Original subtitles

My name's Gregg Braden.

I'd like to welcome you to this very special presentation

of "Missing Links, The Deep Truth of our Origin,

History, Destiny, and Fate."

In our last episode, we discovered

that we are literally wired for healing and longevity,

and that the real life examples that bring those miraculous

potentials into our lives, you had the opportunity

to see through the people who demonstrated

for us in their lives.

In this episode, we're going to take

this idea of personal healing and resilience

to the next level of community and healing.

And we're going to begin with an ancient map of time

and the guidelines that it offers us today

as to how we can thrive in our time of extremes.

Early in this program, we identified the fact

that we are, in fact, living what the experts are calling

a time of extremes, a convergence of cycles that

are wreaking havoc in the way of life

as we have known it in the past, the climate

cycles, the economic cycles, and the cycles of human conflict.

And I intentionally shared those with you

earlier in the program, so that we could refer back

to those cycles in different episodes,

and this is one of those episodes.

We saw that these cycles that are converging now,

it's not the first time it's happened.

They've converged in our past, and that they appear

to do so on a rhythmic basis, on a regular basis,

that is approximately every 5,000 years.

Well, our ancestors knew this.

They prepared for it.

The ancient astronomers, the Mayan astronomers,

for example, they dedicated an entire sect

of their population, the scientists,

to observing the heavens throughout their entire

lifetimes, and recording what they observed,

and passing those observations to the next generation

and the next and the next.

And in this way, they recorded celestial events and cycles

of time more accurately in the way

that we did not see again until late in the 20th century.

And even then, it wasn't done by people,

it was done by computers using the data from ice cores and sea

floors to tell us what it is that happened in the past.

So I'm saying this to you, because our ancestors

knew that cycles of change were coming.

They knew that they would live times of extremes,

because they always happen when the cycles converge.

And because of that, they knew that they

had the possibility and the potential

and they had the honor of leaving for the next generation

of people that would come along, what

they had learned in the past generations for the cycles,

what they meant, how to navigate these cycles in a healthy way.

Because they didn't want to just survive

by the skin of their teeth and get through some tough times.

They were learning to thrive, to thrive

in the environment of a change.

And the only time that a change becomes a problem for us

is when we're not prepared for it.

When we see our time of extremes,

if we cling to the old ideas of living

and the old ideas of what's sustainable,

and we try to implement those in a world

where those ideas no longer apply,

that's where the struggle comes from.

That's where we find the problems

in our times of extremes.

Well, I want to share with you an example,

one of the most beautiful, one of the clearest examples of how

our ancestors were able to document the times of extremes,

and perhaps more importantly, how

they were able to share with us what

it would mean for future generations, what to look for,

the actual markings in time in history,

so that we would know where we are in the cycles

and what it would take for us in our thinking and the way

we live to get through these cycles.

I'm talking about the Hopi map of time.

The ancient Hopi, on the mesas of northern Arizona

in the United States, have one of the most continuous records

of their lineage and of their history from their creation

story forward.

And the Hopi have, in their homeland,

a very mysterious rock.

It's called Prophecy Rock on the Third Mesa.

And this rock, they tell us, even they do not

know for certain who created the hieroglyphs that

were on this rock.

They don't know the exact person that did it,

but they have a pretty good idea of when it happened.

And they have a really good idea of what

this rock is saying to them.

So what I'd like to do is share this with you

and some very rare images that we don't get to see very often.

What you're seeing on your screen right

now is the major portion of Prophecy Rock.

And I recognize that the lines are a little faint.

We had the opportunity of one of the elders

to take a piece of chalk and trace through the lines

that you're seeing, so that the cameras could photograph

these a little bit better.

And I'm going to do this with a computer.

I'm going to use a computer to trace across the lines,

so that you can see on your screen

precisely the timelines that we're talking about.

So what the Hopi say is at the end of the last great cycle

of change, what's called a great world age,

a 5,000-year cycle that is one fifth of the greater

26,000-year cycle that's called precession of the equinoxes.

So at the end of that last 5,000-year cycle,

those who had come before them their ancestors created this

map.

And it was a map that told them two things.

It told them when the cycle ended.

It told them what they could expect to happen--

big things, landmarks, milestones of time

as they would go through--

and it would tell them how to think and live

both on the inner world as well as the outer world,

so they would successfully thrive as they

go through the next change.

And they tell us that change is the change that we're

experiencing right now.

So this Hopi map of time has been

preserved for a very long time.

And they said they preserved it for us, for you and me,

so that we can benefit from their wisdom

and do it today when we need it the most.

So what is this map of time telling us?

I'm going to begin on the left-hand side of the screen.

And what you see is that I've traced out two paths.

And what the Hopi say is at the end of the last cycle,

the people of this world were given the opportunity

to walk two paths that would carry them

to the end of their time into the next cycle, where

we are right now.

What makes it so interesting is that in the beginning,

both paths looked very similar.

And you can see that when you look on the rock.

They both look very similar, just in different places.

But if you look closely, however, you'll

see that the people that are depicted on each path

are telling a very different story.

If you look at the upper path, for example,

there are people there, people living on the upper path.

Their heads are not connected to their bodies.

And what the Hopi elders say is that these

are the people who live in this time, the people that

walk that path that do not know themselves.

Their heads are not connected to their bodies,

because they don't know who they are.

They've lost themselves.

And if you look closely at this path,

you see that while it begins in a very similar fashion

to the one below, as the path progresses,

it begins to change.

And look at what happens.

It begins to get a little jagged, a little rough.

It begins to get steep and an incline.

And if you look closely, the path ends abruptly.

It goes nowhere.

The path just stops.

But if you look at the lower path,

it, again, looks very similar to the one above it.

It looks smooth and relatively even.

The difference is, it continues that way

throughout the entire hieroglyph.

And along the lower path, there are people depicted as well.

There is an elderly person.

And we know this person is elderly,

because the person is leaning over, hunched,

leaning on a cane, which is a sign of advanced age.

We also know that food is plentiful on the lower

path, because right behind the person

is a stock of corn that is growing,

and that is a sign that food is abundant on this path.

You don't see any evidence of that on the path above.

So right off, we're seeing a distinction between these two

paths.

Now, there is a third path as well

that may not be as evident.

And I'm going to trace it out for you on your screen.

It's the green vertical line that connects the two existing

paths.

That line, the Hopis say, marks a point in time

that they call the point of no return.

And for them, that point of no return was the year 1998.

In 1998, the Hopi sent the eldest elder of the Hopi nation

to the United Nations to deliver the message

that this map has left for the people of the Earth.

And what he said is in 1998, that we are now living,

this moment in the map of time, the point of no return.

That while in the past, it's always

been possible to choose between the upper and lower path--

and truthfully, we can always choose--

from 1998 on, it becomes much more difficult to choose.

So that was the time, that was the warning, that

was the message that was delivered to the United Nations

by the Hopi nation in 1998.

And to help them know where they were on this map,

I'm going to invite you to look at the image one more time.

And on the lower path, what you see

are three circles that straddle this lower path.

The first one on the left is what the Hopi call the First

Great Shaking of the Earth.

They said, between the time of the last 5,000-year cycle

beginning and when it ends, the people of the Earth will go

through these three great shakings.

And the first shaking they say is the First World War.

It's already happened.

The second shaking, you see right next to

that, you probably can guess, is the Second World War.

And then we see the vertical line, the point of no return.

And to the right of 1998, we see the Third Great Shaking.

And when I asked the elders, I asked them,

I said, does that mean that we have another war?

What does that shaking mean?

And they said, we don't know.

Our ancestors could never tell us.

It doesn't mean that there necessarily

is a war between nations.

It can be a conflict in beliefs.

It can be a conflict of ideas and ideology.

It could be a conflict of religion.

It could be a war.

But they said, the truth is, we don't know.

It's something to watch out for in this time after 1998

before the end of the close of this next cycle.

So what does this mean for us?

It's giving us indications.

If you could see further down on this map,

you would actually see the hieroglyphs

that identify those circles.

You would see the swastika, for example,

and the sign of the Rising Sun, Germany and Japan,

underneath the World War II cycle.

And you say, how did they know?

How did they know, thousands of years ago, what kind of symbols

would represent what's happening now?

Well, this is part of the mystery of cycles.

We begin to open to the possibilities

of what is called fractal time, the fact

that time and history repeats itself again and again.

This is the wisdom that our ancestors

tap into in their time, and still do today, that is largely

discounted by modern science.

And I want to take this to the next step.

This is the map.

It's telling us what we can expect.

It's telling us where we are now.

Wouldn't do us any good if we didn't

know what to do about it.

So now I'm going to share with you

another image of the same rock.

And you can see it now.

And on this image-- it's a little bit different

perspective--

you can see where the upper path ends abruptly and goes nowhere.

You can also see-- and this is where the elder has traced out

the images with the chalk--

the lower image, it reaches a corner,

which is the edge of the rock, but it doesn't stop.

It continues.

It goes around that edge, and it keeps going.

They tell us that that edge is our time of extremes.

That edge is where we are right now.

And that the path that will carry us gracefully and allow

us to thrive with food into advanced age across that path

is the lower path.

So when I had the opportunity to meet with one of the Hopi

elders, one of the eldest elders who has

passed and is no longer with us.

Now, I'm not sharing his name, and I

don't mean to be mysterious, but in honor of their tradition,

they asked that we not say the name of someone who has passed,

because it keeps calling the spirit back to us.

So I'm simply going to say a recent elder elder who shared

this wisdom with us today.

And what he said is this.

The qualities of both of these paths, the upper path,

he said, the people that walk the upper path,

they live in the world of comfort, greed, and profit.

And I looked at that, and I thought, ah,

that's interesting.

Profit, especially.

I said, does that mean that we shouldn't make money?

Does that mean profit is a bad thing?

He said, no, no, it's not that kind of profit.

It's not about money.

He said this, is the kind of profit where

one person or a group of people benefit

at the expense and the suffering of another.

Whenever we do better at the expense of someone else hurting

or doing worse, that's the kind of profit

that is on the path that leads nowhere.

It's the path that ends abruptly.

It's a path that cannot possibly carry us through our time

of extremes, because it is not a sustainable path.

And I said, well, what is this lower path all about?

What are the qualities of the lower path?

The lower path, and probably is no surprise to you,

is based upon a different kind of quality, love, strength,

and balance.

Love, strength, and balance.

And if you look closely at each of these qualities, what you'll

find is that comfort, greed, profit, those are

things that we do in the world.

Love, strength, and balance, those

are things that we become in our lives.

And this is the essence of many of the indigenous traditions,

including the Hopi, many of the ancient traditions.

And now what you know from quantum physics,

from the hologram, from entanglement, from the photon

experiments, all the things that we have talked about,

it all boils down to this simple principle.

We must become, in our lives, the things

that we choose to experience in our world.

We want a world of love, strength, and balance,

we must become those things in our lives,

and live them every moment to the best of our ability day in

and day out, not be out on the street angrily

protesting that we want love, strength, and balance.

It's counterproductive.

It makes no sense.

Now you begin to understand why.

So I wanted to share this with you.

This is the Hopi perspective.

Well, this Hopi wisdom, it should come as no surprise,

intuitively, we look at this, we say, well,

of course, that makes total sense.

Intuitively, it makes sense.

This all goes back to the ideas of Charles Darwin.

So once again we're hearkening back

to these ideas in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Charles Darwin's ideas of what it

takes to get through the difficult times

are in direct competition with what

the Hopi have just told us.

They're in direct opposition, and they're about competition.

And just to refresh your memory, what I'd like to do,

I'm going to read Darwin's words to you once again.

And I mentioned this a couple of segments earlier.

And what I said is that Darwin went into the natural world,

and he observed in nature very specific forms of life-- ants,

birds--

and the way that they behaved.

And what Darwin said, his insight, he said,

ah what I'm seeing here in this place

on the Earth in this moment in time

must be a representative, a little piece

of a bigger law that applies to all life everywhere

all the time.

And as I mentioned earlier, I think

this is where he went wrong.

This is a dangerous, dangerous way to think.

Let me read you Darwin's precise words,

so you can see his thinking and why this is so dangerous.

In his book "Origin of Species," what Darwin said,

he believed that life was a struggle.

And while he believed that on the one hand,

he also prefaces his own words by telling us

what he's about to say to us doesn't make a lot of sense.

So I want you to see what he's saying,

and just hear his own words.

Darwin said, quote, it may not be a logical deduction,

but it is far more satisfactory to look at instincts,

such as ants making slaves of other ants

as small examples of one general law leading

to the advancement of all beings.

And that law is the law that says we should multiply.

We should vary, let the strongest live,

and the weakest die.

Let the strongest live and the weakest die.

This is such a dangerous way to think.

And it's dangerous for a couple of reasons,

particularly because of when it was introduced,

late 1800s, early 1900s.

This is when the great wars were being fought.

This is when the thinking that was being created of how

people relate to other people.

Darwin is telling us that when he

saw the ants capture another colony of ants,

they didn't kill them.

They enslaved them and made them work.

He said that is a reflection of the general law.

Let the strongest live and the weakest die.

This later became survival of the fittest.

Darwin called it survival of the strongest.

And he said this in his own words.

And I want you to know that.

So I'm not mincing words.

Survival of the strongest.

The ideas of the great genocides and the great suffering

of the late 1800s, the 1900s throughout the 20th century

are directly linked to this thinking.

If you look at the manifestos and you look at the writings

and you look at the lengths of the greatest acts of war,

aggression, and genocide, the philosophies

are directly based and sometimes quoted.

I'm not saying Darwin intended this.

But this is how a dangerous thinking like this

can be misinterpreted and applied

in horrible ways that create tremendous suffering

in our world.

And it's based on something that's not true.

This is a false assumption of science,

and that's the good news.

That's the good news I want to share with you right now.

The best science of the modern world

is now telling us one of the deepest truths,

I believe, that has the greatest impact, the greatest

consequence on our world as a whole, on your life and my life

individually.

If you think back to the inverted pyramid that

began this entire series, it was in episode number

two, when we talked about the false assumptions of science.

Assumption number six, at the top of the pyramid,

was that the fundamental law of nature

is based upon competition, conflict, and struggle.

And that comes directly from Darwin's ideas

that were embraced, and not questioned,

in late 1800s and early 1900s.

It is deeply ingrained as the fabric of our very society.

The economic system that's collapsing

right now, the way that we're dealing with differences

between nations unsuccessfully, the way that we are trying

to share resources, food, water, oil, energy, communications,

defense, all of these things are based in this idea

of survival of the strongest.

And in our time of extremes, as our ideas

and what we think about ourselves

and our beliefs are being pushed to the limits,

because the extremes are changing the environment where

they've been applied, the ideas have been applied in the past,

all those ideas are breaking down.

They're not working.

They can't work, because they're not true.

They're based in false assumptions.

And this idea of cooperation versus competition, this

is key.

So I want to share this with you.

I'm going to take a minute to do this.

I think it's important.

The best science of the modern world

is now telling us that, in fact, the fundamental rule of nature

is cooperation and what biologists

call mutual aid, not competition and conflict and survival.

Now, we all know that competition, conflict,

and survival, they're a fact.

They happen.

We see them all the time.

They're not the fundamental rule.

And to the degree that we see violence, competition,

and conflict, to the degree that we see that happening, what

we're actually witnessing is how far we or any population

has strayed from the harmony of the deepest truth of nature.

It tells us the more violence and conflict we see,

it tells us how far we've strayed from the natural laws

of this world.

And if we believe that we somehow

are separate from nature, that we

don't have to abide by the fundamental laws of nature

that all the forms of life abide by,

that is the opening to our demise.

We've seen this happen in the past with other civilizations

and other cultures.

There's a powerful lesson that we can learn from this.

And our own science, the best science of the modern world,

gives us the reason to change our thinking.

We don't have to do it on faith.

We don't have to do it on trust.

Because we've asked science to tell us

the deep truths of our lives, now science

is revealing those truths.

The question is, will we embrace those truths?

Well, here is the truth of what Darwin said about cooperation.

There was a study that was done.

Over 400 papers were written, asking the question

about competition and conflict.

Specifically, the question was this.

What is the optimum amount of competition in any situation,

in any place?

And when I say competition, I just

want be very clear of what I'm saying.

I'm not talking about a friendly game of soccer or chess

or checkers at the family dinner table.

When we say competition, this is what biologists

call violent competition, OK?

What is the optimum amount of violent competition

in the world?

Over 400 studies came up with the same answer.

And once again for clarity, I want to read to you directly

the results of that study.

In his book entitled "No Contest, The Case

Against Competition," Alfie Kohn wrote, quote,

the ideal amount of violent competition in any environment,

in the classroom, in the workplace,

in the family in the playing field, is none.

He said, violent competition always, always,

always is destructive.

So this is one of the first cases.

Late in the 20th century, this was

in the 1990s, when these studies were published,

and they opened the door to a possibility.

Scientists began saying, what if we're wrong?

What if the ideas that we've embraced about competition

and conflict that are reflected in our economy, that

are reflected in our defense policy,

reflected in the way we deal with other nations,

what if they're wrong?

And that led to even more studies.

Alfie Kohn was one of the first.

But from there, scientists began writing about this competition.

And what they found in the year 2008

made headlines in one of the most prestigious

scientific journals.

It's called "New Scientist."

There was an entire issue based upon evolution.

And once again, not my words.

I want you to hear exactly the words, the conclusions of what

this article is saying to us.

In an article by Michael Le Page,

it was entitled "Evolution myths, survival of the fittest

justifies everyone for themselves,"

the "New Scientist," edition April 2008.

What Michael Le Page said is this.

He said, quote, what we see in the wild

is not every animal out for itself.

He said, cooperation is an incredibly successful survival

strategy.

And then he went on to clarify that.

He said, when cooperation breaks down,

the results can be disastrous.

End of quote.

So what Michael Le Page is saying in "New Scientist"

and what that scientific thinking is now

that is willing to embrace the facts of what we're seeing

along these lines is that it's not every animal out

for themselves.

There is violent competition, but that competition

is part of a higher order that we

see in the animal kingdom that is actually

a form of cooperation.

When we see the weakest of one form of life succumb

to other forms of life, that is a cooperative endeavor.

It is not animal against animal fighting for the survival

of their lives.

The same principle now that we're seeing in science--

this is science--

it's telling us that what we've been thinking about our deepest

truth is not necessarily the deepest truth.

The biology now is reflected in the archeology of our past.

This is fascinating to me.

Let me say it again.

The biology of this discovery is reflected

in the archeology of our past.

Here's what I mean by that.

The biology is telling us that we

live in this world of cooperation and mutual aid

where conflict may occur sometimes.

Now, I'm going to go back to some

of the archaeological sites that we talked

about earlier in this episode, and I'm

going to reveal something now that we didn't talk about then,

so that we can do it right now.

There is a mystery that scientists

have found when they are uncovering

some of those ancient sites, the ancient civilizations that

are older than 5,000 years.

So remember, 5,000 years is when we're

taught civilization began.

I shared with you earlier in this program

the evidence that tells us there's

another cycle before that.

So I'm going to share with you some of the hallmarks of this

previous 5,000-year cycle, whether we're talking about

Gobekli Tepe, or whether we're talking about the Gulf

of Khambhat off the coast of India under 120 feet of water,

or whether we're talking about Catalhoyuk--

now, didn't I identify specifically,

did I mention it in Turkey along with Gobekli Tepe--

or whether we're talking about Caral, the oldest

technologically advanced civilization in all

the Americas that's now located in northern Peru,

there's a common theme through all of these.

And the theme is amazing.

Every one of these sites, there is no evidence of any weapons

that has been discovered in any of these ancient sites

or others within this 5,000-year window.

There is no evidence of mass war.

No evidence of mass graves.

No walls to protect the homes.

No walls protect the communities.

No evidence of mutilated bodies that you

would expect to see from armies facing off

against other armies and the result of ancient warfare.

It simply does not exist in this block of archaeological

discoveries, this 5,000-year block before our cycle began.

Why is that?

If we are to believe what the texts themselves tell us,

they say that before we began our cycle of war, darkness,

and violence 5,000 years ago that now has brought us

to the point of extremes where we are now,

the cycle before was a very different cycle.

It was a golden age of peace and cooperation.

And that the cycles alternate one

after another, war, peace, war and peace,

triggered by the climate change and the competition

for resources when that is needed.

What does that mean for us?

We've just crossed that 5,000-year mark, all right?

We are now into the next cycle.

The question is, will we perpetuate

the cycle of war and violence from our last 5,000 years?

Or will we choose a golden age of peace and cooperation

based on the deepest truth of nature,

and the harmony that we know is possible?

In our next episode, we're going to take

this idea of localized change and peace and harmony

to another level, to a global level.

And in doing so, we'll discover the revolutionary science

that tells us that our personal choices, what's

happening in here, is the key to global cooperation

and lasting peace in the world out there.

Thank you for joining me for this program.

And be sure to tune in for our next all-new episode

of "Missing Links, The Deep Truth of our Origin,

History, Destiny, and Fate."