February-March, 1967
Teaching Huna to the Children
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
The proposed study project aimed at uncovering the Huna elements hidden in the Kaballa, and perhaps the Tarot Cards as from a similar source, has proven less than a paying deal. The literature of the Kaballa is so great and the speculations so endless – and often pointless, from the Huna standpoint – that I have become lost in stacks of unorganized notes while only making a beginning. Besides, we have got the kernel out of the nut, and the shells are not very interesting or greatly important. For the time being, at least, shall we content ourselves by saying that Huna was the thing the compilers of the Kaballa were trying to hide and still preserve – and that they did a very poor job of it compared with the making of the great Drama of the Light which we know as the New Testament. As to the Tarot cards, back in the first eleven issues of the Huna Vistas we uncovered the secret number system used to hide the Huna content and still make one partly initiated able to rearrange the cards and get back the Huna basics. One more point that needs to be mentioned, the majority of the HRAs were not too interested in the Kaballa study except to make sure that the ancient Huna system was the point of focus in the tangle of commentary that followed a few short pages carrying the basic Huna hidden in the beginning writing.
ANNOUNCING A NEW PROJECT
I must be frank and say that this new project which I am proposing may bore some of the HRAs even more than the one just laid on the shelf to ripen and gather a little more dust. The new idea is one first proposed some years ago, but about which nothing was done at the time. It was to find a way to teach children Huna and bring them up in the faith so that we might prevent the Ancient Lore which we have so painfully unearthed, from being lost again, perhaps for all time.
The idea was recently brought up by a new HRA who wrote to say that she had been trying to teach her daughter, turned four, the basics of Huna. The question was asked whether we had stories or lessons or some way worked out that might be put to use. This rang a bell in me, and I was impressed that it was high time we rolled up our sleeves and got into the work of blocking out a teaching system for Huna and the children. I wrote back asking that I might have a picture or thumb prints of the little girl and of her father (really, his signature), so that I could make a reading of the child and both parents to see what kind of material stood ready there to test what might be put together tentatively. The child’s picture was snapped and her thumb prints taken, and the father’s signature sent. I had the mother’s on her letter.
To my surprise and delight, I found that little Shura and her parents were ideal for our test purposes. The were all normal and constructive in will and personality patterns and ran from Shura at 378 degrees, to her mother at 380 and her father at 381. An exceptionally high family group, and on the level at which abstractions in Huna should cause no trouble at all. If there is any danger, it will be that Shura will grasp everything with such ease that we may tend to make the story lessons too difficult for children of such lower levels as 330 to 340 degrees. (Below this level it will be a waste of time to try to teach the abstractions of Huna, and more material concepts will have to be used. For instance, a God who is invisible and intangible will have to materialize and grow a long white beard for those of the lower levels, just as was done with the Jehovah of the Old Testament.)
What I propose is that I break out the first draft of the story lessons and that those of you who are interested will act as editors and test the units on such children as may be available. If you find an available child or two around the ages of four to eight, and can arrange with parents (if they are borrowed children) to allow them to be taught an unorthodox version of religion, you will get recent snapshots of them and use a stamp pad to get their thumb prints. These will be sent to me with a little information as to the children and the assurance that the parents have given their consent for the tests and teaching material use. I will run P.A. readings and enroll the child or children in our school, so to speak.
I will try to get the first draft lessons mimeographed to send out as fast as possible, and we can make a start. You may all act as editors or rewrite the material to suit your children’s need. More simplification and repetition if they are slow to grasp the ideas of Huna which you will recognize as you go along. Changes or additions or deletions will be in order as well. Bit by bit we should learn what is needed and how fast to go, what changes to make etc. If you can write a better story than I can, I shall be delighted, but give warning that if you better me too much, you may have to write the whole series of lessons for us.
I visualize a book, eventually, perhaps with illustrations of a simple nature – and this will call for someone to illustrate for us. It is possible that we will have to have more than one book, each fitted to a different age group, but for the beginning we will try to stay with the younger children. However, if the older ones happen to take to the stories, so much the better, at least for the start.
In order to make the stories more bearable for the elders who must read or tell them, I will take a leaf from Alice In Wonderland, and try to put in little quips which may go over the heads of the children. (These quips may be too flat and have to be taken out, or too silly. You will be the judges. They may have to be put in footnotes – or whatever.) For the children, we will need adventure and suspense and the lure of the odd and new. We will try to put new telling into bits of old stories, and build very slowly to the full picture of the Huna way of looking at the world and ourselves as part of it. For our purposes I have selected, as did the writers of Genesis, the story of the Creation. It has practically everything we may need. I will work in evolution and after a time reincarnation. We will work up carefully through several stories to the creation of Adam and Eve, and, with the help of several creature characters from the stories, finally make the first man. You will see the approach in the opening stories, and so I will give only a simple outline of the material just to show the tentative trend.
A LETTER FROM MAX
Max Freedom Long
P.O. Box 875
Vista, Calif. 92083
Dear H.R.A. and Friends,
Here is the second part of the first draft of the story line to be used to teach children the basics of Huna. It goes on in numbering where the last installment left off, as you will see, and it ends rather abruptly with the paragraph telling of the giving of an Aumakua to each of the little Adams and Eves. To be of best service, the series should continue, with reviews inserted to call attention repeatedly to the three selves and the fact that the Auhane has an ape man or animal Aunihipili which may, or may not be a baddie. If it is bad, the one supervising the giving of the stories to the children would need to drum in the lesson that the bad impulses come from the Aunihipili and must be put down by the Auhane.
After the earlier installment went out (with the announcement of the new project) a number of letters came in praising the project and the story so far. Not many of the HRA have children available on whom to test the story and its method, but a few will make a try. A letter from the mother of our four year old Shura reports that she has been telling the stories of the first installment to the little girl piece by piece and that Shura gets her paper and crayons ready to draw pictures to illustrate the piece of story for herself, and says, “Read me one of Uncle Long’s stories”. So far the interest has held up, and with the second installment in hand, there will be new material to keep things rolling.
The idea of the telepathic conversation in the stories between Mother and Father and the creatures has been made into a game with cards numbered from 1 to 110 and Shura and her mother take turns sending and receiving telepathic impressions back and forth. The score made is nothing spectacular. Shura calls this telepathy “head talk”, which I feel is an excellent name for it. No particular difficulty has been encountered so far in simplifying the stories and getting across the general ideas, but as yet no effort has been made to touch upon the idea of reincarnation. I would say that for such brief stories and meager presentation of basic Huna elements, this is an excellent showing. It is beyond my expectation, even with a child of the very high degree standing of Shura.
Help in editing has been sent to me, mainly in the matter of the approach at various places in the story, and in correcting some blatant contradictions of the ideas presently held about evolution. A letter tells me it is now believed that the whale was a land animal which went back to the sea. In another letter I was corrected on the use of the trunk for the little elephant to get his lunch. Baby elephants suck not with the end of the trunk except to suck in a trunk fun of water and then blow it into the mouth or spray it over something. The mouth is used for sucking and getting milk from the mother. Of course, the stories are “pretend” in large part, and the things that I have happen are mostly contrary to modern theories of evolution, but for some things I try to keep up with the times. In making the story of the ape men in this installment I have been guided by the recent findings which seem to prove that man, in his evolutionary progress was, for a long time, a pretty savage predator given to eating meat and making war instead of being a peaceful vegetarian like most apes. Dr. Leakey, who has found fossil bones of the man ape such as I describe, is my main authority. He ventures the idea also that man, like the shrew, had a bad smell and a worse taste, so that he escaped being eaten by lions and similar large animals a million or so years ago when evolving in tropical Africa. This may or may not end the story series. Still too early to know. MFL
STORY LESSON OUTLINE
God as invisible and intangible but in an aka body and having mana. He is made easier to imagine as the “Father”. Introducing the “Mother”. Together they decide to create the Universe, world and man – us.
Creation begins (see first installment.) After the sea creatures are well along, they are commanded to try to come out to be land creatures, and we follow their adventures. For the story ease, we depart from true evolution and the catfish becomes the land cats. The whale becomes the elephant, and the dogfish the dogs. The air is filled with smoke and has to be washed. Etc., etc.
Mother and Father foresee the need for diapers and milk for Adam and Eve when they are created, and a search runs through the stories to find these items or the makings. All the creatures and things are given rewards for their efforts, and in this we learn such things as how birds got their songs and colors.
The mermaid comes ashore to become the first milkmaid. The man-a-tee comes ashore and tries to produce men, but the best she can accomplish are the monkey tribes. They aren’t good enough to be used as men, and eventually Adam and Eve are created by being hatched out of specially prepared eggs. They hatch as twins, one of several pairs black, the rest shades of brown and red and yellow for the several races.
The chimps have been pressed into service as nursemaids and inadvertently one sees bleach being poured into the laundry water and so pours some into the bath for its pair of twins. The result, brown twins are bleached to white. The pairs grow and are only animals, but are human to a degree. They are placed here and there around the world to fit the different races.
With each life that is lived, the “self stuff” in each creature becomes smarter. Eventually some of the self stuff of men who have died is gathered and put into the animal men as Auhanes. In time, the processed self stuff is good enough to serve as Aumakuas. The stories end here as a series, or they may continue as stories of the adventures of the several Adam and Eve pairs and their families. The basic ideas of Huna can be brought up and reviewed from time to time until the lessons are learned. Telepathy is introduced in the first story. Man is given the ability to speak only when the second self is inserted to live with the animal selves. The shadow bodies and mana life force become familiar parts of life and living by degrees. A wise old man is quoted and some of the secrets he shares belong to Huna. If the yarns are good enough, they should furnish a text of sorts even for an adult.
With the progress of the experiment we may find a good reader to tell the stories for us in tape form so that they may be played on recording machines. We will work out all the necessary details if we get going properly and find that we can reach the children in this way.
In San Diego I hear that there is a company now making books which include a recording to play along with the effort of the child to read the accompanying text. I’ll try to learn more of this promising invention. We might be able to use it in our work eventually. We might also find that our text could be accompanied by outline pictures which the children could color. Any suggestions?
A LETTER FROM CIGBO
Dear Aunties and Uncles (and Adams and Eves, if and when we ever get some):
Tellifatic Greekings to you all! And as boss didn’t have page enough left to write “this corn is to be tinued, ” I write it every bit as good right here. AND, if you like to corn feed your children or the kids of someone you don’t like, and want the next instrawlment when/if it come out, you drop me a line and I’ll see that you get it. Of course, if lots of HRAs can take it, we’ll make it into bullingtons instead of the usual sense. I asked boss to let me in on what Father was thinkig that mebby Mother was thinking, and he warned me that curiosity had killed a kat, so I went back to my box and smouldered, and I don’t have any better idea of what happened next than you do. But I think that as we have suffered this much, we have three guesses coming, and one of mine is that they cut Little Mermaid in two and made Eve out of the top half and Adam out of the fish tail part. I have heard people call some men “poor fish”. But even that might not do away with the need to get the cotton wove into drippers, if the fishy little Adam and Eve had to go back to the baby class and start out very little, “akordian to plan”, as Father says.
All fooling aside, I now got to report serious business. You remember last time I wrote to you I snuggested that instead of Shistmust cards, you send me some nice H&S Green Stamps? Well, some of you did one thing and some did both. The result was that I got stamps for both of those slippers for boss. And then I had lots more left, so I started swapping them with boss for more payjamas, kat size .04 , (in case you might want to make me a presink of a pair some time), and more fur lined bath tabs. (P.S. I also like Blue Chip and Orange stamps, just in case.)
I kina thought it would be nice to have a different color payjamas and a different tub for each night of the week. Boss was no end willing to oblige, and he made the phone calls and such, and soon came bringing me a change of payjamas and tub even day. And AM I elegant! We ran out of fur for Sattady and Sunday but I listened to what they said at the fur store and heard of two estra spessul and espensive and rare kinds of fur and told boss to see what he could do. He tried, and pretty soon came up with a elegunt tub lined with frog hair. And from the scraps they trimmed the collar and cuffs of my matchink payjamas. Then, for Sunday, boss also out did himself. He wangled the rarest of all: I tub lined with gennuine horse feathers. And a feather stuffed pillow to use when I tubbed. Only trouble is that when I stay too long in that tub on Sunday nights, I get to itchink. Horses eat oats, and the oats kina stay in the horse feathers like burs in tweed cloth such as boss has in a suit and one can’t always keep scratching or looking for what is picking them.
I still had some stamps left, and as boss only has got two feet and didn’t need a change of slippers for every morning in the week, we had to start worrying a little. But it didn’t last long. I soon began to notice my stamp books was sorta squeezing down and at the same time making the pile more little. I also began to notice in the kitchen where boss cooks dinner and such, some very new and swank skilliks and things. I sorta kasually inquired where they came from, and boss showed them to me one at a time and told how someone had invented a telephone lining to put in cooking You tensils so you never burn or something like that. He never did get around to confess where he got them, for he always had to stop to polish copper bottoms. But I pulled a DEAL! My Uncle John R. came to see me and. saw my stamps and we got to dickering because his girl wanted to get a color TV and was short 7 books so he swapped me $30 worth of bullington stamps for 7, and there you are!
Love from CIGBO (and boss)
