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The Reappearance of the Christ - Chapter V - The Teachings of the Christ
IV. The Dispelling of Glamor The word "glamor," the outstanding characteristic of the astral plane, has never been correctly employed and it is a pity that it was ever used in the early days of the esoteric teachings. The so-called "astral plane" is simply the name given to that sumtotal of sentient reactions, of feeling-responsiveness, and of emotional substance which man has himself so powerfully created and so successfully projected that he is today the victim of that which he has made. Eighty per cent of the teaching given about the astral plane is a part itself of the great delusion and a part also of that unreal world to which we refer when we pray the ancient prayer: "Lead us from the unreal to the Real." What is said about it has little basis in fact; it has, however, served a useful purpose as a field of experience in which we can learn to differentiate between the true and the untrue; it is an area also in which the aspirant can use the discriminating faculty of the mind - the great discloser of error and the eventual revealer of truth. Once that "mind is in us which is also in Christ" (Phil., II, 5.), we shall find that the control of this emotional nature and this sentient area of consciousness (the astral plane, if you prefer the term!) becomes complete. Then this past sentient control and its entire area of influence no longer exists. It has no reality, except as a field of service and a realm in which men wander in despair and bewilderment. The greatest service a man [131] can render his fellowmen is to free himself from the control of that plane by himself directing its energies through the power of the Christ within. He will then find that the self-centered forces and the energies of personal desire and of emotional love will be superseded by a living energy which can be sensed in a large way, though it cannot as yet be appropriated in its pure essence; this energy, we call the "love of God." It is that free-flowing, outgoing, magnetically attractive force which leads each pilgrim back to the Father's House. It is that force which stirs in the heart of humanity and finds expression through the medium of such great avatars as the Christ; which guides the mystical yearning found in each human being, and works through all movements that have for their objective the welfare of humanity, through philanthropic and educational tendencies of all kinds and through the instinctual motherhood found everywhere. But it is essentially a group sentiency, and only in the Aquarian Age, and as a result of the reappearance of the Christ, will its true nature reach correct understanding and the love of God be spread abroad in every human heart. Of this world of glamor and illusion, Christ knew much, and in Himself demonstrated that true love could control it. Part of the three great temptations of the Christ in the wilderness was based upon the three aspects of world glamor: the illusions which the mind creates, the glamor of the emotional plane of experience and the maze of earthly circumstances. These all threatened to bewilder Him; He met each of them in turn with the enunciation of a clear-cut principle and not with the wordy arguments of an analytical mind; from that field of threefold experience He went forth to love, to teach and to heal. Christ is the great dispeller of world glamor when [132] He comes, and in this work the Buddha has previously prepared the way. The possibility of such a dispelling and dissipation is therefore definitely centered in the two Avatars, the Buddha and the Christ. One of the essential things at this time is to bring home to humanity and to the nations of the world the nature of the work undertaken by the Buddha and the Christ , and to re-emphasize the truths projected by Them into the arena of world thought. The work of the Lord of Light and of the Lord of Love must be presented anew to a needy world. In this connection, it might be said that some nations need to grasp the teaching of the Buddha which He enunciated in the Four Noble Truths; they must be brought to the realization that the cause of all sorrow and woe is the misuse of desire - desire for that which is material and transitory. The United Nations need to learn to apply the Law of Love as enunciated in the life of Christ and to express the vitality of the truth that "no man liveth unto himself" (Rom., XIV, 7.) and no nation either; the goal of all human effort is loving understanding, prompted by a program of love and right human relations for all mankind. If the lives of these two great Teachers can be comprehended and Their teachings be wrought out in the lives of men anew today, in the world of human affairs, in the realm of human thinking and in the arena of political and economic intercourse, the present world order (which is so largely disorder) can be so modified and changed that a new world order and a new race of men can gradually come into being. World glamor will be dissipated and world illusion be dispelled.
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