Greetings
This is Max Freedom Long once more coming via tape to tell you about the ancient Egyptian system which had no name, but was called “The SECRET”, or Huna, to use the language which was made especially to contain the lore, name its elements, and serve as a secret code to shield it from outsiders. This language was beautifully constructed, and served its purpose well. In it the Four Gospels were originally written, then translated into another language, probably Greek, as it was the current official language of the time in the Holy Land. We know that the Egyptians and the Greeks both had elaborate Mystery Plays which were used in the teaching and initiation of members, but there is no evidence to show that these plays were used in the lands where the Four Gospels, or four versions of the same Mystery play were written.
It is evident that the Hebrews carried Huna with them when they left Egypt, and we find the code symbols used to cover up references to the ancient system in the Old Testament. Isaiah is a good place to dig for secret bits of coded Huna. Genesis, of course, started the ball rolling with the legend of the Creation and of the separation of the sexes to give us man and woman — Adam and Eve. The sexes, by the way, are said in the Secret, to reunite at the end of a period of evolutionary growth and in doing so, to graduate from the lower to a higher level of being. On the higher level they become the Superconscious or High Self, the Aumakua, which word is filled with root meanings, one of which is “Time Parents, or the ones who have lived longest. They are the “Utterly Trustworthy Parental Pair, and stand over a dual pair of men and women as Guides or Guardian Angels. These are dual, because each man and woman is made up of a low or subconscious self, and a conscious or middle self. These various secret bits of knowledge have crept out into the religions of the uninitiated and have been misunderstood and warped out of shape. They were a little too advanced and complicated for the average run of undeveloped mortals in their beginning incarnations, and had to be made over to fit their need for something material to believe in.
For instance, take the usual concept of a god. To the savage mind all the different branches of THINGS were ruled over by “gods”. They had a god of the storm, of the rain and of the lightning. These were what may be called High Selves or still Higher Beings, Nature Spirits, if you please. They actually were in some way connected with these things and had power over them. They stood over many things, creatures and animals as the High Selves stand over man, and if properly appealed to, could influence their charges for the benefit or whim of men. I have already mentioned in my talks the “calling of the sharks and turtles, in which a ritual invocation was chanted in Samoa, even by children, and the sharks and turtles in the sea made to gather at the base of a cliff above the ocean. Fire-walking is another example of being able to call on them for help in crossing hot coals or stones. Winds can be made to blow stronger or to be quiet, and it was said in the legends of the Polynesians that the earliest members of what was later to be called Polynesian peoples, were able to make the winds blow just right to drive their great double canoes day after day until they reached their “Promised Land”, Hawaii. They came from Hawaiiki, so the legends say, or the “Land of the Life-giving Dew”, which no one knows as a definite place but is thought by some to be here, or by others, there. The word is part of the secret code, and really refers to the land in which they learned to breathe in deeply in sets of four deep breaths, accumulating mana as they did so, for the root wai in Hawaiiki means water — and water is the symbol of mana. This, then, when sent across or along the shadowy cord of connection to the High Self, gets the mana changed to a stronger kind and returned as the “Life-giving Dew” of healing. Or, it may cause the High Self to give us knowledge, “clear seeing”.
This is the Ha Rite which is so stressed in the Four Gospels as the big and important thing that the leading character in the drama, Jesus, was teaching.
The Nature Spirits were materialistic and served as the many gods worshiped by the uninitiated. The tribes related themselves to one of these Nature Gods, and over the world we find totem spirits of this kind appealed to and giving help.
For the more advanced, or initiate members of the human race, there was reserved a knowledge of the High Self. In Genesis we read “Let US create man”, the US showing the outer belief in which there were many gods. But the idea of the one or single God followed. It may have been a concept which escaped from the initiate kahunas (“keepers of the secret”). It grew to include all gods and Higher Beings, but lost any description of them. In this loss the idea became so vague that it hardly served the desire for something which could be imagined and pictured. The people needed a material God — something near and hovering and kind — who might be appealed to for help.
In answer to this need, there developed the belief in world saviors, and in these the people had what they needed and could understand. Jesus as a High Self in the Gospel Drama was not such a savior, so Paul made him one, after which all was well for some 2,000 years with Christians. And someone even closer and more understanding was Mary, the mother of Jesus. Or, there were Saints no end. In India, China and Japan Gautama Buddha, who taught no such thing, became the object of veneration as the Amada Buddha whose “heart doctrine” was that of a savior. One lived the best one could, and depended on the love of this savior to do what was needed to bring one to an escape from the wheel of reincarnation. We who know Huna, see that his secret teaching was an escape from the middle self level by graduating into that of the High Self — the only Nirvana possible.
In between the Nature Spirits as lesser gods, and the God which was postulated as all-inclusive and one alone — who ruled the Universe out to the farthest star — we have in Huna a very modest concept. It gives us the High Self, just above us, and still higher lies the akua aumakua or godlike Higher Selves, and above them, while there are supposed to range layer on layer of ever increasing growth, we know little, and we are unable to grasp their verity. In addition to the High Selves we have them as a united or group order, the “Great Company of Aumakuas”. These are groups of which we know little, but may preside over certain groups of people, and the idea seems hardly enough to cover a whole nation. Again, we are faced with the familiar limitation of middle self thinking.
The High Self follows the Law in that it cares for its children. In the creature world, the more evolved a creature becomes, the better it loves and cares for its offspring. Man cares most, and his children are longest of all in growing to maturity and being able to care for themselves. We learn to love after a selfish and very personal fashion in bringing children into the world and caring for them. But as High Selves the love becomes perfected and selfless, as does the love of the man and woman, who unite and blend their being as they graduate into a new High Self. This is the second great teaching of the Four Gospels. It is the “marriage made in heaven”, and to gain it we have to learn to love more perfectly.
During past incarnations, so we gather, the true mates are born in the same group at about the same time so that they can meet each other and continue the task of learning to love more perfectly. We seem to come back as wife and husband or as members of the same family, or as lovers. We have to overcome such things as the sex rivalry — which causes the “war between the sexes” — and is really the instinctive effort of the couple to break down the differences between them and to get ready to blend and make a High Self. We try desperately to make the mate over and to make him or her conform to the ideal. In doing so we cause much trouble. The constant nagging of the wife may be such a reaction which has become chronic with her. The neglect and lack of love and tenderness on the part of the man may keep him from filling her innermost dream of the way he should be in the end. One of our most important jobs is to learn to love selflessly, and well and to endure and adjust to the lacks of the mate. We may be married to the mate of some other person in the group, but we can get practice with the one we happen to be wedded to in this incarnation. If we make a fairly good job of learning, we just might be led by our High Self to find the true mate and to enjoy a taste of heaven through the love and recognition.
I do not know just where or how the idea of “soul mates” evolved, but it is wide spread, and could well have been part of the secret lore of Huna which escaped from the initiate kahunas and became common property — with the usual misunderstanding and warping, of course. We read in literature of the ones who have left the ordinary love and found the ultimate and perfect love. The great poets sing of the perfect mate and the perfect love. But for the majority the dream is only a far and nostalgic hope — a dream seldom told or even recognized as such. We see men and women staring at each other perhaps “across a room”, each asking, questing, “Are you the one? Are you? Are you?
But if we find the true mate under the most ideal circumstances, the love is difficult to make perfect, FOR the low self of each of us is like the little brother who hides behind the sofa when his sister is courting. They rule the body, and while the middle selves may be more than satisfactory in their likes and dislikes and their intellectual approach, the physical of each may be out of step and ready to clash. Fortunate, indeed, is the pair whose low selves also go together nicely. But still, we see instances in which the love surmounts physical defects and the love endures despite the physical handicaps. Always we practice loving, striving for the perfection of which we dream. If we can accomplish a near perfection, be it said, it makes little difference if the mate falls short. We are learning the great lesson that, in another incarnation will admit us into the inner room. Keep your lamps filled with oil and be watchful, for who knows when the bridegroom cometh.” (Women, do not let your love spoil your children while you fight back your husband and keep him from disciplining them, and denying him love. On the other hand, husbands should take their full part in the rearing of the children and give the wife all the love and support she needs. The normal way of living is the best way. A lopsided marriage is a bad one.) (I have pontificated.)
We are dealing in these short talks with the general subject of THE TEN ELEMENTS OF HUNA, and often get far away from them. You recall that these were the three selves, the three shadowy or aka bodies, the three manas, and the physical body while it lasts, but which is changed with each incarnation.
In the question and answer part of last talk, I mentioned the expectation that we were about to have a Day of Judgment and that with the present population explosion the world around, it looked as though most of the created “souls” were now in the body, or were close enough in terms of an incarnation to be within easy reach of whoever or whatever may do the judging. In the Four Gospels we have one version of the drama in which Jesus, as the man — not then as the High Self — speaks of the popular belief that such a Judgment is right at hand. This is for the benefit of the uninitiated, and when the document was stolen from the initiates, it was, of course, vastly misunderstood.
In John, the 17th chapter, we find Jesus facing his crucifixion, but at that time he confidently requested God to bring on the Judgment. We read,
“These words spake Jesus and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that the Son may glorify thee: (2) As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast sent him… (4) I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.”
Elsewhere we read of his expectation that he will, when “glorified”, sit on the right hand of God and and judge the unbelievers. In Matthew 26-64 he tells the high priest,
“Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.”
The idea in the drama is to show the candidates for initiation that one of the great stumbling blocks to inner growth and progress is self-righteousness, and the desire to claim a reward for good deeds done. In this story, God did not respond when Jesus asked his reward, but deserted him, as he said on the cross, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Could the drama makers have written anything more telling in their effort to teach the lesson of selfless service and love and humility? Out of context, perhaps purposely done to confuse outsiders should they steal the script? And, Jesus as the man again, not as a High Self, got his reward — going up into a mountain he was TRANSFIGURED and shone with a great LIGHT. Light is the code symbol of the High Self, and we see that he then graduated from the middle self level to that of a High Self. This is the High Self who frequently is made to speak to the disciples and teach them. The Transfiguration should, logically, end the drama, but it was needed earlier and so was used, but the death on the cross and the resurrection were what the outsiders went on in trying to understand what they had no business to have without an instructor in the Mystery.
Later came Paul, to manufacture reasons for everything, with Jesus dying on the cross to save the world from the terrible sin of Adam and Eve when they did the most natural thing in the world and discovered SEX. And he made this sex matter the Great Sin. What was a perfectly beautiful and legitimate Huna drama to be played for the candidates when they came up for initiation became distorted and mistaken for history. It was overwritten by those who copied the original scripts, and much was added that did not belong, while a little was lost. Whether or not we have all the coded parts, is hard at this late date to decide, but we have enough of it to give us a quite different insight into the story of Jesus, as I have been at pains to show in my book, The Huna Code in Religions.
Have we a Huna lesson or two to learn from all this material? We have the greatest lesson that man has been given to learn. In the drama we read, that love of one’s neighbor is a progressive step, but love of the High Self and of the mate is the superior love. This is a matter of constantly teaching and drilling the low self, which is an animal self and must learn middle self ways so it can graduate into the middle self life eventually. It must be taught to give up its greed and hate and savage instincts. It must be taught unselfishness. We, as middle selves, are so closely tied to the low self that its animal desires are shared and hold us back. We must rise above them. We must at last learn HUMILITY, or else come back and take the lessons all over again. (Now for the discussions.)
Suggested Discussion Topics
Q: What other Mystery Plays were there?
A: There is little information to go on in answering that question. The Greek Plays are the famous ones, and little is known of what was taught. In one fragment, a man who was initiate is quoted as saying that he had followed the training and had “seen the Light twice” while one of his friends had seen it once, and a third had seen it not at all. The symbol and code word for the High Self is “Light”, and this is not just the Sun, which was worshiped in so many places as “The Light” and as supreme Deity; it is an actual mystical experience which comes to those who are working to develop their contact with the High Self or to live the good life and to open themselves to Higher influences. We call such people “mystics”, and refer to their experience as something mystical.
Years ago, in Hawaii, I had been making an intensive study of sacred literature from around the world, and in the middle of a dark night I was awakened by having the mosquito netting which surrounded my bed flooded with a light so strong and so brilliant that it was unlike anything I had ever experienced. There was no sound to go with it, just the night silence, but I had a strange feeling that I was being subjected to some initiation or other. I just sat up in bed and stared and waited. In a matter of a few moments the light slowly faded and all was as before in the room … except that I was greatly impressed and set wondering. Since that time my correspondence has made me acquainted with a number of people who have seen this strange and brilliant light around themselves. It is very strong, but has no heat in it. It is perhaps a time when the High Self comes to be with us, perhaps to mark a step in our advancement. It is the one and only strong and really marked sensation which comes from all the occult studies and meditations, and once experienced, it is never forgotten. It is strangely impressive.
Q: How many times do we reincarnate?
A: There seems to be no definite answer to this question. My guess is about twelve times for a fortunate person who learns well from each lifetime of experience. But there seem to be many backward people who learn slowly and remain bad and backward and hurtful. These may take a much longer time to learn their lessons of non-hurt — learn to be constructive and helpful and kind, learn to be “perfect, as the Father in heaven is perfect”. The “Father”, in this case is the High Self Parental Father-Mother. To be like it is the great ideal of Huna and success marks the point at which one becomes ready to find the true and intended mate, then, between lives, to be helped to blend the two separated selves to make one — a new High Self.
Q: Are we always either male or female in our incarnations, or do we change now and then and incarnate as a member of the opposite sex?
A: This is a question which has been answered both ways. Some of the most impressive cases of reincarnation have come from modem India. There both boys and girls have several times had memories of a past life that was so close in time that the children remembered other homes and families, and were able, when taken to the scenes of their former homes, to give dramatic proof of what they had said, identifying relatives and recalling things which had been changed since. In none of these cases has the sex changed. Despite the books written to describe a number of lives of some individual who remembers, I am of the opinion that unless one is born a homosexual and has his sex misplaced, the sex is always the same. Eventually comes the union and graduation to the High Self level.
