Category Archives: Principle of Mentalism

Of Miracles & Natural Order

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One of the great questions of philosophy is, can a miracle truly occur? For some, it depends on how the term is defined. If a miracle is merely an unlikely occurrence, then the answer is easy. Yes. We all witness rare occurrences from time to time. From a sports team coming from far behind to win a championship no one thought them capable of, to accidents where someone narrowly escapes death. We often call these “miracles”, when perhaps they are more closely identified with chance occurrences with low probability.

More often we associate a true miracle when the laws of nature are broken. For instance, Jesus turning water into wine, walking on water, curing the sick, and his own resurrection from the dead. The Buddha was said to have the power of teleportation, the ability to duplicate himself, and manipulate the elements. The Prophet Muhammad was purported to manifest water, heal the sick and also had power over the elements. Today we also hear of modern day miracles which defy nature, such as shrines where people go to be healed or people claiming to see visions of God, saints or other types of entities.

So the question remains, do miracles really exist or are they just human projections on certain events? While we do have many reports of miracles, there are no proofs of miracles occurring to date. I think that’s a powerful statement in itself. There is no proof that has ever been recorded of a real, bonafide miracle.

Many theologians and theist philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, thought miracles didn’t matter. In fact, Kant though that miracles were actually a distraction from having faith. For Kant, miracles were the exception to the rule so it was better to not count on them in your life. Looking to the message of one’s faith was preferable to signs and wonders.

Philosophers such as J. L. Mackie and Michael Martin argue that interference with the natural order from God would prove that God wasn’t perfect. Why would God need to create miracles in the world if everything is going according to plan? Why would God play favorite and help some people and not others? Why would God let some people starve to death or be horribly injured, but save others from that fate through a miracle? Martin also suggests that somethings that appear as miracles to us, may not be God but anomalies that occur in nature that we simply cannot explain yet.

In Hermeticism, when one perfectly aligns themselves (the Below) to the Source Consciousness (the Above), they can achieve the Philosopher’s Stone.

I buy this. I think when we witness synchronicity, this has something to do with consciousness and quantum entanglement. It’s part of the natural order. I do not think a miracle has occurred. In fact, when I think of how magic, astrology and tarot work, I don’t think any of that is miraculous, but more of just how the world operates. I think our individual consciousness is connected to our higher-self or a higher state of consciousness, which may be thought of as our spirit. It’s the entity which keeps sending our soul on mission in the material world. Beyond that, I believe there is a collective consciousness that is societal which we all tap into on a planetary level, and a Source Consciousness which is singular, which all things in the universe share in as well. We share an archetypal bond and this is how things like astrology and tarot work and evolve over time. When we align with our higher-self and Universal Consciousness, we begin to notice synchronicities occurring in our lives. These may appear miraculous, but it’s merely part of the natural order unfolding.

Do miracles occur where the laws of nature are broken? I don’t think so, no. I think when they occur in sacred texts they are meant as metaphors to explain deeper truths. Does the death and resurrection of Jesus mean more if Christ was killed on our behalf as a sacrifice? Or does it mean more that Jesus was the perfect example to show us how to transform ourselves? The Christ story is the path we take to die to our old selves and be reborn as Divine spirits. It’s not about a physical miracle, but rather our spiritual reality if we choose that path.

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Know Thyself

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Move Him Socrates PaleWhenever someone asks what the most important lesson of Hermeticism is, the answer is universal: know thyself. There are, of course, many other lessons to be gleaned from Hermetic philosophy, but most of them boil down to this one thing. Knowledge of self is the knowledge of the universe. More than that, it is knowledge of the Divine. The Principle of Correspondence is found in all Heremtic texts and highlighted in the Emerald Tablet (600-800 C.E.). It states, “That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below…” More succinctly it’s often phrased, “As Above so Below.” I’ve heard the second phrasing often in my studies, typically in Wiccan and Neo-Pagan circles, but I must confess that I really didn’t have a firm grasp of what that meant. I thought of it more in terms of a metaphorical understanding of how the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. Until I began my study of Hermeticism, I didn’t grasp the significance of how the Divine Mind is reflected in the mind of all self-aware beings.

I also didn’t grasp how trying and grueling it is to go through the self-discovery process. I had to learn how to dig in the dirt of my past and to mentally confront what I found. I had to learn how to analyze my thoughts and to observe my analysis. I had to learn how to form many thoughts on what I found and to select those that served me and let go of the ones that didn’t. I had to learn what actually served me versus what I merely liked or found pleasing. I had to learn how to listen to my heart when it spoke truth to me and not brush it off as I have so often in the past. I had to learn that my intuition is real and it deserves my Redpillattention. I had to unlearn all that I have learned before and look at everything with a fresh pair of eyes and an open mind. It is exhausting, heartbreaking, confusing, illuminating, freeing, gut-wrenching, and ultimately the best thing I’ve ever done. But I acknowledge that it is an on-going process and there are tougher things ahead.

When one opts for the red pill, they don’t usually know what they’re really asking for in the end. We all want to believe that we’d have the courage opt for the red pill over the blue, but there is no end to the illusions that burst when one swallows the red one. I’m not sure I would have chosen it had I known what it’d really be like. What I found, is that once I really dug in and went there, I couldn’t find any refuge from the crumbling of illusions. Not the societal manufacture ones and definitely not the illusions I created for myself.  I found my own created comfort illusions were as numerous as the comfort foods I stocked up on in case of panic. I could probably match a comfort illusion with a comfort snack to coordinate the anesthetization process of my brain.

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I’ll have the bacon mac and cheese quesadilla with a side of sour cream and a midlife existential crisis

Finding out the extent of my self-created illusions was more difficult for me than the societal ones. While those are bad, I’ve always had a healthy distrust for what I’ve been told by authority figures and institutions. While I wasn’t always aware of being duped, I can’t think of a time when it actually shocked me to discover that I was being duped. Angered and saddened, but not shocked. But how often I did it to myself was shocking to me. I’ve made a lot of life changes based on my discoveries in 2018. Each one has been mentally exhausting, but necessary.

as-above-so-below2How does this relate to the Principle of Correspondence? Well, when all the clutter is cleared and one learns how to think and how to process information into personal knowledge about themselves and the world, one begins to know God. We can learn to know God because we were created with minds in God’s own likeness. As Above, so Below. Within our own minds the universe exists. As God created the universe and all that is in it, so too can we create a universe in our own minds. The ability is there if we break out of all the illusions that society imposes on us, but more importantly, the illusions we impose on ourselves that keeps us from breaking through and recognizing the Divine presence that exists inside of each of us. We are not God, but we are Godly and made of Divine Godstuff. We have access to this power if we want it. But we must work for it. To say that it is difficult is to understate the case, especially in the modern world where we tend to either reject the very idea of Divinity or we think that every opinion we hold is of value and worth without the process of discernment. Mentalism

The Principle of Mentalism in Hermetic philosophy is the notion that all that exists is a product of the One Mind. Put another way, the universe and everything in it is a physical manifestation of the Thought of God (Logos). The physical universe didn’t give rise to consciousness, it’s the other way around. The universe is inherently ordered by the Mind of God and operates on physical laws. As the universe is ordered and unfolds according to these laws, so does everything in it. Our minds, then, operate as microcosms of the One Mind. When we know ourselves as we truly are, stripped of ego and accumulated illusions, we know God. Not in the afterlife, but in the here and now.

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Some whipped cream would be nice

This is not the easy road. It is on-going and there are many stumbling blocks along the way. I have to tell myself to keep going up that hill when often times I want to get off and find a dark corner with a giant bowl of ice cream. The past two weeks have been this way for me. I didn’t want to write this. I haven’t wanted to study. I didn’t want to think about how I’ve been telling myself a lot of comfort lies to get through the day. But the heart of the matter is this: I can’t go back. Once illusions are stripped, they’re stripped. I don’t want more in their place. While I haven’t been writing, I’ve managed to keep reading, and more important than that, to meditate. I still need to learn to not give myself a hard time when I reach a difficult patch, but I’m still on the path. I getting there.

 

The Law of Mentalism

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Sometime in late 1999, I was working at a Blockbuster in Colorado. I had just move there from New Orleans to attend graduate school at the University of Denver. The big movie that was coming out on video was The Matrix (1999). I wasn’t a huge fan of Keanu Reeves, so I hadn’t seen it. But all of the other employees insisted that once it was out on neotrinitymorpheusvideo I had to see it. They explained to me how philosophical it was and it was right up my alley. I would LOVE it! I did, in fact, love the film and I still use it today in my Philosophy of Religion course that I teach. The first time I watched it I saw it as a classic Gnostic story of the illusory world being stripped away to reveal a darker reality run by an insane God, or Architect as later revealed in The Matrix series (though I can’t recommend the sequels). Once the deception is stripped away, the protagonist has to decide how to act on this devastating new knowledge about the world.

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Cartesian “minds in a vat” as portrayed in The Matrix

The Matrix is not the only modern telling of this story, we can also see this theme less violently played out in The Truman Show (1998) and Pleasantville (1998). Both of these films are subtler in their approach. The characters don’t find themselves literally existing as Descartes’ brains-in-a-vat, as they do in The Matrix. Rather, they see their world slowly starting to change as they become more aware of reality. The Truman Show, like The Matrix, is more of a nightmare. Truman lives his entire life in a bubble. He’s the first baby to be adopted by a corporation and he’s lived his entire life, unknowingly, on a TV show. All of the people in his life are actors. But the illusion can’t realistically be sustained and the audience follows him on his painful path to discovery. Pleasantville pleasantvilletakes a more cinematically poetic touch. As the characters become more aware of reality, the black and white film begins to add color into their lives. Sometimes at a tremendous cost. But once a character start to see the varied colors in life, they can no longer go back to their old ways. The color adds pain, but it also adds beauty and nuance to their otherwise black and white bleak lives.

I’m not sure what was going on in Hollywood at the time that allowed these three films to bubble up from the collective unconscious in the late nineties, but they remain some of my favorite films from the 20th century.

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Just as an aside, if Morgan Freeman is Hollywood’s go-to God, then Ed Harris is its Demiurge (The Truman Show, Snowpiercer).

In the Hermetic tradition, there are seven principles that govern the Universe. The First Principle of Hermeticism is Mentalism. This is the idea that the Universe and all things in it are Mental constructs of the The All. That means, you, me, the chair I’m sitting in, peanut butter, novelty mugs, galaxies, and atoms are living in the mind of the Divine Creator. The universe is mental and unfolds in accordance to the laws inherent in its construct. That is to say, the Divine set up some rules which must be obeyed by all things in the universe. These are strictly physical laws, not laws governing morality. The three authors of the Kybalion (1912), who refer to themselves as the Three Initiates, rather testily point out that we ought not make inane arguments regarding whether or not God can create a rock so big that even God can’t lift it. The All of the Hermeitc tradition doesn’t stoop to such silly things. The Universe is ordered and The All doesn’t break the laws that hold Its Universe together.

So, what does that mean for us? In the Corpus Hermeticum, human beings were initially soulSouls or Spirit Force that are lesser beings than God, but like God in form. We began in God’s mind and we’re granted a mind of our own in which we all have the power of creating infinite worlds of our own. Like The All, our Soul is Immortal, it will never be snuffed out. Our Souls were then sent to Earth to live out temporary lives where we could grow and develop into more worthy beings. Eventually the body dies, but the Spirit continues and is reborn. We have two forms, our physical Earthly form, which changes with each incarnation, and our Spirit form which is our unchanging Soul.

The All sent us some of Its Servants to help us reach our full potential and to open the possibility for us to join the ranks of the Higher Beings. In Egyptian mythology, we know Thoththese Servants of The All as Isis, Osiris, Horace, Thoth, Nut, Ra and so forth. Thoth was our greatest champion who gave us things like writing, science, philosophy, engineering, astrology, and alchemy. If we could use it, Thoth gave it to us. It is said that Thoth wrote the Corpus Hermeticum, possibly during an incarnation as a human. The Greeks got a hold of this idea around the 3rd century C.E. and combined Thoth with their god, Hermes, HermesTrismegistushence why we attribute the Corpus Hermeticum to Hermes Trismegistus. His name is used interchangeably with Thoth as they are assumed to be one and the same.

We are then, Spiritual Beings having a human experience. We are each on a path of discovery and enlightenment. Obviously, we’re not all aware of this or life would be quite different on Earth. We suffer amnesia when we are born into this life. This is due to the lessons we’re here to learn.  It’s hard to learn anything new if we carry all the baggage of our former lives with us. This amnesia helps us to get out of our own way so that we can develop our Souls further. With each life, we pull back a little more of the Material World to reveal more of our Spiritual nature. Or at least that is the goal.

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St. Irenaeus – Christian Bishop and Martyr, Enemy of Gnostics

One of the ancient theodicies (a theory that explains how Evil can exist if God is all good, all powerful, and all knowing) was developed by Doctor of the Church, St. Irenaeus, in the 2nd century. Without getting too deeply into it, he believed that Evil occurred as a means for soul-making. We encounter horrors and challenges in our lives to create greater Souls who are worthy of God.

So, we encounter Evil and hardship, not as a means for punishment or even to demonstrate our Free Will to choose between Evil or Good (St. Irenaeus would disagree, he was no friend of the Gnostics or Hermetists), but rather as a means to grow, develop and improve our Souls. What we tend to classify as Evil is an illusion according to Hermetic philosophy. Good and Evil are dualistic concepts that express opposites. In Hermetic philosophy, there is no duality. All opposites are the same and differ only in degree. This is known as the Fourth Principle of Polarity in the Kybalion, which I will get into much more depth later.

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The Demiurge

In each life time, there exist the potential for humans to pull back the veil and come to understand the second half of our nature, which is Spirit. The Gnostics believed that we were purposely being deceived by an insane god known as the Demiurge. The Demiurge employed the services of Archons to help keep the deception going and keep us ignorant of our Reality. The All sent Aeons to help us break through the illusion. This is evident in the films The Matrix and The Truman Show. Both give us a Demiurge (The Architect / Ed Harris), Archons (The Agents, Cypher / actors who deceive Truman) and Aeons (Neo, Trinity, Morpheus / outsiders who try to help Truman escape).

Hermetic philosophy tells us something a little different. The deception doesn’t come from any outside force, it comes from our inability to look within and find The All/God/Divine/Creator there. This is demonstrated in the film Pleasantville. The false, pleasant but uninteresting, black and white world is peeled away when the characters make internal discoveries about themselves and their world. Nothing forces them out of the illusion except their own self-reflection.

The Principle of Mentalism tells us that to understand our Universe and to understand The All, we must look within ourselves. We are reflections of The All, who exists as Mind. We are able to know the Divine and be like the Divine by virtue of mastering our own Mind. This is why the Hermeticist says, if you wish to understand the workings of the Mind of God and the Universe, Know Thy Self.