3 Selves Working Together in Life and Prayer

March 15, 1949

For Huna Research Associates
Covering the experimental approach to the use of Huna in HUNA and related religious and psychological fields.
From Max Freedom Long
P.O. Box 2867, Hollywood Station, Los Angeles 28, California, U.S.

THE NEXT STEP

The next step in our experimental work of testing Huna and learning to use it as did the kahunas, is [the work] of learning to know and control our subconscious, or Aunihipili, better.

We have tried auto-suggestion and sleep suggestion as given us by mechanical voices. We have experimented with hypnosis. We have accumulated mana and instructed the Aunihipili to send a flow of it to the Aumakua, together with a set of thought-forms of the things we desire to have built into our future. We have tried telepathy to make contact with one another in the TMHG work.

All of these methods have been successful in their own way and up to a certain point, but it is clear that we need a method which is more precise and which will give us a more certain response.

Recently I have been testing various mechanical helps which I thought might give us something better to help get more positive contact with the Aunihipili and, once the contact is established, help us get better results. I have tried the pendulum and have watched my amber bead on its four inch silk thread swing or go in circles in response to questions asked of the Aunihipili. I have worked out a code of “yes” and “no” swings like nods and shakes of the head.

The theory is that the subconscious (or the Superconscious or outside entities, working through the subconscious) causes the pendulum to swing or gyrate. Old hands at the game give the pendulum a start and then watch how it changes its direction or its kind of movement, or how it increases, decreases or stops the movement. A very elaborate code has been worked out and used, but for our immediate purposes, we can keep this type of experiment simple.

A better method, however, proved to be the one described on page 29 of the HUNA pamphlet. It is that of learning to identify various objects placed in closed pill boxes, by “extending an aka finger” to penetrate the cardboard to get a sensory impression of what is inside. I use six identical oblong boxes with hinged lids. In them, I have things picked up at random, a magnet, a key, a wooden spool, a green plastic scraper, and small china elephant, and similar odds and ends. I change them now and then.

These six boxes are kept on the highboy in my room and I work with them night and morning. I mix them up for the “shuffle,” then stand lazily before them and talk in a low voice to my Aunihipili. I say such thngs as, “All right, Boy (my name for my “George”), see how good you are. Take your time and see if you can tell me what is in this box.” (I point at one of just look at it.)

I then wait and do my best to keep my mental hands off the task to let “Boy” do his work with the box in his own way. I stand by and take it easy – relaxed but interestedly watching. And here is the POINT of what I am trying to get across to you: While my Aunihipili tries, and while I stand by, we gradually become acquainted. Little b y little, we get to know each other.

I know of no other way to get across to you what I mean. It is very much like a parent trying to get acquainted with a child which has grown apart and who has mental reservations and thoughts which are carefully hidden. It is like husband and wife getting acquainted all over again after long separation.

In our daily lives we learn to work automatically with the Aunihipili. It does its part and we do ours, much as the parents and children and pets in a home live in close communal relations but each has its own inner thoughts, urges and actions, all hidden and kept out of sight, no two ever completely understanding each other.

When we learn from the ancient “Secret” the fact that the Aunihipili is a separate and distinct self and not a part of the Auhane or conscious mind self, we advance our knowledge greatly. The Aunihipili is not articulate. It cannot talk to us and tell us what is hidden in its depths. The Auhane is the one that talks unless we are asleep or mentally ill. It directs all that we say. The Aunihipili is, in itself, inarticulate and very similar in that respect to an animal.

We may argue the point of just how much each self and our habits and reflexes enter into the matter of talking, but for us, at this stage of our testing and experimentation, it will be of little profit. What we need to learn to do is to pick up the unspoken impressions which are to be had from the Aunihipili.

When we are hungry, not a word is spoken by the Aunihipili, or when it desires other things. It presents a thought-form directly to us. Or it may give an “urge.” Begin to study the ways in which your Aunihipili tells you things and suggest things pleasant to do.

In standing before my scrambled set of boxes and talking softly to “Boy” (my “George”), I find that it is not so much he who is being trained as it is I. I am learning to keep my mental hands off of my Aunihipili – something seldom done in waking hours. I put aside the reins and give Boy his head. I stop even the faintest effort to help by GUESSING OR REMEMBERING what is in the boxes. In this work the great command is “Let George do it.” I find that I have the habit of nudging my Aunihipili along in the smallest matters. I hardly realize that I am nudging. With the boxes, it was some time before I found that I was making guesses and thus confusing Boy. He is so sensitive to my direction that he will instantly stop using his aka “finger” to feel through the box and learn what is inside. My faintest move to give a guess makes him grab the guess and give it back to me.

The IMPORTANCE of this practice, and the reason that I suggest that we all begin it at this time as a part of our daily schedule, is that is is a means of becoming CONVERSANT with one’s Aunihipili – a thing of which we are in great need in our work. We are going to pioneer a new way of becoming acquainted with the Aunihipili and of being able to team up with it for work with both high and low magic.

It makes no great difference whether you get so that you can tell correctly what is in each box. We have already proven that this is possible. What we are now doing is using the box method because it gives us a simple and positive check on whether our work with the Aunihipili has been successful or not. Only with such a check can we work intelligently day by day to train ourselves to work consciously with our Aunihipilis.

MEDITATION and CONCENTRATION

Meditation and concentration, as we have learned them from yoga, are outmoded and clumsy tools. Of the many people I have known who have given serious attention to these methods, I have found not a single one who came to know the Aunihipili intimately and who had been able, in the end, to get its help in contacting and working with, and under the guidance of, the Aumakua – this being the underlying goal of all such efforts, as in Huna. Their trouble seems to have been that they did not know that in meditation, the Aunihipili was to be allowed to emerge and that in concentration, it was to be disciplined. They sought endlessly for direct contact with a Higher Something, not knowing that such contacts are made only via the Aunihipili with its aka thread furnishing the means of contact.

We have read and talked about “integrating the personality,” but have not known what we were trying to “fuse or unite into a whole.” Thanks to the kahunas, we now know that such an integration is not possible. We cannot make the three members of the team into one. We need only to learn to get them properly “stood in line” to work together as a team – a team in which each does the work peculiar to the part it plays. The pitcher must pitch, not catch or go to bat.

In the experiment with the boxes, I have come to understand the meaning of the phrase, “doors opening softly.” You will also. There is a strange still INWARDNESS about it that needs to be experienced to be wholly understood. We discover it as we stand by, trying to be attentive and still relaxed, and with mental hands kept off the work as our Aunihipilis probe the boxes we have selected.

In my case, “Boy” seems like a child which grips me fearfully by the hand as it reaches out uncertainly to try the new trick. It is not too sure that I know what I am asking, or that I am not encroaching on its hidden domain. It is as if it kept its head turned, watching me with anxious eyes as it slowly sticks out its aka “finger,” alert for the faintest sign of guidance on my part, or of approval or disapproval. He is like a very sober child in this work. There is an intentness which reminds me of a child daring to make short swimming circles out into deeper water and back to the waiting parent who stands watching in the safe shallows.

Our conversation is in words from me and in impressions from Boy. It is as if he whispered so softly and bashfully that he could not be quite heard. In this intercourse one learns to feel for, not listen to, the thing below the range of sound. It is an inward “seeing” below or inside the range of sight. It is fascinating to try to watch just how one senses the impression of the things inside the boxes. There is something about the practice that parallels the back-and-forth ebb and flow of love and uncertainty evidenced when the father home from the wars begins getting freshly acquainted with the little son who has mysteriously grown tall and inarticulate.

When the doors begin to open softly, we begin to touch the outer edge of a strange inner world of consciousness that we have talked much about but sensed hardly at all. We are a blind Columbus with the offshore winds of a New World just beginning to tickle our noses. Nothing could be fainter, less tangible, or more provocative than those first impressions and intimations. When Boy finds the little china elephant in the box I have selected, WE seem to become bereft of our five senses – we become deaf, dumb and blind. The impression of the foolish little yellowish elephant is not a picture, or a feel of the glazed surface or the outline. It is not the word “elephant.”

It is nothing reported in terms of the senses. This was very hard at first to understand. Then came the realization that what Boy gave me was a THOUGHT-FORM which embodied all the sense impressions, even all the history and personal significance of our contact with that particular little elephant.

The one thing that must be laid aside while engaging in this practice with the boxes and the Aunihipili is IMAGINATION. One must learn to set the brakes of mind and hold it still and unmoving. One must stop imagining or guessing – stop it clear down to the roots. Or, perhaps the Aunihipili does the imagining for us. If that is true, our job then is much the same – we must HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. These injunctions will have meaning for you later, if not now.

Study these thought-forms as you get acquainted with your Aunihipili and learn how to direct it to act – while learning to keep hands off and allow the action to take place. Get the feel of those thought-forms of “elephant,” so to speak, for they are the things we must become skilled at making and at giving to the Aunihipili to be presented to the Aumakua.

Learn to make a thought-form of the condition you wish to have brought to pass through prayer-actions to the Aumakua. See that your thought-forms are as complete as “elephant” – that they have been built by visualization and the use of all of the five senses, where that is possible. Live in those visualizations. Come to know WHERE your “elephant” came from, WHO made it, who GAVE it to you – all the details that will help perfect and complete it.

I do not say, “Boy, take the elephant from the box and give it to me.” Nor do I say, “Boy, take this thought-form of what I need to come to me in the future, and tuck it away with our stored memories.” I say, “Boy, take this set of thought-forms to the Aumakua, with a strong flow of mana, and ask that they be used as seeds and made to grow into the actual conditions which they picture and embody.”

The end and aim of the Box Practice, as with nearly everything else we do in Huna, is to learn just the right way to make the “seed” thought-forms of the desired condition, get the Aunihipili to take them, and then get the Aunihipili to present them with the needed flow of mana to the Aumakua. We depend on the Aumakua to know how to use those “seeds” to make them come as future realities to us.

Get six boxes from your drug store and begin. Remember that we are not plodding over old and dusty roads, but that we are breaking trails. Experiment. Keep score, as “one out of six,” so you can see how you progress. Watch for experiences that may help the rest of us.

When you have come to be able to make a better score than 1 correct try in 6, you will know that your Aunihipili and you are getting acquainted and are teaming up., Try taking all the trinkets out of the boxes and replacing them with papers carrying written words. Train to get the impressions of them. Then try sentences describing some thing or situation and train to get the thought-form embodying the meaning of the sentence.

That accomplished, write briefly and clearly, words describing the thing or condition to be used as the “seed” of a prayer-action. Tell your Aunihipili to take that “seed” and give it with a flow of mana to the Aumakua (not to you). In this practice, we have all the needed Huna elements of the high magic, including the boxes and papers to act as a physical stimulus. Walk softly. Be confident.