The Road I Know

I must write this book for three reasons: First, to satisfy numerous
readers of THE UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE-the third of the so-called "Betty
books" and dictated by her through another psychic after her death-who
demand insistently to know "how Betty got that way"; second, to answer
questions from the many who, in one way or another, are setting out on
the path Betty followed; third, because in her own training Betty was
given a pattern for living which could well be used by all of us.

For one by-product of THE BETTY BOOK, and ACROSS THE UNKNOWN, written
before Betty's death, as well as THE UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE, published
just eighteen months after she died, is a widespread interest in Betty
herself. This is more than a mere curiosity as to personality. The
latter is well enough defined by what these books report of her words
and thoughts. Rather, people want to know-to judge by their letters-how
that personality came about. Flow much was her original self? How much
was of her own volitional development How much was due to her training
by the Invisibles?* What was that training? As applied to her, alone, or
to be aspired to by others? For of course a good deal of the teachings
in the three books is an account of training methods for mankind in
general. In a word what hundreds of my correspondents say they want is a
biography of Betty.

* Betty's name for discarnate personalities.

But not a biography in ordinary definition. Rather a biography of inner
life and development. What made her what her three books show her to be?
After all, that is the essential aim of any biography-to evaluate the
expansion of a person's life, and to examine the influences and
happenings and accomplishments that brought this person to wherever he
or she had landed by that pausing-time we call death.

2.

As with most lives that grow to an ultimate fullness, material in
Betty's case is embarrassingly abundant. The difficulty is not of
search, but of selection and arrangement. The whole record of the work
Betty did in the higher consciousness, both while she was still here and
after her death, runs to two thousand four hundred single-spaced pages.
From the two thousand done in her lifetime I have clipped those passages
that carried individual instruction. These make over three hundred
pages-all material from which to select. Besides, there are, of course,
my own recollections of nearly forty years. And in addition, more than a
year after her death, I came upon a filing folder containing a
miscellany of papers in which from time to time she herself had set down
jottings of her own attitude toward the work she was doing, and the
impression she had of it.

So, in order to make a start, it is necessary to adopt a point of view.
It must be this: that here is an account of one person's psychic
training for a specific job of what later, after her death, she was to
call "divulgence" It is quite aside from the purposes-and also the
possibilities-to do a portrait or a "character sketch" of Betty. She was
as many sided as she was femininely elusive. When I think of attempting
it, I share her own impatience with words.

"It's like trying to look at the stars in the daytime," she once
complained. "It's perfectly clear until I bring it into the daylight of
words, and then it's gone. I don't want to be silly; but the words make
one laugh: they are so long-drawn-out for the amount of idea in them. It
is as impossible to put my world* into words as it is to put the ocean
in a bucket." Again and again I remember her interrupting her reporting
to express that despair over the impossibility of containing such things
in language. Nearing the end of her long experience she wrote this, in
her own person, one of the fragments I found in her files.