Spiritual Healing, Cleansing & Purification

November 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.

OUR HEALING EXPERIMENTS

Our healing experiments continue to make progress, with the TELEPATHIC MUTUAL HEALING GROUP work producing large and small results, sometimes almost instantly and sometimes very slowly. Hardly a week passes that fresh reports of good results do not arrive here at the Study. And, almost every mail brings a request from some HRA for special work through the TMHG – the needs ranging from health to finances, and from family tangles to greatly desired inner development and peace of mind.

As I sit every day at 3 and at 7 here at the Study, and go through the TMHG ritual, taking up later the letters, pictures and notes one by one to direct the combined force of the “braided cord” to each individual and the problem represented, I am often deeply moved by a sudden rush of realization – the realization of the vast love and kindness of the Utterly Dependable Parental Spirits with whom we strive to work.

Our method of working with the Aumakuas is unique in the field of mental/spiritual healing, as was pointed out recently by a visiting HRA who is a doctor. He said, “What interests me most, and has from my first contact with your work, is the fact that one accumulates a surcharge of mana as a preparation for the prayer, and gives the vital force to the disembodied Aumakuas to use.” It is not too much to ask of us, considering how little we can do for the Aumakuas. In all religions we find efforts to give the Higher Beings something in advance, not after the prayer has been answered. This would be a distinct contradiction of the great natural instinct of trade which always demands that the payment for a thing be given only when the thing is delivered. Savages often make the exchange with each party taking hold of the objects which are to be traded – both parties pulling at the same time lest one be cheated.

Sacrifices were part of the preliminary ritual of invocation and prayer. Our American Indians often spent days in ritual observances and dances, or in making the symbolic pictures with colored corn which has been ground to meal. It is to be guessed that, as the secret of accumulating and giving mana was gradually lost, the crude rites of observance and sacrifice grew and took more and more complicated forms – perhaps reaching a climax in the early forms of the Mass.

Gradually the idea of giving mana seems to have changed to one of getting it, at least in lands where mana was part of the tradition. While the Christians were praying, “Thine be the power….” with little or no knowledge of who was supposed to provide part of the power, at least, and in the form of mana – the “living sacrifice” of Paul, perhaps – the Polynesians were striving to get for themselves the mana that spelled power. The na kahuna undoubtedly worked with vital forces as “power,” but the uninitiated strove to inherit the general principle – mana – from ancestors, persons, or things, not forgetting the fish, fowl and beast. The heart of a brave enemy was eaten in some lands to assure the transfer of mana. It was not the cannibalism of hunger with them any more than with the Christian who believes that the wine and wafer are transformed into actual blood and flesh so that they may eat of the “broken body of Christ.”

In the Christian tradition, Jesus offered his life and his body as a sacrifice to the “Father” supposedly as atonement for all the past and future sins of humanity. Men were, in some mysterious way, “lost” by some accident of birth or of ancestral “fall,” and so had to be “redeemed” by the bloody and agonizing death of the “son of God”.

All this is passing strange to one not brought up in the old traditions and dogmas of Christianity. To the student, say one brought up a Buddhist and taught that one sacrifices only by giving up sinning, the meaning of the death on the cross would be hard to accept. It is so illogical in its concept of what God is and what had to be done to redeem His humanity. To make matters still harder to accept, there grew up a vast and contradictory mass of ritual and dogma, flavored with the rites and beliefs left over in fragmentary form from ancient Egypt and elsewhere.

If, however, we look behind the scenes in Christianity, or in any of the rites of sacrifice or of the personal getting of mana, we begin eventually to see that it was through the loss of the understanding of the “Secret” that the garbled beliefs grew and took frozen and unchanging form. One begins to ask what possible use God would have of the body or life forces of Jesus or any one of the millions of men – all of whom He created. Only in the hints about a “living sacrifice” do we find evidence of the giving of mana to the Aumakuas as the basic mechanism in the original system.

“Thine be the power” can be read “To Thee be given the power,” and the Latin root for our word “power” gives the meaning of “to be able”, so by giving mana we “make able to do” or [empower] the Aumakuas. If there was no passing of mana in the rite of healing through laying on hands, then what purpose could the rite serve that prayer alone could not serve?

Another rite in religions is the actual and ceremonial cleansing or purification of the one who is about to make a prayer. It is again an illogical procedure if we say that one has to wash his hands and feet before his prayer will be clean enough to be accepted by Higher Beings. Even when this rite is elaborated to baptism for the remission of sin, it still does not make sense because the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross was thought to make the amends, and faith in those amends was enough.

Given knowledge of the accumulation and transfer of mana, we can then see a logic and a reasonableness in cleansing. It becomes a matter of clean mana from a clean body. Internal cleansing was best accomplished by fasting or frugal eating of pure foods. Outwardly one bathed. That covered the physical body and the realm of the Aunihipili. For the realm of the Auhane we purified our thoughts by giving up hurtful thoughts as well as acts, and by making amends for hurts done others, (Knowing that man is too weak to hurt Gods.) The guilt and the stain of remaining guilt in the form of a complex, is to be removed to reach the state of purification in which we may present a flow of mana which we are convinced is clean.

So, once we understand Huna and the hidden reason for doing certain things, we return to logic. We see that we do well to become pure in body and thoughts and fixations covering past deeds. We then accumulate mana and present it with the “seeds” or mental pictures of the conditions desired. As mana “fades” in a day, we repeat the prayer action at least daily. To keep the Aumakuas “made able” to aid us or our loved ones – or humanity as a whole, as in our twice-daily prayer and picturing for and of world peace.

In terms of Christian traditions, “I and the Father” actually make the nearest approach to “being one” at such times as the contact with the Aumakua is made and the mana and carefully prepared and “set” thought-form-pictures are presented by way of a flow along the aka thread of the contact. In expecting that the Aumakuas will crystallize the thought-picture into actual physical or mental conditions for us in the future, we cannot keep changing the picture on this side before it materializes – unless we are willing to have it appear a deformed and crooked picture at best. One does well to do the “talking over” of problems with friends before deciding on what is to be asked, and asked and asked again, daily-until-granted, in the prayer-actions. If the decision is not kept secret and protected from the “talking over” process, it is bound to be changed and possibly ruined. I imagine that “going into one’s closet to pray” might apply very well to the necessity of keeping the prayer and the pictured desire from being contaminated by even our best-intentioned friends. The Hawaiian word huna means (1) “to hide or conceal”, and (2) “a small particle of anything, as of dust”. Those meanings may well apply for us in secreting the “small particles” or thought-forms which go into the making of the picture which we construct of the desired condition. Around this simple word and its meanings we can build the whole structure of prayer and its answer.

THE DAILY RENEWAL OF THE “OFFICE”

The daily renewal of the “office,” in the sense used by Holy Church, becomes significant only in the light of the Huna information that mana charges “fade” or weaken if not renewed. Little wonder then, that from earliest times a shrine was thought to cease to have holy power as a place of contact and worship unless the “offices” were renewed or repeated daily. The origin of the word “office” as used here is also highly significant. In my dictionary I find the basic meaning of opificium (ops from the Latin, meaning “ability, wealth or help” plus faceri, “to do or make”), quite in accord with our concept of giving power to the Aumakua and delegating to it the authority to act, do and make some future condition come about for us. The Aumakua becomes to us an official in the full and complete sense of the original word.

The “seeds” or thought-forms of the pictures we make are in need of mana from planting to the harvest. We cannot think a thought without the use of mana or vital force. In using this symbolism, we find in ultramodern thought and practice a surprising confirmation of the basic idea. Men like HRA Edgar Block have experimented by rubbing seeds in their hands to give them a treatment of vital force before planting. Seeds so treated, and if treated daily by “laying on hands” during the growth period show swifter and greater growth than do untreated seeds of the same batch planted in the same place. In the November issue of PAGEANT magazine, mentioned in the last bulletin, we read (page 17 of the article “What is the Secret?”) that in the University of California at Berkeley they have been experimenting to see what high frequency electric waves would do to seeds. A wave band was discovered which, when used in connection with the seed germination tests, increased the germination potential by 30 to 40 per cent. Better equipment was designed and the increase in germination ran up to 97 per cent in the case of onion seeds.

The article tells on page 16 of the experiments of Dr. Burr at Yale University. Working on the theory that life is closely associated with electrical energy of some kind, and that seeds, if living and strong, are like batteries charged with electricity, he undertook to measure the charges. With instruments designed to measure power currents “of one-millionth of a volt and less,” Dr. Burr and his staff undertook to test seeds, plants and animals. They found that every living form had an individual power-pattern. The author of the article, Robert West Howard, makes a statement that seems to indicate that human tissues carry a charge which can be measured. He says, “… sudden increase or breakdown of electric circuits in all forms of life are an indication of abnormal and highly dangerous conditions, as borne out by the experiments with cancerous tissue.” I have just had a long visit with a Californian who manufactures “electronics” machines for the diagnosis of and treatment of disease. He told me that the electrical potential or charge in human tissue was too small to be picked up and amplified so that a machine could measure it. For that reason, a rubbing plate and a method of tuning in on discharges from tissues had to be used. While I am not able to decide such a technical matter, I have the feeling that Dr. Burr may have an instrument for the measurement of the force direct.

Taking a grain of corn, Dr. Burr tested it with his instrument before Mr. Howard, and at first contact with the kernel the needle on the galvanometer rose high on the dial. The force faded and in about a minute registered much less. This first flush of force has been named “the Primal Potential” and it tells how fast the seed will germinate. The lower reading, which continues to register, is called “Equilibrium Potential” and tells how strongly the seed will grow, indicating its worth as a plant under normal growing conditions.

In terms of Huna we would say that the first and largest charge might be that stored in the aka body of the kernel of corn, while the lesser and constantly-maintained charge indicates the rate of manufacture of the life force in the seed proper. We may see in this the probability that the Aumakua, which has only an aka body, can take a large charge of mana from us, but that it does not replenish it (at least as a large charge) and soon the potential fades or is used up, at which time we, acting as the seed proper, accumulate more mana and send it along.

It will be remembered that with the “spirits of the dead” who return and have strength enough even to ring door bells or knock in an effort to contact their living friends, the power soon fades. The mana of the body seems to be carried away in the aka body as in a battery, but once it is used up, it cannot be replenished without borrowing from the living as the poltergeists apparently do.

ALL THIS brings us to strengthen our belief that it may take steady daily prayer-actions and the supplying of mana to the Aumakuas to get the results we desire. The offering of mana made yesterday is gone by today and must be renewed. Instant healing may involve or demand a charge of mana much larger than we have learned to accumulate and send. Be that as it may, the fact that we are getting results, more and more, through long continued prayer-actions, is both greatly encouraging and exciting; it stands as another milepost in our progress toward the understanding and use of Huna principles.

OUR TMHG TREATMENT OF “GREGG”

Our TMHG treatment of “Gregg” began on October 21st, of 1948, just over two years back. His condition as to sanity and as to physical ups and downs, varied from month to month, but not once did the work stop, although at one time a general appeal for more intensive work for him was sent out in the bulletins and many responded. During this period all that could be done on the physical level was done by the young man’s mother and father, also by the doctors.

To my way of thinking, this is a splendid example of what may be accomplished if the “offices” are renewed daily and faithfully. Aside from my great personal happiness at having Gregg responding so well at this late date, I feel that it is a convincing argument for steady and long-continued effort to call down healing. As I have had so many HRAs showing warm interest in the case of this formerly fine lad, and as I also wish to share with you today’s report – which means so much to me – I pass on parts of his mother’s letter.

“Dear Max:
Thank you so much for the joy with us – for Gregory. Oh, I can’t begin to tell you how marvelously he is coming along. He is sweet, calm, co-operative, and the wonderful SOUL that I saw through a photo taken of him at 11 years of age – he has the same expression again, as in that long-past period.

“NOW, for the best news yet. WE TOOK HIM RIDING IN THE CAR on Thursday last, November 10th. On the Tuesday before that, I saw his personal physician and he later came into see Gregg. I said to Gregg, ‘Darling, I think you could say hello to the doctor.’ He smiled and said, ‘Oh good morning to you Dr. Good morning.’ Well the doctor WAS surprised. He said he had no idea Gregg could talk yet. On the impulse of the moment I said that I felt a ride in the car would be the next step. And he actually gave his permission.

“So, on Thursday, when we arrived, he was all dressed and ready. There is a tiny grove and picnic spot about three miles away at the foot of the mountains with pepper and eucalyptus trees – very quiet and peaceful. We drove there and had lunch, and then Gregg walked with his father and me along the little paths over the fallen leaves, all crunchy, until he was ready to go back. We showed him the car and reminded him that he had once asked for a Pontiac – and here one was for him. He said, ‘Lovely – very nice!’ and so on. When we finally returned to the room, an orderly said to him, ‘I see you have a new car, Gregg. What kind is it?’ Gregg answered, ‘A Pontiac.’ Then Waters asked, ‘Is it black?’ Gregg said, ‘No, it’s grey.’

“I mention these little things to show you how he is functioning more and more mentally. He had not been dressed for outside for six years. I have ordered a new outfit for him – tweed slacks, shoes, flannel sport shirt and so on for the time being.

Blessings and thanks,
Nell”

The “blessings and thanks” I pass on to the rest of you who work for Gregg’s recovery. Join me in giving thanks to the Aumakuas when you make your prayer-actions.

Never forget that old habits are clinging things. Try not to slip back into the old way of prayer in which no mana is accumulated, no definite and long-term plan followed, and no mana presented.

BOOK REVIEW

THE MATURE MIND by H. A. Overstreet (W. W. Norton & Co., N.Y. 1949)

In the preceding bulletin, I spoke of the need for better training in several lines before trying to take up Dianetics. I mentioned the book now being reviewed and promised to discuss it in detail for the benefit of the HRAs unable to get and read it for themselves. It is a book that is of great value, quite apart from such methods of finding and draining off fixations as are outlined in Dianetics.

H.A. Overstreet tells us that we are passing from the period of discovery and invention into one in which the general or mass level of childishness is about to move toward mental maturity. However, at present, we are confronted the world over by the spectacle of childish and immature mentality on the part of the individuals who form the ruling groups – on the part of both politicians and dictators.

In a like manner, we are confronted with immature thinking in everything from government down – in our “way of life” – in economics, education, religion and everything that exercises control of us. The result is vast waste of material resources, the exploitation of human beings in all lower walks of life, and even their mass murder in continuing wars.

Not until the beginning of the century did we begin to find ways of measuring varying degrees of mental power. And, only then were we able to begin to distinguish between the childish and the mature mind. Very soon it was discovered that the “I.Q.” of a person might be very high, as in a learned professor, while in his relations with his family, classes and friends, he often showed all the signs of childishness. Eventually it was decided that the man with the highest natural intelligence and greatest store of learning, when filled with fixations carried over from childhood, may remain childishly immature in so far as the majority of his actions and reactions are concerned. If such a person is in a position of authority, he may throw a nation into war on what may seem to be a series of insane impulses – but what are, in reality, only fixed reactions to the complexes formed in childhood – perhaps a complex which was responsible in childhood for his blind attacks on anyone who called him a bad name.

Unfortunately, our modern tests for the individual I.Q. or aptitudes do not bring to light the fixations caused by unresolved emotional conflicts so often suffered in early life, to say nothing of fixations caused by shocks or other circumstances.

Mr. Overstreet points out the fact that when, in childhood, we form a fixation, it blocks the mental growth in that one direction so that always thereafter one’s reactions to similar situations are dictated by compulsions seated in the complex and far removed from the tempering of logic.

As the majority of people suffer from a very similar set of fixations, we find that nations and the world react in the same illogical and immature fashion. For this reason, the minority of individuals who are mature on almost all lines are unable to make themselves heard. Fixations close the ears of those so afflicted.

In addition to the low I.Q. of a ruling politician, and to his possible fixations which keep him immature in many lines, there is a third thing that prevents maturity in thinking and reacting. This is the “conditioned reflex” or artificially formed habit which Ivan Pavlov discovered, and which men of craft, for their own purposes, have learned to inflict on their fellows to their own advantage.

Pavlov conditioned his dogs to react to the sound of a bell instead of to the sight and smell of food. He rang the bell and the mouths of the dogs watered. Our political bosses, through radio and press, teach us to react habitually to hate communism, then by calling political opponents communists, the habituated voter automatically reacts by voting against the branded candidate. Logic is no longer in the picture. Everything depends on who can shout the loudest accusation and get himself heard. (This is my observation, not the author’s. M.F.L.)

In everything we do or refuse to do, we are partly conditioned by schools, papers, radios, sermons and our fellows who are already conditioned. We smoke and drink to the profit of the advertisers. We vote for the benefit of the politicians. When the flag is waved and the button of fear and nationalism is pressed, we march off to war without a word of protest. Hitler and his crafty associates were first to set about using mass conditioning as a part of his scheme to control the world. He used also the “war of nerves” technique. By now the science of psychology marches with the other sciences into every field of world conflict.

It is only when the great majority of us are told and MADE TO UNDERSTAND why we are immature, and why and how we are conditioned as to reflexes by immature men in places of power, that we can begin to hope to do something about a world situation that has become very bad indeed, and which threatens to become very much worse.

Mr. Overstreet has done us a signal service in explaining what is wrong and how it got that way. As a second great service, he has worked out a fool-proof test by which we can tell whether we, our fellows, or our political rulers are mature in mind or not.

The measure-stick which he provides is very simple. One simply asks whether the person in question is doing things in a way that results in the greatest good for the greatest number. If a man is hampered by fixations, he will mix good deeds with those which are either bad, selfish or illogical. Jesus is mentioned as an example of a man who strove for the good of the whole.

The only hope of the world at this time is that mankind may at last grow up to mental maturity to match his advance in the making of weapons. Growth must be swift. It must begin with ourselves as individuals who take our own measures, correct our immaturity by all possible means, teach others, and leaven the masses. Even if we cannot find and remove our fixations, we may study ourselves and our conditioned reactions. Once we discover the avenues which are blocked we will have the chance to fight the childish reactions to which we are prone when a fixation is triggered or when some Pavlov rings his bell in print or over the air. Here is great light for us in a much darkened world.

Here are some passages from this book. They bear the stamp of a mind of a high degree of maturity.

“It is good news that our life can grow in power and happiness as it links itself productively to life other than our own: through willed knowledge, through responsibility, through grace and clarity of words, through empathic feeling, through sexual understanding, through philosophic grasp. It is good news that there is for us no fated road to adult dullness, no fated dying back of the brain.

“If the adult brain does die back; if the adult years are a waste and a disappointment, the reason, we now discover, can be found in conditions that have halted the growth of life into linkage with life. We now know that most of these conditions need not exist; that if, in home, school, church, business, politics, or elsewhere, they do exist, we can alter them. We can, in brief, create conditions far more favorable than ever before for the growth of life into a maturity that is a triumph and a fulfillment.”

In the chapter on present-day education I find these lines:

“It should be the kind of education that sets out to do a notable thing: to take adults, in this newly arrived time of our life and help us to move beyond the routines of a half-baked adulthood into the creative surprises of an adulthood that is truly maturing, giving them, for the first time in their lives, the chance to see life as only mature eyes can see it.”

In his last pages, Mr. Overstreet speaks almost as if aiming directly at us who are Huna Research Associates:

“In the third place, THE PRACTICE OF RESEARCH. (He is discussing the practices which help one to become mature in mind.) Most adults remain merely adults because they never do more than skim the surface of things. They get the habit of being surface-minded, with surface opinions that become surface dogmatisms. These adults of whom we are speaking would want to raise their adulthood above the average superficiality by going – each of them – at some specific problem, physically, or socially, or what not, and applying their minds in the way that good minds should properly be applied. One sustained experience in rigorous research would make all superficial thinking thereafter tame by comparison. Our obligation, then, is to grow up. This is what our time requires of us. This is what may yet be the saving of us.”

NEWS NOTE:

HRA Dr. Reinhold says in a letter dated November 11th: “We have had many interesting experiences applying Huna principles to Dianetics. In fact, it has been possible to substitute very satisfactorily all Huna terms and concepts in the general technique, and this has been done in cases where the subject was familiar with your book.

The over-all results with Dianetics, thus far, have been disappointing in one respect. We found that most of the people who came to us, attracted by Dianetics, were desirous only of picking up our techniques, with the idea of becoming auditors for big money rather than to secure any personal therapy for self-improvement. Most of these came in for only one or two sessions. Actually, one must work earnestly and conscientiously to learn ……..