The Gaelic Manuscripts
by Betty White
with Stewart Edward White

 

Chapter 14
Getting on with the Job

1. Preliminary

Some of the material that follows did not come directly from Gaelic; some of it, as will be seen, was given by another station, but a station of our group. It is by no means a comprehensive treatment; so I have called it "a few hints". However, it seems apropos to the general subject of our personal attitude to life.

2. Rhythm

One morning ‘Joe’ remarked that he was going to talk of a platitude, "a perfectly commonplace platitude". But, he added, "if you look at a platitude from in front, it’s flat. I'm going to peek around a corner and show you it’s round.

"Begin with the physical constitution. After you have more or less theoretically become receptive to the life currents, you begin to resent and become a little bewildered by the fact that you get tired. Your argument runs something like this; bar mechanical toxic accumulations due to physical exertion, there is no reason why the flow of energy from an inexhaustible source should ebb. That this does not obtain puzzles you and perhaps renders you a little distrustful of your actual accomplishment. What I want to convey this morning through this illustration of the physical is this;

"What you receive from the primal source is sweeping through the cosmos, not in the flow of a steady current like that of smoothly running water, but in the pulsations of rhythm, with the ebb and flow of rhythm. The particular wavelength to call it such, that you tune in on by the nature of your constitution, may differ from the wavelength another tunes in on. Even if you are working alone it very often happens that the personal rhythm, or lack of it, which you have established by overt acts of body and mind, do not correspond accurately with the wavelength that comes to you in the way of energy from the primal source. You may have established your peak of receptivity, in extreme cases, with the ebb of your cosmic pulsation; and vice versa.

"This results in harmony, and is a matter of personal adjustment through catching the rhythm of your own personality. We cannot teach you how to do this specifically. We have been trying for years to show you how to catch the rhythm through your own expansion."

3. Affinity

"In working with others your completest satisfaction would be found when you are with those whose rate of rhythm is approximately near your own. Your effectiveness and satisfaction diminishes as those degrees of pulsation draw apart, until there comes a point when the natural peak often coincides with the trough of the other and the effectiveness is, by a well known physical law, completely nullified. Neither party to this catastrophe is in the slightest degree in fault, nor need one necessarily be more advanced than the other. They simply react to different rhythms. In the one case you have a complete affinity, and in the other case a very worthy person you cannot get on with to save your life. There are all degrees between the two. This situation is complicated, of course, by the probable fact that these people themselves are not in perfect harmony with their own rhythms."

4. The rhythm of effort

"Not so obviously, but none the less truly, different types of efforts have also their own rhythms. The trick is to catch them at their peak and relinquish them wholly at their natural ebb. Any attempt to fill that ebb by effort to induce a smooth continuous level of accomplishment results merely in checking the forward free natural movement of the waves. That is a very ornamental way of saying you get ‘stale.’"

5. Cross-rhythms

"Now we are coming to something more difficult to express. All the big waves have loads of little waves on their surface and each of these little waves has its rhythm. We will take a present example to make this clear. You realize perfectly that every one of its days has its rhythm, and you more or less accommodate yourself to that. You are working with us now but you would not try to work with us all day. You catch the peak for an hour and then you do something else in the way of both work and recreation. That, as you say, distracts you and freshens you so that tomorrow morning you are ready for another go at it.

Now the thing I want to point out is that, just as this little wave of possible accomplishment exists in the day, so is it part of a larger wave of accomplishment which must have its peak and ebb. It may seem logical that if, by a balanced refreshment, you keep yourself from too great effort in any one day and arrive at the next day thoroughly refreshed, you should be able to go on with an indefinite series of such days. That is not true. The larger rhythm must also be allowed its swing.

"The point is, when you get your rhythm you will arrange so that you don’t contravert it any more than you have to. You work toward it all the time".

6. Catching the rhythm

"Now this is difficult. These rhythms are not quite in your time element. By the very nature of rhythm they must have symmetrical regularity – pulsation – but that regularity is not made up of time, it is made up of pressure and release. Let’s put it baldly; a wave of effort might last three weeks with you and the next one last two days, yet they would be equal in themselves. It is partly fourth dimensional. It is not exactly intensity, it is the quality of the thing. The nearest I can come to it is that, in diagramming your rhythm, you would have to transpose the quality of the thing accomplished into the terms of space in the diagram, and hence of times of course. I fear this is not transferable except in a glimpse.

"Now your problem is to adapt, as perfectly as possible, the job to the rhythm. If it cannot be comprised within the dynamics of one upsurge, then it must be planned to be accomplished in a series of efforts, and must be imbued with a rhythm of its own of such nature that its natural breaking-off points, so to speak, will coincide with your own natural ebb. A badly conceived effort does not naturally sink at the time of that ebb, and requires forced efforts beyond the limits of your own rhythm. If it is badly planned and you drop it, you have a jagged edge."

7. How that is done

"Now", warned Joe with great emphasis, "you cannot do this intellectually. Here is one soild concrete pillbox where the intellect hasn't even a look-in. And this is final. You have to depend entirely on the judgments suggested to you by your feeling, if you have a feeling for rhythm. If not you are out of luck, for the moment. The artist plans the rhythm of his work unconsciously, by feeling. He feels about how much he has in him, and the proportions of that he is doing seen somehow to arrange themselves so that they pretty closely coincide with his feeling of the ebb of creative energy, which means a forcing if he goes beyond it. He hits it more or less according to his subtle and instinctive in in-understood sense of rhythm, great and small.

"Now this sense of rhythm is an accompanying product of the increasing consciousness of and knowledge of and living in general Harmony. It is nothing else; and it comes no other way. As to its acquisition, therefore, we can say no more than that we are striving constantly with you to lead you into it.

"This attempted glimpse today is not to set you a puzzle for your minds’ manipulation, but to reveal to you an aim, cloudy, misted and undefined though it may be, toward which to turn your farther aspiration. And perhaps to afford you an encouragement on the way."

8. Waves

To complete this aspect I append the following, the source of which was anonymous.

"Vibrations are life, and waves are progress in life. The thing that is made by vibrations moves within the limits of its being, and also carries forward – through itself and its contacts – the wave.

"Waves lift and fall, as well as move forward, and the particles that comprise them are also elevated and depressed, as well as carrying through themselves the forward movement. The rise and fall is in itself rhythmic and harmonious. Without it no forward movement is possible. This is a universal law, applying to the mighty and onsweeping tide of cosmic evolution, and alike to the little ripples in the tiny pools that make up individual affairs. The seagull that exults upward on the shoulder of the rising wave, too often, instead of falling in glory of grandeur into the troughs, plunges from its height darkened with despair – because it has not the vision to see, nor the perception to feel, the mighty, slow-gathering force that will lift it again to another moment of high-tossing, sun-glinted height.

"THIS IS A UNIVERSAL LAW"

"Know that. Understand that, Accept the recession into the quiet hollows, into the slow sucking trough, as part of the great rhythm – without which there would be stagnation. Learn to take it as the repose period, the gathering period, the period in which the mighty forces that lift the wave upward, are quietly powerfully coming in- If you could only once feel this, visualize it, never again could you be uneasy, depressed, low spirited, discouraged merely because of the natural, inevitable, necessary ebb after the flow. Never again would you worry because in this or that your powers of today are not your powers of yesterday, that your wings are folded, that a darkness seems to have closed you about. Accept the quietude, accept the ebb – enjoy it – as all harmonious things should be enjoyed. Rest in confidence with your folded wings, knowing that it is the law; that soon beneath your breast the stir of gathering forces must be felt; sure that in the progress that the law ordains you must once more be swept upward by the glittering crests whence all horizons are far, and the whistling winds of eternity tempt again your outspread wings.

"As I said, this is the universal law. By it you can measure your smallest needs. By it you can measure your greatest griefs and despairs. Carry it always with you, for its fitting is to all occasion."