A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Across the Unknown
Author:     Stewart Edward White and Harwood White
eBook No.:  0500091.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
Character set encoding:     Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted:          January 2005
Date most recently updated: January 2005

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Title:      Across the Unknown
Author:     Stewart Edward White and Harwood White





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

"It is essential to linger frequently on the frontier
of one's limitations, looking out eagerly across the unknown."

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





AUTHOR'S NOTE

THE PRESENT VOLUME, like its predecessor The Betty Book, is a matter of
collaboration in which so many people have been involved that it is
difficult to name an author for its title page. There were of course,
those who gave us the material on which it is based--the Invisibles;
anonymous and probably numerous. There was Betty who transmitted it.
There was I, who took it down and typed it and filed it in loose-leaf
books. And finally there was my brother, Harwood, to join us in selecting
and arranging and digesting and presenting in a form acceptable and
valuable to others outside our small group. No trifling job, this last,
for by the time we got at it, we had over two thousand single-spaced
pages out of which to quarry about three hundred double spaced pages of
text. It is for the form, then, that we on the title page assume
responsibility.

For the sake of clarity it should be mentioned that whenever the pronoun
he first person comes into the narrative, it refers to myself. The reason
for this is that it seemed wise, to all of us, to illustrate occasionally
by actual individual experience.

STEWART EDWARD WHITE







CONTENTS

PART I

EXPLORATION

Chap.  1. OUTFITTING
Chap.  2. FAMILIAR GROUND
Chap.  3. BORDER COUNTRY
Chap.  4. PIONEER METHODS
Chap.  5. THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE
Chap.  6. LANDMARKS
Chap.  7. BACK COUNTRY
Chap.  8. THE LAY OF THE LAND
Chap.  9. PORTAGE
Chap. 10. THE GREAT ADVENTURE

PART II

DEVELOPMENT

Chap. 1. DISTANT RANGES
Chap. 2. TENDERFOOT
Chap. 3. PERMANENT CAMP
Chap. 4. BLAZED TRAM
Chap. 5. PASTURE
Chap. 6. EXCURSIONS
Chap. 7. HOMESTEAD
Chap. 8. EASY STAGES






PART III

USE

Chap. 1. PRODUCTION
Chap. 2. NATURAL RESOURCES
Chap. 3. DISTRIBUTION
Chap. 4. FABRICATION
Chap. 5. SUPERVISION
Chap. 6. TECHNIQUE
Chap. 7. NEW TERRITORY
Chap. 8. COUNTRY BEYOND
Chap. 9. I BEAR WITNESS



THE ACTS of your days on days make a certain-shaped thing of you. Then in
the rhythm of life the influences too big for control strike a sharp blow
or stroke or influence or vibration of some kind, that overcomes your own
plan or sense of direction. And this same stroke arranges your
relationships quite automatically. Suddenly you fit into the place where
the thing you shaped will go with mathematical nicety. It is as though a
lot of scattered things were dancing about; and CLAP! they were all in a
pattern. You call it fate, or luck, or destiny, but all the time it is
just the preparation of your days on days, your own deliberate handiwork.
It is as though we were all put through graded sieves that suddenly
reveal our sizes to ourselves; where usually we are all so mixed together
that you could not measure. No amount of jiggling could shake you into a
place you did not fit, for which you had not shaped yourself. Only when
you are too inert to shape yourself, are you at the mercy of the Pattern
Maker.





ACROSS THE UNKNOWN



PART I

EXPLORATION

THE STRUGGLE of each generation is the interpretation of the whispered
allotment of wisdom into the current vernacular. You are at the turning
of a great tide. Who is there to offer guidance in the age-proven
technique of living, and yet point ahead to the regions we are appointed
to explore? We arraign your generation for its failure to establish faith
in the proven laws of living. Will you not voice it in this book of
yours? Let honest conviction ring out; and strike a new note of
responsibility.





What an awful region of words I've come to! I don't like them; they're
just empty clamshells standing for things that aren't there!

I am greatly handicapped by my seeing the subject. Seeing the subject
makes it too big for the words, and they stumble.








CHAPTER I

OUTFITTING

1.

WE ARE here recommending to you a country beyond. We think you will find
its exploration rewarding. But we shall not be able to go along. We must
merely tell you about it; and thus, perhaps, help you to find your own
way.

This country is not something brand-new that we have been the first to
discover. Others have passed this way before us. But they have been too
few. The topography is not yet well understood, nor is travel there
secure. Safe, well-made trails do not exist--only ways-through along
which predecessors have here and there erected markers. And these routes
are only for the sure-footed, for they are slippery and dangerous. Their
exploration is not a tour, but an adventure.

This is a fact. But I think we are often told so in the wrong way. Mostly
we are warned off. Stay out, is the cry, for this is a land of bugaboos!
Some of the warnings, especially in symbolism, are terrifying. And, to my
mind, somewhat misleading. Astral entities, dugpas, incubi and succubi,
obsessing diabolisms, black magics of all sorts--if we listen to the
East; queerness, crankiness, separateness, illusion, split personality,
all the mental aberrations right up to actual insanity--if we listen to
the West: these are the perils which we must undertake if we are to dare
in venturing. Pause and consider, they tell us solemnly; you need not
venture, but if you do, make up your mind to face these enemies and
dangers.

The dangers are real enough, I believe, in whatever terms they are
stated. But they should not be terrifying, and certainly not deterring.

Did you ever read a pilot book of the Pacific Northwest Coast? It was
written by a pessimist. His favorite phrase is "should not be attempted
without local knowledge." Scattered through his pages are gems of
description telling of the masses of ice "grinding together in tide
whirls of great velocity." A winter fireside perusal could easily
convince a suggestible man that only a miracle could keep him from
disaster. And the author tells the truth. These perils of sunken ledge
and treacherous current, compelling tide whirl, clashing ice, are all
there. But to a man with ordinary foresight and common sense they are
slight menace-provided he meets them well-informed and well-prepared.

Just so, I conceive, these great and very real dangers to irresponsibles,
in this country beyond, are not of the sort among which one must walk in
dread--provided he is suitably equipped for the journey. Was it
Stefansson who defined the usual "adventure" as merely a lack of
preparation? That is what I am trying to emphasize here: the importance
of a little careful preparation.

2.

Before proceeding further, we must first of all agree on the matter of
words. Unfortunately some of the words we must use are pretty well
tattered by careless use. They have frayed out into numerous rags of
connotation. They have been spread thin to cover too many aspects, each
of which really should have a word of its own. If we could find, or make,
fresh words, we should get on much better. But there are none; and the
results of our fabrication are both clumsy and cold. So we must do our
best in freshening, defining, limiting.

First, we must retread the term "psychic." That has become a very skiddy
word; but it is the only one we have.

For this adventure into another region of consciousness is psychic; and
it uses psychic faculties. Only, unfortunately, the term covers too many
things. With some of them we have no concern at all. Some of them we
utilize as a means to the end we are after. All of them are more or less
disputed territory.

Broadly speaking, they present two aspects. Into one general
classification we may crowd that great mass of astonishing and debated
phenomena: ectoplasm and all its varied manifestation, clairvoyance,
telepathy, direct voice, apport, spiritism, clairaudience, levitation,
and such. By most of us these have always been regarded with suspicion or
downright disbelief. Nevertheless, such a weight of evidence has
accumulated that they can no longer be dismissed by a mere scornful wave
of the skeptical hand.

In the second aspect we include a number of things of perhaps more
general toleration. Nevertheless, the average man still lumps them as at
least queer or impractical: concentration, meditation, prayer, communion,
Yogi exercises, cosmic consciousness--even intuition, inspiration and
genius. The names associated with many of these are unfortunate in
connotation. "Religion" is one. For many, somehow, it has come to bring
down the asbestos curtain. Luckily we can dodge that rough spot: our
approach takes a different route. "Occultism" is another; but that need
not alarm us, either. Occult merely means hidden--the thing beyond what
we know. And that is itself the field of our projected exploration.

3.

Corresponding roughly to these two aspects of psychics are two general
classes of "schools." In one we find literally dozens of systems whose
purpose is avowedly the development of "psychic powers." That means
merely a degree of mechanical control over certain faculties latent in
all of us, but as yet little understood. In these particular schools the
"powers" are the main objective:--communion with the dead, visions of the
future, the obtaining of material benefits, and the like.

There also exist dozens of systems of a second type, some of them
resembling superficially the first, but differing in one important
respect: their stated aim is the development of the individual as a whole
to the point where he can enter what amounts to another region of
consciousness. It matters little what this region is called--the
Universal, cosmic consciousness, Samadhi, God--or how it is approached.
The objective is not various separate "powers" for their own sake, but a
single state of mind.

Most of this latter group even go a step farther, and condemn all
meddling with "psychics" as dangerous. In the not very distant past this
attitude was probably justified. Today it is extreme. Certainly even the
crudest psychic phenomena are, at the very least, legitimate materials
for objective scientific study. In that case, of course, they should be
allowed no more spiritual content than cosmic rays, or expanding nebulae,
or the filterable viruses. The scientist's job is merely to establish
their veridicity, to understand their nature, to construct an hypothesis
of their action.

Toward this aspect of "psychics," it must be recognized, any other
attitude is likely to be dangerous. It has often proved so. The dabbler
gets results. Many of them are disconcerting. Many turn the seeker into
bypaths apart from life, that lead into the queernesses of impractical,
sometimes crazy, theories and cults. And even the best intentions in the
world seem to be no safeguard. So true is this that, in merciful
insulation, the average human is protected by an instinctive repulsion
from the whole subject.

Nevertheless it is perfectly possible to start out comfortably and
successfully with what are in reality "psychic" activities. This also has
been proved. For some, even, this may be the only effective method. And
the fact remains, whatever route we elect for our approach to the high
country, sooner or later we find ourselves utilizing some kind of
"psychics." We come to an elevation where our ordinary workaday senses
are not adequate. We have risen from the familiar solidities of the
valley into a new kind of country. We are dealing with intangibles, and
to deal with intangibles we are forced to work with psychic faculties.
This is true in all cases. It is true even in the case of those
philosophies and those individuals who are convinced that "psychics" are
dangerous and deterrent and must be avoided. Their warnings are
well-founded. But they are talking about something else. At the beginning
they may avoid the direct approach through avowedly "psychic" methods;
but as we gain altitude and approach the pass, the trails join.

4.

In a previous volume--The Betty Book--I have told of Betty's first steps
into this country beyond. In the following pages will appear SOME of her
later explorations, together with my own first steps along the trail. So
far we have been fortunate enough to avoid serious danger or distress.
And on the journey we have come into possession of a compass--one which
we feel can be trusted by others following this trail.

The basic difference between safety and danger, between anxiety and
comfort, between surety and bewilderment is very simple. It is the aim.
There are other factors along the way which we must anticipate and guard
against, as will appear later. But we cannot do so unless, first of all,
we know what we are after, and where we want to go. And we must refuse to
be deflected. We must keep the aim single.

The primary nature of this aim, also, is very simple: we are headed for
the high country of consciousness. If there are such things as "psychic
powers," and if we early come into possession of them, it must be for use
on our journey and for nothing else. If deliberately we undertake certain
initial practices leading to any so-called "psychic state," it will be
only as an aid to our greater intention, and for no other purpose, no
matter how many other possible uses for them seem to offer themselves. As
we penetrate the country beyond, many of these powers and conditions will
come to us naturally and securely as a by-product of our progress. Others
will as naturally fall into disuse, because they are crude and no longer
necessary or effective. But meanwhile we must be vigilant neither to
strain for their acquisition, nor to abuse the privilege of their
possession. For it is when we make them ends in themselves, and collect
or develop them for the sake of their power that they become dangerous.
They are staffs for our hands, not stunts for our gratification.

The same simple beginnings are common to either aim. The trail forks.
There is a left- and a right-hand path. That the devices we use at the
start may lead down the wrong trail as well as the right trail, is beside
the point. So may any other device whatever, including the most direct
form of communion possible to the mystic. We have our choice. And a good
compass; which is our Aim.








NOW let us take up your attitude toward things you can't understand. What
is your first reaction? To make fun of them. That is all right: nobody
wants you not to have fun. But it would be a better idea if you could
make that your second, or your third, or your fourth reaction, rather
than your first; provided that your first was that you want to understand
it. That would be a great help.

One more thing: Every day strengthen your DESIRE for understanding: every
day make fertile your understanding by moments of admitting eternal
things to your consciousness.




CHAPTER II

FAMILIAR GROUND

1.

YOUNG things are helpless. They must be fed, cared for, protected until
they mature through natural growth. Then they must care for themselves:
If not permitted to do so, they deteriorate into fat parasitism.

In the animal world a compelling instinct thrusts the fledgling from the
nest as soon as it has grown its feathers, severs the filial ties once
the beast has learned to use its teeth and claws. If occasionally, or
with certain species, young and old stay together for a time, it is not
as a family, but rather as a co-operative unit in which each, old and
young, plays its equal and adult part.

Man serves the same necessity. But in his case the instinct does not
compel. He may inhibit it, or deny it. As a parent he may cling to his
child far beyond the time, swayed sentimentally by misguided--and
selfish--"affection," or more harshly by an egocentric demand of filial
obligation. Or it may be the child who lingers, held by a wholly false
sense of "duty." There is something to be said for him; but little for
the youth who lingers because he loves his safe comfort, or distrusts his
ability to make his own way. There are plenty of them. They would not be
permitted in the sure clean functioning of the animal world. The bird
pushes the reluctant laggard over the edge of the nest.

It is a law, and a simple law: that of ripeness. When a seed--or an
animal--or a man--is ripe, it must mature to its next phase. Or rot.

The impelling force behind that maturing is also simple. It is
discontent. When the young thing has ripened, he becomes discontented, he
wants to get out. Too often he is reproached as ungrateful, and is a
grief to his parents who "have done everything for him." That is silly,
for this is no discontent of captiousness, discontent against details. It
is something more noble; rather a dissatisfaction with things as they
are, with himself as he is. When we perceive clearly its significance, we
turn the word inside out, and rename it ambition. Then it becomes
admirable: but it is discontent just the same. And it can always be
recognized because its state is of discomfort. Resentfully, always, we
grope for comfort. We are yet to learn that comfort is not stable, but
must be constantly recaptured.

As a race we follow that instinct fairly well. Whether we express it to
ourselves or not, we do recognize that the fettered family is
pathological. We approve the restlessness of ambitious youth. But
curiously enough we fail to recognize exactly the same thing when it
works on us in later years. When, at that time, the old formless unrest
once again stirs our spirits--causelessly it may seem--we resent, or we
endure. We have not learned this lesson of youth, which is that our
discontents are among our most valuable gifts from life. They are not to
be resented or endured. They are to be examined. And examination, if we
are vitally intelligent, results in our doing something about it. Which,
in turn, means a new venturing. Curious that we can see this only in
retrospect. Curious that we are able to smile so indulgently at the
fevered blind rebellions of our adolescence, seeing them clearly for what
they were, and yet fail to see that our present case is no different.

That was our emerging from our physical and mental adolescence. This can
be our emerging from our spiritual adolescence. It can be a dangerous
moment--or an inspiring one. It may close the door, or open it to a wide
new land.

2.

This happened to me a number of years ago. I could see no sense to it. My
personal and material world should have been satisfactory. I was happily
married; I had an interesting profession, in which I was successful; I
was in excellent health, had independent means, congenial friends in all
walks of life. Finally--most essential--I saw clearly plenty of work
ahead and plenty of adventure opening up in certain projected excursions
into a wilderness new to me. Certainly I had every ingredient for
happiness. And I was happy, I told myself, entirely so! If, I asked
myself, I were to be given a free hand to fashion a desirable life for
myself, how could I improve on what I had? Nevertheless a faint uneasy
restlessness--the restlessness that meets one on the far side of
novelty--had begun to whisper in my car. Cui bono? [to what end?] that
miserable sneering question that awaits every one of us somewhere along
the journey.

Fortunately for me, at this point I was led into a new venture. This
experience I have tried to describe in another book,* both as a factual
story, and as an exposition of things learned through certain teachings.
The latter seemed true and important to a few of us, and of general
value. Nevertheless we wished to be pretty sure of that. We must try them
out to see if they would work. Pragmatism. As Dooley said: "Av it
worruks, it's true." The only way to tell was to give them time to work.
Therefore we delayed publication--for seventeen years.

* The Betty Book.

Incidentally I, personally, had to be driven to certain conclusions as to
their origin. They purported to be given, through Betty, from outside
Intelligences. We nicknamed them the Invisibles, largely because of their
insistence on remaining anonymous.

For me that was rather a large order. Frankly I could not, for a long
time, accept them for what they purported to be. But driven is the word:
I was finally driven to it. It took a long time, and a gradual
accumulation of small logicalities rather than large evidences--though
these did not lack. Finally I could not reject them, simply because
rejection at last became ridiculous. For each objection I had to adopt
another explanation, and these perforce grew so numerous and so different
that they in turn demanded a more inclusive explanation. And in the long
run I found myself using such ingenious mental devices that they became
more unbelievable than the thing itself. Just as I had my properly
cautious skepticism all neatly arranged, along would come some other
small fact that did not fit in anywhere. That too had to be explained, or
the whole mess would fall down like a stack of matches. And to explain it
altered the explanations of a lot of the others; and the new explanations
had to be more and more ingenious or they would not fit, until it all got
so complicated that anybody's most homespun reasoning would call it
absurd. It was magnificent, but was it sense?

So, finally, that point was settled. I was willing to accept, as a fact,
that we were receiving through Betty, from outside, and apparently
discarnate, intelligences, a graded and progressing and logically
acceptable instruction on how to get along in life.

3.

Most of the ideas offered by these intelligences were foreign to my habit
of thought. I will here epitomize from The Betty Book sufficient for the
purpose of their basic concepts.

Filling all space, said they, is a great sea of undifferentiated force.
We can call it life, or spirit, or the Universal--anything we please. But
it is the thing by virtue of which all living things exist, through their
ability to transmute this general force into something individual. In
other words they--and we are vital transformers. It follows that we are
alive and developed in proportion to how much of this force we can
accept, and how freely it flows through us. The better we do this the
higher grade we occupy, and the more alive and contented and effective we
become.

Ordinarily, said the Invisibles, this goes on unconsciously, and more or
less inefficiently. We are self-contained. We are encrusted in a hard
shell. A certain flow through us persists in spite of this. Otherwise we
should not be alive at all. But too often it is the barest trickle: no
more than sufficient to carry on painfully a slow progress and a torpid
existence.

In the green stage of unripeness little can be done to alter these
natural processes. But there comes a time, to everyone, when we can, if
we will, take conscious and intelligent direction. Then these heretofore
automatic processes will function not only better and more quickly, but
less painfully. In The Betty Book I set down the philosophy and technique
of how this can be done. It is unnecessary here to repeat more than basic
principles. I will state them as briefly as possible.

One of these is that each of us occupies not only the physical body we
see, but a second or spiritual body. This latter will continue to contain
us after physical death. Though imperceptible to our ordinary senses, the
spiritual body is no vague wraith of insubstantial shadow. It is
perfectly real, made of definite substance, and will function in a world
that corresponds to it. That world also is of definite substance. Indeed
so far from the fuzzy or ghostlike is this world that, in one sense, its
matter is even more substantial than that of the physical universe, for
it interpenetrates--fills the interspaces--of the latter. In it the
realities of consciousness will have more vivid scope than we know in our
present phase. Through it the vital force of the universe acts more
powerfully and directly than with us.

But--and here is the important point--that world is not separated from
ours by a hard and fast iron wall of time. We can, in certain ways, begin
to function in it now. Indeed at the time of ripeness that is what we
must do if we are to continue efficient and developing. If we gain
consciously and keep continuously our contact with it, our reservoirs
will draw from unfailing abundance. The difference between that and our
ordinary state would be the difference between power line and a storage
battery.

In doing this our final aim is to develop a definite, close-knit core of
self, in which we can have confidence as an indestructible unit. For only
in this way can we be assured of a permanent nucleus of individuality
which will hold securely together in the strain of life--and death.

Such are the barest of bare bones that upheld the body of the teachings
we received. Their record now fills over two thousand pages. They cover a
wide foreground of detail--as to how this force works in daily life; how
consciously to seek it, and appropriate it, and apply it effectively.
Incidental to the placing of that detail is an inclusive background of
cosmology. The whole picture, background and foreground, is coherent; it
is intellectually satisfying; it progresses both onward and upward until
it escapes the grasp of our highest reaches of imagination. And it stands
by itself, so that in the end it does not matter one bit whence or from
whom it came.








YOU'VE got to play with the idea before you can make it work, because you
are not operating in your accustomed substance. You are employing a
higher creative form which you don't know how to use, except
unconsciously and relaxedly.



CHAPTER III

BORDER COUNTRY

1.

ONLY a very dull man could receive such a body of such ideas without a
wide shift in his point of view. Certainly I was not that dull. For one
thing it gave me a rationale. It silenced my vague discontent. Here was a
sufficing reason for being. I had a comfortable placement. That alone was
worth while.

But it went farther than that. I began to see things whole, to
discern--not too clearly at first--a general scheme. Things fitted
together. Certain of them lost importance; such as death, hatreds,
irritations, conflicts, antagonisms, to mention a few at random. Certain
others gained importance;--the small acts, efforts, and decisions of the
minutes and hours of every day. How should they not, if one is SHOWN that
the causes and effects of life are not isolated, but smoothly continuous?
That they come to no dead ends, that there are no dead ends, not even
death itself?

That was all to the good. It sorted me out mentally. One goes ahead more
confidently if he does not have to go it blind. Indeed so hearten this
one little item of intellectual understanding that for some time I was
quite content. This much demonstrated, in my own case, that the thing did
work, and that because of it I was getting along in life with greater
satisfaction.

But shortly it was borne in on me that the mental was only a part. Betty,
and a few others, were getting something else out of it. They had the
same mental understanding as I, but also something more, a relationship
of some kind that so far I had missed.

2.

I had insight enough to recognize in this a tie-in with all the other
"systems" of illumination and advancement into which human instinct has
groped. There have been many. Sometimes they have been dignified into
religions. Sometimes they have been limited down into philosophies, or
merely into cults. But whatever they were, their adherents fall
invariably into two classes: those who gave mental assent and who, in
return gained a certain--often valuable--understanding; and those who
came into some closer relationship that brought them the something more.
And no matter what the "system" was, it worked, and endured, if that
relationship was established. It remained merely an interesting
philosophy if that relationship was missed.

My insight penetrated just this far, and no deeper. What was this
peculiar relationship, and how did one enter into it? That was what I
must try to find out.

My whole training was against me. I was, as yet, interested only in
definite, clear-cut ideas. All my experience, up to now, seemed to have
proved them the most reliable guides. At any rate they were least likely
to conduct one into dangerous fogs. I rather prided myself on being
practical and hardheaded and "intellectual." What I wanted was direct
statements, ideas, scientific facts. And I demanded them. I set out to
pin down these supposed Invisibles.

Well, I got definite statements at times, especially in the beginning.
But somehow I felt discontented, though I could not quite place my finger
on the why. It was as though these people had some idea or purpose that
they kept withholding, something below the obvious plain surface of what
they said. I sensed it constantly, as one senses the hum behind a
long-distance conversation. It was subtle, and baffling, and finally it
got on my nerves. I demanded a showdown. Why don't you say, in so many
words, what you mean? said I. I'm an intelligent human being; I can
understand plain speech. Here, from the record, is the verbatim
discussion: *

* For the benefit of those who have not read The Betty Book, it should be
explained that these records were dictated to me by Betty while in a kind
of disassociated state--not, however, amounting to unconsciousness.
Sometimes she spoke in her own person; sometimes one of the Invisibles
spoke through her, the shift being marked by a change in voice, diction
and style.

INVISIBLE: Please note: you will not get scientific explanation such as
you expect. You will get the reality as we can manage to give it, which
you can deduce as theory later. We cannot tell you in words which would
convey anything to you, what we must accomplish by molding you to the
thing itself. It becomes increasingly difficult to put things so as to be
easily acceptable to your intellect. Understanding can be acquired only
by actual participation in the reality. At present there is no reaction
of experience to words representing that reality.

S E W: Nevertheless words will be necessary to explain to others who have
not experienced the reality.

INVISIBLE: That will be your part after the perception is yours--after
you are capable of entering it in reality. Only through your capacity of
understanding can truth be produced in written symbol. It is impossible
for us alone. From the beginning that has been difficult for you to
realize. Reckon on statements as near as we ire capable of making them;
but only as an accompaniment to the acquisition of the thing itself.
Without the latter, explanations would be sterile.

S E W: As I understand it, then, it is impossible for you to express
major truths in words; but after you lead us into the reality, it is
within our power to find the words that will express and prove it.

INVISIBLE: That's better; that's much better. You kind of broke through
then. That cleared up things considerably.

S E W: I don't quite see why you did not say that before.

INVISIBLE: You acquired it--produced it yourself.

S E W: But it seems a simple enough intellectual idea....

INVISIBLE: No; not an intellectual idea. It is a growth in yourself. It
would have remained a sterile intellectual idea, as you call it, unless
we had forced you to produce it yourself.

S E W: But it could have been stated....

INVISIBLE: Why will you have only one dimension! But, have patience with
our methods. They are more farseeing in results than you imagine. For the
present don't try to acquire too definite a formula in your medium, but
work for comprehension of the thing in ours. The difference is between
the taking of detached, intellectual, occasionally contemplated concepts,
and having them a constant, integral part of your consciousness. This
difference is the most difficult to present simply to the educated. Minds
which are firmly established in their own sphere of action will not even
pause to contemplate another. It is the keystone of the whole benefit to
be derived from any of these teachings, and is always impatiently
acknowledged and instantly rejected because it dethrones the sovereignty
of the lesser instrument receiving the message.

BETTY: How stiff words are! They've only got one plane--like paper dolls
instead of people. Takes so many of them. Leave it: it's getting all
daubed up with words. So we'll leave that.

This did jar me ahead a little. At least I had a new intellectual
conception. I had a new sequence, a new Pattern: that while pure reason
has its function in this kind of exploration, it is not an ORIGINATING
function. It acts AFTER the fact, rather than before. It does not itself
find anything; it thinks about things after they are found. Then it can
appraise, accept or reject, utilize, apply--but only what is brought to
it by other, and perhaps higher, aspects of mind.

3.

That was an advance. But I must have been, I can see now, an exasperating
sort of pupil. I had not yet decided just how literally Betty's
experiences should be taken. SOMEBODY had to keep his feet solidly on the
ground! And I had to be the one. Therefore, as I saw it, I could not lay
aside my tried and tested reasoning powers in favor of something that
looked to me pretty vague and nebulous. And I said so.

"Do not," advised the Invisibles, "be abashed by your ponderable mind,
any more than you are abashed by ponderable people. There is, you know, a
certain type of over-sane, over-cautious people who have never sensed
intangible verities; who prefer to occupy themselves exclusively with the
more limited ponderables; just as there are the unfortunates who have
never sensed the rapture of a perfume or the ecstasy of a color harmony.
Escape frequently from the limitations of your ponderable mind, and
capture a small boy's enjoyment in constructing yourself a tree house,
high above your ordinary workaday dwelling place."

"Your advice appeals to me," I agreed, "but it reminds me a little of the
Book of Etiquette: 'When meeting new people always assume an easy
unconscious demeanor.' Suppose you have an idea in the back of your mind
that perhaps you are only going to make a chump of yourself. Just how do
you recommend getting around that?"

"You can," they replied quaintly, "begin to gain this reality without
believing in it at all! All we ask of anybody at first is an attitude of
receptivity. The intellectual attitude doesn't matter, not in the least.
Consider a flower in need of sunlight--a flower possessed of thinking
intelligence. Can't get sunlight in its heart unless it opens its petals.
If it opens its petals, it gets sunlight, and the, sunlight has its
effect. Now why should a gardener, interested principally in the growth
of flowers, care a hang whether that flower's theory of why it opened is
that it possesses a subconscious and illusory sun, or not? Whether it
imagines that a gardener exists or not, provided it opens its petals?

"Now we do not care whether we are labelled Subconscious Secundus or
Subconscious Tertius; or whether anybody thinks some portion of his
personality evokes these experiences, or that they are an independent
reality. If you entertain in an attitude of receptivity what comes to
you, you are receiving the sunlight, and that must have its effect in
development. What dust and chaff comes to you at the same time will be
disposed of and pass away. By maintaining the willingness to receive--not
to criticize at first--that which is intrinsically true will
insensibly become part of you, and you will ultimately and most
unexpectedly find yourself possessed of a belief that wilt be a
certainty.

"This does not mean that one should try to accept unquestioningly, nor
that he should inanely refuse intellectual examination. It merely means
the aforementioned willingness to receive and place on file for future
reference, so to speak, what cannot immediately be accepted. It implies a
willingness to leave the question open; neither to seek for far-fetched
explanation nor to attempt an unripe credence.

"If quite honestly one can do this--with entire self-honesty--the event
can safety be left to--I was, going to say 'us,' but I will say time. You
see 'us' may be Subconscious Sub-one or Sub-two."



I HAVE a great plea to make. I want you to come with me, all of you who
are ready. I want you to lay aside all effort at understanding and
interpretation, and come out into the great outside. There is only one
way to do it. Just say to yourselves: I will lay aside the symbols for
the reality. I will be like a mere plant, responsive to unwordable
influences. Busy, near-sighted little self must be quieted, set aside for
the purpose of expanding a great and dormant faculty within me. This
faculty is weak; it barely records impressions yet; but through it surges
all that is enduring.




CHAPTER IV

PIONEER METHODS

1.

CURIOUS how we acquire wisdom! Over and over again the same truth is
thrust under our very noses. We encounter it in action; we are admonished
of it; we read it in the written word. We suffer the experience, we
graciously assent to the advice; we approve, intellectually, the written
word. But nothing happens inside us.

Then one day some trivial experience or word or encounter stops us short.
A gleam of illumination penetrates the depth of our consciousness. We
see! Usually it is but a glimpse; but on rare occasion a brilliant flash
reveals truth fully formed. And we marvel that this understanding has
escaped us so long.

For months, literally, the Invisibles hammered away at my dullness. Not
that I occupied the whole stage of their attention! They had Betty's
education to attend to; and there was also the structure of the teachings
to be defined. But I was part of the job; and they kept at me. And always
the same line of attack.

"Make the leap," they urged. "Dare to do it. Take a chance on our being
night. You cannot connect up in an unbroken series of steps with what you
know. This reality is not on the outskirts; a gap must be bridged. Lay
aside at intervals the measuring stick of your mind. It is very necessary
to employ the measuring stick ordinarily; but lay it aside
intermittently. Hurl yourself into space, as it were. It will not hurt
you to go bravely out to pick up a clue or two. You've been trying to
creep up on things on the scientific side, but they've got to be boldly
taken, artistically, in the present case, Conservatism travels so slowly.
Radicalism suffers for its blunders, but arrives with force."

Here Betty took up the discourse: "Anything gorgeous and wonderful could
happen to you if only you'd have the courage to ignore and outdistance
your ordinary restricted self. Everybody who has pioneered has thrown
aside the customary routine and hurled himself at one inspired ideal.

"The way I want to go about it seems so opposed to that scientific
slow-freight kind of feeling. I don't suppose you could make the world
credit anybody who went around leaping toward things; but the leap is an
ingredient, and you can't go ahead without making it. When you leave out
the leap you are not working in the nature of the substance. You are
trying to work in the new substance with the nature of the old. You can't
do it, except slowly and painfully.

"That's the new big conception we've got to grow around--this idea of
working in the nature of the substance. They are trying to percolate this
to us. It's the next phase of our work. We've gone as far as we can
without acquiring it.

"I suppose there's a striking and sensible way to say it, because I can
FEEL the mechanical explanation of it. There's undoubtedly a mechanical
explanation that fits it. I don't know mechanics."

She paused a moment, then chuckled. "So childish! They put legs on a
flying machine and make it walk around!"

"We are trying," continued the Invisible, "to drag you out of your
restricted element, to show you the taking off process: how to zoom. You
can't conquer the air by working the levers on the ground. It is only by
utilizing the attributes of the new substance that you can succeed. This
next big conception of how to function spiritually is only to be
accomplished by taking seriously this leaping process.

This was the time I woke up. That phrase "working in the nature of the
substance" rang a bell somewhere in the back of my mind.

2.

It happened that at just this time I was taking my first steps in
learning the great game of golf. I early found there are plenty of good
books on how to play it. And that each month a number of magazines tell
it all over again. Nothing has been more carefully dissected and
described than the mechanics of the golf swing. And there can be no doubt
that all this careful analysis is a great help. A man at least knows what
he is to go after, and that is a lot better than just going it blind. But
nobody ever learned to play golf in his armchair. We've got to go and do
it.

Simple and obvious! But it was my own private illumination in this
matter. Reading about golf gets the thing only in the mind. But when I
got out on the practice tee and swung a club, I was translating this idea
into actual objective material--I was bringing it into being in the
physical substance of my body. In the one case I had only an idea, in the
other I had an actual SENSATION: a subjective FEELING: inside myself. It
was something like the difference between the blueprint of a house and
the house itself.

Go out and do it: that was the answer. Not think about it; but do it and
get the feel of it--whatever this reality was that the Invisibles kept
talking about. And suddenly it occurred to me that it is certainly more
fun to get out and play golf than to sit at home and read about it.

3.

Agreed. But how make a start? One has to have implements, tools, some
sort of instructions to go with them. The Invisibles obliged; but by no
means with a full set. They never do. But they did give me a handhold.

"You must gain it in imagination first," said they, "and then work back
through slow steps to connect it with observed facts. Analyze the process
of education through mentality, the gradual, progressive formation within
the minds of children of the accumulated knowledge of the race. Take, for
example, the grasping of the idea of evolution, or what is known as the
solar system. Such things can be successfully presented only through the
imagination--the only function that reaches into the realms that are
intangible, but nevertheless facts of civilization. Having analyzed this
process, apply it to the spiritual education. Reach the imagination into
the reality we present. It can only be made tangible, established within
you, by this type of personal experiment."

"I don't think," Betty interjected, "that's a very good
word--imagination. It's too cobwebby with unrealities."

"Imagination?" they cried, astonished. "Why, that is the very GATEWAY to
reality! Imagination is the Power of Transportation--that overrides space
and time! Imagination enables you to put yourself ANYWHERE. It's the
power of juxtaposition, that puts together things that were never put
together before, at points of contact that nobody else ever thought of.
It's the power to see the Pattern.

"You call it a plaything. You've always called it a plaything. But
actually it's the one thing you possess that connects you with the next
substance. It's a transmuting chemical. We will hunt for a word that will
be more solidly respectable than imagination. Call it speculative
philosophy, if you prefer. Give it any vestment of dignity, but utilize
it to connect with what is beyond your experience, beyond the limits of
your present conceptions."

"It seems to me." I objected, "that imagining things has got a lot of
people into trouble."

"Failures do not affect the law," they pointed out. "Do not fear the
strength of the gift because it has been misused. In looking at failures,
take them as valuable warnings; but negatives, not positives.

There was a pause, and then Betty said, "Well, while I'm laid aside, what
else? I have an unhooked feeling this way.

She was silent a moment as though awaiting orders. Then in a puzzled
tone: "Such a bulk of unrecognized law!"

For several minutes she seemed to study this. Finally: "I can go into
that bulk: I can apparently feet quite comfortable near it and around it,
but there is no comprehension in my mind of it, except bit by bit. I know
lots of things, but I can't teach myself them. I want to go now with
myself that knows things. It's nice not to try to understand--just to
know."








I AM the heir of eternal expansion and clothed in my right to partake of
it. Oh, do not ever again let me be poor-spirited or faded or gnarled in
form! I want the richly patterned life. I want to be gorgeously spirited,
I want the ceremonial beauty and fragrance of the spirit. I want the
freedom of its force. I want the quiet whispering of its wisdom. I want
the simplicity of its love. Oh help me to the fullness of life! I pray
for the fullness of life with an undivided heart, so that I may rest
absorbing strength, not emptying myself of life!




CHAPTER V

THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE

1.

WE OCCUPY habitually but a limited portion of the consciousness we
already possess. Not so long ago we were unwilling to admit that such
uninhabited areas existed at all. Most of us Just occupied the ordinary
territories of our thoughts and emotions and sensations, and were
satisfied to let it go at that. But latterly even the cautious scientists
have come to recognize and study the subconscious, the superconscious,
intuition, inspiration, hypnotism--a lot of things outside the snug
stockade of our comfortable habit. To be sure, most of these outlying
areas, and the dwellers therein, still have somewhat of a bad name. And
possibly a few of them deserve it. Nevertheless they are being
increasingly acknowledged as a wide borderland country, already within
our reach, extending into the unknown far beyond the mark set by our
accustomed "limitations."

"The great value of an interest in these things," said the Invisibles,
"of at least admitting their possibility, is that it affords an
extendible frontier. The inspiration to explore and acquire and
administer new territories of life is always ahead as a lure.

"Youth lives entirely on this frontier, though more on its physical
counterpart, exploring the sensuous possibilities. That is one of the
secrets of its enthusiasm and rapid development. Undamaged by misuse,
this faculty should persist, arriving at maturity with a healthy appetite
for the next stage--spiritual development. Hard and fast boundaries, such
as those set by the phase through which popular scientific interpretation
is passing--your true scientist is not that way--are very restricting and
disheartening. As a result, you make no effort toward liberation into the
higher sensations which lead toward ultimate reality. You are left
flattened on top, confined by the mechanics of your minds."

After all we ourselves set those boundary markers, arbitrarily. We put
them at the limits of visibility, as far as we could see from our present
stockade of accustomed life. And abandoned them, taking for granted that
they are accurately placed.

That is peculiar, seeing that mere curiosity takes us over most
sky-lines. But for some reason this looks dubious to us. We can look back
and see clearly our path of evolution, like a broad highway behind us.
But mists roll across the future, and its forms are half-glimpsed.
Perhaps we are a little feared of the venturing.

Nevertheless it is in that direction we must travel. These present
comfortable headquarters are not permanent. Ultimately they must be out
there somewhere, in the dimness. It would seem only common sense, then,
to scout out the new site. Perhaps we may like it. Perhaps we may even
want to go up and occupy. We can always back-track.

2.

These ideas came to me gradually, a few at a time. It was their
realization that finally persuaded me to explore this frontier country
myself, in person. Only in that way, I decided, could I satisfy myself as
to what it was all about. Then I would be in a position to form my own
opinion, instead of depending on hearsay and guesswork.

But the actual setting out, when at last I faced it seriously, presented
a number of unexpected problems. The trouble was not in getting advice--I
found plenty of guidebooks filled with that--but to figure out what not
to take. Spiritual development, I had come to realize, is individual. No
two men are alike, from thumb print to immortal soul. There are no
shotgun prescriptions, whether of cult, philosophy or religion. We cannot
be helped by rigid regimes. We must have direction, not directions. What
is desirable? Which way points our compass? What, in clearer definition,
are we after? That is about all we can be told. Recognizable signposts
can be planted for us toward the high country, but we alone must find our
own paths. And if we expect more detailed guidance, we plan for
confusion.

My own landmarks were revealed to me by Betty's reports of her
explorations. Just at first, I admit, some of these were a cropful. Great
sweeps of gorgeousness were never my line. I like things tacked down to
something solid--by at least one corner. But I hung on hopefully, and
after a while things began to make sense. In the meantime my feeling for
mystery and adventure were vastly stimulated.

In the next chapter I shall quote some of these reports. Taken as a
whole, I believe, they combine to place the main features of the most
accessible territory in this new country. This does not mean that they
are the only features; or even that they are the ones we shall first
discern. They give a hint of what, sooner or later, we may all look
forward to there--but not necessarily a promise.

"There is no use," warned the Invisibles, "in previsioning or predicting
what this higher consciousness will accomplish or perceive. That is
entirely individual and temperamental. An indication of the things which
one may acquire is all that can be given from one to another."

What degrees of "reality," as we use the word, Betty's reported
experiences represented, it is difficult to say. Sometimes they seem to
have been actual excursions into another condition of life. Sometimes
they were obviously symbolic, weaving a gorgeous and sustaining richness,
like a colorful orchestration, beneath the simple pure theme of reality.
But whether "real" or not, these experiences all combined to lead surely
and definitely into reality. And for twenty years that reality has
withstood the test of daily living.

3.

My directions, up to this time, really boiled down to one thing: in order
to approach Betty's new "substance" or region of consciousness or
whatever it was, I was to use my imagination as a kind of magic carpet.
By wholeheartedly picturing to myself the general conditions described by
Betty, I was to draw nearer to the thing itself--prepare myself, so to
speak, for eventual participation. Also, as a kind of corollary, I must
take a recess from the intellect and its criticisms. A recess, not a
divorce. For the time being I was to be wholly irresponsible of what the
intellect might have to say about the matter; to be--for the time
being--wholly wild and extravagant; willing to accept things I did not
know about as though they were really so.

"It is curious how you have to take the things they give," said Betty. "I
hold an idea rather loosely when I get it. I take it as I would take the
beauty of the rainbow. I know I cannot hold it or reach it or even look
at it closely. I know I can't, and so I don't try. That is the way I take
these big ideas in the beginning--somewhat like the rainbow. I remember
them wholly; but they are out of my reach in the analysis, the pulling of
them to pieces to explain them.

"You know, a child's first impulse, when you give it a beautiful flower,
is to pull it to pieces. That is natural enough, but a flower is not to
be handled that way. It is to be enjoyed whole, as an inspirational
thing. These foreshadowed ideas also are delicate things, blossoming
things. They must have more effect on the inspirational side, and less in
concentration on pulling them to pieces to understand. The dissecting of
them is only allowable after the flower influence, or the rainbow
influence, has entered into you.

"So many beautiful things are put into the world solely to help you to
make the jump-off. I took the rainbow because it seems so obviously
inaccessible that no one could dream of spoiling it by grasping and
analyzing it. You must not starve that rainbow side. It is more practical
than you think. It is the mechanism of liberation."








HOW do I function in the universal strength? How does a bird hold itself
up in the air, resting its wings confidently on the air currents. How do
you hold yourself up in the water, abandoning yourself to its support.
How do I hold myself here? By amalgamation of my heart's desire with the
strength that is myself and not myself. I lie individually quiescent in
it, as one floats contentedly in the great ocean.




CHAPTER VI

LANDMARKS

1.

IN A NEW country a man must find his own way. The landmarks planted by
his predecessors he must discover for himself. When he overtakes them, he
is heartened by their evidence that others have passed this way and found
the way reliable. That is the principal reason for placing landmarks,
against the time when someone shall need them.

But also there is a value in travelers' tales. They excite interest. They
breathe the atmosphere of adventure in strange lands. They awaken the
romance of the unexplored and the unknown, arousing us to venture.

Before commencing the records of Betty's explorations I must emphasize
one thing that every writer knows. No account does more than
insignificant credit to the original. And this seems to be particularly
true when we deal with the far reaches of the mind. A kind of penumbra of
illumination accompanies the thing itself, which is lacking to the record
of cold type. I suppose this is inevitable when we concern ourselves with
a reality whose greater part is intangible, beyond the measuring ability
of the brain. I cannot sufficiently stress this apparently obvious
statement. Only personal experience can realize its import.

This penumbra, then, must be left to the reader's imagination, together
with the actual physical setting: Betty lies blindfolded on the couch; I
sit at my table, pencil hand, taking down her words.

2.

BETTY: I am in a garden with a clipped hedge around it, and an arched
gateway. I don't know why I am here....

Now Fin passing through the gate, leaving behind the green and blooming
garden. Before me is a desert country, but the soil is rich and
unfed-upon. It just needs a gardener, that's all, to extend the
cultivated territory, making it beautiful and appreciated and desired by
man....

We are going to bring this new region to life, so that it can be occupied
and extended by others. It won't have any hedge at the end of it. It's
going to run out into the pauseful shadows of ruminating trees, which
will be the boundaries of contemplation around our garden. People will
come into it in contemplation for entering and mastering the wilderness
beyond. It will be a beautiful inspirational place; not like a clipped
hedge on the boundaries of thought....

That's rather a pity, I think, for I've always liked clipped hedges, and
the feeling of living behind them, sheltered and contented. But never
mind: it's just a shred of regret for something comfortable and
accustomed....

It's all gone now.

(pause)

INVISIBLE: Supposing that all your conscious life you had been imprisoned
in a box, and all you knew was the interior of that box; and suddenly you
were released and found you could mingle with the world surrounding it.
How would you explain it to the occupants of the interior? Wouldn't you
try to make them expand in imagination, surround in comprehension their
present limitations in preparation for release,

(pause)

BETTY: Now I seem to contain my former self as something I've
swallowed....I'm completely outside the box....I've got to give way to
this feeling, and it will explain itself time.

INVISIBLE: It's quite simple. It's like being hatched.

(pause)

BETTY: I'm struggling with comprehension.

INVISIBLE: The vortex of relaxation is simply breaking your shell and
releasing you into the surrounding life. Don't you see the difference of
conditions? How obviously the greater powers of the surrounding life are
to yours as the world is to the interior of an egg? It is hopeless to
compress and reduce it for you. We must release you into it so it can
explain itself.

BETTY: I am not free to function in it. I can only sense it; trying to
struggle to consciousness in the new element.

INVISIBLE: Recollect that this is hard pioneer work, bit by bit, a
struggle to conquer the wilderness of lack of comprehension. Even if it
seems fantastic to you, or obvious, or unproductive, live with this idea
of surrounding yourself. Store it away to ripen. It will shake down into
place.

(pause)

BETTY: Rebirths are going on all about us, and we pay no attention. They
are such commonplaces. Mosquitoes from wrigglers, that get their wings
atop the water--all kinds of metamorphoses. I don't know why it should
surprise me so to stick my head up into a new world, and realize that I
can gradually draw myself up until I get entirely into it. It is quite
natural.

3.

BETTY: I just work hard, and then I find I am raised up somehow to a
superstate, and am in touch with something I did not have before; and I
see it vaguely and look back and tell you about it. But I do it, whatever
I'm at. That's why I work so hard and keep quiet so long. I'm gaining a
sense of reality, experiencing, doing; instead of just reflecting. That
means I've got actually to work in this living beyondness and absorb into
the unconscious, as you call it, until I have something to produce in the
conscious....

Now I'm here; and the other is vague and unsubstantial....I am
functioning as a half-conscious newborn thing, but in a world real enough
to stamp on, to expand into definitely with the strange new powers that
are urging within me. In the quiet, dimly perceived as yet, my extended
self senses great desires. Beauty's new functions and satisfactions are
surrounding me. I am too weak to grasp them. I can't even tell you about
what I do grasp: it's too delicate for formulation....

You know what the extent and possibilities are of the intellectual life.
Its vast joys and discoveries are the dry bones of this other region of
life. This is the vibrant embodiment of what the intellectual imagination
dimly shadows. It would inspire the respect of any angle of learning: the
scholar, the intellectualist, the psychologist, the observers and
searchers in any quarter. The bigness of its possibilities are
untranslatable. It is as impossible to put them into words as it is to
put the ocean in a bucket. Nevertheless I must bring back some of it in
some fashion. If I went on a visit and had a great experience, I'd try to
tell you about it....

Now I want to enjoy the continuous rhythm of it a little while. It is so
beautiful: it's all like music.

I said music, didn't I? But I'm not sure what it is that enters me and
rearranges my particles and transmutes and strengthens and makes me so
happy. It has such a rearranging and ordering of you....

It would sound silly if I said anything it was like: It is so tremendous.
I should say it was the perfect ordering of all elements, an exquisite
joy of participating in harmony. My own little joy of life is welded to
that of every other harmonized being. I've forgotten my individual part:
I'm in a great chorus. I should think you would feel the swell of it.

(chuckled)

I feel like a tramp stealing a ride under a car and suddenly asked into a
Pullman....Wonderful, to be a part, even a little part of anything that
moves on with such majesty and beauty and power....

But I've got to say good-bye....I've enjoyed myself so much. It's been
more like being honored than instructed today. I should like to be more
susceptible to that ordering rhythm I called music. There are so many
things in this consciousness that are beautiful--so many things I
participate in without understanding. Something like being a dog: his
associations with higher beings are very satisfactory and intensely
desirable, but he doesn't altogether comprehend them. He just enjoys
them.

4.

BETTY: I'll keep still and make this out now....Putting me to
sleep....I'm traveling....There are people around me....

I've discovered something...a method of travel; I've stumbled on
it....I've been in this room before; kitchen and dining room....Now I'm
going away. I'm on a balcony....I'm with M....

Ugh! That looks so uncomfortable, like a fungus growth. It is a
horrid-looking thing. She has fed it for so long; now it eats her....

That's curious; that's the thing that accompanies everybody. Supposing
everything you'd done or thought, the TENDENCY of your life, had a shape;
as if your days were bricks and you had built something. And suppose your
eyes were adjusted so that you could see what everybody had built. That
is vaguely what I mean when I say people are walking around with a thing
that accompanies them: that is the way I see people here. It is a
pleasure to see them when they have a balanced growth straight ahead,
instead of one of those fungus growths.

S E W: What was that dining room and kitchen and balcony stuff?

BETTY: That's where I traveled. In stretching my spiritual body I
stumbled on an outlet.

S E W: Why travel there?

BETTY: That just happened. It sounds crazy to see people that way; and to
travel around to see them but that's what I did.

It makes the world seem so small when you reach out for people, and the
space between somehow shuts up like a telescope. I don't understand that.
Got to do some experimenting around. I don't see how you can pull out and
push in space like that....

Why, how astonishingly near that brings things! Isn't that astonishing!
Why, isn't that astonishing! Even the distance to the other consciousness
is not distance of space; it's a slowness or torpidity in penetrating.
It's just lack of the right combination that makes it seem distant. It is
so NEAR when you clear that intervening denseness which is not space....

How can I tell this? Supposing I was in a dark room, and then a bright
light was turned on. The darkness and the light occupy the same area,
don't they? One overcomes the other and reveals what the other did not.
Well, instead of being in the dark substance of consciousness, I'm in the
brighter revealing one. Density is gone. I'm in the same place I was, but
with greater vision.

It is all One; Here; Now--all the heavens and hells and universes
superimposed. Why, that is perfectly tremendous! It gets nearer and
nearer until it all seems right on top of me! More and more revealing
light!...

I can't pierce it further. I'm not big enough: it would overwhelm me and
burst me. I can't do it....

I'm a little tired and shaken with that big effort. It was as though I
became merely a container for something that entered. It was a curiously
powerful sensation, but I didn't quite grasp it....

I'm coming back now. I feel the way an electric light bulb does when it
is turned off: all empty and dark!

5.

BETTY: I don't believe it will be possible to tell you yet of the
dimension I am in: I understand so little....

Supposing, to start with, I presage it to you as an entirely new
atmosphere. In it I am perfectly vigorous and strong and conscious, but I
am all sympathetic. That is, I have a universal sense, not only of myself
alone, but as if all the others were part of the atmosphere. Our usual
atmosphere is a lot of little separate cells,--Tom's, Dick's and
Harry's--all more or less attracting or repelling or self-seeking. This
new atmosphere contains them all dissolved, as it were, into one fluid
substance. It's like possessing a bigger body, instead of being a
separate atom of a body. I can see how you contract your vision in
proportion as you become a little Tom-Dick-or-Harry cell; or how you
expand it in proportion as you live in the atmosphere that contains them
all as part of a great universal life.

I've made an awful mess trying to tell you. I've said it badly because I
gave the impression of a merging of individualities. It is not that. They
are distinct; but it's the merging of the substance possessed by all of
them that produces the magic....

It is drifting away from me now. I am slipping back into the restricted
little egotistical consciousness, the atmosphere of diminished vision.
Little by little I slide right on down, seeing smaller and smaller
aspects, watching each person's blindness and disease and low-grade
effort magnify itself to the proportions of a walled world of its own.

What a stupid thing!

6.

BETTY: I'm having a delightful and mysterious time enjoying new
sensations. Somebody's making me do things; things that are a great
elation. Pretty soon I'll understand them and tell you. But I can't tell
you in petit-point language; I can just work in big influences--the way
clouds travel....

All the density and isolation of ordinary life is dispersed. I am
stripped of something that sets apart from participation in
all-surrounding life; and, fantastic as it may sound, I am so
susceptible, capable of interchange, that it is as if I were made of
blotting paper, only with a power of rejection if I choose. It is very
real, and very pleasant to be so out in the cosmos. It is only little
mean mundane fear that would make me worry about individuality. I don't
worry. There's just a shred of an idea that individuality ought to be
tended to....

Why! That's a new idea! Only I can't explain it. The word "love" doesn't
suit my needs; I'll pass it by. I must gather something expressing more
vigorous action, less fuzzed up with individuality....

I'm doing something quite astonishing. There are influences around me
radiating the warmth of human affection, only with so much greater power.
I dissolve to their love; I surround them as they surround me, steeping
in each other's heart-expansion. It's so transforming, breath-taking, and
I can't tell you in words.

Now, the strange thing is, I reach out and spread around each one I care
for, this atmosphere. And as more and more people are brought in and each
adds his contribution to the atmosphere, it enlarges and grows stronger
and becomes firm, like a continent in a surrounding ocean.

I don't understand the rest very well. I seem actually to BE that firm
body--I feel it in all its parts and yet it is composed of many people.
How can that be?

INVISIBLE: It is not easy to sit down to a comprehension of universality.
Only dimly can you sense it as the great ocean connecting all the islands
and continents. This element of the interstices we will name universal in
an effort to set it down simply. All the parceled-off objective things,
of however great magnitude, are but the islands and continents among and
around which flows the great common carrier of universal spirit.

BETTY: I must start over in different words. Wait a minute. I'll start on
the other side: I'll be the ocean....

Now I am. I am the ocean, the ether, the all-surrounding substance in
which individuals are suspended. It's like a universal contribution from
all hearts. It's not that I, mightier, surround the various personalities
floating in the great ocean, but that each meets me there. Each, through
the functions of his being, sends out a quality capable, worthy of
entering this substance, this universal ocean. He can withdraw it; he
still is an individual. But when he sends it forth, it is his highest
potentiality. All consciousness is open to him. He passes into what we
can only call godship. Only by collecting a group of your dearest, going
forth with your heart among them, cementing, as it were, a collective
entity, and continually enlarging it, putting forth the substance among
you, can you start toward comprehension of the Universal Consciousness.

INVISIBLE: How can we make you desire, be eager for the delights of this
connective consciousness? It is as hopeless as trying to tell a little
child in its sand box how much fun it is to be grown-up and married. And
yet there is no other acquisition of life in the way of grownupness that
compares with this faculty.

BETTY: (after a pause) I am trying to get it into a mechanism which will
stabilize it as a reality to you: a definite acquirable process, not a
mere imagery....

Each time I unite myself with someone or something in eagerness of
admiration and affection--by that process I have merged momentarily
with the Universal. That is clear. But also there seem to be definite
steps reaching to the conscious use of this universal process: response,
admiration, adoration, to unity. This gradual lessening of separateness
from the thing admired eventually makes it possible to draw from it its
spiritual essence, feeding upon it as it were. Then you can produce your
own interpretation, your own embodiment of this essence....

Anyway I know now what that phrase means: God is love. It always sounded
so strained and affected to me. I don't like it yet; but that is my
stupidity. At least I know what it means. There are so many word seeds we
don't know how to plant and make grow into life-giving things!

7.

BETTY: (after a long interval) I am trying to grow into the size of the
place I've come to....

When you are very cold and enter a warm room, you say to yourself that
you are in a different atmosphere, and expand to it. That is the
difference between ordinary life and the element I'm in.

INVISIBLE: Supposing you had always been of the general buoyancy of a
flatiron, and suddenly someone showed you how, by continuously opening
yourself up, you could become more like a balloon. Very little
difference, you see, between you and the air. You became simply an
envelope for it, taking the certain amount of it which differentiates
you.

Now substitute for that substance contained inside the balloon--which
also supports it outside--the universal quality of life. You feel it
everywhere, in the woods and the waters, the endless manifestations of
vitality, pulsing and vibrating in contrast to the inanimate things you
handle so constantly. Try to see what this life actually is like in
essence, and not in its varied forms. Then realize this: when you can
associate yourself enough with this quality consciously to rest in it,
depend upon it, like the balloon--then the great secret of these
teachings is yours.

The widest happiness and greatest vigor is to be obtained in acquiring
this faith in the life-substance. It gives you a simple concept of
support and endowment.

(pause)

BETTY: How delightful this upholding life-substance is! It is so
marvelously happy and natural. I think it is mostly the freedom of it
that impresses me. It extends in every direction there is--and there seem
to be some new directions. There is no strain or sanctimonious struggle
for unified feeling: it is just magnitude and simplicity. I can't get out
of it; I can't get around it: I can't fall off; I can't stand on it. It
is a supporting universal thing beyond our conception....

I suppose for a moment I am being held in a perfect balance of some kind;
unattainable ordinarily, but permitted as an ideal....

 The minute I stop, the thing that impresses me is the tingling vitality
of it. There is nothing passive about it; you couldn't hang back in it.
You might be in perfect repose, but you couldn't be dead in it....

I keep quiet, and I breathe away the barriers between the two
consciousnesses, and I think that I bold the actual golden essence of
this vitality with which we buy our happiness; but I can't bring it back.
It slips through my fingers. I am not built so I can hold it. It is like
gasoline going through a chamois skin.

8.

BETTY: I'm back again where I was the other day, only I'm seeing it a
little more clearly.

(long pause)

I never knew such repose and power and self-produced rapture existed,
such freedom, such immensity of happiness. I say 'self-produced' because
it need not be blindly, spasmodically found in a fleeting condition. Its
laws can be understood, making it possible to continue to live in it. My
own understanding of those laws started long ago with the physical
relaxation. That was the first step. That released the tension and
allowed my higher powers to grow and expand and acquire knowledge of
themselves. And now I hesitate to use the word relaxation any longer in
connection with this great life-consciousness and energy.

I am like a powerful machine in perfect running order, but what the
mechanics call "idling." What I am trying to get at is the idea of the
condition I'm experiencing. Loafing isn't it; it has too perfect
preparedness and readiness. Yet it is not keyed up, either, but in
equilibrium. I am so conscious of repose and receptivity, but the effect
is entirely different, in its feeling of strength, from all the words I
know, such as relaxation, rest, vacation....

While I'm vibrating with this power, nothing of a damaging nature can
affect me. I can handle it uncontaminated or unpermeated by it. What
would be grave disturbances to me in lower levels, now seem merely
opportunities for a selection of life. I can't actually discard the
disturbances, but I surround them with a wholesomeness that makes them
innocuous.

INVISIBLE: This control, this acquisition of raised vibrations--whatever
you choose to call it--is absolutely within the desire of the individual.
If you really want it, nothing from the outside can more than momentarily
distract. It is a thing that one builds or does not build, according to
his caliber.

(pause)

BETTY: I am pitied for my transition struggles. It's a predicament.
Neither consciousness has my undivided support. Only dimly away beyond,
can I see the end of the tunnel I'm in. Nevertheless I almost enjoy the
pain of comprehension, because at least it is acute life. Some day I'll
turn it into a harmonious existence without the struggle of contrasting
conditions....

It is as if I were comfortably in calico, and somebody put ermine on me
and I had to live up to it.








HERE'S a new idea coming along. It has had no words assigned to it. Such
a big beautiful thing; I wish I could encompass it. It is terrible to
have anything so big, so hopelessly nameless. I can't capture it. It is
something so bright it doesn't cast any shadow. It is a borderland thing.
As soon as you begin to sense it, you are a member of a different
fraternity.






CHAPTER VII

BACK COUNTRY

1.

AS TIME went on Betty's explorations took her farther an d farther into
these trackless regions of the higher consciousness. I do not believe
many of us can expect to duplicate them, except fleetingly and in
fragment perhaps. They were, I think, special to Betty, and for special
purpose; carefully guided and controlled, primarily intended as
experiment and demonstration. Nor do I feel we should try to duplicate
them. That would lead to disappointment and perhaps serious defeat.

Nevertheless the quotation of them is worth continuing. To me they fill
in background and populate space in a singularly illuminating and
comforting fashion. They open distant vistas, even if into fields not
property our own. At least there is country beyond. At our feet is no
abyss into oblivion.

2.

BETTY: Why, I can slip back and forth easily today! It is very strange!
The wind swept through me as I came in. I hailed it, did not crouch
before it, and it went through me as sun goes through you. I like
slipping back and forth this way. I don't see why it isn't just as
interesting a performance, and vastly more desirable, than learning to
swim in an element that is not your own. It is just as natural really. I
just leap out of myself, and take a dive into a freer, more stimulating
element. Each time I do it, it gets easier; I am more at home in it; and
more stimulated by it. I am not tremendously good at it: but it's just as
simple as that.

I am getting an actual demonstration, proof, of a spiritual existence as
it is here, not in a future life. It's a very definite winged
consciousness; nothing postponed or impossible of attainment about it.
It's absolutely the next step we've got to take.

Now while I'm entirely possessed with it, I must try to get down to you a
simple method of its acquisition. I don't want to say anything cryptic,
but I must show you this way out, because this exit into greater life is
the crowning glory of our existence here. It means transfiguration into
an electrified and eternal being. I've got to tell you of it by degrees,
because the exit is through the doors of self.

Now stepping outside oneself actually means the practice of making one's
own in imagination the conditions of the hour of death. I hated to say
that because it throws a chill across the thing. I'll start again....

Suppose the day came for the Great Adventure of departing hence. Even a
picnic or a vacation or a business trip demands some preparation. One is
apt to take this tremendous step quite suddenly. What is it going to be
like? Why turn our imaginations away from it so piously--or is it
cowardly? Why not entertain ourselves with the buoyancy of anticipation?
It is quite as speculative an amusement as contemplating a trip to
Thibet, or reading what astronomers say about Mars, or any other pet
flight of fancy. This has the advantage that we are actually dated up for
it....

Children play beautiful games of expanding consciousness, supposing
giants and mighty superlatives. I'm getting Just such a cheerful
imaginative picture of when we depart hence. It is as though everything
had been taken away from me but the residue of me, such as would remain
if I were to die now. It's all I've got to orient me in this new world in
which I am just an embryonic being. Every circumstance of life is gone. I
am as unconscious of my body as ever I could possibly be. The merest
shadow of its existence is on me....

It makes me feet that I personally can never be annihilated. If my body
were actually taken away from me entirely, and I left in space, I feel I
should continue to hold myself together, a vigorously determined entity.
I might be temporarily inactive, perhaps, but I'd be convinced of my
ability to participate in an existence which would be within my reach for
the effort of taking. Though I might be deprived of everything en route,
could not by any conceivable thing be overcome or annihilated. I know
that the development of a spark, even a tiny spark, of individual power
cannot die. It will seek and find its proper progression through its own
vitality. The thing to do is to take a lively spark with you when you
go...

Now it seems to be an army symbol. I have assembled and set in order my
possessions for the great Inspection--what it is permitted me to take
along of my cherished interests. They are dominating me in the order of
their ardor. I am privileged to have a preview, as it were: to consider
them with growing impersonality, and reappraise them, if I so desire.
That is a very illuminating process. I can go no farther until I have
made satisfactory decisions of what I choose for my equipment for the
journey ahead; what I will offer as confidently as possible for the great
Inspector. This is the first game I play; the preliminary practice at the
game of self.

I am trying to show you an actual definite possible method of controlling
the first maturing, naturally and joyously, from this life to the next,
occupying experimentally the higher grades, while continuing existence
here. You can do this by periodically letting fall your acquiescence with
the impertinences of the body and its setting of manufactured needs, its
houses and parks and marts and all its complications: letting them fall
deliberately from your consciousness, and at the same time being
vigorously yourself; translating as into another language the same order
of your ardors and pursuits. It mirrors your soul in secret to
yourself....

Now I am just reposing in the entourage of vitality. I wonder if it is
the actual condition of a place I am going to, or a figment of the
imagination as a symbol. I can't make out; but it's real, as though I had
departed into it. You see, I am away from myself entirely; I am away from
all the things I like to play barnacle to....

I am going back through the gates of self now. I can see the minutiae
coming into focus; the expanded things have all contracted. There merely
remains greater power in the manipulation of them for the purposes
decided on in my higher courts.

3.

BETTY: (after half-hour) All the work ahead is liberation from self; my
portioned-off self has become too great a restriction to me. I have found
out how to blossom forth from it, but I cannot establish myself in the
new atmosphere. I feel curiously like an electric attachment dragging a
cord with me everywhere: I'm not free. It's a clear field, ahead, of what
I've got to do; and I am working on a comprehension of it....

My experiences are like what somebody called a "tightrope of faith." This
consciousness beyond self is just the precarious elevation above what is
normally ours. Equilibrium and progress rest entirely with my ability to
regulate and control myself, to be sure and poised and confident and
daring in a new element. I can see long practice in that ahead....

I seem to be very far out today. I can hardly see the part of me that
walks below. The things people travel for--shops and sights and
things--are nonexistent to me. I feel more closely akin to the smoke from
the chimneys experimenting with its liberation. I am more conscious of
the sweep of horizon-traveling elements from country to country, than I
am of the breezes that wander down the streets.

(Long pause)

Now I am quite successfully dead. It wasn't much of an operation after
all! It was a pleasurable releasing, quite different from the death-agony
idea. That should be looked on as simply the birth pains of the spiritual
body.

I'm here, all right, and quite contented, but I'm like a baby that has
pulled itself upright holding onto a chair: I don't know what to do next.
If only I were a little stronger and more vigorous, that would put me
more closely in touch with the help and affection I feel around me. Thank
heaven I have the protection of it. Now I must keep still and see what my
instincts and emotions are....

I seem to be only semiconscious. There is so much around me now that
before I was blind and deaf to....Oh, I strained to open what should be
my earth eyes and touch with my earth fingers, and it's not
possible!...Helping, loving people are around me, urging me to do
something. I love them back for helping me, and it gets easier.

It is dreadful to be this way without more vitality and shape. I ought to
take form right away and go at it, but I'm lumpish. I may have great
possibilities and great powers, but how am I going to get hold of them,
I'd like some advice about what to do. I should like to start right out
and try my muscles and see what I've got, but I have a feeling I might
fall down and not get up--but I know I can't do that; I am not in that
kind of a world....

I seem to have an impulse, some sort of an urge, to make this weakish
lumpish self of mine move forward valiantly and surgingly. It's not
aggression: that is a bullheaded sort of thing. It's not exactly force:
that is too cold and steely a word. They are stiff-muscled words; they
don't sustain the idea at all. I can't find any better than the old word
"volition." I tried "faith," but that is a queer platform people put
things on; it's been spoiled. So I had to go back to a suspended word
that could travel vigorously.

Well, I got the volition, and I started right out, so as not to be
attached to anything. I didn't want to be huddled in a corner. And I got
much firmer shape right away--like being turned on a potter's wheel. Then
I got something quite easily, no trouble at all. It came right away as
soon as I started out: nice and warm and loving feeling. I don't know
what you call it, but I'm glad I've got it. It makes me feel very
slightly glowish....

Seems to me I'll have to leave myself there awhile, just brooding. I am
going on with the eternal body though; I must find out how I shape it and
energize it.

I've got to come back now....I'm coming like an autumn leaf, zig-zag.

4.

BETTY: I must go out now. I am conscious only of careful manipulation. I
feel like a tiny planetary thing cast off from a body to which I was
adhering to mature. And now I am imbued with actual planetship. You
remember before I was like something electrical with a cord which I
dragged around to preserve my current. Now I am detached and endowed with
the ability to create my own glow, my own current. I don't know how to
explain how I do it; it's an instinctive thing yet. I can obtain it much
as if we got electricity by radio. I am a little tiny unit of power by
myself. I call it glow, because that means warmth and light both. It is a
retained sensation and a radiation at the same time, which is what seems
the most characteristic quality of this ideal extension of myself.
Strangely enough it's my real life body from now on, and I am content to
have it so....

You can't beat upon a shadow and mutilate it, however clear-cut and
defined it may be. You can't bottle up a sunspot and retain it for
yourself. You can't mix your mediums like that. Now this is just to sweep
your mind clean of its sense limitations and help you to think of
yourself, your true forever self, as of an entirely different
substance....

My! I'm going deep!...Still farther? Now!

It is a direct experience of spiritual substance. I am looking at it, but
am unable to comprehend it; it is so different from the skin-and-bones
stuff that we have for bodies. I tell you this so you will know how
puzzled I am. I've got to stay here and work in this until I understand
it. When I put on a body of this I am all so changed I don't know what to
do or what to tell you....

There: I've got it on! But the joke of it is that what I was doing was to
get off the other one. NOW! Here I am!...

I am just the same person, but I am entirely made of this strange new
substance, which is bodiless but seems at the same time to maintain
itself. It does not just dissipate with the rest of the air. I can occupy
it temporarily, but I can't utilize it nor travel in it yet....

It has the most amusing possibilities. Supposing you are made of this: it
is more like the separating and recoagulating power of quicksilver than
anything I know. If I want to go through a material thing, I just flow
right through it, sieve myself through it. There is nothing solid you
know, really. I'm so afraid of leaving some of myself behind on the other
side. I am not very good at it, but I know I can. Confronted by what used
to look like a solid thing like a wall, I know perfectly well I can go
through it....

Supposing you took the figure of a man made up of little dots, like a
radio picture. It's a perfectly good picture; but if you separated all
those dots far enough it wouldn't be. That is what astonished me so: I
lost my body--freed myself from what held all the dots together--and
found I was occupying the spaces, held together in some way by the
spiritual body. It is very puzzling....

I can't for the life of me get used to it enough to go on. I keep trying
to get the feeling of reality by crystallizing the dot figure again: I
bring all the little dots together, close, tight, again; and I say,
"There is what I am accustomed to seeing and being." And then I all
expand, and say, "There's what I am now." Then I am made of something
that was in between, of an entirely different substance--am held together
only by what, long dormant and undeveloped, there was of the spirit
within me when I was crystallized.

I must find out; I must intensify my differentiation, what makes me Me in
my new body" instead of reverting to universal substance: I am so worried
for fear I'll burst out somehow, not hold myself together. Sort of
fragile, my outlines are; not strong enough to hold together well. I am
awfully thin-skinned spiritually.

5.

BETTY: I am learning a great deal: this freed body of mine must be
trained. I no longer get much help in actual support; I support myself.
To do this I must understand the action of utilizing this freed body. I'd
be afraid to explain it minutely, I am so new and ignorant and
experimental. I am acting instinctively, and not intelligently....

How curious those waves are! They have a lifting quality almost
supporting you, and yet they have a drawing quality that brings
sustenance. How wonderful and fascinating it is! I believe there's a
great principle there when I understand it. It's just the way a fish
passes water through its gills for its sustenance. So this freed body of
mine by means of this pulsation maintains itself in a higher form of
ambience by passing it through itself. I am different from it and lesser
than it, but I am also entirely sustained and fed by, enlivened by it.
Not fed in the sense of eating, but in the sense of gaining progressive
understandings.

Everything works in the same way--the pumping of hearts, systole and
diastole; but it's the instant of its passing through you that is your
moment of divinity, absolute unity. Thus individual life is fed. I think
everything I get is the sum of these instants of unity. In time they
prick out a picture, something like a wireless picture. These maintaining
pulsations come entirely from the region of feeling, which we symbolize
by the heart. The brain is a far member, like a hand or foot....

This pulsing business is so important. You remember the other day, when I
couldn't quite function my new body? I discovered then that all I could
do was just collect every bit of inner desire-power and heart-force that
I possessed and fling it out of me in a great exuberant stretch. That was
when I found that this pulsing action is the great life movement which
you transform and adapt to produce your own individual variations. You
see, it reconstructs according to what one takes into it with him of
shaping desire....

One thing I want you to know: that pulsing is an involuntary action. You
don't do it yourself; you only create a kind of yearning condition which
is a suction calling it into being. You mustn't think you could pulse
YOURSELF, because you can't.

6.

BETTY: I get rid of my body quite easily now; like taking off a
boot....Feels pretty good, but I think I've got to go deeper....

I'm looking at a kind of disembodied quality, trying to understand it for
you. I am on the power side, and being assisted temporarily by great
force and wisdom. Under its spell I'm turning to look down to see why I
don't get more of it ordinarily. It is because of the lack of this
disembodied quality I am talking about. I'll get a name for it soon.
We've got to incorporate it in our work.

We have all of us--our group--had a hazy conception that there are such
things as higher forces that work just as well as our physical
applications of force do, only superlatively. We all admit them--as weak
generalizations. But still our hands and eyes and legs and ears are of
far more utility to us. Now this disembodied quality I am looking at is
what would give us actual possession of the working ability of these
higher forces. I am up beside those who have all this to give out, and it
is tremendously important to get their point of view on why we are not
utilizing it. They say I can't get much of it; only a tiny beginning, a
little hint on how to go about growing into it.

It is the same thing I tried to acquire the other day when my weakish
lumpish body wouldn't function. I brought out all the qualities I could
think of and tried them on it to make it work. Will power only gave it a
sort of jerk; and concentrated energy, and all those hard tight
applications, just humped it about a little, mostly in the same place.
This quality is not much recognized. Actually it is just THE SURENESS OF
YOUR BELIEF IN THE EXISTENCE OF THIS GREATER FORCE. That is the principal
thing to begin with.

Take an example from natural physical forces. You wouldn't have the nerve
or the idiocy to try walking on water; but you step out on ice with
perfect confidence. In ordinary daily living you come to associate your
mind so naturally and pleasurably and habitually with the great forces
which control our physical universe that they grow measurably firm under
the feet, as it were. Take gravitation, which always works; the magnetic
attraction or the power of electricity when control is established; the
buoyancy of placement in water--any of the natural laws that appeal to
you. Our conscious minds approve and abandon all test of them.

But these higher forces we have sensed only as weak generalizations.
We've got to make them the same in our conscious minds as the natural
forces I mentioned, and which we accept as a matter of course. We've got
to associate with them, experiment with them, as constantly and
interestedly as people did in acquiring the laws controlling the other
forces. It's the thing that will make our spiritual bodies work. It's the
first thing we shall be faced with when we "go hence." Everything we have
been accustomed to will have gone away from us. If we haven't built this
extension of confidence in known forces, we will be at a loss. This
particular attitude of mind, surety, confidence is ITSELF a force: it is
a superlative force.

INVISIBLE: What we are stepping around is to avoid the use of the word
"faith." We don't want to use it until we have freshened it. It's been
made respectable by calling it suggestion: you all know the power of
that. Only this is its simon-pure reality, its ESSENCE.

(pause)

BETTY: They told me I couldn't get much of it, only enough to begin
acquiring this force. I'll tell you how I'm doing it.

I made a sort of cradle of confidence of the tides and the moons and the
planetary swings; and I said, there's no reason why I shouldn't rest this
spirit of me securely in these unfailing forces. I felt delightfully in
suspension, restful with everlasting-arms restfulness. This extension of
my personality, the reality I call myself, by my name, has quite
reasonably ventured out to associate with unseen but thoroughly tested
realities. That's the beginning: that is how we begin to grow into the
higher forces.

I have a funny way of working. I vary all kinds of tests. I jump up and
down on natural laws to feel their reality. Mentally I turn and twist
them all, and jiggle them around, and they still hold me up with a
sureness of cause and effect.

Now I will leave that side for a minute and seek the society of the
greater forces.

INVISIBLE: You see, we've brought you forth from your lesser self to your
greater self.

(Long pause)

BETTY: Feels sort of like a blind person walking along. I feel when I get
in a sunspot of power, and I try to keep in it, and when I stray out of
it I try to get back. I know it's there, and I just have to make my
senses so acute that I can keep in it or get back to it if I stray.

Each person must play his own mental game in this thing. I am only
suggesting mine....

All this is an effort to establish us firmly in the spiritual so we can
utilize its greater powers in doing the physical things we see are worth
doing. This definite belief in a force assisting our best efforts, and
our reckoning on its unfailing help; the establishment of this principle
of the constructive, directive forward movement which we call
evolution--this condition of faith, must at some time or other in our
progression be permanently accepted by our united being. It is a magic
touchstone, making positive our efforts, instead of negativing them
constantly with doubts and waverings.

There is only one important proviso: we cannot depend on this law to
accomplish anything more than the complement of our own efforts. One must
depend on oneself to build one's aspirational column, knowing that at the
highest stretch of one's hopes and efforts a capital will be placed
beyond one's power to conceive.








LIFE! life! life! Life is so fascinating! I pursue it as it chuckles into
every shape. Fast in my faith I can follow my devious route, because I
know the source, and can return to it, and excavate my little bits of
truth. Life, life, life! I want to live it! But you can't live it happily
and humorously and powerfully until you are first made fast in faith and
perception with reality. I feel eager and loving toward life,--it's a
beautiful pattern, but I haven't stuff enough in me to cover it. I want
more stuff in me to cover it. Everything that touches my senses must make
me more porous to it. Sea-breathing things, underwater things, air and
earth-breathing things; the very sun motes; the very shadows between the
stars speak eloquently, each according to its kind, in the great pageant
of life. I don't want to be a scholar, or a courtier, or a soldier, or
anything else like that in the pageant. I want to wear motley. I want to
be the Fool, and so come close to all kinds. I want to receive and give
back the truth in the fertile form of lighthearted jest. I want to live
in this fluid, flexible condition, because it is happy and easily
disseminates.




CHAPTER VIII

THE LAY OF THE LAND

1.

 THOUGH the Invisibles had the definite purpose of leading us into higher
consciousness, they did not continuously keep us tiptoe. They seemed to
be very wise people, and they understood well the necessity of
occasional breathing times in less rarified air. And they set their
faces always against any attitude, at any time, of hushed and reverent
solemnity. It was, in the beginning, difficult for us bystanders to keep
from being portentous. We were impressed by the importance of what was
being given; and we had not learned to distinguish between importance
and solemnity. Theirs is a laughing philosophy. They agreed with
Stevenson, who said of religion, "If it makes you gloomy, depend upon
it, it is wrong." They did not fear to be funny; to "josh" at times; to
crack jokes with us; and it seemed to me that they got as much relish
out of these interludes as we did ourselves. At the very first some of
us, through old habit of mind, were instinctively abashed, as though
someone had laughed aloud in church. Why shouldn't one laugh aloud in
church? they asked reasonably.

"This subject," said they, "is light-footed; not like the solemn tread of
a processional. It has dance steps in it, and running for the joy of
running, and leaping for the joy of leaping. It is as natural and
cheerful as a baby playing with its toes, feeling out the most desirable
activity for entertainment. This is a gracious performance. It is not a
child in a schoolroom; it is a soul gracefully entering into eternity."

"They are terribly anxious," added Betty, "to take away any solemn
ecclesiastical idea from 'spiritual.' Once recognized as standing for
spontaneous enjoyment, legitimate heart indulgence, the word will have
rough-and-ready hiking clothes instead of vestments."

Betty fell naturally into this lightheartedness. She was always kicking
up her heels in frivolity; a tendency we at first deplored. We were
always trying to herd her back to what we considered the serious job, but
were invariably laughed at for our trouble. Sometimes, indeed, the
Invisibles announced a "party," and for a whole evening regaled us with
stories and doggerel, verse and small talk. After a while we managed to
loosen up and enjoy heartily these occasions. We called them "sag back
parties," and recognized them as necessary breathing spaces.

In these breathing spaces we found occasional indulgence for our
curiosity. We were always full of questions about all sorts of things
that interested us, but which had little or nothing to do with the case.
I can see now that we must have been most annoying, for these people had
a definite plan, and such questions only got in the way of it. What was
life like over there? What should we do in this or that situation? What
might be the Cosmic Plan in regard to this or that?

Generally they sidetracked us, but in the long run we did manage to sneak
in a considerable body of statement. Too great a body to quote in full
here. They no more fit with our present purpose than they fitted into the
Invisibles' main plan. But a few of them may serve to the reader, as they
did to us, as breathing spaces.

2.

Some of our questions seemed to us very important. What sort of people
are we going to be when we "go hence"? A friend who was sitting in with
us was much exercised over that. He wanted something solid and definite
to tie to. Contact with wraiths did not seem much fun to him. At first
the Invisibles hesitated to answer. Their conditions were so different,
and mistranslation had so often resulted in things repellent to common
sense.*

* Such as the unfortunate "cigars" in Sir Oliver Lodge's Raymond.

INVISIBLE: When you think of us don't bother about our shape or
substance. It is a living and loving form still: nothing unnatural or
vaporous. Don't make such an unattractive picture of the change. Keep us
in your hearts as we were; It is nearer the truth, and more comforting
than trying to comprehend the difference. The more naturally you can
think about us, the less apt you are to go astray on phantoms of your own
conception. Dear me, why do you get so FANTASTIC over that? It's terrible
to be loved so fleshlessly! It handicaps a conception of warmth and
response existing AS-ever and FOR-ever.

BETTY: They're so real, so real, and so much more vibrant. It is a pity;
isn't it? If you'd only try to say just what you are we wouldn't make
such silly mistakes....

Oh! I'm getting a little more of things as they're going to be over
there....Wait; I want to took at them....

Each person is endowed with force, individual progressive force. That's
the main difference. It lifts the whole mass into a different freer
state, clear and bright, devoid of WEIGHT! It's mostly the feeling of
power and lightness. So vital, light and strong, that life!

I wish I could stay with you and get that way too! You're made out of--I
don't know--so much clearer, thinner, stronger stuff!...

I'm going; but I know now what you are like.

S E W: Try to tell me before you come out.

BETTY: It is no different in form; it's a difference of element, more
especially of clearness and light and power; without the thick clumsy
dragging substance we are in. It is a much greater difference of element
than going under water. We haven't any similar contrast. I feel people of
different substance, but ENTIRE. They are not distinct to me. Their body
walls are thinner than our body walls; more akin to the substance they
are in, so they are more susceptible to it in getting their energy out of
it.

(Long pause)

Connecting link I don't get. How do we...I must think about this. When do
we most nearly approximate that state? That's the point to work out.

INVISIBLE: Great energy and force put into living raises the entire being
above the control of the physical. There have been many demonstrations of
this in times of great emotional stimulation or necessity of action.

Now compare yourself with lower physical forms of greater density.
Gradually, loosening of density produces finer, lighter form beings in
the region of consciousness. Indefinitely extended, it reaches to the
condition just manifested.

S E W: I don't want to quibble about words, but I do want to understand
how literal they are. I am much higher in perception than a mud turtle;
but my actual flesh, as flesh, is not as tender as his.

INVISIBLE: Man's physical organism is vastly more refined, sensitive,
less dense than that of the turtle. Density is the difference in REACTION
QUALITY.

3.

Fair enough, said our friend, I think I could get along with that sort of
a fellow. But how about any real individual relationships, such as we
know them? How about our mates? And if we haven't found them here, do we
find them there? Or is there such a thing as eternal bachelorhood?

INVISIBLE: No, most decidedly not. They quickly find their complementary
selves. They then unite for greater harmony of effort and complete
happiness.

S E W: Between those thus mated is there any form of what might be called
private relationship; that is, a relationship peculiar to them as
individuals, corresponding, however vaguely, to our physical
relationships?

INVISIBLE: Your world is full of the ecstasy of harmonious attraction,
beginning at the mere chemical affinities and proceeding upward to the
sex relations. This same magnetic attraction continues, but in vastly
higher and even more ecstatic form. It takes place eventually through
perfect union of complementary spiritual halves. It is a little difficult
to put concisely, as there are many ramifications and half-realized
conditions before the perfect mating takes place. That is not very
satisfactory as an explanation, but you may rest assured that the beauty
of physical mating is not lost, but intensively increased in the
spiritual realm.

S E W: Mated relations here have two phases or angles: the fairly uniform
affectional relation, and the occasional intensified relation. Do both
exist there in any form?

INVISIBLE: Discouragingly complex subject, because all affection is
infinitely varied in all stages of acquisition. We cannot take you into
conditions beyond your human imagination. We can only vaguely satisfy
with what will be your next step.

It is rather more crescendo than spasmodic. Just as on earth you rise to
certain heights by occasional bliss, so here by harmony you obtain these
heights. Perhaps occasionally you have them dimmed by periods of
distraction, but the heights are always there, and obtainable and
extendible. In time you can grow permanently into your highest ideal and
remain there, the while you occasionally scale even greater heights. This
is progressive bliss, intensified as you grow into greater capabilities
of realization.

S E W: All of which is a property of the two, mated, of opposite sex; as
opposed to being a common relation of all spirits?

INVISIBLES: Yes. But with your present earth ideas and desires, you
cannot fully appreciate how change of structure will influence your
ideas. Don't you see, we are trying to tell you that we do have something
private between just the two, but change of structure and wider vision
change your desire for so intensely personal an attitude. It is
absolutely possible. Only as the child cannot comprehend the grown-up
ideal, so you cannot now put your earth desires as a standard for what
you will desire when you get here.

4.

These fragments are typical of the way we learned the lay of the land.
They are valuable not so much as statements of fact as flashes that
reveal glimpses beyond our ordinary experiences. We shall have an
adjustment to make; but it will be a natural and easy adjustment. A lot
of our customary standards are to be jettisoned. They will be as out of
place as a buggy whip in a motor car. Take space, by which we measure so
much of ourselves.

BETTY: I see; space is only an imaginary boundary, not a definite
reality. How curious it looks! There isn't any such thing as that
word-pattern we call space. It's altogether different!...

This is too much for me! My goodness! There's no use trying to figure it
out while you're living. You couldn't hold onto the idea when you brought
it back! I don't believe I could STAND an idea like that and get back and
live again sensibly. But I'll try to tell you. I'm gasping over it, and
I'll spoil it; but I'll try....

Yesterday when I looked at a pebble under the microscope, I looked down
into a deep canon of space. How can you measure space? How can you give
anything so elastic and changing the name of space? I can walk on that
pebble; and yet, by the magic of concentration, a tiny crevice in it can
be refracted to the illusion of a real canon with true immensity. Don't
you see, space is not real at all. It is contained in an attribute of
your consciousness.

INVISIBLE: Consider the magnitude of your own illusion of space as
compared with a pebble. Now raise it again to an incomprehensible
magnitude such as you can only guess at.

BETTY: We are all apparently occupying the same space. It doesn't seem to
be a case of distance at all. This is quite new to me and very
satisfactory; because I never could see how they'd have room for
everything and everybody who'd ever died. This is much better; only I
can't understand it clearly....

Well, anyhow, I'm never going to have any respect for space again,
because I know now it's altogether too unreliable. It depends utterly on
who is looking at it. I'm sorry I did not get that intelligently, but
anyway it was a grand muckraking and exposure of space! You see, it's a
word that hasn't any standing at all, except with us. It represents only
what we think about it. But I must say it's rather exhausting to struggle
with, since I don't seem to have much influence with it, and have work to
do in it!

INVISIBLE: Space is not distance: space is degrees of perception.
Distance is only slowness in getting there.








ALL progress leads from the more material to the less material; until at
length it conducts us into regions where reality is perceived without the
use of any laborious material structure at all. You yourselves know that
individuals of higher mentality do not always have to pass through a
material experience. If they are cognizant of its cause and effect, they
can grasp it without painstakingly suffering it: they do not need the
laborious material structure to see its reality. It is the same way in
the still higher levels beyond. You are all leading up to a consciousness
of reality without its material shadows, its material reflections, its
material manifestations, as aids to comprehension.




CHAPTER IX

PORTAGE

1.

THE foregoing may give a rough idea of what was given Betty for her own
development, and by way of evidence as to the nature of the higher
consciousness into which she was being led. My own function during this
period was largely as reporter; but in due course I also had my innings.
Part of the plan seemed to be some form of publication; and my profession
pointed to me as the one to do the actual writing.

Now as a writer I have never been able to do effective work at second
hand. For me there is little carrying power in anything written from the
outside. Tourist impressions are never more than amusing. I have never
been able to go out deliberately for local color. I have had to work at
the job in the lumber camps; ride the

Arizona ranges after cattle; pot round the back of beyond in old-time
Africa or Alaska or wherever, doing whatever the inhabitants have to do,
without ulterior motive, because I liked it, and for no other reason.
Then, after it was all lived through, I would find I had something to
write about.

It was exactly so here.

If I was to do this writing job, I must do something beside report; I
must myself actually live the life of the country.

Up to this point, in spite of so much admonition to the contrary, I had
clung to my intellect as my best guide. I UNDERSTOOD the directions given
in The Betty Book, and subsequently, I admitted their logical truth. As
ideas they were satisfactory. Also my esthetic sense found them
beautiful. But now, abruptly, I found I was no longer after ideas. I was
after something back of ideas--something that could no longer be a
subject of thought.

2.

Aroused and disturbed, I realized that if I wanted to get any farther I
must be in to follow directions--and that I must start from the
beginning. I had accompanied Betty such a long way, mentally, that I had
a lot of practical back-tracking to do.

What was the very first step? On reflection I found only one thing of
which I felt absolutely sure: my aim. I wanted to get into this new
region of consciousness which Betty had been describing. That much was
clear. Also, on further reflection, it dawned on me that the first thing
I must do, if I wanted to go somewhere else, was to learn how to get away
from where I was.

For the first time, I think, I understood why so many doctrines,
particularly those of the Orient, insist on exercises in "getting out of
the body." My practical Western mind had long balked at this concept. The
image, to me, was of some sort of astral vehicle floating about, like a
captive balloon, in some sort of beatific--but dense--psychic fog. It had
given me a good laugh, but had failed to convince me.

Recently, however, I had had to change my mind about this. Betty
certainly was getting away from her workaday vehicle into an environment
that contained things not perceptible to ordinary bodily senses. Any
doubt of this had finally collapsed under her repeated demonstrations
that she could even travel some thousands of very earthly miles and look
in on the doings of friends. That she was there, somehow, she had proved
beyond doubt by reporting to me all sorts of details--who was there and
what they were doing at a particular time--and these details had
subsequently been checked, as accurate, by correspondence. On these
occasions, some part of her consciousness was indubitably "out of her
body"; for her body, blindfolded, was all the while next my hand.
Furthermore the "she-herself," the perceptive part that could observe and
remember and comment, had accompanied that traveling portion of
consciousness. It was aware of events in Boston, it was unaware--or only
dimly aware--for the time being of Burlingame, California.

Faced with this evidence, my cautious skepticism retired a pace or two,
but quickly took refuge in another defense. Betty and these other people,
I argued, were different. They were gifted; they were "psychic." It was
all very well for them. But I did not consider myself "Psychic." I was
just an ordinary person, like everyone else. This "getting out of the
body" business was beyond me; and if it had to be done before I could go
ahead, why then I--and the ordinary run of people like me--was just out
of luck.

I did not then appreciate that "psychic" is just a word: that everyone is
"psychic," just as everyone is alive; that anyone can "get outside the
body" any time he wants to; that in fact we are all doing just this, to a
degree, every day of our lives.

"We have a house with five doors," Betty explained. "There are others,
but they are secret doors. The five doors are your senses. What do you
suppose your senses were given you for, besides to keep you from failing
down? Don't you see?--it's so soft and nice; it sounds so wonderful; it
smells so good; it looks so fair; I've got a hunger for it;--now where's
my body? You are 'in your body' only when you shut all the doors one
after the other, and huddle down within it. Then you get a cramp in it,
get poisoned air in it, get stiff and stupid in it!" So if you want the
secret of life, of how to live beyond your ken, you will start in
practicing. You will do it in foolish fashions, too. You will pat good
things. You will smell good things. And every time you do it, you will
cry: There is a way out!

"The senses are so like wings of the spirit that I am making a beautiful
design for the Doorway of the Senses. They would be great wings, crossed
a little at the top, showing the pearly opalescence beyond. I will make a
BEAUTIFUL Doorway of the Senses!"

This was a marvelous revelation to me, somewhat analogous to M.
Jourdain's world-shaking discovery that all along he had been talking
prose. It seemed too obvious to be true. Nevertheless, when I turned it
over carefully in my mind, it seemed to withstand the test of logic.
There was no doubt about it: every time I stopped my usual busy concern
with what was going on inside my head to look upon the physical world--by
this slight gesture I was undoubtedly transferring a portion of my
consciousness outside the limits of my compact self. This minute I was
inside myself, thinking my busy thoughts, making my plans, concerning
myself with my symptoms, or just buzzing around idly in a too-usual
aimless fashion. Of anything outside myself I was just sufficiently
cognizant to keep from bumping into it. The next minute I had moved
outside myself to companionship with the trees and birds and flowers and
clouds and sky lines; deserting my usual preoccupations within.

"Getting outside the body," then, in its first simple beginning at least,
was not so mysterious and occult a performance as the words implied. It
was simply a matter of attention. If I transferred my attention from
within myself to outside myself, my consciousness followed. I had the
method. Remained only to apply it to this other field of activity.

3.

Before continuing with what is to be said about "getting out of the
body," one thing must be made clear. This process is nothing desirable in
itself. The body is no stepchild. In final analysis it is full partner,
and neglect of it, or ignoring of it, may be as disastrous to the whole
entity as subservience to it. Anything acquired from the spiritual,
anything whatever, must ultimately be brought to the physical and
amalgamated with it, before the process is complete.

In my own case I was soon made to see that this getting aside from the
body was intended only as a temporary freeing from its demands in order
that I might act untrammeled in another part of myself: and also, as a
byproduct, that I might actually experience, by sensation, that the body
is only an attribute of the spirit. Like the mind. As are the hands to
the body itself.

I emphasize this point here because a great many people, "psychically
inclined," seem to think they are accomplishing a deed of merit when they
manage to "get out of the body." It is not meritorious: It is dangerous,
if done for and by itself.

4.

Unfortunately the application of the method turned out to be harder than
it looked. In order to transfer my attention from within myself, I
discovered I must provide it with some sort of a definite landing place.
I couldn't just transfer it to nothing at all. Imagination plus Betty's
descriptions of my objective helped some, but the results remained thin
and unconvincing at best. The trouble was, I finally decided, that I did
not have the FEEL of what I was after. To be sure I'd had a few small,
sporadic "psychic" experiences, as has about everyone else. But these had
really been just amusing external stunts. Nothing had ever happened
"Inside," in the sense of inner visions, or "spiritual" sensations or
perceptions. At least nothing I could identify as such--and certainly
nothing I could use as a definite target.

Then one day, unexpectedly, the Invisibles took a hand.

"There are people around me," it was Betty speaking, "lots of people; a
nice human crowd. There seems to be a message for you; but I can't get
it--something nice: a recognition that is coming to you...

"We come today," broke in the Invisible, "to blend our spirits with yours
and make you feel the great heart expansion. Put down the pencil, close
your eyes, and just give way to the change. Open up and welcome it."

I did as I was told, and at once experienced a most peculiar "balloony"
sensation, as though I were being rapidly expanded in every direction.
This was almost immediately succeeded by a curious inner effect most
difficult to describe. It was very similar to the sensation of bodily
relaxation, only it seemed rather to be a relaxation and expansion of the
normally tight compactness of the gathered-in mind. In my notes of the
occasion I find the words, "Impossible to convey, but a very definite and
unexpected phenomenon." Instantly, sharply, I understood why the
Invisibles had refused to try to explain a lot of things to me in words;
the words just wouldn't have made sense to me. How would you, for
instance, convey any adequate idea of sight to a person born blind?

The experience continued for quite an extended interval, during which I
remained fully conscious and watchful, but withdrawn, as it were, into a
kind of cleared space in the center of my consciousness. Then gradually I
emerged and became cognizant of my surroundings once more.

"We have tried today," said the Invisible, "to teach you the sensation
which is the symptom of expanding life, to demonstrate for your
recognition the actual feeling of it. For the present we ask only that
you seek this sensation, partake of it, and acquire a hunger for it. It
is the reality of which we have talked in discussing the association with
the spirit. Forget the words and get the reality. Establish yourself in
it, naturally, simply, without great effort, as you would sit in the sun
and rejoice in its warmth.

"We leave today before the wane," concluded the Invisible. "We wish to
preserve at its height the impression of the blending of the two
elements."

5.

The very next day I was instructed to continue my experiment.

"Don't be expectant," warned the Invisible. "Be flexible. Also don't
write. You must get complete control of physical relaxation."

After a short pause I felt again the balloony sensation, and immediately
after, an indescribable impression of rapid vibration. This in turn was
succeeded by a combined floating and expanding feeling of great power. It
lasted for only a few moments, and then ebbed away.

"Rest a moment," instructed the Invisible. "Relax. Think of anything you
desire."

"It seems to me," said I, "that my voluntary muscles are entirely
relaxed. What beyond that?"

"It's not so much physical muscles," said the Invisible, "as mental
adhesions which prevent detachment long enough at a time to establish
security in the new sensation. For the present just try to break up these
adhesions. They are difficult for us to control. We lift you, transmute
you; but there is a drag. Now put down your pencil and try again, without
expectancy, but with outgoing response."

For perhaps ten seconds the sense of vibration and expansion proceeded
much as before. Then, quite without warning, a band of white light seemed
suddenly to be drawn across my eyes, much like a bandage. This was not
exactly a brilliant light, though it was quite luminous; it was more like
a ground-glass light than anything I can think of. Gradually it gained in
depth and took on color, until it had changed itself into a veil of
singularly lucent ultramarine blue. At the same time the sense of
expansion and vibration heightened measurably. Then quite rapidly the
whole thing ebbed away, and I found myself in my chair once more.

"They were all around you," said Betty, "as though they were lifting you.
But it was more like a stretching exercise. Very curious: a stretching of
the spirit."

"If you could once," added the Invisible, "feel secure and natural in
this higher element, you could enter it at will. Meanwhile learn to
experiment with the relaxing qualities of it; gain merely the technique
of occasionally freeing yourself." "What were those light and color
effects?" I asked. "Are they retinal, or are they something to do with
this other element?"

"They are a symptom," said the Invisible. "Your own control and power to
take is still weak, because confidence is not yet established. Therefore
we search for a method of bringing it to you more palpably. Any physical
stepping stone makes this process more easily handled and tangible.
Somehow you must establish confidence in your ability to isolate yourself
in an entirely different and superior element.

"This is not easy to attain; never is. Your desire is to keep it reduced
to the element you are used to; our desire is to free you from that
restricted comprehension and force you to come to a higher one. You want
to translate back everything we give; we also want you to go ahead and
write it--provided you experience it more frequently in the original. But
remember one thing: it cannot fail to be anything but vague and
impractical and intangible, if you persist in centering your interest on
the translation. Explore first; write about it afterwards."

6.

The third experience of this nature--and the last for some time--took
place a few days later. It was in a sense a continuation and extension of
the previous experiences. The vibratory sensations began again with great
power. But now they seemed to begin in some remote inner depths, and
expand constantly outward, carrying my consciousness with them. The final
result was an utterly novel sensation of awareness diffused most
curiously beyond the centered kernel of ordinary life.

The visual "symptoms" also were repeated. The band of white light
appeared as before, gradually changed to ultramarine that gathered in
patches, slowly collected to a common center, contracted into a pin point
and disappeared, only to be succeeded by others. It was as though I
looked into a strange and gorgeous kaleidoscope. At the last the color
deepened to a rich purple. I may add that I tried several times
experimentally to induce these color effects by myself. Such efforts were
uniformly unsuccessful.

The entire experience may have lasted a minute or two--not more. Then I
was once again at my table, the words of the Invisible sounding in my
ears.

"All we have tried to do," said they, "was to impart directly to you the
sensation of the reality of spiritual substance. We wanted to give you a
feeling of confidence in it as a real world. This contact is what you
need most at present. In time it will not be difficult for you to get
merely the sensation; and full realization is not necessary in order to
work in it.

"There is no satisfactory explanation of it that we can give you as yet.
For a while we prefer to leave it to experience. Retain the memory of the
SENSATION. Fix it firmly for a future point of departure. After
experiencing it a few times, it will be no longer merely a series of
strange sensations, but a reality to be re