We, The Navigators

Imagine, the ability to navigate Life’s most threatening storms masterfully.

How?

All cultures share an inherent, raw genius. The social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense. Science is simply one way of knowing.

There are oft-forgotten tribes from which we have much to learn. The Moken, for example, sea nomads in the Andaman Sea, sustained no harm during the deadly 2004 tsunami that swept across Southeast Asia. Or, the Palu, Micronesian, celestial navigators who boldly sail the vast and often stormy Pacific in small, double-hulled canoes without the use of maps or instruments.

The challenges we face are not dissimilar to those confronting the Moken and Palu. Our basic needs are the same…safety, security and protection. Yet, how we approach life’s challenges can be quite different.

Our culture has lost its way because we have abandoned a higher order of meaning in our lives. It’s not about what we see with our eyes or hear with our ears. Instead, it’s referencing an internal guidance system, a true north, that ancient cultures have long understood. This way of knowing transcends the physical analysis of science.

As we shift our perception from an I-It Relationship to an I-Thou Relationship, when we cease to objectify the ”other” and instead bear witness, as if through the lens of an elder or mystic. Even for a moment, we are reminded that everything is sacred. Consider this, the Inuits have no word for “it”.

When we are able to establish an intimate relationship with the natural world, as my native Hawaiian elders did, then we are no longer separated. The extent of our intimacy with nature determines the level of our interconnectedness. Our ways of knowing and being are forever changed.

Quantum physics tells us that everything is interconnected at a physical level. All the basic constituents of matter are connected through overlapping probability of wave functions, that the human body is exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation. To many native cultures, this idea is not new.

The traditions of sea nomads and navigator-priests demonstrate human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand. This wisdom blurs the boundary lines of our individuality– our very sense of separateness.

If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a field, and sending out and receiving quantum information, then where do we end and where does the rest of the world begin?

Throughout the world I witness inexplicable demonstrations of such understanding, mastery, if you will, by cultures hardly known to modernity. Their worldview is, in fact, timeless. Even more important, it returns meaning to a world that suffers from a pervasive lack of meaning.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift”. Albert Einstein

In a world bloated with data, we are starved for the level of wisdom and mastery that is rapidly vanishing. Throughout the world, from Chowra, India to Satawal, Micronesia, navigators called the winds and calmed the seas by what these priestly orders refer to as magic. Yet, it was their science, their ancestral technology, their cultural intelligence. Such phenomena continues to defy Western belief. Unfortunately, this mysticism was dismissed by classic science and demonized by religion. The judgments and consequent constraints imposed on native people almost destroyed their field of knowledge. As native societies were conquered, decimated, and assimilated, these priests and mystics: Hawaiian kahuna, Micronesian palu, and many others, were forced to abandon or denounce their ancestral traditions or conceal their secrets. It was nearly the death-knell of native science.

As both a western-trained scientist and a native Hawaiian woman raised by indigenous elders and trained in ancestral ways, I know that both sciences — western and native…from data collection and information gathering to keen observation, synthesis and instinct, to the cultivation of wisdom to a level of mastery, can co-exist. And not only can they co-exist but they serve to enrich and enhance one another.

We stand at the threshold of a dawn of rich possibility where collaboration of ancient and modern science, wisdom and knowledge, has immense potential.

Environmental sustainability, social justice and personal integrity are intimately related. Before we can respect and steward the natural environment, we must respect and care for ourselves. We cannot heal a world of conflict until the battles that rage within us are resolved. We cannot help restore Nature until that which has been depleted within ourselves is properly nourished. Resolving the issue of domination, separation and destruction ultimately rests on the shifts that occur within us because we are an integral part of Nature. Our relationship with the natural world combined with science’s ongoing discoveries, will only serve to increase our awareness that everything is sacred and interconnected.

My mentor, famed celestial navigator Pius “Mau” Piailug, often said, “The canoe is the island, the island, the canoe. Our resources are finite”.

The world is our canoe. The canoe, our world. Each country, community and individual, affects the whole. We must become masterful at navigating life. Our collective voyage is too important.