The Stars Are Still There

All my life, since I grew old enough to, make my own living, I have done
so as a professional writer. That means the publication of between forty
and fifty volumes of fiction, history and travel, aside from more short
stories and articles than I can remember. Therefore I have a fair idea
of how the public reacts; and I know that when any book calls out, over
a period of four years, an average of half a dozen letters a day, the
letters themselves have significance as showing what people are thinking
about. Such letters are a pretty accurate cross section of the general
public's attitude toward the subject of that book. In this case the
continuation of the individual in some sort of life after death.
Immortality.

I said above that the letters have averaged half a dozen a day. That is
over the years. In March, eighteen months after publication of the book
I am talking about, I kept track. The average for that month was sixteen
letters a day! While so fast and furious a pace has by now (mid-spring
of 1945) slacked off, I still get them at the steady rate of about a
hundred a month. These later letters continue to ask the same questions,
voice the same bewilderments, seek the same hopes. The book that elicits
them is THE UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE, published in October of 1940,

This book bears my name as author. As a matter of fact, my contribution
was the plain drudgery of verbatim reporting and the professional
writer's knack of putting the material into easily readable form. None
of the CONCEPTS were mine: they were dictated to me by my wife Betty
some six months after her death through a friend who chooses to protect
her anonymity under the pseudonym of "Joan." Joan is a psychic of the
type that would be called a "trance medium," were she a professional.*
But I can count on the fingers of my two hands the number of people who
know Joan AS Joan.

* She is the "Joan" of OUR UNSEEN GUEST, as well as of THE UNOBSTRUCTED
UNIVERSE.

Betty herself was a "psychic." She had accepted this fact for some
twenty years before her death, since the evening of March 17, 1919, to
be exact, when she accidentally made the discovery. And between 1919 and
1939 she underwent a continuous and rigorous training as a means to what
she called "expansion of spiritual consciousness." Though the gain of
so-called psychic powers was not the objective, nevertheless she
acquired them as a sort of by-product, and was able to do various feats
supposed to be possible to "psychic" persons. She could enter at will a
higher consciousness from which she reported back her experiences and
what she had seen and was taught. She was also able to transmit to me
the ideas of discarnate entities we called the Invisibles, either by
reporting back as though by dictation or by permitting her speech
mechanism to be used directly. These powers and abilities she never used
idly, for curiosity, personal satisfaction or any such lesser purposes.
She sought and used them to one end only, the expansion of spiritual
consciousness.

The accumulation of her records, Some 2300-odd single-spaced pages, had,
up to the time of her death in 1939, yielded the makings of four
volumes: CREDO, appearing in 1925; Why BE A MUD TURTLE, 1928; THE BETTY
BOOK, 1937; ACROSS THE UNKNOWN, 1939. Since she died three more have
been published: THE UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE, THE ROAD I KNOW and ANCHORS
TO WINDWARD.