Greetings. This is Max Freedom Long speaking.
THESE SHORT TALKS are intended to tell people about the recently rediscovered Huna system of Psychology. The system was developed in early Egypt, or may have come from some earlier and all but lost civilization. It contains all that we modem people know of the semi-science of PSYCHOLOGY, and about a third more, that we still have not discovered. It is this additional third that we will discuss at length, for it is of great value.
HUNA – which means “The Secret” – discloses to us the knowledge that man is made up of TEN ELEMENTS OR PARTS. Modem Psychology knows only FOUR OF THESE: the conscious part of mind, the subconscious part of mind, the vital force and, of course, the body in which the man lives and functions.
RELIGIONS which date back to the time when HUNA was already about 4,000 years old, were all we had to tell us the nature of man before modern Psychology began to develop about a century ago. Religion gave man only two parts: a body and a soul – a single soul, if you please, although traces of Huna had found their way into various religions, and from the Greek versions of Christianity we have a vague addition to the soul in the form of the “SPIRIT”. In India there were vague references to a “lower” and a “higher” SELF as resident in the body of man.
DISCUSSIONS will be in order after this short talk on Huna, and there will be the temptation for some of you to rise and argue that this or that is a fact because such and such a statement is made in “THE WORD OF GOD”. Let me say at once and right in the beginning, that RELIGION is no authority to draw upon to prove or disprove things we learn from Huna. Men, and only men, wrote the various religious SCRIPTURES, and the writers of one Scripture did not agree at all with the writers of the several other Scriptures. Religion does not and never did know more than a possible THREE elements of MAN, so we will do well to stop any enthusiastic religionist when the discussions begin if he starts quoting “The Word of God”. Please keep this admonition well in mind. Keep the discussions limited to Psychology and the Huna version of it, and you will be able to learn something of this ancient and most valuable addition to your knowledge of yourself and others.
In passing, may I say that Huna contains ALL that is of value in ALL religions. We shall see this clearly as we progress in our examination of the Ten Elements of Man.
Now for the topic for our opening discussion. Let us take up the FIRST OF THE TEN ELEMENTS OF MAN ACCORDING TO HUNA. This is man’s BODY. After my talk, you can discuss your ideas of what the body IS, and how it acts as the vehicle of CONSCIOUSNESS.
In a study of Huna you will do well at all times to watch for three things which must be a part of the man – of YOU. These are:
- Something material through which consciousness can ACT.
- Some form of consciousness to use the material of the body and brain, and
- some form of FORCE which is used BY consciousness to work with matter.
BODY, MIND and WILL, if you please.
In our first discussion period we will probably all agree that there is a body, although I am well aware that a few religionists will tell us that all is ‘Maya’ or delusion and that nothing has reality. For our purposes shall we say that the body is real – at least as real to us as other things around us.
HUNA TELLS US that man and his body came up through the animal world in some way. This was a stopping of a unit of consciousness in different animal or other life forms on the long ascent from the least conscious life forms to the most – to man himself. This was EVOLUTION, and it was believed that man came up as a conscious unit NOT ONLY THROUGH THE WORLD OF CREATURES, but that in him were traces of what we call the “elements” – of rain and wind and sun and lightning, of water and stone and air. Man came by easy stages to learn to build the elements into a body to house his sense of SELF, and he used a force or POWER OF WILL to cause the elemental building blocks to fall into place.
The unit of consciousness grew as it evolved and learned all the many building trades. It learned to make a shell for itself from lime as a sea creature. It learned to work in groups at an early stage, and as coral, its groups built great coral reefs of lime taken from seawater. Always growing and learning, the life unit ran the gamut of experience from fish to bird and from mouse to horse.
Finally it had evolved to the point where it could produce a body capable of being used by a HUMAN TYPE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. With this step we have the human body. We are not told by Huna just HOW this last evolutionary step was taken. Instead, we are told to accept the fact that the step was taken, and that a body had finally been developed in which consciousness could have its finest expression.
Man had, at long last, the power to use inductive REASON. At last he was ON HIS OWN. At last he could understand things infinitely better than he could as an animal. At last he could take over the control of his own life.
As an animal – all the way up the scale of evolution – a thing which we call “Intuition” ran his life for him and told him what to do and how to do it. As a bird it taught him to build nests at the right time of the year, to migrate at other times, and to do all the bird things.
We do not know what form of consciousness this “Intuition” may be, or whether it comes from something inside the creatures unit of consciousness or from some “elemental spirit” outside the creature world but in some way always directing the life forms.
Many stories of the “Creation” of man were told by the ancients, most especially by the religionists. Every race and people had a version of the creation Story, and some say that the human spirit was first created and then inserted into the newly created body of the man. One story has it that when the human body was made and was ready, an already developed human spirit from Venus was brought and placed in the body.
The early men who were initiated into the secret lore of Huna, often had tales to tell that contained parts of the Secret Science. One of these was that when the gods created man, they used two kinds of clay, red and white for the job. In this way he was able to have TWO SPIRITS live in him. We will not go into the Huna terms for these two spirits as yet, but we can say that in modern terms, the man of two colors of clay was made so that he could contain a SUBCONSCIOUS AND A CONSCIOUS pair of minds, or spirits or SELVES. The Huna initiates, called “Keepers of the Secret”, believed that these two parts of human consciousness were TWO DIFFERENT AND SEPARATE spirits or souls or SELVES. Later we will see how this belief in two parts of consciousness answers questions left unanswered in modem Psychology.
The SUBCONSCIOUS is an animal self living in an animal body, and we, who are the CONSCIOUS MIND SELF, live as a guest and guide in the body. THE ANIMAL SELF (or low self), has still, like all animals, the INSTINCTIVE GUIDANCE from somewhere to tell it how to grow a body from the moment of conception, and how to digest food and do all the complicated bodily works. However, it seems to be able to handle MEMORY on its own and without too much instinctual help. It does all our remembering for us, and even carries our memories with it when we die and become disembodied SPIRITS. It lacks the power to reason inductively, and must rely on the conscious self (or middle self) to reason things out.
Also living as a part of our three-spirit family, is the HIGH SELF. It has evolved much farther than the lower selves and acts as a GUARDIAN ANGEL over us. It does not live in the body but above and well outside of it. It may travel far away, but it is always in telepathic touch with its man.
There we are with four of the PARTS of man already explained. These are, first, THE BODY; and second, THE THREE SPIRIT SELVES of the man. The Egyptian Keepers of the Secret spoke of these three SELVES as The Father, or middle self, the Son, or low self with its body, and the High Self as “the Holy Spirit”. In Christianity we use the Germanic word and say, “Father, Son and Holy GHOST.”
When Christianity and other religions borrowed the outer forms of Huna from the earlier Egyptians, they missed one of the great truths, and had no “Mother, Daughter and Holy Spirit”. But the Egyptians had an inner Huna teaching in which they taught that there were “TWO TRUTHS” of vast importance. This secret lore concerned the fact that everything comes in “twos”. Adam was divided promptly into TWO – male and female, but in the later religions the men grabbed all the honors and elevated a male God and a Father and Son without the Mother getting even a mention except as a necessary evil.
There is polarization and sex and endless pairing off in the realm of the TWO TRUTHS. Light and darkness, hot and cold, male and female, the list is long. The Persians borrowed the Two Truths from the Egyptians and missed the rest of the elements. Their religion is one in which the good forces of Light, constantly battle the bad forces of Darkness — making man at war over his own good and evil all the time. The Keepers of the Secret knew that the only sin was that of hurting others or hurting your own body. But the borrowing religionists gradually made up a whole list of “sins”. If you did not pay a tenth of your income to the priests and the churches they built, that was the major sin. The lesser sins were listed up to ten or more, as by Moses in his Ten Commandments. The Hindus had a special bit of sin of their own. They taught that “karma” was the law of cause and effect, and that if you “sinned” in one incarnation, you would have to pay for it either at once, or in a following incarnation. If you were sick, it was because you were paying off old karma. AND, it was a sin to try to heal anyone — for so to heal stood in the way of the action of Sacred Karma. The people of India became very much a hopeless people under so stringent a set of religious rules – and have not recovered from it even today. Buddha came along later, and his religion eased the pressure a little. He taught an escape into Nirvana for those who would cease WANTING anything. It was strong medicine and the cure was a very vague one in so far as the goal was concerned. But in his day the people, men and women, gave up everything, became beggars, and took refuge in the sanctuaries which were provided by wealthy converts. Sex was tabooed desire.
Now, AFTER ABOUT 5,000 YEARS, [some] of us are winning back to the simple and complete system of Huna. We are modernizing the old religions. Many have left the old dogmatic beliefs and have taken up what is misnamed, ’’Metaphysics”. “New Thought” is a better name. It and its related cults teach an over-simplification. They say, THINK RIGHT AND YOU WILL BE RIGHT. This is fine so far as it goes, but it lacks all the things that the ancient Huna System can tell us of WHO thinks, and HOW, and WHY. It has little to say about even one SELF or Soul. God is hardly ever mentioned in the services. In one denomination everything is said to be unreal except the ALL GOOD, and therefore, anything that is bad is NOT real. Declare the unreality of bad things and they will cease to be.
These modem departures from old religions and dogmas are excellent in so far as they go. But there are some of us who want to know the HOWS and WHYS. Who is to do the thinking, the subconscious or the conscious, or are we to drop these for the older idea of JUST ONE SOUL, and let it do all the “right thinking” that brings — mysteriously — “right conditions”?
Let us try to get into a nutshell the secret of making this modem way of doing WORK. First, we must stop making our low selves THINK we are sick. If we hold the picture of ourselves as ILL, we scare the low self all the time and we impress on it the picture of illness — and it has a way of making the body match the fears. In France, in the last generation, Dr. Coue’ taught people to THINK of themselves as HEALED. He administered fine “suggestion” to them in which he talked to their low selves over the heads of their middle selves, assuring the lesser spirit that he and his body would be getting well. He had his patients repeat frequently, day after day, the words that embody the health picture. Those words are just as good today. They are, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” At one time this formula was all the rage the world around. But it failed in its promise and people soon stopped using it. What was wrong? The answer is simple. The middle self was reciting the words, and the low self was listening. But the middle self did not make the proper mental picture of the man as being healed better and better every day in every way. The middle self didn’t make the picture of the healed condition and live, up to it — live IN it steadily. Here is the key to the failures. FAITH. BELIEF. If you, the middle self, are not fully convinced that you will get better each day and that you ARE GETTING BETTER each day, then neither will the low self believe it. And if the low self does not believe it, it will not stop trying to make the body match your picture of sickness and will NOT START MAKING THE BODY MATCH THE NEW PICTURE OF THE HEALED STATE.
Yes, the low self will heal all kinds of things if let alone. When we break a leg we EXPECT it to knit the bone for us. So, all goes well and the break is healed. But if we keep frightening the low self with our thoughts of possible ills, it will soon be making bodily changes to match the mental picture.
Next. The High Self helps the low self to change the body to fit the healed picture if we ASK IT TO DO SO. It can work miracles, and often does, for us. It can materialize pictures of health and success and peace for us if we will make the mental pictures to fit and have FAITH that they will be materialized in due time. “HOLD THE FAITH” is the second part of the key. Realize that you are a Triune or three-spirit being. Work mightily to get all three of your SELVES materializing the SAME good things. Aloha. ML
QUESTION AND ANSWER PERIOD
Q. IS the subconscious as large when it starts evolving as a one-cell creature as it is in man?
A. It would not seem likely. Huna tells us nothing on that point. But in the body we see billions of cells of different kinds united as in a great colony and working together for the good of the whole. Perhaps others would like to give their speculative guesses as to the growth of the low self and decide whether it is made up of all the units of consciousness of all the billions of bodily cells.
Q. When we ask the High Self to help us and the low self to materialize the conditions we desire, do we just pray to the High Self? Why can’t we just pray to God instead? Doesn’t all prayer go to God anyway?
A. In Huna we learn that there are layers and layers of rising consciousness, so to speak. The High Self is in a level higher than the middle self. But above it are still other levels, and Supreme God is so high and so vast that the human mind cannot grasp its Being and Verity. The Keepers of the Secret taught that our prayers always went first to the High Self, and that if they needed to go to a still higher Being, they would be sent on up. But as all of our prayers go to the High Self, the efforts are not wasted no matter to what Higher Being we address our prayers. The prayer to the High Self is made by holding before it the picture of the thing we want it to materialize. In later talks this will be discussed in detail. Would others care to say what they think about the Huna-type prayer, or about prayer in general?
Q. If we are “Sparks of the Divine” why do we have to try to get the low and High Selves to help us? Why can’t we materialize things for ourselves?
A. For several centuries we have been taught in some circles the dogma that “Ye are gods”. We have been trying all that time to make things come true to fit our plans and desires all by ourselves — perhaps with a prayer now and then for good measure. The middle self has great ability and can often accomplish great things, but, if we are to accept the Huna beliefs, we will then try to get all three of our selves to cooperate and work on plans and problems. If one is content with the results obtained in the first way, then there is no need to try the second. But most of us often feel that we could do with a little extra help. Does anyone have a comment on the matter?
Q. Where do the low and middle selves live in the body, and are there some special parts of the brain that each uses?
A. There is much speculation as to this. No special organs or parts of the brain have been decided upon as centers of the subconscious and conscious. The ancients were not very definite as to this point in human physiology. They spoke of the low self as residing in the body and the middle self as living in the head. The low self was said to have the memories as its pet possession. The middle self was the proud owner of speech. No animal can talk. It was said that only when the middle self was able to act as a guest in the bodily house, did the human animal talk. The Egyptians made a god of the power of speech. It was “The Word”, and in Christianity we meet the idea in a very similar form. “In the beginning was the Word…” Who has ideas on this subject?
