The Gaelic Manuscripts - Softcover

This book is quite old (written 1930s), yet it's a perennial shining light amongst the plethora of channelled material available nowadays. Stewart and Betty White published several books in the 1930s. The Gaelic Manuscripts was never properly published. This is perhaps because of the nature of the material. This book is written to assist people already at work on the path, when much channelled material tends variously to encourage people to start walking it. This book matched the level of other material such as that of Alice Bailey in the 1920s.

One other reason for this re-publication is that such books as this have exerted an indirect formative, seminal influence on many New Age ideas of today - it pays to understand where many such ideas originated, since they are not as new as many people think. Though some of the forms of expression in this book can be a little dated or regarded nowadays as gender-biased, the observations and truths contained herein are all the same clearly put and very relevant in our time.

Excerpt from the Preface:

White himself had 200 copies of Gaelic mimeographed for distribution, while it is not a great number, considering that the usual "first run" is apt to be at least 5000 on regular book publication, neither is 200 copies an amount which might be made up simply for a "few close friends". Since that time it was again put out in the same form to the extent of some 400 copies. More recently about 50 copies were made for circulation among a few people who were interested by someone who had copies of one of the copies issued by White, complete with White's notations on it, A copy of that, run off on a copying machine, and a copy of the last 50 issued came into my hands. The material is too valuable to not give as wide a circulation as possible -- hence the present edition, which is also a limited one, and still in mimeographed form; but at least it does make it available to those who seek the sounder, saner material in the field.

The strangest part of it all lies in the actual intention of Stewart Edward White in making the first two hundred mimeographed copies. And the question which remains unanswered is this. If White himself felt that the circulation of this manuscript be restricted, why didn't he take the precaution of copyrighting it? A writer with many, many published books to his credit is not acting in ignorance when he deliberately puts out material in the public domain. Because of this, we feel that his intention was not to restrict circulation of it but in hopes that from time to time a few more copies would be issued for circulation so that those who could benefit from reading it would be able to get copies of it -- that someone in a position to do so would always pick it up and issue a few more.

Excerpt

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.