
when a shaman talks about the spirit world, I feel he's not very far away from quantum

439
00:49:12,380 --> 00:49:19,380
physicists when they talk about parallel universes and parallel worlds. So I'm going to just

440
00:49:19,380 --> 00:49:26,380
briefly go through what are these things that we call aliens and UFOs and ET abductions.

441
00:49:27,420 --> 00:49:32,260
Because many of the experiences that shamans report with spirits are just the same. I'll

442
00:49:32,260 --> 00:49:38,420
leave that slide at the moment because I have to rush on. We know a lot about the alien

443
00:49:38,420 --> 00:49:43,300
abduction phenomenon from the work of a number of serious researchers in the West, notably

444
00:49:43,300 --> 00:49:48,300
the late Professor John Mack, who was Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University. Harvard

445
00:49:48,300 --> 00:49:52,100
tried to sack him when he started to work with people who believed they'd been abducted

446
00:49:52,100 --> 00:49:57,420
by UFOs, but he managed to hold on to his job thanks to a very good lawyer called Danny

447
00:49:57,420 --> 00:50:03,700
Sheehan. John was actually persecuted for taking seriously UFO abduction reports. He

448
00:50:03,700 --> 00:50:08,860
was cast out into the academic wilderness, but he continued to do the work. And as a

449
00:50:08,860 --> 00:50:13,140
result, we have thousands of hours of recordings of John's interviews with people who believed

450
00:50:13,140 --> 00:50:18,160
they'd been abducted by UFOs. That's a body of data that we can use for cross-cultural

451
00:50:18,160 --> 00:50:24,040
comparisons. And here's the first comparison. Of course, the familiar image of the gray

452
00:50:24,040 --> 00:50:29,440
dominates our ideas of alien abductions today. But actually, many UFO abductees report that

453
00:50:29,440 --> 00:50:35,640
they first encounter the alien in the form of an animal or in the form of a therianthrope.

454
00:50:35,640 --> 00:50:40,480
And you can read this for yourselves. An intelligent gray deer, a deer, a wolf. John sums it up.

455
00:50:40,480 --> 00:50:44,960
The aliens appear to be consummate shape-shifters, often appearing initially to the abductees

456
00:50:44,960 --> 00:50:49,760
as animals. Owls, eagles, raccoons, and deer are among the creatures the abductees have

457
00:50:49,760 --> 00:50:56,760
seen initially. The sense of being taken up into the sky. Here's some sand rock art.

458
00:50:57,320 --> 00:51:00,920
Sometimes it's a matter of floating up into the sky. Often it's a matter of climbing

459
00:51:00,920 --> 00:51:07,920
up a thread or a rope of light. This experience is reported again and again by shamans and

460
00:51:07,920 --> 00:51:14,600
again and again by UFO abductees. The sense of being carried down into a cave or into

461
00:51:14,600 --> 00:51:20,880
an underworld. Very common experience amongst shamans and very common experience amongst

462
00:51:20,880 --> 00:51:27,720
UFO abductees. Betty Aho, a UFO, took her into huge crystalline caverns. Carlos Dios

463
00:51:27,720 --> 00:51:34,600
saw a UFO, found himself inside a cave that was lined with stalactites and stalagmites.

464
00:51:34,600 --> 00:51:38,760
And the universal experience of shamanism is known as the shamanic ordeal, where the

465
00:51:39,160 --> 00:51:45,280
experiences himself pierced, cut to pieces by the spirits and then reassembled. Very

466
00:51:45,280 --> 00:51:50,840
often the spirits will carry out bizarre surgical procedures on the body of the shaman,

467
00:51:50,840 --> 00:51:56,820
will insert objects into his skin or into his brain. And if you want chapter and verse

468
00:51:56,820 --> 00:52:03,820
on this, read Mercy Eliade's majestic work, Shamanism, which records hundreds of examples

469
00:52:03,940 --> 00:52:10,240
of these experiences from all around the world amongst shamans. And of course the experience

470
00:52:10,240 --> 00:52:17,240
of surgery and painful piercings and implants being put into the body is very, very common

471
00:52:19,660 --> 00:52:26,660
amongst UFO abductees as well. Exactly the same thing that shamans are reporting. Shamans

472
00:52:27,000 --> 00:52:33,020
very frequently report having sex with spirits. I do know a shaman in the Amazon whose wife

473
00:52:33,020 --> 00:52:37,980
has left him because of his activities with spirits in the spirit world. He's actually

474
00:52:37,980 --> 00:52:44,620
got kids over there who he repeatedly visits. And again, this is another feature of the

475
00:52:44,620 --> 00:52:50,360
UFO abduction experience, that UFO abductees do report sex with the beings that they construe

476
00:52:50,360 --> 00:52:56,820
as aliens, do report hybrid children, do report being re-abducted again and again and again

477
00:52:56,900 --> 00:53:03,900
to nurture those children. What about books? Maria Sabina was given a book by a spirit

478
00:53:05,300 --> 00:53:10,160
and she learned many things from it. It helped her to help people who need help and know

479
00:53:10,160 --> 00:53:14,020
the secrets of the world where everything is known. But she wasn't allowed to bring

480
00:53:14,020 --> 00:53:20,700
the book back. It remains in the sky. Same for Betty Hill, abducted in 1961. The leader

481
00:53:20,700 --> 00:53:25,220
of the aliens gave her a book but wouldn't let her bring it back to earth. Betty Andreessen

482
00:53:25,380 --> 00:53:31,700
was given a small blue book with 40 luminous pages but soon afterwards it disappeared.

483
00:53:31,700 --> 00:53:38,700
What are these things? Fairies and elves which began to become ridiculous and to disappear

484
00:53:39,660 --> 00:53:45,500
from western culture just at the time that UFO sightings really began. In the 1940s

485
00:53:45,500 --> 00:53:49,480
and 50s that was about the last time you could be taken seriously talking about being abducted

486
00:53:49,480 --> 00:53:55,140
by a fairy and that was just about the beginning of reported encounters with UFOs and aliens.

487
00:53:55,620 --> 00:53:59,420
Once again these entities called fairies and elves have an astonishing amount in common

488
00:53:59,420 --> 00:54:05,580
with aliens and spirits. I want to pay tribute to the work of Jacques Vallee and his extraordinary

489
00:54:05,580 --> 00:54:11,600
book Passport to Magonia published in 1969 which was the first book to document the

490
00:54:11,600 --> 00:54:16,300
amazing similarities between the entities that we used to call fairies and the entities

491
00:54:16,300 --> 00:54:22,820
that we call aliens today. What I did in Supernatural was to take that work on from 1969 and bring

492
00:54:22,820 --> 00:54:26,660
it right up to date because of course there's much more evidence on the UFO abduction side

493
00:54:26,660 --> 00:54:33,660
of things since 1969. So fairies they were in the business of abductions too just like

494
00:54:33,860 --> 00:54:38,260
aliens and you didn't want to come close to the fairy dance if you were to touch it you'd

495
00:54:38,260 --> 00:54:42,940
be drawn into it and suddenly bang you'd find yourself in another world. You might

496
00:54:42,940 --> 00:54:47,660
experience a few hours or a day and a night passing there when they brought you back to

497
00:54:47,660 --> 00:54:51,860
your homeland you might find that a hundred years had passed and that you were just a

498
00:54:51,860 --> 00:54:56,140
memory in the village that you came from. A bit like the phenomenon of missing time

499
00:54:56,140 --> 00:55:01,320
reported by many UFO abductees but it seems that they've refined the problem because

500
00:55:01,320 --> 00:55:06,480
nowadays people only lose five or six hours of time. Fairies could be cruel, they could

501
00:55:06,480 --> 00:55:11,940
hurt human beings but they could also give gifts including healing gifts. Fairies had

502
00:55:11,940 --> 00:55:17,180
the power of flight, they used aerial vehicles construed as flying castles or flying carriages

503
00:55:17,220 --> 00:55:23,500
etc. Fairy abductions frequently involved being abducted underground into caves as

504
00:55:23,500 --> 00:55:30,500
is demonstrated here and fairies also very frequently appeared in animal and therianthropic

505
00:55:30,700 --> 00:55:37,700
form. I keep this woodcut at home in England. It is from the Holland in the 15th century

506
00:55:38,700 --> 00:55:45,700
and here we see a group of fairies dancing in a ring and those fairies are clearly therianthropes

507
00:55:46,220 --> 00:55:53,220
part animal, part human in form. Melucine was a feared medieval fairy feared for abducting

508
00:55:55,660 --> 00:56:01,460
human babies and again the UFO abduction story is clear. I've just been given the

509
00:56:01,460 --> 00:56:08,460
five minute notice that's impossible I'm afraid. Maybe ten. Thank you, thank you. I

510
00:56:11,140 --> 00:56:15,060
hope you'll let me finish. I've got about ten minutes to go I'll try and rush it. We

511
00:56:15,340 --> 00:56:19,180
human beings we can't see anything without interpreting it. Interpretation is built into

512
00:56:19,180 --> 00:56:26,180
perception from the get go. What I would suggest is that what we are looking at here is the

513
00:56:26,180 --> 00:56:33,180
same phenomenon that humans have been experiencing for at least 35,000 years viewed through different

514
00:56:34,000 --> 00:56:39,800
cultural spectacles. And here are some of the common forms that aliens and spirits and

515
00:56:39,800 --> 00:56:46,800
fairies appear. Here are those images from the painted caves. Not only therianthropes

516
00:56:47,040 --> 00:56:52,200
in the painted caves we find these anthropomorphic figures. Look at these curious creatures from

517
00:56:52,200 --> 00:56:59,200
Los Casares cave in Spain or this piece from Angoulême in France or this piece from Peshmerle.

518
00:57:02,120 --> 00:57:06,280
The figure here with the high domed forehead and the narrow pointed chin the large dark

519
00:57:06,320 --> 00:57:13,320
eyes something up in the sky above that figure there 24,000 years old from Peshmerle. We've

520
00:57:13,340 --> 00:57:19,560
done a redrawing of the figure and you can see that the profile is very distinctive as

521
00:57:19,560 --> 00:57:25,060
in this piece of art from the Drakensberg again that high domed forehead narrow pointed

522
00:57:25,060 --> 00:57:32,060
chin virtually indistinguishable from the entities that we call greys today. There are also things

523
00:57:33,060 --> 00:57:37,100
that look like flying saucers on the walls of painted caves. Archaeologists don't know

524
00:57:37,100 --> 00:57:42,460
what they are but they look an awful lot like Pablo Amaringo's depictions of those spirit

525
00:57:42,460 --> 00:57:49,460
vehicles. One of these drawings was done in 1990 by one of John Max patients. The other

526
00:57:49,680 --> 00:57:54,960
two were done more than 20,000 years ago in the painted caves of southern Europe. This

527
00:57:54,960 --> 00:58:00,900
is the modern drawing. These are the ancient ones. The abductee said that every time the

528
00:58:00,980 --> 00:58:07,980
aliens came to abduct her they projected this image into her visual field. I don't take

529
00:58:08,140 --> 00:58:13,700
a totally nuts and bolts explanation of this problem. I think it's much more complicated

530
00:58:13,700 --> 00:58:20,220
than physical aliens coming here across interstellar space in high tech vehicles. I think it's

531
00:58:20,220 --> 00:58:24,820
much more mysterious than that. Of course the universe is full of life but the universe

532
00:58:24,820 --> 00:58:30,140
also consists of multiple dimensions and I think it's more likely that we're dealing

533
00:58:30,340 --> 00:58:36,380
with an interdimensional than with an intergalactic phenomenon here. There's good evidence that

534
00:58:36,380 --> 00:58:41,340
such experiences do become accessible as much through alterations of our state of consciousness

535
00:58:41,340 --> 00:58:46,180
as through any physical contacts in the material realm. Very important work. I don't have

536
00:58:46,180 --> 00:58:51,580
time to go into detail by Rick Strassman, professor of psychiatry at the University

537
00:58:51,580 --> 00:58:58,580
of New Mexico, worked with DMT and human volunteers during the 1990s. DMT is widely found in nature

538
00:59:01,140 --> 00:59:05,380
Everyone in this room has DMT in your bodies. I'm sorry to tell you you're all illegal.

539
00:59:05,380 --> 00:59:10,700
Go to jail now. We all have it in blood, in urine, in cerebrospinal fluid. You can assay

540
00:59:10,700 --> 00:59:16,900
it in sub psychedelic quantities. We don't know why it's there but we do know where it's

541
00:59:16,900 --> 00:59:23,900
produced. It's produced in the pineal gland which is rightly regarded as the third eye.

542
00:59:24,900 --> 00:59:30,460
In evolutionary older animals the pineal gland actually still possesses a lens, a cornea and

543
00:59:30,460 --> 00:59:35,540
a retina. In human beings it does not. It's sunk deeper into the brain but my suggestion

544
00:59:35,540 --> 00:59:42,540
is it is still a sense organ and it is producing DMT to allow us to see a wider and expanded

545
00:59:43,060 --> 00:59:48,420
reality that is not normally accessible to our senses. A sixth sense if you like. I'm

546
00:59:48,420 --> 00:59:53,660
sorry I don't have time to really do this but the experiences of Rick Strassman's volunteers

547
00:59:53,660 --> 01:00:00:00,660
were astonishingly similar to the experiences of UFO abductees. They reported piercings,

548
01:00:00,660 --> 01:00:06,820
surgery, space stations. Just please take my word for it that Rick Strassman's one

549
01:00:06,820 --> 01:00:10,320
of the things that caused Rick Strassman to give up his work actually. He knew these

550
01:00:10,320 --> 01:00:15,500
guys weren't being abducted but they were having experiences exactly like UFO abductions

551
01:00:15,500 --> 01:00:21,300
as though their consciousness was being abducted and he was baffled and nonplussed by this.

552
01:00:21,300 --> 01:00:25,700
When he looks at his bedside notes he finds that at least half his volunteers are having

553
01:00:25,700 --> 01:00:31,340
experiences exactly like UFO abduction experiences. The question is were they getting this from

554
01:00:31,340 --> 01:00:36,660
the wider culture? They'd heard of UFO abductions, their brains on drugs, invented that or is

555
01:00:36,660 --> 01:00:41,780
something else going on? This work in the 1950s before a single UFO abduction had been

556
01:00:41,780 --> 01:00:47,700
reported proves that something else has been going on because these researchers found that

557
01:00:47,900 --> 01:00:54,580
their volunteers on DMT were also giving reports exactly like UFO abduction experiences today.

558
01:00:54,580 --> 01:00:59,100
So it looks more like the culture is getting it from the visionary realm rather than the

559
01:00:59,100 --> 01:01:06,100
other way round. This really leads us to ask what exactly is going on here. By the way

560
01:01:10,620 --> 01:01:17,620
I need to emphasize that Rick Strassman does not believe that these reports are being

561
01:01:17,700 --> 01:01:24,700
abducted. These experiences are nonreal. He believes that these experiences are real

562
01:01:24,700 --> 01:01:29,500
and that what is happening with UFO abductees is that they are people who overproduced

563
01:01:29,500 --> 01:01:35,540
DMT in the pineal gland, enter a trance state, have these experiences and then come back

564
01:01:35,540 --> 01:01:42,540
and report them. This leads us to ask what reality is. I'm going to have to just dash

565
01:01:42,820 --> 01:01:47,100
through this. William Blake, if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would

566
01:01:47,100 --> 01:01:53,500
appear as it is, infinite. Aldous Huxley saw the brain as a reducing valve, largely

567
01:01:53,500 --> 01:02:00,020
designed to cut out most of reality so that we would be able to function in the physical

568
01:02:00,020 --> 01:02:07,020
world. Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, came up with a very useful notion that the

569
01:02:07,180 --> 01:02:12,300
brain may not be a generator of consciousness. It may be a receiver of consciousness. In

570
01:02:12,300 --> 01:02:19,300
that case the altering the receiver wavelength of the brain would allow us to see more than

571
01:02:20,100 --> 01:02:24,500
we normally do. Rick Strassman uses the same analogy. He says that in everyday life we

572
01:02:24,500 --> 01:02:28,980
are tuned into channel normal, the physical world, but that there are all sorts of other

573
01:02:28,980 --> 01:02:33,580
channels broadcasting at us all the time and if we alter the receiver wavelength of the

574
01:02:33,580 --> 01:02:39,220
brain, which is what he believes DMT does, then we can see into those other realities.

575
01:02:39,220 --> 01:02:43,580
He says that these words are usually invisible to us in our instruments, not accessible using

576
01:02:43,580 --> 01:02:47,740
our normal state of consciousness. However, just as likely as the theory that these words

577
01:02:47,740 --> 01:02:53,300
exist only in our minds is that they are in reality outside us and free standing. If

578
01:02:53,300 --> 01:02:59,160
we simply change our brains receiving abilities we can comprehend and interact with them.

579
01:02:59,160 --> 01:03:04,940
Quite often hallucinating subjects are wired up to MRI scanners. Certain areas of the brain

580
01:03:05,180 --> 01:03:10,900
light up. Mainstream scientists then say, oh, the experiences he's having, those are

581
01:03:10,900 --> 01:03:15,940
just a result of his brain activity. We can reduce the experience to the changed brain

582
01:03:15,940 --> 01:03:20,660
chemistry. There's nothing more to it than that. It's a ridiculous idea. If you want

583
01:03:20,660 --> 01:03:25,140
to look at it, here's an analogy. If you want to look at a very distant star, point your

584
01:03:25,140 --> 01:03:29,400
little home telescope at the sky. First of all you're going to have to focus the telescope.

585
01:03:29,400 --> 01:03:34,340
When you focus it, physical changes will take place inside the barrel of the telescope in

586
01:03:34,340 --> 01:03:40,100
the relationship between the lenses. Eventually the star will come into view. You'd be completely

587
01:03:40,100 --> 01:03:45,500
wrong to say that the star is the physical changes inside the barrel of the telescope.

588
01:03:45,500 --> 01:03:50,260
They have simply allowed you to see the star, which is real. And that's the suggestion

589
01:03:50,260 --> 01:03:54,440
of what is going on with altered states of consciousness. So maybe we don't need the

590
01:03:54,440 --> 01:04:00,580
large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland to break open parallel universes. Maybe we've

591
01:04:00,580 --> 01:04:06,180
got the instrument inside our skulls. It's called our brains. Here's what I call six

592
01:04:06,180 --> 01:04:10,180
million years of boredom. I promise you we're getting very near the end now. The human

593
01:04:10,180 --> 01:04:14,980
family tree from the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee. If we have been in contact

594
01:04:14,980 --> 01:04:19,620
with higher realms, we should find some traces of it in the human story. And believe me,

595
01:04:19,620 --> 01:04:25,300
a lot of this story of our ancestors is incredibly boring. They don't invent stone tools until

596
01:04:25,300 --> 01:04:29,260
two and a half million years ago. That's what they come up with, the Aldowan stone

597
01:04:29,500 --> 01:04:32,940
tradition. Once they've invented them, they stick with them without any change for the

598
01:04:32,940 --> 01:04:37,380
next million years. They're incredibly rigid and dull and boring. When they do make a

599
01:04:37,380 --> 01:04:43,180
change, they stick with that for another million years. And then suddenly, round about 35,000

600
01:04:43,180 --> 01:04:47,020
years ago, it's as though a light is switched on in the human brain all around the world.

601
01:04:47,020 --> 01:04:54,020
And we start producing this amazing, amazing art. And overlooking all of this art are these

602
01:04:54,900 --> 01:05:00,820
entities, these therianthropic entities. So it may be that the deliberate purposeful

603
01:05:00,820 --> 01:05:05,620
induction of altered states of consciousness by prehistoric shamans was what gave us this

604
01:05:05,620 --> 01:05:11,260
great leap forward in the development of the human species, not the alert, problem-solving

605
01:05:11,260 --> 01:05:15,220
state of consciousness. There's even evidence to suggest that it was experiences in altered

606
01:05:15,220 --> 01:05:22,220
states of consciousness that gave us language. In the modern era, Francis Crick, the discoverer

607
01:05:22,460 --> 01:05:29,460
of the double helix, admitted privately before he died that he had been under the influence

608
01:05:29,460 --> 01:05:36,100
of LSD when he first saw the double helix shape. That his inspiration came not from

609
01:05:36,100 --> 01:05:40,840
the rational, alert, problem-solving state of consciousness, but from a deeply altered

610
01:05:40,840 --> 01:05:46,380
state of consciousness. Likewise, these guys have gone on the record to say that they

611
01:05:46,380 --> 01:05:51,580
would never have invented the Apple computer if it hadn't been for LSD. So I think there's

612
01:05:51,580 --> 01:05:58,020
a lot of evidence to suggest that these experiences are not brain candy, that they are indeed

613
01:05:58,020 --> 01:06:03,980
utterly transformative if they're done right. And what's at stake in this is not a small

614
01:06:03,980 --> 01:06:08,980
thing because I believe a struggle is underway right now for the future direction of human

615
01:06:08,980 --> 01:06:15,980
consciousness. And it's a struggle on which everything hinges. Our society particularly

616
01:06:16,100 --> 01:06:21,300
values the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness that's useful for activities

617
01:06:21,300 --> 01:06:27,880
like this, science and war and Wall Street. And our society will allow us little holidays

618
01:06:27,880 --> 01:06:34,880
from that by allowing us to get blind drunk on alcohol and of course romanticizing alcohol,

619
01:06:35,340 --> 01:06:40,460
one of the most boring drugs on the surface of the planet, and bombarding us with...

620
01:06:41,100 --> 01:06:48,100
Thank you. And bombarding us with the nightmare experience of reality TV, turning the brains

621
01:06:48,140 --> 01:06:55,140
of our children to mush 24 hours a day. You know all these drugs are illegal, but this

622
01:06:55,140 --> 01:07:00,180
stuff is legal. Can you believe it? If anything's going to be made illegal, I believe it should

623
01:07:00,180 --> 01:07:07,180
be what television is doing to human intelligence today. So it may be that the hubbub of our

624
01:07:07,700 --> 01:07:13,700
daily life is cutting us off from higher realms, or as the shamans in the Amazon told

625
01:07:13,700 --> 01:07:18,220
me when I asked them about the sickness of Western culture, I said, tell me what is it?

626
01:07:18,220 --> 01:07:23,220
What has gone wrong? They said it's very simple. You've severed your connection with spirit.

627
01:07:23,220 --> 01:07:27,660
If you don't reconnect with spirit, you're lost and you're going to bring us all down

628
01:07:27,660 --> 01:07:34,660
with you. It's urgent and desperate that you reconnect with spirit. I also believe, this

629
01:07:35,660 --> 01:07:39,700
is a deep political issue, I don't want to go into it at length, but I believe fundamentally

630
01:07:39,700 --> 01:07:46,060
that if I am not sovereign over my own consciousness, then I'm not sovereign over anything. It's

631
01:07:46,060 --> 01:07:52,380
pointless to talk about freedom, to go around the world imposing democracy on other cultures

632
01:07:52,380 --> 01:07:59,380
when we do not allow adults in our own society to make adult decisions about their own consciousness.

633
01:07:59,380 --> 01:08:06,380
Our consciousness, thank you, our consciousness is the most precious, the most sapient, the

634
01:08:07,860 --> 01:08:13,380
most intimate, the most sacred part of ourselves. The government has no right to hold the keys

635
01:08:13,380 --> 01:08:17,720
to our consciousness. We as adults are the only ones who have that right. If we get

636
01:08:17,720 --> 01:08:22,500
in the face of others, cause trouble to them, the state has a role to play. But what I

637
01:08:22,500 --> 01:08:27,380
experience inside my own brain in the privacy of my own home or in a shamanic circle is

638
01:08:27,380 --> 01:08:33,420
nobody's business but mine.

639
01:08:33,420 --> 01:08:40,100
Ayahuasca has a very insistent message. It's one of those universals and it's experienced

640
01:08:40,100 --> 01:08:45,420
by almost everyone who drinks ayahuasca. It's about the sacred, magical, enchanted nature

641
01:08:45,420 --> 01:08:52,420
of all creation. Our planet is a sacred realm. The Amazon is perhaps the largest sacred

642
01:08:53,420 --> 01:08:59,420
realm on the planet and many report visions of the Amazon who work with ayahuasca. Look

643
01:08:59,420 --> 01:09:05,420
what's happening in the Amazon today. Look what we're doing to the lungs of our planet.

644
01:09:05,420 --> 01:09:11,420
Look what we're doing to this resource of 155,000 different species of plants and trees.

645
01:09:11,420 --> 01:09:16,420
Look what we're doing to it. Every one of those is a fire burning to clear down the

646
01:09:16,420 --> 01:09:21,420
Amazon as the road systems move through it. That incredible gift to us from the universe

647
01:09:22,220 --> 01:09:29,220
is being steadily, steadily destroyed. Burnt down. Why? To plant soya beans, to feed cattle,

648
01:09:29,500 --> 01:09:35,820
so that we can eat hamburgers. What an insane idea. Our society has truly lost contact with

649
01:09:35,820 --> 01:09:41,140
reality when we allow such things to continue. It should not happen. It need not happen.

650
01:09:41,140 --> 01:09:45,940
I did a back of an envelope calculation during the Iraq war. Six months expenditure on that

651
01:09:45,940 --> 01:09:50,620
bloody war would have solved the problem of the Amazon forever. Why are we prepared to

652
01:09:50,620 --> 01:09:57,620
spend money on destruction and not on preservation? It's insane. This is what happened in the

653
01:09:57,620 --> 01:10:04,180
Amazon in 2005. It actually ran dry. Look at that. My goodness, there has never been

654
01:10:04,180 --> 01:10:09,740
a time when we more desperately need to return to enchantment. We more desperately need to

655
01:10:09,740 --> 01:10:16,180
return to the magical universe, to the sense of the sacred gift of life, to break down

656
01:10:16,220 --> 01:10:21,540
the boundaries and to become one again with the universe that made us. Thank you, ladies

657
01:10:21,540 --> 01:10:22,060
and gentlemen.