The Gaelic Manuscripts
by Betty White
with Stewart Edward White

Chapter 16
Getting on with the Job

1. Refreshment

This, like the last, is not from Gaelic. It also came through another station. But that station is one of our own group; and the material seems to be part of the same effort.

"You know a child’s first impulse, when you give it a beautiful flower, is to pull it to pieces", began this communication. "That is natural enough, but a flower is not to be handled that way: it is to be enjoyed whole, as an inspirational thing. These foreshadowed ideas that come are delicate things, blossoming things. They must have more effect on the inspirational side and less in concentration in pulling them to pieces to understand. The constant emphasis is always in putting most attention and energy on the influence of the idea: how to absorb it and assimilate it and take it to yourselves. That is the important work of each one; and the dissecting of it is only allowable after the rainbow influence, or flower influence, has entered into you.

"So many beautiful things are put into the world solely to help you take the jump-off. I took the rainbow because it seems so obviously inaccessible that no one could dream of spoiling it by reaching and analyzing it. It was balancing in visioning. It is the refreshments of life that you should take joyously and vitally. The beauties of things teach you how to liberate your spirit. You ask how can you feel free and happy. Can you not relive the moments you responded most keenly to beauty? Doesn’t that give you some idea of the technique of springing off beyond yourself? There is your guide to the way. And strangely enough it is a circular thing; because, having sprung loose in response to inspiration or beauty, the refreshment and replenishment of it arouses the spark of vitality, which in its turn – through its entirely practical -methods – will help you to climb with understanding and desire, not baffled and strained and drawn. You have oxygenated and energized, have made a natural process of what was a puzzle and a tangle and an effort. You must not starve that rainbow side. It is more practical than you think. It is the mechanism of liberation".

"I am refreshing myself", said the station in her own person. They are showing me how to refresh in myself in a confined place, such as a prison cell. Still it is possible to have rainbow feelings there. There are pieces of color around, separate soft colors, and it gives me a different sensation when I dive – delve – into them. --A fern; just a long green fern with little tender clinging tips that speak of growth in a perfectly suitable environment. That is one. There are so many things. I can’t stop to tell you how playing with them liberates you. There is Nimrod (the cat). He is good for that, too, even his whiskers are amusing".

"You must not deny your rainbow soul its playtime", resumed the Invisible. "If only you realized what wings grow during the playtimes; and how glad you are to have them, even when you have to fold them for practical work. "I’d always like to have a sheath", observed the station",--I suppose they are clothes – of satisfying texture around me".

"Yes", agreed the Invisible, "clothes for the sake of enlivening your spirit and not for the eyes of fashion. It all helps. Don’t scorn little things; indulge them. If you have a secret tiniest leaning towards what seems a madly inappropriate idea, try indulging it for the sake of liberating your impulses.

"Nothing is right if your proportion is not right. There is something so simple I want to say to you. It is on the question of what one simple thing to do when you are puzzled or baffled or congested. And that is this; looking up from your work. When everything else around you may tangle up or bother; you can still know your ultimate intent, your vista. That is one of the rules.

"That intent is a big thing. It keeps us individually from prisoning ourselves with all those painful convolutions in the same place. Looking up, and forward, with intent, never mind how baffled you may be. It is our collective intent with this group that will accomplish."

2. Work within our powers

Look up from our work! And, it is now Gaelic again, work within our powers.

"The effective", said he. "is done well only within one’s powers. The moment the element of strain intrudes, that moment effectiveness slackens. The limitation implied by the feeling of strain is one imposed in order to confine one’s efforts within the effective.

"Strain is likewise a warning that one is stepping outside the task of which one is capable at the moment. Work done with the infusion of strain is never work permanently completed, but is at best in the nature of scaffolding. If it seems to you possible to accomplish only by this extension into the region of exhaustion, that is an indication that your vision has embraced too large a segment of the task. It is well then to retrace in aspiration to within the bounds of the comfortable attainable. Accomplishment beyond the comfortably attainable is an illusion, for it results in nothing of solid permanence. It is well to wait, within the permitted territory, the growth in power until one feels able to advance with sure and easy steps. If there seems pressure to exceed comfortable accomplishment, then be certain the pressure proceeds, not from aspiration, but from unbalance.

"This principle by no means excludes the forevision of things not yet attainable but ultimately to be attained. That forevision, however, implies no pressure of haste or immediacy. There is in it the assurance of ultimate certainty, not of immediate obligation."

3. The value of ritual

"Besides this," Gaelic continued, "much may be gained, in certain ways, by following the grooves worn for us. It is all right to take one’s own line; but there is no sense in it when already established lines are going in our direction. Ritual, in the broadest sense, has its uses.

"In the necessary work that involves cooperation man works best within the appropriate ritual. A ritual is a common denominator of those who so cooperate. A ritual may be significant, or it may be merely an emollient of intercourse, unimportant in itself except for that purpose. In this aspect is seen the valuable side of the human tendency toward small uniformities even to the apparently trivial; such as the custom of the moment as respects clothing, manners, personal decoration and the point of view as to the commonplaces. Valuable as the quality of individuality is, it is absurd to waste its dynamics on the things that do not matter. It is worse than absurd to insist on it in those things when such insistence inhibits or deflects or calls attention unnecessarily among those whose forces would be better expended in cooperation.

"In this sense all outward forms and customs are ritual, and are never intrinsically either good or evil to be fanatically adhered to, or as fanatically deprecated. Each age, each segment of consciousness has its own ritual, adopted by majority consent for the moment. It is effective when it fulfills its function of automatically smoothing the attritions of unimportance. It should never be combated through motives of personal taste or aversion. It becomes of sufficient importance for that only when it ceases to fulfill the function just described. Individuality of soul is a mark of development; eccentricity of externals is a mark of eccentricity. If you were to visit another planet, you night consider it absurd and beneath your dignity to paint your face sky blue, but a failure to do so might set you apart from those to whom you were accredited. Your failure to conform would be submerging your purpose in the trivial. One of the best weapons of deterrent forces is to inject into the human consciousness small windmills at which to tilt, tempting it to remain behind for that purpose instead of going on. The most effective windmills are those of outgrown ritual.

"The matter of decisions is a matter of development, and a mistaken decision may result in considerable advancement. You move by making your mistaken decisions or your happy choices, as the case may be. Once you have made a decision of a course of action, then the principle I have enunciated of working within your powers obtains; and you must have a greater probability of success if you remember this law, for it is possible that you may be tempted to overstep in order to justify your decision.

"I must repeat it in a sentence; strain is impermanence. You may get results, but they are temporary, and they must be done over again for permanence.

"In this contemplation you may see the value of avoidances, for in them, and in them only, you may master that focusing of power that makes for solid result. We are accustomed to think of the developing power of decision as residing solely in a choice of modes of action. A full one-half of development resides in a choice of avoidances. An avoidance is not always of the undesirable; it is sometimes a discrimination of essential irrelevancies."

4. Resistances

"Work," said Gaelic, "is effort; and effort is a concomitant of growth.

"Movement is, and must always be, against apparent resistance. That resistance is not so much opposition as the mere fact that you move. Only when you cease onward progression do you become part of the static and inert through which you have been passing; and so the apparent resistance ceases. Since this is, and always must be, a concomitant of living, one of the first and most useful lessons to learn is that resistance and opposition are not the same. The attainment of this simple mental attitude removes from the resistance the elements of struggle and of personality so that, instead of resenting it as a bafflement, one welcomes it as a sure indication that one is alive and forwardly in motion.

"The strength of apparent resistance in its variation from time to time is sometimes an actual measure of speed of progress; sometimes a purely subjective misapprehension of the amount of energy put forth; and sometimes a mere impatience of egocentricity resenting opposition. In the majority of cases, whatever the external circumstances, the sense of struggle as being stronger at one time than another, is an illustration born of the greater or lesser degree of spiritual integrity in command at that moment. When one feels borne with a triumphant current, it is merely that one has entered into, for the moment and fully, the realization of the nature of resistance, and so rejoices in it, as the skilled player rejoices in the difficulty of the game of his election. When, on the other hand, he feels lost in the rack and battle and ill-fortune of overwhelmment it is because for the moment he has lost in extraneous detail his perception of this truth.

"One of the great simplicities which your world must teach is the unimportance to the compactness of spiritual integrity of any details. So that one realizes that no possible deprivation or destruction of circumstance car deprive one of his place in the cosmos. For ever beyond the ultimate deprivation of life itself remains still such of spiritual integrity as he has acquired; and in due and fitting place.

"That successive deprivation of untoward chance, as it seems to you, may be disagreeable and discomfortable, is readily admitted. That avoidance is desirable and worthy of best forethought and skill is indubitable. But fundamental harm can come from these things only if they move the spiritual integrity from its grasp on its simplicities."

5. Bad luck

"Ill luck is the breaking through of the pressure, which is progress and movement through a weak spot. You can stop the leak by ceasing, to move; if you wish to pay that price. Until you have attained perfection there must be weak spots; so let not ill luck dismay you. Search if you will the leak; though it may be higher up the roof-tree than you are able to climb. Do not seek it in relation to any individual or specific incident; rather in thinness of protection in the envelope of your integrity. Reflect that in the imperfection of your state of development, sometimes small and irritating bits or runs of what you call ill luck may be in the nature of safety reliefs of pressure; so that those small things may divert or dilute from greater catastrophe.

"Reflect further that the surest stoppage lies in the spiritual attitude in which these things are accepted. If welcomed as a test of one's development, in this respect they become of actual constructive value. Each ill fortune that strikes from the soul a spark of dauntlessness has brought its own resolution with it. In this aspect there is no ill fortune and no good fortune; but only the one life clad in motley. One of the simplicities you will learn is that circumstances both toward and untoward, become of the same texture when fronted with this selfsufficing spiritual integrity. And in each may be the same joyousness; for there is no greater joy than the soul can experience in mastery. There is a long road to travel before the truth of this last statement is, not merely understood, but fully experienced."