REFLECTIVE INSIGHT #007 - SPIRITUALITY IS NOT A FAIRY TALE - IT’S THE OPERATING SYSTEM
A computer or phone screen is the part you see, but all of the power is in the processor which takes it’s instructions from the operating system.
Growing up with a mum who held onto a very specific, strongly colonised religious view, my scientific mind was always at war. I want to be clear—I love my mum deeply. She did the absolute best with what she’d been given, and she always did it with a pure heart.
To me, spirituality looked like fairy tales—nice stories for Sunday mornings, but nothing that stood up to the rigour of 'real' data or the 'hard' world of business and physics. I experienced a strain of neoliberalism and imperial theology that had weaponised the spirit, turning it into a tool for control, or relegating it to a building you visit once a week.
The breakthrough didn’t come from a textbook first; it came on 29th September 2023 from a kaumātua. He looked at me and gave me a challenge that shifted my entire trajectory: “Kimihia ma te tika ma te pono e whakaatu ai koe.” Seek truth and faith and let them show you the way.
That challenge sent me down a rabbit hole where I started reading David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity alongside Reverend Māori Marsden’s The Woven Universe. In parallel with my Te Reo journey, the gears finally began to mesh. I realised that when Deutsch talks about the Universal Explainer and the infinite reach of knowledge, the physicist is describing the same capacity our tohunga used to navigate the Pacific. When Marsden describes Wairua as the “ultimate reality of existence”—the energetic substrate from which all matter emerges—the description aligns with what a physicist might call the quantum wave function or the field of superposition.
This isn’t "woo-woo" mysticism; it’s spiritual physics. The forces of colonisation tried to convince us that the spiritual and the material are separate. They taught us to obsess over the 5% of the universe we can see—the cash, the cars, the extracted resources—while ignoring the 95% that actually runs the show. But in a Woven Universe, everything is entangled. Whanaungatanga is the Māori description of what physics calls quantum entanglement.
I began to see the role of Wairua Tapu not as a religious dogma, but as a real Presence, a Guide that navigates that 95% with us. This Presence is the Logos, the fundamental information architecture of reality—the One who turns the "Code" of the universe into a lived, relational experience. There is and always will be an element of faith (believing in what we can’t physically sense) involved in anything spiritual, but to my own satisfaction I’ve realised that to be spiritually healthy I needed to stop treating my spiritual life as an optional extra or a Sunday hobby. Everything in the material realm pivots off the spiritual realm, including our well-being. It sets our potential.
The Fix
We need to move from the Chrematistics of accumulation (Babylon) back to Ekonomia—the stewardship of the whole household, seen and unseen (Zion). Managing your Mauri and your connections is more "rational" than any Babylonian metric that only counts the 5%.
Call to Action
Today, be still and listen out for that 95%. Trust that the quiet voice, the tohu, and the gut feeling are high-fidelity data points from the Presence that supports it all. You aren't just a biological accident; you are a Universal Explainer entangled with the divine.
Straight up: The physical world is just the screen; the spiritual realm is the operating system running the whole show.
