Title:      The Betty Book (1937)
Author:     Stewart Edward White
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0301111.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted:          August 2003
Date most recently updated: August 2003

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Betty Book (1937)
Author:     Stewart Edward White




Excursions into the World of Other-Consciousness
Made by Betty between 1919 and 1936
Now recorded by Stewart Edward White




INTRODUCTION

While considering the most effective introduction to the material
comprised in this book, I submitted the puzzle to a friend whose judgment
I value. His letter so fittingly and completely answered my problem that
I feel I can do no better than to set it down here.

"I should begin, in effect, somewhat as follows": he wrote me. "This book
is the record, condensed, of the excursions of 'Betty,' a psychic
intimately known to me and of absolute integrity, into the world of
'other-consciousness' and of communications received by her from forces
which I have ventured to call 'the invisibles'. These excursions, made in
a condition of trance or otherwise, began in the year 1919 and have
continued ever since. They are recorded in the following pages with no
idea of adding to the existing literature of automatic writing and
kindred phenomena; but in the belief that, as embodying a workable
philosophy of life, they may be of aid to seekers after spiritual light."

THE AUTHOR





CONTENTS



INTRODUCTION


PART I
INTRODUCTORY

Chap. 1.  DE-OCCULTIZATION Page 11
Chap. 2.  PERSONAL EXPERIENCE Page 14
Chap. 3.  THE DEVELOPMENT OF BETTY Page 22
Chap. 4.  PROPORTION Page 32
Chap. 5.  ELEMENTARY STEPS Page 44
Chap. 6.  LATER DEVELOPMENT Page 52
Chap. 7.  PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AGAIN Page 59
Chap. 8.  ELIMINATION Page 71
Chap. 9.  THE SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT Page 78
Chap. 10. THE TECHNIQUE OF ELIMINATION Page 87
Chap. 11. DO IT NOW! Page 93
Chap. 12. THE SPIRITUAL BODY Page 102
Chap. 13. THE SPIRITUAL REALM Page 108
Chap. 14. PERCEPTION Page 119
Chap. 15. IMPETUS Page 129
Chap. 16. CONSTRUCTIVE PRAYER Page 133
Chap. 17. SUMMARY Page 140


PART II
OUR RELATIONS WITH THE WORLD WITHOUT

Chap. 18. LEVELS Page 147
Chap. 19. ASSIMILATION Page 151
Chap. 20. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY Page 161
Chap. 21. SUMMARY Page 172
Chap. 22. SPIRITUAL CIRCULATION Page 173
Chap. 23. THE RETURN FLOW Page 178
Chap. 24. THE CHANNEL BACK Page 185
Chap. 25. INSULATION Page 193
Chap. 26. SYMPATHY Page 199
Chap. 27. MEETING NON-RECEPTIVITY Page 204
Chap. 28. CONFLICT Page 211


PART III
APPENDICES

Appen. 1. THE TECHNIQUE OF COMMUNICATION Page 221
Appen. 2. EXPERIMENTS WITH THE SPIRITUAL BODY Page 243





PART I




INTRODUCTORY



CHAPTER I


De-Occultization


The history of all progress in knowledge is a "de-occultization." Fully
half of the things we do daily as a matter of course would, even as
recently as two centuries ago, have been considered magic, without
explanation except as the product of occult forces and knowledge. The
continuity of history is unbroken in that respect. If we should learn
anything at all from the past, that one thing should stand out for us as
invariable. The superstition of the past is the science of the present,
the proverb of the future. The order of events is always the same. First
a few people observed or did things which were denied or denounced
vehemently by the old school as crazy or maleficent or supernatural.
Exact knowledge overtook these things and found them to be harmonious
examples of natural law.

The uses of humanity absorbed them and they became commonplaces of
existence, thoroughly de-occultized, adopted into the body of usual
mental life. This has happened over and over and over again with
unvarying regularity. One of the most fascinating of scientific byplays
is to backtrack through history picking up at random marvels and
miracles, stripping them of warping legend, and explaining them in the
light of what we now know. They became not the less marvels and miracles,
if you please, but de-occultized. It should be added that all cannot be
so explained. The unsolved residue is not the more-or less-improbable for
that. Perhaps our grandchildren's progress will show this unexplained
residue as simple as we have found some of the miracles that dumfounded
our ancestors.

There are two things that this history of de-occultization, as I have
called it, has taught us. One is, the extraordinary initial opposition
that always meets the process. A combination of man's conservatism,
dislike of being jarred loose once he has settled down to his
satisfaction, a greater dislike of being proved mistaken, an intellectual
pride in his achievements so far, and a rooted suspicion of the one who
walks apart, have all contributed to this attitude. The principle of the
telescope is so much a commonplace of today that the very children catch
and accept the idea; yet Galileo was branded as a madman, imprisoned, and
only just escaped martyrdom. So certain were the scientists of his time
of their reasoning according to "immutable physical law," that they
refused to look through the telescope! They knew already what they would
see! Joseph Thompson reported a mountain with snow under the equator, and
died of a broken heart under the weight of scientific ridicule heaped
upon him. Science PROVED by the "immutable law of physics"-as then
understood-that, no matter what the altitude, snow could not exist at
such a latitude: only it does! Darwin was fought with savage ferocity.
Langley was laughed to death. Why the bitterness? If these things, and
all the others were not so, why rend and tear in attacking them? Answer
that as you will, it is the history of progress; just as de-occultization
is the invariable result.

The other thing which this history has taught us is the very human
tendency to ascribe the unexplained to "spirits." And again we may well
ask, why? Just because a table moves, or a strange light shows, or a
pencil writes under our hand, surely there is no need of invoking the
ghostly or the supernatural. These are facts, perhaps, and some of them
may be due to the activities of spirits, for all we know. But if so, we
can rest completely assured that they will eventually be found working
along the lines of natural law, and not by means of the supernatural, in
the literal meaning of that word.

In the meantime, even if some of these things are the results of spirit
activity-as they may or may not be-we need not treat them as either
spooky or sacred. After all, they are just natural phenomena, and some
day they will be de-occultized, like all the rest. Then all at once they
will seem as normal and commonplace as well, as radio.




CHAPTER II



Personal Experience


1.

The significance of this book is going to be its content. On the value of
that it will stand or fall, both as a claim to interest and as a
practical primer of spiritual hygiene. From that point of view it does
not matter how it was produced, or what its origin.

But from another point of view it must present its credentials. Most of
its teachings will be found, I think, acceptable by ordinary common
sense; but occasionally certain things are stated on authority. What is
the nature of that authority, and why do we feel that we may credit it?


2.

In the early nineteen-twenties a great many popular "psychic" books were
published. A number of them had real value. A regrettable majority were
more or less feeble and undigested accounts of alleged personal
"communications." These evidenced an extraordinary credulity on the one
side, and an equally extraordinary ineptitude on the other,-providing one
accepted their major premise of origin. Most of them began with a ouija
board.

The procedure was almost standard. Two people-or a group-fooling with the
thing as a lark or out of curiosity. It moves. It becomes coherent. It
spells out "messages."

That was the start, the "take-off." What happened after that depended on
the people involved. The subsequent proceedings ranged from the
"communications" of pure spiritualism to speculative philosophy. Nine in
ten of them were spoiled for any serious consideration by what might be
called the awed approach that inhibited any commonsense editorial
appraisal. This was a pity. After a time even those especially interested
in such things became inclined to shy off from "another ouija board
book." Nevertheless, I am inclined to believe that the ouija board may
take honorable place with Sir Isaac Newton's apple, Watt's teakettle,
Benjamin Franklin's kite and other historic playthings which have led to
many great results.

This is such a book. It too started with a ouija board, but it does not
linger on that phase. The first experience with it followed standard
lines. It would not be worth telling had it not an integral connection
with Betty's coming into the picture.


3.

In any research work it is always important to know the equipment of the
experimenter. Before March 17, 1919, my own "occult" background might, I
suppose, have been called average for a man who had lived an active life.
That is to say, I had paid such matters very little attention; and had
formed no considered opinions on them one way or another. By way of
unconsidered opinion I suppose I would, if called upon to express myself,
have taken my stand on the side of scepticism. This was because, like the
average man, I referred all "occult" or "psychic" matters to
spiritualism; which is also the savage's method. And spiritualism meant
to me either hysteria or clever conjuring or a blend of both. I knew that
it had been "exposed."

The literature on the subject was totally unknown to me, except for
Hudson's LAW OF PSYCHIC PHENOMENA, which I had read in college
twenty-five years before. A few "queer" things had happened to me, as to
most. I had had some experience with such phenomena as the swift
transmission of news by savages across wide wastes of sparsely inhabited
country. These incidents, and especially this transmission of news, I had
been unable to explain by any theory that covered the whole
circumstances. But I did not try very hard to explain. I was too busy.
Such things did not especially concern me. I did not have to explain
them; any more than I had to insist on a detailed understanding of a
trolley car before I would ride in it, or a chemical analysis of a cloud
of saffron smoke just because I happened by and saw it. Nothing had
happened really to catch my interest.


4.

As with numerous others, our interest in the ouija board began quite
casually. On the date I have mentioned, some friends called on us
bringing one of these with them. They had bought it as a toy, to try Out,
without belief that anything in particular would happen to it. Somebody
suggested that the heart-shaped indicator was a clumsy affair, so we
substituted a small whiskey glass, upside down.

The occasion was derisive and gay,-and pretty muddled. It did not impress
me much, but I agreed to try my turn provided my opposite would agree not
to fake.

The little glass moved, and without the slightest conscious volition on
my part. That much I could determine. How far unconscious muscular action
went, I could not for the moment decide. After a time whenever the glass
moved away from me I let my fingers go limp and allowed the mechanism to
pull them after it. It did so; and once or twice dragged the glass from
under them. This was interesting. The force that moved that glass away
from me was either an outside force, or my VIS-A-VIS. It certainly was
not myself.

Here was a peculiar unanalyzable movement of an inanimate object beneath
our fingers. The fact that it spelled out simple sentences of whose
purport we none of us had any conscious inkling was an entirely secondary
consideration. For my part my main attention was concentrated on the feel
of the thing under my fingers. It had, it seemed to me, a peculiar thrill
of vitality; but I fully acknowledged to myself that such an effect might
well have been imaginative, following a strained attention. It also
seemed to me that its movements preceded rather than followed even the
slight unconscious muscular pressures; but that too could not be certain.

I am setting down thus minutely the details, not because they were
unusual--for I suspect them of being about the average--nor because of
any serious experimental value, but merely to convey a sense of
background of what later developed, and to indicate our own mental
attitude.

The "messages," as I say, did not seem to me of any importance whatever;
and for their origin I did not search beyond Hudson's SUBCONSCIOUS. A few
of them were pertinent and sensible enough, provided we were willing to
admit the claim of outside intelligences; but they contributed nothing
toward probability of these intelligences, let alone proof. There was not
a scrap of "evidential." But once, in the middle of our laughter and
buffooning, the glass moved with a sharp quick decision as though
impatient, in striking contrast to its customary fumbling.

"Why do you ask foolish questions?" it spelled.

Those sitting at the board denied having anything to do with this: it was
too apropos! Nevertheless we suspected them, and they suspected each
other.

Next our attention was caught by the repeated spelling out of the name
Betty. Now there was present a young woman nicknamed Betty. She was
standing in front of the fireplace after a very brief trial at the
board-and a somewhat scornful trial at that. We insisted that she was
being paged and that she must try again. She was reluctant, thinking this
merely an attempt of those sitting to lure her back into the game, but
finally yielded and took her place.

Immediately her fingers touched the glass it began to move in circles.
Around and around it went, faster and faster until she and her partner
could hardly keep their fingers on it. So comically like a dog frisking
in delight was it that we all burst into laughter.

"It's glad to get Betty," said we.

If any of us expected great things because it had what it wanted, we were
disappointed. Under her fingers the glass moved with a little more
precision, but the so-called "messages" were much the same, the usual
ouija experience of what might or might not be our own unconscious
action: a jumble of unintelligences, a few trivial messages purporting to
come from deceased relatives and friends. However, just as the word
"Betty" had recurred before, now an interpolated sentence was repeated
from time to time, without relevance.

"Get a pencil," it spelled, "Get a pencil," insistently, over and over.

Betty had heard that there was such a thing as automatic writing, though
she had no knowledge of it beyond the mere fact of its existence. Some
days later, privately, she did "get a pencil," and sat with it poised on
a sheet of paper, her hand resting inert and her mental activity reduced
to a mere question mark. The pencil began to move just as the whiskey
glass had moved on the ouija board. After some hesitation she came to me
about it, probably encouraged by my more analytical interest in the other
evening's foolery.

The pencil moved very slowly, and it wrote curiously formed script,
without capitals or punctuation, or even spacings, like one long
continuous word. It was necessary to go over it painstakingly, dividing
the words by vertical marks-when we had determined them. Sometimes we
interlined more plainly, in our own hand, what we made them out to be.
The result made sense.

Betty assured me that she had, consciously, nothing to do with moving the
pencil. Furthermore, she said that she did not know the sense of what had
been written until we had puzzled it out. As I knew Betty's complete
honesty I believed her.

Now here was a new phase of interest added to the first. Here also,
apparently, was manipulation by force outside of consciousness.
Furthermore, it was a reliable field of experiment. Nobody could be
certain of the bona fides of a mixed lot of people out for a good time,
but I was absolutely certain of Betty. There was no question as to one
thing: that her hand was seized and used; and that the seizing and using
was not of her conscious brain.

We agreed on a number of things besides this. The seizing and using was
by a force outside her own consciousness;* no question of that. The force
might be directed by her subconscious. Or it might be by some outside
intelligence. That was what purported. It would be silly to adopt such a
theory merely because of that claim. It would be equally silly to reject
it without further experiment. It would be worse than silly to shy off
from the whole subject merely because it was "uncanny" or "unnatural."

* Not necessarily outside her own SELF, of course.

Similarly as to the content of the writing. It might well be Betty's own.
Or it might, as it purported, come from outside. How could we tell unless
we gave it a chance? An arbitrary refusal seemed to us just as
"superstitious" as a blind acceptance. Furthermore we could neither of us
see how we could come to any harm, mental or otherwise, by such an
examination, provided we kept our feet on the ground.

"Let's give it a sporting chance," said Betty, "Let's give 'them' a
chance to say what 'they' want to without cross-examining like shyster
lawyers."




CHAPTER III


The Development of Betty


1.

We worked, then, together at frequent intervals: I as the recorder and
observer, Betty as the "station." The writing itself became easier. After
a time the words were divided one from the other. Betty blindfolded her
eyes, or looked away from the paper so that she might separate herself as
far as possible from what was to come next. I tried to keep close watch
of her attitude and reactions; with the resolve to call the whole thing
off if, physically or mentally, this experiment seemed to affect her
undesirably.

"We must keep open minded," I warned her, "not only about the thing
itself, but also about its effects. If at any time it seems to tire you
or to affect your health or nerves, or make you fuzzy-minded, or any of
the things everybody is always warning about, we'll drop it. And we'll
quit cold if what it seems to lead to gets visionary, or doesn't keep
human, or tries to take us off our jobs in any way."

We had, as I see it, one commanding advantage over average experience. We
neither of us approached all this from an emotional angle. Most people
do. The customary lure is that of hoped-for communication with the dead.
We had no such desire. We had suffered no recent bereavements. Our
interest was of exploration. We wanted to find out, if we could, what it
was all about-and why.

Up to this time the phenomenon itself had held our interest, but now the
content as well began to attract our attention. I had heard and
subscribed to the thoughtless statement that "spirits" never uttered
anything of sense or consequence. The product of this first automatic
writing, while often fragmentary, often difficult, often groping, was
never silly; and even in its incoherence it seemed to hold fast to a few
central ideas. And these ideas were sensible.

For instance, there was a steadfast refusal to give advice or opinion on
matters of our everyday lives. The argument seemed to be that everyday
life is a series of opportunities for making decisions; that those
decisions form character; that making another man's decisions for him
deprives him unwarrantedly of opportunity. That looked to us like sound
common sense.

Another bit of common sense-or at least it seemed common sense to me-was
the direct statement that the object was not primarily the development of
"psychic" power in Betty. That was to be of secondary importance. The
main objective was, first, the development of an easier and surer method
of communication; and, second, an expansion of her consciousness to a
capacity of understanding things to be communicated.

That was a program to enlist any one's intelligent interest. It was worth
the formulation of what, in scientific procedure, is known as a
provisional hypothesis, and its adoption "without prejudice," as the
lawyers have it. The provisional hypothesis must be the existence of
invisible intelligences. Their actuality must await, for belief, on the
outcome.


2.

The automatic writing continued for several months, improving steadily in
facility and coherence. Fresh material was supplemented each day by a
brief review of principles. This, we were told, was to facilitate their
absorption into our mental structure. Also certain simple exercises in
bodily, mental and spiritual control were prescribed. In September we
were told that soon the writing would cease. It did so.

Shortly afterward I was called away on a business trip. During this
absence I happened to read a book entitled OUR UNSEEN GUEST, and on my
return I suggested trying the method used by its authors. Accordingly
Betty lay with bandaged eyes, and I placed my fingers on her wrist.

At once she slipped easily into a kind of freed or double consciousness.
From it she reported various experiences. Her speech was at first halting
and stumbling, her phrases fragmentary, as though she were having great
difficulty. Apparently this was due to the necessity for running two
consciousnesses at once. The normal, from which she spoke, was
subordinate, it seemed; her real awareness being centered in a deeper
consciousness, from which she reported back.

For a long time that difficulty was so great as almost to obscure
coherence. It seemed to me that the automatic writing had been much
better. Why abandon it just when it was getting good? But we followed on,
as we had agreed between ourselves that we would, and by keeping at it,
in due time-just as had the automatic writing-it justified itself .

The idea seemed to be that Betty was to be brought in touch, through the
superconsciousness, with realities which she absorbed direct; and with
ideas conveyed sometimes in words heard with the "inner ear," sometimes
by mental impression. These things she transferred down to her habitual
consciousness, which then reported them to me.

She constantly complained of the dilution caused by this transfer. What
reached the paper was, according to her, but an unsatisfactory pale
shadow of the actuality.


3.

Possibly the handicap of this difficulty was also felt by these
Invisibles. Along in February,-nearly a year after the beginnings with
the ouija board-they began to experiment with a third technique.

Betty's voice quite altered in quality and timbre. Her phraseology, too,
changed. Some third personality purported to be speaking directly through
her.

Progress was exasperatingly slow. After long struggle a single word,
sometimes a single syllable, would be explosively enunciated. Often an
hour would be consumed in the delivery of a few short sentences. But, as
in the other two phases, facility did follow a long patience.

That, in brief, is the story of Betty's training in technique. In the
appendix will be found what we have been told, and what we have guessed,
of the way it operates.

At present there is often considerable fluency, so that I have trouble
keeping up with the transcription; on other occasions there seems to be
difficulty. Sometimes the direct voice speaks, at others Betty herself
reports word by word as though taking dictation, and again she describes
her impressions and experiences in her own way. Sometimes if difficulty
arises all three methods are tried.

I might add as an interesting small item that often, when I make a
mistake in writing down a word I have mis-heard, I am instantly
corrected, although Betty herself is lying below the level of the writing
table, on the side opposite my pencil hand, and with her eyes
blindfolded. "Attitude of mind" I once wrote down, and was instantly
stopped in mid-sentence. "No, no!" interrupted Betty, "ALTITUDE of mind."

Of course we realized that the choice of these methods probably depended
on what was to be got over. Yet we must have some curiosity as to why the
elaborate pains and patience?

"What we want is, not merely facility, but a trained intelligent
co-operation," they told us in effect, "Only thus can we command
invariable reliability."

Nevertheless, we argued, others have succeeded at this sort of thing
without such training. We instanced several examples. They agreed.

"But attested phenomena of a spontaneous or sporadic character," said
they, "are produced, or made possible at all, by a condition of extreme
flexibility. The flexibility, and utility, of unconsciousness is soon
lost. It is difficult to stress this sufficiently. Plasticity and
pliability are essential, splicing both the higher and lower
consciousnesses. Rigidity permits no impress. Therefore, one of two
things is necessary; either unconscious* manipulation, or trained
intelligent co-operation. Between the two lie all the failures."

* i.e., invisible manipulation of a totally unconscious station.

This was satisfactory as a general proposition.

So there we were, apparently ready to set sail. We had begun to
understand what was meant by "intelligent cooperation." Betty was to be
fitted for an introduction into the realities of another
consciousness,-that of these invisible intelligences. She was to go to
them, instead of their coming to her. It was described as a "lessening of
density," a "change of specific gravity." The matter was more complicated
than that, but the statement expresses the gist of it. Basic concepts
were to be added to hers, new perceptions were to be developed. In a
word, her equipment was to be expanded. And as intelligent co-operation
presupposes participation, her consciousness was not taken from her in
the customary deep trance. That does not mean she remained conscious as
you and I are conscious. She was unaware of her physical
surroundings,--she went "somewhere else." But in that somewhere else she
retained her faculties of thought. She was not put out, drugged, put
asleep. She was transferred.

Even in what we have called direct communication she was merely placed
one side. She expressed this in various ways, "I must not listen": "I
must carry this across without looking at it." Occasionally, but rarely
and only for certain exact accuracies, she goes so "far away"-as it seems
to her-that apparently there remains to her only a shred of
consciousness. But that shred is always there, and through it the
approach to "intelligent co-operation" is always possible.


4.

By this time our original interest in the mere mechanics of the thing had
given way to an increasing respect for the teaching itself. It was
forward moving and logical. It was systematic. It possessed a depth of
kindly wisdom. Above all its suitability to our own needs was uncannily
accurate. In general it was clear and consistent. Occasionally, to be
sure, some of the fragments of indirect approach to a large subject were
vague to us for a time; but always we found that, sooner or later, they
fitted together. Gradually we came to have confidence that this would
come about whenever we ran into mists, and invariably the confidence was
justified.

Indeed, so profoundly satisfying was the material itself, that while of
course, the question of its origin remained important, that importance
became secondary. It was conceivable that all this might be a product of
Betty's "subconscious." If so, this experiment was bringing to light a
trend of thought distinctly foreign to her usual consciousness, and
outside her remembered experience. If this were so, and if by this simple
technique we could make this unsuspected part of herself available, why
then we would be very foolish not to use it.

In the succeeding pages I shall speak of the Invisibles as distinct
individuals, though discarnate. This seems to be the easiest thing to do,
and it has the merit of expressing my present belief. I do not Insist on
this view for others; nor even urge it. The value of the thing offered
must lie in itself, regardless of its source. It may originate In Betty
(in which case she is more of a wonder than I had supposed): Betty may by
this mechanism tap some wide source of wisdom, some reservoir, some
"universal mind": or in this state of divided consciousness she may fall
into harmony with the stored or accumulated experience of humankind. I do
not know; and anybody is free and welcome to adopt any hypothesis that
appeals. But here the thing is. It did not exist before as a formulated
whole, either in our minds or in any of our reading: it came-and is
coming-in the manner before set down. Those are the facts. They may be
explained as you will, but they exist.

The following pages were assembled about a year and a half after the
beginning of the whole experience. The material that had come by then
comprised a little over four hundred typewritten pages. This was by no
means all teaching. A great deal of it was personal; and a great deal
more of it was devoted to experiments in acquiring technique and in
Betty's development. Consequently for general consumption it was becoming
increasingly necessary to separate the teaching and correlate what we had
into some sort of logical sequence. We realized perfectly that it was
only a beginning, and a fragmentary beginning at that; but we had found
that even that much had given us a new outlook and a fresh grip on life.
Furthermore, the few friends who had followed the experiment also
appeared to have found it strengthening and inspiring.

And now was the time to do it. One thing at least I had learned in a life
of explorations in strange countries: If first impressions are not set
down while they are fresh, they are lost. Striking things become familiar
commonplaces. The old timer no more thinks of mentioning them than he
would think of mentioning the fact that houses have doors. All this first
stuff might be tentative and only a beginning. Still, beginnings must be
made; and for those approaching the subject anew, as we had approached
it, precisely the beginning that helped us would probably, help them. It
might be, as our Invisibles said, only preliminary; only a Primer. We
have to have primers in a primary school.

That was over fifteen years ago. Since then we have added nearly fifteen
hundred pages to the record. And from this perspective we can see that
our judgment was good. The later material has indeed the profounder
significance and illumination. In the light of that illumination it would
be possible to rewrite my earlier compilation. We comprehend better now
what the beginnings were about, how they fit into the whole scheme, which
is even yet slowly disclosing itself. But would that be wise? These first
four hundred pages brought us to a certain point from which we passed to
an understanding of the rest. Our progress was wisely conducted. It seems
reasonable that the same stepping stones, in the same order, that offered
us a foothold may serve others as well.

It is wonderful exploration, a whole new country. The trails are dim.
Perhaps sometimes we must back track. But they seem to be leading
somewhere pretty definite. A shout across to those on other tracks
encourages us to believe that they all converge.




CHAPTER IV



Proportion


1.

When first I confronted the task of putting those four hundred pages in
some sort of logical sequence, I was appalled. There was no logical
sequence. The method had been, apparently, to deal with a dozen different
subjects simultaneously, adding to each haphazard and at intervals. That,
at the time, seemed unnecessarily baffling. Later we gathered that this
had a reason. It must be remembered that the ideal was of "intelligent
co-operation," and to this end Betty's own mind was never placed
completely in abeyance. Consequently, if the interest of the subject
under discussion sufficiently aroused its attention, then there was
always danger of its running off on a tangent of its own, adding its own
ideas or conclusions. This we called "coloring." To avoid that, a subject
would be carried on for a time, and then abruptly dropped. Later, perhaps
weeks later, it would be resumed. In the meantime a dozen others had been
introduced and partially carried on.

"How shall I begin?" I asked helplessly.

"The balanced proportion, the balanced ration of life is the first thing
to impress on the world," said they. "Balance is the big thing to
emphasize. The world is crippled now because of its withered spiritual
faculties."

There should be, they explained further, a certain working proportion
between what we call the material and what we call the spiritual. If that
proportion is overbalanced ON EITHER SIDE trouble always results. By
attainment of the right proportion we shall in one way or another gain
all the things worth while in this life and the next. In fact, the whole
problem of successful living can be expressed in that one simple formula:
attain actively the proportions of life. "The rounding out of proportion
is the foundation of everything" they told us. As a general proposition
that sounds broad and simple enough. But when we approach the problem in
search of detail, then we find ourselves in face of the greater
mysteries. How is the proportion wrong, as to the world; how is it wrong
as to me? How is the balance to be struck?

"You have enfeebled the word 'God,'" they said. "The world has grown
ashamed of the spirit. It mortifies it just as the old ascetics used to
mortify the body."

This thought is not new, perhaps, but it needs freshening and
interpretation. The balance happens to be tilted on one side now: but it
was tilted on the other, and it may be so again. "Religion too often
ignores the material and so repels the vigorously human. That balance
should be restored, for the proportion is wrong there too. Weld lovable,
humorous, vigorously practical human life with spiritual dictatorship, an
inward sense of proportion. Welcome and accept all natural human
instincts, all the savoring of life, but permeate them with the vitality
of the spirit. Those who savor even the highest forms of life without
this permeation of the spirit will stagnate, sink backward, imprison
themselves in matter. With them the spiritual sense becomes atrophied."

There is no doubt, to epitomize their further remarks on this subject,
that the main trouble with us now, in this age of science and what we
call hard-headed thinking, is just that lack of proportion which
atrophies our spiritual awareness. And there is equally no doubt, knowing
mankind's tendency always to overdo in reaction, that our main future
danger is likely to be a swing back to the narrow, ungodlike, inhuman
"spirituality" that mortifies the flesh, passes blue laws, neglects plain
business, and lets the world go hang.

Therefore while our Invisibles lay the most stress where it belongs, on
the present spiritual inertness of the world; they are also continually
warning us that only by a hearty mingling in all worldly matters, a
complete sharing of physical life, a whole-souled attention to our own
business and our relations to people, will we, or anybody else, ever get
anywhere. Over and over, in many variations of form, they repeat this
injunction. "Take up more and wider interests. Grasp the joy of living.
Mingle more with people," they admonish again and again. I must confess
that the common sense of this, coupled with their refusal to direct or
advise on any detail, went far toward enlisting my attention in the
beginning.

So then the first proposition of all is very simple: the balance, the
proportion of spiritual and material is out, with the overemphasis at
present on the material. But what are we going to do about it? It is all
very well to say "let us be more spiritual," but how are we to accomplish
it? A vague, expansive, indefinite resolve to be a source of light never
got anybody anywhere. All life is a practical affair to be gone at in a
practical fashion. That is just as true of the spiritual as of the
material. Day dreaming or vague enthusiastic mysticism gets us nowhere.
That is something we must come to realize; that is what repels the
average human work-a-day man when you say spiritual to him. He is
instinctively a practical man, dealing with life in a practical way, and
his intuitions as to that are perfectly sound. If spirituality is in
reality an integral part of life, as the Invisibles tell us so
definitely, then its development and use must be a practical matter that
can be worked on just like any other desirable ingredient of fife. With
this the Invisibles agree:

"Keep the emphasis on the usability and practical application of the
teaching," they said. "Necessarily in order to redress the balance we
have to stimulate the spiritual side; but the aim is not the development
of psychic powers. To the world the interest will reside in practical
application to everyday life; a thing it doubts as to the most of
spiritual development. The natural tendency is to seek psychic powers
rather than practice human living. All truly spiritual teachings have
been acknowledged as truth, have carried within themselves the conviction
of truth; but always they have been put aside as unattainable. We are
trying to give a commonplace working plan to make them attainable. The
gap has grown wider and wider between ideal and achievement because of
one-sided education, lack of cultivation, and even lack of
acknowledgment, of the spiritual being. We try to give a graded
instruction from kindergarten up, to convey a method of arousing and
stimulating and strengthening spiritual faculties dormant through
generations of neglect."


2. MAKE IT SO.

Before proceeding with this graded instruction, however, it is absolutely
essential that we realize one thing fully: THE NECESSITY OF SOMETHING
BESIDES INTELLECTUAL RECOGNITION OF TRUTH. Let us consider this
carefully, for its application is on every page of what is to follow.

We must not only read and understand: we must DO until we absorb into the
substance of ourselves. There is in that the difference between the
athlete and the person who has read the rules of the game, the art critic
and the painter who has struggled with pigments. We must not only see
that it is so: we must MAKE IT SO. This is not knowledge: it is
development.

"Do not merely file the letters we send with instructions and advice,"
went some of the earliest automatic writing. "Read them over and ask if
you are acting on them." "Put most of your energy into doing a few simple
things advised, instead of trying to grasp too much at a time. Do not get
the attitude of 'yours received and placed on file.' We want you to go
only as fast as you can develop. Otherwise we would be taking you from
useful things of the world into a no man's land of idle speculative
dreaming. This is far from our purpose. Your surface mind would go
through surface evolutions which would have no growth or corresponding
demand from within. You must use and exercise our teachings, not merely
acknowledge them as interesting. Mankind has always accepted so
comfortably the revelations of the chosen prophets of the world, and has
as lightly fulfilled its obligations by acknowledging their truth and
dismissing them; ever looking for something new before they have acquired
or digested the old."

"Your progress is in your own hands. We can do little but watch you gain
necessary strength before we can help you further. That is the law. We
can only act as the complement to the act. Of yourself you must drag
yourself at least near your idea, so that you can reach it in moments,
before you go further. Otherwise it is just a shallow intellectual thing.
There is no substance at all in pure intellect. It is just a very fine
shadow. The simplest achievement is so much more important. Pure
intellect is aloof, unrelated."

"Mere intellectual recognition of a truth is merely the empty vein; the
real force is the volition, the pulsing life-giving fluid of
utilization." **

"We can widen your vision, we can give you the impetus, but then we must
leave you to manifest or retrogress. If you could know how anxiously we
watch the seed, how yearningly we strive to continue the stimulation! But
we are not permitted to carry the growth itself. That is in your hands.
Truth MUST manifest itself in action. No step ahead can ever be taken
until the fulfillment of what is revealed. We say again, revelation MUST
be manifested in people's lives before more can be given from this side.
Slow growth is the only reality. All other recognition is but the
intellectual acknowledgment. Your wealth, as we measure it, is the power
you gain to become in solid reality what at first you have been merely
experimentally."

"We repeat: we cannot emphasize too frequently the fact that mere
recognition of occasional truth is not good enough. You must soak it up,
live in it, let it permeate you, let it control you before it is yours.
Nothing can be achieved merely by conception. This book is absolutely
useless if taken merely intellectually."

"It must be done, not under our manipulation, as it were, but in full
strength and purpose of your human faculties. These alone can act
successfully on your physical world."


3. THE NECESSITY OF EFFORT.

The thing we are to strive for, then, is a recognition of the spiritual
forces about us; a contact with them; and through that contact the
establishment of a more balanced proportion between the material and the
spiritual. Does that sound mystic and vague and fuzzy? It is only a
general proposition; and we can lay it aside and come back to it with
what will be fuller understanding. It is just a point to take off from.

The first step in this process, we were told, consists in establishing
conscious contact with the spiritual forces about us. And, like all first
steps, it is the most difficult. It has the disadvantage of being
something new and unaccustomed. It has the handicap of seeming to be
groping and intangible until we have found for ourselves a handle by
which to seize it. And above all, the "first dead lift," as they call it,
must be accomplished unaided. Once the process is started we will get
help in abundance according to our capacity to receive, but we must by
our own effort break through.

"In everything you do the amount of success depends on the amount of
energy you put into it," said the Invisibles. "The force we bring into
the world, let us call it inspirational force for the sake of giving it a
name, comes from a combination of conditions created by the person
himself. We can only take advantage of that combination. Once a person of
his own force establishes it, we can act on it. The initial step is your
work. This force is, roughly speaking, emanations from you which meet
complementary forces from this side. We utilize what you unconsciously
possess. You were born with wings: why prefer to crawl through life? You
acquire exactly in proportion as you arouse yourself to take."

"It is just by determination and faith that you accomplish the first dead
lift. That manifestation with yourself and by yourself, you must get
before you will gain any response. That is what people do not realize.
They don't put any strength into it, and when it will not work at once,
they go the other way. You must get that strength for yourself."


4. CONTACT.

The thing at which we are aiming-access to the great ocean of spiritual
influence-must, for lack of a better term, be called spiritual contact
and permeation. The term is inadequate. But assume for the moment this
hypothesis, simply as a working basis: that we are living in, surrounded
by, a finer more powerful substance. You can call it what you
please-ether, electric field, or spiritual vibrations. When we are
pervious we are permeated by it and obtain from it various elements of
expansion and growth. But ordinarily in our world-absorbed consciousness
is no chink or cranny by which its influence can enter. We are like
people swimming in a sea completely encased in diving suits that admit no
drop of the life-giving water. Only on comparatively rare occasions when
we are off our guard, so to speak, do we permit ourselves even
unconsciously to be reached by it.

But this contact or permeation CAN be brought about by a definite process
of personal volition. Consider this carefully, for it is most
important-this idea that we are capable of enlarging our VOLUNTARY
capacity to receive.

The first essential of this volition must be a genuine energy of desire.
We must WANT to reach out in harmony with spiritual forces. That WANT,
that desire is essential, and it is all that is essential, as a point of
departure. We are perhaps at first doing this only with our heads, but
later it Will unite with the rest of our beings, what we vaguely call our
hearts, our souls.

However, the mere undefined desire is only the taking off place. If it is
to send us anywhere we must have some indication of the direction in
which we are to go. What is this spiritual contact like, and how are we
to reach for it?

Possibly a faint notion of the process may be obtained from analogy. Most
people proceed through life "busy with their own thoughts." That is the
way, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you will find yourself if you go
out for a walk. The teeming inner life of your mental activities holds
you, so that you are cramped within yourself and things outside are half
noticed or perhaps not noticed at all. Now stop short and let things
about you into your consciousness. You will be surprised to find how many
actually have had no existence in you. Birds' singing for example: a
moment ago you literally did not hear them. The line of trees on the
hill: you sensed vaguely that they were there because you were staring
straight at them, but the cast of them against the pale green sky behind,
the light on their leaves, the curious molten look of their foliage in
mass, those things simply were not. You saw the fields perhaps, but you
did not sense them. The EFFECT of the landscape, whatever it might be,
was shut out because you were occupied within the narrow confines of
yourself. Until you voluntarily threw open your spirit to wider
influences than those of yourself, they could not claim you. By this
shift of attention I do not mean a detailed intellectual appraising of
the surroundings, a cataloging, an enumerating of features and species
and lines of composition. That is another, a special job. I mean simply
the expansion that is the result of the shift from a busy mental
concentration within to a voluntary wide opening to influence from
without. That in itself is a form, a simple form, of spiritual contact.

The appreciation of beauty, in the sense of a surrender to its influence
rather than a critical analysis, is another example both of what I mean
and of a simple spiritual contact. "It is the biggest uplifting material
thing you possess," said the Invisibles. "Some may find the hidden spark
in a jewel, others in a temple drum or a Buddha. Beauty is a great and
quiet teacher." But what I am asking here is that in your response to
beauty you notice the difference between the out-going expanded feel of
you, and the indrawn close-huddled concentration of ordinary affairs.

Another example you can find, perhaps, if you are a lover of dogs.
Sometime when you are walking with them, you look up at them wagging
busily along down the trail ahead, and for a moment you stop thinking
about things. "Good old pups," you say to yourself, and with that phrase
is a distinct out-expanding feeling beyond your ordinary boundaries. That
is a minor instance; and I throw it in as one casts a fly on blank water.
It may convey a glimpse to somebody.

Please note, I am not trying as yet to give any complete formula or
directions for spiritual contact; I am merely trying to convey the
feeling of expansion and wide-heartedness, of getting outside one's self.
Once one has recognized the feeling I mean, one goes after it consciously
for the joy there is in it.

If this analogy is clear, then we are ready to begin the kindergarten.




CHAPTER V



Elementary Steps


1. RELAXING.

Most so-called occult instruction seems to begin with relaxing. It is
good practice, whether one believes in the ultimate result or not, and
one finds it surprisingly difficult to cease all tension, not only in the
body, but in every thought of the brain. It is at first a man-size job;
and paradoxically enough, one is likely to find one's self shortly in a
state of tension trying to get rid of tension! Nothing marvelous
immediately follows. But it is essential, and is the first simple
exercise toward the control that will eventually result in the spiritual
contact and absorption. Betty's first instructions, through automatic
writing, were concerned only with this point.

"Contraction," they pointed out, "results in concentrating and condensing
on the physical."

The job becomes much simpler if you just bear in mind one thing: the key
to it is imagination, not will. Nobody ever successfully willed himself
free from tension. Rather picture to yourself the condition as though it
already existed. For instance try thinking of your legs as heavy, and
then successively your arms and your head. Picture your face as smiling
faintly, but do not actually smile. See that your breathing is regular
and slow, and with each exhalation think of your body as sinking heavy
and inert.

"You must let go absolutely," said the Invisibles, "as though you were
falling through space. After relaxing absolutely, hold the condition as
long as possible; but as soon as it becomes a strained condition of mind,
abandon the effort and start over again. By degrees you can hold it
longer and longer."

At first all this should be practiced lying down; later you will find
yourself able to do it anywhere and at any time. It is rather a
fascinating game-and disconcerting to find how your left shoulder will
tighten up just as you get your right leg straightened out! It is,
incidentally, of immediate practical value in that it is physically
refreshing.

The removal of mental tension might seem more abstract and difficult, but
actually the technique is just as simple. In fact we apply it a thousand
times a day without knowing it. For every time we turn our full attention
upon sense impressions, merely as such and without regard to their
significance, our intellect pauses.

"Empty the foreground of your mind," said the Invisibles. And the first
step in doing this is to replace our usual intent intellectual foreground
with a casual sensory one. Little discontinuous sounds, passive and
placid vistas,-anything not too actively stimulating-these are ideal for
our purpose. Under their influence our usual headlong intellectual and
emotional Impetus quickly subsides, leaving the mind like a calm lake.

Once the mental rush is checked in this way, space is created in which to
take the next step. We must now reach out,-SPREAD out is more
descriptive-not yet with any definite idea of contact with the spiritual
world, but toward that wide-hearted, expansive, outside-yourself feeling
of which I have tried to give a glimpse.

"It is not easy to gain a perception of this process; nor, after we have
got the hang of how it feels, is it easy to go on with it faithfully and
with conviction." The results grow in us from so feeble a beginning that
they do not reach even our watchful consciousness for a long time. That
is a period of faith. If we are not convinced that it is going to work,
we can at least refrain from a conviction that it is NOT going to work.
We must foredetermine success, but above all we must not EXPECT anything.
Our job is to thrust out the busy thoughts of the world we live in, to
relax physically, and to strive with a real desire for that wide-hearted
receptivity of which we have had a glimpse.

At this point two warnings should be emphasized. First, it must be
thoroughly realized that this relaxation does not mean utter passivity.
"Now that you have learned to relax, you must study the degree of
relaxation," said they. "There is such a thing as too much abandon. Your
force becomes inactive. The thing to strive for is a subtle combination
of relaxation and a certain subconscious will power or determination.
Keep in mind subconsciously all your faculties, but empty the foreground
of your mind. The passivity is not that of the spirit but is entirely
physical and intellectual. Maintain yourself forcefully, NOT TO COMBAT
BUT TO HAVE STRENGTH TO RECEIVE. What you contribute of spiritual
readiness measures the strength you gain by contact."

The second warning is, DO NOT STRAIN. The moment stress, or expectancy is
allowed, that moment the doors swing shut. Instead of absorbing the
subtle effect of your landscape, you are cataloging, or analyzing or
hunting. When you find yourself in this condition, cease from all effort
and allow your attention to drift to other things. Let the traffic of
your mind proceed for a few moments. Then begin anew.

"Keep the body relaxed, but free, and stimulate the spirit to respond
with a great and rising wonder similar to that inspired by the
overwhelming beauties of nature. Unstopper your imprisoned spirit; let it
rise blithely and naturally. Enjoy yourself."


2. ASPIRATION.

When we have gained the ability to do these two simple things, without
strain, without effort, above all without stiff concentration of
mind-that is, relax physically and mentally but with a spiritual
alertness beneath that makes our inner selves feel wide open, as they
feel wide open when we consciously and absorbently and uncritically look
at something beautiful-then we can go on to the conscious reaching for
spiritual contact, or "The absorption into your heart of the reality."

This is so foreign to our everyday habit of thinking that it is a little
difficult to express. It is one of those things we understand only after
we have worked into it. The essential beginning is that we must DESIRE a
fuller life, whether we know what it is or not. The practical beginning
is to get our machinery assembled, as we have described, and then to
experiment with it until it works-as it surely will if our desire is
genuine.

It took more than a year of hammering away at this desire concept before
we felt we had really grasped it and could use it. They described it in a
hundred different ways. "It is a genuine aspiration, not an intellectual
curiosity," they told us, "a yearning aspiration, almost like the
attraction of needle and magnet; something above that can almost be
recognized as a complement of what exists below. When this recognition,
this genuine aspiration is established, then you have your spiritual
impetus. It is humble but unwavering, not an arrogant demand. It is in
reality a great natural instinct which life there generally inhibits. It
is just a law. When you liberate certain gases chemically, they seek
their chemical affinities, just so you liberate your spirit and it
automatically follows the law. Do you see the difference between this and
letting go all holds and waiting for somebody to lift you up? The latter
is enervating and quite useless." "The energy with which you demand of us
will be the measure of what you will get. IT IS NOT SO MUCH THE ENERGY OF
DEMAND AS THE SHOWING OF A FORCE THAT CALLS ITS COMPLEMENT. It is the
energy of measure for measure, given and received!"

"Do this continually, hourly; when possible, even momently lifting your
thoughts out of and holding them free. We use the phrase 'lift your
thoughts' conventionally. In reality 'spread your thoughts' would have
been more accurate. This permeating spirit is not so much above you as
outside you; but near you, surrounding you, within touch if you would but
believe it. Reach out, not up. When you expand thus with your heart, or
think horizontally, or whatever you want to call it, you come in contact
with this spiritual substance, for the reason that if you go beyond your
boundaries you must enter it. If you find this hard to grasp, just make a
mixture of energy, feeling of desire to get on, of the intense happiness
and outgoing that beauty gives you."

This is a slow process, and many times it will seem foolish to you, and
the hope for any results will appear fantastic. Remember that it must be
not only a gradual natural growth, but also often requires stimulation to
overcome arrested development of dormant faculties. Do not anticipate
results. Take the rewards as they come; and there are such rewards at
every step. The first mere physical relaxation brings physical rest that
can be got in no other way; the open-hearted feeling when acquired is a
pleasure and a mental and nerve refreshment in itself. For the moment be
satisfied with that; and get the habit. In nine you will be able to do it
"hourly, and even momently."

One more warning repeated before going on to the first effect of
establishing this spiritual contact. DO NOT STRAIN. "The moment you try
to create, to pump UPI to reach for definite things, you are in grave
danger. You may get almost anything. Better to stay asleep on earth, far
better. You will never get anywhere if you are thinking of what you are
going to get. In that case you would be just a curiosity seeker. It is
deadly hopeless to try that. You will be led into a blind alley and left
there. That is done with so many people!"

"Belief in the attainability of higher powers is a legitimate ambition,
but they must be grown into faithfully. The amateur method of seeking
growth or spiritual freedom is by a terrible concentration of mind, but
this must be replaced by expansion of the heart."

"How can I bring to you strongly enough this first principle? It is to
expand in spirit, not intellectually. The spirit is usually like a
desiccated fruit inside the brain. Let your spirit soak up in a simple
and pleasant fashion until it is a fitting mate for your brain. Lay bare
your problems to the influence of the great expansion which will bring
your solution. This is the only real channel which will bring permanent
wholesome psychic influence. It is the safe and open highroad. There are
other ways, of course, but they are exploration."


3. AUTOMATIC ACTION.

But if we are not to strive for any definite results, I hear you say,
what can we expect to happen?

Take it on faith for a moment that from the world of the spiritual that
is part of us, and should be a balanced part of us, comes an instant
almost automatic response to any genuine contact. This seems to be a law
of wide application.

It might be described as spontaneous action of the spiritual functions,
as they are developed, very much like the action of the heart in our
physical bodies. "When once you get hold of anything of this sort so it
is inside you, at once it begins to work automatically, so you don't have
to fuss with it. There is, pertaining to each level of life, what might
be called involuntary action. It is like digestion in that it works
automatically to produce results within its particular sphere of
influence or zone of action."

Incidentally this automatic action seems to be a law that follows all
effort, putting forth of volition. Whenever a thing is desired enough to
cause an outgoing of determination, automatic action begins. Thus on each
act of will depend many things. That is outside the scope of our present
discussion: but later in these pages the working of that law will recur
many times: so it is just as well to get the idea now.

At this particular point we are concerned with it only as it assures us
that the moment we succeed, however feebly, in gaining spiritual
awareness or contact, a kind of chemical action takes place; we are
getting results of some sort, growth has begun.

As to what, definitely, this automatic action produces must be left until
later. For the moment it is enough to know that, while the first dead
lift is ours, we are sure of aid in accordance with our effort once the
first small establishment is made.




CHAPTER VI



Later Development


1. HABITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

Even if we practice spiritual contact only once in a while it can become
a wonderful experience-one that will bring a unique peace and
understanding. And in the crises of life it can give support and
illumination unimaginable. And that is not the complete picture.

To catch a glimpse of greater possibilities let us return to our
illustrative country walk. You will recall the feeling of expansion, of
getting outside one's self, of widened being, when we stopped to include
in our consciousness the influence of a beauty hitherto held outside by
our preoccupation within. There is no doubt that the pleasure and benefit
of our walk would be greatly enhanced could we MAINTAIN that outreaching
expansion, could we CONTINUE to see and admit within ourselves the
influences outside. But we don't. We hold it for a minute, and then
something reminds us of something and our busy brains are off like dogs
on a scent. The trouble is that our established habit is against us.

When we paused at my suggestion on the hilltop we opened ourselves to the
outside by a conscious effort. When that effort was withdrawn we dropped
back automatically. We did not have the habit of keeping open to the
outside. This we must acquire if we are to admit naturally, continuously
an influence we have enjoyed only for a moment. Otherwise the instant we
relax vigilance our thoughts and emotions will seize on us and drag us
back with them into their busy little cozy lair.

And exactly the same is true of the more complete contact we have been
talking about. If we are satisfied with just trying it on once in a
while, most of the possible benefit will be lost.

"It is an HABITUAL SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS they are after," Betty
reported at one time. "The gaining of this does not mean straining or
striving; it is more a matter of how frequently you think of it, just
live it calmly and comfortably. Walk through your days as a creature with
folded wings, conscious of the possession of another element and the
ability to enter it. When worries and world annoyances come, you can rise
strongly and determinedly, spend a few moments in calm, and at once
descend reinforced to the object in hand."

"The thing is not to settle down into yourself, but to be always
dependent on the companionship of your spirit, that seems to be just
above the surface, like a mooring, or buoy. The soul has to live in the
body, ordinarily; but in this way you make your body live with your
soul."

Over and over in varying and sometimes picturesque forms this idea was
presented to us. HABITUAL consciousness of the spiritual association must
be gained; HABITUAL living in wide heartedness, receptiveness, must be
compassed; HABITUAL appreciation of the necessity for, and hence living
desire for, this spiritual contact must become normal. When it becomes a
mode of life, then we have gained the thing constant in ourselves.

"The only way to build it," said they, "is to make it a workaday ordinary
kind of affair of which you are aware all the time about your business.
If you want to get anywhere, you have to take this philosophy home with
you, and dress it, and eat it, and breathe it, and motor down town with
it. When you are able to do that you are ready for something more. At
present anything more than what you have would overflow into merely an
intellectual appreciation."

In other words, to sum up, we must not only understand intellectually
what spiritual contact is, but we must "make it so." We must not only
"make it so" occasionally, but we must gradually learn to make it a more
and more consistent habit.

But there is another, and very essential, consideration. We must not only
make a growing habit of spiritual contact: we must also keep it natural
and vital. Such things have a fatal tendency to slump into a kind of
mechanical ritual, conscientiously and laboriously performed for the good
of the soul. Better far to seek contact less often and keep its eager and
spontaneous freshness.

"The moment you begin to think about it too one-sidedly," said they, "you
become self-conscious. What are you going to do about it? Why, go where
you can't be self-conscious; or else get another idea of some sort in
your head. Nature is one way: sunsets, stars, moonlight, frogs at night.
You can't be self-conscious then. Snap go the bonds, and you are all
right. There is another way: through a thing you love, even if it is only
a horse or a dog or a plant. But it can't be done by just saying you are
going to do it; any more than you can just tell a man to talk French."

As time goes on we will be able to reach for contact more and more often
without "disciplining" ourselves too much. But at first "it is not easy
to be loose-skinned and natural. There comes a reaction-a danger."

And above all we must dodge the idea that this training is going to make
Superior Beings of us over night. "Months of successful effort must
elapse, until you are steeped, saturated, permeated with the fluid
strength of spiritual contact. At first you are struggling in a kind of
blind instinct to gather strength, but without being able to see what you
have achieved. Keep your faith in the vitality of effort. It requires
mastering before you feel the repose, the assurance of strength and
progress."

"The only relaxation is in accustomedness."


2. STABILITY.

Little by little, as we succeed in making spiritual contact habitual, we
may expect to come into possession of a quality they sometimes called
stability.

Stability, as a word, seems to have been accepted through lack of a
better. As used by them, it connotes something more than the usual
meaning of steadfastness.

It represents, rather, a definite positive quality within, which forms a
constant to which we can refer ourselves; a core around which our active
lives can be organized; an anchor to windward in times of stress. Betty's
approach to this idea was by the usual roundabout method of symbolic
experiences.

"I've got to climb and to work-a ladder-steep, hard work," ran one of her
early reports, "and it's got to be done enthusiastically and lightly and
vigorously and with steadfast purpose. I feel like a hod carrier climbing
a ladder. As long as I don't feel the weight and the climb-what is it
when you feel adequate to a thing: you have a tremendous load, but your
enthusiasm makes you unaware of it, so you don't feel it and are eager to
do it? I know what it is like: it's like the reason the pressure of the
atmosphere does not crush your body. That is what you have to be if you
are not to cave in, get crushed.

"Such curious work, such queer work. Certain processes that are like
exercises, unproductive in themselves but necessary for strengthening.
That is what I am doing: acquiring I don't know what. This is an effort
at sustaining a condition. You don't know how much steadfastness of
effort it takes. I explained how you had to keep up a certain pressure in
order not to collapse. That's what I have to do. It must be done or we'll
never get anywhere, we'll always be dabblers. It is like the stakes you
drive to keep plants from being blown around and broken. That is what
they want us to make. Until we have it to support us, it is all too
unstable and uncertain.

"I drove a big immovable iron stake. That was my contact. Having secured
myself to that, I built around it, quite wide and loose, a thing which
concealed its rigidity. It seemed to symbolize stability with
malleability. We seem to have to play little games like that. You must
have something to which to refer yourself: first as a stake in water
swirling about; then as planted in sand; and then as a fixed point in
space. It doesn't matter how you symbolize it, but YOU MUST HAVE
SOMETHING CONSTANT IN YOURSELF."

"They're all trying to break it down," she cried on another occasion,
"and I can't hold it together. It's like a reservoir always in danger of
being broken down by pressure from without. If it were to break down you
would lose everything in it, and it would be almost impossible to
rebuild. Failures are very bad. Just when I was thinking about
strengthening the walls and feeling full of confidence in my ability to
keep it from caving in, pressure was put on it from without; and in spite
of the fact that I ran around shoving here and shoving there it all
crumbled in. It was heartbreaking. It all crumbled in and all the
annoying things, the destructive things, the detrimental things came
whooping in. The reason it caved in was because I was working with little
materials instead of maintaining a tremendous pressure inside the
reservoir. If I had done that I could have more than equalized. Instead
of holding up the walls with my feeble earth strength, I ought to have
concentrated on filling with my own spiritual inflow. You cannot hold
against pressure from without in detail or in spots. You must maintain
the whole level. This is an attempt in various ways to make me realize
that the pressure must be from within outwards. What we must work for is
the feeling of inward force and pressure which is what we call the inward
spiritual consciousness. Until they are perfectly sure of stability they
are afraid to go on."

The applications and uses of this quality spread out fanwise in every
direction. It is through them that this philosophy attains much of its
significance and value. But that is a large subject, and one which must
be left until later.




CHAPTER VII



Personal Experience Again


1.

Enough of the text has been given in the preceding chapters to convince
the reader that the stuff is direct, simple and logical in expression.
Take the section I called MAKE IT SO. I have set down its sentences
without change, and in exactly the order they were given. But those
sentences came to us almost literally one at a time over a period of a
year and a half. They were scattered here and there in a mass of material
on a dozen other subjects. They had to be dug out and placed one after
the other in Juxtaposition; and when that was done, we had a complete
short essay, properly formed and proportioned'

Mind you, there was no Juggling in all this. On each occasion I put down
on its appropriate card in a card index the fact that something had been
said on the make-it-so idea, with the page number. Or on automatic
action, or the substance of thought or whatever. Then when the time
arrived for compilation I simply extracted each reference, in its
original order, from the main body, and copied it down. I did this
mechanically, without editing or "interpretation"; and I confess I was
amazed that what had heretofore seemed to be brilliant fragments made so
considered a whole. This make-it-so section represents twenty-five
entries on the card index, ranging from page 1 to page 390 of the record!

This method, of carrying forward a great many subjects at the same time
without clearly defining any one of them, was rather confusing. Just as
we began to glimpse some sort of sense in what at the moment was under
consideration, that subject would be dropped flat. The apparent
inconsequence was maddening: the fragments were interesting and
inspiring. "Virtue," we were told one day, "is not an end in itself, but
a measure of growth," which remark condenses a great deal of wisdom in a
few words. Sometimes they were beautiful in phrasing, "deprived of the
brooding beatitude of country-hearted things," for example. But for a
long time we groped. Only after it occurred to us to assemble together on
one sheet of paper all the scattered entries on one card, did we find
that we were in possession of a series of interrupted sequences. Then the
basic logic of the whole began to reveal itself as through a thinning
fog.*

* In the delicate job of extracting the sequences from the mass of
material, and in keeping them in logical order, my brother, Harwood
White, of Santa Barbara, has been of great assistance.

This was in itself a remarkable phenomenon; or at least so it appeared to
me. But as a method it was baffling, and laborious. Sometimes, pretty
impatiently, I asked myself the question you will ask yourselves: why did
they not state what they were driving at, in logical order and in so many
words?

One reason I have already touched upon. It is worth repeating. They
wanted to state what THEY were driving, at. They wanted no contributions
or dilutions from Betty. Such contributions-unconscious of course-were
inevitable if a subject was defined enough to arouse her interest. Then
it would be impossible to determine what was original matter and what
resulted from association of ideas in the station's own subconscious. We
called this "coloring." 77 It could be best avoided, it seemed, by
attacking the subject in these brief darting raids from different angles.
For a fuller discussion I must again refer you to the appendix.

Parenthetically, that portion of our experiences that had to do with
development, as distinct from the teaching, was largely aimed at the
elimination of this coloring. The mind of the ordinary sensitive is, by
the very fact of sensitivity, peculiarly prone, under almost any
stimulus, to seize upon a content of its storehouse mind and gallop off
with it down to its logical conclusion. If one is naturally "psychic" one
may easily and promptly get something extra-normal. But there will be
with it an awful amount of chaff for a few grains of wheat. The better
and more rugged the physical health, the easier the contact; the better
the nervous and spiritual control, the less likely a runaway into
irrelevancies. The effort with Betty seemed directed toward these things,
and NOT toward the development of "psychic power." The thesis appeared to
be that only by an emphasis on everyday living could anything approaching
habitual reliability be attained.

In this effort, interestingly enough, the "Invisibles" asserted that they
were groping, were experimenting, just as much as we were! They tried
several schemes which they abandoned after short trials. This necessity
of experiment, it is worth repeating, was because her technique was to be
exactly the opposite of the usual procedure. Ordinarily, you will recall
that we were told, the communicating intelligences came all the way to
the translator, and so became more or less dulled and confused by the
"denser" earth conditions. The idea was to reverse this, to train in
Betty an ability to go all the way to them, to enter THEIR conditions;
but at the same time to function in her own sufficiently to report back,
as translator, what she there acquired.

"We do not want to be very strong on this side," said some of the very
earliest automatic writing, "because it is part of our scheme for you to
do your share. It is an experiment to avoid the difficulties of relaying
messages so far. The idea is constantly to DECREASE THE DENSITY between
us to be penetrated, instead of trying so hard and so uncertainly to
penetrate it. We are now near your element, but must slowly and painfully
lead you to ours in order to hold uninterrupted and trustworthy
communication." The process was groping and consumed months. It was
fascinating to me, as a bystander. Much of the time they seemed frankly
puzzled themselves as to what next to attempt. "The variations we try,"
they told us, "are like the combinations of a camera with its focus,
stops, speeds, time of day, and so forth."

"The things Betty sees and experiences just now seem foolish," they
explained certain incoherences, "but she is being used at random in
experiment on many different kinds of forces." "I had a feeling of being
experimented on," said Betty herself another time. "The whole feeling was
of preparation, like an empty house that people were moving into."

"Sometimes we almost feel as if this system had insuperable difficulties
and that you will never have the patience to continue," they confessed on
another occasion, "Its suitability, however, seems to balance the
objections."

"What's the trouble?" I asked.

"We need more force," they stated with great emphasis. "The forces which
we generate seem to dissipate, owing to some lack of proper conditions or
attraction at your end. Leave us to experiment. We need more careful
diagnosis."

"You seem discouraged," I remarked.

"We are not discouraged: only puzzled," they disclaimed. "It is like any
problem. Don't get discouraged: we will find a new angle of approach."

"You think we are all-powerful," they told us again, "but we are not. We
have to grope as much as you do, and can only hope in the groping toward
each other to meet."

"I have read of other stations who do not seem to have all these
troubles," said I.

"Involuntary mediums are good only as long as conditions suit them, they
answered this. "A voluntary medium with control of her own mental
condition would be invaluable. This is the hardest possible way, but it
is the surest, most permanent and trustworthy. The others are brilliant
experiments, flashes. They succeed now and then, and are very
spectacular, but they have awful failures to nullify them. They are
hazardous things. You may get something, or you may become a nervous
wreck. This is a steep way but a safe way. We do not mean to say that
other methods may not get more brilliant or even better results
occasionally. But there is no method that can give you quite the same
splendid feeling of power and stability; because only with this do you
tap something. In this state you get the actual condition of the thing
first, and then slowly the commonplace word that fits it. When we finally
succeed, our progress will have certain mechanical conveniences that have
always been lacking in spasmodic communications."

I called attention to the authors of THE SEVEN PURPOSES and OUR UNSEEN
GUEST as examples of great fluency, coherence and apparent accuracy, but
"spasmodic" in the sense of spontaneous. They agreed but continued to
maintain their point.

"Their experiences were in the nature of phenomena," they said, "We want
with you to demonstrate the possibility of communication as a sort of
laboratory work that can be done by anybody through patient experiment;
just as electricity or any other natural force may be used. They had the
requisite character, training and mating. Then in addition the
connections on this side interested in the work made their selection a
natural one. They came nearest the requirements. The phenomenal method is
possible to many if there is sufficient concentration on this side.
However, the law of action and reaction indicated that there should be an
equal effort on both sides. Great concentration on one side only is
possible for but a limited amount of time. It could be indefinitely
sustained could it be equally distributed on both. As yet we have been
dependent on a phenomenal and rather untrained gift, instead of an
understood and carefully regulated mechanism."

"Why," I asked, "did you not tell us all this in the beginning? We could
have assisted with so much more intelligence."

"If some of these methods had been stated in the beginning," said they,
"they would have made you self-conscious and inflexible. Your clamoring
for intellectual satisfaction was at times very hard to resist, so we
dodged you and evaded you. Only by blindfolding you could we lead you our
way."

Another angle of the same subject was well expressed much later, and
though it is a bit of a digression, it seems worth insertion here. It was
one of the few instances when a definite personality named himself as the
source of the philosophical material. I will transcribe literally, as a
further matter of interest as to the form in which we record these
things.

BETTY: Some one named Willard (fictitious name here). WILLARD: I am
working for the whole scheme, and am interested in its followers, too.

MYSELF: We are interested, too, but we are greatly in the dark as to what
it is all about.

WILLARD: Curious thing, that: and a great drawback in getting the most
desirable intelligent workers. The stiffness of the humanly educated mind
is a great problem to overcome. It is like a spoiled child. The constant
humoring of this self-assertive side, the keeping it quiet enough to
communicate with the real person within is what makes the whole thing so
difficult.

That is the crux of the whole difficulty. Heaven forbid that I should
decry the human brain, but it should be proportioned. The eternal self
must be developed as a fit controlling power. In trying to act DIRECTLY
on the highest-call it organ-possessed by man, his eternal spirit, we are
constantly interfered with by the more developed, the more easily
developed side of him which clamors, INSISTS on translating every
instinct into its own language and limiting it to its own experience and
comprehension; insists we shall go no farther than the facile ready-made
symbols its world education sanctions. We have to ignore it as much as
possible, keeping it quiet by systematically baffling its efforts at
restriction. Meanwhile, under this anaesthetic we work directly,
stimulating the enduring part, trying to develop it. It should be the
dominating part of man.

When this has been developed to its proper proportion, then the
intelligence will have its innings again. The intelligence is an
essential part of the whole, but it simply must be quieted down and made
flexible in any way possible, in order that we may give insight beyond
its comprehension.

I am trying to give this side of it in order to satisfy your natural
intelligence as to this thwarting process. Let the big organ develop
naturally and take control. See if the whole man will not be better
proportioned.

I just had a notion I might be able to get this over to you a little more
clearly. Get it?

MYSELF: As I understand you, for a time you purposely thwart the
curiosities and workings of the mind in order to apply development work
directly. When the eternal side has been developed up in proportion to an
equality with the intelligence, then the latter will be turned loose
again for the purpose of understanding what it is about. WILLARD: Yes;
but expressed in terms of your substance rather than mine.

The main idea of the whole thing is that the thwarting process is in
order to develop beyond the comprehension of the brain, not to bring the
enduring organs merely up to an equality with the brain: to work away
beyond it, assuming at last control of the brain. The brain then becomes
a functioning part of the general organ, which then enables
comprehension. When it is adjusted to its proper proportion, then it
will, later, be the channel for manifesting the level of development to
others. We over here cannot work through the brain very well because of
its great educational and perceptional restrictions. Don't be so OFFENDED
in your intellect. Give us a chance. We won't do more harm than present
your precious intellect something for it to work on for the rest of its
natural life. Leave it in soak and keep it flexible, and we can go on.
It's BOUND to be satisfied later. When this becomes the leader of your
intellect, it MUST immediately react on it; it MUST, just as the blood
goes through your body to nourish all the parts. I thought maybe I could
make you see the point; it's always a great stickler. That's why I came.

Working only in the limited knowledge of the brain is slow business. It
takes generations to develop new respectable symbols.

BETTY: They let him in because they thought he knew how you felt.

WILLARD: Do you get the idea now? Beyond what you can understand, explain
by the brain. If that is what we want to get to you first, how COULD we
get it through your brain without the slowest of evolution?

MYSELF: I can see that as to the individual. How about getting it to the
world? You have to use written symbols of the brain for that.

WILLARD: To get some things to the world you must yourself get the thing
many times multiplied. No strength otherwise. There must be a large
submerged foundation for the lighthouse. It is too puny at present to
give out; too puny to be bountiful.

MYSELF: That all sounds reasonable and satisfying. But how can we best
co-operate, if for a time our intelligence is supposed to go stand in a
corner? Is it a matter of contact alone?

WILLARD: Let it go for the present with the development of your region of
feelings, susceptibility,--AGGRESSIVE feeling. Let it go at that. That is
the other side of the scale from the brain function. But there is a
difference between the sloppy, sentimental, emotional thing commonly
known as feeling, and the feeling of strength and stability that is
absorbent of wisdom.

BETTY: (confidentially) You see, we haven't any words around here for it.
Maybe there are some, but they don't come. I'm very bad on words, because
they get so far away.

WILLARD: The more you live in abandonment of the heart, the nearer you
come to it.


2.

But there is another reason, beside the danger of "coloring," why these
subjects were approached simultaneously and bewilderingly-from so many
different angles. This has to do with the difference between our way of
mastering a subject and theirs. That difference is summed up in a single
statement. Betty was reporting, as is often her custom, instead of being
used directly as a translator.

"I said to them," said she, "that progress must be easy

for them because they could see things and the reasons for them, and what
it is all about; but they answered that I was wrong. The way of our
senses is first of all to see clearly what we are going to strive for.
But the way of the perception of the spirit, the way they go at things,
is first of all always a struggle toward a clear perception of what has
been but dimly sensed. What they struggle for is only seen clearly AFTER
it is attained. Each attainment then provides the strength for further
effort toward something again dimly sensed. That is the difference
between their way of progress and ours."

"Never mind your clarity of perception of it," they said on another
occasion. "That necessarily comes after you have maintained conditions
for a long enough time to establish them."

This method of keeping the logic of a subject obscure until one by one
the details and component parts have been absorbed into the system of
life is very well subserved by the fragmentary kind of communication. It
is in reality again a part of the "make it so" idea, without which there
seems to be no value.




CHAPTER VIII



Elimination


1.

Two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time. If we are to
take in something new, we must make room for it.

That is self evident. We make room by putting something out. And that
something at once tries to come back in. Which means conflict.

We find that all along the line. Even the simple matter of physical
relaxation is full of it. We are forced to vigilance in excluding small
tensions of the muscles. As fast as we make one behave, another is on the
strain. And that keeps our attention anxious, which is not a state of
relaxation at all. The situation is emphasized when we attempt mental
detachment. Vagrant fancies snatch at us, and before we know it we are
galloping off down a side alley of speculation that has nothing to do
with what we are after. We are forced to a process of selection and
elimination.

There is nothing especially startling about this. We are doing it, more
or less, every hour of our lives. We are continually selecting what we
want to do, or must do, from all the things we might do. But we do it,
mostly, without either due thought or skill. We have of it little
understanding or technique.

Such a haphazard muddling through perhaps does well enough for ordinary
affairs. But when we embark on a program of expanding consciousness, we
were told, we should have something more definite. Our job is to take in
spiritual awareness, and somehow we must make room for it. Otherwise it
will have a hard time bucking the competition of well-established habits.

"You must free yourself in order to become aware of the self above
yourself," said they. "This is gained by daily breathing space of
association with the spirit."

"It does seem," ran one of our earliest automatic writings, "as if you on
earth scramble so much. Cannot you move serenely about your affairs? It
is an engulfing quicksand, your world. Do not mistake me: I am not
approving of hermits. I only ask for an effort to live in the world and
of the world with a free soul and sensitive spirit."

"There is no use trying to do anything if you have a lot of little
fishhooks in you all around that keep pulling at you," said they, much
later. "There is no use trying to do anything until you get rid of them
and assert your independence; it is hard to get these barbed things out."

"There's so much leisure of mind and soul and time for your attitude
toward people," explained Betty, "none at all for getting things two
cents cheaper at another store, and all those dinky-dinks. It's like the
difference in size between the figures on a moving picture screen and the
human beings in the front row. I argue that I can't live in a material
world without doing many little things; and THEY argue that that is Just
what we are sent here for, to find out what things are worth doing and
what are not. They have great respect for material labor and necessities
and such things; but they are only so important. They are not asking me
to do what the big idealists have done, like Buddha or Confucius; throw
humanity aside and walk with fixed gaze; but they ARE asking me to
approximate that freedom. It's a case of focus as near as I can come to
it. You must change your focus so that all the little things near you
will not look sharp and important."


2.

We were willing to agree as to the desirability of this, but evidently
the Invisibles were not satisfied with that. They wanted us to realize
not only its desirability, but its importance, and they held Betty to the
subject. Again and again they showed her symbols of various kinds that
stressed this. Here is one.

"The way they are showing me seems so difficult and painful-the skeleton
dragged from the living body," it was Betty reporting, "They are showing
it to me and saying, this is the real structure. All the rest, your
flesh, your clothes, your belongings, the motor you ride in-but they said
carriage-you Just pile on yourself. But after all there's your real
structure that has to carry all the unnecessary stuff. Yet nobody wants
to walk around in his skeleton. But you can entirely clothe it in
something better than all that smothering stuff. Funny way to explain it!
They keep saying: here's your skeleton. How are you going to clothe it?
They seem to think they've freed me from the old stuff, and that now what
I'm to do is put on my new body appropriate to my new life. My, that
other stuff looks clumsy, piled up all around, looks like Mrs. Tanner's*
stuff. It's repellant. It positively nauseates me. I wouldn't like to get
back into that! As they take it away I feel so naked and cold. It is
rather terrible to have it taken away; almost acute suffering. Oh, wait!
I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know where to begin. Oh,
my!-there's a little something gathering about me, rather thin and filmy,
not formed and finished. I don't think that was a nice symbol. I don't
feel as much at home as I did in all that nice warm cozy Tanner stuff .
I'm all new and self-conscious and still a little cold.-Yes, I see what
you mean.-These strange exercises just separate me before my eyes; take
out parts of me and set them aside; and discard the rest. I don't suppose
in this life I'd ever free myself without all this play and mumming.

* A very wealthy acquisitive woman.

"I slipped-back. I always get back into those smothery things. They show
it first in one form and then in another. But these smothery things are
all so warm and human.-You can go on living in the smothery things if you
want to; and there's no direct harm and no judgment held against you for
it. Then why all this effort in this life? The answer is: it is
inexorably true that it has got to be done sometime, that great
passionate shove has to be done sometime. Each one must struggle and free
himself; there is no escape; it is the law; and the longer you
procrastinate and delay, the harder that struggle is going to be and the
softer and more unfit for it you are going to be. It will be a terrible
state, suffering, discouragement, blackness if you delay. Delay bears too
heavy interest. That is why all this exhortation for this life, why they
don't wait until we go over there. This life is that tearing out of your
skeleton, and when we are not doing it here, now, we are making it so
much harder for ourselves later. This is our crucial moment of struggle
right now. How blind and stupid to say wait for such things until we get
over! That is what your incarnation here is your test. That is what they
have been trying to tell us for nearly a year now. We can take the easier
way, but it delays the game and makes it harder. Use every ounce in you,
for you are bound to slump and get soft again. Go into it with the idea
that you will never relax. So important always to try! They keep going
back to the skeleton again. All this determination and effort is your
skeleton; and your body is the nice kind loving relations with people,
and the beauty f life. That is plenty soft enough without the satin
stuffy things. I wonder what I thought I was here for, anyway! Here's the
remarkable part: in spite of all the austere spine stiffening, right
along with that, there's a blitheness that is marvelous. There is a
wracking intensity; but when you have received it and acknowledged it,
they just come right up-it's jolly, so jolly and cheerful and vigorous.
They wrack you, and at the same time give you strength gaily, so gaily
you could crack jokes about it. All the good people on this side who
preach at you depress you without giving you strength. That's the
difference. I'll take my struggle now, thank you. It is hard enough right
now. I don't wonder they are anxious to come back and tell us. It must be
ghastly to be over there and see the people you love here sinking down,
down, putting off the struggle, laying up all kinds of trouble (laughs).
I'm so puzzled myself, you see. I'm groping toward activities-I just take
all these activities-my old smothery body, and by taking it off and
standing in my skeleton and feeling the need of a new body and taking the
substance of a new body and putting it on-why, I've created that thing,
I've made it come to pass. That is the kind of thing you do over there.
You do not merely talk about things; you think of them in substance and
create-I don't know where I'm at, which is substance, which is shadow.
Here I am building out of this substance; it's so much more real than the
consciousness I have every day. All I know is that the body is like a
yappy little dog, very insistent about itself.-I'm getting very tired; it
is so hard to get it back to you.-I'll lie still and review it. I don't
like these records you write. I have my records here. They are just
dropping me back in their impolite fashion. (Laughs) I begin to like my
body better when I get near it; I don't call it names at all. It's got a
little poison oak on it, but otherwise it is not so bad. I'd be pretty
dam sorry to come back and find it wasn't here. You don't know how
piffling words are when you work in substance instead. They showed me so
plainly the seriatim process in heir symbol. First the physical pain of
extracting the skeleton, then the removal of the smothery things with my
longing and regret for them; then the positive nausea at them; then the
chill and need of a new body; then the growing interest in the substance
of thought, and in the eager planning of the details of the new body.
Then came the knowledge that the new body cannot be built perfectly all
at once, that you can go on improving it from plane to plane."

In this manner, then, was built our acknowledgement that elimination was
very much an integral factor in the new job we had undertaken; as much of
a job in its way as "proportion" or "contact," or the "dead lift," or the
"stability." And, it was borne in on us, it also had a definite
technique. Haphazard and rule of thumb would not do. Naturally we wanted
to know what it was; and its prescription was promised us; but before it
could be given we must first comprehend an entirely new concept.




CHAPTER IX



The Substance of Thought


The concept we were to understand before we' were to be instructed in a
workable technique of elimination proved to have an importance far beyond
that. Its influence was to be basic. Once fully accepted, as an
actuality,-or as a provisional hypothesis-its influence must permeate all
that follows.

And now, for the first time we must take the word of our invisible
intelligences for a categorical statement. Heretofore the philosophy has
been a reasoning and a reasonable one. Now we must be prepared to accept
or reject EX CATHEDRA utterances; as one would accept or deny a
traveller's statement that in Utopia are beasts with purple wings. We can
believe or not believe, but we shall have no basis for choice, except our
confidence in those communicating, and the coherence of what they
communicate.

Yet that is hardly a fair statement. Ordinary physical science postulates
certain hypotheses in order to explain facts. Said hypotheses are pure
assumptions, without an atom of proof, reasoned out as probable, and
adopted provisionally because facts fit them. They furnish a taking off
platform.

In that spirit let the most skeptical of us follow the Invisibles; in
their statement that thought works in and on a definite material
substance.

"Without fussing about explanations," they stated emphatically, "keep in
mind SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT, definite, tangible substance. You know the
power of thought in your world. Now extend, magnify, give a greater scope
to its actions. The law is the REALITY of this substance. The great power
that is in your hands is the recognition of this, and the setting in
action,-setting in chemical action-of the thought substances, which are
bound to create according to their species, their kinds."

They urged us earnestly to accustom our minds to this idea, using a
variety of figures to emphasize it. They told us that the workings of
created life as we know them are in reality parts of this substance
working in different combinations.

"You are capable of creating," they went on. "The practical application
of this in everyday life is to watch carefully, guard your thought
chambers. Allow full scope In all directions until they begin to create
undesirable, dragging or belittling things. Then destroy these
misbegotten things without looking at them by flooding them, overwhelming
them with the raw material for a new and better structure. At once,
without delay, replace the undesirable combination. Repeat this operation
continuously whenever barnacles collect.

"This confused halting account contains a mighty formula for growth and
beauty of mind."

That first statement interested me at once, and I proceeded to sidetrack
the discussion. This generally happens when I begin to ask questions. The
Invisibles seem to have prepared very carefully what they are trying to
get over; and questions mix up the plans. Especially as they tend to
attract the translator's attention and so are likely to arouse her
storehouse mind, with the attendant danger of coloring.

"In order to clarify," I asked, "Is the sort of work by way of
construction a fiction writer performs actually dealing with this
tangible substance of thought?"

"Yes, exactly," replied the Invisible, "Only suppose you could breathe
something more powerful into your characters and actually make them live.
That would be thought from a higher plane."

That seemed a little too extraordinary, so I went on. "Assuming that I
could do so," said I, "do I understand that such entities created from
the substance of thought would be independent beings, with power of even
limited free will, for example?"

"My sentence was misleading, not satisfactory," was the answer. "I am
fearful of making misstatements by fragmentary revelation. What you
create does most certainly go out; but remember; not unobstructedly.
Others are creating too. It is a very complicated subject."

"Has the result of this creative thought, this combining of thought
substances, then, an objective reality on that side?" I asked.

"Some are so weak they hardly live and move," explained the Invisible. "I
see all sorts of them. The lowest kind is the sheer-force kind, that
spends itself like a rocket and falls dead. It lives only a brief
stimulated career.

Other kinds of construction, that you build with lots of flame, and by
thinking also with your heart, are self-sustained and have real life and
live on."

I was still a little fuzzy on the main issue; so I asked a leading
question: "Then it might be possible for a human being of the highest
genius to create such a thing, 'that lives on,' and it might become
eventually an entity with a free will?"

"No," said the Invisible. "You are getting ambitious. It is too difficult
and involved to give you a satisfactory fragment. But we wish we could
talk on your ambitious question. That touches the wonder of immortality.
Be convinced that the flame you utilize in constructive thought does not
die. It does go on."

That was all for that day. At our next trial, as is their almost
invariable custom, they attacked the subject from another angle by
putting Betty through an actual or symbolical experience. It is often
difficult to tell one from the other; though when it matters particularly
they always inform us.

"They're showing me a substance and teaching me how to use it, the law of
attracting this substance and condensing it," she began. Then ensued a
long pause at the end of which she freed her wrist from my grasp and took
my hand. "I want to see if I can get that substance around you-if I have
the power to control it," she explained. Then another interim of perhaps
ten minutes.

"That's all of that for today," she said at last, " I lost my nerve on
it. There's nothing so terrifying as the unknown.

"There is an enveloping substance you can attract and surround a person
with. He cannot feel it and he is powerless against it in the sense of
breaking away from it or getting out of it or thwarting I couldn't
understand what I was putting on you, and the moment I clamored to
understand I got frightened. It is a great power of some kind. It seems
as if first you are enveloped with it, and after that I could magnetize
it with thought.. For instance, having enveloped you with it, I could
say: 'This substance will gradually seep into you, permeate you, relax
your nervous system.' And by replenishment I could keep you from ever
shutting out-being impervious, nerve bound. In that case it would be a
healing kind of thing-I think it is possible to direct it in other ways.
First you envelope in it; and then you put any kind of thought you want
into it. It would have to be very carefully handled-a terrible power! The
strange part is, it looks as though I might be able to smother evil with
it.

"It is a very powerful thing; you can't fight against it your resistance
is almost negative. That part worries me. There must be some resistance
possible in some way; there's some modifying law Perhaps I'd better leave
it today."

That was all. By this time I had learned that when a subject was dropped,
the abandonment was deliberate and in order to avoid the danger of
coloring. The next attack was by a symbolic example of actual creation in
the substance of thought. They showed Betty-or symbolized in pictures to
her,-a tract of land (representing, perhaps, a field of potential effort
and development). Here is her running report:

"It's wilderness work; conquering natural forces," she said after some
preliminary description, "It is chaotic and wild and purposeless, great
wasted dormant strength, and I am to do something about it I am beginning
to see things: flowers and things.

"It is building, and I don't understand it Wait-It's too difficult to
tell you This is very, very hard. Oh, I feel so helpless I don't
understand it, it's too difficult.

"They're trying to make me know how to go to work at this continent, and
I don't understand it It's the labor question I can't understand. I can't
do all the work there myself, any more than I alone could build this
place. It's a tough nut! I've got to find out about that, it is BIG! All
my relations with other people are there somehow Up to now it's been
solitary.

"Well, suppose I have a grand big plan, granting that I've had a dream
and made a scheme, and called out the thought substance; how am I going
to form it? Too important to get this wrong You can't' just sit back and
get labor to do it But you'd have to!

"I'm making it out of myself somehow. It feels like hard physical work
that is done by sweat and toil and energy. It's like breaking down cells
in your body, pouring them out of you, making a deposit of concrete
construction. Then you rest and accumulate more force, and then you make
another projection and deposit of work.

"It isn't such hard work after all It becomes a satisfying function. It
is very painful now; almost anguish That's the way it goes. It is
analogous to physical toil Worlds are all built that way, physical and
spiritual. Get rid of any idea of 'Let there be' stuff. There isn't any
let-there-be process of creation or building. I should say not! They put
me to work all right! They say I'll get used to it They keep pulling it
through you, this substance, as through the eye of a needle You transmute
it.

"That's funny, that's very funny! I've made a start on that continent!
I've got SOME work done. I can see it.

"I can't see why I do it alone. I can I t see why somebody can't help
There's something I've got to do first before I can get help. What is it?

"It's much easier now, much easier. I can draw it down and get hold of it
and shape it, and then step outside of it. Oh, yes, it's quite nice now.
It's a pleasure to do it now.

"Here's another difficult point: There are a number of people hanging
around me as if they might help, if I only knew what to do. I've got to
figure that out It looks more like calling out than hiring labor. Depends
on your ability to summon, inspire, coagulate, there's a bigger word for
it; leadership idea; an attracting power with a big altruistic idea.
That's construction over there: that's how you get people to help you.

"It was so hard at the beginning because it served only individual
purpose. It seemed to have been quarried by brute force for individual
purpose. There's a lot easier material I can use when I can rise to
obeying some law Pioneers are necessary; you've got to have them; they do
big work just fighting their way.

"That is progress. The main thing is to get the feeling of work, hard
labor spiritually. It is especially hard as I am combining two elements;
I suffer physically from the spiritual effort.

"I never thought about toil over there. Of course, that's the first
principle of construction. But how you do toil spiritually: and if you
don't toil; you're no good. You RENDER yourself somehow It's too new to
me; I'll say it better next time.

"It seems, vaguely, as if you have to begin on the rock pile, the hardest
kind of work, what corresponds to actual physical toil. You exhaust
yourself on it; but as you go on, learn how,-I hate to use words so
foolishly, but I can't find others.-As you go on, harmony lifts all the
hard part, and you work just as hard without the suffering part of it.

"My continent was all wild and woolly. I saw it like a map, saw it big.
There were masses of stuff that I knew were forests, and big wild rivers
with snags. It seemed such a hopeless mass for me alone. I felt so puny.
I saw lots of lovely flowers. They said: go ahead and make some sort of
plan about it, no matter how poor to start with. That is your measure. I
said: the first thing I'll do is to shape myself up a home site, just one
little piece that I can manage out of the wilderness. And then I grunted
and groaned and felt as though I was being torn asunder; and then it got
easier, and I found that a sort of clearing had been made in one little
corner. On my piece a sort of right-angled fence was made, an impression
of boundary. It surprised me, I didn't know I was doing it. It wasn't an
interesting thing to do; but I had to start somewhere.

"I saw my continent from above as from an airplane, a chaotic, powerful,
untamed thing."

This striking figure they left with us for some time; and when next they
took up the Substance of Thought the application was in a direction we
are not now prepared to follow. What we wish to emphasize here is the
help this concept gives us in visualizing the necessity for elimination.




CHAPTER X



The Technique of Elimination


1. ALTITUDE OF MIND.

This conception of the Substance of Thought gives us quite a new point of
view as to the necessity of elimination in the mental world, as well as
in the world of action and the world of material possessions. We agree
readily that in the latter we ought to pick and choose and reject. But
the mental world is not so defined. Thoughts are so impalpable, so
fleeting, that it is hardly worth bothering about them. Presently they
will vanish of their own accord; and nothing will remain.

But if thoughts are actual things, more or less enduring; working in an
actual substance; why then the matter becomes too tangible to be lightly
dismissed. We are forced to some action, immediate and definite, to keep
our mental premises from becoming all cluttered up with undesirable
thought-forms as unpleasant in atmosphere as any other garbage or offal.
We are eliminating substantial things-things of substance-in whatever
medium.

How to do? Let me repeat a passage before quoted:

"Carefully guard your thought chambers. Allow full scope in all
directions until they begin to create undesirable, dragging or belittling
things. Then destroy these misbegotten things without looking at them, by
FLOODING THEM, OVERWHELMING THEM WITH THE RAW MATERIAL FOR A NEW AND
BETTER STRUCTURE."

Often when we gird up our loins to fight a thing we lend it strength by
the very opposition put into it. The FLOODING OUT idea is one to get. "It
is very like any growth in the world," say they, "People spend their time
fighting things, when if they would only spend their time growing they
would just naturally shove these things to one side. There is only so
much room in a given space. If you grow and fill it up, everything
automatically gives way. That is the way plants fight."

They elaborated the idea a little further, on another occasion, by means
of a symbol, as is often their habit.

"This is it," said they. "The lower forms of even human life allow bodily
dirt, decay, even vermin; and sanction them as a necessary part of
living. But we know better; we've got beyond that and will not tolerate
them. But we are in the same state spiritually. We allow all these
bloodsucking thoughts, all these waste-matter things to share our spirits
with us, simply because we think they are a necessary part of living. But
they are not. As soon as we are strong enough to cleanse ourselves and
keep ourselves cleansed of them, we can stay on the higher phase as a
matter of course. It is just decent living.

"In keeping physically clean we do not worry about vermin, nor even think
about them. We get rid of them simply by living a certain kind of life.
They don't exist for us. There is no set opposition in them; we simply
act in a certain way and they are not. Likewise it is not a case of
avoiding consciously any specific thoughts. It is an attitude of mind."

That is the way I wrote it: but the words were hardly down on the paper
before I was corrected. It must be remembered that Betty, through whose
mouth the words came, was lying blindfolded on my other side.

"No, they set me right, 'ALTITUDE' of mind. It is keeping yourself on
that level, and remembering all the things that belong to it and
practicing them.'


2. ATTENTION.

"The whole thing is a matter of Attention. All sorts of things are always
swarming around you as thick as can be, but unless you give them your
attention, they can have no point of contact with you. Anything you give
your attention to is magnetically yours. So the only way to reorganize
yourself is to regulate your attention. That maintains your altitude of
mind.

"This sort of attention is just exactly the same as looking at things. It
is only the things you look at fixedly that really register."

"If you had to copy a thing you would look at it long and hard; a glance
wouldn't do you any good. So if you want to become anything, you must
keep looking at it, not just vaguely and generally, but fixedly, so you
can reproduce it. That is Attention.

"I wish I could find a bigger word than attention; it is so important."

In the external as well as the mental world, the same principles obtain.

"They're not asking me to give up all the little dinky-dinks I have to
do," said Betty at one time. "They don't care WHAT WE DO, it's HOW WE DO
IT."

"The thing you do does not matter," they agreed. "If it is humanly
desirable to cut up bits of paper or do anything small and silly, go
ahead and do it in the most efficient way you know how; but in doing it
keep full sail ahead. The trouble with you is you try to haul down your
sails and use them as floor cloths. You put draghooks in your spiritual
part, too. It is out of all proportion, it's the wrong way round; it's a
nuisance. That is how you damage yourselves: not by the things you do but
by the way you do them. Why hitch up a great big powerful machine just to
mow the lawn? And the mowing of the lawn is important, but utilize
attention and power only in proportion."

"As you get along," they told us apropos of something else, "you will
find that there will be a whole new set of taxes on your Attention, and
they will be much simpler and nicer. You pay there (on earth) a hopeless
and exhausting lot of taxes on Attention. You are always hedging and
squirming among things, paying taxes on your freedom."

"There seems to be some sort of regulation," commented Betty, "So you
don't have there all these nasty little taxes, each of which takes a
little drain out of your attention . Collect myself; that's it. In the
next step I am going to collect myself. All these little taxes are so
disintegrating ."

"Roughly speaking, the idea is this," they went on, "Everything you turn
Attention to, you spend on; pay a tax on. You go in for lots and lots of
little things. It is like having all your fortune in five and ten cent
pieces. You ought to have more beauty of proportion to it. That is not
saying the five and ten cent pieces are not all right: the world is full
of interesting little things. Spend as much as you want on them, don't
stint yourself on them in the least; but first you must have the big
things assured. Get your proportions and then see what you can afford in
the way of little things. It is just a case of what you can afford."

"They show me the big things and the little things, the big things and
the little things, over and over," said Betty, "I mustn't cut up all the
big things into little things. That's the freedom that is ahead. First be
rich and generous with the big things, then play with the little things.

"They show it to me in so many different ways. Now they are making
confetti out of some such beautiful material, and you lose all the lovely
design. It's such a pity! I long to piece it together again.

"Oh, they just made a terrible picture of the tax-paying thing. I know
what hell is; it's being forced to look at mistakes! Oh!

"You see this tax business Oh, dear! (distress) I'm trying to tell you
about it, but I am so miserable! They just drew out my life blood, a
little bit from each thing I am, a little bit from each thing I do.
Horrible! I won't forget that! Bloodsucking little things."

"Now we show you the condition," they concluded, "take hold of it.
Construct your plan of action. Take hold with boldness. Fortify against
yourself, your weaker self. Breathe life, determination, enthusiasm into
this plan. Hold your forces cleanly vibrant, not enervated with diluting
thoughts. The main danger is apt to be loss of stamina. Maintain your
vigor. Your gauge of strength is your concentration on your spark of
enlightenment. Fan it into a flame. That is what you work with. You
cannot let that die, or smolder. Keep fanning it; that spark is your
spiritual energy. Watch your foredetermination, particularized
foredetermination, not just hazy. Work over it carefully as you would
over an architect's blue print. That is vitalized thinking, a creative
thinking. There's substance to it. Make a start of materializing to
yourself, analyzing, grasping, taking hold of materials at hand, and
fashioning something out of them. Thought is the material, but not
speculative thought, positive building. It seems to be all grasp, taking
hold of the few things you've got, and grasping them and holding onto
them, and by and bye, you've shaped something. You can have them now.
Just the mighty strength to take, the imagination and idealism to see
them and reach for them. Constantly uphold the tradition of an
unconquerable spirit."




CHAPTER XI



Do It Now!


1.

The customary trend, in the great majority of such experiments as ours,
is toward either straight spiritualism or the development of so-called
"psychic powers." But in our case both these aspects were ignored.
Basically our effort was to be directed, they told us, toward an
AWAKENING OF CONSCIOUSNESS. "The nature of it," said they, "is the
abolition of barriers, the breaking down of the walls obstructing
spiritual vision." They had no time for wonders or personal
identifications. Certain "psychic powers" might develop; but if so, they
would be as incidental to the main job. So pointed was this refusal to
concern us with what, after all, is the most natural of curiosities, that
I broke through the programmed trend to ask a question; and, what was
even more unusual, I got a reply.

"Are merely personal communications deterrent to your scheme?" I asked.

"They only develop a certain futility, if continuous," was the reply.
"The conditions on both sides are so inexplicable that satisfactory
communication seems sometimes to decrease instead of progress, owing to
discouragement, or dissipation-scattering-of concentration on really
important subjects. There is great difficulty at best. Discretion must be
used, and it must be in the hands of masters, experts. Much trouble and
muddling results from indiscriminate communication."

All this was taking place, you will remember, during the wave of popular
interest in psychics just after the close of the war. This, our
Invisibles acknowledged, was helpful, but its aspects were not entirely
satisfactory.

"There is too much emphasis on the 'Spirit' aspect,"

they told us, "and too little on the individual application of what it
all means. There is too much interest in the mere fact that friends still
five about us; overlooking what they come to tell us. Your own growth is
what matters. We cannot hope to touch each other often; any more than can
any friends living in different places. The thing that counts is our
daily aspiration."

"The point is that the natural tendency is to seek psychic powers rather
than practice human living. There has been an over-balance of attention
on mere personal identification, which is necessary if balanced by
stability and direction of effort toward spiritual perception. Otherwise,
if spiritual perception is not developed, nothing can be given after
identification is established. Do you see more clearly the practical
application of our instructions?"

"Your cautious skepticism dragging back on your intuitive recognition of
the truth was your main attitude in the beginning. A certain attitude of
fair play in allowing us an uninterrupted voice to develop our argument
led to the success of the communication. Fearlessness and confidence in
your own power to reject if the communications became less convincing
also aided in success, in happy combination with the interest of both of
you in exploration."


2.

Satisfactory and sensible, we thought; as far as it went. But I had
another question, and it seemed to me legitimate and natural.

"Agreed as to the importance of all this," I stated, for the sake of
argument. "Why the hurry? We are supposed to have all eternity before us.
Why should we 'fash' ourselves with it now? It takes considerable of a
sustained effort, if it is to amount to anything. It involves a radical
change in the point of view. Life is full. For the average man, of
sufficient maturity to take this in, routine and habit are pretty well
established. He is fairly well content with things as they are. That is
his natural life on earth. On the other hand the spiritual life is the
natural life after he dies. Why not postpone all this development to what
would seem to be its natural season and environment.

For once I must have hit upon a vital question. It brought not merely a
reply: it opened up a whole new subject for most emphatic insistence.
And, like all other cardinal subjects, it was presented to us
recurrently, at odd times, until it was molded into the main body of the
teaching.

The gist of it was this: that this spiritual quickening, this conscious
contact, must take place at some point in our evolution. The sooner we
attain it, the better. It can never be entirely postponed to "its natural
season and environment" (my idea). In one form or another, to one degree
or another, every human creature must and does, during his normal earth
life, attain SOMETHING of spiritual contact. Otherwise he is completely
sidetracked; "lost," I suppose it might be called, in the old Biblical
sense. That is most often merely an unconscious function of living. But
if he can get it consciously and voluntarily, it is infinitely more
effective.

Furthermore,-and here is the real answer to my question-the "natural
season and environment" is NOT wholly in our next state of existence.
There are in this very earth life certain facilities for beginning which
are lacking in the next state of existence. We can begin then, if we want
to postpone, but it is going to be much harder. Failure to take advantage
of our opportunity here means difficulty and bitterness later. "Delay,"
said they strikingly, "BEARS COMPOUND INTEREST, which you must pay."

The urging of this point became at times almost frantic.

"Arouse yourself," they insisted, "It is worth your greatest effort. Once
started you cannot choose: you must take all or nothing. You will get as
far as your own yearnings carry you. You must not fad. We cannot let you
now. We are mightily and intensely pledged to your success. All of my
strength goes into this plea tonight to arouse you from your world
lethargy. Fix firmly in your mind the things to cling to in times of
danger threatening your purpose. The first is grim determination to
succeed; and the second is a great heart hunger which is the call of
love. These will be your strongholds. Could I lash you to my own frenzy
of purpose, I would for your own salvation. We cannot always come with
the force of this evening, and I want these words to burn into your soul,
to be your obsession and your ruling passion. A tremendous stimulation it
should be to you. Power wanes, and I want to leave you at my highest
pitch of urgency, calling to the deeps of you to answer the great duty
you have been chosen for."

Evidently they now appreciated the importance of giving us some
rationale, some notion of what it was all about. "I will try to tell you
something about the aim of all our efforts," we were told a few days
later, "Imagine if you can a world in which truth is one general and
something we will call blindness is the opposing general. These two
simple factors one must choose between. There are no neutrals. We are
frankly for or against and hold our positions by the force of the effort
we put forth. The great struggle is not only to conquer our opposing
forces, but to reclaim and form them into fighters for the truth. It is
more of a game than the mere overcoming, for we are after the plunder of
human souls to salvage. This, of course you know, is the A B C of our
work.

"Now what I want to tell you is that when you come here it is more
difficult to make the voluntary choice than you can imagine. It seems
that you would unhesitatingly choose the side of truth, but it will be
almost impossible for you to do so unless you have made yourself an agent
or disciple while on earth.

"Why are you all so afraid of the truth? Why do you not look it squarely
in the face? You want samples of what I see to illustrate your fear; well
then,-have you thought out or taken stock of your first principles? What
are your most valued possessions? Begin there: love, health, time, etc.,
to mention a few. Decide which they are and observe how you are guarding
them, cultivating them and acknowledging them your treasures. You throw
your pearls before swine. It is the usual procedure.

"What I am trying to lead up to is that we are striving to MAKE YOU AWARE
in your present life of what you really desire. The free choice is yours,
only choose; do not muddle along until unconsciously you have fashioned
habits which are your paste jewels. The time will come when you must
abide for awhile by your choice, and your treasures will be ashes in your
hands.

"This is the best I can do tonight to show you why I insist on preaching
to you. I should like to be able to say it better, but the main thing in
any form is to have it reach you.

"Your life is more selective than ours they explained another time, "and
so you have a greater chance to waste yourselves," as well, of course, as
a greater chance to develop ourselves along certain specified lines.

"We grieve most over the poor in spirit who close their hearts to our
life. They fear effort and struggle, when all you have really to fear in
your life is blindness and stagnation."

"It is funny," said Betty wonderingly, "they don't look so black on this
side, the people who try to escape and have bad luck-opium, drink, why!
even anarchy!-it sounds dreadful to say that! They haven't stability, but
they are trying! The ones who look b