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Title:      With Folded Wings (1947)
Author:     Stewart Edward White
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0301201.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted:          August 2003
Date most recently updated: August 2003

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      With Folded Wings (1947)
Author:     Stewart Edward White




Walk through your days as a creature with folded wings, conscious
of the possession of another element and your ability to enter it.

INVISIBLE




"Caterpillar on the end of a twig; and he's even all the leaves and got
to the end of the twig; and he's crying, because all the food in the
world is eaten up, and the race of caterpillars is going to die! Besides,
he's pushing out into the air in every direction, and he says he's found
out everything; no place else to go. It's only a little twig, too. And he
thinks that if he dies there aren't going to be any more caterpillars!
... Wait a minute, the caterpillar is saying something: that he doesn't
know what's going to happen to the work of the Creator. Creator isn't
going to have anything more to do; He's finished; because he (the
caterpillar) was the Crowning Work, and when he's gone....

"Never saw a caterpillar cry before--it's funny. Well, it's a tragedy.
All the work of the Creator is coming to an end in the highest possible
thing--and he's going to die! He says there'll be nobody to pass on his
enormous experience to! He's going to make a mummy case, and crawl into
it--no matter how the Creator feels about it. He'll do it to spite Him.
He doesn't know he's going to be a butterfly. He's crying because he's
sorry for himself; he really believes he's sorry for God--all His
wonderful creative work going to end! That's a sad picture!"

"Well," said the Invisible, "that's the way most of your sad pictures
look from this side."

"There he goes, into his mummy case. He's shutting the door and saying:
'That's that! I'll bet God'll be sorry that He fixed it so there's
nowhere else for me to go--and nothing more for me to find out!' ...
Bing! There's the door shut. And a little squeaky voice coming out
says.--'A-a-ll over!'

"Damfool! He doesn't know how funny he is."

"No damfool ever knows how  funny he is," observed the Invisible.

"Crying because he doesn't know he's going to be a butterfly."

"No, he wouldn't want to be a butterfly," concluded the Invisible,
"because he's never been one!"




PUBLISHER'S NOTE

The completed manuscript of WITH FOLDED WINGS came to the Publisher from
the late Stewart Edward White only a few days before his death.

As a general thing, Mr. White made a few corrections and emendations in
the text of the work while it was going through the press and it is
reasonable to suppose that he might have done so in the present instance,
but the suddenly fatal termination of his illness rendered this
impossible.

The text of WITH FOLDED WINGS here presented is, therefore, with the
exception of the correction of type-errors, exactly that of the copy
received from Mr. White, without either editing or revision.




INTRODUCTION

THE MATERIAL for this book is drawn from some 2,500 single-typed pages of
verbatim records. The latter are made up of communications from
discarnate entities we called the Invisibles, mainly through the
mediumship of one of us known as Betty. The latter had become a station
for this sort of transmission only by dint of a rigorous twenty years of
training. This training, according to the Invisibles, war, intended not
so much for development in mediumship as a means toward expansion of
consciousness. The resulting psychic powers were an accompaniment, a
by-product. In themselves they were not the aim. The real aim, it now
seems to me, was--and is--a demonstration in attainment of what Bucke
named Cosmic Consciousness. But with this important advancement. The
examples Bucke cites* experienced Cosmic Consciousness as an
illumination, sudden and brief. He adds that it is probable that this
state, touched only momentarily and by illumination, is the state of
consciousness toward which evolution is developing.

* Cosmic Consciousness, by Richard M. Bucke (New York: E. P. Dutton &
Co., Inc.).

The aim of Betty's training, and the experience she encountered in the
course of it, might seem to imply that she was demonstrating a step in
that evolution. She was exemplifying, in her own person, what is to be
the process by which the human soul will gain permanently Cosmic
Consciousness. She herself entered it again and again, but only in her
trance state. She reported back, and her reports have the same quality
and contact that Bucke describes as the "illuminated moment" in the
examples he cites. Furthermore, at the very last of her life here she won
to that insight, that condition of soul, in her waking state. This
laboratory demonstration of our soul's future has a profound
significance.

But incidental to this, we set down the aforementioned records and
communications, which dealt with Betty's training--expositions on
technique, helpful comment on how to live, enunciation of principles.
From them, over several years, we have compiled, generally under the
further direction of the Invisibles, several books.* Subsequent to
Betty's death, in 1939, she reversed the process, and through the
mediumship of a friend whom we named Joan, she produced that amazing
"divulgence," The Unobstructed Universe. In addition, two other books
whose contents were not so directly quoted from the records nevertheless
fitted in as part of the whole effort.**

* The Betty Book, Across the Unknown, The Road I Know (New York: E. P.
Dutton & Co., Inc.).
** Anchors to Windward, The Stars Are Still There (New York: E. P. Dutton
& Co., Inc).

That would seem to cover the field. But a rereading of those 2,500 pages
convinced me that the present volume was also part of the pattern. The
remaining material was too richly significant to ignore. Furthermore, it
covered aspects of this expansion of consciousness business not dealt
with in the other books.

Nonetheless in a very few instances the logical sequence demanded a brief
repeat of a paragraph or so that had already been used. This is due
warning that such is the case. So if some reader recognizes a passage
here and there, he will understand that it is an intentional inclusion.
This being once and for all understood, I have felt justified in omitting
footnote references that would merely clutter up the page.

There remains but one further explanation. Most of this is form or
through Betty, and is so labelled. A few others, which are ascribed
simply to "the Station," came through two people who developed their
mediumship with Betty and did nearly all of their work in either her
presence or mine. We have been given to understand that the
communications are an essential part of the complete picture.




CONTENTS

       INTRODUCTION
I.     THE AIM
II.    EDUCATION
III.   FUNCTIONING
IV.    THE POSITIVE INGREDIENT
V.     NEGATIVES
VI.    CONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT
VII.   CONTACT 80
VIII.  MEASURE FOR MEASURE
IX.    MEDITATION
X.     PRAYER
XI.    HARMONY
XII.   THE POINT OF REFERENCE
XIII.  MANIFESTATION
XIV.   OUR PART IN CREATION
XV.    INTENTION
XVI.   HEALING
XVII.  THE AREA OF ACCOMPLISHMENT
XVIII. THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT
XIX.   LAW
XX.    DE SENECTUTE
XXI.   THE GENTLE ART OF DYING
       INDEX




I. THE AIM


I DON'T want to preach at anybody; I just want to share something
beautiful. The true teacher brings his own iris of beauty to you without
proselyting, I, without thrusting things at you. He makes you remind
YOURSELF of the deep blue sky and the fluttering gold of autumn, or the
thrill of fern fronds and the sweet stirring earth of spring. A man like
that who stimulates living is his own sermon.
BETTY


1

SINCE WE are not ourselves ultimates, we cannot know ultimate Purpose.
The present purpose seems to be evolution by means of functioning. The
objective of evolution is twofold. On the one hand it is the development
of the independent individual. On the other it is the coordination of the
individuals so developed into a functioning Unity.

This dual objective is the Aim with which we must be concerned. It is the
rod by which we must measure our ambitions, activities and deeds. Are
they in furtherance of this Universal Aim? Provincial divergences of
ethics must yield to this simple criterion. So the development of
ourselves as individuals in evolution becomes our first obligation.

2

When this doctrine of self-development was first offered us by the
Invisibles we shied away. In common with most of our generation we had
been brought up on an ethic of "doing for others," of "unselfishness," of
"service." We had not lived up to that ideal. As children we had often
endured the finger of scorn and the epithet "Selfish!" And has grown-ups
we had more than once had an uncomfortable feeling we were not "doing our
duty" by others. The idea that maybe we had been at least partly right
all along looked too much like wishful thinking.

But the Invisibles persisted. A little here, a little there, they
infiltrated their subject. Finally they treated it to a full-length
discourse.

"You must," said they, "learn to understand what necessary over-emphasis
has obscured. This is that the word 'selfish' has also an obverse, a
meaning of usefulness, even a meaning of necessity. Like all ingredients
of life, it has its necessary proportion.

"Your first duty in development, not only for your own sake but for the
sake of the greater whole, is the establishment of a homogeneous,
close-knit, invulnerable core of yourself as an individual. Until you
have so established a center or nucleus, no matter how small, in which
your conviction is absolute that it is the germ center of yourself as a
separate eternal entity in cosmos, any venturing outside your boundaries
is unwarranted and will inevitably prove more or less disastrous. Even
the natural instinctive eagerness of outfling must be withheld until that
sure core of integration is assured.

"This primary central establishment is the first indispensable step in
the creation of the eternal self. Whether it takes a decade, a
half-century, a whole lifetime, or the repeated incarnations of a number
of phases, NO FORWARD MOVEMENT CAN SAFELY, EFFECTIVELY OR CONSTRUCTIVELY
BE ATTEMPTED UNTIL THIS IS ACCOMPLISHED. OUTSIDE engagements can succeed
only after this fact. Thenceforward this central self becomes a citadel
for withdrawal from mistaken or premature outgoings. Such outgoings,
before the complete and homogeneous occupation of this center, leave a
tenuosity behind your back permeable by usurping forces which a firmer
establishment would have automatically excluded. Therefore, stop AT THIS
POINT OF DEVELOPMENT until the assurance is gained, no matter what
implication even to yourself such a course may seem to have of
selfishness, self-centeredness, lack of outside response and
responsibility, or any of the other reproachful concepts of which this
use is the constructive obverse.

"Here is a truth so profound and yet so simply stated that I would have
it in a separate paragraph:

"OUTGIVNG IS NEVER CONSTRUCTIVELY EFFECTIVE UNLESS IT IS AN OVERFLOW.

"You may out-give by pumping up, generally with the suction of what is
expected, or the proper thing, or the duty, or the obligation to the
world or humanity, general or specific. But pumping up always means
depletion; depletion means vacuum; and vacuum is a vortex of attraction
for the destructive. Overflow, on the other hand, is a super-abundance
that leaves no lack behind it, but still the filled reservoir of
accomplishment. When you rush forth to give, driven by your natural
instincts of sympathy, of desire to reconstruct, of sensitivity to
conditions, pause to consider whether you are leaving your territory
unoccupied, open to an invasion that ultimately is going to make you
ineffective. Your responsibility as a component part of the greater whole
is primarily yourself, and only secondarily that which you accomplish
outside yourself. That the secondary may be important is acknowledged,
BUT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE that it should be aught but ephemeral if the primary
is not a solid reality. In this sense it is your BUSINESS to be selfish,
in the shining aspect of that word. And the great paradox is that the
shining use of selfishness enables you to be effectively, and without
disintegration, what the world calls 'unselfish.'"

3

As a rule the Invisibles waited for us to practice what they preached
before they gave explanations. The idea seemed to be that only in this
way could we accomplish anything permanent. Otherwise it would not be
ourselves who accomplished. It would be merely the acceptance of someone
else's accomplishment. And that is never permanent.

It was just this way in the present case. But eventually they gave us
more insight into how this self-development thing worked.

"The individual man," said they, "is a member of not one narrow group
only, such as the family. He is also a member of a succession of ever
more inclusive groups, until he is to be considered eventually a member
of that which comprises the sum total of earthly incarnations. Each of
these groups has its own type of problems, good and evil, to be worked
out. And all of these problems have the same characteristic of being
beyond the scope and power of individual solution. They have also the
characteristic in common that they are the individual problem and
responsibility.

"From this it follows that if an individual works out his own
development, he automatically also works out, as far as the individual
can, the group problem. And consequently, if the group problem is by so
much carried out, there is so much less of it to weigh upon the other
members of the group. In that thought you may glimpse the interrelations
of effort, and the value to others of whatever real progress you make for
yourself. You may also, perhaps, glimpse the reverse, and perceive how
imposing additional limitations on yourself through inertia and
indifference does likewise to others. This is for the automatic
relationships.

"There enters also a semi-automatic relationship, as one might say. If
the individual works out within himself his own portion of the group
Impetus, he will in the process, by a universal law, have produced
something which manifests that bit of development in the external world.
It may be a concrete thing, or a bit of practical knowledge, or merely an
externalized spiritual attitude. But whatever its form, it is there
existent in an appropriatable shape for those who can reach out for it
and utilize it. And whenever such an appropriation is made by another,
not only does the utilization aid further in the solving of that group
problem, but also in repercussion it renders stable the advancement of
the one first attaining."

"Then," commented one of us, "it really is legitimate to pursue personal
ambitions!"

"Surely!" was the reply. "One should build one's self the best possible.
The trouble often is that that becomes both sufficient and inviolable.
One forgets that the building of one's self is but for the purpose of
contributing one's self-contributing one's self COMPLETELY. That may
sound out of reach, impractical, even undesirable. And maybe it is--for
the present. Nevertheless it is an eventuality to be faced, for the
things we hold back are what keep us from participation in the greater
Whole."

4

So indispensable to the longer view of evolution is this imperative of
self-development that to it we may ascribe the urgency of one of
mankind's deepest instincts. Like other basic instincts, at this stage of
human development it is more often perverted than not. But the handicap
of present perversion is a lesser price to pay for the later perfected
function. I refer here to the acquisitional sense.

This instinct expresses itself in a thousand forms. It is a fruitful
cause of injustice, greed, wars, all the less pretty manifestations. Yet
we could not exist, much less advance in evolution, without it. It has
also its higher manifestations, and they are worth waiting for and paying
for. In order that our level of abundance may rise to the point of
overflow.

"Like everything else," said the Invisibles, "the acquisitional sense can
be transposed from the gathering together of things--often a necessary
and valuable pursuit--to intangible and more valuable purposes. Also we
can acquire by drawing entirely to ourselves and keeping what we gain, or
we can acquire what is necessary for a FORTHGOING PLAN. This second form
of acquisitiveness is manifested in countless ways, from the hungers of
the body, which are hungers of purpose beyond the mere possession of the
immediate object, to the farthest reaches of man's serving of his
destiny. Viewed thus from a height, this impulse we inadequately call the
acquisitive sense is but the ambition of an artist seeking finer and
still finer materials for his creative purposes. Break the health of this
function and you destroy man's reason for being."

Betty was introduced to this higher acquisitiveness in one of her
symbolic experiences with the Invisibles.

"It is hard to tell you of this,", she said, "because I know so little
about it, but it rests on firm sane laws. It is hidden under the surface
glint of materially desirable things. Those who never possess these
sometimes find the secret of possession of all life; and those who have
satiated themselves come painfully to starvation on golden platters: and
some in between acquire the balance which directs them to the secret of
possession.

"I cannot grow in a moment to where I can describe this vivid contrast in
the methods of ownership: ownership after the manner of man, and
ownership by way of the law. I can only just sense it by looking at my
associates here. Because today I am in the company of those who have
completely abandoned self for the heritage of participating in the whole.
They are absolutely dispossessed of things. They've grown into enormous,
almost unlimited power by the strength of their aims. I don't understand
it. I only know their power is a kind of selfless power which makes their
position unrelated to any of the products we call possessions.

(long pause)

"I was experimentally broadcasting myself to participation in the great
elements of life, and I said: Why do I not come to dissolution of my
individuality this way? And then I dimly sensed the use of that other
gathering-in, collecting instinct in its unperverted state. I sensed its
ability to concentrate power collected to be utilized for the intelligent
purposes of cooperation. But I'm too feeble and stupid to tell you much
that is useful....

"Here are two great forces. I must leave them there."




II. EDUCATION


I WANT just to swing on a gate and look at things go by and think how
nice the world is and how something exciting might happen. BETTY


1

SELF-DEVELOPMENT, then, is our first aim in life. I place it first, in
time if not in importance, because no coordination of individuals is
possible until said individuals are first established. Another priority:
before we can do a thing well we have to learn how. And learning how is
education.

So it will be profitable to examine what the Invisibles had to say to us,
at different times, on this subject. On this subject in general, I hasten
to add; for the particular details of our own individual training have
been elsewhere set down. What broad principles could the Invisibles
suggest to us?

"We will not consider education in any narrow or restricted sense of the
word," they once told us. "We endeavor to tell you of the process by
which personality comes into being out of the totality of existence; how
it gains self-consciousness and vision of its purpose which is its only
excuse for being. The cosmic task is to gain self-knowledge and
self-control. Individually we need go no further than that our task also
is to acquire self-knowledge and self-control, in order that through the
exercise of free will we may assemble conditions for the satisfaction of
our creative instinct.

"Education, then, in the largest sense, is the assembling of such
conditions as will facilitate making habits of right choice, actuated by
the creative instinct, and inspired by the disciplined imagination which
senses the glory of the Pattern.

"Therefore, the teacher--which includes parents of both sexes--is under
obligation to assemble those conditions in which the self-preservative
instincts--to state it in its lowest terms--shall find it advantageous to
acquire habits that will be of the most practical use to the individual
as such, and at the same time the most socially effective.

"Or perhaps," they continued laying this cosmic foundation, "we might
define education as the process of gradually changing the emphasis of the
underlying instincts from the egocentric to the altruistic.

"And remember," they concluded, "that the little child is the type; both
of the task and of those who must perform it. For you and we, viewed from
the eminence of that Cosmic Purpose, are only little children feeling our
way."

2

In the light of that statement, the methods of parent-teacher with
children become of vital significance in hinting a clue for the most
effective way to go about our own adult self-education. The best insight
we were given into the child's own reactions came from one of Betty's
symbolic experiences in which she seemed actually to become the person
she described. In this case a small boy enduring too common grown-up
ideas of training.

"How absurd!" she began. "What a ridiculous game! I don't reduce very
well, do I? I can't stay long enough in it--like a rubber band springing
back.

"I am in a tall and incorrigibly rigid world. There are many fascinating
things; but they are all guarded by dragons of fierce and painful
penalties. How stupid to make so amusing a world so difficult! It is a
child's near-sighted world; and all these horrid grown-ups have such
far-sighted penalties!

(laughs)

"I'm so amused at myself: this Lilliputian game is so absurd!

"The world could be quite nice; but it's like a nightmare of
scene-shifters, always thrusting forward obstructions to shut out the
wide world. One could make one's way along very comfortably, taking
things as they come, if it weren't for those obstructions that they are
always running across one's path. It stiffens and spoils everything,
makes a cross feeling.

"Don't you see? That sort of thing immediately makes you fighting
obstinate to see the other side, to get beyond the obstruction. It is
maddening to be always thwarted that way, just as you get started. That's
what makes him so wild later, this constant confusing and thwarting of
contrary purposes around him. This is the chief warping of him. That
makes the obstinate streak, the dogged, blind, pig-headedness being bred
in him. That's the flaw: going right along increasing.

"He's a nice, cheerful, likeable boy, when you don't touch this
particular sore spot. Nice boy; not too thick-skinned, but certainly not
very sensitive; capable of average modeling--perhaps a little above the
average."

(pause)

"Terribly oppressive, the contact with grown-ups, isn't it? So deadening.
They have no understanding of what you are talking about. And they tell
you stuff you can't grasp and that just puzzles you. Pretty soon you shut
down and don't try.

"He wishes he could be a newsboy, like the one who comes with the paper.
Such a devilish kind of a person! He hurls in the paper all folded up
tight; and lops away on his bicycle, first on one side and then on the
other, and he generally tries to be funny. Anyway, he has a great life!

"What a nuisance thinking is, isn't it? It is so much pleasanter just
rhythmically to repeat gestures or words without having to tic them down
to anything. It is the pinning-down-of-things that grown-ups do that's so
hard. It is so much pleasanter not to THINK. You just start the hammock
going and get the swing of it....

(pause)

"See? The child is coming out of that rhythm, and the fixation of things
is a tremendous struggle. We forget how much of a struggle it is.... See
how the rhythm is slowing down? It's slowing down; it's getting fixed.
It's like putting pins in some fluttering wings.... No: it's a natural
development; it's not painful, like pinning wings. It's a natural
process. It slows down naturally. That transition is what makes contact
with the experiences of life. It should be carefully handled. Jars are
what do the damage, the clumsy handling of well-meaning grown-ups. It is
very important that it should be done, though.

"Isn't it curious, the proportion of life that is spent in directing the
plastic little mind toward the proprieties and what is spent toward the
principles of living? The proprieties are all right, but they are not
nine-tenths. They are only the door-men for the principles."

3

Next day Betty continued with her symbolic experience. Once more she
explored the point of view of the harassed small boy.

"You've seen a bumble-fly go around the ceiling," she said, "bumping and
bumping in circles, trying to find a way out. It's like that, the way a
child is always restlessly picking and breaking, trying to find its way
out. You cannot understand how the bulk of your assimilated experience
looks to a child who has not digested it. And we give so niggardly of it!
'What's that thing for?' 'Oh, that? That's just a ding-bat.'

"All you know of its history and use denied to the child. He has no
contact of interest with it. Everything is kept away up in grown-up G.

"Even the well-meaning grown-ups will not reduce their material. They
insist on giving it whole, instead of in assimilable little bits
patiently administered. How stupid we are; and how contented THEY are in
many ways. It's lucky they are, or we'd all mold them on our mistakes....

(pause)

"There's that poor sullen boy again. He's not sullen as much as thwarted
some way, undeveloped. Poor little stiffening mind! They are working so
much with that organ they're stiffening it, and it is exceedingly
uncomfortable. It is something like a valve that normally should be open,
but by too-constant pressure, more than it can stand, it acquires a
spastic way of closing. A fatal habit! It is not his strongest faculty
anyway, mental effort; and by hectoring they've spoiled the natural
resiliency of that open valve. They've caused this nervous hysterical
action of closing instantly when approached; a kind of self-protection
against too great strain. The boy didn't have the calibre for it.

"Now I will stay still and see if I can get the contrasting opposite.
That little valve would have stayed open if it had been left alone until
it had matured. Seems not to have been particularly backward; but too
early, too vigorously, too unwisely tampered with. Should have had little
bits of food daily. It is a most precious thing, his keeping open that
valve in the mind, that desire for knowledge, that ability to listen,
that confidence in approaching subjects, instead of a shutdown
antagonistic attitude....

"It is very difficult for me to keep down here, to keep to this level. I
begin to get interested, and at once I over-age myself in my point of
view. I have got to stay down here as well as I can without trying any
grown-up interpretations...."

(pause)

"Well it's springtime; very exciting. My, the outside-the-windows feels
nice when you lean out! How much nicer the world is outside the windows
than in! More understandable. Everything is so soft and velvety; kind of
warm-damp feeling. For some reason it's a particularly exciting day....
Only he doesn't think about it; just feels."

At this point an Invisible took over to interpolate: "This response of
the human plant to growing impulses would be the same in his 'indoor'
environment, if it were properly adjusted to his expansion. The trouble
is we always try to drag children out of their simple little childhood
gardens into our formal landscaped ones. They SHOULD absorb their
experience of living naturally and eagerly. Therefore the open pores of
the mind--what she calls a valve--should be the first consideration. In
some children it is dominant enough to stand rough handling; with others
it takes more restraint and care to develop more slowly, fed by mere bits
of natural proclivities. This particular boy should have had more freedom
of mind, should have been let alone in the spaces of childhood. They
crowded his childhood spaces."

"As near as I can see it," said Betty, "the only practical method is
bit-by-bit acquisition--even for us grown-ups. What a blessed thing it is
that the Great Plan is concealed from us. We couldn't stand it. That's
what's the matter with the child: they thrust the grown-up plan on him,
instead of keeping him in ignorance of it and letting him take it bit by
bit in daily doses. It's the way they have taught us, our Invisibles."

This is a most significant statement. After a moment she resumed the
narrative of her experience.

"Now I've got to be that newsboy for a while....

"He has a moderate neglect that is very satisfactory from his point of
view. He is flopping along through the spring morning, keenly open-pored,
and very puppy-energied. He is in good condition for most any experience
that comes along, but there is no one to direct his growth, no helping
hand to point the way to education. He hasn't been damaged, but neither
has he been cultivated. He's just a nice brave weed."

"The triumph of civilization is when the undamaged plant is assisted
naturally to acquire the experiences which develop," the Invisible took
it up. "These two boys should be utilized as foils; neither extolling the
virtuous poor, nor condemning the strictures of the rich; but visualizing
natural growth regardless of material circumstances as the all-important.

"If parents could hold that ideal, how rapidly the race would move. These
little plant-minds in the garden of childhood are as precious and as
easily damaged as windflowers, yet see how steadily they grow in natural
conditions. The successful educator must enter that garden of childhood,
if his wisdom will let him. Sometimes that wisdom gets so bulky that he
can't get through until he obtains a finer kind. Then he can present his
wisdom, quite humbly, and see what the child picks out. That's the only
way to begin. Only the child knows what he can see. The educator
continues offering it, supplying it, but not forcing it."

"There is so much of this child's stuff," said Betty, "but I think I can
get enough of it in one more time."

4

Some days later Betty concluded childhood experience.

"I don't know what's happening," she began. "I can't think and I can't
talk. Curious state!"

Ensued a long pause, necessary, it would seem, to reenter her former
state.

"Now I'm in the child's world again.... Funny little unthinking automatic
animal: I'm reduced to that state now....

"I am lying on my back and kicking at that dangling rope, over and over
and over again, first with one foot, then with the other, without
variation, perfectly content. There is the feel of the sun and the
breeze. Vacancy of mind.

" I, in trying to make out why this thing is so important, why this state
of fallowness is so important to the child's growth. It is what keeps him
from closing up, tightening up. A rest period, strengthening his
developing faculties. He needs so much of it: it's like feeding him.

My, what nice relaxation and replenishment! Every hour of the day,
nearly, is planned for. He doesn't often get this kind of a chance to
straighten out. Nature just grabs it, clutches it in dire need. There's
not a thought in his poor little slow brain, except a delicious numbness.
You wouldn't think lying on your back and kicking at a dangling rope with
your feet could be so ALTOGETHER satisfactory!

"My, but the sun feels good! Guess I'll roll over on my stomach and feel
how warm these boards are. Wow! That sensation of warmth and happiness is
all through me.

" Mother Nature has reclaimed her baby. She is teaching quietly and
silently the part of him that is being left uneducated. The little shy
spirit is creeping out to investigate the universe outside its
body-prison. Poor little house mate, it has to live like a slavey below
the level of the daily consciousness. Now it has come timidly out and is
reviving itself. It is growing in companionship of other things of the
spirit. That valve is open. Happiness, comfort, confidence are
reestablished by the magic adjustors. If left unstrained and uncontracted
now, the energy acquisition of life experience would assert itself: the
boy would be whole and normal again.

"I'm so puzzled at these day dreams; how they are converted into energy,
and how they go wrong when you dream too much....

"There are some very wise and tender grown-ups, and they are tiptoeing
into this child-land world. Why, you can come in and out, and bring
almost anything in, if you do it carefully. They are not pussy-footing
around either; they are just handling things with firm but tender and
flexible touch. It is very nice to walk in that land when you can adjust
yourself to it and do it helpfully....

"Now I am to understand that the only successful modellers of childhood
are the ones who can enter this plastic state of mind, and see the
strange persistent determination of young growth. It has a wise will; it
knows valiantly which way it ought to go, before this directing sense is
atrophied. Restriction and perversion come through too harsh handling,
too much cramping into a narrow mold....

(pause)

"That was a very nice excursion! I liked that. I feel as though I had
been in fairyland. You see, that explains things to me. I knew you
couldn't just ABANDON a child to Mother Nature. But now I see how you
should adapt knowledge to childhood. It is almost reducing it to a fluid
of easily absorbed knowledge. We don't work over our kind of knowledge to
digest it fur them. We try to ram it down them in the form we eat it.
They take it readily enough if you prepare it.

"I can see very clearly now that rebellion of childhood. It's a kind of
self-preservation."

5

This was an inside view, so to speak. On another occasion we were given
the same sort of thing, but in reverse. The Station is now observing from
the outside. The technique is a back and forth dialogue with an
Invisible.

"He's working on a kind of picture-puzzle,"* reported the Station, "all
sorts of queer-shaped pieces. He's just playing with the picture-puzzle.
You'd better keep an eye on him, or he'll get hold of some of these
ding-bats and bust something and hurt himself."

* This is one of the examples of communication independent of Betty
described in the Introduction.

"Well, he might," conceded the Invisible, "but that's the way he's got to
learn-playing with things that might hurt him. We've got to watch and see
that he doesn't hurt himself, and yet learns."

"Doesn't seem to me quite fair to have this big gang of rubber-necks just
watching a little kid play."

"That's the trouble with them: they never saw a child play before. He
doesn't know he's playing; he's doing business, very important business.
He doesn't even know he's learning; he's just got to put these together.
He doesn't care whether it's important or not; it's just what he wants to
do. He doesn't know there's anything else in the world except putting
these together. He doesn't see you, nor the place, nor the people; he's
just putting it together."

"Don't you see that won't fit? Let me show you."

"Get away from him: let him alone."

"But it's just a little thing to show him." Let him alone."

"But he's going to waste a lot of time trying to get that big thing in a
little hole. It delays the picture."

"Let him alone."

"Now that woman over there: she's most crazy. She's got to show him.

"That's all right. If she moves, I'm going to make her sit down again.
The rule is: let 'em alone. That's all the rule there is in this game."

(pause)

"Anyway, he's found that out. Looks as if he knew that. Can't make a
square thing fit a round hole."

"Well, wasn't that worth finding out?"

"Why didn't he know that?"

"Well, we never get used to seeing you fellows try to fit square things
in round holes."

"Look at him grin! He lit up the whole place with that smile. He found
out that a round hole has to have a round thing."

"Yes, and if he was writing a book he'd probably say he'd discovered a
new law of nature. (scornfully) New law! Why, that was a law before there
was any Adam! That's the way man does. He stumbles over something that
was always so, and he thinks he invented it."

"Say! Say kid, don't you see you've got to have a little thin thing in
there? It almost fits, but it's got to have a little thin thing."

"Let him alone: don't crab the game. How is he going to learn, if you
keep telling him?"

"He'll believe me."

"What of it? What if he does? If he does it because you tell him, you'll
be doing it. If he finds out for himself, he will be able to do it when
you are not watching. Let him alone. It's the motto of this game."

"But supposing one of those sharp things should stick into him and cut
him?"

"It would only cut him once or twice. Then he'd learn that sharp things
stick into him, wouldn't he? Well! What is more important: that he
shouldn't cut himself, or that he should learn that sharp things stick
into him? Are you going to hang around him as long as he lives, and
holler to him every time a sharp thing comes along?"

(pause)

"That woman's going to have a fit!"

"Well, let her have a fit. It is more desirable that she should have a
fit than that she should interfere with that child. Let 'em alone!"

"What makes him look so puzzled?"

"To save time I'll tell you. He is just beginning to get a little faint
notion about the picture. He is just beginning to realize that he is
doing something besides amusing himself or merely putting queer-shaped
things together. There is something else going on that he does not know
about. It is just beginning to dawn on him a little that if he puts them
together right, something is going to happen that he did not suspect. He
is just beginning to realize an intention that is bigger than his own."

"I suppose you're going to tell me that's the beginning of religion."

"Well, that's the first glimmer of human intelligence you've exhibited.
You see, you're putting together a picture-puzzle too. And you can't get
the picture unless every piece is in its place."

"I see. Then that wiggly one over there, that is so proudly wiggly, is
holding out on the picture."

"Sure. And if you'll watch you'll see that he's got to have other wiggly
ones joined up with him in a square, and he doesn't like squares. He
isn't interested in the picture--not yet. He's only interested in being
the only wiggly one like that."

(pause)

"Now, perhaps, you see why chlorine and sodium are put together, with all
their diversity of shape and function--different kinds of wiggly ones put
together right. It makes a different shaped kind of wiggly one, or maybe
a square one, but it all fits in the picture."

"I can't make out whether this is an experiment in chemistry or
philosophy or physics or carpentry or art or education or psychology or
religion."

"Neither does anyone else; because they're all the same thing, and each
one is all the others."

"That's what I call a very disorderly method of education. First thing
you know, you won't be able to tell whether a fellow's an artist, or a
chemist, or a preacher."

"It doesn't make any difference, does it, as long as the little fellow
learns about placing the round things in the round places, and the wiggly
things in the wiggly places? He is making a picture."

"Then the picture is the great thing?"

"You might say so; but I prefer to say that the little fellow is the
great thing. The important thing that is going on is going on inside him.
Don't you see, every time you interfere with him, you are interfering
with BOTH things."

"Well, can't I help him at all?"

"Sure! Give him every possible chance to learn that round things go in
round holes, and that sharp things will cut, and so on. He will see the
picture of his own accord as soon as it is a picture, if you give him a
chance to learn how to see things by giving him things to see. If he
didn't have things to see, his eyes would go dead on him. Give him
practice in seeing things--but let him alone!"

Apparently this finished that aspect. But the Invisibles were not quite
satisfied. Days later they suddenly returned to the dialogue as though it
had never been broken off.

"She had to do that, didn't she? I thought you were going to keep her out
of it," began the Station.

"I am letting her do it so you can see something."

"Agh! She thought she had to get that picture finished. She's so much
smarter than he is--she thinks!"

(pause)

"He doesn't seem to be much interested in what she's doing. She keeps
yanking him back to look at her doing it. He was absorbed in it until she
butted in... What's she doing that for? Why doesn't she mind her own
business?"

"Don't you see; she's a school ma'am and she has two reasons. She doesn't
know what her reasons are; she thinks she's educating the child--that's
what she says to herself. Her real reason is that she wants him to take
that finished picture home and tell his mother and father that he did it,
and then they'll be pleased because they'll think he is a very smart
child. But she won't care so much what they think about that, as that
they will think she's a very smart teacher. She's thinking not so much of
the child as of herself and her job. If she were thinking about the child
she would see that she is only teaching the child to lie to his father
and mother in pretending that he is something he is not.

"Oh yes, he's smart enough; only she is robbing the child of his chance
to acquire experience and memory, which is the indispensable attribute of
personality. She kids herself with the idea that she is teaching the
child. She isn't; she is robbing him for her own benefit. The joke is
that by just so much as she is cheating him, she is also robbing herself.
I told you that, you remember, we are not allowed to 'help' anybody when
it means robbing him of his opportunity to acquire personality. It is a
Law.

"You see, that kid doesn't give a hoot for what she's doing. She thinks
he's there sitting beside her, because she's big enough to keep him there
physically. As a matter of fact he went away some time ago and is out in
the garden looking at the birds. But she doesn't know it.

"It's a very big principle. If you once get it into your head that the
laws of nature operate only under the direction of Intelligence--ALL the
laws--then the making of intelligence is the big thing. And the only way
to acquire intelligence is through experience and the memory of it. It is
possible to assimilate the experience of other people, but it is real
assimilation only when you contribute an actuality of your own."

6

The last statement resulted in a side excursion into the question of the
vicarious and its value or lack of value.

"Consider novels, movies, all that sort of thing," said the Invisible.
"In a measure, if the novels are real and skilfully done, and the movies
are wisely conceived, something does get across that is genuine
experience in a way. But the majority are cheating themselves by a
make-believe process. They are getting their experience cheap, just by
looking at an imitation of it! They wish they could be brave and loyal
and so on, so they go and look at somebody being brave and loyal, or they
read about it in a book, and they get a kind of little tinkle of it--but
it doesn't COST them anything. Or they go see things done in the way of
experience or gratification that they haven't the guts to do. The
potential thief gets all the temporary mistaken zest of stealing
vicariously without having to go to Jail. The picture goes to jail. And
don't you see, by just so much as a picture or novel deals with primitive
debased instincts and gratifications, it piles up the effects of low and
mean experiences and memory, and builds up a personality on the wrong
side; because a man is in a very big sense the sum total of his
experience and memory. And if he confines himself to low and mean
experience and memory--his own or another's--he can't help being low and
mean.

"There's another side to it too. When he thrills himself with second hand
bravery or other fine qualities, it takes an increasing dose always to
get the thrill again--when he doesn't do it himself--and after a while it
doesn't act on him any more: he has to get something stronger and ranker.
Then two things happen: he doesn't react to the fine things, and he has
to get rawer and ranker and more debased things to tickle his palate. So
he gets what the preachers call gospel-hardened--it doesn't ring his bell
any more.

"I don't mean to knock novels and movies and such in any indiscriminate
way. Exhibits of constructive forces in operation are good--provided they
inspire to self-activity. Bravery and loyalty and all that sort of thing
are no good to you as long as you just look at them: you've got to BE
them.

"On the other hand, it's easier to slide down than to climb up.
Construction takes work. That's the reason why habitually looking at
destructive and debasing things does you more harm than habitually merely
looking at examples of constructive things does you good.

"So you must surround this little kid, not with things that will
emphasize his disintegrating tendencies, but with things that will
inspire he best that is in him. Don't you see what a terrific
responsibility this lays upon everyone who can control environment,
however slightly? Never forget that you yourself, in your interplay
between your own soul and its physical manifestation, are part of the
environment that you are creating for that kid. Anybody who makes
anything, or writes or paints or sings or behaves--anything--is making an
environment for the kids, for the souls coming along; for the little
hands reaching up.

"So the fellow who writes has a big job, not only to depict brave things
and loyal people--for the drug-fiends of emotion to amuse themselves
with, and to distract them from their own business; but to raise hell
with his readers so that they will have to do it. The fellow who does his
art so that it will actually INSPIRE UP and RETARD DOWN is some artist!

7

At this point they swung back to the original discussion.

"Now that little child isn't getting anything out of the teacher's work
because he isn't doing it himself. The business of education is to bring
out what a child has inside; and the only way it can come out, generally
speaking, is by taking the outside pressure off so it can come out. Then
it win come out along the line of least resistance. But if you clamp him
in, it not only does not come out, but it either goes dead on him or
raises some kind of hell inside. First thing you know that kid is going
to bust, and likely they'll can it mischief and spank him as a bad boy.
They may even get him to thinking he is a bad boy, and he is likely to do
what he thinks is expected of him. I think you quite realize that the
energy that is used in badness--as it is called--is precisely the same
energy that is used by the same fellow in what you call goodness. Keep
your pipe loaded with that: there's only one kind of energy.

"Now education consists in supervising with the least possible
interference the process of trial and error. The wise teacher helps--yes,
he tells things; he gives little facts; he knows how to give little
ready-made lumps of racial experience and the things he has found out
himself. But he does it in such a way that it isn't a substitute for the
child's own experience. His relations with the child are such that he can
smuggle in sometimes a pretty good sized gob of ready-made stuff, but
there's got to be a large measure of sympathy.

"Look at that word a minute. We all have enough Greek to see what it is
made out of. First, SYN--together. Second, PATHOS--feeling. Well, don't
you see, the ready-made stuff doesn't get across without the
SYN-PATHOS--together feeling.

"There's mathematics. Mathematics is a tool, and a good one. But children
get scared of it because the teacher thinks she should put on a sour face
when she says mathematics, instead of smiling about it. You can teach a
child anything with a smile--SYN-PATHOS.

"But no amount of SYN-PATHOS can take the place of experience and
memory--the little kid's experience and memory. He's got to learn to use
his equipment: he's got to learn to open and see through those five doors
of the senses HIMSELF. The only way he can learn is by reaching up to the
handle and trying the knob and seeing how the hinges work and making his
little fat legs reach up to the step on one side and down the step on the
other. You can put a little stool under his feet so he can reach, and you
can have your hand ready to keep him from stumbling when he might break
his neck. But it is a lot more important for experience and memory that
he should learn to balance himself than that he should keep from bumping
himself.

"There's a good saying that the parents--yes, and teachers (by which I
mean everybody who has anything to do with him)--need only give the child
tools and show him how to use them. But even that isn't true, really.
He's GOT the tools, and you don't exactly show him how to use them. The
only thing you can do, when you come down to brass tacks, is to give him
opportunity where he can't be happy unless he uses them all. Amy kind of
purpose or project that INTERESTS him offers opportunity for using all of
them. See that he uses all of them. Don't let him get so occupied with
seeing that he doesn't give a square deal to hearing, and smelling, and
tasting and touching.

"You understand that the use of these tools isn't for his own sake alone.
It is in order that impressions and experiences sorted out and
remembered, both consciously and unconsciously, shall not only build up a
body of experience and memory--which together make personality--but that
that totality, that increasingly efficient totality, shall become
self-conscious, self-directing, self-controlled intelligence, with the
power and the right to assemble conditions for the purposes of creation."

8

"It looks," said the Invisible, "as though we had left out parental
authority.

"You have been shown as in a vision a little child about the business of
self-education, self-mastery, absorbed in a task the meaning of which he
only dimly sensed, and perhaps sensed not at all. You have been adjured
not to interfere unintelligently with the process. Now a narrowed view of
this situation might lead you to suppose that it would be sufficient and
desirable to leave the child to his own devices. Well, if I were
compelled to choose between too much freedom and too much interference
and superimposed authority, I think there is no doubt that too much
freedom is the preferable alternative. But we are not driven to any such
extreme. True, the task of education is not to drive or compel or
circumscribe. But you too--as the teacher--have the duty and the
privilege of exercising free will and right choice, of assembling
conditions appropriate for individual development. It is for you to help
make the channels through which, in the person of this developing
intelligence, the power resident therein shall be directed to the
fulfillment of the Pattern.

"Parental authority is a real and valuable thing, and just because it has
been abused and overextended is no reason why it should be discarded
entirely.

"You must remember the child is an immature thing in every way. You would
not allow him to strain or injure himself by exceeding his physical
powers; you would restrain him from jumping off the porch, or lifting too
heavy a weight, or eating green apples or too much ice cream or cake. In
doing so you are definitely exerting arbitrary parental authority in a
sane, sensible and needed manner. Since the same laws work in all
substances, similarly you would expect to find--and you will find--the
same principle in the mental and spiritual aspects as well. There needs
only wise definition of the extent and the kind of application of
authority.

"All this let-him-alone advice is literally good and true. The offering
of complete opportunity for self-education is the basis of all teaching.
Restriction or prohibition is legitimate only when, as in the physical
phase, the child is attempting to go so far beyond his powers as to
injure himself or others. That does not mean he is to be inhibited when
by the mere experience of defeat or disappointment he has an opportunity
of extending his self-knowledge.

"In final analysis, therefore, the imposition of parental authority must
depend on the wisdom of the parent. That wisdom must consist of a careful
analysis, by both intellect and heart, of whether the prohibition is for
the sole and only purpose of preventing an effort of one sort or another
beyond the child's present strength. Just as no parent would allow the
child to attempt to lift a weight beyond its muscular power, so he should
not permit the child to exercise its judgment beyond its mental or
spiritual power.

"I cannot point out how this is specifically to be done, for that of
course depends on the individual case, and is in itself a measure of the
parent's wisdom and capacity. But I do wish to call attention to the
exact parallel with the merely physical training. Also I feel that some
counterbalancing consideration should be introduced to prevent
superficial reductio ad absurdum [literal-minded] brains from conceiving
that, because we advise against herding the child too closely, we
therefore advise that he should run wild."

9

Much later, after we ourselves as "children of eternity" had been at
least exposed to education as the Invisibles see it, they made the adult
application more directly. Their method probably is too delicate and
personal for us to make more than a small beginning at its use. It is,
perhaps, more in the nature of an Ultimate. Nevertheless it points a
way--one that we could do well to study.

"Run your mind back," said they, "over the method employed in giving you
these teachings. What was it? It was a motif with a refrain; it was a
number of concepts repeated in alternation. The teachings were presented
first with an experience, a parable, a symbol which entered your mind in
a rather novel way, perhaps through the window instead of the front door,
bringing a certain amused interest, a glimpse of something that seemed
worth your intellectual attention for the moment. It escaped you very
quickly, but the crack was there, the informal entrance had been made,
the preparation for the second return to the subject. Next time you were
a little bit more ready to receive it, more intellectually indulgent.
Something obvious, perhaps, had been said, but it might possibly have
value because of a telling phrase or fresh way of statement. You
listened, in other words, with feeling, receptivity of heart. Germination
had begun; accretions followed. The concept grew to a respectable status,
worthy of your lordly mental condescension."




III. FUNCTIONING


PROGRESS is the pursuit of things for which we pay the price of
ourselves.

 BETTY


1

AS WE have seen, in the personal case the aim is self-development. This
is essentially an individual process. Therefore, it cannot be
blueprinted. Nobody can give exact directions, as for the care and use of
a washing machine. That is the mistake made by many systems of teaching
and of religion.

"Individuality," said the Invisible, "is the end of evolution. And the
higher the evolution, the more individual becomes the entity. Therefore
the more individual must become its treatment."

However, it is quite possible to examine the general procedure
intelligently and supply conditions that will encourage growth. We do
that with plants. We have determined pretty well what happens chemically
and biologically; and we supply proper soil, fertilizer, climate, water.
So likewise we have a certain knowledge of the method by which we expand
in consciousness. We are beginning to learn what we can supply to
accelerate and foster that expansion.

2

The basic ingredients of evolution, even away down the scale, said the
Invisibles, are experience and memory.

"Memory," they defined, "is a faculty which gathers or acquires certain
phases from the All for the building up of that which possesses the
memory. It is by the utilized memory of experience that the body of any
segregated thing is expanded."

The important word here is "utilized." How do we utilize the memory of
experience?

"The body of memory," said the Invisible, "acquired through the automatic
awareness-responses of any entity builds up the content, not of the
particular entity, but of the species to which it belongs. In that way,
one might fancifully say, dogs in general learn how to be dogs in
increasing sufficiency. Only when an experience results from an exercise
of free will does it become a part of the memory of the individual. The
human physical structure, to take a simple example, is daily undergoing a
great multitude of experiences having to do with the sensational and
instinctive, and therefore automatic aspect of awareness--such things as
the ordinary bodily functions. None of these experiences, so far as the
individual is concerned, has any place in his final structure. But every
experience which is a manner of action by free will, however slight, is
drawn from that part of the cosmos which comprises the Not-done, and
transferred into that part of the cosmos which comprises the Thing-done.
The latter is, in the realest sense possible, a portion of the individual
entity, AND WILL FOREVER REMAIN SO. The course of personal development,
then, is a constant transferal from that which is outside in experience,
permanently to that which is--not inside, but ourselves."

Another time one of us asked: "Is all evolution achieved by a process of
assimilating experience? And is this assimilation an intellectual
process?"

"Evolution," said the Invisible, "must, in the final analysis and in one
way or another and at one time or another, pivot on an exercise of free
will. Free will implies a decision, a choice between one thing, one
course of action, one rejection or acceptance, and another. The mere
experience and the mere translation into conscious possession are only
the materials furnishing forth the opportunity for this exercise of free
will. That which is absorbed but not intellectualized, and that which is
intellectualized but not absorbed, are alike in that they are powerful in
possibility but barren of result when viewed from the standpoint of
personal evolution. In this regard they become significant only when
they, or such portion of them as is appropriate to the moment, are
utilized in decision or the exercise of free will."

Another time a little more detail was given us on the evolutionary
process. On this occasion a friend who was a teacher was in a dilemma. He
had been lectured by the Invisibles on the importance of balancing intake
and outgo. How did this fit into the free-will-and-decision picture?

"The evolutionary process," said the Invisible, "for the teacher as for
all others, is threefold--indivisibly threefold. Without adequate,
balanced and complete working of all three aspects, futility results.
First, that which is to be given out is received, either through the
spiritual senses or through unconscious experience of life. Next, it is
understood intellectually by the focussed mind--it is rationalized. This
intellectualization can come about from within by constructive thought,
or through recognition by means of something read or taught from outside.
And third, the subject matter gains its dynamics.

"Now often the third element, that of obtaining dynamics, is omitted. As
soon as the thing is intellectualized it is given out. That is the method
of most teachers and preachers, polemic writers and reformers of the
world. And because of the omission of the third essential, the effort is
with little or no result.

"Dynamics are obtained only through the immersion of the concept in the
substance of which your earth life is composed. That means it must be
applied in the ordinary way of living to actual and constructive life.
Only thus does it obtain a body of substance which will make it
effective. The thing you learn and understand and become enthusiastic
over and immediately give out as a teacher falls flat, because it is
made, not of flesh and blood, but of an alien substance. The preacher who
fills his church is the preacher who lives what he says outside his
church. The teacher of influence is he who has bathed his ideas in life.
And note the following: it is most important: this process of bathing in
life is not a laboratory process; it is not a conscious bringing forth of
doctrine for dipping in a solution prepared for the purpose; it is a
taking the doctrine as part of yourself with you where you move among
earth affairs. There are no preachers, there are no teachers, who are
teachers and preachers only--not in the true sense of those terms. They
are practitioners of life who bring from their daily uses their well-worn
tools for explanation. He who learns must expand his practical earth life
in equal measure to his learning, for his learning will in the long run
equal his expansion."

3

We grow in consciousness, then, by making decisions. And the immediate
product is individualized experience and memory.

Now one cannot make decisions that will result in experience without
overt action. The action may be either mental or material, of course;
though ordinarily the latter.

But it must be action, functioning. The wholly inert never progresses. So
important and basic is this principle that for a long time our Invisibles
hammered it at us, in its simplest form, over and over again. Only after
the crude raw idea was integral to our thinking did they concede that the
KIND of functioning had importance.

"It doesn't make the least difference what you do, which part of the
world you choose to function in; it's the functioning itself that
counts."

"What he means," another Invisible commented on this idea, "is, never
mind whether or not you think your job is a fool job, if you know it's
your job. But have no doubt as to that."

Or again:

"You can't find out anything by simply wondering. YOU have to get busy
and do something. Just what you do does not really matter; it's the
intention that counts. Perhaps you don't get that. I'll explain. You set
about doing something. It goes flat. You try again. You quit. After a
while you try again. Perhaps you never succeed, but the mere act of
trying is sufficient to give you a sort of boost. Not a boost as respects
that particular thing, but in a definite DIRECTION. On the other hand, if
you lie down, you come to a dead stop. You have no momentum."

"Action is all of development," stated another Invisible. "Of course I do
not necessarily mean physical action. The very first slight wee crawly
movement on the part of the most microscopical creatures you can discern
is not merely to insure the means of existence, though apparently that is
the sole reason. The basic real reason is development-action. Any new
thing must be acquired by action, by experience, before it can be told,
either by you to yourself, or to you by somebody else. You can be TOLD no
new thing. You can be given the words, but you will not understand them.
That's why there is so much vagueness and groping and dissatisfaction in
the approach to anything new. You must first confront it, become aware
that it exists. It is something; just SOMETHING. You cannot understand it
because you have no experience. Then you must act, and from the act, and
its result, you get knowledge."

"But how about spiritual contact?" we asked. "You have been emphasizing
how important that is, and the filling up at the Source. Now you seem to
be trying to turn us back to the mere mechanism of daily life!"

"With the average man," observed the Invisible quaintly, "the building of
a water wheel arouses an ambition to supply some water for it. He is
proud of it and he wants to see it go."

4

As a corollary to this main theme, the Invisibles drew a fine
distinction. It is only in functioning, they pointed out, that we
experience reality at all. Things merely in relation one to the other are
symbols of reality. In activity, in function, they become the EMBODIMENT
of reality.

"As symbols," said our Invisible, "they merely stand for something behind
them as a note on a page stands for a musical tone. A man in a world of
physical objects, but static of emotions, actions, thoughts, is but
surrounded by a multitude of suggestive symbols that stand for, but do
not embody a reality remote from him. Through the symbols, and his
imagination, he may surmise the existence of the reality. He may thus, to
a certain extent, perhaps even manage a critical or appreciative
understanding of it, but it will touch him only as a shadow touches the
wall, leaving no impress. From it he obtains no experience of solid fact,
but lives in a world of insubstantial poetry whose quality is that of
dreams and whose endurance is as fleeting. If he is of mystic quality he
is perpetually in anticipation of some remote time or state of existence
when he shall break through the veil of illusion, as he calls it, to an
undefined and rather vague reality of an unguessed form which he imagines
to lie behind. He does not realize that in the nature of the universe,
and under proper conditions, the reality enters into and informs with
life the symbol itself--that the veil of illusion is itself illusion, and
that, had he the secret, he could, with the fingers of his very own
spirit, touch the living naked essence to which he longs so often in
vain.

"To himself, each man is a reality; to himself he symbolizes nothing. He
is, and in the mere fact of that being he touches an underlying
fundamental essence of the real. This is simply and solely because the
life that is in him functions. His appetites, his emotions, his passions,
his imaginations, the coursing of his blood through his veins, the
registration of light through his eyes, his movements and his every
activity are not to him symbols, but are expressions of that which is his
inner self, seeking outlet in a world of movement. The living intangibles
flow through their respective mechanisms within him to produce, as far as
his consciousness is concerned, a portion, limited though it may be, of
absolute reality.

"But in the outer world, if he deprives himself, or is deprived, of
acquired or natural-functioning correspondence with things about him, all
things remain to him symbolical except himself, and he is surrounded by a
dream world."

However, the argument can be turned inside out. Since the lack of
function makes for the merely symbolic, the activity of function makes
for reality.

"To the extent that man succeeds in functioning through that external
world, he removes it from the category of symbols suggesting truth into
the category of things conducting truth. Man's education and development
on all planes of life and lives consists in his fashioning tools, skills,
understandings and abilities actually to function in a wider and wider
inclusion of his environment.

"Now the penalty for the fashioning of a tool is that it must be employed
or it will rust. The obligation, then, of having developed
correspondences, aptitudes, talents, skills, techniques, abilities to
function, is their employment. Through them one translates the symbolical
to the real; but, once the transmutation has taken place, a neglect to
continue actually blunts the perceptions in that direction. In time,
therefore, that particular thing will cease, not only to be a conductor
of truth, but even to symbolize the truth, and so will end at last in
something lifeless, useless. And dead things must be painfully carried
away.

"So," the Invisible summed up, "a man should examine himself to see what
he has learned to do, for what he has learned to do cries out for its
fulfillment. In calling to life a need for the fulfillment of reality, he
has to an extent chosen a road which he must tread out. Or if not a road,
then certainly a direction. He has made himself tools that are his
obligation of equipment. Possibly he may not use them in the way he
intended when he fashioned diem, but use them he must--if he is to
continue in the realm of reality."

To test our grasp of the principle the Invisible asked that one of us
repeat back the gist as we understood it. One of us did so.

"If an ability has been called into being as a transmuting and expressing
channel for some form of reality, the individual is subsequently
obligated to continue and fulfill the obligation so undertaken, or its
complete equivalent in some other form."

"Yes," agreed the Invisible, "but I would state it a bit differently. The
fashioning of a tool by means of which one functions in a symbol to
transmute it to a reality, imposes an obligation to continue that
transmutation IN ONE FORM OR ANOTHER. It is permissible to discard that
tool only when by means of some other tool the same transmutation is
continued. Now beware," he warned, "lest too-close inspection of a very
large and general law gets you to splitting hairs of literal
interpretation. There is, of course room for experiment and room for
expanding in new interests."

The teaching just given does not mean that one must stick to a thing
merely because he has begun it. That would be perilously close to a
philosophy of drudgery. And if there is one thing these Invisibles of
ours had no use for at all, it is drudgery.

"If you find you have made a mistaken choice in some specific activity,"
said they, "remember it is not a fatal and divorceless marriage. But,"
they added emphatically, "it will be necessary to determine what reality
has been transmuted, and the old task must not be abandoned until an
equal transmutation is assured in another direction. Be it noted," they
pointed out, "genuine mistakes rarely result in a very high order of
transmutation anyway. What we are warning about is abandonment without
sufficient cause, from whim."

5

One of our group had an idea. How about functions that had been carried
through to their full perfection? Does there then remain, as far as the
individual is concerned, an obligation to continue to employ them? Or are
they then outgrown, as is the vermiform appendix? "Is there," be
expressed it, "anything to the oriental notion that we outgrow any
function by perfecting and rounding out its manifestation?

"Cart before the horse," answered the Invisible. "You do not use a
function in order to perfect it; you perfect a function in order to use
it. Its best use begins when it has been perfected--that would be a silly
time to discard it. Your generalization is as though you were to
recommend a violinist to work until thoroughly satisfied with his
technique--and then to consider his job done and smash his violin!
Functions are indeed occasionally to be discarded, but as a rule only
because you have perfected a better tool; or because you are actually,
though perhaps not evidently, otherwise doing the same activity."

"It seems to me," suggested the inquirer, "you might sometimes grow into
different needs, and hence require different mechanisms to fulfill the
new needs."

"And perhaps discard the old one which has fulfilled its need,"
supplemented the Invisible. "In your earth, however," he added, "it is a
rare thing thus to discard a function. Its seeming disappearance merely
means that it has been refined to correspond to a higher and finer-grain
aspect of the same activity."

"A transmutation of energy to a higher form by the disintegration of a
lower form," came a further suggestion from us.

"Transformation, not disintegration," corrected the Invisible, "a
sublimation."

The last word led to a passing consideration of the
withdrawal-into-monasteries idea which was one of the ideals of the
Middle Ages. The Invisible was against it--at least, for us.

"Every person should recognize the necessity for living a normal active
life, and not be longing for the next world. Now, have you ever
understood why, if all this we have told you be true, it has not been
sooner revealed and more widely understood--and why, even today, so few
people really comprehend? Because it is too strong meat for most. Because
it is liable to take your mind away from the job that belongs to you.
That's why. But: you CAN take it intellectually and not emotionally, and
that is the very way you should take it. You must know the reality of the
continuity of the entity, and in understanding that you must understand
that you are given a span on earth in which to live on EARTH, worthily,
so you may take on immortality in the hereafter. Every man is an
individual entity. He is responsible for that. You have been given free
will, the greatest gift in the entire universe. Now you live up to it!
And how can you do it by gazing off and not doing the job?"

"How about the ancient saints?" asked one of us. "They seemed to have
what might be called subjective functioning, without apparent objective
correspondences. Was this abnormal?"

"That depends. To the extent to which they consciously functioned
according to their own stage of development they were normal. To the
extent to which they were seeking their soul's salvation, or their own
ecstasy, they were not. Only such rare entities as the few who have lived
earth life possessed of nearly complete earthly development can
successfully or usefully attempt a purely subjective life on the earth
plane. With others it smacks somewhat of both conceit and arrogance, for
it is an assumption either that they have already completed the earth
job, or that they know enough and are privileged enough to step aside
from the ordered scheme. The only road to the subjective life, as you
call it, is by the steps of accomplishment in the environment in which
you are placed. That is why you are placed there rather than somewhere
else.

"Do not misunderstand. In ordinary spiritual contact there may be a
feeling that you describe as ecstasy. I use the term in its mystic sense
of tingling high pleasure, as in the communion of the nuns and monks and
that type. He who carries this ecstasy eventually through the formulation
period into manifestation of one sort or another, is functioning in the
normal course. It might be so that one can receive from universal
consciousness direct, but he cannot render back to universal
consciousness by any other way than external manifestation. He cannot
effectively face upstream and barrenly return towards the source merely
an emotion, however elevating and satisfactory that may seem.

"Anything normally functioning produces an emotion of pleasure; the
pleasure is oft of a type and intensity commensurate with the breadth and
depth and cosmic significance of the function. The highest emotional
content must be in the perfect functioning. The pleasure is legitimately
enjoyed to its thrill of rapture so long as it is a concomitant of
function and does not become an end in itself. The proper action of any
major function implies the proportionate functioning of any subordinate
function. Can you not see, then, that a neglect of one or more lesser
functions, because you get pleasure in a larger function, immediately
implies the pursuit of the pleasure for itself? It therefore becomes a
perversion, as sometimes in the case of the monastic ecstasy before
mentioned."

"I am warned to go no further in this, as it can but give a false
impression. The very word 'function' is itself too heavy-footed to follow
the subtle, flexible and delicate reality. 'As a man thinks, so he does'
is true, but a better saying is 'as a man does, so will he eventually
think,' when leaden-footed thought has overtaken."

6

Function, then, is the very basis of all evolution. And the key to
INDIVIDUAL evolution is decision. So don't get the habit of letting
others make your decisions for you.

"Individual development," said the Invisible, "is a matter of decision.
Even a mistaken decision may result in considerable advancement. You move
by making your mistaken decisions or your happy choices, as the case may
be."

"Decision," another agreed, "is the vital principle of individual
progress, and cannot be taken out of the individual's hands without a
far-reaching harm.

"By making a person's decision for him you have deprived him of a certain
opportunity and therefore a certain property. You have robbed him, even
with the best intentions in the world. He may thereby gain certain
easements unearned, but at the same time he has been forced to forego a
chance for certain self-building which the process of earning would have
accomplished for him."

The Invisibles were constantly recurring to the point; it was of supreme
importance. To a visitor who asked for specific advice, they had this to
say:

"I would not steal from you. You are in a world with just so many
opportunities of choice, of right choice and wrong choice, just so many
unique opportunities for learning from the results of your choices.
Therefore, we have called it a selective world in which you are placed
ultimately to determine what is worth and what is not worth the choosing.
In this one particular respect your earth life is more richly endowed
than any other phase of existence you will probably be called upon to
pass through. Each time you allow another to determine for you what is
within your own choice, you have allowed that man to dip his hand into
your pocket and take from you a bit of property you cannot replace. You
would think hardly of a friend who took from you gold pieces. I am your
friend, and I would not take from you what is more precious than gold. So
I shall not answer those questions."

And similarly, to a similar request on another occasion:

"Would you thank anyone who was to take from you an opportunity to make
money? Why should you thank us for taking from you a legitimate and
never-repeatable opportunity for progress? It will not come again. If
that moment is taken away from you, you are that much poorer for all
eternity. You may steal a man's purse, and you can make restitution. But
if you steal a man's opportunity for making a decision, you take that
which you can never return to him. Each decision made is a step in your
development, a moment in your eternity. Once passed, it is gone forever."




IV. THE POSITIVE INGREDIENT


I CAN just suggest the truth by the fragrance of it.

 BETTY



1

FUNCTIONING means more than mere activity. For complete fulfillment it
must have one certain positive content. Otherwise it is at best a
purposeless stirring about, and at worst deadening drudgery. There is
nothing intrinsic to any form of activity that makes it one thing or the
other. Any business whatever with which we may concern ourselves may be
either constructive functioning or drudgery. That depends not at all on
what the thing is in itself. I once knew a man who was enthusiastic as a
garbage collector, and had a half-dozen good reasons. Indeed anything can
be transformed from drudgery to real functioning. The change needs only
one ingredient.

Drudgery is something which must be done, and we seem to be the ones to
do it, so we do it. But it exhausts us. Why? Because we are not
interested. Interest is the missing ingredient; what Betty called
eagerness, zest.

That is all very well to say, but how can one pump up zest for a repeated
daily routine intrinsically not only uninteresting, but a deadly bore?
Like washing the dishes; or slugging away on a production line? It is
silly and hypocritical and posey and a pretense to pump up any artificial
enthusiasm for that kind of a job.*

* See Anchors to Windward for a fuller exposition of this idea.

"True," the Invisibles acknowledged. "Of course you cannot go around
zesting things priggishly. What we must get into this is naturalness, not
priggishness."

Cannot be done? The Invisibles deny that.

"Nothing," they stated emphatically, "is too small to work on with the
tools of spiritual values. Take the smallest things, little hourly
experiences or situations of a commonplace day; you can, by your
concentration of desire, transfer them into a spiritual significance akin
to a poem. You can even take a nap with a spark of interest, instead of
just a dead exhausted failing away.

"The joke of it is," interposed Betty, "there is a trick about doing it;
and the trick is to enjoy the doing. You haven't found the real secret,
unless you've found that. I know this isn't new; but it's going to be
said over and over and over again, until it acquires the same importance
in life as eating tomorrow's dinner. We are sure to feed ourselves that
way! "

2

A clue to accomplishing this was given us later in the distinction
between two types of impelling force. They called them will-power and
desire-power. Will-power they here used in the narrower sense of driving
forward against reluctance or inertia; something dragging or even
disagreeable. There is of course a wider sense to the word, but that was
aside from their present purpose.

"There is," said they, "always a contracted and expanded form to
everything. Will-power is the contracted form of this higher thing. You
can step into it from will-power without contracting, if you think of it
as DESIRE-POWER. Will-power is in spite of your preference, doubling the
pressure. Will-power is a faculty of holding yourself up. This other is a
power of outreaching yourself by desire."

"It is the great secret of power," commented Betty. "I can see it work
over and over again. It's a process of making pleasurable your
will-power. The minute you make it pleasurable it starts working, like a
chemical affinity, pumping warmer vitality into your object, making it
work itself naturally. What a nice secret! It's a process of work. It
doesn't matter what it is--playing tennis or growing into life."

"I want you," said the Invisible, "to substitute for the stiff words
'will-power' the same idea in a natural exuberance of appropriating
life."

And on another occasion:

"Consider the directing power of one's self. Do not stiffen the idea with
the rigidity of the words 'will-power.' Do not leave out the warm
fostering condition of heartily and enthusiastically DESIRING to
accomplish. That contains the secret of success, the diagnosis of
failure. One should bring to bear on it the same simple attitude of mind
with which one approaches one's vacation days, one's hobby, one's
favorite Interest, either of work or of play. People often work so hard
at play. Lightness in living--that's play, isn't it? Don't let living be
heavy. Reorganize it and keep it light.

"We must get the whole of this force," said Betty, "not merely the
detached bits we recognize in the words 'will-power.' Lifting-power is
what I am trying for. What is that big thing? Oh, we haven't scratched
the surface with words! We've dimly sensed the urge in a snail-like thing
we call evolution, the lowest speed, dragging gait of progress. That
isn't the way it's meant to be: this other thing is the way it's meant to
be. In evolution the power is barely great enough to drag us along. This
way we go with it.

"All we seem to realize is that will-power accomplishes certain results
of self-propulsion. But look how hard you run in tennis, or walk in
fishing or doing something you like. That's another sort of
self-propulsion: easier because you are in HARMONY WITH WHAT YOU ARE
DOING. That isn't generally recognized as part of the lifting force. And
it gets so stiff and painful when you do it from the will-power side.
This whole fabric of lifting-power is quite new to me. It's so definitely
divorced from the mind: will-power is centered in the mind. Mind is the
planning organ. But that which carries out the plans of the mind is the
real executive. This force is to will-power what will-power is to the
mind. I don't know what that real executive of you is called. There's a
lift to happiness and harmony which is so much easier a way than this
painful will-power business. It makes the leaping flame instead of just a
smoulder. One is done with your united being; and the other in spite of
your divided being."

Much later Betty out of her experience of the moment coined a significant
phrase.

"Had a nice COMBUSTION OF HAPPINESS," said she. "It revealed something to
me. There's a great big principle there.

This morning in my shower, when I turned it from warm to cold, I thought,
Ha! here comes the cold! I'll grapple with it and exercise myself against
it! You old cold, you; I'll show you! Ha! And that element of pleasure in
meeting it enthusiastically, and outdistancing it, as it were, was a
discovery. I enjoyed it, and was warm under it without feeling bitten by
it.... I can't tell it. Anyhow, I know there's a DYNAMO IN ENTHUSIASTIC
COMBUSTION."

3

Later on the Invisibles defined the positive ingredient more clearly.
Then we understood why they had stepped around it so carefully. It calls
for a word which has become, as Betty said, a "skiddy word." This one
certainly needs retreading, for there is no substitute that carries the
whole meaning. The word is LOVE. It is a pity we cannot discard its
sickly sentimental connotations and use it in its fresh and simple
meaning.

"The word," said the Invisibles, "has become a palimpsest overlaid with
the scribblings of many interpreters until the original simple writing
has been obscured. But this is true: whatever is done, whether in the
physical world, in human relations, in the substance of thought, or
spiritual contact--whatever is done with LOVE endures. All else is
consumed in the eventual transformation. I do not mean necessarily and
completely 'sentimental' love. If I were to attempt, in a few words, to
define what I mean, I'd say 'THINGS DONE HEARTILY'--these alone have a
complete and ultimate influence in the accretion and the fashioning of
the spirit entity.

"Love comprises all that is of a positive character. It is understanding
as well as sentiment. But it has many ingredients, and all must be
equally developed before perfect love is attained. Any effort, any
outward-looking thing that constructs is an ingredient of love. The man
who builds conscientiously a brick wall is manifesting one of the
ingredients of love. It is of course a small ingredient as compared to
what is manifested when a man sacrifices his life for another."

4

How--or where--can one acquire more of this "love"? If it is the
foundation of all individual progress, and if we happen to be deficient
in it, we are in a bad way. The, answer, technically, is complex, as will
appear later in these pages. But we can get a glimpse from a talk we had
with Betty, long after, when she was in the unobstructed universe.

"There are," said she, "in your obstructed universe, three kinds of love:
sacrificial love; demanding love; and the third--I'm troubled for my
adjective. It's the combination of the other two: it enfolds."

"Interfusing love?" one of us proposed.

"It's more than that."

"Describe its action. That may suggest something."

"Well," said Betty, "demanding love includes the need of expressions of
love. Limited-universe marriage is part that. Also work--a man's love for
his work. Ambition, too. It's laudable.

"Sacrificial love--true mother's love is frequently just that.
Patriotism. Self-denial. Wide charity.

"All love is good, but the third love is above, higher--EDITS the other
two. It encompasses; it knows. It knows how far sacrifice should go, how
far demands should go. The source--they who have this love in your
universe have tapped the source. It is inclusive; it contains the other
two, and their expressions. It radiates above and beyond the emotion of
human relationships, yet it includes them. It enfolds and COMPREHENDS,
though sometimes without individual UNDERSTANDING on your plane of the
universe. That is the love that Christ talked about, and it includes all
the gradations, glories, and beauties of the other two."

"Could be called the state of love?" one of us queried.

"Yes. The reason for this rather academic discussion of love is that I
want to create in your consciousness the reality of the entity of love.
One of the miscomprehended statements of Biblical literature is this: God
is love.

"Now that 'state of love' is the third kind. It is one of the most
important facts of the unobstructed universe. Love, if I can use an
analogy, is so actual here with us that it needs no more factual
assurance than the air you breathe. Love with me is so real that I can
permeate you with it. I enfold you. I make you conscious of it--or rather
if you accept it you will be conscious of it. You don't need to ask for
it, you don't need to demand it, because it is always there. You just
HAVE it. Now all individuality has to have a focus, a peg on which to
hang itself. I am your peg. But you can so love me that this love
permeates all of your own universe and carries over to ours--bridges."

"Could not too exclusive a focus on the peg be detrimental to the wide
aspect?" I asked.

"If it is only the demanding love."

And here is another side-glimpse from another Invisible at another time.

"All love, from the love of a flower or a bit doggie or even a skyline by
a hill, to the love between two human beings, is nought whatever but an
unrecognized realization, not merely of kinship, but of actual identity.
It is a fragment, not yet intellectualized, of what will be in the course
of development a universal, and not a fragmentary thing. Love may be
defined in terms of identity, just as, in dealing with particulars,
identity may be defined in the terms of love. They are interchangeable
terms."




V. NEGATIVES


THE ultimate aim, in the highest utilization of any material environment
such as your earth, is the fullest expression of spirit in the completest
manifestation of matter.
INVISIBLE

STRAIN will never accomplish anything but defeat. If radiance were
anything but illumination in rapture, it would not be radiance.
INVISIBLE


1

WE HAVE touched on the positive side of function. There is also to be
examined the negative side, the reverse of eagerness. And that is fairly
well expressed by what the Invisibles called "drab-colored
words"--drudgery and duty.

Now here, the Invisibles acknowledge, might be preached what could
readily be made into dangerous doctrine. That is, if it is taken as
sanction to license or avoidance. It is neither, as you will see when you
have finished this chapter, nor is it in any manner relief from
responsibility.

Even though that is understood, the two proposals are startling enough at
first glance.

Never be content to pursue a course of action merely because it is your
"duty."

Never "give up" things for the sake of your soul.

2

Over the years these two admonitions were given us many times without
great elaboration. But when the Invisibles finally tackled the subject in
detail they began with general principles.


"The more fully," said they, "you can live outwardly and inwardly
expressed, and develop the thing that is individually and personally and
uniquely you, the more completely are you fulfilling function. But the
deep-set currents of your being are not always easy to recognize. Do not
mistake the ghostly pressures of habit, of environment, of the power of
old-time thought. They are strong in conviction. Naked duty is easy to
mark as the flint-faced hag she is. But clothed in tradition and the
expectation of approval or reward she often hides her identity. Always
remember that a thing done merely because it is a conventional duty,
unbacked by the essence of self, is sterile and unproductive. There is no
duty to others that is not also a duty to one's self.

"It is for this reason we have so often deprecated the value of plain and
gray duty. It is even seriously to be doubted whether one should ever be
content merely to 'do his duty.' If it appears to him as a duty, with a
capital D, then he is regarding that event too superficially. He must lay
aside that particular aspect which shows itself as a duty, and go back
and back of it until he finds something wider and more inclusive, which
he can perform heartily. For example, one is a wee lad and he looks with
considerable disfavor on a long wet tramp through the brae to bring
homeward the kine, and he goes forth for the performance of that task
only because he feels it to be his duty. If this lad is a Scot, and hence
philosophically inclined, he might conceivably be able to abandon the
thought of the task as a duty and obtain a necessary enthusiasm to make
of it a formative thing--and these little things are formative as well as
the big things--by reflecting on the real pleasure it will give his
widowed mother to see him taking responsibility. Thus he has centered his
force of motivation not in the detail of the thing to be done, but in a
wider underlying principle. This is a crude childish illustration, but I
purposely take the very simplest example to make clear what I mean. No
man should ever merely 'do his duty'; but in recognizing a duty as such,
he should examine back and back of it to find it is only one detail of a
larger principle which is his pleasure. If he cannot do that he must not
do his duty. I speak here, of course, as you understand, in a rather
exaggerated hyperbole. It is sometimes desirable to do certain drudgeries
which cannot be avoided, pending the discovery of the leaven which will
make them palatable.

"Indeed, such performances are often valuable, as calisthenic exercises
are valuable, in strengthening spiritual muscles. But it must not be
thought for a moment that one is thereby attaining grace, as so many
worth-while people imagine. The disagreeable, merely as such, is never
constructive in the direct sense. The disagreeable, however, is often a
challenge to our spiritual perceptions. Unless the thing presented for
our performance is evil or out of harmony, there exists in it
somewhere--if our natures are developed enough to find it--an aspect or
an inclusion which will fit into our world of things done heartily. All
life is a challenge to our spiritual perception of harmony--there is
nothing but what fits if only we can find out how."

3

This brings us to the question of sacrifice, and especially
self-sacrifice. In popular esteem, sacrifice is meritorious. We admire
it, though we may not do it. And we tend to look on it as a moral duty.
There is that "duty" again. But the Invisibles had other ideas.

"Self sacrifice," said they, "in the popular conception of giving up your
own to another almost indiscriminately and without reference to the
conditions, is often bad. It may indicate merely laziness or a vain
self-righteousness. Self-sacrifice, so called, is true and constructive
only when it has its inception in the field of complete inner conviction.
And then it is merely a recognition, conscious or intuitive, of the fact
that the harmonious need of the moment is for relinquishment. And since
this is a natural process, it is in final analysis a joyous process, as
is any harmonious functioning.

"A man should not give up an object of desire because of some rigid
intellectual idea of duty, or some weak sentiment or emotion, or some
mistaken conception of stripping himself to give to others as a
meritorious thing in itself. He should relinquish only because he senses
that the occasion demands, for the harmony of which he is a part, a
foregoing rather than an insistence. In this understanding, what the
world calls self-sacrifice is no sacrifice at all, in the sense that it
involves much pain or ultimate regret.

"Indeed, if pain is felt in arriving at the point of relinquishment, he
can always apply a sure test. This test is whether, through the decision
at which he has arrived, he experiences a completely unregretful
satisfaction and a sense of having done the totally harmonious thing. If
still there lingers a strong sense of mere duty, that in itself indicates
that he has not functioned entirely within his field of complete
understanding.

"Sometimes his decision, from an abstract point of view, may be
intrinsically correct, and he 'should' make the sacrifice. Nevertheless,
from his personal point of view the struggle to be made is not in the
direction of this especial relinquishment. It is within himself, to
extend his understanding so that it will include the pressure which has
forced him to the decision of mere duty.

"Or, again, it may be that his duty decision is intrinsically wrong,
though he may not know it. To give up what he should defend may throw
confusion into the harmony of the General Plan. Knowingly to abandon to
others that which is not their right may only deprive him of that which
he should rightfully have. At the same time it may also fill unhealthily
a gap whose completion by effort should have developed certain qualities
in the others.

"You must not forget that in such decisions all your
powers--intellectual, emotional, intuitional--must be accorded full play.
If a man comes to such a decision without calling upon himself fully, he
may permit surface desirabilities too great an importance. He may
penetrate so little beyond his mere liking as never to allow other
influences access to him. Perhaps, when he goes deeper into himself, he
may discover that in these particular circumstances he may not like these
things at all!--however desirable they may be in other and perhaps more
ordinary circumstances. Then his feet are on the ground."

4

Most of us think of asceticism as the supreme example of self-sacrifice.
Likewise most of us harbor a sneaking suspicion that there may be some
sort of good in it. The Invisibles would have none of this.

"It is a mistaken idea," said they, "that conscientious and ritualistic
giving up of things has merit. Giving up things, per se, has no merit at
all. The moment any philosophy, any system of thought denies or avoids,
you may know that it is wrong. Perhaps you may have to search for
meanings and adjustments and proportions before your life will work
smoothly, but you cannot cut off part of it and have anything left but a
monstrosity. That is the trouble with all asceticisms. The idea is not to
divest yourself but to utilize yourself; to express the whole of yourself
and not just a part. Welcome and accept all human instincts, all savoring
of life. No matter how commonplace, how humble or capable of being used
solely for material purposes certain functions may be--nevertheless,
properly viewed, properly utilized, each may express some aspect of
spirit that otherwise could not be as adequately expressed."

Objection to this doctrine occurred to us. For a good many centuries, we
pointed out, the school of monasticism, withdrawal, abstinence, denial
has had great authority and unassailable standing as the way to spiritual
life. As one of us phrased it, "the oriental retirement from the
trivialities of ordinary life in order to concentrate on spiritual
growth."

"The product of that system," said the Invisible, "is not without value.
Nevertheless, it does not fulfill the ideal of its functioning. It is too
thoroughly an individualistic achievement. It lacks the contagious
quality which should make it avail in the common earth life. Whatever its
reachings, its powers and its appeals, they are primarily adapted to
other planes than that of physical earth, and may only, by art and
knowledge, be secondarily applied to the earth plane.

"I must repeat: no physical aspect of life, no matter how unlikely it may
seem at first glance, but has a spiritual complement which its use, or
indulgence, can release. The task of the world is to find and to grow
into these correspondences. The long spiritual striving of the East fell
into negations and avoidances. So it has attenuated itself into what
might be called a sterile and solitary functioning, mostly on a plane not
intended in the original plan. It is necessary, then, to start anew in
the richness of the soil."

The idea of asceticism, the Invisibles hastened to add, is by no means
peculiar to the East. Indeed the West, especially in the Dark Ages,
carried it to the extreme of fanaticism with only a minimum of the wider
spiritual connotations.

"Christianity likewise fell into negation," said the Invisible, "and in a
manner even more fatal than in the case of the Eastern beliefs. The
negations of the latter were at least motivated by the theory that they
were an integral element of higher growth. The negations of the West,
however, came to their authority merely through a constricting fear, so
that in their final form they implied that aught of earth that gave
pleasure must, by that very fact, be deterrent. This peculiar doctrine
took its inception from an eager instinct for concentration, and a
mistaken extension of the primitive rite of sacrificial offering. It was
a sublimation, in a way, of the old savage superstition that the
sacrifice of that which the suppliant holds dear is a propitiation for
ultimate favor. In primitive society the sacrifice of a bullock was made
to win immediate privilege from a personal god. In the larger later
development the sacrifice was of those things that made life pleasurable,
in order to purchase a remote and future 'heaven.' So sublimated, there
increasingly became attached to it a body of inhibition which, in
aggregate, made indeed of earth existence a 'vale of tears,' supportable
only as a price of future, and otherwise unearned, bliss.

"Unfortunately this attitude is still very common. It varies widely in
degree and gets startlingly diverse results. To it are due a great list
of prohibitions, ranging from the imposed celibate orders to the keeping
of the Sabbath holy by reducing its activities to the smallest trickle
that could sustain life. All this diversity could, however, be comprised
again in that single, dry-rotting word, negation. In place of
transforming ever more and more of the functions of material life into
their proper expression of the complementary spiritual values, the
process tends rather to wither more and more even of the significances
already in existence. As a consequence this Western philosophy, like the
Eastern, has become a dead-end product, without further growth. Both will
continue to function, each in its own way, but in the future their
contribution must be rather that of the tributary than that of the main
current.

"The task of your evolution is not to deny, for all negation is either
deterrent or destructive. The real task is to utilize and educate, so
that your action may not only fully and pleasurably express all its
earthly capabilities, but also act as a conduit to its appropriate
spiritual counterpart. There is no thing, no function, no pleasure, no
gratification but can in development not only express its first and
obvious earthly content, but also be made to release its complementary
spiritual content. Your part is to live in full, as far as you may, all
correspondences that your material earth presents to you; to do so
without negation; but so to accept and use each and every one of them
that you may eventually discern and attract its spiritual meaning. This
is not only a satisfying, but an immensely thrilling pursuit. You
exercise in it the instinct and ingenuity, not of your mind but of your
heart. And when that spiritual complement is finally uncovered by you,
sometimes in the most unexpected and unlikely aspects, you will
experience the excitement and satisfaction of one who at once discovers
and enriches. That use and that meaning are in every natural aspect of
your earth life. The future of the general spiritual advance of your race
is dependent upon this process of discovery. As an individual you
contribute your quota of your personal research, for that research is
synonymous with growth. In this plowing and fallow time, when it seems
the race lives in a muck of materialism, that is the harrowing you may
contribute. It is in the muck because it begins a fresh and, we hope,
more glorious attempt."

Still, we were not satisfied.

"How about the so-called Masters of the Far East," we wanted to know. "If
they attained to their advanced powers by withdrawing to the Himalayas
and doing Yogi exercises, then why shouldn't we?"

"You have the thing wrong end to," replied the Invisible." John Jones
could not withdraw to the Himalayas and do the things in the certain way
you speak of and become an adept. It is only an adept who can do it. It
is not by conscious taking of thought, and withdrawing from life for the
purpose of pursuing spirituality like an elusive and rather solitary fox,
that one attains--unless the withdrawal seems, not a question, but the
most natural thing in the world. An effort to renounce is not the effort
which is the price of all growth. The effort must be always to expand, to
reach out, to gain more contacts, to live everyday life with a leaven of
sympathy, and to walk on the highest plane of which one is capable. If
these things are done naturally and simply and eagerly and with a will,
spirituality, as you call it, will flood in, bringing with it all its
gifts of intuition, of spiritual wisdom, of cosmic contact. But that is a
thing which must be left to take care of itself. All the other is yours
to do, and to its doing you bring all that you can of that which comes to
you on the flood."

5

These pronouncements, I realize, will strike many as radical and
iconoclastic. But not many of the younger generation. Outgrowing things
is their specialty. Nevertheless, there are two sides to the picture.

"The younger generation's overturning of our lifeless idols of duty and
sacrifice," said the Invisible, "is in reality a very healthy rebellion.
The farther reaches of psychology have showed the damaging impress of
these older concepts. Now, what the younger generation have not
discovered yet--life will surely teach them--is the seeing the scheme of
responsibility whole. They must realize their importance in the creative
scheme of things, so that the unquestioned giving of themselves to doing
their part is as healthy an outgoing of self as a good football tackle.
The seeing of their responsibilities whole will finally reveal duty and
sacrifice, in their essential structure, as full-blooded essentials of
conquest rather than old dried mummies of dogma.

"These young rebels are the creative ones or the next generation. But
they will find they can't work successfully without a technique of
association. And they haven't gone far enough yet to build themselves a
better and healthier one than the old.

"What they'll find in time is that the job can't be done, however
improved their new tools may be, without the ESSENTIALS of duty and
sacrifice. But they must get them in their own terms, and the result
won't be the old thing at all. Enthusiasm will be its life blood."




VI. CONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT


IT IS HARD for us to foresee here what will be the results of this more
general belief and how much we dare reveal. The teachers are all very
cautious, for reaction must be carefully reckoned before knowledge can be
given out. There is so much danger in the present situation that it is
one of the first things we are cautioned about, when we are allowed to
give communications: that is to be very watchful and not go too far, to
move slowly and cautiously for the present. We have to note results
carefully. It is the most intensive and comprehensive campaign that has
ever been arranged over here, they say. It will be the most far-reaching
and we are all tremendously excited about it. You see, we are under
strict orders and have to evade sometimes the way they do on a witness
stand, because we are not quite sure how much we dare tell. Also there is
great care taken lest any conflicting information gets out. It is a
wonderfully well-planned campaign. There is great consultation here all
the time and we have to report results of our work.... I am aching to
tell you lots more state secrets, but I cannot. Don't forget one thing,
will you? and that is that a wonderful age of stimulated creation is
ahead, the result of the war suffering. We are all watching so eagerly
the growth of the big things.
INVISIBLE

DON'T You imagine that, if a seed could think, it might look on you as
spirits with the wisdom of God, because you made it grow by cultivation
and the understanding of law? Well, suppose yourselves seeds underground,
and think of us as ordinary people who have a higher comprehension of
law, and who help you germinate.

INVISIBLE


1

WE PROCEED in evolution by expansion of consciousness. This takes place
through function by the natural processes of growth. But when the time is
ripe for the individual, he may greatly foster--not force--the natural
process by taking conscious charge. Before that ripe moment he is more or
less insulated from spiritual awareness, ordinarily, by indifference or
open scepticism. That is why revelation--any revelation, great or
small--generally receives limited acceptance. That is why pressure
methods and proselyting have so little permanent value. Per contra, when
the moment of ripeness does arrive the opportunity is always there.
Whether it comes in one form or another does not matter. There are many
forms, and as many approaches.

The moment of ripeness comes to races as well as individuals. Then we
find especial effort on the part of the invisible powers. There is a
surge of interest and effort and belief. Sometimes this is expressed in
material or economic or political terms; sometimes in what is known as
"psychics," or intellect, or religion.

Apparently the present is one of those moments. The plowing and harrowing
of war and social disturbances have prepared both general conditions and
the individual for a fresh sowing. And through suffering the fields of
human thinking have been made receptive.

"This," said the Invisibles, "is the most marvelously plastic time we
shall have for aeons. For that reason it is vitally important to utilize
it. We are all of us making a mold. Youth feels it most; feels the
healthy intuition to go as far as possible in freedom, to outrun the
greatest possible distance from the old shackles, now, while it is
possible, before the stiffening process begins again.

"Whispered counsels, too low to be heard by the world of ruder
comprehension, have kept alive the mere trace of spiritual consciousness
which exists today. Now the effort is to the fostering of development of
this nearly lost potentiality. You can see for yourself, when you
contemplate the historical picture, how necessary it has been to bring to
earth the scientific strength, control and rationale of physical law.
But, now that it bids fair to topple over its own structure by limiting
satisfactions to its own achievements, it must regain impetus by
directing its explorations to new fields, illuminating hitherto unseen
possibilities."

"It looks," observed Betty, "like the last lap of a period in time which
is ripening a movement. There is a confident feeling that we need only
wait so long--it is not very long--before a new epoch comes in. I am
delighted with the looks of it. What a comfort it will be to have
everybody hang their own responsibilities on THEMSELVES through their own
standards of belief! It can only be done by waiting for the maturity of
this idea, this level of belief they are growing. There are a few here
and there who stand out above the others, but it must be an accepted
thing by the majority before it can do the race much good....

"I wonder what that nice new shining idea is? It has so much vitality. I
can see it springing out of laboratories, out of books, leaping and
bounding into life....

"Nothing is as important for this particular age. He says that
distinctly. No inventions or peerless presentations of any form of human
conceptions are as important as personal demonstration of the harmonious
living which comes of spiritual consciousness. It is a great message, to
those who are prepared, to go forth into the world as lawgivers of life,
healers and harmonizers, inspirers and gift bringers from the wider,
freer, bolder life. They called me to say it, but I'm not good enough to
translate. That's too bad. But perhaps even in dusty fragments the
message may have some beauty, though it hardly seems possible. There's
nothing anybody can do so important as to gain the consciousness of
hourly spiritual influence."

2

The time is ripe, then, for many of us to take conscious charge of our
development. It hardly needs saying that conscious contribution has the
potentiality of being many times more effective than any blind
offering--for good or for ill. But how do we go about this taking over?
In the telling, the answer is deceptively simple: by conscious
cooperation with spiritual forces. Even in the dawnings of understanding,
mankind had a dim appreciation of this. We call that appreciation by the
general term "religion." Crude as it originally was, adulterated as it
always has been by selfish and material ends, nevertheless it had in it
always an element of true spiritual cooperation. And in certain
historical instances it became almost pure spirit offering itself up in
service of the All.

Meantime the work of the world had to be done. So insistent is that
necessity that it is probably a good thing the average man still does not
see clearly what it is all about. The job has to be done. We can take no
chances that it may be dropped in favor of a mistaken pursuit of Higher
Powers.

Here we must return once more to our aim. All along we have seen that our
basic obligation is self-development. But before we pursue that
obligation into spiritual realms it behooves us to ask ourselves a
question. For what purpose do we seek to further ourselves in evolution?
What is our private aim in this seeking? Is it ourselves as ourselves? Or
have we a more inclusive purpose?

In this connection let us examine the other aspect of the twofold
objective of evolution. You will recall this as the coordination of
individuals in a functioning Unity. Later, in defining education, this
was expressed differently as "the process of changing the emphasis from
the egocentric to the altruistic." Including this aspect, then, our own
basic aim is to MAKE OF OURSELVES AGENTS BETTER EQUIPPED TO AID IN THE
ADVANCE OF THE WHOLE.

In the larger sense that which subserves the universal Aim is
good--whatever it is. That which does not subserve it is evil--whatever
it is. In judging, therefore, whether our reaching out for spiritual
forces is Right or Wrong, we may ignore the bewilderments of detailed
method, provided we Are wholeheartedly honest in our basic aim--to make
of ourselves agents better equipped to aid in the advance of the whole.
In this, as in all enterprise, we can rely absolutely on the sure
protection that, if our aim is single and pure, we are safe. If it is
diluted with self-seeking--in the narrower sense--or with pride, then we
are in danger. The matter is as simple as that. Above I with pride. The
moment we begin to look upon our efforts toward spiritual cooperation as
placing us above others in an "especially selected" category, then we
enter a blind alley. Apropos, it would be well to re-examine the
beatitudes through retranslation from the Aramaic. The same symbol that
indicates "spirit" in that language means also "pride." "Blessed are the
poor in spirit" is rather too humble; "blessed are the poor in pride"
really means something.

How are we to judge whether or not our aim is pure? Is there any compass
we can steer by? The answer is yes. It is the results of our efforts as
reflected in our lives. What direction do our actions take, naturally and
without strain?

At this point we must use another word that needs retreading. All down
the years mankind has used it to mark an ultimate goal. As with all such
fundamental terms, it has become overlaid with the partial and the
sentimental and the false. I refer to the word "service." This has been
so abused that to many it has become a cause for levity or cynicism. When
it was offered to Betty she did not like it. But it caused her to find
another, of an allied nature. One we shall return to later in these
pages.

"Service is a cold word," she objected; "this is a warm, living--a sort
of spontaneous creation, a curiously spreading, outgoing thing. It is
more like production through the desire to produce. I can't see much of
this strain and duty and uninspired effort, heaviness of work which I,
and everyone else, go through to accomplish things. There is something
one-sided when it's that way. This other is like the hard work you do in
play, only it's a consuming, quickening, life-begetting thing. It is
glowing, pulsing, sweeping you along. We weren't meant to work with
heaviness; it's a discordant condition. Work is just fun. What a pity
that the tradition of work has become so painful. Work! Production. Work
is painful: production is better. Service has a sterile taint. What can I
get that is self-acting? Creation is the nearest to it. That is a
cleaner, brighter word. People do not create under a lash."

Creativeness, then, is the test we are looking for. If our lives are
creative, in the inclusive sense of contributing something real to
humanity, then we are on the right track.

3

There are a thousand methods of cooperating consciously with spiritual
forces, ranging from performing the most humdrum tasks with a full
content of spiritual understanding to the most profound philosophical or
religious undertaking--and everything in between. It is a mistake to
suppose that spiritual growth must be technical. That our own approach
happened to be the psychic means nothing as a prescription. It is a road
for specialists, and is one of the more dangerous ways unless skilfully
and continuously safeguarded. The safeguard is, again, the aim. For what
reason is one doing it? For development of psychic stunts and powers? For
material benefit? For personal pride or prestige? Out of curiosity? Or
for the single purpose of becoming a better tool?

At the risk of tiresome repetition I must reiterate that there is in
everything, in every activity, this potential duality of purpose. The
most clearly defined illustrations can be cited in the professions. A
young man "expands his consciousness" in medical school to acquire skill
to heal. His primary ambition may be to bring ease to suffering, or it
may be a fashionable practice and lots of money. Another may write a book
for the purpose of expressing an insight into life, or he may all the
time have his eye on markets and sales. He may study art that he may
bring more beauty into the world, or his sole idea may be to acquire the
skill to do pot boilers. He may seek to be a well-paid shyster or a
seeker for justice. In all cases the activities are the same; the
outcomes differ. The difference is in the aim.

This was put up to us clearly when the Invisibles took us in charge.

"Your success will depend on your attitude," they told us. "One attitude
you may take is the desire to expand the consciousness and understanding
for the sake only of the joyous inclusion and comprehension of more and
more of the spiritual quality; as one expands one's lungs to breathe
deeper of the freshness of the morning. The other attitude--differing so
slightly from it that it is even difficult to express the difference
clearly--seeks spiritual quality as an ingredient of PERSONAL spiritual
growth. The difference is, as I have said, very subtle; but the one is
safe and wholesome; the other is beset with danger, and leads into a
confusion unimaginable. The latter seeks primarily DEVELOPMENT, which,
when consciously primary as a motive, is a trait of self-centeredness.
The other seeks only a capacity for greater inclusion."

The immediate object, they made it equally clear, was a better and more
effective technique of living--again for the ultimate purpose of greater
usefulness. Nothing, they emphasized, is any good at all unless it is
usable in everyday life. If that were not so, there would be no
particular object in our being on earth. This is true even of the most
abstract and apparently detached strivings and speculations. They must
have an umbilical cord to human life or they have no life of their own.
The Invisibles called this necessity the principle of "Make-it-so." But,
they added as corollary, while actual overt action, visible application
and functioning are the usual, inner action and functioning may also be
an ingredient of growth. They called this type of action radiation. The
emphasis of radiation was one of their objectives.

"A developed person," they explained, "even a developing one, who has
come to some recognition of the vital spirit expanding within him, has
the opportunity of utilizing that power over the most commonplace
episodes of daily life. It is more exactly like water let loose on
parched ground than any other figure I can find. Not too great a volume
of water at first; but the life-giving spirit of it creeping and seeping,
arousing and expanding the paralysis of aridity, everywhere supplying the
quickening element that releases the fertility stored in the dusty brown
earth. It is just this gentle distribution around you of the spiritual
heart force as you feel its expansion within you that will teach you the
actuality of spiritual faculties. It is not a directed irrigation like
the so-called mental treatment; it is more the rising stream finding its
spirit level in opened places among natural encouragements and
resistances.

"In other words, the steadiness of the original life-giving impetus is
what fosters the best area of growth. Therefore the person who is, who
maintains the heart area, the atmosphere, the climate of the spiritual
mind--he is the eminent citizen of eternity, the life-educated one,
soundly, progressively self-made, permanently cooperative."

4

There are many methods, as I have said, of consciously cooperating with
spiritual forces. And each method has its individual approach,
appropriate to itself. Since our own approach was the psychic, most of
the early training was largely occupied with the development of the
psychic faculties, especially that of communication with the invisible.
But here also the means were carefully distinguished from the end. From
the very beginning our Invisibles vigorously rejected "psychic power" as
an objective.

"The purpose of this exploration," said they, "is not immediately to
broaden communication between the obstructed and the unobstructed
universes. One of the causes for the instability you note in peoples,
individuals, society, thought, is the ultra and sudden ease of
communication in time and in space. The radio and the auto are not
stabilized. They are too rapid for the assimilation of society in
general. Knowing these things probably even better than you, it could not
therefore be our purpose to do more at this time than re-establish on the
basis of your present knowledge and the demands of your present
knowledge--the faith in the divinity of self that is tottering."

This purpose became evident to us after a while, but at the outset it was
natural that our first curiosities and wonders should be concerned with
the psychic processes themselves. Nevertheless, the Invisibles
steadfastly held before us the ultimate objective: that they had for us a
"divulgence"--provided they could develop a channel through which to
express it.

"It is not," they disclaimed against our uneasiness," a fuzzy, fetishy
thing. It's a square-cornered block of facts; and we are going to hurl
them right at the world, square and strong. Can't you see what a tough
nut that is to crack? Can't you see it's a wedge of spiritual substance,
hard-driven into the toughest fibre of the world? It's a good strong blow
in an effort to penetrate the--" they hesitated.

"'Hopeless tenuosity of our consciousness,' they say," the Station helped
out. "That's funny: we always think of them as tenuous, and here we are
just foggy! I don't wonder we can't take hold of anything: and here they
are all square-cornered and wedges and things like that, (chuckled) I
thought you said we are a tough-fibred world!

"It's a tremendous job because, you see, we are not very intelligent
about it. This is a carry-through proposition. They are depending on us
for concerted action in planning the demonstration of what is given. That
part is for us to manipulate. They plan for it to permeate print and
pulpit and pictures and pastimes. (chuckled) I bet you ran out of p's."

"It is planned for the moments of relaxation," the Invisible explained,
"the most susceptible of moments. Let this thing grow in your collective
consciousness, but remember it must be administered popularly. It is like
the little thin life-saving line they shoot over to pull over the big one
afterwards. It is a small effort now, but it prepares the public mind for
the big wedge of demonstration through scientific discovery. Later it
will be linked to the slow process of evolution in collective
intelligence."

"What the world needs," said they on another occasion, "is a chemical
demonstration of spirituality. You see what the substance of spirituality
does to individuals; why not also to the race through standardized
education? What an immense breaking down of barriers, if something more
than the mere verbal philosophy could be given! If it could be
DEMONSTRATED! Humanity stepping over the line, humanity released from
complete physical consciousness. Superstition vanished under education.
If the awe of superstition could be lost. Awe is an active agent, both
good and evil. Half-education has developed contempt, arrogance,
unleashed egotism--banished the awe. Real education must proceed to the
point of redeveloping the awe, but enlightened, reinforced. Wipe out the
superstition of physical limitations to the human soul. That is where the
blow is to fall; the effort to prove.

"Men sickened and died by thousands, 'through the visitation of heaven,'
it was piously said, piously believed except by a rebellious few. And the
rebellious few strove to wipe out this deep-rooted superstition, just as
we are trying to get you to