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Glamor - A World Problem - The Causes of Glamor
Where there is a real grasp of the whole idea (a rare thing indeed) there can be no illusion. The idea is so much bigger than the idealist that humility saves him from narrowness. Where there is illusion (which is usual and [132] commonplace) and a vague interpretive reaction to an idea, we find emerging fanatics, vague idealists, sadistic enforcers of the idea as grasped, one-pointed and narrow men and women, seeking to express their interpretation of God's idea, and limited, cramped visionaries. Such illusionary picturing of reality and such visionary showing forth of the idea has been both the pride and the curse of the world. It is one of the factors which has brought our modern world to its sorry pass, and it is from this misuse of the divine faculty of touching the idea and transforming it into the ideal that the world is today suffering - probably inevitably. The imposition of these humanly and mentally interpreted ideas in the form of limited ideologies has had a sorry effect upon men. They need to learn to penetrate to the true idea which lies behind their ideal and to interpret it with accuracy in the light of their soul, besides employing those methods which have the warrant and the sanction of LOVE. It is, for instance, no illusion that the idea which finds expression in the statement that "all men are equal" is a fact which needs emphasis. This has been seized upon by the democratically inclined. It is indeed a statement of fact, but when no allowance is made for the equally important ideas of evolution, of racial attributes, and of national and religious characteristics, then the basic idea receives only limited application. Hence the enforced ideological systems of our modern times and of the present day, and the rapid growth of ideological illusions, which are nevertheless based on a true idea - each and all without any exception. It is again no illusion that the development of the Christ consciousness is the goal of the human family, but when it is interpreted in terms of authoritative religion and by those in whom the Christ consciousness is as yet undeveloped, it becomes simply a nice concept and often a sadistic incentive and thus enters immediately into the realm of illusion. [133] I cite these two illustrations, out of many possible ones, so that you may realize how illusions come, how they develop and how they must eventually disappear; thus you can achieve some standard of comparison whereby to grasp the relative value of the true and the false, of the immediately temporal and the basic eternality of the real. It will, therefore, be apparent to you that the lower or concrete levels of the mental plane will have acquired or accumulated - down the ages - a vast number of ideas, which have been formulated as ideals, clothed in mental matter, nourished by the vitality of those who have recognized as much of the truth of the idea as they are capable of expressing and who have given to these ideals the emphasis of their thought-form-making faculty and their directed attention, which necessarily implies the energizing of the limited formulated ideal because - as you know - energy follows thought. These forms of thought become objectives towards which the subjective reality, man, reaches and with which he identifies himself for long periods of time; into them, he projects himself, thus vitalizing them and giving them life and persistence. They become part of him; they condition his reactions and activities; they feed his desire nature and consequently assume undue importance, creating a barrier (of varying density, according to the extent of the identification) between the man in incarnation and the reality which is his true Being. There is no need for me here to itemize any of these prevailing thought-forms and aspects of intellectual and mental illusion. I would not have you think for a moment that the embodied idea, which we call an ideal, is in itself an illusion. It only becomes so when it is regarded as an end in itself instead of being what it essentially is, a means to an end. An ideal, rightly grasped and used, provides a temporary [134] aid towards the attainment of immediate and imminent reality which it is the goal of the man or the race, at any particular time, to reach. The idea before the race today is the re-establishing (upon a higher turn of the spiral) of that spiritual relationship which characterized the race in its child state, in its primitive condition. Then, under the wise guidance and the paternalistic attitude of the Hierarchy and the initiate-priests of the time, men knew themselves to be one family - a family of brothers - and achieved this through a feeling and a developed sensuous perception. Today, under the name of Brotherhood, the same idea is seeking mental form and the establishment of a renewed spiritual relationship (the idea) through training in right human relations (the ideal). This is the immediate goal of humanity. This result will be inevitably brought about by means of the cycle of necessity through which we are now passing and the dimly sensed idea will - as a result of dire necessity - impose its rhythm upon the race and thus force the realization of true Being upon all men. If a dose study is made of the basic foundation of all the ideologies without excepting any, it will be discovered that this idea of integral relationships (often distorted in presentation and hidden through wrong methods), of spiritual objectives and of definite positive brotherly activity lies behind every outer form. I have used the current situation as an illustration of the idea taking form as the ideal and, alas, brother of mine, oft becoming the idol and the fanatical misunderstood and over-emphasized goal of the masses, under the guidance of some pronounced idealist. An ideal is a temporary expression of a basic idea; it is not intended to be permanent but simply to serve a need and to indicate a way out of the past into a more adequate future. All the present ideals, expressing themselves through the current ideologies, will serve their [135] purpose and eventually pass away, as all else has passed in the history of the race and will give place, eventually, to a recognized spiritual relationship, a subjective fellowship, as a defined and expressed brotherhood. These will produce, when sufficiently developed and understood, a form of control and guidance and a species of government which it is not possible for even advanced thinkers at this time to grasp. When ideals and mental concepts and formulated thought-forms dominate the mind of an individual, a race or humanity in general, to the exclusion of all perspective or vision and to the shutting out of the real, then they constitute an illusion for as long as they control the mind and method of life. They prevent the free play of the intuition, with its real power to reveal the immediate future; they frequently exclude in their expression the basic principle of the solar system, Love, through the imposed control of some secondary and temporary principle; they can thus constitute a "forbidding dark cloud of rain" which serves to hide from view the "raincloud of knowable things" (to which Patanjali refers in his final book) - that cloud of wisdom which hovers over the lower mental plane and which can be tapped and used by students and aspirants through the free play of the intuition.
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