A Wall of Protection for Our Soldiers

January 15, 1951

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.

THANKS SO MUCH

Thanks so much for your recent cards and letters, with often a choice sprig of catnip for the grateful and hard-scratching Cigbo who is just beginning to cheer up a little after the sad experience of sending notes to over 90 Auntie and Uncle HRAs to ask if they were still interested or had turned to “dead wood,” and having all but three fail to answer. (This after several months of hints that the ax would eventually have to fall.) However, while our membership is much smaller, the quality of it has been enhanced. We remain perhaps the one and only organization dedicated to research and experimentation in this field. We still have in our number most of the best students in the occult and psychic field in America. One thinking student who has a real background of study and who can intelligently cooperate in our research and experimentation – while questioning all conclusions with a carefully-weighing mind – is of more value to the world which we serve with our combined efforts than a thousand unthinking followers of some musty and crystallized cult which has long since turned back and in on itself and its originator.

A CORRECTION has been requested by an HRA in Australia. He writes that Harry Edwards, spiritualist healer, of England, recently mentioned in a bulletin, has never asked for a contribution. The healing work is entirely apart from money reward. I should have been much pleased to have known this earlier. I had, as a matter of fact, no direct word from Mr. Edwards himself, my information coming from a friend who told of the healing available and who said that, as the work was entirely supported by donations, it was well to send along something with the request for healing aid. I still feel that anyone asking for healing should keep in mind the fact that those engaged in this humanitarian work have to eat just like the rest of us.

HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS are in order for HRA Geraldine Birch of California whose set of fourteen paintings for the stations of the cross in the Episcopal Church of the Ascencion of Sierra Madre, were dedicated the day before Christmas. Newspapers carried reproductions of some of the paintings and a glowing account of the research that lay behind the work. The artist is known especially for her portraits and in the reproduction of the Sixth Station picture her skill is very evident. But the thing which strikes me as most remarkable is her conception of the face of Jesus. I have never, until this time, been at all satisfied with the various pictures in current use. Here, however, we at last have Jesus as the mystic. The eyes are most remarkable. In them lies inner quiet and they look out of the picture and into some beyond as if seeing the realms of reality which endure and which were of the “Father” who was ever close to him. I earnestly hope that this set of pictures or at least some part of the set, can be reproduced in color and made available. This Jesus is a master kahuna as well as “the Son of Man.” (This HRA began work with us in the TMHG nearly a year ago, the prayer-actions being directed toward correction of a serious heart condition and strength and inspiration. She has come through on all counts with flying colors and has sent her thanks and blessings to us who have stood with her in the TMHG to help call down Help and Guidance.)

THE NEW “WALL OF PROTECTION” for soldiers and their kin, as proposed in page 9 of Bulletin 46, brought up at once a question which must be met squarely and right at the beginning. HRA Bond Collier, of Michigan, saw the point at once and wrote in about it. As this is of basic importance, let me quote from the letter.

“I may be all wrong, but simply as something to ponder over and discuss with your Aumakua, I suggest the possibility that this business of building a protective “wall” around our soldiers may be wrong.

“As you say in your book, we are supposed to hurt no one. We can’t ask the Po`e Aumakua to hurt anyone. Yet the longer the soldier with the charmed life lives, the more human beings he will kill or wound, directly or indirectly. Do you think the Po`e Aumakua would like that?

“Here’s what I ran into: If you ask for protection for GI Joe, you have got to ask also that all his destructive efforts be in vain. You have got to ask for protection for all enemies with whom this individual GI Joe comes into contact. Then, since the Commie Joes thus have a limited protection, they are more dangerous, more destructive, so you must ask for partial nullification of their effectiveness. So, you see, the thing branches out into a thousand ramifications.

“Now if that were a backhanded way of stopping the war or something like that, it wouldn’t be so bad. But that’s not the way to stop the war. It burns up a tremendous amount of precious mana in a negative sort of way that does not get at the roots of this war business at all. GI Joe and Commie Joe shouldn’t be out there shooting at each other to begin with. It’s an artificially created, man-made danger. Aren’t we wasting a lot of mana asking for protection and counter protection, nullification and counter nullification? Couldn’t we project a double or triple mana bomb at Truman and Stalin to get them to negotiate this thing instead of shooting it out? There must be some constructive, positive approach to this thing.”

The problem is, as HRA Collier points out, one involving many angles.

However, I have felt from the first that we are safe to rely on the Huna idea of “hurt” rather than those which had the same historical beginning and were developed and developed until they left the realm of logic and practical living to enter the realm of the impractical, illogical and metaphysically abstract.

In India, where we find all ideas stretched to the illogical and ultimate extreme more than in any other land, we have the extreme of the religionists who sweep the path before them lest they tread on worm or ant. They allow their hair to be infested by insects and go to other extremes. In Christianity we have also the doctrine of non-resistance.

In Huna we have life divided into three levels, one to match the level of each of the three selves. On the level of the Aunihipili – in which we live in a physical body which belongs to the animal kingdom – we come under the same laws as do the animals and lesser beings down to the smallest germs. The law is one of “eat or be eaten,” to a large extent. Perhaps a man may become so continually in contact with the Aumakua level as to be protected when he meets the hungry tiger in the forest. But until this protection is possible, he will do well to carry a gun in case his prayers for the protection of non-resisters do not “hit the mark,” as the na kahuna picturesquely describe it.

On the physical level there is not a single living thing that has not been instructed by the Powers That Be to defend itself in one way or another. Certainly mankind is well supplied with the instinct of self-protection.

Next consider the mental level – the level of the Auhane. In our minds we may come closer to accepting the ideal of non-resistance, but few of us would willingly sit with folded hands and not try to use the power of logical thought to avoid being killed the next day by an enemy known to be on his way.

On the level of the na Aumakua we may be sure that there is no physical body to be injured. One of the early discoveries was that “God is a spirit” and this goes for all disembodied forms of life. All the great and glowing ideals known to man have their perfect realization ONLY on the high level of the entities who are SPIRITS. Only on that level can non-resistance be perfectly practiced with complete safety. Love that is entirely unselfish and impersonal is another ideal belonging to the high levels. These are things we can grasp on the mental level rather well and toward which we aspire and grow in the face of our limitations which stem from the necessity of living in an animal world in a physical body.

Morals enter the picture on the mental level only. The tiger and the germ have no moral sense. They are constrained to follow the pattern of life laid into and over them by the “Autonomous Field” of Gustaf Stromberg, which closely approximated the aka body of Huna when directed by intelligence of the “group soul” kind working as apprentice na Aumakua.

The soldier whom we hope to protect, belongs to the tiger level in so far as he is not allowed to pass on the morals or right and wrong of the war he is compelled to fight. Our elected leaders have the duty of thinking for the nation. They decide the moral conditions and do all the thinking related to right and wrong. The generals and soldiers must accept their decisions and fight.

In so far as we now know, the Red faction of North Korea, backed by the Chinese and Russian Reds, attacked South Korea with the object of conquering the people at any cost and of forcing the survivors to conform to their orders in all matters of living. We know that the Chinese Reds came into the war when the United Nations forces were driving the North Koreans back. I think that most of us are now convinced that Russia has been and is now, engaged in a cold war of aggression aimed at forcing all the nations of the world to conform to Red commands. There is little question as to what the Reds did in Russia to gain that end. Historians tell us that we will never know how many human beings were killed in cold blood because they once resisted Red control. Russia recently warned the West Germans that if they resisted any Russian attack, and were later caught, they would be beheaded.

In my opinion, under the sanity of Huna (if not under the impractical idealism of some religions) we are fully justified in (1) protecting ourselves against any threat of aggression and in doing what we can to protect weaker nations who face the same threat, and (2) in asking with the best use of Huna which we can find, that the future for each one involved in the battle for right and freedom be changed in such a way by the na Aumakua that a “wall of protection” will result. This should make use of protection on all three levels.

In other words, we will be following the law of nature on the physical level in doing what is possible to drive off the aggressors. It makes no difference whether the men in either army have been forced to fight against their individual wills. We are all a part of some group and of some racial or national system. We stopped advancing or retreating in our evolution on the family level centuries ago. We evolved through the tribal stage and then began on the national scale. It is probable that in no long time we will be working on an international or world scale.

We have followed the law on the level of the Auhane by making what logical plans we could and by deciding from the available evidence that we were morally right in resorting to hurt to fight hurt. We will follow the law of the Aumakua level in so far as possible. We do not know just how to apply this law all by itself, so we blend it as well as we can by asking the help and guidance and protection of the na Aumakua as we strive to bring about a world condition in which there will be no aggression and as little hurt of any kind as possible.

One volunteer has already written in for the TMHG work for the Wall of Protection. She will take the 11 p.m. time. (More of this activity after more replies have had time to arrive. Meantime the work will be added to the regular TMHG sittings here at the Study as we get organized for this important Service.)

THE DREAMS OF THE FUTURE EXPERIMENT

The experiment remains unfinished. While a number of dreams have been reported, they have often been unaccompanied by one of those brilliant and flashing explanations which result so often if the Aunihipili is asked to explain the meaning and symbols as soon after awakening as possible.

HRA Lewis C. Cornell, of Poland, Ind., reported a typical dream which more or less matches several of the same general class in our HRA collection here at the Study. In his dream, as in most of the others, he found himself in a situation in which the ordered life of the nation had been badly disrupted. No men were to be seen, only boys up to about twelve years of age and very old men. Women were huddled with children in makeshift shelters. They seemed to have become almost like animals. This class of dream seems to indicate the possibility of an all out war in which our own country will this time be one of those fought over and laid waste.

HRA Sherman Peticolas of New Jersey reported the final conclusion he reached after working through a series of dreams. These dreams are of the class that I have come to label, “After the War.” One was reported in an earlier bulletin with the dreamer acting as a supervisor of work on a very modern collective farm, you may recall. In these dreams the typical situation is that someone is helping in the reconstruction. HRA Peticolas dreamed of working as an engineer to plan and supervise some large reconstruction projects. This is very natural, he being an engineer by profession.

Over Christmas the HRA na Aunihipili seem to have been interested in other things and reluctant to try for glimpses of the future to hand on in dreams and symbols after contacting the na Aumakua. This has been true in my own case. Let us keep on with the effort, making attempts to get the dreams and asking for their meaning. The class of dreams representing the flying saucers and the Etherians – with any part they may play in the dawn of the New Age – remains wide open with empty files up to date. Surely someone of us should get something on these exciting possibilities, even if only a dream of laughter.

IF YOU AREN’T USING MANA, YOU’RE WORKING TOO HARD

This might well become a slogan for our activities when it comes to self-healing. One of our most courageous HRAs is Sid Herbert of San Bernardino, Calif. Polio cost him the use of his legs and he has fought for recovery in a manner that shows the steel in his young heart. He not only talks and reads about Huna (and other things such as diet, organic food culture and all that), he tries out everything to the limit of his ability – and keeps cheerful through all vicissitudes. (Take a well deserved bow, Sid!) Recently, he broke a leg because part of the bone had wasted away. He landed in [the] hospital for some weeks while the doctors operated, and came away with a hip infection and a kidney stone. After some consultation with me by letter, he added to his cooperation with the TMHG work the practice of accumulating as large a surcharge of mana as possible, commanding it to go into his hands, and then into the parts of his body which needed healing.

He has been placing the two hands over and under the parts to be treated, and has discovered something of importance to us all. He writes:

“I am finally out of [the] hospital and getting back into the swing of things. I have been doing as you suggested about trying to direct mana into the troubled areas and am pleased to report that something DOES happen. When I do the hip, my left hand gets sweaty in the palm and the area around the infected part of the hip sweats too. The right hand does not seem to be affected. The same method has been successful in eliminating headaches also, particularly the ones I have experienced at times when passing a piece of the kidney stone.”

In the TMHG periods I suggest that you who can think of Sid and send through my line of contact all the mana and healing you can for a moment, I send out such telepathic projections in turn to those on the TMHG list – a rather long list just now. And the reward of happy letters telling of Help called down, is one of life’s great satisfactions.

One such reward came recently from a newly joined HRA who is an advanced student in the field of occultism. Let me share her letter with the rest of you who are part of the TMHG – of course, it is as much yours as mine and I know you will all rejoice as I do.

Dear Mr. Long:
I came up here to our cabin (in the mountains of Southern California) yesterday for a few days quiet before the Christmas rush – it is so calm and peaceful.

Words cannot describe my feeling about Huna. The more I study it the more I am certain THAT THIS IS IT! After reading the Basic Lessons, I practiced making the prayer-action for healing – I was nearly killed in an automobile accident and hadn’t walked for two years without aid. Well, within two weeks I began to walk without a cane and am growing progressively better day by day. Also I feel more alive and alert than ever before. My family and friends are amazed and I tell them it was a miracle – which it was.

I am so delighted I go about grinning like Cigbo – or isn’t he a Cheshire cat? As an alumnus of many religions and cults it is refreshing to find someone who is experimenting. I am delighted with each bulletin and will be everlastingly grateful to you for sharing this study so generously.
Very sincerely, H.B.S.

DIET AND PSYCHIC POWERS

Diet and psychic powers have come up of late for comment by several HRAs. One tells me that Harry Edwards, the famous Spiritualist and healing medium in England, eats whatever is set before him and that he also smokes heavily. (Kuda Bux, we recall, does the same, and fire-walks or demonstrates eyeless sight well. At last report he was trying to learn to walk on water.) From the Huna point of view, it is what we believe about what we eat or smoke that makes the great difference. However, the matter may contain more elements than that. Let me quote parts of a very interesting letter from HRA H.M. Wagner, whose years of study and experience give much weight to his words.

“It is true that for phenomena on the near physical plane – fire-walking, materialization, billet reading, apporting, etc., etc., no special physical training is necessary. The medium can indulge in what he pleases, even drugs and all sorts of perversions. But the only minds which can be met by a seeker of that sort are negligible. For getting contacts on more elevated levels, physical preparation is essential.” (He goes on to give instances in his experience in which a change to a non-animal or animal products diet and the giving up of smoking caused a great improvement in the psychic powers and in the grade of spirits contacted.)

In my book, SSBM, I have discussed such things as materialization and apporting from the Huna point of view, giving it as my opinion that only the na Aumakua can step up the frequency or power or whatever it is in low mana to make of it the high mana, and then use this force to break down physical substances to ectoplasmic form and then rebuild it in the uninjured aka body mold to reproduce the original, perhaps at a far distant place. (See Dr. Nandor Fodor’s ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PSYCHIC SCIENCE under these headings.). The usual assumption is that all the na Aumakua are so evolved – so high, holy and moral, to say nothing of being Puritanical, earnest and even prudish – that they would not stoop to work through any medium not of the purest in body and mind. Like many other popular assumptions which find negation in Huna, this one is not upheld by the observable facts.

Poltergeists who show little or no reasoning power often are instrumental in the materialization of hands strong enough to lift material objects and throw them about a room, or to throw showers of materialized stones. Animals materialize from the spirit world. The least spiritual mediums can also get materializations. I incline to believe that the supply of a sufficient amount of the low mana is the first requisite of the na Aumakua when they produce “physical phenomena” and that the choice of a medium, be it living human plus poltergeist or normal human spirit of a dead person, is a purely personal matter and little related to manners or morals.

Theoretically, any Aumakua of any degree of progression should be able to produce materializations, just as any human should be able to produce sounds. The Aumakua of a savage would love its Aunihipili/Auhane man as much as if he were civilized and highly advanced. However, when it comes to what type of there-living human spirit a here-living person or medium may contact, that is quite a different matter. Like always attracts like. A medium of rare moral quality and with a body refined by a scant and highly refined diet, would be far more apt in contacting spirits of that same standing or of even greater refinement of morals and thought. There is much evidence, also, that the thoughts and natures of the medium and sitters in seances cause either the communication of similar spirits or the strong coloring of the messages given – regardless of the nature of the spirits.

BUILDING A “WALL OF PROTECTION” around the individual through the aid of the Aumakua is not a new concept. It is as old as the concept of a HIGHER INTELLIGENCE to which man may appeal through:

• thinking and the control of thoughts, first on the part of the conscious self or Auhane, and second, on the re-active part of the subconscious or Aunihipili. A third element is the physical stimulus which may take many forms and be a triggering and compelling factor as ritual, as a help in clearing away the guilt complexes and in causing the Aunihipili to make the clear and swift contact with the Aumakua.
• setting a schedule for daily repetition of the rites worked out by the individual for prayer-actions. This is the necessary renewal of the “offices” before the inner shrine of the one engaging in the work. Without this regular and continuous daily work in a definite and well ordered fashion, the Aunihipili inevitably slips back into its former habit of thought, doubt, belief and reaction to its fixations, large and small. A long Sunday effort to establish and then re-establish one’s thoughts and one’s contacts, has been excellent from the most ancient days, but one day in seven or ten is not enough. The Aunihipili can be out of hand in five minutes if something re-stimulates its old fears, hates, guilt senses and general or single fixations. Moreover, it will throw up a great emotional wave of dislike for the prayer and the steps of the ritual being used. It will find a dozen excuses for NOT following through. It will rain old doubts and recalled statements of scorn or disbelief on the Auhane in its effort to go back to the old and habitual ways of stumbling alone and helpless in the dark with the light of the na Aumakua all but cut off.
• the continual replenishment of the supply of mana which is the ONE THING which cannot be neglected as an offering to the Aumakua and the Po`e Aumakua if the mighty POWER of the high mana is to be continually generated for use in shaping and controlling the events on the lower levels of life on which we of the Aunihipili and Auhane grade have our being. The ancient symbol of the complete MAN was the tree. The physical body and the Aunihipili are the roots which gather earthy nourishment down in the darkened earth. The leaves are the Auhane and it is their duty to absorb the LIGHT and make coordinated use of the roots which may be said to supply the symbolic low mana without which there can be no permanent growth. The Sunlight and the Gardener are the Aumakua. The sunshine represents the great creative power above and beyond the High Mana, and which is of no possible use to a tree unless it has both roots and leaves – and the connecting trunk and branches. True, the highest creative force is always there, but even if it causes the sun to shine, the LIGHT can do no good if the roots and leaves do not do their part every day. Mana is the symbolic water (wai). It is as basic as sunlight. Without water, the tree dies, no matter how brightly the sun shines down on it. Without LIGHT, the tree soon sickens, growth stops, leaves turn white, and death comes.

The ancient symbolism does not stop there. The tree which has been tended by the gardener and watched over to maturity must then bear the fruit of SERVICE. If it does not, it is as accursed as the fig tree in the New Testament – it is cut down and burned to make room for another and better tree to grow in its place. This burning, incidentally, seems to have given rise to the concept of HELL as a place of burning and as a place of punishment for refusal to Serve. Helping others physically or mentally is Service. The opposite is hurting others. The first is passive sin of omission, for which the punishment is stagnation of evolutionary and upward growth. The second is active sin, the punishment for which is contained in the symbol of the “burning” – of a Hell or place of darkness.

It is not enough that we read or think about Huna or any form of religion or metaphysics. Too many read such materials only as a way of entertaining themselves. They read and then indulge in another popular form of entertainment – they speculate endlessly and talk and talk and talk, but never get down to actual use of what they learn – never really begin to Serve the Great Po`e Aumakua which hovers over the troubled earth as a Shining Company and to whom the surcharge of mana is due.

In the Bible much seems lost or obscured by lack of understanding of the copyists down the centuries, but once we know Huna, we can recognize the references to the “living water” and the “living sacrifice” and understand clearly what the original belief and significance must have been. The great central drama of Christianity was the “lifting up” as a sacrifice of Jesus. He was lifted up and offered as a LIVING sacrifice, and as a bodily sacrifice. Here we have the symbol of the mana – the living-bodily-sacrificial-substance which mankind was being taught was the great and all-important item in maintaining the correct relation between men and God. The forgiveness of sin or absolution of the Church was secondary and part of ritual preparation for opening the way for the flow of mana “upward.”

A passage in Romans (12:1) comes down to us in good form. Fenton translates it for us. “Therefore, I call on you, brethren, by the Divine mercies, to prepare your bodies a holy, living sacrifice, well-pleasing to God, your rational service.”

Perhaps the greatest curse of priest-craft down the ages has been the constant and greedy perversion of this truth about mana which has been the great central and basic mechanism in many religions. It is so easy to see how the priests would come to teach that the sacrifice must be in food or goods – which could be enjoyed by the priests themselves after their formal presentation to the gods. The secret of the sacrifice of mana was covered up because its offering needed neither priest nor temple, Moreover, all concepts of Service were warped and twisted to make this service come by necessity through the priests and temples. One served by giving to the church, which in its turn doled out a little of its gains to the needy.

“Salvation” in many religions was to be “saved from the burning.” It still is, but to be saved, we have to be initiated into the secret or symbolic meaning – be given the “strong meat.” If our efforts, working together as Huna Research Associates, are to be such as to earn for us a shining reward here or hereafter, that reward will be best merited if we can give back to troubled and bewildered humanity this great basic truth that has become so lost as to render prayers almost useless and to keep the Great Po`e Aumakua so weakened that it cannot keep order on the lower levels – cannot do ITS part for us.