When I was a young man in the 2000s, I scoured the self-help sections of bookstores and sites in the earlyish Internet to find out how to feel better and become successful.
I found Huna- a philosophy of life that had a neat explanation for every subject I had ever wondered about- science, love, creativity, charisma, power, confidence, success, dreams, as well as things like telepathy and clairvoyance, which I have come to accept as real without a shadow of doubt- unpredictable as they can appear to be. I learned about who we are, why we are here and where we come from. Far from just satisfying my curiosity, Huna invited me to adopt a clear, consistent worldview, create my own path for my life, and then use practical, proven techniques to embark on it as a grand adventure. All I can say is it worked- I was able grow from a shy, angry and lonely youngster who was full of doubts and confusion into a confident, strong, happy and connected man living a life that feels like the adventure games young me used to love to play so much.
It can do the same for you- if you use it. Enjoy my blog!
And now for the big one- how to get rich, using Huna.
To answer your first question up front- yes, I have!
When the news reaches you and that news is not good- it disturbs you, and you find yourself going into a spiral of feelings of violent rage- and I'm speaking from personal experience right now- then it is a good time to heal yourself, and do your part to heal a situation.
The first thing to know is that you- right now- don't have to do anything about those feelings. You can just let them run their course. If you're like me, and the unbearable made you think and feel thinks you didn't quite know you had in you- that's okay. You don't have to act on it. You can do things differently, but you you don't need to hold back on feeling these things.
After you've done that for a while, acknowledging what you feel, realizing it isn't pretty, and doesn't have to be pretty, and you don't need to do anything right away- you will reach a point where those feelings have run their course and you will feel more calm. You don't have to force yourself to get there, it will come by itself. It helps to know you don't have to do anything about those feelings, for the time being- but if they do stir you into doing something, and that is a good thing, like reaching out to people you love- go ahead! My point is that if you get really angry and you feel like harming people or similar- there is nothing wrong with you. This is a pretty normal reaction to harsh events. But it is important to know you don't have to do anything about this, you can let these feelings run their course and only act when you can tell that there is some sort of inspiration coming through from them and you will be acting in a way that is good, that helps.
Now that most of the techniques and ideas in Huna Kupua have been shared on this blog, we'll be focusing on a new kind of article- the How-To. In these, we'll be going through processes of getting specific things done using Huna, with examples of chosing a goal, picking techniques to use, meeting challenges and persistently following through until a change has been achieved.
We'll start with the biggest one- taking charge of your entire life.
Don't worry- this may sound intimidating, but it's not about forcing yourself to go somewhere you "should" go, that very idea is completely foreign to Huna. We will simply learn from you which things are already very important to you, and acknowledge them so you can be yourself even better.
To give yourself direction, it's good to chose a core philosophy of life. There are lots of different ones, and personally, I chose Huna's- nothing else has ever given me that much freedom and still that much power. Huna's core philosophy is in its first principle:
When you are using any sort of mind technique- affirmation, visualization, the super effective Haipule combination, meditation, belief clearing- you are changing what the subconscious mind believes.
This has two interesting effects.
One, you feel good right now. Your life energy is flowing through new, positive beliefs.
Two, because of this, the life events that are lining themselves up to happen reflect the new beliefs as well, so they will also feel good.
One of the most powerful and unique techniques I found in Huna is called dreamchanging.
Dreamchanging is a type of visualization where you take an experience you don't care for very much, and change it, in your mind, into one you do like.
You can use it to change the outcome of an unpleasant night dream after waking up.
But- strikingly- you can use it in your everyday life to change the way your everyday life unfolds.
Don't you just love arguing with people who already made up their mind?
No?
Me neither. Who does? It's like trying to walk through a brick wall by taking a running start.
Even worse- how are we supposed to know our own ideas are true? Any idea can feel true, ideas are designed to feel true if you act like it long enough.
The most straight forward solution to this problem is violence. If you seem threatening enough, people tend not to disagree with you very much, at least not to your face. But this approach has, among others, the disadvantage that you don't learn very much any more and are stuck with what you learned when you were more accommodating.
Then a group of people a long time ago came up with the idea that you could just stubbornly argue it out until everybody agrees. They put their ideas in writing and their students are still arguing about them to this day.
Another group of people decided they would carefully set up special situations to test their ideas and then, depending on the outcome, everyone would have to agree. They tried it with falling rocks and turning gears and it worked really well for a while, but then people noticed it's really hard to set this sort of thing up when humans are involved. You just can't draw many conclusions from one person to the next because everybody is different and is always changing.
Even if we can test human behavior there's this little catch that the more important something is, the less obvious it is to other people because it gets very personal and very specific and very emotional. In other words, it gets subjective: defined by experience and relationships and strong bonds and big ideas. Can you imagine a harder place to go looking for universal truth with an inquisitive mind than another person's psyche? Let alone many people! It's so hard that the idea-testing crowd usually just throws in the towel and reverts to arguing that individual experience just isn't all that important.
Huna has a really, really elegant solution to all of these problems. Huna says: If it works, it's true.
The sixth principle of Huna is called "All Power Comes From Within" and it is related to the- hold your horses- the second-most important thing in life, according to the Huna philosophy.
Huna is very particular in this way. The most important thing bar none is love. Love is the end all and everything. Love is what everything is about, and even not-so-loving things are really only able to make love more recognizable no matter how mistaken they are or how hard they try otherwise.
I had an interesting experience last night. I woke up about three thirty in the morning and couldn't really go back to sleep,and after about an hour I kind of collapsed, exhausted.
I didn't exactly go to sleep- I was fully conscious and I could tell what was happening. But I wasn't exactly awake, either- I could see an image forming in front of me- I could see a line of cliffs and ocean extending to it, and huge waves which interestingly were coming from the cliffs towards me, outwards and away from the shore line.
To Love Is To Be Happy With is the fifth of seven principles of the ancient philosophy of Huna Kupua.
You can bungle all the other ones, reinterpret them to mean completely different things because then they fit your habits better, because that's more comfortable, while pretending to have made progress, because that feels good. You can sputter your energy all over the place and make your very existence a hapless exercise of half baked perplexity. You can be dogmatic and rigid and self-serving and deliver morsels of self-righteous hubris to anyone willing to listen. You can cower under a table most of your time and just stay there because it's a great way to stay out of trouble. If you get love right, none of that matters- your life will be a good one. You can royally screw up all the other principles, if you get this one right, you're good. Intrigued yet?
Love. The alpha and the omega. The be all and the end all. The core of every spiritual teaching- even the ones that don't make it very obvious. The only universal principle. The reason to exist, build civilizations, and get out of the bed in the morning, to meditate, have relationships with each other, own pets, not own pets, go skydiving, surfing and whale watching, for music, for philosophy, for math- and eating pizza. Poems have been written, duels and wars fought, wars prevented and duels rigged so nobody gets hurt, nuclear missiles sabotaged, condiments spread on sandwiches, wheat ground and shaped into noodles (did I give away my Italian heritage with that one?), cows farmed, cows kept in sanctuaries, houses built, houses burned down, wolves shot, wolves protected, chemicals developed, forests guarded, books written, amulets crafted, clothes designed, yarn spun, floors swept, computers invented. In a burning, chaotic urge to feel better about ourselves and the world around us. For love.
I'd been feeling a little off for a while.
I usually keep myself in pretty good emotional condition but this time, no matter what I tried to get better, it just seemed to make it worse. My back was in painful knots, I was grumpy, touchy, looking out of my eyes like a hungry lizard out of his cave, ready to lunge at someone. I knew this wasn't going to go well for long, so I decided to use my spiritual power of last resort: Distraction! So after a really unsatisfying session of watching television I decided to try a spiritual technique that I'd ignored so far because I didn't know what it was good for: Astral Projection.
The most reliable technique that I found in Huna Kupua, and also the most flexible, is symbol healing. Most other techniques like the La'a Kea, the Haipule, dream changing or journeying be considered variants of symbol healing with different emphasis and different flavors. On the four levels of reality, which are four distinct ways of perceiving the world around you, symbol healing is entirely a third-level technique. You look at the world as a representation of something else.
The fourth principle of Huna Kupua is called: Now is the moment of power.
Like all of the teachings of Huna Kupa I have encountered, it is both a common sense, everyday experience, and profoundly deep spiritual knowledge.
Most spiritual teachings, no matter where they come from and when they came about, recommend some version turning your attention to the present moment. It is featured in almost all schools of self-mastery, traditional or modern- martial arts, marksmanship, academia, acting, rhetoric, athletics, dance, gymnastics or Yoga. You could fill entire libraries with the pop psychology books about it. And there is this very personal experience that when you're paying attention to what's happening, and you're not hemming and hawing- you feel better, and people like you more.
But why?
The third principle of the Kahili shamanic tradition explains just about everything that happens to you, ever.
Energy Flows Where Attention Goes
So in the traditional Kahili shamanic worldview, there is such a thing as energy- you can probably feel it tingling if you like to meditate, or listen to really good music, or are in a place where everyone is happy and relaxed, and even though, you feel like the place is bursting with energy.
It is also what you notice when you see someone and think that person has a lot of energy, and then you might be strongly drawn or strongly repulsed based on that person's ideas, but you're not usually unmoved. Or you can see that someone is doing really well at something, like sports, or art, and you are moved somehow, by witnessing it.
Or you can experience a place with not so much energy that can have an eery feel, like a room where people are feeling a little awkward, or an abandoned building, or someone having a hard time for whom the simplest daily tasks are obviously very difficult, like getting up a short flight of stairs or getting their wallet out of their pocket. Or people who are just being slow, and you can just tell that person just isn't likely to be doing a lot of things today. People say it casually, there isn't a lot of energy in that room, or they're worried about Joe, he's been low energy lately.
So there is such a thing as energy, and it matters a lot to everyone's life. That's great! But now what?
The great, practical secret of this principle is that your energy follows your attention.
That's big. Why? Because your attention is, and is probably the only thing that is, totally under your control.
I've been using- and teaching- a really simple technique recently, to clear up some pretty intense bad feelings I was having that came up while I was working on a really ambitious money goal of mine.
It goes like this:
Whenever you don't feel so good, pay attention to the body feelings you get from it. So you let yourself feel that a little bit until you get a sense of what that feeling is about.
And then, you ask yourself: "What would I have to believe in order to feel this?
Expect a straight, short, comprehensive answer. If you don't get it right away- keep focusing on that question. Sooner or later, something will come to your attention.
Once you've got it, you're done. Nothing else to do, it's gone.
Now this technique is really, really, really simple, and it's also kind of technical, but it works- really well. It's the only way so far I found to get rid of ideas I don't in a way that feels like a clean slate, completely gone.
The most fundamental idea in shamanism- to explain it to someone with a background in Western-style thinking, it would sound very differently to explain to someone indigenous because those things that go without saying vary so much around the world- is that consciousness is more fundamental than time and space.
We are not living in a physical world, and then consciousness erupts fully armed from someone's forehead (to quote a Western legend). We are blobs of consciousness, dreaming of a physical world, together.
Yeah. Groovy, isn't it?
I remember very well the first time I grasped this I spent hours staring at my feet running up the hill towards my university yelling to myself in my mind (I hope it was in my mind) "It looks so real! It looks so real! It looks so real!"
Now the kicker is that, once you've gotten over your initial reaction (provided it came as a surprise), it doesn't change that much. The dream is still there. You interact with your dream as your dream character the same way as you used to interact with your perceived real world as a perceived real character. Your dream still works the same way- it is still good to pay your dream bills and interact with your dream government departments at the dream appropriate times to avoid dream trouble.
You can still describe your dream world using dream mathematics to make certain dream predictions and use dream tools to build other dream tools to do certain things you couldn't to before, which results in having stuff in your dream like electric cars and the Internet.
If you want to dream-fly, it's still a really good idea try to lift off while standing on a level surface rather than after having jumped off a dangerously high area, in case you need more than one attempt. Because it is still possible to take a dream exit by using very familiar mechanisms for transforming your body into something the dream rules say will now blend into the environment.