In January of 2013, Graham Hancock, a British author and researcher, presented a lecture to a TED audience titled “Visions for Transition: Challenging existing paradigms and redefining values (for a more beautiful world).” His numerous investigative works involving the origins of human consciousness were discussed, with key personal insights and experiences accounted for. Hancock presented a contrast between the traditional cultural values and practices of visionary states of consciousness with those of the modern industrial world.
The event was intended to be paradigm-busting, but Hancock’s lack of conservativism had his TED lecture banned and removed from their website and YouTube channel.
The treatment by Western establishments, Hancock remarks, is connected to the value it places in what he calls the “alert problem-solving state of consciousness,” one that is responsible for “the more mundane aspects of science, the prosecution of warfare, commerce, politics”. Hancock mentions that this belief has failed us, granted the destruction, inequality, and pollution that has occurred.
In a podcast Hancock did with Joe Rogan after the banning of his talk, he states that TED became accusatory against his talk for being “pseudoscientific.” The main claim by TED citing that Hancock suggests DMT allows you to come into contact with ancient cultures. Hancock maintains that the scientific community stigmatizes altered states of consciousness, especially when they threaten the materialistic worldview and consumerist philosophy.
“I am making no claim one way or another as to the reality status of these entities we encounter…it could be that the brain generates consciousness the way a generator makes electricity – if you hold to that paradigm, then of course you can’t believe in life after death, when the generator is broken, consciousness is gone,” Hancock states.
Two of the complainants against Hancock’s talk come from atheist professors of biology. The claims made against Hancock by TED were addressed and dismissed by Hancock in this reply:
“Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.” – Alan Watts.
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what makes you think we’re free anyway? freedom is being able to own your own house, to own your own body. stop paying your taxes and we’ll see who’s free.