Graham Hancock

There are some tribes in the Amazon who interpret the spirit of Ayahuasca as male, but in all cases, that spirit is seen as a teacher. fundamentally what ayahuasca is. It's a teacher and it teaches moral lessons.

And that's fascinating that a mixture of two plants should cause us to reflect on our own behavior and how it may have hurt and damaged and affected others and fill us with a powerful wish not to repeat that negative behavior again in the future. The more baggage you carry in your life, the more

of the beating that ayahuasca is going to give you until it forces you to confront and take responsibility for your own behavior. And that is an extraordinary thing to come from a plant brew in that way. And I think in, yes, I think ayahuasca is the most powerful of all the plant medicines for accessing these mysterious realms, but there's no doubt you can access them. They're all tryptamines.

They're all related to one another in one way, You can access them through LSD, and you certainly can access them through psilocybe mushrooms as well in large enough dose.

It is. And the curious thing is that the same iconography, people paint their visions after ayahuasca sessions. People were painting in Europe in the cave of Lascaux, for example, and of course they had access to psilocybe mushrooms in prehistoric Europe. there's a remarkable commonality in the imagery that is painted.

I like to give credit where credit is due, and there are two names that need to be mentioned here. One is the late, great Terence McKenna and his book, Food of the Gods, where he proposed the idea very strongly that it was our ancestral encounters with psychedelics that made us fully human. That's what switched on the modern human mind.

And very much the same idea began to be explored a bit earlier by Professor David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. Fabulous book called The Mind in the Cave, where he is again arguing that these astonishing similarities in cave art and rock art all around the world

can only be properly explained by people in deeply altered states of consciousness attempting to remember when they return to a normal everyday state of consciousness, attempting to remember their visions and document them on permanent media like the wall of a cave. So typically you get a lot of geometric patterns, but you also got entities.

And those entities often are Therianthropes, part Therianthropes. part human in form, might have the head of a wolf and the body of a human being, might have the head of a bird and the body of a human being, and so on and so forth, and that they communicate with us in the visionary state.

Interestingly, although this sounds like woo-woo, and it is an area that most scientists would steer clear of at risk of their careers, there is very serious work now being done at Imperial College in London and at the University of California at San Diego, where volunteers are being given extended DMT.

There's a new technology, DMT-X, where the DMT is fed directly into the bloodstream by drip, and it's possible to keep the individual in the peak DMT state, which normally when you smoke or vape DMT, you're looking, if you're lucky, at 10 minutes. Or if you're unlucky, if it's a bad journey, because those 10 minutes can seem like forever.

But with DMTX, with the drip feeding of DMT into the bloodstream, these volunteers actually could be kept in the peak state for hours. And unlike LSD, where you rapidly build up tolerance, nobody ever builds up tolerance to DMT. It always hits you with the same power, even if you took it yesterday and the day before and you're taking it tomorrow as well. it's still going to have that same power.

There's no tolerance there. So that's how they can use that lack of tolerance to keep volunteers in this state. And then when they debrief those volunteers, they're also putting them in MRI scanners and looking at what's happening in the brain. But when they debrief them, they're all talking. about encounters with sentient others.

There's even a group now called sentient others where people are exchanging, volunteers are now exchanging their experiences. They didn't do, they weren't allowed to do so at the beginning of the experiment, but now that most of them have left it, they're exchanging their experiences. And it's all about encounters with sentient others who wish to teach them moral lessons. Now, to me, that's wild.

What is going on here? How do we account for this? Yeah, I get the notion of hallucinations and brightly colored visuals, but the moral lessons that come with it, those are very odd.

Yeah, and can help us to be better members of our own community. Right, with moral lessons. Yeah, more contributing members of our community, more caring, more nurturing members of our community. That's got to be good for any community. I've said this a dozen times, but I'll say it again. If I had the power to do so, I would do it.

make it a law, an absolute law, that anybody running for a powerful political position, particularly if that position is president or head of state in any kind of way, that that person has to undergo the ayahuasca ordeal first. They have to have 10 or 12 sessions of ayahuasca as a condition for applying for the job.

I suspect that most who had had those experiences wouldn't want to apply for the job anymore. They would want to live a different kind of life. And those who did want to carry on being a leader of a nation would be very different people from the people who are leading the nations of the earth into chaos and destruction today.

I have no doubt that it would be a better world. I mean, this raises an interesting point, which is the role of government in controlling our consciousness. And in my opinion, the so-called war on drugs is one of the fundamental abuses of human rights that have been undertaken in the past 60 years. It should be a Republican issue.

If I understand the Republican Party correctly, the Republican Party believes in individual freedom for adults as much as possible, and particularly the freedom to make choices over their own bodies. But In the case of even cannabis, I know that's one of the great things that's happening in America.