If I had kids, which I won’t, my go-to piece of advice would be, “try it and see what happens,” especially if it’s a practice. If you adopt a practice, take it seriously, and dedicate significant time every day to it, it will infiltrate every corner of your life, including your dreams. You’ll draw connections between all kinds of seemingly disparate ideas, notice all sorts of stunning synchronicities. Shit will get weird, guaranteed.

These liminal, otherworldly experiences can emerge from a spiritual practice such as prayer or meditation or from running every day. They don’t necessarily contain any information about the objective nature of reality, but if you can rest in a place of radical agnosticism – I don’t know and you don’t, either – they can serve as sources of life-shifting insight, not to mention creative dynamite. Cultivating a system of habits around an idea will almost inevitably make it “come true” for you, in a sense. I’m a big believer in the power of the placebo effect. And the times when I’ve been deeply engaged in a practice have been by far the happiest in my life.

The Kybalion is a book published in 1908, credited to “Three Initiates,” assumed to be written by a Chicago lawyer named William Walker Atkinson. It purports to package the essential wisdom of Hermeticism, an attempt by ancient Greeks to distill the philosophies of much more ancient Egyptians, into seven snappy principles. It casts a prominent shadow on modern Western Hermeticism, itself even more of a mishmash, having picked up elements of gnosticism, alchemy, kabbalah, freemasonry, theosophy, Crowleyian magick, and other outre belief systems as it joined the current of New Thought, which connects the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau to the proto-self-help programs of Napoleon Hill, Neville Goddard, and George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Now it’s spawned a documentary feature directed by Ronni Thomas and starring Mitch Horowitz that doesn’t so much “make sense” of the Kybalion mythos as it vividly illustrates why it matters in the lives of dedicated practitioners.

A lot of boring and toxic cranks call themselves “heterodox thinkers,” but Horowitz is the real deal. He’s a rigorous scholar and public intellectual who enthusiastically embraces all sorts of esoteric ritual practices normally relegated to the conspiratorial Coast To Coast AM fringes of popular discourse. He presents sigils, ESP, mentalism, and tarot in a sober and serious way, with a skeptical audience in mind, as pragmatic systems of improving focus, clarifying goals, and perceiving your world from the perch of your highest intelligence. (He also writes eccentric self-help books that, along with Carolyn Elliot’s Existential Kink, include some of the most dynamic ideas to emerge from the genre in decades.) If you want to understand the highlights of Western Hermeticism not as received wisdom but as a battery of specific, results-oriented practices you can try for yourself, Horowitz has the hookup.

The film consists of Horowitz summarizing the core teachings of The Kybalion over aggressively disorienting b-roll interspersed with hallucinatory, Jodorowskian scenes of an “Alchemical Wedding” and interviewers with a psychic, a medium, a hypnotist, the avuncular philosopher who coined the term “near-death experience,” and other dedicated practitioners of Kybalion-adjacent esoteric arts. These interviews comprise the meat of the matter.

The sway of these odd ideas and beliefs comes not from what they reveal about the “true” nature of reality (which is arguably nothing and is certainly missing the point), but from what happens to those who take them seriously, develop rituals and habits around them, and serve others through their work.

If you’re down for a documentary with gratuitous bush and dong shots in the first 30 seconds, an alchemist who does gonzo dream interpretation, and a host who speaks like a tenured academic and dresses like a Satanic youth pastor, The Kybalion is a fun ride. It can also show you a preview of the payoff that comes from dedicated practice, even if the thing you’re practicing is something a lot of people would consider weird. Not that it needs to be.

I’ll confess that, when it comes to self-help and new-age crap, I’m a filthy hippie. My mom got into it during her divorce, and her interests in the Enneagram and John Gray’s “love letter” technique sparked an expansive lifelong fascination for me. I grew up in a shithole mountain town that was near Asheville, North Carolina, a new-age mecca named Rolling Stone’s “freakiest city in America” in the late ‘90s, to which I escaped after high school. I’m now settled on the West Side of Los Angeles, which is hard to navigate socially unless you join a cult or three. I’ve tried many fringe therapeutic modalities, participated in a LARP based on est, and got an astrology reading during my own divorce that helped me pull myself out of near-suicidal despair. Sure, it had elements of theater and performance art, both of which have also changed my life for the better. More importantly, it had the sort of poetry and paradox that are necessarily absent from most conventional therapies and were, as it turned out, just what I needed.

As long as you don’t start making big assumptions about the world and imposing them on others – which, to reiterate, would be badly missing the point – the exhilarating weirdness of getting into a spiritual practice and giving it your all can make you feel happier, more creative, and more open to others, especially when you keep your sense of humor about it. Try it and see what happens.

These days, I mostly meditate, write, do some psychedelic-assisted therapy, practice my own form of Satanic Buddhism, and breathe. But the subjects of The Kybalion remind me that I’m not so much interested in what you practice as how having a serious practice affects everything about how you experience your life. Art is a practice. Work is a practice. Sex, done well, is surely a practice. Rearing kids is a practice. When you go deep, you can simultaneously make yourself a monarch and a much greater fool, so it’s important to stay humble. Just because there’s no difference between you and god doesn’t mean you can act like a god on earth whenever you like. Some things are true and some things are not permitted. You don’t need to get fully enlightened every time you hit the elliptical. In the course of every practice obsession, I eventually return to earth, disillusioned but a bit wiser than before.

The Kybalion, the book, is wildly controversial among the true heads of hermeticism and the film is not without its flaws. It feels more like a broad introduction and a playful experiment than a devoted deep dive, which is ironic considering the nature of the subject. It jumps around, ends abruptly, and doesn’t always try to make sense. But as a surreal celebration of the reality-creating power of the carefully channeled energies of the mind, it should be an inspiration to anyone who craves the joy of losing oneself in a flow state and working on something long and well enough to get scary-good at it.

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The Seven Hermetic Principles of The Kybalion

All right, let’s do this…

1. The Principle of Mentalism: The all is mind; the universe is mental. When you take responsibility as the writer and director of your own experience – if only as a thought experiment – you can shock yourself with your own power.
2. The Principle of Correspondence: As above, so below; as below, so above. How you do anything is how you do everything, and you may already understand your “known unknowns” and “unknown knowns” better than you realize.
3. The Principle of Vibration: Nothing rests, everything moves, everything vibrates. Change is the only constant, which explains all those vibe shifts you keep hearing about.
4. The Principle of Polarity: Everything has an opposite; all opposites are the same. Hate is closer to love than to indifference, the people who piss us off are projections of ourselves, and all suffering contains the seeds of transformation.
5. The Principle of Rhythm: Everything flows; rhythm compensates. Our minds seek patterns and stories in an endless series of actions and reactions.
6. The Principle of Cause and Effect: Chance is but a name for a law not recognized. Whether or not there is anything like “karma” operating in the universe, behaving as if there is makes things measurably better for everyone involved.
7. The Principle of Gender: Everything has masculine and feminine principles. This applies the concept of polarity to sex, love, the creative process, and the relationship of our conscious and subconscious capabilities. Yin and yang. Zeroes and ones. The film dances around the obvious questions of gender identity, and yes, the whole thing is a can of worms; you’re welcome to take what worms are useful or charming to you and release the rest to wriggle back into the sediment.

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