World of Illusions

What is an illusionist ?

From the excellent d20 website it's a wizard variant that has this ability to distort realities, to mass charm people into believing what he wants.

It really has no "real" power - and therefor some players are wondering why even play an illusionist compared to a mighty paladin, ferocious barbarian or skilled ranger ?

Benefits of playing an illusionist

But the fact is the illusionist is introducing really interesting new parameter in the game.
He can scare a lot of people, by creating illusion of a stone giant in the busy market place of a tiny village, then the rogue can take advantage of this situation by looting all shops.
He can make the entire party becomes invisible, he can create distractions when the party is heavily wounded and has nowhere to hide.

The illusionist can also be used as a king adviser to keep the population quiet, by creating intrigues and plot - so the king can mass-control his subjects.

An illusion is an unquestioned belief.

When a party knows that an illusionist is there - everybody is regularly making saving-throw ; that's the only way to go with these

What does that have to do with spiritual growth?

Our Ego is a master illusionist, he has this capacity of distorting realities, sending false signals, and decoy all over the place when you start to get serious in your spiritual growth.

Doing Shadow work is a nice way to avoid falling in the traps the Ego is setting.

For every thought the exercise is to ask the 4 questions (see "The Work" by Byron Katie) - is it true ? can you absolutely know that it's true ? How do you feel when you believe this thought ? How would you be without this thought ?

And perform a couple of "turn-around" to see this thought through different lights.

I spontaneously do this while I'm awake during the night, and this had an impact on the dream I had. The results are real, at first emotionally it's quite vivid.

But as far as I can see now, the emotional roller-coaster is just a physical reaction to the loss of the unquestioned belief, but it doesn't have to be the goal to look for - it feels good crying when you realize how badly you had rooted a core-belief, but the crying or laughter aren't important - the work is.


Looking for freedom is the true progress

Question your thoughts, don't be fooled




Here's a few examples of how you can fall for the illusions

The Intermediate zone: In his posthumously published book, Vernal Blooms, Theosophist W. Q. Judge describes the dangers of "astral intoxication". He asserts that the astral plane, which is the same as that of our psychic senses, by nature has endless powers of delusion, and has to be well understood before the student can stay there long without danger. He states that while interesting phenomena such as astral lights, moments of peace and revelation, come, it does not indicate spiritual advancement. He states that to regard every picture seen in the astral light as a spiritual experience is like becoming drunk, and that such indulgence while neglecting true progress, which is always dependent upon purity of motive and conquest of known or ascertainable defects, only results in becoming satiated with a store of illusory appearances.