Evidence for the Continuity of
Consciousness After Death
The struggle of each generation is the interpretation of the whispered allotment of wisdom into the current vernacular. —Stewart Edward White
In January of 1970, Dell Publishing released “The Unobstructed Universe,” a mass market paperback reprint which boldly proclaimed itself a “World Famous Book.” An anonymous blurb promised: “The most detailed, definitive, authenticated picture of life after death ever published”. It cost 95 cents, leaving a nickel for sales tax and a pack of gum.
From 1925 until 1945 The Unobstructed Universe was the most popular of a series of best sellers known as the Betty books. Today they are almost forgotten but just before and during World War Two they were America’s favorite metaphysical books. The Betty books teach a deep philosophy and simple practices that have improved the lives of many readers.
Stewart Edward White and his wife Elizabeth (Betty) Grant should be household names, given the magnitude of what they achieved. They lived a life-long romance and then left us impressive evidence of love after death. As we shall see, Carl Jung and Who’s Who agreed.
It all began after a dinner party on St Patrick’s Day in 1919 when some friends got out their Ouija board. Stewart ignored Betty’s reluctance. He tried it out for fun. In an atmosphere of facetious frivolity they replaced the planchette with a whisky glass. When the glass moved, Betty thought they were playing tricks on her. Watching from a distance, she ignored their denials. The joke seemed to be going well until the glass very firmly spelled out: “Why do you ask foolish questions?”
Betty thought they were teasing her again when the glass next spelled out her name repeatedly and urgently. Just to prove she wasn’t afraid, Betty finally joined in. The glass spun in circles like a happy puppy. With her fingertips on it a new message repeated: “get a pencil.”
A few days later, alone at her desk, feeling foolish, Betty sat with pencil in hand before a blank sheet of paper. To her surprise her hand moved involuntarily, or unconsciously. In America it’s called automatic writing, in China the flying spirit pencil: a method of receiving messages from beyond.
Intrigued, Stewart helped Betty puzzle out the words. The writing flowed from beginning to end, uninterrupted by spaces or punctuation. The messages they deciphered were deep enough to invite further exploration.
They found themselves in touch with what most people call spirits, but these spirits preferred to be called Invisibles. Automatic writing evolved into mediumship—sometimes in Betty’s own voice, sometimes in a different voice—and a few times by way of a voice that didn’t seem to be coming from Betty at all.
Betty was what was then called an American aristocrat. Though pampered as a child she proved hardy, and able to keep up with her outdoorsman husband. Ultimately, she proved to be the greater explorer.
Stewart Edward White was a no nonsense can do early 20th century American male. Such a dedicated conservationist that a sub-species of golden trout was named after him, and a grove of Sequoias.
Stewart was a man with experience of mines, frontiers, lumber mills, and a world war. He was so good with a gun that he filled a hall with taxidermies, and sardonic enough to call it “the Ark.” Eventually Betty and the philosophy that she channeled convinced him to shoot with a camera instead of a gun.
Stewart once broke his leg on a trail and then dragged himself for several miles back to camp, stopping along the way to shoot a game bird to bring back for dinner.
A very successful adventure writer, with a good skeptical head on his shoulders, and a way with words, Stewart approached Betty’s mediumship the way he did the Serengeti: as a practical, detail-oriented explorer, an open-minded observer; never giddy, always ready.
Stewart camped with President Theodore Roosevelt in the California wilderness and in Africa. Roosevelt listed Stewart as one of six naturalists to whom “we owe a real debt.” He also called Stewart “the kind of young American who is making our new literature.”
In 1905, Roosevelt appointed Stewart a federal Forest Reserve inspector. Stewart held the office for four years. In his autobiography, writing about his Sagamore rifle range, Roosevelt wrote: “the best man with both pistol and rifle who ever shot there was Stewart Edward White.”
By 1915 Stewart was such a well-known writer that a postcard was issued of his home in Santa Barbara. Betty’s flourishing flower garden climbs almost to the second story of the dark shingle siding of the house, obscuring a generous porch.
Readers of the Betty books had two shocks along the way. First, when they learned that the medium behind their favorite books was Stewart’s own wife. But that was not as great a shock as her death and what she did next.
Betty’s mission wasn’t complete until she was able to demonstrate “the hereness of immortality” and that “consciousness is the starting point for everything” as she said through a medium. Who’s Who, convinced by her posthumous authorship, declined to print her death date.
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The celebrated psychoanalyst Carl Jung had this to say about the work of the Whites: “I would recommend to anyone who is interested in the psychology of the unconscious to read the books of Stewart White. The most interesting to my mind is The Unobstructed Universe (1940).”
Jung wrote a skeptical foreword for the German edition, but, in a letter about The Unobstructed Universe to his friend Fritz Kunkel, Jung admitted: “Betty behaves like a real woman and not like an anima. This seems to indicate that she is herself rather than an anima figure,” meaning that her communication from beyond was not a figment of her bereaved husband’s imagination.
Jung concluded: “I must own that with regard to Betty, I am hesitant to deny her reality as a spirit; that is to say I am inclined to assume that she is more probably a spirit than archetype, although she presumably represents both at the same time”
When Jung left Freud to find his own way, among his colleagues was a future M.D. named Tina Keller. Inspired by her interest in Tai Chi, she was the first to bring movement and dance to Jung’s active imagination therapy.
In a 1971 lecture at the C.G. Jung Institute, Keller said Jung gave her The Betty Book when it was published in 1937, at the beginning of World War II. She “read and reread” all the books that followed and left us this testimonial:
Betty White, the brilliant woman who had accidentally discovered her mediumistic gifts, dictated to her husband, the writer and explorer Stewart Edward White, a long series of teachings, full of wisdom and salty humor, for practical application in living. They were communicated by different personalities or quasi-personalities whom the Whites dubbed “the Invisibles.” It was stated emphatically that only those who really practice the teachings could, through experience, come to understand them. My own experiments, based on the books, proved this to be both true and extremely important.
The “Unobstructed Universe” teachings profoundly influenced Jung. In 1939 he received a letter from a pastor whose brother didn’t let dying in an accident in Africa stop him from having a postmortem conversation with him. Jung responded: “Accordingly the capacity to nullify space and time must somehow inhere in the psyche, or, to put it another way, the psyche does not exist wholly in time and space. It is very probable that only what we call consciousness is contained in space and time, and that the rest of the psyche, the unconscious, exists in a state of relative spacelessness and timelessness.” Eleven years later, Jung wrote a letter that summed it up in a sentence: “It is only physical phenomena that happen in a distinct place at a distinct time, whereas the spirit is eternal and everywhere.”
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Hitler’s Blitzkrieg had just devastated Poland. Betty had died mere months before. As we shall see, Stewart was convinced of her survival. The continued presence of her companionship, stronger than ever, intimate and unique, comforted him daily. Other friends reported similar visits, sometimes accompanied by small signs, often at the mention of the name Betty, any Betty.
Six months after Betty’s death, friends wondered why Stewart had made no attempt to reach her through a medium (he preferred the term he learned from the Spiritualist classic Our Unseen Guest (1920): a receiving station).
Stewart later admitted to his readers that he had been afraid. What if Betty didn’t communicate? What if the communication was so obviously inferior it could put doubt into all their work together? Would he search vainly from medium to medium for the rest of his life?
Stewart was also convinced that with her extraordinary training, Betty must be doing important things in the unobstructed. A sentimental conversation seemed disrespectful. To interrupt her for a little reassurance against loneliness would go against all they had achieved.
Pearl Harbor was still two years away when Stewart realized that he couldn’t stay home any longer where Betty’s garden of rare and exotic plants were dying despite the best care money could buy. Stewart travelled through America, having been invited to visit his many friends who wished to console him.
At the end of his lonely journey, his first travels after a lifetime of traveling with Betty, Stewart stayed with Darby and Joan, the authors of Our Unseen Guest. With these old friends, who had mentored his own exploration of the afterlife, a session was inevitable, but Stewart asked Joan not to channel Betty. Joan promised she would contact only her own guide.
As soon as Joan went into trance Betty crashed the party. She began by calling Stewart “Stewt” the pet name for him she had only used in private. Then she provided all the proof he could want. In The Unobstructed Universe Stewart wrote that Betty began:
—talking to me quietly, fluently, with assured and intimate knowledge of our common experience and living. There was no “fishing” and no fumbling. That part of it became almost ridiculous, it was so easy for her where with usual “psychical research” it has been so difficult. Here, in this first evening, she literally poured out a succession of these authentications. She mentioned not one, but dozens of small events out of our past, of trivial facts in our mutual experience or surroundings, none of which could by any possibility be within Joan’s knowledge.
Betty also talked about shared personal experiences that embarrassed Stewart. Betty reassured him that Joan was not conscious of their conversation and would not remember any details.
Joan had recently had an experience that had puzzled her. She had been compelled to take the wrong bus, which led her to a store she had no intention of visiting, in which she found a Chinese red lacquer box carved with swallows. When told the last one had been sold, she insisted that the salesperson look through the stockroom. He found one left behind, which Joan eagerly purchased. On the way home she came to her senses and wondered why she had bought the box when she already had other lacquer boxes and no room for a new one.
Betty explained that she had compelled Joan to seek out that Chinese box. It was a gift for Betty’s younger sister, Millicent. Betty added that the carving of the birds was the important part. She asked Stewart to reimburse Joan.
When Stewart presented the gift to his sister-in-law, he asked her if she had ever talked with Betty about a carved red box. She had:
“When I was on the Coast with you in 1936, Betty and I saw one in Chinatown. I was crazy about it, but it was much too expensive. But later I thought it over, and I wrote her asking where I could get one—I must have written her three or four times, but somehow, she never answered my question.”
Stewart told Millicent that Betty had emphasized the importance of the birds. At first Millicent was speechless, then she explained through tears that when they were children, every spring Betty would help her climb into a tree where they watched fledgling swallows nesting in the eaves.
According to Stewart, such impressive examples of specificity “accumulated into several hundred, equally good. Like any other evidence often repeated, it has forced acceptance by its volume and invariable accuracy. One thing is accident; two is coincidence; three is remarkable coincidence. But a hundred or more just simply moves out of that category. That is why I am absolutely certain in my own mind.”
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The Betty books concern that moment of human life described in the Tibetan scripture The Precious Garland. In the process of death we arrive at the strange experience “when consciousness remains as an orphan, with no support.” The Invisibles worked with Betty to help her cross that threshold going both ways: from form to pure consciousness to form again.
Speaking from beyond, Betty explained that the work she had done with the Invisibles during her lifetime in the obstructed had helped her learn to adapt her consciousness to the unobstructed; but the step by step process had actually been provided to give her extraordinary training in coming back to communicate with Stewart and their readers.
What followed, Stewart described as “forty sessions of communication with Betty; sessions vivid with her unseen presence, from turn of phrase and mode of thought to her own special brand of fun and laughter.”
Darby conducted the sessions. He asked questions, requested clarification, and protested in the name of Newtonian physics. His efforts helped Betty communicate more clearly.
With the world at war again, Betty said that her mission was to encourage people to find their own proof of the continuity of consciousness after death. She asked her readers to imagine how different the world would be if we understood we are temporary visitors with other destinations ahead of us, instead of desperate creatures struggling through our brief hours in the sun. She and the Invisibles wanted to provide reassurance for families who lost loved ones as the war killed millions. Using the exercises in the books, anyone could experience the unobstructed.
The key to the exercises is relaxed appreciation. Stewart asks us to cultivate the feeling we get when we admire a beautiful sunset, to enjoy the sound of frogs chirping in the night, or the sight of “good old pups,” as he puts it, wagging their tails, leading the way on a walk. He asks us to notice how it expands our senses, how we experience what we’ve been missing wrapped up in our own thoughts: bird song, the tint of the sky behind a lush hill, small wonders that refresh the soul. He explains that, for most people, the soul is like a dehydrated husk.
Betty denied that she was now in a different world. The difference is not in location but frequency. The world of human bodies exists at a much lower frequency than pure consciousness.
According to Betty, consciousness is the matrix and sustenance of form. Electric current, a hunk of granite, a bee buzzing by, in every variation of matter, at the center of the particles that make forms, consciousness exists.
Three sentences stand out in the metaphysical works of the Whites.
Consciousness is everything.
Attention is existence.
The individual is immortal.
“The obstructed universe,” Betty explained from the afterlife, “is for the purpose of birth, of the individualization of consciousness. All matter is born in your universe. Nothing is lost. Individuality is not lost; though in its lower forms matter can be burned, turned into gas, or what have you. Yet it is all kept. It is the highest form, the soul, that goes on undivided. Your scientists have accepted the law of the indestructibility of matter; but I say to you that this law is only a corollary of the indestructibility of consciousness.”
One of the implications of the Betty books is that we have forgotten the part of our consciousness which exists outside of time. From that point of view anyone who sets up shop as a gatekeeper to paradise is selling water by the river. No one has a monopoly on rites of purification or human transcendence. These are birthrights of every human being.
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Betty’s poetic sensitivity to natural beauty, and her wholesome, humorous, and often sublime advice about living a good life, comforted a nation at war and in mourning that found hope in the revelation that the mysterious Betty was none other than the wife of the famous writer beloved by generations. Stewart could have built a metaphysical empire from the attention he received.
Mrs. Leslie Kimmell, Stewart’s secretary at the end of his life, said he had an aversion to meddling in other people’s affairs. He amused himself by reading, going to the movies, gardening, and dictating letters giving advice to seekers, who were encouraged to think it through for themselves. Two Cairn Terriers followed him around: one chosen from beyond by Betty. As Kimmell told the story:
His cairn terriers Toto and Bibi (Swahili for “Little Boy” and “Little Girl”) were always at his heels. Toto “the little yellow dog” which Betty “found” for Stewart shortly after her death, was a real person; and with him Betty made some of her most amusing demonstrations. Often Toto would sit up opposite an expanse of bare wall looking intently at a spot less than five feet from the floor (Betty was four feet eleven inches tall), waving his paws in the way he had been taught to show that they were “clean” and obviously begging to be played with. Then he would go through all the motions of retrieving a ball, scuttling across the room and under furniture, returning with “it” in his mouth to be tossed again by his invisible companion.
Kimmell described Stewart as “a reticent, even a shy person. The very quietness of his manner invited confidence, and his genuine interest encouraged one to talk freely.” Elsewhere she wrote that Stewart had a “light touch. The humor which made him such a popular dinner guest carried over into every aspect of his life.”
Kimmell described Stewart in his later years. “He always carried with him the feel of the outdoors. His skin was bronzed and ruddy; his eyes had that indescribable expression characteristic of people who are accustomed to scanning the horizon. Even in his seventies he had the appearance of being much younger.”
But Kimmell wrote: “No matter how vividly he might feel Betty’s presence, the life he had shared with her for so many years was over; the house was big and quiet; the garden missed her magic touch.” In a letter to Kimmell, Stewart admitted that it required resolution to face “the loss of the physical presence of so vibrant and exquisite a personality.”
Kimmell recalled that Stewart spent an hour a day meditating in Betty’s blue room, where he felt her presence and received instruction. Private interviews were granted to people seeking help only after Stewart felt more secure in the support that he believed Betty and the Invisibles gave him. The many requests for a school or organization of some kind were “gently but determinedly discouraged.” He didn’t want to convert anyone. He often said: “every fellow has to find his own way.”
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Before we take a deep dive into the lives of Stewart and Betty, and the teachings of the Invisibles, let’s put their experiences into historical context.
From rural Quakers of the pre-Revolutionary colonies to college professors of the 21st century, throughout history Americans have been preoccupied with ghostly chats. Today social media, reality TV, and talk shows can make a medium or ghost hunter famous overnight. Yet most Americans dismiss mediumship as fraud, entertainment, or at best a low rung on the spiritual ladder. To many it’s a trick of the devil.
In Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Odysseus performs a ritual to give the dead the power to speak. Irving Finkel, Senior Assistant Keeper of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures at the British Museum, in his book The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies (2019), explores how all ancient cultures had tales of apparitions and of communication from beyond the grave.
In the mid 19th century in the western world, especially America, Great Britain, and France, a series of popular reports of experiences with spirits occurred. In a sense it could be said to have started with A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens, not only the most famous ghost story in the English language, but also what could be called the most popular Spiritualist novel in history, though written before Spiritualism had a name.
In 1848, the Fox sisters started a seance fad by publicly demonstrating spiritual communication by means of mysterious knocks. One knock meant yes, two knocks meant no. Four years earlier, Samuel Morse had sent a message from Baltimore to Washington D.C. over the first commercial telegraph line. While there’s no evidence that the sisters were inspired by this long distance communication, news of it had captivated the world. The Fox sisters became an international sensation but the pressures of mediumship and fame over forty years made them alcoholics. In 1888 a reporter offered Margaret Fox fifteen hundred dollars to confess to fraud, the equivalent of about fifty thousand dollars today. Margaret publicly demonstrated how she created knocks by cracking her toes. Though this was an inadequate explanation for some of the phenomena the sisters had exhibited, her confession made headlines everywhere. Offers of financial support by Christians eager to undermine Spiritualism did not materialize. Margaret faced desperate poverty. A year after her confession she recanted, but her credibility and her career were ruined. Spiritualism, on the other hand, became more popular than ever.
At a seance in France in 1855, a teacher named Allan Kardec was given the mission of compiling a book of questions by the living answered by the dead. He published The Spirits’ Book in 1857. Immediately popular, it gave birth to the Spiritist movement in Brazil which today has millions of followers.
Spiritualist churches and communities have existed in America since the mid 1840s and several still do, the best known being Lily Dale, which in 2010 inspired the HBO documentary No One Dies in Lily Dale. American mediums like Andrew Jackson Davis, Edgar Cayce, and Jane Roberts influenced their own and later generations. Today TikTok, YouTube, and other social media platforms teem with explorers eager to share experiments and alleged communications with the dead.
The Betty books are perhaps unique, however. Betty, Stewart and the Invisibles provide a skeleton key for unlocking understanding of the process of soul awakening at the heart of all spirituality, esoteric and traditional. Stewart reported that he had received letters from important leaders of all the world’s religions who told him the Betty books captured the essence of their faith.