The first of the seven Hermetic principles is called Mentalism.
All is mind. The universe is mental.
The principle derives from the Corpus Hermeticum, the body of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Great. The oldest of these texts, the dialogue known as Poimandres, opens with a vast luminous being identifying itself as the Mind of Sovereignty, the first principle from which all reality derives. Mind itself, primary, prior to everything, generates everything as its expression.
The Kybalion, the 1908 synthesis of Hermetic principles, states it this way. The All is mind; the universe is mental; held in the mind of the All.
These terms carry the weight of the principle.
The All designates the universal mind. The infinite organizing intelligence that is the source and ground of all reality. Self-existent, self-knowing, unbounded. Every tradition has a name for it. The Hermetic tradition calls it the All.
Mind in this principle designates the universal organizing intelligence, the All, rather than individual human cognition. The individual mind is an expression of the All. The All generates the individual mind as one of its expressions. The distinction runs in that direction; from universal to individual, from source to expression.
Mental designates the nature of reality as the expression of that organizing intelligence. The physical universe is mental in the sense that it exists within and is generated by the All, the way a dream exists within and is generated by the dreaming mind. The dream is real within its own terms. Its reality is the reality of an expression of something more fundamental generating it.
The principle operates as architecture rather than philosophy. The physical world is real. Its reality is the reality of an expression of the universal organizing intelligence generating it from the level of source downward through every level of manifestation.
Mentalism is the first principle because every subsequent principle is a specific aspect of it. Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, Gender; all of these describe how the universal mind operates as it generates reality. Mentalism establishes what that universal mind is before the subsequent principles describe what it does.
The mechanism underneath Mentalism is a hierarchy of levels, each level generating the level below it, each level operating by the same laws as every other level because all levels derive from the same organizing source.
The universal mind, the All, is the top of the hierarchy. The physical world of material manifestation is at the bottom. Every level between them is the organizing intelligence expressed at a different degree along the continuum from source to manifestation.
The levels are expressions of the same organizing intelligence at different degrees. The physical world at the bottom is as real as the universal mind at the top. The bottom is downstream from the top in the generative sequence.
This sequence is the mechanism. The universal mind generates the level of pure organizing principle. That level generates the level of individual consciousness, the capacity for self-aware experience through which the organizing intelligence knows itself through individuated perspective. Individual consciousness generates the level of belief, the organizing templates through which individual experience of reality is structured. Belief generates the level of material manifestation, the physical circumstances that belief templates produce as their expression.
The organizing intelligence is present and operative at every level simultaneously. It is the substance of every level, expressing at different degrees of the same continuum.
This is why the principle is foundational. The organizing intelligence present at every level means every level remains accessible through every other level. The physical world is accessible through individual consciousness because both are expressions of the same organizing intelligence. Individual consciousness is accessible through the level of belief because both are expressions of the same source. The source is accessible through individual consciousness because individual consciousness is its expression.
The hierarchy is the structure through which all levels remain in continuous relationship with each other and with their common source.
Most people have experienced Mentalism operating, arriving before any language existed to describe the experience.
A fundamental belief shifts. Something understood one way for years reorganizes into a completely different configuration. The external circumstances remain the same. The physical world is identical to what it was the moment before the shift. The relationship to those circumstances has changed so completely that the same facts now point in an entirely different direction.
Then the external world begins to reorganize. Opportunities appear that were invisible before. Relationships reconfigure. Circumstances that seemed fixed reveal themselves as fluid.
The standard explanations account for some of this. Confirmation bias changes what is noticed. Behavioral shifts change how others respond. Both are real. Both are partial. They describe downstream effects without addressing what the shift itself was or why the outer world responds to it with the consistency it does.
Mentalism is the complete account. The belief shift is a shift at a level upstream from material manifestation. The organizing intelligence expressed through individual consciousness reorganized at the level of belief. The material level, being downstream from the belief level, reorganized to correspond.
The outer follows the inner because the inner is upstream from the outer in the generative sequence. The above changed; the below followed. The organizing intelligence shifted at the level of individual consciousness; the physical circumstances, being its downstream expression, reorganized accordingly.
This experience is the first Hermetic principle operating visibly enough to be noticed. The universal mind expresses through individual consciousness expressing through belief expressing through material circumstance. The hierarchy operates continuously, generating experience at every level simultaneously, responding to shifts at any level by reorganizing every level downstream from it.
All is mind means this is the permanent condition of reality operating as reality operates.
The mind reading those words is the All reading itself through an individual expression of itself.
That recognition, arriving before the explanation does, is Mentalism operating as Mentalism.
@ Lee Greene