REFLECTIVE INSIGHT #007 - SPIRITUALITY IS NOT A FAIRY TALE; IT’S OUR OPERATING SYSTEM

The war in my mind

Growing up in Taitokerau, my mind always felt like it was in a tug-of-war. My mum had a very strong Christian faith, and she did her absolute best with what she was taught. But to my scientific mind, the stories I heard on Sunday mornings felt like fairy tales. They were nice stories, but they didn't seem to have much to do with the "real world" of physics, maths, or running a business.

I saw a version of faith that people used to control others or a version that stayed trapped inside a church building. It felt separate from the land and separate from the facts of life. I thought I had to choose between being smart and being spiritual.

A challenge to seek truth

Everything changed for me when a kaumātua from my hapū gave me a challenge:

“Kimihia ma te tika ma te pono e whakaatu ai koe.” 

Seek truth and faith and let them show you the way.

This sent me on a journey where I started reading deep science alongside our own Māori traditions.

I began to realise that our ancestors and modern physicists were actually looking at the same thing. When scientists talk about the "Universal Explainer," they are describing the same incredible mind that our tohunga used to navigate across the Pacific Ocean using only the stars and the currents.

The unseen ninety five percent

Science tells us something mind-blowing: everything we can see, touch, or taste only makes up about five percent of the universe. The other ninety-five percent is invisible energy that we can't physically sense.

Our old people have always had a name for that unseen ninety-five percent. They called it Wairua. They knew that the spiritual realm isn't a fairy tale; it is the actual "operating system" that runs the whole world. The physical stuff we see is just the screen, but the spirit is the code running in the background.

The words of Ihu

Ihu (Yeshua's name in the Paipera Tapu) spoke about the importance of focusing on this unseen reality because it is the only thing that actually lasts.

"while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal." (2 Corinthians 4:18, NKJV)

"i a tātou kāore nei e titiro ki ngā mea e kitea ana, engari ki ngā mea kāore e kitea ana: ko ngā mea hoki e kitea ana, mō tēnei wā kau anō; ko ngā mea ia kāore e kitea ana, he mea mau tonu." (Translated from the original Greek: mē skopountōn hēmōn ta blepomena alla ta mē blepomena)

Plugging into the code

I began to see that Wairua Tapu is not just a religious idea, but a real Presence. This Presence is the "Logos," which we can think of as the fundamental code or the logic of the universe. It turns the raw information of the cosmos into a lived experience filled with love and connection.

For too long, we have been taught to obsess over the five percent, the money, the cars, and the things we can extract from the land. But that is a recipe for struggle. When we ignore the spiritual operating system, we are trying to run our lives on broken software.

Trusting the signal

My wero to you today is to take a moment to be still. Listen for that ninety-five percent. You know those quiet voices, the gut feelings, or the signs in nature that we usually ignore because they don't fit our "data"? Those are high-fidelity signals from the Presence that supports all of life.

You are not a biological accident. You are a connected part of a woven universe, entangled with the Divine. When we stop treating our spiritual life as a Sunday hobby and start seeing it as our primary operating system, we find the strength to heal our land and our whānau. Let's start trusting the code again.