The Gaelic Manuscripts
by Betty White
with Stewart Edward White

Chapter 15
Getting on with the Job

1. The necessity of function

"All things that be are in function an embodiment of reality, but in relation are symbols of reality – they merely stand for something behind them as a note on the page stands for the musical note", Gaelic stated as the basis of his next argument.

"A man, static in a world not only of physical objects but of emotions, invisible faculties, and even of thoughts", he continued, "is but surrounded by a multitude of suggestive symbols standing for, but not embodying, a reality remote from him. By their aid, and the aid of his imagination, he may surmise the existence of realities, and perhaps to a certain extent obtain a critical and appreciative understanding of them, but they will touch him only as a shadow touches the wall, leaving no impress.

"From them he obtains no experience of solid fact, but lives in a world of insubstantial poetry, whose quality is that of dreams and whose endurance is as fleeting. If he is of mystic quality he is perpetually in anticipation of some remote time or state of existence when he shall break down the veil of illusions as he calls it, to an undefined and rather vague reality of an unguessed form which he imagines to lie behind.

"He does not realize that in the nature of the universe, and under proper conditions the reality enters into and informs with life the symbol itself, that the veil of illusion is compact of illusion itself, and that, had he the secret, he can, with the fingers of his very own spirit, touch the living naked essence to which he longs so often in vain.

"To himself, each man is reality itself; to himself he symbolizes nothing. He is, and in the mere fact of that being he touches an underlying fundamental essence of the real. This is simply and solely because the life that is in him functions. His appetites, his emotions, his passions, his imaginations, the coursing of his blood through his veins, the registration of light through his eyes, his movements, and every activity which is his, are not to him symbols, but are expressions of that which is his inner self, seeking outlet in a world of movement. The living intangibles flow through their respective mechanisms within him to produce, as far as his consciousness is concerned, a portion, limited though it may be, of absolute reality,

"If it happens that he is deprived of all outward-reaching, acquired or natural-functioning correspondence with things about him, he is surrounded by a dream world in which all things are to him symbolical except himself. So true is this that certain ones, by nature contemplative and externally almost non-active, have gravely propounded this as a philosophical system.

"But, an extension of the same process exactly that renders certain aspects of personality, is capable of transmuting the symbolical to the real in the environmental world about. To the extent that man succeeds in functioning through that external world, he removes it from the category of symbols suggesting truth into the category of things conducting truth. Whatever man functions, whether within or without himself, becomes such a conductor and ceases to be a symbol. Man's education and development on all planes of life and lives consist in his fashioning tools, skills, understandings and abilities actually to function in a wider and wider inclusion of his environment."

2. The obligation to function

"Now the penalty for the fashioning of a tool is that it must be employed or it will rust. And there were no tools fashioned there would be no rust, and rust is only another word for deterioration and decay. The obligation, then, of having developed correspondences, aptitudes, talents, skills, techniques, abilities to function, is their employment. Through them one translates the symbolical to the real; but, once the transmutation has taken place, a neglect to continue so blunts the perception in that direction that, in time, that particular thing will cease, not only to be a conductor of truths but even to symbolize. And so it will end at last in summat lifeless useless – and dead things must be painfully carried away!

"On reaching mature years it should be, and it will be in time, a spiritual requirement that each man should sit down with himself to take stock of his equipment. He must examine to see what he has learned to do in the matter of this transmutation; for what he has learned to do cries out for its fulfillment. He has called to life a need of fulfillment of reality which did not exist before. He has to an extent chosen a road in which some way or another he must tread out; or, if not precisely a road, he has taken a direction. The path his feet may tread may not be precisely that which he had in view when he started, but his ability to function must be in some way fulfilled. He must lay his aptitude and talents, and the rest, before him as on a table, and he must say to himself "These things are mine, they are in my possession, and in some degree I am skilled in their use. Furthermore, in one way or another I must use them. They are the obligation of my equipment in this life. I may not use them in the way I intended when I fashioned them, but of them some use I must make, Otherwise the reality I have called close to me will, in its nature, recede, and about me will deepen and darken the veil I have so sore labored to thin". Mankind is prone to greediness and, like a child, would grasp ever more than his hands can hold.

"I would state it a bit differently", said Gaelic, "by the fashioning of a tool or function through which one functions in a symbol to convert it to a reality, he calls into existence an obligation to continue in one form or another the transmutation. The abandonment of that aptitude is only justifiable when, through some other aptitude, that same transmutation is continued.

"Now beware lest too close inspection of a very large and general law gets you to splitting hairs of literal interpretation. There is, of course, room for experiment and room for expanding in new interests."

3. The making of reality

"The obligation of functioning that which one has fashioned and acquired is not so onerous as one might fear", said Gaelic, "Developed muscles require less exercise than those in the building and accustomed action less attention than in the learning. In the second place, a small impetus brings an early fulfillment. The effort is to show you that it is not only desirable but is a part of the great web of law that one should choose, and, once having chosen, should maintain one’s greater directions.

It is to discourage, not only by general precept, but also by the great web of law, too great a scattering of one's forces and too ready unwarranted abstinence from motion forward along one’s chosen path. One may be perhaps mistaken in ones’ early choice; it is not a fatal and divorceless marriage. It will, however, be necessary to find by analysis, or oftener by intuition of the unsatisfied equation, what reality has been worked for transmutation; and the old not abandoned until an equal transmutation of reality is assured in some other direction.

"Be it noted that genuine mistakes very rarely result in a very high order of transmutation. Abandonment through whim is very possibly what I am more particularly emphasizing, or abandonment without sufficient cause.

"This evening is a crude, rough and general statement. If you dissect it in detail with your intellectual scissors and forceps, you will probably find much to question and perhaps to deny. That is due to the fact that a complete statement is impossible for a great variety of reasons. But if the general principle is laid away in some absorptive corner of your spirit, it will cause you to grow into a fuller understanding than I can at present express. Plant it and water it; – do not pick it to pieces, for I cannot myself tell from here how much or how little of that particular reality I have functioned into you."

4. The outgrowing of faculties

There was a good deal of talk about ‘living through’ experience, so that the value of that experience was fully realized, and so one need not endlessly repeat. How about those ‘functioning faculties’ of Gaelic’s exposition? Did not they come under the same category? Once a faculty had been developed and utilized to the limit, should not one discard it? Was that not the purport of much of the ‘renunciations’ urged by many spiritual teachings?

Gaelic repeated our doubts for clarity. "You have", said he, "done much speculating on what you have variously described as the outgrowing and discarding eventually through use: conceiving erroneously that having developed a faculty and having given it full and complete employment, so far as full and complete subjective experience is concerned, you have as you call it, lived out that experience and are to abandon it for summat more advanced – Erroneously, as I say, for these reasons:

"In the first place, faculties are developed primarily not only to afford yourself experience, but to enable you so to function in the external symbol as to bring yourself in touch with as much of reality as your effort in developing the faculty has magnetically attracted toward you. We can best understand the second reason by considering some faculty actually outgrown and abandoned.

"To avoid all possibilities of dispute we would best take for our example something in the physical organism, as for instance the vermiform appendix. This at one time subserved a useful and indispensable purpose in that it formed a large by-pass reservoir for the breaking up and the bacillar inoculation of the food which the animal organism at that state of its development ingested. In other words, crude though the process was, through function the grasses and herbages, which to primitive intelligence could be naught but vague symbols of hunger-satisfying possibilities, became life bestowing reality.

"In the course of evolution, that which we might call ‘appendix faculty’ was ‘lived through’, in your definition, and abandoned. In your reasoning, which I have quoted, the possessing entity had from that particular faculty extracted all the experience it could bestow, and was therefore impelled to move on to the construction and occupation of higher faculties.

"But, be it noted that the error in this reasoning here becomes plainly evident. Before the old faculty even began its process of atrophy, a new faculty, the later chemistry of the intestinal tract, had been fully developed and in function. A novel apparatus had come into existence fully capable of transmitting at least an equal amount of symbolism into reality – or grass into energy – and probably in much larger quantity. The abandonment of the old was not conditioned on the fullness of experience acquired through its functioning, but solely on the fact that a replacing and higher faculty was fully completed to take its place."

5. The same, continued

"Now thus we see the life of development proceeding in a two-fold manner. On the one hand, we have the hearty use of what faculties and attributes we possess which are at least enough perfected to admit of free function. Those we turn toward the transmutation of the great world immediately about us. On the other hand, by means of the material of reality with which we thus come into touch, we are slowly evolving new faculties and attributes which will in due time begin to function and thereafter will increasingly function, until, in their perfection they may supersede that which is outgrown. But until that time is reached, the obligation of hearty and eager and vivid and complete activity of the old faculties and powers, utilized on the material more appropriate to them, is the most necessary, if not the most important obligation of existence.

"This is so true that, although a due and proper proportion between the two is essential for that higher harmony which is balanced happiness, nevertheless a complete submersion in the use of possessed powers is accompanied by a certain balance of comfort which is wholly lacking if emphasis is overbalanced in the direction of new employment. You will feel a sense of harmonious correspondence in your doggies, or in certain humans whom you feel to be so comfortable toward their special environment that you will wonder, often, if you are not, unawares, in the presence of some higher harmony of development. Such are examples of what I mean, in contrast to the one whom you know to be a sincere and laborious aspirant towards spiritual perfection but who, nevertheless, you cannot but observe is restless, baffled, discomfortable or even wholly unhappy. He is, to drop roughly to our first simile, trying to get along without his appendix before he has developed a stomach."

6. Maintaining the balance

"I will repeat, for emphasis, that in spiritual relationship man is in function a mechanism for the transmutation of appearance into reality. That he must do to the extent of his powers. He may not develop new powers at the expense of that function. He may not pay for expansion by abandonment of this great reason for his spiritual being. He may not develop new powers in advance of his ability to use them for this purpose, and this purpose only.

"The main point is, a man’s whole possession of faculty, old and complete or new and half formed, must be directed toward active function in the life of the world about him, and not directed toward an attempt to function in an environment beyond him,

"Now do not misunderstand me. I said ‘function’ – ‘use.’ That does not inhibit exploratory reaching and experiments in advance. Function means due and complete exercise; it need not comprehend the whole of activity. The balance must be maintained in proportion, and. the greater proportion of activity must be in the correspondences natural to the entity’s average state. Gradual growth will perhaps change the type of application, but, until the environment is changed, as by what you call death, that point must be in your world surrounding.

"Identifying your discomfort with disproportion, nine times in ten. When one experiences intense discomfort in what you call ‘psychic development’ – a bad term – it is worse than foolish to drop ‘psychics’ and scuttle back to a static existence. Rather you should examine your equipment as I suggested, and turn yourself to a more studied and complete use of it in your natural everyday world."