The first year · Lesson 5
Two Ends of One Scale
The principles of Vibration and Polarity, and the science the book borrowed
Welcome back. Today’s saying is a long one: “Everything is dual; everything has poles.” It asks you to look at any two opposites and wonder if they are really one thing. We read two chapters, about twenty pages, on the third and fourth principles. They are some of the liveliest pages in the book.
The reading
- Chapter IX: Vibration The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, pp. 137–147 · about 1,775 words, 9 min
- Chapter X: Polarity The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, pp. 149–158 · about 1,654 words, 8 min
About 17 minutes in all. Each link opens the book at the first paragraph.
Before you read
- Chapter IX is about Vibration and Chapter X is about Polarity. You met both in Chapter II as one-line sayings. Now each one gets a full chapter.
- Chapter IX leans on the science of 1908: atoms, electrons, light, X-rays and the “Ether.” Don’t worry if the science feels strange. The notes below explain what it was and what became of it.
- Watch for the long picture in Chapter IX of a spinning object that goes faster and faster. Follow it step by step. Ask yourself what you would hear and see at each stage.
- Chapter X is full of pairs: heat and cold, east and west, love and hate. Make a list as you go. The quiz asks about some of them.
In a nutshell
Chapter IX: Vibration
The chapter opens with the saying you already know: nothing rests, and everything vibrates. The authors say this is an old Hermetic truth that science only found again in their own time. They claim that all things differ only in how fast and in what way they vibrate. At one end of the scale is Spirit. At the other end is the most solid matter. Next they walk through the science of their day. Heat, atoms, electrons, light and electricity are all, they say, kinds of motion. Then they go past science. They claim that thoughts and feelings vibrate too, and can pass from one mind to another. A trained will, they say, can change these vibrations. The chapter ends by saying this is how Masters work their “miracles.”
Chapter X: Polarity
This chapter says that everything has two poles, like the two ends of a stick. Opposites are not two different things. They are one thing at two different degrees, with many steps in between. The authors start with big pairs, like Spirit and Matter. Then they turn to everyday ones you can feel and see. Then they move to the mind, where feelings come in pairs too. They say a feeling can be moved along its own scale toward its opposite. But a thing can only change into its own opposite, never into something of another kind. The chapter ends by saying that a student who grasps this can rule his moods instead of being ruled by them.
Highlights
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; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.
The full saying of Polarity, and the longest in the book. “Extremes meet” and “two sides to everything” were common sayings long before 1908. The book gathers them into one rule.
Spirit is at one end of the Pole of Vibration, the other Pole being certain extremely gross forms of Matter.
Here Vibration and Polarity meet. Spirit and matter are two ends of one scale. Chapter X comes back to this very pair first.
He who understands the Principle of Vibration, has grasped the sceptre of Power.
The book gives this to “one of the old Hermetic writers,” but never says which one. A sceptre is the rod a king holds. Notice how the chapter ends on power, not on knowledge.
The Universal Ether, which is postulated by science without its nature being understood clearly, is held by the Hermetists to be but a higher manifestation of that which is erroneously called matter
The book takes an idea from the physics of its day and gives it a place on its own scale. Read “The real story” below to see what happened to the Ether.
Master of his mental states, instead of being their servant and slave.
This is what the book promises the reader of Chapter X. The same hope runs through the self-help books of the time, and many since.
Words to know
- Vibration
- A fast back-and-forth motion, like a plucked string. The book uses it for every kind of change.
- Ether, Ethereal Substance
- An unseen stuff that scientists of the 1800s thought filled all space and carried light. The book makes it a step between matter and energy.
- Corpuscle
- A tiny bit of matter. In 1908 it was one name for what we now call the electron.
- Pole
- One of the two ends of something, like the North and South Poles, or the ends of a magnet.
- Polarity, polarize
- Having two poles. To polarize, in the book, is to move toward one end of a scale.
- Transmute
- To change one thing into another. The book uses it for changing one mood into its opposite.
- Induction
- Making a change in something without touching it, as a magnet can. The book uses it for one mind changing another.
The real story
Our notes, not the book's.
The Kybalion borrows the words of an exciting time in science. Wilhelm Röntgen found X-rays in 1895, and J. J. Thomson found the electron soon after, calling it a “corpuscle,” just as the book does. Light was known to be a wave, and most scientists thought it moved through an unseen “Ether” that filled all space. The book stretches these real discoveries to say that thoughts, feelings and Spirit are vibrations too. Physics did not go that way: experiments found no trace of the Ether, and after Einstein’s work of 1905 scientists gave it up. The book’s ladder from heat to red to violet to X-rays does match one family of waves, but sound is a shaking of the air, so no spinning wheel turns a hum into a color. Still, these chapters are a fine window on 1908, when science felt like magic, and on how an old idea, that opposites meet, was dressed in the newest words of its day.
Quiz
Answer from the notes or the reading, in any order; you can change an answer at any time. Each answer says why, with a link to the page.