Betty White
Selected Passages from
Across the Unknown

for
Transformative Contemplation
Stewart Edward White



Transformative Contemplation
  Contemplation is:
    • Concentration on spiritual elements (persons, events, concepts, truths, Forms) as a form of private devotion

    • A state of mystical awareness of a Higher Dimension

  Transformative contemplation involves:
    • Reading the passages below aloud thoughtfully

    • Meditating on their meaning for you

    • "Experimenting" with the ideas presented

    • Using the images to energize your imagination

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

Betty White, Across the Unknown


     Betty White was one of the most remarkable spiritual teachers the world has known. She not only participated in her own development of higher consciousness, assisting Stewart (her husband) to gain discernment in the process, but also created a body of teachings for all those interested in cultivating this same capability of higher awareness.

      Her teachings are unique in that we actually "hear" Betty's reports as she is developing, teaching us by what she is experiencing. Her teachings are not about mere concepts but about actual, experiential events which lead to the development of higher faculties dormant through generations of neglect.

     Both Stewart and Betty reported their developmental experiences as they occurred. We are privileged to "go along" with them as they report these adventures in development, hearing how they experimented in creating a New Being in a higher realm. We're then able to experiment with these same operations and concepts in learning to enter and develop within this supersensory world.

     One of the most powerful ways to develop an experiential awareness of the Higher Dimension is to use your creative imagination to accompany Betty as she learns and experiments in this Higher Consciousness:
  • You are able to get a "feeling" for this Higher Dimension

  • You can begin to develop your own powers of apprehension

  • You develop your own method of returning to the Higher Dimension

     By contemplating the passages below, you're able to accompany Betty White on her experiential excursions into the spiritual world. It's as if you were learning to "fly" with her so you can then "solo" in this higher dimension. You are actually creating your Higher Being by "struggling to consciousness" in the Higher Dimension. It is a literal, actual new birth into a higher realm of being.

  1. "Their stated aim is the development of the individual as a whole to the point where he can enter what amounts to another region of consciousness." 6

  2. "As we penetrate the country beyond many of these [psychic] powers and conditions will come to us naturally and securely as a by-product of our progress.  . . .  But meanwhile we must be vigilant neither to strain for their acquisition, nor to abuse the privilege of their possession. For it is when we make them ends in themselves, and collect or develop them for the sake of their own, that they become dangerous." 8

  3. "Every day strengthen your desire for understanding: every day make fertile your understanding by moments of admitting eternal things to your consciousness."

  4. "Each of us occupies not only the physical body we see, but a second or spiritual body. This latter will continue to contain us after physical death. Though imperceptible to our ordinary senses, the spiritual body is no vague wraith of insubstantial shadow. It is perfectly real, made of definite substance, and will function in a world that corresponds to it. That world also is of definite substance." 13, 14

  5. "That world is not separated from ours by a hard and fast iron wall of time. We can, in certain ways, begin to function in it now. Indeed at the time of ripeness that is what we must do if we are to continue efficient and developing. If we gain consciously and keep continuously our contact with it, our reservoirs will draw from unfailing abundance." 14

  6. "You've got to play with the idea before you can make it work, because you are not operating in your accustomed substance. You are employing a higher creative form which you don't know how to use, except unconsciously and relaxedly." 16

  7. "Understanding can be acquired only by actual participation in the reality." 18

  8. "At present there is no reaction of experience to words representing that reality." 18

  9. "For the present don't try to acquire too definite a formula in your medium, but work for comprehension of the thing in ours. The difference is between the taking of detached, intellectual, occasionally contemplated concepts, and having them a constant, integral part of your consciousness. This difference is the most difficult to present simply to the educated. Minds which are firmly established in their own sphere of action will not even pause to contemplate another." 19

  10. "Escape frequently from the limitations of your ponderable mind, and capture a small boy's enjoyment in constructing yourself a tree house, high above your ordinary workaday dwelling place." 20

  11. "You can . . . begin to gain this reality without believing in it at all! All we ask of anybody at first is an attitude of receptivity." 21

  12. "If you entertain in an attitude of receptivity what comes to you, you are receiving the sunlight, and that must have its effect in development. What dust and chaff comes to you at the same time will be disposed of and pass away. By maintaining the willingness to receive--not to criticize at first--that which is intrinsically true will insensibly become part of you, and you will ultimately and most unexpectedly find yourself possessed of a belief that will be a certainty." 21

  13. "My busy, near-sighted little self must be quieted, set aside for the purpose of expanding a great and dormant faculty within me. This faculty is weak; it barely records impressions yet; but through it surges all that is enduring." 23

  14. "Make the leap. . . . You cannot connect up in an unbroken series of steps with which you know. This reality is not on the outskirts; a gap must be bridged.  . . .   Hurl yourself into space, as it were. It will not hurt you to go bravely out to pick up a clue or two. You've been trying to creep up on things on the scientific side, but they've got to be boldly taken, artistically, in the present case." 23, 24

  15. "Anything gorgeous and wonderful could happen to you if only you'd have the courage to ignore and outdistance your ordinary restricted self. Everybody who has pioneered has thrown aside the customary routine and hurled himself at one inspired ideal." 24

  16. "The leap is an ingredient, and you can't go ahead without making it. When you leave out the leap you are not working in the nature of the substance. You are trying to work in the new substance with the nature of the old." 24

  17. "We are trying . . . to drag you out of your restricted element, to show you the taking off process: how to zoom. You can't conquer the air by working the levers on the ground. It is only by utilizing the attributes of the new substance that you can succeed. This next big conception of how to function spiritually is only to be accomplished by taking seriously this leaping process." 25

  18. "You must gain it in imagination first . . . and then work back through slow steps to connect it with observed facts." 26

  19. "Reach the imagination into the reality we present. It can only be made tangible, established within you, by this type of personal experience." 26

  20. "Imagination is the very gateway to reality! Imagination is the Power of Transportation--that overrides space and time! Imagination enables you to put yourself anywhere. It's the power of juxtaposition, that puts together things that were never put together before, at points of contact that nobody else ever thought of. It's the power to see the Pattern." 26, 27

  21. "You call it a plaything, You've always called it a plaything. But actually it's the one thing you possess that connects you with the next substance. It's a transmuting chemical.  . . .  Utilize it to connect with what is beyond your experience, beyond the limits of your present conceptions." 27

  22. "There is no use . . . in previsioning or predicting what this higher consciousness will accomplish or perceive. That is entirely individual and temperamental. An indication of the things which one may acquire is all that can be given from one to another." 30, 31

  23. "In order to approach Betty's new 'substance' or region of consciousness or whatever it was, I was to use my imagination as a kind of magic carpet. By wholeheartedly picturing to myself the general conditions described by Betty, I was to draw nearer to the thing itself--prepare myself, so to speak, for eventual participation." 31

  24. "I hold an idea rather loosely when I get it. I take it as I would take the beauty of the rainbow. I know I cannot hold it or reach it or even look at it closely. I know I can't, and so I don't try. That is the way I take these big ideas in the beginning--somewhat like the rainbow. I remember them wholly; but they are out of my reach in the analysis, the pulling of them to pieces to explain them." 31, 32

  25. "How do I function in the universal strength? . . . By amalgamation of my heart's desire with the strength that is myself and not myself. I lie individually quiescent in it, as one floats contentedly in the great ocean." 33

  26. "It's like being hatched." 35

  27. "The vortex of relaxation is simply breaking your shell and releasing you into the surrounding life. Don't you see the difference of conditions? How obviously the greater powers of the surrounding life are to yours as the world is to the interior of an egg? It is hopeless to compress and reduce it for you. we must release you into it so it can explain itself." 35

  28. "I'm struggling with comprehension." 35

  29. "I am not free to function in it. I can only sense it; trying to struggle to consciousness in the new element." 35

  30. "Recollect that this is hard pioneer work, bit by bit, a struggle to conquer the wilderness of lack of comprehension. Even if it seems fantastic to you, or obvious, or unproductive, live with this idea of surrounding yourself. Store it away to ripen. It will shake down into place." 35

  31. "Rebirths are going on all about us, and we pay no attention. They are such commonplaces. . . . I don't know why it should surprise me so to stick my head up into a new world, and realize that I can gradually draw myself up until I get entirely into it. It is quite natural." 35

  32. "I just work hard, and then I find I am raised up somehow to a superstate, and am in touch with something I did not have before, and I see it vaguely and look back and tell you about it. But I do it, whatever I'm at. That's why I work so hard and keep quiet so long. I'm gaining a sense of reality, experiencing, doing, instead of just reflecting. That means I've got actually to work in this living beyondness and absorb into the unconscious . . . until I have something to produce in the consciousness." 35, 36

  33. "I am functioning as a half-conscious newborn thing, but in a world real enough to stamp on, to expand into definitely with the strange new powers that are urging within me. In the quiet, dimly perceived as yet, my extended self senses great desires. Beauty's new functions and satisfactions are surrounding me. I am too weak to grasp them."




  34. "I'm not sure what it is that enters me and rearranges my particles and transmutes and strengthens and makes me so happy. It has such a rearranging and ordering of you. . ." 36

  35. "I should say it was the perfect ordering of all elements, an exquisite joy of participating in harmony. My own little joy of life is welded to that of every other harmonized being. I've forgotten my individual part. I'm in a great chorus." 36, 37

  36. "Wonderful, to be a part, even a little part of anything that moves on with such majesty and beauty and power. . ." 37

  37. "There are so many things in this consciousness that are beautiful--so many things I participate in without understanding." 37

  38. "Even the distance to the other consciousness is not distance in space; it's a slowness or torpidity in penetrating. It's just lack of the right combination that makes it seem distant. It is so near when you clear that intervening denseness which is not space." 38

    "For it is possible, my son, that a man's soul should be made like to God, e'en while it still is in a body, if it doth contemplate the Beauty of the Good."

    Thrice-Great Hermes, The Key

  39. "It is all One; Here; Now--all the heavens and hells and universes superimposed. . . It gets nearer and nearer until it all seems right on top of me! More and more revealing light!" 39

  40. "Suppose, to start with, I presage it to you as an entirely new atmosphere. In it I am perfectly vigorous and strong and conscious, but I am all sympathetic. that is, I have a universal sense, not only of myself alone, but as if all the others were part of the atmosphere. Our usual atmosphere is a lot of little separate cells--Toms's, Dick's and Harry's--all more or less attracting or repelling or self-seeking. This new atmosphere contains them all dissolved, as it were, into one fluid substance. It's like possessing a bigger body, instead of being a separate atom of a body. I can see how you contract your vision in proportion as you become a little Tom-Dick-or-Harry cell; or how you expand it in proportion as you live in the atmosphere that contains them all as part of a great universal life." 39

  41. "I gave the impression of merging of individualities. It's not that. They are distinct; but it's the merging of the substance possessed by all of them that produces the magic." 39

  42. "There are influences around me radiating the warmth of human affection, only with so much greater power. I dissolve to their love; I surround them as they surround me, steeping in each other's heart-expansion. It's so transforming, breath-taking, and I can't tell you in words." 40

  43. "Now, the strange thing is, I reach out and spread around each one I care for, this atmosphere. And as more and more people are brought in and each adds his contribution to the atmosphere, it enlarges and grows stronger and becomes firm, like a continent in a surrounding ocean." 41

  44. "I seem actually to be that firm body--I feel it in all its parts--and yet it is composed of many people." 41

  45. "It is not easy to sit down to a comprehension of universality. Only dimly can you sense it as the great ocean connecting all the islands and continents. . . . All the parceled-off objective things, of however great magnitude, are but the islands and continents among and around which flows the great common carrier of universal spirit." 41

  46. "It's like a universal contribution from all hearts. . . Each meets me there. Each, through the functions of his being, sends out a quality capable, worthy of entering this substance, this universal ocean. He can withdraw it; he still is an individual. But when he sends it forth it is his highest potentiality. All consciousness is open to him. He passes into what we can only call godship." 41

  47. "Only by collecting a group of your dearest, going forth with your heart among them, cementing, as it were, a collective entity, and continually enlarging it, putting forth the substance among you, can you start toward comprehension of the Universal Consciousness." 41

  48. "How can we make you desire, be eager for the delights of this connective consciousness? It is as hopeless as trying to tell a little child in its sand box how much fun it is to be grown-up and married. And yet there is no other acquisition of life in the way of grown-upness that compares with this faculty." 41, 42

  49. "Each time I unite myself with someone or something in eagerness of admiration and affection--by that process I have merged momentarily with the Universal. That is clear. But also there seem to be definite steps reaching to the conscious use of this universal process: response, admiration, adoration, to unity. This gradual lessening of separateness from the thing admired eventually makes it possible to draw from it its spiritual essence, feeding upon it as it were. then you can produce your own interpretation, your own embodiment of this essence." 42

  50. "The universal quality of life. You feel it everywhere, in the woods and waters, the endless manifestations of vitality, pulsing and vibrating in contrast to the inanimate things you handle so constantly. Try to see what this life actually is like in essence, and not in its varied forms. then realize this: when you can associate yourself enough with this quality consciously to rest in it, depend upon it . . . then the great secret of these teachings is yours." 43

  51. "The greatest happiness and greatest vigor is to be obtained in acquiring this faith in the life substance. It gives you a simple concept of support and endowment." 43

  52. "I keep quiet, and I breathe away the barriers between the two consciousnesses, and I think that I hold the actual golden essence of this vitality with which we buy our happiness; but I can't bring it back. It slips through my fingers. I am not built so I can hold it." 44

  53. "I never knew such repose and power and self-produced rapture existed, such freedom, such immensity of happiness. I say 'self-produced' because it need not be blindly, spasmodically found in a fleeting condition. Its laws can be understood, making it possible to continue to live in it." 44

  54. "This control, this acquisition of raised vibrations--whatever you choose to call it--is absolutely within the desire of the individual. If you really want it, nothing from the outside can more than momentarily distract. It is a thing that one builds of does not build, according to his caliber." 45

  55. "I like slipping back and forth this way. I don't see why it isn't just as interesting a performance, and vastly more desirable, than learning to swim in an element that is not your own. It is just as natural really. I just leap out of myself and take a dive into a freer, more stimulating element. Each time I do it, it gets easier; I am more at home in it; and more stimulated by it." 46

  56. "I am getting an actual demonstration, proof, of a spiritual existence as it is here, not in a future life. It's a very definite winged consciousness, nothing postponed or impossible of attainment about it. It's absolutely the next step we've got to take." 47

  57. "This exit into greater life is the crowning glory of our existence here. It means transfiguration into an electrified and eternal being. . . The exit is through the doors of self." 47

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

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

  60. "It makes me feel that I personally can never be annihilated. If my body were actually taken away from me entirely, and I left in space, I feel I should continue to hold myself together, a vigorously determined entity. I might be temporarily inactive, perhaps, but I'd be convinced of my ability to participate in an existence which would be within my reach for the effort of taking. Though I might be deprived of everything en route, I could not by any conceivable thing be overcome or annihilated. I know that the development of a spark, even a tiny spark, of individual power cannot die. I will seek and find its proper progression through its own vitality. The thing to do is to take a lively spark with you when you go." 48

  61. "I am trying to show you an actual definite possible method of controlling the first maturing, naturally and joyously, from this life to the next; occupying experimentally the higher grades, while continuing existence here. You can do this by periodically letting fall your acquiescence with the impertinences of the body and its setting of manufactured needs, its houses and parks and marts and all its complications; letting them fall deliberately from your consciousness, and at the same time being vigorously yourself, translating as into another language the same order of your ardors and pursuits. It mirrors your soul in secret to yourself." 48, 49

  62. "All the work ahead is liberation from self; my portioned-off self has become too great a restriction to me. I have found out how to blossom forth from it." 49

    Rumi with Shams as his Higher Self
  63. "This consciousness beyond self is just the precarious elevation above what is normally ours. Equilibrium and progress rest entirely with my ability to regulate and control myself, to be sure and poised and confident and daring in a new element. I can see long practice in that ahead." 49

  64. "Now I am quite successfully dead. It wasn't much of an operation after all. It was a pleasurable releasing, quite different from the death-agony idea. That should be looked on as simply the birth pains of the spiritual body." 50

  65. "I'm here, all right, and quite contented, but I'm like a baby that has pulled itself upright holding onto a chair. I don't know what to do next. If only I were a little stronger and more vigorous, that would put me more closely in touch with the help and affection I feel around me. Thank heaven I have the protection of it. Now I must keep still and see what my instincts and emotions are." 50

  66. "I seem to be only semiconscious. There is so much around me now that before I was blind and deaf to. . . Oh, I strained to open what should be my earth eyes and touch with my earth fingers, and it's not possible! Helping, loving people are around me, urging me to do something. I love them back for helping me, and it gets easier." 50

  67. "It is dreadful to be this way without more vitality and shape. I ought to take form right away and go at it, but I'm lumpish. I may have great possibilities and great powers, but how am I going to get hold of them? I'd like some advice about what to do. I should like to start right out and try my muscles and see what I've got, but I know I can't do that, I am not in that kind of a world." 50

  68. "I seem to have an impulse, some sort of an urge, to make this weakish lumpish self of mine move forward valiantly and surgingly. It's not aggression, that is a bull-headed sort of thing. It's not exactly force: that is too cold and steely a word. They are stiff-muscled words; they don't sustain the idea at all. I can't find any better than the old word 'volition.' I tried 'faith,' but that is a queer platform people put things on, it's been spoiled. So I had to go back to a suspended word that could travel vigorously. 51

  69. "Well, I got the volition, and I started right out, so as not to be attached to anything. I didn't want to be huddled in a corner. And I got much firmer shape right away--like being turned on a potter's wheel. Then I got something quite easily, no trouble at all. It came right away as soon as I started out: nice and warm and loving feeling. I don't know what you call it, but I'm glad I've got it. It makes me feel very slightly glowish." 51

  70. "I feel like a tiny planetary thing cast off from a body to which I was adhering to mature. And now I am imbued with actual planetship. You remember before I was like something electrical without a cord which I dragged around to preserve my current. Now I am detached and endowed with the ability to create my own glow, my own current. I don't know how to explain how I do it; it's an instinctive thing yet. I can obtain it much as if we got electricity by radio. I am a little tiny unit of power by myself. I call it glow, because that means warmth and light both. It is a retained sensation and a radiation at the same time, which is what seems the most characteristic quality of this ideal extension of myself. Strangely enough, it's my real life body from now on, and I am content to have it so." 51, 52

  71. "You can't beat upon a shadow and mutilate it, however clear-cut and defined it may be. You can't bottle up a sunspot and retain it for yourself. You can't mix your mediums like that. Now this is just to sweep your mind clean of its sense limitations and help you to think of yourself, your true forever self, as of an entirely different substance." 52

  72. "It is a direct experience of spiritual substance. I am looking at it, but am unable to comprehend it; it is so different from the skin-and-bones stuff that we have for bodies. I tell you this so you will know how puzzled I am. I've got to stay here and work in this until I understand it. When I put on a body of this I am all so changed I don't know what to do or what to tell you." 52

  73. "There I've got it on! But the joke of it is that what I was doing was to get off the other one.  Now! Here I am!" 52

  74. "I am just the same person, but I am entirely made of this strange new substance, which is bodiless but seems at the same time to maintain itself. It does not just dissipate with the rest of the air. I can occupy it temporarily, but I can't utilize it nor travel in it yet." 52

  75. "It has the most amusing possibilities. Supposing you were made of this: it is more like the separating and recoagulating power of quicksilver than anything I know. If I want to go through a material thing, I just flow right through it, sieve myself through it. There is nothing solid you know, really. . . Confronted by what used to look like a solid thing like a wall, I know perfectly well I can go through it." 52

  76. "That is what astonished me so: I lost my body--freed myself from what held all the dots together--and found I was occupying the spaces, held together in some way by the spiritual body." 53

  77. "I am learning a great deal: this freed body of mine must be trained. I no longer get much help in actual support; I support myself. to do this I must understand the action of utilizing this freed body." 53

  78. "It's just the way a fish passes water through its gills for sustenance. so this freed body of mine by means of this pulsation maintains itself in a higher form of ambience by passing it through itself. I am different from it and lesser than it, but I am also entirely sustained and fed by, enlivened by it. Not fed in the sense of eating, but in the sense of gaining progressive understandings." 54

  79. "It's the instant of its passing through you that is your moment of divinity, absolute unity. Thus individual life is fed. I think everything I get is the sum of these instants of unity. In time they prick out a picture, something like a wireless picture. These maintaining pulsations come entirely from the region of feeling, which we symbolize by the heart. The brain is a far member , like a hand or foot." 54

  80. "I discovered then that all I could do was just collect every bit of inner desire-power and heart-force that I possessed and fling it out of me in a great exuberant stretch. That was when I found that this pulsing action is the great life movement which you transform and adapt to produce your own individual variations. You see, it reconstructs according to what one takes into it with him of shaping desire." 54

  81. "Now this disembodied quality I am looking at is what would give us actual possession of the working ability of these higher forces. I am up beside those who have all this to give out, and it is tremendously important to get their point of view on why we are not utilizing it. They say I can't get much of it; only a tiny beginning, a little hint on how to go about growing into it." 55

  82. "Actually it is just the sureness of your belief in the existence of this greater force. That is the principal thing to begin with." 55

  83. "But these higher forces we have sensed only as weak generalizations. We've got to make them the same in our conscious minds as the natural forces I mentioned, and which we accept as a matter of course. We've got to associate with them, experiment with them, as constantly and interestedly as people did in acquiring the laws controlling the other forces. It's the thing that will make our spiritual bodies work. It's the first thing we shall be faced with when we 'go hence.' Everything we have been accustomed to will have gone away from us. If we haven't built this extension of confidence in known forces, we will be at a loss. This particular attitude of mind, surety, confidence is itself a force: it is a superlative force." 56

  84. "You see, we've brought you forth from your lesser self to your greater self." 57

  85. "All this is an effort to establish us firmly in the spiritual so we can utilize its greater powers in doing the physical things we see are worth doing. This definite belief in a force assisting our best efforts, and our reckoning on its unfailing help; the establishment of this principle of the constructive, directive forward movement which we call evolution--this condition of faith, must at some time or other in our progression be permanently accepted by our united being. It is a magic touchstone, making positive our efforts, instead of negativing them constantly with doubts and waverings." 57

  86. "There is only one important proviso: we cannot depend on this law to accomplish anything more than the complement of our own efforts. One must depend on oneself to build one's aspirational column, knowing that at the highest stretch of one's hopes and efforts a capital will be placed beyond one's power to conceive." 57, 58

  87. "This subject . . . is light-footed; not like the solemn tread of a processional. It has dance steps in it, and running for the joy of running, and leaping for the joy of leaping. It is as natural and cheerful as a baby playing with its toes, feeling out the most desirable activity for entertainment. This is a gracious performance. It is not a child in a schoolroom; it is a soul gracefully entering into eternity." 60

  88. "They are terribly anxious . . . to take away any solemn ecclesiastical idea from 'spiritual.' Once recognized as standing for spontaneous enjoyment, legitimate heart indulgence, the word will have rough-and-ready hiking clothes instead of vestments." 60

  89. "It is no different in form; it's a difference of element, more especially of clearness and light and power; without the thick clumsy dragging substance we are in. It is a much greater difference of element than going under water." 62

  90. "We are all apparently occupying the same space. It doesn't seem to be a case of distance at all." 65

  91. "All progress leads from the more material to the less material; until at length it conducts us into regions where reality is perceived without the uses of any laborious material structure at all. You yourselves know that individuals of higher mentality do not always have to pass through a material experience. If they are cognizant of its cause and effect, they can grasp it without painstakingly suffering it; they do not need the laborious material structure to see its reality. It is the same way in the still higher levels beyond. You are all leading up to a consciousness of reality without its material shadows, its material reflections, its material manifestations, as aids to comprehension." 67

  92. "Getting aside from the body was intended only as temporary freeing from its demands in order that I might act untrammeled in another part of myself; and also, as a by-product, that I might actually experience, by sensation, that the body is only an attribute of the spirit. Like the mind. As are the hands to the body itself." 71

  93. "An intellectual conviction gained through study, through the reading of books, through the experimental examination of evidence, has one function and one function only; it moves the center of interest into the path in which personal experience is most likely to be encountered." 79

  94. "When each individual has reached that point of inner growth where he is ready to contain the emotional conviction, the experience personal to himself never lacks. He may not anticipate its coming or even seek it: generally in our own lives we fail to see the sure action of evolution taking place--fail to see the same maturing as takes place in a chestnut burr. . . . Likewise the moment comes inevitably for the culmination of our efforts. . . And at that moment the experience appropriate to the individual always is supplied. It is inexorable." 79

  95. "The gift of illumination of the moment . . . is how to substitute for bodily functions the higher intelligence and vital intensities of the enduring being within you." 85

  96. "Put more time into thinking constructively of your new body. If you can realize clearly this core of life that carries on beyond your present span, and fulfill all your daily occupations and expenditures of strength in relation to it, that will help tremendously." 88, 89

  97. "The biggest thing we can do for ourselves is to make a new conception of life as one continuous thing extending far beyond our present span." 89

  98. "Occupation of the higher consciousness . . . requires skill. The only way a skill can be developed is by doing, over and over--repetition, preferably with as little help as possible." 97

  99. "I would carefully, very carefully, detach myself from my symbols and try to sense myself as a disembodied point of consciousness in space." 109

  100. "This training . . . is really bringing the subconscious, which has charge of your automatic actions, under some sort of responsible discipline." 109

  101. "The secret of success with the reinforcing power of the higher consciousness is to practice with it as a recreation. Then when the time comes you can test its reality by deliberately selecting an upsetting moment, a harassed moment, and applying it purposefully. But before you can use it in serious matters, you must first use it for your own pleasure. Otherwise, it won't hold up." 111

  102. "The sensation of the inner psychic being is what we are after. . . . Within every individual is a psychic core to which he can return in case of trouble. It is his enduring center, his seed that will endure. Search yourself for this constant within. You cannot play on your outer surfaces and pretend that they are it, because they are not. Nor will you find it in your brain. Look for it rather in the region of the heart; or more accurately, the intangible sensations which have no organic position. Warmth is the nearest we can come to describing it. . ." 112

  103. "The only answer is first to make within yourself an individual bit of reality over which you have complete jurisdiction. That is your one method of approach to the ultimate attainment of absolute reality. The first step in control, then, is the possession of such an inner fortress for protection and refreshment. . . . The main thing to acquaint yourself with is a feeling of liberation and immersion in complete security and power and warmth and beauty of happiness. Continually practice on this ideal nucleus, enlarging it, enriching it, intensifying its atmosphere with your accumulated memories of harmonious moments of life." 113

  104. "There is nothing more important than creating the abode of emotional security, spiritual order and demonstrable strength. . . . It is the establishing of this safe sanctuary--this sort of room of heaven within you--it's the accustoming of yourself to living part-time in it, that makes you able to go forth armed with a wisdom and power which is beyond your conscious mind to comprehend." 114

  105. "The object is to learn so to place your consciousness that it is strongly above earth frets. That is the ultimate desirable. It makes you one with the great creative forces of the universe, and brings a joy and strength such as you have never dreamed of." 115

  106. "Your response must be from the inside out. You withdraw yourself. Things surge beneath, picking and battering and fuming, but they cannot destroy you. As long as you have this inner power you needn't mind who is battering on you, nor what tools or dynamite they are using. They can only be a surface nuisance. They may take the empty shell, but you have withdrawn the part of you they can hurt." 115

  107. "To be effective you must, through your creative powers, already have so frequently experienced the most intense sensation of harmony and well-being within your fortress, that you can voluntarily re-enter the sensation even in moments of violent irritation. Your habit-serving consciousness must be so trained that association of ideas instantly reproduces the modifications in your brain which will allow you to escape at will from even the most discordant situations." 116, 117

  108. "You have certain traits which prevent your winning through to spiritual ease, and which you'll have all your present span of life. They are more than individual--they are racial. The more you attempt to trash them, the more nerve strain there will be. But the less you combat them at all, the stronger they'll get. Therefore the only thing to do is to find a way around them by strategy." 119

  109. "One way is to regard the combat as something in the nature of a humorous private sport. You have no enmity toward the traits you are opposing, only a determination to prove your mettle. This technique gives a certain flexibility in turning from one consciousness to the other, and evades the tensions which come from unnatural spiritual straining."

  110. "I made a friendly antagonist of my lower self, as one does in sports--in tennis, for instance--an antagonist one would be friendly with in other moments. For the time being he merely furnishes a conflict necessary to the developing of one's power. He becomes a kind of effigy. Sometimes he is getting cross at the telephone, sometimes he is persuading me to hustle and not take time to breathe calmly and be relaxed of tensions, sometimes he is making me eat stupid things. It is far more amusing than being that self." 119, 120

  111. "The trick is in contemplating one's lower self as one stops to train and play with a puppy. I don't know why lower selves should always be considered vicious. Actually they have very engaging qualities. They are just uneducated." 120

  112. "The inner strength is the only means of recognizing one's lower self, and by definite intake of inspiration lifting out of it; like the simple definite process of getting out of a chair or climbing stairs." 127

  113. "The expansion must always be balanced by the contraction to experiment with material reality. Each time you expand to; acquire subjectively; you must contract on to make yours objectively, so that you possess it and can utilize it in practical living." 140

  114. "It is really just a matter of withdrawing your attention from one thing and giving it full strength to another. . . . During the day and about our affairs, we should at intervals practice retiring to our spiritual body and withdrawing attention from the other. It is necessary to keep on doing this until we get control." 143

  115. "The point toward which all this instruction tends is ultimate identification with our higher self. But first must come a vital effort to know that higher self, and a gradual training of your spiritual muscles to maintain it, once recognized. . . . Your major efforts should be in the recognition and cultivation and establishment of your inner being, the eternal part of you. The gradual growth and expansion of this eternal self is the major business of each day, whatever may be the pressure of obligations in your everyday life." 149, 150

  116. "One acquires a truth as one believes in it, and admits it, and tries to stick to it. Until that truth has become to you an unfailing motive power; until you have established yourself in it without intermission; until you cannot help acting any way but in it; until you are one of its supporting elements, as it were, you do not gain the full benefit of its possession." 151

  117. "You are progressing toward a point where your spiritual body will become capable of taking over the direction of the parent or earth self." 152

  118. "It is in such companionable association with spiritual values that one develops a conviction of the reality of these finer potentialities, and gradually learns to sense and utilize the power existent in them." 152

  119. "The very first thing always is the tuning of yourself, your leap or levitation of heart to your Source--the absolute tuning of yourself. You are then imbedded in something so much more potent than yourself, so incomprehensibly secure that all you can do is to sense the comfort of it, lend yourself rapturously to it.
    Next, while you are completely comfortable, composed and warmed and reassured of your divinity--while power is upon you--decide what you are going to do when you are farther away from it; when you have changed your focus. Then proceed wholeheartedly to use your ordinary faculties in clean-cut application to the thing at hand.
    Don't mix your regions of consciousness. When occupied with something practical, don't keep wondering if you are working in a spiritual way."

  120. "Spiritual development . . . is not a desperate struggle for anything. In fact it is absolutely the contrary. It is a secure embryonic stirring, a happy stretching into one's own peculiar universe, a basking in growth sensations until one establishes oneself in permanent strength. It is not a strain, nor an obligation to assume anything you do not absolutely possess. It is a great and quiet letting in of something that is already there." 161, 162

  121. "Spiritual development must always be a twofold effort. Along with the continual onward-upward movement, pressing back boundaries, must go the sympathetic spreading of the perception you have acquired. You must be conquering, overcoming the world with it, giving what you have in such a way that it will enter others and start similar action." 215

  122. " The higher consciousness is essentially a co-operative affair, not a single independent thing. It is like pressing my breast against a harness that unites us all. I am only successful as I comprehend that unity. Each person I help to the consciousness of taking his place seems to lighten the drag of the whole against me." 179

  123. "Actually, habitual spiritual consciousness is never an aggrandizement of individual power, although that conception is at present enjoying a very elaborate popular exposition. Brought down to an every-day workable attitude of mind, it is more an aggrandizement of humanity." 180

  124. "What is habitual spiritual consciousness? As applied to oneself, it is the placing of oneself permanently on the frontier of one's highest reaches of perception. However often we may fail to maintain the position, it is a definite attempt and a wholehearted possessing desire to live to the fullest of one's capacity in spiritual perception." 180

  125. "This unified consciousness cannot be imprisoned and shackled. Every glimpse of it you get must be felt in its life movement. It must be held lightly and loaned to others, passed freely and lavishly. One's function is to help conduct a flow--not to steal a cupful of something and run away with it." 181

  126. "Your outgo must equal your intake." 181

  127. "The higher consciousness as a current; not a pool of still waters. . . It is an infiltration of your bit of universal substance into what is below you. When I bring the higher force to someone else, then I have utilized for practical purposes what has flowed into me, and the principle of movement is established. It is the acknowledgment of a sensation of spiritual alignment with what is above and what is below, permitting the force of the higher consciousness to flow through. That is the whole of these teachings." 182

  128. "It is the greatest of all sensations, this alignment with what might be called the Great Doing--this alignment of oneself with it, not merely to feel, passively, the flow, but to try out one's allotment of it, actively and enthusiastically." 185

  129. "It is the most beautiful feeling imaginable: like being imbedded in an infinite life of warm, pulsating, desirable human qualities, immeasurably greater and more powerful than your own." 185

  130. "Unless you join hands in that way, you will not be entrusted." 186

  131. "I found I could broadcast myself to complete participation--which is true possession." 187

  132. "Today I am in the company of those who have completely abandoned self for the heritage of participating in the whole. They are absolutely dispossessed of things. They've grown into enormous, almost unlimited power by the strength of their aims." 187

  133. "Any individual who has strength enough to overcome within himself this dead weight, and to make the first effort toward becoming an outgoing, radio-active, positive expression of life, comes in contact with an entirely new field of existence." 188

  134. "And if he can maintain his reversed current of force; then in exchange for his contribution to the whole positive field, that entire field is his to draw upon in proportion as he acquires the wisdom to manipulate it." 188

  135. "This outgoing current is the consciousness that life is more than self; it is voluntary fusion with the dimly sensed greater self of endlessly expanding possibilities." 188

  136. "There exists in you, indefinitely developable, an engine of power, dynamically creative, capable of impressing and molding your material world according as you give out from your inner being in creative force. This force is not primarily the mentally creative force, which you understand perfectly. It is the higher sense of that mentally creative force, the vital principle of life; and comes, not from that mere agent of the soul, the intellect, but from the very plexus of life itself. The mental force can make a mold or plan, but for completion this plan must have its vital principle supplied. It is the neatly made electric globe into which the current is not turned. The true creative force, on the other hand, carries its own vital principle with it. It is a matter of the heart as well as the clearly seen concept of the mind." 192

  137. "Concentration is a word appropriate to the mind. Discard it. Get the fuller idea of it in the sense of naturally, and easily, without tension, gathering and holding yourself in harmony with the strength of the higher consciousness." 195

  138. "Alongside of spiritual consciousness must be established propulsion of the vitality you accumulate. It is fundamentally an emotion or feeling, a sensation of throwing out from you--not an idea to be expressed. You do not work with material implements, such as words: you work by having plenty of this superior force to give. It is an active, superabundant sort of sympathy that naturally overflows and helps to do for others what has already been done for you. It is like a magnet or a chemical attraction that draws out of them a similar quality, and gets them started with their own effort." 201

  139. "When you want to be of help to people, always remember that what you must work with is not a brain impulse, but a heart impulse. Don't struggle with people in the tight little bottled-up medium of the intellect--don't be a Miss Fixit. Just flood them quietly silently, persistently with this heart fluid. They won't know it, won't see, but they'll soak it up a little when they are off guard. This is the first principle of dealing with people." 202

  140. "The safest way is not to bother about working it in detail at all. The minute you begin to figure consciously how it is gong to work, you are in danger of becoming pious. If you leave it alone it will work itself, without pose or effort, automatically--like heat drying up dampness, or a sun ray expanding a thing. You see, in reality it is never a question of painstakingly doing carefully considered acts. It is more a question of continuously giving back, continuously throwing off from you the surplus vitality of understanding, sympathetic perception. If this through process is acquired, it will keep open a channel through which inspiration will come for the necessary individual acts." 203

  141. "It is just this gentle distribution around you of the spiritual heart force, as you feel its expansion within you, that will teach you the actuality of spiritual faculties." 209, 210

  142. "The developed man can search out any distance with an extension of himself, his full consciousness concentrated at any point he desires. He assumes kinship with other consciousnesses as poignantly as with his own." 211

  143. "This sympathetic assumption of kinship empowers him with the attributes of the higher consciousness. And one result of this is that he is no longer, while living as other men, restricted by their limitations of position,--position in the geometrical sense--because anything he turns his attention to ardently, anything he loves, he becomes in this greater entity. It gives him the ability to broadcast himself, to travel to it sympathetically, as it were, on its individual wave length." 211

  144. "It is something like learning another language so you can listen intelligibly. Each time you desire to travel beyond your present country you must say to yourself. Am I thinking and listening in the right language? Otherwise communication is hopeless." 226, 227

  145. "Wisdom is man's hard-won heritage of experience, plus the interplay of the higher consciousness, accepted even if uncomprehended. Precipitation of these joint forces through the intellect is called inspiration, and is the attribute of genius." 225

  146. "The more you ally yourself with the higher consciousness, the more you become aware of greater forces to be cooperated with in order to gain still greater freedom." 246