The Cosmic Illuminations: Mentalism
In this series, we explore twelve principles of Hermeticism, including the seven original plus five. The first is mentalism.
The seven original principles of hermeticism persist and shall be taken into the corpus of our order. The hierophants have added five, bringing the total to twelve. When considering these principles, first meditate on each in its barest formulation.
Ask yourself what each means to you.
Then, we will offer you introductory explanations designed to open doors to your contemplation and practice. These are primarily exoteric, meaning they are suitable for initiates and new readers.
To penetrate more deeply, one must explore their esoteric understandings, which requires patience, study, and an openness to different interpretive modalities, known as hermeneutics.
To begin, we can borrow from the way of the Kabbalists, whose PRDS (paradise) hermeneutic framework serves as a guide to divine more of the secrets:
Peshat—Simple literal meaning of the text
Remez—Symbolic or allegorical meanings woven into the text
Derash—Deeper moral, psychological, or philosophical meanings
Sod—Secret, coded, or esoteric meanings
The 1st and 2nd (P and R) are recommended for beginners. The 3rd and 4th are for those prepared to engage in more rigorous analysis and mystical exploration.
Imagine Kabbalists applying the PRDS framework only to the Ten Commandments, rather than the entire Tanakh. While PRDS can be applied to texts of any length, we’re using it to interpret something brief—short enough to fit on two stone tablets.
We are justified in applying rabbinical hermeneutics to a syncretic philosophy of Hellenistic Greek and Egyptian origin. Though both emerged from the philosophical milieu of late antiquity, Hermeticism’s explicit influence on Kabbalah became pronounced in the Renaissance, when European scholars merged the two traditions into synthetic esoteric systems.
Of course, we will apply hermeneutic techniques unique to our order. Still, proceed with caution.
Mentalism
The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.
Everything that exists originates in thought or consciousness. The physical world is an expression or projection of the All. By understanding our reality as mental, we can influence our experience by learning to control our thoughts and perceptions.
None of this means a person can will himself to become a dog, or that he is impervious to being trampled by horses. The crucial point is that consistency, causality, and consequences are reality’s vital properties, not its constitutive ‘substance,’ even though materialism is our habit of mind.
The principle that ‘The All is Mind’ resonates, at the very least, with the notion that perception shapes reality. Our beliefs, expectations, and internal narratives filter our perception of the world. The brain generates models of reality and continuously updates them with sensory input. Mastery, then, involves editing or adapting those mental models and altering our emotional and behavioral outcomes to achieve better outcomes. That means reprogramming our mental states to reshape our experience.
For instance, a young person might worry about her financial security, but reframing these worries can have a positive effect.
Current Model
Money is scarce and difficult to come by. Spending anything feels dangerous.
Wealthy people got lucky or exploited others.
Reprogrammed Model
Money is a tool that flows through value exchanges. I can be valuable to others while developing more useful skills.
Wealth often follows disciplined learning, risk-taking, and effort.
Shift in Outcome
The person invests in skill development, takes calculated risks on career moves, negotiates salary more confidently, and notices opportunities she previously filtered out.
Her relationship to money becomes active, rather than passive or defensive.
Mental and physical are imperfect linguistic categories. From the All’s infinite, transperspectival experience, these categories are neither separate nor finite. Their separateness and finitude leave them beyond our ken. Yet we can get a little closer in the conceptual domain, which is the domain of socially constructed reality.
And that reality is absolutely everywhere.
Think about chess. The rules exist only as concepts. There is no Law of Knight Movement floating in the existential expanse to be tested and observed. These are rules—concepts—without which chess would not be possible. The concepts are constitutive of chess reality, indifferent to the physical instantiation of chess pieces and boards. Yet the rules are completely real and binding within the intersubjective context of the game. If you moved your knight like a queen on a whim, the match would cease to be chess.
The reality of rules has real consequences for winning or losing, just as the reality that is the Allmind has real implications for our being and becoming.
The Allmind holds patterns as thoughtforms—not as human minds hold fleeting ideas, but as the infinite contains the finite within itself. The mind of the All is not separate from these patterns. It is emanant—a living entity that is thinker and thought in one. The Allmind is reality continuously thinking itself into existence from the future—not in the same way we ponder, imagine, or fantasize, but as the totality of being expressing its intelligibility by emerging as the present.
The power of mentalism lies in recognizing you are nested in the All, and allowing the Allmind to think, feel, and act through you.
Note: Both hermeticism and hermeneutics trace back to the god Hermes, but they emphasize different aspects of his mythology.
Hermeticism → Hermes as keeper of secret/esoteric wisdom
Hermeneutics → Hermes as interpreter/translator between realms
It’s a lovely linguistic coincidence that makes using hermeneutics to interpret Hermetic texts feel almost destined. Adding the Kabbalist’s PRDS accelerates our work.