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A Treatise on White Magic - Rule Three - Principles and Personalities
As regards the action of those whose point of attainment greatly transcends your own, I can only ask you to do three things: [114]
  1. Reserve judgment. Their vision is greater. Forget not that one of the greatest qualities members of the Lodge have achieved is their ability to view the destruction of form as unimportant. Their concern is with the evolving life.
  2. Realize that all events are brought around by the Brothers with a wise purpose in view. Lesser grade initiates, though utterly free agents, fit into the plans of their superiors just as do you in your lesser way. They have their lessons to learn, and the rule of learning is that all experience has to be bought. Apprehension comes by the punishment that follows an ill-judged act. Their superiors stand by to turn to good account situations brought about by the errors of those inferior in point of development.
  3. Remember also that the Law of Rebirth holds hidden the secret of the present crisis. Groups of egos come together to work out certain karma involved in past days. Men have erred grievously in the past. Punishment and transmutation are the natural working out. Violence and cruelty in the past will reap its heavy karma, but it lies in the hands of you all now to transmute the old mistakes.

Also bear in mind that principles are eternal, personalities temporal. Principles are to be viewed in the light of eternity; personalities from the standpoint of time. The trouble is that, in many situations, two principles are involved, one of which is secondary. The difficulty lies in the fact that (both being principles) both are right. It is a rule for safe guidance always to remember that usually basic principles (for their wise comprehension and fruitful working out) call for the play of the intuition whilst secondary principles are more purely mental. The methods hence necessarily differ. When holding to the basic principles, the wisest methods are [115] silence and a joyful confidence that the Law works, an avoidance of all personality innuendo except wise and loving comment, and a determination to see all in the light of eternity and not of time, coupled with a constant endeavor to follow the law of love and see only the divine in your brothers, e'en if on an opposing side.

In secondary principles, which all opposing forces are at present emphasizing, the use of the lower mind involves the danger of criticism, the employment of methods sanctioned by time in the three worlds - methods involving personal attack, invective and the expenditure of force along destructive lines, and a spirit contrary to the law of the plane of unity. The term "opposing forces" is used rightly if you employ it only in a scientific sense and mean the contrasting pole that leads to equilibrium. Remember therefore, that opposing groups may be quite sincere, but the concrete mind acts in them as a barrier to the free play of the higher vision. Their sincerity is great but their point of attainment along some lines less than that of those who adhere to basic principles, seen in the light of the intuition.

A principle is that which embodies some aspect of the truth on which this system of ours is based; it is the seeping through to the consciousness of the man of a little of the idea on which our Logos bases all He does. The basis of all Logic action is love in activity, and the fundamental idea on which He bases action connected with the human Hierarchy is the power of love to drive onward, - call it evolution, if you like, call it inherent urge, should you so prefer, but it is love causing motion and urging onward to completion. It is the driving of one and all to further expression. Hence, this principle should underlie all activity, and the government of the lesser organizations, if founded on love leading to activity, would lead to a divine urge in all its members, driving them likewise on to fullest expression, and thus tend [116] to more adequate completeness and more satisfactory endeavor.

A principle, when really fundamental, appeals at once to the intuition and calls out an immediate reaction of assent from the man's higher Self. It makes little or no appeal to the personality. It embodies a conception of the ego in his relationship to others. A principle is that which governs always the action of the ego on his own plane, and it is only as we come more and more under the guidance of that ego that our personality conceives of, and responds to these ideas. This is a point to be borne in mind in all dealings with others and should modify judgments. To apprehend a principle justly marks a point in evolution.
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