Excellent work. Seriously. If you've ever asked yourself who we are as a species, where we came from, and why we're so downright odd compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, check out this book.
The basic premise is this: the human animal has been anatomically the same for almost 200K years. Including the brain. So why did we not have art, writing, culture, and religion until about 25K years ago? What happened?
Additionally, why is most prehistoric cave art so similar? And strange?
The answer: drugs. We discovered hallucinogens and started tripping out. If we take them now, we see similar things that people painted on caves 25000 years ago. This is when we became spiritual beings, when we took hits of mushrooms and other plants and saw spirits. So all religion, and really all creative expression stems from this drug use -- it kickstarted the unimaginitive human brain.
Now here's the odd part? Why is it so similar? Why do people report seeing such similar things that art seperated by tens of thousands of years and continents look so similar?
The answer, Hancock posits is because we aren't seeing stuff that's generated by our chemically altered brains, we're seeing self-consistant evolving worlds in altered realities. In essence, we're changing from "channel normal" to "channel mushrooms" or "channel ahayuasca" and seeing real, living entities there. Not sure about this last bit, but he raises some interesting points, like why would evolution give us as a species the ability to hallucinate similar events? What reproductive advantage would that cause?
Great stuff!
http://www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Meetings-Ancient-Teachers-Mankind/dp/1932857400/sr=1-1/qid=1172182111/ref=sr_1_1/103-8294158-2783832?ie=UTF8&s=books
