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Esoteric Psychology II - Chapter I - The Egoic Ray - Rules for Inducing Soul Control
b. The Quality of the Hidden Vision The next emerging trend is one most difficult to express. It is not easy to discover the right words to define its meaning. It is the quality of the inner vision. This cannot readily be expressed in words that man can comprehend, for we refer not to man's vision of God but to God's own vision of His purpose. Down the ages, men have sensed a vision; they have seen it, and have merged themselves with it after much struggle and effort; they have then passed out of human life into the silence of the unknown. The mystic and the occultist have both testified to this vision, and to it all that is beautiful and colorful in the world of nature and of thought also bears silent witness. But what is it? How define it? Men are no longer satisfied to call it God, and they are right, for it is, in the last analysis, that to which God bends every effort. Yet the quality and the nature of the vision which is God's own vision, dream and thought, have held His purpose steady throughout the aeons and have motivated His creative processes. Great Sons of God have come and gone and challenged us to follow the light, to seek the vision of reality, to open our eyes and see truth as it is. Down the ages, men have sought to do this and have called the method of their search by many names - life-experience, scientific research, philosophic questionings, history, adventure, religion, mysticism, occultism and many other terms applied to the adventurous excursions of the human mind in search of knowledge, of reality, of God. Some have ended up in a maze of astral phenomena, and must continue their search later when they [238] emerge, chastened, from the depths of the Great Illusion. Others have wandered back into the dark cave of a pronounced materialism, of phenomenalism, and must likewise return and reorient themselves, or rather perhaps, complete the circle, for who shall say that God is here or there, or from what point His vision can be seen? Some lose themselves in thought processes and self-induced imaginings, and the vision gets hidden behind a multitude of words, both spoken and written. Still others find themselves lost in the clouds of their own devotion and self-awareness, and in the misty speculations of their own minds and desires. They are at a standstill, lost in the fog of their own dreams of what the vision should be and thus it eludes them. Others - the theologians of any school of thought - have sought to define the vision, and have endeavored to reduce God's hidden goal and intent to forms and rituals and to say, with emphasis: "We know." Yet they have never touched the reality, and the truth is as yet unknown to them. The possibility of the Vision which lies beyond, or behind the vision of the mystic is forgotten in the forms built up in time; and the symbols of the teachings of those Sons of God Who have seen the reality is lost to sight in rituals and ceremonies, which (though they have their place and teaching value) must be used to reveal and not to obscure. The vision is ever on ahead; it eludes our grasp; it haunts our dreams and our high moments of aspiration. Only when a man can function as a soul, and can turn the developed inner eye outward into the world of phenomena and inward into the world of reality, can he begin to sense God's true objective and purpose, to catch a brief glimpse of God's Own pattern and the Plan to which he so willingly conditions His own Life, and for which the Eternal Sacrifice of the Cosmic Christ is essential. [239]
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