How the “Invisibles” Trained Betty White

As Betty White was being slowly tutored by the “Invisibles” to receive meaningful messages from the spirit world – a process that took an hour a day for nearly 10 years – she often wondered why she had been selected for their mission. She saw herself as a person of a somewhat average intelligence.  Her husband, Stewart, would seemingly have been a much better choice. He had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Michigan, received an M.A. degree from Columbia University, was a best-selling author of many travel and adventure books, a man of seemingly superior intellect, with military experience, while knowing many people in high places, including President Theodore Roosevelt. Why not him?

“There is no substance at all in pure intellect,” the Invisibles explained. “It is just a very fine shadow. The simplest achievement is so much more important. Pure intellect is aloof, unrelated.”  They further stated that Betty was too much in her brain and that the spirit is usually like a desiccated fruit inside the brain. 

As Stewart interpreted it, “the whole thing boiled down to one simple statement: the brain is the executive, not the originating, branch of our personal government.”  As he further understood it, his ego was also an obstruction.   Too much intellect, too much ego, and too much skepticism prevented proper “absorption” of the spirit messages. Betty’s “self” was “vastly more flexible, permeable and self-controlled” than Stewart’s, according to the Invisibles. Stewart admitted that he was a hard-headed, no-nonsense person who initially rejected the idea of “spirits” being behind it all.   

The story of Betty and Stewart Edward White was summarized in my blog of February 9, but to briefly recap and add to that, it was in 1919, when she was 39, that Betty began displaying mediumistic abilities and receiving communication from a group of spirits she called the Invisibles. “One night during dinner we and a friend discussed a psychic book I had been reading.  The friend then told of her success in Russia at moving tables and we were inspired to try it ourselves, solemnly swearing ‘on honor’ to be honest in the experiment. After dinner the lamps were put out and by the firelight, kneeling around a small table, with tips of fingers touching the top and our little fingers joined, we three sat quietly waiting. After a brief wait we were thrilled by a strange feeling of vitality in the table and movement began. Until midnight we experimented too spellbound with our own astonishing success to carry out our original engagement to go the movies.”  

Betty added that the table tipped once for “yes” and twice for “no,” and moved around the room in designated directions. “Next we tried pencil and paper and had a little success. Hearts were repeatedly drawn, ‘love’ and ‘Helen’ written, and a few uncertain attempts at words…”  Betty then began experimenting on her own, receiving fragmentary messages, some making a little sense and others gibberish. She heard “from my old colored nurse, an adored foster mother, who was with me from my birth to my marriage. Then came my mother, who had died in my babyhood…” She was told that her deceased family had been watching over her for years and attempting to influence her. She was urged to continue practicing and was told she would develop rapidly if she had patience, kept her mind blank, and practiced regularly. 

“We hesitate to use words like soul yearnings, for instance, because in your mind they have a set significance,” the Invisibles further explained the difficult process, insisting that Betty must, oxymoronically,  make haste slowly.  “But the idea is that we cannot work on the unreceptive person in any satisfactory degree. Roughly speaking, the forces we use are emanations from you. They meet complementary forces not your own that unite with them and open up a further process of creative selection.”  

Outside Intelligence?

“The pencil moved very slowly, and it wrote curiously formed script, without capitals or punctuation, or even spacing, like one long continuous word,” Stewart explained the automatic writing by Betty.  Betty assured her husband that she had nothing to do with moving the pencil or forming the script, at least consciously.  Moreover, she struggled to understand what was written.  Concluding that it was either an outside intelligence or directed by Betty’s subconscious, they continued to experiment. 

After a time, the words began to flow.  Betty blindfolded her eyes and looked away from the paper in an attempt to separate herself from the writing as Stewart sat next to her as an observer. The automatic writing continued for several months before some experimentation resulted in Betty becoming a trance-voice medium with Stewart recording her words in shorthand.   At times, she spoke in her own voice, at other times the Invisibles spoke through her and there was a marked change in voice, diction, and style. Occasionally, words would come through the direct-voice, independent of but near Betty.

Initially, Stewart considered it all nonsense, but, after receiving some very evidential messages, which he concluded were beyond fraud, telepathy, or the subconscious, he gradually became a believer.  As Betty advanced from automatic writing to automatic speaking, Stewart took it down in shorthand and wrote books about it, several of them best sellers.  After Betty died in 1939, Stewart began hearing from her through another medium, named only Joan, for privacy purposes, resulting in additional books, ten in all, setting forth considerable knowledge and wisdom from the spirit world.  

As Stewart further came to understand it, mediumship is a natural gift, but like other such gifts it is imperfect and unreliable. It requires much intelligent cultivation and if used prematurely or excessively it often deteriorates, even atrophies to nothing. He saw an analogy with a good singing voice that is used too soon and too much.  As a long-time follower and reporter of various sports, I definitely see an analogy with many different athletic skills.  Even the most gifted athletes can train too hard, go out too fast, fail to pace themselves, overtrain, or simply wear out from over-use and a weakening body with age.  

Betty’s development seems to have been very similar to that of Pearl Curran, the St. Louis, Missouri medium for the entity calling herself “Patience Worth,” which took place between 1913 and 1937.  Stewart explained that Betty’s consciousness was not taken from her in the customary deep trance, describing it as more of a disassociated state.  However, she was unaware of her surroundings and went “somewhere else,” still retaining her faculties of thought.  He further noted that when he made a mistake writing down a word he had misheard, he was instantly corrected, even though Betty was lying below the level of the writing table with her eyes blindfolded. As an example, he wrote “attitude of mind” while taking dictation and was instantly stopped by Betty and informed that the correct wording was “altitude of mind.”  

Considerable Fluency

“At present there is often considerable fluency, so that I have trouble keeping up with the transcription,” Stewart recorded.  “On other occasions there seems to be difficulty. Sometimes the direct voice speaks, at others Betty herself reports word by word as through taking dictation, and again describes her impressions and experiences in her own way. Sometimes, if difficulty arises, all three methods are tried.”  

As Stewart understood it, Betty would, through her superconsciousness, be brought in touch with realities which she absorbed directly, and with ideas which came to her in words heard with the “inner ear,” sometimes by mental impression.  These things were transferred down to her habitual consciousness and dictated to him. Betty often complained that what came through her was diluted and a “pale shadow of the actuality.” In effect, she had no vocabulary for them. 

Betty further explained that for nearly three years she struggled for comprehension, passing from automatic writing to what she calls “a curious state of freed or double consciousness in which I absorb experiences directly, somehow, and Stewart records them in words spoken through me, or by me at first hand impressions.”    

Stewart continued to wonder what part Betty’s subconscious played in the communication.  If it was coming from her subconscious, he reasoned, it was completely foreign to her usual consciousness and outside her remembered experiences.  “The value of the thing offered must lie in itself, regardless of its source,” he concluded, adding that if it originated in Betty she is more of a wonder that he had supposed.  He also considered the theory that she was tapping into some “universal mind.” He could not completely discount that theory, but saw it as nothing more than a far-fetched hypothesis to avoid accepting the spirit hypothesis. 

So much of it was foreign to both Betty and himself that he wondered how it could be coming from the subconscious of either of them. He finally decided “to accept, as a fact, that we were receiving through Betty, from outside, and apparently discarnate, intelligences, a graded and progressing and logically acceptable instruction on how to get along in life.”  He and Betty nicknamed them the Invisibles, primarily because they insisted on remaining anonymous.  They had all the characteristics of a “Group Soul,” a number of spirits speaking as one. 

“The balanced proportion, the balanced ration of life is the first thing to impress on the world,” the Invisibles communicated early in Betty’s mediumship. “Balance is the big thing to emphasize.  The world is crippled now because of its withered spiritual faculties.”  They explained that they were talking about the balance between the spiritual and the material, pointing out that overbalance on either side always results in trouble. 

“Welcome and accept all natural human instincts, all the savoring of life, but permeate them with the vitality of the spirit,” the Invisibles continued. “Those who savor even the highest forms of life without this permeation of the spirit will stagnate, sink backward, imprison themselves in matter.  With them the spiritual sense becomes atrophied.” 

The Invisibles discussed perception, elimination, impetus, assimilation, constructive prayer, personal responsibility, the substance of thought, and other subjects related to bringing the spiritual life in balance and harmony with the physical life or, in other words, stimulating the consciousness to partake of the higher consciousness. “The active life means constant inflowing and outflowing,” they stressed. “You must never, never forget to be constantly giving out…Without this giving out there is no circulation…your outgo must equal your intake.”

No Dead-Ends

Many of the teachings of the Invisibles had to do with showing that causes and effects are not isolated, but smoothly continuous – that there are no dead-ends, not even death itself. When White requested more scientific explanations, the Invisibles told him that they can give reality as they can manage to communicate it to him.  They cautioned him about being one of those “over-sane, over-cautious people who have never sensed intangible verities” and suggested that he escape more often from the limitations of his ponderable mind. 

White noted that there were many distortions in the communication, what he called “interruptions from opposing forces,” apparently referring to lower-level or earthbound spirits breaking in on the messaging, while he also recognized that the medium’s subconscious could color the messages with her own ideas.  Betty learned to discern the “false messages” from those given by the Invisibles.  “The false messages had always been delivered with feverish haste and great force in contrast to the calm and deliberation of other communications, especially those from my father,” Betty explained. “This ‘cutting-in’ haste had the virtue of making me able to recognize instantly and discount anything thus received.”    

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I. and No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife. His latest book Consciousness Beyond Death: New and Old Light on Near-Death Experiences is published by White Crow books.