The Gaelic Manuscripts
by Betty White
with Stewart Edward White

 

Chapter 19
The Technique of Communication

1. Purposing and intention

Thus we have had satisfying glimpses, at least, of answers to some of our natural curiosities. But we have had no satisfying picture of how the thing is done. It goes beyond mere mechanisms.

This turned out to be a big subject. Before it could be directly treated we must be educated. We must be told of the nature of consciousness, and the human mind, and their place and. function in the universe, until at times we felt we were wandering so far from the subject that we would never get back. Nevertheless we did get back, and with a pretty fair start toward a cosmogony. In reviewing the mass of material, I find it impossible to do other than follow the same method.

One primordial stream of vitality, of life, is the primordial Source. It flows so to speak, "ceaselessly through all cosmos. It becomes evident only when arrested, or rather slowed up, through the effort of its dynamics to free itself and proceed upon its way."

How and by what is it arrested, or slowed up? By an idea; or by a purpose; both necessarily originated by Intelligence. Intelligence is the reflecting prism, so to speak.

"Arrested by an idea it becomes a creature or a thing, dependent for its form and its attributes upon the nature of the idea; – what you have called the quality of consciousness. Slowed up by a purpose, rather than an idea, it becomes a vehicle of differentiated force, dependent for its nature and its effects upon the nature of the purpose."

Our own degree of Intelligence is obviously not high enough to accomplish pure creation. We may, however, conceive a purpose that checks the life, or vitality or psychic force, or whatever you please to call it, that flows through us and animates us, and thus appropriate for our own use the resultant force. The precise effect of that force depends upon the direction we give it by our conscious intention.

This is perhaps better understood by an example. We have in New York a friend who has long been identified with psychic work. After a number of years she discovered, purely empirically, that if she held her hands a foot or so apart, sometimes she, and others, thought to distinguish a ‘current’ of some sort of force, passing from one to the other. These ‘currents’ seemed to be of three types, cold, warm, and ‘prickly’. They appeared to be soothing, sometimes healing. Naturally we had no means of knowing whether these ‘currents’ were subjective or physical: or whether their effects were mechanical or mentally induced. Suffice it to say that those ‘currents’ apparently exist; that they have very definite effects; and that they are of different kinds.

"It is all the same force," said Gaelic to this, "only the intentioning varies. All results of this kind are gained by a slowing down of the universal current by intentioning... Whenever you apply this power," he told our friend, "try to remember and as far as possible duplicate your impression of the greater current carrying into you from above, sweeping through you as a fresh breeze flows. Imagine that picture. Always conceive of it. It will be difficult at first to gain any sense of reality, but not too difficult to obtain a fancy. One must begin small. Always do that. It fashions the conditions we desire in the substance of thought.

"Then try once more to imagine deflecting a certain portion of this current to pass outward in focused form – not merely permitting the broad sweep, but focusing, as of water in a pipe".

This is a very good example of the checking of a portion of the universal flow of life by a purpose – that of healing; and an ‘intentioning’ of it when so segregated in a specific mechanism, the ‘currents’.

2. The process of creation

The checking of the universal flow by an intelligent Idea results, as has been said, in a creation. We have in cosmos an underlying reality, an ALL Consciousness, which is infinite, and which we, as finite minds, cannot understand. Necessarily, finite creation must be part of this consciousness, of its same stuff. But it is what it is because of its underlying Idea. A dog is a dog, with a dog’s form and attributes and limitations, because of the peculiar quality of consciousness he possesses – and which forms and animates him. He is essentially the same thing as everything else. That is to say, his consciousness is [art of the All Consciousness; and his body is made up of proton and electron. What molds and limits those common things into a dog, is Idea – his dogness.

Similarly, Consciousness assumes the form of a tree, rather than any other, because of its essential treeness. And so with all individual things. Life, as life, is obviously a single animating vitality. It expresses itself through the enormous variety of its forms simply because of an equal variety of qualities, of Ideas, in universal consciousness.

"But," warned Gaelic, "we must beware of creating a mental image of separated pools or reservoirs of the different qualities, as distinct from one another as are the creatures that manifest them. You must accustom yourself, as far as you may be able, to the idea of those qualities as so interfused throughout all cosmos that we may literally say that each pin point of space contains in itself all elements of all qualities of consciousness.

"In other words, or so it seemed to us, the possibility of any kind of creation is always present everywhere. Then why a tree here and a rock there and a dog somewhere else? What determines their appearance at that precise "pin point of space"? Is it, we surmised, because at that point the tree quality was stronger than other qualities?

Not exactly, replied Gaelic; rather it is because at that place the conditions are better for the manifestation of treeness than for the manifestation of any other quality.

That was reasonable: but, like many explanations, it merely pushed the question back. Why are conditions better at that particular place?

"To answer that question," said Gaelic, "we must first examine the method of the working of any law whatever."

So we moved back one more step from the original subject. This usually happens with Gaelic. The most practical or trivial discussion, before it is finished off, results in a bird’s-eye view of cosmos. Sometimes we lose sight of what we started out to talk about; but invariably we land back on it at last. We were used to it. All right, we agreed, let's do it. How do you make a law work?

3. How a law is made to work

It seems you do not! "No man," stated Gaelic positively, "ever causes a law to act!"

"He merely assembles," Gaelic answered our demur to this statement, "proper juxtaposition and proportion of the necessary conditions. Having done so, he cannot prevent the law from acting. You think you light the fire. As a matter of fact, you pile your wood, you place your kindling, you insert the paper. You then supply the chemical, under those conditions of motion and abrasion to the oxygenation of those materials."

We acknowledged the distinction.

"Who or what gathers together in like manner the conditions necessary to the production or manifestation of your tree quality or whatever-quality? The same thing in essence which has gathered together the fire material – Intelligence.

"There is no working of any law unless the conditions for that law are arranged. And that arrangement comes through Intelligence.

"You may – would ye quibble – point to the gathering of certain conditions by the action of certain laws, but that is only pushing the subject back. In the final analysis you will discover – Intelligence."

The point appeared to be important. It was emphasized; repeated on numerous occasions. In the event it proved to have many applications.

We do not work a law: we merely assemble the conditions for its working. Then the matter is out of our hands; we cannot prevent it from working.

4. The composition of the mind

But we were not yet sufficiently educated It is all very well to talk of Intelligence; of Mind. What are they; and how do they work? Gaelic insisted on a distinction between Intelligence and Intellect. He defined Intellect as the focused part of Mind; or rather point of the Mind; for he refused to accept as actual our various partitions into the sub-conscious, the super-conscious and the rest.

What is consciousness, he demanded, but the awareness of an entity? "Awareness", he went on, "requires for its functioning a mechanism; as all things that function, in whatever way, require their appropriate mechanism. Now how does anything become aware? It becomes aware by physical sensation, or response; by intuitive response; and by Inspirational response – these divisions being purely arbitrary for the purpose of the discussion.

"Consider what you call white light. Broken up by a prism into the spectrum, it shows as a series of separate colors, to which you give separate names, from the red at one end to the violet at the other; separating them arbitrarily into the different lines. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the spectrum presents an orderly progression of vibrations, without defined boundaries between any group of constituents, from one end to the other. The whole, taken together, undivided by the prism, you call one thing white light.

"So your consciousness, which is in manifestation your awareness, progresses in orderly unbroken fashion from the red of physical sensation to the ultra-violet of the highest aspiration. And if you are functioning through the nerves and contacts of your physical body, your awareness-response is through sensation. If you are functioning in a different portion of the spectrum, the same response in kind you receive through the blue or green of what you call intellect. And if your awareness-response is received through those higher powers of which you are but primitively gaining control, you are receiving the same response in kind through intuitive faculties or through what you call direct inspiration.

"Thus from one end of the scale to the other you are simply traversing one and the same thing – what we call the white light of consciousness. This white light of consciousness is refracted through the physical manifestation of quality. Without this manifestation you have that In understandable, the white light of Cosmic Unity, which you have variously named as All-Consciousness, All-Spirit, or God. In this aspect you may call it the All-Wisdom, the All-Intelligence, the All-Perception of All-Possibility. Refracted through the physical manifestation of quality, it becomes a spectrum in which the entity dwells; and at various points in which the entity centers its individuality according to its state of development – and in a very limited way according to its choice.

"We may conceive the simplest creature, or bit of consciousness, starting at the dullest red and progressing slowly, slowly in the course of its evolution along its rainbow path through the various phases of awareness-responses; And you must remember that, like the spectrum, there are no dividing lines. There are no dividing lines between the senses and the mind and the intuition and inspiration. And it does not matter how you subdivide the mind into what you call the subliminal, the superliminal, the superconscious, the subconscious, or whatever; or the physical responses into this, that or the other hairsplitting categories of your physiologists. It matters not. They blend one into the other in orderly progression and the reason one appears as red, or sensation; and another as blue, or mind; and another as violet, or inspiration is not because of a differentiation in the thing itself, but because of the constitution of the perception-mechanism which happens to be more or less predominant in the particular manifestation of the entity from whose point of view it is examined."

In this analysis we have, for greater clarity merely, considered the human mind, Gaelic pointed out, rather than Mind itself. "From the human point of view," said he, "we have arranged our spectrum to comprise the awareness-mechanics of Sensation, of Instinct, of Intellect, of Intuition, and of Inspiration. Of these, the ‘red’ end, or sensation, might from one point of view be defined as almost a mechanical and automatic response to stimuli. The rocks subjected to certain influences of heat, cold, or moisture, responds invariably in a certain manner. Progressing to the next higher step, we see in exactly the same manner, the most primitive organisms responding automatically and invariably to given stimuli. Surrounding an insect with certain conditions of sun-warmth, or of other climatic or material impactions – a predictable and uniform action may be expected. That is pure instinct.

"The birth of Intellect, as distinguished from this type of automatic response, coincides with the first appearance of Free-Will. Free-Will is that mechanism by which an organism of advancing complexity is enabled to segregate and select, from the superabundance of responses made possible by that complexity, in the direction of its most insistent need and development. A complex mechanism – to repeat this thought in other words – has within itself points of possible contact in a multitude of directions; beyond the simple needs of its mere animal or vital requirements. And beyond its capacity of assimilation, were all to be accorded equal attention and response. The faculty of intellect is the selecting instrument among these superabundant multiplicities. And, naturally, it functions through what you have named Free-Will. Have I made myself clear?

"Very well. The exact point in our figurative spectrum at which any consciousness possessed of free will, in however small a degree, is centered, is that consciousness’ point of intellect.

"The point above that center of consciousness is the point of the supra-conscious mind, of that entity; related to its conscious intellect in exactly the same way that your supra-conscious mind is related to your own conscious mind. And as the center of consciousness, which is the center from which that individual entity makes its selections, moves on up the scale of vibrations, which constitutes the spectrum, it enters the field of what has heretofore been its supra-conscious, and renders that erstwhile supraconscious into its selecting conscious.

"This being the case, you can readily deduce a wider significance in our statement of last year, when you learned that your supraconscious is to ourselves (Invisibles) what the conscious is to you in your physical body. That did not mean that in entering our estate, your supraconscious mind in its present aspect of relationship to yourselves would then become your predominating intellectual instrument. It merely meant that those powers and relationships and cosmic contacts which now exist in your intuitional region, so to speak, will be transferred into an intellectuality which will possess the same selecting and applying powers of individual free will which you now recognize and employ in your conscious mind of today. And above that center still will be another appreciable, but only partly translatable, field of awareness which perhaps you may call ‘intuitional’.

"The conscious mind, then," Gaelic summed up his distinction, "is the focusing point in that environment which at the moment supplies the need of the entity. The Intellect – the conscious mind of yourselves – is that which focuses sharply on the physical. Outside of that the Mind – the same Mind – is blurred, so to speak."

As a corollary, that focus may be shifted, altered. Normally, this is done in due course of development. It is moved along the spectrum.

"Our conscious mind," Gaelic referred to his own ‘discarnate’ state of existence, "is that which focuses on our state of consciousness or environment."

In certain cases this shift of focus may be temporarily accomplished, we were led to suppose, by ‘occult’ knowledge.

"We," said Gaelic, "are able to move that focus, more or less. Some of you a little."