When Huna Prayers Fail

April 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.

WE ARE NOW WAITING to give sufficient time for the “Wall of Protection” letters for soldiers to reach them via the slow overseas mails. In due time we will begin to get word as to how the letters have been received. A new supply of the six-page letter has been run and you may have as many copies as you wish to send out. This is a work that promises to be a real Service. Claim your part in it.

A GOOD LETTER on the matter comes from HRA H.J.S. in Detroit. “I will be glad to give the ‘Wall’ letter part of Bulletin 51 to a soldier boy the first chance I get. I may hear of one among my friends or neighbors. It is very beautiful and surprisingly simple. I read with interest the first part of the bulletin in which you give your answers to the ‘Three Questions’ concerning contact with the Aumakua, time required for getting answers to prayers and our requests for Guidance. I must say, as I did before, that according to my experience, absolute surrender in faith to our Aumakuas during the prayer-action, with absolute trust that the prayer is going to ‘hit the mark,’ will cause a strong flow of mana, and the contact can then be felt, so proving that contact has been made. One has to observe the results of blessings as they appear – perhaps on the same day or in any period of time later. I have trained my Aunihipili to keep away all thoughts that do not belong in my prayer. I not only feel mana leaving me, but I feel the Mana Loa returning to me.

“When mana has been offered and released and accepted from the body day by day, then our Aumakuas, as I see it, are ever ready to fill our needs. I had a complicated problem recently, with a time limit set and no allowance for mistakes. Other men had already failed on it. I called down wisdom and divine guidance the evening before, and got it. The next morning everything was in tip-top shape. This is one more proof to me that there is no other way to overcome difficulties but to resort to prayers which are being answered and guidance which is given when we are in a pinch and it is necessary.”

SLEEP SUGGESTION

For the HRAs who may be interested in taking part in experiments, including Huna angles, with sleep suggestion, and who have or will get recording equipment, HRA J.R. Richards, Jr., 151 Armstrong Drive, Hampton, Virginia, should be addressed. He has offered to do all the work for us of directing and coordinating the experiments. Eventually, a full report will be made for the benefit of the rest of us. If enough letters are received to show sufficient interest in the project, it will get underway, perhaps in from 60 to 90 days. Preliminary work will have to be done to decide on the best ways to run tests, the best types of suggestion and the best ways of voicing the recordings and using them. HRA Richards has had enough experience of his own by now to be of great value to us. Here are parts of his letter to me.

“Since becoming an HRA, I am still trying to assimilate all the data you have prepared and it will apparently take some time to put it into operation. Little by little I am learning to put my ‘George’ thru his paces – I am having my share of failures, likewise enough amazing results to more than intrigue my curiosity. I have been using sleep suggestion to order the accumulation of vital force and I have counted over 1500 swings of the pendulum at one time. At other times my swings ran from 600 to 1300. (Normal swing 175, as tested after he finished writing the letter and added in a postscript.) I have used a tape recorder now for over 13 months, and doubt seriously that I will ever abandon its use. In view of Wing Anderson’s comments regarding the statistical evidence that some people seem to have a delayed response of a period of a year or longer, I seem to fall into that category with a few very important exceptions.

“I made up Huna type recordings on tape to get dreams of the past (no definite results). I got results in three nights and began to get dreams of the future. I dreamed of two different naval engagements (with foreign forces). (In a dream for which he got the date of 1983) my wife and I were in a city whose identity was unknown, and with no others seen. If these dreams continue, I intend to keep a careful record of them and will send it to you later. It is my personal opinion that Huna type prayers through the medium of a recorder, offer a very fertile ground for experimentation and I hope that I can develop a foolproof technique that will produce results. I still think we can use this method to (1) explore the past in dreams, (2) also the future, and (3) to contact the Aumakuas to get correct procedure, etc.”

NOTE: Please write to HRA Richards, not to me, about the sleep suggestion project. I am more than pleased to have an energetic and clear-seeing HRA take up and carry through a project, heading it himself, answering all correspondence, etc. If we could get other projects started and handled in this way, with reports made from time to time, it would make much more work possible for our organization.

GUARD YOUR MANA

In a recent letter, the question was asked, “Why is it necessary to break contact with the Aumakua and finish the prayer abruptly as we do? I like to keep the contact and commune with the Aumakua – sometimes going to sleep that way.” MA Major O.B. Gabriel, who is an experienced healer and who works at times with Harry Edwards in England, wrote in the magazine, RELIGIONS, “But the passing of human vitality – sometimes called Magnetic healing, is only one, the lesser in fact, of two types. The greater is the transmitting of a Power from without the human frame. The difference is easily discerned in practice, for whereas the Magnetic healer gets depleted to the point of exhaustion if he continues too long, the Spiritual healer ends up better than he began.”

In our work, we make our prayers when in direct contact via the aka thread, with the Aumakua. We send the mana as our offering. That is a basic part of the ritual and we have to perform that act for ourselves, not depend on the Aumakua to do it. Each self must do the part assigned to it, and in this case, the Aunihipili and Auhane are responsible. When the prayer-action is over, it has been found by experience that, for some reason or other, it is also necessary to invite the return flow of mana – mana raised to the Aumakua level of power and purity which can heal and bless. The kahunas asked, “Let the rain of blessings fall.” We must do the same. It seems to be a part of the act of opening the door to the help of the Aumakuas so we may have the aid they are forbidden to give unless their presence is recognized and their aid requested. Always without exception, we should make this formal ending to prayer if an offering of mana is sent to the Aumakuas. That ending made, we may then resume contact and happily commune – rest in the happiness of the warm nearness, dearness and love of the Utterly Trustworthy Parental Spirits. One may also visualize the mana rising as in a fountain in the body, fountaining above to the Aumakua and returning to you as water to the fountain bowl. This establishes a complete circuit and one can then pray or treat for a long period of time without being depleted. I use this method in the TMHG periods here at the Study.

A STUDY OF FAILURES IN HUNA USE

A letter came recently from one of our HRAs who has been in the work almost since it started. It is valuable to us because it brings to a clear focus the problem of failure after efforts to use Huna. “Enclosed is a dollar for Cigbo. However, I don’t feel that I can send it every month from now on. I have joined the small church group here, and that means contributions, and also I have taken on another obligation. I don’t want to drop out of Huna, and read the bulletins eagerly.

“I feel, though, that we are off the track somewhere. Results just don’t come as they should. I got this so-called wonderful chance in the fall, and it meant no money at all; again, one at Christmas, and it brought me about $200 – the trip itself costing over $100. And I sent good entries to contest after contest, with no results. The spectacular results promised by astrology were actually fairly trivial in end results. And from what I can tell, it is the same for healing, etc.

“Perhaps it is this matter of picturing exactly what we want. How do we KNOW what we want? Again and again I have been fooled in this respect, and what I thought I wanted turned out to be dreary. Tarot – as well as the orthodox churches – teach that we are merely channels for Primal Will, God, etc. and can do nothing of ourselves. Perhaps it is merely mana we should give, and not an outline or vessel to be filled. Perhaps Unity comes closer in that respect, with its ‘I place myself lovingly in the hands of the Father – that which is for my highest good shall come to me.’ Perhaps not.

“I don’t know what’s wrong. I only know that it is not, is very far from being, completely effective….”

I have prayed with and for this good friend for a long time, and there is no denying that something is wrong in so far as the results are concerned – the ones which we failed to bring about. This brings us at once to the question of whether our concept of Huna is wrong or whether there is a possibility that it has not been properly put to use.

We all have the very natural tendency, when things we ask for are not obtained, to put on our hats and say, “Well, this is where I came in.” However, we react much as did Job when, in his extremity, his wife asked whether or not he would “curse God and die?” He would not, and neither will most of us. In these modern days, we either go back to the faith of our childhood, or we go over to some other psycho-religious system which we hope will work better. We are all incurably tied – deep in our hearts – to a faith in some form of helpful Higher Power. Once in a great while, we sit down to ask ourselves whether or not we’ve overlooked something in our efforts to use the basic mechanisms of Huna, although the conclusion is reached in advance, nine times out of ten, that Huna is wrong or that we do not understand it.

Of course, it must be remembered that in HRA we are still a study and experimental group. We can neither claim a full knowledge of Huna nor graduate skill in its use. We have good evidence that it worked for the kahunas however, and we know that healing miracles have taken place at certain shrines. There seems little question that prayer is sometimes answered.

Let us each, as we read, consider our own failures in the use of Huna as we know it. Let us consider the way the kahunas did the things we have tried to do, or what they caused their clients to do to bring about the desired results.

So far as I know, the kahunas did not believe that it was enough to lay our problems in the lap of a loving God and affirm that He would provide the highest good. They asked whether or not there were guilt or other fixations to be brought to light and removed. They demanded that amends be made for hurts done others, knowing that unless and until amends were made, the Auhane could not accept the fact that the guilt was canceled, and that unless the Auhane became fully convinced, the Aunihipili retained the sense of guilt and so “blocked the path” of the prayer.

This is a primary point. It appears in no other psycho-religious system, ancient or modern, so far as I know. And it leads up to a very important secondary point which is the fact that the fixation of guilt or of any nature, may often be held fast by the Aunihipili long after amends are made or the fixation has been rationalized. The use of a physical stimulus, with or without suggestion, was used here at this stage to free the patient of this blocking. A “cleansing” was used, a kala or restoration of the “light.” It was not the poorly understood cleansing of sins in general, as practiced in the Christian churches (and as ignored by modern cults). It was a definite work undertaken for a definite purpose, and it was not a “baptism” which would last a life through. It might have to be repeated for other fixations.

We must admit that we still have developed no kahunas. We have yet to begin trying to rid each other of fixations. Few of us have even tried to do a sufficient number of Boy Scout type good deeds to serve as physical stimuli to wipe away our last traces of guilt conviction. Perhaps we have made no attempt to make amends for hurts done others. If both the Aunihipili and Auhane lack the definite feeling that help from the Aumakua is deserved, that help may be held off by a blocking of the path so that the prayer does not get delivered and acted upon. Valid or otherwise, these considerations should be kept well in mind. We may have failed in this observance.

Deciding just what we want is indeed a great difficulty. We so often wish to go to the new, but cannot bring ourselves to make a clean break with the old. Or, as I once found in my experience, we may subconsciously cling to the old and so prevent such things as the sale of business or home. “George” forms strange and stubborn attachments to things, circumstances and people. He must be watched, his objections brought to light, and everything explained tellingly in terms of logic and personal survival advantages, as KNOWING what we want is as important as making a blueprint of a new house. In our modem cults we too often ignore the blueprint and even provide no foundation. God, the divine carpenter, is supposed to know better than we do what kind of a house we want. But, we keep interrupting to insist that this or that or the other thing MUST be built into or around the house. The lumber of mana is not supplied, or is cut up and wasted by repeated tearing down for a new start. The wonder is that any kind of a house is ever completed. Moreover, we seldom live our lives alone. Members of a family may be at loggerheads as to what is to be built or not built. We should all ask ourselves whether or not our family unit was agreed on what was wanted.

Where there were cross purposes, the rule seems to be that no house of any kind is built.

The thing we call “natural law” or the “law of cause and effect,” is seen at work all about us all the time. As we work in certain directions, the future crystallizes and becomes set ahead of us. If I undertake something which is either foolish or impractical and move ahead, the natural result is failure. Failure is part of the future of the project from the start. It might well take a miracle following endless prayers to change that future to one of a fine successful outcome. We learn by doing and by our mistakes on the Aunihipili and Auhane levels. On the other hand, if our plan is well thought out and is sound, a single prayer might swing the tide of difference between success and failure. After we fail, fortunately, we can usually look back and see that the major fault lay in a poor plan rather than in a failure to use Huna correctly after the plan was put into action.

We may object, and rightly, that the Guidance had failed, and that brings us back to the question of whether we can lay our lives and problems in the lap of the Aumakuas and sit back and wait to be told just what kind of a house to build. Huna is sane and very practical in its basics. We can see this in everything the kahunas undertook and in what they did. The kahuna did not lie on his mat in the morning and pray to be told what to do. He rose, went to fish, or did whatever he knew to do for himself. Only in the things in which all three selves needed to work side by side did he turn to the Aumakua. Likewise, we must stand on our own feet and push ahead. Win or lose, our job is to plan the best we can and act as wisely as we can. In retrospect, I can say that in my own life I have usually discovered soon after beginning anything, whether I was moving in the right direction or not. This negative form of Guidance undoubtedly helps us to learn in ways hard enough to leave a lasting lesson in our possession. But, even at that, I can look back and see where the most important Guidance in my life has come repeatedly through some seemingly tiny accident. Once I missed a train. Once I decided to take a little walk. Once I stuck my head out of a hotel window to see a fire engine go by. In each case the entire trend of my life was switched radically as a result. If any one of these things had not happened, I would not be writing to you about Huna at this time. The kahunas believed that the major events in our lives were decided by the Aumakuas, but that a free hand is ours by divine right in all the lesser things – so that we may learn to paddle our own canoes.

Contests and betting are strange things. I have about decided that they are contrary by their very nature to the thing humanity seems to be set to learn – cooperation and mutual help. The gods teach the bees and ants to cooperate. They set a pattern for man, but competition and the law of the fang is hard to unlearn as we progress. Contests and wagers are constantly lost by most HRAs despite prayers and careful, clever work. The sad part is that to fail to win after work and prayer, marks the Aunihipili with doubt and suspicion. A close friend told me of praying, when a little girl, that she might guess correctly the number of beans in the jar at the corner store so she could win the marvelous doll. She lost, and with the loss went her childishly serene faith in answers to prayer. Later she found solid ground – if she washed the dishes, the promised penny was never withheld. Pennies would accumulate and buy dolls. She had learned the hard way, but she HAD learned.

I do not know how it is with you other HRAs, but I have long since learned that astrology or the run of the Tarot cards cannot give reliable guidance. My wisest friends, where these matters are concerned, tell me that the “stars incline, but do not compel.” I am a tyro at astrology, but when I think the stars are good, I try all the harder, and when bad, I exert a bit more caution – while still trying all the harder. Between times, I simply do the best I can. This has little to do with our Huna studies and testing, but it is not a bad plan. It works rather well for me. When I fail, I can blame my mistakes on the bad stars, which is a great relief to Cigbo who gets tired of accepting all the blame for everything we HRAs do. If I succeed, I can claim all the credit – and that is very good for battered old egos now and again.

We may fail, and probably will continue to fail for a long time, but we can never say that Huna has failed until we have in some way learned to use Huna as did the kahunas. Turn to my book, SSBM, and read again the story of how I went to the kindly kahuna woman in Honolulu when I could not sell my camera store and faced disaster. Read how she questioned me with such great care to help me to become utterly sure of exactly what I wanted to have happen, how she set me the task of clearing my path, how she asked the Aumakua if I could be helped to accomplish my desire, how she got the affirmative answer by psychic means. Read how she built the picture of the new condition by reciting the prayer request three times word for word, how she then asked for instructions as to what I must then do, how instructions were obtained swiftly and certainly by psychic means, and how, when they were followed to the letter, the help was given – the prayer completely answered.

No, Huna has not failed. I am convinced of that. It is we who fail. We fail largely because we have had such pressing needs for help that we have been unable to delay the attempt to run until we had first learned to creep – to say nothing of learning to walk.

Perhaps the most heartening thing we can tell ourselves is that we are frequently getting much better results than we can logically expect, our training and its limitations taken into account. Even at the very worst, we are no worse off than before we set out boldly to play the kahuna. Even in failure we continue to learn, and THAT is of lasting importance. Also, it is just possible that we may better see why we have failed if we examine what we have done in our attempts to get help – perhaps at each step we have not made certain that we were being “utterly trustworthy” to the best of our light.

When I was a very young man, I sat at the feet of an older student of the “occult.” One day I asked him why he had failed to be able to use the methods he expounded and become rich. “It is because I can’t be trusted with more than just enough to scrape past on,” he replied somberly. “Three times I was allowed money, and each time I stopped short in my occult work or just went through the motions. They want me to grow – to get ahead on the Path. I can’t be trusted with more than about half of what I need. It keeps me working my best all the time just to get enough of that other half to keep body and soul together.”

The shining goal which lies ahead for each of us in the future is to become “utterly trustworthy.” If we can keep this goal always bright before us and realize that nothing else matters, really and permanently, we will not go too far astray.

A QUESTION ABOUT BREATH AND SPIRIT

A question about breath and spirit came in by letter recently, with the note that Glenn Clark, famed for his “Camps Farthest Out” movement, advocated special breathing as a spiritual exercise in connection with prayer. “What does Huna say?” asks the letter.

In early Christianity the word for breath and for spirit had the same roots and a common meaning. Breath was life, and with it gone, the spirit was supposed to have departed. The word “soul” was a later word for “spirit,” borrowed from the Middle English and of the North European languages rather than the Greek or Latin. It is more like the “self” in concept, while “spirit” has more of the element of the life force or mana. The Egyptian word ba for “shadow” is pointed out in the dictionaries as similar and earlier than the Greek and Latin concepts, and as coloring the Christian idea of the self in man. In Huna we have the ba in its original form as ka, and with the elided vowel “a,” lost in translating the glyphs of Egypt, we have our aka, or shadowy body, which Huna tells us is not the self but just the invisible body used by the self both in and out of life in the physical body. Each of the three selves has its own aka body.)

The warped knowledge of Huna which was borrowed by the Jews and later by Christianity remains a tangle of muddled concepts until one applies Huna and restores order. In Fenton’s translation of the Bible we get, in Genesis, the statement that God rocked the surface of the waters with His breath before creating light. In Huna we have three corresponding secret meanings hidden behind the symbols. The “water” is mana. The ‘breath” is the “shadowy body” or aka body of all things – the outline or mold. The “light” is the consciousness or selfness or soul. Consider the “breath” in more detail.

In Hawaiian, the language used in our Huna study, there are three words for “breath” or “breathe.”

Ea: To enter into. To raise or lift up, as water rises up (as in a fountain – symbol we use in accumulating mana surcharge.) Spirit, vital breath, breath of life, life itself.

Aho: The breath or natural breathing. A cord of line. (Aha also means cord, and is better to use than to say “aka thread”, although we have become accustomed in HRA to the latter. It is significant to find the word aho with a double meaning indicating a direct connection with the connecting thread and breathing. The significance would appear to be that the accumulating of mana or putting it to use, entails the use of the breath in one way or another. Hidden under the symbol we see the “entity” or consciousness in some form, directing the creation of the earth or of some small thought-form in our prayer-actions.

Ha: To breathe, to breathe with some exertion, (a stronger act of breathing than indicated in the word hanu, which is another word for natural breathing.) A trough for water to run through, (water standing for mana, [suggesting] the possibility of causing mana to flow in definite directions by the use of a trough – breathing). (Remember that soul and spirit are Aunihipili and Auhane and the Aumakuas.)

Genesis (Fenton) continues, “God then said, ‘Let Us make men under Our Shadow. So God created men under His Own Shadow, creating them in the Shadow of God.” Note that careful translation replaces the word “image.” This takes us directly back to the Egyptian and still farther back to Huna, so that we find it stressed in the account of the creation that the shadowy body or aka was used as the mold into which man was cast in the material body.

The process was used in the same identical way in the creative work of the kahunas, and the account of the “Creation” may well be a veil to conceal the Huna secret meaning. To use Huna methods of creating, we move the waters, or mana, we breathe as a part of controlling and accumulating and sending mana, (ea from the roots means, e: to enter, and a: to burn. We moderns say that we breathe in air and use it to burn or oxidize food elements in the blood stream). The symbol of breath in ea and aho give us the “life force” and the mold of the shadowy or aka body. “God” symbolizes the intelligence (the selves of Huna) setting the creative process in motion and directing it, step by step, as in the “six days” taken for the creation of the world.

In the New Testament account as we now have it, Jesus returns in full materialized form after his death and appears to the disciples. In John 20:22, we read “And having said this, he infused (poured?) Himself into them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you expel sins from any, they will be free. If you subdue them, they shall be subdued.'” Fenton gives us a footnote for the word “infused” which he used instead of the familiar “breathed,” and we turn back to Genesis 2:7 and find “breath” used instead of “infused” “… formed Man from the dust of the ground, and BREATHED into his nostrils the life of animals, but the man became a life-containing soul.”

The thee selves of Huna have been the major puzzle of Christian doctrine. The ancient doctrine was that all beings, high and low, from man to the gods, were triune in their nature. The Egyptians had the gods as the Father, Mother and Son. In the confusion, lacking Huna knowledge, it is quite apparent that the three selves of man were confused with the three units of a triune God. The six bits were shaken up together, and man came out with a single self. To remedy the matter, he was assigned a Guardian Angel or, if he was properly good, the Holy Spirit was added to him. The Holy Spirit or Aumakua was, however, left dangling between heaven and earth in the doctrines. It was vaguely seen as a self connected with man but not in the same way the the one spirit or self was in him. It was a superior spirit which had superior wisdom and power, and which came to help men under certain conditions. The suggestion of the lines from John quoted above, would seem to be that the fixations of guilt as well as other fixations which had to be “subdued” instead of simply “expelled” (or removed), can best be he handled by those who have had a working introduction to the Holy Spirit or Aumakua.

This, if it is a fact, could be of utmost importance to our Huna exploration and experimentation. Perhaps all psychoanalysis, and even Dianetics, fail of full effectiveness in finding and draining off fixations or guilt complexes because of the lack of a necessary element of Aumakua mental and mana power. For some time I have been leaning strongly to the opinion that we need very badly to have some way to finance and carry out a proper series of experiments on just this line. Some work has been done by HRA Dr. Reinhold and HRA Mrs.. Reinhold, as well as others. The preliminary results cry for a full-scale testing on a larger basis. MFL