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

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





CONTENTS

PART I

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

PART II

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

PART III

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

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

GLOSSARY

APPENDICES


PART I


CHAPTER I

THE TWO CHINESE BOXES

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

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

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

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

"Well?" said we.

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

"Go, ahead," we encouraged.

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

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

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

Darby and I shouted.

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

We became quiet, in expectation.

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

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



CHAPTER II

AGAIN I BEAR WITNESS

1.

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

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

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

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

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

2.

The four books were these:

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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps. Betty called it only a divulgence.

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



CHAPTER III

ONLY ONE CHINESE BOX

1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How long has it been?" she asked.

Somebody in mischief told her "about three hours."

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

** In San Francisco.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Any particular shade?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

"What of it?" I wanted to know.

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




CHAPTER IV

"THIS IS YOUR HERITAGE"

1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V

THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND
THE BLUE SLIPPERS

1.

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

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

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

Betty was fairly satisfied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

"You will!" she replied confidently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hardly expect me to remember....

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

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



CHAPTER VI

WE SET OUT

1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We told her, at last, not to bother.

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

2.

You will remember I said that in that initial evening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Across the Unknown.

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

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

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

* See The Betty Book.

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER VII

ONLY ONE UNIVERSE

1.

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

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

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

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

Darby voiced my confused bewilderment.

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

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

"Possibly two viewpoints of it?" suggested Darby.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VIII

WE WORKED OVERTIME

1.

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is this complementary frequency?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER IX

WE MAKE THE GLOSSARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Betty ignored this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this manner, was our glossary compiled.

PART II


CHAPTER X

CONSCIOUSNESS, THE ONLY REALITY

1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Betty developed this thought for a visitor unskilled in metaphysics.

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

Again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

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

4.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XI

FOUNDATION STONES

1.

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

"Consciousness--" she began one evening.

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

"--as I have told you over--" she continued unperturbed.

"--and over, and over, and over, and over," we finished for her.

Nevertheless she was not deterred from saying it again.

That is true in the cosmological aspect; in other words, consciousness is
the everything. Beyond consciousness is nothing. Back to consciousness
all manifestation can be traced. On the acceptance of this concept will
depend the later development of Betty's argument.

It is also true as to us individually. We do not need much reflection to
see that this is so. Betty made that clear in her little homily to our
visitor unversed in philosophical enquiry. With us she established it as
basic concept Number One.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE ONE AND ONLY REALITY.

2.

Then she beat over again the ground she had covered in introducing us to
her own first new concept: that there is only one universe.

"All the new concepts that I have been assigned to bring to you," she
insisted, "must be based on the fact that THERE IS ONLY ONE UNIVERSE."

As a premise to start from, we had to accept more or less uncritically
her initial assertions concerning the obstructed and unobstructed aspects
of this universe. She said that we lived in the obstructed, she in the
unobstructed phase. She pointed out that we are obstructed by
matter--"you bump," as she put it, up against a stone wall; it obstructs
you and you have to climb over it or go around it. You bump up against
space--linear distance obstructs you and you have to employ some means to
get from place to place. You bump up against time; you say, "I haven't
time to do" thus or so, and you mean that the fixed duration, of an hour
or a day or a year is obstructing you. You bump up against motion; some
rate of speed, slow or fast, is continually obstructing you. You bump up
against thought, people's ideas; every day they are hindering, limiting,
obstructing you. We could cite examples indefinitely. There is no
question but that we live and operate in an OBSTRUCTED universe.

"Even so," Betty said, "You have an actual, present perception of my
unobstructed universe. You will be amazed to find how much of my universe
is in your present knowledge."

This, of course, was really her basic thesis: that there is an
unobstructed universe, and that it interfuses with our own; that,
furthermore, even our obstructed aspect is obstructed, only to us, and
not to her. So really her major arguments in proof belong with such
extended discussions as we shall encounter in her detailed analyses of
time, space, motion, matter, and so on. But from the beginning she did
take time to point out to us that right in the midst of our obvious
obstructions are many things we know about, or take the word of
specialized science concerning, which to us as human beings are not
obstructions.

"You know," said she, "that all about you, all the time, are colors,
sounds, energies--even infinitesimal floating particles of organic as
well as inorganic matter that you never perceive; of which you go about
your day wholly unconscious. When you stop to think, you acknowledge the
fact of a radio wave--and you might have walked through one. But it did
not obstruct you. So for you it just wasn't there. If you will only
THINK, you will find that already you know quite a lot about an
unobstructed universe. At least you know that there is a whole physical
world, or field, of measurable and usable actuality which causes you no
inconvenience and of which you are not normally aware. Even with you now
there is an unobstructed universe beyond your ordinary obstructed
universe, and with it you deal every minute of your days."

And so we drop in place her second foundation stone.

THERE IS ONLY ONE UNIVERSE. ONE UNIVERSE, OF WHICH THERE IS AN
UNOBSTRUCTED AS WELL AS AN OBSTRUCTED PHASE. And as a corollary:
UNKNOWING, WE ALREADY, TO SOME EXTENT, INHABIT THE UNOBSTRUCTED ASPECT.

3.

The next basic concept is what, for convenience at first, Betty called
parallel law.

You will remember that in the foregoing review of Our Unseen Guest
Stephen was quoted as saying that Evolution and Parallel Law were the
"two great glimpses," and that parallel law, or parallelism, was "really
the greatest of all glimpses." Nevertheless, Stephen went no further than
to assert that all known earth laws are paralleled on the invisible
plane. Betty approached her own development of this idea with caution.

"My words are heavy: I have to weigh them," said she. Then, after a
pause, apparently for consideration, she began:

"The law of parallels, which Stephen promulgated, is more concrete than
at that time it was possible for either the receiving station or the
conceiving station to embrace mentally. You have no familiar attribute in
the obstructed universe, that is not paralleled with a coinciding,
operating attribute and law in the unobstructed universe. That is
important. Now let's CHEW on that."

We chewed on it, to some purpose evidently, for some days later she
returned to the subject--with much diminished heaviness!

"The deeper we get into the thing," Said she, "the simpler it becomes,
because, as I told you, there is only one law. All you need do is to take
your limited law and project it out into an unlimited operation. What
understanding of limited law I brought with me has made it possible for
me quickly to adjust myself and project myself into understanding of, and
cooperation with, the unlimited aspect of the same law. You must stress
parallelism. Reach out along the limited laws you best understand, to
meet me.

"What you call natural law is just a reflection, so to speak, of the
orthic law governing my unobstructed universe. There is only one
universe, one reality. The only-one-universe is pluralistic, as
consciousness, the fundamental reality, is pluralistic. My aspect of the
universe is unobstructed. Your aspect of the universe is obstructed. But
there is no condition or fact that we have here that is not at least
foreshadowed in your world.

"Now your laboratories are constantly discovering new manifestations, new
laws. Every one of those laws has a parallel here, and every one is
useful to you and to us. All the laws and manifestations discovered on
your side are operating on our side. And on our side are many laws and
manifestations you have not discovered and do not sense. Years hence all
this will be told again in the terminology of our laws yet to be
discovered by you.

"But"--and here was the important point--"it is not a case of actual
PARALLELISM at all. It is actually an EXTENSION in operation of the same
law, that's all. If we are going to use the word 'parallel', we must make
it clear that it is not a case of two different laws. Of course there are
laws operating here that you have not discovered. When they are all
discovered, it will indeed be one universe. I can't tell you about them,
for there are no words yet. The reason Stephen used the word 'parallel'
was because the entire universe is, as far as you are concerned, divided
into the obstructed, or your world, and--in your hopes at least--the
unobstructed, or my world. For him to have said that there is only one
law that extends through the entire universe would have been
incomprehensible. The thing I want to make perfectly clear to you is that
every law in the universe, that you comprehend or that you do not
comprehend, whether it operates within or without your apprehension,
extends through the ENTIRETY of the universe. There is no law here that
is not potentially discoverable in your world, though of course there are
many not yet discovered."

THE SAME LAW WORKS IN BOTH ASPECTS OF THE UNIVERSE.

4.

The thing she wanted to get to us next was that consciousness,
individualizing itself, dividing into the countless entity manifestations
that make up the entire universe, operates in trilogy--in threes. In that
no occult significance of numerology was intended. It was merely another
way of saying that the universe is three-dimensional; though ordinarily
the term means to us only length, breadth and thickness. Betty needed to
extend the field covered by that term.

As often happened, she sprung the idea on us suddenly, and then, little
by little, here and there, in the course of many sessions, gave it
contour.

"First, I want to establish the word 'constant' as defining an
ever-present and inclusive aspect," she began.

We immediately objected. "Constant," we reminded her, has been given an
inflexible mathematical meaning by the physicists.

"It means fixed, unchanging, invariable in integral calculus and such,"
explained Darby.

"I am not familiar with integral calculus," replied Betty rather
scornfully. "Neither is Joan. But there are those here who tell me that
you are right. What I am familiar with is the everyday use of the
word--the vernacular use. When I said to anybody, 'It rained constantly
for two days,' I meant that it rained without interruption for two days;
and I was so understood. I have to use words--Joan's words. The noun
'constant' means to her what the adjective means in her everyday
speech--ever-present without being fixed. It could drizzle or pour for
two days, and yet constantly rain. Ever-present, but not fixed. In no
sense fixed."

She was emphatic about the meaning not being fixed. So after much
discussion we added "co-existent" to our growing terminology. It was a
word, we found, that Betty herself had used back in our fourth session.
And the record reads, "Note the new terminology I am using." This
sentence was thrown into a long paragraph of dictation as a parenthetical
phrase. We had not noted it; a failure that had caused us endless mental
gyrations. But we had caught it in time. Betty's "three-dimensional"
universe is far from fixed. It is most emphatically in evolution. But it
is co-existent with Consciousness.

"Now if you have that meaning in mind," she continued, "I will discuss
with you the co-existent trilogies of your obstructed universe. You have,
for instance, Solids, liquids, gases: earth, air, water." She rattled off
at least a dozen more, merely to illustrate, as a sort of "come-on," but
too rapidly for my "shorthand." "In the trilogy of space you have reduced
it to the prepositions--FROM, AT, TO. Time is yesterday, today, tomorrow.
All through your three-dimensional universe runs trilogy, scientifically,
materially, psychologically, even mystically. There are the three Graces,
three Fates. It took the great psychic, Christ, to propound the thought:
'Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; these three are one.' In any case, the
trilogies of length, breadth and thickness and of yesterday, today and
tomorrow are ever-present co-existents of your obstructed universe."
THE OBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE--OUR PHYSICAL UNIVERSE--OPERATES IN TRILOGIES.

5.

The immediate application she desired to make of this concept was:

The obstructed universe--our physical universe--operates in trilogies.
But--SO DOES THE UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE. SO DOES CONSCIOUSNESS ITSELF.

And for this basic operation or accompaniment of consciousness in her
unobstructed universe, Betty, out of the thin air, coined the term
TRILOGIA, to differentiate from the trilogies of our three-dimensional
earth experience.

"You have your trilogies in your everyday life. Better call the ETERNAL
verities of consciousness 'trilogia' instead of 'trilogy,'" she ruled.

Soon she was putting new content even into our everyday word "trilogy";
while her own new term "trilogia" became fraught with very special
meaning. To illustrate:

Consciousness as we know it in the obstructed universe operates through
that trilogy which we accept as Time, Space and Motion.

Consciousness as Betty knows it in the unobstructed universe operates
through the trilogia which consists of the ESSENCES of Time, Space and
Motion; these essences are Receptivity, Conductivity and Frequency,
respectively.

From the nature of these essences, and from the interaction thereof,
comes all of what we know--and do not know--of the universe. To
understand that process, however, we have to get a notion of what they
are in orthos, and not of what they are as we ourselves experience them.
Remember that orthos is "the operation of consciousness in its
unobstructed aspects." In other words, we must attempt to understand
Betty's time, space and motion; and build from there.



CHAPTER XII

ORTHOS and the ESSENCES

TO approximate comprehension of Betty's time, space and motion--or our
own, for that matter, if her divulgence be true--we must acquire some
mental picture or acceptance of orthos.

This is not easy. It was particularly hard for Darby and me, because both
of us were still pretty well mired in Newtonian physics. Furthermore,
despite Betty's, as well as Stephen's, repeated assertions concerning
evolution as a fact rather than a theory, there remained in our mental
background an established SOMETHING that was absolute and therefore
UNCHANGING and UNCHANGEABLE.

But as Betty led us further and further toward her unobstructed universe
we realized that her statements--from which we could not move her by a
whole battery of arguments--implied the opposite of what our world's
intellectuals have been accepting as the most logical reasoning, from the
pre-Christian days of Plato down to the materialism of the exact
mechanics of our own twentieth century. We had been taught to think in
terms of ABSOLUTES, real ones; and here was Betty knocking philosophy's
favorite measuring stick out of our hands. Consciousness, the reality of
the entire universe, is in evolution; what is in evolution can not be an
"absolute." And that, staunchly maintained Betty, was that. Dogmatic,
unshakeable, flat!

Not that she rejected a Supreme Degree of Consciousness. She merely
pushed it back, out of the finite, into the infinite. Infinity we do not,
cannot, understand, for the supreme degree is beyond our comprehension.

In attempting a discussion of this, while Betty was still here, the
Invisibles had told us that we must keep steadily in mind the realization
that the supreme degree is beyond earth understanding actually, and that,
while we here are privileged to examine all consciousness for the simple
reason that we ourselves are individual bits of consciousness, and
therefore within us is the POTENTIAL capacity of understanding, we must
do so from the finite aspect.

In this concept rests the thought that reconciles completely Betty's
attitude, as outlined above, with her naturally profound religious faith.

Within this frame of the finite, then, she had set up time, space and
motion as the great earth trilogy. That we do operate in this trilogy is
self-evident, once that fact is called to the attention. There is nothing
else in which we of earth CAN operate.

Next she proceeded to project these three familiars of our universe into
HER universe, by "stripping down," as she called it, our accepted
CHARACTERISTICS of each and thus arriving at their essential properties.
It is with these essentials, she told us, that her unobstructed universe
deals. And here is where her term "essence" came in; "stripped down" to
the meaning of its Latin stem ESSE--to be.

These ESSENCES, the great trilogia of her unobstructed universe,
correspond to the co-existent trilogy (time, space and motion) of our
obstructed universe. Each of these essences will be explained separately
in a chapter all its own. Nonetheless, and though they were defined in
the preceding chapter, they must be restated here as the basic conception
of orthos--restated even as Betty re stated them "over and over" for the
labored understanding of Darby and me.

1. The essence of Time is Receptivity.

2. The essence of Space is Conductivity.

3. The essence of Motion is Frequency.

4. The co-existent trilogy of the obstructed universe (Earth) is Time,
Space and Motion.

5. The co-existent trilogia of the unobstructed universe (Betty's) is
Receptivity, Conductivity and Frequency.

Those five statements are of the greatest importance--and to be
remembered.

For a long while--it seemed long in our struggle to encompass her ideas,
though, as I have said, actually she put over her entire concept in but
forty sessions--Betty allowed our three-cornered discussion of
receptivity, conductivity and frequency to advance not only on the
supposition of their being the ESSENCES of time, space and motion; we
were also allowed to consider them the "absolutes" of time, space and
motion. As she said afterwards it was the only way she could get her
wedge into our brains! Something like the theory of giving a fellow
enough rope...!

Anyway, one night in the midst of a rapid and succinct discussion Darby
suddenly right-about-faced.

"I don't like the word 'absolute,'" he announced. "It's too static."

Then came one of those abrupt, meaningful pauses--the station seeming to
be held in a sort of suspended animation--that we have come to recognize
as heralding something of special significance. We waited. The station
remained immobile. To this assertion of Darby's, Betty apparently had no
response. Certainly her silence did nothing to help him out. So we waited
some more.

"Say," he ejaculated at last. "Why can't we use the word 'orthic' instead
of 'absolute'?"

Whereupon Betty went off into a series of triumphant chuckles. It was
Betty's own satisfied--and satisfying--laughter, not Joan's.

"Good! Good!" she cried. "You've got it yourselves now! That is why we
had to manufacture the word 'orthos.' We had to ditch the word
'absolute.' Absolute does connote static, and mine is not a static world.
It is in evolution."

Of course we had been told that "over and over and over." Nevertheless...

"I suppose," said Darby to me, "we should try to conceive Betty's
unobstructed universe, not in terms of our time, space and motion, but in
terms of receptivity, conductivity and frequency. That is HER approach to
time, space and motion."

"Approach to nothing!" Betty came back at him before I could answer in
the midst of my mad "shorthand" scramble to get everything down. "Time,
space and motion are the RESULT; they are APPEARANCES, if you wish, in
your obstructed universe of receptivity, conductivity and frequency as
they truly operate in orthos. You remember how we gave you the word
'orthos' because in the original Greek it means TRUE. It is only a word,
of course. But it means--really--the condition or state of qualitative
consciousness in my unobstructed universe, just as sidereal means the
condition or state of quantitative consciousness in your obstructed
universe. Don't forget: orthos means true. All this while we have had to
argue from your perceptions of time, space and motion toward the true.
That is all right. But to get it clear, so that you fully understand, it
also should be argued from the true--orthos--toward your perceptions of
the true."

We let this soak in for a moment or two in silence. Then--

"Maybe we ought to try for a sort of mental picture of orthos," I
ventured.

"Maybe you had," acquiesced Betty dryly.

And so we started at it all over again; but this time from her top down
instead of from our bottom up. I can be no clearer than to repeat the
give and take of our questions.

DARBY: just what is meant by your Greek word, orthos? Do you thereby
express the complex of the so-called trilogia, covering all its
co-existents from all aspects?

BETTY: Yes. Orthos is the true, the correct and the inclusive.

DARBY: It seems to me we must use it with one content. Does orthos cover
the complex of the essence of space, the essence of time, the essence of
motion?

BETTY: Yes.

DARBY: Does it also cover our obstructed universe aspect of the three?

BETTY: No.
DARBY: It is not synonymous with consciousness?

BETTY: No.

DARBY: It is then a word coined to cover the reality, as seen from the
unobstructed universe, of time, space and motion?

BETTY: It covers the constituents of consciousness.

DARBY: By it we mean the complex of all the three constituents--the
trilogia,--of the unobstructed universe?

BETTY: It exists in the unobstructed universe, not in the obstructed
universe. Orthos is the true, correct condition of my unobstructed
universe: the one standard thing, the norm, of which all else is but a
reflection. This does not mean that orthos is other than in evolution. It
is in evolution. That which is true and correct as a norm can grow. But
it can only grow correctly, undeviatingly, true to itself. Also orthos is
a fundamental reality, while matter and force and all the things you play
with in your chemical and physical world are the results only of various
juxtapositions of the co-existents.

The last sentence of Betty's seemed to bring orthos right down to our
obstructed universe. But this she would not allow. Nor were we to think
of orthos as "heaven," though the old idea of fulfillment and
unspoiledness as a CONDITION of heaven, she assured us, is a "great
glimpse." Glimpse was a favorite word of Stephen's and he used it in our
everyday meaning of seeing or understanding a portion or part of a thing
or a fact without encompassing its complete truth or whole. So I think we
might go this far--the CONDITIONS of orthos and "heaven" are the same:
unspoiled, undeviating as to observance of law, correct and true.

Betty was satisfied that we had the idea at last. It seemed simple enough
then, and we were inclined to be apologetic for having been so slow. But
this, too, she would not allow.

"Everybody has to go over and over a path to make a beaten track," she
assured us. "What we are after is the beaten track, the visible trail
that neither the rain nor the wind nor the growth of nature can
obliterate. The only actual beaten tracks in the obstructed universe are
conceptive ideas. These we are now creating. Good night."

Conceptive? Was there such a word? There was not. But on looking up the
noun from which it must be stemmed I found other unusual adjectives, such
as conceptional, coined by no less great contributors to thought than our
own William James and George Frederick Stout of England. They, too,
evidently felt the need of new words to express new ideas.




CHAPTER XIII

TIME

1.

"NOW I think we should begin to clarify the subject of Time," began
Betty. "There are three kinds of time: sidereal or clock time;
psychological time; and then a third or orthic time, which we are to
discuss. Sidereal time is a fixture of your universe; it depends on
movements of planets, and is measured by calendars and clocks.
Psychological time is more flexible. It is your inner sense of time. You,
for yourself, can more or less control your sense of sidereal time by
your psychological time. If you are happy, and busy, an hour is short: if
you are cold and uncomfortable, an hour is long."

But, IF WE WILL, she went on to point out, we can often take any given
hour and MAKE it long or short. We can fill it with distraction, interest
or amusement; or we can just sit still and be bored, In that fashion we
do control sidereal time by means of psychological time. But the control,
we must admit, is fragmentary and partial.

"In our universe we can--partly--control psychological time,"
acknowledged Darby, "but that does not actually change sidereal time."

"No," agreed Betty. "What I said was that in the obstructed universe the
individual, by means of his psychological time, can control his SENSE of
limited periods of sidereal time."

"That's all right," Darby pursued his point, "but he doesn't control
sidereal movements, or the clock. He merely gives content to time."

"He is controlling the KIND of time in which he exists," said Betty.
"YOUR PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME IS REALLY THE TIME IN WHICH YOU LIVE."

This, on reflection, we had to concede is profoundly true. Our lives are
not, in retrospect, measured by years, but by the content of those years.

2.

We in our obstructed universe have sidereal time and psychological time.
Sidereal time is our measuring stick or constant--mathematical constant,
that is; and, as far as we are concerned, we may be said to control
it--partially--by psychological time.

"Now," said Betty, "I have in my unobstructed universe orthic time and
psychological time. And I control orthic time in a similar manner, by
means of psychological time. Only there is this difference: Your command
of psychological time is only partial, as you will admit; mine is more
nearly complete. In other words, I am freed from sidereal time; and I am
not dominated by psychological time, but employ it in controlling the
time of my own state of being.

"In your use and my use of psychological time there is a parallel. That
is what I mean when I say that our psychological time we take with us,
and we use it to control our orthic time.

"Orthic time is the reality. Sidereal time, which is a reality to you, is
only an attribute of matter: it is an obstruction.

"'One thing more--psychological time, by which the other two are
modified, is the only variable for me just as it is for you. Both
sidereal time and orthic time are 'constants,' in that they do serve as a
basis of comparison as well as of mathematical calculation. Both are in
evolution; but their evolutional process no more disturbs either your--or
my--use of them as a norm than the movement of the earth upon its axis
round the sun disturbs your physical equilibrium. In other words,
sidereal time is 'constant' enough to serve your present individual
awareness mechanism and the present evolutional status of the obstructed
universe--a norm enough 'fixed' by the ordered movements of the heavenly
bodies to serve your mathematical purposes. In the same way, orthic time
is a fundamental co-existent of my state of Being. These facts--and
especially the nature of orthic time--account for certain discrepancies
and deviations that your laboratory workers find in their scientific
research and which, so far, they have not been able to explain."

There followed a quick interchange between Betty and Darby.

"Please note that I am using the word 'constant' in the mathematical
sense," he said. "In that sense sidereal time may be said to be a
constant. Is orthic time, fully encompassed, also a constant?"

BETTY: That is true for the Supreme, in infinity. And sidereal time for
you is an infinite constant--a concept--but that's all. It works as far
out in your time as you can go, but--

DARBY: Yes, but our sidereal time is also a stabilizer for our
psychological time. What I want to know is whether you--not the Supreme,
but you--have a similar stabilizer.
BETTY: Orthic time is a stabilizer for us, of course. But your sidereal
time is only a constant in the universal sense. Mathematically, you can
work it out that way; but you don't ordinarily do so.

DARBY: Then your orthic time is a mathematical constant in a
corresponding universal, that is, impersonal, sense? Without such a
constant, subjective experience on your side would be a madhouse.

BETTY: CERTAINLY! There would be no common denominator.

The importance of this exchange seemed to lie in this: that, as sidereal
time is a universal constant at our option, and not by our habit, so
orthic time is a mathematical constant to Betty at her option, and not
necessarily by her habit. In other words, in asserting the constant
character of orthic time we must also realize how ephemeral in our own
mode of thought is the constant of sidereal time. Also of importance is
Betty's statement that we can apply the constant of sidereal time only as
"far out as we can go." Beyond our reach it becomes only a mathematical
concept, not to be verified by cases.

3.

Now the thing that enables us to manipulate our psychological time, Betty
insisted, is the fact that we have actually an inner awareness of orthic,
fundamental time, in our state of being in the obstructed universe,
though we do not recognize it as such.
"Indeed," she asserted, "contrary to your accepted conception, orthic
time is better understood by you in your obstructed universe than any
other of the universal laws that control the entire universe. What I mean
to say is, that this time in which I exist, is not only shared by you,
but can be conceived by you from your own experience--I was going to say
fringes of experience. I told you that your psychological time is really
the time in which you live. The time that is most ingrained, however, is
orthic time. That is the time we have here."

That was a pretty bold statement. We protested that we understood nothing
whatever about orthic time, except its name, which as yet was meaningless
to us. Betty replied that she did not expect us to understand it; but
that she did want us to recognize the FEEL of it--of time, just time,
divorced of sidereal aspects.

"A child knows nothing of clocks. Nevertheless he has a sense of time.
You are TRAINED to sidereal time," said she. "As a child is born into the
world, it brings with it the acceptance of time--just time. Certainly it
has no conception of a longer or shorter period of sidereal time, while
psychological time is still but one of its potentialities as a human
entity. This initial knowledge--instinct, if you like--is of my time.
Orthic time. Even an idiot, deprived of controlled mental activity, has a
realization of orthic time. He knows he exists--in time. It is purely
instinctive, because it's a co-existent of Being. It is Being; an
ever-present time; without beginning and without end. Of course it is a
difficult concept to your modern thought because the reality has been
lost through your personal experience; just as, before you, it had been
lost through the racial experience which is your earth inheritance.

"That is the price of civilization. Man has educated himself out of
inherent wisdom--'eaten of the tree of knowledge'--and now by the sweat
of his intellectual brow he must search out the truth for himself again.
And being, your member. 'only a little lower than the, angels,' man will
find the truth, since truth is here TO find in my unobstructed universe;
in orthos.

"But," she returned to her line of argument, "you have another aid in
your understanding of orthic time, and that is sleep. Things happen in
sleep without time relation."

"I have no difficulty with eventless time," said Darby. "I have the feel
of that, but...the time you suggest," continued he, "would have to be
felt in one's inner core as a time that is distinct from or above the
feeling of DURATION! The sort that recognizes Being as a constant, not a
variable."

"Yes," assented Betty, "it has no division, neither by hours nor by
memory of events. The cat, the dog, the new-born child live in that time.
This time--while we are conscious of it, and you at least recognize
it--is still for you an X. A child is perfectly conscious of it, and he
must develop before he gets out of living in that time. Yet you have
always projected your individuality over into my time. You are always
doing it; everybody does. Recognizing, to use your terms, the constancy
of Being. That is the time your scientist would tell you has neither
past, present, nor future. It is a co-existent. Whenever they tap that,
it is THERE."

"Getting a notion of time's collapsible quality through the instantaneous
transmission of radio may be a glimpse of how these people act in this
third kind of time," suggested Darby.

"Let's get together, " urged Betty. "because this time business is the
common factor between us. It is the one place we can meet with
understanding. You can be aware of my time much better than you can have
an awareness of my kind of unobstructed space. Space, as you know it, is
a series of obstructions."

All she expected of us, at this stage of her argument, was that we should
have the FEEL of it. Later, she promised us, we should know what it is
all about.



CHAPTER XIV

SPACE

1.

THE next job proved quite an assignment. We were to gain a feeling of
space similar to what we had come, at least partially, to sense as a
FEELING of time. And after that of motion. Of their character, that is,
in our obstructed universe and in Betty's unobstructed
universe--sidereally and orthically, in short. These three, the great
trilogia, said Betty, were the basic concepts of her new divulgence. Once
we possessed them--and that means POSSESSED--she promised us plain
sailing and fascinating landfalls of new adventure in this strange land
of hers. But we must, we simply must, do the drudgery of building these
three concepts into our mental structure. So we heaved a sigh and tackled
space.

This was, as Betty had predicted, a much more difficult subject than the
last.

"You can be aware of my time much better than you can have an awareness
of my kind of unobstructed space. I have already conceded that space, as
you know it, is a series of obstructions," she said at the start.

"That's right," agreed Darby, "no obstructions; no space. Science
measures from one limit--one obstruction--to another."

"Sidereal space is divided and obstructed as is sidereal time. They are
alike. What about your psychological space? You must have it, as well as
psychological time," commented Betty. "I suppose," mused Darby, "that the
difficulty in getting the feel of pure space lies in the fact that we
have no instinct for it as we have for time. We can easily feel an
eventless time. We do not feel as easily, if at all, placeless space.
Could you give me the same feeling of placeless space as I have of
eventless time?"

"Well," Betty attempted, "the whole difficulty is that two things have
happened. First: long before you were born it had been discovered that
your material earth, instead of stretching out flat to infinity, was
round and turned back on itself. So you have the knowledge, as far as
sidereal space is concerned, that if you go far enough on the earth's
surface, you will come back to the place you started from. On the other
hand, you can never return to any of your starting points in sidereal
time.

"The other difficulty is that your sidereal space is not only measured
obstructively, but it is measured muscularly. You cannot sit down
inactive, and without motion of some kind--either by your feet, or the
feet of a horse, or an auto or a ship--have a definite spot in space come
to you. In your universe, for that spot in space and you to come in
contact, you have to have a motion. On the other hand, with sidereal time
you need do nothing about it at all. Ten o'clock will arrive for you,
whether you lift a Anger or not. Your office will not arrive for you,
unless your body, in some kind of motion, covers the miles.

"Now those are the two handicaps you have to overcome in comprehending
orthic space. So it seems to me that the best way for you to try to get
it in your mind is to look out and up into the universe where you have,
as far as your personal experience is concerned, no muscular obstructions
and no limitation. The trouble is that you have been educated out of your
sense of orthic space, and have not yet caught up with your sense of
orthic time."

"On the round earth you deal with two dimensions only," objected Darby,
irrelevantly, I thought. "I don't see how plane, or even solid, geometry
will help."

"Oh, I used the image of the globe only as an illustration of a
difficulty," returned Betty with a touch of impatience. "But remember
this--you had the feeling of orthic space originally; only you were
educated out of it--even more so than in the case of orthic time. Still,
I recognize your problem, so let's try time-space, and see if that will
help. That is one of the new playthings of your mathematicians, isn't it?
It is a makeshift, but at least it expresses their dissatisfaction with
their present, working hypothesis and a groping after a new."

2.

Now I felt we were getting somewhere. Hooking time and space together
made a new springboard. All three--time, space AND motion--are hooked
together, Betty somewhere reminded us; they are the trilogical
coexistents of consciousness. In our experience they are more or less set
apart from each other, and for analysis and understanding must be
completely separated. But now she recalled to us what she had said some
evenings before about the malleability of time and space, even with us.
And of what Stephen has told us. He had popped in for a moment when Betty
was floundering a little.

"What Mrs. White wants you to understand," he had said, "is that recent
discoveries have made it possible for you to have a better understanding
of our time ratio than any other of our shared characteristics," and
promptly withdrew.

"To what discoveries was Stephen referring?" I asked Betty.

"He meant the radio and the various new light beam as affecting the ratio
of time and your geographic space," she answered. "You have, because of
them, a new ratio between your time and your space."

"In other words," I contributed, "the same amount of time does not
measure the same amount of space."

"That's it!" she cried enthusiastically. "So many hours between New York
and San Francisco instead of so many miles! You listen to a baseball game
over the radio. It is a fact that you hear the crack of the bat on the
ball before the people in the grandstand do; you are 3,000 miles away,
and the people are within sight of it. Just as you have always been able
to see the puff smoke before you heard the gun fire. This suggests that
your preconceived ratio of time and space, even in your own field, is
variable, malleable, and is in the process of reestablishment.

"You know that we here, to use your terminology, travel far--call it
spatially; yet you call me, and I can immediately come. The
wave--conductivity--that is used by you now to transmit vibrations
resulting in sound at the receiving end of a radio, is a part of our
natural habitat. With your radio you are isolating, for a single use
only, a medium in which we dwell. This is your next 'glimpse' of the
relativity of time and space, something you yourselves are using. Now,
since man has developed a mechanical thing through which, by turning a
couple of knobs, he can make a new ratio actual, it ought not to be too
difficult to conceive a different ratio of time and space for us."
"You must be able to slow down and to expand or otherwise to control that
ratio in order to make it usable," I suggested.

"We can control time and space relative to our individual needs,
precisely as you do," Betty agreed to this. "'Man has himself developed a
control. You can speed up or slow down, not to the same degree as
ourselves, but much more than you were able to do even two decades ago.
You are beginning to control the ratio of time and space--sidereal time
and geographical space. Your spatial conception of yesterday is not your
spatial conception now. So you see that, even with you, there is a
variability and malleability of space. Nevertheless the geographical
actuality is the same. It is variable and malleable only because of your
new time-space ratio.

"Now we have here a parallel. These parallels are so important. Our
orthic time and orthic space are in relationship to each other, as are
your sidereal time and geographical space. You are able to control to a
higher and higher point the time consumed to cover your space. We control
our psychological time more fully than you. By the use of our
psychological time we control our orthic space. It is simple here; but
they tell me it's important for scientists, for it will change the whole
idea on your plane."

"One of the first things you told us," said Darby, "was that our best
approach to an understanding of orthic time was our sense of
psychological time, which proves to be true. I feel that for us to get
the FEEL of orthic space we shall have to explore psychological space
even as we did psychological time. So why not broaden our conception of
psychological space?"

"Well," assented Betty, "well take the stretch of road from the foot of
that hill to the post office. Now try to disassociate any idea of time
from this. We take your car. We drive up. We are there, and of course you
have covered the ground to get there. But what is your RECOLLECTION of
it? It may be a complete blank.

"But wait until it snows, and you slip, and you slide back on the hill,
and you start again. Now what will be your recollection of the same
sidereal DISTANCE--leaving out time?"

"Or," I suggested by way of supplement, "suppose yourself in a brown
study during the journey. Suddenly you find you are there. You have no
sense of EITHER space or time in getting there."

"Yes," Betty accepted this.


3.

We agreed that we had at least a working glimpse of psychological space.

"I have such a big job. I have to make you understand this afternoon,"
Betty sounded a trifle helpless, "the actuality of space, plus its
indivisibility, as respects the obstructed and the unobstructed. In other
words, your space and my space are the same. Their point of
indivisibility is in orthos, of which you are somewhat conscious. In the
obstructed universe the line of demarcation varies back and forth."

She cast about for some moments for a starting point.

"When you look at the stars you know that they ARE; and they a re so far
away that there is actual space you cannot possibly travel, which only
light can travel."
"That isn't orthic space--unobstructed space," one of us objected.

The thought attempted seemed to be that we could not get at such space to
handle it mechanically, as we handle the space within our reach.

"Of course it is obstructed, in a way," she admitted. "But to your
comprehension it just looks like out."

Darby had an idea.

"Does orthic time, perhaps, debunk space completely? Is it possible that
space might be a phenomenon only of sidereal time: and to an extent, of
course, of psychological time? In the upper reaches of ourselves we do
find a sense of orthic time; but we find no corresponding sense of orthic
space. That suggests that there is no orthic space."

It was a grand idea, and if it could have been adopted into our
philosophy it would certainly have simplified the universe. At the moment
both Darby and I took it as adopted, for Betty merely remarked: "I have
told you that space is a series of obstructions. Now our space is your
space. You have manifestations that are obstructions to you. Those same
obstructions, to you, are not obstructions to us. There is only one
universe." This was one of those Delphic statements that can be taken
either way, and closed that session.

"I ask you to use your own minds to aid me in clarifying," began Betty,
next session. "I want you both to attempt to conceive a limit to space.
Or could you conceive time and space as being the same thing?"

"Pretty difficult. The rate of motion is one thing, and that equals time:
the direction of motion is something else, and that equals space." Darby
and I both thought up to now she was talking of our space. In our
conception, at that moment, that was all the space there was! Darby had
debunked orthic space. Nevertheless there must be a parallel.

"We agree that obstructions make our space in our obstructed universe.
What analogous to obstructions makes your space in your unobstructed
universe?" I voiced this.

"I don't want to disturb your sense of the reality of my unobstructed
universe," Betty was hesitant. "Well, let's reduce the problem to the
walls of this room. Suppose that inside this room were all the space in
the universe, and we're all here. All this space is created for you by
obstructions--that is, the chairs, the desk, the lounge and so on all
make distance points of so many feet apart.

"Now the contour--the limitation--the boundary--of this arbitrarily
restricted space is as real to me as to you. I am being and thinking in
it. Yet inside this space these things are to me no obstruction.

"Suppose you took the infinity of the universe. The universe as such
contains all the stars, nebulae and so on. You call that the universe.
Your limited conception and perception of it is all made up of
obstructions. But there is orthic space, just as there is orthic time,
and we are all Being in it."

"Hold on!" I cried. "I thought Darby abolished orthic space"

"Your difficulty is this: despite the fact that you have divisions of
sidereal time, those divisions are not material things. So you have
retained a qualitative conception of orthic time. Now your earth
experience with space is materially obstructive. Your own physical
habitation, your body, is itself an obstruction; and that obstruction is
in turn hampered and obstructed by those form attributes of lower
consciousness that make your material matter. Because you bump into that,
you cannot conceive of my space as easily as you conceive of my time. You
cannot have EITHER time or space or motion alone in your obstructed
universe. But by the same token you cannot interchange one for the other.
Each stands on its own feet with you, and so do they with me."

Darby threw up both hands; another bright idea gone wrong!

"Very well, let's restore orthic space," he conceded resignedly. "We live
in a spatial universe based on obstruction; she in an unobstructed
universe where space is not relative!"

"Darby," she consoled him, "the thing you were groping for and misstated
was that you know matter is the form attribute of consciousness and as
such it is an obstruction with you. We have defined your space as a
series of obstructions. But these are only form attributes. They are not
obstructions to me. Space exists for me in essence."

"And are there no boundary lines?" asked Darby.

"Points only."

"Do they serve the same spatial purpose as our obstructions do--as
markers?"

"Of course they do. But I have told you that in my universe we do not
have obstruction. We do have space. Space with us is no more static than
with you. It expands and contracts, according to its ratio with time.
Let's discuss.

Darby was doubtful.

"To hook up space with obstruction in such a way as to contrast it with
your space without obstruction is not accurate, because you must have the
thing that causes us to think we have obstruction," he objected.
"Correct," approved Betty. "The degree of your awareness of my orthic
time is the measure of your individual awareness of the unobstructed
universe, or of the actual indivisibility of the universe as a whole.
Space, as you conceive it, is the antithesis of space as an actuality. My
space is the actuality; your space is only a conception. Living not only
in the unobstructed universe, but in the obstructed universe as well,
since they are one and the same of a whole, I manipulate what you call
space--and I call conductivity--by means of what you call time--and I
call receptivity. Nevertheless, our space is an existent of Being. It is
no less a fact than your space."

4.

We agreed that our gallant philosophical attempt to abolish space, per
se, in the unobstructed universe had failed. Betty had space; and as she
dwelt in the unobstructed universe--in orthos--it must be orthic space.
But what was it? We had no feel of it. That, said Betty, was exactly what
we must try for, rather than complete understanding--the FEEL of it. As
with orthic time. She back-tracked to a previous discussion, when she had
pointed out that we had "contracted the space" between New York and San
Francisco from nearly a year by ox cart to less than a twenty-four-hour
day by plane.

And I had contributed:

"Continue this contraction to a logical conclusion. It has been brought
about by the removal of obstructions. Contract it, by the same process,
beyond all obstruction, and you would have your placeless space."

"Try this," she suggested. "You put in a telephone call to San Francisco.
You hear the voice. Where is the space between New York and Pittsburgh,
and Cleveland, and Chicago, and Denver? It is not there."

"Then the nearer to complete instantaneity of time you get, as with
radio, the nearer you come to instantaneity of space?" I asked.

"In other words," Darby caught up the thought, "if you postulate two
separated places in any given field, as the broadcasting and receiving
apparatus of radio transmission, then in THAT PARTICULAR FIELD--RADIO
TRANSMISSION--the two places instantaneously become one place."

"OR ANY OTHER FIELD, WITH A HIGH ENOUGH DEGREE OF FREQUENCY. It's the
extension of that field in frequency that is going to establish the
existence of the universe as one," cried Betty, jubilant.

As a conceiving station Darby was going strong, as his next contribution
proved.

"Take the psychic condition," he suggested. "Observe Joan--the feeling of
obstructed space seems lost with her. How about that, Stewt? Did Betty
seem to experience that when she was working here?"

"No sense of space. 'I'm just THERE,' she often said that," I replied.

"In your subconsciousness there is no awareness of sidereal space," Betty
now helped further. "Take even your own thoughts. You can picture in your
mind's eye any familiar place, or even an imaginary place, without any
relation to sidereal space at all."

"Any different feeling of space in flight? Of leaving sidereal space?"
asked Darby.

"Definitely," agreed Betty. "You leave the obstruction of the earth of
course there are atmospheric obstructions, which on earth you knew
nothing about. But granting that, and assuming a smooth easy flight, you
have a definite sense of having eliminated obstructed space. You have a
sense of being yourself a part of space. If you fly high enough, and
don't look down, and don't observe the obstructions--which are divisions
of your habitual space--you get the sense of the identity of yourself
with space, just as you have admitted a sense of your identity with
time."

"I believe I can carry that illustration a little farther," I interposed.
"As you have said, our space is made by obstructions. The more
obstructions we manage to remove, the nearer we come to a sense of orthic
space, since, by definition, orthos is a condition of no obstruction. Now
let's make your flight a night flight between Salt Lake City and San
Francisco. We are enclosed in a dark cabin. The only space we know
anything about is the little space in that cabin. We and that space are
near enough the same for the argument. There are practically no
obstructions, as far as we can sense. We assume a smooth flight. Indeed,
the only obstruction of which our senses can be aware is the slight sound
of the propeller against the air. So--as far as we are concerned--we are
all the space there is. Nevertheless we start at Salt Lake City, and find
ourselves in San Francisco. We have passed a lot of sidereal space. But
without sensing it. The only space we have sensed is the space in the
little cabin, but that is practically identical with ourselves. How is
that for a FEELING of something like orthic space?"

For once I had made good. Betty acclaimed this enthusiastically.

"I asked you to use your minds," she cried. "Now here's one other
illustration of stripping down space. Take the last message of Edward
VIII, when he abdicated. That voice was heard more widely than any other
in all of history. As he spoke in London, people in every portion of your
world heard his voice, SIMULTANEOUSLY. There was no sidereal space."

We did not have to understand it fully, as yet: that would be attempted
in later discussion. It is sufficient for now if we get the FEEL of it,
she reminded.




CHAPTER XV

MOTION

1.

"ONE of the great glimpses of the mad scientists," said Betty, "is
perpetual motion. That is one of the truths that man has glimpsed and
attempted to accomplish, but failed; the dream of the mad
inventors--perpetual motion!

"For motion is a co-existent of Being. There is motion in everything that
exists. Time and space are co-existents of the reality of Being. I am:
Time is: Space is. If there is Being, there is Time and Space. And if you
have the Time-Space combination, you are by way of having Motion."

Here we were again, back at "the new plaything of your
mathematicians"--Time-Space.

"All right," said Darby. "We accept time-space, hyphenated for the sake
of the argument. Let us suppose an object in motion between two points.
In a sense, that is only another way of saying time-space. Now we speed
up the motion. Exactly in proportion to the speeding up, we shorten the
time and contract the space. Thus we telescope time-space."

"Exactly," said Betty. "But just what does that mean? We have learned
that both time and space are malleable. Already your obstructed universe
commonly measures the distance between two points (space) by so many
hours (time). What makes that measure possible?"

"Motion," we agreed.

"But not what you call the rate of motion," warned Betty. "That is
Something else again. That is the specific measure, what you can count.
But it is just motion that makes the count possible--motion; the last,
and the first of the three inseparables."

2.

Now we have here also a trilogy of aspect. We have motion-in-relation,
with which we are most familiar: we have psychological motion, a fact
which we did not apprehend until almost the end of the divulgence, and
motion-in-itself, that is, orthic motion.

When I finally sat down to study the record as a whole--after the returns
were all in, so to speak--I realized that in the discussion of motion
Betty had deliberately reversed her method of procedure. In dealing with
time and space she had used the same sequence, beginning with our
everyday sidereal experience and then leading us on through our
psychological FEEL and understanding, into her unobstructed universe
aspect or orthos. But with motion she plunged us directly from sidereal
motion into orthos, deferring discussion of psychological motion till
close to the end. We had not much noticed this, and when we did we
thought it an oversight, though by that time we felt we had arrived at a
fairly clear conception of orthic motion. So, while not sensing any great
need for a discussion of psychological motion, still we asked for it just
to keep, the record intact. And Betty was more than ready for us.

Naturally we were prepared for a discussion of psychological motion on
the analogy of psychological time and psychological space. But Betty had
her own viewpoint, the difficulty seeming to be that any exposition on
those lines would be just a repeat of psychological time and
psychological space as she already had explained them. It was, therefore,
somewhat of a jolt when she pried out of us the idea that THOUGHT ITSELF
MIGHT BE PSYCHOLOGICAL MOTION.

I doubt if we could have accepted that as the next step beyond the
in-relation-to, measurable motion that is so major a part of our
hour-by-hour living. I think she, and those working with her, knew this;
which is why Betty went about the subject of motion in another way.

Motion-in-relation, we can dismiss in a few words. It is the ordinary
motion we know; and, as Mr. Einstein has emphasized, it exists in any
object only as related to some other object.

"There is atomic motion," Betty opened the subject of orthic motion. "You
don't see it, but you know about it. That is not orthic motion. And
celestial motion. Neither is that orthic motion, for it is
relative--measurable; always you relate it to something else. But it is
in the concept of celestial motion as an inescapable, always functioning
characteristic of the heavenly bodies that we may find a stepladder for
the understanding of orthic motion."

"All right," said Darby, "we're pretty familiar with our measurable
motion. So trot out your stepladder. Let's see if it will reach to
orthos.

"Well," continued Betty, "can you imagine anything that is not in motion
in the universal sense? The earth turns, the grass grows, light travels,
wood decays returning to dust, water evaporates into vapor and vapor
condenses into dew. Something happens to carbon and you may get coal that
can be turned into heat and gases or you may get a diamond hard enough to
cut glass--brilliant enough to set in a king's crown! You in your
obstructed universe are aware of SOMETHING that impels, energizes--even
sustains. A sort of purposeful core common to all that you know.

"You see," she complained, "every word I use in your language is so
surrounded by meanings you have attached to it, that it is almost
impossible for me to explain. Now don't take this too literally," she
begged, "but back of the motion you know--measurable--has to be the
impulse, that aspect of consciousness which is motion; a motion back of
the motion that manifests. Now the highest expression of orthic motion in
your obstructed universe is life. Yet if there were no time or no space,
life could have no form.* Perhaps if I said orthic motion is the
evolutional impulse, that would suggest something to you."

* More fully explained later. But, briefly, if there were no space for a
thing to, occupy, and no time to give it duration, it could not exist as
an entity.

"Speaking of time and space," Darby took a new tack, "assume an auto
running at a hundred miles an hour. Speed it to two hundred, and then
four hundred, and so on up. Its motion is measured against time and
space. Now speed it up to infinity and it has nothing to be in relation
to: it comes close to 'absolute' motion. Would that be orthic motion?"

"It is possible," supplemented Betty, "even your universe, to speed up
such things as a motion picture or a wheel so high that you cannot see
them. They have gone beyond your sense of sight. It is possible to speed
a twanging wire so fast that its sound goes beyond your sense of hearing.
As distinct from obstructed manipulations, orthic motion is the fact of
motion as you know it in the lower degrees. One reason why the concept is
difficult is because motion per se is something which you yourselves can
create, operate and control--and thereby make it relative. It is an
obstruction, as space was a muscular obstruction. But you USE it. It is
too familiar to you."

"It is even worse than that," complained Darby. "We have to analyze space
quite consciously to see its relativity. But motion is the acme of
relativity in our minds. It is immediately relative; we do not have to
analyze it. In fact, we know it only as relativity. And I don't think
merely adding speed answers the question."

"But conceive of yourself," prompted Betty.

"Myself," Darby slowly reflected aloud, "distinct from my members. Is
that myself in motion? I haven't the feeling of it."

"Have you the feeling of being static?" countered Betty.

"In my inner self, yes."

"How about your relationships; to your mind, to the whole of
consciousness, of which you are part?"

"Well--" Darby shook his head.

"Take it on the basis of a physicist's knowledge. What creates any motion
at all? Why is motion?"

"It is a postulate of physical science that everything moves straight
ahead until it is deflected or stopped." Darby obeyed. "Then it simply
reacts and you have a resolution of forces, a change of direction but no
actual loss of motion."

"How is this?" I proposed. "Take it from the other end. Motion is Being.
And it is orthic motion that starts all obstructed universe motion."

"Getting warmer," encouraged Betty.

"We might say, then, that what we call motion ordinarily is after all
just a segment, a little slice, of a universal orthic motion,"
contributed Darby.

Now it was my turn.

"A while ago," said I, "we conceived of a moving picture running at
normal rate; and we gradually speeded it up. Then we noted that we
completely altered the ratio between time and space as depicted on that
screen. It took the actor less time to cross the stage-set, and therefore
it became not so far across--space was less. And vice versa. Remember?

"Now speed it up until it completely blurs out into nothing. What have we
got? No picture: just motion. Apparently there's no space or time in it
at all. There, by way of illustration, is a glimpse of motion, orthic
motion.

"Now start from there and begin to slow it down again. What are we
accomplishing? We are bringing back space and time to the screen. In
other words, we are bringing motion into relationship with time and
space. And because of that fact it differentiates from pure motion into
limited motion. And it has entered the obstructed universe."

"I KNEW we would get it over!" cried Betty in high jubilation.

It was, as I said, much later that, reading back in the records, we
discovered there had been no concise discussion of psychological motion.
So remembering Betty's law of parallels, Darby asked:

"We have had psychological time and psychological space. It logically
follows that there should be psychological motion. Is there? Tell us
something about it."

"Yes," said Betty, "there is. The highest expression of it in the
obstructed universe is your awareness of self. You know, for instance,
that you were yesterday; you are today; and you expect to be tomorrow.
The continuity of the I-Am."

"That is to be distinguished from time?"

"Possibly I should have said, 'of the I-Am's being.' You see, the I-Am is
made up of frequency, which is the essence of motion."

A point, indeed, toward which science has reached in reducing all the
material with which it works to protons, electrons, neutrons--all rates
of motion.

"What you have said," commented Darby, "is that psychological motion is
that rate of motion which one recognizes as his own vibration;
recognizing also that back of that is the orthic rate of motion that one
knows is the I-am."

"Take the subconscious activity of your own body," suggested Betty; "that
is motion. Your sense of it could be as psychological as your
psychological sense of time. Let's start there.

"Psychological motion is of complete importance because the individual's
way back into orthos is through his own frequency. His recognition of
psychological motion, therefore, is of greater importance than his
recognition of psychological space and psychological time. It is through
that recognition he touches the Whole and becomes a part of the Whole in
his own sense of it."

"Would James's* old phrase 'stream of consciousness' mean anything here?"
Darby enquired. Betty assented. "Actually we recognize ourselves as
distinct from that flow," he continued.

* William James, American psychologist and philosopher, 1842-1910.

"You recognize yourself as an individual station in that stream," Betty
amended.

"I recognize myself as distinct from the flow," insisted Darby. "I am
close to orthic in that distinctness."

"As you consider the psychological importance of what you call the stream
of consciousness, your own awareness will not only become more acute and
individualized, but it will also become more consciously a part of the
Whole, or the universe, or orthos. Because, you see, it is that which
stays put. The only change that happens to it is its relation to space
and to time. Your own rate of motion, vibration, is yours."

"In the phrase, 'my thought'--" began Darby, and stopped short. "Why," he
cried in sudden illumination, "thought itself is psychological motion!"

"That was very bright of you," Betty applauded. "That bald statement will
do for our purpose now, though it should be much elaborated--the
statement that thought is psychological motion."




CHAPTER XVI

FREQUENCY

WE TOOK up time first, then space, then motion, not as indicative of
relative importance, but only for logical convenience. However, in
dealing with their essences it will be best, I think to reverse our order
of procedure. This was, in a way, Betty's own idea of a point of
departure. At our very first meeting she popped in the word frequency,
all by itself, without relation to anything else; but her emphasis made a
paragraph of it.

"Frequency--frequency!" said she, and let it go at that.

"Frequency of what?" I asked when, days later, she repeated.

"Of consciousness, the one and only reality. It is what controls.
Consciousness is in evolution. Therefore it is in various degrees. Each
degree has its frequency. That frequency is a--well, I'll have to call it
a sort of magnetic energy. It is a vibratory emanation of the vital
force; the thing that is; the individual rate."

"Apparently," observed Darby after we had discussed this matter a great
many times, but loosely, "we're going to use the word frequency a lot.
I'd like to know just what frequency is."

"Frequency," said Betty, "is the essence--"

"Don't say 'of motion'," interrupted Darby. "You have told us that. And
anyway, such a definition is merely restating motion in the terms of one
of its characteristics or properties."

"Frequency is the essential characteristic or property of motion,"
insisted Betty. "I am not talking about rate of motion, which is the
property or characteristic of motion most familiar to you in the
obstructed universe. What I am talking about is that essence of the
orthic trilogia which results in motion.

"Your individual frequency and your degree of consciousness are related,"
she continued. "There is, for example, a degree in the evolution of
consciousness that we will call treeness; and in manifesting it becomes a
tree. Now to that there is a corresponding frequency. And you have an
electrical spark, and that is a degree of consciousness, and to it you
have a corresponding frequency. There is an actual difference in
vibration. Motion is. Frequency is an essence of consciousness, an
actuality. What you call motion is really only one aspect of frequency."

She refused to consider vibration a synonym.

"Take the simplest thing we can call a frequency. Take a tuning fork. Its
prongs move in space at a temporal rate." Darby was groping.

"That is motion, as you know motion," said Betty.

"The motion is simply the motion of the fork," continued Darby. "The
frequency is the number of times the tine moves in relation to sidereal
time. It makes a frequency in the air; a high tone is rapid, a low one is
slow. Or take the pendulum of a clock. It is in motion. Now, the essence
of the motion is frequency. The pendulum swings back and forth so many
times in a given amount of time. The radio wave is no different. Any
object, moving back and forth in space at a certain rate of time, equals
frequency. Now, from that definition how can we build up the larger
conception of frequency?"

"You remember," obliged Betty, "that I told you the old hooted-at idea of
perpetual motion was one of the great glimpses. The entire universe is in
perpetual motion. All manifestations are the results of various degrees
of frequency. To use your own terms, the rapidity of molecular frequency
is one thing; the rapidity of light frequency is another; the rapidity of
that frequency that manifests itself as life, as you know it, is another.
My body that I have here is very close to pure frequency. It has
frequency, true; but it is in orthos."

"The division into time, space, motion, I gather, is only for our
understanding. Actually they are only aspects, there is no sharp division
between them?" surmised Darby.

"Not in the orthic," agreed Betty.

"Time and space," Darby pointed out, "more or less stand on their own
legs: we can conceive of them separately. But when you get to motion and
frequency, they won't stand by themselves. You must have time, and space
or you can't have motion."

"Oh, yes, you can! " asserted Betty. "Because you are frequency. Go back
to matter as a stress point. Conceive that the stress point of matter is
an arrested frequency. The matter can be taken apart into flame, or
smoke, or gas--all frequencies. There you have the material concept of
frequency in a pluralistic universe.

"But step from what you call matter into what you call life. There you
have your essence, the self, the I-Am frequency. You see perpetual motion
is a fact in the sense of perpetual frequency."

"You mean to say that a frequency can exist without spatial or
temporal--" Darby was incredulous.

"Yes," she interrupted positively, "if consciousness is the one and only
reality. It has aspects. It has essences in those aspects, manifested in
the obstructed universe as motion, space, time. Your trilogies are
inseparable in actuality. That I have told you."

"Frequency means to me motion in time," insisted Darby.

"Frequency means to you a rate of vibration, a setting of particles or
things or your body into juxtaposition. But what is yourself?" probed
Betty.

"Myself? The entire of my awareness of the outside and inside world,"
returned Darby.

"That is good. You have defined your awareness by an outside and an
inside world. But what is your awareness?"

"I think I'll redefine self as my inward feeling of being as distinct
from any feeling of awareness at all," amended Darby.

"That is much better. This feeling of being is cognizant of a physical
limitation. You know that Being is housed in a body. You LEARNED that;
somewhere between birth and early childhood. Now this self that can take
cognizance of an inside and an outside world we might define as Being.
That Being is because a certain frequency has been arrested, and in the
arrestment creates a human person with the essence of self that is Being.
It is in that frequency that your 'aliveness' of consciousness to all
things is."

We let it go at that for the moment, but we did not consider the concept
tidied up, for Darby returned to it at the next session.

"Frequency has been defined as the essence of motion," he began. "Part of
our difficulty may be that we have accepted that, but we haven't related
it up to consciousness. What we are talking about is frequency of
consciousness, not of motion. Frequency is the unit of consciousness in
motion."

"Consciousness is in motion," agreed Betty.

"And from the viewpoint of frequency, motion is the phenomenon,"
suggested Darby.

Whereupon Betty threw up her hands and Anne took a try at it.

"Take a seed in the ground," suggested Anne. "Now that seed bursts its
shell and a shoot appears. But for that to happen to the seed it has to
have the potentiality of grass, or a flower, or a tree, or a weed. Now
that potentiality is its frequency."

"That means that frequency and quality are at least closely related,"
said Darby.

"What is that thing in any seed that bursts the shell?" Anne was not to
be diverted from her line of questioning. "You know that there is a stir
there. What word would you use to describe that thing-in-itself?"

She was referring to Kant's "ding-an-sich" over which Darby and Stephen
had held many a battle royal.

"My answer would be motion," insisted Darby stubbornly.

"But," said Anne, "the motion does not start until after something else
has occurred. Something must impel the motion. Frequency is more than a
characteristic of motion. Motion RESULTS from frequency."

"Betty told us that," said Darby.

"She did," agreed Anne, dryly.

"What you an postulating is that what you call frequency is a
non-physical thing beyond motion--or certainly beyond motion as we know
it," he argued. "And you can't use a physical term like frequency to
describe a non-physical thing."
"An ye wad be doin' as ye be told," Anne came back tartly, her dialect
broader than ever under her bit of impatience, "and strip the word
down--clear down as Betty asked you--you would not find the term
frequency entirely physical."

Then she relented and did the job for us.

"The word frequency," said she, "suggests motion to you over and above
any other meaning because of its modern use in physics and especially in
connection with electricity. Now, any term used to describe the essence
of motion must suggest action. But it must do more than that. If you will
make an analysis of the word frequency and clothe it with all its various
connotations you will find--what modern use has discarded--two old
meanings of the word which make it fit the present need quite perfectly.
The adjective 'frequent' still carries them, though the noun 'frequency'
has lost them. These two meanings are 'habitual' and 'persistent'.
Habitual and persistent motion gives you sufficient content of frequency
as an essence of the orthic trilogia."

"Well!" said Darby.

But before either he or I could begin discussion of just how much this
idea of HABITUAL and PERSISTENT action clarified our understanding of
orthic motion Betty was back again.

"Impetus," she popped at us. "Remember, Stewt, how I always was bringing
back--using--the word 'impetus'?* Well, I recognized what it meant then,
but I couldn't explain it to you fully--not without this whole new
interlocking concept of orthos and its essences.

* When as a receiving station here she was getting the material for The
Betty Book and Across the Unknown. See both for her original use of the
term.
And I couldn't get THAT until I REALLY came here! Another way of saying
it would be that FREQUENCY IS THE HABITUAL AND PERSISTENT IMPETUS OF
ORTHIC MOTION."

It was my turn to exclaim, "Well!"

"Frequency is the eternal motion that never stops, and of which you are a
part," Betty went on swiftly. "It is your bit of quality: it's your I-Am.
You are that frequency of consciousness that is a man; oxygen is that
frequency of consciousness which is oxygen; a tree is that frequency of
consciousness which is a tree.

"It is difficult for you because you ARE the frequency; because the thing
that is you is an arrestment of motion. Your duration of motion, your
frequency, makes you what you are, just as another arrestment of
frequency makes the tree. Frequency is the potentiality of immortal
individualism. Everything is in motion. THAT IS WHY CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE
UNIVERSE ARE IN EVOLUTION."



CHAPTER XVII

CONDUCTIVITY

1.

BETTY made her approach to discussion of conductivity as the essence of
space through Sir Oliver Lodge's ether of space. Until recently, as the
reader knows, that concept has been considered sufficient and
satisfactory to cover transmission of the finer vibrations--such as
light--through depths of space where our ordinary well-known vehicles,
like atmosphere, are lacking. A wave or vibration theory demanded some
medium of transmission. The ether was invented by synthesis of all
properties of matter necessary for such transmission, and a rejection of
all other properties whatsoever. As a synthesis, of course, it is a
highly theoretical assumption, that forced acceptance because it seemed
to be the only thing that could cover the case.

The ether of space is, I think, still acceptable to a large proportion of
present day physicists. At any rate it has not suffered any hundred per
cent of rejection by the orthodox. But it is seriously questioned;
especially by the mathematicians. The iconoclasts have as yet no
satisfactory substitute; but they have established their case
sufficiently for uneasiness; sufficiently for the creation of an
impression that there may be a catch somewhere in this ether business.

The first intimation that our Invisible friends might share the latter
view, was merely in the wording of a statement on quite a different
subject. This was away back, in the course of one of our very early
discussions on time.

"Time in your universe is in relation to your individual consciousness,"
Betty was saying. There followed considerable give and take wherein Betty
tried to get into our heads the handling of psychological time; and was
talking of the scientific discoveries that ought to help us to
understand.

"There is a gentleman standing here," she said finally. "He thinks he
might help."

The "gentleman" promptly obliged.

"Your scientists have accepted an hypothesis called ether as an
actuality," said he, and proceeded with an illustrating statement
relevant to the subject in hand. But what particularly struck both Darby
and me was the caution of the opening phrase: "Your scientists have
accepted--" Why the qualification? We fell into discussion of the
scientific schism outlined in the opening of this chapter.

2.

"I think," began Betty, "the next subject for discussion is conductivity.
You were speaking of the postulation called the ether, and of its present
rejection by a certain school of scientists.

"The ether idea, as I understand it, is that in things like light and
radio a series of vibrations are set up that travel, and produce another
series of vibrations that a receiving end is tuned into.

"The difficulty with the ether postulate is that it is conceived as a
MATERIAL, from the obstructed universe standpoint.

Scientists had to have, she explained, some vehicle of transmission: so
they began with the material they knew, and from it stripped away all the
qualities which either they did not need for the purpose, or which were
actually antagonistic to the purpose. Such as friction and weight, for
instance. But they still, as Betty said, kept it material; though they
fined-out that material as thin as they possibly could.

"Don't you see," Betty pointed out, "that in thus discarding properties
of the obstructed universe they are actually endowing it with the
characteristics of my state of being in the unobstructed universe? They
are making it as nearly unobstructed as they can!

"It's a great glimpse; but, being endowed with nonobstructive properties
by science, it belongs thereby to the unobstructed universe. Consequently
it cannot be material in the sense your obstructed universe conceives it.
We must find a new name, because if we call it 'ether,' we get into the
old wreath-hung terminology.

"This all-pervasive something is a co-existent of consciousness."

Now there, thought we enthusiastically, was in itself a great glimpse!
And so simple! But we needed the implications.

3.

"It is perfectly possible for a vibration originating in San Francisco to
be registered in New York, and for it to pass through this room without
your being aware of

 THE: UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE

it," continued Betty, after a pause. "Consequently you can see that the
frequency of that vibration is higher than your awareness-mechanism can
register. Now I employ frequencies that are still higher. You have not
yet brought into general use a vibratory registration, from a mechanical
standpoint, that can pick up my frequency. But it is reasonable that, if
there are registerable frequencies beyond your awareness-mechanism--which
man's ingenuity has mechanized--there are also frequencies beyond his
present mechanization. It is perfectly true that so far it is he who has
created--by means of isolation and utilization--the frequencies beyond
the human awareness mechanism that he picks up mechanically. But it is
also true that if a conductor were not there to carry those frequencies,
he could not pick them up."

"It is, then, to a high degree, through the unobstructed universe they
are transmitted?" I surmised.

"Exactly," said Betty.

"The difference between the radio wave you employ and the frequency we
employ in parallel to it is that ours goes in a straight line: there's no
conceivable obstruction to it. If you threw a ball, and there were no
obstruction, by ANYTHING--gravitation, air, resistance, anything--it
would go in a straight line. But the frequency of the thrown ball in
motion is not high enough to escape these obstructions. So it falls to
the ground. Radio, infinitely higher than the ball in frequency, is still
not high enough to escape obstruction: therefore it is curved. And your
present mechanisms can register it.

"The medium I postulate for conductivity is entirely unobstructed, and is
therefore to be distinguished from the old theory of ether, which still
has trailing to it a materialistic conception." Darby gummed up the
scientific problem.

"The scientist," said he, "accustomed only to the concept of material
conductors, but forced to postulate a conductor beyond known material,
was obliged to endow his ether with properties beyond his physical
knowledge, but still conforming to his materialistic conception of
conductivity. Later certain scientists experimented for gravitational
drift, with light, but found none. Therefore they discredit ether, and
say the wave itself is all there is to it."

"Motion is a co-existent of Being," interpolated Betty. "That
co-existence is a fact. But remember always you are conditioned by an
obstructed universe."

"Displacement of waves in water is up and down, not forward. Do these
higher vibrations, radio waves--of which we are talking--displace this
new ether of yours through which they pass?" Darby went on.

"No, they go through it."

"But water is displaced up and down," objected Darby.

That, said Betty, is because water as a medium is an obstruction. The
wave is obstructed because its frequency is low.

"Take the vibration of sound," she said. "You can measure on a machine*
the up and down movement of the air. But, again, air is an obstruction.
Your body frequency is so low that you bump against a tree; but the radio
frequency is high enough to go through the tree. The higher the
frequency, the less the obstruction."

* She is referring to the cathode ray projection on a screen of sound as
a line of light.

"And the higher the frequency the less the disturbance of the medium?"
Darby carried out the thought.

"This 'new ether' of yours: what is that in your unobstructed universe,
what's the parallel to the purpose of the old ether? What function does
that new ether serve in your unobstructed universe?"

For the time being Betty accepted without demur this suggestion, and this
terminology, of a "new ether" to substitute for the old. She even used it
herself. But as soon as possible she discarded it. It was for her a
provisional hypothesis, so to speak, to avoid confusing us.

"It is," she answered Darby's question, "the medium for the conduction of
frequency. The idea of ether was a great glimpse. But, just as your
physicists thought it should have obstruction, and found out it didn't,
so now they find that fact pointing to an unobstructed conductivity. That
medium exists. At the same time, in your universe--which it pervades, as
it does mine--there is obstruction in the frequencies of lower degrees.
You yourselves can get vibrations so high--you have already created them
so high--that they cannot be recorded or obstructed. When you can make a
record of them, they are obstructed.

"We have communication with each other here. We have a parallel of sound.
You can't hear us, and the reason is because our sound frequency is ABOVE
YOUR obstruction and hence your recording.

"We have destroyed the old ether--which I insist is a great glimpse. We
are now postulating something that pervades the entire universe. It is
the universal conductor. It is by means of that conductivity that you get
light."

"--and all above the frequencies that can be conducted by matter?" I
supplemented.

"Yes. One step further: so far the obstructed universe has not been able
to record frequencies high enough to proceed in a straight line, that is,
unobstructed frequencies. You will. The whole trend is that way. All
lower frequencies are curved, but such things as X-ray, radio, and so
forth, are far less variable than, say, the recorded sound of the voice."

4.

"Well, take sound," said Darby. "There's something that is conducted
merely through atmosphere. In a vacuum the sound of an alarm clock simply
doesn't exist!"

"Not for you: but it's there. Your registration of sound is through your
bodily senses. I could hear your alarm clock in the vacuum," stated
Betty.

"Hold on," objected Darby. "Sound is a vibration conveyed by means of
waves through the medium of air. Seems to me no ether is necessary; air
is enough."

"Only the low vibrations are RECORDED in the atmosphere," Betty made a
distinction. "Radio waves pass through the body, but the body does not
record them. The atmosphere has a quality of obstruction. It is of the
obstructed universe. Above that you cannot breathe, you do not exist.
Sound exists, if you could register it"

Your own science, she protested, postulates that vibration, per se,
continues on out indefinitely--or infinitely. Sound is vibration. On what
medium does it continue when it reaches the limits of the atmosphere? A
different one?

"Do you conceive that at the limit of the atmosphere the vibrations
change cars?" she asked quaintly. "Or did they not start on the same
vehicle that is to carry them on out?
"The atmosphere, or any other physical medium, is not the primary
conductor of a frequency. If that were so, how, for instance, could the
fight of stars, which you know emanates from far beyond your atmosphere,
be conducted? IT IS AN OBSTRUCTION THAT BRINGS THAT FREQUENCY INTO THE
REGISTRATION POSSIBILITY OF THE OBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE. Without what you
called the new ether, no conduction; without the material, the
obstruction, no registration by your universe.

"So while the atmosphere does conduct to you the frequencies you can pick
up, and while the atmosphere is a necessary medium for your present
registration of those frequencies, the sound in the vacuum IS created.
You stop hearing a tuning fork before it stops vibrating."

"Are you saying that, even though the transmission seems to lie in the
atmosphere, it is even there conducted by the new ether, and that the
phenomenon in the denser medium is a coincidental phenomenon?" Darby
wanted to be sure.

"The sound you are making in this room is conducted over the atmosphere
just as a telephone conducts over a material thing. But were it not for
the all-pervading 'new ether,' the various types of material things like
atmosphere could not register as they do. The atmosphere is required
because are still in the obstructed universe. But you have in your
universe also the 'new ether,' just as you have in yourselves the beta
body. THE 'NEW ETHER' IS WHAT MAKES THE ATMOSPHERE A CONDUCTOR."

5.

Our minds were not quite yet ready to abandon the idea of some material
medium. Betty wanted to extend her provisional hypothesis of the "new
ether," one step forward.

"It is," she said, "an all pervading absolute. But that," she added, of
the latter word, "is your terminology, and so is the word 'ether.'
However, I want to get into your minds the fact that this 'new ether' of
yours is a coexistent of consciousness itself. A constituent," she added,
"of the orthic trilogia. It is through it that our parallel laws operate
throughout both the obstructed and unobstructed universes."

A day or so later Darby expressed himself as somehow uneasy about this
whole 'ether' business; and I agreed that neither was I satisfied. This
confession Betty greeted with a crow of delight, as at a symptom of
mental convalescence.

The very next day Joan was given the 'essence' idea; and ether went out
for keeps. We do not need it, or any other medium of conduction, for the
simple reason that the ESSENCE OF SPACE IS CONDUCTIVITY. Wherever there
is space, then there MUST be conductivity; it is an inherent part of
Consciousness, the all-inclusive reality.

6.

We took a long breath when we got this. But we were a little puzzled that
it had not been said before. The simple statement would have avoided a
lot of brain-fag on our part, and not a few of our interim
misconceptions--with which, by the way, I have avoided overburdening this
narrative. For instance, at one time--instead of the basic trilogia of
receptivity (time), conductivity (space), and frequency (motion), we had
one of time-space, 'ether,' and motion.
"This new material rather seriously revises material hitherto received."
Darby was perhaps a trifle critical. "How come?"

At the moment he was talking to Stephen who, it will be remembered, came
occasionally to help out.

"It was necessary to build up the concept," explained the latter. "If you
will go back in the records, you will find that it has been done step by
step, founded on your accepted knowledge. For instance, at first it was
necessary to permit you to explore the time-space concept in order for
you to encompass our thought at all. However, you will admit that it was
not entirely satisfactory to you. As far as the ether was concerned, that
was a confusion between the communicator and receiving station. The
communicator knew perfectly that conductivity is the essence of orthic
space, but to get the thought through the station she had to accept the
old terminology of physics in the mind she was using. You must admit that
we have been able to correct the erroneous statement quickly, and through
the receiving station herself. Do not let her, in her conscious mind, be
distressed over the understandable and quickly rectified mistake.
Besides, it was not wholly a matter of error."

7.

"You tell us that the essence of space is conductivity. Let us see how
that functions. Conductivity implies something conducted. What is
conducted?" Darby opened a new phase of the subject.

"Various degrees of frequency," replied Betty.

"You must," she postulated, "conceive conductivity as variable. Suppose
we take a pipe ten inches across and ten feet long. That would give quite
a flow of conductivity. Now attach to the ten-inch pipe another, also ten
feet long, but only eight inches across. Keep on doing that, reducing the
diameter two inches at a time, until finally we get down to an
infinitesimal opening, perhaps a molecular space. But it still has
conductivity.

"It is obvious that, in addition to the bulk of any given ten-foot
section of the pipe, there must be an INTENSIVE capacity, a DEGREE of
capacity. That is, it may have a slow or a rapid intensity, or a
condition that is either heightened or lowered in sharpness and
efficiency; for it is quite possible that through the smaller bulk of a
given section there might be a more potent flow than through the larger
bulk of another, according to what degree of frequency is conducted. For
instance, in your physical world the flow of water through a ten-inch
conductor, or pipe, would not have as potent a result as a flow of
electricity through a two-inch conductor, or cable. Therefore you can see
that conductivity, as such, per se, is variable. Conductivity itself is
in degrees. You must not forget the basic concept. All consciousness is
in evolution, hence in degrees. So, therefore, must be all its component
parts--all its essences.

"I am hunting for a simple analogy. Suppose we take a road, any road. In
your world it is a conductor. It is a space, and it always runs between
points. It has location. The road is a direction. It constitutes a beaten
path in your operations. Over this road people walk, ride on horses or
bicycles, in slow-moving trucks, in fast-moving automobiles. In addition
to that, this road often gives direction for a varied number of
manifestations of motion, each of itself an entity, each producing a
result, and each result different.
"The road, even when there is no visible motion on it and it is blank in
the landscape, is still in and of itself a road. IT POSSESSES THE
POTENTIALITY OF PERMITTING THINGS TO PASS OVER IT.

"The purpose of the road is for easy travel and for the concentration of
motion. Rather than going out on the sides, people go on the road. Now,
this road has more than one lane of traffic; and since it has telephone
wires and water mains, it has various types of traffic. One of the
characteristics of the road is that traffic goes both ways. This also is
an essential characteristic of the essence of space; you go backward and
you go forward. Here again, in your own living, you have a manifestation
of the malleability and variability of conductivity. It is true that it
is not the road itself that removes back and forward, but it is its
characteristic that anything that comes into juxtaposition with it CAN
move back or forward--or stand still. The fundamental potentiality of the
road is conductivity. If nothing moves on it, the potential is not used.
But it is there.

"CONDUCTIVITY IS THE ESSENCE OF SPACE."

WHEREVER IS SPACE, THERE, BY THE NATURE OF ITS ESSENCE, IS CONDUCTIVITY.



CHAPTER XVIII


RECEPTIVITY

THE bare statement--that the essence of time is receptivity--conveyed
little or nothing to us. The explanation of mere meaning was much simpler
than of the other essences. The extensions in implication were
tremendous. To tell the truth, we did not follow them far. That may be
for the future. Betty had a quip she used when we showed signs of getting
off the reservation.

"Sufficient unto the day is the wisdom thereof," she paraphrased.

The first lead was given by Joan, speaking in her own person. Betty was
"showing" her things, and she was reporting back. She did this
conscientiously, but apparently without much comprehension.

"Motion," she told us the results of what she was shown, "has to have
space to go around in. It is possible for motion and space to have
juxtaposition, but, if not registered in time, the result is not an
actuality. I don't get that.--If it doesn't get registered in time, it
doesn't get itself born. Everything has to get born, all consciousness,
to get quantitative development. It makes no difference whether it's an
electric spark, or a baby, or a tree, or a mouse--everything has to be
born."

The material world, both Betty and Stephen agreed, would probably give us
the best hint.

"The easiest example is matter," observed the latter. "Let us reduce
matter, per se to, say, gold. To you the gold is a form attribute of that
degree of consciousness representing gold-ness. It is, to your
sense-perceptions, visual. It is also tactile. You can feel it. You can
measure the weight and thickness of a piece of it. You can melt it down
and transform it into articles for your use. In other words, on your
plane, it is quantitatively malleable and subject to your will. But the
quality of gold-ness is always there.

"Now, whatever you do with the gold--whether you make it into a coin or a
bit of jewelry--it remains objective to you. Your awareness-mechanism is
aware of it. It is received in time, because it is in time that it, and
its relationship to you, occurs. Your awareness of it from beginning to
end is a thing of duration, exactly as would be your use of an electric
current or a radio wave. As such it is observed, operated and established
in your individual consciousness."

"You have in physics," Betty took up the exposition, "a law known as the
indestructibility of matter. This covers energy. As to the
indestructibility of matter and energy, you have the law pretty well
understood. You can reduce your matter into various compounds; or strip
it down to its elements; or you can bring two chemicals together and
dissolve them into gas. But your scientist has learned that nothing is
lost in connection with the element with which he works.

"All these things, all matter, all events, all thought, all ideas are
received in TIME. IT IS BECAUSE OF THE RECEPTIVITY OF TIME THAT YOU HAVE
THE LAW OF INDESTRUCTIBILITY."

"Matter that you see is a good symbol." She started to adopt Stephen's
approach several days later, but switched quietly to one of her own which
carried us straight to a broader viewpoint. "Man is the highest form of
consciousness manifested in your universe," she began. "He has the
creative impulse, just as consciousness again has the impulse to born
things for the purpose of evolution. He makes things--whether a thought,
or a cathedral, or a method, such as the way to use a radio wave--and he
puts them into time. They are received in time. They stay in the
obstructed universe, and other entities of consciousness use them and
profit. Then man comes over here. The whole aspect of those things
changes when he is here. They are no longer obstructions to him, though
he did create that obstruction. Consciousness, per se, itself, the whole
of consciousness, by its juxtaposition does the same kind of creation.
I'm going to leave that now for you to think about."

"Time is, with us," she continued later, "just as consciousness is; space
is; motion is. The trilogia is ever present with us--what we operate in.
But it is in time that all the three-dimensional things of the obstructed
universe are held and become realities. It is in time, too, that they
exist, rather than in space and motion. They do have those essences, but
they REALLY exist in time."

"Time"--this was Anne taking a shot at it--"could be called passive.
Motion and space are more active. Time does not create. Motion-frequency
and space-conductivity--the balance of motion and space--they are the
creative two of the trilogy. Yet they could not focus were it not for the
actuality and the reception of time."

We were getting a pretty good idea, of what was meant. Nevertheless Betty
went back to her law of indestructibility.

"You have a saying that 'thoughts are things.' They are, in this way:
they are received in time, and so are indestructible. You are having a
bad dose of that in the world right now--retarding thought--and it's pre
much indestructible, and you've got to overcome it. If you ever think a
thought or say a word, it is in time, and you cannot take it out. That
law of indestructibility of matter goes clear through.

"You people haven't made much of my statement that the indestructibility
law is possible because of the essence of time, which is receptivity,"
she complained, "but your physicists are going to!"

"Well, all right," agreed Darby. "Granted that things am received in
time, it seems to me that things are also received in space. The physical
world is 'received' in space; it exists--for us at least--in space. Tell
us what is not received in space. How much do we reserve receptivity for
time?"

"I suppose one answer would be that psychological frequency is not
received in space. Your thought is not received in space, but it is in
time. We have told you over and over that thoughts are things--"

"--and over, and over, and over, and over," we gave her our usual chorus.

"--and over." Betty was undisturbed. "There are psychological influences
received in time and not in space. Ideas. Theories. As I said, you're
getting quite a dose of that right now. Take history. The facts and
conditions resulting from 'wars and rumors of wars'--any
happening--remain in time, though the acts as incidents have vanished
from space. What is your present? A condition created by the
happenings--and thought being a thing, it, too, is a happening--received
in time in the past. And on top of this past you, in your present, are
conditioning the future. All that you think and do is received and
remains in time, though your physical bodies and acts vanish from space.
Research, invention, material catastrophes, like earthquakes
uncontrollable by your free-will, or the beneficence of a season
producing big harvests--all are received in space as incidents that pass.
It is in time that they remain--to condition and influence your present
and the present of all coming generations.

"RECEPTIVITY IS THE ESSENCE OF TIME."




CHAPTER XIX


ANNE SUMS UP

WE HAD now, apparently, surrounded Betty's basic concepts. And this gave
her, and Anne, and the others working with them in the background,
enormous satisfaction. Indeed, they pulled off a sort of jubilation, and
told us we should "keep the feast of the Fourteenth of October as the
birth with you of the reality of immortality."

"I will be talking to you a bit," said Anne.

"In the first place, consciousness is the one and only reality in both
universes. In my universe and yours there is consciousness possessed of
awareness-mechanism. With you it is entities, with form attributes. With
me it is entities, with form attributes. You live in your world, you work
with your world, you conceive your world. I live in orthos, I have to do
with orthos, I conceive orthos. Orthos is only a word: world is only a
word. There is but one universe.

"You have in your world what you term sidereal time, sidereal space,
sidereal motion. These constitute the coexistent trilogy of your world.
All that you have, has to do with them. You operate with them. Each has
its own essence--motion, frequency; space, conductivity; time,
receptivity. They are in degrees, and are therefore variously manifested.
But they are in your world.

"Furthermore, they are in your world as obstructions. The world is an
obstructed state. That is what makes it the world.

"In orthos we have orthic motion, orthic space, orthic time. We operate
in them. Consciousness operates in them, in our state, precisely as
consciousness operates in your, state. The only difference is that you
operate in degree-manifestations that constitute obstructions, and we in
degree-manifestation which overcomes your obstructions. Your world is our
world. Your laws are our laws. The only difference is that our individual
development, of our consciousness as a whole, is orthic.

"In other words, you exist in a world and we exist in orthos. You have
the same degree-manifestations, after a fashion, in your world. The
awareness-mechanism of the bug is to your awareness-mechanism as yours is
to mine.

"Do not try to make the conceptions difficult. They are very simple. They
are only extensions of your own ACCEPTANCES.

"Now, you well know that there are about you things of which you have no
sense perception; indeed, of which you are in no way aware. Of many of
them you will be in time aware; or those who come after you. For, just as
you are reaching after the awareness-mechanism that is beyond your sense
perceptions--by invention and research--so are we reaching down with
invention and research.

"Postulate orthos merely as a convenience in terminology. Orthic motion,
orthic space, orthic time, are all contents of each individual
consciousness as they are of the whole of Consciousness. If you will
examine your own bit of individual consciousness, you will find this
true. It is so, through the great trilogia, that you gather to the real
You all that you take in.

"The vital difference between the world in which you exist and the orthos
in which I exist is your conception of matter. This is true, because
matter is always an obstruction to you, though degrees obtain in this
case too. Some are not so great an obstruction as others: there are
solids, liquids, gases."

Anne ended abruptly. She did not proceed, as one might have expected, to
discuss what she, had called our "vital difference"--matter.

"Well," said I to Betty finally, "you have your three central concepts.
What are you going to do with them?"

"It is the meeting of the three that creates the objective in your
universe," said Betty. "I think we should find out how that is."

PART III


CHAPTER XX

MATTER--ARRESTMENT

1.

WE HAVE, then, Consciousness, and in it three basic aspects--Receptivity,
or Time; Conductivity, or Space; and Frequency, or Motion. These are the
co-existents of Being.

"They," said Betty, "are the actualities we live with, work with; as do
you. They are just as necessary to our operations as to yours. You can't
do anything without time, space and motion; nor can we. Consciousness
controls your fundamental trilogy--time, space and motion--Just as
consciousness controls the essences of our trilogia,--receptivity,
conductivity, and frequency. We here, because we are free-willed I-Am
entities of consciousness, control--no, let us be more accurately correct
and say MANIPULATE--our trilogia. You there also manipulate your trilogy,
but not as much--not to the same extent--as we do. However, the three
great coexistents of consciousness are constantly, enduringly,
uninterruptedly with me precisely as they are, and as you know they are,
with you.

"The three," said Betty, "are co-existents in their own right. And the
orthic trilogia of them is a co-existent of consciousness. The term
'co-existent,' it will be remembered, was defined as an all-enduring and
inclusive aspect.

"Consciousness," she summed up, "is the one and only reality. The great
trilogia is orthic time, space and motion. This trilogia is the
co-existent--or constitutes the three co-existents--of consciousness. All
are observable and operate in the obstructed universe, and all three are
coexistents of your obstructed universe. All the familiar things,
occurrences, beings and happenings of your obstructed universe are
subject to the great trilogy coexistent of consciousness; time, space,
motion. That is all there is. Now discuss it."

"I want to avoid the danger of setting out these three co-existents as
actual ENTITIES," said Darby. "And also of setting them out as mere
ATTRIBUTES, in the heretofore use of that word. It helps me to free them
of these conceptions by considering length, breadth and thickness--in
analogy only. By them I mean nothing separate from the object under
observation. Hence I mean no entity, per se. Neither a mere
property--attribute in that sense--of the object. I mean a mental
conception I have of the ASPECT of things only. Cannot we conceive of
length, etc., as ABSTRACTED, as it were, from the object? So, too, with
consciousness: in one aspect, we conceive it as spatial; and in still
another aspect as receptive and in another as movable. The co-existents
comprise an ASPECT of things, rather than an entity."

"Go back to my definition of a co-existent," advised Betty, with vast
irony. "Didn't I SAY aspect? 'Co-existent, an all-enduring and inclusive
aspect'," she quoted herself.

"By Jove!" Darby was both astonished and dashed. "'You did say aspect,
didn't you!"

"The three are co-existents of consciousness, but only co-existents,"
continued Betty. "You see, CONSCIOUSNESS is the reality. It is with you:
it is with me: it is. It is the power, the impetus, the thing that is,
the Being. The coexistents of consciousness are what consciousness
OPERATES in. Consciousness is in motion; all the time. They--the
trilogy--are not attributes; but various juxtapositions of them make
various kinds of attributes. Now, in the light of this talk, could you
define matter for me?"

We tried various definitions of matter, but none of them proved to be "in
the light of this talk."

"Taking into account what your physicists have discovered and are
postulating," said Betty, "would not matter he defined as a trilogical
length, breadth and thickness of orthic motion?"

We agreed that it might; but added that she'd better explain what it
meant.

"But, how does the physicist define matter? As charges of force in
motion. Now read my definition of matter. The physicist does not
understand yet, quite, the actuality of his so-called force in motion. It
is orthic motion. Matter is the form attribute, in the obstructed
universe, of orthic motion."

Well, anyway, we agreed, time, space and motion are always with us, and
we have to have all three; and matter is somehow an attribute of orthic
motion. And orthic motion is really frequency. So matter is really a
product of frequency. That's all right; our own physicists tell us that.

2.

But before we go on to Betty's exposition of Matter there are three terms
properly belonging to this portion of her "divulgence" which should be
called to the reader's attention and defined for the sake of clarity.*
They are: ARRESTMENT: An incidence of frequency, conductivity

* See Glossary.
and receptivity that results in individualization in the obstructed
universe.

Juxtaposition: The manner in which frequency variably collides with
conductivity and receptivity to result in an arrestment producing
manifestation.

Intraposition: As juxtaposition is the manner of arrestment, so
intraposition is the status of relationship that obtains so long as that
arrestment holds.

"I wish," said Betty, "that you could talk this out with some one of the
bright youngsters at any of the electric research laboratories. It would
mean something to him when I said that the radio beams, waves,
electricity, light, all of which you are beginning to handle, are degree
manifestations of only one reality; and that the highest manifestation of
that reality, of which you are actually aware, is consciousness.

"As to matter in the UNOBSTRUCTED universe, it is a question of
frequency. Matter--and by matter in your world I mean obstructions--in
the obstructed universe is also a question of frequency. This is all very
difficult even for me to understand. Individuals here, who in the
obstructed universe made a special study of physics, tell me that your
matter, like our matter, is a question of frequency."

All right, we agreed to that.

"Matter, and force and all of the things you handle in your chemical and
physical world are the result of the juxtaposition in orthos of the three
co-existents," stated Betty. "Matter, the form attribute of
consciousness, is a frequency of orthic motion; conducted in orthic
space; and received in orthic time. For earth perception, registration
results as the consequence of obstruction."

"It always finds expression in one of these coexistents?" we asked.
"In all of them," amended Betty. "They interlock. Between the essences of
the trilogia there is always a ratio of interdependence. Fix this fact of
interdependence in your minds. When you take your obstructed universe and
strip it down to the scientific, in so far as your material trilogies are
concerned, and metaphysically, in so far as your psychological trilogies
are concerned, you will find that everything is based on the great
co-existent trilogia--orthic time, orthic space, orthic motion.

"Now the trilogy is the same with us as with you. It is motion, space,
and time. With us it exists in orthos as frequency, conductivity and
receptivity, and does not constitute an obstruction. With you it exists
as an obstruction. It is this obstruction that you see, that you use. You
yourselves are obstructions.

"Now it seems to me that it would be a good thing if we took some of
these intrapositions in orthos and analyzed them. Suppose we take
electricity, or water, or gas, or anything."

"I don't quite see yet what you are driving at" said I, "but let's take
something simple--like water."

"All right," she agreed. "Water is one of your trilogies. It is a solid,
fluid, gas trilogy. Now there is one common aspect, or one common
terminology, we have to accept in connection with the three essences of
the three coexistents in any discussion of matter; and that is frequency.
And it is variable. In a chemical laboratory, if you combine more of one
acid with less of another acid, you get one thing. But if you use less of
the one and more of the second, you get another thing. The manifestation
that results in water--H2O is your symbol--operates the same way.

"It will be a long time before science has gone far enough in the
measurement of the frequency of motion and the conductivity of space to
be able to segregate the essence of each to the point where they can tell
how much of frequency and how much of conductivity results in the one
case in water, and in another, earth, and in another, air. But you see
that they are degree-manifestations of the same thing, only with
different frequencies."

Darby caught here a possible point of confusion.

"You mention, or at least imply, a frequency not only of motion, but of
space," said he. "You said before that frequency is the essence of
motion. Was I wrong in thinking frequency the exclusive property of
motion?"

"Frequency is the essence of motion," replied Betty, "conductivity of
space; receptivity of time. But matter, as you know it--in any form--is a
degree-manifestation, in time, of some BALANCE between frequency and
conductivity. It is no more split than is consciousness."

"Let's get this quite clear," said I. "Would you say that for the
functioning of these essences they must be intermingled proportionately?"

"The orthic trilogia in the obstructed universe has to interoperate, in
its essences."

"And," I continued my surmise, "the nature of the functioning is
dependent on the ratio of each that is used in the interoperation?"

"Yes. If frequency comes into juxtaposition with conductivity at one
point, you get one thing; if at another point, you get another thing."

"Here's a frequency that is electrical, a volt," Darby contributed. "If
it collides with a copper wire, a good conductor, you get a certain
amperage of current. If with dry wood, a poor conductor, you get
appreciably nothing."

"Illustrating Betty's last statement," said I, "if you send your
electricity through a copper wire, you run a motor. If you send
identically the same current through an iron wire, you get radiant heat."

"Good! " she cried "The thing we've been trying to say is that the orthic
trilogia is all you have to operate with; it's all there is. Certain
juxtapositions of these essences produce different types of energy,
force, matter, and so forth. That is the way the essences function."

3.

We had the subject pretty clearly, as far as our own obstructed universe
is concerned. How about her state of being? Did the same principles
obtain there?

"In this universe of ours," Darby worded this question, "we never have
frequency of motion except in time and space. Now, in your universe is it
otherwise? Is there frequency of orthic motion without its being in
orthic time or orthic space?".

"No. You see, there is only one law," replied Betty. "It is the meeting
of these three in your universe that creates the objective. The
obstructed universe is for the purpose of birth, of the individualization
of consciousness. All matter is born in your universe. Nothing is lost.
Individuality is not lost; though in its lower forms matter can be
burned, turned into gas, or what have you. Yet it is all kept. It is the
highest form, the soul, that goes on undivided. But we have the same
universe.

"Carry back into orthos the concepts from their intrapositions in your
world. You must see that some place between that intraposition and orthos
there is a point at which your awareness-mechanism stops registering
them.


That point is variable with different people, and it is controlled for
the human consciousness by the senses. You know how the senses vary in
individuals--artists seeing color and form, musicians hearing sound. That
can be shown mechanically, but we have no physical laboratory, so all we
can do is to state the law to you. But after we have done that, it can be
placed in the knowledge of men by means of a physical and chemical
laboratory; and then science can extend the law, follow it through."

"Then you have 'matter'--or at least what corresponds to matter?" I
asked.

Decidedly, Betty assured us; but added that she was, in the present
discussion, more or less restricting the term to physical matter.

"Our matter is the essence of form, which is an accompanying attribute of
consciousness individualized, just as I am now the essence of my previous
individuality. ESSE--to be--essence. Our matter is not an obstruction to
us.

"You have accepted the beta body. [See Glossary.] I had it when I was
visible to you. Then when the I-myself left my physical, or alpha, body,
it was the form attribute of my consciousness--my beta--that went on with
me. That form attribute exists in the unobstructed universe.

"Your scientists have accepted the law of the indestructibility of
matter; but I say to you that this law is only a corollary of the
indestructibility of consciousness. You have long known that all
consciousness has form. It is a fact. Now, matter in the unobstructed
universe is the essence of a form attribute. It is not broken up, as on
your side. Primary entities are indivisible. Matter, as you know it, is
not a primary entity: it is made up of primary entities.

My physical body was made up of a lot of little cells. My beta body is
single, atomic.* All matter is atomic here, and of course it has form."

* Betty's use of the word is not scientific, but follows Webster--"not
cut,  indivisible."

"Does such matter furnish points in space, as does ours?" asked Darby.

"Points in space; but not stress points, not arrestments.

"My awareness-mechanism, registers and verifies an unlimited concept,
which is my matter. Your awareness-mechanism registers and verifies a
limited concept, which is your matter. Your matter, therefore, being
limited, is an obstruction. Mine, being unlimited, is not an
obstruction."

It is only, she said, a difference in rates of frequency. We have that
relativity in our own universe, even before we escape into unobstruction.

"For instance, you know perfectly that there are vibrations so rapid that
none of your senses can segregate them, and yet they remain obstructions.
An example: you could cause a flywheel to be turned so fast that you
could not see it, but if you put your hand against it the hand would be
cut off. In other words, the obstruction is still there. This is true
also in your simple understanding of an electric current. You can find
plenty more such examples of the relativity of frequency. Moreover here
we have matter which, because of our ratio of time and space to
frequency, is not to us an obstruction; any more than, from a solid
standpoint, gas--which you utilize--is an obstruction to you.
Nevertheless you do use gas. Now, by this I do not mean that our matter
is formless. All consciousness possesses the attribute of form,
irrespective of

what its frequency is in ratio to either the obstructed or the
unobstructed universe."

She went into that aspect more fully later.

4.

"So," said Betty, "THE CO-EXISTENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS THAT YOU CALL MOTION,
I call frequency. Individualism, in the material world, is caused by an
arrestment of frequency. Thus all manifestation that is man has a common
frequency. You do not raise or lower your own frequency. The
manifestation that is a tree is the arrestment somewhere else along the
line of frequency. The arrestment is what makes individuality."

"I don't like the word 'arrest'." I interpolated, "and I don't believe
you mean arrest. That means 'stop short'. If a frequency is to remain a
frequency, it's got to wriggle a little."

"By arrestment I do not mean stoppage," said she. "The potentiality of
evolution is still in the arrested frequency. It is held in suspension."

"It functions, but it functions in proportion, or at the rate of its
suspension," suggested Darby.

But she clung to the word, possibly because she could find no other;
with, however, the qualification to keep in mind. "Call arrestment a
suspension of potentiality, if that pleases you better," [See Glossary.]
she conceded.

Later, however, she gave us the idea of "arrestment" as "a sudden
interruption in progress," which is the definition of the verb "to
check," at the same time indicating that it is in the sense of this
synonym of the verb "arrest" that she used the noun "arrestment.

"Aside from frequency," she resumed her argument, "take the supposition
that matter is a rate of vibration. As there is only one reality, and
since matter is one thing and you another, you and matter must have
different rates of vibration. The essence of both matter and you is
consciousness. The differentiation between you and matter is the rate of
vibration, or frequency.

"My beta body is of my frequency. My stepping up process, as far as I am
concerned at the moment, is the release of my beta from the lower
frequency of my human body. The only reason you cannot exist and operate
in the ENTIRE universe, as I do--for I operate in our universe as well as
in mine--is because you are not able to step up your frequency."

"Matter, you tell us, is an arrestment of frequency," interposed Darby,
"that is, an incidence of motion, space and time. So is consciousness of
man. There must be some difference between these two arrestments."

"Assuredly. There is a ratio difference. It's a mathematical progression.
Both are manifestations of consciousness. I don't want to use the phrase
'rapidity of vibration'; that gives a false picture. But man is a higher
frequency than the matter he observes. He is closer to the orthic than
the matter he observes. In this frequency band, that is conducted through
space and registered in time, are innumerable very high frequencies that
man is trying to observe. Not so high as his own frequency, but very
close to his own.

5.

"Betty has encouraged two viewpoints," observed Darby reflectively. "The
first is that the difference between her time, space and motion and ours
is a difference of concept, a difference of aspect; and the second is
that more or less she lives in an actual space, time and motion."

"Both are true," Betty assured him. She paused. "Now I want to do this
carefully. We will take first the difference between my time, space and
motion and yours, as to our individual concepts of them. It is difficult
because you deal with the material RESULT of receptivity, conductivity
and frequency, and I deal with the actuality, the essence, the REAL
receptivity, conductivity and frequency. Now there is no less
receptivity, conductivity and frequency in your time, space and motion
than in mine. But you deal with an arrestment of it, which is the
obstruction that makes your obstructed universe, and I deal with the
actuality."

"That is to say, with the unarrested actuality?" asked Darby.

"Yes."

"The fact that I am an arrested--" began Darby.

Betty chortled over this phrasing.

"Well, I have had no ticket!" she chuckled.

"The fact that I am an arrested frequency--" repeated Darby, determined
not to be put upon.

"As long as you're not frequently arrested," prodded Betty.

"The sentence of the judge," Darby yielded to the conceit, "is a certain
concept as to time, space and motion. Now you, as yet, are an unarrested
frequency."

"I told you I had no ticket--as yet." Betty was unsubdued.

"So actually you roam the world quite free of my misconceptions." Darby
was not to be deflected. "It occurs to me that time, space and motion are
all concepts of relationship. Now, if our universe were not one of
pluralistic monism, [See Glossary.] there would be no need for time,
space and motion. If there were just consciousness, and it were monistic
only, and not in evolution, then there would be no time, space and
motion. The point I'm trying to make is that time, space and motion are
concepts of relationship between the individual parts of the whole."

"And something else. Fill it in," urged Betty.

"Can't. Think tank empty," confessed Darby.

"They are really the relationships between the orthic and the obstructed
aspects of consciousness."

"Come again; don't get it!" cried we.

"How can I make you understand; In the obstructed universe all of the
individualistic particles of consciousness that are manifested arrive
with a set quality. This quality, as you know, is of varying potentiality
with respect to each. You also know--now--that each unit of this varying
potentiality is itself, in a generic sense, an arrested frequency. In the
material world this arrested frequency, that is manifested either as
organic or inorganic matter, has the potentiality of gathering what we
call quantity.

"In terms of science, quantity means physical or material growth. In the
spiritual sense it is a growth of character, say. The thing to keep in
mind is that each of these individualities or entities of which you are
cognizant is an arrested frequency, the essence of motion.

"Now I said to you that you, the observer, are cognizant of these
arrested differences as entities. How come? Only because you
have--yourself being an arrested frequency--established, by your own
consciousness, the measuring stick of the great trilogy on earth. It is
you who have made a mile, created a clock, observed the varying positions
of the stars.

"It is your knowledge and use of time, space and motion that links
together the two universes into one,"

6.

"About this arresting of frequencies: what does the arresting?" I asked.

"The juxtaposition of different degrees of frequency in space and time,"
Betty replied. "You could perhaps illustrate it by algebra. Z plus Y plus
Z equals a stone. X plus 2Y plus Z equals a weed. 2X plus Y plus Z equals
a flower. And so on. X is a frequency; Y is conductivity; Z is
receptivity."

"That describes a process, but does not say what does the arresting," I
objected.

That was rather stupid of me, I now see. She had just said that
juxtaposition had to do with it. But the question at least gave her
material to develop the subject further.

"Here is a line coming down on a slant this way: call it receptivity,"
said She. "Here's a line coming down on a slant this way: call that
conductivity. And here's a line slanting in still another way: we'll call
that frequency. Now all three are in evolution. They are of
consciousness, and consciousness is in evolution. If the lines of
frequency and conductivity strike receptivity together in one place, one
manifestation occurs. If you move the angle they make so it strikes in
even the slightest deviation from the first angle, then you get, another
manifestation. But always all three must come together at a single point.
They are variable, malleable and in evolution."

"Then would you say that frequencies coming into time and space are
arrested by the very nature of that situation?" I enquired.

"No. It occurs because there is a stress point created by the
juxtaposition of the three. Varying angles of incidence; various stress
points."

"Then could you say that when the three get together it is in their
nature to create a stress point?" I carried my suggestion a step further.

"Take an icicle." This was Darby. "It is none the less water with all its
potentialities. Yet it is arrested. What caused that?"

"Being arrested means that definite, concrete, measurable form is being
given in the obstructed universe. That is the borning place. It is only
arrested for a certain period. If heat comes to your icicle it will
return to water, then to vapor."

"What happens to receptivity when an icicle is formed?" asked Darby. "I
should say it is considerably slowed down."

"As is also conductivity and frequency," added Betty. "That is why you
have your icicle. Your orthic trilogia comes into arrested juxtaposition.
Which is what I was saying."

"Well," said Darby, "I must say your statement about conduction of sound
was a good one! * I want to point out that it is immensely helped by the
arrestment concept.

* "The atmosphere, or any other physical medium, is not the primary
conductor of frequency. It is an obstruction that brings frequency into
the registration possibility of the limited universe."
"Now there's another thought that occurs to me. What is conducted:
frequency. What is received: frequency. When frequency is conducted and
received, we observe motion. Certainly that constitutes a unified field.
A unified field is what Einstein and all those fellows are after."



CHAPTER XXI

PARALLELISM OF LAW

SO YOU see--was Betty's thought--the processes and laws and methods of
creation work the same for both the obstructed and the unobstructed
universe. This, of course, is only to be expected; and is really what we
were talking about when we discussed parallel laws, and the like.

She carried us on a step further. She--and those with her in her state of
being--live, not in one aspect only of the universe, but in the entire
universe. It must follow logically, then, that she must be in our
obstructed universe as well as in her own unobstructed aspect. Such, she
assured us, was the case.

"Naturally!" said Betty. "Once you accept the unlimited action of the
co-existent trilogia, you tear down completely any real wall between an
obstructed and an unobstructed universe. Founding his researches on this
formula, the scientist can go forward to prove, not only that supposed
limited laws are in reality unlimited, but to discover many new laws and
project their operation and beneficence into your limited field.

"One of the most important things, as I told you, is the parallelism of
our laws. There is only one set of laws; but they are conditioned in two
ways. Now, just to see how well you are getting this, I'll ask questions.
The laws are conditioned in two ways. How? For what?"

"As to the material they work on, and the intention, I suggested.

"That's it The material is the obstructed aspect; the intention is the
unobstructed aspect."

Stephen, on one of his rare visits, made an epitomization that led up to
this same topic. He covered much previous ground, but I include it all
here, as refreshment of the subject.

"Consciousness is the reality," he began. "It is in degrees. It pervades
the entire universe. Because it pervades the entire universe it has both
quantitative and qualitative development. Evolution is a fact.
Consciousness is in evolution. The highest expression of consciousness
metaphysically is man.

"Now the manifestations of consciousness in the universe are in degrees
because the whole of consciousness is in evolution. The degrees are the
evolutional advances of consciousness. Consciousness being in evolution,
and consequently in degrees, is individualistic. The individual
manifestation, no matter what the degree, is an evolutional expression of
consciousness. The entire universe is in degrees of expressed
consciousness. What is an obstruction for one degree of consciousness may
not be an obstruction for another degree. This law proceeds beyond my
present knowledge.

"What you call earth, material matter, the obstructed universe, exists
for the individualization of various degrees of consciousness. In a word:
birth.

"Now, we gave you a new term--orthos, which is, the Greek word for true.
The term orthos simply means the true, co-existent characteristics of the
reality, consciousness. We have told you that there is an orthic
trilogia; in other words, three characteristics of consciousness that
always obtain. These three are orthic time, orthic space, and orthic
motion. They are--whether you realize it or not--the three greatest
familiars of your obstructed universe; and also of the entire universe.

"We have chosen the word 'essence' as a term in this new exposition, to
be used in its basic meaning. The essence of orthic time is receptivity;
the essence of sidereal time is receptivity. The essence of orthic space
is conductivity; the essence of sidereal space is conductivity. The
essence of orthic motion is frequency; the essence of sidereal motion is
frequency.

"The new thought that has been growing in your minds is the fact that the
three essences of the orthic trilogia--receptivity, conductivity and
frequency--have been manifested in the obstructed universe as time, space
and motion, precisely as consciousness itself has manifested in the
obstructed universe as man, energy or force, and organic and inorganic
matter. Or, in reality, life and, matter.

"Every manifestation of consciousness operates in the trilogia essences.
Your laws, which before were termed parallels, are in reality an
extension to the obstructed universe from the unobstructed universe of
the same law. However, there are many laws operating in the entire
universe not yet discovered by individualistic consciousness in the
obstructed universe. There is a whole field yet to be developed."

The disconcerting conclusion we drew from these and Similar discussions
was that there is no such thing as an obstructed universe--except for us!
And when Betty says she lives in our universe as well as her own, she is
just being polite. She "lives in the entire universe"; she told us that
often enough. We live in it too, after a fashion, much as a blind and
deaf man might live in our world. We are obstructed because we are
ourselves obstructions, as one might say, so long as we are here on
earth.

"But," insisted Betty, "this unobstructed universe is part of BOTH of us.
The difference between your existence and my existence is that what is an
obstruction to you is not an obstruction to me; and that you could not,
in your present state, eliminate the obstruction."

All right: we agreed we would admit all that. Nevertheless, here we were,
considerably obstructed; and after all we were the ones she was trying to
make understand; and it is a condition, not a theory, that confronts us.
Some time before, we reminded her, she had expressed the purpose, among
others, of getting to us the actual interfusion of her state of being and
ours. Perhaps we could best get at that by knowing more about her present
state of being.



CHAPTER XXII

INTENT, EVENT AND THE EGG WOMAN

1.

WE ENJOYED considerable idle-curiosity give-and-take from time to time.

"Do you play games over there?" I asked, half jokingly. "Or is your work
so much like play that you don't need games?"

"Of course we play games! We're human!" said Betty.

"What kind of games?" I was skeptical. "Trying to see who can hurt the
best frequency?"

Betty refused to joke. She considered.

"Well, not unlike your games--in principle. We tackle something just a
little too big for us."

That sort of thing was both interesting and amusing to us. We did not
want to press details, but there were certain things having to do with
fundamentals of Betty's present state of being that we desired mightily
to explore further. How does she handle her time and space, for instance?
We had already gathered that, to her, both were highly malleable: and we
had been given certain analogies, as has been set forth in. Part H. How
completely could she escape from that trilogy of time, space and motion
by which we are constrained?

She could not escape completely at all, said she.

"Neither motion nor space could impinge on your awareness-mechanism save
in ratio to time. The same thing is true of me. The potentiality of all
of these three is in consciousness. All I can tell you is that they
operate in the two worlds," she answered. "You must keep clearly in mind
the difference: that the obstructed universe has a limited frequency, and
that the unobstructed universe has an unlimited frequency. But it is the
same frequency. It operates in the same way. You have a frequency that
permits your senses to be aware of the entire universe, up to a certain
point. That point varies with the individual. Our frequency in the
unobstructed universe is the frequency beyond the highest point reached
by that variation.

"Let us take time in your own universe. Examine the various conceptions
of time held by individuals in your own universe. What is time to a dog,
to a child, to you? It is different to each. Time, in your obstructed
universe, is in degrees. The nearest that you can now conceive of our
orthic time, space and motion is your psychological time, space and
motion. They are obstructed only by your degree of conception."

Her "degree of conception," she implied, is higher than ours; hence her
psychological command is greater. This thought was at first a trifle
obscure, though it afforded a glimpse.

"You manipulate time, space and motion--after a fashion--in your
obstructed universe," she pointed out. "So why should not conductivity,
receptivity and frequency be subject to manipulation?

"Our method of contracting [and expanding?] time is our individual
attitude toward it. What may be a long time to another in my degree, may
be a short time to me, and vice versa. We, because we want a given period
to be long or short, make it so. Various persons in your degree of
consciousness approach this power."

That gave us another idea, or rather another glimpse, but the subject was
still not at all clear.

"The trouble is that you are MEASURING time," said Betty. "You get up in
the morning. You have a sidereal day before you. For some reason you wish
it were the end of the day. You don't want to endure the hours. In order
to pass them quickly you put into them content of interest. You have to
cover the sidereal measurement of the day. Twelve hours have to be
filled--a duration. Our time is not divided in that fashion. But we can
extend it in that fashion! I can live here, hour by hour, with you. Or if
I want to leave you and go home and come back to the sidereal time I
left, I can do that. You can't. You have only psychological control of
time, that's all.

"You have developed in your world a greater control of space,
mechanically, than you have of time. We have here a control of time
comparable to that control you are developing of space. I realize that
your control of space is only a time measure, but it is not the TIME of
which you get final mechanical mastery; its the space. Our mechanics are
yours--frequency.

"The best thing I can do to make you understand our apprehension of time
is to liken it to a map. It is there. We encompass it. Time, whose
essence is receptivity, is experience. It is all the empirical knowledge
laid out for us to use. That does not mean that it is static. The future
is there too, and if we have the impulse to pick out of it some
particular potential, we can do so. The future is to us much as the past
is to you. You can go back in history or emotion or research or memory,
and pick out any bit of empirical knowledge that you think will serve
you.

"Now, in addition to this aspect of time as a measure, you use time as a
duration. So do we. But because we have the psychological control of the
map--we can see all over it--we can pick out what we want, just as you
can go back over it and pick out what you want. We can control the
duration of it. Without your knowledge, you do the same, to some extent.
You do it psychologically. One of the reasons why it is possible for me
to be telling you these things today is because in the past couple of
decades your man-degrees of consciousness have so much advanced in the
control of the relationship between time and space.

"We can go backward or forward in time in the unobstructed universe. Time
is. That is probably where the Old Testament writers got their idea of a
God in the heavens, and the last is first, and rolling out like a scroll,
and all the rest."

This too was at least thought-provoking; and it raised a lot of
questions. We agreed with Betty that we would probably understand it
better if we would go into it in connection with her kind of space, but
some of those questions clamored in our minds for immediate discussion.

There was Betty's statement, tossed out in passing, as it were. "If I
want to leave you and go home and come back at the sidereal time I left,
I can do that. You can't."

And her remarks as to her command of knowledge of the future seemed to
carry implications of predestination, of fatalism. And where did the
power of prophecy come in on that? I had had some queer experiences with
prophecy lately.
2.

The matter of what might be called Betty's fleet-footedness did not prove
to be as difficult as we had feared. Betty left its solution to us; and
we managed to wangle it out. She approved of my final statement as at
least sufficient.

"Between the sentences of this very conversation," I proffered, "are a
few seconds of sidereal time, a very brief period, nevertheless time.
However, this is sidereal time; and it is brief only by sidereal measure.
In orthic time, however, it is sufficient for whatever purposes you
desire to accomplish. By means of your control of psychological time, and
your ability to fill it with content, you are able in it to give yourself
'elbow room,' so to speak."

That would do for the moment, said she. Later Stephen added something.

"The essences--receptivity, conductivity, frequency--are the reality,"
said he. "Sidereal time, sidereal space, and sidereal motion are the
manifestations in the obstructed universe. That is what explains the
malleability of time, space and motion. That is what Mrs. White was
trying to tell you. Yet she didn't know how she could stretch or contract
time, space and motion. She doesn't. But she does stretch and contract
receptivity, conductivity, frequency. She knows how to do that. She told
you she used her time psychologically. A little unfortunate; yet it's a
key to understanding."

3.

The matter of predestination, free will, prophecy proved even more
interesting. It came very much into the front of our minds through an
experience that Betty urged upon me. Taking time off, I had been visiting
friends down on Long Island who had invited in one evening a physicist
and his wife who, like themselves, shared my interest in psychic matters,
academically at least. The special reason for the invitation was that I
might be told, first-hand, of a local psychic whom the physicist had
visited several times from a research viewpoint, and about whom he and
his wife had told my friends. His name for this psychic was "the Egg
Woman," and though his reports of his experiences and findings with her
were unusually interesting, they were in the main an old story to me. I
long had been a member of a psychical research group in California and as
such had "investigated" mediums all up and down the Western Coast.* So
under these circumstances, and as it was not particularly convenient for
me to visit the Egg Woman, I stored the evening away in my memory as a
pleasant social experience and supposed it so written off.

* See The Mystery of the Buried Crosses by Hamlin Garland.

However, when I next talked with Betty she insisted that I make the
arrangements required to interview this psychic. Therefore, on a
subsequent visit to the Island, my friends, nothing loath, drove me some
distance into the country to visit the Egg Woman. The wife of a farmer,
she proved to be what is usually called a "fortune teller." My friends
made quite an occasion of the trip--"going to have our fortunes told!"

We found her a personable Welsh woman, very self-possessed, quiet, and
sincere in manner, with extraordinary dark eyes. She needed the
self-possession, I thought, for the house was filled with the noise of
children and two radios going at once. Fortune telling was a side line
with her. She had no assumptions or trappings. She took us each singly,
in turn, into her dining room. There she presented me with a glass half
full of water, a raw egg and a spoon. Under instruction I broke the white
of the egg into the water, and stirred it with the spoon. She looked into
the glass and "read" the pattern made by the white of egg. That was her
form of tea leaves, crystal ball, playing cards. It was her "signal."

She encouraged the taking of notes; and she was remarkable, for of course
she had never seen any of us before, and had no slightest idea of our
identity. Her statements were very definite: they required no
interpretations. But the most interesting phase, as it turned out, was
the accuracy of her predictions. She made a number of them,
categorically; and as most of them were cast to occur in the fairly
immediate future, they could be readily checked. All such turned out to
be correct. Some are still in the future--supposedly. While she gave
neither my friends nor me anything of world-stirring importance, she
certainly impressed us as possessing a definite gift, of its sort.

But I was still wondering why I had had to see the Egg Woman. The reason
soon developed.

"I think," began Betty, the first evening I was back with Darby and Joan,
"it was suggested that we talk about fate, and the conversation at
dinner"--I had been recounting my experience with the Egg Woman--"put in
Stewt's mind the glimpse that is to be found in the old doctrine of
predestination. Suppose you begin by asking questions."

"Well," obliged Darby, "Stephen says that your greater knowledge of cause
and effect permits you to make better predictions than we can."
"I told you that we looked over all time like a map. The contours of the
map we see. For instance, one of the contours of the future is evolution,
a growth toward perfection. We know, for example, that in the immediate
future in the obstructed universe, there will continue to be apparent
deflections of growth and a seeming retarding of perfection.

"Your will is free, and you can choose according to your quality. My will
is free, and I can choose according to my quality. I don't know that you
call it precisely picking out the future. It is perhaps that I set myself
to assimilate an aspect of the future that I am aware I need.

"The truth in the glimpse of predestination is the fact that the
individual QUALITY of one born to earth is fixed; and that it must return
back to its own quality when it comes here. That much is law, and if you
wish to call that predestination, you can."

"Could you," Darby expressed the thought that was troubling us both,
"expand the concept of the future in view of our new ideas as to time? We
gathered that orthic time is rather collapsible; that you could pass on
into the future more or less at will. It is accessible by some orthic law
you can operate and we cannot. I find in my time FEELING, as such, that
it is more or less futureless and pastless. If you include that, it does
give you somewhat of an insight into the future. If you can see that a
thing is going to happen, what can you do about it? That's
predestination."

"Cause and effect," said Betty, "is one of the laws of time, just as it
is one of the laws of motion. There are those here now who could tell you
things that are going to happen. They have proved it. It is done in times
essence, receptivity. "Take your own experience. You get up in the
morning. Your INTENT is to go to the office. You foresee your arrival at
the office. It's perfectly true there are things that could deflect that
intent. And it is true you have to operate certain things in your present
to make that future event become present. Nevertheless, you do foresee
the EVENT. That is a very simple example. You can will it not to take
effect. There can be extraneous deflections that can stop the effect.
That is a condition of the obstructed universe. Predestination is, with
you, only a glimpse. It is much more than a glimpse with us, though it is
not a complete reality. Ask another question: she's lost it."

"You can see this room as it is. Can you see it as it will be two weeks
from now?" propounded Darby.

"Yes, conditioned by certain wills."

"Whose wills?"

"Yours, first, because this room happens to belong to you."

"At some unpredictable hour, something is going to change this room. Have
you the ability to see that change?" asked Darby.

"Yes," she claimed.

"Does that extra ability of yours have to do with a property of time, of
which you are cognizant and I am not?"

"Yes," Betty assured him.

"Can you go farther into that? Or can you only say that it is your
appreciation of more causes than I appreciate? Or is it in the nature of
your sense of time, and not of cause and effect?"

"It is in the nature of my sense of time. But I must insist upon your
also understanding the evaluation of small events and the malleability of
them, in contradistinction to great purposes.
"By that do you mean that small events are more easily disturbed by small
causes brought about by free will than larger events? The latter are too
big to be affected ordinarily by small divergencies of free will?
Therefore the prophets might have more luck with the latter," I
suggested. I was only partly right; but my question did lead directly
into the kernel of the matter.

"The INTENT in time is one thing. The EVENT in time is another," stated
Betty; and paused to let that sink in. "You foresee your future, for the
most part, by the event," she went on. "You condition your future on the
present event. We look forward into time in both ways. We are cognizant
of the EVENT, but we immediately relate it up to the INTENT. Some of you,
too, do that--a little," she conceded. "Some people have that broader
sense of the meaning of events, as it were, the broader evaluation of the
event.

"The evolution of time we see. That you call the intent. It is perfectly
clear to us. We see also the event as it is conditioned by the wills of
men. But we, knowing the intent of time, which is the future, can follow
that conditioned event beyond your present, and see how it relates
itself, individually, to the intent."

"I think we need some illustrations," said Darby. "How is this? Here is a
river. That is the intent of time. Here is a log floating in the river,
an event. You know there's a log jam down the river. The intent of the
river will remain. You know that this log, both of itself and as
implicated with the other logs of the jam, is not going to alter the
intent of the river; and that ultimately the jam will break, and the
event-log will be absorbed in the intent of the river. So that if we were
to ask Betty WHEN the jam is going to break, she might make an inaccurate
prediction. But if we ask her if it is going to break, she will prophesy
truly, for she knows the intent."

"That's good," Betty approved.

"Or take another example," said I. "Before they started work on the
Golden Gate Bridge you could predict accurately that there was going to
be a concrete pillar on the Marin shore. That was in the intent of the
bridge; and you knew that a bridge was intended. And that intent would
not be affected by the small divergencies and exercises of free will, as
in a strike, or being lazy, or sabotage, or what have you. But those
things would seriously affect your predictions as to the EVENT of when
the bridge would be finished."

"The whole point is to differentiate between the event and the intent.
And to consider the juxtaposition of the two," agreed Betty.

"The prediction of the intent depends on the sense of time; of the event,
on cause and effect. Is that the difference?" I asked.

"I think that the intent is in time, and the events the way stations
along the stream," answered Betty. "The intent does control the event, to
a certain extent, but the event is more controlled in the obstructed
universe by the free-will of man. But you cannot control the intent by
the will."

"Then," said Darby, "'intent could not be implicitly relied on because of
the conflicting intents of different intruders."

"'You mean the intents of various degrees of consciousness," Betty
particularized. "The only intent that really GOVERNS is evolution. It is
the primary characteristic receptivity, of time. It is true that there
are various intents, including individual intents, but the intent of
quality of consciousness is more in a straight line than the intent of
quantity of consciousness. Even in your obstructed universe you have
intents of time, as well as events.

"Intents might conflict with each other, you say. What you mean is this:
a high degree of consciousness-quality can set in motion an intent. A
lower quality can also set in motion an intent. This is so because both
are free wills. But the difference here is that the intent of
consciousness is one thing; and the intent of an individual--any kind of
an individual--is only an event.

"When you get consciousness divided into individuals, the intent of the
individual may run counter to the evolutional intent. The difference
between us and you is that with us events are more closely identical with
intent.

"We can see into the future as far as intent goes. We can see event on
the cause-and-effect basis with a broader vision than you. We can see the
event in intent; that is, we might. But what's the use? A leaf falls off
a tree, but what of it? It is unimportant, because it does not interfere
with the intent of the tree at all.

"Now the Egg Woman"--we were back to the Egg Woman at last--"is what you
might call a near-sighted prophet. That is, while she does see, partly,
the short-range intent, it is mostly cause and effect she sees. She does
not predict far ahead accurately. But her close-range stuff is so good
because there the causes and effects are pretty well laid out, with only
small chance of outside modifying or interfering event happening in so
short a time. Besides, cause and effect gain more solidity, immunity,
against outside interference as they approach culmination. A good deal as
a stream gains acceleration and strength as it nears the edge of the
waterfall." Later Darby had an idea by way of illustration. "Here's a
thought on that future stuff," said he. "I look into a mirror in the
adjoining room, and I see in it a picture on the wall that I do not see
actually. And I won't see it actually until I get up and go into that
room and look; and A of that action is not now, but in the future. Time,
the mirror, does show me the intent of the picture, but not the
event--until it comes into the present by my walking into the other
room."




CHAPTER XXIII

BETTY'S WORLD: ITS FLUIDITY

1.

WHEN Betty and Joan worked together as stations, back in 1922,* each used
her own method. Betty went exploring, in her own person; Joan stepped
aside from herself to permit the Invisibles to say what they had to say.
Betty often--when both were in trance--tried to induce Joan to join her,
but Joan had always refused. Her few tentative excursions did not please
her: and the interchange of persuasion and objection was sometimes very
funny.

* See Appendix of The Betty Book.

In rough outline, Joan adhered to her old method now. But with,
apparently, a difference. Heretofore she had been "taken away" merely.
Now she was "taken away," as usual; but was also herself under
instruction.

"Joan," Betty confided to us, "has for the past three weeks been going to
the same school I have been going to."

"I've been here lots of times, but it's only since Betty came to stay
that I've been able to be part of the pattern," was Joan's first comment.
"I have to learn to do what Betty did. If I can do it, with her to
explain, I can tell you how it's done.

"This wandering around over here with Betty is so confusing," she
complained, "because it isn't any different. Now, if it were only a kind
of down-under-the-water place! But it's NO DIFFERENT."

"Well, who said it was?" retorted Betty.

"You know, I've been here BEFORE!" Joan repeated. "It's so FAMILIAR. I
didn't know what the difference was. I'm finding out.--The only
difference is the degree of frequency. I just have more power over here
than I have back with you.

"There are a lot of funny things.--I'm watching people. I'm not like them
yet because I have to go back. I can only stand on the sidelines and
observe."

Betty displayed an almost inordinate pride over this first success of
Joan's. The experience was not often repeated, or at least not often
reported back to us; and was usually intended more to clear our
understanding than to convey anything recordable.

"Joan is here with us," Anne suddenly interrupted Betty's discourse one
day. "Would you like her to tell you what she sees?"

"Very much! " we responded heartily.

"I've always wanted to travel; and now I can travel," began Joan. "I can
go anywhere I want to go. There are no obstructions.

"It is hard to make you understand the difference. The only difference I
can see is freedom, liberty and reality in the things we fight for on
earth.

"One of the things that interests me most is the beautiful bodies the
people here inhabit. My body is tied: I have to go back, I cannot stay.
But if anyone likes light and color--the bodies of these people shine
with light and color. I recognize them by their light and color, because
the intensity of their color and of their light shows their frequency.
You can almost TELL their degrees that way. Certainly you feel the
radiance of their individuality. They are very beautiful.

"I'd like to tell you how I see Betty; how she is with me here. She looks
just as she looked in her garden, except that she shines, and there is a
soft rosy glow from her, and it is warm and sweet, and very, very
comforting to feel. It is friendly and kind, and there is great strength
in it. Her color is a beautiful new color I have never seen anywhere
else. I cannot describe it, for it is out beyond the color-frequencies we
have words for. But it is made up of gold, and rich deep rose, and a sort
of heavenly blue, and it pulsates around her.

"That old saying 'the music of the spheres,' is true too; and it's the
voices of the people around me; and Betty's voice is a dear, singing,
laughing voice. Everyone here who knows her adores her; and she is
accumulating to herself a great deal of power and graciousness and
strength because of the work she is doing.

"Why!" cried Joan, "it seems that we, you, all of us who have close ties
here, can do a great deal to help them, just as they help us! Betty says
I help her, and you help her, oh, so much! She says you are doing the
earth half of her work.

"This place where I am doesn't look any different. It's just here. The
only difference is that nothing obstructs. There seems to be a fluidity
to endeavor, to space, to time, to everything. It flows, some way. The
only difference is that it is unobstructed."

"But," she added, "it strikes me as a place where they haven't any
solids!"

2.

"You want to know how I operate in my consciousness, which is just beyond
yours," Betty took up the story. "We have postulated that there is only
one universe. For purposes of evolution this universe has been divided
into quantitative and qualitative aspects. [See Chapter X, Consciousness,
The Only Reality.]

"First let me get into your minds firmly the idea that your world is my
world, and your matter is my matter. Now, just as in maturity you handle
an automobile differently than does a boy learning to drive, so do we
here differ from you in our handling of the same fundamentals handled by
you. I am going to have to eliminate details because I am afraid of
confusing you, but I am going to try to tell you as nearly as I can what
my world is like.

"In the first place, when you come here, one of the things that astounds
you most, as Joan said, is the lack of difference. Over and over Stephen
told Darby that one of his first jobs here was to meet boys who died
suddenly in the war, without the little interim between the two
consciousnesses, and explain to them what had happened and where they
were."

Of course Betty had already told us, incidentally, a good deal concerning
her state of being. The reader has had some of it in Part I of this book.
And a great deal more came to us at the very first, in unrecorded
conversation, when Betty was giving assurance of her actuality. So I then
wrote out a little epitome, addressed to her, of what, up to date, we
thought we had been told, and the conclusions we had drawn from it Here
is the epitome:

3.

"In your body you have, through its perceptions the same relationships
with your world as we nave with ours.

"But your body is not multicellular, not composed of numerous entities;
it is integral, and expresses only your individual entity.

"You are able to see and touch our world. You experience the same
reactions, subjectively, as you would through your physical senses.
However, you add something to what you have perceived in the flesh; you
'see also beyond it.'

"You understand us when we speak aloud to you. I gather that an unspoken
message consciously addressed to you is likewise heard. I understand that
you do not read thoughts not addressed you; but also you could do so if
necessary or desirable.

"The 'density' so much talked about as being between your world and our
world is a density affecting our receiving function. Its penetration by
you is a job. But the idea that it is dulling to you, that it hampers you
as a drug might, is incorrect."

4.

The basic difference between her world and ours was, apparently, one of
obstruction. What, exactly, did she mean by that? And what were the
implications?

"Just what I said," was Betty's attitude. "Matter is an obstruction to
you; it is not to me."

"Well now," said Darby, "the desk there is no obstruction to you. I
suppose you can walk through the desk. You must then be of matter so
attenuated that you leave on the desk's substance no trace. I was
wondering--"

"You can send an electric shock through the desk, or an X-ray, and leave
no mark," Betty interrupted.

"The consciousness of matter is a very low degree, and it is at the
command of the consciousness of man," said Anne. "It is even more at our
command in the unobstructed universe. However, there are limitations
here.

"You must not forget that we enjoy your earth garden. There is truth in
the statement that God walked in the garden in the cool of the evening.
We love your earth and its beauties and grandeurs. It is very pleasing to
us, and we see more of it than you, and so we love it that much more. It
is a wonderful place, even in its obstructed aspects; and unobstructed,
it is heaven to us who developed our quantity there."

"Do you actually see the desk, just as we see it who are here in this
room, in our physical bodies?" we nagged Betty.

"Let me talk to myself," she requested. After a moment she began to talk
in a low voice, with pauses between each sentence, as though she were
actually doing things, and checking on them as she went along.

"I come into this room. I am living in the entire universe. However, I
see the desk. If Joan went to the desk, it would be an obstruction to
her. To me it is not. Of course, I can't live in those limitations. I
cannot refocus my frequency to recover the old desk. But I could use that
desk in my way."

"Explain a bit," urged Darby. "What is 'your way' with a mundane desk?"

"Well," Betty tried to explain, "the form attribute of the desk is what
is real to me. Now, the form attribute of the desk, naturally, to you has
a certain use. I could do all those things, IF I WANTED TO."

"Then," queried Darby, "your use for the desk corresponds to our use for
the desk, as your beta* corresponds to the beta of the desk. The desk is
an alpha in relation to my alpha body, just as it's a beta in relation to
your beta body?"

"Our 'intent' is exactly the same, as relates to the desk; but our
'event' of use is different," said Betty. "The intent is the making and
storing of records. We make and store records. And even with you there
are various intents for desks. Stewt has a desk for writing one kind of
creative work; Darby has a desk for another kind of creative work."

We abandoned the desk as our illustration. Long since Betty had warned us
against what she called "educating ourselves beyond understanding"; which
is a good phrase to describe a very common human fault. And also she had
warned us that we must expect no clear and detailed account of her world.
Indeed, that warning, had been given us many times by our Invisibles when
Betty was working on this side.

Focusing down to exact description was what Betty called "getting Oliver
Lodgish," in reference to the statements about brick houses, cigars, and
such things in Raymond.* Too literal a translation of a parallel, said
Betty.

* Raymond or Life and Death, by Sir Oliver Lodge; George H. Doran Co.,
1916.

"Sir Oliver is a very great and comprehending physicist." said she. "He
understood in part what Raymond was trying to tell him, but he did not
get it clear."

The best we could hope to do would be to get the principles of her life
rather than the concrete details.

I tried a new tack.

"You say that your body is 'just as I used to know it'," said I. "That,
also, is difficult to understand. What possible use could you have for
such a body?"

"I am as I used to be--you'd know me as you used to know me--" Betty's
voice was doubtful. "I don't believe I can, make you understand. It's
that law of parallels again. My body functions for me--according to my
needs--

"Your development is qualitative," suggested Darby. "Haven't you new
functions and faculties for that development?"

Betty approved the question, but felt we were getting Oliver Lodgish
again. So we veered off from that.

"Now," Betty returned to the original subject, "I said that your matter
is no obstruction to me. Neither is my matter, to me. BUT, neither is my
matter to you. Now chew on THAT."

Darby had a horrible thought.

"Good Lord!" he cried. "When we run against each other I don't know who
rambles through whom!"

Betty laughed.

"The fact is, we DON'T ramble through each other," said she. "ENTITIES,
primary entities, are indivisible. Your body, the 'temple of the body'
that you--the You, the I-Am, the Being--inhabit for a period of sidereal
time, is divisible; for it is made up of innumerable low degree entities
of consciousness.

"I am not telling you anything you do not know. Our primary indivisible
entities could not go through each other. I am calling all this to your
attention for the better apprehension of the indivisibility of your
conscious entity and my conscious entity."

The only difference, she reminded us, is the difference of frequency.
Recall her homely illustration of the flywheel moving so fast--moving
with a frequency so raised that its spokes are invisible, so that we see
right through them. "That is the only reason you cannot see me," she had
said. "And there is a corollary difference in the mechanism of awareness.

"You remember what I said about the 'density' many people suppose we have
to penetrate in order to reach you. There is a question in Joan's mind
about that. When I used to visit here"--she was referring to her
penetration of the higher consciousness when she was still on
earth--"when I used to visit here, you will remember that I used the word
'density' to describe a condition, a difficulty of understanding, a
degree of obstruction. Now, that is what density is. It is not an
obstruction in the sense that your matter is an obstruction, but it is a
lower frequency than we here operate in, and it is a condition of the
obstructed universe that sometimes makes it difficult for us to
communicate with you. But it is not matter, per se. It's a lower
frequency. We have to tune it up to get through it to communicate with
you."

"Then it is not a thing that hampers you in going about in our
surroundings?" I asked.

"No. It is psychological, as it were. It's not matter. It has to do
more--a sort of border line between your subconscious and our actuality.
If you will go back in our old records you will see, with this new
understanding of frequency, what the Invisibles meant years ago when they
talked to us about 'density.'"




CHAPTER XXIV


BETTY'S WORLD: ITS SOLIDITY

"YES," said I, apropos of Joan's statement as reported in the previous
chapter, that to her the unobstructed universe looked like a place where
there weren't any solids, "that's a good point. You said you wanted to
bring--and I mean BRING, said you--a picture showing the oneness of the
two universes; and that they are parallel; and all that. Well, I'll state
flatly that our universe is to us solid. I've bumped my head on it. And
that solidity is due to the fact that things are an obstruction to me.
But you live in an unobstructed universe. What do you do? just float?"

But Betty would have none of that floating business. In fact, I think she
was a little indignant about it. The accusation that she was in any
respect a "disembodied spirit," a "shade," or a harp-playing angel,
always aroused her. "But I tell you, we're HUMAN!" she would protest.

"What is your idea of where I am now, anyway?" she challenged a visitor,
on one of the rare occasions when we had added to our number.

"Why--"stammered the visitor, "I just think of you as suspended, somehow,
in space."

"I am right here," she was most emphatic. "There is only one universe.
There is no other 'heaven.' It is only that you can't see me. Your eyes
are not attuned to the color, your ears to the sound. I am in an
unobstructed phase of the one and only universe, that is all. It is only
that my I-Am is separated from the obstruction that was my body. My world
is your world plus."

"Your world vibrates at a higher frequency than mine?" asked the visitor.

"Yes, it does," admitted Betty. "Just think that it is only that you
can't see me; can't hear me, unless the talent of someone like Joan lets
me express myself through it."

"I have thought of you as a higher octave. Are you always near us?"

"Where else would I be?" Betty was almost impatient. "Space is not what
you think it is. It is only your idea. Space is conductivity. You know
from science that there are a lot of things in this room you can't see.
An ordinary camera would see some of them. My awareness-mechanism is
higher tuned than yours. That is part of my being in the unobstructed
universe."

And that's what we wanted to know about. "The obstruction of this chair,"
Darby pointed out, "is what keeps me from falling into the cellar."

"It's so simple," replied Betty, "but sometimes the simplest things are
the hardest to explain. Of course it's a matter of frequency; that is,
the relationship between frequencies--the frequency of what you call
matter as a solid, and our own individual frequencies. Your relationship
in frequency to the frequency of your matter is what makes it a solid to
you.--I think I'll have to get a clearer explanation for you.

"Here is this world as you know it. You walk on the earth: it supports
you. I walk on your earth, and yet I do not need it to support me. Your
earth is there because it is a nexus of certain frequencies. It exists
for both of us. You cannot walk on your water. I can. But that is because
the relationship of my frequency to the frequency that is water is
different from yours. My universe and my degree of consciousness is
yours, only the aspect is different."

Apparently, then, solidity per se is a ratio between frequencies. As far
as we are concerned, according to Betty, the denser the solid, the lower
the frequency. And it is the ratio our own frequency bears to the
frequency of the matter with which we are in contact that determines its
character as a solid; or not, as the case may be. There are a lot of
things in our own material world that are perfectly real, but are not
solids to us.

"Suppose you are on a mountain, said she. "You see the clouds below you.
They are objective. They have form, color, substance, and they screen
from your sight everything below you. Yet you are aware that there is a
world of action below the clouds. To the bodily you, and to your actual
knowledge, those clouds are no obstruction. They are an obstruction to
only one of your five senses--vision. You can eliminate that by
projecting your body through the seeming obstruction by the act of
walking down the mountain path.

"Or take a rock. You can SEE a rock, but you can't penetrate it. What can
penetrate it? Solids can't; fluids can't; certain gases can't. But
certain frequencies can. They can go through, and be registered on the
other side, without disturbing the rock's form attribute, in your
consciousness. Like electricity or X-ray, or some similar force. Light
cannot penetrate it. And yet your scientists and mathematicians use light
as their yardstick of motion--frequency."

But, said Betty, she does not use light as her yardstick.

"Light," she defined, "is merely a degree-manifestation in space. You
know that both quality of consciousness and quantity of consciousness are
in degrees; and you know that they have degree manifestations. Light is
one of them. Now we take consciousness as in man as our yardstick, and
that is a higher frequency. And I, in my present state, in orthos, as the
highest frequency, can go through the rock. I am unobstructed by your
matter."

All of which was interesting, but it did not meet our question as to her
kind of solidity--if any.

"Now, if my frequency is great enough for matter to be nonobstructable,"
Betty sailed serenely on, "why does it not follow that this same
frequency is great enough to be unneedful of support? I can walk on your
matter, but the aspect of that matter is changed to me because I see it
and deal with it in its essence, in orthos.

"Now I have told you that the individual in the obstructed universe has
an alpha and a beta body. You can touch and feel your alpha body. It has
a form attribute, as has all consciousness. The beta has a form
attribute. This beta is so closely allied to the alpha in the obstructed
universe that it would be recognizable to you, could you see it, and it
is merely the extension into your obstructed universe of that degree of
frequency that is the individual. I have begged you not to try to push
this so far beyond human understanding as to make all of your hypotheses
ridiculous. All the facts that you know in the obstructed universe are in
the unobstructed universe. There is only one set of laws: only one
universe.

"I have my landscape. If I wish to sit beside my stream on my bank of
flowers I can, BY MY HANDLING OF FREQUENCIES, produce an ASPECT of my
matter that will give me a perfectly good support."

"Somewhat like a man in water?" I suggested. "He can float on the water,
by taking certain measures; or he can sink down through the water by
taking certain other measures."

"That's all right, as far as it goes," conceded Betty. "The thing that
bothers you is that you consider matter as an obstruction, and as a
solid. Matter isn't a solid; it isn't always even an obstruction to you.
Matter may be solids, liquids, gases. You do not handle them the same
way, and they do not affect you the same way. Are you near enough
satisfied?

"The whole thing is a matter of relative trilogia," she added. "There are
instances, therefore, in your everyday world experience of an approach to
the essences of orthic motion, space and time. As Anne said to you,
everything is fore-shadowed; it is a projection. Now it is easy for you
imagine the projection of many of your mundane laws into my awareness of
the universe. It is not so easy for you to imagine the projection into
your awareness of common ordinary laws in which I operate, but which you
either have not discovered or are just beginning to sense. As, for
instance, the thing they call now the radio wave; and the new stepping up
of light frequencies through mechanics. Those are commonplaces with us."



CHAPTER XXV

THE HOMELY NECESSITIES

1.

THIS explanation of solidity was clear enough for the purpose at that
tine. It has become clearer since, the more we have thought it over; and
that, I surmise, will be the reader's experience.

"All right," we agreed. "You have showed us that you live in a world that
is solid to you--or of which you can make a solid aspect when you so
desire by, as you expressed it, your handling of frequencies. And you
have repeated in emphasis the old idea of parallels--or rather the idea
of the identity of law in the two universes, yours and ours. In view of
that parallel you must have the same basic necessities as ourselves. We
don't want to force you to be Oliver-Lodgish, and indulge in exact
descriptions, but could you discuss your form of such things as sleep,
food, shelter, communication with each other? In principle at least."

"Well," said Betty, "what is sleep? Sleep, for the human body, is
refreshment, replenishment of frequency. Not of the beta body--which, for
a while, inhabits a so-called natural body--but for replenishment of the
material body in order that it, being of a lower degree, may maintain the
requisite ratio of frequency for your inhabiting it. All consciousness
has its frequency. Now, in the intimate contact of the frequency of the
beta body with the frequencies of the natural body, the lower frequencies
drain on the higher. They have to maintain a definite ratio."

"Is sleep, then, a stepping up of frequency?" asked Darby. "If in sleep
we are more sensitive to the influence of the unobstructed universe, is
that because sleep raises our frequency? Or are we more sensitive then?"

"No," replied Betty "Your frequency is not raised, but your receptivity
is, because the contact between the frequency of your material body and
of your spiritual self is lessened during sleep. That is, your physical
body is maintaining itself without your conscious aid.

"You have rest," she continued; "so do we. The very idea of frequency
implies go-stop, go-stop. You have two types of rest required:
psychological rest, and the rest of the physical body which is
dissociated from the I-Am. Our form attribute--which we had there and now
reclaim--the beta body, has to be replenished, to rest, just as you
psychologically rest; but not in the long, stated, static periods you
have established for the lower degree you inhabit."

"We are unconscious while taking that sort of rest: we sleep," said I.
"Are you?"

"Our awareness-mechanism is never dissociated from our form. One of the
characteristics of my rate of frequency is a closer association between
the I-Am and the form attribute. My form attribute is so much a part of
me that it came along with me when I died. You could cut off a leg or arm
from the form attribute I left behind, and I could still have inhabited
it. But because my form here is integral, there could be no similar
division of it."

"What is your form of rest, if you are not unconscious?" I asked.

Betty was doubtful. "If I said suspension of frequency, it would give you
a false impression. Why not a suspension of projecting frequencies?" she
ventured. "A withdrawal of contacts," suggested Darby. "I really do as
you do, only in a higher form," decided Betty. "I withdraw into my inner
consciousness, AND STOP RADIATION. It's a sort of limited static; a
little space of static in frequency. You have it in sleep."

2.

"Now let's take sustenance," she proposed, "You eat food. By that I mean
you absorb matter of a lower frequency than that of your natural body.
Now, we have form, and we have to maintain form, the balance of
frequency. You do it through air, food, water, sleep. We replenish our
frequency, but not through any kind of food you are talking about."

She did not seem to be able--or inclined--to go further with that.

"After all," contributed Darby, "it isn't the actual food we seek. It's
rather the stimulus of our bodily frequency by means of chemical
reaction. The chemical formula is a frequency formula, not an inert
material formula. That gives us a line. They do it with a frequency
formula comparable to the chemical-reaction conception of food."

"Absolutely!" agreed Betty.

3.

"'So much for food and sleep," said I. "How about shelter? Or don't you
need it? I mean something comparable to our mechanical shelters, such as
houses."

"Our universe, like yours, contains lower degrees of frequency which we
want to avoid. We have our insulations.

"Do you have insulations of different kinds for different purposes, as we
have homes, churches, dugouts?" asked Darby.

"We are so much closer to the essence of consciousness that our form
attribute does not need the same shelter as yours. Ours is a type of
insulation from lower degrees of consciousness that would impinge on our
own consciousness unhappily."

"Well, has this insulation a form attribute, like a house?" I persisted.

"Now you're trying to get me to be Oliver-Lodgish again!" protested
Betty. "Just as matter is a form attribute of consciousness, so is my
insulation a perfectly real thing to me. It is an individual thing, that
belongs to me. It's a condition."

And after all, in principle, that is all our own buildings are for;
insulation against lower degrees of frequency we want to avoid, the
frequencies of cold, wind, rain.

4

And finally this matter of communication with one another, we ventured.
There is, said we, a strong suggestion that you do so mentally, by a kind
of telepathy.

"No, no," protested Betty. "I've told you of that before. We have a
voice. Your voice--in ordinary physics--is nothing but an impingement on
your atmosphere that sets up vibrations--frequencies--that produce what
you call sound. We have exactly the same thing in a higher frequency. So
high that, like the last vibrations on the tuning fork, you do not hear
us speak. That is the only reason in the world I can't talk to you
direct."

"Do you use lower frequencies for communication with each other there, as
we use lower frequencies here: air, pencil, or what have you?" I asked
"Or do you tune in to each other's frequency; or to a common
communication band, so to speak?"

"The latter," she replied.

"So you employ lesser frequencies than your own for such things as--" I
began.

"I am here," she broke in "I have a form animated by frequency, like
yours. It is a higher frequency. Your obstacles are not obstacles to me.

"Instead of our having to create clothing mechanically, for instance, we
do so by a diversion of frequency. We can create directly by an
impingement of our frequency on a lower degree of frequency. We use
degrees. Color is a manifestation of a certain degree of frequency. I
want it in my clothes. I don't make the color. I impinge on that
particular frequency, and call it to my frequency."

"Are you taught how to do this?" I wanted to know.

"Yes, we have to be taught. I can't tell you that I hit a key or touch a
string to do it. It's a selective impulse. I start an impulse with a
psychological selectivity."

"You fix your mind on a frequency you know, and give it an impulse?"

"The impulse is there," corrected Betty. "It is already in frequency.
What I do is to direct the frequency, and I do impel it.

"I don't think I can take you any farther into my mode of life," she
doubted. "You have come so far in already, that to particularize is only
confusing now, to us both. You see there won't be much use in my trying
to give you anything more in that connection, because you have so much
you have not digested. It would be like overloading your stomach."

We yielded, of course.

"Well," said Darby apropos of nothing, "we've got one thing you haven't
got, anyway."

"What is that?" demanded Betty.

"Antique collectors," he said, still prodding.

"We've got 'em: lots of them."

"What antiques are there over there for them to collect?" jeered Darby.

"Outmoded empirical knowledge," retorted Betty.

Darby abandoned that. "How's the cosmos?" he asked lazily.

"Gathering no moss," flashed Betty.

"Well, you must miss something over there," continued Darby, who is a
glutton for punishment. "What is it? The days of the week? Three meals a
day?"

"No." Betty turned serious "The only thing I miss is the use of the five
senses in the obstructed universe for the expression of my love for
people who are still there; and of course if I had that, I wouldn't be
here. I miss their not recognizing me, not hearing my voice, not feeling
and seeing me when I'm there. And of course I am there. I miss your
response. And that is all."



CHAPTER XXVI

HOW BETTY HANDLES SPACE

1.

WE HAD already gone through a considerable course of sprouts on the
general subject of space, as the reader saw in Part II. But certain
aspects of relationship were still in the air. Sometimes over a quarter
of the span of the earth, Betty appeared to have "gone to find out" the
answer to some question, and had returned within the compass of minutes.
How did she do it? Her discussion of her handling of time gave us a clue,
of course; but we wanted to pin the subject down. What is her space?
Where? How does she "handle" it?

"In the sense of extension, your space is our space. Space is a map too.
Again our ability to 'collapse' space is due to higher frequency."

We had found it wise, in these discussions to keep a dictionary handy;
and we had early discovered that nothing less than the unabridged would
do. Darby reached for it.

"The dictionary says," he read, "extension; a drawing or stretching out.
Distance, a standing apart, separate. Is your idea of space, not one of
the distance between two obstructions, not the standing apartness of two
obstructions, but rather of an elasticity?"

"Space isn't elastic," disclaimed Betty. "Conductivity is. You see, it is
conductivity of space we deal with rather than the limitations of
sidereal space."

"Your measure of space is conductivity?" I asked, for getting for the
moment that she had told us just that--"over and over."

The frequency of an electric spark is naturally high; and conductivity,
for it, is also high. The frequency of a physical body is comparatively
low, and the conductivity of space, for it, is correspondingly lower. You
and I cannot get there as fast as does the electric spark, but we get
there a lot faster than we used to. Why? Because we employ frequencies to
supplement our own. In plain words, by our inventive faculty in removing
obstruction. Or in concrete example, by means of motor, telegraph,
airplane, radio.

"Until a few years ago air was an obstruction to man," said Betty "He
could not go through it except on the surface of the earth. The earth was
his only medium of traversing space. Now you have eliminated that
obstruction. What did it? What is it that keeps a plane that weighs so
much suspended and projecting itself through the air? The air was never
an obstruction to a bird, or water to a fish. But both were an
obstruction to man, until his ingenuity built ships, and later planes. In
removing obstructions through his own efforts, man makes his obstructed
universe ever nearer like to my unobstructed universe.

"The whole point is that, gradually, through your science, you are
controlling more and more obstructions. You are reaching up into my
universe. By means of extending your understanding and use of the law."

"Frequency implies a time element as well as a space element," said she
on another occasion, "Naturally, it has to have space to move in; and if
you call it 'frequent' it must be occurring again and again, and that
requires time. Now, we are able to manipulate the ratio between these
things; and by means of that manipulation--which is a manipulation of
frequency--we can give our state of being its spatial contours.

"It's a matter of will, and concept, and filling it. We will to fill it.
You have granted you can handle your space to a certain extent. We handle
space psychologically instead of materially.

"Now suppose I tell you what I do. I want to go home and see if the
leaves are raked up in my garden." Ensued a pause. "All right; I have
been home, and I am here again. You have part of the mechanism I have in
controlling space--the wish, the desire, the will."

"But we have to overcome actual obstruction, and you don't?" I objected.

"We have, in a way, to overcome the same thing she overcomes--our own
concept of time and space; and the reason we have to have mechanical
means is because we have to overcome a certain conception of time and
space," interposed Darby.

"You have overcome your conception by means of such things as radio, for
example," supplied Betty, "but you also have obstruction, and obstruction
because of its material nature, must be overcome mechanically. Ours is an
unobstructed universe; and therefore we have no need of mechanics."

"You live in orthos," Darby pointed out. "Yet you say your time and space
are malleable, collapsible, more or less. If so, your time and space are
variable."

"They are in manipulation; not in essence," modified Betty.

"Suppose," she suggested, "we reduce the problem to sidereal space. The
linear space between two points is actual. In the mathematical sense it
is a 'constant'. In the psychological sense it is a variable. The essence
of that space, mathematically, does not change. Psychologically you can
change it. Mechanically it becomes space-time, and is changeable. Just as
space and time operate for you, so they operate for me. I am not great
enough to change the essence of time, space and motion; I can only read
just myself to them."

"I assume that I have time, space and motion so I can orient myself in a
pluralistic universe," said Darby. "I see my universe through time, space
and motion in their relationships. You must do the same."

"But my concepts are more closely allied to the trilogical ESSENCES of
the orthic," added Betty.

"The fundamental with me is relationship of the three, one to the other.
To what extent does the question of relationship enter into your state,
of being?" asked Darby.

"I can no more get away, in being, from the trilogia, than you can get
away, in being, from the trilogy," said Betty.

"Never," she warned emphatically, "question the reality of time, space
and motion. They are just as your own individual concept of time, space
and motion is malleable, so is mine. The reality of time, space and
motion is in the entire universe. The essence of them in orthos--or the
qualitative universe--is free, or unobstructed; and in the quantitative
universe they are obstructed, for the purposes of individuality. But they
are no less actual, and the essence is no less present. When the beta
body is released from the obstruction of the physical body, it is true
that your aspect, or your conception, or your understanding, or your
vision or use of time, space and motion becomes unobstructed. It is
further true that the malleability of the time, space and motion concept
of your own world which you operate, is extended for me in my present
being. In other words, your recognition of a psychological time, a
psychological space and a psychological motion extends over into my
reality."

"Does it follow then," Darby asked presently, "that your time, space and
motion are only nearer approaches to orthos than ours?"

"Let me see--I don't want to mislead you," Betty hesitated. "The
unobstructed universe is in reality orthos, and we inhabit it, yet we too
are in degrees. The obstructed universe is in degrees exactly as is the
unobstructed universe. It is a law. All laws operate with us as they
operate with you. I am many degrees beyond you. But don't misunderstand
me: I am unobstructed. That gives me a comprehension of, a touch with,
orthos that you have not.

"The thing you must always remember," she reminded us, "is that all
consciousness, all awareness-mechanism, individualized, is in degrees. It
isn't that we don't have matter: we do. We all have form; and matter is
nothing but a form-attribute of certain degrees of consciousness. And it
varies in form according to the degree. Our awareness-mechanism
apprehends. A certain degree manifests to your awareness-mechanism as a
solid. But not to mine, as you consider a solid, because with you a solid
is an obstruction. This is because of the orthic quality of time and
space and motion with us."

2.

"There is a little point of puzzlement in that degree thing as
manifesting in an individual frequency," interposed Darby. "You say I
cannot become aware of your world because my personal frequency cannot be
stepped up to that point. But another time you told us that there are
certain personal frequencies here on earth that are actually higher than
the lowest personal frequencies there with you. There's a discrepancy in
idea there."

"Not really," returned Betty. "It is a question of DEGREE of
consciousness rather than of frequency. Your degree may be as high as
mine, but your frequency is arrested, held static--as is your quality--in
the obstructed universe. It is arrested by your earth-body frequency. The
I-Am frequency is much higher than the earth-body frequency. Yet the two
are combined in the obstructed universe for the purpose of
individualization.

"The handicap is simply the handicap of the COMBINATION of the alpha and
beta bodies."

"Yes, I can see that," agreed Darby. "Now, here's another thing that
occurs to me. When all obstruction is removed, there's a lot emptied out.
My typical day, for instance, is occupied with handling obstructions. I'm
largely engaged in overcoming resistances. I get out of bed, and from
then until I go to bed again fully eighty per cent of my time is occupied
in moving matter, in one way or another. You don't have to do that. You
have eighty per cent more time to fill up. If I had eighty per cent more
time, I simply would not know what to do with it. You have a lot to fill
up when they emptied out for you the content of your human senses."

"Emptied out the content of my human senses!" Betty repeated the phrase.
"That just isn't true! We bring them with us, only intensified."

Darby still indicated that something must be done about that extra eighty
per cent of leisure.
"Would it mean anything," suggested Betty, "if I said we fill up the gap
caused by the lifting of obstructions by means of our increased ACUTENESS
of perception. Our range of registration is so much wider."

"I think I see it," I ventured. "If you take a two-hour walk in the
country with a dull person totally uninterested in nature, it seems
forever; but with a naturalist, say, who knows all about the birds and
pretty flowers and things, those two hours--"

I did not need to finish.

"That's it!" cried Betty.

A stray word brought up another loose end of thought. It really grew out
of one aspect of the discussion on space. In the course of it, one of us
propounded the question that someone invariably asks--about life on the
other planets, or elsewhere in the physical cosmos.

"What I have been told," Betty replied, "is that there are other degrees
of consciousness on other planets--on the other solar planets--but not
quite comparable to man. They are borning places like earth for other
types of consciousness, but what their degrees are I don't know."

It seemed to me it ought to be simple for her just to go and find out.
Hadn't she command of space? But apparently that did not work.

"It has to do with frequency. You see, we come from the earth; and while
consciousness is only one in the entire universe, sidereal and solar,
there are varying degrees of frequency: and because I am I, I too have my
limitations. It would seem possible for me to visit the sun, but I am not
ready to, do so because my degree of frequency is not yet suitable."

"Well, how about tackling the planets, then?" I suggested.
"I think that has to do with light," said Betty doubtfully, "I know it
has to do with coldness, with that frequency. I do go beyond your
frequency in sight and sound and obstruction, but I am still close to
you, comparatively. Let Anne talk about it. It's confusing, to me."

Anne obliged.

"This is difficult for your understanding, and I don't think it will mean
much to you; but I'll try," said she. "Too much detail would confuse your
judgment. There is much I do not myself know.

"This is true: that in all the universe there are manifestations of
degrees of consciousness. Many of them manifest as what you call light
and heat. These constitute your solar system. We have told you that the
entire universe is constituted of obstruction and unobstruction; and that
both are operated by the same law. You can call it parallel law, or
extension of the law. On all these planets there is manifestation of
degrees of consciousness. On some of them, I have been told, there is
manifestation equal to man: that there have been such, equal to man; that
there will be others equal to man."

We gathered that Anne was talking of sidereal planets in general, and not
merely of those in the solar system.

"The attraction of the earth's frequency holds those of us who developed
our quantity on earth," she continued. "The other night you were talking
to a scientist, and he told you that if you had two currents going into a
bed of mercury, and you put one pole of frequency in one end and the
opposite in the other, they would draw together. That is what happens to
the obstructed and unobstructed universe that is surrounding this
particular bit--earth.

"All consciousness is in degrees. I apprehend that the sun and its other
planets are degrees of material consciousness of such a type that the
beneficence of the sun's heat develops lower degrees of consciousness,
where the heat of light strikes.

"But I would be misapprehended if I tried to tell you anything about it.
The frequencies are so different that we are held to our own yet. That is
why we are so near to you. We call this an unobstructed universe, but it
is psychologically limited. There is a difference."

"Limitations of your own individual development of consciousness," I
surmised. "We here, when you get right down to it, are developed by our
overcoming of the obstructions that characterize our obstructed universe.
Since we acknowledge the parallelism of law, you must have something
analogous, in order to develop. Do limitations of individual development
supply that resistance to you;

"Our limitations here have to do with ourselves, and are mainly
psychological," said Anne. "They are inside of us?--well, yes and no.
There are 'obstructions' of frequencies and degrees. I shall go on into a
further degree of consciousness, but I must graduate to it. Our
resistances are for development, as are your obstructions. We grow by
overcoming, just as you do. You have to overcome definite obstructions,
physically, materially. And also you have to overcome mass psychology.
You have to overcome now this ideology that is growing up in a strip of
Europe. It is a more definite obstruction than a mountain range would be.

"I would not have you think that in this mode of existence here there is
lack of understanding of psychological obstructions caused by deliberate
planning. The obstruction here is in the degree--the lack of development
of the degree; and our job is to bring it up. We are still so close to
you that such an obstruction with you also retards us; and we can garner
here much quality by aiding you to overcome it. We do this also
individually. I heard Betty say last might that you were carrying on her
work. That is true: but also she is carrying on yours, and thereby she is
gathering to herself strength and influence and understanding and wisdom.
It is a good word: wisdom"

"I understand," said Darby, "that you deal in two types of
frequency--your own, and others outside which you employ for specific
purposes. Those outside might be compared roughly to our electric or
radio waves. They are no obstruction to you; but are they not more
analogous to our conception of the material than are those frequencies
which are your own?"

"Aye," agreed Anne.

"We are not conscious of doing anything of the kind, but do you not, out
of your own frequency, develop what might roughly be called forces, which
you manipulate?" Darby continued.

"Aye. What about thoughts, force of character, decisions? You develop
them. They are frequencies, and are more potent than many other
frequencies. Thoughts are things. The hardest thing to wipe out of your
world is an idea."




CHAPTER XXVII

THOUGHTS ARE THINGS

"I AM glad Anne brought that up," said Darby. "I suppose the statement
has come to us fifty times, not only from Anne, but many others. Just how
literally is thought 'real'--is it literally a 'thing'?"

We discussed that matter, pro and con, without getting much of anywhere.
But some days later, Anne abruptly began the evening.

"I am here," she announced. "I would talk to you for a bit on the reality
of thought. I have nothing new to tell you. Many a time we have told it
to you, but we will try to point it up into an apex of understanding. I
will ask a question; and it is not rhetorical. What, above all other
things in the obstructed universe, continues after the individual who
promulgated it has been dissociated from the material frequencies which
were his body, and himself passed into the unobstructed universe?"

"Oh, we'll grant that it is thought," admitted Darby, a little wearily,
"but that does not answer; it just restates."

"Thought," said Anne, "is an attribute of consciousness. Being an
attribute of consciousness, it has frequency. It is received in time;
and, according to its creative potency, it remains in time."

"It is," Darby pointed out, "received in time; but it is not received in
space. In that respect it differs from ordinary material things. Yet you
are continually telling us that thoughts are things."

"Thought is as much a substance as electricity and such things that you
deal with," asserted Anne. "There is a statement I will make to you, that
I have not made. It must be apparent to you that you live in two aspects
of the obstructed universe. You have sidereal experience; you have
psychological experience; and you have empirical knowledge of both. This
is what I would tell you: that the psychological experience is and
remains realer, more comprehensive, than the sidereal. And you can
understand your psychological experience more basically, minutely. You
feel more the actuality and reality of it than of your sidereal
experience. Why? Because the psychological experience is that which is
most closely related to the I-Am, whose form attribute is your beta body,
and which carries on forever; the I-Am which is the core of you, the
purpose of consciousness expressed in the individual."

Darby accepted this.

"Would it be correct, then, to say thought is a frequency, just as
electricity is?" he asked.

"Aye," agreed Anne.

"Then thought is a force, rather than a thing," I argued, "and manifests
itself as a thing only through its action. Like electricity."

"You cannot use the word 'force' as that word is used by the modern
world," Anne objected. "We want to avoid that word. I gave Betty very
strict instructions not to use that word. There is a borderland, a
no-man's land, between the obstructed and the unobstructed aspects where
is all that which Stewart calls force. That you realize and manipulate,
but its form attribute you cannot see."

"Then I am to understand that electricity, per se, has a form attribute
to its own?" I wanted to get this extraordinary statement cleared.
"Aye," Anne assured me. "You know it by its potency. You diverge the
potency into different works. It is precisely the same with thought;
only, instead of the thought-frequency coming out of no-man's land, it is
your creative agent, and it is THERE you are like what you call God--or
the devil!" added Anne quaintly.

"There is form," she continued. "All consciousness has form. It is not
true that all consciousness is associated with other consciousnesses, as
man with his body. Life: yes.

"There is a differentiation between what man controls and what he cannot
control, or recreate. For instance, you can call electricity out of
'nowhere,' and pass it into a wire, then dissociate it from the wire, and
pass it back again. You can dissociate the I-Am from the alpha form
attribute, but you cannot pass it back again. That is so with all life,
as you call it."

"Your statements are reasonable," admitted Darby, "but our question is
still not completely answered. You say, 'thoughts are things.' Marbles
are things, and everybody knows what that means; and I can put one in my
pocket. And it may be lost or roll into a corner, and I may never see it
again. But it goes on being a marble. I have a thought. It isn't a thing
in the sense the marble is a thing, and it doesn't last. You seem to say
that all our thoughts keep on having registration somewhere. I have lots
of thoughts of no importance for registration."

"Tour own thoughts are of importance to you," said Anne. "The stream of
electricity and of thought are only comparable for the sake of
illustration, and not really near enough alike for that. But the
individual thought is not unlike a spark of electricity that flashes up.
It can't spark outside its own source or substance."

"The electricity eventually and inevitably grounds back to its source,"
Darby followed the analogy. "Does my individual thought similarly ground
back into the 'substance of thought,' the source-thought?"

"Aye," said Anne.

"So that when you, speaking morally, continually tell us that thoughts
are things, you literally mean our thought is indestructible?"

"Aye," said Anne.

"Do my unexpressed thoughts have objectivity)"

"They have more objectivity in you than they have in the general
reservoir." Anne modified this. "When your electric supply is flashed
without application, you call it a waste of energy."

"Is there not," I put in, "a parallel in our quality-quantity idea?
Thought is in evolution: no doubt of that. Is not the individual thought
a contribution in quantity, so to speak, to the quality, which is the
source-thought, or substance of thought, or whatever you want to call
it?"

"Aye," Anne agreed to this.

"Just to sum up"--this was Darby--"thought is a frequency analogous to an
electrical frequency. Just as a fortuitous spark finds its way into the
body of electricity, so even the unexpressed thought finds its way
objectively back to the body of thought. And, like the fortuitous spark,
might not add much."

"It gains its dynamics by expression, by manifestation? " I surmised.
Anne assented. Darby went on.

"But," said be, "the fact that the thought was not expressed would not
break down the potential of its objectivity."

"You say that 'a certain attitude of mind is in the air'. You speak
true," said Anne.
"That might be explained by the process you are describing," conceded
Darby, "but on the other hand, modern methods of communication are so
widespread and rapid--"

Anne interrupted.

"I grant the communication, but I do not grant that it need be in words.
If one man in an audience is discontented he may infect a whole audience,
though he never opens his mouth. Man never has realized the importance of
thought. I will give you a key. How far does your thought go?"

"Without limit; no, limited only by my degree," replied Darby. Anne
continued:

"There is a definite frequency that goes out from the minds of men of
which they have not taken full cognizance, and that is thought. As a man
thinketh, so is be. But I would go one step further and say: as a man
thinketh, so is his surrounding habitation, so is his influence on the
other frequencies he comes in contact with. Especially human frequencies.
Especially those of lower degrees than his own.

"You go to your daily work with a glad heart and a free mind, happy in
your consciousness, and the day starts with a snap, and you affect
everyone. On the other hand, you do not feel so good, and down goes the
whole day; and those in contact with you get the reflex. That is a
definite application of your frequency, for it's a thing. A man can have
private moods of his own, certainly--like sorrow--but this is true: that
every time you overcome, you have strengthened your frequency, and you
have gathered unto yourself a bit more of the source material, and the
thing that is You. Thought is a reality. Its potency in your world is
very great--as you of this generation should well know. He who seeks
wisdom either as a protection to himself or as a service to others, must
first of all recognize the objective validity of thought."



CHAPTER XXVIII

DO YOUR JOB!

1.

"YOU started out to bring us a picture of your state of being," I said.
"I'm willing to acknowledge it's a pretty good picture. But it is not
complete; and that incompletion is dangerous."

How was that? Betty wanted to know.

"It's too attractive. You've talked so much about your lack of
obstruction, and your high-wide-and-handsome manipulation of space and
time, in contrast to our hampered state of existence; that you are apt to
discourage the average man here so he'll be inclined not to bother any
more. He'd rather just sit down and wait. Or anyway, he'll lose his zest.
That's a state of mind they had, more or less, in the dark ages; and
which great masses of people have now in India and the East. And it
doesn't work. I don't believe that is the effect you desire."

It certainly was not. Betty applied herself very seriously to getting rid
of that possibility of misconception. What is the earth for? Certainly
not a mere waiting room. And certainly, if willfully we use it as such,
we shall not become an easily and pleasantly functioning part of her
unobstructed universe. If we want to keep really attractive that picture
she had drawn--we must earn the privilege. We have responsibility.

"Why," cried Betty, "the fact that you are a bit of individualized
consciousness is itself a responsibility. The old saying that a chain is
no stronger than its weakest link is true as far as it goes. The chain
may indeed break there, but it can be mended. The point is, no one should
want to be a weakest link--the cause of a need for mending. We all know
that in ordinary living, rightness does have a certain reward, and that
there are penalties for the breaking of any law. In the greatest
actuality, consciousness, of which each of us is a part, that is the
truest of all. Consciousness is in evolution. There is no way an
individual bit of I-Am can stop it. Each bit has to grow sometime: it has
to keep up with the evolutional law. Consequently, the more quantity one
attains in the obstructed universe, the more beautifully he will be able
to go on in the unobstructed universe. Indeed, just that accumulation of
quantity is the reason a long life is desirable. That is why we have to
look on suicide as cowardice. The suicide is the fellow who is not wining
to accumulate as much as possible.

"In older civilizations, where they have a closer understanding of the
indivisibility of the universe, old age is greatly honored and much
desired. As Stephen told us years ago, there is a germ of truth in any
belief that has survived over long periods. The ancestor worship of the
Chinese is a recognition, from one point of view, of the accumulation of
quantity given to the whole of consciousness on entering the unobstructed
universe. Too great stress cannot be placed on the responsibility of the
individual, not only in connection with the whole, but especially in
connection with his own I-Am."

"Quite true," I agreed, "and you have expressed the idea before. But it
is, to the average mind, too much of an abstraction. It will get mental
assent, but mental assent to an abstraction has not nearly the effect of
a punch in the nose. If you could tell, concretely, what's going to
happen to the fellow who lies down on his job, you'd be getting
somewhere. There's considerable virtue in this hell idea as an
influence."

"Free will creates its own hell with the widening of the arc of
understanding," said Betty. "No person of any sensitivity at all lives in
the obstructed universe without having acquired, by maturity, some
regrets, either slight or deep, though generally those regrets come only
momentarily, in flashes. However, they should make it perfectly possible
for anyone to understand the acme of regret that is the portion of the
individual coming to this place of perfect understanding who has either
shirked or passed by his earth opportunities.

"There is a very definite reality in 'hell' and 'purgatory,' not
precisely as the theologians have it, perhaps, but a reality. But no one
comes to the perfect understanding without the necessity of a time of
readjustment, and wishing he had done differently, and a girding of his
loins for going on in the evolutional process which he cannot escape, and
does not want to escape, because it is the law. So it is ever good to
pray for the easier girding of the loins, at least, of those who have
gone on into the perfect understanding. Why? Because the universe is one.
You pray for us: we pray for you. You can be, in a sense, our guardian
angels, as we are yours.

"He who comes here without his full accumulation of quantity, cannot
quickly assume control and manipulation of the law of the unobstructed
universe. It is here exactly as in adultland. A child who is well trained
steps into manhood well trained, and can leave childhood behind."

"Well," said Darby, "take a man who does all sorts of wrong on earth. How
does he get by so easily over there? How does he so soon get control, and
so readily?" "The answer is, he doesn't; he can't. That's his hell."

"Then actual unhappiness does exist on your side, in certain cases? It
must," reasoned Darby.

"You see, consciousness is its own judge. So there must be individual
unhappiness--until that consciousness is appeased."

That, she explained further, is one of the great differences between her
state and ours. A fundamental in her state--whether of saint or
sinner--is a tremendous urge to go on. Some of us here lack that; others
may have it, but can ignore or smother it. That is impossible in her
world. It is a basic instinct, even more peremptory and compelling than
our own basic instincts, such as self-preservation, sex, hunger, thirst.

"It is the same for all," said Betty, "so peace and rest and ease do not
come to those individuals as easily. They have to acquire it, to make up
for what they did not do there. Furthermore, instead of going forward
quickly into a higher degree with its higher perceptions and pleasures,
they have to linger in that low degree in which they were. Yet in them
the urge is strong. They suffer--from frustrated urge. And when they get
here, regret is no momentary flash, to be thrust down, as on earth."

Darby returned to the original topic.

"In the obstructed universe there are material values that can be
obtained by stealth and cunning," he propounded, "and if a man gets away
with it, he has at least the satisfaction of actual possession. In the
unobstructed universe there are no such values. Appreciation of that fact
is part of the quick illumination of those who go over there? Here's a
fellow who robs some other person, on earth. He goes there. He is quickly
illuminated. Now, what restitution can he make to the man he robbed,
still on earth?"

"Sometimes he can make restitution. But more frequently he cannot; not in
the obstructed universe. I know such a man, and he spends his entire
existence futilely trying to rectify, in the obstructed universe, a
mistake he made there. In consequence, he was not only retarded when he
came, but he is continuing to retard himself."

"Suppose both the wronger and the wronged are now in the unobstructed
universe?" asked Darby.

"That is a happier circumstance. That is where the 'seventy times seven'
forgiveness thing comes true. They both understand: they both are free."

2.

I had, apparently, brought up a good point. There is, said they, no
stability to "spiritual development" unless first a foundation has been
established for it by adequate accomplishment of the ordinary things of
the life in which we find ourselves. We may think we are making progress
for eternity by "withdrawing ourselves from the sordidness of life." We
may imagine we are getting somewhere by cultivating assiduously our
"higher natures," either by our own inner meditations, or by following
the practices of some religion or cult. And, indeed, we may gain by such
conscious effort--but only if we have first done thoroughly and
adequately the ordinary commonplace job of living out what is thrust
under our noses. That is what we are here for. And it makes no great
matter how sincere are our "higher" intentions. Betty had scant patience
even with those who piously and consciously devote themselves to
"service," if by so doing they leave their own backyards cluttered.

"When you make a cult out of service," said she, "you have eliminated
service, and created nothing but egoistic satisfaction. And egoistic
satisfaction is a straight road to self-adulation, and that leads to
attempted dictatorship."

We raked these coals over pretty thoroughly. Charity building up vested
interests; altruism so focused on correcting one corruption or negative
as to undermine hardly acquired positives--both were uncompromisingly
criticized.

"The simplicities of truth have been for too long overshadowed by
idealistic thinking," said Betty. "That type of thing establishes vested
interests for itself, and then rationalizes and propagandizes for the
sake of protecting them. I am not talking about any such colossal systems
as have sprung up in Europe. I am speaking only of the comparatively
uncomplicated social systems of your own particular way of living. I am
not denying democracy. Nor education, nor charity. I am urging them. That
is what this whole divulgence, this philosophy, is about! But I am also
urging a recognition of the inevitable and undeviating laws of
consciousness--an acceptance of them, and a responsibility to and for
them.

"After all, if consciousness is in degrees, it is in that manner that it
has to operate, and it is in that manner it must evolute. You 'can't make
a silk purse out of a sow's ear'; but a sow's ear is of itself a very
beautiful and soft thing. As I said, the world has gone haywire over
idealistic thinking. It's the same story as that of the Jews modeling a
calf out of gold, and then being so enamored of the apparent realism of
their creation that they set it up and worshiped it as God. Your
idealistic thinking has run along the line of trying to force what you
consider growth on all degrees of consciousness.

"Now I submit, Darby, that that man who was here tonight [a mechanic, who
had been called in to make household repairs] is gathering more quantity
unto himself by going his own free-willed way according to his degree of
quality than if he had permitted you to force on him the reading of books
he could not understand, the possession of things he could not afford, or
attendance at the opera that would entertain him about as much as Chinese
music would entertain the three of you. There has been too much
holier-than-thou stuff, and not enough recognition of the genuine
adequacy of growth.

"Socially, democracy is the closest thing to real evolution. And it
worked very well in this country as long as, it operated on the degree
method. And whose fault is it that it seems to be falling down? It is the
fault of the higher degrees of quality, because they have become so taken
up with their own creations--their golden calf--that they have shirked
their responsibility.

"You are your 'brother's keepers'; and that goes for high, low and
in-between alike. No man--no man," she emphasized, "be he born with great
or small quality--his individual potential ability--can get away from
this fact."

"Now," Darby reverted, "take the person who has fostered or allowed in
himself a gradual growth or accumulation of petty griefs, envies, angers,
unkindly judgments, intolerances: toward his associates, amounting
finally to a complex that actually makes a character? How is that
resolved in the unobstructed universe?"

"Those are the negatives that must be eradicated in purgatory,' if you
want to call it that. Such a person must come to a complete
understanding, complete selflessness, complete love. AND BY HIS OWN
EFFORT. Except it might be made a little easier, as we here help each
other.

"It is only the emotional things that really count. If people are big
enough to live right emotionally, the concrete things can be overridden.
Because--and I want you all to get this--because NOTHING THAT HAPPENS TO
AN INDIVIDUAL IS AS IMPORTANT AS WHAT THAT INDIVIDUAL THINKS ABOUT IT."




CHAPTER XXIX

THE CONTINUITY OF EXISTENCE

1.

OCCASIONALLY, after a period of good hard work, Betty was willing to
indulge our curiosities a little. But only by way of dessert, as it were.
"What do you want to know?" she would ask. Generally these talks started
on a more or less frivolous note, but were likely to lead into serious
discussion.

"How about dogs? Have you got dogs in your world?" I asked.

"Of course I have my dogs; and I love them," she replied.

"Then they continue on individually as you do? As dogs, I mean."

"The individual is immortal. He or it brings back to its degree its
accumulation of quantity, thus raising the degree level. Too bad if, when
the degree level is raised high enough to require a new form, there
should be no more dogs born!"

"Well, some dogs have been over there so long they ought to show the
effects of change, if there is any. How about Moses' and Aaron's dogs?"
asked Darby.

Betty chuckled. "Why, I don't even know where Moses and Aaron are!" said
she.

2.

This was one of the occasions when our trivialities led into something
more serious-minded. Betty's confession of ignorance must have bothered
her, for the next session she returned to the subject in the first part
of the evening.

"I couldn't find Moses and Aaron," she began on a facetious note, "so I
went off on a still hunt for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. And I've
been told things. Some of them I don't myself quite understand. You see,
I went to school and tried to learn some of the things you want to
discuss. We were talking about the continuity and persistence of the
individual. It's an old story that all religions that survive have
glimpses of fundamental truth, which through the years become distorted
into dogma. One such glimpse is purgatory. The conventional purgatory
does not exist. What does exist is the life immediately beyond death on
your plane. During this particular life--my present life--there is very
little difference or change.

"Now, the best illustration for the progression of life here is your own.
Your life is in stages--early childhood, boyhood, young manhood, middle
age, old age. They are all steps, and they are all different. Each one is
dependent on its preceding phase and what has been accomplished by and
during that phase. My present phase of life, just as yours, is not my
last phase. I shall go on again; I shall evolute; and I shall do it as an
individual.

"You have been thinking about the persistence of the individual through
all eternity in all its degrees; and you were talking about personality,
and the difference between the two. Personality is not a strong enough
word for my side of the wall. Mere personality can linger and remain
potent in your obstructed universe even after the individual has passed
to my plane. The personalities of Napoleon, Henry VIII, Plato, Caesar,
Confucius, Lincoln--and thousands of others--were so vivid and so
expressive of their times that they have remained in the world and in the
minds of men.

"Now, it is true that all individuality, on being separated from its
lower degree habitat in the obstructed universe, comes back to the
qualitative degree out of which it was born into the world for the
accumulation of quantity. And it is also true that in this very
close-to-you phase of life in which I move and am, there is very little
difference. But even on your plane all consciousness is in degrees.

"The lowest degrees of consciousness come back to our plane without much
individualization. An electric current is not much different here or
there. The difference between your matter and mine is obstruction there
and not here. The thing that does persist individually on this plane is
that type of consciousness that on your plane has acquired volitional
reasoning.

"By that I do not mean instinct only; it goes on through, I don't know
for how long. Probably to a certain point of development, rather than for
any specific length of time. But only the volitional reasoning creature
comes back to its degree as an individual. An amoeba does not come back
as an individual. It hasn't the volitional reasoning power, and is
absorbed into its degree. The amoeba has its degree here, and it has its
purpose, but it does not manifest quite the same here; is not
individually immortal, the way I am. For that you have to get closer to
the man-degree. Dogs--my dogs are here--they do have fairly high
development of volitional reasoning.

"As for me, when I shall go on into my next life, I do not know. They
tell me it will be something comparable, but not quite as I know it here.
I know there are future manifestations of consciousness, but I do not
know their characteristics. I know I shall go on. I have had the
experience of transition. You have not. When they say to me that I am
going to experience further transitions, but that I am only going to
experience something familiar to my being, I believe what I am told.
There is an ultimate or supreme degree of consciousness."

"What is the highest degree of consciousness of which you are cognizant?"
I asked. "Are there any of which you are not cognizant?"

"I know there are degrees of which I know only a little more than you
know about me. I don't think there are any of which I am not cognizant,"
stated Betty.

"Then I gather there are degrees of consciousness with which you have not
come in actual contact," said Darby. "You say there are none of which you
are not at lean cognizant. What is the content of that cognizance? Have
you seen them?"

"I have seen some of them. Some not. I believe what I am told of them, as
you believe what you are told of the South Pole, though you have never
been there.

"I do not understand all the process, and I do not believe that even
questions will make it clear, but I do know that for an ungraspably
infinite period the individual man, created in the image of the
consciousness that has reached man's estate here, will go on as an
individual. 'God made man in His own image,'" Betty quoted. "Human
consciousness, the height of individualized consciousness, reveals itself
in a form that is a copy of the actuality which is the consciousness
itself."

"Alt consciousness is limited by its degree until it evolves into the
Supreme," said Anne.
"How many are there--in the supreme? How many, have reached the supreme
degree?" asked Darby.

Anne indicated that this did not, as yet, concern even her; Betty adding
that the whole question was so remote we need not concern ourselves about
it either. "Sufficient unto the day is the wisdom thereof," she quoted
again, "and, anyway, I don't know enough about it to tell you."



CHAPTER XXX

IMPLICATIONS

1.

SO FAR as a system of philosophical thought was concerned the
"divulgence," Betty indicated, was complete. We drew a deep breath and
relaxed.

"I suppose," mused Darby, "that Betty might sum it all up--in effect, I
mean--by saying: 'There! That's how it is. That is how you do live with
us, removed only an inch from us. Or at least that is how you could
live.'"

"Well, yes," Betty conceded, "but that's the emotional climax. The real
climax is, that here is a reasonable explanation of an unobstructed I-Am,
and its habitat. And the startling thing is, that it is not merely
logical; it is as you, and your poets and playwrights have most
acceptably visualized it. Furthermore, here am I, a woman who is known to
have done this work on your side, and who now--still doing the same
work--has come back, and has been able to propound this philosophy."

"It's an explanation not so much of the fact of immortality, as the
HERENESS of it," said Darby.

He was right. The "hereness of it" is what has come to seem most real.
That is, to us--who experienced these forty sessions of communication
with Betty; sessions vivid with her unseen presence, from turn of phrase
and mode of thought to her own especial brand of fun and laughter. But to
you who read, the SUGGESTIVENESS of what we were told, together with
implications thereon based, must constitute the greater value. The major
implications were set forth at length. Others were outlined for us but
briefly; just touched upon. A new slant on sociology was suggested; a
revitalized and more practically operative code of ethics; an advanced
psychology dealing with memory, genius and dreams. The last we were keen
to pursue, but Betty would have little of it; and her reticence hinted at
other fascinating topics, which, however, she has not yet taken up.

"The subject is an anticipation," said she. "It has directly to do with
the Content of Consciousness. But I want to say this much more:

"We do creative things here. There is not much original genius on your
side; sometimes there is, but more often what you call genius is a
dipping into what individuals here accomplish. Great artists have
dexterity; and as a rule they are also great psychics. Sometimes they get
our thought without being able to produce it, and that is a real tragedy.
Scientists work on what you call scientific discovery, and are subject to
sudden solutions of their problems. As in sleep."

"Can you get at us better in our sleep?" one of us asked.

Sometimes, Betty agreed.

"Just as, in this communication, I use the released subconscious of this
station, and its storehouse, to produce my message, so in your sleep--to
an extent--is your subconscious released. And sometimes the impingement
of our ideas is actuated in the same fashion--in sleep--by the stirring
of a subconscious memory. Frequently dreams, stripped of their emotional
content, are a direct contact with the unobstructed universe and with an
idea being promulgated here. With this knowledge you could become
mentally adept at using your dreams, and solving your problems during
sleep.
"And do not think for one moment that high, low and in-between do not, at
times, tap the infinity of our thought."

2.

"I am wondering," said Darby, "about the wisdom of using the word
'prayer.' It has such various connotations in people's minds."

"I think most people understand, dimly at least, what prayer really is,"
said Betty, "and I think that to most there comes, sometime, a pretty
keen understanding. I don't think the exact meaning of the word is
discarded."

"To most it means that you are trying to influence a power beyond you in
your own behalf," pursued Darby. "It is directed to a god with magic
power to answer it. That is not the conception we have. We need some
different devotional word to indicate contact with unobstructed
consciousness, do we not?"

"The majority of people cannot aspire to such contact," pointed out
Betty. "Their degree is not yet high enough. The formulation of a need
into a thought, a petition, with the sure submerging of self, that comes
with prayer to what is higher and greater than self, is a beneficent
operation to the individual, and is a definite projection into the
unobstructed universe."

"It is a very good thing to teach children to pray," contributed Anne.
"Prayer is an actuality and gives them a belief. The world has got along
very well on a belief in prayer, for the voicing of a desire or an
emotion makes it concrete. It clears it in your own mind, if nothing
else. And maybe when you have formulated it, you find you do not want it;
or if you do.... It was one of your own great countrymen who said, "God
helps those who help themselves!"

"Well, now," said I to Betty, "you have always been beyond the
anthropomorphic idea, yet you were always fond of repeating the Lord's
Prayer. What did you have in your mind? To what or whom did you address
it?"

"To consciousness," replied Betty.

"Did you think of consciousness with personality, warmth--such warmth as
comes with personality, I mean?"

"As though I were drowning in a great sea, and there was a shipful of
people, any or all of whom could help me," replied Betty promptly.

3.

Perhaps as advanced ideas as any were supplied by the Doctor. You will
remember that the very first evening Betty spoke through Joan I asked her
if she was "working on the subject of pain, its nature and the technique
of handling it"--a message purported to have come from Betty to a friend,
and relayed to me--and that she replied she was, under the tutorship of
"the Doctor."

This Doctor, dead these many years, and a great friend of Betty's, spoke
to us infrequently, but here is a sample of the sort of thing he had to
say:

"All sickness in your obstructed universe existence is nothing but a
maladjustment of frequencies. All consciousness in the entire universe
has a degree-frequency. The individual consciousnesses of the various
organs of the body each have their individual frequencies, since all
consciousness has its degree-frequency. Now my point is this:

"In the obstructed universe I employed certain drugs, which were
themselves really lower degrees of consciousness--each with its own
frequency--to stimulate or retard frequency in higher degrees of
consciousness as manifested in the human organism. I had, for example,
something for a torpid Ever, for a tired heart--digitalis--and so on,
which should continue to be employed. But with your present concept and
understanding of frequency and its relation to consciousness as the
reality of which you are a part, I think you could, after a few trials,
open your mind to the inflow of the orthic whole for restoring the
depleted frequencies of your body. Use your minds! That is one of the
truths that has made Christian Science live.

"The only difficulty with that system is that, having added the
unobstructed universe's healing concept to earth's own restorative
properties, they immediately eliminated the degree-frequencies of drugs.
Now, both should be used. If a tool has been placed at hand, why disdain
it, if it can aid you?

"When you understand illness and pain from this angle, you can see why
the Science healer, not through the laving on of bands, but through the
deliberate opening of the mind, does get results, as well as the
practitioner of materia medica."

The Doctor in this life was a thorough-going allopath, and--though for
his times he was unusually restrained in medication--his doses, when he
gave them, were the bitterest of bitter!

More than once be talked to us on the modern use of radium electricity,
various light rays and the like in medicine; all based on the supposition
of their being entity frequencies complementing the various degree
frequencies of the function of the human organism. It was interesting and
provocative but entirely too technical for us to comprehend. It did call
to mind, however, recent successful experiments of forcing plant life by
means of artificial light and electrical charges and keeping alive an
isolated chicken heart through chemical stimulation.

Perhaps if, as Betty claims, they of the unobstructed universe "do
creative things" in their celestial laboratories, some obstructed young
medico may be "dipping into" the great reservoir of research Betty and
her Doctor both insist "is all here waiting to be told" and discover for
mankind new "frequency" in healing!

4.

Anne had a last word.

"Long ago I told you," said she, "that the greatness of communication is
not the mere fact of communication, but the creation of new
understanding. That is what is real for you--a new understanding out
beyond the current conceptions of the obstructed universe. One of the
criteria of your own existence is the endurance potency of new thoughts.
Whom do you best remember in your own world? The same is true with us. If
we, by any means, can create, for the entire universe, in either phase, a
definite and concrete advancement of the experience and thought of that
universe, we have shared in real Creation. And if you have wanted a proof
that I, that Betty, still exist, better than all the so-called evidential
we could possibly give, that proof is in our building up the foundation
of your own empirical knowledge into new and advancing thought."

Also it is worth while to quote Stephen's comment when we had finished
receiving all Betty and the rest had to say.

"We on this side are almost as much amazed as pleased over what has been
done in so short a time," said be. "It has been possible only because,
without exception, those involved managed an entire submergence of
egoism. And the station has been remarkably cooperative. Her mind is much
interested in this, and the natural wish would be to sit in on the party.
But there has been as complete and definite a submergence of opinion,
personal and theoretical, as one could find. So there has been little
coloring. And she has thereby learned a great deal in manipulation of
herself as a station. Much of that is due to Mrs. White.

"All this has taken a lot of work. For us, as well as you. Mrs. White has
not been alone in it. Indeed she has never claimed to be, and has stated
that she wag not. But she was decidedly the best adapted to give this,
both because of her work there and here. We have really had a pretty
large group. Some had the sole job of attending the station. They treated
her physically, for health of the physical body. They entertained her.
They took her away for profound instruction of a type she has heretofore
refused, or been unable to lose herself in. Her success in that was due
to Mrs. White and their fondness for each other.

"Mrs. White herself is now getting her reward for not 'finding a place in
the universe to slump!' as she expressed it in Across the Unknown. There
are very few who are able to walk across the no-man's land as
sure-footedly as she. It was not new ground for her: it was a road she
knew. And now she comes back over it with most unusual ease, and facility
and accuracy. Those who give largely, receive largely. She learned this
and practised it of her own free will."


PART IV


CHAPTER XXXI

WHAT IT ALL MEANT TO DARBY

1.

I LOOKED at Darby, and Darby looked at me.

"Well!" we exclaimed in unison.

We sat awhile and smoked. We agreed that this had been a most amazing
performance.

"To start from any premise--true or false--and build on it so inclusive a
philosophical structure, so closely knit, so airtight logically: one that
proceeds through so wide a range of subjects and interlocks them all so
perfectly that not a seam shows; and, with all that, expresses it so
simply and clearly--" Darby was overwhelmed, apparently forgetting that
Stephen had put on a similar show, more than twenty years ago. "A man
might do such a thing by his own processes and unaided," he conceded
doubtfully. "But you can bet all you've got he wouldn't do it in forty
days. Not by forty years he wouldn't. Why," Darby was warming up, "he'd
get the germ of the idea, and he'd fumble, and he'd cut and try, and he'd
go back and modify in the light of his greater thought, and feel about
again, and restate, and when he'd got it really airtight--according to
him--bed have white whiskers, and they'd call him a Philosopher, with a
capital P.

"And this thing has come complete, as is!" Darby mused a moment. "I'll
tell you one thing I know!" he said with conviction. "Joan is out of
it--except as the receiving station. She's gone to school, and she's a
bright gal on her own, but she just hasn't the equipment. And I know I
couldn't do it."

"That goes double for me too," said I. "And Joan has done a grand job as
receiving station." A thought struck me. "That reminds me, Betty gave us
a job too--as conceiving stations. Now she and Joan have certainly made
good. How about us?"

"What do you mean?" inquired Darby.

"Just recall what Betty said when she appointed us," I urged. "We were
not only to help develop her thought--subject," I added in rueful
reminiscence, "to her correction and veto; but we were to 'reflect back'
our undemanding, so she could judge how much of her thought she had
managed to get over to us."

"I got it," said Darby.

"So did I--I think," I agreed. "So let's do a little 'reflecting back.'"

"As how?" Darby was puzzled.

"Let's sit down and write out, in our own words, what we each understand
to be Betty's basic concepts, or otherwise comment on them."

Darby nodded. "Good idea," he approved.

"That will sharpen our own mental picture, at least," I continued, "and I
have a hunch that something of our own obstructed viewpoint might help
all the subsidiary conceiving stations--may their tribe increase!"

"Huh?" grunted Darby.

"The readers of the book," I explained.

And then? characteristically, it turned out that Betty had intended this
all along. She had hinted at a Part IV, for which we could see no
material. We told her that henceforth we would utterly give over the hope
of having original ideas. She did not like that, even in fun; but we
reassured her by the promise of doing a bit of unimportant independent
thinking from time to time. After which, Darby settled down seriously to
compile his report.

2.

This is conceiving station D-A-R-B-Y speaking.

That there is psychological time as distinct from clock, or sidereal time
seems plain enough. No matter what the clock says, five minutes becomes
sixty when you're waiting for a pot to boil. But I don't think Betty
would have rung the changes on this obvious enough fact just for the sake
of its own exposition. What she really attempted was to entice S E W and
me--and you, too--out of our customarily static conception of time, out
of the acceptance of an hour as a fixed length, unvarying irrespective of
circumstances. That done, she sought to ease us into an appreciation of
time's malleable character right here in our ordinary experience.

Yes, psychologically a day may be short or long. We can fidget during the
fifteen minutes we wait for a train--bored, empty and bedeviled by
frustration--and thus stretch a quarter of an hour into three quarters.
Or we can be interested in our surroundings, speculate on where all the
people are so intent on going and why, and--presto!--the train arrives
before we know it; somehow fifteen minutes has been contracted to one.

So that is psychological time--not hard and fixed like sidereal time, but
stretchable, contractible, collapsible, elastic, malleable. And all of
this is in our daily experience.

I do not remember whether SEW has quoted the statement, and I shall not
stop to search through the record for it, but my recollection is that
Betty called time, psychological time, the road by which our
understanding might with the least sweat and strain penetrate into her
land of the unobstructed. For a certain distance it is a road we know.
But perhaps it has not occurred to many of us that, beyond the familiar
portion, this road continues as a trail.

Here is a little-trodden path leading beyond psychological time, quite as
psychological time carries on beyond sidereal time, to still another kind
of time--what Betty at first, for want of the word "orthic," could call
only third time.

Have we in our present obstructed state any perception, however elusive,
of this third time? The chances are we do have, if the wall between our
obstructed universe and Betty's unobstructed is as thin and fragile as
she asserts. This much we can now infer: That third time is malleable as
is psychological time--only more so; that like psychological time it
expands and contracts.

And this must mean that the tenses of sidereal time do not survive wholly
intact in the third time; surely they crumble in our daily experience of
psychological time. It would seem that, in third time, present, past and
future somehow coalesce.

Suppose you enter that railway station again, this time rapt in thought.
It will be no unusual experience if you pace about oblivious of
everything, finally boarding your train you know not when. In some stray
corner of your mind you will have noted its arrival, of course, and you
do board it. Nonetheless you were unaware of the passage of the
fifteen-minute wait. Clock time ticked its way into a past that left no
impression on you. And more ticks were just around the corner of the
future, but they were unanticipated by you. Only the present registered.
You were in that present. Or should I say you WERE that present, that one
way or the other you and time, for the while, were one?

Betty's third time is like that. It stretches and it contracts; but
neither the stretching nor the contracting can be defined in terms of a
sidereal future or past. An odd kind of time, admittedly. But strange
also is the malleability of our own everyday sense of psychological time.
Look at it as we will, clocks are one thing; our internal timepiece is
something else again.

So far, so good.

But I think we can do even better than that. I think that we can dig down
into our consciousness, not mystically, but in a rather commonplace way,
and find there an all-including present--a matrix, as it were, that
receives and registers yet transcends events. Let's try.

There is in you, as I think there is in me, a final point below which
there is no need of underpinning. That point is our ultimate foundation,
supporting by its own sheer strength all the vast structure of our
senses, emotions and thoughts--the manifold of our perceptions,
instincts, tastes, our loves and hates, our very response, and even
obligation, to the world of things, forces and people about us. It was
called by the Jehovah of the ancient testament, "I Am." And after
thousands of years, language can find for it no better word. "I Am"--not
I was or will be, but just I am.

Now, in this deep-down, ultimate core of you do you find anything like
the past and future that clocks record? I think not. Do you find there
primarily just a BECOMING, such as might be measured by the standards of
ordinary time? Hardly. I think you will find there, as Betty encouraged S
E W and me to find in ourselves, something more fundamental than
becoming, basic as that may be, something that after a fashion escapes
the squirrel-cage of past and future: BEING--being that is rooted in one
tense only, the present.

You, the innermost you, ARE--co-existing with change and becoming, and so
still in time, still a matrix for reception, though looking neither
forward nor backward.

That kind of enduring yet malleable present you will find, I believe, in
your own feel of being. At least, it is foreshadowed psychologically. It
is the third time. It is the orthic time of Betty's unobstructed
universe.

3.

If time has three aspects--sidereal, psychological and orthic--so too has
space--or so Betty said.

I shall always remember my first automobile. One-lungers had disappeared
some time before, but high-compression was still many years away. Tires
carried seventy pounds of air and were about as unyielding as the bumpy
unpaved roads, which, however undeniably they lured us, had to be
negotiated with a fine skill. Differentials had a way of responding
totally to every other thank-you-ma'am--they just up and fell out. Axles
were always breaking and springs forever going smash.

With the requisite urging this automobile of mine could do twenty miles
an hour. But, when on the open highway that speed was attained, farmers
working in their fields would turn to see what all the din and uproar was
about.
For at twenty miles Peggy (feminine for Pegasus) shook in all her parts,
shivered and snorted, rattled and clanked--from radiator to tail-light.
And I, with Joan holding her breath in the seat beside me, had a sense of
tremendous speed. The rougher the road, the wilder was Peggy's career;
and the more boisterous that career, the faster Joan and I seemed to be
propelled.

"She certainly eats space up," we used to say affectionately of Peggy, as
we bedded her down for the night after a fifty-mile run done in four
hours and thirteen minutes flat.

So, right in experience, you and I know that a mile is not simply a fixed
geometrical distance between two points. Sidereally it is all of that,
but psychologically it varies. Long if we walk it, footsore and weary;
short if we ride over a concrete road in a modern motor car geared to do
seventy, eighty, a hundred miles an hour.

A commonplace, of course--this mental appraisal of distance in terms of
experience rather than in geometrical feet and miles. Betty would not
have labored the point, as without ulterior purpose she would hardly have
hammered away at psychological time, had she not hoped that through
psychological space we could get some inkling of a third space--the
orthic space of her unobstructed universe.

As a rationalization, the proposition can now be stated. Betty's space,
like her time, is elastic, malleable--in the same way that we know our
psychological space to be elastic and malleable. And again it should be
added, "only more so."

But must we stop at a mere rationalization?

Unlike S E W, I have not taken to the air. A Pullman compartment, usually
entered at night to save a day, remains my fastest mode of travel.
Invariably, when I turn my back on the lights and sounds of a busy
railway station, board my train and close the compartment door, idling
away then the few minutes till the train pulls out, I have this
experience: It seems that space in its ordinary sense has vanished, that
suddenly all there is of space has been squeezed into the four
compartment walls. A feeling of intimacy with it comes over me; space and
I are alone at last, and the world with all its places and all that
intervenes is gone.

The train now moves, picks up speed; and still all space is compacted
within my four walls, but with a difference. Now this intimate all of
space has become fluid. Malleable? Of course. Has it not all been
squeezed into one small Pullman compartment! But it is flowing now, and I
with it. The two of us seem everywhere, yet nowhere. No longer for me
does space mean just the distance between two points. Rather, it's a
stream, without banks or landscape--a stream that flows in all directions
out from a center which is no dimensional center at all but only myself.

Perhaps the telling of this recurring experience tends to trip and fall
into the occult. Yet I have never felt any sense of mystery accompanying
it. At least, there's nothing even slightly mysterious about the further
fact that after a night's sleep I, who switched off the light just out of
Elizabeth, wake up in Chicago, with no feeling of geometrical space
traversed or of the places that dot that space. By availing myself of the
mechanical help of a railroad I have traveled five hundred miles in less
time than a good rider on a good horse could have run seventy, and with
infinitely less pains.

After all, then, it is not the number of geometrical miles that obstructs
us, but our inexpertness in telescoping them or, if you will, flowing
through them.

In the company of two friends I took an elevator the other day to the
sixty-fifth floor of a certain skyscraper. Numerous stops were made on
the way up, and finally we reached our floor, and that was that.

But, coming down, we made the descent without stop, clear from the
sixty-fifth to the ground floor. There was no sense of speed and little
of motion. Unprepared for the mental effect of the long drop, we stepped
from the elevator into the lobby.

And--bang!--it was like that explosive recovery from nitrous oxide with
which you crash back into everydayness after the dentist has extracted an
infected molar. "Where am I?" you demand, faced with just the plain,
familiar world, but now for a moment strange and curiously elfin. So my
two friends and I felt as we stared about in the lobby of the skyscraper.

Through some trick of the small, moving enclosure called an elevator we
had been loosened, maybe, from the space of good old Euclid and then, on
reaching the ground floor, unceremoniously dumped back into it.

"Where am I?" I almost asked the starter in the lobby. More sensible
perhaps would it have been to ask, "Where was I?"

All in all, third space was hard for me to get the hang of. For third
time I seemed to have an intuitive feeling. But I could uncover in myself
no similar spatial instinct. And Betty's introduction of the time-space
concept as an aid to understanding did not help much, though in
retrospect it becomes clear that all our modern control of space analyzes
down to control of the time required to travel space. With me the
time-space idea began really to click only after motion came under
discussion.

But, whatever my difficulties, they need not be yours. For some ordinary
experience of your own may so illustrate the malleability of
psychological space that it will be easy for you to add Betty's new
ingredient, the flow. Do so, and I think you will have glimpsed orthic
space.

And now let's go back for a moment to consideration of unadorned sidereal
space. Is there warrant in it, wholly aside from psychological reactions,
for Betty's conductivity concept?

Look at the matter in this wise:

Your physical body is itself an obstruction, and as such it is in
constant conflict with environing obstructions, the most deterring of
them being solids. It is from these solids--the doors of our houses,
their walls and floors and furniture; the materials of our handicraft and
its tools, from lathes and drills to pencils and paper and even
books--that we gather our more obvious spatial impressions. Everything is
so long and so wide and so high; and that, we judge hastily, is all there
is to space. But even sidereally this is only one aspect, and perhaps not
the more fundamental. The other aspect tells us that space is that in
which we move.

Space itself is not a solid. On the contrary, except as we meet
obstructions, we pass right through it. Indeed, it is only because our
bodies are material and must be moved about in such a way as to avoid, or
utilize, other material obstructions that we are particularly aware of
space at all. To the degree that our bodies are not hindered by other
material objects, we pay but small attention to the length, breadth and
height of things. But always we are aware that we move--through space.
Surely we do recognize the conductivity of space, even in this sidereal
world.

So, to use Betty's phrase, strip space down. Strip off its three
dimensions, and there is still left conductivity. Orthic space is
conductivity--a fluidity of conduction, neither up nor down nor across,
yet, because of its very fluidity, still definitely space.

4.

In presenting orthic motion Betty did not follow the pattern she had
established for explanation of third time and third space. Starting with
the motion of our obstructed universe, whether astronomical or just
pedestrian, she could have passed glibly to psychological viewpoints. For
motion--the uniform sway of a clock pendulum, for instance--does seem to
speed or slacken according to the observer's interest; at a scene of
disaster relief arrives with cruel slowness, be it rushed by horse or
truck or plane.

And it was thus that I supposed Betty would postulate orthic motion:
malleable, just as a given rate of ordinary motion appears to vary with
the conditions under which it is experienced.

My questions led in that direction. Betty would have none of them. Once,
if my memory serves me, she came close to denying existence of any such
thing as psychological motion. Later she took that half back, with a
ho-hum and a yes-no. And in the end she took it back with a vengeance.
Thought itself, she announced, is psychological motion! Had this been an
early statement, S E W and I might well be floundering still.

In any case, abandoned the established pattern was, even at the risk of
motion appearing for a while to be the ugly duckling of Betty's grand
trilogy. Instead, we found ourselves plunged deeper and deeper into that
hyphenate of the modern physicist--time-space.

First, let me say that Betty used this concept only as an aid to
instruction. When it had done its work, she proceeded promptly to knock
the hyphen out, ever so solicitously putting time and space back on their
sundry and individual legs.

Several decades ago a search developed among mathematically inclined
physicists for a fourth dimension. The length, breadth and height of
objects in space, satisfactory enough in everyday thinking, had become
inadequate. For it was being experimentally demonstrated that the
innerness of all physical things was in flux--even inert matter. And how
in the world could one go on charting a no longer static physics in terms
of three-dimensional substance?

A number of dizzy books were written. But few, if any, of them tried to
name or describe the needed new dimension. That is not to say it didn't
exist. As a mathematical X, it opened fields of equations far beyond the
ambition of a Leibnitz and his calculus. And as a convenience in
accounting for the disappearance of lost articles it was par excellence.
After a man had searched ten minutes under bed and bureau for his dropped
collar button, he could dismiss the wretched thing with good
conscience--somehow it had just rolled into the fourth dimension.

Finally something akin to common sense prevailed. By common sense is
meant, I take it, the art of reasoning toward what one doesn't know from
what one does know. If we can't find a clew to the unknown in empirical
knowledge, we had best wait. Otherwise, we are liable to become spinners
of remote and inapplicable theories, or, worse, mystics, or, more horrid
still, cultists. Anyway, common sense found a fourth dimension, truly
essential to the new physics of radiation and electrons and wave-lengths
and what-not, in simple, ordinary experience--in time itself.

Let's explore the idea. There in the station waits our railway train. It
possesses the traditional three dimensions; it is so long, so wide and so
high. But now it moves, quitting the station; and, as it moves in the
three dimensions of space, uphill and downhill and straight away on the
level, it moves as well in a fourth dimension. It swings along in
time--in time as in space.

And men say, as they have always said of such matters, that the train
moves so many miles an hour, which is to assert that its rate of motion
in space can be stated only in terms of time.

But suppose the train does not get under way. Suppose it continues to
stand still. Nonetheless it moves, because it is part and parcel of an
earth that itself is in motion.

So pertinent to any analysis of motion is this concept that one may well
ask whether time-space is not just another name for motion. Maybe so, and
maybe not so. This much, at least, the concept makes clear:

Without the time dimension there can be no sidereal motion, and, equally,
there can be none without the dimensions of space. In other words, there
can be sidereal motion only in time plus space.

But where does this get us in understanding orthic motion?

Betty says that her unobstructed universe is but an extension of our
obstructed. To use Stephen's language of some twenty-five years ago, the
two worlds function under parallels of one and the same law. This being
so, it follows that motion in the unobstructed universe is as
inextricably tied into an orthic time-space as motion here is tied into
sidereal time-space. If, then, we have learned anything of orthic time
and orthic space, no matter how little, we probably have learned a like
something about orthic motion. Let's see.

Sidereally, any really instantaneous transit is impossible. The train can
move faster and faster as the engineer desires, but only up to a certain
limit. There is a final maximum rate of speed beyond which it can not go.
Light moves fastest of all, so fast that astronomers set down its speed
in terms of years; but even in the instance of light there is always just
so much movement in any given interval of time. Never in the obstructed
universe is motion transmitted instantaneously.

In the same way, sidereal motion cannot escape the fixed distances of
space. However fast the train, it must run the exact length of each
individual mile traveled.

But orthic time, we have learned, is malleable, collapsible; and orthic
space is a flow, a completely rarified conductor if you please. In such a
time and such a space, the instancy of motion becomes conceivable or, if
not quite conceivable, imaginable.

And that--instantaneous transit, with all the brakes of sidereal
time-space released--is half, more or less, of Betty's story of orthic
motion, as told through Joan.

You will understand now, I think, why Betty did not rely on psychological
considerations to demonstrate the motion of her unobstructed universe.
Sidereal motion, unlike sidereal time and space, is patently malleable
here in the obstructed universe. It not only SEEMS that way to us; it IS
that way. We can walk or we can run. By interest and anticipation we can
speed the frequency of our very heartbeat. S E W and I knew that all
along, and Betty knew that we knew it. But what about it? It helped us
not at all to apprehend instancy, that is, motion unlimited by a maximum
rate.

Our effort to visualize an infinitely accelerated flywheel did
help--some--at the time. But this was largely an intellectual exercise.
For myself I had no FEEL for that sort of flywheel, though at the point
of infinity its motion would plainly imply instancy.

No, some other device was called for--and provided. The time-space
concept, offering an everyday frame for sidereal motion and then argued
from the obstructed to the orthic, turned the trick--for me. At least, I
can state the proposition:

Motion in the obstructed universe is gripped in the vice of sidereal
time-space. That time-space is fixed, and any motion through it is
potentially limited. The parallel motion of the unobstructed universe is
as unrestricted as the orthic time-space in which it functions. And
orthic time-space is limited neither by tense, direction nor extraneous
resistance. In orthos, motion is instant.

You may say, as I was tempted to say, that this annihilates time, that a
truly instantaneous motion would have no need of time. But that is to
think in terms of sidereal time, with its three tenses. Furthermore,
Betty cautioned us again and again not to confuse the rate of motion with
motion itself. Perhaps all this can be made clearer if we pause to answer
the question asked a page or two back: Is time-space just another word
for motion? The answer is, no.
I walk into a room, stumble and in recovering my balance knock a chair
over. As it topples to the floor it is in motion; it moves through
time-space. But time-space was there before my awkwardness upset the
chair, as it will be after I put the chair to rights. Given time-space
and it only, the world would lie as unruffled as the night before
Christmas, when, as everybody knows, not a creature was stirring. A stir,
an activating something must exist as a condition precedent to any
motion.

It is that stir, orthic in the final analysis, which, colliding with
sidereal time and space in the obstructed universe, sets up the
phenomenon we know here as the time-rate of motion. The stir itself
requires no rate.

And now to get back to earth, if only briefly. Let's reason out the
second half of Betty's story of motion unobstructed. This exploration
need not press beyond mundane frontiers.

In everyday motion we deal first with our bodily impacts. We hit things
and they move. And so we are inclined to assess all motion in terms, say,
of a billiard table. The cue strikes a ball. Immediately that ball leaps
into motion and hits another, which in turn rushes off to hit a third.
Finally all the balls are at rest again, and we say that the motion set
up by the impact of the cue has spent itself. The fact, of course, is
that that motion did not SPEND itself, did not cease, but was merely
DISTRIBUTED, its big stream breaking up into innumerable small streams no
longer apparent to us.

It is only on reflection that we note that motion never comes to rest. It
may be transferred or transformed until it eludes our senses; but, on
second thought, we are not deceived. It still oscillates, actually or
potentially, in one wave-band, so to speak, or another.
Of course, then, orthic motion is perpetual, just as perpetual as is
sidereal motion. And again it is well to add, " Only more so." This is
why Betty spoke tolerantly of the "mad inventors" who, glimpsing a truth,
have labored honestly, if fatuously, to apply it. Their perpetual motion
machines have not come off for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless motion
itself is perpetual.

Perpetualness, demonstrated in the obstructed universe, is the other half
of Betty's story of orthic motion.

We know now two characteristics of the orthic stir, the activating
impulse without which time and space would be as dead as a
herring--instancy and the state of being perpetual. And we know one thing
that this stir is not--thought. For thought, says Betty, is psychological
motion; and I suppose that psychological motion is as remote from orthic
motion as sidereal is short of psychological. Yet, to use the word of
children playing hide-and-seek, thought is " warm"--warmer than the sway
of a pendulum or even the course of the planets around the sun.

From the very beginning of Betty's divulgence, it was a sidereal word
that she used to express the essence of orthic motion--"frequency." This,
I think, was because modern physics has gained wide acceptance for the
word and given it new and flexible meanings. Also Betty may have been
influenced by the fact that men know much about the deep inwardness of
themselves and can tell little, while of the world outside themselves
they know little, yet feel qualified to tell much. Pardonable, since
language depicts the outer world more adequately than it does the inner.
5.

There remains a clump or two of underbrush to clear away, and then, I
rather think, we shall be ready to make trial of what Betty, borrowing
again from the Greek, called "trilogia"--her threefold frame of
consciousness.

First, we must not be tempted to regard time, space and motion as mere
attributes of consciousness, as one might say blueness is an attribute of
the sea. Under shifting light conditions, the sea may be blue or it may
be green or just gray; it is still the sea, whatever its color. Time,
space and motion, however, are of the very fabric of consciousness. If it
is correct to say that they exist no otherwhere than in consciousness, it
is hardly less correct to say that consciousness exists no otherwhere
than in them.

The second misconception we shall want to guard against is illustrated by
the very emphasis of what I have just written. I seem to suggest that the
sum of time, space and motion equals consciousness. Not so. Always
consciousness works through time, space and motion, but their total is
not consciousness, any more than leaves, branches and roots add up to
make a living tree.

One thing more, in passing: The word trilogia could be applied, of
course, to the time-space-motion complex in which we function here in the
obstructed universe, as well as to orthos. Do not the obstructed and
unobstructed parallel each other in all respects, existing under one law?
But it was not the obstructed universe that Betty sought primarily to
clarify. She was trying to rationalize the unobstructed. For the ends of
language she reserved the term trilogia for the orthic complex, and it
has seemed best to S E W and me to preserve that usage.

And now let's get on.

Consciousness has three co-existences. From the obstructed point of view
this is not a difficult statement. You are constantly in time; you are
constantly in space; and I suspect you are constantly in motion, or at
least you are always in the midst of motion. It is not otherwise in the
unobstructed universe, granted that time there is not measurable by
clocks, space by footrules or motion by speedometers.

Betty's trilogia, co-existent with the consciousness that is she,
consists of ORTHIC time, the essence of which is RECEPTIVITY; ORTHIC
space, the essence of which is CONDUCTIVITY; and ORTHIC motion, the
essence of which is FREQUENCY.

A day or two after the essences were sprung on us, without which I am
afraid trilogia might indeed have proved just a verbal curiosity, Joan, S
E W and I had occasion to drive sixty miles across country. As we climbed
into the car, I had a big idea. For the purpose of this one ride, why not
forget all our ordinary notions of time, space and motion and instead
think only in terms of receptivity, conductivity and frequency? "A good
idea if it works," agreed S E W.

Well, it worked and it didn't. Certainly the well-tuned motor fired with
an unmistakable rhythm, and regularly this frequency was transmitted to
the wheels of the car. There was conductivity too, such as modern
road-builders know how to make; for we were being propelled THROUGH
rather than AGAINST. And there was receptivity, maybe. S E W said the
receptivity was good, meaning, I inferred, that, as the countryside was
new to him, his mind was registering many fresh and interesting
impressions. To Joan and me the receptivity was only fair; we had taken
that ride too many times before.

"How shall we define the rate of this frequency?" I asked S E W.

"So much conductivity per so much receptivity," he replied with a
twinkle.

"Hooey!" volunteered Joan. "Why not say a mile a minute and be done with
it?"

Why not, indeed? For were we not right where we began--in sidereal time,
space and motion? The plain fact was that we had never got out of them.
And that, of course, was why the experiment had failed to work.

"But," I said, "it does help. Imagine a road of perfect smoothness,
running through an atmosphere of no resistance. That road, that space
would suggest just conductivity."

"A super speedway for a motor of unlimited frequency!" S E W contributed.

"Provided," said Joan, "one hasn't brought the wrong kind of receptivity
along. I insist on the orthic brand."

I think Joan's insistence went pretty straight to the heart of things.
The effort of our technical age has been to control motion, to speed it
and so to collapse time. Thus stated, time shortens as an effect of
speeded motion. But actually it is the other way around. You must tinker
with time first, seeking to step up its ratio to space. Accelerated
motion is the external evidence of how well you have done that tinkering.

Betty says she controls her orthic time, the essence of which is
receptivity. How? By manipulating receptivity? How? I was in deep water.

To say that space, orthically viewed, is essentially a matter of
conductivity was becoming acceptable enough, because in ordinary
experience space is a conductor; we do go through it. To say that the
essence of orthic motion is frequency may require a deal of explanation,
but it rings a bell, because even in the obstructed universe we are so
accustomed to analyzing motion into vibrations, cycles, rhythms--in fact,
frequencies. But to me time seemed possessed of other characteristics
quite as essential as receptivity.

There was duration, for example. Had I been asked before Betty came what
was the essence of time, I am confident I would have replied, "Duration."
Surely so subjective a characteristic as receptivity would not have
occurred to me; such is one's inveterate devotion to the working
materialism of the obstructed universe.

And I was not content even after Betty explained at, length how all
things are received in time, and in time only, and how an event remains
influential after its occurrence--as the influence of a man may continue
after his death--precisely because of the receptivity which is time's
essence. I was impressed, but not satisfied.

So I had to back-track. I had to remind myself again of what Betty was
really trying to do. It was this: She was seeking to explain to us why
her world is unobstructed and the how of it; she was trying to make her
unobstructed state reasonable in terms of our obstruction.

All right, then, how do we HERE overcome obstruction?

The sixty-mile cross-country automobile ride is a good enough answer. We
MASTERED space, because a mechanical gadget, our gas engine and its
appurtenances, had put us in a position to take more than usual advantage
of conductivity. But we did not really SHORTEN space. As to time, that we
DID shorten, relatively. We traveled sixty miles in the interval it would
have taken us to walk five. And how did we do that? By manipulating
duration? Scarcely. For duration, I was learning, really was the thing
shortened. We shortened time, because we had increased its
receptivity--crammed more into it, as it were--thanks to our humming
motor.

Orthic space is no obstruction at all to Betty, if she is in full control
of its essence, conductivity. I had ceased to argue about that. And it
now seems that there can be as little argument over the essence of orthic
time, receptivity. For it is only in this characteristic of time, as we
know it here in the obstructed universe, that control is to be
predicated.

To the extent that Betty can increase receptivity, that is, fill time to
its utmost, to the extent that she can increase conductivity, telescoping
mere distance, to that extent she can step up, as she will, the essence
of motion, frequency--all this simply on the basis of an altered
time-space ratio. It is in this orthic ratio that motion becomes
instantaneous; time becomes an all-inclusive now; and space becomes only
a stream of non-resistance.

To assert these wonders of the trilogia would seem fantastic were it not
that we find them grounded right here in the commonplace experience of
our obstructed universe. After all, these are the very wonders that Joan,
S E W and I worked in that sixty-mile auto ride--imperfectly. We
shortened time by crowding its essence, receptivity. We overcame space by
utilizing to unusual degree its essence, conductivity. And motion beyond
the dreams of shanks' mare resulted. As Mr. Wordsworth might have
said--Trilogia lay all about us.
6.

Speaking of wonderland, you'll recall that when Alice arrived on the
other side of the looking-glass she was horrified by the persistence with
which the people she found there attached strange and outlandish meanings
to comfortable words that Alice had always supposed she understood quite
well. So it had to be explained, and this is what they told her
concerning one of their puzzlers:

"You see it's like a portmanteau--there are two meanings packed up in one
word."

Betty's term "frequency," I take it, is a portmanteau word. And therein
it differs from her other terms, receptivity and conductivity.

As a word, "receptivity " functions well enough whether applied to
material or psychological processes. For instance, paper is receptive to
ink, and likewise your mind is receptive to sensory impressions. In the
same way, the word "conductivity" blankets both the objective and
subjective ranges. A length of pipe is conductive of water; from the
verbal standpoint, one can say just as reasonably that your mind is now
serving as a conductor of the thought expressed in this sentence.

But with the word "frequency" it is different. There may be a word so
descriptive of the essence of motion as to work both materially and
psychologically. But I don't know it. Neither apparently did Betty.
Anyway, it was a portmanteau word that she left with S E W and me--a word
of two meanings. Rather, I fear of three and maybe more.

Frequency--what is it sidereally? On first consideration, only the number
of vibrations in a unit of time. That's our take-off; and in these latter
days we get off the ground quickly enough, leaving such old-time
familiars as the oscillating clock pendulum and the vibrating piano
string far below. For now the primary meaning of the word is no longer so
simple. With the discovery and utilization of electricity, including in
recent years what we have come to know as radiant energies, the
connotations of the term have been vastly broadened. Now we talk
confidently of radio frequencies. We never saw or felt one. But because
of mechanical registration we know they are.

It is this territory of new energies--and of older but equally baffling
ones such as light--which Betty (or was it Anne?) called "no-man's land."
Scarcely nonmaterial are they, nor yet material in the old acceptance of
the word.

A few pages back we tried to isolate two characteristics of orthic
motion--perpetualness and instancy. As motion is perpetual even in the
sidereal universe, further comment is unnecessary. But sidereal motion is
not instant. Orthic motion is, says Betty. If so, perhaps the frequencies
of no-man's land foreshadow orthic instancy. Certainly they should do a
better job of showing the way than do the grosser vibrations of tuning
forks and such.

The radio announcer, broadcasting miles off, says:, "Eight o'clock by
Fugit, the world's most estimable watch." And we, sitting at our
firesides, haul out our own watches to see if they need resetting. So
close to instantaneous is the transmission of the radio frequency that we
ignore the lag between the announcer's spoken words and our reception of
the impulse that reproduces those words in our own living rooms. This
discrepancy never occurs to us.

Or we push a button in the wall and expect instantaneous response in the
chandelier, and for all practical purposes we get it.

So our present-day experience does encompass frequencies approximately
instantaneous. Suspect, therefore, the existence of really instant
frequencies, as far beyond radio, for example, as radio is beyond a clock
pendulum. Thus S E W and I were charged by Betty, through Joan.

In fact, one of these ultra frequencies men have known since men were,
more intimately than they know land and sea and all that in them is. But,
because they have found no way of measuring this particular frequency,
they still swear by the gods of earth, air and water. Good, reliable old
gods, to be sure! But their robust objectivity became measurable only
when yardsticks were devised and applied by thought.

True, the energies of no man's land lift our understanding of frequency,
the essence of motion, beyond the simpler mechanisms. But with the
frequency we so intimately know as thought we climb high above no-man's
land, high above wave-lengths, and quanta and what have you.

Betty did not ask us to conceive thought as orthic motion. For us in the
obstructed universe it remains only a psychological frequency, still
short of orthos, but powerful, real and pointing straight up the skyway
in the direction of orthic frequency itself.

Let's test the proposition out. Assume that thought is a frequency, an
ultra frequency, foreshadowing the orthic essence of motion. In that case
you would not expect to find it in sidereal space. Do you? Obviously not.
Nor would you expect it to be confined in sidereal time. Is it? The ACT
of thinking may be in sidereal time, but thought itself jumps all
sidereal barriers. The truth is, neither space nor time obstructs it. You
can think of China, not as accurately, but as easily as you can think of
the street you live on. You can think of 10 B.C. as easily as you can of
1940 A.D.

There was once a very great philosopher who, wishing to prove all things,
began by trying to prove his own existence. And he proved it, in his own
estimation, by saying, "I think. Therefore, I am." Critics ever since
have been clamoring that Descartes could have said with equal sense, "I
walk, or I talk, or I weep. Therefore, I am." But the critics, I submit,
have been only half right. For, while it may be futile for any man, no
matter how great a philosopher, to attempt to prove the only thing that
he really KNOWS, his own consciousness through which he infers all else,
nonetheless long before consciousness walked or talked or wept or even
rejoiced, it THOUGHT, if only amoeba-wise.

Another thing: Betty says that we here always confuse the obstructed
manifestations of the simple mechanical world, and those of the more
complex no man's land, with motion per se. We are made that way, it
seems--with an exception, however, in the case of thought. Thought is a
thing that we never confuse with objective manifestation. We may think to
walk, but we do not call walking thinking. And there, too, thought is on
the side of the angels.

Again, if thought previews the essence of orthic motion, we would expect
it to be close to instantaneous. Is it not so? And we would expect it to
be close to perpetual. Surely it is ceaseless in our waking moments; and
we are told by psychologists that subconsciously it continues even in our
deepest sleep. Betty is living proof--to me--that its activity survives
bodily death.

In the same vein, thought does not vanish with the act of thinking; the
thoughts of a thousand years of yesterdays color today, for better or
worse, and will color tomorrows unnumbered.

Yes, I think thought offers specifications on which to build whatever
lame conceptions of orthic frequency we denizens of the obstructed
universe are capable of. It is the freest, the least obstructed fact in
our experience. And, more, is it not the great creator? Is it not our
world's biggest stir, its mightiest activity, its most potent impulse?

I make these observations on thought not to glorify it. There are
negative as well as positive thoughts. My purpose is only to suggest some
experiential basis for your and my understanding that the essence Betty
calls frequency is the ACTIVATING impulse, without husk, shell or
wrapping--obstructed in this world, but with thought offering a glimpse
of its unobstruction in orthos. There is nothing I can add to the phrase
"activating impulse." We shall just have to let it go at that, with,
however, a caution or two.

Don't think that by frequency is meant consciousness itself. Frequency,
the essence of orthic motion, activates consciousness, and is co-existent
with it, but not more so than is receptivity, the essence of time, or
conductivity, the essence of space. All three together constitute the
trilogia of consciousness. They are interfused and interdependent.

Nor should we vainly imagine that all orthic frequency is of the same
degree. As there are many sidereal frequencies, each differing from the
other, so there are many orthic frequencies. Betty's world is as
pluralistic in its monism as is our own.

For instance, there is in our world this thing we call electricity. We
know that we do not know its essence; all that we know about it is the
manner in which it behaves in obstruction. In the unobstructed universe
the essence is known and dealt with. And that illustrates why, when we
asked Betty if there were electricity and oxygen and bricks and sticks
and stones in her world, she answered, yes--even at the risk of being Sir
Oliverish. But always she added that she knew and dealt with these
things, not in their obstructed aspect as we do, but in their essence.

Never fear but that Betty's unobstructed universe has all the infinite
variety of our obstructed universe--"only more so," what with frequencies
we here have not been able to reach up to, and she there, reaching down
to us, is unable to bestow.

So the portmanteau character of the term "frequency" need no longer
concern us, because it is clear that frequencies must be in degrees, as
is consciousness itself. There is no difference in kind between the
essential frequency of ordinary visible motion and a radio wavelength;
there is only a difference of degree. In essence, a radio wave-length and
thought are alike in kind; they, too, differ only in degree. It is the
same way with thought and the frequencies of orthos.

But Betty did not mean that all orthic frequencies are of a potential
equal to that of thought. On the contrary, thought, even as it operates
in the obstructed universe, has a potential far beyond that of many a
frequency of the unobstructed universe. She meant only that in the
unobstructed universe all motion is apprehended in its essence and that
our feel of the freest obstructed motion, thought, gives us a clue to
motion's orthic essence, called by her for the purpose of her divulgence,
FREQUENCY.

7.

Still another of Betty's terms seems to warrant Special
attention--"arrestment." She had her bit of fun with me there, as I
maneuvered this way and that to get at her meaning. But I forgive her.
Certainly I had earned no "ticket" for speeding. I was guilty only of the
common and relatively trivial offense of blocking the traffic. In the
name of the unobstructed universe, aren't we all!

You and I--every mother's child of us--are arrested, joking aside. And so
are all other frequencies manifesting in obstruction. Thus spoke Betty.
Perhaps a moment's introspection will help us to understand.

We have all had the experience of being lifted out of ourselves by great
music or perhaps just a good movie. Under the spell of art, we escape our
encirclement. That is, we imagine we are escaping it. And then when the
play is over, what do we do? Do we go out and crystallize the vague
aspirations of make-believe into fact? Sometimes--if we have aspired
quantitatively, as Stephen would say. But if we have aspired
qualitatively, and often we do, it is otherwise. Here we are left to
settle back as comfortably as may be into what we really are.

The point is that but slight self-analysis is required for each of us to
recognize arrestment in himself. We know our arrestment unmistakably
enough whenever we try to escape it.

But in the field of self-awareness, as elsewhere, arrestment of frequency
does not imply obdurate limitation. That can hardly be, urged as we are
by our deepest nature to break through whatever it is that confines us.
And surely arrestment implies no dead stop. It means only a SUSPENSION of
potentiality. Nonetheless, frequency as it manifests in the obstructed
universe is arrested; it does have its point of suspense.

Take the electric fan that Joan was repairing one morning in the early
days of Betty's divulgence. Let's say it was a fan of two speeds. The low
speed we'll label 50 and the high speed 100. We set the fan revolving at
50. It will go right on revolving at 50 indefinitely, though its over-all
frequency is 100. In other words, without disturbing the potential of
100, we have arrested the fan's motion at 50.

Now, forgetting about 100 being a potential, well push the control lever
directly into high. With the fan going twice as fast as before, we note a
curious effect--just as did Joan. Whereas at 50 we could see the blades
clearly, now we don't see them at all. We look right through them at the
wall behind.

It is easy for us to say that the fan is revolving too rapidly for our
eyes to follow its motion, and that's true. But something else is also
true, something that is independent of our eyes. It can be stated this
way: At 100 the blades of the fan are traveling twice as far as they did
at 50--in the same unit of time. Into the same time interval we have
packed double the space.

And this brings us to Betty's statement that matter as we know it in the
obstructed universe is an arrestment of frequency resulting from a
certain incidence of motion in time and space. This is not altogether a
hard saying, if, for the purpose of illustration, you will assume 100 to
be the essence of motion, frequency itself in its orthic meaning. To our
obstructed eyesight the blades of the fan are invisible at 100 (essence);
there is just the wall behind the place where the fan was. But now we
pull the control back to the 50 mark of arrestment Behold the fan again,
safely back in the obstructed universe! All done by a simple shift of the
time-space ratio.

Physicists have been telling us for some years now that there is no
material substance as we have understood the term in the past; that
instead there are only aggregates of energy. Matter, it seems, is the
name that we popularly apply to those particular stress-knots that are
three-dimensionally measurable. Well, it is the arrestment of frequency,
if I understand Betty correctly, that makes that measurement possible. It
is the arrestment, in fact, that we measure.

8.

The universe, Betty told S E W and me, is one and entire, despite its two
aspects. Therefore this one and entire universe is HERE now, despite our
obstruction.

Go into a dark room. You blunder around and see nothing. That's one
aspect. Now find the electric Switch and flood the room with light. You
no longer blunder about; now you see furnishings and decorations, colors
and shapes. That's another aspect. Yet both aspects are of the same room.
And this is the room you were in all the time. You are still in it and
will be in it You perceive the room in obstruction. Betty perceives it in
essence.

Did you ever see two sides of a coin at one time? You could do that only
with mirrors. Yet, seeing one side of a coin, you do not deny the
existence of its other side, or that both sides belong to the same coin.

It has not been my purpose, in this contribution to S E W's more detailed
report, to tie Betty's divulgence down to hard and fast formulas. That I
could not do, and would not if I could. For she intended her divulgence
only as an aid to thinking, as suggestion rather than statement.

The truth never varies. Men's understanding of it does, and will for
long, long ages to come. New knowledge brings new understanding. Hence it
is that dogma dies. To me it seems that the fruits of Betty's divulgence
are for those of us who are still willing to ask: "Where shall wisdom be
found, I and where is the place of understanding?"

This is conceiving station D-A-R-B-Y. I return you now to S E W.



CHAPTER XXXII

THEY SHALL BE COMFORTED

1.

"NOW," said Darby to me after he had finished the foregoing, "it's your
turn."

"It is," I acknowledged. "Only--what you have written so exactly
expresses my own understanding that you've left me nothing to do! And I'm
not saying that to dodge work, either."

"I hope it will help," said he, "for it does take some thinking out, I
found. I wonder how many people will 'get it'?"

"More than you think," I assured him. "It offers as first concepts what
anyone can understand, and what everybody wants. And it goes on to show
that anyone can have it. An unobstructed universe," I anticipated the
question he looked as if he were about to ask, "immortality; life beyond
death. They'll get Betty's new terminology, and the reassurance that
terminology carries with it, whether they get all the finer points of the
argument or not."

"I don't know," doubted Darby.

"I do," I persisted. "Why, an eight-year-old child knows he lives in an
obstructed universe. He knows because he bumps into it. So even the
eight-year-old will understand that much if he is told. And a
twelve-year-old, tinkering with his radio, has a glimpse, through it, of
the possibility of unobstruction. And so on right along the line. Every
man knows only too well that he lives in an obstructed world. Everybody
has at least imagined a world without obstruction as the height of
desirability. It's an almost universal hope--more or less vague--but
characteristic of man as far back as history goes; how things will be
when he 'dies and goes to heaven.' So now if he sees a good chance that
he's going to get some acceptable foundation for his hope; that this
divulgence of Betty's gives good and acceptable reasons, not based on
mere statement, but on what he himself knows and experiences in his
everyday life...why, he's going to follow that argument even if it is a
little difficult for him. But," I added, "I don't myself think it is
difficult. I asked my typist to be a guinea pig for me and mark down any
points that seemed obscure to her, but she found it clear enough, and she
was busy typing, remember, and--"

"Hold on," Darby stopped me, "don't talk at me. Write it down. I've tried
to give my understanding of the concepts as I see them. Suppose you give
your understanding of the significances as you see them."

"I'll try," I agreed. "It's a large order."

2.

Mankind has always had the picture of two entirely different states of
being separated from each other as by a wall--the "on earth" and "in
heaven" idea. That division has been expressed, of course, in all sorts
of terminology. But the concept is always the same; in every age, by
every race, through every creed.

Betty called it the obstructed and unobstructed universes, but she denied
the wall between. That was her mission in her present divulgence--to
knock down the wall.

To accomplish this she pointed out, first, that there am not really two
universes, but only two aspects of one. We here live in the obstructed
aspect, a proposition none of us is likely to deny. Given this fact, the
logical deduction would be that she lives in the other, the unobstructed
aspect. But that, astonishingly, she asserts, does not follow. On the
contrary, says she, she lives in BOTH aspects, in the ENTIRE universe; in
the obstructed phase--that tiny percentage of the whole which we of earth
inhabit--as well as in the vast and mysterious unobstructed portion she
assures us science has glimpsed but of which as yet we know next to
nothing. It is one homogeneous universe to her, simply because what are
obstructions to us are not obstructions to her.

So we are forced to modify our earth-heaven picture. We must see
ourselves as living in a minute segment of a " one and only universe,"
held within its confines by obstructions that affect only us. Those
obstructions have nothing to do with Betty's state of being; they are
inherent to ours, and even are, somewhat, of our own production.
Furthermore they are, to a greater extent than we have realized,
removable by ourselves--if we thought so, and knew how. That is one of
the things Betty tried to show us; to what extent and how. And here we
touch the practical value of her divulgence for us, right now, at the
present time. Especially at the present time.

FOR SHE INSISTS THERE IS NO WALL! The two universes, or rather the two
aspects of the same and only universe, are already so alike in texture
that they interfuse. In fact, there seems to be a "no-man's land" in
which even we of the obstructed aspect can scarcely tell which is which!
But Betty defines first the one, then the other, in the terms of our own
thinking, to show that the ONLY difference between the "two worlds" is
from our viewpoint, and is no more than that little business of
obstruction. From her viewpoint there is no basic difference. Each
removal of obstruction brings these viewpoints--hers and ours--closer
together. And from the beginning of time man has been busily doing just
that; removing obstructions and thereby eliminating, as far as he is
concerned, some of the differences.

Betty's present effort is to convince us of this fact, of the gradual
elimination of the obstructions; to prove to us that this underlying
principle may be made--and BY OURSELVES--even more workable for us, so
that we may be less bewildered, so that we may proceed more confidently
and understandingly and happily toward conditions of less and less
obstruction. Personally and racially.

How she builds up to that great concept through analysis of the
fundamental principles of the entire universe in its obstructed and
unobstructed aspects--ours and hers--is the body of this book.

3.

Betty further says that the human race has come to a point in evolution
where, as she expresses it, "consciousness must be sloughed." I believe
her. It may suffice in our earlier an cruder stages to pattern life on
mere self-preservation, with the accompanying greed, indifference to the
other fellow, hatreds, cruelties and treacheries necessary to carry out
that scheme of things. But civilization is supposed to be growing out of
it. As individuals I think we are making pretty good progress toward
growing out of it. But our collective policies have been too often based
on the same barbarisms; and, in singular blindness to opportunity, we
have recurred obstinately after each lesser ploughing to build anew the
same old structures on the same old foundations.

Worse, we latterly have showed a tendency to sheer away from the straight
path of such progress as we have made. We have gone far our understanding
and control of physical matter and force since the days when we lived in
caves and did our controlling mostly with our two bare fists. Indeed, so
far have we gone that we have lost sight of the two truths that are the
underpinning foundations of all advancements in living: the creator is
more important than the thing created: the end and aim of evolution is
the perfection of the whole through the unretarded functioning of its
individual parts.

Perhaps in ordinary course a swing toward materialism is normal. Any
forward movement occupies a broad band of extremes. And it is the
commonplace of commonplaces to say that we have not caught up spiritually
with our scientific achievements--assuming comfortably that we are going
to do so in due time. But unfortunately we have showed few indications of
so doing. After every ploughing of consciousness--even those of more
recent years--we have again set up things-created as the ends of
desirability--as our golden calf to worship.

Now by that I do not mean merely the material "products of civilization."
We might, with a little more growth, be able to handle them. To take them
in our stride, as it were, and to control them. I want to include also
the trend of thought that more and more subordinates the individual to
the institution and the thing; a trend that reaches its logical and
predestined end in totalitarianism. Which means only, "stripped down,"
that the state, the nation--man-created--is so much greater than the
individual that the latter must be sacrificed to it. But do not mistake
me: governmental totalitarianism is only the outward and visible symbol.

The same trend runs deep through all modern life, not only political and
social, but economic, industrial, artistic and even the formal-religious.
And in its pursuit, often sincere, men have been forgetting more and more
the basic truth--that there can be but one Reality: that the Intent of
that Reality, which is Consciousness, is Evolution; and that the one law
of evolution which we of earth have established beyond question is that
it proceeds exclusively THROUGH THE INDIVIDUAL. We are parts of a Whole;
not alike, not even of equal degrees of capacity and potentiality; but no
part is of lesser importance than another part, and no part greater.

Again and again during the forty sessions of her "divulgence" Betty
insisted on the value of what she called "stepladders" as aids in
reaching up to her ideas. Many such stepladders did she actually point
out to us--though she seemed to find more value in teaching us how to
recognize them for ourselves.

"Find one of your own stepladders," she would say when we failed to
understand, "climb to the top of it, and reach from there."

Those she did indicate she brought to us from all kinds of sources; from
science and the arts, from history, from fairy tales, from the Bible. The
latter especially; because, she reminded us, "as an exposition of the
human emotions" it is rich in stepladders. What worthwhileness Betty
herself places on that record comprised of the Old and New Testaments I
am going to let her say for herself later in this chapter. But I myself
found so good a stepladder concerning our individual importance to the
Whole of which we are each parts, that I want to call it to your
attention right now. It is too long to quote. You can read it for
yourself in the twelfth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the
Corinthians. I was particularly interested in the 12th to 26th verses
inclusive. It is, beyond question, the simplest, clearest statement of
democracy I have ever read. "For as the body is one and hath many
members...the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor
again the head to the feet, I have no need of you...." But take time to
read the entire chapter. A great metaphysician and a wise man--Paul.

4.

Now, as I hinted, a certain amount of calf-worship may be part of the
method of progress, provided we balance it with proportionate spiritual
expansion. Nobody wants to go back to the flickering of candlelight, and
there is no reason, moral or material, why we should. In fact, there is
every reason why we should not. But for the sake of the steadier, clearer
fight of a tungsten lamp we are not called upon to sacrifice the hard-won
treasure of past spiritual attainments.

The creations of man's hands are cheap--cheap in time and sweat--as the
creations of men's souls are dear in age-long struggle. Not through any
one, or two, or even dozens of brilliant generations, but through
age-long struggle has man attained the simple things of the spirit, what
we call the homely virtues. The sacredness of a promise; the sense of
moral obligation; common ordinary veracity; personal integrity,
individual liberty, elementary justice...to mention only a few. And in
the end--when all else in the world crashes about our lives--they are the
things to which we turn; the things that count. The "homely" virtues.
Spiritual values.

5.

This ploughing of consciousness is no affair of judgment or retribution,
but of simple cause and effect, as natural as the reaction of the bodily
process when, at a certain stage in hyperacidity, the body starts to
produce its own correcting alkali. The present catastrophe in Europe is
no product of proximate circumstance, nor wholly of any one race or cast
of thought. It is, rather, that men's minds have more and more centered
on the material world outside themselves, less and less have they looked
within, until, at last, almost nothing of their attention turns to the
inward searchings that alone maintain spiritual faith.

Now, the only way that an individual, who has so prospered in this
world's goods that he has become wholly engrossed with them, can be made
to took within is to take those things away from him. That, I suspect, is
the real meaning of the story of Job. Sometimes it is necessary to take
away from a man EVERYTHING he holds dear before, in despair, he will sit
him down alone to find that which cannot be taken away from him; that
which, despite all, endures and lives within his own consciousness. It is
no different with peoples.

Something of that sort, I gather from Betty and her friends, is back of
the present world-wide turmoil. How much will have to be taken away from
mankind before it sits itself down to its inner searchings, she cannot,
will not, predict.

"That," says she, "is dependent on the free-will of man. Your wills are
free. That is your heritage and your glory. That we cannot touch."

Only when the balance is restored will the storm die. Not because
somebody decides that we have suffered enough, but because the cause and
effect have worked out in restoration. When the Intent of Consciousness,
which is evolution, again becomes an EVENT in the hearts of men as well
as in their research laboratories.

6.

"There was growing up in the world a definitely retarding influence,"
Stephen told us. "The best way a thing can be destroyed is for it to
destroy itself. That so many, who are themselves individually positive,
must be destroyed with this negative, is your side of the tragedy," be
continued pityingly, "but you must remember that it is only one universe
after all. And we know, WITHOUT A QUESTION, that your world, which has
forgotten the importance of immortality and the wisdom of recognizing the
reality of the Oneness of Consciousness, is going to recover that
knowledge. 'Where your treasure is'...remember? The world will recover
that knowledge because so much of its treasure--so many of its individual
loved ones--will be here, with us, in the unobstructed universe."

"'The price is high," supplemented Betty, "but that for which it is paid
is man's greatest good, and so no price is too high. The time has come
for a distinct step forward in man's psychological and moral evolution,
and sometimes it rakes great shock and sorrow to force him to take that
step."

What is that step forward?

Realization of the truth from which humanity was straying.

What truth?

Faith in the immortality of the individual, and the extension of outlook
that faith implies. Not belief, but FAITH--as man has faith in his
compass when he is on the high seas.

What extension of his outlook?

KNOWLEDGE that he, HIMSELF, is in evolution as well as being part of that
greater evolution of the whole of consciousness that must go on, that
will go on. That his own little segment, of an obstructed universe, and
what happens in it, are only a part--though a vitally important part--of
the greater whole.

"The actuality of that relationship is what I am trying to prove to you,"
said Betty. "It is what I want to make real by showing you--in your own
terms that you understand and of which you can intellectually
approve--that the universe is one, and that you and I are co-existent in
it. So that," she pointed out impressively, "you may widen your thoughts,
and so your actions, to that horizon, and by so much escape into the
unobstructed.

"I am," she continued, "stating nothing new. The consciousness of man
knows the truth. He need only be told the truth to recognize it--IF HE
WILL--since the truth is in himself. And the only reason he has stepped
aside from living the truth is because he has become too enamored of his
own creations. That which creates, I repeat, is greater than the thing
created, no matter what it is. "Now man must be retold. Always in world
crises he has been retold; always it has taken a world crisis to make him
receive.

"Now, perhaps, he needs this stepladder I offer--this divulgence with its
modern terminology--by which to climb back. In the crash and fall of
ideals, in the chaos of a world new to him, he MUST have a beacon toward
a wider outlook. He must have a significance to life, wherever he may be
and whatever may happen to him. He must know that, however untoward or
retarded the EVENT, the INTENT of consciousness, which is evolution, is
eternal; unchanging and unchanged.

"So many stepladders by which to get back," she went on. "So many
stepladders the human race has accumulated, if only it could recognize
them. They are recorded in all languages and in all sorts of ways; in
folk tales and the picture writings of the savage tribes; in the various
bibles of the various races; in poetry, in music, in sculpture, in
painting. In fact, all humanity has been reaching toward the UNOBSTRUCTED
ever since humanity was.

"Above all there is the Christian Bible. All faiths have in them truth.
Indeed, any system of thought that has lived and continued from
generation to generation in the minds and habits of peoples, has some
element of truth in it. Otherwise it could not have lived. It may not
contain all the truth, and its element of truth may have become
overdecorated by what Stephen called 'emotional hypotheses'--in other
words, the elaborations of dogma. And, a in, what may be truth for one
age may not be truth for a succeeding age. But so long as a man seeks
truth and keeps his path straight, his own SEEKING makes it true.
"Of all the faiths that have lived, Christianity has done most for the
world; in envisioning individual and collective liberty, in belief in
self, democracy, education, real freedom. It was first expressed in terms
needed for understanding at the time, just as I retell the truth now in
the terms of your times. It is the same truth, whether you call it the
brotherhood of man made One in a fatherhood of God, or the individual
degrees of consciousness operating in evolution toward the perfection of
the whole of Consciousness, the Reality.

"And I want to call your attention to the sweep of the Christian Bible as
a whole. It is the historical record, not only of events and the rise and
fall of social orders, but of human emotions and--most of all--spiritual
evaluations. In the Old Testament there is a happiness, and references to
joy and singing that you do not find in the New. True, you have job with
his troubles and Jeremiah with his lamentations, but you also have David
with his psalms and Solomon with his songs. Now, if you read carefully
you can find, in this gradual getting away from happiness, story after
story of the ignoring of the Oneness of Consciousness, the rejection of
what they called 'the fear of the Lord.' So when the Jew, Jesus, came to
preach his doctrine of brotherhood, one of the first things he did was to
scourge the money-changers out of the Temple. The things he had to say
were pretty much paradoxes to them--so captivated were they by the things
they had created. But these paradoxes, or parables, need not be such for
you.

"The Christian Bible is full of stepladders," she repeated. "They merely
need restatement, or perhaps reinterpretation, in modern terms. For
instance? Why, for instance, the second of the Beatitudes? 'Blessed are
they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.' What could apply more
directly to the world today?

"What was meant by these words then? and what is meant by them now? I
have said to you more than once that the thing most needed by the human
race is a renewal of faith in its own immortality.

"All that was meant two thousand years ago was that people who mourn seek
after the truth of immortality for the sake, first, of those they mourn,
and, second, for their own sakes. And that is what is meant again, today.
And the promise is, remember, 'they shall be comforted.'

"IF your fife on earth is all, why bother with it? Why bring children
into the world? Why plan ahead for coming generations? Fundamentally, you
know that the I Am of man is in evolution, and must go on. But man has
become so engrossed in the wonders of his own obstructed
universe--allowed himself to become so confused and overawed by things
outside himself--that he has broken away from that simple, early faith.
The world is mourning now. And it is going to mourn. It is losing much
that it has valued, emotionally and materially. It is only when people
who have become stiff-necked and proud in their own self-sufficiency are
forced by sorrow to take time to seek after truth--when they themselves
want truth--that truth can 'comfort' them or again make them free.

"'If you search, you will find many such stepladders to a clearer
understanding of the things I have been permitted to tell you.

"I gave you the other day," concluded Betty, "the symbol of a wheel, and
the hub of the wheel is truth, and the spokes of the wheel are the
various paths leading to truth. Now, no two spokes are identical, and no
two start from the same place on the rim, but in that they all run
straight and bind the rim to the hub they are alike, completing a perfect
whole, each spoke strengthening the hub. So if one man, starting from one
place, reads one meaning into this divulgence, and another starting from
another place reads into it a little different meaning, it can make no
matter."




GLOSSARY

CONSCIOUSNESS: The one and all-inclusive reality, in evolution. Man's
self-awareness is the highest expression of this reality.

ORTHOS: (Greek, orthos: true.) The operation of consciousness, through
co-existent essences; in its unobstucted aspect.

ORTHIC: Adjective. Pertaining to orthos.

UNIVERSE: The total of all manifestations of consciousness.

OBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE: That aspect of the whole universe which man knows
through his senses, including their mechanical extensions.

UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE: That aspect of the entire universe ordinarily
considered to be beyond the limitation of man's sense perceptions and
their extensions.

TRILOGIA: The threefold aspect of orthos, consisting of receptivity,
conductivity, and frequency.

ESSENCE: (Latin, ESSE: to be.) The co-existent and coefficient actuality
of orthos, manifesting itself in the obstructed universe as Time, Space
and Motion.

RECEPTIVITY: The Essence of Time.

CONDUCTIVITY: The Essence of Space.

FREQUENCY: The Essence of Motion.

TIME: The obstructed manifestation of the orthic essence, receptivity.

SPACE: The obstructed manifestation of the orthic essence, conductivity.

MOTION: The obstructed manifestation of the orthic essence, frequency.

ARRESTMENT: An incidence of frequency, conductivity and receptivity,
resulting in manifestation in the obstructed universe.

DEGREE: Consciousness, being in evolution, is in degrees. Each degree
represents a specific manifestation.

QUALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: That aspect of consciousness resulting in
species manifestation, as electricity, gold, tree, antelope, man, etc. In
the unobstructed universe Quality is in evolution, and therefore in
degrees. In the obstructed universe it is of fixed potentiality in its
given degree.

QUANTITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: That aspect of consciousness, in the
obstructed universe, capable of, and subject to development by the
individual, in evolution and therefore in degrees.

MATTER: In the obstructed universe matter is that arrestment of frequency
which manifests itself in a three-dimensional extension; in the
unobstructed universe it is the form attribute of any aspect of the
trilogia.

MATERIAL FORCES: Those arrestments of frequency expressing themselves
through matter.

AWARENESS-MECHANISM: That equipment of self-aware consciousness whereby
the individual perceives that which is objective to him.
PARALLEL LAW: The term connotes the interextension of principles
operating in both the obstructed and unobstructed universes.

BETA BODY: The form attribute of that frequency which is an individual
consciousness, an I-Am. It is integral, atomic and noncellular.

ALPHA BODY: The form attribute of a combination of frequencies,
constituting the physical housing in the obstructed universe of an
individual consciousness. Such as the human body.

PLURALISTIC MONISM: Connotes one reality expressing itself in
individualization, alike in kind but different in manifestation.

JUXTAPOSITION: The manner in which frequency (motion) variably collides
with receptivity (time) and conductivity (space) to result in an
arrestment, producing manifestation.

INTRAPOSITION: As juxtaposition is the manner of arrestment resulting in
manifestation, so intraposition is the status of relationship that
obtains as long as that arrestment holds.

CO-EXISTENT: That which is united in Being with something else for the
production of an effect.



APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

Reprinted by permission from

WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA

Reference Service, January 1940

WHITE, Stewart Edward. In his first biographical sketch for insertion in
Who's Who in America--published nearly 40 years ago in volume 2--Stewart
Edward White listed himself as unmarried and the author of two books, The
Westerner and The Claim-jumper. When volume 4 went to press he had
married--Elizabeth Grant, in 1904--and there were seven books to the
list, including The Blazed Trail.

By the time volume 19 of Who's Who in America was issued, Mr. White's
list of books had grown to forty--and all forty of a type so related one
to the other that even the titles carried a common thread of romance and
adventure. However, when a proof of his sketch for volume 20--the current
Who's Who in America--went to Mr. White for revision he added a
forty-first book, the tide of which at first glance hardly connected it
with this thread of pioneering and new frontiers.

For the title of this forty-first book was The Betty Book. Surely only
those who by one circumstance or another were led beyond the tide
discovered that in it Mr. White as a matter of fact still held to type,
and actually recorded astounding adventure on the greatest frontier of
all. And probably very few of those fortunate enough to go beyond the
tide, knew, if outside of Mr. White's own circle, that "Betty" was Mrs.
White, the Elizabeth Grant first appearing Mr. White's second Who's Who
in America sketch, published thirty years earlier in volume 4.

The facts are that Mr. and Mrs. White have been exploring the most
challenging of the frontiers for many years. Several thousand pages of
closely typed records have been assembled; Mr. White's brother Harwood
was contributing much of his time in collaboration.

When Mr. White received the proof of his Who's Who in America sketch to
revise for Volume 21--to issue in 1940--Betty had crossed the frontier
that she and "her boy" now knew so well; this time not to return as she
had in the course of many previous adventures along it. Also, a
succeeding volume to The Betty Book, and one under a more revealing
title, was in the printer's hands--Across the Unknown, now available.

The research editors came to Mr. White's biography in the course of the
careful checking all sketches in Who's Who in America undergo, including
the comparatively few which, like Mr. White's, have appeared regularly
for decades. It was immediately noticed that while Mr. White had added
Across the Unknown (with Harwood White), 1939, as the forty-second entry
on the list of his books, he had not altered the line "m. Elizabeth
Grant, of Newport, R. I., April 28, 1904." The usual notation was about
to be inserted in the sketch, when one of the editors recalled that he
had only a few days previously received a copy of Across the Unknown as a
gift from a friend. He glanced through it. His eye was caught by the
final chapter--"I Bear Witness."

Before he had finished the four pages of the chapter He understood why
Mr. White had not himself altered the reference to Betty. And he had
reached a decision--he would suggest that the usual notation be not made.

His suggestion carried--and the chapter, "I Bear Witness," was the
deciding factor. There will be no change in Mr. White's sketch other than
the addition of his forty-second book: Elizabeth Grant and Stewart Edward
White will continue to be listed in Who's Who in America exactly as they
have been since April, 1904

There results a "first" among the 433,050 sketches published in Who's Who
in America since Mr. White's sketch first appeared nearly four decades
ago. A waiving of accuracy to make possible a gesture recognizing the
beautiful chapter in an unusual book. No doubt justified on that score,
but have the editors of Who's Who in America for the first time actually
waived accuracy to any material extent? Perhaps The Betty Book and Across
the Unknown should be read before answering.



APPENDIX II

THE SEVEN PURPOSES

THE remarkable series of psychic communications relayed in the spring of
1918 through Margaret Cameron by a company of the Unobstructed under
leadership of her deceased friend "Mary K.", and published as The Seven
Purposes by Harper & Brothers in the following autumn, ended with this
statement:--

"Two things only we have striven for through you: to prove to a group of
intelligent persons that this force [the motive power employed in
communication] exists and may be practically applied between your plane
and ours, and to warn mankind of the nature and eternal import of
impending struggles.... Upon the choice of them who hear this truth the
immediate progress of the world depends. It is a warning to unite and
prepare for combat. This is the truth. Heed it." (June 13, 1918).

In the shorter ranges of human affairs, it would appear, much that is
wise goes to waste. Bread, cast on the waters, returns. But not always is
it so with wisdom. While The Seven Purposes was widely circulated during
the years after its publication and has exercised a continuing influence
since, its acceptance was largely among those interested in personal
proofs of individual survival after death. That the book was of equal
significance this side of death, economically and governmentally, seems
to have been overlooked. Certainly its "truth," which one can now see
offered the design for social living then required by events, has not
been heeded.

"The forces of disintegration," said Mary K., in course of the twelve
brief "lessons" that serve to focus the broader narrative of the 314-page
book, "have made friends with the poor and the needy, and have fed them
husks of brotherhood. They have made friends with the powerful and rich,
and have tempted them with earth and its kingdoms. They have fed the
artist falsehoods, and the writer fear of fear... These are the works of
the purposes we fight, and thus do they disguise themselves. Unless this
can be brought home to the souls of men, the fight will be long and
bitter." (March 26, 1918.)

If these were words of today's writing, they would be without portent.
For already the prophecy is fulfilled. All too apparent is the present
debauching of the needy by specious promises of security and of the rich
by empty assurances of controlled profit. Force now has followed
propaganda. The "long fight" is upon us. But they are not words of 1940.
They were communicated through Margaret Cameron in 1918, and were
immediately passed on by her and her publishers to the public.

One is reminded that prophets, so-called, were as natural to the ancient
scene as they are strange to the modern. Then popular thought accepted a
priesthood whose function it was to confer with divine oracles. Vague
were the findings at times and clothed in imagery more metaphorical than
factual. Yet did the seers of old venture to prophesy; and their words
still ring in our cars--true in the main as to intent, however wide of
the mark of event.

But the compiler of The Seven Purposes had had no thought of consulting
oracles. A gifted author in her own right (see Who's Who), none was as
astonished as she when overnight she discovered in herself a talent for
what: psychical research has called automatic writing. She had knocked at
no door; she had gone up into no mountain; she had encountered no burning
bush. Without asking for the communications later assembled in The Seven
Purposes, she received them just because they came--free of obscurant
symbolism. Nonetheless the twelve lessons were prophetic. Consider the
following, also from the material received March 26, 1918:

"This is the second lesson.

"The forces of disintegration are gathering for a titanic struggle, of
which your Great War is only the beginning....

"Germany...chose to follow the forces of destruction, and they will
surely destroy her. But the forces she followed are uniting for a fiercer
fight, more subtle, more deadly, more furious. Hidden beneath the
garments of peace and good will, they make ready to poison the minds of
men before destroying their forces and delaying their purposes.

"This is the battle to which we call you and all who are for progress.
This is the message you are to give the world, to warn them of the danger
at hand. The time has come when men must choose consciously to fight for
or against the forces of construction. They are confused from the
conflict within themselves, running hither and thither, calling for help
from the gods they have made unto themselves, but looking only to the
present good, perceiving only the present purpose, fearing only the
present defeat. They will find no help from these gods, for they have
impotent feet of clay....

"The forces of light are positive. Shun negation. The forces of freedom
am individual. Shun dependence. The forces of progress are fearless. Shun
fearful combinations. Work together as individuals, consciously
cooperating, not as sheep....

"The forces of disintegration am wily, but fearful. Bullies and cowards.
But when they are united in sufficiently strong numbers, fearless and
unscrupulous. They fear the reawakening of the forces of progress in your
life. This is the reason they gather now, to smite while the world is
weary. Disguised as purposes of light they hope for welcome.

The deterrent saviors of mankind, who leave no man, rich or poor, free to
create his own freedom! They have indeed found a welcome. The name of the
deluded who hail them is legion. Legion too is the name of those who hail
them through fear. Nor has the welcome been solely of Europe and Asia;
and that, in this year of disgrace 1940, is the bitter lesson.

Perhaps America, at least America, will listen now:--

"Free development demands free purpose and concentrated force. Wherever
two or three are gathered together to follow the same purpose in free and
conscious cooperation, there force is multiplied. Wherever a hundred are
assembled to be led like sheep by the bellwether, there force is
debauched and disintegrated.

"Because men have huddled together in fear, destruction threatens them.
Because free speech has been debauched to fell purpose, free men distrust
it. Men, forces of disintegration, but possessed of glib tongues, have
played bellwether to the multitude. Priests of purpose, whose counsel was
inspired by the Eternal, have been thrust aside... Better were it for the
immortal man to follow his purpose to death and mortal oblivion, than to
lose his force to the bellwether...."

(April 1, 1918).

Is a vivid description desired of the pressure groups that have bedeviled
American politics for the past ten years? Read this, received by Margaret
Cameron April 3, 1918:--

"Brotherhood, to one class, is a defensive organization, for protection.
Brotherhood, to another class, is an offensive organization, for pillage.
Brotherhood, to mother class, is in organized attempt to preserve the
unfit. Brotherhood, to another class, is a dream of unorganized following
of untried theories. None of these know that all men are brothers."

Such is the brotherhood of disintegration. And the brotherhood of
construction--how is it described by Mary K.?

"A great brotherhood is possible only when its component parts are great.
Strength lies not in numbers, but in purpose.

The fit may not lie down with the unfit, and their progeny survive. The
strong may not yield their purpose to the weak, and their force
remain....

"Brotherhood is purpose of progress, not purpose of profit. Brotherhood
is made beautiful by unity, not by schism... All build together the
common home of all.

"Seek ye those of your own purpose. Unite together all who fain would
build. Master and man, architect and mason, financier and farm laborer,
all work to the same end, and this is Brotherhood.

"To work to the same purpose, in whatever capacity may be necessary, this
is the only Brotherhood." (April 1, 1918.)

Again:--

"Today, the first essential of brotherhood is freedom. Freedom to think,
freedom to believe, freedom to strive, freedom to develop, from highest
to lowest. And the employer who refuses this opportunity to the men who
work under him is no more truly a force of disintegration than the
laborer who refuses to cooperate with his employer and thus proves
himself unworthy of a place in the procession of progress...

"There can be no society that will withstand disintegration that has not
labor, capital, and market. When capital oppresses labor, forces of
disintegration are freed. When labor dominates capital, forces of
disintegration am freed. When the people forget justice, forces of
disintegration are freed. And the destruction of one is the destruction
of all. The rich man who denies his brother freedom is a destroyer. The
poor man who denies his brother freedom is a destroyer in no less degree.
Each is a part of the other, and each follows eternal purpose to one
end--construction and progress....

"There are seven purposes. Progress, Light, Truth, Healing, Building,
Production, and Justice. Equally great, save Progress, which moves them
all. One of these each man must serve, if he proceeds toward the Great
Purpose...

"Give unto each his opportunity to grow, and to build for progress.
Freedom to strive is the one right inherent in existence, the strong and
the weak each following his own purpose, with all his force, to the one
great end. And he who binds and limits his brother's purpose binds
himself now and hereafter. But he who extends his brother's opportunity
builds for eternity." (April 3, 1918.)

Aside from the reasonableness of the argument it makes for personal
survival, The Seven Purposes stands as one of the truly important books
of the twentieth century; because (1) it clearly foretold, twenty-two
years ago, the plight in which the world and its freedom find themselves
today, (2) it forecast the cunning disguises of good-will, peace,
prosperity and security behind which the powers of bondage would plot
their victory, and (3) it carried assurance that in the end Construction,
not Disintegration, would win through, despite all--if and when men cease
to huddle, cease to hesitate, and choose.

As important as the first two, more so, is the third, phrased thus by
Mary K.:--

"All men aspire. Some with reluctance and halting, but all feel the
purpose of progress working within They may mistake its nature and deny
its power, but no man lives who has not felt its prompting. This is the
purpose beyond all others, the Eternal Purpose of United Construction. No
man can thwart it, no man can evade it, no force can defeat it. Why,
then, oppose and delay it? " (April 9, 1918.)

This Great and Eternal Purpose is defined by the lessons of The Seven
Purposes as unity--united construction. Betty would broaden this
definition a bit, as did Stephen. Unity of what? Her answer: Unity of
Consciousness, the one and only reality. In the oneness of the whole of
consciousness all men's needs must be of one flesh, one blood and one
soul--not figuratively, but actually.

The Great Purpose is served first and best by the purpose of Progress,
said Mary K. Betty would give progress an inclusive connotation. She
would call it evolution. But really the two names have but one meaning.

"There are disintegrating purposes as well as constructive, insisted Mary
K.; and all men know that this is so, though Betty, one imagines, would
prefer the word "deterrent." It, too, was sometimes used by Mary K.

Supporting that preference are statements such as this, taken, not from
the lessons but from the body of communications reported elsewhere in The
Seven Purposes:--

"The individual whose purposes are fundamentally destructive is not
damned nor lost. He is just delayed. Sooner or later he must work his way
up, and it is entirely up to him whether he does it sooner or
later--after he reaches this life, especially. In your life, he is
sometimes confused and misled. He pays for that, too--not pays, but makes
good for it, by working here for the development he had not sense enough
to take there."

It must be remembered, however, that a prime aim of The Seven Purposes
was to arouse, to realization of new and more perilous dangers, a world
that believed that the defeat of Germany in 1918 would bring a final
peace to all peoples. Accurately to characterize the hands and minds from
which renewed and greater violence--material, intellectual and moral--was
to come, required strong words, particularly as the tools of that
violence would be brute force last, but first envy disguised as justice,
doubt disguised as tolerance, cupidity disguised as building, destruction
and nihilism disguised as progress.

Surely the following prediction, made by Mary K. in March, 1918, and now
fulfilled, called for uncompromising words:

"The forces of disintegration are gathering for a tremendous fight. The
Great War is one of the crises of civilization, but the battle to come
still is one of the crises of eternity."

And now as to the word "purpose" itself--just what did Mary K. mean by
it? From the positive, constructive viewpoint, simply those great
inexorable currents that have controlled mankind's development from cave
to culture. It is these trends, inherent in consciousness itself, that
keep the ideal of man's destiny ever in his heart--a whole of brotherhood
perfected through the free service of individuals.

These are the purposes of consciousness that, like hounds of heaven, will
not down. Betty has called them intents. But the sweep of Constructive
Purpose as set forth through Margaret Cameron needs small re-enforcement
beyond the pages of The Seven Purposes itself.

--D.



THE END

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