July 24 (Day 13) | Go to Day 1
For all the talkiness and ostensible candor of this journal, the major things that have happened to me here are personal and internal, between me and the spirits of this place. Kaua’i is a cutting-edge realm, a dirt-covered, jungle-pollinated, boat-people-colonized psychic lava field in the middle of the Pacific amid healing waters in trade winds, bearing soul memories, dream-bodies, collectively unconscious vestiges. In my odyssey from Po’ipu to Noniland lies a whole universe, a life passage, a precis of my time as an American. But it could not be unfolding if I had not already been incubating and working on it for decades. The island triggered its fruition and, through its landscapes, vibrations, and gods supported a shamanic and psychosomatic change. In a very profound way I don’t feel like the same person anymore, and that kind of transition at any time anywhere is rare. Yet it has an edge to it, like the psychic version of a hurricane or volcanic eruption, wiping the zone clean and making a fresh start. That is what followed the visit to the temple.
The morning of the night after my luminous visions at Kadavul Temple I had one of the strangest and most powerful dreams of my life. I awoke around six AM, looked around, saw the clock, heard the birds, and then slid into a different level of dream. I had been placed on a bed in my father’s old house at his hotel like a corpse on a slab. I was alone now. I was not only alone, but I had no context—no parents, no wife, no children, no calling, no identity. I knew that this was the end. I was stunned beyond fear or hope. Amnesia like a cold poison seeped from my feet up my legs, and it was about to devour all of me into the Great Dream when I awoke and was relieved and ecstatic to find myself back in the world, still alive, still holding onto an identity, still with a bit of time to live. The cold serum did not only numb my limbs and then torso like an embalmer’s anesthetic. It made them into a corpse that was not part of my being. And then the zone of my existence began closing down from the bottom up like a guillotine lens.
The dream was stunningly short in narrative, but its actual occurrence was deep, complex, and invariable. I was not so much in linear time as a timeless phenomenological state. Except for the transition of numbness upward from my feet to above my knees, the dream had no chronology and no content. It was more my deepening awareness of a body, which was my body, in a way I had never felt it before, as though it was an object like a scarecrow, a bundle of decrepit layers pulling me down into muy death. I was simply a lab report or x-ray imprint of my own being; there was nothing to anchor onto, no place to attach my identity or experience or empathy. It was over. But what was over?
I understood the core proposition of dying, but this was nothing like my imaginings of death. It was matter-of-fact, procedural, merciless. The reason that I wasn’t more afraid was that I felt something inside me that I had never felt before, a seed. And, even while I was dying, I was discovering—in fact experiencing—a core that was deeper than my thoughts or concerns for my health and being. It was not as though I wanted to go there, not at all. I went because it was more compelling than anything else and I knew, when everything else fell away, it was the lifeboat, the lifeboat and the passenger in the lifeboat as well. Whatever it really was felt as impersonal and final and cold as death, and I hated it and shunned it, but I couldn’t deny its profundity and insistence on being, on being me. It was the other, the great change, that allowed me to survive, survive myself. There was no way simply to concede and give up, because there wasn’t any emptiness or void beneath me. There was “it.” The finality of the situation revealed a different angle on existence.
In that sense it wasn’t a dream. It was more like a direct proposal and invitation out of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, as it demonstrated a basic reincarnation meditation practice. Its proposition took me into the rainbow-cellular structure of my body, starting at my feet and moving upward. It suffused me with a kind of Etheric intelligence, even confidence, while telling me, though not in words and not even as an entity, where my body and personality were rooted at every instant and where their consciousness in this life unequivocably ends. It felt like death itself. It wasn’t amusing, and it wasn’t pretty.
The good part was that the dream made it seem possible to either live or die at any time, not just possible but was was happening like the flicker light that birthed and sustained my existence. It was a pupa dream, a resurrection dream—but I’ve got to tell you, it was also as terrifying a nightmare as I have ever had visited upon me. It wasn’t a dream about dying; it was an actual symbolic death, and I experienced it as death, creeping up from my feet toward my head. When it reached my brain, I would no longer exist. I knew that. I still know that, beyond time.
What person would choose to have an Egyptian mummy/Avatar-like embalming proposed inside his own mortal fame? I say no one. (And I say “Egyptian” instead of “Tibetan” because there was no narrative, no staging, no bardo. It was direct and explicit, irrefutable—a single demonstration or instruction. There wasn’t a ticket booth, an exit after the show.)
The pictures in the temple during the day—the autonomic cinema—were light Hindu sitcoms, playful and sacred, compared to the kundalini arising of the mummy-yoga-dream body of the collective unconscious. No mere trailer this—this was the sarcophagus.
If my visit to the Hindu temple wasn’t like being touched and awakened by the Yogananda guru, this dream—in its anonymous autogenesis—was. An imperceptible, anonymous seed was planted in me there at Kadavul, programmed to burst into projective holography in the dream-body.
If I received an esoteric transmission of the highest degree, older than Egypt, it said: “If you think that you are living as opposed to dying or dead, that is not right. You are already dead and, when you die, it will be no different; the thread of identity will not be snapped, so assimilate the intelligence of your existence now, while there is time, while there is no time.”
I will restate that: You have to give everything up, every memory, every breath and heartbeat, every cell, every treasured molecule, every trace of life, of love, and that way you give nothing up. You will lose what you are, what you have. But in the larger frame—cosmos, creation, soul—you remain precisely what you are. Not as persona but the great silent torrent beneath persona. There is a part of you that is indestructible. Know it. Feel it. Let it scare the hell out of you. Let it settle you into your body and life. Let it give you solace.
Right, it was more than a lucid dream; it was a pupa dream; it was a pupa, an active resurrection—a lesson conducted by another intelligence or my own higher intelligence. Good to know that either or both exist and are present inside me to help and to scare.
I mentioned that the dream took place a room in our house at Grossinger’s, my father’s hotel: more precisely the large upstairs guest bedroom, a site from the fifties that no longer exists. I was brought there at nine to be taken into a second, previously unknown family. My body was brought there, my ego-self. It had to change its name from Richard Towers to Richard Grossinger.
The bedroom had two spooky double closets inside of closets, one to the left and one to the right of the gigantic doublebed. Their second doors, when I dared to open them, revealed ghostly artifacts: dusty paintings, trunks, hardcover books, bottles. They seemed originless and ownerless. They seemed numinous, which back then I would call dangerous. They worked their way into my childhood dreams as dormant toxins and monsters, homesickness-inducing amulets, though I had no true home for which to be sick. They were anti-pied-pipers, calling me into exile, the exile that is life. They took away my purity and innocence and contaminated me even by their intelligence and knowing.
The overall set-up was a daunting room in which to place a nine-year-old who was already on a supernatural journey. Yet I changed into Richard Grossinger; I had to. I changed from one boy into another.
Now at Noniland in a house of wizards, on on Kaua’i, a volcanic island, I was put in a crucible again, this time a dream version of the Grossinger’s chamber congruent with a smaller room, a room with empty closets and sand on the floor in which my sleeping body lay.
Over a life I had moved from birthbody to childbody to languagebody to baseballbody to dreambody to waking body to adolescent body to adultbody to marriage body to sick body to well body to ecstatic body to terrorbody to visionary body to craniosacral wavebody to aurabody to initiated psychic body and, in my dream, to intimation deathbody. Together these comprised the pupa.
In the shadow of the Hindu temple, this bedroom emanated as a false front to the Grossinger’s room, to my first public bathhouse at Long Beach, New York, where old men and young boys shed wet bathing suits to hairy mortal nakedness back to the fashion of street clothes, and together they pointed to the larger room in which we undress and dress again, or not, and either way, become something different, something “else”: the funeral parlor, the crematorium, the dream creamtorium, symbolic and real, always and again.
We are led once and forever led into fundamental circumstances of pupa change, asked to become someone else, something else, to marry something else. But this is the way of resurrection, the only way.
I walk in a new body today, the pupa created in the dream that I watered alchemically everyday in the salts of the ocean—in childhood and again these last two weeks. It the body I have dreamed and sacrificed to the atomic furnace and regained as cellular DNA folios, then reawakened to, each morning like the first glass of apple juice ever. It is a body I finally earned in an ordinary way through years of non-ordinary practices.
The message took this much time became it came in my blood and cerebral fluids. It wasn’t a thought or even an insight. It was a serum. It was the revelation that the serum contained. It was the serum transmitted through the crystal mindedness of the overseer brain.
I lay in bed for over an hour after awaking, considering what had just happened to me and where I had been bounced. I was making sure that I really got my body back and still had it and would get to keep it for a while, even as I must have wondered and made sure on entering the womb-body, again upon being born. Then I rose gingerly, to continue this life.
I still smell and taste noni in the air here. The odor is persistent and irreducible, and I am drawn to its mystery and depth, out of curiosity, out of respect for its healing powers and interest in overcoming my shyness in its presence. Visitors to Noniland have commented on the totem’s abiding presence, something not rationally explicable by either the fruiting trees or the jar of fermenting fruit inside. It is a ghost smell.
I feel a bit foolish writing these epistles. To whom? Why? Who am I kidding? And who am I pissing off?
So I am grateful to Robert Phoenix today for his most recent comment: “Richard, truly outstanding. You’ve tapped into a deeply elemental muse there. Thoroughly enjoying these vignettes from Lemuria.”
Lemuria, that’s right. Lemuria the undine land. Lemuria in the modern Pacific. Lemuria in another body on another plane.
There have been other enjoyable comments the last few days, like Marilyn Handel’s squib on the Rock Quarry: “I see you made it to my favorite beach, the one with the river. Interestingly, it was really gentle when I was there. I loved the river next to it as well…sounds like you and Lindy are having a marvelous time…moment by moment.”
Perhaps a little too moment-by-moment, sorry—but not really. No, I am not trying to document everything. Whenever I step over that line, my witnessing gets in the way of living. Done however like this, at the end of each day, my notes are a way of processing and practicing. It adds another layer, more texture; it connects me to the world of literature, of Charles Olson and William Faulkner and the old “boys”; it restores me to the comfort and company of others—all of you. It allows me to critique myself through my readers’ eyes, and I do, and your unspoken cavil vibrates back into my experience, continually changing its frequency. That’s how energy works psychically when you write.
Ellias visited us this morning for tea; we sat on the Noniland porch for two hours talking—first just me and him; then Lindy, him, and me; then various combinations of habitants and him and me. He got a Nick Good flyby. We talked (in different combos) more 2012, astrology, children, family constellations, karma, Kaua’i, publishing his future books, plans for changing times. Here is a smattering of what got said by Mr. Lonsdale:
“I’ve stopped trying to explain myself to other people because I’m really just explaining myself to myself. I mean, I’d wonder too. Why does he live in this way? Why does he have four young children at his age? It makes total sense to me, but it doesn’t to most other people. When I explain it, they don’t get it anyway, so I don’t bother.”
“You guys lucked out here at Noniland. This is the real Kaui’i; it’s not that easy to find the real Kaui’i. People usually end up in places like what you had in Po’ipu. This looks like Hawai’I; it’s a working organic farm, very Kaua’i.”
“You have gotten a deep dose of this place. Kaua’i is a water-element land, a realm of watery spirits, so whatever is water in you, which is a whole lot, gets brought to the surface and worked on.”
“The gooey sweet world of our childhood and our parents’ America is gone. It was nice, in a way. But from here on, it’s going to be a powerful ride. Are you ready?”
“I’ve had to unlearn who I am and learn new ways. That’s not a problem because I’m not someone who’s interested in having his expectations fulfilled. I am not looking to be comforted. I’m not interested in confirming what I already know. When I was younger, I was hot-tempered, but it wasn’t personally directed at anyone. What it had to do with was that the world didn’t conform to what I wanted it to be. But why should it conform? It’s for me to find out what the world is, not for the world to be what I want it to be.”
“It’s especially dangerous to be hot-tempered with children. They are willful, spirited, irrepressible, and adventurous beings. You can’t deny them or it just builds up resentment. Anger accomplishes nothing; it makes them feel rejected. Instead, I have to tell them that I want something with them to be different while at the same time communicating, either in words or telepathically, that this is not about denying them. It’s just that right now they have to do it another way. I read my children’s charts so, aside from those particulars, I know that they have different missions and karmic challenges, and I try not to get in the way.”
I confided something sweet that Curtis confided to me during our visit yesterday, “I’m not a big fan of kids; I’m not a kid person, like they’re cute or something. People don’t associate me with kids. But those kids of Ellias’s are special; I love them.”
“Yep,” said Ellias, “they have many fans around this island, and people are usually fans of one or two of them, and not ever the same one or two.”
As Ellias was leaving Noniland, I stopped to introduce him to Kohta by the coconut-chip/honey room. There Kohta lamented he would probably miss the going-away party for Lindy and me because he was attending a celebration for the gap in the Mayan calendar between one 28-day cycle and the next. “It’s when we celebrate ‘Time is Art’ rather than ‘Time is Money,’ and it’s big all over the Hawaiian islands. Mr. Arguelles, you know.”
“I know about that,” Ellias said. “I am familiar with that ceremony. It’s also the first full Moon in a while that hasn’t been eclipsed, so it’s a very powerful time, high energy, edgy. In fact, the next four weeks are filled with transits, so a lot is going to change on this world. We’re going to have some big-time changes coming to the Earth. The old world is dying, but a new world is being born.”
“I know too,” Kohta chuckled enigmatically.
“The collective only hears that the old world is dying because that’s all they know how to hear,” Ellias continued, “so they think apocalypse and destruction and collapse. The collective, especially here in America and in Northern California, is collective anxiety. They don’t hear the other half, that a new world is being born. That’s because they don’t understand the new world; they have no reference for it. But that’s why it’s new—and why it’s being born.”
“Yes, I know this too; this is true,” Kohta chuckled again.
Lindy and I set out at ten for the Hanalei Farmers Market, a gala community event every Saturday on the North Shore. The drive to Hanalei, so treacherous in the dark and rain, is pleasant on a sunny morning, and we got there quickly. The market was being held on a ball-field in front of jagged volcanic mountains piercing the clouds. Cars were parked on the grass.
I grasped at once that our thus-far-unrequited desire for native music had come to a sudden happy fruition. The sounds bubbling out of the market were pure Hawaiian, a smooth island lilt.
It turned out to be three young guys on a kind of open-air quonset pavilion, all playing electric guitar, one of them a ukele. They were singing in Hawaiian and English, and the Hawaiian sound was delicious, all those “pu’u,” ha’ke,” “he’le,” “oo-a,” “nu’e” and “me’ke-mo’o-ka’a” glottal-stopped syllables inside a trade-wind melodiousness with occasional huffed and puffed insertions that gave an inimitable indigenous accent to the phonemic thread.
It didn’t take me long to realize how rad the lyrics were. This was no old-fashioned tourist shit; this was Hawaiian Power, naked and bold: all about bringing back the gods from the clouds, reentering the Dreamtime, praying to the taro root, sailing the old canoes, reclaiming the stolen land from the Anglos, getting rid of the destroyers and polluters, bringing peace to the islands and then the world: “…seven generations/must become a nation.”
With the mountains in the background and farmers gathered around with stacks of coconuts, lilikois, papayas, purple sweet potatoes, mangoes, pineapples, greens, goat cheese, edible flowers, and kitschy souvenirs, it was a rhapsodic event, as we lay in the shade of spacious umbrella material stretched over poles to make a viewing zone and from there watched the performance. Naked kids played, everyone seemed enchanted, and people (us included) strode up and dropped dead presidents into the basket before the stage.
Eventually the music boys brought up an older, more rotund Hawaiian, and the four of them jammed together in a sequence of complex drumming sessions, some with mournful flute accompaniment. It was a different genre of music; the mellifluous element dropped and replaced with the shamanic and divinatory power of the drum and its varied beats, both hypnotically regular and sharply discontinuous: aserial gaps followed by rapid reentry passages.
We eventually got ourselves over to the booth of Island Bakery and its baker and proprietor Susan Fein, the object of our visit to the market. Robert Phoenix had urged us to hook up with his soulful first wife—”truly beautiful and deeply real” were his words. She had resettled in to Kaua’i from Austin in April and had started her own organic bakery. She considered this place her spiritual home, as she had lived on the island for a good deal of the seventies.
After we introduced ourselves, she excitedly told me about her childhood visits to Grossinger’s. “You even look familiar,” she said, as though childhood personae would translate into adult ones. “I’m sure I saw you. We went there five times a year. My father was a big bridge player. He was good friends with your father. It was incredible, the best part of childhood.”
“More for you than for me,” I said.
“Well yes, it was my home away from home.”
“You know,” I said, holding my hands apart. “If Grossinger’s is here, then Robert Phoenix is out here, like in China. That’s how far apaart from each other those two are for me. I mean, I discovered Robert when he was secretly living in our warehouse with his dog Cosmo in the nineties, reading tarot on the streets of San Francisco. And Grossinger’s….”
“For me too,” she replied. “That’s the full scope and distance of my life: Grossinger’s and Robert Phoenix.”
She offered us a piece of any cake in the display. Lindy chose blueberry coffee, and I picked a ginger cookie. When Lindy opened her purse to pay, asking how many dollars (as Susan hurried off to meet a bulk customer), her assistant said, “No dollars.”
The girl from Grossinger’s later joined us in the shade by the musicians, and we had a rambling conversation to be picked up on the morrow when she is not “fried after two whole nights of sleepless baking.”
Robert, to her, was a beautiful, spiritual guy, very gentle. It was twenty or so years ago that she and he were married. Since then, she had been in Austin mostly: “The first two years were great; after that it felt like prison.” She had just gotten herself free of a deteriorating four-year relationship there.
As we tracked across the time of our lives, she was astonished to discover that Lindy and I were twelve years older than her, as she gauged us roughly the same age—which we are in the broader sense: different-phase baby-boomers. As we opened the counterculture, she fell in the middle of the stew. So, no she probably didn’t see me at Grossinger’s.
She still considered Robert one of her closest friends. Her answer to the question as to how such an unlikely pair of individuals met was that he was in the same men’s group as an old friend of hers. “The trouble was, he wanted to move to Washington right away, and a land where it rains ninety percent of the year is no place for an island girl.”
I said next that I had a bad feeling about his most recent marriage from the moment that I met the woman.
“Of course you did. I had a bad feeling when he told me about it. He said, ‘She’s totally opposite anyone I’ve ever hooked up with.’ That was a recommendation? How could Robert think to be with someone who wasn’t doing a spiritual practice, who wasn’t spiritually awake and didn’t even want to be? He got a son out of it, though, and he always badly wanted a son.”
“Yeah, those two are great together. Otherwise, he’s back out on the great vision-quest.”
Then Susan took up, saying, “To be continued tomorrow.”
As the musicians were putting away their instruments and equipment, I walked up to the stage and asked one of them if they had a CD. “No,” he said, “we’re making one now.”
“Can you let me know when it’s out if I give you my card?”
“Sure.” He took it and looked it over. “What sort of publishing?”
“Mostly mind-body-spirit, but we do other things too: art, politics, literature.” Silence while he pondered. Then I asked, “Do you write?”
“Yeah, I wrote all those lyrics.”
“I mean other stuff.”
“Sure, lots of stuff. Reclaiming our native land. Getting the right to visit our ancestors. Burying the beached orcas on the sacred ground. Making a new treaty with our Polynesian brothers and sisters. Building a sixty-foot canoe like the old days. Bringing the Hawaiian nation back together. Navigating from Polynesia to Hawai’i, using old techniques, by the stars. Does any of that interest you?”
“A lot.” I told him. “Will you write about it?”
“I am writing about it. My book is about native Hawaiian culture and regaining our land.”
“Well then we should talk.”
“Ka’imi,” he said, extending his hand. “And you’re Richard?”
“Richard,” I confirmed.
We walked back to his car and he got me his group’s brochure. They were called Ku Halele’a. He invited me to a Polynesian cultural and political meeting at which they were performing in Kapa’a later that afternoon. “Hawaiian royalty is coming soon from Polynesia. It’s time to start to put the kingdom together. It’s time to return sustainable living to the land.”
The encounter reminded me of how we followed a random meeting in Prague (1993) to a dinner of former exiles and radicals. When traveling in strange lands, accept bids and follow the mystery. (See “1993 Europe Journal” on this site.)
In the early afternoon Lindy and I went together to Rock Quarry Beach and stood in the surf. It threw us around, and Lindy quickly had enough, so she went back to lie on a towel on the sand. I put in another fifteen minutes, then decided to try to swim again, for the first time since the evening we arrived.
From the I Ching of waves, I must have picked a powerful one for, as soon I dove underwater and began lotusing my arms and legs like a frog, a huge wave swallowed me up and rolled me over in it. I swallowed a noseful of water. More startled than scared because I knew that it was headed rapidly in, I had one queasy moment as the undertow sucked out, then the next wave arrived and I got deposited unceremoniously onto wet sand.
It was cleansing, right through nostrils, brain, throat, and mind. The ocean had done the most gentle massage of which it was capable.
But that was enough!
We set out at about 4:15 for the Hawaiian sovereignty-movement meeting at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Kapa’a. We had no idea what to expect and told ourselves that it was only fifteen miles, so we could hang out and then come back if it wasn’t right.
When we got there, we found that event time was at 5:30, not 4:30 as we Ka’imi had imparted, but we learned too that the public was welcome and we were encouraged to stay around. Luckily we ran into Curtis and KatRama coming out of Papaya’s, confirming their dictum that that grocery/restaurant was the primary meeting place on the island (Papaya’s was also where Layla ran into Trevor after the loss of her belongings and got invited to stay at Noniland).
We convened at a table where, after both of them described their recent trips to New Zealand and Mantak Chia’s complementary healing center in Thailand (bloodwork with ozone and stem cells), Curtis filled us in on the many levels, variations, and complications of the sovereignty movement in Hawai’i. For a start, he said, there is not one sovereignty movement but several, and this one here tonight is the most radical because it does not seek American-Indian-style recognition and restitution; it wants to reunite with the Polynesian kingdom.
The argument is that all of the Hawaiian Island chain was illegally seized by the United States during the nineteenth century, by which time Hawai’i was already recognized by the international community as a sovereign nation with a legitimate king and queen. The queen in fact had toured Europe and was accepted there as representative of an old royal lineage.
So whereas other native Hawaiian movements were working through the U.S. Congress to acquire special status like the American Indians and sought casino-culture recognition and capitalist spoils, the separatist sovereignty movement wanted the land restored to its native lineage and ownership. From the separatist standpoint the American Indian situation is entirely different for, though they have clearly been colonized and their rights stolen too, they are North Americans and were subjugated before getting international recognition, whereas Hawai’i was already an established Pacific nation, recognized by France, Spain, Holland, etc., and could not be legally seized. They don’t want gambling resorts; they want sustainable development, a return of the sacred.
Curtis’ rendition proved to be pretty accurate, as you will see.
First, however, we took seats in the hall and listened to another rousing Ku Halele’a concert.
Some bands have a kind of charismatic power for me, and these guys really let loose the magic. Intoning their Hawaiian and English lyrics, spirituality- and sovereignty-based, going hard on the electric guitars and ukele, and throwing in their warrior-like kiais “Who!” and “Ha!” between stanzas, they held me riveted the way that some reggae or country and Western bands have in the past. Lindy found “who” and “ha” as sexy sounds as she ever heard coming out of a band, both energizing and transporting. I can listen to the Skatalites or Dave Insley and the Careless Smokers with rapt attention and chills down my spine as they create and synergize instruments and sounds. Add Ku Halele’a to that group. Plus here they were playing not at a commercial farmers’ market but on their home field.
When the guys were done, they introduced the leader of the sovereignty movement whose name I got as Dayne. The introduction was done as such: Dayne came up on the stage and walked its length with triumphant arm gestures like a preacher or football player after a touchdown. As he did, he bumped heads with each of the three musicians in a manner that suggested this was part of their cultural repertoire as well as an act of respect. They were pretty solid head whacks that caused me to wince; yet they did not seem to hurt. The bumps said, in essence: “We are native Hawaiians, bump.”
Dayne was a stocky middle-aged guy with a pony-tail and ceremonial leis. He opened by declaring that this meeting was about the creation and restoration of the Hawaiian kingdom and its sovereignty but even more than that “how we come to represent the light of God.” He spoke briefly about his mission and then he introduced his aunt. She intoned a long prayer in Hawaiian, which people in the hall received with heads bowed. By then, there were maybe fifty or sixty in attendance, not a huge turnout for such a watershed movement and also such great music.
After the prayer, Dayne riffed, rambled, and answered questions for the next hour. It was a compelling if somewhat bizarre, disjointed presentation during which I learned a lot of diffuse but interrelated things—sort of like coming into a movie that was more than halfway through. The talk was interrupted by an Australian visitor named Derrick, who was summoned onto the stage to do his riff. Dane was also frequently redirected by his aunt who broke in with back stories, side tales, and prayer-meeting-style cheerleading such that it became a combination lecture, ceremony, revival meeting, political rally, and caucus. Here is some of what I got:
Hawai’i belongs to Polynesia, not America. There is no hope in restoring land rights or getting back what was stolen by going through the American judicial system or Congress. It is necessary to appeal to a higher law. On the one hand, that higher law is God, in whose name all things will be set right eventually but, on the other hand, it is the Circle of Pacific Island Nations, of which Hawai’i is a charter member and from which it was unnaturally and unjustly and illegally seized and dragooned into American jurisprudence. One can try to undo some of this through the American courts, but that gambit will never be more than a delaying action. The legitimacy of the Hawaiian claim must be established through Polynesia, the ancestral home—through the genealogy of those remaining descendants of royal lines, through the prior recognition of Hawai’i as a separate kingdom by the world’s nations and now the UN, and finally by the authority of Polynesian law, which is prior and superior to United States law and has the only real jurisdiction here.
If you think that this is a marginal fantasy movement without any chance of success, especially given the small turnout tonight, then think again. You need to hear that Dayne and his sovereignty group have deputized an army of native Kauian body-guards and paramilitary warriors, and they show up when they need to in order to protect indigenous interests. Though this entails a confrontation with the State, the County, and various levels of police and the military, there is apparently an understanding between the Pentagon, the FBI, and the native Hawaiian militias, and, as long as the Hawaiians are not breaking Federal or State laws, they will receive cooperation and support from branches of the constabulary. In a very mild way, these folks are like Taliban being backed by the Pakistani intelligence services for uses that transcend ordinary judicial authority.
Kaua’i is far and away the most radical island, and its militia has engaged in civil disobedience from the beginning. Dayne’s radicalization and journey began many years ago when he was arrested for trespassing on his ancestral land. “The light came on in his head and in his heart,” his aunt inserted. “He knew this wasn’t right and it had to change.”
Though they practice mostly nonviolent resistance, they play right at the edge. They engaged in civil disobedience in order to block the superferry from coming to the island and bringing more tourists and commerciality, and they used it again to try to stop Monsanto’s from sowing GMOs. In the latter case, after the police negotiated an end to their blockade, the militia stayed seven hours past the negotiated departure time because, as Dayne put it, “we wanted to make the point that this was our land and we would leave when we were ready.” Monsanto was too big to stop, but, yes, they made their point: they weren’t going away, and they would be back.
Maybe not in ten years or fifty years or even a hundred years, but in two hundred years or five hundred years, Hawai’i will rejoin Polynesia and the Pacific nations. America won’t last forever. It is falling apart already. Mexico, from which much of the American West was similarly stolen, is telling you that in a louder voice than Kapa’a, illegal immigrant by illegal immigrant, drug lord by drug lord. That is why the Hawaiians are practicing nation-building now, setting the terms, the long terms, for their children’s children’s children and those beyond them. It is not about settling for crumbs or placing politicians in office or getting short-term political results or fighting losing battles and ending up in the hoosegow; it is about lighting a torch to carry forward, even if that torch is still a tiny candle. It is the diametric opposite of how politics are practiced in America now. Those waffle from month to month and poll to poll. The attention span and meaning of the sovereignty movement transcends all of modernity by a factor of at least five. They will wait six hundred years if need be, so they are cultivating that level of patience, but they will rejoin Polynesia, and they will get their islands back from the corporations, the resorts, the tourists, and the movie stars, unless they want to join the people. The power of being willing to wait for the distant future beyond your lifetime while meeting and planning in the present is akin to the power of the suicide bomber: it changes the game, it changes the rules, and it transfers power silently and irrevocably and spiritually.
Dayne is who he is because he personally has been recognized by the Polynesian confederacy as king of Kaua’i, a role he takes very seriously but does not lord over anyone. “I’m not even anti-American,” he says. “I come from a military family. I served; my father works at the base. No one can take that heritage and identity away from me either. I’m American; I trained and fought for America; that’s mine too.”
He represents Hawai’i at the Polynesian court and in deliberations of the confederacy. He understands that not all native Hawaiians accept his rank or representation of them, but he is acting on the basis of recognition of his genealogy by Polynesians who have researched the matter thoroughly.
Derrick’s role, obscure to me, was apparently to indicate that Dayne’s ascension to the throne represented the end of a twenty-year search in Kaua’i for the rightful heir to an ancient Hawaiian flag that he (Derrick) held for some reason because he had inherited it from other royalty. I didn’t really grok that part.
The once and future political name of Hawai’i is the Polynesian Kingdom of Atooi (PKUA). Literature handed out at the event states that “by the royal decree of our Alli Nui, Aleka Aipoalani (Dayne) proclaims that all lands, waters, and activities under this nation’s stewardship shall transition to being sustainable.” The document went on for pages to delineate the basis of this sustainability.
Sustainability and “the requirement to build your own spirituality” were in fact the central and only prerequisites for citizenship in PKUA. This meant that members of all races, including Euro-Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans, American Indians, etc., were potentially part of sovereign Kaua’i. It was no longer just Hawaiian, for Kaua’i had become not a nation based on ethnicity but a meta-nation based on a value system, a kind of futuristic Pacific ecotopia highlighting environmental livelihood, organic farming, care for its children, and the promotion of peace throughout the planet by cultivating a balanced spirit. Kaua’i had become a transcendent future nation of the Aquarian Age.
“Those who believe in it can stay,” Dayne’s aunt announced to cheers, “but anyone who desecrates the land has to go, and we will see to that.”
I am sure she has ways. “Maybe we don’t have the power to kick out the rich, the powerful, and the exploiters of the land now, but ultimately we will have that power, and it will come from the Pacific not from the mainland.”
There are presently fifteen Pacific nations in the confederacy, including the natives of Australia; Tahiti; Tonga; the Fiji Islands; the Polynesian Triangle, made up of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia; and New Zealand (the Maori are considered lineal descendants of Hawaiian boat-people, and the sacred map of New Zealand has been interpreted as a transposition of spiritual Kaua’i onto a southern ethnoastronomy and geography). Six other nations—not named—are about to join.
The power to enforce natural and Hawaiian law will eventually arise from this Circle of Nations. They will defend the land and establish a higher international and divine law. The kings and queens of Tahiti and Polynesia will regain their moral and traditional authority over Atooi at which time they will establish a kingdom of aloha everlasting.
For now it is a matter of building a constituency, honoring God’s law, and waiting for the end of this corrupt world age. If conditions change enough, the present power structures keep crumbling, and enough transits follow, PKUA can and will happen. Nothing is permanent, and ancient centers of influence tend to reestablish themselves after the waning of present kingdoms.
A thousand years from now, the United States of America with its deep-rooted transnational corporations and its formidable black-magic military will be an ancient memory, and the old kings and queens rule the Pacific again. It is necessary to prepare for that time and begin to dream that world back into being. First now with a song and a prayer….
July 25 (Day 14)
I was getting rid of some of our stale bread this morning, trying to break it in crumbs for the chickens, especially a one-legged hen who moved me to tears with its struggles to get around. All animals are brave.
But these are really wild birds and probably know that they are mega-unpopular hereabouts. In fact, where aren’t they unpopular except among tourists? Unlike at Waimea Canyon I couldn’t get anywhere near the Noniland chickens. Because the crumbs seemed to disappear in the grass, I tossed crusts, but the birds took off from my motion with such a squawking that you’d think I was the one chasing them with coconuts and a beebee gun.
The chicks really show their lineage. These guys are baby dinosaurs, very, very old animals with a meta-reptilian knowledge of the Earth.
The gigantic size of the leaves here stops me in admiration. They could be landing platforms for Astral faery craft or used effectively as mainland umbrellas.
Wonderful comments from Robert Phoenix this morning.
After I had asked his permission to write about him, his response: “Go for it!” Now today: “On second thought maybe you shouldn’t put me in there. Nah, great stuff. I think there’s a career for you in the travel writing thing. Sort of a blend of Gerald Heard, Least Heat Moon, and Larry Durrell.
“Glad you met Susan. I think she’s sitting on a good cookbook somewhere in there. I wanted to turn her into the spiritual Martha Stewart at one point.
“The amazing thing is that our signal is as clear as when I first met her.”
I went to Rock Quarry Beach early while Lindy was still sleeping. The bright sun from the east made the foam even whiter. Blinding light created extrasensory overload.
Water is always baptism. We are baptized whenever we enter water with an offering of self. We baptize ourselves. Christ baptized by bringing his aura together with water. That act is still done in his name over two thousand years later, but the resonance of his aura is all but depleted in most modern circumstances. That gives a sense of its original power, though.
It is interesting to think about baptism as offering oneself in and to the intelligence of the ocean.
Yesterday’s dream really stays with me, and it always will. It seemed to address the slumber of many births. It seemed to want to imbue me from within with a recognition that dying and being transformed by the events in life are phases of a larger metamorphosis—a literal transubstantiation. It taught me all that in a way and with a lesson that will always be with me. A pupa.
It said, “Live are like dreams; that’s all. Except you forget everything and start again. This luminosity is just a station on the dial. It is a single world illusion—a present lucid dream. When you get sucked out of life into the wind tunnel, you get sucked into another dream.
“As you wonder what it will feel like to be extinguished and silent, a mystery passes into your awareness and forms the bridge into the unknown. Everything stops, and what starts after everything stops is the meaning, the root of being. Yet for now be calm and assured. You are not drowned or annihilated. You are merely being blown by great winds from one lattice across another.”
The dream said: “You are this, whether you are alive or dead, but when you are dead you enter a black-hole singularity; then my dream begins again, a different dream.”
This is an indestructibility that can’t be conferred by words or promises; it has to be drunk, brewed in the cells, earned somehow from within. Anything else is just an idea that evaporates like fog before the onrush of world sensation.
I have followed Avocado’s barefoot imprimatur as much as possible. I have walked Noniland pretty much shoeless the whole week, negotiating the pebbled dirt road carefully, planning my routes ahead to avoid too many crossings. I have traipsed up to the cattle pasture; I also walk to and from our car in the guest parking without shoes. I pass barefoot back and forth between the car and the beach, which involves rocky terrain.
Ions and alkalinity aside, I like this exercise for its boost in consciousness. With all that sensation, even the ouchy stabs, there is a kind of pleasure, a Braille as the ground and the stones write their pagan bar codes on gravity-rooted flesh. The body-mind changes; the connection to the planet-body changes. This is something that I have known for a long time, but I don’t get many chances to practice it with any continuity. I will return to Berkeley on awakened feet.
As David said, riffing off his famous aphorism, “This is going to be the best vacation ever.”
Nick gave Lindy and me a lesson in chopping coconuts with a machete so that just a few strikes leaves a perfect nipple with very little spill. “Thousands of repetitions,” he explained. “That’s my art.”
I’ve found Lindy’s transformation here especially remarkable. She covered it in a group email today:
“I just want to say what a marvelous gift it’s been to stay at Noniland and get to watch and be immersed in not only the Sunfood Diet, but the way these fifteen or so young people have embodied the ways of living David describes. They are amazingly positive, even in the face of adversity. I have never felt myself changing so much and so fast as being among them. Yes, it’s hot, but they don’t surround themselves with expensive fans, they move along—barefoot.
“I also admired the way buildings were constructed in Po’ipu to let the trade winds in (it was by the ocean, so had continuous ocean breezes) with wooden slat windows you crank open to let in more, or less….”
A second visit today to the beach and the waves. This activity is of unending interest to me, for every wave is different and it is hard to pull away. I wait for one more, and then one more, and one more. It is clean, ancient, medicinal water—not longer just as knowledge but in the experience of it, of feeling one’s own alchemical beginnings. Even if it has been sullied by civilization, we are still on the innocent side of the tipping point.
The day was very hot, the water was cool. That simple a meme—yet it is what Mad Men aspire to with their every beach commercial, touching the sacred part of people’s desires.
Late afternoon we went to visit Susan Fein at her house on the river in Anahola, about seven miles clockwise from Noniland.
Most of our conversation was about our paths, and I won’t go into that (except to report that Susan has had a remarkable odyssey as an itinerant gourmet chef cum free spirit/divine seeker, stops in New York City, Paris, San Francisco, Honolulu, Kaua’i, Seattle, and Austin). However, here are a few Kauaian notes arising from our time together:
The 1991 hurricane occurred on September 11 (a key local date, the first numerological 9/11); it generated some of the highest wind speeds ever recorded on Earth. Not only did it scatter the chickens, but it drove the Star Wars project off the island, at least temporarily, because there were suddenly no roads or water or anything sufficient to support the military infrastructure. Believe what you will, but the hurricane was not supposed to come anywhere near Kaua’i; it was headed for Oahu—then it took a last-minute 90-degree detour. The residents had only five hours to prepare for it. Buildings and cars were blown to smithereens and washed away, but no one was killed. All that was left of Susan’s geodesic dome and auto was the meditation room in the house. So the islands got rid of a serious intruder.
(Later, I got some additions and corrections from someone else about the hurricane: “Not true that no one was killed; we lost five people, two Japanese fishermen in their boat, another man hit by flying debris. It is considered quite a miracle that the toll wasn’t much higher. The locals felt that Iniki was ‘called in’ to get rid of the invaders—us haoles, or at least some of us. The hurricane went over our island twice; it made a U-turn. There were small tornadoes within the hurricane.”)
The GMO project was not deterred in the least by the native Hawaiian sovereignty movement and its blockade. In fact, Monsanto pretty much rules the Western side of the island, past Waimea Canyon. The corporate military-industrial monster provides jobs and, like Blackwater, pays well, so they are not going anywhere. Genetically modified materials are now in the trade winds and the sea. O brave new world!
All sorts of very high-vibration and spiritually developed people are arriving independently on Kaua’i these days, whatever that portends. They are coming from different places and for different reasons, and they are not making themselves obvious. The vibration of the island is drawing them, and they are changing that vibration.
Susan, Curtis, and KatRama came to our farewell dinner. Nick led a prayer circle in which he told Lindy and me that we were now members of Noniland and would always be welcome here. He said he was pleased to observe our met-a-morph-osis (as he put it) over the week, “but that’s what always takes place at Noniland.” Lindy, he said, looked luminous and beautiful, and Richard had let loose his inner playfulness. “You better watch out,” he added, “because Noniland might add a few years to your lives.” Then he thanked various gods, devas, elementals, and resident spirits, and led a native Hawaiian chant. After that he captioned the papaya salad with its enzymes, the shiitake and avocado dishes.
The evening closed with a so-called talent show, Nick the continuing emcee. Lindy began it with four recent poems; then a bunch of Nonilanders performed spiritual and love poetry, raw and from the heart (and almost to a one, from memory, with some strategically-enacted rhyming)—and “perform” is the operative word. They opened their heart chakras and blasted the hell of those poems.
Nick’s selections exploded with passion, mantra, ecstatic love, romantic love, divine love, childhood nostalgia for the crossing of two rivers in Lincolnshire, the joy of existence. We heard surfer love poems, belly-dance love poems, living-on-the-land love poems, evocations-of-animals poems and, of course, cosmos poems.
This is our last night in Kaua’i; tomorrow we return the clunker to Island Car and get on the plane in Lihu’e.
Nick: “I heard the rumor that you two changed your plans and you’ll be staying in Noniland ”
“Maybe someday,” I said. “We’ll be back.”
July 26(Day 15)
Morning awakening is different because today is about returning, not staying here any longer. I have no temptation, as I thought I would, to visit the beach for a last “swim.” My mind has let go of it. Instead I walk around Noniland letting go. I let go of the coconut shed. I let go of the giant leaves. I let go of the chickens, the doves, the flowers. I let go of banana trees, the limes, the lilikois, the noni trees, the men, the women. Not an overdetermined exercise, just attention to what is already happening inside me.
The signature image in this process comes from the numerous flattened bodies of giant frogs run over on Noniland’s dirt drive. Even the recent ones no longer stink of life, or death. They are just cards on the platform of nature; the spirits, the frogs are elsewhere. Too bad their careers were shortened. Too bad cars are such a rival to animals and give none of the cues of a predator, certainly not on the proprioceptive level of a frog.
In reminding myself that the frogs are gone, I send my attachment to pictures from the last two weeks in the same direction. I stand in the Kauaian sun and salt breeze of Now.
Nick and I sit at a table on the lanai and talk about future projects on which we can collaborate. After a while he asks my permission to change the subject to something personal and, when I say okay, he asks me about my practices. I lay them out: psychotherapy, psychic work, martial arts, Jungian dreamwork, craniosacral, a bit of zen, chi gung and yoga in Maine.
Nick’s occupation, beyond being the foreman, as it were, of Noniland is as a personal trainer—a psychospiritual dietary coach. He runs people—business executives, athletes, and Hollywood types among them, a Lehman Brothers guy for instance after the collapse (but he didn’t do his homework: big surprise!)—through his CD-directed 21-day SUNPOP (Success Ultra Now Optimization Program) program; then he brings them to Noniland and initiates them into the warrior arts on site.
Now he is interested, not so much in selling me the program, as giving me a ten-minute synopsis of the training and its benefits plus a future bridge to his assistance or guidance if I ever need it.
In response to a range of his questions, I tell him about my issues with anxiety, panic, demons, my mother’s and brother’s suicides, and then I confess the amount of energy that I have to use to deal with all this. Yet I am basically positive and happy, I add; I get out a lot out of my encounter with the shadow; it just uses too much of my time.
Nick lets me know that he appreciates and understands the power of the shadow. “It’s horrendous. It’s dark. And it’s not just personal and family trauma; it’s all of humanity you’re experiencing. It’s the pain and chaos and confusion on Earth.”
“The collective psyche.”
“Bro, you have a blessing and a curse to be open to it, but that also gives you the possibility of making a great transformation in yourself, for everyone, here and across the universe. That’s the great work, mate.”
“It’s also not just human; it’s animal, it’s plant, it’s stone. It’s the cosmic unconscious.”
“That’s right. But at the bottom it’s all love; it’s only love. The negative stuff, the fear stuff, is just love twisted. You have to come at it with love, honestly so, fill the breath, fill the heart, keep approaching it with love, because that’s the only way to change it, to make it into love, for yourself, for the planet, for us. Love and spiritual practice are the way you neutralize and convert demons. Then they go into energy; they go into acceptance, release. That’s the path of personal and global transformation.”
“I feel that I have been doing that my whole life. It’s the only thing that has saved me, that has given me intelligence, skills, happiness. I have been trying to make my life sacred because it is the only alternative to its becoming traumatic. I haven’t been doing it the way that you did it or that you would teach, but I have still been on it, working on it, everyday.”
“The thing is, bro, you’ve got to get right to the roots where the ego and the psyche part ways. You’ve got to go down into the psychic source below the ego like swimming into one of those dark caves at night. You get below the personality, where there is no Richard, no self. Just go at it. Go with love, go with courage, go transparently. And you will change. I guarantee it. Your love will be rewarded and come back to you transformed, a thousand-, a million-fold.”
“I understand. It’s a great teaching you’re embodying. I feel it.”
“But you can’t do it as Richard. You’ve got to teach yourself to meet those demons, to bring your energy to them. You do it by SUNPOP: diet, swimming, running, praying, more diet, more cleansing, sitting in silence, meeting everything with love. I’m going to send you off with that, mate.”
“I’ve been picking up on your transmission all week, so I have it with me regardless.”
“Remember, the battle takes place in the heart. Your only weapons are love and nonattachment. You have to close all those openings, your holes, with heart power. You have to be a warrior. If you leave any holes, the demons, the dark forces will get in. I know. I know what they are like. They are relentless; they are pitiless. They will devour and eviscerate you. But they can be converted by an open heart and the courage of a warrior. Love, bro. Love always.”
And that was goodbye.
However, later in the morning he blended Lindy and me a parting drink for strength in transit: ground pumpkin seeds, mushroom tea, sprouted chia seeds, and perhaps a dash of noni, papaya, coconut. It didn’t taste what I would call wonderful, but I swigged it respectfully as a medicine drink.
We got in our battered Hyundai, drove it to Lihu’e and found Island Car. One of the native guys received the keys and then ferried us back to the airport. First I asked him if he was going to use the same car (so as to know whether or not to take our baggage out of the trunk), and he respond with a great laugh: “What! Not in that death trap!” Then we all laughed.
“No purple potatoes on the mainland.” The agricultural x-ray machine caught my one, and I was asked to dig it out of the center of my suitcase and repack. Very reassuring that the software found one potato amidst my clothes.
Taking off from Lihu’e, I am a nervous flyer but am struck by the beauty of the water and the beaches. Blue and green and all their intermediate blue-green shades are more like rich pigments of paint than water. This is a magical place. For a short flight (a half hour), Lihue-to-Oahu is not trivial. The winds really whip, and the descent into Honolulu, when the plane crosses from ocean and clouds into Oahu airspace, is intense.
The agricultural attendant between inter-island and mainland flights has us eat our two Noniland bananas so he won’t have to take them away.
Rising from Oahu…it looks like Los Angeles—an entire city of skyscrapers beside a volcano.
So many waves below us, headed somewhere. So far to Oakland.
Mahalo.