AS FEATURED ON FREE HAWAI`I NEWS - "WHAT SPEAKS THROUGH US?"
What Speaks Through Us?
Warriors, Akua, Ancestors & The Human Need For Meaning
By Dr. Michelle Manu
Perhaps this was superstition. Or perhaps humans standing near death have always sensed something difficult to explain.
That question has followed humanity across every age: what exactly are we listening to? Are humans truly communicating with gods, ancestors, spirits, and unseen intelligences? Or are we speaking to ourselves through the language of symbol, myth, ritual, and projection? And if we are speaking to ourselves, why has humanity done so with such consistency across geography and time?
These questions matter to me because I move between many worlds: Hawaiian cosmology, Lua, modern martial arts, manmade legal systems, energetic legal systems, embodiment work, ancestral energetics, and modern public conversations about spirit, power, culture, and the unseen. I also move beside people whose language and beliefs of the sacred differ from mine.
Some speak of Akua: Kū, Kanaloa, Pele, Hiʻiaka, Laka, Kamapua’a, and others held in Hawaiian memory, chant, place, and genealogy. My own language often moves through Pō and Ao, field intelligence, Elemental Spirits, body-law, thresholds, consequence, and the body as an instrument of perception.
Some may see contradictions there. I no longer do.
Perhaps humans attempt to describe encounters with the mysterious using the symbolic architecture available to them.
The modern world often assumes ancient people were primitive because they explained reality spiritually. But as modern humans, we still externalize uncertainty. We simply use different names now: algorithms, institutions, experts, data, markets, political systems, credentials, technology, and AI.
Have we stopped outsourcing to gods, or have we simply replaced them with systems?
Historically, we appear deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty. We create structures to help us metabolize what would otherwise overwhelm us: death, randomness, suffering, intuition, consciousness, violence, grief, love, awe, and the terrifying possibility that existence may not provide clean answers.
Religion has often functioned this way. So has spirituality. So has science when treated dogmatically. So has ideology. So has technology.
We repeatedly transfer burden outward. We place sin onto saviors, fate onto gods, morality onto institutions, truth onto authorities, and identity onto systems (what appear to be) larger than the self. This
may be why sacrifice appears in so many cultures. Humanity seems endlessly drawn toward the idea that someone or something else can carry what feels unbearable.
But relationship with the sacred is not the same as outsourcing. This distinction matters.
Outsourcing occurs when a spiritual, cultural, religious, or intellectual system replaces personal responsibility instead of deepening it. Relationship with the sacred should make us more accountable, not less. More embodied, not less. More truthful, not less. More humble, not more inflated.
This is where the question becomes dangerous.
What if some of what we call spirit is projection? What if the voice of the ancestor is sometimes memory? What if a “download” is subconscious integration? What if ceremony regulates the nervous system more than it summons metaphysical beings? What if gods are symbolic architectures humans built to carry realities too overwhelming to hold directly?
But another question arrives immediately afterward: what if reductionism becomes its own blindness? Reductionism is the philosophical and scientific approach of analyzing complex systems or ideas by breaking them down into their simpler, more fundamental components. It operates on the principle that a whole is merely the sum of its parts, and understanding those individual parts explains the entire system.
Just because we interpret spiritual experiences psychologically does not mean those experiences originate only within humans. Across cultures, humans report visions, dreams, synchronicities, intuitions, near- death experiences, altered states, unexplainable knowing, and encounters with energetic presence. These reports do not prove every claim, but they also should not be dismissed.
The body itself complicates certainty.
Before organized religion, we had breath, heartbeat, instinct, dreams, grief, hunger, fear, ecstasy, pain, sexuality, birth, blood, illness, and death. Perhaps the body was humanity’s first oracle. Perhaps many spiritual systems began as attempts to explain what the body was already sensing.
This is where warriors become important.
A serious warrior cannot survive entirely inside fantasy. Combat brutally punishes illusion. A fighter learns quickly which ideas collapse under consequence. And yet nearly every warrior culture developed some relationship with ritual, spirit, ancestor systems, omens, cosmology, or altered states.
Why?
Because violence places us at the edge of ordinary consciousness. The warrior stands close to mortality, fear, instinct, silence, blood, uncertainty, and the fragility of the body. Under pressure, time changes. Perception sharpens. The body knows before thought. Breath can determine survival. Silence can become information.
Perhaps warrior cosmologies emerged not simply from superstition, but from repeated encounters with states we did not fully understand.
Women warriors carry another dimension. Historically, women often preserved continuity itself: children, memory, ritual, mourning, food, healing, oral history, and community survival. Women frequently became keepers of invisible continuity between worlds — between life and death, body and spirit, past and future.
This may be why women across cultures are so often associated with prophecy, intuition, dreams, medicine, and spiritual transmission. Not because women are less rational, but because women have often lived closer to the continuous realities of embodiment itself.
Atheists also belong inside this conversation.
Atheists ask necessary questions: how do you know? Could this be projection? Could this be trauma? Could this be pattern recognition mistaken for divinity? Could this be neurological? Could this be social conditioning?
These questions matter because we are capable of profound self-deception. Atheists, agnostics, and skeptics often protect intellectual hygiene. They challenge dogma, manipulation, magical thinking, spiritual inflation, and unchecked metaphysical “authority.”
And yet many atheists still experience awe. They stand before oceans, stars, death, birth, music, grief, or love and feel something immense — even if they refuse to call it God.
Perhaps the divide is not truly between believers and atheists. Perhaps the divide is between those who can stand humbly before mystery and those who require absolute certainty to feel safe. Because certainty itself may be the greatest danger.
Absolute religion becomes tyranny. Absolute scientism becomes reductionism. Absolute spirituality becomes delusion. Absolute skepticism becomes starvation. Any system can become dangerous when it removes humility.
So, the question may not be, “Are the Akua real?” or “Are the Kūpuna speaking?” or “Is this all psychology?” The better question may be: what does the relationship produce?
Does it produce humility, responsibility, embodiment, ethics, courage, reverence for life, care for land, and integrity under pressure? Or does it produce dependency, delusion, hierarchy, performance, fear, avoidance, and outsourced accountability?
Honua (earth) still speaks, whether we interpret it spiritually or materially. Moana (ocean) speaks. Makani (wind) speaks. Ahi (fire) speaks. Ma’i (illness) speaks. Pōloli (hunger) speaks. Māluhiluhi (exhaustion) speaks. Kaumaha (grief) speaks. The kino (body) speaks. Hopena (consequence) speaks. The question is whether we are quiet enough, honest enough, and disciplined enough to listen without immediately turning mystery into ego. Attempting to describe non-physical pohihīhī (mysterious) matters with physical language.
I no longer think the deepest human task is proving whether the sacred exists entirely outside us or entirely within us. I think the task is learning how to stand responsibly at the edge of mystery without surrendering discernment, embodiment, humility, or awe.
We have always been listening. The question is whether we are listening clearly.
I invite you to resist the temptation to simply agree or disagree with what you have just read. The value of these questions is not in arriving at the “correct” answer, but in examining the assumptions, beliefs, experiences, and uncertainties you carry about the sacred, the self, and the unseen. Some questions may challenge long-held convictions. Others may reveal tensions you have never fully explored. Sit with them honestly. There is no requirement to choose between spirit and skepticism, faith and reason, ancestor and self. Instead, allow yourself the rare opportunity to become curious about what shapes your understanding
of reality, where you place your trust, and what ultimately speaks through you. The goal is not certainty. The goal is deeper awareness.
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Where do I place responsibility when life becomes frightening, uncertain, or painful?
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Do my spiritual beliefs make me more accountable, or do they give me language to avoid accountability?
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What do I call “intuition” that may actually be fear, projection, trauma, desire, or pattern recognition?
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What has my body known before my mind could explain it?
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Where have I mistaken certainty for truth? (No shame.)
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Do my beliefs produce humility, discipline, reverence, and ethical action?
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Where do I outsource discernment today — to religion, culture, politics, experts, technology, ancestors, algorithms, or identity?
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Can I remain in relationship with mystery without needing to explain or control it?
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What kind of human does my worldview produce?
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And when I say I am listening, what am I truly listening to?
As you reflect, consider not only what you believe, but why you believe it—and whether those beliefs have brought you closer to truth, responsibility, humility, and wonder.
