Retrospect

Now that it's 55 years, one Bachelor of Science and a Ph.D. in Mathematics, a marriage, divorce, a house, and homelessness, later, I think the Huna that Lani explained to me is looking very good.

Western Science is cautious about knowledge. The idea that we all have to be objective and stick to observable facts and regard all theory as tentative until disproved is a great way to enforce the caution that science needs.

But the Huna denial of objective reality takes Western Scientific caution further. It regards theories as not even tentative but relative to the needs and aims of the theorist. The Huna as I understand it is more scientific than Western Science.

Also, after years of consideration, I've come to the conclusion that the core religious thinking of the Kahiko is not faith-based, but philosophy-based.

Lani said that the myths and legends were only for entertainment and illustration. He compared fabulous stories of Maui to stories of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or to the idea that God sits on a cloud and has a white beard. The Huna is the real religious thinking.


The Huna doesn't suppose that gods are persons. When Lani talked about moving in and out of mental states, he said the gods couldn't do that. A god is a mental state, he said. It's the way humans are superior to gods, that as persons we can change our minds, but gods' minds are fixed.

Today I would put it this way: the different gods represent the different possibilities of mind. They are like masks. People can move among them, putting them on, taking them off. You shouldn't let one get stuck on you. You're more than all of them.

It's a view that doesn't require beliefs at all. It's only a view. Like all the best views it survives by seduction, not force. It doesn't demand that you accept it, it entices you. It makes no sense to proselytize for it. It's not about believing, it's about seeing.

Designing Mind

My last few months in Hawaii were frustrating. When my parents found out they would be leaving soon, they wanted to get last minute sight-seeing and beach time in. So my Father started taking vacation days and sick days off for excursions. Of course I wasn't in on the planning of any of this. I'd just wake up one day thinking I was going to see my friends, and instead I'm dragged off to some must-see tourist-trap.

On top of that there were hours spent in a hot car in a parking lot while my parents shopped at furniture stores for the kind of cheap island-style bamboo and wicker furniture that they had to have to remember Hawaii by.

The worst thing that happened was the arrival of relatives. They had to see all the sights all over again, that my parents had already seen. Here's my Grandmother and one of my cousins with me and my parents and the dog at a beach. Doesn't my Grandmother look like she's hearing a voice telling her to wade home? I think my Mother is getting ready to strangle me, as soon as the shot is over. My Father looks like he's having a rare Jeff Goldblum moment in his head. Ordinarily he wasn't at all Golblumesque. I'm much more Goldblumesque than he ever was.


The later conversations with Lani and Lono that did take place were all over the map. Literally.

There was a long conversation in which Lani talked about his theories of Atlantis and Mu. He talked about the lost continent of Mu as though it were a traditional Polynesian idea, when I am sure that it was mostly a Western European fantasy based on misreadings of Mayan texts. I think he mixed up the continent with Hawaiian legends of people also named Mu, who were said to have inhabited the islands before the Polynesians arrived, and might still reside hidden in the mountains.

There were stories of other predecessors of the Polynesians, including cannibals. That was just creepy.

When Lani brought up the Menehune, who were a legendary short-statured people of the islands, he managed to mix them up with Leprechauns. All in all, the sense I get in remembering it all is that I can't rely on much as being genuinely ancient Hawaiian. He filled in gaps with anything he could find.

There were some things that I'm sure hailed back to pre-colonial times. There were ghost stories. There was a strange tale about two shape-shifting gods or demi-gods chasing each other from island to island.

Then there was talk about the Huna. I don't know what to make of that. Could it be ancient, or was it extrapolated from Buddhist and Hindu beliefs? A lot of the natives who ended up on Ni'ihau, though they spoke Hawaiian, had mixed ancestry, including Japanese and Chinese. A strong Buddhist influence on the non-Christian holdouts wouldn't be very surprising.

At any rate I remember some of what Lani had to say about the Huna, traditional or not. He said that just because the word means "hidden" everybody thinks it's an occult secret, but the joke on everyone who thinks that is that the Huna isn't itself hidden, the Huna is about "hidden-ness."

He illustrated by pointing out that when he held the palm of a hand up to me, I couldn't see the back, and when he held the back to me, I couldn't see the palm. He said that the Huna begins with the simple observation that you can't be aware of everything all the time. There are always going to be aspects of reality that are hidden from you, and if you look at them, other things will go hidden. The Huna involves learning respect for what you can't know.

A related idea was the idea of mental states. He said there are many different mental states a person can be in. One state is good for one kind of understanding. Another state is good for another kind of understanding. There is no state that is good for all kinds of understanding at once. That's why there isn't just one god, but many, because there isn't just one way to understand and organize reality. Only mana comes in touch with everything. But mana has no mind.

Minds, by their nature, organize and prioritize. Therefore as soon as our minds awaken and we look out and see the world, our minds impose order on that world, which order is never universal. Some things come forward, other things recede, in accordance with who we are and the sort of state we are in. It even depends on how hungry we are, and what we eat. if we are flies, we look for shit everywhere, and we're happy to find it.

Once we know that there are different mental states that provide access to alternate views of the world, Lani said, that the next thing that Huna does is offer ways to move among the states.

Only one such method was discussed. It came up in a conversation a few weeks before it was time for me to leave Hawaii. I was told about sleeping mat designs.

This is something I've confirmed: Ni'ihau is known for its sleeping mats. The people make sleeping mats which are decorated with geometric designs called pāwehe. The designs featured repeated triangles and squares. There are checkerboard patterns, rows, and a few patterns that seem to grow out from a point.

The Bishop Museum has samples online. See artifacts numbered 02560, 02562, 02564, 02565.

What Lani added to this, which I haven't confirmed, is that long ago the designs weren't just for sleeping on, but were for meditating upon.

The idea was, the meditator would sit and by some means, draw one of these designs. There were chants suitable for different designs depending on the state the practitioner wanted to achieve. While singing the chant the meditator would add to the drawing as his mind and aims moved him. The design would be an evolving ki'i of the state he was reaching toward.

I don't know if the Huna really involved such practices, or if a Taoist injected such ideas into the blend of post-colonial tradition after Ni'ihau was established as a native reservation. Or did the original Polynesian settlers in Hawaii bring such ideas with them from Asia?

What I do know is that a lot of this thinking would later be very difficult to integrate with my Sunday School lessons.

Heavens and Heavens

I had a conversation about heaven and hell with my Hawaiian friends. It was sometime after my 3rd birthday. I had asked my Mother if we were Christian, because Lono had said we probably were and I wanted to be sure. My Mother assured me that I was Christian, as I had been baptised. I told her I didn't know what that meant, so she told me I'd had water sprinkled on me.

"That makes you Christian?"

"Yes. It means you will go to heaven if you keep being good."

"Where's heaven?"

"It's a place in the sky where everybody is happy all the time."

"Where in the sky?"

"I don't know; ask your Father when he gets home."

Instead, I reported back to Lani and Lono, because they gave reliably clearer answers. I said we were definitely Christian, but the heaven thing needed explaining.

They tried, but it made no sense to me. "It's a place in the sky." OK, how do I get there? I don't fly. "God carries you up." Right. So if it's in the sky, why can't I see it on a clear day? "It's invisible." Right. So how can I have fun there if I can't see all the fun things you get to play with, cause everything's invisible? "You don't have fun, God just makes you happy." How? "He puts happiness inside you." Why do I have to go to the sky for that? "The alternative is Hell. You don't want that."

I asked what Kahiko had to say about all this. They told me that ancient Hawaiians didn't make such things a big central issue of their worship. I said, yeah, but they think something about it, right?

So Lani said that some people believed in reincarnation and some didn't. He said that of those that believe in reincarnation some believe you take a rest between lives and some don't. Of those that think that you rest between lives, there's general agreement folks don't rest all in the same place. So there isn't heaven and hell, there's heavens and more heavens, different ones for different people.

Of course we sidetracked for an explanation of "reincarnation". I then wanted to know if all the Hawaiian heavens were invisible heavens scattered around throughout the sky, and I was told that, no, they were where you couldn't see them because they were all in the ground.

But isn't that where Hell is? Doesn't that mean Hawaiian heavens are all hell? No, Lani said (with some exasperation now), because Hawaiians don't regard the Earth as evil the way Christians do.

OK then, how do I get to one of these heavens, I said.

Lani told me about jumping-off places. After you're dead your soul goes wandering around until you find a high place, called a jumping-off place, where if you jump off from it in the right direction the ground will open up for you and you will fall into your own special heaven.

If you jump the wrong way? The ground doesn't open and your soul is broken in the fall, and is doomed to linger at that spot forever, wishing it had chosen better.

How do you know which way to jump? You don't. But you'll know when you've found a jumping-off place because there will be the souls of dead children all around the bottom waiting for you to get ready to jump so they can shout directions to you and try to trick you into jumping the wrong way, just to be mean (as children often are.)

It's a lovely horror story which visited some real living anguish upon me several years later when I took it too seriously. I'll save that for another time but for now, here is a painting I made in the 90s of a jumping-off tree pretty much as I envisioned it hearing the story. Just the faces of the broken souls appear out of the darkness. The tree glows because it calls the dead soul to climb up into it, to jump from it. The children's souls at the bottom, trying to confuse the jumper, are brightly colored by mana that the dead can see.


At the lower left some demons haunting the jumper are hanging about. Our jumper ought to jump into the middle of them. That's the trick. By the way, the smiling demon at the far lower left will smile for you upside-down, too.

Substitute Puppies

Lono's involvement in my spiritual education was mixed, in motivation and outcome. To get at the difference I will try to get at the difference I see between what religion should be, and what it appears to me to be to most everybody else.

There is a distinction between psyche and pneuma that meant something to the ancient pre-Christian Greeks, less to the Christians, and maybe more to me. Generally people translate them as soul and spirit respectively.

Christians say Jesus is all about saving our souls. But when it comes down to practice, there's very little food for the soul, just some meager wafers of unleavened bread and sips of wine, compared to the massive airlift of supplies for the spirit that Christianity provides. You could really get the idea that Christians are using "soul" as a synonym for "spirit".

In fact, when I raise this point with individual Christians, the one response I get most often is that the point makes no sense, "of course they're the same," they say. They say soul is just another word for spirit.

So I say to them, "Why don't you say Jesus saves spirits?" And they answer by telling me that "Jesus saves souls" is just an old phrase that's become set in the language. They could say "Jesus saves spirits" and mean the same thing, but they don't, because there's no difference anyway.

Well, to me there's a huge difference. To me souls and spirits are two different things, and my chief complaint about Christianity is that rather than saving souls it mangles them and leaves them for dead, in order to save spirits.

To illustrate the distinction between soul and spirit, I will use a very familiar common scenario, the Substitute Puppy scenario.

We have all had this happen to us or known someone who has. Let's say a boy of six, I'll call him "Bean", is given a puppy, let's call it "Bottom". Bean immediately adores Bottom because Bottom is so cute and cuddly. Bean feeds and waters Bottom every day for a month, and takes Bottom for walks, and tries to run and play with Bottom, even though Bottom has such very short pudgy legs so Bottom doesn't run so very well. Bottom rolls and stumbles more than runs.

But one terrible day, Bottom rolls and stumbles clear to the edge of the avenue and over the curb and into the avenue, and a double semi sweeps by and rolls over Bottom and the driver doesn't even feel a bump, and he keeps on driving and doesn't even know he hit anything until he stops for coffee in North Bend, and then he thinks by the looks of it that it might have been a squirrel, because the stain is too little to be anything else.

Bean, who actually witnesses Bottom's demise, cries his brains out. Bean brains, Bean tears, everywhere you look.

You know what's coming. I didn't call it the Substitute Puppy scenario for nothing. Dad, probably a Christian, goes right out, that very afternoon, and obtains a substitute puppy. He brings home another cute puppy, and announces proudly that he has solved the problem, here's the solution. He even suggests a name. "Why don't you call it Bottom Too?"

Bean needs only a split second to observe that Bottom Too is NOT Bottom. Bean, having already cried his brains out, is now crying out sensory organs, trachea, esophagus, and getting ready to cry up lungs, stomach, and guts. Let's skip further discussion of that and leave Bean to it, while we instead get back to our point.

Our point is that the substitute puppy is a solution for the spirit, not the soul. I call Christianity the Substitute Puppy religion, because Christianity seems to encourage these kinds of "solutions" more even than other doctrinary religions.

When Bean starts crying at the loss of Bottom, he's grieving. He doesn't have a problem with his soul. His soul is working, doing something souls do well, albeit slowly. He doesn't need a fix, he has a soul that will do the fix. He doesn't even have a problem with his spirit. His spirit is just getting out of the way, to let the soul do the emotional mending that's called for. Dad, however, doesn't see Bean's soul work as Bean. He sees the crying as Bean not being himself. He thinks Bean has to get back into his former spirit.

That's Christianity all the way. It's all about trying to get people into the "right" spirit. Fixing the spirit when it doesn't need fixing. It's worse than totally neglecting the soul, which, to begin with, especially in unbroken children, is a far better emotional doctor than any that Christians can come up with. What they do is worse because it interferes with the soul in such a way as to damage it.

Far from saving souls, the religion that Christians blame Jesus for founding actually destroys souls, so that Christians lose the ability to grieve effectively, among other things. They are only able to find substitutes for grieving. Whole cultures that have had their soul-based religions crushed and replaced with Christianity are now all about finding substitutes for all their losses, which are enormous, beginning with their former traditions.

The Evangelical Christians will say that all that's a good thing, so long as the substitute chosen is Jesus Christ. I say that's sick, and it dishonors Christ Himself to make Him out to be only the best substitute puppy in the shop.

So, getting back to Lono. Lono and Lani both suffered the same family loss, before they met me. The "younger brother" who died would have been close to both of them, whether he was a brother in our sense or not. Lani took it hard, and Lono, the Christian, wanted to fix Lani's spirit. Lani wouldn't accept Jesus, the universal substitute, so Lono had to settle for an alternate substitute. I was to be Lani's substitute puppy.

So Lono colluded with Lani's spiritual (I should be saying soulful, but spiritual is the word set in the language) adoption of me and allowed his education of me in Kahiko to go forward, in order that I help in a grieving process that didn't really need me. But Lono was still a Christian, so all of this was done with misgivings.

Ironically, Lani began to take me as a substitute puppy in much the same way that he might have taken Christ if he had accepted him. As more and more of my previous troubles with my parents came out, as they learned of my eidetic memory and my conviction that I was a replacement of the original me, he entertained the idea that I might be a kind of Kahiko messiah.

In 1952 Hawaiian Kahiko was held in low-esteem even by most natives. The few that still wanted to preserve the old religion and traditional ways had to mostly keep company in secret. As often happens in such situations, many of those holdouts clung to a dream that there would one day come a savior who would be able to restore the old ways to common practice, and maybe even drive the haole out at the same time.

Lani told me at one point he thought I could be that Hawaiian messiah. The fact that I was the white son of a white Army officer only made it seem more believable that I might have eventually, when I grew up, the real-world power needed to pull off the revolution. The fact that I seemed to him to take to the Kahiko as if I were born to it made Lani believe my changeling idea. His version of it was, the gods saw that Kahiko needed a savior, so they put one of their children in the body of a dying white boy whom they took up to heaven when his parents didn't want him.

The child of the gods (me!) would not only bring justice to the evil white parents, but he would also set the Hawaiian world back in its upright position.

Big Maka, Little Maka

Lani wanted to teach me Kahiko. He never had time to teach much, but he wanted to teach as much as he could. The biggest barrier, besides time, was the lack of props. He tried to explain the old living arrangements, but it was tough getting the ideas across without the aid of pictures or models. Likewise, with just Lani and Lono to talk to I never got to hear women speaking, or interactions between men and women.

Early in my teaching Lani focused on the cast of spiritual characters and spiritual entities that made up the Kahiko world. The major gods were described. Their dependence on mana was emphasized. Mana was all important. Gods were nothing without mana. You can get too much. You can get more mana than you're ready for.

Moving down the hierarchy, there's the great ancestors. These were the 'aumākua, who acted as family and personal gods. You could have more than one. An 'aumakua could take the form of any sort of animal, or even a plant. The taro (kalo) plant was an 'aumakua to everyone. Poi is made from it, that's why you don't argue when the poi can hear.

Lani and Lono told me a story about a shark that protected and saved someone from danger. I was a little bored by the story itself. I think they thought it would interest me because the protagonist was a boy, but I didn't care about the kid in the story. What I wanted to know was, what's a shark?

Try it yourself. Try explaining to a 2 or 3 year old what a shark is, without the use of pictures. We ran into additional confusion because of a peculiarity of the word for eyes in Hawaiian. Maka doesn't only mean eyes, it also means face. So when they said the shark has a big wide face with little eyes, it came out "big maka, little maka." I don't think I knew what a shark looked like for another two years.


I asked if I had any 'aumākua. They said they couldn't know what my family's 'aumākua could be, but asked if any animals had seemed special to me. I mentioned the red bird that I'd seen the day my Father went to Korea. I imitated the red bird's song from memory. They both recognized the song and could name the bird. I believe now that they said it was an 'i'iwi.

Then I told them for the first time about how my parents had arranged to run me over with the car, and how seeing the red bird in my imagination saved my life. I figured that if the red bird really was there to save my life, that would make him an 'aumakua for sure, but since he was just there in my thoughts it didn't count.

Lani's answer to that was that thoughts count more than anything. Thoughts are driven by mana, thoughts are how the gods work on people. If a thought of a red bird saved you, that's mana flowing through you. The 'aumakua is anyway only a sign for that working.