Glamour of Sentiment

The glamour of sentiment holds the good people of the world in thrall, and in a dense fog of emotional reactions. The race has reached a point wherein the men of good intention, of some real understanding and owning a measure of freedom from the love of gold (symbolic way of speaking of glamour of materiality) are turning their desire to their duty, their responsibilities, their effects upon others, and to their sentimental understanding of love. Love, for many people, for the majority indeed, is not really love, but a mixture of desire to love, and the desire to be loved, plus a willingness to do anything to show and evoke this sentiment, and consequently to be more comfortable in one's own interior life. The selfishness of the people who are desirous of being unselfish is great. So many contributing sentiments gather around the sentiment or desire to show those amiable and pleasant characteristics which will evoke a corresponding reciprocation towards the would-be lover or server who is still completely surrounded by the glamour of sentiment.

It is this pseudo-love, based primarily on a theory of love and service, which characterises so many human relationships such as those existing, for instance, between husband and wife, parents and their children. Glamoured by their sentiment for them and knowing little of the love of the soul, which is free itself and leaves others free also, they wander in a dense fog, often dragging with them the ones they desire to serve, in order to draw forth a responsive affection. Study the word 'affection', my brother, and see its true meaning. Affection is not love. It is that desire which we express through an exertion of an astral body, and this activity affects our contacts; it is not the spontaneous desirelessness of the soul which asks nothing for the separated self. This glamour of sentiment imprisons and bewilders all the nice people in the world, imposing upon them obligations which do not exist, and producing a glamour which must eventually dissipated by the pouring in of true and selfless love.

From Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul