Excerpts from the Introduction of
A Treatise on White Magic by A. A. Bailey
"Let us study how we can become practical magicians, and in what way we can best live the life of a spiritual man, and of an aspirant to accepted discipleship in our own peculiar times, state and environment…
"We stand now towards the close of a great transition period and the subtler realms of life are closer than ever before; unusual phenomena and inexplicable happenings are commoner than at any time heretofore, whilst matters telepathic, psychic, and peculiar occupy the attention even of sceptics, scientists, and religionists. Reasons for the appearance of phenomena are being everywhere sought, and societies are formed for their investigation and demonstration. Many are likewise going astray in the effort to induce in themselves psychic conditions and the energy-producing factors which give rise to the manifestation of peculiar powers. This book will endeavor to fit the information given into the scheme of life as we today recognize it and will show how basically natural and true is all that is termed mysterious. All is under law, and the laws need elucidation now that man's development has reached the stage of a juster appreciation of their beauty and reality…..
Three types of people will respond to these rules for manifesting an idea on the physical plane. (LH) They are:
"1. Those open minded investigators who are willing to accept its fundamentals as a working hypothesis until these are demonstrated to be erroneous. They will be frankly agnostic, but willing temporarily, in their search for truth, to try out the methods and follow the suggestions laid down for their consideration.
"2. Aspirants and disciples. They will study this treatise in order to understand themselves better and because they seek to help their brother man. They will not accept its dicta blindly but will experiment, check and corroborate with care the stages [Page 7] and steps laid down for them in this section of the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom.
"3. Initiates. These persons will arrive at a meaning which will not be apparent to those in the first group and which will only be suspected by the more advanced members of the second. Within themselves they know the truth of many of its statements and will realise the subjective working out of many of the laws. These laws of nature have effects in three distinct realms:
a. Physically, where they demonstrate as effects in the dense form.
b. Etherically, where they demonstrate as the energy lying back of those effects.
c. Mentally, where they concern the impulses which produce the other two.
"The ignorant and the wise meet on common ground as extremes always do. In between are those who are neither totally ignorant nor intuitively wise. They are the mass of the educated people who have knowledge but not understanding, and who have yet to learn the distinction between that which can be grasped by the rational mind, that which can be seen by the mind's eye, and that which only the higher or abstract mind can formulate and know. This ultimately merges in the intuition, which is the "knowing faculty" of the intelligent and practical mystic who—relegating the emotional and feeling nature to its own place—uses the mind as a focussing point and looks out through that lens upon the world of the soul."
pp. 17-18, A Treatise on White Magic