BY URVIL JAMES VILLARUEL

Jan. 19, 2016, Toronto, ON - Question everything.

As a child, I was never quite fond of History. Every class I ever took and every textbook I ever read seemed to be exceptionally boring, as it was my pre-existing notion that: the world had everything all figured out, so what was the point in looking back, when forward held all the real uncertainties? Pyramids, pirates, dinosaurs, mass extinctions, renascence men (and women); it had all been discovered, written-down and thoroughly examined by the experts - hadn't it?

It wasn’t until my post-graduate studies that I discovered the true nature of our collective understanding as a human species: we have nothing figured out. We're all just grown-up kids, inheriting and discovering for ourselves our own meaning and purpose while on this little blue planet of ours. So, what was really going on? Where exactly did this all come from? Who are we? What are we? What is it that we think we are, but do not really know for sure?

After all, it's not what we think we know that makes life interesting, but what we don't that makes it so.

If the pyramids were our most ancient monolithic structures, then why have we come to recently discover various monolithic structures pre-dating even our oldest assumed structures by many thousands of years? How could such a sophisticated society, like the Egyptians, suddenly decide to write everything down - only some 4,000-odd years ago? If they were so sophisticated, why didn't they want to record anything before then? Did they really create the pyramids or did they just merely stumble upon them? If Plato had conjured up this idea of Atlantis, then how could he have gotten the date so accurate regarding its extinction, that it so closely coincides with our most recent catastrophic global climate shift - without any scientific instruments to aid him? What were and where are all of these ancient ruins from that are now buried at the bottom of the sea - and who lived there? What exactly did we lose at the burning of the library of Alexandria? How many times have asteroids hit our earth and reset our civilization? At what frequency do these massive climate shifts actually happen? If this is already what we know we don't know, then what greater things are out there that we haven't even become aware of not knowing yet?

Humankind, it seems, is truly a species with amnesia. We have woken up smack-dab in the middle of history, not quite sure of what's going on as we stare in awe, vigorously rubbing at our eyeballs, coming to focus on just how ridiculous this hurdling spaceship that we’re all on really is.

Should any of these questions interest you, as they did me, here (for all of you free-thinkers out there) is a great place to start: Graham Hancock. The real-life Indiana Jones, Graham is a historical investigator and writer who not only points out the inconsistencies of our own pre-recorded History, but endeavours to find the answers; always in pursuit of his quest for deeper, more meaningful answers to questions regarding our own human consciousness of understanding, surrounding: Who We Are, and Where Did We Come From?

You never quite know where it is that you’re going if you’ve never quite understood where it is that you’ve been. Liberate yourself and come to realize that no one really has it all figured out.