The Seven Principles of the Kybalion, Read Carefully

The Kybalion (1908) sets out its teaching as seven principles, each summed up in a short axiom. They are among the most quoted lines in modern esoteric writing, usually one at a time and often loosely. Read in the book’s own order and in its own words, they turn out to be less a list of slogans than a single scheme in which each principle corrects and limits the others. This article sets out the seven, then looks closely at two places where popular retellings drift furthest from the text: the principle of Polarity, and the apparent conflict between Rhythm and Cause and Effect.

The seven principles

The book’s axioms are short, and quoting them exactly is the best protection against paraphrase.

1. Mentalism. “THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental.” The underlying reality, which the book calls THE ALL, is an infinite living Mind, and the universe is a mental creation held within it.
2. Correspondence. “As above, so below; as below, so above.” The same laws and patterns repeat across the planes of being, physical, mental and spiritual, so that what is known on one plane gives a key to the others.
3. Vibration. “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.” Differences between matter, energy, mind and spirit are differences in rate and mode of vibration.
4. 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.”
5. Rhythm. “Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything.”
6. 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.”
7. Gender. “Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.” The book insists that it means generative principles, active and receptive, on every plane, and that in the mental sphere this becomes its doctrine of Mental Gender.

The principles are meant to be read together. Mentalism says what the universe is. Correspondence says that its planes mirror each other. Vibration, Polarity and Rhythm describe how things exist and change within it. Cause and Effect says that all of this is lawful. Gender describes how anything is generated at all.

Polarity is not positivity

The fourth principle is often retold as “think positive and the negative will go away”. The chapter it comes from says something more interesting, and more restrained.

Opposites as degrees of one thing

Its central claim is that opposites are one thing seen from two ends. Heat and cold are degrees of a single scale; there is no point on a thermometer where heat stops and cold begins, only more and less of one quality. The book extends this to light and darkness, hard and soft, and then to the mind: love and hate, courage and fear, are likewise poles of single scales. The principle is about continuity. A state and its opposite are the same kind of thing, which is why one can pass into the other.

The limit

It then sets a limit that retellings usually drop. Only things of the same kind can pass into each other. Love can turn toward hate, but not toward east or toward red. In the book’s words, “Things belonging to different classes cannot be transmuted into each other.” A mood can shift along its own scale; it cannot be swapped for something of a different kind. This is a real constraint, and it is what keeps the principle from becoming a promise that anything can be turned into anything.

What the book claims, and what it does not

The book does say that the positive pole of a scale tends to dominate the negative, and that a person can change their own mood by deliberately attending to the opposite end of the same scale: meeting fear by cultivating courage, rather than by fighting the fear directly. That is a claim about attention, and it is the book’s. It does not say that denying a feeling removes it, or that a thought by itself changes outward circumstances. Holding both ends of a scale in view is closer to what it describes than banishing one of them.

The book also describes “mental treatments”, in which one person, by the same polarising method, changes the mood or condition of another. That is part of the book and of its New Thought setting, and it belongs to an honest account of what the text says. It is the book’s claim about influence, recorded here as such.

Rhythm against Cause

Two of the principles seem, at first sight, to collide.

Rhythm says that everything swings. Enthusiasm is followed by depression; the measure of the swing one way is the measure of the swing back. Cause and Effect says that everything follows from law and nothing happens by chance. Put them together and the return swing looks fixed: every high is a debt that must be paid with a low, and nothing can be done about it.

The book sees the problem and answers it in two steps.

Neutralization

First, it says that the Masters do not abolish the law of Rhythm, which cannot be abolished. Instead they learn to polarise themselves at a higher plane of mind, so that the backward swing of the pendulum continues on a lower plane without carrying their consciousness with it. “This they call the Law of Neutralization.” The swing still happens; the person simply no longer rides it.

One law against another

Second, in its closing chapters, the book explains why this is not an exception to causation: “You simply overcome one law by counter-balancing it with another.” There are many planes of causation, and a cause set in motion on a higher plane can balance an effect on a lower one. Nothing escapes law. One law meets another. The free person, in the book’s picture, is not one who stands outside cause and effect, but one who has learned to act as a cause on a plane above the one where they would otherwise be merely an effect.

It is a tidy answer, and it shows how the seven principles are meant to work: not as a list, but as parts of one scheme that correct each other. Polarity sets the poles. Rhythm moves between them. Cause and Effect says the movement is lawful. The planes of Correspondence say where a higher law can come from, and Mentalism says why a change of mind can count as a cause at all.

Compensation and reincarnation

The book then adds something retellings usually leave out. Its Law of Compensation, the idea that the swing in one direction is balanced by the swing in the other, assumes reincarnation. A present pleasure may be the repayment of a past pain, including a pain from a previous life, and the account is settled over more than one lifetime. This is a significant commitment, and it is the book’s own. A reader who adopts the principle of Rhythm without it is adopting something narrower than what the book teaches.

Reading the principles on their own terms

None of the seven axioms appears in that form in the ancient Hermetic writings; they belong to the 1908 book, even where older texts offer genuine relatives (the ancient Pymander calls God Mind, speaks of contraries, places Fate under Mind and calls God both male and female). That does not make them less worth reading. It means they are best read as what they are: a modern, carefully built system, written in the language of the New Thought movement and dressed in the authority of Hermes.

Read that way, the principles reward attention. Their value lies less in any one axiom than in the way they hold one another in check. Polarity without its limit becomes wishful thinking; Rhythm without Cause becomes fatalism; Cause without the planes of Correspondence becomes a closed mechanism with no room for change. The book’s own answer is that each principle needs the others, and a careful reader will find that answer more interesting than any single slogan drawn from it.