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Title:      The Unobstructed Universe (1940)
Author:     Stewart Edward White
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0301131.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          August 2003
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Unobstructed Universe (1940)
Author:     Stewart Edward White





CONTENTS

PART I

Chap. 1. TWO CHINESE BOXES
Chap. 2. AGAIN I BEAR WITNESS
Chap. 3. ONLY ONE CHINESE BOX
Chap. 4. "THIS IS YOUR HERITAGE"
Chap. 5. THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND THE  BLUE SLIPPERS
Chap. 6. WE SET OUT
Chap. 7. ONLY ONE UNIVERSE
Chap. 8. WE WORKED OVERTIME
Chap. 9. WE MAKE THE GLOSSARY

PART II

Chap. 10. CONSCIOUSNESS, THE ONLY REALITY
Chap. 11. FOUNDATION STONES
Chap. 12. ORTHOS AND THE ESSENCES
Chap. 13 TIME
Chap. 14. SPACE
Chap. 15. MOTION
Chap. 16. FREQUENCY
Chap. 17. CONDUCTIVITY
Chap. 18. RECEPTIVITY
Chap. 19. ANNE SUMS UP

PART III

Chap. 20. MATTER--ARRESTMENT
Chap. 21. PARALLELISM OF LAW
Chap. 22. INTENT, EVENT AND EGG-WOMAN
Chap. 23. BETTY'S WORLD: ITS FLUIDITY
Chap. 24. BETTY'S WORLD: ITS SOLIDITY
Chap. 25. THE HOMELY NECESSITIES
Chap. 26. HOW BETTY HANDLES SPACE
Chap. 27. THOUGHTS ARE THINGS
Chap. 28. DO YOUR JOB!
Chap. 29. THE CONTINUITY OF EXISTENCE
Chap. 30. IMPLICATIONS

PART IV
Chap. 31. WHAT IT ALL MEANT TO DARBY
Chap. 32. THEY SHALL BE COMFORTED

GLOSSARY

APPENDICES


PART I


CHAPTER I

THE TWO CHINESE BOXES

ONE Thursday evening Joan returned from a trip to the city very much
vexed with herself. I was visiting Darby and her over a long weekend, and
so was present to hear her plaint.

"I hate to be a fool," was its gist, "and I hate doing silly things; and
I like to plan things out and then do them; and I am a careful shopper,
and I hate to buy things I don't want--"

"Tell us about it," Darby and I urged.

"Listen," said she. "I went to town this morning with a careful list of
errands to do. The first one was at a shop over on Fifth Avenue; and to
get there you take an Avenue bus from the Hudson Tube, near the Penn
Station--right to the door."

"Well?" said we.

"I found myself on a CROSS-TOWN BUS," wailed Joan disgustedly. "I always
take the Avenue bus--NEVER the cross-town. Yet there I was! And they
don't even leave the station from the same place. And that isn't the
whole of it!"

"Go, ahead," we encouraged.

"I went to the end of the cross-town line--I thought I might as
well--prepared to walk the five blocks to my shop. At the end of the line
there's a big department store--I almost NEVER shop there. I hadn't been
there for years. But I thought I'd walk through it to the Avenue instead
of going around by the side street. I'd hardly got inside when I caught
sight of a red box being trundled off on a floor truck along with a load
of other stuff. No reason why I should be interested in red boxes, but I
just HAD to chase after that one. And was I disappointed when the truck
got away from me down an elevator! I even hunted up a floorman and shot a
volley of questions at him. He told me the box must have been one of the
Chinese chests they had been having a special sale on; and he directed me
to what they had left. They were good-sized camphorwood chests, covered
with pigskin and painted with various designs and colors. I went and
bought one," said Joan bitterly.

"Weren't they attractive?" I asked, puzzled by the bitterness.

"They were most attractive," she admitted. "But I have camphorwood
chests. And"--her voice rose in emphasis--"in all this house there's not
a place where I could put another camphorwood chest--or any other piece
of furniture for that matter--without everybody's falling over it every
time he went from here to there. I have about as much use for a
camphorwood chest as Tabs has for two tails!" Tabs being the family cat.

Darby and I shouted.

"That isn't the worst," said Joan.

We became quiet, in expectation.

"You see," said Joan, who was now beginning to enjoy her own narration,
"none of the chests was red. The one I bought was yellow. And that red
color--the color of the first one I saw, on the truck--somehow I couldn't
get that particular shade of red out of my mind. No, said the salesman,
the merchandise on the truck was all sold goods. No, there were no more
red ones. You'd think that would have satisfied me, wouldn't you? Not at
all. I insisted they must have a reserve; I insisted on seeing the
department manager; and finally I elicited that there WAS a reserve, but
I couldn't see it. Just the same, I kept at them, and I DID see it--they
must have thought me crazy! And there was a red one. And I bought that! I
bought two of the dratted things! Now I ask you! And tomorrow they'll be
out here in Orange Center cluttering up everything! Well, they'll go back
bright and early Monday morning, I can tell you that I can't IMAGINE what
got into me!"

Neither could we--not until the third evening. Nor will you--not until
the third chapter.



CHAPTER II

AGAIN I BEAR WITNESS

1.

ABOUT six months before Joan bought her two unwanted Chinese boxes in New
York--at eight o'clock, on the fifth of April, 1939, in a little foothill
town of California, my wife Betty died. And immediately I had gone out of
the house to face the overhanging mountains and my own emotional and
intellectual conflict.

Some twenty years of exploring with Betty beyond the known frontiers of
present consciousness had lifted from me most of the conventional ideas
as to death. I had come to have no faintest feeling of it as final and
irrevocable separation. Nevertheless, I found on April 5, 1939, that the
even greater number of years--thirty-five of them--spent with her close
companionship in exploring the odd and wild comers of this, our earth,
had sharpened rather than dulled my sense of the immediate separation. We
had been more closely knit together than most. During those years of
companionship, crammed as they were to the brim with journey and
adventure, from then unknown Central Africa to the wildest of Alaska, we
were apart only three times: twice when I was on African expeditions
inadvisable for her, and throughout my service in the first World War.

Now, in the conventional phrase, I had become a man who had "lost his
wife." The loss was more than that of personal companionship, close and
warm as that had always been. It was also the loss of the one I had long
recognized as the more important member of our working team. When I left
that little house, in the California foothill town, to stand alone in the
moonlight, beneath the stars, it seemed to me that my part of our
greatest adventuring--that in the Unknown--had calamitously ended. For I
honestly believed it impossible for me to carry it forward alone.

You see, in addition to our other, and richly abundant, activities, Betty
and I, since March 17, 1919, had been exploring another land, that unseen
land of mystery from which, it used to be said, "no traveler returns." We
doubted that. Betty had visited that land, and had returned, many times.
It was her reports of these, her explorations, which made up the body of
the work I now felt so impossible without her, and so untimely broken
off.

We had accomplished something, we thought; and what we had done had
already found print in four books; but it had seemed to us both that
there was still a strong lead onward to something culminating, something
Betty had not yet reached. So she fought hard to stay; and I fought hard
to keep her. And it had looked like a winning fight until the very last.

2.

The four books were these:

Credo, a preliminary volume issued in 1925, in which, without revealing
its actual source, I presented the practical aspects of the philosophy
received psychically through Betty from "the other side";

Why Be a Mud Turtle?, 1928, in which I reported further teachings of the
same philosophy that seemed to me so applicable to modern living that it
was actually unfair to withhold them from our growingly complicated
world--but again without explaining the origin of the concepts;

The Betty Book, 1937, in which I threw my hat over the modern public's
materialistic windmill and wrote frankly of "the excursions of 'Betty,' a
psychic intimately known to me and of absolute integrity, into the world
of 'other consciousness,' and of the communications received by her...in
a condition of trance or otherwise...from forces which I have ventured to
call 'the Invisibles.'" But even so, it was only my own hat I threw. I
refrained from stating in so many words that "Betty" was in reality
Elizabeth Calvert Grant White, my own wife.

Just after Christmas, 1938, the fourth book, Across the Unknown, was
finished and the manuscript shipped to its publisher. Here there was no
attempt to conceal the identity of Betty. Indeed, the flood of
enthusiastic and demanding letters that increased rather than diminished
month after month following publication of The Betty Book had at last
convinced us of the truth of what the Invisibles had told us repeatedly,
from the very beginning:

"The MESSAGE is what is important...the MESSAGE and THE FACT THAT WE ARE
ABLE TO GIVE IT: not you."

3.

Thus it was that communication with the Invisibles, disincarnate
earth-entities, had been of daily occurrence in Betty's and my home. I
had taken down in my own brand of "shorthand," and then typed for record
purposes, several thousand single-spaced pages of teachings so received.
From these several thousand pages, containing well over a million words,
I had written my four books acclaiming the intellectual reasonableness of
the continuity of life--the going forward of the individual I-Am after
natural death.

And then, very soon after the last proofs had received the author's
corrections, Betty died. What happened out on the hillside under the
trees that April night I have told elsewhere. That record still stands.
While Across the Unknown was actually in press, I added one short chapter
entitled "I Bear Witness." I repeat a portion of it here because I can
tell it no better:

"You know the cozy, intimate feeling of companionship you get sometimes
when you are in the same room; perhaps each reading a book; not speaking;
not even looking at one another. It is tenuous, an evanescent thing--one
that we too often fail to savor and appreciate. Sometimes, in fact, it
takes an evening or two of empty solitude to make us realize how
substantial and important it really is.

"Then, on the other hand, you know how you draw closer by means of things
you do together. And still more through talk and such mental
interchanges. And most of all, perhaps, in the various physical
relationships of love and marriage.

"Now when you stop to think of it, all these latter material contacts,
right through the whole of life, are at root and in essence aimed at
really just one thing: that rare inner feeling of companionship suggested
feebly in the sitting-by-the-fire idea. That is what we REALLY are
groping for in all friendly and loving human relations, hampered by the
fact that we are different people more or less muffled from each other by
the barriers of encasement in the body.

"Well, within a very few minutes that: companionship flooded through my
whole being from Betty, but in an intensity and purity of which I had
previously had no conception. It was the same thing, but a hundred, a
thousand times stronger. And I realized that it more than compensated for
the little fact that she had stepped across, because it was the thing
that all our physical activities together had striven for, but--compared
with this--had gained only dimly and in part. Why not? Actually it was
doing perfectly what all these other things had only groped for. So what
use the other things? and why should I miss them?

"Does this sound fantastic? Maybe; but it is as real and solid as the
chair I am sitting on. So much so that I have never in my life been so
filled with pure happiness. No despair; no devastation; just a deeper
happiness than I have experienced with her ever before, save in the brief
moments when everything harmonized in fulfillment.

"And furthermore it has lasted, and is with me always."

Now, more than a year later, I can in all honesty re peat: "It has
lasted, and is with me always." The experience of that night was charged
neither with the exultation of emotional belief nor the quiet sureness of
intellectual knowledge. There was just a quick dissolving of my conflict;
for BETTY had not gone--SHE was still with me. There was left me no doubt
as to her Presence with me on the hillside.

That presence has continued, not all the time, but normally so. I go into
a room; she may or may not be there. I stroll about her garden; she may
or may not walk with me. But many times throughout each twenty-four hour
day she is there, her vivid personality enveloping me, and not only me
but even strangers visiting in the house.

It was Betty who, when here, created easy, friendly hospitality in our
home--not I. She it is who still creates it; for Betty is still living.
This I know. Not as I live, but with me in "the one and only universe."
She has given me a thousand proofs of it. And through another
psychic--Joan of the Chinese boxes, about whom much more in the following
pages--a whole new concept of possibly scientific thought including a
unique, and I think illuminating, terminology.

Betty calls it a "divulgence." The few physicists or metaphysicians to
whom I have submitted various portions are all agreed, with normally
professional reservations, that it is "important." One, less normally
professional than the rest, let himself go.

"I don't care how or where you get it," he said. "This is definitely a
step forward--a system of anticipatory thought. At the very least it will
give us laboratory fellows new premises to work from and new hypotheses
to work toward."

Perhaps. Betty called it only a divulgence.

Divulgence of what? of The Unobstructed Universe where Betty went after
her body died and concerning which, its ways and means, methods, laws,
habits, work, triumphs, failures--indeed, its very PLACE--she, through
Joan, has since reported back to me.



CHAPTER III

ONLY ONE CHINESE BOX

1.

FOR nearly six months, then, after her death, Betty and I continued
living in "the one and only Universe" with, however, a barrier of verbal
communication between us; she on her side and I on mine.

I hope I have made it clear that she had most decidedly "come back" in
the most satisfying form possible, for me at least. Nor was my experience
unique to myself. From all over the country I received letters, many of
them puzzled, some of them even from people who had met Betty but
casually and many years ago, trying to tell me about their feeling of her
presence with them.

"I found myself happy and twinkling, for no reason at all. I had a merry
sense of Betty--out of a clear sky--apropos of nothing. No
heartache--Just a merry and impudent nudge."--"I did not think I could
stand it. But all evening I had a sense of Betty, and a feeling of peace
that I had not thought possible."--"When I think of Betty I can't
possibly pump up any feeling of desolation. She's just THERE"--this with
a sense of amazement.--"It was an astonishing experience of amazing
power.... I just called to her, and instantly she was there, and with a
voltage that swept me right out of myself."

That sort of thing. And so much of it, and from such scattered sources,
and from so many people who had no use for, or no knowledge of,
"psychics." Explanation of fortuity and coincidence began to look rather
absurd.

But Betty appeared as yet to have nothing to say, in words. This might
seem rather curious to anyone familiar with the type of work she had been
doing for twenty years. That had involved her penetration into the higher
consciousness, the state of being in which, presumably, she now dwelt;
and her reporting back to me her experiences and findings. That was
"communication from the other side." Also we had slowly come to know and
trust a small group of friends who--incidentally to the friend ship--were
gifted, as Betty was gifted, with her peculiar sensitiveness or talent.
If anyone could "come back," as they say--and by that they generally mean
come back in conversation--it certainly should be Betty.

Furthermore, a good many people wrote me, or asked me, whether I had
"heard from Betty," and were bothered when I told them I had not--not in
the sense of their inquiry. I was not bothered. On the contrary, I came
at once to appreciate the wisdom of her course. For the very moment the
ordinary and customary "message" was offered, that moment the brightness
of her present demonstration must be--even if ever so slightly--dimmed.
Admit my conviction that it is actually Betty speaking; admit my
acceptance of authenticity as respects the body of the "message"
received, there must always remain in my mind some slight question as to
detail--how much is Betty; how much is the subconscious of the psychic?

To be sure, it can be, and is, sorted out in time. We had found that to
be true. But, UNLESS SHE HAD SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO SAY, how could mere
spoken words add to what, apparently, she was now trying so successfully
to do?
2.

In this frame of mind I flew East, in the early part of September, 1939.
It was my first visit for many years. Though I had crossed the continent
nearly a hundred times, I had never ceased to consider it inordinately
wide, and the journey inordinately time-consuming. Well, I reflected as
the plane touched earth, we have at last done something about that! In
1884 it had taken me nearly a week to get to the Coast from Chicago. Here
I was in Chicago for breakfast, and I had left San Francisco after dinner
the night before! Time and space were no longer the barrier they had
been. A trite enough reflection. But unknowingly I was hitting the
keynote of my next big adventure.

My purpose had to do with a novel just written and in the process of
publication, and with renewal in person of certain friendships that the
said space and time had not been able to affect. These were many. Among
them was that of a man and his wife who, twenty years ago, had published
a book that has had a profound effect, in that it introduced certain new
concepts that have become so integral with our body of thought that they
are today used as building blocks in many an intellectual structure by
people who have never heard of the book or its authors. The title of the
book is Our Unseen Guest, and the concepts of which I speak will appear
naturally in the course of what follows.

Now we get back to the Chinese boxes. For the Joan of that bizarre
episode was the Joan of Our Unseen Guest. The authors had elected to call
themselves Darby and Joan--and still so choose to conceal themselves.
Twenty years ago they were, and still are, both professional people. They
could not--or thought they could not--risk the possibility of such
controversy as, almost invariably, has raged about outstanding mediums.
And theirs was no pseudo-anonymity. Even today there are, I suppose, not
a score of persons who are aware that Joan possesses her special talent;
and of that number not half have any first-hand experience. The
privileged few realize that she is one of the greatest psychics, if not
the greatest, in the world today.

Such a statement requires a moment to explain why I make it.

As to method: Joan works blindfolded from a state of trance, into which
she enters instantly and completely at the signal of Darby's touch on her
wrist. However, she is not "unconscious" in the sense of helplessness or
immobility; she is not "asleep." At times she even moves about or does
things apparently required of her. I have seen her, for the demonstration
of some point being made, perform an intricate dance, accurately and
surely, through a room crowded with furniture, though she was as usual
heavily blindfolded. Invisible entities talk through her, and then her
own personality is completely absent; but on occasion she also reports in
her own right what is shown her or told her, in which caw, of course,
apparently she participates. Nevertheless, on returning to her normal
state she never has the slightest recollection of anything that has been
done or said, and she has no sense whatever of the passage of time. This
latter was once amusingly illustrated to us. She had been "out" for
perhaps five minutes when it became necessary to make certain
arrangements before we could actually begin the work in hand, so Darby
brought her back.

"How long has it been?" she asked.

Somebody in mischief told her "about three hours."

She accepted this so unquestioningly that she was much concerned because,
as she supposed, she and Darby had missed their last train home! We had
to show her the clock before she would be convinced that only five
minutes had elapsed.

This perfection of abeyance, so to call it, is remarkable, but not
unprecedented. But added to it are certain qualities that justify my
estimate, such as honesty of character; total absence of egotism; an
eager desire to help, to play the game; a fine mind and intelligence; and
a fastidiousness of social selection in ordinary life which, we have been
assured, is of enormous assistance to the Invisibles in keeping their
channel clean and free of the extraneous that clutters up so much of this
kind of effort.

"The point is this," we were told, "Joan is selective. She is so in her
social and intellectual interests. So there are some individuals here
whom Joan welcomes, and others she does not. Joan accepted Stephen,* who
came to her out of the thin air, just as she would have accepted him if
she had met him on earth."

* The personality who gave most of the material for Our Unseen Guest.

Betty and I had first met Darby and Joan at the house of Margaret
Cameron,* in 1922. With them, and Margaret, and another psychic, Mrs.
John Palmer Gavitt* we conducted the remarkable series of experiments in
demonstrating and verifying the "second body"--beta body, we called
it--described in an appendix to The Betty Book. In the next seventeen
years we had with Darby and Joan but two other contacts: once when Betty
went East without me, and once when they visited us at Burlingame for two
days. Nevertheless, in spite of so few meetings, and in spite of the fact
that Betty and Joan were doing diametrically opposite kinds of work by
different methods, the two of them had always "clicked." And they always
felt that, somehow or another, they were destined to do more good work
together. But they, no more than Darby or myself, realized how perfectly
they were being trained, each in her own way, to combine their methods in
one triumphant effort when the time came.

*Author of The Seven Purposes.
** The "Mrs. Gaines" of The Betty Book.

3.

These two were among the friendships I had come East to renew.
Nevertheless, my interest was not in the possibility of getting in verbal
touch with Betty. I must repeat, I did not NEED verbal touch with Betty.
I would not seek it, unless I were convinced that she really had
something to say beside greeting and chit chat! and my opinion then was
that her serious work had been rounded out, had reached its culmination.
So I wrote it down in the chapter "I Bear Witness," added to Across the
Unknown after she had died. "This [the demonstration of her presence], I
now believe, is the 'great blossom' of which the Invisibles spoke; the
final significance to which all of Betty's twenty years of work was to
lead. Here is her concrete proof of one reward that can come to those who
follow in her footsteps, her final evidence that her instrument of twenty
years' forging is strong enough to stand the supreme test." Unconsciously
I think I was just a little afraid of weakening the perfection of that
demonstration of her actual and continuing presence: I was inclined to
let well enough alone.

My first evening with Darby and Joan swept that particular fog out of my
head. Betty had something to say: and she said just enough to prove to us
that all of her previous work, and all of Joan's previous work, and
before that the work of Margaret Cameron--who was one of the first
Americans to make a nation-wide psychical stir outside professional
research circles--were really a necessary preliminary foundation to what
she was going to be able to tell us now, from her present point of view.

In all this business of alleged communication across the border, the
question of identification has always been the focus both of
investigation and of opposition. When a man calls you up on the
telephone, saying he is John Smith, and the matter is important, you want
him first of all to prove to you that he is who he says he is. The best
way he can do it is to tell you something that only you and he know.
That, transferred to psychical research, is what is called evidential
material, or simply "evidential."

So important it is, from the point of view of research, that the great
bulk of psychic investigation has been in the direction of obtaining and
analyzing evidential. The task has proved to be one of extraordinary
difficulty; and, speaking by and large, your researcher is delighted if,
out of a great mass of material, he can winnow an occasional bit which,
with reasonable interpretation, can be considered air-tight. When he gets
such a bit he publishes it in a Journal rather triumphantly.

Betty began talking to me quietly, fluently, with assured and intimate
knowledge of our common experience and living. There was no "fishing" and
no fumbling. That part of it became almost ridiculous, it was so easy for
her where with usual "psychical research" it has been so difficult.

Here, in this first evening, she literally poured out a succession of
these authentications. She mentioned not one, but dozens, of small events
out of our past, of trivial facts in our mutual experience or
surroundings, none of which could by any possibility be within Joan's
knowledge. Many of them, indeed, were gone from my own memory, until
Betty recalled them to me. And all of them--EXCEPT JUST ONE--clean-cut,
air-tight, without need of interpretation. A dyed-in-the-wool psychic
researcher would have gone mad with joy over such a demonstration, which
would have furnished him enough material to have lasted him for the next
seven years!

Darby was taking the notes. He has not my verbatim "shorthand," and
confined them mostly to what he considered significant in what Betty was
saving, which was why his script missed the "evidential." It sounded
unimportant to him. I myself was so amazed--and excited--that it did not
occur to me to write anything down. So most of it was lost, as far as
record goes. That does not matter. Betty's purpose was merely to
authenticate for us herself--and incidentally her command of Joan--in
order to bespeak our attention to what was to follow.

That for me--and for Darby when afterward I explained to him the
appositeness of what had sounded to him like chit chat--was done so
thoroughly that from that evening on we could not doubt that we were
hearing from Betty; and that Betty had something to say. Not without
accusing our own plain common sense.

It would be possible to gather some of these scattered bits together, and
the reader is certainly entitled to something beyond my simple statement.
But such a compilation would be fragmentary, and in addition would depend
largely on my own assurance of its factual character. Therefore I will
not make that attempt. But fortunately there were three other incidents
of "evidential," quite as brilliant and as detailed, involving others
outside our little group of three, which DID get recorded. These I shall
narrate--and that at last brings us back to Joan's outrageous purchase of
the two Chinese boxes she did not want.

"Well!" Betty began with a chuckle,* "I did have a terrible time in town!
No, not a terrible time--I had a lot of fun--but I had to work hard to
get Joan to take the wrong bus so she would go to that store and see the
truck with the gadget on it. I saw one in Chinatown ** once, but it cost
seventy-five dollars, and this one was so cheap. You'll have to lend me
the money for it, Stewt. I wanted something that Millicent *** had had in
mind for a long time; and I wanted it for the color and the birds; but
Joan bought the wrong one, so I had to make her buy another. Tell Mill IT
IS FOR THE COLOR AND THE BIRDS. When we were little girls we used to be
fond of watching certain birds."

* It may be as well to state here that all speeches quoted from any
Invisible are verbatim unless otherwise stated. I have a shorthand
adequate for that purpose.

** In San Francisco.

*** Betty's sister, who lives in a New York suburb.

"The boxes are in the game room, unpacked; and one of them, the yellow
one, nobody wants. Joan had decided to send both back; and she was
amazed at herself; and she didn't know what she was doing; and generally
when she shops she knows what she is doing; and ever since she's been
wondering why on earth she bought them, and what she was going to do
with them.

"Tell Mill she will find the red one just as useful, to keep her furs in,
as I found the tricky little leather dressing case that she gave me. Ask
Joan if she will please give you four small gliders to put on the bottom.
She has them in a small drawer. I think Joan is going to insist on--No,
she isn't. [ paying for them perhaps?] The yellow one is to go back. The
store got them from a Chinese ship in port, and bought the whole cargo,
and that is why they were cheap. I wanted the BIRDS for Mill; there were
others with flowers, but I wanted the BIRDS."

Now here was something! Three things we could verify at once, and did.
The statement as to the reason for these boxes being on special sale was
true. They were part of a cargo refused by the original importer and
bought by this store to use as a "come-on" special: this fact, however,
was already known to Joan. The reference to the furs might have
significance in that I had recently given Millicent Betty's furs: a fact
that was not known to Joan. The promise of the gliders we investigated at
once. A search of the tool drawer, where such things would ordinarily be
kept, disclosed none; but finally "in a small drawer" in the kitchen we
turned up six of them. Two were large, and four were "small." But of
course Joan's subconscious might have had recollection of them.

All interesting, but not conclusive. So at the earliest opportunity I
went to see Millicent.

"Mill," said I, "what's your favorite color?"
"Well," she laughed, "you know I'm part Spanish, so I'll have to confess
it's red."

"Any particular shade?"

She had a small box of Chinese lacquer, and instanced that. So far,
exceedingly good.

"Have you had particularly in mind wanting anything like a Chinese
camphorwood chest?"

"Yes," replied Millicent promptly. "When I was on the Coast with you in
1936 Betty and I saw one in Chinatown. I was crazy about it, but it was
much too expensive. But later I thought it over, and I wrote her asking
where I could get one--I must have written her three or four times, but
somehow she never answered my question."

"Well, she's got it for you now," said I, and explained. "But there's
something else. She said, 'Tell Mill it is for the color and the birds,'
and she emphasized that, and added something about watching birds when
you were little girls. Anything special about that? I suppose all
children watch birds."

Millicent stared at me, for a moment unable to speak.

"Every spring," she told me solemnly at last, "every spring Betty and I
used to climb up in the trees on our place, and sit very quiet for hours
and hours to watch the birds build their nests! Why, I think that's
wonderful!"

I agreed.

"Now, there's just one other point, said I. "How about the leather
dressing case? Did you ever give her one that could be described as
'tricky';"

"You must have seen it," was her reply. "It had a sort of double top, so
you could get at the mirror and toilet articles without opening the
suitcase part."

"Of course I've seen it," said I. "But I did not know you gave it to
her."

I returned to the city. Barely had I entered my hotel room when the
telephone rang. It was Millicent, very much excited.

"Did you notice what KIND of birds they are--painted on the chest? They
are swallows!"

"What of it?" I wanted to know.

"Why--why--" gasped Millicent, "it was swallows we used to watch building
their nests. That's why we climbed the trees--to get level with the
eaves!"




CHAPTER IV

"THIS IS YOUR HERITAGE"

1.

I HAVE said that, in view of Betty's "pervading-presence" demonstration,
as it might be called, I was not eager for communication from her through
a psychic "unless she had something to say." I meant that not only as far
as personal messages to me were concerned, but in a broader sense and a
wider application. For the world is full of books substantiating the
existence of the unexplained, and I was no longer interested in
generalities.

But that first evening with Darby and Joan convinced me, as already
stated, that Betty did have something to say; something quite the
opposite of generalities; something not only for those who, in the shock
of personal loss, have struggled with the weariness of grief, but also
something for those who, in the dismayed bewilderment of seemingly
unwarranted failure, out of their despair ask that final, most
disheartening of questions: "What's the use?"

And so, before I set down further evidence of Betty's authentication of
herself, and of the individuality and continuity of that self, I think I
should tell you why Betty had something to say; why--to quote her--"I am
permitted to bring you this divulgence," at this particular time. And
also to tell you something of its present aim and need.

"My very dear," Betty began one evening as if she were dictating a
letter, "naturally what I have to say is directed first to you. But any
truth that is of comfort and surety, to one man may be of comfort and
surety to other men. Always this has been so. Not that all can share your
present experience--this sitting down, here in this pleasant room, and
listening to my thoughts framed in my own words, though relayed to you by
the voice of another woman. That experience is not for A nor is it needed
by all. What the all--all people--need is a new presentation of the truth
in the light of their own times and the terms of their own knowledge; so
that each may seek truth's comfort for himself, and find it--if he will.

"The world calls me--us here--dead. But sometimes people, unable to
endure the thought of such a blanking out, speak of a loved one as having
'gone on.' That idea, THE ACT OF GOING ON, is more correctly true. It is
true that we are 'changed'; but so is man in his earth experience changed
from a new-born child to adulthood. And not only is he changed
physically, but his perceptions are changed, his power of assimilation,
his control of himself and of the things of. earth about him.

"It is so that I am changed--so all we 'dead' are changed; glorified with
our own immortality. Even as you, too, will be glorified. We have indeed
gone on beyond the comprehension of your present earth perceptions; but
so is man beyond the comprehension--even the sight perception--of that
new-born child. Of course it takes only a little while before a baby
begins, as they say, 'to notice.' It is the same with you. You, the
World--so small a child in Time's duration of the Universe--only notice
us as yet. But just as the noticing of a child brings a feeling of
personal comfort and stability to him, so would the world's acceptance of
Immortality bring back stability and comfort to mankind. Individual and
socially. Indeed, it is only so--only by a reestablishment of the old
faith in the continuity, the worth-whileness, the purpose and
responsibility of life--that people or nations can regain stability.

"Stability," she repeated. "STABILITY is what you have lost and are now
seeking to regain. Not security. Security is material. Stability is
spiritual. Stability is the soul, the character of peoples. Given that,
man or nation makes its own security. But stability--real
foundation-rock, unwavering stability--no man can have without FAITH in
immortality. Why? Oh, my dear, my dear! Earth-life would have no point,
would be too much to ask of man, without immortality."

What was she driving at? For what does she hope? However difficult--or
not--may be found the intellectual concepts as elaborated in later pages,
of their emotional stimulus and purpose she leaves no slightest doubt.


2.

The old order of things has collapsed, says Betty. In some parts of the
world, as in Europe, that collapse has been so complete that it seems
everything of the old has been destroyed or lost. Elsewhere, as in our
own country, much of the staunchness of the old order is still intact;
but it is becoming increasingly obvious that even here readjustments are
inevitable. The same elements that brought about the catastrophe in the
Old World are at work in the New, and will proceed to the same conclusion
if we continue fatuously traveling the same road. What brought about this
collapse?

"Loss of faith in the present fact of immortality," Betty states bluntly.

She does not mean, she carefully explained, a conscious attitude of
agnosticism or denial. We may still profess belief in a vague and remote
"heaven" to which eventually we shall go. But belief is not faith; and it
is only FAITH--FAITH in the same sense that we accept the inevitability
of death itself--that can transfer the field of our practical endeavor
out of the present moment. When the present moment--the earth span of
life--is all that concerns us, then the emphasis of all we think and all
we do at once bases on materialism. We know that modern civilization has
been drifting toward that point of view, whether we are frank enough to
admit it or not. More and more we have been tending toward writing off
everything but the gain of the day. We deny the claim of the future; we
are increasingly indifferent to the coming generations. We are
emphasizing RIGHTS rather than OBLIGATIONS; those obligations that a real
faith in immortality must impose.

When humankind gets far enough away from the fact of immortality, said
Betty impressively, it has to come back. Or perish. And the only way it
can come back is to cease looking outside itself and search within.

"Furthermore," she told us, "any coining back always means a new
pattern."

Yet if men redesign the pattern on materialistic lines alone, the same
result must follow. The worth of the new pattern must depend on the basis
of its establishment.

"That," says Betty, "is dependent on the free will of men. Your wills are
free. This is your heritage and your glory."

Now to America, she insists, is entrusted the chance to fix a new and
better pattern. Why are we so entrusted? Why have we the job?

Because our nation's pattern of government was originally laid down
closely in accord with a reality of consciousness which we call
evolution. That is the structure of the universe; various DEGREES of
development, high, low, and in between. Each must work freely in its own
capacity toward the development of the whole. Leave out the word "freely"
and you have totalitarianism. Put it in and you have democracy. In our
beginnings we functioned pretty closely to that ideal. And still do;
though we have backslid somewhat.

But democracy is not a form of government. It is a pattern FOR
government. It is the union of all the parts in the common good of all,
with--to repeat--complete opportunity for each individual to do that
which he can do; but only to his capacity, though to his full capacity,
and with no obligation to do more--or less!

"Neither the 'more' nor the 'less,'" said Betty, "may set the pace for
all."

In this sense the democracy of our Republic was, and is, the nearest
parallel, reflected in government, to the Reality of Consciousness. By
which is meant the mode or law of the operation of Consciousness. And
this is why, says Betty, the responsibility has fallen on us, the United
States, for the set of the new pattern.

Now, she demands, how are we going to do it? Surely not on the old
material basis that has collapsed in Europe; not on the basis of each day
for itself and devil take tomorrow. Must we not dig down into the
consciousness of men and lay bare the only rock strong enough to support
the many-storied and varied superstructure that today's science has made
ours?

"But what is that rock?" we demanded of Betty.

"Recognition of the creator as greater than the thing created," she
answered promptly. "Acceptance of the Oneness of Consciousness as a
whole. Realization that man's thoughts and activities are a real and
vital part of the scheme of things, having their effect on the Whole as
well as on himself. Not only here and now, in his own little segment of
the universe, but on out in an eternal continuity. Immortality! Not as
some vague and distant possibility! But you--here--now! This is the thing
you must recapture as an immediate and working principle if the new
pattern is not to crumble as has the old."

Such, Betty told us, is the purpose of her divulgence.

"I must make reasonable," said she, "the HERENESS of immortality. For you
as well as me, and for me as well as you. Man has always had some
conception of the THERENESS of immortality. And the thought was
good--fertile in aspiration and inspiration, pregnant with comfort and
content. But the new thought I would bring to you is better. For the
HERENESS of immortality, once you understand it and accept it, will make
what has seemed to you vague, entirely and triumphantly real."

I shall have more to say of this when the unfolding of her divulgence is
finished.




CHAPTER V

THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND
THE BLUE SLIPPERS

1.

BETTY'S sister, Millicent, had always accepted Betty's psychic work
simply because she believed in Betty. But the acceptance had been more
acknowledgment than belief. The Chinese box episode had startled her; but
back in her mind, I suspect, lingered the thought that if all this were
really so, in all its implication, she would before this, somehow,
through someone, have had word from her husband, who had died suddenly
several years ago. I must confess that I myself wondered a little why
Betty said nothing of the one thing most important to Millicent.

"I was not ready," said Betty a week or so later. "I wanted to do it all
in one fell swoop."

Then she began to "show Joan pictures," as we call. that process. Joan is
made to see things, which she describes. Only later do we know whether
they mean anything or not. At the time they generally sound like a
confused jumble to us, but I take everything down faithfully, for you
never can tell! Betty "showed pictures" for about twenty minutes. Then
Francis, Millicent's husband, dictated a short letter to her. This took
about two minutes. It was an affectionate note, such as any husband might
have written to any beloved wife. Without the authentication crowded into
the previous twenty minutes it could have meant little or nothing.

Betty was fairly satisfied.

"Some is good, and some isn't," said she. "But some is. When pictures
start--Joan being very susceptible to pictorial vision--it is hard to
segregate her own memories from our impingement on her subconscious. That
is why, in getting this, there will be some you may not understand."

In consequence of this cautious remark, when I took my notes to Millicent
next day, I did so with no very keen anticipation of more than the usual
proportion of "hits"; and hoped that enough would be recognizable to her
to give her some measure of comfort and conviction. The result was
amazing. I certainly should have been wholly satisfied with less.

"Now, the first thing Joan said," I told Millicent, reading from my
notes, "was this: 'There is a man here. He has a watch chain across the
front of his vest, and there's a sort of dingle-dangle thing on it. The
watch ticks too loud, and it lies on a table by the side of the bed.' How
about it? Of course he had a watch chain, and--"

But Millicent cut me short. She was staring at me and gasping a little.

"Why, Stewart! Why, Stewart!" was all she could say. After a moment she
recovered herself and could explain. It seems that Francis was about the
last man she knew to cling to an old-fashioned thick "turnip" watch,
because it had belonged to his grandfather; that it had a chain so
unusually long that, on his death, it was divided in three for the three
boys and made for each of them a perfectly adequate chain; that a heavy
seal--a "dingle-dangle"--depended from it. Furthermore, Francis tried to
keep the watch on a table by the side of his bed, but abandoned that
because its ticking kept him awake. It DID, indeed, "tick too loud."
That short sentence had certainly proved full of meat. Presently we went
on to the next.

"This is good enough, but by itself it does not mean much, I think," said
I. "It simply reads: 'Boots he has. with his trousers tucked in.' Might
be a sort of identification of Francis as a civil engineer."

"It means a lot more than that," Millicent assured me.

It seems that, when Francis was building the docks at Bordeaux, during
the last war, he had bought a pair of French half-boots that had pleased
him so much he actually used to bring them out to show dinner guests what
proper engineer's foot-gear should be; and on the slightest excuse he
would put them on and tuck his trousers in them to rake leaves or
otherwise work around the place. That bit we agreed was rather splendid;
for it was not only correct, but it meant so much more than I had
guessed.

"'Something about a surrogate court.'" I read the succeeding sentence of
my record. That was a hit; for Francis had left an involved estate that
had only recently been settled to the point of attention by the
surrogate. However, I took up the next without expectation. "'Oatmeal,'
Joan said, 'something about eating oatmeal.' Of course there's something
about eating oatmeal--in any family with children," I remarked, and was
about to proceed. Millicent burst out laughing.

"Oh, that's good!" she cried. The children ate breakfast alone. Francis
was a great stickler on oatmeal for the children--many fathers are. The
children grumbled and balked on the subject of oatmeal--many children do.
All but the youngest. His face, and his plate, were always bright.
BUT--when housecleaning time came around, behind every picture on the
wall were discovered great dabs of oatmeal!

Joan had next described--and illustrated--"someone who put on their
nose-glasses this way." Before reading this I asked Millicent to put on
her glasses. She duplicated Joan's performance. Subsequently I asked
other members of the family to show me "how Millicent puts on her
glasses," and received the same demonstration.

"'Don't forget the creek: mustn't forget that!'" I continued. I confess
that looked to me like a clean miss. None of the various residences of
the various members of the family were within miles of anything that
could be described as a creek.

"Could I EVER forget the creek!" cried Millicent fervently.

Francis, as has been mentioned, was a civil engineer, engaged in heavy
construction--like the docks at Bordeaux and a good deal of New York's
waterfront. His estate included a lot of heavy machinery, dredges, pile
drivers, barges, and the like, which had worried Millicent for years. She
was unable to get rid of them; she paid taxes and storage on them. And
they had been kept all these years in an inlet of the Flushing marshes
known by name as The Creek.

Now followed a number of small, less striking references which it would
be tedious to analyze in detail. For instance, "A portrait. There's an
old portrait." Now, every family has old portraits. But Millicent told me
that a portrait of Francis' grandfather had somehow got separated and had
gone to a collateral branch of the family, and that it was only after a
long search and much trouble that he had managed to buy it back. Another
was a simple insistence on the number seven. It seemed that Francis died
just seven years ago; a fact not recalled to my mind even by the mention
of the number.

There were, however, two more statements that hit Millicent hard,
bringing her both to laughter and to tears.

"'Street car,'" I quoted Joan, "'the episode that occurred on a street
car. I think,' said she, 'the boots, and the watch and the portrait, and
the creek and what happened on the street car are important.'"

Here is where Millicent laughed. In the old days of ferry boats, said
she, Francis was accustomed to go to the city each day with a neighbor,
whose temper was somewhat peppery at times. One day--on the street
car--this neighbor was rudely jostled, and promptly broke a paper bag of
apples over the offender's head. Result: a near not, and a family warning
when anger threatened--"remember the street car!"

The other statement: "This man says to tell Millicent, 'the child that
never got born is here with me. Little girl.'"

A little girl had been born indeed, but never breathed.

"It was the only time in all his life I ever saw Francis cry," said
Millicent.

I knew nothing whatever of this fact until I heard it then.

"Betty is laughing and nodding her head," Joan had concluded. I should
think she well might. Joan knew nothing of Betty's sister: she did not
even know Millicent's last name.

This looked to us like a pretty close hundred per cent, when we got
together to analyze my report from Millicent.

Betty had shown--"on the screen"--and Joan had described twenty-three
distinct pictures. Of these eleven were brilliantly striking; six were
exact but of lesser importance; the other six were not recognized, but
might have been apt; none could be categorically denied as certainly
untrue. I think anybody familiar with the methods and difficulties of
psychical research would have pardoned us elation over somewhat of a
record in the way of "evidential." It must be reflected that none of
these matters was in either Joan's or my subconscious mind. She was
wholly unacquainted, either in person or by hearsay, with Millicent and
her family: I had never known or heard of any of these particular things.

With this authentication for Millicent's conviction, the letter from
Francis was then dictated. It began with the address "Old Lady" (which
Joan unnecessarily assured us was a term of endearment!), which, said
Millicent, was his common form of reference to her. And that might be
considered as evidential number twenty-four.

Of only one did Millicent profess complete and blank ignorance. That was
the description of a house. Joan had given it in detail. "A big house,"
she had said, "built when they had square towers, and full of great heavy
furniture." She spent a lot of time on that house, mentioning the
arrangement of its rooms, and the porches, and much of the furniture. A
hat rack especially held her. "There's a joke about it," she had said.
"Some children played around it." And a very important coal scuttle; and
a lot more.

"It may be Francis' boyhood home," said Millicent, but doubtfully.

We let it go at that, but months later I had a chance to check with one
of Francis' immediate family. That house was a clean miss. And--believe
it or not--that fact pleased us! It had looked to be all good. Betty had
said: "Some of it is good, but some isn't." And we needed a miss to
verify Betty's remark.

2.

And now, before leaving this particular subject, I want to go back to
that first night of Betty's verbal communication with me through Joan. It
will be recalled that I said the evidential she piled up especially for
me with such fluency and ease was clean-cut, air-tight and without need
of interpretation--except just one item, "the blue slippers." That meant
nothing to me.

It was an astounding record for a conversation lasting almost three
hours. As I look back and remember the minutiae of it, the whole
performance assumes ever greater and more significant proportions, for I
do not believe any two carnate people could sit down together and
reminisce for that length of time without one of them making a slip. And
in this case I was a yes-man only Betty necessarily led the conversation,
and in every instance it was she who said, "Do you remember..." and
supplied all details.

Her one miss, so far as I personally am concerned, was when she
announced, "I never thanked you for bringing my blue slippers."

"What blue slippers? Where did I bring them?" I asked. "I don't
remember."

"You will!" she replied confidently.

Nevertheless, I did not, and the slippers annoyed me, because I HAD
remembered many things quite as inconsequential. Only recently, in
California, was that reference tidied up.

Twice again, at intervals, she prodded me about the blue slippers. Still,
all I could remember concerning the slippers was her own three references
to them--each pointed enough to make me realize that in this instance my
memory, or hers, had failed. I racked my brains trying to remember, for,
with this solitary exception, Betty's record of evidential personal
communication with me had been perfect. I did not want her achievement
even so slightly spoiled! But I could not conjure up the haziest
recollection. The slippers were out.

The last week in February, 1940, before starting the work of putting this
book together, I cleaned up a number of matters entrusted to me by Betty.
Among them was the typing and delivery of several letters she had
dictated, through Joan, to various friends. One of the letters was to her
favorite nurse who had accompanied her home from a hospital siege in 1937
and stayed several weeks in the house. Betty had nicknamed her Johnnie
and the two women had become very good friends.

I left Johnnie's letter till the last. Betty had said when she dictated
it, "Johnnie thought I was a nut. At first she thought I was crazy. I
knew it all the time. I said to myself, 'Well, I'll show Johnnie!'"

I had not seen Johnnie for many months. Beyond Betty's comment that
Johnnie had thought her "a nut" I had no idea what Johnnie's attitude
might be toward psychic phenomena. I did know that her training and
experience had, of necessity, given her a pragmatically scientific and
probably thoroughly materialistic outlook. Her job is to fight disease
and death. She does it magnificently, never wavering for an instant. But
when death comes, so far as Johnnie's training is concerned, the job is
done.

From the context of the letter I knew it would be either highly
evidential or--probably--a complete dud. It was full of specific and
intimate personal detail: And I had not forgotten the specific and
detailed description of the "house with the square towers" presumably
intended for Millicent that turned out to have no significance. This
house and the blue slippers were, before my going to see Johnnie, the two
outstanding marks against Betty's incredibly high batting average.

As I say, I did not know Johnnie's attitude toward psychic phenomena.
Neither did I know if--broadminded though she might be about it--she knew
anything of the technical difficulties of communication or the technique
of sifting out "evidential." In other words, if there were inaccuracies
in the letter, would she--as my experience has taught me most people of
her highly specialized training do--ditch the WHOLE incident and in the
back of her head write down Betty even more definitely as "a nut." I
mailed the message, however, but anticipated an impending visit from
Johnnie with a good deal of diffidence, I must admit.

One of the things that bothered me was an emphatic statement by Betty:
"The child will get well." What child? Johnnie is a surgical nurse and
more or less specializes in adult patients; or such was my understanding
when she was taking care of my wife.

However, "the child will get well" proved particularly and peculiarly
evidential. In fact, a great part of the letter was evidential, as
Johnnie, no matter what her personal attitude on psychic phenomena, was
quick honestly to admit. Some she failed to recognize, but her sharp and
ruthless analysis of the detail of the letter was to me exceedingly
satisfactory. Far more satisfactory, than any polite acceptance or
evasion would have been. So I told her something of Betty's other
communications and finally of the blue slippers as the one personal thing
I could not identify.

"I can," said Johnnie promptly. "When Mrs. White was in the hospital in
San Francisco she asked you to bring her a pair of slippers from
Burlingame--from home. And I'll never forget how she laughed and laughed
over the ones you brought. You picked out the fanciest high-heeled
slippers she had, and what she wanted was bedroom slippers, not style.
But I can't remember the color."

Later in talking with Reider, who does everything nobody else does in my
household, I told him of having seen Johnnie and of the slipper incident
as amusing, fortunately withholding the color angle. Reider has been in
my employ for more than ten years. He has a memory for detail that never
fads.

"Why, I remember that!" cried Reider. "You came home from the hospital
with a list of things Mrs. White wanted. You got them together and I made
them into a package for you. Among them were her blue slippers."

"BLUE? Are you sure?" I wanted to shout, but refrained.

"Certainly I am sure," said Reider. "I rather wondered at the time what
Mrs. White wanted with her blue slippers. It is too bad that you can't
remember yourself, Sir. But several times Mrs. White sent home from the
hospital for things and I made them into bundles for you to take to her.
I would hardly expect you to remember what was in the bundles, Sir."

Hardly expect me to remember....

I departed for my study in haste and pawed through the records to re-read
Betty's three references to her blue slippers. And found that she had not
wanted me to remember! That she deliberately had chosen something she
knew--or hoped--I would not remember!

"Too bad" that I couldn't remember? It was glorious that I hadn't--and
still couldn't remember. With Johnnie and Reider to remember, those blue
slippers are just about the best piece of "evidential" a man ever had.



CHAPTER VI

WE SET OUT

1.

IN WHAT follows Joan will be referred to at times as "the receiving
station" or, more briefly, "the station." To avoid possible
misunderstanding on the part of the reader, as well as to give a fuller
comprehension of this term, it should be explained.

Back in 1916 when Joan--accidentally, like Betty--discovered she was
psychic, transmission of the Morse code by wireless signals had come into
its own, but radio as we know it today, and its now familiar terminology,
were still several years away. For the general public this long-distance
projection of the human voice without wires through the mechanism of
broadcasting "stations" and millions of "receiving" sets all came after
1920.

Yet even in 1916 Stephen was calling Joan a "receiving station."
Occasionally, Darby tells me, he used the word "psychic" but never the
more popular word "medium"--not once in all the hundreds of pages of
notes comprising the Stephen records. From the published portion of these
records, Our Unseen Guest, I quote:

"The process of communication," says Stephen, "is more like the
transmission of a wireless message than anything else in your experience.
Our term, receiving station, is very good, not because it is
metaphorical, but because it is the exact opposite of metaphorical."

Betty, for the last twenty years of her earth life, had been a receiving
station--a much more prolific station than Joan. For, after the rounding
out of Stephen's philosophy, Joan had only at long intervals and for
short periods invited communication. All her adult life she has been a
busy woman, with a personally satisfying--and exacting--job to do. Not
for seventeen years, had she done any really sustained psychic work. I
knew this. And after Betty's death Darby had written me that, though he
had hoped to reach Betty through Joan, he had been unable to do so.

"We have so seldom tried for communication in recent years," he
explained. "Not that Stephen or Anne ever fail to appear when we do try.
But they are old standbys. We have not been able to contact Betty. Joan
says it must be because she herself is rusty."

Joan was not rusty. But I think Betty's failure to speak through her
until I went East six months later inclined us to agree with Joan's
suggestion that she might be rusty. I wanted to see Darby and Joan in any
case, because, as I have explained, we are friends. But that first night
in their home I really hoped we would not try to get in touch with Betty.
Suppose we failed! Darby, whose experience and background have trained
him in the habit of controlling troublesome situations, kept our
after-dinner conversation going pleasantly enough about the novel I had
come East to see made ready for the press. But he did not fool me; and
Joan, quite unlike herself, was openly nervous. How deeply distrustful of
her talent, how downright fearful she was of the possible disturbance
failure might cause in my acceptance of Betty's voiceless but continued
Presence, I had no conception for a week or more. Parenthetically, that
particular fear was unwarranted. Nothing could disturb that Presence: it
is too actual and vivid.

Joan confessed her anxieties days later and only after Betty had suddenly
thrown an entirely new slant on the importance of evidence.

I have told how quickly and cleverly and abundantly Betty piled up proof
of her identity that first night Darby and I certainly needed no more
"evidential." Nevertheless, from time to time, in our subsequent
sessions, she would suddenly and unexpectedly slip in another bit.

We told her, at last, not to bother.

"You don't understand," Betty explained. "We do not do it only for you,
but also for the protection of the station. To assure her, in her
subconscious, and afterwards when she sees the record, of her own
integrity as a station, and that she is really giving the right message.
Do you think that if Joan felt for one instant that this was not I
talking, she would ever again go 'out' for me?"

2.

You will remember I said that in that initial evening.

Betty convinced me of two things: her identity, and that she had
something to tell. The foregoing chapters are intended to cover the
first. But before we go on to the second I want to say that I well know
mere evidence is little good except to those at whom it is personally
directed. Curious, but true!

We accept, as part of our mental equipment, "facts" of which we know
nothing whatever, merely on the testimony of some physicist, or
astronomer, or medico, or traveler, or whatnot, as to what he claims he
has seen. We haven't seen them, but we believe them. Yet we--as a
race--remain unmoved by equally specific and supported testimony, as to
what they claim they have seen, of such men as Sir William Crookes,
Flammarion, Sir Oliver Lodge, Richet, down to the bewildered--but
stubbornly honest--chiefs of police so often lugged into research of
psychic phenomena on the naive assumption that they must be particularly
qualified to detect fraud. We haven't seen; so we don't believe. Same
KIND of testimony, by same type of witnesses. If we simply must explain
to ourselves, we say they've gone a little dotty, and let it go at that!

Probably that is as it should be. This type of evidence may be intended
only for the person to whom it is directly addressed. It may be the job
of each to search out his own experience; or have it seek him out when he
is ready for it. The only real and satisfactory "evidential," in the long
run, is not the testimony of phenomena, but of ideas. Darby summed that
up well in the last paragraph of Our Unseen Guest.

"We believe," he writes, "Stephen is real, not because of the tests,
convincing as they have been; for these, it is conceivable, might be
explained away. That the terms of his philosophy should have come to us
as though out of the air, with us ignorant of their meaning until Stephen
elaborated them into a connected and dignified metaphysical system, seems
a test unlikely--as far as we are concerned--to be explained away. Yet
granted it were--still would Joan and I be compelled to accept the
reasonableness of Stephen's message. And that the philosophy should be
reasonable and the phenomenon a deception is a contradiction which, to
use Stephen's words, Joan's mind and mine are not 'nimble enough' to
entertain."

With that I agree heartily. Your own persuasion should await the
completion of what Betty had to say. The "evidential" of the preceding
chapters was not narrated to convince you: merely to show you the manner
by which we personally were convinced. Now, in order to show how Betty
managed to persuade us that she had indeed something to say, it might be
well to set down the high lights of the first few evenings.

After Joan had gone in trance that first night, a long pause ensued. Then
a whisper: "Yes, yes." Suddenly the voice came through clearly.

"Where shall I begin?" it said. "You see, Stewt,* Joan's all clogged up
with emotion, and I can't.... She wants to. She wants to let me have her
mind to use for you. I think the best thing is just to begin the job, and
that will quiet her down and give me a better chance."

* In a manner of speaking, this was the first bit of "evidential," though
it was not particularly important. Only Betty had ever called me that;
and--as far as we know--Joan had never heard it.

"You see, the thing I have to do now is what I did before, only from the
other end. I have to come back and tell you how I come back. That's my
job: that's what I have to do."

The facility abruptly failed. In such cases a question often helps. An
earlier "message," purported to have come from Betty to a friend, and
relayed to me, was that she was "working on the subject of pain, its
nature and the technique of handling it." I asked about that, merely to
get things going again. It worked.

"That is a very definite part of what I am doing," she resumed. "We are
all of us working so hard on people who are coming over suddenly now.
[This refers to the fighting in Poland. S E W ] Our friend the Doctor is
helping on that. He and I are working together. It is all confused here
now: so many coming suddenly, and they don't know what has happened to
them. You see, to people like you, and me when I left you, who know the
facts of the very narrow no-man's land between what you call life and
what I now call life--well, we can aid those who come out to help us in
going over, and meet them all clean and glorious and sure. Always those
who go naturally are met and told what the change is, so that there is no
disconcertion on their part. But those like you and me, we can help of
our own volition and knowledge. We are not only spared the surprise of
finding ourselves suddenly in another sphere, but we ourselves can wipe
out the tensions of our memories."

Her reference to working with "so many people coming suddenly now...not
knowing what has happened to them," while those "who go naturally are
always met and told," is an old story. Most of the books on psychic
experience, especially those published during or immediately following
the 1914-1918 World War, carried this same statement, endorsing the
age-old plea of the Litany: "from battle...and sudden death, Good Lord,
deliver us."

Betty's new and reassuring thought was how we--"people like us who know
the facts of the very narrow no-man's land"--can meet death, sudden or
natural; how we can rejoin our friends on the other side "all clean and
glorious and sure" and "wipe out the tensions of our memories."

This last seemed important to us; and very comforting. It struck Darby as
especially so, and he made a contribution.

"A long time ago," said Darby, "soon after a medical friend of mine died,
I was talking, through Joan, with him about his own passing. And among
other things he said this:

"'Birth is the mystery, not death. And did you ever stop to think that if
a child about to be born could be awarely conscious, how confused it
would be, and how afraid of the strange new world it had to face?' How
about it, Betty?"

"Your friend was right," she replied. "Of course death is much simpler
than birth; it is merely a continuation. Earth is the BORNING PLACE for
the purpose of individualization. That is one of the things I am to tell
you about later."

Nor could we persuade her at this time to explain further.

"No," she said firmly. "I could not make you understand yet. What I am
being permitted to tell you has a pattern--a well-thought-out,
step-by-step pattern. It will be easier for all of us, if you do not
disturb the pattern."

I asked another random question, with the same object in view: to keep
things going.

"Do you see and feel the physical sensations of my world that I see and
feet?" I enquired. "If so, do you get them through me? Or on your own?"

"I have all the senses you have, only more," she answered.

"Then," I persisted, "you can actually share a physical sensation with
me, as smelling a flower, or seeing a landscape?"

"Of course. And I've done it. All that you have I take, and I want it.
And I can induce a sensation in you.

"But our next job together," she continued, "is philosophy, though my
study of pain is important. You see our last book* tells about how I went
'out,' how I came into contact while I was still living on your side, how
anyone can teach himself to come in contact, to some extent at least,
with this side. Now I must evolve a method for telling how we COME BACK,
how I do it, so that you can receive more easily. You have learned how to
project your consciousness into my present state of existence and draw
sustenance from it; but you do not know how to permit us, on this side,
to project ourselves back to you. I did the one thing there; now I must
do this here."

* Across the Unknown.

"If Joan knew just how to let me come, it would be perfect. We will try
to make progress as fast as we can. I want you to be with me; I want
to--Oh dam!" she interrupted herself as the station fumbled. "If Joan and
I can only work together until I can rub out the wrinkles in her
brain--it's all here to be told. It requires a keyed-upness from the
spiritual side; a calmness from the physical. You have to be spiritually
alert, physically passive. But that alertness is peculiar. If you are too
spiritually alert you get keyed up to the point where you are not
dominated. It is under high tension that visions are seen--Angels of
Mons, and so on. But what I am talking about is the day-by-day means of
natural normal communication with me, and me with you."

That certainly sounded interesting enough, aside from all the personal
and the evidential, from which I extract these excerpts. At the next
opportunity I reverted to her statement as to her senses.

"You said, or implied, that you received sensations from our physical
world. Do you get them actually through the contacts with it of your
present body--what we used to call the beta body*--or do you get the IDEA
of contact first? Do I make myself clear?"

* See The Betty Book.

"Clear as mud," laughed Betty. "But I'll tell you how it is, I do touch
you, and sometimes you feel me, depending on whether your sense is keyed
to it. MY TOUCH OF YOU TO ME IS JUST AS REAL AS EVER. We ARE real. We are
entities. I am."

"In psychic literature," suggested Darby, "we are always reading about
the 'density' of earth conditions that it is necessary for the discarnate
to penetrate for the purposes of communication, and we get the idea
somehow that you do so with difficulty, something like a man under water.
Doesn't that affect your other contacts with our world--"

"The density is not for us," she interrupted. "It's the density for you.
We can see you. There is an earth density that is factual that you can
penetrate only under certain circumstances--emotion, shock, trance, and
so on; and then there is a spiritual density created by the minds of
people."

"Then your own faculties are not dulled by it?" I pressed the point.

"No. Take a radio: the announcer is in full possession of his faculties,
he is not dulled or fuzzy. But there may be static to spoil reception.
The limitations of relationships between the two worlds are for the most
part limited only in your world. Your world and mine are the same, only
you are not conscious of mine. I see both."





CHAPTER VII

ONLY ONE UNIVERSE

1.

"LISTEN!" Betty paused. For a breath there was utter silence in the room.
Then--"Listen," she said again. "THERE IS ONLY ONE UNIVERSE."

Darby's eyes, lifting from the notes he was taking, met mine. Here,
indeed, was a new concept if Betty meant her statement to include herself
as well as us.

Granted a Hereafter as a necessary accompaniment of immortality, where
was its place? Most moderns, I think, have discounted the pre-medieval
imagery of a Heaven set above the clouds with golden streets and golden
harps in the hands of gold-crowned angels. Yet my own ideas on the
subject, I suddenly discovered, were pretty nebulous. Betty existed. I
had no slightest doubt, emotional or intellectual, as to that. She had
come back to me on the hillside not thirty minutes after she had died,
flooding me with her presence and personality. Since that night she had
done the same thing repeatedly; again and again and again. Now, speaking,
through a receiving station, she had come back to identify herself by
means of specific statement of veridical facts.

She had COME BACK. For twenty years her Invisibles and mine had been
coming back; but coming BACK implies "from." From what? A mode or state
of being? Or from some PLACE, some WHERE?

Darby voiced my confused bewilderment.

"Don't get that," he said shortly. "What's the implication, only one
universe? Are our universe and yours one and the same? Do you mean what
you say literally?"

"Literally," she replied. "This divulgence is an effort to get at the
relationship of our two worlds. The immortality theme has been developed;
you believe in immortality. Until actual laboratory work is ready, you
have to go on laying the foundations. For instance, you have to have a
goal and a premise to work from. If I can ONLY tell you how we come back;
chart some kind of a course to be followed later scientifically. I want
to get over to you in terms of mechanics the possibility of the two
worlds being the same. There is only one universe."

"Possibly two viewpoints of it?" suggested Darby.

"'Many," she admitted. "But the only viewpoint we are interested in now
is yours and ours. Only one universe: two viewpoints is just your
perception. I want to make you understand, first, the reality of my
existing in the universe of which you are not wholly conscious. I want
you to understand, secondly, the possibility of my existing in a universe
of which you are fully conscious. And the third job is the actuality. I
want to make you understand that I do exist, and in a one-and-only
universe, wherein you too live, but amid the world's obstacles. What I am
really trying to say is that I live in the universe you don't see, and
also in the one you do see. Therefore, I live in the WHOLE universe."

"And as a corollary, to show that a great many things supposed to be lost
by separation are not really lost?" I suggested.

"The only things that are lost are those apperceptions controlled by your
senses--and not those entirely.

"One of the things that makes it seem to you, in your existence, that my
universe is not your universe is Frequency.* Let us examine the subject
of frequency.

* "Frequency" as Betty used it had a definite technical meaning which
will in due course appear. In this connection, however, the context makes
it sufficiently clear.

"I called frequency to Joan's attention when she was mending the electric
fan. She could hear the hum. She could look through the fan and see the
door case back of it. The fan was running so fast that so far as her
vision was concerned it had lost its solidity. My co-existence with you
is analogous. If the frequency were different for your human focus, you
could see me. As it is, you look through me. I am not there.

"Now suppose you cast your mind back to my efforts, when I was with you,
to project my consciousnesses beyond my then universe. What I was doing
was to project my consciousness beyond my then limitations. The
limitations of human existence vary according to the individual. The mode
of existence of certain individuals is farther out into the whole. Grant
that, and you immediately grant that you have a shifting line, an unfixed
horizon, even in your own universe."

I asked some question, irrelevant, unimportant, unrecorded and forgotten.

"Again that is beyond the point I am trying to make," said Betty
reprovingly. "I insist that you stay for the moment in your own natural
habitat, and grant, in it, a shifting horizon. It is already malleable in
your life. I am speaking of the shifting line of your existing universe
for the individual. You live in that universe. You work in it. How
different do you suppose that universe is to you than it is to a child?
The application is that there is no division--neither for you nor for me.
If you can discover the frequency, you can reveal my universe. That would
not mean that you could inhabit my universe. It would only mean that you
would know that I am inhabiting it."

Something like looking at fish in an aquarium, one of us suggested half
humorously; you can see them, but you can't live with them. Betty was
inclined to accept this.

"Let's get back to the child," said she. "You know how a child develops
its five senses. Touch is the first; hearing is the next, and so on. Now
THERE is a shifting universe."

"You said your frequency is different from ours," I observed. "Do you
have to leave your natural frequency to come in touch with our physical
world?"

"We do not have to," was her unexpected reply; "no especial effort. The
only change of frequency required of us is in order to apprehend more
fully our own new existence."

2.

All this was, naturally, of extraordinary interest to us, and opened up
many fresh avenues of thought.

We recognized the importance of the concepts coming from Betty--Betty who
had authenticated herself beyond question. Betty had got us that far. But
our acceptance of her universe and ours as one, was something else again.
With the body of the world's opinion, as expressed in religion,
literature and art--to say nothing of science--against us in this matter,
it was difficult for Darby or me to assimilate Betty's idea of her one
and only universe.

We sweat over it. We argued it between ourselves and with Betty. It
stayed over our heads for several evenings. And then finally we got it.
Betty herself had given us the key for logical understanding, but we had
not recognized it. We had failed as "conceiving stations. And here, by
the way, is a term much used by all our Invisibles.

As Betty explained it, a conceiving station has two functions.

"I know what I want to get over," said she, "and I express it. But how
can I tell how much I have conveyed, unless I get a reflection back from
your minds? What can I read of your comprehension from blank silence?"

The second function goes a little further. The conceiving station must
not only comprehend what is said, but he must on his own hook develop
implications as they occur to his habit of mind, and report them back and
discuss them. Many times these contributions are negatived or drastically
modified by the communicator; in which case they are valuable as clearing
misconception. More often, through restating Betty's concept in other
terms, they indicated full comprehension. Rarely--but often enough to
gratify--we actually carried to conclusion premises she had started. Then
Betty was jubilant, as over the brightness of a precocious child.

Therefore a conceiving station, unlike a receiving station, must know his
subject, or at least he must be able to learn it. First or last, he must
comprehend the meaning of the material coming through. Unless there is an
alert and adequate conceiving station, the value and importance of what
comes through the receiving station is generally lost.

"Photography," Betty had said in the midst of one of our boggings-down,
"you ought to understand the oneness of your universe and mine through
photography..." Joan likes to hear the records read after each session.
As she says, it's all SHE gets out of our parties! On such an occasion
the three of us were discussing the evening's work. It had been very full
of meat. Betty, not impatient but persistent, was hammering bigger and
better ideas at us constantly. And our failure to comprehend her ONLY ONE
UNIVERSE was holding everything back.

"Stewart," asked Joan suddenly, "what was it Betty said the other night
about photography? Could the analogy be there?"

I don't know whether the great illumination burst over Darby or me first.
But out of our ensuing debate was evolved this:

Take a black and white photograph--it registers a reality. Take a color
photograph--and it registers exactly the same reality, but--a reality
beyond that depicted by the black and white.

The illustration proves nothing, of course. Nevertheless it helped us to
understand how there might be two different appearances of one and the
very same thing. The color picture is only an extension--a more detailed
and accurate registration--of the identical scene originally photographed
in black and white.

Assuming that we here normally live in the black and white universe, it
is now entirely POSSIBLE (Betty's word and emphasis) for us to imagine a
"color" universe in which she might live. So there you have apparently
two universes; one black and white, one in color, but nevertheless the
same.

"So analyze them as you will," said Betty, "they are only two appearances
or aspects of the same thing. There is only one universe."
3.

It soon became evident, however, that her aim, and the aim of those with
whom she was working, was even more ambitious.

"Now, Stewt," said Betty one evening, "you remember when my consciousness
was voluntarily projected into this unobstructed universe,* I brought
back to you examples and imagery to explain phases of living. I was given
here a pattern for earth-life development. Now my job is to bring back to
you--and I mean BRING--a picture of the existence in which I now have my
being.

* She means her work as explained in The Betty Book and Across the
Unknown.

"All the concepts that I have been assigned to bring to you," she
repeated, "must be based on the fact that THERE IS ONLY ONE UNIVERSE. The
next step is your recognition of the shifting, even in your
consciousness, of the dividing line between the obstructed and the
unobstructed universes. Next is your realization, of what your scientists
have admitted, that there exists--in the only-one-universe of which you
are part--much that your senses cannot detect, but which you have proved
to exist by means of instruments invented by man. This unobstructed
universe of mine is part of your universe, just as your obstructed
universe is part of mine."

"We must," she insisted, at a later session, "say, over and over, THERE
IS ONLY ONE UNIVERSE. That is the fundamental premise. We have
established the reality of consciousness, and the continuity of the
individual division of consciousness. That was done long ago. Now and
more than ever, for a laboratory starting point, a premise, a goal to be
proved, we must rationalize for a reasonable mind the second great
reality, that of the ONLY ONE UNIVERSE. THE GREAT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOU
AND ME IS IN OUR AWARENESS-MECHANISM; and even that awareness-mechanism
is FUNDAMENTALLY the same: the difference is not so great."

"Awareness-mechanism" is a term much used by our Invisibles when Betty
was here, working with them. Later, through loan, Betty made out a
glossary of terms which she wished for complete accuracy in this present
divulgence. "Awareness-mechanism," she defined, "is that equipment of
self-aware consciousness whereby the individual perceives that which is
objective to him."

In view of her statement that she was to "bring a picture" of her state
of being, I was a little curious as to why her Invisibles in all her
twenty years' work while she was here had always so steadfastly refused
to tell anything about the conditions of life there; and, furthermore,
had never permitted Betty to attempt any descriptions of her exploration.
How does that come, I now asked her.

"Two reasons," said she. "First, you were not ready to receive
explanation. Second, there was never before Just this combination. I mean
a hookup like Joan and me. You see, I put in many years of projecting my
earth consciousness into the universe as a whole. Most of my
understanding that I brought back was in the terminology of earth
symbols. I did not then know how factual that terminology was; how good
it was for one side as for the other."

"I want to make this as all-inclusive and simple as he told us on still
another occasion. "My work been an explanation of reality. It is now. But
the purpose of this further exploration of reality is not to broaden
communication between the obstructed and the unobstructed universes. It
is not to make the picture of my existence so attractive as to create in
earth consciousness a longing to come here. Each individual is put into
the world to do a job; and he comes here best and happiest only when it
is completed; after he has gathered to himself as nearly as possible his
requisite of work and experience. The purpose of the present divulgence
is to restore in earth consciousness the necessity of individual effort,
and the assurance that the effort will not be wasted. The only assurance
of this is. a return to the belief in immortality.

"A second purpose is to instill into earth consciousness the oneness of
the whole. THIS BROADENS YOUR ETHICS AND RESTRICTS YOUR MORALS. Both have
been too loose for the comfortable living of mankind. Incidentally, one
of the causes for the instability you note in peoples, individuals,
society, thought, art, is the ultra and sudden ease of communication in
time and in space. The use of radio, the automobile and the airplane is
not stabilized. They have been too rapidly developed and perfected for
the assimilation of society in general.

"Knowing these things even better than you, it could, not, therefore, be
our purpose to do more at this time than reestablish on the basis of your
present knowledge--and the needs of your present knowledge--the faith in
the validity of self that is tottering. So much for your general reader.

"For the special reader, your scientist in his research laboratory, we do
hope to promulgate ideas upon which he can build toward us an actuality
of truth. That does not mean that the man in the street, going about his
business, could be in constant communication with us, either see or hear
us. It is the acceptance of reality that we seek for the sake of the
return of the individual's self-respect.

"It is only through the application of the reality of law, the acceptance
of responsibility by the higher quality, the recognition of the need of
the lower qualities for aid in their individual fulfillment of their work
and obligations, that the world can settle into a true evolutionary
process. It is important not only for you, but for us, that this occur."

I hope the reader must agree with us that as a prospectus for exploration
all this was sufficiently attractive: that Betty had, indeed, something
to say.



CHAPTER VIII

WE WORKED OVERTIME

1.

ON THE strength of all this I modified my plans. As many of my weekends
as I had not previously engaged, I spent with Darby and Joan.
Occasionally I managed an overnight in the week itself. Finally, I
extended my stay East to its last possible limit in order to visit them.
During those last days we worked every evening, and on Saturdays and
Sundays we could manage two and sometimes three periods. In this manner,
all told, we finished off with exactly forty work sessions.

We worked hard; no question of that. Betty had new and big concepts to
get over: and she had not only to state them, but to make us comprehend
them. To accomplish this she encouraged talk, argument, and contribution
on the part of Darby and me--the "conceiving stations." Darby did much
more than could I. There were moments when the job of getting down
verbatim some pretty rapid talk, and at the same time endeavoring to
absorb enough meaning to evolve some slight contributing intelligence of
my own, made me feel as though I were trying to take in the whole of a
three-ring circus. Some of our offerings proved helpful: many of our most
gorgeous deductions and theories, that looked perfectly all right to us,
Betty turned down flat--and continued calmly along the line on which she
had started. Reading the records later, as a whole, I can see how
ludicrous it was. She gave us scope to frisk all over the intellectual
landscape, but herself proceeded straight and undeviating toward her
objective. Or, to change the figure, she played us as a fisherman plays a
trout: gave us plenty of line, but reeled us in at last to where she
wanted us. A good method. It cleared our minds of what isn't so!

Usually each session lasted from two to two and a half hours. At the
close of each, Betty--oh very politely!--dismissed Darby from the room.
"You see," she explained quaintly. "I must change myself back for Stewt,
from a schoolma'am into a gal." Then for ten minutes or so she would talk
to me of personal things. So intimate to ourselves, at times, was some of
this that at first I could not quite avoid a slight uneasiness.

"I know it seems strange to you to be talking this way with this woman
present," said Betty. "But she is not present. She is a thousand miles
away! She goes so willingly and sweetly," added Betty appreciatively.

These little private talks--if I had stopped to think of them that
way--fairly bristled with the most brilliant "evidential." But I did not
wish to think of them that way. They were just talks with Betty, about
our own affairs.

2.

I have used the term "what Betty had to say," merely because it was she
who actually said it. She did not pretend--indeed she specifically
disclaimed--that this was all her own effort. She was always referring to
others with her, who were directing and advising as to the course of the
discussions.

"I don't know; I'll ask," she would say when we asked something outside
her own knowledge. "Those I am working with suggest--" she would preface
some advice. And occasionally, when she got into difficulties, or perhaps
by way of epitome, one or another of these collaborators--or
directors--would speak in his own person. But briefly. There was "Anne."
for example. Anne is a personality who, along with Stephen, immediately
began communicating through Joan once the latter had discovered her
psychic powers. She was a Scotswoman of, probably, about the sixteenth
century. Her broad dialect is archaic, interspersed upon occasion with
pure Gaelic, and, until one's ear becomes accustomed to it, far from easy
to follow or understand. Anne, or "the Lady Anne" as other Invisibles
usually refer to her, did not appear in Our Unseen Guest, though she had
much to do with that book's making. But because she is so beloved by
Betty, and indeed by all of us who know her--on this side as well as
there--Anne is to be included in these pages.

"The Lady Anne is a very great personage," Betty assured us. "I don't
suppose you people really appreciate--I didn't--what an honor it is to
have an individual like Anne take so much trouble. And she is so funny!"

Anne's wit is brilliant; her tolerance and wisdom profound with the
simplicity of broad and unemotional thinking. Nevertheless I shall not
attempt to reproduce here either her repartee or dialect.

"Anne knows much more than I do," Betty told us, "but I was selected
because Joan and I were nearly of the same frequency while I was there;
because I have so recently come over, and therefore am in closer touch
with you and your ways of thinking; and, finally, because I worked so
hard at it while I was there, that I developed certain qualifications.
3.

"The only difference, really, between our worlds is a difference of
frequency," Betty continued.

The gap between has never, as yet, been MECHANICALLY bridged. That is to
say, the highest frequency we have mechanically produced or isolated is
lower than the lowest frequency of Betty's state of being.

"You see," said Betty, "when I was there with you, I was very close in
degree to Joan. I am stepped up now higher than she."

In order to communicate through Joan, explained Betty, she must first of
all close this discrepancy; "step up" Joan's frequency to a meeting point
with her own, so to speak. That was roughly it, but the statement is not
exact. Nor was it made exact; but a glimpse was afforded by the
illustration of striking a note on a piano and getting vibrations on all
the other octaves of that same note.

"The only reason," said Betty, "you cannot exist and operate in the
ENTIRE universe, as I do--for I operate in your universe as well as in
mine--is because you are not able to step up your frequency. That is the
basis of Joan's talent; she can, upon occasion, step up her frequency.
But it is not a constant with her, which is why she isn't living with me
here now.

"And further," Betty amplified, "Joan can also permit me to help step up
her frequency." There seemed to be considerable technique to that.

"A station's ability to release subconsciousness and be stepped up in
frequency is a talent," she repeated. "It's a part of that person's
make-up, like any talent. You all have it to a degree, the simplicities
of it. Everybody is more or less 'psychic.' Some know it; some don't.
Darby is a good conceiving station, Stewt is a combination. Joan is a
super receiving station. During communication I use the released
subconscious of the station, and its storehouse to produce my message.
It's a talent on my side, too. In a way we have 'mediums' here. Certain
of us can communicate with more facility. I have to contend with the
frequency of Joan's physical body, just as she does to communicate with
me. That is a resistance. In many cases the deflection is so great you
get no communication at all."

All this was really aside from the line of the philosophy Betty was then
trying to get into our heads. Nevertheless it interested us enormously.
We were curious as to what made the wheels go round. We often wanted to
know things that had little to do with the presentation of the argument,
and generally were squashed by the simple statement, "That is aside from
the point I am trying to make"--expressed with the finality of Queen
Victoria's "We are not amused." But this question of the technique of
communication was an exception. Betty was willing to touch on it, from
time to time. Perhaps she was indulging the children. Perhaps she felt
its understanding would add to the reality of the situation. I do not
know.

"You said a while back that you 'used the released subconscious of the
station and its storehouse.'" I reminded her one evening. "Of course we
have known that you people over there pick a station for its vocabulary.
Do you also pick a station for its content of knowledge of a subject?"

"Rather for its POTENTIALITY of knowledge," she amended. "Joan has no
metaphysics, but it was possible for Stephen to give his philosophy
through her because the potentiality was in her mind. So I do not think
we shall have much difficulty in getting the present divulgence through
her. Of course, there is here a profound and sort of consecrated
eagerness to receive. Every time I come I realize how much she wants to
open her mind to the use we want to make of it."

"Now as to this attuning of your frequency and hers, one to the other. Do
you tune hers up and yours down; " I asked. "And when you meet us, as you
say you do, do you tune us up and yourself down?"

"I do not tune down my individual frequency to meet you," she replied
with dignity. "I do stimulate yours, and I deliberately use a
complementary frequency on this side to meet it. It happens that my
frequency and yours and Darby's and Joan's are very close. But Anne's
frequency is away beyond mine. I am telling you how she does it."

"What is this complementary frequency?" I asked.

"IT IS THE FREQUENCY ON MY SIDE THAT IS EXACTLY EQUAL TO, YOUR OWN ON
YOUR SIDE. It is lower than mine. But there is a degree here that is an
exact complement of Joan's, but it is lower than I am now. I have to be
able to manipulate that frequency in order to complement her.

"Suppose," said Betty, surrendering at last to our persistence, "we first
take up the procedure from your end. Now, here is Joan, with a talent for
receiving impressions outside the ordinary world impingements. She goes
about her business all day, having her share of hunches, but no more than
the average person. Then we four get together.

"Now, one of the reasons Joan is such a good station is because she can
be turned on and off by somebody else. In her case, by Darby's touch on
her wrist."

Something of the sort seems to be the case with professional mediums--I
epitomize Betty's statement here: they have their "signals" for entering
the peculiar state of communication. Some have a crystal ball, or tea
leaves, or playing cards, or the singing of hymns--there are dozens of
devices. The ancient soothsayers used the entrails of sacrifice.

"Nevertheless"--I resume the verbatim report of what Betty said--"in none
of their cases is there that little peculiar device, like clicking on and
off a radio, that we have here. When Darby touches her wrist, that is
merely a signal--a command-impulse from him for her to release her
subconscious--that I comprehend in response.

"Now suppose we describe that subconscious as a magnetic field of a
certain degree of attraction. If we were dealing with pure physics, you
would at once recognize that a like field could send to it or receive
from it any impulse.

"Now, operation of the field on my side is just as much a gift as is the
opening of the field on your side. Nevertheless, even failing that
operation, IMPRESSIONS do get through, but neither clearly nor
correctly."

"And that presupposes also the possibility of leaks through from other
sources," suggested Darby.

"Yes. We have here a magnetic field. And there are other magnetic fields
of approximately the same tuning. That is why, in the middle of a
perfectly evidential and correct message, you will get words we, or the
station, have not been able to edit out. As we learn better to control
the field, and as the station learns better to edit, you get less and
less of that.
"When Joan is in this communicating state--that is, while her magnetic
field is opened--anything you say registers, and because she knows it at
the time, she is able to edit. Nevertheless her memory is blocked off.
Now, when I get in the communicating state, through her--when I begin to
work my complement field here--I am in a like state. That is, not
PRECISELY like, but comparable. And I've put myself so in tune with HER
senses that I get back a most pleasurable reaction to them. That is why I
like to hear you address me audibly, though it is true I can pick up from
the entire field, on which you two [Darby and S E W] impinge."

That is, she could "read" our thoughts and mental questions.

"Now we're on the subject," said I, "how about this mind-reading
business? Suppose I am making a mental comment to you. How literally do
you take that from my mind? Exactly, or only in gist?"

"I get more than the gist of your comment. I get your exact words when
there is a DIRECT communion between you and me. When there is a station,
I would not only have to get your words myself, but in most cases I would
have to get enough of the sense of your question into the station's mind
to be able to answer it through her."

"It has been stated, quite often, that in your world you communicate with
one another mentally, what you might call telepathically," I continued.
"Is that true? It doesn't sound very sociable."

"We have voices. We can communicate with each other mentally, but we use
words over here simply because it's easier. There is a little more
technique to getting it out of the mind. Just as there is to getting it
out of your mind, to carrying on a mental talk with you. And of course my
awareness-mechanism has to be more acute in getting what you think than
when I converse with another individual in my state."

There is, she explained, a "communication band" of frequency, common to
all.

"It isn't important," said I, "but there's a current idea in occult
circles that every time we think of you people, you are aware of it and
have to respond--"

"I should say not! " Betty's scorn was vast. "If you thought you really
had something to say, of course we would come," she relented.

"Now," she finished off that aspect of the subject, "I want to call your
attention to one fact. In this type of communication we are using now,
you have never had to contend with a lower degree [of outside
interference]."

"Am I to understand that the control of this station by a lower degree
than the station is practically impossible?" I wanted to get this clear.

"Yes, it is. Let's go into it more deeply. Just how much effect on your
actual mentality, your think tank, not your emotions, would the
meanderings of a child have in influencing judgment? Little, or none.
It's exactly like that."

It is true that all this series of dissertations proved astoundingly free
from what we call "coloring"--the to interposition of the station's own
subconscious; and of what we call "interference"--presumably from outside
entities. We remarked on that one day.

"Oh, I can handle this woman," said Betty, almost smugly.

I think she must rather have hoped that all this would settle our minds
so we could get on with the main job. And, after all, our minds had to be
settled. It is part of how we worked, and that is one reason why I
include it in this chapter. Another reason is that I think it
interesting.

"Now look here," I challenged, "you've got me scared. If you people can
enter our minds at will, pretty soon I'm going to be afraid to think. And
you say you can go anywhere in our world 'because to you it is not an
obstruction.' Where's our common ordinary privacy? Irvin Cobb's goldfish
in a bowl has nothing on us."

"Certain things you call traits of character and convention have a
different meaning here than there. They are enormously intensified. Such
things as honor, honesty, self respect, and the like," said Betty.

"Does that intensification impose on you an actual inability to intrude,
as a locked door with us?" I wanted to know. "Or is it merely voluntary?"

"There are certain things you could not do--that you need no conscious
inhibition to keep from doing. You never would think of them. Murder, for
example. Then there are, in addition, conventions that perhaps you have
consciously to think about. You might break a convention, and then you'd
be sorry. Such things do go farther on our plane. They are all of them
protective."

"How about lower degrees without the full sense of honor, privacy, and so
forth, of the higher degrees? I instance not reading a man's diary. True
of us; but not perhaps of the typical landlady of fiction."

"One of the difficulties on earth is that you have idealized truth out of
your social set-up. Yet you have your prisons. The reason you have so
many of them is because you have permitted the lower degrees to run
amok," she replied.

"How do you keep them from running amok over there?" asked Darby.

"In the first place," said Betty, "laws are obeyed here. The recognition
of law is imperative. Law is a THING here. It operates. And here we all
understand that if we run up against a law, we bump. The breaking of a
law here has a different reaction on the individual consciousness than
does the breaking there. And it's not done."

"These lower degrees are then UNABLE, by their nature, to invade
privacy?" was my question.

"It is the very nature of things that makes them unable."



CHAPTER IX

WE MAKE THE GLOSSARY

BETTY early began to have trouble with terminology. The ideas she wanted
to convey were exact; and our habit is to use words inexactly. Her ideas
were new; and they deserved new terms. However, at first she used those
with which we were familiar, and eased us out of them only when by their
means she had penetrated our density.

As an example, for some time she distinguished her universe and ours as
unlimited and limited. "It is all one universe," she insisted, "but yours
is limited."

That did all right for the first rough exposition. "But we are not
without limitations," she later reflected. "They are not limitations of
your kind of matter, but...."

Then for a while she switched to "restricted" and "unrestricted"; but
this would not do: she admitted she did have the restrictions of her
state of being. Finally she settled down to "obstructed" and
"unobstructed" and was satisfied. So was Anne.

"And," the latter pointed out, "you will remember that at the very first
Betty said there is the obstructed and UNOBSTRUCTED universe." This was
true--as a phrase--but we had forgotten it.

We had the same difficulty with the word "constant." It took us some time
to learn, by the context of the record, that Betty used it in the sense
of "constantly accompanying," as an integral necessity of being. But its
stricter connotation is mathematical. It would mean "fixed" to most
people, and that was not what Betty wanted at all.
"Substantial"--standing under--had too many connotations:
"Co-efficient"--analyzed down to its derivatives--was good enough; but no
reader would stop to analyze. He would simply take its mathematical
significance, and let it go at that. So we had to search still further.

And in another connotation Betty used "constant" for a while in such
phrases as "constant time," "constant space." On Darby's suggestion we
substituted "absolute." That was a comfortable enough fit for the
foundation ideas. But later it could not contain them. Betty became more
and more dissatisfied, as did Darby.

"We HAVE to ditch the word 'absolute'," said she at last. "'Absolute'
connotes static; and ours is not a static world; it is in evolution. We
have had to use terms at first that were ABSOLUTELY gray-headed. That is
why we had to get the word 'orthos.'"

That was a brand-new word Betty had managed to coin some days before, and
had defined for us, after a fashion, but whose real intended use Darby
had "conceived" only now. We had been fumbling, with much give and take
of discussion for her conception of "constant time," or "absolute time,"
and finally in despair fell back on "third time"--the other two being
ordinary sidereal or clock time, based on astronomical movements, and
psychological time.*

* The argument will be developed in its proper place later.

"'The Greeks have a word for it!'" quoted Betty.

At the moment we thought that a flippancy, nor did we change our opinion
when, later, she repeated.

"You remember last week I told you 'The Greeks have a word for it,'" she
insisted. "Strip down--as you stripped down your word 'essence'--ESSE, to
be. The Greeks HAD a word for it."

She tried to tell Joan, and have Joan repeat it to us--a method sometimes
effective when there is verbal difficulty. Joan produced EROS, and in her
capacity as a receiving station stuck to it in face of derisive hoots
from both the conceiving stations. This, we protested, was no love story;
nor one of those love-light-and-sweetness cults! Or was it? No, it
wasn't.

"For the time being Betty gave it up and went on using constant" and
"absolute," but always with dissatisfaction. Finally she got it over,
through Joan, in automatic writing; a method Joan very rarely employs,
and at which she is not particularly good. It was ORTHOS;* a word which,
audibly, sounds sufficiently like eros to one who, like Joan, knows no
Greek.

* Greek--straight, true. As orthodox, orthochromatic, orthopedic, etc.

Like all new words, it had to have not only meaning, but connotation
poured into it before it could become medium of exchange. That came later
for us, and will for the reader come later in this book. But it soon
became sufficiently obvious, as our especial terminology accumulated,
that we would have to go in for definitions. [See Glossary at end of
book.]

And that, for Darby and me--the conceiving stations--turned out to be
genuine labor. Betty seemed to think, and probably justly, that it would
be good for our understanding if she let us do the defining. She reserved
the right of veto--and exercised it. And let us try and try again, with
an occasional kind hint or suggestion--seldom more than that--until we
had hammered out something satisfactory. It was really funny. We had so
many bright ideas, and were so enormously pleased with ourselves, and
were so flatly sat upon! Definitions of half a dozen terms would leave
us, and the evening, exhausted.

"Now formulate and define orthos," Betty challenged us.

Before we begin, I beseech the reader not to try to make head or tail of
this now. It will be discussed--and I hope clarified--in Part II. I quote
here, only as amusing, an example of what we were up against in making
these definitions.

"Well," fumbled Darby, "you have said that orthos is 'the elemental
reality'; 'it is not synonymous with consciousness'; 'it does not include
the obstructed universe aspect.' 'Orthos is the elemental reality of the
unobstructed universe'--but really consciousness is the elemental. By its
derivation, 'orthos' is 'the true.' If space and time and motion are, as
you have implied, appearances set up in the obstructed universe, then
orthos is that of which they are the appearance."

"Orthos--from the Greek for true--is the ultimate from which all
appearances of the universe emanate," contributed Betty.

"Is it fair to say that orthos is the unobstructed universe, the frame,
the concept of the unobstructed universe?" asked Darby.

"It would be fair enough," conceded Betty. "Orthos is the unobstructed
aspect of the entire universe."

"Then," said Darby, "I'd say that orthos is the field of operation of
consciousness and its co-existent essences in the absolute."

"But," objected Betty, "why did we coin the word 'orthos'? Wasn't it to
get rid of the word 'absolute'?"

"Orthos is the field of operation of consciousness and its co-existent
essences in its unobstructed aspects," was my try at it.

Betty ignored this one.

"One of the subjects we want to talk about is the fourth dimension--the
possibility of it, not its reality; you can't get the reality," said she.

"But," objected Darby, "you have said that orthos is in trilogy.* Add a
fourth? Unless it is consciousness itself." Darby was doubtful. So was I.

* A trilogy of Time, Space and Motion. See discussion in Part II.

"Well, if you add any fourth dimension tonight, I'll lose consciousness,"
I observed.

This joke was not appreciated. We returned to the job. After much anguish
we evolved this:

"Orthos: the operation of consciousness through coexistent essences in
its unobstructed aspect."

Betty passed this. "The next is 'orthic,'" she said.

"'Adjective: pertaining to orthos,'" I proffered glibly.

"Congratulations! A perfect definition, and right the very first time,"
said Betty ironically.

In this manner, was our glossary compiled.

PART II


CHAPTER X

CONSCIOUSNESS, THE ONLY REALITY

1.

ALMOST a quarter of a century ago Stephen, through the same station Betty
is now using, developed an original philosophy which many people, among
them I, have felt made rational--or at least more rational--the
continuation of the individual after death.

Early in Betty's divulgence I realized, as did Darby, that her own work
of the past twenty years, as recorded in The Betty Book and Across the
Unknown, and that of Margaret Cameron as detailed in The Seven Purposes,
as well as the philosophy of Stephen of Our Unseen Guest, were of the
same piece as her present effort--perhaps a groundwork and preparation
for her present effort. Indeed, it was Betty herself who later suggested
that her current thesis, while inclusive of the pragmatic and ethical
teachings of The Seven Purposes, was so definitely a metaphysical
extension of the Stephen philosophy as to make a resume of his earlier
thought imperative for the present reader's best understanding.

"It is felt here," said she, "by intelligences who, when operating in the
obstructed universe, had much to do with stimulating public thinking,
that this particular book on which we are working should pretty much
encompass the whole teaching. We must get from Darby and Joan permission
to restate the substance of their publication, and build this
presentation on a combination of what Joan received and what I received,
as a foundation to what Joan and I are now doing together."

Therefore, at Betty's behest I epitomize briefly Stephen's concept, which
rested on the following:

There is but one reality. It is all-inclusive, but in degrees. Its
highest expression on earth is consciousness, the self-aware I-Am of man.
Consciousness, in degrees, is the one and only reality.

This is not a statement of subjective idealism. It is as far from that as
from materialism. For as Stephen phrased it:

"Your men of books and laboratories...all seek to find a fundamental in
their favorite attribute of reality. The idealist has made mind
supreme...the materialist has made matter supreme. The truth is that both
mind and matter are...attributes of one that is greater than either."

To that "greater than either" he gave the name of its highest
expression--Consciousness.

Betty developed this thought for a visitor unskilled in metaphysics.

"What is your reality?" she asked. "What do you KNOW, beyond question?
Take this room. Are you sure these walls are green? Maybe your eyes trick
you. Maybe these walls ARE gray--just as one of your friends has always
insisted! Take the salt in the soup last night. Maybe there WASN'T too
much--nobody else thought so--maybe your taste tricked you! Take all of
your sense-perceptions--any of them can trick you! So what do you know?
Just one thing. You know that you ARE. That is your reality--consciousness.
Consciousness is the one and only reality."

"You know the people you love," the visitor objected doubtfully.

"How do you know them? What do you know of THEIR I-Am? Of course you know
that they are entities in your obstructed universe. But the only thing of
which you are absolutely sure, what you know in any specific dot of time
and space, is I-Am. Everything else you know is in RELATION to your I-Am.

"Consciousness," said Betty, hammering home Stephen's basic concept, "is
the only reality."

2.

Next, the Stephen philosophy undertook a QUALITATIVE and QUANTITATIVE
analysis of consciousness--exactly as a chemist might undertake a
qualitative and quantitative analysis of elements and compounds--showing
that here on earth evolution advances from A QUANTITATIVE aspect only. In
other words, so far as earth evolution can be noted and measured by
science, a set pattern is followed; we get higher and higher developments
of the earth species, but in any observable span of centuries no NEW
species occur, no new genera. One can breed better dogs, bigger or
smaller dogs, curlier or smoother dogs; but always they are dogs. Yet
science also knows that in the various ages of the earth's history new
genera HAVE appeared. Man, for instance, the genus homo.

Where from? Monkeys? Or a common ancestor of man AND monkeys? That is one
theory of evolution. But even to the most convinced Modernist--the
believer in evolution as opposed to the rapidly decreasing group of
Fundamentalists who dispute evolution--the suggestion of an ape ancestry
just won't click. Somewhere along the line there's a missing fact as well
as a "missing link"! However, back in 1916 Stephen had said:
"Your science knows but HALF of evolution."

Granting the truth of evolution's quantitative development here on earth,
what about evolution's qualitative development--those periodical
appearances in this world of new genera and new species, or even of new
varieties in those species so radically different as to cause science,
unable to account for their source, to call them "mutations"?

Postulating earth-life as quantitative evolution, Stephen proclaimed the
other "half of evolution" to be qualitative. Thus he established for
Consciousness--the one and only reality--two planes or, better perhaps,
two modes; QUANTITATIVE EVOLUTION, or life here as we know it, and
QUALITATIVE EVOLUTION, or life there as he knows it after what we call
death. His plane, or mode, of consciousness, he said, is qualitatively
free; quite as our earth plane, or mode of consciousness is
quantitatively free or, at most, subject only to such limitations as
result from the fixed quality of individuals and species.

On the basis of evolution, then, and evolution's own need to account for
its mutations, the Stephen philosophy asserts a qualitative plane or mode
of existence as an inevitable necessity for the development of these
mutations.

Again:

1. Evolution was accepted by Stephen as a fact or law:

2. The whole of consciousness, the fundamental reality, is in evolution:

3. The earth manifestations of consciousness are in evolution
quantitatively only:

4. It follows that the QUALITATIVE aspect of consciousness can be in
evolution only on ITS own plane--a someplace beyond earth-life.
And in this "someplace," said Stephen, exists a consciousness not
observable at any given period on earth, since no particle of
consciousness can be lost.

He further asserted that the fact that qualitative consciousness is
limited in its evolution to its own plane accounts for the FIXED quality
of the earth species--man as man, tree as tree, gold as gold, electricity
as electricity.

But we must not forget that Consciousness is the fundamental--the one
common reality, despite all manifestations and attributes.

"The consciousness of the weed is no different in kind from that which
manifests itself as an electrical current, and the consciousness
manifested by the electrical current is no different in kind from that
which manifests itself as what you call inanimate, inorganic matter.
Consciousness is. It is the one and only reality, alike always in kind,
though its degrees are many," stated Stephen.

In fact, there are degrees within degrees. To illustrate:

Man is born into this quantitative world out of the man-degree of
quality, not the tree-degree, nor the dog-degree, nor the
electrical-energy-degree, nor any of the other manifold degrees, but out
of his own human-degree. Nevertheless, though the individual man is born
man, his capacity as an individual varies greatly from that of his
fellows. In the man-degree of quality itself there is a procession of
what we might call sub-degrees, accounting for individual differences.

So man, like any individualized bit of consciousness, comes into this
quantitative world with a fixed degree of quality. He is born man, and he
can't change that; but he is also born with a degree of quality
individual to himself. This, too, he can never change--his capacity for
doing, for understanding, for becoming. But he can fulfill that capacity;
he can win for his individual consciousness a degree of quantitative
development proportionate to his quality.

There is nothing complicated about this thought. We know it already.
Nobody would contend for a moment that Tony in the ditch and Einstein in
the laboratory are of the same degree of quality. So when a man is born,
he is a man because he is born from the human quality of consciousness;
but he is born his KIND of a man because he comes from his own particular
sub-degree within that quality, bringing with him not only an unalterable
humanness but a fixed individual capacity. So what can he do? Obviously,
he can develop quantitatively. He can fill his capacity,--or come as near
filling it, or as far from filling it--as his free will chooses. In any
event, he does so by doing his job, undergoing experience, and
assimilating that experience. In other words, by living earth life. The
manner in which he lives it determines how high a mark in his capacity he
makes. And, incidentally, in any human being there is more capacity than
his best efforts are likely to fill. He won't spill over!

3.

This, in distinction to quality of consciousness, Stephen called
"accumulation of quantity of consciousness." That, of course, is
terminology; and, like all terminology, must be broken in before it
becomes an easy fit for the mind. Stephen broke it in by the use of
simple illustrations:

"Take a common field daisy," said he. "It will in its earthly character,
always be a daisy, though by cultivation it may be made a thing of many
petals, of intricate life. So it is with the individual."

Tony in the ditch can go to night school, and support his crippled
parents, and get to be quite a man; or he can stay in the ditch and
arrive at old age pretty much the same Tony. Not quite. There is no one
but accumulates some quantity. Both a Tony and an Einstein, each
according to his quality, can, and do, grow here on earth intellectually,
morally and socially. Each builds what we call character. And we know
that the extent of that building depends upon the personal initiative of
each, on his individual free will.

For this quality-quantity thought concerning man is as old as the ages.
Remember the "Parable of the Talents?"

How to one man had been given five, and to another two, and to a third
one? And how the five-talent man accumulated another five, and the
two-talent man another two, while the one-talent man--burying his in the
ground--did not even try? And the Master commended the first two
"servants" in the same words, equally, though the five-talent man had
returned with ten talents and the two-talent man with but four. Only the
one-talent man did the Master rebuke, because he had not even tried. Each
of the first two had made the most of his individual capacity; each of
them had fulfilled his own degree of quality quantitatively.

4.

And now to this bare outline of Stephen's teaching must be added two more
major ideas, both stated by him but left, apparently, for development by
Betty these many years later. The first:

"Form is an attribute of consciousness...all manifestations of
consciousness have form...in qualitative evolution as well as
quantitative evolution"--in the unobstructed as well as in the obstructed
universe.

This is a comfortable thought because here on the quantitative plane we
are so used to form. All that we see or perceive has form; all that we
cannot see, but nonetheless have learned to measure or use, has form. We
ourselves have form; an electrical impulse has form. We cannot see
qualitative (unobstructed universe) form--but neither can we see all
quantitative (earth, obstructed universe) forms--air, for instance.
However, Betty will tell us more about that.

The second proposition to be noted now is what Stephen called Parallel
Law.

"There are two great glimpses," said Stephen. "Evolution is one of these.
With this truth your world already is familiar.... In inorganic matter,
evolution finds one expression; in the reproductive process of life,
another; in the intellectual and moral phases of human endeavor, still
another.... But always it is the same law, its varying manifestations
parallel each other. Now here where I am there are laws, just as natural
as yours...which parallel the laws, evolution included, of the
earth-plane."

"Do you mean," Darby asked (back in 1916), "that spiritual law is simply
a more complex expression of material law, and that the law of your plane
is but a parallel of the natural or earth-plane law?"

"Parallelism, so defined," Stephen replied, "is the second of the two
great glimpses, the greatest really of all glimpses. If earth scientists
will...interpret psychological laws on the basis of so-called material
laws, they will lift the assurance of the existence of my plane out of
the field of mystic belief into that of reasonable fact."

And there, for the time being, Stephen left Parallelism, despite his
having called it "the greatest really of all glimpses." Perhaps it was
left for Betty's more precise development.

One more of Stephen's terms seems pertinent--pluralistic monism. It's a
serviceable handle for thinking, though just another way of saying "many
in one" or, for that matter, "e pluribus unum." The United States, for
example, is one nation, manifested, however, in forty-eight states. The
oneness of consciousness is a fundamental of the Stephen philosophy, but
just as fundamental is his insistence that consciousness, being in
evolution, manifests itself in degrees and in individualizations within
those degrees. Thus it is on earth, and thus it is, said Stephen,
throughout all of consciousness, qualitative as well as quantitative.
Hence pluralistic monism.

"A reasonable peg, in the light of your own knowledge," said he, "on
which to hang your faith" *--faith in immortality.

* All quotations of Stephen are from Our Unseen Guest, published by
Harper & Brothers, February, 1920.

But between the immortality of his qualitative-plane in some afterlife
and the mortality of our quantitative-plane in this life Stephen left a
wall; a wall between TWO planes--one HERE, the other THERE.

Now, twenty-four years later, Betty, having died, "comes back" through
the same station to proclaim that "THERE IS ONLY ONE UNIVERSE." Her job,
we were given to understand that first evening she spoke to me through
Joan, was to try to break a hole in Stephen's wall.




CHAPTER XI

FOUNDATION STONES

1.

"CONSCIOUSNESS," said Betty, "is the starting point for everything." A
familiar statement to us; yet of such importance that she thought it
worth returning to so often that we began to make jokes about it.

"Consciousness--" she began one evening.

"--is the one and only reality," Darby and I supplied in chorus.