The Principle of Mentalism

The principle of mentalism is the first and, the Kybalion argues, the most important of the seven Hermetic principles: the axiom that “the All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.” If this is true, the consequences for magical practice are profound, because it means that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon arising from matter but the most fundamental feature of reality, and that working with the mind is therefore working with the substance of the universe itself.

The principle does not claim that the physical world is an illusion in any dismissive sense. It claims something more specific and more interesting: that what we call matter, energy, and physical law are expressions of a cosmic mental process held in what the Kybalion calls “the All,” an infinite, living, substantial mind that is the closest approximation our finite understanding can make to ultimate reality. Individual human minds exist within this greater mind and partake of its nature, in the same way that a dream character partakes of the dreamer’s mind.

History and origins

The idea that mind or consciousness is more fundamental than matter has a long history in philosophy and mysticism. Among the pre-Socratic philosophers, Anaxagoras (c. 510-428 BCE) proposed that Nous (mind) was the source of all motion and order in the cosmos. Plato’s dialogue Timaeus presents the cosmos as the creation of a divine craftsman (the Demiurge) who orders pre-existing chaos according to the eternal Forms, a conception in which intelligible structure is prior to material existence.

Neoplatonism, particularly Plotinus’ account of the three hypostases (the One, the Intellect or Nous, and the Soul), places mind at the second level of a hierarchy that generates the physical world. The physical is real but is an emanation from the mental and the spiritual, which are more fundamental. This Neoplatonic framework entered Western esotericism through the Renaissance recovery of Platonic texts.

The Hermetic corpus (the texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, actually composed in Alexandria between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE) contains statements consistent with mentalism. The Poimandres, the first text in the collection, describes the origin of the cosmos as a vision in the divine mind: the practitioner who receives this vision participates in the divine understanding. The Hermetic tradition as a whole treats gnosis, direct experiential knowledge of divine reality, as the central goal, and this gnosis is understood as a mental or experiential state rather than a merely intellectual one.

The specific formulation of the seven Hermetic principles as presented in the Kybalion was composed in 1908. Scholar Philip Deslippe has made a strong case that the author was William Walker Atkinson, a Chicago attorney turned New Thought writer who was prolific under several pseudonyms. Atkinson synthesised Platonic, Hermetic, Hindu (particularly Advaita Vedanta’s non-dualism), and American New Thought ideas into the Kybalion framework. The result is not, despite its claims, a translation of ancient Egyptian doctrine but a coherent modern synthesis that draws on genuine philosophical traditions and organises them around practically useful principles.

The parallel with Advaita Vedanta is particularly strong. Shankara’s (8th century CE) philosophy holds that Brahman (ultimate reality, pure consciousness) is the only reality, and that the multiplicity of the world is a superimposition upon this single consciousness, created by maya (creative illusion or measurement). The Kybalion’s mentalism is less technically precise than this but structurally similar.

In practice

The principle of mentalism is applied in magical practice in several ways.

The most direct application is in understanding how intention works. If reality is fundamentally mental, then directing focused thought toward a specific outcome is not merely an internal event; it is an interaction with the mental medium in which all events arise. This is not an argument that wishing makes things happen, but that clear, sustained, directed consciousness genuinely participates in the unfolding of events in a way that purely materialist philosophy does not allow.

Visualisation practices, common across magical traditions, are undergirded by mentalism: the clear mental image of a desired outcome is treated as a seed planted in the universal mental medium, where it can develop and manifest. The quality of the visualisation, its vividness, emotional engagement, and consistency, determines how clearly the seed is formed.

Meditation practices focused on experiencing the mind as the fundamental nature of reality, rather than as a product of the brain, develop what the Kybalion would call knowledge of the first principle. These practices are analogous to the Advaita Vedanta practice of self-inquiry (atma-vichara) and to certain forms of Dzogchen in Tibetan Buddhism.

A caution and a clarification

The most common misreading of the principle of mentalism in popular spirituality is the inflation of individual human mind to the status of ultimate creator. The Kybalion is clear that the individual mind creates within the universe-as-mental-creation, not that it creates the universe itself. This is an important distinction: it means that mental causes have real effects, but it does not mean that a practitioner is solely responsible for everything that happens in their life, or that suffering is always a product of insufficient positive thinking.

The principle is a tool for expanding the practitioner’s understanding of what they are working with and what is possible. Used with intellectual honesty and within a balanced understanding of cause and effect, it is one of the most practically useful ideas in the Western esoteric toolkit.

In myth and popular culture

The principle that mind is more fundamental than matter has appeared repeatedly in religious scripture, philosophical tradition, and popular culture. The opening verse of the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word,” uses logos (word, reason, divine intelligence) as the foundation from which all else proceeds, a cosmological statement with strong resonance with Hermetic mentalism. The Upanishads, particularly the Chandogya and Brihadaranyaka, declare Brahman, pure consciousness, to be the ground of all being, with the material world arising from it.

In contemporary popular culture, the principle of mentalism has been absorbed and frequently distorted into the self-help and manifestation movements. Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book and film The Secret popularized the idea that thought directly creates reality, citing the law of attraction as a quasi-Hermetic principle. While the Kybalion’s mentalism is more careful and philosophically grounded than The Secret’s formulation, the genealogical connection between New Thought, the Kybalion, and contemporary manifestation culture is real. The distinction matters: the Kybalion does not claim that individual human thoughts create the cosmos, only that they operate within a cosmos that is itself mental in nature.

The film The Matrix, as read by many philosophers and critics, engages implicitly with mentalist themes: the reality the characters inhabit is literally generated by a mental process (the computer simulation), and liberation comes through recognizing the nature of that construction. The Oracle in the film operates as a Hermetic figure who understands the laws of the system and uses them rather than being dominated by them.

William Walker Atkinson, the most likely author of the Kybalion, was a prolific writer under several pseudonyms and shaped a generation of American esoteric popular literature. His influence on the New Thought movement, and through it on contemporary spiritual self-help, is substantial and largely unacknowledged because of the pseudonymous nature of his major works.

Myths and facts

Several common errors of interpretation attach themselves to the principle of mentalism, particularly as it circulates in popular spirituality.

• A widespread belief holds that the Kybalion is a genuine ancient text preserving Egyptian wisdom. The text was published in 1908 and is a product of American New Thought philosophy. Its philosophical sources are real, including Platonic, Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Vedantic material, but the specific Kybalion formulation is modern.
• The principle is often read as stating that individual human thoughts directly and literally create all events in a person’s life. The Kybalion explicitly distinguishes between the All’s mind, which creates the cosmos, and individual human minds, which operate within it. The doctrine does not make practitioners solely responsible for every circumstance they encounter.
• Some practitioners interpret mentalism as meaning the physical world is unreal or illusory and can be safely ignored. Most sophisticated versions of the principle, including the Kybalion’s, hold that the physical is real at its own level, even if its deeper nature is mental; dismissing physical reality as mere illusion is both philosophically imprecise and practically unwise.
• The principle is sometimes treated as uniquely Hermetic. The underlying idea appears in Platonic philosophy, Advaita Vedanta, Buddhist Yogacara philosophy, and several other independent traditions, suggesting it reflects a recurring philosophical intuition rather than a proprietary teaching.
• Mentalism is occasionally confused with psychological projection, the idea that one’s mind creates the interpretation of events. These are distinct claims: mentalism is a metaphysical claim about the ultimate nature of reality, while projection theory is a psychological claim about how perception is shaped by prior mental content.