A Few Books on Egypt

Along with the movies and videos I just posted about, a number of books on ancient Egypt have also landed on my radar, one of which I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to finish … What I wouldn’t give to have a year to just read.

Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Ancient Lost Civilization (2015)
Graham Hancock

Graham picks up the themes he introduced in Fingerprints of the Godsa lost civilization brought advanced technology to various continents after a global cataclysm destroyed their island home - and introduces all the new geological, archeological and astrological evidence that's continued to emerge over the last two decades in support of this view.
“At six thousand or more years older than the stone circles of Stonehenge, the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe, like the deeply buried megaliths of Gunung Padang, mean that the timeline of history taught in our schools and universities for the best part of the last hundred years can no longer stand. It is beginning to look as though civilization, as I argued in my controversial 1995 bestseller 'Fingerprints of the Gods', is indeed much older and much more mysterious than we thought.” --Graham Hancock, 'Magicians of the Gods'
Based on a few recent videos from Graham, it sounds like new evidence from several monolithic sites continues to surface so I'm not sure how up-to-date even this recent book might be. Regardless, I found it a good introduction to Graham's theories about the emergence of ancient cultures. An amusing note - this book, along with Graham's many YouTube lectures on this topic, also exposes the slow but inexorable acceptance by 'the establishment' of the startling ideas Hancock and others first saw rejected 20+ years ago.

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A Detour Through Ancient Egypt

Exploring An Ancient Wisdom & New Mysteries

After bookmarking the rich scientific and spiritual content I found on SAND, my search next brought me to a collection of films and books all having to do with ancient Egypt. Looking back, I’m not entirely sure how this happened; perhaps it had to do with running into Graham Hancock’s banned TED talk about exploring altered states of consciousness with psychotropic plants. Rarely does Graham discuss these topics without looping in a connection to his other passion, ancient wisdom traditions. And no wonder – as the films below show, some astonishing recent discoveries by Hancock, John Anthony West, Robert Bauval and Robert Schoch and others continue to add significant weight to their arguments that 1) the ancient Egyptian civilization began thousands of years earlier than previously thought, perhaps guided by an even older advanced civilization and 2) the Egyptian people had a far more advanced understanding of various technologies, sciences and spiritual philosophies than expected for a Bronze Age civilization, perhaps as an result of contact with this much older and more advanced civilization – or it’s survivors.

Pretty eyebrow raising stuff, eh?

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Graham Hancock

Website, Facebook, Twitter

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."

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