15/02/2026
Among natives, the Kahunas possess perhaps the most systemic understanding of the bioenergetic coding of life, and it is surely from them that the Sioux and the Cherokee of North America adopted it. The religion of the Kahunas, as Max Long, an American psychologist, found in his lifelong research on Huna, considered the knowledge about mana, the cosmic energy, as a secret science. Long observes in his book The Secret Science at Work (1953/1995):
It was a virgin field because, in spite of startling evidence of the powers of the kahunas (the priests and magic-workers of olden times), anthropologists had tossed their works and beliefs into the discard as ‘superstition’. The Christian missionaries, arriving in 1820, disapproved of miracles performed by natives, and bent every effort toward eradicating kahuna beliefs.
Max Long found that these natives excel by their specific ability to understand human consciousness and the fact that consciousness and cosmic life energy are basically one. Contrary to our knowledge that in this field was mainly conceptualized by early psychoanalysis, the Kahunas regard the unconscious, that they call unihipili, as a spirit force, and not as a trash container. And they ascribe to this force a certain independence of will and intention.
By its own will, this force, that they call the lower self, may stop collaborating with the other inner selves. Further, the Kahunas are teaching that it is the lower self that manufactures and handles the organism’s mana, its vital energy reservoir. Long named the current or flow of this energy ‘auric charge’.
In fact, the idea that energy and consciousness are linked in some way is very old and it is some sort of intuitive knowledge. As Joseph Campbell observes toward Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth (1988):
I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Where you really see life energy, there’s consciousness.
Mana, the Kahunas believe, is the vital force, the life force, and this force is being observed and attributed concise characteristics. This force is said, for example, to be the constituent of all of the activities of the three selves. Max Long observes that the Kahuna priests taught that the lower self creates mana ‘automatically … from food eaten and air breathed.’
Max Long reports he found through slow and patient effort that the Kahunas’ belief in the three selves describes each of these selves as an entity that dwells ‘in three invisible or shadowy bodies, one for each self.’ This shadowy body was named aka body by the Kahunas, while esoteric sciences, as Long rightly remarks, use to call them ‘etheric doubles.’
Long saw that the Kahunas used a handy metaphor for describing the mana force; they associated it with water as a liquid substance that represents the juice of life; from this basic idea, the Kahunas extrapolated the metaphor of the human being as a tree or plant, ‘the roots being the low self, the trunk and branches the middle self, and the leaves the high self.’ While the sap circulating through roots, branches and leaves vividly illustrated the nature of the mana force.
