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The traditional Hawaiian culture has a wondrous healing process for the
family. This process is based in the spiritual realization that illness,
whether spiritual, physical, emotional, or mental, is not primarily caused
by the individual's wayward life style or by happenstance. Illness in any
member of the family is caused by and experienced as a result of an imbalance
among family members and between family members and the environment. The
ill person may be the vehicle through which the family imbalance manifests,
though he or she may not have been involved in the actual transgression.
The Hawaiian view is that everything is related to everything. When harmony
prevails, illness either dissolves or has no way of manifesting. This expereince
of wholeness is not unique to the Hawaiians. It is prevalent in most cultures
living close to Nature. It is a magical, mystical realization that the
rational, intellectual, and concretized mind cannot enjoy.
To invoke the healing forces of wholeness in a Hawaiian family, whether for the healing or the prevention of illness, requires a communal ritual called Ho'o Pono Pono. Translated this means "to make right." Rather than concentrating on the ill person, the family gathers together and, after praying for Spiritual assistance, begins a process of forgiveness and of being forgiven. If a violation has occured, the violating person admits the wrongdoing and requests forgiveness from the person violated. The violated person must find his or her way into the Spirit of Aloha and orally express forgiveness to the violator. The nature of the illness and the size of the family or clan determines the length of the ritual. As the ritual proceeds, the ill person recovers. The Aloha Spirit reigns once again over all aspects of family life.
The magical, mystical dimensions of awareness, because they are not based in the egoistic dichotomy of time and space, have access to and are influenced by transcendent, collective forces of Wholeness of a miraculous nature. What is impossible to experience and to effect from the egoistic state is easily and naturally experienced and affected in the Magical and Mystical states. Forcing matter to respond to the personal will without being based in the dimension of wholeness in which we are all enmeshed sets the stage for ultimate breakdown and destruction, whether it be of an individual, a family, a clan, a nation, a civilization, or an entire world.
On the island of Kauai lives Allen Keala Elia Alapai. Every evening he gathers with his wife, Antoinette, and their four children to enter the ritual of Ho'o Pono Pono. If any of them have transgressed the mystery of harmony, forgiveness is asked for and given. At the end, the whole family enters into embraces. Thanks-filled prayers are chanted. Dancing and singing soon burst forth, as Allen and Antoinette, radiant with ancestral contentment, reach for their ukuleles.
A Radiance of Love,
