Transformation
The time is not tomorrow, it is now. The work of transformation is dependent upon practices. We might be given all the best theories in the world, but these will not necessarily do anything. Unless they're put into practice. When it comes to practices, each human being is different and unique.
One pair of shoes does not fit everyone. The same practice may produce different results in different people. This is why a living teacher and a living school is so helpful. Because it is very difficult. If not impossible, for the conditioned mind to lead itself out of its own trappings. And it is very difficult, if not dangerous, to assume that the same things will benefit all people.
There are some practices and ideas, however, that are more universal. which can be useful to anyone. The purpose of all practice is transformation. This is what a real school is about. Most people come to a spiritual school to get something for themselves. They think that the practices are for their self development, when in fact they are for the transformation of the self, not its development.
Transformation involves sacrificing our concept of the self. Otherwise, there is no transformation. It involves real change. And for something new to come about, something else has to die away. Another misconception is that we can transform ourselves by ourselves. Transformation happens to us and for us, depending on the degree of work we do.
People often talk about working on themselves without knowing what this means. You cannot transform personality with personality. When you work on yourself, what is working on what? If you try to destroy the ego with the ego, you create a thousand headed serpent. So what can you do? It is said that love can turn even copper into gold.
Love will melt the personality, because love redeems all into itself. We have to allow ourselves to be loved, which is to be transformed in the fire of love. We keep thinking we are so very important. We keep thinking and talking about me, me, me, me. If we cannot get past this sense of me, We cannot take the next step in the octave, which is a step into the heart, a step into love.
We are not important, at least we are not more important than this great wonderful universe. We are no more important than anyone else, but we think we are with all the demands we make every day. We demand others to be as we want. We demand our own happiness. We demand our important experiences. As long as we demand anything for ourselves, we are stuck in the me center.
And we can never cross the great water. The secret to crossing the Great Water is in the breaking of what I call the Dome, which is between the solar plexus and the heart. The Dome acts as a filter between the higher and lower aspects of ourselves. It is actually a spiritual protection. So that we do not open too quickly and be overwhelmed by the light of the higher powers.
When we are ready to go beyond our spiritual virginity, it is possible to gradually relax the dome and move our center of gravity from the solar plexus to the heart. The resistance needs to melt. It is an opening of the heart which can only come about when we have gained freedom from the dominance of our lower nature.
And from this, dormant faculties and intelligences begin to awaken. The habitual patterns start to dissolve, and new impulses from a higher order begin to move us. As we move our center of gravity into the heart, A higher energy is released, which can then awaken dormant faculties beyond the senses we usually know.
The key to relaxing the dome and entering the heart is to do with breath and the attitude of service. If we can learn to breathe out love from the heart in service to all around us, then we are certainly helping in God's work, which cannot happen without us. We are given this opportunity, as human beings, to participate in the divine plan.
Then, in the arms of God's compassion, we return to our true nature, to be one with the Beloved, and thus fulfill God's will on earth. We are the bridge between heaven and earth, and we can return to God through the sacrifice of all that we think we are. while at the same time acting as a channel for that divine will to manifest on earth.
In this way, we are turning to God and to the earth like a vortex or spiral moving up and down at the same time. We turn to God so that the will of God may manifest through us. This is the way of service. But before we can hope to be of service, we need to have knowledge of certain basic laws and gain control over certain aspects of ourselves.
We cannot do this on our own without some help from others who have already walked the path. We need to be receptive to the knowledge that others are willing to give, and we need to allow ourselves to be transformed. Unless the time is right, nothing can be done. We can be taught the greatest secrets of the universe.
But it will make no difference at all if the time is not right. The time becomes right when there is receptivity. The work is very much alive, but it needs receptivity to manifest itself. Sometimes in this work, we come across forces within us and in the world that do not want to allow the work to happen.
These forces do all that they can to stop the flow of spiritual grace into the world. They try to stop the work, because they do not want to change. They actually struggle against the work, and so we have to struggle with ourselves to remain awake. Once we are involved with the work, there is a tremendous flow of energy.
We are dealing with enormous energies. Energy follows thought, and so if we are not completely pure or united with the One, there is bound to be some thought in us that can lead us astray and impede the work. If we let ourselves be led astray, if we let ourselves fall asleep for too long, disorder will soon take over.
This is evident when it comes to running a center for healing or transformation. If we let it go, if we let our intention to serve drop just a little, the forces of disorder soon set in, and the result is a drain in energy and a growing confusion. I've seen it happen so many times. We have to keep the space for the work spotlessly clean and in complete order.
And we have to watch these things very carefully. We are given space and time, and it is our responsibility as human beings to make correct use of them. In this space, there is possibility. What we do with our space is up to us. If we don't do something with it, we are wasting time. Let us make space for beauty to enter.
Let beauty come on earth as it is in heaven. Each moment of beauty that fills our space is indeed creating heaven on earth. Every moment can be magical if we realize that it is the only time there is. Space without time would be a void with no possibility. Time without space. would be a pointless waste of energy.
What do we fill our space with? What kind of thought? What attractions? Are we preparing a space for divine possibility to enter? Remember that energy follows thought, and thought attracts its own kind. This means that we as human beings on this planet have a great responsibility in the way we use thought.
Every thought has a sound, and every sound carries a weight of meaning within it. Thought comes in many different colors and vibrations. All thought wishes to express itself through the world of feeling and into the world of form. We are approximately 80 percent water, and water is a conductor of electricity.
A thought form is an electrical impulse. Therefore, we are full of a lot of thought, most of which is probably useless. If we breathe consciously, that water can flow continuously, and then we will not be full of so much stagnant thought. It is hard not to let thought rule us, because the food of the mind is thought and comparison.
Eat these thoughts, transforming them into pure thought, which is the food for our spiritual growth. If we can sacrifice them, or allow them to be transformed into light, we are feeding our inner being and freeing ourselves from the tyranny of thought. When we live in freedom, we can free others. If we can live for the freedom of others, we become free ourselves.
We can become willing servants of God, dedicated to service, in the love of God and all beings on this planet. As we serve others, so we serve God. This is a completely new orientation to life, and out of this comes a real change in our being. Our ability to serve is dependent upon our commitment, willingness, and agreement.
The Triad of Freedom. Through this triad, we are freed from the cocoon of our conditioned self. We are liberated from the tyranny of thought and self centered feelings. Through our commitment, willingness, and agreement, we are able to fulfill the true destiny of the soul. This is the sacrifice of oneself in transformation, and it can only happen from the heart.
The heart is the altar of sacrifice. As we move into the heart and give everything up in love, our whole being is burned in the fire of love. As in Mevlana's wish for burning, only burning.
Prayer. True prayer is an act of total self giving. Life is a prayer. And until we understand this, we are merely puppets in this world. Moved by the strings of the collective unconscious and our own conditioning. To know that life is a prayer is to realize a great possibility in life. What do you want?
Ask yourself what you want from life. Probably a whole flood of ideas come to mind, but what do you really want in the depths of your heart? Do you want to know the truth? Do you want union with God? That's a big prayer indeed, but it is fully possible if we are willing to go for it. Prayer does work. Or at least it allows the answer to come.
But we have to hold that one great prayer in our heart. It has to come from the heart. We have to know it in the heart, and we have to feel it in the heart. It is like a burning question, or the burning prayer. Mevlana's burning, only burning. We each have the free choice to ask the question, or not to ask the question.
Either we affirm that prayer, or forget it. Either we realize our dependence upon God and ask for what we need with all our heart, or we're on our own. Whatever we ask for, it is a legitimate prayer if it comes from a sincere need or yearning. Prayer is the expression of a need, on one level or another, of something that appears to be unattainable without some kind of greater help.
And, uh, if the prayer is for union with God, then it needs to resound continuously in our hearts. This is the way to live. It is a life full of passion. The passion to know and to be one with God. It is a beautiful way to live, and I can't imagine any other way myself. If we are lucky enough to meet up with another human being, who has touched this fire and who is burning in prayer for God, then we'll see that it doesn't matter what religion we have or what group we belong to, because that person has found the flame and can light the spark in our own heart.
Life is a prayer, and we are that living prayer. We could say that prayer is to communicate with God. God is not something out there, outside of ourselves. Rather, there is one God in all things. Whatever image we have of God, however different from another's, it is in fact only a different manifestation or reflection of the one eternal truth.
There is one absolute being from which all emanates and to which all returns. We can pray in God, where there is no separation between us and God. between creator and creature. This is where the individual meets the eternal essence. When we enter the world of pure essence, we enter that which is already perfect.
We affirm the ever living presence and deny anything but the unity. This is prayer in the realization of unity, which leads all awareness back to the ocean of essence. We do not pray to God, but we pray in the knowledge of unity, knowing that without that one prayer, things will not come about. This is hard for the mind to understand.
There is one absolute being. God is not somewhere distant from us. The future of this world depends entirely upon the affirmation of this one being, without which the experiment of mankind on earth will not succeed. There are three basic sorts of prayer. The prayer of ignorance is when we pray for something without considering the consequences.
It is wanting or asking for things without realizing that You cannot pick a flower without the traveling of a star. Is what we ask for something that we really need? Is it only for ourselves? Second, there is what I call the prayer of duality, which is asking God to intercede in the world in some way.
This is a Christian form of prayer, as in, Father, please help me be a better person. Or, Almighty God, may we have peace in our time. The third form of prayer is prayer in unity, which is on a different level. Prayer in unity is possible when we have surrendered everything of ourselves into unity, and thus nothing else exists.
When we realize our unity within the One, then we can pray within the unity. Every time we affirm the unity of God in the complete knowledge of this, someone in the world is yearning towards unity. Being in unity does not mean that we think we are God, because this would limit God. Instead, we realize in humility that God lives through us, and prayer in unity is dependent upon the degree of this awareness.
If we are not humble, we cannot be the agents through which God works. God is the only knower, and God is the only doer, and prayer in unity is the affirmation of this essential unity. At the highest level of prayer, we do not need to ask for anything, because everything is already complete, and we know we are given exactly what we need to fulfill our part in the divine plan.
If we say within, I will, knowing that in this sacrifice we come to be merged in the great ocean of love, then whatever is necessary at this moment in time will come to pass. There is a vast hierarchy of divine helpers at different levels of consciousness, each with a specific function in order that God's will may manifest in this world.
Everything happens within consciousness and within prayer. Manifestation requires the help of many invisible beings on many levels, and it requires our help and our prayers. We become the agents for this divine plan to work itself out. Within unity, we each have a unique job to do for the will of God to be made manifest.
We therefore need knowledge. The knowledge of ourselves. And of God's will, because the greater our knowledge, the more perfect our prayer. Then we will know the power of prayer. Prayer is an exercise of the will, in which the created human will seeks loving identification. with the will of God. It is a personal encounter with the divine will.
This is the height of prayer. No more is there you trying to get what you think you want, or trying to help others get what you think they should have. All opinion goes out the window, and all we want to do is to serve God's will. There is no other intention. We need to develop a personal communication in prayer or invocation.
Thoughts without feelings are useless, and feelings without thoughts are equally useless. Without feeling, we are only half alive, and without a question, we are only half here as well. A question brings prayer to life, and through the question you may have a response. When we say, may I be allowed to be of service this day, we are asking a question.
We are asking to be part of the work of transformation. If we have a question in our prayers, it makes the prayer alive. Prayer. is to give God the undivided attention of a lover. True prayer is an act of total self giving and a vehicle for sacrifice. Praying for someone is not a matter of holding that person in a certain concept of being well, but is a willingness to sacrifice ourselves for that person.
When we can sacrifice ourselves for another, we are giving something of love and healing to them. It is not a matter of projecting energy or performing magic. It is to do with giving ourselves so completely that we surrender our whole life in that moment of sacrifice. In the Kabbalah, there is the lightning flash, which comes down from above into the world of manifestation.
This can be seen as the grace of God, or the rain from heaven descending on earth. Yet we cannot just rely upon this grace. There is something we must do. Evolution is dependent upon man and woman. And it is prayer that spirals evolution. We could say that God has his job to do and we have ours. There is a descent of purified forces into this world, but the manifestation of this on earth is dependent upon man and his ability to produce what we call conscious evolution.
In prayer, we become the vehicles for God's will on earth. Through prayer, we become the creator, though there is the one creator beyond. Then we can actually do something. The correct attitude in humility brings us to a state of being, which can be seen as the preparation to prayer. That is when there is no separation between myself and my father, as in the saying of Jesus, I and my father are one.
In this knowledge, we can truly be of service. Our prayers help towards conscious evolution. Every step we make in our sacrifice helps the unfolding of God's plan. We must continually remember that we are not doing the work. But the work is being done through us. We are not developing ourselves because that would be a further development of the illusion of ourselves as separate from God.
Instead, remember that as you sacrifice yourself for the work, You become a more purified instrument for its unfoldment. It is not a matter of developing what we think we are, but sacrificing the illusions of what we think we are, and allowing the unfolding to take place through us. It is an entirely different attitude to what we are usually taught in the West.
Every step taken in conscious evolution requires something to be given up. We have to pay for everything in this world, and every time we give up a little bit of the illusion of our separation, and take a step in service to the work, we are allowing that lightning flash of God's will to come on Earth.
This is a great responsibility. We can allow the spirit to infuse us, which can be seen as a fusion of the higher nature with the lower, the spirit with the body. It is a spiritualization of matter and a crystallization of light energy. In this way, we become a vessel for the spirit to enter. So we need to live at a higher rate of vibration.
Because the lower vibrations, or identifications, block out the fullness of the spiritual light. We need to let in the spirit and work with it, which means working with will, because will and spirit go hand in hand. With will, we can allow more spirit to enter through us, and through the planet. Put yourself into an active receptive state so that you are prayed through.
When we are in such a state of prayer, whatever needs to be prayed for will come forth for help. We are in a state of readiness to serve whatever comes up, and it could be someone we know or it could be something going on across the world. We just give ourselves up to be a pure vehicle for prayer. Don't underestimate yourselves.
There is much that can be done on an inner level, but it's not a matter of imposing what we think is right upon that situation. In real prayer, we are not making something happen, but allowing what is needed to happen by being an opening for divine grace to enter in the way that is needed. It is prayer that spirals evolution.
And it is prayer that brings about real change, not the appearance of change. Whatever is happening in each of our lives is being reflected to some extent in the world at this very moment. Walls cannot divide us, and when we can accept this responsibility, we are at the beginning of the way. The world is truly here within this space, and all that we can do for good, or for God, is dependent upon the degree of our realization.
If we can breathe in harmony with the universe, then amazing things will happen. We have to accept the responsibility of being human beings on this planet. Whatever we think about another person, or how we judge the world, or what we want out of life, starts to bring about a manifestation. A thought form never dies until it is redeemed back through man.
Our bodies are a combination of fire, earth, air, and water. And these elements... are ultimately at our command, our thoughts and prayers are indeed powerful, and this is why we need to be even more careful as we go along the path, because when the command is given, the elements in that combination are locked into that decision.
And they cannot get out of it until they are redeemed through man. So we have to be awake. Think of all the people in the world who are asleep and not in control of their thoughts. They are not consciously thinking, but are being used by thought. And all the chaos and violence in the world is just a manifestation of these unredeemed thought forms locked into their destination.
This is why the work on ourselves is so very important because we are transforming energies. We cannot pray if we are asleep and we cannot get the answer if we are asleep when it comes. We must be conscious and actively engaged in the prayer. Consciousness can be defined as As the reaction of active intelligence to pattern, this pattern is the perfect geometry of God or the divine order, which permeates all life and manifest itself through the many planes of consciousness.
Some say that there are at least twelve spheres, or dimensions, each having its own particular geometry and laws, which we can consciously pray through. Mystical prayer is rising through the spheres to break beyond the sky. Going beyond dimension, then bringing back through the vortex pure spirit into this world.
We could also say that it is the quickening of the spirit into this world. We must be conscious so that this action can manifest through us. And in order to be conscious, we must activate our innate intelligence. through will. Our intelligence lies dormant until we awaken it through will, which means that we must first want to awaken it.
It isn't activated just by itself without work. It doesn't just happen. We don't just wake up one day intelligent. We must work on it. We must work on waking up. This is the beginning of knowledge. Through the awakening of our intelligence, it is the knowledge of pattern, the knowledge of divine order, and the interconnectedness of all life.
When we are in this knowledge, then we can call ourselves conscious beings. Our aim, therefore, in prayer, is to surrender, as conscious lovers of the beloved, into the redemptive spirit of God, through which all miracles come. Within God's will is perfect order. And the manifestation of God's will on earth brings about the order that is necessary for the reciprocal maintenance of the planet.
In order to receive the answer to our prayers. Or in order to know what we are meant to do, we need to attune ourselves to that answer. Breath and silence are essential to this attunement. But we also have to be here to receive the answer. Since the answer is really already here, we can only receive as much of it as we are here to receive.
Just about the time we get bored or go to sleep, the answer appears. We have to put more and more effort into staying awake, and that means to be fully here and present. We need to bring our full attention to this moment, and we need fully to inhabit our body. If we want to receive the answers to our prayers or our questions, then we have to inhabit the vehicle through which the answer may come.
God made us in his image. The only ears God has are ours, and the only mouth he has is ours. Part of my own work has been to wake people up and help them to get here. In order to receive knowledge, we have to get here. And in order to apply knowledge, we have to be here. We can never receive anything, really, unless we are here.
And we can never really do anything unless we inhabit this body. and are awake to the present moment. In prayer, we need the right attitude and intention set deep into the flesh itself. It is no good having a wishy washy attitude that is up in the air. We have to get it down into the actual flesh. We have to feel it in the body.
It is essential that we come to realize that this body, this vehicle made up of its many parts, is the vehicle from which we pray and through which our prayer is answered, even if the prayer from the outside. Let us pray for guidance all the time that we be guided on the straight way. Someone on the way may be giving the answer, but if we are not awake, we will not get the answer.
When we pray, we need to be awake, not only to pray, but also to get the answer. The answer is not really outside ourselves, but because we cannot find it inside ourselves, God produces the mirror outside, so that we can see it inside. When the Sufis talk about polishing the mirror, it doesn't just mean for ourselves, it means for God.
If I polish my mirror, you may get the answer you need through me. And if you polish your mirror, I may get the answer I need through you. Polishing the mirror is an act of surrender, sacrifice, and responsibility for God and humanity. If we see something outside, it may be coming in answer to our prayer because we cannot see it all inside.
The answer will come dependent upon the condition we are in when we are praying. Being in a higher state of prayer, we need not worry about seeing or hearing the answer. It may not be the right time for the answer, or we may not be the right person to hear it. This state of prayer is not limited. to just receiving the answer, because the prayer comes from beyond you.
The answer is not for you alone, and may not be for you at all. In this prayer we can ask, but there is nothing else that we can do. Sometimes the answer comes quickly. While at other times the answer takes a long time to manifest, it depends upon the need and upon the movement through the higher worlds into this one.
If we pray for ourselves, or pray out of self pity, the prayer is of a lower vibration than if we pray for others. Or pray from a very deep question in our hearts. There are different rates of vibrations to which we resonate. The lowest is apathy, at which there is very little spirit at all. Then comes self pity, where we are close to anything coming in, because we are so wrapped up in our own pain.
In self pity we cannot hear or see anything, and in fact we begin to resent what could actually help us. The next is fear. In fear we tighten or block out what is coming in. In all of these states, which we all experience, to some degree or another, we are trapped in the illusion of our own separateness.
So the spirit can only enter to a limited extent. In order to be free of these lower levels of vibration, we need to be free of our self identification, which closes us off from spirit entering. We raise the rate of vibration by praying for understanding. Or to be of service. In this way, we raise ourselves up from apathy, self pity, or fear.
But the moment we turn our attention back onto ourselves, we go back into these lower states. We need to come into a greater intention and a pure motive. We raise our rate of vibration by ceasing to identify with these states, just as in some forms of meditation one practices observation of the mind without identification.
The highest vibration is the still center because in this stillness of being there is unlimited energy and a freedom of consciousness. This is where prayer and meditation come close to being the same. In meditation, we come into the true nature of our being, which is not separate from any other being.
In both meditation and prayer, we need to consider our intention. Are we after power for ourselves? Are we trying to attain something for ourselves? Or are we intending to be of service to a greater cause and willing to be transformed along the way? The true intention for both meditation and prayer should be love.
For love is the cause and effect of all creation. We say God is love, the lover and the beloved. Mevlana said love alone is capable of revealing the true nature of love. and of being a lover. True prayer must come from love. We need to be able to relax into this love and trust in its natural flow. We need to realize that love is the cause of all creation and love will flow where it is needed when we ourselves have surrendered to it.
This is the end of side three. Please fast forward the cassette to the end and turn over to play side four.
The Bowl of Light
Chapter 1 - First Encounters
In the mid 1980s, having just achieved my doctorate degree from the University of California at Berkeley, my family and I decided on impulse to spend a year or two living on our small farm in Han na u na u in the South Kona District of Hawaii Island. We had acquired this property in the late 1970s, when agricultural real estate was still affordable, and we had always intended to live there, at least for a while.
We thought of this time as the Hawaii Project, in which we planned to restore our house, clear our overgrown land, and then plant it with the famous Kona coffee. In the mornings, we took our children to the beach, and during the days, I worked on the farm. In the evenings, I taught anthropology classes in...
Kealakikua for the West Hawaii campus of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. We flow through our days with grace and ease, and our children flourished. In 1989, this period in our lives came to a natural close, and we took up residence once again in California, where I taught at several universities, colleges, and institutes until 2007, while my wife, Jill, worked as a physical therapist in the Sacramento area.
But I still had a longing for the islands of Hawaii, so in the waning days of 1996, we decided to spend Christmas there with our two daughters, then 10 and 13 years old. Just the year before, Spirit Walker, the first volume of my Unusual Spiritual trilogy, about a continuum of spontaneous visionary experiences that I had experienced while living on the island between 1985 and 1989, had been published.
This book and the two volumes that followed record my endeavors to understand the nature of those experiences. They took the form of deep, cataleptic trances in which my lucid conscious awareness was brought into connection with the mind of another man, an individual of Hawaiian ancestry named Nyanoa, who appears to live in the future and who may be one of my descendants.
To say I was surprised by these dreamlike episodes would be an understatement of considerable proportion. I was stunned. In the first of these visions, I found myself looking out through someone else's eyes at a world I had never seen before, and I discovered almost immediately that I could in some unknown way receive his thoughts and emotions as if they were my own.
This included his memories. The man, Nea Noa, lives somewhere on the western coast of what is today California, but the landscapes I saw were tropical like those of the Amazon, bearing out warnings about radical climate shifts. Descended from Hawaiian voyagers who had landed on the coast in a fleet of ocean going canoes more than a hundred years before, he was prepared, preparing to leave on a quest of geographic investigation into the unknown interior.
of The Lost Continent of America. The visions happened in sequence, creating a sense of ongoing connection with this man that lasted almost 20 years, yet I was unprepared to accept the reality of these experiences in the beginning. But as they deepened, an extraordinary story began to unfold. My attempts to assimilate and understand these experiences drew me, a professional anthropologist, into the shaman's world of mystery and magic.
Because I was living in Hawaii when the visions began, my scholarly curiosity led me inevitably toward an area of knowledge about which I knew virtually nothing, the esoteric wisdom of the Hawaiian kahuna mystics. Through my inquiries into Hawaiian mysticism, I began to discover an expanded perspective on the nature of the self, as well as on the nature of reality, that elevated my understanding of just about everything to an entirely new level.
In writing about this indigenous perspective in Spirit Walker, I was sensitive to the fact that I was trespassing into an area that did not exactly welcome outsiders, especially anthropologists. I knew that sooner or later one of the Hawaiian Kahuna elders might come in to have a look at me, and this is precisely what happened during our return visit to Hawaii Island in 1996, but not exactly in the way I had expected.
I had been invited to speak at the New Millennium Institute, an alternative educational center devoted to exploring the interface between consciousness and spirituality and being of service. The Institute was then located on a just completed house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright up on the northern part of the island near Waimea.
On December 28, Jill and I drove up there in the early afternoon. The Institute. Upon our arrival, we were greeted by our hosts, the house's builder. A retired advertising executive from Honolulu and his wife. They had fixed a bite to eat and the four of us sat down to get to know each other a little in their striking kitchen in which everything including the furniture and the fixtures had been designed by the famed architect.
We then had a tour of the new hemicycle house fashioned of conjoined grey cylinders with a soaring glass floor. Overlooking, excuse me, a soaring wall of glass overlooking expansive views toward three of Hawaii Island's great volcanoes and capped by a greenish bronze colored roof that created dramatic upsweeping curves.
It was and is impressive to say the least. About 50 expectant people then began to show up to hear what I had to say about the transformational community. And as the introductions were being made, The sky outside suddenly darkened, and it began to rain, torrentially. The leaks in the new roof made themselves known within seconds, and as my hosts busied themselves with the mop up, they told me offhand that until this rain, the area had been suffering from drought.
Abruptly, the rain began to slack off, and the clouds began to clear as rapidly as they had arrived. There was something at work here that I did not fully understand in those moments. Something I would eventually learn and come to accept. When the Hawaiian transpersonal forces, or deities, arrive, they often come accompanied by, or concealed by, clouds and rain.
As if on cue, the front door opened, and in walked a big Hawaiian man. He was a half a head taller than me and considerably more robust. His thick white hair on top and dark underneath was glistening with the rain and tied in a long ponytail that hung halfway down his broad back. His dark face was framed by a long bushy white beard that masked his upper chest.
He smiled broadly as he brushed water drops from his massive shoulders encased within a classic, flashy aloha shirt with a bright floral design. With his right hand, he leaned heavily on an intricately carved wooden walking sticks. Our hosts immediately abandoned their mop up to introduce us to our esteemed guest, the Hawaiian elder Haile Makua.
His arrival was unexpected. We would later learn that a mutual friend had encouraged him to come and we could all feel the energy change in the room. His white teeth gleamed in his brown face as he laughed with delight. Then he deftly drew two thick flower lei's from around his own neck and draped one around my neck, the other around Jill's.
As I inhaled the fragrance of my lei, I noticed that several more Hawaiian men were arriving through the door, all with long hair and beards. I smiled to myself somewhat nervously as I sensed, rightly, that the time of reckoning had come. I was an outsider as well as a haole, or foreigner, and I was aware of the strong feelings that many Hawaiians hold toward white people.
Under such circumstances, one's mind can work exceedingly quickly, and as I took stock of my situation, I saw that the Hawaiians had brought their wives with them. This was good news. I would not be turned into a pillar of salt, at least not this day. I greeted each in turn as we were formally introduced, and I almost immediately forgot all their names due to my shock and anxiety over what was occurring.
In a very formal manner, the Hawaiians sat down across from me in the circular central room, with Makua in the center. Jill and I had heard about Makua for years from mutual friends, and we knew something about who he was as well as some information about his genealogy, yet we had never met him until this moment.
I watched him warily and reflected with some chagrin that this might be a good time to direct a prayer to my spirit allies. This was not just any Kahuna elder who had come to hear me speak. This man was descended from kings and high chiefs. This was one of the big Kahuna. I half closed my eyes and looked down into my inner place of tranquility, mentally addressing the spiritual beings who serve as my protectors and advisors.
I asked them to provide me with support and the ability to speak from a place of truth. Then I looked up again, and after a brief introduction from my hosts, I launched into my talk a rather academic discussion of the beliefs, values, and trends held dear within the new transformational community taking form in the Western world.