I remember working with an award-winning television journalist who came from a long line of Harvard intellectuals and luminaries. As a child, she was given love, support, and every possible advantage and opportunity. But despite her success, by the time I met her she was continually plagued with a sense of never feeling good enough. She couldn’t understand why she always felt so badly about herself, until she realized that, along with all of her advantages, her parents had set up a subtle competitive dynamic between her and her brothers. When she was finally able see it, she could start to let go of the pressure and judgment that she had always placed on herself.
The darkness slips into light.
The first line of the Kumulipo adds further texture to this discussion of creation: O ke au I kahuli wela ka honua has been translated as, “At a time that turned the heat of the Earth” or “The active seed transforms the Earth with passion.” This points toward the hypothesis that there was never an actual beginning to creation, that all creation happens spontaneously of its own accord. It suggests a joyful intention—creation occurring for no other reason than to experience more of itself.
Well, that sounds like love, doesn’t it?
The Hawaiians believe that the creative void of the Po is not only the realm of the gods, but also the dwelling place of our Kane, or individual god-self. If this is true, and creation happens all by itself as an act of love, then we can assume love no matter what our experience, because each of us is an individual expression born out of that love. The Hawaiian proverb He punawai kahe wale ke aloha means, “Love is the spring that flows freely,” which Serge Kahili King interprets further as “Love is boundless and available to everyone.” The shaman trusts in the goodness and rightness of life by seeing it as a creation born of benevolence, inevitability, and a spark of love contained within each of us.
Hawaiian Magic
Historically, magic was a commonplace assumption on the islands of Hawaii. Like all indigenous peoples, the Hawaiians consciously participated in co-creative relationship with the forces of Nature, the universe, and their own minds to effect change and to influence events and circumstances in their physical world. This is called kalakupua, translated as “under control of mysterious or super natural power,” or simply as “magic.”
From a Huna perspective, magic is our birthright. It is a propensity in all of us that is as natural as any of our five senses, and our bodies and minds are the only tools that we need to practice it. Other than some cultural differences, Huna magic is essentially the same magic that is practiced in the Western Hermetic traditions. Occult associations can make it more complicated (and more loaded) for people than it needs to be, for magic is nothing more than conscious manifestation; the utilization of the natural forces of thought, emotion, energy, and spirit to bring about change. While we have all experienced this to a certain degree, Huna provides a conceptual framework that leads us to understanding and developing the magical resources within.
We have been socialized away from these intrinsic gifts, but to think like a shaman is to return to childlike ways of wonderment and imagination. Like children, shamans play with drums, rattles, and bells; daydream their way into faraway lands; and communicate with their “imaginary friends,” the spirits. Shamanism brings us back to a time when we were not victims of the empiricism of science and its postulation that if something can’t be measured or explained, it can’t be real. Further, many of us rejected the hypocrisy of organized religion and cynically threw the baby out with the bathwater on all things energetic and miraculous, deferring instead to a sterile, scientific view of an entirely mechanical world.
If we are lucky enough to still believe in magic, we are at odds with the judgmental and religious morality that is embedded in the collective unconscious of the West, whether we adhere to it or not. It tells us that we do not deserve to advocate for ourselves magically, and to do so is wrong, egotistical and, in some circles, blasphemous. But it’s not just our pulpits of origin that are the problem, we may also have self-limiting stories. These stories often originate in the wounding we received in our families or communities, and continue to disempower us from cultivating our magical gifts.
But from an indigenous perspective, you are here to live your best and most natural life, not the life that looks the most acceptable to your neighbors. Shamans practice magic from a place of deservingness and even entitlement. They give themselves full permission to want what they want, to honor their heart’s deepest yearnings, and to be unencumbered in their desires’ expression. As you will learn, this is what makes our magic most effective—it is the ache of our wanting that seeds kalakupua—our ability to make magic and do wonderous acts as shamans do—into full blossom.
To take this a step further, and I know I’ll be ruffling some feathers with this one, but here goes: Our primary obligation in this lifetime must be to ourselves. This is not selfish. It is centered on the self, yes, but it is not selfish. What is counterintuitive here is that when we focus on ourselves, the entire universe benefits.
The altruistic impulse that many of us have to contribute to humanity and to the planet happens most effectively when our own needs are met first. Because when they are met, we are able to give from our surplus, rather than from depletion or lack. The more gratitude that we feel in our fullness, the stronger our impulse to share becomes. The instruction that we hear on airplanes to secure your own air mask before helping others with theirs isn’t just practical advice, it’s shamanic thinking at its finest.
While the paths of spiritual anorexics, ascetics, martyrs, and barefoot yogis begging for food are considered legitimate by some in the West, they are, in my opinion, mostly symptomatic of spiritual bypass, or seeking to find spiritual solutions for real-world issues that can only be solved through concrete action. Instead, indigenous wisdom asks us to be in right relationship with the world. This means that we are in a constant cycle of receiving from the Earth, and then giving back to replenish her.
The ancient Hawaiians lived abundantly on their lands; they had a forest of fruit in the morning and an ocean full of fish in the afternoon. They unabashedly and gratefully practiced magic to increase the natural abundance provided throughout their archipelago. By maintaining a deep conversation with the dynamism of Nature and the infinitude of the cosmos, they developed a psychological framework that allowed them to see reality as a matrix of interconnectivity; one that was more energetic than it was material. In doing so, they learned to exist magically. It was this artful connection with life that captured the interest of the early researchers of Huna lore.
Dr. William Tufts Brigham (1841-1926), was an American geologist, ethnologist, and botanist, who lived for many years in Hawaii. As the first curator of Honolulu’s Berenice Pauahi Bishop Museum, which holds the largest collection of Polynesian artifacts in the world, from 1892 to 1918, Dr. Brigham spent much of his time researching the Kahunas. While he barely scratched the surface in excavating and understanding the ancient magical practices of the shamans of Hawaii, he was an instrumental player in influencing others to pick up where he left off. One of these was an American novelist and New Age author, Max Freedom Long, who became Brigham’s protégé during the later years of Brigham’s life, and was a tireless researcher and the author of many books on Huna.
Long’s writings on Huna from the earlier part of the twentieth century were clearly influenced by the Theosophical Society and the New Thought movement, but he was among the first to attempt to bring Huna wisdom out of the inland shadows of the secret dwelling places of the Kahunas. Long is a controversial figure, considered an outsider by traditionalists, because he provides us only with his interpretive view of Huna rather than an authentic one. Yet his fascination with Hawaii, his scholarship with its language, and his earnest yearning to understand the Kahunas cannot be denied.
Brigham made this observation of the mystical