Gaelic Manuscripts

1. THE PROCESS OF CREATION

I suppose we all want and search for satisfaction in life. I suppose most of us agree that the man who attains the most of such satisfaction is the creative artist who produces something that people like. He does constructive work, that interests him and is appreciated. But it seems to us that there are comparatively few of him; and of those few only a minority attain what we call success. But Gaelic maintains that this is not so: that we are all creative artists: and that there is possible to each of us these satisfactions. He even has a word for "failures." Here first of all, are his basic premises, his summary or sketch of the creative process. It takes close reading; apparently it is merely a description of the processes of the astral in the technical sense; but its principles must be understood before the comfort and enlightenment of the personal application.

"Creation," he defines, "is an arrestment, a checking, of the flow of universal harmony; its differentiation: its rearrangement into a new form of particularization.

"The amount and quality of this first segregation is dependent on the interposition of an individual entity by which it is checked and through which it is filtered.

"The rearrangement depends upon the innate creative imagination possessed by that entity."

1. RELIGION DEFINED Gaelic defined religion as "that device by which people live with realities." He distinguished two aspects of religion. "The first is the essence, which is very simple and not diversely differentiated; and the other is the outer appearance, which represents the essence to the individual beholder. The first is always the same; the second is of almost infinite variety. The second never completely expresses the first, but to those who hold it in sincere belief it represents as much as is adequate. When it ceases to be adequate, it either is changed, or if obtained, becomes not a medium of transmission of reality, but actually an insulation against it.

"These almost infinitely varied forms correspond in their variety to the variety of receptive apparatus. The variety of receptive apparatus is merely another reflection of the variety to be found everywhere in nature; and comes into being from the same causes; that is to say, because of divergent developments through reaction to different environments, mental, physical, and spiritual. Just as the fish and the eagle are both basically creatures embodying a common life force; nevertheless owing to different evolutionary developments, one maintains his contact with the life force through one medium, water, and the other through a totally different medium, air.

"It is of course from this point of view self-evident that the exact outward form of any religion derives its whole importance from the degree to which it expresses the inner essence. But note that this importance derives (is communicated or transferred) only to that particular group with whose individual and personal receptivities these particular forms correspond. It is of less than no importance that to any other group of people this particular outward form expresses nothing whatever of the inner essence.