These three principles underlie all of the many forms of mental induction, or mental influence.  We find them in active operation in cases in which the person is seeking to attract to himself certain conditions, environment, persons, things, or channels of expression, by setting into motion the great laws of mental attraction.  We see them also employed when the person is endeavoring to produce an effect upon the mind of some particular person, or number of persons.  We see them in force in all cases of mental or psychic healing, under whatever form it may be employed.  In short, these are general principles, and must therefore underlie all forms and phases of mental or psychic influence.  The sooner the student realizes this fact, and the more actively does he set himself to work in cultivating and developing these principles within himself, the more successful and efficient will he become in this field of psychic research and investigation.  It is largely in the degree of the cultivation of these three mental principles that the occultist is distinguished from the ordinary man.

It may be that you are not desirous of cultivating or practicing the power of influencing other persons psychically.  Well, that is for you to decide for yourself.  At any rate, you will do well to develop yourselves along these lines, at least for self-protection.  The cultivation of these three mental principles will tend to make you active and positive, psychically, as contrasted with the passive, negative mental state of the average person.  By becoming mentally active and positive you will be able to resist any psychic influence that may be directed toward yourself, and to surround yourself with a protective aura of positive, active mental vibrations.

And, moreover, if you are desirous of pursuing your investigations of psychic and astral phenomena, you will find it of great importance to cultivate and develop these three principles in your mind.  For, then you will be able to brush aside all distracting influences, and to proceed at once to the task before you, with power, clearness and strength of purpose and method.

In the following chapters I shall give you a more or less detailed presentation of the various phases or forms of psychic influence.  Some of these may seem at first to be something independent of the general principles.  But I ask that you carefully analyze all of these, so as to discover that the same fundamental principles are under and back of each and every instance presented.  When you once fully grasp this fact, and perfect yourselves in the few fundamental principles, then you are well started on the road to mastery of all the various phases of psychic phenomena.  Instead of puzzling your mind over a hundred different phases of disconnected phenomena, it is better to master the few actual elementary principles, and then reason deductively from these to the various manifestation thereof.  Master the principles, and then learn to apply them.