Today  (July 20, 2017) I read two articles that affected me a lot.  In no order at all, they are “Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Efi, Final Speech as Head of State of Samoa, Tuaefu, 19 July 2017” and “The Human Brain Builds Structures in 11 Dimensions, Discover Scientists” by Paul Ratner, in the journal Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience.

Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Efiʻs address struck me in several ways.  First, of course, its eloquent humility and its deep connection to, respect for, inherent commitment, and gratitude to Samoa and Samoan culture(s).  I do not share his religion – he is Catholic – but I appreciate and respect his Biblical references and his application of them.  Also, I have used some of his speeches in my work with Kūkanilokoʻs astronomy, and those speeches, particularly but not only “Tupualegase: The Eternal Riddle” at http://www.head-of-state-samoa.ws/pages/speech_tupualegase.html.  The farewell address also reflected some of the differences between Oceanic and Western cultures, and those differences, I very much believe, play an essential role in any effort to understand Kūkanilokoʻs astronomy.

Ratnerʻs article introduced me to topology (another) area of knowledge of which I am ignorant, but which, now having encountered it, strikes me as important generally but also important in its applications to the knowledges incorporated in Kūkanilokoʻs astronomy, especially regarding its multiple simultaneous conceptions of space, place, and time.

Now I have to learn/read more about topology, especially geometric and geographic topology.  I know that geometric and geographic topology offer explanations and means of understanding many of the ideas/concepts I have found and am still finding evident at Kūkaniloko.  Among these are how a diamond/quadrilateral shape is also a circle, how a canoe is also the ocean upon which it sails, how borders make places finite and connect them to one another in two dimensions (the flat plane of the earth) and to places/objects/events in the sky both above and below the earth (the third dimension that, for example, makes a triangle into a pyramid, and time, the fourth dimension).

Topology also, I think, offers ideas about and evidence of epistemological foundations of Hawai’iʻs precontact cultural astronomy.  And of precontact philosophical and metaphysical knowledge and their integration with other precontact knowledge systems, such as cosmogony, interrelatedness and interdependence, and the construction of spacetime.

Paul Ratnerʻs article – http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/our-brains-think-in-11-dimensions-discover-scientists

The Tui Atuaʻs address –  http://www.samoaobserver.ws/en/20_07_2017/local/22381/Thank-you-Samoa!.htm