No Reply Required
July 15, 1950
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.A.
SPECIAL NOTICE – SPECIAL NOTICE – SPECIAL NOTICE
This spectacular heading is to be sure to attract the attention of all HRAs, including those who glance at the bulletin, then lay it aside until time allows a full reading.
A CHANGE IS BEING MADE here at the Study, after much thought and long prayer-actions for Guidance. I believe that this GUIDANCE has been given in shaping my decisions and plans for our HRA progress, and I am showing my faith by following through.
AS YOU KNOW, I tried some months ago to trade an extra bulletin for freedom from answering your many and GREATLY APPRECIATED AND VERY MUCH VALUED, NEEDED AND DESIRED LETTERS. I asked that on the letters each HRA mark “No answer required” if one could be gone without, and “Urgent” if it was absolutely necessary that an answer be sent. As you also know, you did your part most graciously, but I could not refrain from answering every one of my dear friends, even if only with a line. It is entirely my fault. (Cigbo grins at me from his shelf where he is scratching hopefully in his box. This is one of the times when I cannot say, “Blame it on Cigbo!”)
IN ORDER TO ANSWER ALL LETTERS, I took to writing and mimeographing short letters filled with personal news which was of no real and lasting importance to our work. To these “tinned letters” I added a paragraph or more and usually had a “thank you” letter from Cigbo to enclose if a present had come for his box. It was great fun to play “Cigbo” and write little notes for him to those who playfully wrote him notes. I enjoyed answering all letters and commenting on your reports to me covering your Huna experiments, TMHG work, problems, personal activities, thoughts, speculations, readings, etc., but I have finally made so many close personal friends amongst you in this way that something has to be done.
THE HRA INVESTIGATIONAL AND EXPERIMENTAL WORK on my part has fallen behind. I have a whole shelf of your books waiting for my reading. Many of these have been urged to my attention as possibly containing things of value for all of us in our work with Huna. I have also manuscripts and booklets and clippings – all long due back to their senders. In addition, my personal experimentation has been much hampered along healing and various lines because I have had no time left between getting out the bulletin and answering the ever-increasing number of letters.
IF OUR WORK IS TO PROGRESS WELL, I simply MUST have more free time to read, study and experiment as well as to digest your valuable reports and ideas as they come in. I need more and more time for the TMHG and pressing cases which need treatment of a more intensive nature. RESEARCH must go on if I am to be able to lead the search for the ancient Light and to direct our combined efforts. In the time I am asking you to give me, I may wade through masses of books and other materials without coming up with a thing of importance for us, but, on the other hand, I almost always run into things that set me off on some fresh line of thought – often setting me to delving into the roots of the language of the kahunas with surprising results.
A FEW LETTERS WILL HAVE TO BE ANSWERED, as those from prospective HRAs who write to say they have read SSBM and wish to know what comes next. Orders for books or back bulletins will still have to go out in the next mail, and now and then there will be reports or questions which will be of much importance to our progress and which may demand letters back and forth. However, the average questions, if they are of enough importance to be of general interest to all of us, can be taken up in the bulletins – and we can all gain.
ALL LETTERS WILL STILL BE READ with the same care and enjoyment and research interest as before. Even if I do not answer, be sure that I have overlooked nothing. Also remember that your letters to me are absolutely necessary in order that I may know of your experimental efforts and results as well as of your findings and ideas – your suggestions for the work.
THE ALL-IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTIONS FOR CIGBO must continue, even if not acknowledged, otherwise the cloth will have to be trimmed to the pattern and the bulletins will gradually dwindle in size and have to be sent at longer intervals. So far as I know, in all the months in which we have worked together, not a single cent, dollar, check or stamp has been lost. But if you wish a receipt, to be absolutely sure Cigbo has had your gift, please send along a self-addressed post card which can be returned to you with Cigbo’s notation of “Got it Thanks.”
I AM CERTAIN that you will agree that this Guidance is correct. With world turmoil all about us we must pray our best for peace, and because the time and opportunity for HRA progress may be none too long, we owe it to the Aumakuas who watch over us, to sacrifice our personal pleasures in friendly intercourse and drive with all our combined strength as straight to the heart of the great workable SECRET of Huna as we can. If the worst comes to the worst – heaven forbid – and we slide backward into social and financial chaos because world social structures cannot stand the strain of a final “total war,” we may still be able to leave in a few scattered bulletins a few final words that would make it possible to keep alive the spark of the lost Huna – and in some brighter day, furnish the seed from which a Tree of Life and Light could again be grown to bless the world. Save your bulletins. We do not know where a set might remain safe for posterity when half the world has gone. There is a danger that, largely because of the dogmas and entirely unproven claims in religions, the men of the “Bright New World” that may follow the upheaval, may, as in Russia, throw overboard all sacred and revealed systems. Only in Huna is there to be found a system based on psychic science and inclusive of all of the science of psychology – and more – as well as on the physics of the aka and the manas. Only in Huna may there be enough proof and freedom from dogmas and absurdities to survive a purge and a revolt of such reactionary force as may come.
I ASK HUMBLY AND IN ALL SINCERITY that you ask often that I be Guided and my hand upheld in all the needed ways – so that I may better lead the HRA work. I feel that it demands of us all that we can give – in whatever way each of us is best able. We are trying to keep alight a very small and flickering light in a swiftly darkening world.
MFL
NEWS – LETTERS – COMMENTS
DIANETICS is still of much interest to many HRAs. Of the several who have tried it with their friends and who have reported, nothing final or conclusive has been noted. Our HRA who writes for Round Robin under the signature of “M.C.,” tried it out with her husband in a preliminary way and was sufficiently interested to fly back to enter the first class. She is exceptionally well trained for such work and will be able to give us really expert judgment on the value of Mr. Hubbard’s system. It may be September before we really begin to know how it pans out in actual practice.
Any HRA in the Burlingame or San Mateo (California) district, who wishes to have a partner for Dianetic auditing experiments is invited to drop a line to HRA L.B.S., care of me at the Study. I will see that it is forwarded. This HRA is also exceptionally trained in psychological lines and, in addition, has an exceptionally logical and penetrating mind. Let me quote parts from a letter which has just arrived from her.
“Did you gather whether “unconscious” moments when engrams are recorded would include sleep? If so, how thoroughly could the reactive mind misinterpret records of positive instruction played during sleep? The possibilities seem slightly fantastic for the young woman who might be promoting a family … that is, in the light of Dianetics. What?”
As I read Hubbard’s work, he claims that the period of unconsciousness must be one brought about by the impact of pain or some painful emotion. One may be “out cold” as in an accident or when on the operating table. Or, one may just be “dazed” by emotional shock so that, in our terms, the Auhane has its mana supply cut off temporarily by the Aunihipili – in which case the former does not function and cannot rationalize impressions had by way of words, or sights or other sensory impressions.
In ordinary sleep there is no pain or shock of this dangerous proportion. A very wild nightmare might give sufficient shock, but if wild enough, one usually awakens and rationalizes the experience for what it is – just a nightmare.
As to sleep suggestion, mechanically administered or by the voice of another, I have as yet to hear of any difficulty being caused by a misinterpretation of the worded suggestions. Most such misinterpretations, according to Dianetics, are made when the Aunihipili of the unconscious person identifies itself with the one speaking, be it the mother or father in prenatal pain-moments, or the doctors and nurses around the operating table. Ordinary sleep, without the Dianetic pain or shock ingredient, must be very different. Moreover, the carefully planned recorded suggestions are aimed at getting the Aunihipili to identify itself with the things and conditions presented to it by voice in the suggestions. I can recall no single suggestion which is not simple and direct – to be taken literally. It seems to me that even the illogical Aunihipili would find it hard to put the wrong interpretation on what it repeatedly hears voiced through the recording machine. I will go into this angle with Wing Anderson when he gets back from Colorado in a few weeks. His experience with sleep suggestion is wide and varied. (He is having a home built at Montrose, just in case, and will give us the latest in prophetic materials soon, so I understand, to go with his PROPHETIC YEARS.)
Continuing our discussion of Dianetics, I wish to point up again a very reasonable set of conclusions to be found on pages 150 and 151 of the book. Speaking of the fixations (our terms again), Mr. Hubbard tells us that in certain cases the methods he advocates do not have to be used. He has observed the same thing that our Dr. Fodor describes in his reports on his practice – that if a patient can be given an artificial or imaginary first-cause of his fixations, and can be made to believe that this is the cause of all his fears and physical reactions or ills, the fixations often will drain off and all be well.
Mr. Hubbard remarks that if one can be “educated” in such a way that a strong and unquestioning faith in some Higher Power or cult is built up (and driven home to the Aunihipili, we must add), the old fixations cease to cause trouble. That is of great importance to us as HRAs. As one HRA recently wrote, “The Aumakua, as I understand it, is an entity farther evolved than the Auhane or Aunihipili, and, for this reason, certainly should be able to do what neither of the less evolved selves can do, that is, clear away fixations in the Aunihipili when conditions allow it to take a hand in our lives and help us in that way.” I think we will all agree that we have evidence in the lives of the serene religionists about us, showing that they are not thrown for a loop at every whip-stitch by the reactivation of old fixations.
We have all known of sudden and almost miraculous cures which have followed religious uplift and/or psychological treatment. In such cases, the fixations may not have been identified at all, but the patient has been able to rise above the level of thinking on which the fixations and guilts are lodged. We do not know just what one does to “raise the vibration,” but we are on our way to finding out exactly so that we may set about doing it in orderly fashion. (This is one of the problems which I have begun to work on and for the solving of which I need more free time. On a later page I will discuss the matter in detail.)
REINCARNATION
Reincarnation was not stressed as a thing important to living by the kahunas, in so far as I have been able to learn. They seemed to have made no effort to recall memories of past incarnations, and used no rites of any sort to counteract the boogies which plague India and also some of our modern psycho-religionists. The boogies are really twins. The first one is called “Karma” and we all know to what illogical lengths some cults teach that man must go (1) to stop making karma, either good or bad, and (2) to free the individual from the effects of past lives in which bad karma was generated.
The psycho-religionists or more adventurous psychologists have first accepted the fact that we remember from the time of conception, then have pushed on further back and have decided that some fixations had their origin in past incarnations and are the cause of troubles in the present life.
HRA C.F. Stone, of Knoxville, Tenn., who has a healthy curiosity about everything that may be connected with the materials of the field in which we work, reported at length in a recent letter on his experience in answering an ad in an astrology magazine and having his past lives read for a fee. In the same magazine he had read an article by the advertiser, in which she told of having learned in India a method by which past incarnations could be read and reasons thus discovered for certain difficulties in the present life.
The writer, “Gervee Baronte,” calls such a delineation an “Incarnascope” and, to make one for a client, needs only the birth time and place, the full name, and the sex. She then uses “certain symbols” and – presto – is able to draw on some form of surviving memory or records, with the result that she can tell you in great detail who and what you were and what you did in incarnations past.
It took nearly five typed pages to tell C.F. what his “Incarnascope” revealed. He began as the close friend of Alexander the Great, as a general, but apparently his name evaded the reader, although she was careful to set down a most interesting thing, supposedly discovered by her methods. It was that in that incarnation he shaved. “Alexander has left much to his men. He was the first man to shave, and to insist upon his men following his example. He used the STRIGEL, the ancient Greek razor.” (Now we may guess why this was so important that it needed to be reported at this late date.)
There was an incarnation in Cilicia around 628 A.D. This time he was a Christian priest who was sent to England and who had an affair or two, the result being karma to be contended with in the later lives, including possibly the present. In 1532 he incarnated on Malta and became one of the famous “Knights of Malta.” There he was “over-bearing and very dictatorial.” In Wales, in the “XIII Century” he was a minor baron and lived a very mixed and interesting life. Many details were given. He had an arranged marriage, two children, and his wife was English. He made a trip to France and promoted education, as did his wife. (C.F. was amused and entertained.)
Such things as readings of past incarnations are all a part of the playground activities of occultism. Together with the fun of endless speculation and the entertaining reading furnished by the many available “courses” fill the time of the average student almost completely. The bulk of the things found as “vast and unquestionable truths” or presented as “Word-of-God Revelations” will be found to be contradicted from one writing to another all down the line. Not only are statements NOT proven, but seldom is an effort made to show where they came from or why they should be accepted as more veritable or more useful in the job of living than Aesop’s Fables.
I keep hammering away at the job of reminding my friends to pause and question the authority of the ones who appear as self-appointed “teachers.” I have learned the hard way and have looked behind the scenes too often at the individuals who have had the brass and the dishonesty to try to sell me their statements in pig-in-a-poke packages. Not once have I found one of these men or women who lived the life they preached or demonstrated the powers they offered to teach others to use for the usual fee. I respect very greatly the men and women who are honest enough to admit that they do not know, and who are bent on research instead of profitable deception of the unwary. When someone tells me where he found certain information, and how, and whether or not it seems to be historically correct or valid in practical use, I will stop delightedly to listen.
As HRAs we are all entitled to play and have entertaining reading in any form we prefer, but when anyone offers us something to take and swallow whole, we disgrace ourselves and HRA if we accept it.
THE PROBLEM OF “RAISING THE VIBRATION”
Most students in the realm of religions and the psychologies, have a vague idea of what is meant by “Raising the Vibrations.” It is a phrase which came into use about the turn of the century when the idea that all things were made of vibrations in basic ether was developing.
Modern religions have struggled to keep up with physical science. In the older religions there were endless claims that could not be accepted because they could neither be proven nor made to work – because they could not be understood in the clear light of mature logic.
In Christianity we were taught to pray and to have faith if we were to get help in the job of living. We tried this the best we could and found that faith was very difficult to generate. About one prayer in a thousand seemed to get results.
In modern times the world of the West discovered the East Indian psycho-religious systems which were combined and sifted to give us our several schools of Theosophy. In these, a slightly different way of getting help from Higher Beings was described – even if hastily garnished with the warning that to use any method was to tamper with karma and was therefore not to be tolerated.
As a young man I eventually came to Theosophy in my search for something that would hold water. Blavatsky seemed to favor trying to use the Eastern systems – in fact, claimed to have used them with some success herself. Later, heads of dividing branches of the cult which she founded undertook to correct the mistakes of the founder. They increasingly warned that no occult practice should be tried that offered anything other than “spiritual growth.” This meant that one must live down old karma and try not to make new. The doctrine was the simple one of “Do what you must to live, but desire nothing. Become impersonal and selfless. Break all ties with things earthly.” In the increasingly thinner airs of Indian aspiration, the student was taught that he must not even desire spiritual evolution, the final breaking of the wheel of reincarnation and karma – NOTHING. The Bhagavad Gita was the Bible of desirelessness and selflessness. However, the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali was an equally popular text, even if its whole teaching was aimed at desiring mightily to learn to control the mind and guide it in meditation and concentration – to the end that the student might eventually perform a feat of mental and spiritual straddling fit for one afflicted by dual personality symptoms of the first degree.
The teachings of the sage promised on pages 70 to 73 of my copy that, “If the ascetic is not desirous of the fruits, even when perfect knowledge has been attained,” he could rise to the exalted mental or spiritual state that his GREAT DESIRE had driven him for years into ascetic labor and practice to reach.
I well remember my own early puzzlement. In the first flush of enthusiasm I had plunged into meditation and concentration. I had done so because I wanted something. I found it hard work and I knew very well that if there was nothing to be gained, I would not exert myself. What I wanted was the ability to do the things mentioned on pages 52 to 61 (Judge translation). I wanted to be able to “be transferred to any other body and have complete control.” I read, “From the acquirement of such power over the elements, there results to the ascetic various perfections, to wit, the power to project his inner-self into the smallest atom, to expand his inner-self to the size of the largest body, to render his material body light or heavy at will …” “… Therefrom spring up in the ascetic the powers to move his body from one place to another with the quickness of thought, to extend the operations of his senses beyond the trammels of place or the obstructions of matter, and to alter any natural object from one form to another.” There was much more, and it all sounded most worthwhile.
I suppose that there were hundreds of eager students around that time whose reactions were much like mine. We tried, we failed, we became suspicious. We became convinced that something was left out of the teachings, and turned our attention to inventing variations of the meditation and concentration methods. Oh, yes, we all had our tries at living the “ascetic” form of life, and many, like myself, narrowly missed psychic tangles that might have wrecked us with fixations or obsessions or both. Many must have had their “teachers” just as I had mine, only to find that these posers had never arrived at first-base themselves.
There resulted from these efforts on the part of the bright young men and women of my youth a great blossoming of “courses” and of “teaching.” Older HRAs will recall how budding psychology was stripped of ideas to use to patch up Patanjali and make him work. There was a great to-do about “developing the WILL,” and everyone who would buy the book or take the course was assured that by daily practice the “will” could be developed to the point of levering the world. “Personal Magnetism” was the name of another ingredient. On my shelves I have a group of old books dating back to 1910, and which are good for a burst of laughter at any time I care to take one down and begin a random reading.
A little later, when nothing was found to work more than about a dime’s worth, sanity began to creep back into literature and the little magazines which we all read. In Theosophy, all efforts to follow Patanjali’s instructions were increasingly frowned upon. It was true that Leadbeater and Besant were privileged to demonstrate the promised occult abilities in a very small way – not flying through the air and the like, but getting into the heart of the atom so that drawings of its form and motions could be made and past incarnations investigated for the faithful. But when all was said and done, the students – who were growing gray by this time – still had nothing very practical for their personal use or to fill their needs. Some tried to revert to Christianity. Many went over to Buddhism, as I did for a season. Some tried Zen – at least I did – and many, also including myself, turned to Spiritualism, finding in Psychic Science the ability of the “spirits” to do almost all of the things that Patanjali had promised that the living might learn to do. A few turned to mysticism and contented themselves with its unpredictable intangibles. For my part, I accidentally fell in with Huna while in the midst of having a close-at-hand look into psychic matters.
In forty years of search I have still to find any who can do the things Patanjali promised except the spirits, and they must have help from the living, as in the matter of mana and perhaps other items. I have seen one pretender after another appear and have his turn at lying to the people. Aside from good use of some of the psychic powers, such as in telepathy, premonition and the like, I have yet to see anything more startling than cataleptic states brought on by autosuggestion, in which men of India and the Occident alike have been “buried alive.”
I NOW PROPOSE that we go on from there as HRAs and put our heads together to see if, from the springboard of meditation and concentration, we can do something along the lines of the vague “raising of the vibration.” I ask that each of you take stock of your present ideas of this basic need to lift ourselves in some way to closer contact with the higher somethings, be they “selves” or “planes of consciousness” of Triune God and the All Good. Do you agree with me that there may be some action of mind to be taken? That there may be some physical condition to be reached? That the Aunihipili must be caused to join in the effort in some way?
If you agree, even in part, our first problem is to decide on what form of mental action we will try to use in our experimental approach. Will it be training attention and will to obtain the most perfect state of concentration? And if the Aunihipili is to go to the Aumakua for glimpses of its realm in “Realization,” shall we use something like the Zen method with the “koans” or riddles which have no answer?
In this very important work together, which I am proposing, we will not be selfless or lacking desire. We want to learn how to “raise our vibrations” in order to get freed from our fixations and so stop reactivating them to our sorrow, physically, mentally or in relation to our living conditions. We want to learn to rise into this different state at will and to be able, from there, to help get healing of body, mind and purse for our fellows. This is, in my opinion, legitimate. Despite any claims to the contrary, we have no pure religion. We do not worship for worship’s sake. The element of magic always has been mixed into religious worship and may always be, at least while humans continue to have problems and need of help.
Shall we turn to some form of ordination to get the uplift? Does the spiritually uplifted state pass from one who has it to one who has not? Shall we look to some form of initiation given by man or spirits?
How shall we use the manas? The aka threads of contact? Is it possible, while still in the flesh, to learn to duplicate the causing of psychic phenomena such as that so well described in the passage from Patanjala which I have quoted?
If you will marshall your personal knowledge and experience on these lines during the next two weeks, I will do my best to dig into the roots of the language used by the kahunas and to find out what I can from the ancient Secret to help us. I have already discovered the fact that accumulating a mana surcharge enables one to focus the sight and the mind on a picture or view or drawn symbol with great strength and force. Try it, and see if you can go on from there. MFL
