The Challenge of Spiritual Glamour

What is it, and how does it affect our perceptions?

Glamour is one of the Greatest Impediments for a Disciple to overcome.

An esoteric definition could be stated thusly:
It is “a glass darkly” through which people view themselves, concepts, and the world. It is essentially the veil which the emotions cast over the thinking process – therefore truth becomes hidden behind the fogs and mists of feeling and emotional reaction.
It is that which enfolds and over-emphasises the lower at the expense of the higher, and serves to distract the attention of the Aspirant or Disciple away from reality.

All of this means, the truth the person does see is thereby distorted, but nevertheless their perceptions they believe to be genuine and true. When the emotions are allowed to affect the mind in this manner, it constitutes wrongful use of astral substance. One of the terrible consequences of which will then be the conditions and nature of the person’s afterlife within the astral plane, which could literally be termed a hell state!

More general descriptions could be thus:

Glamour is a misrepresentation of Truth, but unlike illusion, which is a product of distorted mind; glamour is a product of the distorting emotions – often appearing as emotional thinking.

The tendency of glamour is to create unconscious patterns that romanticise and colour, thereby occluding accuracy of insight.

Glamour glosses over or “glamourizes” all subjects – in an attempt to make things appear more special or important or dramatic than they really are.

Glamour utilises commentaries lacking in right co-measurement – preferring vague or generalised descriptions – rather than cross-checking with higher truth and straight knowledge to ensure accuracy.

Glamour also distorts and destroys correct perception – as the glamoured person conveniently excludes important or essential specifics, over-emphasises unimportant details or exaggerates the correct and important ones!

The glamoured perception can lead a person to believe danger is not, and all is well when in fact corruption abounds. It sees harmony and resonance when discord is truly present. And even can call Darkness, Light – such is the nature of this pattern described as Rose-Coloured Glasses!
Of course, the converse perception can also appear in the awareness of one suffering from glamour – namely, glamour can see corruption where there is purity, evil where there is truly only Love, and it can believe there is disharmony when in fact there is just discomfort – a natural side-effect of growth and change.

The number of glamours from which a person can suffer are vast. Far too many to enumerate here!

However, let us look at a few aspects:
Criticism, separativeness or pride are definitely breeders of glamour.
A person who is still subject to the see-sawing of the pairs of opposites indicates glamour is present.
Self-pity, or as it is often termed nowadays, “victim consciousness,” is one of the major glamours of the advanced and sensitive person – those spiritual seekers who are still caught up in blame and lack conscious connection with their Divine Creative Power. Self-pity is a strong emotion that most definitely blocks a person from seeing anything as it truly is!
Of course, not all people with “victim consciousness” are conscious spiritual seekers, this is a common human affliction.

An Additional Quality of Glamour

Another element indicative of glamour is Sentimentality – which is well characterized by an emotional addiction to “niceness.”

Sentimentality creates a gushing substance that: dulls the Heart Fires, wants Love to be sickly sweet, obsesses over part truths, and altogether stymies the Clear Cold Reason of the Heart – that is Love, as it is understood esoterically!

Folk who are inflicted with Sentimentality, are often those who prefer to avoid discomfort at any cost. They are driven by a diluted idea of Love, equating it to perpetual happiness – namely reducing Love to a pleasant trifling emotion! Thereby any time they encounter the returning manifestations of their glamour-driven causalities (the troubles and conflicts they unconsciously and continuously create), they baulk and prefer to run away, blaming others for their feelings, rather than standing and confronting their inner limitations face on. Or else they create an additional glamour in the form of a narrative of being a “long suffering one.”

These folk suffer immensely, because they are chasing phantasms – seeking a sanitised, rainbow-coloured, and glittery version of reality.
Energetically and therefore spiritually, they resonate more with the astral beings posing as Enlightened Masters – those that gush forth sickly sentiments and spiritual platitudes, and not at all, Higher Wisdom! They light up when these inner beings tell them “Exactly what they desire to hear.”
These types of people usually lack the fortitude to walk the Higher Path, due to their strong Love-stifling emotional nature, which occludes their higher reasoning – instead they think emotionally and are driven by mental emotions – which keeps them firmly anchored in their Lower Nature. Needless to say, the New Age is filled with folk such as these.

Glamour and the 2^nd Initiation

The full command of glamour usually takes Lifetimes to achieve! And it usually forms the backbone of the 2^nd Initiation, the hardest one to pass because it requires mastery of our emotions.

The three key qualities that must be mastered in order to pass the 2^nd Initiation, in both gross and subtle form, are Fear, Hate, and Ambition.

Fear – causes one to stymie the natural expansion of their Heart and Love – it causes one to become inward focused and insular to true connection. To overcome Fear requires: true courage to make the necessary sacrifices to grow on the path of Love, and to demonstrate that Service to Humanity is more important than petty personality concerns.

Hate – is the aggressive emotionalism that is used to attack others and the principle of life. It comes into manifestation by the frustration of desire and the craving to control. Equanimity is needed to counter this potent energy and its seeds.

Ambition – concerns the prostitution of creative energies for personal gain. It implies a ruthless grasp and conquest of things desired for the personal self, no matter the consequences upon others. Spiritual ambition in Disciples destroys right group relations and impedes the development of humility and loving sacrifice. Like with Fear, the remedy is Love in Action, balance, wisdom and the seeking of benefits for all.

The mastery of these three qualities, and of our emotional nature, entails balanced expression of our emotions – neither suppression nor over-expression. It requires us to balance the pairs of opposites, as far as the emotions are concerned. An example of this is the dipole of Craving and Aversion, or of Grasping and Resistance. This balancing of emotional duality necessitates the finding and treading of the Golden Middle Way. And of course – the mastery of Spiritual Glamour!

Tools for Transformation

The Overcoming of Glamour

As this subject is simultaneously vast and subtle, I will need to speak here in terms most esoteric.

Glamour can only be dissipated by the inflow of clear, directed light – specifically the Light of the Soul.
When the Disciple can make right alignment to and contact with their Soul, the results will show as increased light. This light pours down and irradiates both the mind and the brain consciousness, illuminating the mind – which must then work as a reflector of this Soul Light.
If the Disciple is then steadfast and holds their mind “steady in the light,” then as the rays of this Pure Light stream forth from their Soul, glamour will be dissipated – like early morning mists in the rays of the rising sun.

To align to the Soul requires release from the world of feeling and emotion, and polarising in the world of the illumined mind – specifically the abstract mind, as opposed to the lower concrete mind.
This means in application, that we must subject our astral and emotional nature to the effect of hard straight thinking, using the mind as the instrument. We must always work from Above-Down – utilising a greater or higher force to master that which is beneath it.
The process is one of linking the mind with the Soul, and then focusing oneself consciously and with precision in the mind nature or in the mental body, and not in the Soul nature or the Egoic Lotus.

It is Illumination that we must seek, for it is only through this and the achievement of clear vision, that the fogs and miasmas of glamour will finally be dissipated.

To arrive at the point where Soul contact is possible, requires the balancing of the pairs of opposites, or at least many of them. To elucidate this further I will here quote from “Glamour A World Problem” by Alice A. Bailey, page 79:

“Upon the Probationary Path there comes the swing, consciously registered, between the pairs of opposites, until the middle way is sighted and emerges. This activity produces the glamour of the pairs of opposites, which is of a dense and foggy nature, sometimes coloured with joy and bliss, and sometimes coloured with gloom and depression, as the disciple swings back and forth between dualities. This condition persists just as long as the emphasis is laid upon feeling – which feeling will run the gamut between a potent joyfulness, as the man seeks to identify himself with the object of his devotion or aspiration, or fails to do so, and therefore succumbs to the blackest despair and sense of failure. All this is, however, astral in nature, and sensuous in quality, and is not of the soul at all. Aspirants remain for many years, and sometimes for many lives, imprisoned by this glamour. Release from the world of feeling, and the polarising of the disciple in the world of the illumined mind, will dissipate this glamour, which is part of the great heresy of separateness.”

To Balanced Being and Being Balanced

Azure Seer