Over the years, I’ve been blessed to interview many exceptional people and share their wisdom with our community. Recently, I had the rare opportunity to interview one of my longtime heroes, Graham Hancock, and I’m really excited to share a powerful clip from our talk with you today.

In a former life, Graham was a foreign affairs journalist for The Economist, but for the last 25 years, he has been deeply investigating the mysteries of our human past. When I first read his bestselling Fingerprints of the Gods more than fifteen years ago, it changed my worldview dramatically. I had to rethink everything I learned in my college anthropology courses and was inspired to begin my own exploration into human origins and traditions, leading me to Peru in 2002.

In the video below, he explains that we’re missing some very critical information about our past, specifically the time period around the last ice age—which ended only 11,500 years ago. Graham’s investigations have led him to believe that a highly organized and technologically advanced civilization lived and thrived during this time, while simple hunter-gatherers simultaneously wandered other areas of the planet.

In the beginning of this lively 10-minute segment of our interview, you’ll hear Graham describe abilities like telekinesis and telepathy, which are beyond our current technological framework. If you’re short on time, make sure you don’t miss Graham’s fascinating take on reincarnation, which he calls “an incredible mechanism for immortality,” starting at minute 3:58. For mind-blowing discoveries about ancient visionary plants and their connection with the wisdom still accessible from Shamanic plants today, fast-forward to minute 6:21.

Get ready to travel back in time!

(We have included a transcript of this video below – if you prefer to read.)

To check out Graham’s new book Magicians of the Gods, click HERE

For other editions of the book, click HERE

To watch our full interview with Graham, click HERE

For a transcript of this clip, continue reading below:

NP: Do you feel that the lost civilizations were as technologically advanced or more than we were? Part B to that question is where are the buried computers?, where is the computer that’s like 18,000 years old?, There is sort of this notion that technology looks a certain way.

GH: My answer to that is if we really want to get to grips with history, let’s stop looking at history as a mirror. Let’s start looking at it as a window through which we actually see what happened rather than projecting ourselves onto the past. There’s no reason on earth why an earlier civilization should have followed the same technological route as us. Even if it had the capacity to do so, it might have chosen for moral or other reasons, to do with the sacredness of the Earth, not to exploit petro-chemicals, for example.

We’ve chosen to go that route, no certainty that an earlier civilization would have gone that route. And in the route that we have chosen to take, we have placed great emphasis on mechanical advantage. We do things by leverage, by mechanical advantage and we’re very good at that. We do amazing things with that.

But perhaps we’ve allowed other faculties of the human mind to lapse in the process. We’ve become dependent on mechanical technology and other faculties of the human mind, which are spoken of in traditions all around the world. Faculties of telekinesis, for example, to move objects with the powers of the mind, of telepathy and so on and so forth, are spoken of again and again in ancient traditions. Maybe human beings in general have those capacities, but maybe we’ve gone to sleep. We’ve been lulled into a state of sleep by our society. We’re so proud of our technology. We’re so impressed by its achievements and my goodness the achievements are extraordinary – they’re overwhelming actually – that we’re just forgetting what else we might have done if we’d gone a different way.

I think this is the answer. That the lost civilization, of pre-historic antiquity, was a very different civilization from our own and that it was not primarily about material things. It was primarily about the nurture and growth of the human spirit and that’s reflected in the myths too because it’s when the lost civilization Atlantis or whatever we wish to call it, strays from that path, when it plunges into materialism, when it loses sight of its spiritual goal, that’s when the danger occurs.

NP: Is there any possibility that members of the civilization in your opinion could have survived and be somehow hidden among us still?

GH: No, I think they were human beings just like us. But they are hidden amongst us in terms of their ideas – this is important to be clear. Ideas are what live or can live forever in human culture and the idea of the lost civilization, of the Magicians of the Gods, of the civilizers who went around the world trying to keep that light of civilization burning – that idea is very strongly impressed upon the memories of mankind and no amount of rationalizing or scientific skepticism is going to get rid of it. In our hearts, we all know it’s true.

NP: So I’ve heard you say and write, that the Egyptians have put their best minds to work for 3,000 years on the mystery of death.

GH: This touches exactly on what we’re talking about just now because the ancient Egyptians were the inheritors of an earlier tradition. It was the tradition I believe of a lost civilization and the primary focus of that civilization was not upon material things and physical life, but on eternal things and the possibility of eternal life.

Now typically in our society today, when we talk about eternal or immortal life, people start thinking in terms of trans-humanism – that we’re going to install all these gadgets in our brains (a ghastly horrible repulsive thought) or even download our consciousness into a machine. What selfish and narcissistic thinking is that?

We already have an incredible mechanism for immortality. It’s call reincarnation. Why would one wish to be a transhumanist and keep the same body forever or download one’s consciousness into a machine when the mechanism of reincarnation allows us to live many different lives and benefit from the learning experiences that those different lives offer? Now of course I can’t prove that reincarnation exists but I happen to think it does. I think it’s just as likely. I think it was Voltaire, who said “It’s no more improbable to be born twice than to be born once.” And actually why not? We could go into that. There are huge amounts of evidence for it.

There’s the thing, if reincarnation is possible, then we are not our bodies. Whatever we are we are not our bodies because those bodies surely die. We are not our bodies. There is some immortal part of ourselves, the soul, the essence, spirit – that’s what reincarnates and the focus I believe of the lost civilization was upon that immortal essence of the human being for a very long period of time, but that it gradually fell away from that and evolved into materialism but that primarily it was not a materialistic society. We should not expect to find recognizable material traces of the kind of industrial technology that we’ve created in the 20^th and 21^st Centuries.

NP: Do you feel as though Shamanic plants, visionary plants might have played a role in this study of our own mortality of death in Egyptian culture?

GH: I’m certain they did. Indeed the ancient Egyptians did put their best minds to work for three thousand years on the mystery of what happens to us when we die and in that project they had aid from a number of plant allies. We know that Nymphaea Caerulea, the blue water lily, is a mild visionary plant. Interestingly and it’s my friend Dennis McKenna who is an ethno-pharmacologist, who’s made this identification, which is that the ancient Egyptian tree of life, which you see in huge numbers of reliefs around ancient Egypt – and often you will see Thoth, the God of Wisdom, writing the name of an individual upon the tree of life – that means that individual has graduated from earthly life into the life of millions of years. Well it turns out that the tree of life is Acacia Nilotica according to Dennis’ estimation and that acacia nilotica is rich in dimethyltryptamine in DMT, the most powerful hallucinogen known to man. The fact that it’s the tree of life in ancient Egypt is really intriguing and we should absolutely consider the possibility that we do know what the ancient Egyptians were smoking.

NP: Did your experience with ayahuasca give you any extra insights as to what happens after we die, as to this possibility of reincarnation?

GH: Again, I can’t prove that this is correct. I can only tell you the impact upon me. My experiences with ayahuasca have made me understand that everything we do in this life matters. Everything counts, everything will be weighed out and considered. We are being given a precious opportunity to be born in a human body. It is a very rare opportunity in the universe as a whole to be a human being, to have the fine powers of discernments between good and bad, light and darkness that human beings do have, the capacity for love and sadly the capacity for hate. All of these things are part of the miracle of being born in the human body.

It’s up to us to live up to that miracle, to fulfill it. Do we want to spend our lives just pursuing material goals and objectives? If we do we will not be nurturing that non-physical part of ourselves at all and it seems to me that the ancient Egyptians were very focused upon this. That’s why actually you don’t find remains of peoples’ houses and personal possessions very much in ancient Egypt. I don’t think they cared about that.

Towards the end of Egyptian civilization, Herodotus visited that country and described them as the happiest people on Earth. They’d been happy for three thousand years and their happiness came primarily not from focusing on the material realm but from living life in a way that nurtures spirit. Ultimately what we’re all here to do is to give love, to act with love towards one another. That is the fundamental truth that emerges from ancient Egyptian civilization and from all the civilizations and the further that we move away from love and the more deeply we get drawn down into materialism, the less chance we have of fulfilling our mission here.

NP: I couldn’t think of a better way to end this talk. That was profound, thank you for that.  Any closing thoughts?

GH: No I think we’ve wrapped it up in a fairly tight way, which is good, no need to ramble on endlessly.

NP: Absolutely. Hopefully we can do it again. This is like a dream come true for me.

GH: Well I’d love to do it again and we’ll definitely do that.