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....<<<Read More>>>...