Graham Hancock: belief

Transcript context

…Exactly. Exactly. To realize that this is something very special. And then to use the principles there to find another form of it. So ayahuasca is the form that is made with the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of the Chacruna plant. But Yage is made from the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of another vine the ploparis caapiano, which contain not only, which is the DMT that everybody’s pretty much familiar with these days, but also 5-MeO-DMT. And the Yage experience, which I have also had, in my view is more intense and more powerful almost to the point of being overwhelming than the ayahuasca experience. But what the result of this sophisticated chemistry that we find taking place here is a brew which is hideous to drink. The taste, I find it quite repulsive. I almost retched just smelling it in the cup. But then unleashes these extraordinary experiences. And it isn’t just pretty visuals. It’s the sense of encounters with sentient others, that there are sentient beings, that somehow we are surrounded by a realm of sentience that is not normally accessible to us. And that what the ayahuasca brew and certain other psychedelics, like some psilocybin mushrooms in a high enough dose can do it as well. LSD can do it. But Ayahuasca is the master in this of lowering the veil to what appears to be a seamlessly convincing other realm, other world. And of course the hard line, rational scientists will say that’s just all fantasies of your brain. But I don’t think we fully understand, Or even close to understanding exactly what consciousness is. And I remain open to two possibilities that consciousness is generated by the brain, is made by the brain in the way that a factory makes cars. But I also am open to the possibility that the brain is a receiver of consciousness, just as a television set is the receiver of television signals. And that if that is the case, then we locked into the physical realm. We need our everyday alert, problem-solving state of consciousness, and that’s the state of consciousness that western civilization values and highly encourages. But these other states of consciousness that allow us to access alternative realities are possibly more important. It may be apocryphal, but it was reported after Francis Crick’s role- hly encourages. But these other states of consciousness that allow us to access alternative realities are possibly more important. It may be apocryphal, but it was reported after Francis Crick’s role- But it was reported after Francis Crick’s role and his Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix that he finally got it under the influence of LSD. There’s the classic example of Kary Mullis and the polymerase chain reaction. He said he got that under the influence of LSD. So the notion that the alert problem-solving state of consciousness is the only valuable state of consciousness is disproved by valuable experiences that people have had in a visionary state. But the question that remains unresolved is those entities that we encounter, and not everybody encounters them, and you’re certainly not going to encounter them on every ayahuasca trip. There are ayahuasca journeys where nothing seems to happen. I suspect something does happen, but it happens at a subconscious level. I know that shamans in the Amazon regard those trips where actually you don’t see visions as amongst the most valuable, and they say you are learning stuff that you’re not remembering, but you’re learning it anyway. These sentient others that are encountered, what are they? Are they just figments of our brain on drugs or are we actually gaining access to a parallel reality, which is inhabited by consciousness which is in a non-physical form? And I’m equally open to that idea. I think that may be what is going on here with ayahuasca. But the other thing is that there is a presence within the ayahuasca brew, and she is present both in ayahuasca and in yachay. And that’s one of the reasons why the shamans say that actually the master of the process is the ayahuasca vine, not the leaves. It’s as though the vine has harnessed the leaves to gain access to human consciousness. And there, if you have sufficient exposure to ayahuasca or yachay, you drink it enough times, I’ve had maybe 75 or 80 journeys with ayahuasca, you definitely start to feel an intelligent presence with a definite personality, which I interpret as feminine, and which most people in the West interpret it as feminine and they call her Mother Ayahuasca. 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. That’s 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 harder the beating the 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. the beating the 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 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 psilocyb mushrooms as well in large enough dose.…

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