Epopteia

This Vision, as we are told by many seers and prophets of the time, was incapable of being set forth by "tongue of flesh" in its own proper terms, since it transcended the consciousness of normal humanity. Being in itself a living potent, intelligible reality, apart from all forms either material or intellectual in any way known to man, it pervaded his very being and made his whole nature respond to a new key of truth, or rather, vibrate in a higher octave so to say, where all things while remaining the same, received a new interpretation and intensity. 

The interpretation of this Vision, however, was conditioned by the "matter" of each seer; he it: was who had to clothe the naked beauty of the Truth -- as the Gnostic Marcus would have phrased it -- with the fairest: garment he himself possessed: the highest thoughts, the best science, the fairest traditions, the most grandiose imagination known to him. Thus it is that we have so many modes of expression among the mystics, so many varieties of spiritual experience -- not because the experience itself was "other;" the experience was the "same" for all -- but the describing of it was conditioned by the religious, philosophical, and scientific background of the seer.

This element, then, is the basic fact in all such apocalyptic vision. 

 Commentary on The Divine Pymander by GRS Mead http://altreligion.about.com/library/texts/bl_meadpymander.htm

You who follow the path of another lay your fate in the interpretation of another.  Your personal journey is then mapped out by someone who never was and never will be YOU. What does this mean for these beliefs that you did not develop yourself?