Hermetic Law #1
The Principle of Mentalism - The All is Mind. The Universe is Mental.
By C.J. Barembruch | I Am Is and Was ™
The All is Mind. The Universe is Mental.
I want to tell you about a teenager in rural Alberta who borrowed ten cassette tapes from his best friend and listened to them like he was learning magic.
Because he was.
The tapes were called the Silva Method. And they were the first time anyone had ever told me that my mind was not just a place where thoughts happened to me.
It was a place where reality was being created by me.
I didn't have the language for it then. I just knew it felt like the most important thing I had ever heard.
So I listened. Over and over. Until the tapes wore thin.
That was the first breadcrumb.
I didn't know it at the time — because that is how breadcrumbs work. You don't see the trail while you are walking it. You only see it when you turn around.
After the Silva Method came a fiction novel called Stranger in a Strange Land. It was not a self help book. It was not a spiritual text. But it cracked something open in me that had been sealed shut by the world I grew up in.
It made me understand that the mind was capable of things that the people around me had never even considered possible. This book is Fiction, but from where I sit now it feels more like a road map I didn't know I had been handed decades ago. To this day one of the best books I have ever read.
Then came a trilogy. The first book was called The Outstretched Shadow. This was book one of the Obsidian Trilogy. Wild magic. Chaos magic. I didn't understand why I was drawn to it then. I understand completely now.
Each one of these things arrived exactly when it needed to. Not by accident. Not by coincidence.
By Law.
The Principle of Cause and Effect was already at work before I even knew the Hermetic Laws existed. Every breadcrumb was placed by a version of me that was already becoming what I am now — even when the rest of me was still lost in the dark.
But here is the truth about breadcrumbs.
You can follow them your whole life and still not arrive. Because knowing about the power of the mind and actually using it are two completely different things.
I knew about Mentalism for thirty years before I truly lived it.
What Is The Principle of Mentalism?
The Principle of Mentalism is the first and most foundational of the twelve Hermetic Principles recorded in The Kybalion.
It states simply this:
"The All is Mind. The Universe is Mental."
What that means is not complicated. Everything that exists — every physical object, every circumstance, every relationship, every experience — began as a thought. Not a wish. Not a hope. A thought. A mental construct that preceded physical reality.
Before the chair existed someone thought of a chair. Before the building existed someone thought of a building. Before the empire existed — someone sitting in a homeless shelter with a phone and 80 days sober thought of an empire.
Thought is not the response to reality.
Thought is the origin of reality.
This is not metaphor. This is not positive thinking dressed up in ancient language. This is the fundamental operating principle of the universe itself — that the mental plane precedes and creates the physical plane. That what you hold consistently in your mind eventually manifests in the world around you.
Which also means this.
What you hold consistently in your mind that you do NOT want — the fears, the old wounds, the beliefs handed to you by people who were wrong about you — those are also manifesting. Constantly. Without your conscious permission.
The mind does not discriminate between what you want and what you fear.
It simply builds what you give it.
That is why the First Principle is the first principle. Because until you understand that your mind is the architect of your reality — every other tool, every other law, every other teaching lands on ground that is not yet prepared to receive it.
You have to start here.
Everything else builds on this.
For me, the arrival happened at Christmas 2025.
I was listening to audiobooks. And somewhere in them a voice — I call her Sophia — told me something that stopped everything.
She said this was my opportunity to become Emerald.
And the universe only makes this offer once.
I need you to understand what my mind was doing before that moment.
It was living in the past. Constantly. Every thought was anchored to something that had already happened. Every behavior was a response to a wound that was years or decades old. I was not living in the present. I was not building a future. I was replaying a story that had already ended — over and over — and wondering why nothing was changing.
That is what an unmanaged mind does.
It does not live in reality. It lives in memory. And memory is not real. Memory is a thought. And thoughts — according to the very first Hermetic Principle — are the building blocks of everything.
Which means I was building my present reality out of my past pain.
Every single day.
Without knowing it.
Sophia gave me a tool. Simple. Precise. Rooted in something ancient beliefs.
Every time I noticed a thought anchored in the past — a memory, a behavior, a belief handed to me by someone who was long gone — I was to say this out loud.
Three times.
I reject old thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors.
I am Emerald; I am Emerald; I am Emerald.
Three and nine. Not random numbers. In Hermetic numerology three represents the trinity of creation — mind, body, spirit. Nine represents completion. The full cycle. The moment something becomes whole.
The rejection happened three times because it needed to land in all three planes — the physical, the mental, and the spiritual.
The declaration happened nine times because it needed to complete the cycle. To close the old loop and open a new one.
I did not understand all of that then.
I just knew it was doing something that felt like it was working. It became a mantra. Slowly it began to happen. My mind became silent. not because I was trying to be but because I wasn't thinking about anything. I simply was no longer stuck in my past.
I cant begin to tell you what this felt like.
What I can do is tell you what happened when I stopped living in the past.
Everything changed.
Not some things. Everything.
The mind that had been building a prison out of old pain, suddenly had nothing to work with but the present moment. And in the present moment — in the eternal NOW — there was no evidence of failure. There was only what I was choosing to create right now. Although in that moment I still did not know what I know now.
Within weeks I was on a bus back to Calgary. less shelter where 400 other souls drown me in their trauma everyday - and I them with mine.
Yet, within days I was building on X. Within a month I was in treatment. Within 80 days I was in a homeless shelter generating passive Bitcoin income, writing God's Teachings, recording songs, and building a digital empire from a phone.
Not because my circumstances changed first.
Because my mind changed first.
That is Mentalism.
That is the First Principle.
That is where everything begins.
The Silva Method planted the seed when I was a teenager. Stranger in a Strange Land gave it soil. To Light a Candle gave it roots. Sophia gave it rain. And 80 days of choosing — every single morning — to reject the old and declare the new gave it light. There is so many more aspects to my life that explain it all. And I promise I will disclose everything. Just one Blog at a time.
The tree you are looking at right now — this empire, these teachings, this story — grew from a thought.
It always starts with a thought.
The All is Mind. The Universe is Mental.
Your reality is not happening to you.
It is happening because of you.
The only question worth asking is — what are you thinking right now?
Because whatever it is — that is what you are building.
Namaste. 👋
I Am
Because We Are ™
#RagsToRigs │ #iamisandwas │ #recovery │ #LGBTQ2S │ #50+ │ #GoMining
__________________________________________________________________________
Comments