We could not fail to behold that the abysmal depth of these cult-leaders' failure is in direct ratio to the preposterous height of their extravagant claims to wisdom and power. Of what outstanding value have they been to their fellow men and women? We are entitled to ask for the visible fruits of all this verbal commotion and general mystery-mongering. What proof have they given that there is anything substantial behind their claims? They can show no practical achievement or productive effort that has made a deep mark in any sphere of contemporary history or even revealed that they possess any capacity to make it. They have not brought to the concrete problems which confront mankind any better counsel than the non-illuminati have brought--unless the utterance of abstract nouns be such. The final demonstration of their futility is given by the personal failures of their followers in consequence of such unprofitable influence and hollow teaching. Hardly any have developed and balanced the trinity of head, heart, and hand, the harmony of brain, feeling, and will. Few possess the ambition which works hard for what it wants, but almost all dream of great good fortune coming effortlessly to them through some divine Grace, auspicious planet, invisible adept's working, or other miraculous means. In short, the personal lives of a large proportion of these believers are stamped with frustration and failure, as the public lives of their leaders are stamped with utter inability to accomplish any marked positive benefit for mankind. It is as comical as it is tragical to contemplate how ineffectively they drift through the years as mere dreamers lacking power but ever talking of it. Even when their miseries and sufferings impel them eventually to some reflection, they apportion the blame everywhere except in the right place. It is God's will, or adverse stars, or evil spirits, or unavoidable karma, or a spiritual test, but it is never the harvest of the gullibility which they have sown, of the intellectual exaggerations to which they have yielded, of the one-sided, unbalanced, and negligent view of life which they have been taught, nor of the self-deception which permits them to take so many illusions for realities.
-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 10 : The Is Is Not an Ism > # 77
