here's a copy of The Kybalion on the shelf above my desk that I've read so many times the spine is soft and the pages have that particular smell of paper that has been handled too often.
I didn't find it in a bookstore. Priya slipped it into my bag at brunch one afternoon in early 2023, with the casual delivery of someone leaving a twenty on the table. "Just read the first chapter," she said. Priya, who reads almost exclusively literary fiction and argues about semicolons. I didn't ask questions.
I read the whole thing in two days.
The Sentence That Changed How I Think About Everything
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The first Hermetic principle is stated in four words: The All is Mind.
That's it. That's the whole thing. Four words that, if you actually let them land, reorganize every assumption you've been holding about why your circumstances are what they are and whether you can change them.
The Kybalion was published in 1908, attributed to "Three Initiates," and draws on a body of teaching traced back to the Hermetic tradition, which itself traces back to ancient Egypt and the mythological figure Hermes Trismegistus. The occult roots of manifestation, the part that most modern content skips entirely, run right through this text. The Law of Assumption that Neville Goddard built his whole body of work on? He was standing on these foundations. So was Florence Scovel Shinn, whose The Game of Life and Its Rules described the mind as a projector before anyone was using that metaphor in the mainstream. So was practically every teacher who has told you that your thoughts create your reality, whether they cited the source or not.
I don't tell you this as a history lesson. I tell you this because knowing where an idea came from changes how seriously you take it.
When I was on the kitchen floor of my Greenpoint apartment on a Tuesday night in March 2022, burning out from eight years of seventy-hour weeks and two years of antidepressants and a life that looked fine from the outside and felt like asphalt from the inside, I needed something that wasn't a platitude. I needed a principle that held. And when Priya eventually handed me The Kybalion a year later, I understood for the first time what the teachers I had already been studying were actually pointing at.
What "The Universe Is Mental" Actually Means
This is where people get tripped up. The principle of Mentalism does not mean that material reality doesn't exist. It does not mean your rent isn't real or that your body isn't real or that the grief you feel is just a thought error you need to correct.
The All is Mind means that what we call physical reality, including your body, your bank account, your circumstances, is a kind of mental substance. It is consciousness expressing itself as form. The Kybalion uses the word "THE ALL" to describe the infinite living mind from which everything else emerges. And then it says: you are not separate from THE ALL. You are, in some way that the intellect strains against, an expression of it.
Sit with that for a second.
If that's true, and four years of working with this principle have made me stop treating it as a metaphor and start treating it as operational fact, then the question isn't whether you can influence your reality. The question is whether you believe that the thing doing the influencing (your mind, your consciousness, your assumed state) is actually what the principle says it is.
Neville Goddard put it this way in The Power of Awareness: your consciousness is the only reality. He didn't mean reality in the philosophical sense where you get lost in definitions. He meant it practically. He meant: what you assume to be true is what becomes your experience. The state you live from, not the one you're trying to get to, is the one that manifests.
The Hermetic tradition gives that teaching its grounding. If the universe is really mental, then your assumed state isn't wishful thinking. It's cause. And the physical world, the bank account, the relationship, the career, is effect.
Where This Became Personal
By mid-2022, three weeks after Priya sent me Neville's The Power of Awareness at 3 a.m. during a stretch of insomnia she was having, and a few months before I would eventually find The Kybalion, I had started to understand the practice in the way you understand anything before you understand it theoretically. You feel it work before you can explain why.
The layoff came three weeks after I started actually working with Neville's ideas. I had $8,400 in severance and $40,000 in debt. A freelance contract appeared six days later. Not because I sent fifty emails. Because something in the state I was operating from had shifted.
I know how that sounds. I spent the first several months waiting for the other shoe to drop, assuming I had been lucky, that correlation was being dressed up as causation. But I cleared the $40,000 in fourteen months. I stopped taking antidepressants (at the right pace, with proper support). I met Daniel in 2024 after a year of very deliberate inner work. And at each of these points, the mechanism was the same: the state changed first. The outer condition followed.
What I didn't have, in those first months, was any framework for why this was happening. I had the Neville practice. I had the techniques. But I was working with effects without understanding the principle that made the effects possible.
That's what Mentalism gave me.
The "As Above, So Below" Connection
The Hermetic tradition has seven principles. Mentalism is the first because it contains the others. But the one that tends to land hardest for people encountering this work for the first time is the second: As above, so below. As below, so above.
You've probably seen this phrase. It's become a kind of decorative mystical slogan, which is a shame, because it is one of the most precise descriptions of how manifestation actually operates.
"As above" refers to the inner plane, the mental, the imagined, the assumed. "As below" refers to the outer plane, the physical, the manifested, the experienced. The principle is saying: these two planes mirror each other, not eventually, not metaphorically, but structurally. What you hold in the inner as true will become the outer. And what the outer shows you has always been a reflection of the inner, including the stuff you didn't consciously choose but absorbed from your family, your culture, eight years in a PR machine that measured your worth in billable hours.
This is where the as below, so above half of the phrase matters. Your current circumstances are not random. They are data. They are showing you what the inner plane has been running. And here's what that means for practice: you don't have to fight the outer. You don't have to fix the job or the relationship or the account balance from the outside. You revise the inner. The outer follows because it has no choice. That's not a promise. That's the principle.
The Kybalion frames it this way: "He who grasps the truth of the Mental Nature of the Universe is well advanced on The Path to Mastery." Which is Edwardian prose for: once you understand that the mind is primary, the whole practice becomes cleaner. You stop throwing strategies at symptoms and start addressing causes.
Why the Brain Science Layer Matters Here
I want to be careful with this section because I am not a neuroscientist and I am not going to gesture at research I can't link to. What I can say, from my own reading of Joe Dispenza's work and Bessel van der Kolk's writing on how the body holds the patterns the mind has been running, is that the Hermetic framework and the contemporary science of neuroplasticity are pointing at something adjacent.
Dispenza writes about how the brain cannot distinguish, at the level of neural firing, between a vividly imagined experience and a physically lived one. Van der Kolk's work on trauma shows that the body continues to perform old scripts until the inner state is actually revised, not just intellectually understood, but felt, embodied, changed at the level of the nervous system.
What the Hermeticists called the "mental plane" and what contemporary researchers call the "nervous system" are not the same thing. But they are describing overlapping territory. The inner precedes the outer. The assumed precedes the experienced. Fix the pattern at the source, and the expression changes.
This is why I tend to combine the Neville practice (the revision, the SATS, the living from the end) with somatic work. Because the mental substance the Hermetic tradition describes isn't just your conscious thoughts. It's everything the body has been holding as true. The thought that you're not the kind of person who earns beyond a certain number. The cellular memory of a Midwestern Catholic upbringing that categorized desire as a form of ingratitude. Beatriz, my friend who has been doing this work longer than I have, was the one who first put words to this for me. "You can't think your way into a new body," she told me in a voice note she sent me around this time last year. "You have to feel your way there."
She's right. The principle of Mentalism isn't an invitation to think harder. It's an invitation to change what your whole system is assuming to be true.
Mentalism and the Question of a Simulation
I want to address something that comes up in contemporary discourse around these ideas, because it keeps landing in my inbox from readers who have gone down certain rabbit holes.
Are we living in a simulation? Is that what the Hermetic tradition is describing?
The "simulation hypothesis," as it's framed in technology culture, suggests that physical reality is basically computational, that we are software running in some larger substrate. Some people encounter the Hermetic principle of Mentalism and collapse it into this framing. The universe is mental, therefore we're in a simulation.
I'd push back on that. And I think the Hermetic texts would too.
The simulation hypothesis implies an external programmer, a substrate outside the system, a reality that is fake in some meaningful sense. The Hermetic framework is describing something different: not that reality is fake, but that it is mental in nature. Consciousness is not running in a simulation. Consciousness is the ground of what we call reality. There's no outside. There's no programmer separate from the whole. THE ALL is not a coder who built the universe and walked away. THE ALL is the universe, dreaming itself into form, including through you.
For practice purposes, this distinction matters. If you believe you're in a simulation, you might approach manifestation as a form of hacking, finding the cheat codes, exploiting the system. If you work with the Hermetic framework as described, you approach it as a form of alignment. Aligning your inner state with what you want to be true. The universe responds because you are not separate from it. Your mind is, in some meaningful sense, of the same nature as the mind that runs the whole operation.
That lands differently.
Mentalism in Practice: What It Actually Changes
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So you've read this far, and maybe you're nodding, and the real question is: what am I supposed to do differently?
Here's what this principle actually changes, practically, in how you work.
First: it reorients the question. The question is no longer "how do I make this happen" but "who is the person for whom this is already true, and am I living as her?" Neville's version: live from the end. Hermetic version: the inner always precedes the outer. The action comes from a changed state, not from effortful strategy applied to an unchanged one.
Second: it changes your relationship to evidence. When the outer world is showing you something you don't want, Mentalism tells you that outer world is showing you the current output of an inner pattern. Which means the evidence isn't final. Evidence of the old state is not evidence of permanent reality. It's data about what the inner has been running. And inner states can change.
Third: it changes where you invest your energy. If the mind is primary, then time spent on visualization, revision, assumption work, nervous system regulation, and somatic practice is the real work. Not because journaling is more important than applying for the job. But because applying for the job from a changed inner state produces different results than applying for the job from the old one.
I paid off $40,000 in fourteen months. I wasn't working harder than I had at the agency. I was working from a different inner state. The Mentalism principle explains the mechanism. Your assumption is the fact you live from, not the one you arrived at.
If you're interested in how these ideas connect to other esoteric frameworks, the How to Use the Tree of Life as a Manifestation Map piece on this site maps out how the Kabbalistic system relates to the same inner-to-outer logic. And if you want the broader scaffolding, The Tree of Life Explained for Manifestation Practice gives you the full structural overview. These traditions are in conversation with each other, and knowing more than one of them makes your practice more stable.
The Part Nobody Tells You
Here's what I wish someone had said to me earlier.
Understanding the principle of Mentalism intellectually is satisfying in the way that reading about running a marathon is satisfying. It explains the mechanism. It makes the theory coherent. But the actual work is the slow, repetitive, sometimes boring practice of living as if the inner has already changed. That's where most people stop. They understand the principle. They do not embody it.
And the gap between understanding and embodying is where the doubt lives. The moment you wake up and check your bank account before you've even had coffee (I did this for two years at the agency). The moment a friend asks how things are going and you hear yourself describe your circumstances instead of your vision. The moment you catch yourself planning from fear instead of from the assumed state.
This is real. This is the work. Knowing that the universe is mental doesn't spare you from the work of changing what your particular mind is assuming to be true.
What helps, and I say this as someone who is four years into a practice that has really reorganized my life, is getting specific about which assumptions are actually running. My mom's voice about money, the guilt about wanting more than enough, the agency's implicit message that your worth is your output: those are the specific assumptions I had to revise. Not "money" in the abstract. The cellular-level belief about whether I was the kind of person who gets to have it.
Beatriz sent me a voice note around the time I was first working through all this: "The universe doesn't manifest what you want. It manifests what you are." She was paraphrasing Neville, more or less. But hearing it in her voice, from someone who has been in the practice longer than I have, it landed differently than it does on a page.
The principle of Mentalism tells you where to go. Your assumptions show you what you've been building there without realizing it. And the practice, the revision, the somatic work, the steady commitment to a different inner state, is how you build something else.
That's the whole thing, friend. That's all of it.
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The Shelf Above My Desk
The Kybalion is still there. Still soft-spined. I've since added Neville's The Power of Awareness, a library copy of van der Kolk I never returned (I'm sorry), and a few others I reach for depending on what I'm working through.
But the Kybalion was the one that made the whole thing make sense. The one that showed me why the practice works, not just that it does. And sometimes, when the inner state gets murky again, when the old assumptions start running louder than the revised ones, I open it to the first chapter and read those four words.
The All is Mind.
And then I remember what that means for me, specifically: the outer is a read-out. The inner is the instruction. And I get to change the instruction.
That's enough to get back to work.
