Today's Transcendence

For this session, I’d like to build on what we went over in part 1: African Holistic Health.

First is a disclaimer: everything I’m sharing with you here (and everything I share with you period, really) is a combination of my personal research, my personal opinion and my personal experience. As an individual, you should take responsibility for your own health and follow what feels right for you.

Dr. Afrika actually just added me on facebook yesterday, and I added something to the Black Legacy archive that actually quoted him saying:

“White sugar is sweet, it’s delicious, and it tastes good…however IT’S A DRUG! Black people know what it is to the taste buds, but not what it is to black life: a highly refined carbohydrate that’s technically classified as a drug.

The refining process was invented by a Black man named Norbert Rillieux. He invented the process to help produce better minerals and metals, but his good invention was turned into a weapon: his refinement process when used for sugar became a weapon of enslavement and a destroyer of health…”

Dr. Afrika is a nutritional consultant, a massage therapist, a historian, a certified addictionologist, an acupuncturist, a writer and a Doctor of Naturopathy. I support this brother and his African Holistic Health concept because it saved me from depression: during the second semester of my freshman year at school, I was at an extremely low emotional point where every morning I woke up thinking:

“What’s the point?,”
“I can’t do anything right, so why even try?,”
“I’m worthless…what am I even alive for???“

…and other depressing thoughts to sick to even mention.

Around that time (I believe it was Spring Break), I went back to Long Island to help my Mother move into a new apartment and found this dingy, beat-up book in one of her boxes underneath some old junk: African Holistic Health, 4 ed., with a signature from Dr. Afrika, right there on the first page.

This book shattered my mind. Every page (with the exception of the charts & diagrams) was a paradigm-changer: the history of nutrition, the use of sugar in the slavery, the question of meat, food being used as a military offensive, ancient African medicinal techniques, etc. It was a transformative read that changed how I thought forever.

Somewhere in there, almost as an unimportant side note, he mentioned that one of the first things he does for his clients is put them on a 4 day fruit juice fast, and something made me say to myself “I should try that.”

Since I didn’t have a blender, and I was eating strictly out of the school cafeteria, I went on a four day “fruit fast” instead – I ate nothing but raw fruits and drank nothing but juice and water.

I didn’t even end up going the full four days…I only went two, but by the late afternoon of the second day I was filled with so much joy and energy and vitality that it didn’t even make sense: I was smiling for no reason, making other people laugh, talking it up with complete strangers and all in all, just happy to be alive.

I remember one of the lunch-aids in the cafeteria that evening asking me:

“Boy – what the heck’s gotten into you??? For the last two months, you’ve been walking around looking like you had the world on your shoulders, but now, you’re smiling little behind off…What happened?“

I don’t remember exactly how I responded, but it was something to the effect of “I just realized something.” Really, I was just surprised anybody had even noticed…

So that’s one of the things I’ve learned from reading this book: how intertwined our emotional and mental states are with the diets we have, and how we live in a culture that supports and perpetuates a diet prone towards, depression, obesity, and other sicknesses too numerous mention.

I’ve also learned how to understand my body as an intelligent system and illness as part of a bio-feedback mechanism (not just an external symptom without a root cause), and how our Western medicinal concept is disease-oriented and overly complicated for PROFIT (when things pertaining to health are described as having “cancer-fighting properties” or “preventing high-blood pressure” it actually conditions your mind to focus on disease, NOT health).

The book taught me about Holistic Health: how to see the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of yourself as a complete unit, and how light, color, sound and environment contribute to your health state.

It taught me the real truth about our disease-oriented diet here in the Western world, which is not nutrition, but nutri-CIDE.

“…again, just to disclaim – I’m still learning as well…I actually have a teleseminar planned up with a friend who’s a fruitarian and also getting a Master’s degree in Chinese medicine that’ll go in depth about the direction I’m looking towards…

Also I don’t want you to think that I’m condemning you as foolish for where you might be at right now: I used to have what they call compulsive eating disorder, I used to have severe acne, I used to have bone issues (where I thought my knees and ankles were breaking and that there was something wrong with my shoes and I tried to buy all these different shoe-sizes etc. until I found out about electro-magnetic frequencies and did some things to clear that up, which I’ll talk about soon), I used to be constipated, I used to have depression (like we talked about earlier) and a whole bunch of things…in essence, I used to be really jacked up, so I know how whack it is and I’m not sharing this like ‘you need to get your act together’ ok?

If it ever comes off like that, that’s just because I’m upset at the paradigm that we’ve been talking about. I feel that disease is institutionalized in our culture as a profit-mechanism, and it really hurts me to see so many great, positive, talented and intelligent people inhibited because they’ve been conditioned to think a certain way about their physical shell. Then, when something goes really wrong and they do go to get help, they get manipulated to a point where they become dependent on a system that’s probably going to leave them diseased forever…”

Filed under: A Legacy of Black Intelligence, Uncategorized on February 12th, 2010