1. A thought-form of such potency that it does two things:
   1. Controls the life activity or output.
   2. Tunes the aspirant in on the mass thought-forms, which are of a similar nature, and which are built by others under the dominance of a similar illusion.

   This, in its worst aspect, produces mental insanity or idée fixe, but in its least dangerous and normal result produces the fanatic. The fanatic is usually - even if he realizes it not - a bewildered man, who has a potent idea of some kind or another, but who finds it quite impossible to integrate it into the world picture; to make those needed, and often divinely directed, compromises which profoundly help humanity; to find the time or place for the realities which are within his natural grasp.

2. When a man is highly developed, the mental illusion is built around a definite intuition and this intuition is concretized by the mind until its appearance is so real that the man believes he sees so clearly that which should be done or given to the world that he spends his time endeavoring [30] in a fanatical manner to make others see it too. Thus his life slips away on the wings of illusion and his incarnation is a relatively profitless one. In a few rare cases, this combination of intuition and mental activity produces the genius in some field or another; but then there is no illusion, but clear thinking, coupled with a trained equipment in that particular field or enterprise.
3. The weaker and more average mental types of people succumb to the general field of illusion and of mass illusion. The mental plane manifests a different sort of distortion to that of the astral plane or the etheric. The faculty of discrimination which is being developed has produced sharper lines of demarcation, and instead of the dense fogs and mists of the astral plane or the swirling tides and currents of energy of the etheric plane, we have on the mental plane masses of sharply indicated thought-forms of a particular quality and note and tone, around which are grouped lesser thought-forms, created by those who respond to these forms, and to their note, quality and tone. Similarities are then seen to exist which constitute channels or avenues for the magnetic drawing power of the more potent thought-forms. Ancient theologies in modern garb, fixed presentations of half truth, the wild thinking of various world groups, and many similar emanating sources have - down the ages - produced the world of illusion and those mental states which have held humanity prisoner to wrong concepts and thoughts. So many are these thought producing illusions that the effect in the world today has been to cause a general division of the human race into varying schools of thought (philosophy, science, religion, sociology, etc., etc.), into many parties and groups, all of them colored by an analogous idea, into groups of idealists fighting each other on behalf of their pet concepts, and into tens [31] of thousands of participants in group mental activity. These are today producing the world literature, through which the world platforms are colored; by their means the world leaders are inspired; and they are responsible at this time for the mass of experiments in the field of government, of education, and of religion which are producing so much of the world unrest, and consequently so much of the world illusion.

The emotional types respond with facility to world glamor and to their own individual inherited and self-induced glamor. The bulk of the people are purely emotional with occasional flashes of real mental understanding - very occasional, my brother, and usually entirely absent. Glamor has been likened to a mist or fog in which the aspirant wanders and which distorts all that he sees and contacts, preventing him from ever seeing life truly or clearly or the conditions surrounding him as they essentially are. When he is a somewhat advanced aspirant, he is aware of the glamor and occasionally sees in a flash in what direction truth for him may lie. But then again the glamor settles down upon him and he is rendered powerless to release himself or to do anything constructive. His problem becomes further complicated by his consequent distress and his deep disgust with himself. He walks ever in a fog and sees naught as it truly exists. He is deceived by the appearance and forgets that which the appearance veils. The emanatory astral reactions which each human [32] being initiates ever surround him and through this mist and fog he looks out upon a distorted world. These reactions and the surrounding aura which they constitute blend and merge with the world glamor and fog and form part of the miasmas and unhealthy emanations for which the masses of men, for millions of years, are responsible.