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Hawaiian Perspectives on Reality
In several of our past columns, we drew upon the Hawaiian kahuna perspective on the way the self is put together—addressing the primordial question of “who are we?” Now we move toward a more expanded perspective on the way reality is put together so that we can ask another important question—“where are we?”
At the onset, it could be observed that the number of dimensional levels of reality varies from tradition to tradition, according to how they are defined. Only four need be discussed here, and in doing so, a great secret is revealed.
The shaman’s many worlds are simultaneously levels of reality, levels of awareness, and levels of experience. By intentionally shifting their level of awareness, shamans are able to shift their level of experience, effectively moving their consciousness from one level of reality to another.
References and source readings for the ideas that follow may be found in the Notes section of our small book Spirit Medicine: Healing in the Sacred Realms.
Level One: Hawaiian kahunas consider this to be the physical objective level of the everyday world that we all take so much for granted. It is a level of action in which our oversoul essence can inhabit a physical body--a level on which we can have jobs and careers, friends and families, on which we can build houses and accomplish goals, eat and sleep and make love, and much more.
It is a level of challenge, and it is in response to life's contests that we grow, increase, and become more than we were… AND we experience the physical plane the way we do through three basic assumptions that we accept as valid.
The first is that everything is separate from everything else. I am writing this column here, and you are reading it there wherever you happen to be. This sense of separation between people, places, and events dominates our perceptions of the physical world.
The second assumption is that everything on the physical plane has a beginning and an ending. Your life began when you were born, it will end when you make transition; stories and books begin at the beginning, they end at the ending. This also reveals that on Level One, time is linear: it progresses from the past, through the present, and into the future.
The third assumption is that in the everyday world, every effect has a cause. Understanding the relationship between cause and effect is critical to healing and will be reconsidered in future columns.
Healing modalities performed on Level One include all Western allopathic physical medicine, chiropractic medicine, physical therapy, massage, exercise, yoga, as well as acupuncture and acupressure. Herbal therapies as well as rituals and ceremonies could also be included here.
Level Two: The second level of reality, awareness, and experience is the subjective level of mental-emotional consciousness in which feelings can be felt, thoughts can be thought, and thoughtforms can be created--the first step to manifesting something into the everyday world of Level One.
This is also the level of energy, revealing it to be the dimension in which the matrix of our energy body exists. The mental soul and the body soul, discussed in previous columns, are carried by our energy body on Level Two.
The first assumption by which Level Two may be experienced is that everything is connected to everything else. The kahunas perceived these interconnections to exist as a vast energetic net or grid that stretches out across the continuum of the universes. This is the diaphanous web-like structure that mystics see in visions, and most likely the grid-like abstractions seen in indigenous rock art all over the world.
The Hawaiians call this matrix the aka field. The word aka can mean many things in the Hawaiian language according to how it is used. In this context, aka refers to the primordial stuff out of which everything, everywhere is made.
Interestingly, aka is also the Hawaiian word for shadow, and it may be analogous to what physicists refer to as dark matter, an invisible, undetectable substance that makes up a substantial percentage of the universe and exerts a mysterious force (dark energy) that holds the structure of physical reality together. Physics suggests that this dark matter is the ladder-like scaffolding upon which the building blocks of ordinary matter assemble. These units of physical form are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and are generally referred to as baryons.
During the first several billion years of cosmic history, the baryons existed as vast gas clouds, composed primarily of hydrogen, which eventually condensed into a spidery network of filaments connecting galaxies and galaxy clusters. Stripped of its electrons, the hydrogen in the filaments cannot radiate light, and so it cannot be seen, hence the term ‘dark matter.’
These filaments are most likely the fibers that make up the web of the aka field and may be analogous to the superstrings of advanced theoretical physics. It is likely that the indigenous peoples have known about them for a very long time because they are depicted in petroglyphs and pictographs that extend back well into the stone age—to 77,000 years ago in fact.
In kahuna thought, when you make contact with a place, an object, or a person, that connection is made of aka. This exists as a stretchy, sticky, invisible fiber that extends between your aka (energy) body and the aka of the person or place. It is through these aka filaments on Level Two that we suddenly know when the phone is going to ring, as well as who is calling; it is through these same cords that a close friend or significant other may tap into our thoughts and may start talking about something that we are thinking of at just that moment.
This reveals that it is through the aka web that all psychic experiences occur, including extra-sensory perception, clairvoyance, telepathy, clairaudience, clairsentience, deja-vu, and precognition. These are natural functions that we all possess to a greater or lesser extent, although some of us are better at it than others.
It is also through the aka field that shamans may communicate with plants and animals, and with the winds and the rain, with the river as well as with the fish swimming within it. It is through the aka matrix that they connect with the spirits (in Level Three), as well as with the mind behind nature that permeates and infiltrates all of creation.
The aka field is thus revealed to be the internet of second level--the real worldwide web that was known to the Anglo-Saxon wizards as the web of Wyrd, to Eastern mystics as the Net of Indra, and in our own time, to quantum physicists as the zero point field.
The second assumption: on Level Two, there are no beginnings and endings, only cycles and transitions.
It is a law of thermodynamics that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, although it can shift to a new state. This reveals that energy is immortal, a quality that could also be ascribed to our energy body. Understanding this allows us to comprehend with absolute surety the truth of reincarnation. The death experience only occurs for the physical body on Level One.
Life on Level Two exists as a spiral of cyclic activity within which our lives can remain stable for long periods, and then can change quite rapidly when energy flows into and out of the spiral. It is within this dynamic of stability and change, expansion and contraction, ebb and flow, that the Mysterious Source is manifested into individual form and experience.
The third assumption: on Level Two, time is synchronous. This means that our experiences on Level Two are outside of the time-space continuum, and that all time is now. This also implies that everything that has ever happened, as well as everything that will happen, is all going on at once, interconnected though the matrix of the aka field. This is how past and future lives can be perceived and connected with. This is the manner in which psychics and shamans can uncover something that happened in the past, even generations ago.
This is how shamans may even travel across time—a phenomenon that is explored in depth in my Spiritwalker Trilogy.
All energy medicine, including reiki, qigong, energy balancing and transfer, as well as the psychotherapeutic healing modalities take place on Level Two. Acupuncture and acupressure are performed on Level One, but are experienced on Level Two.
Level Three: This is where we find the spiritual worlds, the Dreamtime of the Australian Aborigines, the Other Worlds of the Celts, the Po of the Polynesians, the Wyrd of the Anglo-Saxons. Level Three is often referred to simply as The Sacred, and it is the astral level in which our personal oversoul lives as an immortal being of pure energy rather than as form.
This is the plane of realization in which there is nothing to gain and nothing to experience. Spiritual consciousness makes the knower, knowing, and the known, one. It is in this manner that perception, knowledge, and action can occur simultaneously, and like Level Two, all space is here and all time is now.
The great three-leveled world system of nonordinary reality is located here—those beautiful, awesome regions in which the shaman journeys to connect with the spirits, as well as with the power that the spirits possess. These “worlds” appear to exist in layers, with the various levels distinguished by their density, as well as by who and what may be found within them. In the West, they are commonly known as the Upper Worlds, the Middle Worlds, and the Lower Worlds.
Right in the center of the stack are the Middle Worlds of human dreaming—the same mysterious realms where we go at night in dream when we are asleep. This is also where we find ourselves right after the death experience--the post-mortem Bardo states of the Tibetans and the Purgatory of Judeo-Christianity—regions populated largely by the souls of recently deceased humans.
Everything that has a physical aspect on Level One seems to have a dream aspect in the Middle Worlds of Level Three, which is why many refer to the physical world as the Middle World. This is also where we may find our personal place of power and healing in the dream world—an exercise developed at some depth in my small book The Journey to the Sacred Garden.
Below them, we find the Lower Worlds, formed by the collective dreaming of nature. This is where the shaman journeys to connect with the spirits of nature--with the spirit of wolf or bear, raven or tiger, eagle or deer, with the spirit of oak or corn or healing herb, and even with the elementals, the spirit of fire or water, air or earth or stone. Shamans and mystics of all traditions across time have discovered that many of these spirits are willing to come into relationship with humans as spirit helpers, providing us with protection and support, and by association, with the power that they possess.
Above the Middle Worlds, in turn, are the Upper Worlds, formed by the collective dreaming of the gods and goddesses and the angelic forces, as well as the spiritual heroes and heroines of the past. It is within these luminous, light-filled regions that we may find connection with our spirit guides and ascended masters, as well as the members of our council of elder spirits. Many of the beings who exist in the Upper Worlds may serve us as spirit teachers, and it is among them that we have a very special connection indeed—our personal, immortal oversoul.
Interestingly, these imaginal realms are perceived in much the same way by visionaries of all cultural traditions, everywhere, implying that all human beings may be linked by a basic psychic unity as some anthropologists and psychologists have proposed. It also suggests that these dream worlds, as well as the spirits that live within them, are separate from the one who perceives them and that they have their own autonomous existence, a claim that shamans everywhere affirm with confidence.
The first two assumptions by which the spiritual worlds of Level Three may be experienced are: 1) that everything within them is symbolic and 2) that everything is part of a pattern. These symbols are the archetypes familiar to mythologists, psychologists, and shamans alike, and the pattern is the great tapestry into which they are woven. The fabric of this tapestry, spread out across the continuum of Level Three, is the spirit world.
Needless to say, the human sector is already woven into the pattern, and we, ourselves, are the weavers of our part of the fabric. We accomplish this extraordinary task though our actions on Level One, through our thoughts, intentions, and emotions on Level Two, and through our dreaming on Level Three. Everything that we have become and accomplished, on our long voyage across time, is woven into the tapestry--everything.
Considered from this perspective, the spirit world can be thought of as a level of relativity, in which space and time, galaxies and stars, animals and plants and humans, achieve meaning only through relationship with each other.
This insight brings up the third assumption: In the level of the dreamtime, everything means what you think it means—a statement that implies each of us must interpret our symbols, as well as our dreams, for ourselves. No one can do this for you with accuracy, because your dreams, visions and symbols have come to you for a reason, and often from many sources. Your job is to figure them out, a task that will deepen your awareness of your self, as well as everything else.
The healing techniques of spirit medicine occur primarily on this level, although the energetic aka connections of the grid of Level Two are obviously utilized as well. We will discuss them in the columns that follow.
The kahunas say that there are actually twelve levels of reality, awareness, and experience, and so we might mention yet one more—one that exists beyond the spiritual/dream worlds of Level Three. This is a dimension that is defined in different ways, in different cultures, according to the belief systems that these cultures hold and express. This is the level of The Source.
This is the divine field that the Taoists call Tao, that Buddhists call Buddha-mind, that Hindus call Brahma, that Judeo-Christians call Yahweh, Jehovah, or God, that Islam calls Allah, that Native Americans refer to as The Great Spirit, that the Algonkians of North America call Gitchi Manitou, that Hawaiians call Keave or I’o or IAO, and sometimes Ke Akua.
The visionary fieldwork of countless saints and sages, mystics and shamans across time affirms that the Source is not some fatherly creator god as defined by the mythologies of our monotheistic traditions. That heavenly being, sitting up in heaven, listening to our prayers, and working in mysterious ways, is our Oversoul, our personal god-self, and it is dual-natured, possessing and expressing qualities that are both masculine and feminine.
Conversely, the Source is beyond Level Three. It is a purely subjective state, remote, unfathomable, yet omnipresent. It is the ultimate source of the manifested universe, including the power that infuses everything within it with essence, vitality, and life force.
Shamans and visionaries affirm with absolute confidence that while the Source can be directly experienced, it cannot be described (although I tried—see chapter 16 in Visionseeker, the third book in my trilogy.)
The Source could also be called the Unitive Field because on this level, there is only one assumption: that everything, everywhere, and everywhen is an aspect of it, existing as part of a vast, ever-expanding One-ness. On this level, there is no sense of individuality. There is only the One—a divine sea of grace that has no boundaries and knows no shores.
And beyond? Despite many well-intentioned claims from many organized religious traditions, no one knows for sure if there is a Great Dreamer, an Unmoved Mover, who is the Source of the Source.
This is, and will forever be, the Great Mystery.
Until next month, allow me to invoke the spirit of my great Hawaiian friend, Kahu Hale Makua, and extend to each of you the Light and the Love of the Ancestors, The Source of Life, rejoicing in the Power and the Peace, braided with the cords of Patience, revealing the tapestry of the strongest force in the Universe, your Aloha.
--with warm thoughts--Dr Hank
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