Manifestation is something that really confuses people.
A lot of people believe in the idea, or at least would like to believe in the idea, but find it quite difficult to actually make it work for them.
Yet the truth of the matter is that one of your purposes in life is to learn how to harness your desires, wishes and energies, and turn them into reality.
As Napoleon Hill put it, “What the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” We have been given both the power to imagine and outcome, and the means to achieve it.
There are traditions going back to the beginning of recorded human history which speak of the power of Manifestation and The Law of Attraction.
Manifestation is the ability of any human being to use certain techniques to manifest what he or she desires.
The Law Of Attraction – more accurately Laws – are the principles which you can use to manifest your desires.
There’s nothing mysterious about this.
Although the early teachers of manifestation tried to hide their teachings in secrecy and mystery, and tried to limit the knowledge for a select few who had undergone initiation rituals of one kind or another, the fact is this knowledge is now and always has been available to everyone.
Or at least, to those who care to look for it.
And manifesting your desires is a healthy way to live.
You know that your thoughts create reality — otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. But you may wonder how you can control your thoughts, and you may want to know what techniques you have to use, so that manifestation of your desires becomes consistent and reliable.
One of the original accounts of how to turn thoughts into reality was the Kybalion.
This was an ancient Egyptian text, but its origins are irrelevant.
Our only interest in it today is to see what it can tell us about Laws Of Attraction and the process of Manifestation.
The Kybalion was written by an Egyptian sage called Hermes. That’s why these teachings are called hermetic teachings. Like many others who have been interested in manifestation, Hermes tried to make sense of the principles behind this phenomenon by classifying and ordering what he thought was going on.
And so, to make sense of it, he came up with seven sacred secrets or principles of manifestation. Here, they are, with some comments about how they relate to us nowadays as we manifest our desires.
The First Sacred Hermetic Secret Or Principle Of Manifestation
Everything in the entire universe, whether physical, intellectual, spiritual or emotional, is part of an all-encompassing divine creation.
People give this different names: The Mystery, All That Is, The Life Force, Cosmic Consciousness, and so on … you may have your own name for it.
Of course if this is true, and we are all living inside an omnipresent and omniscient energy force, or divine presence, then we are all more connected than we are separate, more similar than we are different.
A Modern Interpretation
Nothing, as you know, is permanent.
Change is a continuous force all around us. And whether you call controlling and directing energy of the universe Spirit, Divine Wisdom, or All That Is, this energy is present in every place.
In the Kybalion, Hermes put it like this: “That which is the fundamental truth, the substantial reality, is beyond true naming, but wise men call it the All. In its essence, the All is unknowable. The All must have continuously and always existed, for nothing else could create it, and nothing else could exist outside it. The All must be infinite in space as there is no place outside of it.”
This, of course, begins to sound a bit like “God”. But do we really need to consider the nature of Spirit, the nature of “All That Is”?
No, we do not, simply because spirit transcends our understanding, just as it always has and always will.
Given the grace to use Spirit (or whatever you call the universal energy) to manifest our desires, need we look beyond the techniques that we can use to get what we want, or should we be content in knowing that the universe has granted us the power of manifestation?
To me the answer is clear: explanation is not necessary. It is our grace that we can manifest whatever we wish, when we know how to do so.
And do we really need to consider the divine paradox — that matter is both illusory and real, simultaneously?
Modern quantum physics teaches us that matter is energy, and energy is matter, and that surely, is that!
The point for us right here, right now, in manifesting our desires is to simply keep in mind that because matter and energy are interchangeable, the power of our brains is such that it can influence the manifestation of matter around us.
It’s also able to change events and energies around us so that certain outcomes can occur, can be made manifest.
And in any event, it’s not true that our universe is either an illusion or a paradox. In fact, our physical universe is but one, very real, manifestation of the energy of the universe.
It happens to be the manifestation that we require for our lives as physical beings on this planet.
At the same time, because we are also spiritual beings and we have an energetic existence, we can connect with the energy behind the universe, and influence how things manifest on earth.
Every system of manifestation, every example of Law Of Attraction, depends upon a certain mental process.
The hermeticists, the followers of the Egyptian sage Hermes, used words like meditation and divine attention to describe the process that somebody needed to use before they could engage with the mental energy, the spiritual energy of the universe. Others have called these processes, desire, belief, visualization, faith and more.
The Second Sacred Secret
The phrase which has come to sum up The Second Sacred Hermetic Principle is: “As above, so below … as below, so above.”
What this means in practice is that the physical, spiritual, or mental activities are subject to the same spiritual laws.
A Modern Interpretation
We all know the saying “As above, so below; as below, so above”. The “above” refers to the spiritual plane, and “below” to the physical. That’s how people think of our spiritual existence – somehow higher than us. But it’s incorrect to do so, because all three planes of existence co-exist together in the same time and space.
So, in one sense, dividing our existence into spiritual, mental, and physical realms is artificial – they are all aspects of life and existence which co-exist together.
In other words, the physical, mental and spiritual realms reflect the qualities, each of the other. People think of the spiritual plane as having the highest vibrational energy – and maybe it does.
For me, a more useful way to think of these three planes of existence is to see them as different aspects of the All, the Mystery, All That Is, Cosmic Consciousness, or whatever name you wish to use for the power of the Universe.
We can touch the cosmic consciousness by using our minds in certain ways.
Any formula for manifesting your desires, for getting what you want, achieving success, setting goals and making them come true, will ALWAYS involves some mental process that allows connection between your mind and the cosmic consciousness.
The most ancient form of such connection, of course, is prayer. But how many people have been let down by prayer over the years? Far more, I suspect that have had their desires manifested. We’ll examine why prayer works so inconsistently in the section of these writings about Belief.
The Third Sacred Secret
Everything in the universe is composed of matter which vibrates at a certain rate; and matter is just a physical form of energy.
We all know that is true, as the work of the atomic physicists from the days of Einstein onwards has shown.
It is a powerful and amazing thought, even so: what appears to be solid is, in fact, just energy. And since energy is universal, and manifests in different forms only because it has different energetic frequencies, it follows that we can probably influence what’s going on around us by changing the frequency of our own vibrations.
A Modern Interpretation
The fact that energy and matter are interchangeable means that every thought, every emotion, every desire, attracts to itself its physical equivalent.
You’ve probably experienced how your mood can be affected by the mood of others — and, as you know, the same is true in reverse.
When you with a person who is happy, you tend to feel happy, and when you’re with a person who is depressed and negative, you feel your own mood lowering. (Unless you protect yourself from the transmission of their energy to you.)
Naturally energy flows from a higher energetic state to a lower energetic state.
That’s why you raise your emotional energy when manifesting…. (we’ll see how you can do this later on).
Somehow, the mind has the power to attract towards you the things about which you consistently think: so if you consistently think about poverty, you’re raising your awareness of poverty, and you’re avoiding the opportunities that wealth presents to you.
This means you generally have a “poverty consciousness”.
This simply means you’re functioning at one end of the poverty / wealth polarity – and by changing your thoughts to what some might consider to be a “higher” frequency vibration, you can raise your expectations so that you move both mentally and physically to the prosperity end of the spectrum.
And the same is true of any other polarity that exists in your life: health, wealth, relationships, success – these things are there for the taking, and the primary step to achieving them is to match your vibrations, your energies, your thought processes, with the energy in the world that will make these things manifest as a positive, healthy reality for you.
To put it more simply: you get what you think about.
But of course, you have to think about your desires in a particular way – which is the whole point of manifestation and Law Of Attraction.
The Fourth Sacred Secret
Everything that appears to be an opposite is in fact just simply a polarity.
So, like masculinity and femininity, poverty and prosperity are simply at opposite ends of another spectrum. Enlightenment and ignorance are another pair of qualities which occur at different ends, at different polarities, of another spectrum.
By raising our energy so that it more closely approaches that of the higher end of a particular spectrum, it’s possible to transmute unwanted and undesirable situations into something more positive.
A Modern Interpretation
If you worry about money, or complain that you don’t have enough, your thoughts are at the poverty end of the finance polarity. That’s what you attract.
And even if you don’t appear to have money right now, simply changing your thought processes to focus on prosperity and opportunity will change your physical circumstances.
But of course you must believe that prosperity is possible.
Releasing, eliminating, changing, or even destroying your limiting beliefs is a fundamental aspect of getting what you want and manifesting success.
Take love and hate.
A lot of people think these are completely different things. Yet they are simply opposite ends of a polarity: very few people feel either completely pure love or completely pure hate. Most of us experience a mix of these emotions.
The principle of polarity also allows you to influence another person’s mental state: to either elevate or depress it.
Another example: depression and fear can be transmuted into positivity and courage.
And you almost certainly will have experienced how the transmission of mental energy from one person to another can be conducted.
If you consistently attract negative people to you, is it because you are negative yourself? (Misery loves company!) Or is it because these depressed people are taking your positive energy to make themselves feel better?
The Fifth Sacred Secret
The Kybalion suggests that the entire universe operates to a precise and predictable rhythm.
A Modern Interpretation
While the Kybalion seems to suggest that every movement in one direction will produce a compensating movement in the opposite direction – in other words every success hast to be followed by a failure, every rise to be followed by a fall – the truth is rather different.
Success can be a continuous process. Getting what you want can be practiced each and every day.
There’s no negative karma coming just because you get what you desire. The universe did not give you the power to manifest what you want only to take it off you again.
If people succeed and then subsequently fail, they do so merely because they have a belief system which holds that every success has to be followed by failure.
Change your belief system, to expect success, and success will be a continuous process. We are not subject to any kind of Law Of Compensation as the Kybalion suggested.
The Sixth Sacred Secret
This is simply the law of cause and effect: every cause has its effect, every effect has its cause. Chance does not exist: it’s only a name given to the law of cause and effect where those two qualities are not yet recognized.
While there are many levels of causation, the essence of this principle is that nothing can happen by chance.
Life mastery, the ability to manifest using the Law Of Attraction, is the product of YOU becoming a conscious cause rather than a passive recipient of effect.
A Modern Interpretation
Every event has a cause.
Even so, I don’t buy into the idea that wherever you are in life right now is the product of your own creation.
Too many people have suffered abusive childhoods and are still experiencing the consequences in their own adult lives for me to believe that the universe – or even the people themselves – actually chose to manifest into an abusive childhood so that they could “learn something”.
I think this is banal and simplistic, and possibly even an insult to the creative design of the universe. (And I might be wrong, of course.)
I’d much prefer to understand the law of cause and effect working as follows: that in your adult life today, every single action you take has a consequence. What the universe gives you is the power to redeem your situation….
Even when you cannot understand why something has happened to you, you can safely assume that the law of cause and effect is at work. Perhaps the cause of what has happened to you (the effect or outcome) is simply too complicated to see clearly.
To take responsibility for your own life, it is necessary to accept that you CAN AND DO create, right here, right now, the things that happen to you.
No matter how bad your childhood may have been, and no matter how limiting the environment in which you grew up, you do now have the power, if you choose, to change your situation by taking control of the causes of what happens in your life, of your “outcomes”.
You can also visualize your outcomes – or effects – so you set clear and specific objectives for your life, which your mind will then go to work to produce. That is how you really take full responsibility for your life.
The Seventh Sacred Secret
This is a development of the fourth Sacred Secret: it ascribes male and female energy to every force and creation in the universe.
I’m not entirely clear what Hermes meant by this, but he seemed to think that a combination of male energy and female energy were important in manifestation.
He wasn’t referring to conventional gender roles here, but something more like female energy being an attracting force and male energy being a creative force.
A Modern Interpretation
Rather than thinking of every event and experience in the universe as governed by feminine and masculine energy, let us simply say that there are different and complementary forces at work in the world, some of which will get us what we want, and others which will not.
- The energy of creation, the energy of manifestation.
- The energy of visualization, the energy of action.
- The energy of cause, the energy of effect.
- The energy of passion, and the energy of passivity.
- The energy of desire, and the energy of acceptance.
- The energy of belief, and the energy of hopelessness.
- The energy of expectancy, and the energy of despair.
Perhaps these are better ways of describing the opposing energetic forces that the Kybalion described as masculine and feminine.
So we can take as much or as little of this as we wish, and transmute it into a modern system of manifestation.
Manifesting Your Desires
One of the most interesting things about working with Law Of Attraction principles is how easily and quickly they work: at least, when you have mastered the antecedents, the requirements, the preconditions, for the universal laws to take effect.
We don’t really have to look at complicated principles which were created by less sophisticated peoples (by our standards) than ourselves to explain a natural process.
The basis of manifestation is simple: intense desire, complete belief, and confident expectancy. Oh, and action in the world….
You can see and hear more about Desire, Belief, Expectancy and Action on this website.
Take away from the Kybalion some simple straightforward truths:
That whenever negative energies present, so must the positive energy be present too. Napoleon Hill summed this up when he said that “in every adversity there lies the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
Maintain your expectations towards the positive end of every polarity. Keep your thoughts positive, and you will manifest positive outcomes. Napoleon Hill summed this up: “The way you think determines the quality of your life.”
Balance visualization and creative thought with action.
And remember that you can think of your inner masculine and feminine as having different skills and abilities.
Since each of us has an inner masculine energy and an inner feminine energy, we are all capable of manifesting our desires by using the Law Of Attraction.
The masculine loves to take action, the feminine loves to create ideas. The masculine loves to go out and build, while the feminine taps into the creative unconscious.
One way to balance your masculine and feminine energy is to consistently engage in giving and receiving: give something every day (time, money, friendly words, or something more tangible) without any attachment to receiving praise, rewards or gratitude. This is your masculine energy at work.
And also allow your feminine to receive: it is very receptive to the whispers of the divine, of the collective unconscious. Quiet time, meditation, visualization, will allow your feminine to receive, to pass ideas on to the masculine, the energy which is always ready to take action.
“The possession of knowledge, unless accompanied by manifestation and expression in action, is like the hoarding of precious metals: a vain and foolish thing. Knowledge, like wealth, is intended for use.” – The Kybalion
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