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.

LESSON XVII.

PERSONAL PSYCHIC INFLUENCE OVER OTHERS

Psychic Influence, as the term is used in this book, may be said to be
divided into three general classes, viz., (1) Personal Influence, in which
the mind of another is directly influenced by induction while he is in the
presence of the person influencing; (2) Distant Influencing, in which the
psychic induction is directly manifested when the persons concerned are
distant from one another; and (3) Indirect Influence, in which the
induction is manifested in the minds of various persons coming in contact
with the