book report: the Kybalion

A classic modern occult work, I would imagine composed in the early 20th Century; many have suspected the author is in fact William Atkinson and having read several of his books I would agree there is a similar style and approach. It begins:

The purpose of this work is not the enunciation of any special philosophy or doctrine, but rather is to give to the students a statement of the Truth that will serve to reconcile the many bits of occult knowledge that they may have acquired, but which are apparently opposed to each other and which often serve to discourage and disgust the beginner in the study. Our intent is not to erect a new Temple of Knowledge, but rather to place in the hands of the student a Master-Key with which he may open the many inner doors in the Temple of Mystery through the main portals he has already entered.

The entire book is written in a stuffy but readable Edwardian mode. It is mostly commentary on seven principles:

1. The principle of mentalism

“The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.”

2. The principle of correspondence

“As above, so below; as below, so above.” […] This principle embodies the truth that there is always a correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of being and life.”

3. The principle of vibration

“Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

4. The principle of polarity

“Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.”

5. The principle of rhythm

“Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.”

6. The principle of cause and effect

“Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law; chance is but a name for law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law.

7. The principle of gender

“Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes.”

I would describe it as a work of philosophical occultism; there are no practical techniques here. In essence, it treats of cosmic laws, and their manipulation. Hermetic occultism is about transcending our mundane reality, in order to see and be more, and to thus control the lower:

We overcome the lower laws, by applying still higher ones – and in this way only, But we cannot escape Law or rise above it entirely.

Having studied the occult for a decade and more, I found much of it obvious; though I can’t say if that is because the Kybalion’s themes have been so echoed in subsequent works, or because it borrows from earlier works, or both. However, it would be an interesting read for anyone beginning to study the philosophical occult; and even I found much of interest, e.g.

The word Positive means something real and strong, as compared with a Negative unreality or weakness. Nothing is further from the real facts of electrical phenomenon. The so-called Negative pole of the battery is really the pole in and by which the generation or production of new forms and energies is manifested. There is nothing “negative” about it. The best scientific authorities now use the word “Cathode” in place of “Negative,” the word Cathode coming from the Greek root meaning “descent; the path of generation, etc.” From the Cathode pole emerge the swarm of electrons or corpuscles; from the same pole emerge those wonderful “rays” which have revolutionized scientific conceptions during the past decade. The Cathode pole is the Mother of all of the strange phenomena which have rendered useless the old textbooks, and which have caused many long accepted theories to be relegated to the scrap-pile of scientific speculation. The Cathode, or Negative Pole, is the Mother Principle of Electrical Phenomena, and of the finest forms of matter as yet known to science.

For the time, pre-WW1, this is an interestingly Taoist insight.

That is, that lack itself generates, by its very lack & vacuum, an enabling suction. Imbalance is the driving force for balance. As in The Four Quartets, the perfect figure is found not in static being but rather in becoming; in the ceaseless motion of death and rebirth, striving and becoming, failure and regeneration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugc5FZsycAw

“we are in the Matrix”

1. A curious story:

Erin Valenti, 33, was discovered in the back seat of her rental car on a residential street in San Jose’s quiet Almaden neighborhood on Saturday, five days after she was first reported missing.

Valenti, the chief executive of Salt Lake City-based app developer Tinker Ventures was last heard from on October 7, when she missed her flight from San Jose back home to Utah.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until 3:30pm on Monday after she met with a former colleague on Sand Hill Road, before calling her parents to say she couldn’t find her rental car.

[…]

Once she located the grey Nissan Murano, she stayed on the phone with her mother and father where Valenti’s conversation began veering from the strange to the down-right bizarre.

Her father, Joseph Valenti, says his daughter was talking ‘a mile a minute’ and wasn’t making any sense.

Though the bereaved father insists his daughter has no history of mental illness, Joseph says he wasn’t the only member of the family to receive a ‘confusing and disjointed’ call in the hours leading up to her disappearance.

Valenti also called her mother on and off for several hours across Monday afternoon and through the evening.

‘Her thoughts were disconnected…. She’d say I’m coming home for Thanksgiving, then in the next she was saying she’s in the Matrix,’ Whitey Valenti told Mercury News.

Valenti is said to have told her mother, ‘It’s all a game, it’s a thought experiment: we’re in the Matrix.’

All a bit strange. Even for a start-up, she seems – at 33 – to have been a very young CEO; and her available online photos suggest an at most midwit young woman raised on Sex & the City.

Her recorded history is simultaneously blandly mediocre and Cabal.

Mediocre: her Linkedin reads:

a successful track record of 10 years of cross-functional leadership experience building and investing in disruptive technology companies. I’m passionate about helping startups with product development, fundraising and scaling. I’m always looking for the next great idea to work on or invest in. Reach out anytime to chat.

It’s almost computer-generated corporate-ese. A young woman whose online photos are typical brainless narcissistic selfies, but who enjoyed an effortless corporate career. It’s typical “rise of the mediocre”.

As for Cabal: she attended Georgetown, studied Chinese, managed staff in Pakistan, was an enthusiastic Clintonista, and was married to an almost invisible (in online terms) psychologist. She was involved in anti-human-trafficking, which could mean she was genuinely opposed to the powers behind her favourite politicians; but, as we have seen, Cabal totally subvert organisations like the Red Cross and Amnesty and Oxfam, and so Valenti could well have been involved in, well, dubious affairs.

Judging from her online photos, the most banal explanation is she took various drugs (her hobbies included “climbing rocks” and “chasing powder”) and had a breakdown and died.

Another explanation: she was a mere figurehead, a midwit (IQ 100-110) chosen to represent a company deeply involved in Cabal projects, and one way or another she learnt about a project to manipulate consciousness and perhaps even reality. Being a midwit, it was all a bit too much and she went nuts, and ended up being “removed”.

2. I was watching a good video by Apollonian Germ, and thought of all this. I shan’t embed it, since his channel will probably be deleted at some point, but it’s worth a listen. Germ’s point is that, to put it in Andrew Breitbart terms, politics is downstream of culture; and culture is downstream of religion/spirituality; that is, consciousness determines physical reality.

3. Another thought-point: Anonymous Conservative’s gangstalking theme. AC acknowledges there is something inexplicable, impractical, unaccountable about gangstalking. It simply makes no sense, in terms of manpower/manhours, and result. However, when I began reading AC, I was walking home in my little suburb outside Munich, and started to notice odd patterns, e.g. a car pulled out, drove past me, and then about 50 meters on stopped and idled, and meanwhile someone rounded the corner and stood there indecisively for a while. Such things happened three days in a row on this quiet street, as if someone was tracking me in person. I was at first a little alarmed, but then shrugged and dismissed it, and it never happened again.

When I was 19/20, I read William Burroughs. One of his essays, in The Adding Machine, related to synchronicity. He taught creative writing and instructed his students to walk around for an hour and notice things. They returned, astonished, gasping even, that they had seen seven red cars in a row drive by, and just as they were thinking “what are the chances?” a woman in a red jumper walked by, and then someone said “and it was so RED!!!”. After reading this, I started to experience uncanny coincidences of this nature. I wondered if I was reading too much into it, if life had always been so; but the coincidences were so extreme that I would have noticed them before – e.g. I was watching Don Juan deMarco, and reading Sylvia Plath at the same time; the latter had a line about standing on the windowledge, and in just that moment, the film cut to a scene with Johnny Depp’s character standing on a windowledge. For a few months, I experienced two or three such coincidences a day.

My friend at the time, a now mentally & physically crippled degenerate imbecile, also underwent the same phenomena after reading Burroughs’ essay.

For both of us, the coincidences peaked for a couple of months, and then subsided when we began to take them for granted. I concluded that our very consciousness was moulding physical reality, and that when we were no longer interested, the pattern dissolved.

I wonder if gangstalking is a similar phenomenon: that is, the subject creates it himself; but that AC indicates external, objective awareness of his surveillance. However, the sheer resources required continued to puzzle me: in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a character in (I think) Prague is subject to total surveillance, 1970s-style, and labels it “a grandslam operation” because it requires so many trained professionals, and is thus accordingly expensive. Why not simply kill AC, or drug him to insanity? Why waste dozens of operatives on the task of making him feel that he is observed at all times? Wouldn’t the risk be lower, if he were simply poisoned, than to have dozens of operatives following him about at all times?

When I consider my experience on the quiet street, where for three days in a row a car pulled out and then stopped, or people suddenly appeared and just stood there, I wondered if the Cabal have experimented & come to understand something of our metaphysical reality.

What if our consciousness does indeed deform and form physical reality, so if you start to expect surveillance, you will attract people who seem to be observing you? What if, your mere awareness is enough to draw e.g. a housewife to this shop, and she will be drawn to follow your route, with her phone in her hand, looking in your direction?

If so, perhaps the Cabal came to understand certain triggers in the subject’s consciousness, most likely highly individual & specifc. It could be, that the surveillance on AC is significantly lighter than one might suppose – it might be enough to trigger his awareness, and then his awareness will draw in random people, who will e.g. take a diversion and then decide to go shopping at his shop, or drive past his house and then they decide to stop outside his drive and call their friends, as he peers out with an AK47, Malcolm X-style. And if he confronted these people, they would be genuinely baffled and bewildered, for they just happened to be passing – or at least, most of them would.

4. As an occasional occultist, I have learnt that certain forms mould & determine reality. For example, I study a specific rune and then encounter correlant realities. I think our consciousness determines our physical experience in ways we mostly do not understand. If I began this journey aged 19/20 through Burroughs, it seems plausible that Cabal began a few decades earlier, at least. They perhaps learnt that certain symbols, thoughts, images, cause people to unconsciously attract & form objective physical realities.

It would explain something at which I have long wondered: why Cabal worked so hard to destroy the Latin Mass of the Roman Catholic Church. I know modern “Catholics” who scoff at the Latin Mass, but when I – as a non-Christian occultist – attended a SSPX Mass it was dauntingly, strikingly powerful. Vatican 2 could be a part of the systematic destruction of Western thought, such as hit the universities a generation later – the suppression of all that was good in the West.

5. Judging from Erin Valenti’s online photographs, she does not seem very intelligent, and certainly not wise. Perhaps she discovered some program to manipulate reality itself, within human consciousness; and perhaps she realised how easy it is, once you abandon all sense of the gods, of tradition and virtue; and it was too much for her. She strikes me – from her CV and photos – as a classic NPC; perhaps, very briefly, she came a Player-Character.