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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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So one of the most wonderful concepts I came across in Huna Shamanism is the idea that there are four levels of reality.

I'm always harping how no matter where I turn for more spiritual knowledge, I check out Huna and I find a better, more complete version that works together with everything else I know as a well tuned system. It's really that good.

So one area where Huna really shines is the level of philosophy. A lot of traditions poo-poo intellectualizing, and end up with a bunch of thoroughly confused intellects among their students. Not Huna- Huna integrates intelligence instead, and comes up with just about the single most fantastically organizing idea so you can deal with just about any spiritual tradition you come across. And it's so simple I can explain it in a blog post. Ready? Great!

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More is one of my favorite words.

I get lot of flak in polite society for appreciating more a lot, because of a widespread belief that there isn't enough, so anyone who wants more must be selfish enough to want, there it is, more than their fair share.

But I don't want anyone else's share, and I couldn't have it if I tried. I can have that experience, though, if me and someone else agree that I will simultaneously expand my sense of possibility, and others will contract it. Now if I were to persuade other people to contract their sense of possibility, asking them to limit themselves in a way that really does not tend to be in their best interest, okay well then I'm as close as you can come in this universe to the uncle scrooge character. Because the easiest way for that particular thought pattern to manifest in all experiences is, indeed, you giving something to me, and getting little to nothing in return, or from anyone.

But why on earth would I do that? What possible advantage could I get from limiting other people? I would have to believe in lack myself for that to make any sense whatsoever, and since I have the choice, why would I do that? I don't want a weird non-appreciative coercive-feeling limited above-below kind of relationship with anyone at all, thank you very much! Subjects are like followers, they're just too much trouble. Give me peers any day of the week. I consider my 8 month old daughter a peer, and she can't walk yet, but that's nothing a little practice and growing won't sort out. I mean, if I were to surround myself with my inferiors, and perhaps even try to influence them so they stay that way, how uninspiring can surroundings be? And I do tend to notice among those whom I perceive to enjoy unequally-designed relationships that inspiration tends to be in short supply. Whew. Thanks, but no thanks, empires are so 20th century.

So, more. Yeah, more is what I would like, right now, copiously, and I also would very much like to be aware of more areas to want more in. Here's a list: I would like

• More money
• More power
• More energy
• More strength
• More relaxedness
• More friends
• More collaborators
• More sense of purpose
• More leisure
• More effectiveness
• More healing
• More respect
• More inspiring others
• More listening to animals
• More ideas
• More wisdom
• More connectedness
• More experience
• More love

I would like to add to this that more is an art form. Let's take money because it's such an obvious one and so far-reaching. When I say I want more money, I'm not talking about the old "oh I have lots of money but no time to spend it" deal. That's not more money, that's poverty in disguise. When I want more money, I want more money with equally many or fewer obligations than I have now. That makes life really easy. I don't have to worry creating some hip project or finding investors, because investors' money comes with obligations for the future, and my criteria preclude those. I don't have to go find some illustrious career, because those would tie me up for many more hours than at present.

Mind you, I could still go and get an illustrious career because that's rewarding, or go find investors because that's what my project calls for, but I don't have to do any of those commonly associated things when all I'm after is more money. That's probably the most important secret right there- and it's an application of the as-of-yet-unblogged-about seventh's principle, spoiler, it's about flexibility- if you want more, get rid of all the ideas commonly associated with more, and just go for more. There will be very little resistance.

Here's a couple of techniques to stretch the mind, in order to possess, well, more flexibility. Because if you are flexible in the mind, then, guess what, you are much better able to imagine yourself having more of those things you want, and when you can do that, you will have more energy, which will give you more power, which in turn means you will experience more love, because true power always means more life to all and less to none, and it doesn't get any more loving than that. The beauty is that it doesn't really matter which more you go for first, every other area will get so much easier. Pick one that's hard for you. Try money, that's usually hard, and the world certainly can use a lot less "uncle scrooge screwed me over" vibes in the world, I think we had plenty enough of those, thank you very much.

The second principle of the Kahili Shamanic Tradition is about as bold as it gets.

There are no limits.

This might seem too silly to even consider, but if you go deep enough, it looks pretty darned true- and boy is it every practical to think that way. So much so that everyone else can seem incredibly fenced in. Honestly, this idea is the ultimate liberator- ever since I decided to accept it, I have never felt so free.

The funny part is, it's not an illusion of freedom that superstitious people cling to in order to enviably, but self-deceivingly, make them self feel good in a naive way. Nope. I'm talking honest to got, real freedom here, available right now.

The key to that is that it's not that we tell ourselves we're free and then justify it sort of a little bit and call it a day. It's that we actually already are free. Not metaphorically. Not in mind only but not in body. Not for the afterlife, later, before, or in parallel. Right here, right now. Free. Pronto.

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My tradition of Hawaiian Shamanism is commonly told as seven principles, which were put together in this way buy an extremely competent shaman who first was taught the shamanic meaning of common cultural proverbs, and then organized them in an ingenuous way.

Mind you, the system is still arbitrary. He made it up. It's special because it works so well. You've got a problem you can't quite put your finger on, you go through the seven principles to see which apply most, and by golly you start seeing ways to apply it by deriving very simple logic from the principle. It works wonderfully, and it brings much needed clarity to something as vast and rich as the nonphysical cosmos.

So let's jump right in. The first principle is called The World Is What You Think It Is.

What this means is that there is very little, and one might well argue nothing at all, that doesn't come down to how you interpret things.

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In traditional Hawaiian shamanism, you think of a human being as made up from three distinct selves- the lower, the middle and the higher.

They are not really separate, but more like different aspects. Your liver isn't really something different than your kidney, it's all you, but they work differently and do different things.

If you know how to direct your lower self, and how to be inspired by your higher self, you can pretty much guarantee that you will enjoy your life, have love, power, material things you need, and deep, deep contentment.

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