Chapter III
THE PROCESS OF CREATION

1. (NO TITLE)

Although the communicator seemed dissatisfied with the form of his remarks on discomfort and unhappiness, he did not again directly recur to the subject. His concluding statement, however, led straight to another aspect of man's life.

We had been given glimpses, in the course of other discussions, of man's interdependence with the rest of creation. He is one cell of the body of Cosmic Consciousness: one of its mechanisms by which it becomes self-aware. But his affiliations, it seems, are even more sharply defined. He cannot stand or work alone. However solitary his desire, he is in spite of himself a member of a Group. He belongs to this group because of affinity. Toward it he has certain definite, inescapable responsibilities. This is true whether he is actively conscious of the fact or not.

Of what nature is this group? What is the affinity that joins him to it? How long and for what purpose is he held to it? What is the kind of connection he has with it? What are those responsibilities, and what are the penalties for their avoidance?

2. THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT

We were led to this subject in rather a curious and roundabout fashion. We had been discussing the ancient puzzle; and there had been decidedly two sides to the discussion.

One faction maintained that just as sometimes it appears that a man is made criminal by the shape of his skull, so in general man's character and deeds are conditioned by physical make-up. Man is made by his body, or at least heavily modified by his body.

The other side did not like this and argued back.

Like most discussions, it got nowhere. Instead, it branched out. The body is one sort of external condition. Its inhabitant cannot get away from it. But how about other sorts of external conditions? How much effect have they? To what extent is one justified in running away from them - if he can?

Every time!

But hold on! Take the Family. That's an external condition. Some families are a blight on those who belong to them. Do they just bust up? Or do they stick it out? It is simple to say bust it up; but we reached out and recited a lot of specific instances where it was not so easy to decide. Life is not so naive.

3. THE REASON FOR THE GROUP

"The points of view, as to how much manifested character is determined by the physical vehicle, and how much the physical vehicle is molded by the character, are not antipathetic but are segments of one circle," stated Gaelic as to our first discussion. So both factions were right.

"What a man is capable of," he explained, "is indeed conditioned by the shape of his skull, the proportionate activity of his glands. On the other hand, his skull is so shaped and his glands are so activated because his characteristics clothe themselves accurately. The physical characteristics are mechanically and physically hereditary in family and race - they depend upon mechanical transmission through the germ plasm. A human soul to whose attributes these characteristics are more or less accurately fitting, is attracted to and embodied in one race or one family rather than another for that reason.

"Now any group of people, no matter how large or how small, are a group because of a certain impetus in the world for the working out of which to its finish of dynamics the contribution of effort of a single individual is not sufficient. The impetus is at once a product of, and a responsibility of, a certain group type of entity. When that impetus is worked out, whether it be of constructive or deterrent or destructive nature, that group, whether it be of a single family, a nation, or a race, dissolves and comes to an end."

In that statement is the whole reason for, and the ultimate termination of every type of human gathering whatever. It will therefore bear re-reading.

"This blending in final harmony with larger cosmic currents may be hastened or delayed according as the members of the group accept, and work out those group tendencies or characteristics - which at first view seems sometimes unjust, sometimes unaccountable, and always outside any dependencies, so far as we can see, on anything the individual is or desires or has done.

"This breaking into a vast diversity through individual initiative, generally blundering, and the leading back to original simplicity through faithful working out, generally blundering, is only another example of that breaking to complexity and reuniting in simplicity which obtains in all other cosmic processes.

"If a human being finds himself hampered and confined by accident of body, by bounds of temperament, limited by an overwhelming group tradition which has imposed itself in the plastically receptive period of life, all of which is outside of his own origination of impetus, he must reflect that this is the condition of his group problem - it is the field of his group activity; it is his opportunity of group contribution, quite aside from his intimate, entirely personal job. He must reflect that he is allied to this group and imposed upon by these conditions because, in a way too complicated to sketch here, his own problem, his own degree in development, fits him to it - just as his other characteristics drew him magnetically to clothe himself in those confining physical characteristics which we call heredity. And he must reflect, for his encouragement, that each hampering or confining group-characteristic which he succeeds in lifting from its lower turmoil through his personal development to conscious higher harmony, is that much done and finished with and put behind of the whole group problem.

4. THE RESOLVING OF GROUP PROBLEMS

"A family will start with a tremendous black burden of narrowness, bigotry, intolerance, whatever you will, which being subscribed to fully and lived out consistently by all members of the family in succeeding generations, will grow in power and volume of influence until an inharmony is created in cosmos of tremendous consequence. And it will persist as a deterrent thing to which human entities will be magnetically drawn, until bit by bit and little by little through hard won illumination those individuals have lived out and through to harmony, and little by little and bit by bit have dissolved it.

"The interrelation to the personal development is too complicated a subject to undertake here. Suffice it to say that this is not a horrible thought but one of great encouragement, for degree of development is not measured by space passed but by pressure overcome, and those hindrances imposed, as we say, by no fault of one's own but by the group condition, afford opportunity for exerting pressure which would not otherwise be afforded. The measure of one's life, from this point of view only, must be not only the measure of one's own personal progress but also to what degree or extent one has emerged constructively from the undiluted group attitude, which must be his in youth, to an individual solution.

"Now it must not be misunderstood in this very brief exposition that all group agglomerations are unconstructive. There is also a class of impetus which makes for construction. I give you the other side today because it applies more to the present problem.

"You must not forget," said he, "the element of group loyalty. That is the basis of race patriotism: it is the basis of family cohesion: it is the basis of finishing the job. The army is engaged upon the building of the bridge, the tunneling of the mountain - 'We will all work it out together.'

"Yes, Uncle Peter is a hard, dour man. He oppresses the poor and steals from the rich. He will probably be hung at last. But he is in the family. Let us get together and work it out, so that there will not be another embodiment of Uncle Peter! For just as long as his problem remains unsolved it must continue to seek embodiment in the family. Perhaps it is your particular job to rid the family of Uncle Peterishness. If you succumb and carry on the Uncle Peter tradition, so to speak, then you impose a burden on another who is to come. And you do not release yourself from any part of the job; you must still, here or elsewhere, bend your back to that labor.

"That is one reason, merely by way of light aside, one reason why so many on this side are working so hard and so yearningly over those on that side; it is merely a matter of a group job."

5. A MAN'S RESPONSIBILITY TOWARD HIS GROUP

This seemed good, as far as it went, and quite cleared up a number of people with 'Uncle Peters' of one sort or another in their immediate families. But Gaelic was not through with the subject. At the next opportunity he continued with it.

"The individual man is a member of, not one narrow group only, such as the family, but also of a succession of ever more inclusive groups until he is to be considered finally, as far as your earth life is concerned, a member of that which comprises the sum-total of earthly incarnations. Each of these groups has its own type of problems, good and evil, to be worked out, all of which have the same characteristics of being beyond the power and scope of individual solution, but which may eventually be worked out by individual contribution toward solution.

"They have also the characteristic in common that they are individual problem and responsibility.

"The exact form in which, and the exact manner in which, they are proposed are dependent upon the individual circumstance. The human being is born upon your planet and conditioned by its limitations because his state of being fits those limitations. He is born Chinese or Arabian or African or Caucasian, and conditioned by the peculiar limitations which inhere racially, because his state of being fits more or less accurately those limitations. He is born into a family and is conditioned by the heredity of physical makeup, because his state of being finds a comfortable fit within those limitations. He is born with certain physical qualities of body which limit him in his possibilities, because his state of being does not, at that state of development, press beyond the bounds thus set for him.

"So, while one may say that an incarnate is by the fact of incarnation unable to reach the same powers of perception as the discarnate; while we may say that a man born, bred and educated in the criminal slums cannot by that fact be responsibly aware of higher ethics; while we say that a man born with certain glandular secretions cannot attain a normal balance, we must not therefore conclude that fatal circumstance is to bear the entire burden as an explanation. The state of being has not actually formed the outside envelope, as some schools of your thought would have you believe; but it has come by a sort of magnetic attraction of appropriateness to that circumstance which most nearly clothes it.

"Now the hope and the release come through the vital and intelligent working out by the individual according to his capacity and the opportunity of his own progress, toward harmony and enlightenment. Just as each embryo passes in review the whole biological history before it arrives at that point where it is to function as an independent human being; so, as a member of the group, will the human entity live through the spiritual history of that group before arriving at the point where it can function as an independent worker on its destiny. As the embryo wholly and completely lives its life as cell, reptile, fish, tailed animal, and so on; so the child lives wholly committed to the outlooks, the points of view, the beliefs, prejudices, temperamental vices of its own group, the family. It has the family attitude; it has the family loves and hates, tastes and religion, politics, sympathy, hardness, courtesy, rudeness, which is the atmosphere of its little group.

"So the youth in his larger group is provincial, ignorantly arrogant toward what he lumps together as 'foreigners,' ineptly patriotic without thought that patriotism means aught but self-assertion, and blandly indifferent to the peoples beyond his border.

"Only a little broader is the Caucasian within his race, is the Arabian, proud and self-centered beneath his desert stars, is the African, convinced that whatever powers of magic the white man possesses - he alone is the great man of earth. And so the Chinese, secure within the age-old serenity, looks with contempt upon the 'foreign devil.' And so the human race in its youth bends its eyes downward towards its speck of earth and cries out against the few who raise their eyes.

"But as the child grows to manhood, just as when the embryo grows to human form, it begins to appraise and utilize what has been unthinkingly a part of itself. It is knowledged in the family temper or the family pride, the family point of view toward human kind, the family religion and the family politics, the family traits of all kinds that make a group. He does one of two things: he controls and utilizes them by the alchemy of his personality: or he continues, unresisting, their tradition.

"If he does the former, there is either that much more or that much less of this particular impetus, which had originated far back in that particular group. If he does the latter, responsibility in his case has been passed on and must be worked out by others who follow. Furthermore, he has, by his indifference, so accentuated these certain qualities in himself that his magnetic attraction toward this type of limitation in the future is greatly intensified.

"On the other hand, if he has, by even ever so little, worked out a portion or a phase of this group impetus, he has not only removed just so much limitation from the world, but he has also lightened the human burden for his successors on this particular job and, naturally, qualified for a wider field himself.

"This can only be done according to his knowledge and his capacity. The child is not responsible for storming at the servants. It is the family habit, and he thinks it is the only way. The man who has literally never realized cannot be responsible for what he does not know. But intellect and the perceptions come into contacts outside the group, and they cannot fail to bring the seeds of enlightenment through comparison."

6. SURGICAL LIFTING OF LIMITATIONS - GLANDS

For the moment no one had anything to say. All questions seemed to be answered. But reflection showed this not to be so.

How about constructive energy? How about those clever chaps who remove a little pressure in the skull and thus transform a criminal into a model of all the virtues? There are such cases. How about those medicinal gland stimulants that work apparent magic in altering a man's whole being as respects health, mentality - yes, even stature? There must be a catch in it here. If one is supposed to work out his group problem by his own transcendence of the limitations, how is he justified in dodging the whole issue by changing himself, not through his own efforts but by outside mechanical means?

But Gaelic saw no difficulty here.

"Now in our discussion," said he, "I must remind you to keep constantly in mind that what is said in principle of one group applies in principle to all kinds of groups. I must also remind you to keep before you the basic idea that as a whole the group impetus is beyond the power of the individual. Also that the problem of the individual is in the main a portion or phase of the group problem, according to his personal capacity and aptitude. Therefore, if he works out his individual development, he automatically also works out, as far as the individual can, the group problem. It follows that if the group problem is by so much carried out, there is so much less of it to weigh upon the other members of his group. In that thought you may glimpse the interrelations of efforts and the value to others of that real progress you make for yourself. You may also, perhaps, glimpse the reverse, and perceive how imposing additional limitation on yourself through inertia and indifference imposes an additional burden of limitation on those magnetically attracted to your group. This is for the automatic relationships.

"There enters also a semi-automatic relationship, as one might say. If the individual works out within himself his own portion of the group impetus, he will in the process, by a universal law, have produced something, which manifests or clothes or makes evident that bit of development in the external world. It may be a concrete thing, or a bit of practical knowledge, or merely an externalized spiritual attitude or radiation; but whatever its form, it is there existent in an appropriable shape for those who can reach out for it and utilize it. Whenever such an appropriation is made by another, not only does the utilization aid further in the solving of that group impetus, but in repercussion it renders stable the advancement of the one first attaining.

"Note carefully that these things are produced for appropriation - I use the word advisedly. The appropriative movement comes from the spirit of the one who takes. The wares may be as attractively arranged and displayed as you will, but there must be no forcing or selling campaign. If there is that attempt, you are making an assault on the freedom of spirit which is the necessary prerequisite for any actual advance.

"Now do you not see that, so far from acquiring merit by acquiescing in the limitations to which your former state of being has been drawn, simply because you cannot tear them down with your bare hands, you are wholly justified in reaching out in appropriation of whatever tools, of whatever kind, your fellow group members have manifested from the spirit of their own efforts toward a working out of their own particular portion of what is wrong with their - and your - group? And do you not see that, if by so doing you tear asunder your own limitations, you have not only released yourself for wider efforts, but by the practical demonstration of the value of those tools you have justified the other's efforts?

"The men who have worked to perfect a medical remover of limitations have worked in their own sphere of capacity on a portion of the great group problem - How comes human infirmity? Naturally that is but a part of the great human impetus upon the working out of which each in his own way, every member of humanity is, or should be, engaged. Whatever any one of them accomplishes or manifests for appropriation is just so much of an advance toward the final solution. It may be, probably is, of the most concentrated efficiency in his own case. He has accomplished that much anyway in the whole task, whether his results are ever appropriated or not. But with each intelligent appropriation by another of his group the effect toward solution is thereby expanded, and so much less remains for the future of the race. So much for justification.

"Now as to the other aspect that probably will occur to you; why, if so serious a limitation is imposed upon him, should so simple an effect suffice to relieve it? An easily relievable limitation of any kind, no matter how it appears, is a limitation whose impetus has been nearly run through.

"A man born with a badly shaped skull is imprisoned within the intelligence that shape imposes. Neither surgery nor serum can lift that weight. The only removal of such a limitation must come through as earnest an effort as capacity permits toward filling out all the possibilities within that limitation. Then in future states of being he will find himself more or less relieved, but always sufficiently so as to leave room for further repetition toward expansion.

"But in the case where the administration of some simple remedy brings about what you call complete normality, that is an indication that somewhere or somehow, by the united progress of many efforts, this particular phase of impetus is nearing its conclusion. Those afflicted with faulty glands fifty years ago were in as defined a limitation as our man with the deformed skull. There was no known remedy; the impetus had not been worked out. Nor has it yet been entirely worked out, but it is in a fair way of accomplishment. The gift, not yet quite in perfection, but usefully appropriable is in the world.

"Let us take," said Gaelic, "a suppositious case of gland deficiency. A man is born with this particular physical deficiency because, roughly speaking, his state of being or development, the kind of entity he has become, takes on readily this deficiency. This is his individual handicap, which he must work out for progress. It is also a physical handicap for mankind, which mankind must work out for its progress. And it is, furthermore, one of a multitude of limitations, the sum total of which magnetically attracts to incarnation those entities whose state of being is at that point in progress.

"Now the gland deficiency results in a certain type of mind, way of activity, trend of thought, of a quite different nature from what those things would be in that individual were the gland deficiency not present. He is, as you say, a different person. Now if by the intelligent act of appropriation he reaches forth for the medical knowledge to rearrange the gland secretions, he has availed himself of the working out on the part of the whole of that particular deficiency. He has by the act of appropriation, as expressed a moment ago, strengthened by justification, and so has contributed his due part toward that aspect of the problem. He has finished with that phase; and in other, liberated aspect of his personality - which as you say is quite different - he will find a new phase of the group impetus to which to apply himself.

"Now it must be recorded further, and emphasized, that the individual ultimately shares according to his effort, in any direction, in the whole body of removal of limitations. Therefore, while immediately of the greatest importance to himself is the direction of his effort, in the long run he is compensated all along the line. It is the avid activity with which he exerts pressure that is the measure of his accomplishment. That pressure is exerted in the direction his perception and knowledge show him. If a handicap of a physical nature prevents him from pushing aside the obstruction to as great an extent as would have been possible without the physical handicap, nevertheless the ultimate effect is commensurate with the effort made, rather than with the visible result obtained. The removal of the handicap is too often taken merely as an opportunity to diminish pressure."

7. THE QUESTION OF MORONS AND IMBECILES

That also seemed satisfactory, for the time being. However, further discussion raised another difficulty. The argument seemed to be that one must transcend or reduce his limitation by his own effort, even if that effort was only one of appropriation. How about the moron, or the total imbecile without sense of direction or initiative? Someone calls in the doctor, and he is restored. He has nothing to do with it. And how did he happen to be an imbecile in the first place?

"By indifference, inertia and neglect of one's opportunities for expansive life we have seen that, so far from removing or enlarging limitations, one but assures to them added potency when one enters one's next opportunity. In a way it is as if a focus on this lack or need was in the first instance too diffused, and must now be concentrated so that other possible interests are left outside the field of vision and one's possibilities are narrowed to an obligatory attention. Conceive still an indifference, inertia and neglect, a continued acquiescence in these new limitations without the normal pressure towards transcendence of them, and you will find the limitations still further narrowed, the individual attention still more sharply focused, his possible activity still further circumscribed. When near the vanishing point of this continued process you find him narrowed, not only to the point of such physical disability as cripples him to a place of contemplation of the sun, but his mental movements bound within the circumference of almost the lowest animal. His start upward must come from an interest as vigorous in proportion to his capacity as would equal the pressure, in proportion to his capacity, of the most enlightened spirit of you all. Nevertheless the outward and visible seeming of the effort would appear no more than instinctive stirring toward the sunlight and away from the chill of the shadow.

"But there comes a point when even such a movement seems to hang in a balance of equilibrium, and it is a question whether or not the germ of personality is to dissolve into its original elements or swing back up the slow and difficult arc. At that point it seems that even the opportunity for exerting what you call proportionate pressure has left the power of that atrophied will. Some outside help must be given, not toward supplying a deficiency which the entity itself must fill for stable development, but merely to place it in the way of making the first effort.

"Now this type of arbitrary administration of help, rather than the usual and justifiable offer of the materials for self help, is the only type of instance in which what one might call assistance by authority is permissible. I have carried the process back to its first elements merely to illustrate the kind of assistance this must be. It may be offered - generally is offered - far short of the immanent point of final disintegration. The instance you spoke of lately - a person insane, forcibly taken to a treatment; your other instance of placing one possessed in the way of dispossession by another - both these in principle are not far different from my type example.

"Both have reached a state of equilibrium where not the will but the power to apply pressure is lacking. Your contribution consists merely in so placing the person that there is a chance of disturbing this equilibrium to permit once more of individual application, no matter how small in outward seeming - as one touches the pendulum of a wound clock to start its machinery once more.

"This that I have said is almost self-evident. I offer it merely to round out the course in group work, and its extent, and the justification of interrelated activities between its individuals.

8. MISTAKEN HELP

There is here required a warning, which Gaelic proceeded to utter. Mistaken, officious, ill-timed 'help' is in reality no help at all.

"If by making a person's decision for him, of any kind, you have deprived that person of a certain opportunity and therefore a certain property, you have robbed him, with the best intentions in the world," he said. "He may gain thereby certain easements unearned, but at the same time he has been forced to forego a chance for certain self-building which the process of earning would have accomplished for him.

"Taken in the group sense, this thing that you have presented him, this thing you have prevented him from doing, is in the group impetus still undone. It remains to be done, and must await another combination of circumstances making that thing possible. That may not recur until a considerable time, and the group is burdened with the effects until that time has come. That is for the group aspect.

"Now as to the personal aspect; in the law of compensation sooner or later you must make restitution in kind for whatever you have appropriated. Some time in your two histories an extra effort from yourself for the other will be demanded and must be made, when condition and opportunity serve. This apparently gratuitous service accounts for most of the responsibility for others outside of the natural affection and desire. It is the affinity which you will probably recognize.

"As to the assumption vicariously of the immediate consequence of that which you have arbitrarily taken from the other, that may well happen. But it will not be by way of any immediate compensatory balance. It is merely because unguarded you have stepped too close within their zone of action. You did not belong within that zone of action, remember, and unless your insulation is strong it probably will come about that you will be affected."

"How," asked someone, "does one know the difference between the service which you owe and that for which you are going to owe later?"

"That is a very pertinent question," replied Gaelic. "The gratuitous service that one owes comes about in such a way, when conditions are ripe, that one is forced to pay it by force of circumstances. You have the general principle of offer and appropriation for your ordinary guidance."