The seven principles

The teaching

As The Kybalion (1908) teaches it.

The master key

The Kybalion opens its teaching with one sentence: “The Principles of Truth are Seven; he who knows these, understandingly, possesses the Magic Key before whose touch all the Doors of the Temple fly open.” The seven are Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender, offered together as one account of the whole of things, from the stone to the mind.

Behind the seven stands the book's map of being: three Great Planes, the Physical, the Mental and the Spiritual, each divided into seven lesser planes. The planes are not places stacked like floors but states, degrees on one scale of vibration.

Mentalism

The axiom is “THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental.” Beneath every appearance, every change and every thing that can be named stands one substantial reality, which the book calls THE ALL. In itself THE ALL cannot be known or defined, but it may be thought of, as nearly as words allow, as infinite living Mind, which the illumined call Spirit. Everything else is a creation held within that Mind, as an image is held in a person's mind without ever becoming the person.

The world is not THE ALL dressed in matter, for THE ALL does not divide or change; nor is it nothing, for it is real to everything that lives in it. The book calls this the divine paradox: in the absolute sense the universe is a mental creation, and in the relative sense, in which we live, it is real and its laws must be obeyed. The half-wise, it warns, take the first truth, ignore the second and are broken against the rocks.

Mentalism comes first because the rest follows from it. If the universe is mental, mind is the deepest power a person has to work with, and from this comes the book's art of Mental Transmutation: changing one's own states of mind by knowing the laws that govern them. “True Hermetic Transmutation is a Mental Art,” the book says, and its students begin by noticing which states they live in and choosing which to cultivate.

Correspondence

The axiom is “As above, so below; as below, so above.” There is always a correspondence between the laws and events of the different planes of being. What holds on the physical plane has its counterpart on the mental and the spiritual, so that one pattern can be traced from the motion of the heavens to the working of a mind.

The book compares the principle to geometry, which lets a person measure distant suns without leaving the observatory: correspondence lets the student reason from the known to the unknown. When a law is understood in one place, the student looks for its likeness in every other.

Vibration

The axiom is “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.” The differences between matter, energy, mind and spirit are differences in their rate and mode of vibration. At one end of the scale stands Spirit, vibrating so fast that it seems at rest, as a wheel spun fast enough seems to stand still; at the other stand the grossest forms of matter, vibrating so slowly that they too seem at rest. Between them lie countless degrees, and everything that exists has its place among them.

The book pictures an object made to vibrate faster and faster, giving first a low note, then higher notes, then heat, then light from red to violet. Mental states have their rates as well, which is why one mind can catch the mood of another. Whoever understands vibration, the book says, holds the sceptre of power.

Its students treat a state of mind as having a pitch, which the will raises by fixing the attention steadily on a more desirable state, calm in place of agitation, until the mind takes on that rate.

Polarity

The axiom is “Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.” Heat and cold are one thing, temperature, at different degrees, and no one can point to the mark on a thermometer where heat ends and cold begins. High and low, light and darkness, hard and soft, noise and quiet are pairs of the same kind: the two poles of one scale.

The same holds in the mind. Love and hate, courage and fear, are poles of one quality. Here the book gives its most practical teaching, the art of Polarization: since a state and its opposite are one thing, a state can be moved along its own scale toward the other pole. The fearful are not told to kill out fear by fighting it, but to fix the attention on courage and cultivate it until the pole shifts.

There is one rule. Polarity works within a kind and never across kinds: love, the book says, never becomes east or west, or red or violet, but it can become hate, and hate can become love. The student learns first to name the scale a state belongs to, and only then to look for its other pole.

Rhythm

The axiom is “Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.” Between the two poles of everything there is a swing: the tide, day and night, the rise and fall of nations, the moods of a person. Nothing stays at one pole.

With it goes the law of compensation: the swing one way measures the swing the other, so that the one who can feel great joy is open to great sorrow. This is not a punishment but the shape of the motion itself.

Rhythm cannot be destroyed, but it can be neutralised. The book speaks of two planes of consciousness, a lower and a higher. The master rises to the higher, and the swing, which goes on, passes beneath on the lower plane. In practice the student learns to recognise the backward swing of a mood as it begins, declines to go with it and holds to the chosen pole; kept up, that refusal is how the masters avoid being thrown back and forth.

Cause and Effect

The axiom is “Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law.” A thrown die seems to fall at random, yet its fall is the sum of causes: the hand, the force, the angle, the table. Chance is only the name for causes not yet traced.

Causes work on many planes, and a lower plane is moved by a higher. Most people, the book says, are carried along like pawns on a chessboard, moved by other people's wills, by inherited tendencies and by suggestion. The masters rise to a higher plane, govern their own moods and powers, and play the game of life instead of being played. They do not break the law, which no one escapes; they use the higher laws to master the lower.

The student's practice is to ask of their own acts whether they came from their own choice or were set off from outside, which moves a person from the plane of effects toward the plane of causes.

Gender

The axiom is “Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.” The book takes gender in the old sense of the word, from a root meaning to beget, to generate, to create. It is not sex: sex is only the form gender takes on the physical plane among living things. On every plane the masculine principle projects, sends out and directs, and the feminine receives, conceives and brings forth. Nothing is generated without both.

On the mental plane the two appear as what the book calls the I and the Me. The I is the masculine side: the will, the conscious and active mind that directs attention. The Me is the feminine side: the receptive mind that takes in impressions, holds them and gives birth to thoughts, ideas and images. A mind that uses only the Me becomes a field for other people's suggestions; the student's work is to let the I choose and direct, and the Me conceive and form.

The book warns that this teaching has nothing to do with the theories of lust that some cults of its day put under similar words, which it calls degrading. Gender here is the pattern of every creation, in a thought as in a world.

Knowledge put to work

The book closes with axioms on practice, and the first is that knowledge not expressed in action is like hoarded gold, a vain and foolish thing. The seven are used together: Mentalism shows that the work is done in the mind, Vibration and Polarity give the means of changing a state, Rhythm warns of the swing that follows, Cause and Effect makes a person a cause, and Gender pairs the will that directs with the mind that conceives.

Its method for an unwanted state of mind is short: do not fight it head on, but find the opposite pole of the same quality and concentrate on that. The student keeps this as a daily habit, the state named, its scale found, the other pole chosen and held, the backward swing watched for: a discipline of attention, practised in the ordinary course of a day.