And then, as I was ready to pass the manuscript on to the publishers, Betty herself, through Joan, of The Unobstructed Universe, turned it down flat.  It must be done over again.
 
"You have," said Betty, reinforced by her coadjutors—I here adopt their own bold habit of putting a condensation, though an accurate one, in quotes—"collected an admirable lot of building blocks.  Good building blocks.  Your trouble is that you are trying to use them undressed for the job, and even yet you are influenced by the chronological order of their delivery."  Now I will begin to quote the Invisibles verbatim.  "You see, Betty was DRILLED, DRILLED, DRILLED for twenty years, over and over again in the same things, with enormous elaboration in her instruction.  Of COURSE there were many repeats, and in many places.  You cannot take your readers in three hours over the whole of those twenty years.  Your job is a selective job.  You have the obligation to dip into any portion for clarity.  You must pick out the bits that seem the sharpest illustration of Betty's systematic travel of the Road — no matter where they come.  The public has to have a straight line.  It just can't be expected to jump over twenty years.

"When you come over here," she continued, "this force is all you've got to begin your work with.  All you have is the amount you can take and arrange.  I take stock of myself — sense how much individualized current is around me which keeps at bay, as it were, what would be an all-engulfing substance if I'd let it.  But I'm not going to let it engulf me, I'm going to act on it.  That is as near as I can get to sensation, the first primitive sensation of creative force which I manufacture and maintain."
 
 
"One of the most essential motivations of progress," put in the Invisibles, "is the reality of this very thing, this acute aliveness, this warm eager current ever seeking new channels.  Without a definitely encouraged consciousness of this aliveness you are not yet in possession of your highest capabilities.  But when you gain it for your own, you will have forever in your hands the magic open-sesame of gates beyond gates.  You cannot realize all the difference between what has always existed as the common eternal history of the race, and the few inheritors of actual treasure.  The astonishing power, the intense stimulation beyond anything you can conceive intellectually, is the reward that awaits your efforts.

"You grasp intellectually what the raising of vibrations means.  Yet could you, deliberately, sitting in your chair, raise your vibrations; and, clearly aware of the act, describe and control the accompanying emotion?  This is, quite simply, the trained approach to acute aliveness."

"I cannot accomplish it through the channel of my mind," Betty took it up.  "I must experiment and tell you myself. . . .

"I can, for instance, walk from here to the door in various degrees of vibration—which I call that for lack of a better term.  I can go as a human lima bean, for instance: life contained within an ungerminated shell, you know.  I can walk somewhat in that fashion without particular sense impressions on the way.  Or I can go with perhaps some simple idea occupying me, of some business or pleasure.  Or I can go in various degrees above that, admitting more and more of life to my inner being, in proportion as I am increasingly released from my restricting shell.  Or, finally, I can go with acute aliveness, which is the master dispeller of that containing shell; so that, while I walk seemingly as before, utilizing the same functions, actually I am permitting a flooding-in of the greater all-encompassing self.  I would then walk towards the door in a beautiful spare moment, occupied happily and naturally in merging myself.  There's the secret.  Like warm sun rays on a gratefully receptive body, in the pregnant moment of eternity in passing to the door, all the richness of life would flood through me; and I, comfortably, deeply happy in my, merging with it, would slowly learn the secret of acute awareness and all that it horizons to my soul.

"I can't tell you what it really feels like: words don't hold it nicely.  But it's not only a flooding-in, there's an ebb to it, and you flood out with it.  Nevertheless I do not, somehow, lose control of my segment of life.  The participation temporarily in the greater unity just expands the segment."

"The great effort being made today," concluded the Invisibles, "is to impart the gift of knowledge of the true nature of spiritual practises.  It has been so unhumanized, so undesirably presented, so scoffed at and misunderstood.  The time is ripe to present it as a warmth and shelter and beauty of the inner life, as ardently to be desired and worked for as those of the outer."

As I look back I realize I must have been a great trial, nevertheless I believe my insistences were useful.  My stubbornness gave Betty an anchor to windward; counteracted any danger of drifting.  At least the Invisibles were kind enough to tell me so. 

 

Betty realized that for this period anyway, we must have different points of view.

 

"I am emboldening myself," she told me one day, after a long initial pause, "and it takes time.  Funny game! . . . I have to embolden myself in order to acquire an authoritative presentation of things.  You see, we work in different mediums.  Yours offers adjustment to the highest reaches of comprehension compatible with earth conditions; my records are translations from other conditions extending beyond normal experience.  Each time I have to transmute myself for participation to the best of my ability in the new conditions, and then struggle to turn them into word symbols giving approximate concepts.  I keep my contacts with you by passing back and forth from one type of comprehension to the other.  It is slow hard work, but it has to be done.  I hold my little bit of consciousness as on a magic carpet, miraculously freed from what I can only symbolize to you as terrestrial gravitation — that being the hampering customary conditions as compared with this greater scope of action. . . .

 

"Coming here is like coming from a stingy little cabin to magically wrought palaces and vaulted temples, with still more beautiful places beyond — a vast and colorful world purpled over with mystic promises.  How can I tell you these things, when they are so big and I am so little?  My audacity in even sensing them awes me! . . .

 

"Today's experience seems to be a lesson in selection.  There appears to be an elaboration and richness in my surroundings which surpasses all my powers of perception.  I sense intricacies of beauty I cannot even comprehend.  I could easily lose myself in convolutions of the varied appeals to my senses. 

 

"Fortunately there is within me a controlling desire and ability to see a few great simplicities of this different and more powerfully vital form of life.  While I can sense the stupendously manifold lesser manifestations existing in this particular arc of my illumination, at the same time I can see the fundamental motivations behind them.  Because of my hold on these I can support the wealth and beauty and elaboration."
 
 
Obviously many of Betty's experiences were symbolic shows arranged by the Invisibles.  For example: 
 
"I am carefully approaching something-a great Presence."  It was Betty speaking.  "I want to see if I can make out who he is and what he has to tell me. . . .

"Now I can't come any nearer to him, so I will just have to listen carefully.  Something is shaping vaguely, as a mass comes to form on a potter's wheel. . . .

"He is showing me carefully guarded treasures.  I know they are treasures, but I don't know what to value them with.  I am to select from them as the natural appeal is to me.  And then I am to wear them, because of the dignity and responsibility they imply, as a treasure bearer should.  It is like an emblem of office laid on me, and I am trying to conduct myself as worthy.  I wish you could understand what this kind of spiritual pride is, how it differs from the pride of arrogance.  It is a lofty tingling thing that is married to humility.

"It must be a great poverty of spirit that makes people go unadorned with the emblems of their belief.  These emblems now being showed me are beautiful things, so marvelous in design and workmanship, so distinguished in prerogative.  They mark the rank that serves.  They acknowledge before all men's eyes the grandeur of kinship, the unity of human experiences."
 
 
"There are so many things in that treasure heap.  I just selected the things that would give me strength.  There is a mass of beauty in them, so curiously wrought with every human perception and precious instinct.  There is a long golden chain I would like to have had.  It was a chain of concentration that does not bind, does not restrain you from expanding; but I did not take it.  I wanted it, too; but I did not think I was fit to wear it yet.  It is a great pity, because everybody who knows anything will notice that something is lacking.  I'll go back some day and get it."

"I am," she said, "very busy getting a consciousness of my aliveness for you to put down later.  It's an acknowledgment and exercise of acute aliveness.  I must prepare it first in quiet.  It is one of the secrets of all inner creative work and progress and self-propulsion. . . .

"One of the most essential motivations of progress," put in the Invisibles, "is the reality of this very thing, this acute aliveness, this warm eager current ever seeking new channels.  Without a definitely encouraged consciousness of this aliveness you are not yet in possession of your highest capabilities.  But when you gain it for your own, you will have forever in your hands the magic open-sesame of gates beyond gates.  You cannot realize all the difference between what has always existed as the common eternal history of the race, and the few inheritors of actual treasure.  The astonishing power, the intense stimulation beyond anything you can conceive intellectually, is the reward that awaits your efforts.

"You grasp intellectually what the raising of vibrations means.  Yet could you, deliberately, sitting in your chair, raise your vibrations; and, clearly aware of the act, describe and control the accompanying emotion?  This is, quite simply, the trained approach to acute aliveness."

"I cannot accomplish it through the channel of my mind," Betty took it up.  "I must experiment and tell you myself. . . .

"I can, for instance, walk from here to the door in various degrees of vibration-which I call that for lack of a better term.  I can go as a human lima bean, for instance: life contained within an ungerminated shell, you know.  I can walk somewhat in that fashion without particular sense impressions on the way.  Or I can go with perhaps some simple idea occupying me, of some business or pleasure.  Or I can go in various degrees above that, admitting more and more of life to my inner being, in proportion as I am increasingly released from my restricting shell.  Or, finally, I can go with acute aliveness, which is the master dispeller of that containing shell; so that, while I walk seemingly as before, utilizing the same functions, actually I am permitting a flooding-in of the greater all-encompassing self.  I would then walk towards the door in a beautiful spare moment, occupied happily and naturally in merging myself.  There's the secret.  Like warm sun rays on a gratefully receptive body, in the pregnant moment of eternity in passing to the door, all the richness of life would flood through me; and I, comfortably, deeply happy in my, merging with it, would slowly learn the secret of acute awareness and all that it horizons to my soul.

"I can't tell you what it really feels like: words don't hold it nicely.  But it's not only a flooding-in, there's an ebb to it, and you flood out with it.  Nevertheless I do not, somehow, lose control of my segment of life.  The participation temporarily in the greater unity just expands the segment."

"The great effort being made today," concluded the Invisibles, "is to impart the gift of knowledge of the true nature of spiritual practises.  It has been so unhumanized, so undesirably presented, so scoffed at and misunderstood.  The time is ripe to present it as a warmth and shelter and beauty of the inner life, as ardently to be desired and worked for as those of the outer."