Rafiq's Blog - Posts Tagged "indigenous-wisdom"

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-....