July-August, 1970

The Huna Religion According to Dave “Daddy” Bray

 

I HAVE RETIRED from the book business, and all orders for my books (not the bound books of back bulletins, however) should be sent to DeVorss & Co., 4900 Eagie Rock Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90041, U.S.A. In order to keep the books in print, owing to the steady advance in reprinting costs and postage, the price has had to be raised for the first time in all the years. SSBM and SSAW go up from $4 to $5.50, GIL, S-S and P.A. up from $3 to $4. HCIR up from $6 to $6.50. It had come to the place at which in order to give the dealers their discount, we were selling the books at about cost. Friends at DeVorss have long been distributors for us, but their business is about 90% wholesale, so the raise was necessary. All orders sent to me will be forwarded to them and the books will be sent out with a bill for the difference between the old price still given in the books and the new price. (They add 15¢ to the price of the book for postage.)

PLEASE NOTE MY NEW ADDRESS, which is my house, although letters sent to the old box number at the post office will be forwarded and reach me. The new address is 210 North Melrose Dr., Vista, CALIF., 92083, U.S.A. The mail is delivered about four hours later this way, but I no longer have to drive to the post office to pick it up.

THE BULLETINS WILL CONTINUE AS USUAL as long as I am able to manage them. There is nothing wrong that turning back the clock a few years would not mend, but the race with the Galloping Charlie Horses grows pretty strenuous for me and for my partner, Miss Ethel Doherty. The change will ease up greatly on me and also on the keeping of accounts, which is her end of the work. With the price of the books raised, we will get a small royalty on sales, and can see our way clear ahead under ordinary contingencies. The new arrangement will give me a little extra time and I am working on the paperback book, WHAT JESUS TAUGHT IN SECRET, and trying by letter to find a publisher with a newsstand outlet who will put it into print. One rejection has already come in. The publisher may be hard to find. They are afraid of offending the old established churches, and I must admit that the book will be hard on much old dogmatic belief and theory – praises be. I am making it as simple as possible.

CORRECTION, PLEASE. The first page of the last issue of the Huna Vistas was accidentally numbered 94 instead of 95. Cigbo takes the blame, but my face is red. I was surprised and pained at the number of questions asked about the numbering and the fear by HRAs that they had missed an issue. Some of you still seem unaware that we publish only every other month, NOT each mouth. The number 94 H.V. was given over to the What Jesus Taught In Secret condensation, and the article was numbered 1 to 11, but with the first page, made up the full 12 pages which a six cent stamp allows to go in the envelope. There was no more of the article. It ended on page 11. By the way, the piece has by now been tried on a few prospects, mostly people known to be of open mind but members of churches. Some reports are most encouraging. One Baptist Minister was given the bulletin, and later he was using it in his mid-week bible study program. That is almost more than I could have hoped for. People hunger for more light, but, it must be admitted, they have to be at least a little bit intelligent to understand what the Code was and how it applied to the Gospels.

WHAT I BELIEVE ABOUT JESUS has been questioned by one of my good friends and associates. He asks, “Max, how are we to know just where you stand when you say at a given time different things about the reality of Jesus? One time you say that he was the Great Kahuna who knew and taught the Secret, another time that he was just a myth. In HV 94 it is enough to make one think that Jesus was real. Can a character in a play teach something in secret, or anything at all? If it were only a play, somebody had to write it. Can you dig up the name of the author somewhere?”

For many years I have been unable to see how Jesus could have been more than the leading character in a mystery play, but as such, he certainly could be made by the supposed authors of the Four Gospels to voice teachings, directly or using the Huna Code, and showing in his life story an example of what to do or not to do. What I said in H.V. 94 was that in the paperback I would not bring up the question of the historicity of Jesus as I did in my book, HCIR. To give the coded Huna teachings makes the book controversial enough, and I prefer to leave it to the reader to decide the question for himself if it occurs to him to raise it. Many cling to the belief that Jesus lived in the flesh and to question this gives them distress. I feel that living the teachings and following the good part of the example do not depend on the historicity, and that more people may be brought to read the paperback and to benefit from it if I limit the discussion to the Code and the light it throws on the inner teachings. All Associates must always remember that I am not setting myself up as a “Teacher” and saying, “Hear me! I am giving you the last word. I am right, and all others wrong. Believe me or else.” We have had too much of this from the people who set themselves up as authorities and peddle courses. Let me retain a little modesty. I offer only the tentative fruits of my research   and often yours. If something is said that you feel is correct, then accept it, but if not, then do not. Of course, there are different ways to look at things. For instance, I see Jesus making a vast mistake in thinking he was the Messiah and that he was going to sit on the right hand of God and judge the Jews. I think this was given as a great example of a leader who got “biggety”, and that his crucifixion was a great example of what not to let happen to one. I believe that the story of the transfiguration comes after the crucifixion and his rising from the dead in the Drama, and that this shows the example of the triumph of man over evil and personal weakness and pride. For nearly 2,000 years others have seen the crucifixion as the supreme sacrifice which offers salvation to all who believe and turn to good.

WILLIAM GLOVER, FHF, who started the Glendale, Calif. groups and who is now working out of Sunset Beach, Calif., reports good progress and that the revised lecture tapes are being typed off for further description to fit his needs. He sent me what he calls “a paraphrasing and condensation of a course given by David “Daddy” Bray, and asked me to comment on the correctness of the contents as I see them from the point of view of my own research. He writes, “The business of the Haven of the Spirit, which seems to me too much like the Third Eye of some teachings, seems confused. At one point Mr. Bray states that the mana enters through the Hunu and in another place he states that the psychic light enters the body here. Also the discussion of the positive and negative forces are something which you have not brought out in your books. What do you know about this concept?” In order to comment fully, I think I had better give first the condensation of Mr. Bray’s teachings.

THE HAWAIIAN RELIGION

The Hawaiian Religion was called Hoomana and many kahunas had special temples or Heiam. Within these temples was the “Oracle” or Kaleoakeakau which was shaped something like a pyramid. Four posts were placed in four compass directions and leaned inward, but did not touch. The outside was covered with tapa cloth and the top was left open. Ordinary worshipers were never allowed near the Oracle, and only the High Priest could enter when he wished to speak with the Aumakua. The four sides of the Kaleoakeakua represented the four elements, Air (Koka Lani), Fire, (Koka Ahi), Water, (Koka Wai), and Earth, (Koka Honua) which were thought of as the four pillars of nature. The open top of the Oracle represented the entrance of spirit or mana power into matter. The four elements also symbolize the nature of man.

The physical body is made of earth and water, however there can be no life without the breath of air and the vitality of fire. The elements represent man’s body and the mana power that gives man his divine spark.

Each element was ruled by a special god and the kahunas believed that by focusing the mind in meditation upon these gods, the power of the four elements of life could be released. The kahunas taught that there was one great God, Io. Io means “reality and truth”, and He was the eternal reality of all truth. Io was and was not a creation, having form and no form. He was both the all and the void, eternal and indestructible. As He was held to be so holy, prayers were very rarely addressed to Him.

Each line of kahunas had their own special Aumakua, although all respected the power of the Great Company of  Aumakuas. They also had their own spirits who were contacted to perform their work. The kahunas believed that they were directly related to and descended from their Aumakua. At one time some of the Aumakuas lived on this planet, but the highest lived long ago and had evolved into higher beings. A few of the highest are concerned with the development of the world and would contact the kahunas. They could also act as intermediaries to the forces that never contact this world but who can contact the Supreme God, Io.

Four Aumakuas are considered the highest. Kane was created to create the world. He was the first born of the first creation. He gives life and light. Since air was considered the highest element, it was ruled by Kane. Ku is both the divine architect and destroyer. He governed death, but also brought health and wealth and, along with Hina, (Mother Earth), ruled the earth element and all the spirits of earth.

Kanaloa is the sustainer of life and ruled the vast ocean. Lono is similar to the Christian concept of the Logos or Christ. He was the first born of the Second Creation and, as his father is Kane, was the messenger between mankind and the highest Aumakua. All prayers and chants derive their force to contact the Aumakua from him. He dwells in the rain clouds of purity and life, and with Kanaloa, ruled the water element, and all the spirits of water.

The four great gods, representatives of the Supreme God, were in turn represented by numerous lesser deities. Some of these were Pele, and her sisters and brothers. Many, such as Hina (Mother Earth), were goddesses. Pele, and her brothers and sisters once lived on earth and fulfilled their obligations on earth. They became gods and goddesses and were sent back to earth to help mankind. Pele is the fire goddess and lived in the volcano. Fire can warm and heal, but it can also burn with fierce temper. Pele and some of her brothers and sisters ruled the fire element and the spirits of fire.

There were many other lesser deities who served the four great gods by acting as intermediaries between them and mankind. Their importance lay in the ability to intercede with the higher gods, the Aumakua Mai Ka Po Mai.

The kahunas taught that mana power consisted of both positive and negative force. The positive works through the mental and spiritual, while the negative force works through the material and physical. All life is the union of the positive and negative forces. The highest represents those forces of nature that work for the benefit of mankind and the harmony of nature. The lowest of the negative forces work for destruction. 

The positive force is the knowledge of the Truth or God within, such as self control, patience, kindness, humbleness, and love. The negative forces of man are his biological processes and his emotions. The negative or material things of life are composed of emotional attachments which create negative emotions such as greediness, selfishness, lust, envy, hate, and jealousy.

To the kahunas, all action takes place because of a spiritual being. Our emotions are the tools that spiritual beings of the lowest negative force use to control us. So long as we hide from the emotions and do not understand them., we can be prey to the power of the lowest negative spirits. The highest of the negative power could be used by the kahunas to heal, to bring peace of mind, and to achieve material wealth. The kahunas strove to learn to distinguish between the highest and the lowest of the negative forces. They learned to control and to know the negative of their own natures. The kahuna derived his power by bringing the negative forces into harmony with the positive forces. They taught that the negative is centralized below the navel and the positive is located in the center of the head between the eyes. Between these two centers is a bridge of energy that flows back and forth. He taught that one must balance the positive and negative for health and true happiness. There is then established a flow in which the positive refills the negative and the negative allows the positive to find material and psychic expression.

When there is a balance of positive and negative, then mana power flows freely throughout the psychic centers of the body and the Haven of the Spirit (Lua Uhane) is flooded with light. Man does not then merely reflect the light of God, he radiates the light. The Lua Uhane is the Cavern or the Haven of the Spirit located between the eyes at the bridge of the nose, but filling the entire forehead as the man develops and obtains Kukui, or the inner light of psychic sight. The Hunu is the back of the head where universal mana power enters to refill the positive and negative centers of the body.

In order to understand the meaning of the positive and the negative it is necessary for a person to put aside all the moral training of western religion. The Hawaiians did not believe in sin. The ancient kahunas taught that “sin” is a man made law (kapu) that is only real for the person who thinks it is real. This means that the person who is possessed by negative emotions of guilt cannot be free. He is “sinful” because of his feelings of guilt. His own mind enslaves him.

Dreams are very important to the kahunas. The interpretation of dreams could furnish understanding of one’s destiny. The Hawaiians believed that when the body sleeps, the Aumakua maintains its vigil and infuses or implants dreams in the mind for one’s instruction and warning.

There were different kinds of dreams such as simple dreams when one is almost asleep, visions which take place when awake, and reveries which come from very strong impressions on the mind during the waking hours that reappear during sleep. Dreams that come just before the break of dawn are those which enter into the realm of seership. When taken into meditation, these dreams can open up problems and show a very clear answer. If one lets the mind go and considers all the possible meanings of the dream, suddenly ideas will come to mind.

The kahunas believed it was only possible to contact the Aumakua when one had a completely free and clear mind. It was necessary to relax the body, the emotions and the mind. The body must be made to let loose of all tensions and be free of any strains that might interfere with the thoughts of the mind. The mind must also be relaxed so that it can be open to psychic impressions. Most important was the relaxation of the emotions. If there is envy, hate, or some other emotion, the mind cannot become free and clear. All images, thoughts, and the imagination must be discarded from the mind.

When the mind is empty, it will seem that the head is filled with light. This is kukui or the inner light of the psychic sight. The kahunas believed that psychic light enters from the back of the head or honu and fills the inner cavern of the Haven of the Spirit, the Lua Uhane. One then focuses the consciousness on the purpose of the meditation. If there is a problem, think of it as if God and the Aumakua were solving it. Feel that the problem is already solved and be receptive to the solution. If you are healing someone, close your eyes and see the person in your mind’s eye, the Haven of the Spirit. See the patient as cured from the physical or emotional disease. Feel that God or the Aumakua is making the patient perfect and ask that you be used as an instrument to help the patient.

These steps are important for successful meditation. Use prayers and affirmations that are most meaningful to you. If you have trouble from outside disturbances, you have not mastered the technique of relaxation. Often long periods of time are required before results occur. People develop at different rates. However, sometimes the person who is slow in developing goes further than the person who suddenly succeeds without a solid foundation. Meditation is used in preparing the mind for addressing the Aumakua by prayer or chant. The chant derives its power from the god, Louo. He was the power of heaven that vibrated in the kahuna’s heart, throat and mouth as the prayer found expression. In the chant, the forces inside man acted to raise the mind to the level of communication with the Aumakua.

Prayer must be sincere. If one prays with doubt or pretense, he will fail. The power will not be released. As the kahuna meditated and prayed, he was always sensitive to the feeling that he was being directed by the Aumakua. In prayer we reach beyond the limited consciousness to the infinite mind. We pass beyond mind to the great power of the universe.

Prayer is simple and childlike. Better than all the complicated prayers of ritual is the prayer of the sincere heart that states simply its feelings and need.

The mind that is clear of the lowest negative force of emotion and filled with the positive power is like a child. Hawaiians believe that man is the child of the gods. Faith, trust and honest prayer is the way to talk with the Aumakua.

The traditional chant has definite words and kahunas were taught to use special tones and gestures in chanting. The sounds of the chants acted as a bridge between the kahuna and the Aumakua. More takes place on a psychic and spiritual plane than is apparent on the physical. Sometimes the results of prayer and chanting only becomes apparent after a long time. The main thing is to develop confidence and to continue to pray without ceasing. Then the feeling of inner harmony with the great power of the Aumakua suddenly blossoms. (End)

COMMENT: With David Bray now gone, and unable to defend his teachings, it is a rather sad and difficult task to point out where and perhaps why his synthetic system differs from what I consider the genuine Huna. “Daddy” Bray was a small man, very appealing, and a showman of the first water, having spent his early years with his wife and family touring and presenting the Hula Dance and the loved Hawaiian music. He was of mixed blood, an English grandfather and a Hindu grandmother, a Hawaiian mother and some additional English or American blood added someplace to the mixture. He espoused the cause of the fading lore of old Hawaii, and had an uncle who seemed to have taught him some of the beliefs of the kahunas. He soon became more Hawaiian than the pure Hawaiians, and in his later years billed himself as “The Last of the kahunas”, chanted at state occasions, and was available to ask a native blessing on cornerstones and building projects.

He also found that after my books had introduced the subject of the kahunas, he could lecture and teach his brand of Huna, and proceeded to do so, selling his “course” for $40 to all who would attend his lectures, and offering meditation sessions in which he sat silently with his pupils to allow them to have his help in developing their psychic powers. As a healing kahuna, his achievements were not too great. I met him but once, and liked him at once. He had a beautiful chanting voice and used it with heartfelt fervor. But he had no use for my research or findings and was not at all backward about saying so. He refused to discuss anything with me, and I gathered that he had never read any of my books, so he could not have discussed the Aunihipili and Auhane intelligently. We just visited, and he chanted a blessing on our house before he left.

What can I say? He did not believe in an Aunihipili or subconscious self, nor did he believe that the Aumakua was a third part of the man. To him a man had one self and was a Biblical “Soul”. My Aumakua was for him a vague ancestral spirit who helped men but who was the deified soul of some long dead ancestor, and he had Lono as the higher god on whom man and Aumakua depended for power.

With only one self, he had only one mana, and did not believe in suggestion or hypnosis, so far as I could learn. He had no idea that the Aumakua needed extra mana and could use it to bring about healing or the answers to prayer. The three aka bodies meant nothing at all to him. His philosophy included not even one, and as to the aka cords, they were entirely beyond his ken.

Mr. Bray’s excursions into modern religious thought gave him a strange and very mixed background on which to set his system which he patched together with a little Huna and much of other things. Brought up a Christian, he had joined the Mormons, later dabbled in Christian Science, then in New Thought and with some final borrowings from Indian beliefs, possibly because of his Hindu grandmother, or from a slight contact with Theosophy. He neglected nothing except the Huna that lay there exposed to any good student of the Hawaiian language, but which he failed to notice. The Hawaiian words he used were usually poor even to describe the ideas he had assembled from the four corners and had invented from what seems to have been whole cloth.

It is like calling the word “worship” Christianity. Hoo mana is to accumulate mana, and we know from the other code words that the mana was then to be sent to the Aumakua. But the word did not mean a religion by any stretch of the imagination. That the three primeval gods of Polynesia represented the four elements is forcing a meaning. Writers have speculated and thought that this might be true in some far fetched way, but it is not at all definite. Lono had little resemblance to Jesus, and still less to the Christos of the Greeks. It was pure invention to hook him up with prayers and chants addressed to the Aumakuas. The god, Io, was not known very well outside of the Society Islands where he was the god of the cult of what might be called strolling players. It was a name possibly retained from an ancient contact with Egypt or Greece, but as Universal God, it fails. In the old Hawaiian dictionary on which I depend, “Io” is not given as a word having anything to do with a god. It does, however, mean “real or true”. Tregear, in his dictionary of the several Polynesian dialects, gives the meaning of the word as, “power, force, energy, spirit, and soul.” Only in Tahiti and some parts of the Maori world did it denote a god.

Pele and her brothers and sisters were lesser gods and but little known on islands where there were no active volcanoes. Her part in Huna is very slight.

‘The idea of the “Third Eye” which has recently been popularized in western occultism, seems to be the pattern upon which Mr. Bray’s teaching of the “Haven of the Spirit” is based. I am sure that any kahuna of the old days would have been greatly surprised at an idea so foreign to his beliefs. Lua uhane does not appear in any dictionary on my shelves. Lua has the meaning of “two, or second.” It was also the art of breaking bones in war, and with ahi meant the fire pit of a volcano, and so might have some reference to a “cavern”. But what that “cavern” might have to do with the Auhane of Huna is hard to see. Mr. Bray gives no word for the “bridge” leading back to the rear of the head and the Hunu which marks the spot where the “universal mana power enters” – this supposing mana to be filling the atmosphere like the pran of the Hindus, and to be drawn in by some unspecified method. (A later word coined in Hawaiian to use in anatomy is luauhane, but it means only “the canthus or corner of the outer eye”, not a cavern deep in the head behind the brows.) There is no hunu in Hawaiian, but Tregear gives it in some other dialects as hunu or hununu, which is “to singe or burn as toast, also as a skin disease”. It has no root to connect it in any way with mana.

The word given for the “light” which fills the supposed cavern is kukui, but this is a very bad word to use for such an exalted idea. It means such light as may be cast by burning oily kukui nuts strung on a splinter of palm frond to make a torch. How much better it would have been to use the code word for light, la.

The kahunas may or may not have believed or taught the several items mentioned in the article. Nothing of such teachings are clear in the roots of the words which they used or the code which we have uncovered. However, they may have looked upon sin as breaking a kapu (or taboo), rather than the act of hurting someone, as I have decided. I agree heartily that a sense of guilt is a thing that acts as a “sin” to cut one off from contact with the Aumakua.

Dreams may have been important to the kahunas, as Mr. Bray says, but I have found little to tell me just what the beliefs were. So far as  I know, “meditation” was a strange idea to the kahunas, but perhaps I am wrong — also seership.

Mr. Bray’s most surprising idea, which he said was a kahuna teaching, was that the one grade of mana which he recognized was divided into two parts, negative and positive and that one part was centered in the lower part of the abdomen and the other in the head. By its very nature, mana cannot be mana if so divided. It takes the union of positive and negative to make any electric charge or force such as mana. Given the positive pressure on an electrical charge that is ready to leap as a “spark” and there must always be the negative, even at a distance. The two leap to meet and form one neutralized force.

As he had no Aunihipili and no Aunakua, he had no need for anything more than the vaguely understood “vital force” of our belated physiologists. But with that, under the banner of mana, he made up for the lack of an Aunihipili in part and tried to get it to balance the positive, or was it negative, Auhane. He spoke learnedly and with authority about the emotions and the naughty part of us below the navel which must be brought into harmony and balanced. It sounds well when taught, but, like so many “teachings”, it does not hold water on close inspection.

In his system he has drawn heavily on the idea of Paul and the sages of India: the idea that only spirit is naturally good and pure, and that the body and all the things related to it must be wicked and bad. In the sacred literature of India the idea is crystallized, and in the writings of one of the Theosophical luminaries we read the sonorous line, “Kill out desire”. The poor and long suffering Aunihipili has been beaten over the head and kicked in the southern exposure endlessly, but we have never found a way to do without its patient ministrations, and if we refuse to let it have its rightful share in our lives, with all its natural anticipations, it will find mysterious ways to slay us. The necessity for balancing the negative and positive halves of an undividable mana is not true to the facts as we know them. What must be balanced is the normal life and anticipations of ALL THREE SELVES.

When the “last of the kahunas” taught confidently, “The positive force is the knowledge of the Truth or God within the man”, he was speaking not as a kahuna, but as one whom no kahuna of the old days would have recognized as even faintly resembling them and their system of beliefs and practices. His trouble was that he had too little real knowledge of Huna and so was forced to invent a system of his own.

NEWS OF THE GROUPS

GAYE MERIDAN, HRA, FHF, of Sydney, Australia, has been giving most freely of her time and money to try to get a working Huna group started and strong enough to hold together for more than one or two meetings in a city where distances are great and few have escaped the binding influences of the Church. Recently she wrote:

“You said in a bulletin that it is hard for you to understand why it is difficult to get Huna groups going when churches flourish. I think I can furnish the answer.

“When people go to church they get a glow of satisfaction and pride at being so good. All they have to do is go and sit and they are carried along by the minister and the service. It is different with a Huna group – they have to do some work. There’s no emotional carry along from hymns, choirs, organs, polished pews, flowers and the handshake on the way out.

“I have thought about this a great deal and have come to some conclusions that are possibly so ordinary and homely, you may have to discard them. First, I hasten to say that this is not a criticism of groups etc., but rather the way I see it as the approach to forming groups. My main idea is, briefly:

1. “That each person needs to have read, and studied and thought about Huna until they are ready to practice it. Perhaps this is all so elementary that people overlook it. Study is so necessary that you’d wonder how anybody could present himself for a Huna Group without this work and knowledge, but some do.
2. “Breathing. This is another big thing. So many people, especially city dwellers, don’t know the meaning of proper breathing, and until they place themselves in the care of an expert on breathing, they never will.
3. “Visualization. It is often an unknown and unthought of procedure. It takes a real effort to learn to do it in the first instance, and then constant practice to make it into an effortless skill ready for using on call.
4. “Concentration. Ability to concentrate will is often a matter of temperament, but it’s better if it is cultivated and you know it will work for you when you need it for Huna. Concentration is also a taught, developed and practiced skill.
5. “Relaxing We also know that it is essential to be able to relax at will for Huna. But you can’t just ‘do’ it unless you know how, and this becomes another skill to be acquired.

“I am sure you will agree that a Huna group whose members are all able to perform well at these basic skills will be a growing concern with a good chance of becoming better as members go on with their practice of Huna. Just picture a person thus: he learns about Huna – maybe has a loan of a book – is invited to a group, not very sure of anything, but is agreeable to participate. He has no idea how to breathe although he has been doing it all his life, but not properly. He is a shallow breather – he has tight chest muscles. He is tense – maybe he would relax, but he hasn’t ‘time’. What he should admit is that he doesn’t know how. His job may or may not give him some practice in concentration.

“Visualizing skill is acquired in some jobs, but here we are the creative ones and not the common lot of everyone. Last, but certainly not least, is the inescapable fact that being able to ‘do’ is the greatest of all learning aids. When we can add the practice of Huna – with all its marvelous and interesting results – onto the study and reading and thinking, we get along very fast.

“All this is so primary and down to earth that I hesitated to put it into a letter, but I offer it humbly and won’t be aggrieved if you can’t agree with the practicality of it.

“Our group is coming along and they are now convinced that it is better to proceed slowly and thoroughly. One is going to America to visit a sister in Miami, one has gone to Singapore and one has moved sixty miles up the coast to live. This is a nuisance but not important as we who are left are working with great gusto and interesting things are turning up all the time.

“You already have 2 votes in favor of reprinting Recovering the Ancient Magic, and perhaps you could get two friends to read your copy and see if they are as enthusiastic about it as we are. A re-issue with more pictures, a late day photograph and a biographical piece on your life and work as a frontispiece?

“Thea is making a tape of part of Recovering for her daughter who is coming over from Adelaide for a short visit soon. My daughter is getting excellent results from prayers for people in her own area, and sometimes telephones her mother for extra telepathic help for special healings.

“Don’t be polite about the foregoing if you find it tedious. You know how I value your opinion an Huna far more than my own.” (Signed) Gaye

I am most pleased with the above letter, and the thought given the problems which surround the formation of groups. I am all for the careful training she has outlined, and must admit that I was never able to hold members of prospective groups in line to make them get down to hard work on such basic practices as are described. I fear I have been all too timid in asking those who turned up for a group to do anything but listen impatiently for five minutes to what I had to say about Huna before they began to argue for some pet system of their own. At that early time we had no books as yet, Recovering the Ancient Magic having been burnout in England by the Blitz. I got the little pamphlet written and printed on Huna, but couldn’t get anyone to read it before coming to the group meetings. When I tried to get them settled down to actual work on accumulating mana and concentration or visualization, they at once lost interest and always someone wanted to argue. We had difficult people for our purpose. Most of them had been dabbling with the various forms of occultism and metaphysics for years and had listened endlessly to lectures in which they had been stuffed with misinformation, or had taken courses, or, as with the Rosecrucians, were still taking the courses which never end. Many were members of clubs given over to the study and practice of hypnosis, and these seemed especially opinionated. I was hoping to get experimental work started to find out what could be accomplished. My leadership was poor. We lacked proper meeting places and money. Eventually all four groups talked themselves to death, most enthusiastically, and I gave up, contenting myself with what could be accomplished through the books I proceeded to write and then the bulletins.

I am delighted to have clear thinking set me back in line on the matter, and to find in the Sydney group people who are willing to learn basic steps and to read my books and get themselves ready before entering a group and starting to put Huna to work. Our need is first to have someone able to teach breathing, concentration and visualization, along with relaxation. Perhaps we should have a mimeographed text book on these subjects, and work hard by letter and lectures on tape to get a teacher ready who could take charge and train others as a preliminary step before forming the group, and later, before allowing any candidate into a working group. We are gradually learning that groups can get results, and that is most important. We can begin to promise results, even if not every time or what is expected, but often enough something is accomplished that is to be seen plainly and can be pointed to with confidence. Perhaps it is organization we keep needing. If we could promise results and a living to healers like the Science of cults, and make the candidates for the schools pay well for their schooling, we might go places. What do you think?

Yes, RECOVERING THE ANCIENT MAGIC does have a freshness and high enthusiasm or something about the writing that is different, but I had not realized that it would be sufficiently attractive to invite special reading and even copying off as it has been by some. When we get the paperback and the changeover of the book business out of the way, perhaps I can read it into tapes so it can be available and we can begin to judge whether an illustrated reprint might be in order. Perhaps one day we can find someone with money to spare to give us a foundation grant such as has been given the American Theosophical Society and the Casey A.R.P., which has enabled them to put out many books in paperback but with better print and paper. They also put out fine hard cover books. Three of my books are now up for reprint editions, and to ask for a reprint of Recovering would be hardly in keeping with possibilities, but DeVorss is a very active publisher and distributor and might one day be able to help in these matters.

THE NEW SANTA ANA (Calif.) GROUP under the leadership of HRA W. Thomas Rapp, is getting a good start. They meet every Saturday night, listen to the tape lectures, and have questions and discussions to clear up points and get a better understanding of Huna. HRA Rapp writes, “We all practice P.A. reading on interesting people that we have come into contact with during the week. We also practice telepathy. Usually the colors are easier to send and receive than the objects. We are also working with the crystal ball as an added experiment. Patricia is very good at it, but I’m still practicing. The meeting starts at about 7:30 P.M., and usually gets over about 1:30 A.M. We have so much to do that the time just flies.” Nothing is said as yet about trying out healing practices in the circle, but that can come later on. Mr. Rapp suggests that we republish the century old Andrews Hawaiian English Dictionary, as he would very much like to have a copy with a full list of words instead of just the selected ones given in the back of my book, HCIR. He is even anxious to have my copy to get it photostated, lacking republication. My copy has had the binding edge cut off in my big paper cutter and was used to photocopy the pages before I began the selection of Huna important words and the cut and paste job of putting them into order. There are 560 pages of the text, and it was really quite a job making the first set of copies to be used to cut up. I doubt that there would be enough demand for a reprint to justify its publication.

THE WILLIAM BOONE GROUP in La Mesa, near San Diego, Calif., has been heard from. HRA Boone writes, “We do not have a meeting place now. The place we had was unsuitable for several reasons, so we gave it up. The Aumakuas will bring us the right place eventually. The old one served its purpose for the while we had it. As a result of giving up the place, I think we were given a method of contact via aka for more effective group prayer work. We do not need to meet, and use the telephone, setting up the prayer effort at a specified time. We have had two cases with good results from both.

“There is no doubt that it is necessary to get proper aka contact with the one to be treated if good results are to be realized, and this method assures it. Some participants experienced reactions, which proved that a close contact is made with the subjects when working with them.

“First, I have found that the telephone can transmit the aka substance or thread from the ink writing or photograph to a heavily inked circle on paper. The circle, then, also establishes a direct line to the person’s Aunihipili, the same as the writing or photograph does. I can use the inked circle for P.A. readings and the removal of spirit entities and blocks and contact both Aunihipili and Auhane for any purpose. The person with the photo and signature holds them to the mouthpiece of the phone and transmits the aka thread to the person at the receiving end where the inked circle is held to the earpiece for about 30 seconds. The inked circle holds the aka substance indefinitely and can be filed away for future use, however, it is not possible to transmit the aka substance from one inked circle to another circle, the writing or photo being necessary for this transmission

“A group may be called the Invisible Huna Circle and there can be groups of twelve that could cooperate with each other to always have twelve making the thought cluster prayer to the Aumakuas. Of course, the subject and the prayer participants should be free of entities and Aunihipili blocks.

“In regard to the Spiritualists I have been working with, you are right about them. I find that they axe determined to rid themselves of their entities and blocks, but only pick up more. One whom I worked on some time ago has passed on. It becomes evident that Huna is not for the average Spiritualist who is inviting spirits to come and take over without too much knowledge of the danger. The man in the Thetis Island Group up Canada way, whom you mentioned “reported to be re-obsessed, required further work and has been clear for some time now.

“The case of a woman in Reno, Nevada, is worthy of note. She has a death wish or premonition, believing she will die when she reaches her destination in a planned trip to the East. I found her two lesser selves unresponsive and with difficulty communicated with them, but they seemed normal enough for a time. Later, I found the Auhane out and got it back. I must check again today. This has some connection with her death premonition, no doubt. It would be interesting to check some other suicide prone person on this.”

I comment, that this is excellent research work, and DO so value FHF Boone’s work and the help of his wife, Essie, who types his letters for him. They sent me their pictures recently and are a most attractive couple. The Thetis Island Group sent signatures for him to see if any of the other members need to have help in getting clear of eating companion spirits or blocks in their aka paths which might prevent full contact with the Aumakua.

NOW FOR BOOK REVIEWS

A fine paperback by Frank Waters and Oswald White Bear Frederics, (Ballantine Books, Dept. CS, 36 West 20th St., New York, N. Y. 10003, $1.25 plus 25¢ postage), is titled THE BOOK OF THE HOPI. It gives their legends and a fine insight into their traditions and the religious beliefs which have so influenced their culture. Unlike an earlier book on the Indian cultures of the region, Mr. Waters makes no effort in this book to relate the original Indian lore to the Buddhist or pre-Buddhist cultures from which he felt they were drawn, perhaps by some ancient migration. This is straight and delightful Hopi and the material was gathered with much care on the reservation in northern Arizona where the Indian village of Orabi is the oldest continuously inhabited place in North America.

1 was interested to find that, in their story of the Creation, they  had mankind represented in the beginning by two twins, not a man and woman, like Adam and Eve, but two brothers, who were polar opposites one might say and might have once stood for male and female, as one lives at the south pole and one at the north of the earth. Also in the Creation they have a “Spider Woman” who created light and darkness, men and many other things. Nothing is said of the reason for calling her “Spider Woman” (Kokyangwuti), but knowing our Huna, we can guess that in the original at some point she was spinning aka threads and substance as the first step in her creation of everything. The book is well illustrated with drawings and photographs, showing the tribal totem drawings, native signs and ceremonial underground places of worship. 414 pages of delightful reading, and the print larger and clearer than most books of the kind. Thanks to good HRAs, I have an extra copy to loan.

A REBIRTH FOR CHRISTIANITY, by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, written shortly before his death, has been brought out in a very fine hardcover edition by the Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Ill., priced at $5.95. 215 large pages on the finest white paper I have seen in books. Dr. Kuhn has done himself proud with this work, using his amazing vocabulary with telling effect, and trying to give back to Christians a system of belief that is based on something that will hold water historically and philosophically. While he remained, primarily, a Theosophist and favored the views of the sages of India, he goes back to Ancient Egypt, to Massey’s fine research, and offers a fine version of Christianity in which man has only one soul, (unlike Huna’s three) but shows how the human soul can come to develop in itself the divine spark of the “God Within”. A very satisfying book to read and to enjoy. MFL