Graham Hancock and John Anthony West on the Origins of Civilization

ladies and gentlemen Graham Hancock and John Anthony [Applause] West thank you thank you very much so so this is going to take the form of a conversation or perhaps an argument um because John is an argumentative sort of fell uh and I guess I am too um uh but we'll we'll see how it goes now I I want to tell you about the first time that I met John Anthony West uh at that time I had begun research on my book Fingerprints of the Gods and John Anthony wst was one of the main reasons I began uh work on the possibility of a lust civilization because there is a lot of wooly nonsense talked in this area but a number of people are doing really serious work and John has been at the Leading Edge of that for decades uh I reached out to him the first time I met him was in Egypt in 1992 and at that time John was leading one of his guided tours of Egypt let me say now that if any of you and you should be are thinking about making a journey to Egypt make it with John Anthony West because it is an utter Revelation an utter Revelation this is a man who has immersed himself in the mystery of ancient Egypt for decades and and he shares that mystery and that enthusiasm and gives you insights into places that otherwise with with uh other people you would just pass by and not realize what they meant and so I I met John actually on a cruise ship on the Nile by pre-arrangement and then I joined your tour for for a day and uh it was an incredible experience it really it really was and you know to get this uh wisdom shared about Egypt and and the love and the passion for Egypt is something that nobody else can replicate so if you're going to Egypt go with John okay okay how much was that um actually supplier seats with these dildos and I don't know what the hell they're for um the but a couple of things one is I I usually start off a lectur and this was this venue here with graham lecturing and then us having a conversation was the the brainstorm of one of my friends who' been on an Egypt trip with me which is really good because otherwise you have two high-powered non-stop talkers one after the other and it gets to be exhausting everyone would be falling asleep by the time they got to me but this way now we can go back and forth and tell jokes and have fun and stuff like that and I just want to say that with Egypt the difference between Egypt and so many of the places that Graham was just talking about is that it's only in Egypt that we have that much of that Lost Civilization still available to us and I usually start a lecture off I won't now but I'll just tell you what I usually started off with which is that Egypt is like sex and that gets everybody's attention but why is it just like sex well you can read all about it and that's informative and you can look at pictures and that's informative in a different way but you don't actually stand it at all until you experience it period and Egypt is like that and the ancient civilizations are like that it's possible to go to Great sacred architecture around the globe in India the great mosques of of Islam and what else tanako all of these other places Graham has gone to goca you don't really get that sense of a sacred because yet because it's only less than 5% excavated and now it's all loused up they covered it over and it's near enough to the Syrian border where they can throw G grenades at you so I'm I'm all for taking chances for archaeology but not not those kinds of chances anyhow uh Egypt Egypt is the two weeks there is a is an immersion course it's like a PhD course in what civilization once was and it it's only I won't say only by doing that because I got led into it before I got into Egypt but it is you understand what civilization once was and the dramatic difference between what was civilization and what's now laughably called progress and it's only in Egypt that you can get that nowhere else I mean everywhere else has a temple here and a monument there and so forth and so on but nothing on a day byday hour by hour basis that gives you that so if you think this is a plug for taking my trip it is but that said unfortunately I'm I'm pretty much the only um pretty much the only wheel in town in this regard that as Graham said there a lot of unicorns out there that are busy feeling the energy and sniffing the crystals and I I don't have anything against that as such except you come back not understanding Egypt and the the the difference is that um there are only a handful of people that understand symbolist Egypt that's charotte dubich is Egypt well enough to transmit it and I happen to be the only one that leads tours so there's no competition it's easy all you need anyway all you have to know is that not to listen to the prostitutes of the of CNN or NBC or fox or anything like that has these wonderful phrases that he coins the pr institutes the quadem and the quads yeah well I have see I I I started out not as not as a scholar I'm a scholar by default actually I started out as a novelist playwright mostly satire and I I still do that it's my favorite hat to wear but most of the time for a variety of reasons I find myself wearing my egyptological pit helmet now that's enough about me well um actually the first thing I want to ask I think I think it's I think it's really important that the legacy of John Anthony West is preserved for the future that history does not uh gloss you over and forget about your name so my first question is actually what are you doing for yourself you're doing a lot for all the rest of us but what are you doing for yourself and to make sure that your legacy is is preserved I don't actually give a damn about that um see my legacy that's car only only other people give damn John just doesn't care that's that's their job um the who is it you had up there that was regretting that it took him so long to get to get recognized that there was no one left to gloat over oh yeah J well I figure I'm still around for a while yeah and and even if I outlive them not by that much and appropo to what you were talking about and the last few few times I've heard you gram is that we're close it's it's getting close now yeah um I don't think that they feel the heat yet they don't understand the situation I sometimes tell them that when they get certain kinds of opposition it makes me feel the way I imagine a cannibal Chieftain must feel watching a boatload of missionaries approach it's I salivate yes and another another image I came up with it's it's like a they're living they are living like a little town in Russia around 1220 and every once in a while this crazy Horsemen comes wheeling in a cloud of dust you know out from the out from the East telling them they better pray pay tribute because in a couple of years this wild man is going to come and ravish The Tear Down the Walls and ravish the women and murder all the men and they want he wants tribute right then and there and they just send him on his way and three years later the great con is at the gates and that's exactly what he does so in a in in a very real sense uh archaeology even though they may not know it yet are under siege they're facing genas Khan they don't know it and I'll be around to gloat so John you've um you've written two two books that that that I'm very familiar with which is serpent in the sky and the traveler key to ancient Egypt and again another plug the traveler key to ancient Egypt forget about all the other guide books to Egypt The Traveler key to ancient Egypt is the book to go around Egypt with and it was was the book that I went around Egypt with on my first Journeys and I'm eternally grateful for that any other books in The Works any any other thoughts well the other one that I just published which is edited by me it's not written by me but it it's appropo your talk actually well what you what we you didn't get into and which is more more My Province than yours is the philosophy yes behind this because yes ancient civilization it's very nice and all of that and it's really good to know that what we call progress is what I call shiny barbarism but it doesn't that in and of itself does not tell you what a true civilization is and a true civilization my own definition is is U what occurs when when people not everybody it can't be everybody I don't think that the universe is constructed in such a way that everybody participates in at that level but when enough people understand that they're here for a purpose and that purpose is spiritual for lack of a better word or Divine for lack of another better word um it's only then that a civilization arises and replaces barbarism under whatever name smartphones dumb phones whatever the hell they are all of those things are quite unnecessary what's necessary is something that anchors you to a true philosophy and that's the the very interesting thing about this new book you know it it was on David was on your the author of the month and this is a good friend of mine who financed actually our own trip to GOC Lee a few years ago and uh and then was working he was he was a Christian pastor but a very unusual Christian he actually practiced it was very rare um it's about as rare as an open-minded scientist or still rarer a Visionary billionaire with the conscience I haven't met any of those yet but anyway David was a pretty rare bird and he was doing all of this very careful scholarship on the nde the near-death experience there's a lot of material that's been written on them by people who have been through that through that tremendous experience and without going into a long pav he was collecting a lot of information and I was saying to him we didn't we were good friends but not that close friends and at a distance and I was telling him David you got to make a book of this this is he he was going at it in a particular way of systematically go David Solon David Solomon yes that's right systematically going at it in such a way that it wasn't just his personal experience he had his own kinds of personal spiritual experiences but it made sense of it in a kind of way and my sense of it was sort of like with our work we're on the cusp we it's it's close now anyway David was putting all of this material together and said well I'm not a writer I'm going do it and then all of a sudden he started he was a taichi apart from being a Christian Pastor he was a high level taichi practitioner and a bonai master he studied bonai that wonderful Japanese way of torturing trees into being works of art but I I even David got me understanding more about Bonsai that's how I always saw it from the outside we said no no the tree has to allow itself to be treated that way it's very interesting philosophy no really not getting this time um anyway David then started losing his balance and getting and he was a physical you know guy and a taii practitioner and that's dependent upon balance and he started losing his balance and the way the upshot of it was that he was D diagnosed with a gly blastoma Goma it's called it's what Ted Kennedy died of um a 100% fatal brain cancer and then he realized that he had a mission that he was doing all of this work on ndes but he needed a writer he was he was an excellent and meticulous um um scholar but he wasn't a writer being a writer or something else again so he drafted me in and was I ow I owed him a big favor anyway but but I also recognized that this was something that was missing as it were from the philosophy uh the spiritual philosophy as expounded by I'm I'm in the GF society that um that's one way of expressing it it's not the only way but all of the tra the all of the great Traditions religious Traditions spiritual Traditions have this as a background and the experience as it were the the the nde what that actually is when you when you look at enough of them and understand what they are it's not a hallucination which the qu academics would have us believe because they want to make sure that everybody thinks the world is as meaningless as they experience it um and it's not we don't have to buy into their rubbish and the nde is actually a few moments of Grace of something over and above what any spiritual discipline or experience can give to you in other words it comes from out of the blue and it happens at the point of death um or that can be one time at which it happens and the power of the ND and the way that David puts it together um is that it it's it's understood that this is available to all of us we don't know about all of us actually I mean David doesn't get into that there are some really malevolent people do they have it too does Dick Cheney have it or Donald Trump I don't know I hate to think so because i' like to thin --- alignant it's absolutely malignant and it separates us from Spirit and and this surely is one of the great lessons that ancient Egypt has to teach us yeah yeah and the other the other civilizations as well really this is an interesting thank you Jonathan um an interesting way of of doing this the venue because you present the ancient civilization or the the bone of it anyway and the ongoing work and the Very solid ongoing ongoing material that we have to work with and then when we we talk about it we put about we put it in context without me doing the Egypt side of things was good I like this well let's get uh let's get into this I mean the uh I I associate you more than any other individual with the the quest to rewrite history that's what you're all about as far as far I'm concerned and you've been right there in the front lines for a very very very long time but how did remind me how did it start how did how did that where did it start for you started early actually I was never one of these genius kids you know that you watch these Tire some little creatures on television every week there's some eight-year-old kid who's standing on his head playing B Beethoven's violin sonado while he's eating ice cream cone and you never hear of him again thank God bu and some other tiresome little girl 8 years old singing ver with absolutely perfectly so I was never one of those but what I was what I was was I was in retrospect I was I I was psychologically precocious and I knew at the age of 13 or so which was a long time ago that I've been BR that i' been born how old are you now John if you care to share that with with us how how old are you now you know know perfectly well how old don't and I'm not telling 84 you got to catch you got a ways to go to catch up to me anyway the I understood that I'd been born into a lunatic asylum and it was very very lonely and by the time I was 19 I knew what I wanted to do I wanted to be the little boy who says the emperor has no clothes and I did that to my own satisfaction I started out writing novels and plays and Scripts and um successfully in that they were published or produced mostly anyway um but they never made me any money which is probably a good thing in a way because I'd be sitting at home in a MC mansion somewhere or another not driving all the way into New York in this horrible rign talking to a few hundred people for few bucks but seriously that stayed with me and then I learned to my dismay that being the little kid I wrote a story what was it I forget where it's published was it Nova that was the magazine put out by Gioni in in the 70s good magazine um and was called The Emperor's New Clothes continued and it's what happens when the emperor gets to back to the palace and all of this the the wheels of Empire are put into motion and everybody gets together to prove that the Empire that the emperor's new clothes are real and everybody in the whole empire conspires or takes happily engages in the conspiracy either design well what should I say designing producing marketing and advertising The Emperor's New Clothes and the little kid is by a philosophical ruse which is absolutely a testament to what modern fossil philosophy has become is declared a nonperson who doesn't exist and therefore not be disproved and The Emperor's New Clothes are real but little child doesn't exist and in the end there's even an upside to that because when winter comes only he stays warm so anyway that was my parable of the emperor's new clothes and then one thing led to another living on Aisa in the island you used to you you used to live in UHA Ina in southern Spain yes um that was great hippie Paradise at a certain period those days I'm pre hippie but it was it was it was an effort to be there and get any work done but I did manage one way yeah so tell us about um schaller's one line that's SP one line you didn't I was going to mention that because you made it sound as though I invented this and I didn't I was I got interested first well my first my first non-fiction book was called a case for astrology I was enough interested interested in it to write a big book on it getting putting together all of the um direct and indirect evidence that there was something to it but that led through another series of strange synchronicities or W coincidences except there aren't coincidences uh that led me to the gerf work and then gii GF gii GF well there's only one put up your hands if you've haven't heard of GI good yet yeah a lot a lot of a lot and I hadn't heard of GI GF until I met John Anthony West and I didn't read GF until very recently although John continuously urged me to do so finally I'm about 60% into Bill's Tales to his Grand did you start off with that I did yeah not with ensky no as as directed yeah ah well you shouldn't you shouldn't start off by trying to read GFF it's like taking your first driving lesson in a Ferrari you do not want to do that start off with his most brilliant pupil PD uspensky which is spelled o u p NSK k y uh a book called in search of the miraculous which we talk about GFF system which was I mean What attracted me so much about it it in a way it it's like all of the other genuine spiritual systems the difference is that it was designed to be practiced in the lunatic asylum and I knew a lot about the lunatic asylum G called it the pain Factory it is not for everyone it just plain isn't but it's maybe for more people than given the number of people that raised their hands not knowing about it and half of the others were just ashamed to do that so that's a lot of people who didn't had never heard of GFF but it was the difference was when I when I read him first he was the only person that I'd come across postly he died in 49 he was the only person not come across who was as contemptuous of Western Civilization as I was the difference was that he knew how to live in it and I didn't anyway not very well yeah and I spent much of the last 40 years I guess learning to live in it reasonably well or anyway learning to live in The Lunatic Asylum of our society really without being one of them without actually being a lunatic yeah so anyway that that led me nine years in abesa had gotten all ruined um and I knew that when I got there I could see it happening and uh to begin with and and I had novel published which is almost a film on a couple of occasions but it wasn't and in doing the first scholarly book The the case for AST astrology I came across the work of this amazing Frenchman with the unpronouncable name Rik and it was his work I I could tell I had I had to learn French in order to read the book and then travel all the way across London every day because it was the only copy I could find was in the British Museum library where you couldn't take books out so I had to go there to access it with the dictionary by my side and at the end I could understand Scher well enough to transmit it that's the symbolist Egypt that you those of you who come on my trip which this would be about 20 trips I guess worth of people there everyone to come on a trip um this is this was schwaller and schwaller was talking about ancient Egypt and their belief I would say not belief but understanding that their civilization went back much much much further into the back into the past and he wrote a long essay on this based mostly on the Greco Roman text that's around the time of Caesar and and Jesus and he went into all kinds of texts and so on and built a case for the for the probability the probable reality of this older stage of Egyptian civilization and then at the end almost as a throwaway line he said oh yes and of course in French he said the the the great snx of Giza shows unmistakable signs of aquatic erosion water weathering and I realized when I read that that that was the game changer that all the rest was a scholarly argument like arguments over with Shakespeare arguments over a passage in the Bible there are better and worse arguments but none of it really amounts to science and um I realized that this was if you could get if you could get the backup for it this could this could rewrite history in and of itself because here was the arguably the greatest statue on the on the face of the Earth and perhaps even more to the point the temples on either side of it and by now i' I'd been to egyp anyway done a lot of study and the temples alongside it which which are built of stones the ones that s the sort of stones that Graham was showing but these are whole temples full of them still in reasonably good shape and these Stones weighed 75 100 150 200 tons slaughtered in if I can just add to that the the Sphinx is excavated from solid Bedrock The Core Body of the Sphinx was created by cutting a deep trench around it in the Bedrock but that trench in the Bedrock of the Giza Plateau they didn't waste that they took the material there and they cut it up into just enormous blocks of stone certainly many of them in excess of 100 tons and they raised them up in front of the Sphinx so we can say that the Sphinx and the temples do date from the same period and then here's schwaller saying water erosion on the Sphinx so so I could see that the that this was all going to fit together if somebody was if I could find the geologists to verify that the Spinx was weathered by water and I had plenty of Clues to that but I'm not a geologist and nobody would listen to me so it took a long time and how much time do we have we have an hour oh you have plenty of time um this is a fun bit of the story um finally I I got friendly with with a guy who taught English at Boston University who had had been teaching English at University of Cairo in Egypt and there he'd got acquainted with symbolist Egypt in my work in schwaller and we were having dinner one day and he said is there anything I can do for my academic position to try and get more people interested in symbolist Egypt and without even thinking twice about it I said sure find me an open-minded geologist to look into this whole Spinx Theory and then I laughed and he's already laughing and I came out with my line that's when I invented that line that finding an open-minded scientist is like finding a fundamentalist Christian who loves his enemies and he he said wait a minute wait wait wait wait so he wouldn't tell me the name of this he said he's young but he's got four or five he's got four technical books already published and you don't handle you stay out of this you're too incendiary let me handle this years went by and a couple of years i' keep asking as him well he's very cautious he's interested he he wonders anyway then finally he said well listen he's he's up for 10 years so he doesn't want to do anything he doesn't I can't tell you his name but then I realized of course so you're up to tenure and they think you're soon as they say Lost Civilization everyone thinks in quadia everyone thinks ah the a word and Atlantis so I understood that that was the case fin fin he was he was actually up for tenure and then he said okay so we had a he said let's let's do a uh a a talk at Boston University so he arranged that for faculty faculty and uh and friends and I said okay I'm I will do that so we did that in fact and that went over quite well some of the faculty were shaking their heads and a lot of the students were thought that's is pretty cool and long and short of it was the chalk finally we wrestled up a few pennies and got them over there and initially he just couldn't believe because it was so obvious that it was water weathering let's just say a bit a bit about Robert shock so Robert shock is Professor of geology at at Boston University geology geophysicist phds and both from Yale so he's super qualified and and uh also open-minded and well he was one of those who was open-minded well you had to PR him a B and in fact when he first got into the this is another point I wanted to raise with you when we first got into the Spinx enclosure and I'm not sure if we got in the illegally or used the what works even better in Egypt as a bit of bakish and got ourselves in there and he looked around everybody else sees the Spinx this enormous unbelievable brooding statue looking out at the Horizon and everybody normally sees the Spinx not Rock shock shocks are the Rocks particularly of the enclosure wall and he said wow he said these rocks look like they're hundreds of thousands of years old and then said don't quote me on that and which I wouldn't for years I would keep that quiet actually but that was his that was his educated PhD geological geophysical reaction to the enclosure wall of the sinks this fantastic eroded surface and one thing led to another --- e thing public and it's been going on ever since we've been collecting the evidence and now beckly tee is the Smoking Gun because that day date at 10,000 BC or older by the way it is older because this is not goes for sure it didn't go up in one fell soup and the part that they've excavated is the lower part so generally speaking when they're doing something like this whatever they're doing first is the highest 50 times as much is still lying on ground it's still there I didn't think it was that kind what Secrets does it have to reveal and and what do other Hills that are around there like cuz they all look like Hills that that's another interesting study coming up there so you went to gockley tee when you went with shock and what year David must have been about six years ago six years before they covered all the stuff up I know so it was put a horrible roof over it now what was your what was your feeling when you got there when you saw the site had a look around what what what are you thinking put talk us through your process when you're there well that that this was correct I mean there was no there was no way in in which it could be other than it was the fill was the fill it had been filled you could see that they dated the fil they couldn't they didn't make a mistake dating the fil they 8000 BC and Schmidt himself who you met who was as archaeologist go a pretty open-minded guy pretty open-minded I should say in certain regards he was not into the astronomy or the cosmology of it which is has been handled I think very adequately by by lar Scranton and but he was he would he would stand by the dating and chock who was the most careful guy in the world couldn't fault the way the the various methods they used for the dating so there it is and actually gram this was a a point in your talk that I wanted to that I wanted to bring up they're all about their hunter gatherers and stuff you know these are guys who I mean most of these people have never built the dry stone wall in their lives or done anything creative whatsoever I mean they couldn't write an advertising jingle which in fact is difficult to write but these are very uncreative people looking at the most creative people that ever lived and so they haven't a clue as to what goes in and also they don't know what it's like to be a hunter gatherer because they don't hunt and they don't fish and they don't gather they go to the supermarket like everybody else and and they why should anybody learn to plant and till the land when all you have to do is go outside the Palisades or whatever it is that keeps you safe and shoot a rhinoceros or whatever it is and you have food point in fact Hunter gather lifestyles are very satisfying and and spiritually nurturing and and and ample in fact yeah why should they do anything other than shoot their rhinoceros there aren't that many of them and plenty of rhinoceroses when they get tired of Roser they can shoot an elephant but there's Hunter Gathering is great who who in their right mind wouldn't Hunter gather and same applies you know the rough and crude conditions well we don't know that I mean they have their bare skins and they have plenty of stuff to wear and they have plenty to eat yes and we know that the upper Paleolithic cave artists who definitely were hunter gatherers were creating this Transcendent art 30 40,000 years ago that was my other point actually that it's unnecessary it should have been unnecessary if there were such a thing as a as a genuinely respectable and open-minded I almost like to use the word open-minded bunch of scientists and Scholars out there because the cave art itself and now with chave that pushes it back to 31,000 before you had alamira and Loco which they were dating at 177,000 19,000 BC these are geniuses who are painting these these bear curved unfinished walls in such a way that they were heightening the perspective and all the rest you didn't need anything other than that to prove that it's a sophisticated civilization they think that illumination comes from electricity and it has nothing anyway put it this way illumination might but Enlightenment doesn't come from light bulbs but I do think there's one point which is which is that um hun hunter gatherer societies don't generate surpluses to a large extent they are they are living often very comfortably from dayto day it's an untold story of hunter gatherers that actually in famines in South Africa that have that have occurred it's the agriculturalists who starve the hunter gatherers are just fine in for example Botswana namibe yeah they they they they they do fine but I suppose the one difference is that an Agricultural Society can set aside and store surpluses which can then the argument at any rate is that it can free people to develop specialist skills in in areas like stoneworking and so on and that's the explanation of stone but this is baloney too because look at look at those caves this is at a time when this there isn't that going sure and somebody was having time to create these astonishing works of art yeah good point Picasso learned to to paint Bulls from I think alamir or Lasco or one of those places and then Along Comes chave which is exponentially superior to the other ones and that day date at 31,000 bced and they're still talking all this garbage about that this may have to make archaeologist change their minds and blah blah blah well they don't have any Minds to change it should be easy but this is this is what is frustrating um I think Graham's more frustrated by this stuff than I am my my G jef training teaches me that whoever and whatever presses your buttons is your master and I personally do not like being a Slave I work very hard at not getting my buttons pushed to cons fairly with some success I must say yeah yeah so let's move on slightly uh why is it important to get history right why is it important to dig out these facts that are so unwelcome to the official Arbiters of History why why does it why does it matter why should we care really if the Sphinx is much older uh if there was a a deeply wise and and um spiritually sophisticated civilization in the remote past why should we care well we we wouldn't there was be no reason to care if we had a civilization of our own worth calling a civilization right but we don't we have a we have a fraudulent religion which they don't even which they call progress and I call the church of progress um that is absolutely pernicious both on the personal and on the cosmic level we're in the process of destroying ourselves with all our stupid ass technology and getting nothing for it but I mean the five five cowboys explain it practically everybody even in this room will be spending much of their time I bet doing stuff that does not in any way enhance or feed your soul or your or anything other than pay the rent I I take bets on that the number of us who manage to actually make a living out of doing what we want is very small and usually as I said at Great cost y so that's why otherwise if we had a civilization of Our Own no why bother then it's just an academic question but if you could if you could pick the lessons what could we what can we learn from ancient Egypt and I agree with you that ancient Egypt is a well it's one of it's one of your famous lines that that ancient EG ancient Egypt is not a development it's a a legacy so they are they are bringing down Knowledge from a remoter past but what what would be the key elements of that knowledge which we could apply to our society today and somehow make things better if that were possible well I guess this is where the dead Saints Chronicles comes comes in that probably in very old day all ancient times that hunter gatherers so what they chopped you know they had Stone axes and they chipped away at things I mean you see some of the things that they've done that they date very old I don't know you probably saw it that Turkish bracelet sure that dayto day ,000 BC made of obsidian that employs a very complicated geometry involved wo this is 8,000 BC um and and what we're talking about then with with these ancient societies is that they're probably when they talk about the Garden of Eden it's probably not a physical place it probably is a condition or a spiritual State I think and these people are living in something approaching a state of grace or something like that right and we just have we have no access to that I mean we can't even imagine what it is unless we live with the aborigenes or so when you cast your mind back I remember we've had we've had conversations about the things many times and I know that you are open to the possibility that the Sphinx is even much older much older yeah I'm convinced of I think you're I think you're persuaded by the astronomical argument but you make the point that the age of Leo recurs every 26,000 years yeah and and the Egyptian text themselves the polaro stone and the Turan Papyrus that talk about these earlier periods and give the regnal years of these supposedly mythical Kings and when you put them all together which is what schler did you get 34 36 6,000 years so we're closing in on an earlier age of Leo right shock's initial reaction of wow these rocks look like the hundreds of thousands of years old that's and that's not from a guy who exaggerates much I mean that's from from a cautious guy just taking a look at this yeah so this is one of the things really that we want to do is to get together a a panel of geologists to go over and study that which we've never had we've never had the opportunity or the money to get the permissions now we think we can get them because now shock finally 20 years later has his own University agreeing that maybe he's worth supporting so not in money I don't have any money but in terms of prestige all of a sudden the university is saying to hell with you to the archaeologist right and and is being supportive so maybe but but what's at stake is as I said is philosophical and immaterial as it were it's not it's not it's going to help us make more money or anything of the sort at whatever it is that we do whatever our jobs are it's that it changes the whole way you approach your day on an individual and a collective basis sure that there's something worth stri that actually worth striving for that just isn't the mortgage or the you know the payments on the car but that is the lack of a better word Soul fulfill in and soul expanding yes yes something of the sort when when you consider this the that's at at the heart of this is a notion of A Lost Civilization but listening to you now you're making very valid points about hunter gatherer societies that that they they rightly and properly also deserve to be called a civilization but when you look back on the on the notion of A Lost Civilization are you envisaging something uh technologically advanced in the way that we are we regard ourselves as certainly are you envisaging a a a complex structured urban-based the the the whole Suite of things that are associated with the word civilization today or are you thinking along hunter gatherer lines clarify your your thinking on that both actually and one doesn't as you pointed out when you had the the um the it was that it was the the rainforest Indians and who's to say that we're more civilized than they were it's it's what goes on inside them yeah really exactly so and you could also we're so used to seeing it manifest in terms of buildings or sophist what we call sophistication but doesn't have to be that way of whole civilizations could last for thousands of years expressing their deepest the deepest feelings and the deepest knowledge in dance and they wouldn't leave any church any whatsoever but yet members of those civilizations would have been deeply fulfilled and and and had meaningful and purposeful lives yeah but then uh if we consider the Sphinx and we consider those 100 ton blocks that are shifted in front of the Sphinx and turned into two extraordinary temples that that surely involves something other than just Manpower or or what what does it involve what's what does it come to I don't know it it certainly involves Manpower in some way shape or form since men did it and not machines and not aliens at least I don't think aliens um poor aliens they get a bad rap all the time about aliens let's go light on the aliens yeah I mean I I know some people who I think are aliens they're nice and I like them I just don't think they built the pyramids of the sinks they I don't know um whatever impels them to do that at that stage you know we're now talking right we're talking at least 10,000 years ago maybe more prior probably to the younger dras --- hich ones to break yeah you're doing this sort of stuff in a sense we're in an almost in an overload of information I'm I'm finding now with because I I post quite regularly on on Facebook and I might find a story I like but these days I am going to check out the background to that story extremely thoroughly before I share it because there's such a lot of I mean bogus information that's put out there I think the internet is a great good I think it's a I think it's a wonderful thing it's allowed communities of ideas to form uh and it and it and it's made it impossible for the controlling powers to really suppress information that happened with my TED talk when they took it offline I got fortunately advanced notice 3 hours I put out the word and hundreds of people downloaded it just in time and then it went out there and it blew up in Ted's face in a massive way same thing happened with rert actually with sheld sheld he got he he got the same we were on the same we were at the same event but he got the same kind of reaction to it yeah he's too polite though too reld too much of a gentle who spoke at the same Ted talk as me and rert uh Rupert sheldrake uh the one thing that rert and I had in common actually and the one reason why they took our talks down was was because we considered the possibility that Consciousness was not local to the brain right yeah that defies a fundamental dogma of materialist reductionist science which is that Consciousness an artifact that's the Church of progress the Paradigm that's that's its that's one of its Central yeah catechisms that's what we bumped up against there and that's what you've been bumping up against all all your life so we live in this time of flux and and transition and change with with um availability of of new ideas we have the sense that we are speaking of an idea whose time has come yet as you rightly say the the the light that is burning is is relatively small at the moment what's it going to take to trigger this to the next level what happens that's the big qu that's the that's the big question that's what I was talking about it needs it can use its Uncle Tom's Cabin moment and you can't predict what that's going to be yeah I'm I'm thinking it's not because you thought it was going to be the Sphinx well could have been yeah it could it can still be sense but it could have been but it wasn't yeah um or maybe I mean GOC Lee yeah but this is why I think that I don't know but that something like the dead Saints something like that nde that's easy to grasp as it where everyone can grasp it yeah whereas the other the Lost Civilization or the sinks or all of that is primarily intellectual and you have to be willing and able to at least read or anyway watch the videos or something of the sort what it will do I you know what will bring it about I don't know I mean the the one possibility is that they it up to such an extent which they're in the process C of doing that at least a lot of people all of a sudden wake up and say we didn't we didn't bargain for this yeah you let us down the path yeah yeah but I don't know well there's clearly already I mean massive dissatisfaction with the status quo it's not directed toward anything it doesn't have a positive side to it it's just fury it's just anger for for good reason but that doesn't do any good yeah I don't know everybody here go home and tell everybody do you know all about lecture that you saw and that we have to do something and maybe you'll find somebody to talk to or anyway Find Out Who Your Friends Are I don't know so where does it where does it lead for for you from from here what's next for John Anthony West well what's next for Graham Han more what else is there all you can do is what you do yeah yeah just keep on keep on doing it and and and hope it gels in some way you know hope that the mortgage gets paid yeah and uh and keep doing it yeah but the bottom the bottom the bottom line I think you and I are completely on the same page on this is that is that a fundamental ailment of the so-called civilization that surrounds us today is the complete disconnect from Spirit absolutely that that is that is the heart of the matter and we're sitting of course in a church but the mainstream monotheistic faiths aren't really are they providing us with that reconnected actually they're part of the problem because they are exactly contrary to what their own teaching is particularly in the west yes look at these crazies running around talking about Jesus and stuff who would Jesus bomb next I said somebody had a t-shirt I saw a t-shirt somebody had that yeah so they're they're part of the problem and and and they're currying favor often with exactly the wrong elements of science I mean they the pope was okay with he was okay with darwinian Evolution or something Quai or darwinian Evolution he was all for that or was it wait some one other thing he was he was against something or another but nevertheless the Virgin birth was fact right well no Pope whatever his name is right no you can't say that it's fact just because you haven't to believe it and that of course gains points when it comes to jerks like Dawkins and yes denn and as I call them the co- commandants of the Latter-Day Darwin yugan um Daniel dennet and Richard Dawkins yeah Richard Dawkins the author of The God Delusion and the selfish gen all that they feed into those guys with that kind of with that kind of commentary yeah they have to be attacked yes right straight straightforwardly yeah shock and I have idea for a couple of books that we want to do actually but with me around it's it's difficult ult organization is not one of my strengths yes anyway a beautiful adventurous Spirit who has explored the world and raised fundamental questions that I think have touched uh everybody in ways some people don't even realize haven't touched Donald Trump haven't touched Donald Trump well you never know you never know um on this on this question of Disconnect from Spirit we uh um we're we're approaching the time when we need to stop but we agreed we agreed um that uh I would read a passage from the the esus John John suggested this um and uh it's from the Hermetic texts and it's a text uh these purport to be dialogues between the god th the god of wisdom who the ancient Egyptians called Hermes um and his pupils this is a particular dialog sorry the Greeks called him Hermes polite thank you for being polite um jeti yes um dialogues uh in which th Hermes is uh uh in dialogue with certain pupils and this is this dialogue with Aus and it contains uh a passage called the lament and I think that does I think you chose it well because it does actually touch on you know the core issue that we're raising here that there is a a vital lesson to learn from the past and that people in the past knew we were already going wrong they saw the the track so say something while I get my computer to speak to me um and I'll read this passage I'm running out of I'm running out of ideas here never John West never runs out of ideas I don't run out of Babble but I do sort of run out okay so I am going to type in my password remember that I do remember it yes and and I am going to open a file um because I'm 66 I'm going to put on my reading glasses oh all this stuff and here we go Aus the lament do you know Aus thank you s prompted me to use the microphone yes yes do you know esus that Egypt is an image of heaven or to speak more exactly in Egypt all the operations of the powers which rule and work in heaven are present in the earth below in fact it should be said that the whole Cosmos dwells in this our land as in a sanctuary and yet since it is fitting that wise men should have knowledge of all events before they they come to pass you must not be left in ignorance of what I will now tell you there will come a time when it will have been in vain that Egyptians have honored the godhead with heartfelt piety and service and all our holy worship will be fruitless and ineffectual the gods will return from Earth to Heaven Egypt will be Forsaken and the land which was once the home of religion will be left desolate bereft of the presence of its deities oh Egypt Egypt of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tail which thine own children in time to come will not believe nothing will be left but Graven words and only the stones will tell of thy piety and in that day men will be weary of life and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and worship they will no longer love this world around us this incomparable work of God this glorious structure which he has built this sum of good made up of many diverse forms this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which he has made ungrudgingly favoring man's welfare this combination and accumulation of all the manifold things that call forth the veneration praise and love of the beholder Darkness will be preferred to light and death will be thought more profitable than life no one will raise his eyes to heaven the pious will be deemed insane the impious wise the mad man will be thought a brave man and the wicked will be esteemed as good as for the soul and the belief that it is Immortal by nature or may hope to attain to immortality as I have taught you all this they will mock and even persuade themselves that it is false no word of reverence or piety no utterance worthy of heaven will be heard or believed and so the gods will depart from mankind a grievous thing and only evil angels will remain who will mingle with men and drive the poor wretches into all manner of crime into Wars and robberies and frauds and all things hostile to the nature of the Soul then the Earth will tremble and the Sea Bear no ships heaven will not support the stars in their orbits all voices of the Gods will be forced into silence the fruits of the earth will rot the soil will turn Barren and the Very air will sicken with Sullen stagnation all things will be disordered and AR Ry all good will disappear but when all this has befallen asclepius then God the creator of all things will look on that which has come to pass and will stop the disorder by the counterforce of his will which is the good he will call back to the right path those who have gone astray he will cleanse the world of evil washing it away with floods burning it out with the fiercest fire and expelling it with war and pestilence and thus he will bring back his world to its former aspect so that the cosmos will once more be deemed worthy of worship and wondering rence reverence and God the maker and maintainer of the mighty fabric will be adored by the men of that day with continuous songs of praise and blessing such is the new birth of the cosmos it is a making again of all things good a holy and all inspiring restoration of all nature and it is wrought inside the process of time by the Eternal will of the Creator and that's the lament yeah that's that's worthy of s of a concentrated study somebody should look at that the the ecological environmental side of it is I mean unbelievable for 2,000 years ago the the qu academics like to think that it's foretelling the downfall of the Roman Empire but it's much more than that the the reference to the Stars may be an echo from the distant distant past of that we're talking about of of know younger Drass older Drass and so on it's really and it's a it's a breathtaking piece of Pros I must saying piece of Pros really whoever whoever whoever penned that in the first place I think it's translated from the Greek yeah and that's the only one translation that's any good I don't know if you read any of the others but they're all they all sound like you know traes and economics or something but anyway that's basically it that's that that esus um prophecy is is pretty much what we're what we're going through we're in the middle of and my only my sense of it is that God's going to need some help yeah not going to do this on his own or her own whatever the case may be yeah it's up to us at the end of the day we don't have to put up with the any longer uh we can take the choice to change things it's not easy it's a difficult road but it's the road to follow we can do it yeah so ladies and gentlemen I think we've um we've come to the end of the formal part of the evening John and I will be sitting down here and uh anybody wants book signed or anything else I do pose for selfies if anybody wants that oh yeah right no objection at all let's let's charge for selfies this is this is a source of income that we have not yet tapped we're here for you we we're here for you so anything anything that you want really thank you thank you thank you [Applause]