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 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.