> Lost me at "Navigation is as much an art—and a spiritual practice—as it is a science."

> I'm a pilot and I've done coastal and ocean yacht navigation including coastal at night in a new country. No art or spiritual practice. ...celestial angles if you want latitude at sea, accurate time source if you also want longitude and the option to automate it all with GPS.

Ahh, yes. The famed Maori clock coconuts, which enabled the Maori to determine longitude out of sight of land.

As near as I can tell, what you've shown is that you're an unspiritual navigator and pilot. That's fine. You went to unspiritual flight schools, the staff of which presumably reminded you before each class that they were champions of western rationalism, having thrown off the shackles of something-or-other.

But, none of this goes to show that Polynesian navigation, as practiced then and as continued now, was or is not a spiritual practice. You conducted your navigation education adorned with aviator glasses while smarting off in a classroom between homoerotic beach volleyball scenes, while Polynesians embedded their navigation education in a spiritual practice. Top-Gun flight school joking aside, we tend to create things like flight schools, the Merchant Marines, or various other institutions, on a more or less massive scale, to propagate the knowledge, application, and technology of navigation as we mostly practice it. That seems fine.

However, I think we're here going to run up against a matter of context. I presume, for example, that as a responsible navigator, you had a radio, and perhaps an EPIRB? May I assume you have some passing familiarity with a weather-vane autopilot? You have modern charts, a product of centuries of applied cartography, updated on a regular basis? I presume also that your education is a product of centuries of European navigation? Itself able to tie its history back to the Greeks and further?

The point here, I am becoming more aware the longer I type, manifold. In order to propagate the discipline of navigation within an island culture, limited in size and infrastructure by, you know, being on islands, it may make sense for the practiced to have evolved "spiritually." First, the specialization of the skill in, I suspect, a culture where specialization was less prominent, probably required a certain amount of "making an exception" for the practitioners. Second, that the skill was used episodically or sporadically, by which I mean "only when navigating," also means that the practice must be maintained between voyages, perhaps generationally. Spiritual practice, likely an extant institution in these cultures, probably provides a handy mechanism, if not by design, then at least by evolution. (Although, we should probably not assume Polynesians so oblivious as to not have members in power who were capable of thinking, "You know, if I tie this navigation thing to our priesthood, then my heirs will be able to trade and conquer, too. Hmmm....") Finally, the level of concentration required of navigators, who we can judge bear the ultimate responsibility for the fates of the other passengers, is probably suited to spiritualization as well. "Don't bother the navigator. He's like a priest, except for this life, and this boat."

In summary, "Open-ocean sail navigation in a canoe 800 years ago is a spiritual thing; random westerner navigating today is a GPS thing," hardly seems worth mentioning, except to disparage the former. Relax. Even if some people's navigation comes from a spiritual practice, nobody is going to pry your GPS from your cold dead hands.