Graham Hancock

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Graham Hancock's teachings seem to center around two broad topics: exploration of consciousness and the interpretation of spiritual wisdoms left behind by ancient cultures. The two areas overlap in Graham's books, lectures and films in which he presents his entertaining and well-reasoned case that early civilizations in Egypt, South America and other areas routinely used psychotropic plants to explore consciousness and these practices played a significant role in the development of their arts, culture and sciences.

"Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs (Bolivia), emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight-- and with no apparent antecedents whatever." --Graham Hancock, 'Fingerprint of the Gods'

What's been helpful: The first video from Graham I encountered was The War on Consciousness BANNED TED TALK ... You can see why it caught my attention. What hooked me in his presentation was learning that the use of psychotropic plants to explore the nature of consciousness has a long and rich history. I was immediately intrigued and ended up side-tracking into the wisdoms of ancient Egypt at his behest, largely because I thought I might have to go back that far to get clear of the influences organized religion has had on current spiritual teachings.

In the last several years, Graham's included in his lectures theories about a meteor strike that ended the last ice age and generated the massive floods spoken of in many spiritual texts, including the Bible. For several years, Graham's been working with geologists, archeologists and others to coalesce the physical evidence behind this theory, which he writes about it in this post: Why Science Should Cherish Its Rebels. That I've driven many times through the eastern Washington scab lands that bear some of the scars of this massive flood brought the discussion interestingly close to home.

This summer, Graham suffered a severe acute illness but has fortunately bounced back and is writing a new book. From his 8/22/17 blog post, it sounds like he's ready to dive back into the fray: ..."My journey to the gates of death in the past week appears, however, to have cleared the energetic miasma by which I was briefly entrapped and has renewed my strength for the struggle ahead. We have been grievously misled about our past as a species and plunged into a state of sleepy amnesia. It is desperately important that we awaken if the human family is to survive on this beautiful garden of a planet, and if we are to honour as we should the gifts of life, consciousness, joy and the opportunity to learn and to love, to grow and to develop, that the universe so generously and unhesitatingly bestows upon us."