I posted this comment on Graham Hancock's "shamanism" lecture
I asked Graham Hancock a question - face to face - in Bethesda Maryland - at the International Fortean Organization conference - 20 years ago. He was arguing we should use a nuke weapon to destroy any comet about to hit Earth. I said yes but isn't the development of nukes on Earth just as bad as a comet hitting Earth and wouldn't the radiation fall back into Earth? He really didn't have an answer.
Glad to see he wants to focus more on shamanism but to do so at the expense of the original human culture is a real shame! He tries to emphasize the sweat of the San shamans - as if he has to cling to some material substance as a "technology" that the shamans use! haha.
This is the Kundabuffer problem that controls modern humans - males especially. The psychic blockage in the lower back, such that a person's intentions (the personal qi connection to the Universe) is at a lower spirit frequency in the body.
Science is now realizing that "shamans" have a stronger and higher gamma frequency brain wave but at the same time also a stronger theta brain wave as a heart-brain breathing synchronization.
This cardio-respiratory synchronization is a macro-quantum healing state that was the focus of the original human culture - the San Bushmen and so is the origin of "shamanism" around the world. And yet Grahman Hancock, marketing himself as some kind of shaman expert - totally skips over any real details or true meaning of the original human culture! I called him out on this before - but to claim the "original" San went extinct? That is really blatantly over the top denial.
So here is a review of Hancock's research on shamanism of the San from Hancock's 2005 book Supernatural:
In the case of the San he also provides ethnographic evidence, what he calls the “Rosetta Stone": interviews with San elders in the 1870s, before their race were completely annihilated, conducted by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. These interviews confirmed that the paintings depicted shamanistic journeys, “it is the special burden and responsibility of the shaman that he is able to leave his body here on earth, send his spirit to the otherworld to contact and negotiate with the beings there, and then return to his body and resume his normal life." (p211) According to the San informants, the therianthropes and chimera depicted in their cave art are shamans transforming into the animal forms that they adopted to journey into the spirit world. The formations of human figures, depict their shamanic dances. The bleeding from the nose often depicted in their figures (human and animal) is a representation of the physical reality: their dance would result in a bleeding nose for the dehydrated shamans. Also, valid information is said to be brought into the world as a result of shamanistic journeys and used to the benefit of the San people and people of other races with whom they share their knowledge.So Graham Hancock really doesn't understand the N/om training at all and there are current present day "informants" - of this supposed "annihilated race."
Hancock now proposes an answer to the riddle of the “wounded men. He discusses “somatic hallucinations", including attenuation or foreshortening of the body and limbs, the possession of extra limbs and digits (an effect known as polymelia), and significantly painful pricking and stabbing sensations.(p327) The electrical current you feel when you project is one such “hallucination." He relates the common shamanistic experience of being mutilated, even fully disassembled, and having organs removed or devices such as crystals implanted by spiritual beings.
Hancock then speculates on why people chose the caves. He offers a few theories. One is that the cave itself could have been inductive to trance via sensory deprivation. Another is that people who had tranced and reached altered states naturally (about 2% of the population he tells us later in the book) had sought the caves because they were suggestive of the trance state, “concrete symbols of passage into another world, or a descent to the underworld. (p343)
Under the subheading “Scientific sacrilege" Hancock is now very direct. He differs to David Lewis-Williams in that he does not believe these experiences are hallucinations in the scientific sense of the world but are in fact interactions with other planes and their inhabitants.
So the Graham Hancock claims that because the cave paintings show astral travel and animal shape-shifting THEREFORE these cultures used psychedelics. the idea that "gasp" - the San Bushmen original human culture is in no way dependent on psychedelics to achieve their shamanic energy N/om training. Yes psychedelics were used sometimes as an aid but not considered to be the real thing.
I'm gonna go on the Graham Hancock forum and expose this bunk.
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