Concluding a long reply to a personal question of his father’s, he said: “Know that I am enjoying every pleasure you take, doubly, once for you and twice for myself. There’s your watchword, Dad! One for myself, and two for the Boy. Remember that every time you are worried, every time you are tempted to overwork, every time you put off physical repairs, every time you feel depressed, every time you need rest and relaxation and pleasure, every time you play with Mother and the girls, every time you renew your fellowship with other men—always remember: One for myself, and two for the Boy.”
That evening, Mrs. Gaylord said that she had received a message about a relative in the West, purporting to come from her brother on the next plane, which she thought was not true, but one of her daughters told her that a letter received the night before had verified it.
“Mother dearest, all messengers have that trouble,” Frederick warned her. “There are certain things concerning details of your plane, that will come to you through forces around you, that get confused in transmission. That’s as near as I can come now to explaining what happens. Some day, I can perhaps tell you more about it. But don’t let that disturb or discourage you. The explanation is as natural as a deflected ray of light, or an electric current grounded.[9] It is a part of the conditions under which we work with your plane, and is never encountered regularly or continuously. Certain detached experiences of that sort come to every messenger. This one you mention was not one of them, but I tell you this now, because the experience may come to any of you, including Margaret, any day. The current gets mixed. That’s the best way I can express it. But it doesn’t persist for any length of time.”
We talked about the force moving the pencil. Mr. Gaylord asked whether I wrote the words, after receiving the message through my mind, and I replied that the force, on the contrary, seemed to be applied to the pencil from without—sometimes above my fingers, sometimes below them—my only participation being to hold the pencil upright and to follow its movement. Mrs. Wylie mentioned the theory that the message comes through the subconscious mind, the muscles of the hand supplying the motive power. We asked Frederick whether he could tell us anything about it.
“The subconscious mind is like the battery,” he said, slowly, “but the connection is made through the hand. The motive power for the pencil does not come, as scientists claim, from the subconscious mind, but from the subtle force I mentioned, put into connection with the hand by certain sympathetic and sensitive conditions of the subconscious mind. The comparison is not exact. The force is not electric, and has certain definitely distinctive qualities not to be expressed in any terms now familiar to your plane; but in time words will be found—or coined—to express this connection.”
Some weeks afterward, Mr. Kendal obtained a little additional information about this unknown force from his wife.
In endeavoring to establish communication with Frederick, through a pencil, one of his sisters had been overwhelmed by insistent, and frequently unknown, personalities seeking expression, and had had some rather violent and annoying manifestations of the force they employ.
“You mustn’t do too much of this writing stunt,” Frederick now advised her, “unless you give up a lot of other things. You can’t burn your candle of force at both ends. Margaret gave up a lot of outside activities long ago. You are sensitive, and could do this in time very freely, but the receptivity is decidedly a strain upon the messenger at best, and if any amount of writing is to be done, you can’t do other things, too.” After mentioning that she would probably be beset by “any number of yearning forces,” he added: “So either say ‘not at home’ to anybody but Uncle J—— and Bud ...”