At the beginning of the 20th Century, a mysterious book was published called “The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece,” written by a mystery author or authors calling himself or themselves The Three Initiates.

The book describes the principles of the universe and claims to be the source of all modern religions. 

The book derives from the teachings of an ancient philosopher, referred to as the greatest of the greats, Hermes Trismegistus, who understood the reality and principles of the universe. Hermes Trismegistus either became the basis for the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth or was derived from the knowledge base that formed around them. 

Hermes Trismegistus’ teachings are also the basis of Western occult beliefs, mystical, magical and supernatural belief systems, alchemy, and the teachings of many secret societies.

I find the teachings of the Kybalion to be incredibly consistent with the revelations I have had in my meditation practice as they relate to the nature of the context of the All.

Briefly, the Kybalion sets forth seven core principles of the context of the All: mentalism, correspondence, vibration, polarity, rhythm, cause and effect and gender. 

Don’t worry about most of these principles yet, as we will discuss them later in the book in more depth. But think about them generally and keep them in the back of your mind as you read on.

The most important principle of the context of the All is that everything that exists, including the All, exists in the mentalism of the All.

That is to say that the All is mind, and the universe is mental.

Let’s explore what I mean by “mind” and “mentalism,” because we use those words every day in ways that can make their usage here confusing.

The universe that we know originated from the All and is part of the All, therefore, the All is both the context for and the manifestation of our universe.

By context I mean that our universe emerged from something. That something I describe as context because a context is the circumstances that form the setting for an event. In our case, the event was the manifestation of our universe.

We have insight into the construct of the All as both context and manifestation in ourselves. 

Our consciousness is the circumstances that form the setting for our thoughts.

Our consciousness provides for our creation of new thoughts, their modification, there interaction with other thoughts, but our consciousness itself is not thought. It is the context from which our thoughts manifest.

Just like the All, our consciousness does not require time or space, but our thoughts do.

This is why I say the All is “mind.” Like our consciousness, the All is comprised of both its contextual medium and everything it manifests, just like our mind is comprised of the context of our consciousness and all the thoughts it manifests.

Keep this construct in mind as we move on in this book and recognize that reality is not just the things, or what scientists call “quanta,” in our universe but the context that manifest those quanta as well.

We experience the quanta in our universe with our senses.

As biological humans most of our daily manifestations derive passively from our senses because our senses are critical to our continued biological existence. The result is that we live under a powerful and fundamental misconception that only what we sense with our senses is real. 

But our senses did not evolve to define our reality. Our senses evolved to keep us alive. Our passive manifestations from our senses do not define what is real. In fact, what we manifest from our mind-sense interaction has little to do with the true reality of the universe we interact with and nothing to do with the context that manifested our universe.

For example, we accept the existence of a chair because when we sit down on it, we sense its existence holding us up. The chair is “real” to us because we “feel” it.

But as we will discuss in Part 1, when we experience something through our senses, the experience is a manifestation of our minds.

Everything about the chair, how it looks, how it feels, how we perceive it, even our emotions about it are manifested by our minds.

Yes, the chair exists, but our manifestation of the chair is unique to us. If our senses had evolved differently, the chair would still exist, but we would manifest it differently.

The existence of a chair would have a different reality to us.

As we will discuss later, the chair is an amalgamation of quanta we call atoms, just like we are, and even smaller quanta that make up the atoms. 

The interaction between our atoms and the chair’s atoms we manifest as physical touch even if what we are sensing is the interaction of forces that derive from the existence of the quanta that make up atoms.

As biological humans, we are mind, and we are mental. Our reality is entirely of our creation. There is no distinction between what we passively manifest from our senses and what we intentionally manifest from the intuition of our souls.

Just like the All, we magically create quanta, in our case, thoughts, out of a context. 

I was explaining this concept of manifestation to a friend when we were stopped in a car at a traffic light. 

I asked my friend what she saw when she looked at the traffic light.

She said, “I see a red light.”

I told her that the red light was a manifestation of her mind, and that all that was there was a machine that emitted photons of certain wavelengths that her mind manifested as either red, yellow or green.

I told her that colors do not exist without her sensory-organ-mind connection, in this case her retina and her mind. The photons emitted by the traffic light have a wavelength, but manifesting color from that wavelength is entirely a manifestation of her mind.

It would be as if I told her to remember that the number 2 is always blue. The number 2 has no inherent color, but she would manifest blue with 2 based on my directive. 

She looked at me like I had lost my mind because it is so hard for us to move past our manifested, sensory-based reality. That manifestation is what helps keep us alive and is powerful.

The reality of the traffic light is one thing and the reality that we manifest about the traffic light is something different.

Yet we believe that the reality of the traffic light is what we manifest about it, and not what it is. Just like the sofa. 

This is an important distinction because the reality that we manifest for ourselves is what we live in.

We create realties that do not exist without us.

As sentient beings, we have a unique connection to the All because our consciousness provides a context for thought manifestation. 

Our mentalism, our consciousness, is therefore what reveals to us as biological humans the nature of the All. 

To understand the nature of the All we must look inward to our own thought manifestation and our own consciousness. From this exercise we begin to understand reality.

But first we must acknowledge that what we believe is reality is not reality at all.

Let’s begin with our known universe, one manifestation of the All.

The total manifest quanta of our universe in The All I represent as a pure circle. 

I will frequently refer to the pure circle of the All in this book to define all the manifested quanta of the All without the manifestations of our and other sentient beings' mentalism.

The limited subset of the All that constitutes this Earth Life System, all the quanta that exist within our existence, I call our True Reality.

What we are capable of perceiving and understanding with our senses and our biological mind is yet a smaller subset of our True Reality which I call our Practical Reality. Practical Reality is our biological experience of our True Reality through our senses. 

Finally, what generates our daily thoughts, our mentalism, our reality, is an even smaller and altered subset of our Practical Reality which I call our Altered Reality.

Altered Reality is the reality created by our thoughts that do not derive from our consciousness. Altered Reality includes true and untrue things, but all of it is an extension of the quanta that make up the manifestations of the All.

In the above graphic, Altered Reality, the reality created by our and other sentient beings’ mentalism, extends outside the pure circle of the All. 

Importantly, while everything that exists within the pure circle of the All is true, meaning that it exists without human or other sentient beings’ mentalism, that which is created solely by our mentalism is not necessarily true, but equally as real and is graphically represented by the portion of our Altered Reality that extends beyond the pure circle of the All.

I may believe that the world is flat, and for as long as I live in that reality, I have created it as part of the Altered Reality that extends beyond the pure circle of the All, but it is untrue.

Each reality is a limited subset of the quanta manifest of the All.

We will start with the quanta manifest of the All (excluding the existence of sentient beings), and then will peel back the layers of the onion of our reality down to our Altered Reality to analytically show ourselves how limiting our day-to-day thoughts of reality are in this Earth life system.

To find our way to our integration into the All and the reality that is derived from its context, we need to first acknowledge and believe that our reality is a manifestation that deceives us into believing that what is real is our Altered Reality. 

Without that acknowledgement, our mind in our Altered Reality will lead us to deny that any other reality exists, and we will remain trapped. 

Where our Altered Reality ends and all other reality begins is where we start to get in touch with the supernatural abilities that taking control of our reality and intentionally manifesting from the intuition that our soul provides.

People say we die alone in this Earth life system as biological humans. But we live alone in this system as well because every aspect of our reality while we are alive in this life system is based on our own internal mentalism.

While this may sound scary, it is empowering because it means that we are each empowered to determine our own reality, but until now we have mostly done that in a passive way developed through neurological processes determined by evolution.  

Outside this Earth life system, we are never alone. We are connected to the quanta and context of the All. We are as un-alone as imaginably possible and that is the natural existence of our consciousness.

Let’s more expansively begin to understand the limitations of our True Reality.

Science 

Science exists as a way for us as biological humans to explain our True Reality. 

To do that, science looks at what we can sense or measure in our True Reality and then builds theories and models to define the nature and predict the behavior of the quanta in our True Reality. It does that by dividing quanta into fields or particles, energy or mass.

It is important to understand that science does not exist to define reality. Science exists to explain our universe. In that way, it is much the same as our senses – practically important to us but not where we learn about reality.

Physics derives from ancient philosophical concepts of True Reality and has been enormously successful at predicting the behaviors and relationships of quanta. 

Quanta are the particles and energies that make up our universe.

But by focusing on the quanta, physics reaffirms our bias to believe that reality is made up of what we can sense, when reality is so much greater than that.

Let’s further understand how True Reality and our Altered Reality differ by further discussing light.

Remember the traffic light? 

Light does not exist without us and other sentient beings that depend on sight from an interaction with photons.

Our minds manifest light from the interaction of photons hitting our retinas, and without the reality of light created by us and other organisms that create the thought of light, it would not exist in the All.

We experience photons every day in our True Reality but have no idea what a photon is because our minds manifest photons as light and color, not as photons.

But a photon exists as a quantum of the All separate from our manifestation of light and color. This illustrates how the pure circle of the All is different from our Altered Reality and how our Altered Reality distances us from knowing the All.

We can describe the behavior of a photon using mathematical equations derived from Wave-Particle Duality theory provided to us by physics.

Because quanta in our universe exist as either mass or energy or some combination of both, physics uses two mathematical theories to describe everything in our universe. 

One theory describes quanta when it is energy using wave theory. The other theory describes quanta when it is mass using particle theory. The combination of these theories is called Wave-Particle Duality Theory. 

We can replicate experiments testing the validity of Wave-Particle Duality theory and prove to ourselves that it is a good predictor of photon behavior in True Reality. 

But the theory doesn’t describe what a photon is in True Reality. It merely defines the parameters of and predicts the behavior of a photon in relation to other quanta.

We don’t have anything that we encounter in our Altered Reality that we can relate a photon to even though we experience photons every day because our experience with photons is a manifestation that results from our evolution as biological beings.  

A photon is not like a banana or a rock or even a wave or a particle. It is unlike anything in our lives other than itself. It is supernatural and yet it is a critical part of our daily lives. 

Even physicists refer to photons as “light,” and the speed at which they move their information as the “speed of light,” demonstrating how our own manifestations make it into our description of True Reality.

Nevertheless, science exposes to us the limitations that we face in existing in our True Reality in understanding the reality of the All.

Even if our Altered Reality was the same as our True Reality, our ability to understand the reality of the All would be limited.

Obvious Matter

In this Earth life system, we developed in a portion of the quanta of the All that is made up entirely of quanta that physicists call “obvious matter.” 

A bus, a lasagna, a flower, a raindrop, are all obvious matter. All the quanta that make up those things are also obvious matter and constitute the basis of what we think of as nearly all our True Reality.

We live in an obvious matter house or apartment, eat obvious matter food, drink obvious matter beverages, wear obvious matter clothes and scratch our obvious matter heads.

However, physicists have discovered through observation and experimentation that some other form of quanta must exist in the All and that the obvious matter that makes up our experience represents only about fifteen percent of the quanta of the All.

The remaining roughly eighty-five percent of the quanta of the All, physicists refer to as “dark” matter, as the astrophysicist and Harvard professor Dr. Lisa Randall describes in her book “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs.” 

Dr. Randall explains that while we have no experience with dark matter directly, without dark matter we would not exist, and neither would have the dinosaurs. And the demise of the dinosaurs, that cataclysmic meteor, would not exist either. 

Dark matter is something we can’t see, but we theorize exists because of its effect on other quanta. 

There is no dark matter in our True Reality, so there is nothing for us to relate it to. Dark matter is supernatural.

It’s like the photon, except that we manifest the photon as light and color. 

We don’t experience dark matter at all except that we experience the cause and effects of its theoretical existence. 

We can only comprehend dark matter as a predictive abstraction, and as a predictive abstraction, 85% of the quanta derived from the context of the All becomes part of our mentalism, part of our Altered Reality. 

Dimensions and Time

We also developed in a part of the All limited at least in terms of our True Reality to three physical dimensions and time. 

As Dr. Randall points out in her book “Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions,” that mathematics predicts that there could be an infinite number of dimensions of nearly any size in an infinite number of universes, and time, and our limited three other dimensions may or may not be relevant to the reality of the All.

We drive down the street in our three-dimensional car in our three-dimensional bodies and, as we do so, time passes. 

Because energies, energy fields and planes of existence exist everywhere in the quanta of the All, the fact that our True Reality is different than most of the reality of the All is an important starting point in understanding that our True, Practical, and Altered realities are fundamentally limited compared to the reality of the All.

To illustrate the dimensional limitations of our True Reality, try to imagine what it would be like to encounter something consisting of more than three dimensions and time in our world. 

We can’t. It is an abstraction because there is nothing in our Altered Reality to relate that to.

So, let’s do something easier. 

We can relate to two dimensions since two dimensional things exist in our three-dimensional world - a comic strip, for example, is a two-dimensional world for the characters in the comic strip. 

Let’s imagine ourselves in that comic strip world to understand how odd interaction with a larger dimensional world would be. 

A three-dimensional sphere entering our two-dimensional world would appear out of nowhere as a point, expand into a growing circle then shrink back to a point and disappear.

It would be very hard for our minds that developed in a two-dimensional world to understand or explain using the science of our two-dimensional world.

Yet, in our three physical dimension world, we try to explain the All from the perspective of our three physical dimensions and time. It is the best we can do without abstraction. 

It is no more valid than a two physical dimension world trying to explain our three physical dimension world in the context of two dimensions.

Maybe the existence of other dimensions could explain, for example, our encounters with other life systems like UFOs and how they are able to appear and disappear and move in ways that do not conform with the rules that govern our true reality.

If a UFO were tubular in a fourth dimension and entered our three dimensions at an angle it would look to us as a spherical object that appeared, moved quickly along a linear path only to disappear again.

Whether other dimensions explain UFOs or not, there is no reason for us to limit how we look at our existence in the limitation of our four dimensions. 

But it is critical for us to accept that our three physical dimensions and time are only a limited reality of the All.

Three physical dimensions and time are a core part of our True Reality, but they are only part of the mentalism of the All.

Summary

Science has shown us that our True Reality is limited not only because it is made up entirely of obvious matter but also because there is no reason to think that the reality of the All is bound by three physical dimensions or time.

The most we can relate to in our human biology is something substantially different from much of the reality of the All in almost every way because of where we exist in the quanta of the All.

Yet we make decisions on what is real and what is faith, based on a reality that we have already demonstrated to be a very limited reality.

That is only the beginning in unwinding the limitations that are imposed on us by our Altered Reality and we need to unwind all of them to cognitively take control of our reality, reconnect with our soul and live life to our fullest potential.