The Na’au is connected to Nature itself, and when we learn to discern it, it will never steer us wrong. The more we listen to it, the more we are led toward “flow”—the effortless living that comes from being in our authentic truth. This inner compass lives in us, and being on the shamanic path requires that we nurture an intimate rapport with its deep wisdom. The Kahuna tradition of only answering questions from the student ensures that the student really wants to listen to what the Na’au has to say, and will take responsibility for whatever it tells them.
There is a Huna proverb: A‘ole ka ‘ike I ka halau ho‘okahi, or “All knowledge is not taught in one school.” In other words, Huna is one path but it is not the path. Acquiring knowledge comes not just from teachers or following established systems, but from the creative engagement that we can each choose to have with our lives. Everything that happens to us (even the bad stuff!) is the material through which we step toward enlightenment.
And what is enlightenment, anyway? If you were to follow any legitimate spiritual path to its penultimate conclusion, you would learn two things: that we are all connected, and that we are all God. Now, I can tell you this myself, but it means very little, or possibly nothing at all until you come to decide what it means to you, if it is true for you, what you want to do about it, and if you want to start asking questions about it. That is your work to do. It is only by engaging deeply with our life that we enter into a co-creative relationship with it, one in which the questions that we ask become the path to the deeper truths within.
The Hawaiian Language
Like the islands themselves, the Hawaiian language is a metaphor for the shaman’s mind. The point of my linguistic exploration is obviously not to teach you the language, but rather to offer you a snapshot into how the Hawaiian language supports the indigenous thinking of the shaman’s mind.
If we contemplate English or the Western languages with which we are most familiar, we see that their primary purpose is to name things and to label experience. There is a linear, fixed quality to Western languages. Their subject-verb-object structure implies something static and apart. Western languages point at life, but fall short in expressing the beingness of it. It’s like vacationers grabbing their cell phones to take a picture of a beautiful place, but forgetting to actually look at the beautiful place! A Zen philosopher once said that when a child learns that a bird is called a “bird,” that child’s experience of bird is forever changed. The very act of naming distances us from the universe.
The simple sentence, “I hit the ball with the baseball bat,” implies a separation between me, the ball, and the bat. This takes us away from the unitive consciousness of the shaman’s mind which never forgets an interconnective perspective of oneness. The fact is that the ball, the bat, and I cannot exist without each other and the space between us. Further, that simple sentence tells us absolutely nothing about the flesh-and-blood experience of performing that action.
In our language, words can certainly be put together in highly intelligent, and even wildly creative or poetic ways, but the expression of the experience itself is limited because our language can’t vibrate experientially. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The moon is the actual lived experience of the moon. That is why when the wonderful spiritual philosopher Alan Watts was asked the question, “What is reality?” he didn’t give a verbal answer, he just rang a bell.
The Hawaiian language functions very differently from Western languages. It doesn’t point at reality, it comes at reality from the inside. To even begin to understand it, we are required to release our habitual way of seeing the world through eyes of limitation and separation and, instead, bring ourselves into a shifted perception that presupposes unity, feels into vibration and energy, and assumes the presence of concealed and hidden truth.
Hawaiian is a relatively simple language. Although there are comparatively few words, they often contain layers of kaona (hidden meanings), ranging from the mundane to the poetic, the metaphysical, and even to the sexual. For example, Hawaiians don’t usually tell the tourists that the word Waikiki, the name of a city on the island of Oahu, also means “flowing water,” “springing life force,” and “spouting semen.” This implies the lived experience of Waikiki involves water, vitality, sensuality, and possibly the literal or metaphoric seeds of creation.
While that is a colorfully illustrative example, here is possibly a more elegant one: The Hawaiian word ha‘ena can be translated as “red hot” or “hot sun” but it has another meaning, “intense breath.” Ha‘ena not only depicts the extreme heat of the sun, but it is also the felt reaction from us through our own breath that the hot sun induces. At the beginning of the day, we breathe out “Haaaaa,” as we feel the exhilaration of beholding an awe-inspiring sunrise, feeling the sun’s warmth on our face. At sunset, we sigh out an entirely different kind of “Haaaaa” as we breathe out relief, peace, and tranquility while watching the sun disappear down below the horizon.
Nouns and verbs do not exist in Hawaiian in the same way that they do in our language. It’s not that the Hawaiian language doesn’t name things or depict action, but it does so under the presupposition of a connective experience, where everything exists together. The Hawaiian language implies process. There is a Hawaiian proverb that reads, I ka olelo no ke ola, I ka ‘olelo no ka make—“In the word is life, in the word is death.” Hawaiian words often contain seeds of their opposite meanings, and nuances in almost every syllable can be doubled for emphasis, or altered with the addition of another vowel to reveal other aspects.
In Hawaiian, there are the same five vowels as in English (a, e, i, o, and u), but only seven consonants—h, k, l, m, n, p, w—and the ‘okina, a glottal stop that is written as a single open quote—‘—and is pronounced similar to the sound between the syllables of “uh-oh.” Hawaiian has a fluid movement and melodiousness to it because every word ends in a vowel. The vowels function roughly like verbs, which means that change or movement is implied in every word. In this way, Hawaiian is vibratory and energetic, a closer approximation to the felt experience of reality—a myriad of changing potentialities and limitless prospects in every moment. To see reality in this way is to see through the lens of the shaman’s mind.
If we examine the nature of fear, for instance, we see that it is actually nothing more than an adverse reaction in the present moment to a possible future state of permanent “stuckness”—some negative situation that may continue, unchanging, forever and ever. If you bring to mind your worst fear right now, and follow it to the scariest possible consequence, you will find yourself in a story that is bleak and desolate, with no way out.
The Hawaiian word for sickness or illness is ma‘i. If we examine other meanings of this word’s syllables, we have ma, which means “a state of,” and ‘i, which can mean “great” plus an interpretive meaning of “hardness, closeness, or stinginess,” which might be thought of as “tension.” From a Huna perspective, every illness of the body or mind is born of tension, whether that tension be mental, emotional, or physical. But when we remember that change is inherent in everything, as the Hawaiian language reminds us, then we see that the nature of reality itself is change. So, to fear an unchanging permanent state is to fear something that doesn’t exist in reality—and to let it go is to release the tension.
This is the quintessence of Huna: replacing a thought form that induces tension with one that produces relief. And when you do this consistently, the thought form that produces relief grows in strength to such a degree that we begin to exist at an energetic frequency in which that thought form transforms itself into a new reality.
The Hawaiian language has no equivalents for the past or future tenses of verbs; everything is linguistically related to the present moment. Serge Kahili King often gets a giggle in his workshops when he explains that an English language sentence like, “I went to the store yesterday to buy milk,” is roughly translated in Hawaiian as, “My having gone to the store yesterday to buy milk is now over.” Similarly, “I am going to the beach next week to go snorkeling” becomes, “My going to the beach to go snorkeling next week hasn’t happened