When your views are at odds with the system, how do you walk your talk? What does it mean to live ethically in a world at war?
Disillusioned with the religious and political models of the 9/11 age, Rafiq asks a question that we all face in our desire for authentic lives: how can he remain in the world and still be true to himself?
His quest for an answer carries him to a job at an Islamic university in Indonesia, where the US embassy is looking for terrorists, and then to the Sufi communes of northern India in search of the mystical. It pulls him into the trenches of 9/11 truth activism in Montreal before immersing him in the peyote ceremonies of the Huichol shamans of Mexico.
Days of Shock, Days of Wonder is the eye-opening true story of one man's confrontation with the spiritual and cognitive dissonance of our times - and how at last he escapes Babylon to find wisdom in the earthbound ways of the ancients.
Read excerpts at https: //www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/9918493-at-the-bottom-of-the-world-love.
Praise for Days of Shock, Days of Wonder
"If Kerouac or Bukowski had shunned alcohol for cannabis, encountered Sufism, and faced 9/11 truth and its implications, the result might have looked a bit like this. An engrossing read and an important document of our time." Kevin Barrett, author of Truth Jihad and 9/11 & American Empire
"Rafiq narrates a twofold journey of discovery, describing how the 9/11 attack was engineered by the Bush administration and why humanity needs to replace religion, based on an external God, with devotion to the divine as a unifying force that lives in all of us." David Ray Griffin, author of 9/11 Ten Years Later and God Exists, although Gawd Does Not
"This book links one man's luminous journey with a nation's crisis of identity and waywardness in the aftermath of the state crime that was 9/11. Rafiq gives us a deeply engaging account of arriving on the other side of a new awareness of our world from which there is no returning. Having shared this experience, I drew much solace and inspiration from his lyrical meditation on choice, doubt, determination, and resolve." Matthew Witt, co-editor of State Crimes against Democracy
Hear an interview with Rafiq about the book at http: //noliesradio.org/archives/109522.
Watch Rafiq's 2008 Parliament Hill speech at https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4hFZgR8VIU.
About the Author: Rafiq is writer and filmmaker Robert Sean Lewis. He wrote his first book, Gaj: The End of Religion (2004), to counter the idea of God or Allah as an individual who could take sides in the "war on terror." His memoir Days of Shock, Days of Wonder (2016) tells the story of his confrontation with the spiritual and cognitive dissonance of the 9/11 age.
His documentaries include Be Smile: The Stories of Two Urban Inuit (2006), Khanqah: A Sufi Place (2011), and Cosmic Shift: Pilgrimage into Mayaland (2012). Be Smile screened at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco in 2008 and at Cinema Politica in Montreal, Ottawa, and Fredericton.
Gaj is at www.endofreligion.com. And Rafiq's docs are online at Vimeo.
