The text of this book belongs to the class known as automatic writing. However one explains the phenomenon, it is too well authenticated to be denied, and always it is a psychic and never a spiritual proceeding. Not all messages coming into a wireless station are of equal value or interest; and likewise not all script received through a relaxed physical and an active subconscious mechanism is worthy of credence or publicity.

The psychic is, however, the intermediary between the material and the spiritual, and may be the vehicle for sending truths beyond our earthly experience. By spiritual, I do not mean the so-called realm of spirits, necessarily, but that high and dimly glimpsed condition, Reality, with which both metaphysics and religion deal. And occasionally words, psychically received, merit the opinion that they are of spiritual import and origin, and such I boldly claim these to be.

The manner of their coming; was this: Three years ago, a small group of women vitally concerned with knowing and living Truth, so far as they perceived it, but with positively no occult experience or interest, found themselves suddenly possessed of power to write automatically. For weeks they hid the fact from each other, as something unbelievable; but having at last confessed it, they found that each had received remarkable information concerning life and what is called death.

With one exception, the messages came from men not known during life and in no instance were they personal. Those making up this volume were received by me from a writer with whose work I was slightly familiar, and a friend of us both has since told me they are characteristic.

None of the communications offered advice concerning worldly affairs; there was no cheap element of fortune telling, nor any attempt at prophecy except the one prediction of earthquakes to follow the Great War. This came long before they began to occur.

In this one case only, was publication requested; and the writer asked that the message stand on its own merits, without his name or the receiver's. The Truth it contained was to be its credential and the standard by which it was to be judged.

The last words, about Light, indicate the cessation of the writing, and except for slight corrections for clearness of meaning when the manuscript was typed, nothing more has ever come to me. The pencil, once so alive and rapidly moving, is as dead now as any other bit of wood.

And a curious thing remains to be told. The women who received the messages later discovered that, unknown to each other, they had ceased writing on almost the same day. It was as if, the teaching offered, the word delivered, all which could now be understood had been sent.

These words, then, must establish or refute the claim that they are of the truth by internal evidence entirely. Their author declares that he sent them, not in answer to curiosity or even because of scientific investigation of this subject, but because many souls are longing for comfort and desire to learn the Real. What he tells is not of the highest heavenly condition, but what can be known of that realm, "TheNext Beyond."