The Gaelic Manuscripts
by Betty White
with Stewart Edward White

 

Chapter 7a
Immortality – Conditions in the Invisible

1. What is heaven like?

Naturally, being human, we are anxious as to conditions on the 'other side'. We got only evasive replies to our questions. "If we tried to tell you, you would not understand", we were told. "We haven't any words". "It would only give you false ideas".

This was exasperating. We could understand plain English, and we had some degree of imagination. Plenty of others had made a try at it! The Bible, the occultists, the spiritualists, theosophists, clairvoyants. Was what they said to be trusted? Answer, yes or no!

Nothing doing.

Well all right then: why can't you tell us?

2. Why it cannot be described

"The exact outward form by which any quality manifests itself physically, or in any substance, using the broadest meaning of the word" finally we were told, "depends entirely upon its correspondences with the type of environment in which that manifestation takes place.

"Tree-ness – to use our old example – manifests itself in woody fiber for its stability, the necessary circulation of its sap in branching form for the accommodation of its myriad foliation, and the foliation itself for those purposes of breathing and absorption which its life in an atmosphere of hydrogen and oxygen makes necessary. The result of these correspondences viewed as a whole is the tree, as you see it. In like manner all other qualities of life produce on your physical plane the physical apparatus necessary for the furtherance of the particular characteristics inherent in those qualities. And the forms of material life are thus determined – not, as some philosophies have thought, by an ‘ideal’ pattern of the thing as you see it – but rather by the production of such mechanisms as are required for the material life of that quality.

"The wonder of the intricate niceties of these correspondences between the organ and the need is and always has been a marvel to the human mind. Their accuracies have been the chief field of speculative science, and the measurement and cataloging and intelligent understanding of their smooth interplay have been the subject of practical science.

"If this principle has been understood, conceive now in imagination a substantial environment of totally different content than that by which you are surrounded – let us say on some remote star. The elements of matter are not only all new and stranger but they bear to each other, let us say, relations cast in a novel ratio. Let us suppose that in this suppositious environment the ‘tree’ quality again manifests itself. It no longer deals, in terms of its development, with hydrogen and oxygen, or with the chemical formulae comprised in moisture or air, or with heat as you know it; but for these simple correspondences other and unknown correspondences are substituted. Providing, mark you, for the satisfaction of the same basic needs of that particular quality – Tree-ness.

"It follows that in order to provide a mechanism by which these needs of tree-ness can be satisfied in that new set of surroundings, there must evolve a different physical structure than in your earth environment. And, conceding that your eyes-of-the-beholder remain the same, that thing would look no more to you like what you know as a ‘tree’ than a dog does. Nevertheless, it would be a tree, considered as a reality, not as an appearance.

"But, consider yourself not as an outsider in that distant sphere, looking about you with alien eyes, strange with the standards of your earth; but as a being, still of the human quality which manifests itself on earth as a man such as you know him; yourself in all your many complex multiple needs for correspondence fully embodied and adapted to that by which you are surrounded; at home in that environment. Then the embodiment of that treeness there would be to you beautiful, harmonious, satisfying, pleasure-giving, as fully as is now your great oak here on this place. And that, no matter whether you in your old character as the alien visitor from earth had looked upon that embodiment of tree-ness there as an ugliness, a fantastic thing, almost unimaginably distorted to your human appreciations. Or, not to give a false impression, of course the contrary might be true. It might seem beautiful to you – but only if within you had developed that sense of perception which could at once penetrate below the external to the reality, and bring back to the surface the feeling of its essential beauty of harmony with its world.

"But suppose by some means you on this earth could extend your thought across those immeasurable spaces, to touch and make your friend some being on that far-off star. So mingling the humanness of yourselves as to establish true communication, you two human beings touch each other; you talk; you exchange news. You think of him as like yourself – in outward form. He thinks of you as like himself in outward form. You are like each other actually, of course. He says to you, ‘Have you trees?’ And since you understand the essence of his thought, and you know what he means by ‘trees’ (because of their tree-ness), you reply: ‘Certainly we have trees, have you?’ And he replies, ‘Why, yes – very beautiful ones.’ And in like manner you talk together about what you call the generalities of your common experience.

"But some day you inquire in detail what his ‘tree’ looks like. And from then on, you're lost.

"Now, I know so little of how much of a framework this makes to you; but can't you see, when you ask us what we are like, what we are surrounded by, what kind of places we live in, where we go – all the little details – we must reply in one of two ways? Either we must say, ‘Yes, we have trees, clouds, insects, birds, flowers, fountains and cities and streets, and dwelling places’ – and then you have a picture of those things as they are to you in externals, and that picture would be wrong; or we must try to translate into your verbal symbols these qualities of tree-ness and floweriness and all the rest, as they embody themselves in our substance, in the mechanism that is best adapted for manipulating the correspondences they need. In which case, translated into your verbal – and hence visual – symbols, they seem fantastic, or unbelievably inhuman. They seem undesirable, unbeautiful – because their correspondences are not those of the correspondences of identically the same things on your earth.

"But if your own mechanism were adapted to the correspondences of this our element, as they are now adapted to those of your environment, we could describe the shapes of things here, and they would seem as harmonious, as desirable, as beautiful, in every way a soul can imagine.

"Furthermore, the same quality of pleasure, appreciation, reaction of any kind, that comes to you from a forest of trees there, would come to you from a forest of trees here, however embodied; because whatever you get inside yourself from the forest there is the tree-ness, and the beauty of perfect correspondence of itself to that in which it dwells. We get the same thing here. So that the emotion you have for any given thing there is identically the same emotion we get from the same thing here.

"That is why we cannot tell you more when you ask. We must choose between allowing you to build up a solid brick heaven or, quite naturally going to the other extreme, to conceive of us as floating, nebulous, homeless, foggy and phantasmal in the ether of space.

"I wish to repeat, just to emphasize: when you see beauty in anything whether of form or character or thought, the emotion you experience comes straight from the heart of Reality that is behind the form. That emotion is the same emotion that the same Reality inspires in us.

"We live among real things. We live among real things!

3. A picture

And then in a final statement Gaelic presented what he himself often described as a "picture and not a literal statement of fact". It is certainly at least a big picture.

"We will not attempt to transcend your own limitations of space and time", he began.

"You have. stretching out in all directions from the place you stand, an immense universe of tremendous spaces of something almost near emptiness. Here and there hundreds of thousands, millions, billions upon billions of miles apart, is a single small pin prick in immensity – something registering on your sense organism. Those minute points of registration you name the constituents of your physical universe. All between them is empty space, space so wholly empty that you must make a grasp for understanding by postulating an ether – which has no registration on your physical mechanisms! This registration is comprised within narrow limits of vibrations, vibrations so attuned to the organs with which your body is provided that they become, through that attuning, the real objects in your cosmos.

"But now – suppose yourself, by some magic of readjustment, to be attuned in your sense organs to a different scale of vibrations. Instantly the worlds and suns and stars and cloudy star-dust skies would be blotted into a black void of nothingness. From them would be conveyed to you no faint tremor of impingement to make you aware of their existence. But there now would flash before your reattunement galaxy upon galaxy of new worlds, new suns, new stars and cloudy star-dust skies, occupying in the firmament pinpricks of space at those points where before had been only the empty void of ether.

"And still moving on, in still another attunement, this second universe in its turn would vanish and be no more; and in the vast and empty void more points of light would spell to your renewed senses more worlds.

"And so on, and on, and on, through the almost infinite reaches, until, in the nearest approach to omniscience possible in a finite cosmos, you would appreciate that in all the vastness of space is no empty point; that it is all One Thing, One primordial Thing. And its manifestation in the complex is only as a man moves, and so sees new lights that were before obscured, and loses in obscurity lights that before have shone.

"That is all. I will bid you farewell".