Rafiq's Blog

The Temporal Ego and the Timeless Divine: A Conversation with Rafiq

Terry Vacheresse and Rafiq

In April 2019 Terry Vacheresse of Portland, Oregon, a caterer and mother of five, was in the yoga and surfing town of Sayulita on the west coast of Mexico when she stumbled upon a reading and documentary film screening by writer and filmmaker Rafiq at a local café. Terry returned home from her trip with a copy of Rafiq’s political-spiritual memoir Days of Shock, Days of Wonder (2016) and later began a correspondence with him while reading his book Gaj: The End of Religion (2004). What follows is drawn from that conversation.

Terry: I am certain my trip to Sayulita was to meet you. When I got home last night there was a book in the mail: it was your Days of Shock, Days of Wonder. I had ordered a copy for my Mom, who is a very spiritual lady. She is part of a prayer circle and had been praying for me to be enlightened, and after meeting you, I was! When I was getting things to take home to my kids, I was told I had peaceful eyes. About thirty minutes later, I saw a man from Portland I know from a twelve-step meeting we both go to – we couldn’t believe we were both there – he told me I seemed at peace! Then that evening, when I was getting off the plane back home in Portland, the flight attendant told me I looked so peaceful. I felt happy with lots of love and gratitude.

Rafiq: That peace you carry is entirely your own to draw on always. It is your birthright, your divinity. But don’t forget that the ego is there too, needing to be nurtured and coaxed along, for we are forever two-part beings, the temporal ego and the timeless divine. I have spent too much of my life swinging between the two and living in extremes not to make note of this ultimate need for acceptance of the human condition and, as the Buddha said, the need to find the middle path between the two.

With any experience of enlightenment – by which I think you mean a knowledge (beyond faith) that there is a spiritual energy inside you and outside you with which you are connected – keep in mind that our paths are not linear but follow an ever-tightening spiral, one that brings us back around to the same opportunities for insight and growth again and again rather than carrying us in a straight line. All that to say, if the signs become fewer and farther between or if the high dissipates, know that you are still on the right path.

Terry: I am reading your book Gaj: The End of Religion and loving it. The first page says so much. I was wondering what your belief is today? Has your perspective changed?

Rafiq: As I discuss in Gaj, it is possible to move from belief into knowledge. Whereas Gaj is a book about a belief regarding the divine, my memoir, as you know, is about knowledge regarding the divine in everyday life gained through countless synchronous events and encounters, bolstered by signs and wonders.

So to answer your question, my perspective hasn’t changed. Rather, the belief regarding the divine that I describe in Gaj has only been confirmed by knowledge I have gained through experience. What has changed and continues to change is my understanding of how the ego and the divine relate to one another and interact within ourselves.

Terry: How do you define pantheism and monotheism?

Rafiq: Pantheism and monotheism both profess one God. The difference between them lies in where this God is said to be located. The one God of monotheism is said to reside outside of creation and thus outside of us, whereas the one God of pantheism is said to reside in all things; it is energy itself, which manifests consciousness and whose highest expression is love.

Pantheism should not be confused with polytheism, which professes many gods, although the faces of these many gods may really just be stand-ins for one pantheistic God, as they are in Hinduism, where this one God within all the others and within all things is called Brahman.

So clearly, I reject the monotheistic idea and embrace the pantheistic idea. It is ultimately a mistake to place Jesus between us and the divine as a conduit, or at least it is a mistake if that doesn’t ultimately lead a person to move beyond needing the conduit in order to identify the holy spirit within, as I think Jesus wanted us to do.

Terry: Do you believe we see ourselves in others eyes?

Rafiq: I know that the divine spark resides in all of us and that it is possible to see that part of ourselves looking out at us from the eyes of others.

Terry: Beautiful, very nicely put, thank you! I see you as a prophet, personal conduit, do you believe that to be true of yourself?

Rafiq: As I write in my books, the age of the prophets is behind us. Today, we can all be prophets. We can all inspire each other. And my ideas are not new. I am but one of many across time who have said the same things. I’m just trying to say them in a way that makes sense to the modern ear.

Terry: Reading your book, I feel like I miss you.

Rafiq: Perhaps you miss the part of yourself that you beheld in me. It is hard not to hold tight to externalizations of the divine because they can seem so much more tangible than our own inner sense of the divine. Of course, we need both – the internal and the external – but we have to be careful not to long for what we already have.

Terry: “Now, I have no choice but to see with your eyes, so I am not alone, so you are not alone” – Yannis Ritsos

Rafiq: I like the reciprocity expressed in these words. As a writer, the most I can hope to do is give others moments when they feel less alone in their experience, and when readers feel that way, I too feel less alone in my experience.

Terry: What makes our soul different from our spirit? And what is the difference between knowledge and wisdom?

Rafiq: I think that “souls” are individual sites of the one energy that is the divine, whereas “spirit” is another word for that one energy. Souls are made of spirit. As souls, we live and express spirit. But we also live and express ego. Within ourselves, there is a constant pull between the ego and the spirit. All of a soul’s experiences across all of a person’s lifetimes are made possible by this coexistence and tension between the divine spirit and the human ego within each of us.

Knowledge is about facts, whereas wisdom is about knowing how to act on those facts. A knowledgeable person might know that quantum entanglement is a real phenomenon that shows the interconnection of all matter/energy in the universe, but a wise person will act on this knowledge in such a way that his or her behavior is not divisive or competitive but is consistent with, or in harmony with, this holistic aspect of reality.

Terry: I was born and raised Catholic, but as an adult I don’t practise Catholicism. My spirituality has been shaped by a twelve-step program and yoga. That is where I found my tribe. I have experienced miracles in my life, and as I continue to pay attention, more is revealed to me. I have heard many different ideas about who God is, and to many there is no God. Believing in a Higher Power, of one’s own understanding, is what works for most.

Rafiq: The shift from monotheism to pantheism is a paradigm shift that requires many subtle adjustments in our thinking and language. For example, I would say "inner power" (pantheism) rather than "higher power" (monotheism).

At the same time, the problem with thinking only of an inner power is that we must also look outward and recognize the divine in nature and in each other. We are all concentrations and expressions of energy in a single field of energy that connects us all and that can be observed both inside and outside of ourselves. That is where the metaphor of the matrix and the Tao comes in. All of life is inspirited, or animated by spirit energy.

Terry: So you believe in the idea of Indra’s net? The web? The matrix? Kismet? The Tao or “the way things are”?

Rafiq: I do very much understand the energy of the universe to be everywhere at once and yet singular, like a matrix or the animating spirit of the Tao. The key to spirituality is to harmonize our being with the “ways” of this energy – to get into its all-enveloping current – so that we can experience it fully, its highest expression being love for ourselves and for all others.

Terry: I have heard a few ideas about what happens to us when we die. What do you believe happens after death?

Rafiq: I believe that we are reincarnated again and again as we move ever further toward full consciousness, revisiting the same issues and themes as we travel along an ever-tightening spiral toward the ultimate point. The journey is not a straight line but a spiral because, as with all of nature, it is cyclic, with many births and deaths. As we revisit the same issues and themes, we are better able to navigate them, so instead of blaming ourselves for arriving back at the same place, we can congratulate ourselves for being ready to meet those moments with newly acquired wisdom.

I recommend reading Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls (1994), which documents case studies by a hypnotherapist who regresses patients back to the time between their past lives and is startled when, without any prompting from him, they all describe the same things.

Terry: I like the Leonard Cohen quotes throughout Days of Shock, Days of Wonder. I too am a big Cohen fan. Lines like “dance me to the end of love” and “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” have appeared throughout my life many times. The cracks in my heart are where the light shines brightest.

Rafiq: I love the line “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” but note how it is a monotheistic idea. If God is the light, then God is outside of us and enters through our cracks, or our wounds. I prefer Cohen’s line “in every atom broken is the name,” which locates God deep inside us and in all things, which is the pantheistic idea of God.

Terry: I carry a small book with me, Edgar Cayce’s Think on These Things (1981), and I open it to a random page each day and read a paragraph. What do you think of this quotation?

“Happiness is love of something outside of self! It may never be obtained, may never be known by loving only things within self or self’s own domain!”

Rafiq: I think “self’s own domain” here means the ego. Most Western thinkers conceive of the inner self in terms only of the ego. As this writer suggests, going outside of oneself and connecting with something larger than the self is the essence of a spiritual experience. But the divine, and thus a connection to something larger than the self, can also be found inwardly. The “self’s own domain” is not just the temporal ego but also the timeless mind of God.

Terry: My faith in God has been questioned a few times in my adult life. My mom has been in a close platonic relationship with a now retired Roman Catholic priest for the past thirty years. They have retired together, with separate sleeping rooms, but share a house. He has been a big part of our lives, but my views on the Catholic religion are a bit askew. I lost a son at birth, and I found myself very angry at God and struggled with depression for quite some time! I guess my faith has been challenged, but I have always believed in a God! I have spent the past twelve years being a single mom, and there’ve definitely been some very hard times but also some very rewarding times! I have become stronger and more independent than I thought possible! My faith has been renewed in times of deep darkness and in times of simply letting go! Today I believe not only in God but also in myself, and I have found that I am so much more capable than I ever knew. Do you ever question your faith? Do you believe in miracles?

Rafiq: I am sorry to hear about the son you lost. It is normal that we have the impulse to cry out against God when all goes wrong because our relationship to each other as separate individuals prompts us to regard God as a separate individual too. As we shift into seeing ourselves as expressions of God and therefore as not separate from each other either, we also shift into regarding ourselves as inseparable, even indistinguishable, from God. We are God self-experiencing.

But if that is the case, how should we respond to personal tragedy and the pain it brings? How can we make sense of it within the context of an idea of God? The most often heard response is that “everything happens for a reason.” We are told that since we simply can’t see the big picture, we shouldn’t look for this reason but should just trust that there is one, as if to say that the bad thing was meant to happen and is therefore good after all. I’m not sure about that. I think that a lot of things are obviously out of balance in our world, creating outcomes that are clearly bad and that could be avoided if we changed our ways.

I think the truth instead is that whatever happens in our lives, good or bad, can be a catalyst for growth. We have an active part in choosing how to make use of pain. This understanding allows for enough detachment to see that ultimately both the good and the bad are pure context for relational experience, which is the only kind of experience by which a soul, and thus God, can evolve.

You asked, Do you ever question your faith?

I went through a crisis of faith in my late teens, during which I rejected religion and God as the same thing and went on to embrace the atheistic, existentialist ideas I encountered at university. Of course, it was the monotheistic God that I rejected, not understanding that another idea of God was operative in all religions, an idea ignored by Friedrich Nietzsche and all of those after him who declared God dead, namely the pantheistic God that is the energy animating all of life, including us. One big difference between the monotheistic God and the pantheistic God is that whereas the former is a matter of faith, being something outside of ourselves, the latter is a matter of lived experience, being something that resides within. I do not need to have faith in this God but need only attempt to align myself with the current of this God and observe the outcomes.

You asked, Do you believe in miracles?

I have experienced many things that might be described as miracles because of the sheer improbability of the synchronicity involved. I have also spoken at length with Indigenous elder Four Arrows, author of Point of Departure: Returning to Our More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival (2016), about experiences that most people would describe as miracles. However, none of these “miracles” defy the laws of physics. They don’t require an external God to intervene in normal affairs by altering the rules and fabric of reality. They do not require our belief but rather our broader acceptance of what goes on at the trance level of the subconscious, at the subatomic level, and within the unseen inspirited dimensions of reality. So, no, I don’t believe in miracles; rather, I experience them when I manage to align myself with the current of God, which flows through all things.

Terry: What do you think of this Cayce quotation?

“For the entity, as each soul, is a portion of the whole. Thus, though a soul may be as but a speck upon the earth’s environs, and the earth in turn much less than a mote in the universe, if the spirit of man is so attuned to the Infinite, the music of harmony becomes as the divine love.”

Rafiq: The idea that each soul is a “portion of the whole” is spot on. About this idea of the soul, I should probably add that even though I consider us to be God self-experiencing, there is a sense it which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That greater-ness is God. As ego-bound souls, we may be God self-experiencing, but we are not the greater-ness that is God.

Terry: How is quantum physics compatible with God? Where do Adam and Eve come from?

Rafiq: God is mind/energy, which can vibrate at a slow enough frequency that it can become matter. Quantum physics is the interface between energy and matter, the dimension at which we can see pure energy coalescing into matter. Spinoza said, where there is matter, there is mind. Einstein said, where there is matter, there is energy. God is mind-energy-matter. God is all.

The story of Adam and Even perfectly replicates the Big Bang theory because both in the Garden of Eden and before the Big Bang, we were united with God, whereas both after Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden and after the Big Bang, we were separated from God in the sense that the one energy that is the universe had divided itself into the many, creating the illusion of separation and thus making relational experience and expressions of love possible. With this illusion of separation comes the hardship of the human condition because alongside love, expressions of hate also become possible.

If you are asking if God created Adam and Eve, the answer is, of course, yes, since all is God. But the real question seems to be, “Where did God come from?” And the answer simply must be that God is that which is and has always been. As God says in the Old Testament, “I am that I am.”

Terry: “God is that which is and has always been.” That is the perfect answer, what I have been looking for, what I have always believed to be true. Thank you!

Rafiq: Funny how the truths we “find” turn out to be our own, which always reminds me of the Taoist parable about the guy wandering through the forest after dark with a burning lamp in one hand and a chicken in the other as he looks for a fire to cook his dinner. He already has the fire, it’s in the lamp, but he doesn’t realize it.

Terry: I understand to some point we have free will, how does that coincide with our destiny, or fate?

Rafiq: The concepts of free will and fate can seem contradictory. If our fate, or final destination (or perhaps many pivotal destinations), is carved in stone, then we are free to choose the path to that fate but we are not free to choose whether or not that fate will come to pass. If we do indeed have a fate, we can be said to have true and complete free will only if we choose that fate ourselves, and we can choose that fate ourselves only if we participate in the choosing of our life’s destination prior to our birth, suggesting reincarnation. That’s a lot of ifs, so I’m just speculating here, not making any claims about whether or not we have a fate.

Terry: I work at the Arlington Club, a private business club downtown. I do catering for breakfast and lunch meetings. I have been here for twenty-five years. I have five separate groups who do Bible studies once a week. They leave me their reading materials, and I have been given many books on different religious styles and ideas. They all have prayed for me and my kids at different times throughout the years. Luis Palau is a Christian evangelist I have known for twenty years, and he has given me the books he has written on faith and religion. Although I don’t know if I have the same belief system, I do stay open to new information. I have learned quite a bit by being exposed to the beliefs of others. My youngest daughter is an atheist and only believes in an energy. Do you believe in the power of prayer?

Rafiq: As I discuss in Gaj, we possess the power of creative thought, or manifestation. In this sense, all thought is prayerful. It is our means of interfacing with the mind within the energy of creation. That is why we must be careful with our thoughts and words. They carry there own vibrations and can be either negatively or positively creative. I don’t believe that we pray to an external God who may choose to answer our prayers or not. Prayers are effective, or “answered,” to the extent that what we seek aligns with “the way things are,” or the Tao.

Terry: Ever since our paths crossed, I have started to journal again, and I find myself writing about events I had forgotten about. So much keeps coming up. Three examples came to mind this morning that bring up questions about religion for me.

One of my best friends is a gay man who is sixty years old and has two sons and three grandchildren. He grew up in Ohio, a very conservative state, and married the mother of his children, but he was very unhappy and came out at age thirty-three, having known he was gay since he was twelve. His revelation was not accepted by his family. He was rejected by his mother and his church, and his wife had him undergo therapy so that he would no longer be gay. He became an addict late in life as he tried to find himself. Today he is a very well-balanced person and an amazing grandfather whose sons love him very much. How can a religion turn its back on a creation of God and judge him for the way he was born?

I am friends with a man who was a Catholic deacon. He was married for forty years and has four sons and many grandchildren. He is a recovering alcoholic who was a closet drinker for decades. When his wife confronted him, he went to the church with her and, at her request, confronted his alcoholism. His church demoted him, sent him to treatment, and asked him to take a leave, and his wife divorced him. He has never gone back to his church. How can anybody be judged in this way by an organized religious community, especially someone who has given himself to that community?

My uncle Jerry, my mom’s youngest brother, served as an alter boy from the age of twelve until he was fifteen. He was sexually abused by the priest. My grandparents, who were very devoted to the Catholic Church, refused to believe their son and stayed with the church. It is still looked at as a family secret.

I guess I question how there can be so much judgment in religion. We are all children of God, a reflection of each other, yet some are not accepted but instead are shamed for who they are. Why?

Rafiq: These are powerful anecdotes that perfectly illustrate the problem with the practice of much monotheism: it imagines that it can exclude some people from participation in God, and thus it is not ultimately loving. Religion must bring us to love for all in all, or it has failed. It must also bring us to the realization that we do not need religion in order to access God and must thereby set us free, or it has failed.

Terry: Here’s one more Cayce quotation:

“Only music may span that space between the finite and the infinite ... Music may be the means of arousing and awakening the best of hope, the best of desire, the best in the heart and soul of those who will and do listen.”

Rafiq: I feel that way about all art: that it is a bridge between the finite and the infinite, but that is especially true of music, which is closest to the vibrational stuff of life. In Indigenous cultures, making art is understood as an interaction with the inspirited realm, or the infinite, and since everybody can access this realm, everybody can make art, which we dismiss as handicrafts because in Western ego-centred thinking, the artist is considered to be an exceptionally talented individual rather than a humble conduit for expression of the infinite, or God.

Terry: How long did it take you to write Gaj? What inspired you to study theology?

Rafiq: I wrote Gaj over a period of four months in the summer and fall of 2004 to counter the idea that God or Allah could take sides in the “war on terror.”

The Western idea of God as an individual separate from us, and thus from our “enemies,” is destructive to our social and planetary well-being. It can also be destructive to our individual well-being, which it was in my case. For that reason, I began researching theology in my late teens in search of alternatives to the Christian God.

Terry: I just finished Gaj! Wow! Astounding. The more I read, the more I could get into it, and the easier it was to absorb. Very well written, I am amazed at your knowledge and how well you interpret it. Thank you.

Rafiq: Thanks for being such an enthusiastic reader. I’m glad my little book has resonated with you. I hope the short piece at the very end, “Gaj: In the Beginning,” gives you an idea of God’s frame of mind and a real sense of how we are both the playwright and the player in this drama called life.

Indigenous Worldview and the Art of Transformation

Book review / Four Arrows, Point of Departure: Returning to Our More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2016).

We all have a worldview, an idea about the nature of reality. We may not be conscious of it, but we do. It shapes our thinking and our actions. Likewise, the worldview that is dominant at any point in history shapes our societies. If we wish to address the imbalances in ourselves and in our societies, we need to understand that these imbalances are the product of our worldview. Moreover, we need to recognize that the worldview that created the problems faced by the world cannot be used to fix them. For real solutions, we must look to our original worldview – the one that allowed us to live in relative harmony with our planet and with one another for most of human history.

This is the argument of Indigenous elder and scholar Four Arrows in Point of Departure: Returning to Our More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival. He estimates that between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, we began to depart from “a moral order that bound all life together.” This moral order was a product of Indigenous worldview. Since that time, we have evolved an anthropocentric moral order that separates life based on hierarchy. This moral order is a product of Western worldview. Four Arrows contends that all religious, cultural, and moral systems are not worldviews unto themselves but are expressions of one or the other of these two worldviews.

Before the point of departure, Indigenous worldview regarded what we might call “God” as inseparable from humans, non-humans, and the rest of Nature. In this sense, all of life was seen to be inspirited. After the point of departure, which was perhaps prompted by the advent of agricultural surpluses and the resulting sense that we had mastered Nature, Western worldview came to regard “God” as separate from creation. This distinction between the interconnectedness of all and the separation of all explains the differences between Indigenous worldview and Western worldview.

Because Indigenous thinking has been repressed and Western thinking has become dominant, the two worldviews are no longer in balance. The negative outcomes of this imbalance range from a likely “sixth mass extinction” to “religious dogma, absolute rule, class hierarchy, military expansion, slavery, land ownership, economic debt, domination of women, greed, jealousy, a centralized system of government (the state), and large-scale war.” Four Arrows explains that balance can be restored only by means of Indigenous ways: “Recognizing and implementing the ancient pre-departure beliefs will enable us to understand that we are truly connected, and allow us to realize peace, respect, and sustainability again for the benefit of all human and non-human beings. It would be a mind shift from mutually assured destruction to mutually assured survival.”

More than a philosophical treatise, Point of Departure is a handbook on Indigenous practice. Coupling Western scientific investigation with Indigenous self-authored experience, Four Arrows not only offers evidence of the many phenomena attributed to Indigenous practice but also equips readers to adopt Indigenous methods themselves. He explains, “Theory is combined with recommendations for learning and praxis, and exercises are suggested for actualizing personal and, ultimately, global transformation.”

To this end, Point of Departure focuses on five aspects of Indigenous practice that can help to correct the imbalances of our Western thinking: trance-based learning, courage and fearlessness, community-oriented self-authorship, sacred communication, and the idea of Nature as All. To emphasize the holistic interdependence of these five aspects, Four Arrows places trance at the center of a figurative Medicine Wheel whose four cardinal directions are fear, authority, words, and Nature. In this way, the reader is reminded that the outcome of all trance-based learning is determined by one’s orientation to each of these four other aspects of Indigenous practice.

Trance refers to states of consciousness at the lower alpha and theta brainwave frequencies. Alpha is a state of light trance, and theta is a state of deep trance. Unlike the higher beta brainwave frequency of waking consciousness, trance frequencies give one access to “wisdom that is independent from reason and ego.” Four Arrows explains that this wisdom arises from “a vital energy within us and in the world, the source of which is creation itself.” Because Western worldview largely ignores this energetic realm in favor of the material realm, it denies that “all experience happens in two worlds at the same time.” Thus it “prevents us from fully learning.” Achieved through self-hypnosis and meditation, trance states can help us to undo negative subconscious programming by instilling new thinking, which in turn can lead to new behaviors. Point of Departure is full of firsthand accounts of how this process works, as well as simple techniques that anyone can use for the betterment of all.

Fear relates directly to trance because in a state of heightened fear, we can enter a trance state and become unknowingly susceptible to subconscious programming by others. Owing to its grounding in trace-based learning, Indigenous worldview protects one from such external manipulation by orienting one toward internal energetic wisdom. It recognizes that one’s sense of separation from the inspirited realm is the source of fear and that courage is thus derived from realization of one’s interconnectedness with all. This kind of courage is not rooted in dogmatic certainty about reality but in acceptance of the unknown. The inspirited realm is regarded as the “Great Mysterious” – “an unexplainable power that manifests through countless beings, spirits, and matter.” When such courage accompanies our actions, we can become fearless enough to be selfless on behalf of others. Generosity is the highest expression of courage. Point of Departure offers metacognitive strategies for facing our fears so that we are not weakened by them but are able to use them to achieve personal transformation and to practice virtues.

Authority relates directly to trance because trance-based learning fosters internal authority and self-authorship. This type of authority frees one from dependence on external authority, protecting one from potential misdirection. It also emphasizes that “the highest authority for all decisions comes from one’s personal, honest reflection on lived experience with the understanding that everything is related.” Thus Indigenous self-authority is rooted in firsthand knowledge but is oriented toward the community and the greater good rather than toward ego fulfillment. This focus on the community ensures a balance between the individual and the collective – in contrast to Western worldview’s emphasis on obedience to external authority for the good of a few. Within Indigenous societies, this balance is further reflected in the fact that authority is nonanthropocentric, nonhierarchical, and noncentralized. Point of Departure provides concrete ways to determine the sources of authority that guide our decisions and actions so that we might embody our full potential as individuals on behalf of the human community.

Words relate directly to trance because the language that we use in self-hypnosis to instill subconscious ideas has a critical impact on the effectiveness of this practice. For example, negative words like not or won’t should be avoided because they “do not form images in the mind.” In contrast, positive phrasing that uses the present progressive verb tense results in active images that facilitate creative visualization and orient one toward change. This orientation is at the heart of Indigenous worldview and is evident in Indigenous languages themselves, which “emphasize process, subjectivity, transformation, and living connections with a more verb-oriented structure.” In contrast, “Indo-European languages emphasize categories, objectivity, permanence, and a separation from Nature with a more noun-oriented syntax.” The Indigenous orientation toward transformation is spiritual, as reflected in the fact that “the concept of god is a verb in most Indigenous languages. For example, in Lakota, Wakan Tanka (god) is literally the ‘great mysteriousing.’” Point of Departure shows us how to balance the left-brain language favored by Western worldview by using Indigenous right-brain language to “more authentically describe reality, enhance relational ethics, reduce deception, and manage unconscious thoughts and behaviors.”

Nature relates directly to trance because the “vital energy” that we access while in a trance state is the same energy that animates the world. Just as we can commune with this energy through self-hypnosis and meditation, we can commune with this energy when we are immersed in Nature and mindful of the wisdom that Nature imparts. Indigenous worldview regards Nature as the ultimate teacher and source of experiential learning. Vision quests, for example, are done while one is alone in Nature. And animals can model right behavior, demonstrate the interconnectedness of all, and symbolize spiritual lessons particular to one’s own circumstances. In contrast, Western worldview fosters a separation from Nature that deprives us of this kind of knowledge. Moreover, its hierarchical “discrimination against Nature” is “the foundation for human discrimination against other humans.” Without a spiritual connection with Nature, we have lost our spiritual connection with one another. For the good of our human relations and the salvation of our ecosystems, Point of Departure implores you to “be courageous in using what you learn from Nature in word and deed to bring balance back into the world.”

The chapters on each direction of Four Arrows’ Medicine Wheel employ a range of Western scholarship and Indigenous experiential knowledge to illustrate the differences between Indigenous worldview and Western worldview. The chapter on trance-based learning includes a complement to the ideas of Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements. The chapter on courage and fearlessness includes an overview of Western philosophy’s idea of courage alongside an account of how both Mohandas Gandhi and Huston Smith led lives that demonstrated Indigenous transformative learning. The chapter on community-oriented self-authorship includes a discussion of MRI studies confirming that whole-brain functioning is enhanced when Indigenous right-brain orientations toward fear are combined with Western left-brain knowledge. The chapter on sacred communication includes a comparison of the linguistic theories of Benjamin Lee Whorf and Noam Chomsky. The chapter on Nature as All includes an assessment of the life of Ohiyesa (aka Charles A. Eastman), a Santee Dakota who graduated from Boston University School of Medicine in 1890 and straddled the Indigenous and Western worlds.

Point of Departure does not claim that the holistic orientation of Indigenous worldview is unique to Indigenous peoples or that the individualistic orientation of Western worldview is unique to Western peoples. Rather, the holistic and the individualistic orientations are two halves of a single whole. Each is one half of the human mind. Thus each is a product of human experience. What Indigenous worldview shows is that Indigenous peoples actively worked to maintain a balance between the two by coupling their left-brain material experience with their right-brain spiritual experience. They were well aware of the risks of moving too far in one direction or the other. Four Arrows writes, “The ancient stories helped to create cultures that held on to the balance because of what they taught.”

Today, the excesses of Western worldview have produced forces that are intentionally, systematically, and maliciously working against our collective best interests. But the solution does not lie in fighting the left-brain system with left-brain approaches. The worldview that created our problems cannot be used to fix them. Rather, the solution lies in adopting right-brain practices that can complement our Western worldview. The battle is a spiritual one, and we must become Indigenous warriors. Four Arrows writes, “If the reader uses this unique Medicine Wheel and its interactions to consider daily choices, feelings, problems and deep-seated beliefs, my vision tells me we have a chance to help restore the world for the seventh generation.”

Point of Departure is a unique and profound book. It offers a lucid presentation of ideas that are often rendered in the overly abstract language of metaphysics. This is a huge achievement! More than that, it presents simple techniques for putting Indigenous worldview into practice. Perhaps most remarkable is its appendix, where Four Arrows tells two personal stories that illustrate the effectiveness of Indigenous methods – stories whose outcomes are “miracles” when seen through Western worldview but are fully understandable when seen through Indigenous worldview. Anyone can achieve similar outcomes using trance-based learning. It’s a matter of remembering that “fear offers an opportunity to practice a virtue; authority comes only from honest reflection on lived experience with the realization that everything is related; words and other forms of communication are understood as sacred vibrations; and Nature is the ultimate teacher.”

Point of Departure: Returning to Our More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival is available at https://www.amazon.com/Point-Departur....

Four Arrows teaches in the School of Educational Leadership for Change at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. Among his twenty-one books are Teaching Truly: A Curriculum to Indigenize Mainstream Education (2013), The Authentic Dissertation: Alternative Ways of Knowing, Research and Representation (2008), and Primal Awareness: A True Story of Survival, Transformation and Awakening with the Raramuri Shamans of Mexico (1997).

Links to Recent Writing

Here are links to some recent writing,
as well as links to my books
in case you want to recommend them to anyone.

At the end are links to two books
I want to recommend to you.

Recent Writing

1) “Indigenous Wisdom Explains Hypnosis of the 9/11 Lie,” http://truthjihad.blogspot.com/2016/0....

This is a guest blog post to mark the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11. It includes an excerpt of my memoir, Days of Shock, Days of Wonder, where I recount what I learned from Indigenous scholar and elder Four Arrows about fear, trance, and mass hypnosis.

2) “Hitler’s Blue Eyes and the End of Truth,” http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/09/....

I always thought Hitler had brown eyes. What do you remember?

3) “Rafiq on ‘Hitler’s Blue Eyes and the End of Truth,’” http://noliesradio.org/archives/119602.

When the article about Hitler’s blue eyes got over 10,000 reads in one day, Dr. Kevin Barrett had me on his radio show to talk about the strange appearance of entangled timelines and whether it is a ruse or actual.

4) Orlando False Flag: The Clash of Histories, https://www.amazon.com/Orlando-False-....

This new book edited by Dr. Kevin Barrett includes two essays of mine.

5) “The Clash of Histories,” http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/06/....

This is a book review of Dr. Kevin Barrett’s edited book Another French False Flag? Bloody Tracks from Paris to San Bernardino. This review was republished in Orlando False Flag: The Clash of Histories.

6) “Pacifism and Fascism after 9/11,”
http://pacifism21.org/pacifism-and-fa...#

This is an invited article published on the website of one of my co-panelists at the May 2016 Left Forum in New York City.

My Books

1) Gaj: The End of Religion (2004), https://www.amazon.com/GAJ-The-End-of....

You can listen to an interview with me about this book at http://noliesradio.org/archives/115279.

2) Days of Shock, Days of Wonder: The 9/11 Age, the Ways of the Mystics, and One Man’s Escape from Babylon in the Belly of a Whale (2016), https://www.amazon.com/Days-Shock-Won....

Sixteen 5-star Amazon reviews and counting! You can listen to an interview with me about this book at http://noliesradio.org/archives/109522.

And you can read four excerpts at https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog....

Recommended Books

1) David Ray Griffin, God Exists but Gawd Does Not, https://www.amazon.com/God-Exists-But....

Griffin is a renowned religious studies scholar and 9/11 truth scholar. He is a likeminded colleague and one of the back cover endorses of my memoir.

2) Four Arrows, Point of Departure: Returning to Our More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival, https://www.amazon.com/Point-Departur....

Four Arrows is a renowned Indigenous studies scholar and 9/11 truth scholar. I have written a review of this book that is soon to be published. I’ll keep you posted.

The Clash of Histories

Book review / Kevin Barrett, ed., Another French False Flag? Bloody Tracks from Paris to San Bernardino (Lone Rock, WI: Sifting and Winnowing Books, 2016).

Originally published by Veterans Today at http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/06/...

Reading Kevin Barrett’s edited collection of essays on false flag history in the twenty-first century is a dissonant experience. On the one hand, the daily media tell us stories about a “war on terror” started by crazed Muslims on 9/11. This war is said to be waged in the present by al-Qaeda’s offspring, called ISIS, in the form of mass murders like the Paris Attacks of 2015. On the other hand, scholars like Barrett and most of the twenty-five thinkers represented in Another French False Flag? tell us stories about a “war on terror” fabricated by the CIA and Mossad on 9/11. This war is said to be promoted in the present by Western governments in the form of ongoing attacks against their own people. Clearly, there is a clash of histories going on. The outcome of this clash could well determine whether the coming century will be dominated by war.

That is why Another French False Flag? is such an important book. Its wide-ranging collection of essays provides a view of our current history that shatters the official government and media story about the “terrorist attacks” that have befallen the West. Essays like these ones aren’t usually written until long after the events have passed, when it’s too late to change history. Indeed, the essays in this collection read like the core of a history curriculum fifty years in the future. With the publication of this book, we see that history has caught up with itself. Today, the tricks of those who want to steer history have been used too many times to go unnoticed.

As Barry Kissin points out in his chapter on the urgency of exposing false flag terror if we are to secure peace, the CIA’s history of using this tactic to overturn governments has long been declassified. As an example, he cites the CIA-led coup that overthrew democratically elected Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. Kissin writes, “The record now affords us a comprehensive view of the makings of what is destroying today’s world.” Similarly, Gearóid O Colmáin traces the use of false flag terrorism by deep state actors from Latin America in the 1980s to present-day Europe and Syria. Notably, the agents who carry out such false flag terror attacks are likened to Nazi “brown shirts” in Colmáin’s chapter. All the way back to Hitler’s Germany, we see that terror by governments against their own people is not a new phenomenon.

Most striking about this kind of terror is that it targets innocent civilians instead of targeting the political enemies of those who are said to be the terrorists. This tactic of terrorizing the populace has long been used by fascists to further anti-democratic agendas. When terrorism of this kind is blamed on others, we can be sure that we are observing a false flag event. More than that, from 9/11 to Paris, Another French False Flag? identifies the telltale signs of modern-day false flag terror.

Among these common traits is the fact that there is never an investigation before blame is assigned. As Ole Dammegard describes in his chapter, the official story of the Paris Attacks was posted on Wikipedia less than two hours after the attacks had begun, complete with President François Hollande’s comment to the nation that France should “close the border” to keep out murderous Muslims. Few noticed that the president did not actually make this comment until fifty-two minutes after Wikipedia reported it.

Additional recurring features of false flag attacks are discussed in the chapters by Paul Craig Roberts and Nick Kollerstrom, among others. These include the fact that terror drills replicating the specifics of the attack are always running at the same time. In the case of the Paris Attacks, the number of dead in the terror drill just happened to be identical to the number of dead reported after the live attack. Further, the terrorists who are blamed always leave behind their ID, either a passport or a driver’s license. And, most convenient, some kind of technical failure, like failed subway cameras, usually aids the terrorists. Roberts reports that during the Paris Attacks, “the French police were blinded by a sophisticated cyber attack on their mobile data tracking system.”

What perhaps most reveals the involvement of governments in these attacks is their prior “surveillance” of the Muslims who end up being blamed. Although said to be under investigation before the attacks, these people are permitted to cross borders unimpeded, establishing a pattern of suspicious behavior that is later used against them. Warnings about these behaviors are ignored, and the terrorists are often hunted down and killed afterward, lest they confess that they are covert federal assets who are being used or framed by their employer. Roberts states, “By my last count, the FBI on 150 occasions has successfully deceived people into participating in FBI orchestrated ‘terror plots.’”

False flag attacks are psychological operations intended to terrorize. In Hitler’s time, those who carried out the terrorist killing of innocent civilians face to face were members of “death squads.” Today, they are mercenaries hired by “private security” firms. In both Paris and San Bernardino, these mercenaries turned up in eyewitness accounts. Contrary to the official story about Arab Muslim terrorists, witnesses to both events reported that the shooters were “white men in black military attire.” In documenting the similarities between such attacks, Another French False Flag? provides us with a handbook by which to identify false flags and thereby free ourselves from psychological manipulation by the agents of fascism.

In fact, the Orlando attack of 2016 exhibits many of the characteristics of state terror identified by the writers of Another French False Flag? A drill similar to the attack, with a similar number of casualties, was held in Orlando three months beforehand. And the Muslim man blamed for the attack had been under investigation by the FBI in prior years, yet he was never questioned about a Florida gun shop’s report to the FBI that he had recently attempted to purchase body armor and bulk ammunition. Instead, he was allowed to proceed with his preparations, and on the night of the attack the SWAT team waited outside for three hours while he continued his rampage.

In addition, eyewitness accounts of the Orlando attack contradict the official story about a lone Muslim gunman who hated gays. One survivor reported that a man inside the club was blocking a side exit and preventing people from escaping. Another survivor said that there were two additional shooters who went free. Were these shooters again “private security” mercenaries? In a revealing coincidence, the attacker was himself employed by one such security firm, called G4S. So the answer is likely yes, making him a mercenary and a pretend homophobic jihadi rolled into one.

More than providing us with a blueprint for modern-day false flag terrorism, Barrett and his colleagues situate our governments’ use of such terror in the unfolding of history, painting a clear picture of why this fascist campaign is being waged now and who benefits from the march toward a third world war. Notably, the chapter by Anthony Hall discusses NATO’s use of terror against civilians in Europe during the Cold War as a means to falsely discredit left politics, which is the method now being employed by NATO to discredit Muslims. He explains that “the same national security establishment created to fight communism was re-deployed in a very strange operation involving both the creation of, and opposition to, Islamic terrorism.” Only in understanding the agenda of the real terrorists – the deep state elites – can we intelligently confront their push to war.

At the beginning of Another French False Flag? Barrett writes, “based on what we know of other events such as 9/11, I think it’s fair to assume these new events are probably false flags, and put the burden of proof on the authorities and mainstream media to prove they aren’t.” I agree. But many readers may be shocked to learn of the murderous tactics used by our governments to shape public opinion and thereby the course of history. Why should this evil shock us? Why do many of us refuse to believe the evidence of this truth? Why do some of us become angry when confronted with a history that clashes with the official one?

Roberts offers this answer: “Some people are so naive and stupid as to think that no government would kill its own citizens. But governments do so all the time … Americans are not capable of believing truth. They have been brainwashed that truth is ‘conspiracy theory.’ A population this stupid has no future.” Roberts is only half-right. Being “naive and stupid” has little to do with it. He is closer to the truth when he concedes that we have been “brainwashed.” But even that isn’t accurate. Rather, events like 9/11 can be said to hypnotize us. When we are in a state of heightened fear, our subconscious is susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. Things implanted subconsciously bypass rational scrutiny and become difficult to dislodge.

Mujahid Kamran hints at this phenomenon in his chapter when he writes, “The people, who are in a state of shock, and are therefore in a highly suggestible state, are deeply influenced by the media.” Readers would do well to remember this fact when exploring the alternate twenty-first-century history presented in Another French False Flag? If the clash of histories is going to be won by the side of truth, it will require a mass awakening of Western citizens. And that isn’t going to happen unless we understand not only the tactics of the elite but also the psychological effects of those tactics, including the hypnotic effect of lies told to the traumatized. We don’t need to blame ourselves for being susceptible to this effect. We only need to recognize that it has prevented us from knowing the truth. Until now.

In short, Another French False Flag? is a book by the fearless for the fearless. It goes a long way toward countering the onslaught of war propaganda that passes for news today. In doing so, it stands as a great resource in the quest for global peace.

Indigenous Wisdom Explains Hypnosis of the 9/11 Lie

What follows is an excerpt from my new book, Days of Shock, Days of Wonder: The 9/11 Age, the Ways of the Mystics, and One Man’s Escape from Babylon in the Belly of a Whale, a memoir about my confrontation with the spiritual and cognitive dissonance of our times.

This new book is structured around my reaction to the truth about the attack of 11 September 2001 on the United Sates. It narrates the story of my passage from denial about this truth to discovery of its particulars to disillusionment with our system’s ongoing inability to bring this truth to light. Without truth, there can be no justice for the murdered, no end to the “war on terror,” and no repeal of the fascist laws enforced in “Babylon” since 9/11.

In my years of truth activism, I have emphasized that we need a new 9/11 investigation because we know neither who did the attack nor how. We don’t know who because the FBI has stated that there is no evidence against Osama bin Laden, and we don’t know how the Twin Towers were so completely destroyed because, as the scientists working for the 9/11 Commission have admitted, their investigation stopped at the point where each tower “was poised for collapse.”

In making the case that a new 9/11 investigation is necessary, there is no need for people to get bogged down in the science of how the towers collapsed or in a debate over the specifics of how 9/11 might have been pulled off. It is enough to explain to others that the story about bin Laden and the hijackers came from the government of George W. Bush. Not from the investigators and the scientists.

Yet time and again, my attempts to share this fact about 9/11 have been met with hostility, particularly in street actions intended to foster public education through media dissemination. For a long time, I couldn't understand why otherwise sensible and well-educated people become irrationally emotional when confronted with the truth of 9/11.

It was not until I embarked on a two-year journey in a camperized 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon – the “whale” of my book’s title – that I found an answer in Mexico. More than that, I came to understand the ongoing effect of the 9/11 lie on the psyches of the millions of people who are still unaware that they have been deceived.

This knowledge was imparted to me by Indigenous elder Don Trent Jacobs (aka Four Arrows). I pass it along in the hope that the psychological transformation experienced by many on 9/11 can be reversed. Only then can their blind fear and subjugation be converted into wide-eyed fearlessness and resistance to the schemes of those who brought us 9/11 and who continue to bring us terror, none of whom are Muslims.

Excerpt

Four Arrows showed me some books in his library. “These ones I wrote,” he said. He was a professor and the author of twenty titles in a handful of fields. He’d been a paramedic, a hypnotist for surgical patients who couldn’t be put under using drugs, and a trainer of wild mustangs. He handed me a book. “In this one, several scholars and I prove that the official story about 9/11 is a lie,” he said. I handed it back.

“I don’t need to read it,” I said. I told him about my days in the truth movement, the petition to the Canadian government for a new investigation of the attack, the March on Ottawa. I told him that I was done with it. I chose a book he’d written called Primal Awareness: A True Story of Awakening and Transformation with the Raramuri Shamans of Mexico. I wanted to forget the political and learn about the Indigenous. But I would soon see that the wisdom of the second had a lot to say about the evil of the first. Like it or not, I’d come back around to the attack of 2001.

In Primal Awareness I learned that in a heightened state of focus we were susceptible to suggestion and change. Indigenous peoples entered this state through intentional trance in order to deepen learning. By means of ceremony, vision quests, chanting, dancing, endurance, or plant medicine, they achieved what Four Arrows called “concentration activated transformation.”

I also learned that trance could be spontaneous. Especially when triggered by fear. In such cases we were in danger of being hypnotized. Indigenous peoples understood this phenomenon but were not vulnerable to it because when facing the fearful they drew on authority rooted in experience. They used words whose vibrations had been honed by integrity. And they turned to nature as the ultimate ground of their wisdom. This respect for authority, words, and nature meant that Indigenous peoples were able to use fear as an opportunity to practise a virtue like courage. It could be a source of growth.

While travelling to his first meeting with the Raramuri, Four Arrows had experienced a spontaneous concentration activated transformation. He was kayaking in Mexico’s Copper Canyon with a friend when a flash flood made the river rise by many feet. After the rain stopped they kept going. But the current had turned mean and Four Arrows’ kayak capsized. He was pulled into a tunnel of water in the rock and was sure that he would drown. He let go of his fear and grew calm. He saw the people he loved and said goodbye. He gave into nature and let the current carry his body. At last he was shot back out into the river. He was alive. But changed. He felt new power and purpose. He discovered new sensibilities. With the Raramuri he saw visions that first revealed to him the role of concentration in deep transformation. Later he learned that the tunnel in the rock or one like it had once been used in shaman initiation rites. If the apprentice panicked and thrashed about, he lost the current and was carried into one of two side tunnels that dead-ended. He drowned.

In his past work both as a paramedic and as a horse trainer, Four Arrows had seen how fear could cause spontaneous trance. When studying to be a paramedic, he was told to be careful not to say anything negative to trauma victims. He reasoned that if saying something negative could be harmful, then saying something positive might help. So he started to experiment on trauma victims at accident scenes. He told a woman trapped in a car wreck to stop her head from bleeding while the firemen freed her. She did. He told her to start the bleeding again when she was out of the car so that he could clean the gash. She did. He told an electrocuted man to start his heart while they waited for the ambulance to get there. The man did. And he survived. Later he reported hearing everything Four Arrows had said. These people were susceptible to hypnosis because they were in a fear-induced state of heightened concentration.

Four Arrows had been well known for breaking wild mustangs. Once he was asked to work with a domesticated horse that refused to cross the shallow part of a stream. No matter what he tried, the animal wouldn’t do it. Four Arrows didn’t understand what made this horse different from the wild ones. Then he figured it out. The horse wasn’t afraid. So he walked it to where the stream was deepest and shoved it into the water. It came out terrified. Now he had its attention. Twenty minutes later the horse was trotting back and forth across the shallow part of the stream without a care.

I saw that our fear during the attack of 2001 had put us into a collective state of spontaneous trance. I realized that the images on our TVs of people being murdered in real time had been used to change us for the worse. In the moment of crisis George W. Bush was the voice of authority. He told us that the culprits were al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. His words brooked no dissent and rallied all to revenge. Common sense was forgotten. Intuition was suppressed. There was no appeal to our deeper nature. Most of us were hypnotized into believing a story that was implausible even on its surface. It should have been obvious that the US military couldn’t have been fooled by a bunch of guys with box cutters and no flying skills.

I understood why the shock and awe of the attack had made us dumb, why intelligent people got so angry when you told them the truth. We’d suffered a negative concentration activated transformation. We’d been brainwashed.

Four Arrows hadn’t believed the hijacker story for a second. The day after the attack he told an assembly of university students not to forget the US government’s history of staging terror and blaming it on others. When Bush’s lies about Iraq led to war in 2003, he posted photos outside his office of Iraqi children killed by US soldiers. The dean of his faculty tore them down every day and finally bullied him into leaving. He’d taken a professorship elsewhere and now only worked with graduate students via the Internet. Self-exiled in Mexico.

Notes

1 M. Chossudovsky, “Osama bin Laden, among the FBI’s ‘Ten Most Wanted Fugitives’: Why Was He Never Indicted for His Alleged Role in 9/11?” 17 September 2006, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.ph... S.E. Jones et al., “Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction,” Open Civil Engineering Journal, no. 2 (2008): 35–40 at 39, http://benthamopen.com/contents/pdf/T....

2 P. Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories, 2008).

3 D.T. Jacobs (Four Arrows), Primal Awareness: A True Story of Awakening and Transformation with the Raramuri Shamans of Mexico (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1998).

4 “Hani Hanjour: 9/11 Pilot Extraordinaire,” n.d., http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRH... ; M.H. Gaffney, “How the FBI and 9/11 Commission Suppressed Key Evidence about Hani Hanjour, Alleged Hijack Pilot of AAL 77,” 9 July 2009, http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-....

Like the Guy in the Taoist Parable Clinging to the Riverbank

The following excerpt is from my new book, Days of Shock, Days of Wonder: The 9/11 Age, the Ways of the Mystics, and One Man’s Escape from Babylon in the Belly of a Whale, a contemporary memoir about my confrontation with the spiritual and cognitive dissonance of our times.

The conclusion of this excerpt is the first piece of the book that I wrote, long before I knew that I was writing a book. It marks a turning point in my story that made personal change possible. It was this moment of Taoist surrender to life’s current that pulled me out of the political realm of 9/11 truth activism and returned me to the Sufi path of the heart.

The book’s fourth and fifth chapters describe my exploration of Sufi mysticism with the “wild Sufis” of northern India. Here, at the end of the eighth chapter, the pendulum of my narrative swings away from the shock of politics and back to the wonder of the spirit. But like the men and women of spirit before us, from Jesus and Muhammad to Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, I knew then that I would still have to return to the political one day without losing my balance again. And I’m happy – and grateful – to say that I did. But first I needed a good shove in the right direction.

Excerpt

IN FEBRUARY 2009 my days of living out of my backpack in a rented room came to an end. Kristy had gotten engaged. She was moving out to live with her boyfriend. I couldn’t pay the rent on my own or furnish the place, so I had to move out too. I found myself apartment hunting in the middle of winter, when the wind chill is forty degrees below zero and walking outdoors is painful. All I needed was a room with a kitchen at one end. Something for five or six hundred dollars a month. The best I could find was a a basement suite with windows that started near the ceiling. The fence next door was so close that it blocked out most of the sunlight.

Worse, I ended up doing what I’d said I wouldn’t. I bought a bathmat, a garbage can, a cutlery holder. A chair, a lamp, a coat rack. A sofa bed, a coffee table, two area rugs. A book shelf big enough to divide the room. Two mirrors framed in wood three feet across and six feet high to make the place feel bigger. In no time I’d racked up a debt of nearly three thousand dollars on my credit card. Like a good consumer, I was dancing with the bankers.

My new neighbour turned out to be a noisy savage into all-night binge drinking and shoot-em-up movies. The noise came through the connected fan vents above the stoves in our kitchens. And he beat his girlfriend. Their early morning fights ended with her screaming, “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me!” Followed by the thud of his fists and then by her flight in a taxi with her pit bull in tow. Another man would’ve punished the guy for hitting her. He would’ve waited for the girlfriend to leave and then pummelled the bastard. But I wasn’t that man. I talked to him instead. But talk was all I had. And nothing changed.

MEANWHILE, MONTREAL 9/11 Truth was starting to fray. There was a running dispute over the content of our website. Some members wanted postings restricted to the truth about the attack and to the “deep political” agenda of the real attackers. Others said that we should cover all corruption and deception. As a compromise we agreed to add a disclaimer to the site. It explained that not all members condoned all postings. We agreed to disagree “in the spirit of rooting out the empirical truth.” This seemed to solve the problem.

But the conflict reached a crisis over Michael’s postings. In the fall he’d caused a row when he’d used the site to publish interviews with a woman who claimed to have dirt on Canadian politicians. Something about a prostitution ring. At issue was the woman’s credibility. Now he’d angered the group’s francophones. Something about Quebec’s separatist politicians being in bed with US globalists. At issue was Michael’s judgment. At our next meeting we confronted him. But there was nothing we could do. A friend of his had launched the website before Montreal 9/11 Truth was formed. We had no control. We talked about starting a second website under a different name. I was too angry to even consider it. Instead the night ended with me shouting at Michael down a university corridor as we headed to the metro station.

We soldiered on. On April 18 we held a lecture by Richard Gage. The founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. A reporter was in the audience from the National Post, Canada’s right-wing daily. Jonathan Kay. He was working on a book about the truth movement. He’d written that truth activists were no better than Holocaust deniers. When he spoke during the question period after the lecture, I heckled him. I was fed up with the propaganda war. On April 3 evidence that demolition explosives were used in the attack had been published for the first time in a peer-reviewed journal. A group of scientists had found “red/gray chips” of thermite in dust samples taken from four locations at ground zero. The findings had been verified by laboratories in the United States and Europe. It was the smoking gun!

But people weren’t convinced. It was making me crazy. I couldn’t read a newspaper, or watch a movie, or edit books for work without seeing the big lie. It was told over and over again in countless ways. False history was being written and played out under our noses. And if you told people, you got slandered. So I shouted at Kay from the back of the room.

I shouldn’t have. Two days after the Gage lecture I quit the truth movement. “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” That was one of our mottos. It bannered a lot of truth websites. I needed to figure out how to do that. The love had gone out of my actions. I’d lost the Sufi path.

ONE NIGHT AS I drifted toward sleep in the basement of sorrows, my neighbour’s girlfriend came home late and started banging on their door. He hollered from his place in front of the TV set. Then he went and let her in. The door slammed behind her. There was a thud. She cried, “You punched me in the face!” I shoved my earplugs deeper into my skull and closed my eyes to it all. The pipes that swished with the piss and shit of the tenants upstairs. The girl cradling her swollen jaw behind the wall. My useless rage.

I decided to move out. I’d lasted four months. I’d have to break the lease but it didn’t matter. The apartment wasn’t legal. There was a bylaw against basement suites so mine was rented out on the sly. The owner had to let me go. But it was June, when most leases ended in Montreal. On July 1 everyone would be moving to new digs. For two weeks I trudged across the city looking for rental signs in building windows. I visited half a dozen overpriced dives. Most were carved out of bigger apartments that had once been livable. In some, the kitchen was built into a closet, with the refrigerator standing out in the room.

I eventually found a place on the third floor of an old building that stretched along the street for two blocks. You could smell mould in the walls but I was desperate. At least it was above ground. There were treetops outside the windows. I filled out an application and paid the deposit. The landlord would have to check my references. Two days later he called to say that I should come and get my money back. It was noisy there, the walls were thin, I wouldn’t like it. My basement landlord had told him why I was moving out. I tried to explain that the problem wasn’t the noise but the violence. He didn’t care. It was mid-June and I was back on the street looking for an apartment.

The weather turned hot. I walked and walked. It gave me a throbbing hemorrhoid. I felt like the guy in the Taoist parable clinging to the riverbank. His fingers are swollen and bleeding. His body is being dashed to shreds by the rocks. But he won’t let go. After six blocks of agony I stopped at a pizza place to use the washroom and adjust things down below. I got a slice and shook on some hot peppers. I took a bite and burned my tongue. I sucked in some cooling air and inhaled a pepper flake. It seared my throat, I began to cough, and the spasms dislodged my hemorrhoid. That was when I gave up. I let the pepper do its worst. I let the hemorrhoid distend. I was done. The current could carry me where it wanted.

Notes:

1 By 2014 over two thousand architects and engineers had signed Richard Gage’s petition to Congress for a new investigation of the attack. One that would be independent and scientific. See http://www.ae911truth.org and N.H. Harrit et al., “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” Open Chemical Physics Journal 2, no. 1 (3 April 2009): 7–31. On the removal of steel from ground zero to conceal the use of explosives, see “The Expeditious Destruction of the Evidence at Ground Zero,” n.d., http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/groun....

2 This saying is likely a paraphrase of Gandhi: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” See B. Morton, “Falser Words Were Never Spoke,” New York Times, 29 August 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opi....

The Traveller as Outlaw and Fearless Mystic

Below are two excerpts from my book Days of Shock, Days of Wonder: The 9/11 Age, the Ways of the Mystics, and One Man’s Escape from Babylon in the Belly of a Whale, a memoir about my spiritual travels and activist journey.

As a traveller, I have discovered that when we step out of the routines of our lives, three significant things happen.

One, we become an outlaw, sleeping where we shouldn’t and trampling on the bylaws put in place for the sedentary. Two, we become fearless in the face of the many obstacles that arise between ourselves and the basic necessities of life. And three, we become aware of something almost mystical guiding the course of our journeys.

As the following passages illustrate, suggestions of this third phenomenon are most often seen in the “coincidences” that accumulate as we travel.

At the beginning of the first excerpt, I have just arrived in New Delhi with the intention of meeting a Sufi or Hindu guru. I wanted to experience a mystical religion up close. And being a filmmaker, I’d brought along my video camera, hoping to make a documentary.

But what were the odds of finding such a person? Like a Taoist, I prefer not to make plans. I just let the current push me along. So I decided not to look for this mystic or to tell anyone why I was in India. I would simply show up in New Delhi, get a room at an ashram, and wait to see what happened.

Excerpt 1

On Monday I had jetlag. I was in bed at three-thirty in the afternoon. Parrots were squawking outside my window and keeping me awake. Mosquitoes buzzed in my ears. The pillow slip was spotted with the blood of those I’d managed to kill. The curtain at the balcony billowed into the room. Finally a breeze. An inner dialogue started:

“Get up.”

“I’m tired.”

“Get up or you won’t sleep tonight.”

“I’ll get up for dinner.”

“Get up now.”

“And do what?”

“Get up and walk out of this room.”

“And go where?”

“Get up!”

I got up and left my room. I walked to the staircase and went down to the next floor. A door to one of the rooms swung open. It was the German musician I’d met in the dining room. He spent half the year in Europe giving concerts and half in New Delhi with his tambura teacher. He was allowed to live at the ashram because his study of sacred music counted as a spiritual quest. He asked me if I wanted to go to a concert.

“When are you leaving?”

“Now,” he said. He just had to check about a taxi.

For forty-five minutes we careened through the din, heat, and smog of New Delhi at rush hour. Finally we stopped at the arched gateway of a centuries-old Muslim neighbourhood called Nizamuddin. In its maze of streets we found our way to the shrine of Inayat Khan. The saint who’d brought Sufism to the West. Pilgrims from Europe and America were there to mark his death. That was why there was a concert.

My German friend concluded upon sight that the American guy running the show was a spiritual fraud. I was amused by the various pieces of Indian garb the pilgrims were wearing. Scarves and chunky necklaces. Ornate rings on fingers and toes. Wise beards on young faces. But the vibe was mostly good. There was some love in the place. I made friends with an American who’d been in India for weeks. Peter. He was on the verge of sporting a wise beard himself.

Excerpt 2

The next three days I went back to Nizamuddin and walked its narrow streets. I filmed the food vendors sweating over open grills. The families who lived in the recycling yard and sorted the waste. The women who washed their clothes at the neighbourhood water pipe. Muslim tombs and gravestones rose up out of the pavement in the alleyways. Traces of Islam’s hold in northern India since the twelfth century. Children followed me wherever I went. I turned the camera’s viewfinder around so that they could see themselves. They grinned and mugged as they jostled with each other for a spot in front of my lens.

Each night I went to the shrine of Inayat Khan for food and music. On Friday Peter said that the next day he was going to visit a Sufi babah in Nizamuddin. He asked me if I wanted to come. We were in the street outside the shrine and about to leave for the night.

“Meet me here,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Eight-thirty.”

“Right here,” I said. “No matter what.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be here.”

“I want to meet this babah,” I said.

It was the end of the rainy season. On Saturday a storm was lashing the city. When I got to the shrine the doors were locked. There was no one around. I waited ten minutes. Then Peter came out of the downpour. We ran to the end of the street. There it was. The babah’s khanqah. Like an ashram but curbside. Just an enclosed room with a cement pallet out front. It was next to the water pipe where I’d been filming. But I hadn’t seen it.

Inside were at least twenty men crammed shoulder to shoulder. They were sitting cross-legged on thin carpets. Their brown faces bobbed. Their bodies swayed. Lilting sounds rose from their throats. They were chanting the many names of Allah. A practice called zikr. We each found a space on the floor and squeezed in. The babah lit a chillum. Hash smoke billowed into the air above our heads. He placed a hand on his heart and gave the chillum to Peter, who smoked and passed it along. It got to me. Using it was tricky. The clay pipe got hot. You had to keep it straight up and down without burning your fingers. But the babah was patient. He smiled and held it for me.

I closed my eyes and fell in with the chanting. Everything began to spin. Even the cells beneath my scalp were whirling round my head. But at my centre all was still. My consciousness had merged with a vaster consciousness. A small room had opened into a larger one. As if there was no end to the well of mind. Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” The house of God was mind itself. And I was there. The babah handed me a drum. All I knew was the four-beat rhythm of Indigenous ceremony. I banged away. He smiled. Straight rows of small white teeth sparkled in his dark face.

By the time we left the khanqah, I’d missed the ashram’s eleven o’clock curfew. There’d be no one at the gate to let me in. I decided to go to Peter’s hotel on the other side of Nizamuddin. It was still raining and water was rushing through the streets like a river. We got soaked to the knees. But the hotel wouldn’t let me stay. Not even in his room. Everyone had to sign in with a passport and mine was at the ashram.

I only had one option. I went back out into the downpour and retraced my steps until I was at the khanqah again. The front of the pallet was deserted. Torn plastic tarps hung overhead, twisting in the wind. In the roofed area outside the door two men were asleep against the farthest wall. Wrapped in blankets. I was wet to the bone. I had no choice but to knock. After a moment I heard a chain rattling through the handles on the other side. The door opened a foot. A Sufi with frizzy hair looked out at me. On his head was a plastic takeout container made to look like a woven basket. It was green. He’d had it on his head all night instead of a Muslim skullcap.

He smiled. “Come, come,” he said. I stepped into the room. Rows of sleeping men covered the floor. Three of them shifted closer together to give me a spot. The babah handed me a blanket from a trunk. It was new and still sealed in plastic. One of the men began chaining the door shut. I’d heard of bandits disguising themselves as Sufis and duping foreigners into spending the night. While the visitors slept the impostors slit their throats and fled with their cash and cellphones. The guy who was chaining up the door saw me watching him. He frowned and pointed outside. “Bad man coming,” he said. But I wasn’t worried. This was a den of devotees, not a den of thieves.

In the morning I went back to the ashram. It was Sunday again. Seven days since I’d arrived. My time was up and I had to go. I got my backpack and returned to the khanqah. I started living with Babah Mubarak Ali Shah and his bacha. His spiritual children. Mostly orphaned boys and homeless men. After a week in India I’d met the follower of a mystical religion. What I’d wanted to find had found me.

At the Bottom of the World – Love

The following excerpt is from my new book, Days of Shock, Days of Wonder: The 9/11 Age, the Ways of the Mystics, and One Man’s Escape from Babylon in the Belly of a Whale, a memoir about my confrontation with the spiritual and cognitive dissonance of our times.

This excerpt describes a moment in the tenth chapter, at the middle of the book, when a spiritual quest begun years earlier comes to a beautiful turning point through a chance meeting with a man straight out of a Taoist tale. If I hadn’t gone with the flow, I might have missed what this flawed wayfarer was going to reveal to me about myself.

Part of my spiritual quest included exploring mysticism with the “wild Sufis” of northern India. In the tenth chapter, I find my way back to the teachings and practices of the Sufis when a young woman on the Baja Peninsula gives me a book of poetry by the Sufi master Hafiz.

Here, toward the chapter’s end, I am living in a camperized 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon – the “whale” of the book’s title – when those teachings find their sudden expression in me. And I am both surprised and humbled.

Excerpt

By New Year’s Eve everyone in our group had moved on. Some north, most south. I had editing work to finish so I stayed. When the propane tank for my fridge and stove ran dry, I used bags of ice to cool my food and a Coleman burner to cook it. The nearest filling station was a hundred kilometres away.

Then one day a Mexican family came to the beach in a beat-up Volkswagen bus. Its windshield was cracked all the way across, it had no hubcaps or taillight covers, the sun visors were gone, and its signal lights didn’t work. But it ran fine. The father said that they were headed north to Guerrero Negro, but first he had to stop at a junk lot off the highway. I’d driven past it. A graveyard of Volkswagens, boats, and motorbikes.

I went along. I wanted to see if I could add a valve to my propane line so that I could bypass the tank in the van and use a portable one. Something that I could fill in town. We pulled into the yard and were met by a squat, tattooed, mean-looking German. The father asked about the parts he needed. He wanted them cheap. “I’m no American,” he said. “Look at me. Look at my kids.” His three shirtless boys were watching us through the side window of the bus.

The German held one eye open with his grease-blackened fingers. “Do you see anyone in here who cares?” he shouted. Then he went around the yard and gathered up all the stuff. He even took a windshield out of a gutted blue and white bus. And he let the whole lot go for five hundred pesos. Less than fifty bucks. The guy had a heart after all. He said that he would help me with the propane valve, change my oil, and rotate my tires. I just had to come back next week.

When I saw the German again, he came with me to Mulegé to get an oil filter and the parts for the propane refit. I needed him to speak Spanish at the hardware store. As payment for installing the valve, he asked me to buy him dinner. He was starving. As he devoured his southern-fried steak with mashed potatoes in a pool of gravy, he told me his story.

He was an ex-con doing time on the Baja to avoid a life sentence back home. He didn’t say for what, only that he’d had his first run-in with the law when he was sixteen and working as a doorman at a brothel in Hamburg. One night at closing time a man who didn’t want to leave threw him against a wall. The German lunged at the towering brute and clamped onto the guy’s crotch with his teeth until blood was running down his face. When the guy buckled in two he clobbered him in the head without having to reach up.

That was the day he learned how to fight the big ones. The first thing he did whenever he got put in the joint was take on the biggest guy he saw. He would hammer him in the balls, wait for him to come down, and then beat him with the frightened fury of a small man. He said that people always left him alone after that. I wondered what I was doing with this guy.

We went back to the junk lot and he worked on the propane line until after sundown. He was bruised up because his chopper had fallen over on him without anyone around to lift it off. He was lying on his back in the gravel grunting in pain. He had to work by flashlight but he got the bypass line put in. I had propane again.

I came back a few days later so that he could rotate the tires. He was cranking off the lug nuts on one of the wheels when I saw that his arm was scarred. The tattoos were melted together. “What happened there?” I asked.

“Barbecued,” he said. A drunk in a pick-up truck had pulled into the road and cut him off while he was on his chopper. He was left knocked out in the ditch with his arm under the hot exhaust pipe while the drunk sped off to find “witnesses” that he could pay to lie for him. A nurse at the hospital said that she could see the driver was liquored up but the German told her to forget it. He saved the drunk from jail so that the guy could pay for the damages to the bike.

But the German needed parts. So he asked his friends in California to deliver some stolen goods to the drunk at his house back in the United States. All the guy needed to do was mail them south. But he never did.

“Now the motherfucker’s dead,” the German said. His eyes grew wide. “It’s not for nothing I’m an ex-biker. I phoned up there and told them to kill the son of a bitch.” He rolled over in the dirt to adjust the jack. “Was it the right thing?” he asked. “I think yes.”

I was talking to a murderer. He was confessing to me. Asking for absolution. “You should’ve let him live,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“So he could’ve seen what a prick he was,” I said.

“If he didn’t know it already, he was never going to,” he said.

I watched the German sweating there on his back in the gravel and ground-up seashells of what was once an ocean floor. Like he was lying at the bottom of the world. And all I felt was forgiveness. Love.

I recalled what an American man had said to me in Nizamuddin. How the important thing was to choose one path and follow it to the end. At the time, I’d scoffed. That would be like reading only one philosopher. I’d forgotten what the Hindu thinker had said about all religions being a finger pointing at the same thing. The unifying, indwelling quality of God. I felt like I’d followed the path of Sufism to its end. Love for all in All. And I’d found my heart again.