Vibration

The Principle of Vibration is the third of the seven Hermetic Principles, summed up in the axiom: "Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates." It holds that all things are in motion, and that differences between things are differences in their rate of vibration.

A modern statement, an old name

These seven principles should be dated with care. They were set out in The Kybalion, published in Chicago in 1908 under the pseudonym "Three Initiates," a work generally attributed to the New Thought writer William Walker Atkinson. Although it invokes the name of Hermes Trismegistus and calls itself a Hermetic teaching, the seven-principle scheme is a product of the early twentieth-century New Thought movement, not of the ancient Hermetic writings such as the Corpus Hermeticum.

The principle is described here as part of that documented modern esoteric tradition, which has been widely influential in later occult and self-help literature.

Of the seven principles, Vibration is the one that most plainly borrows the language of the science of its own moment. By 1908 the wave theory of light was settled, the electromagnetic spectrum was a schoolroom fact, and wireless telegraphy had crossed the Atlantic. The Kybalion takes that vocabulary and carries it past where the physics goes, holding that thought, emotion and spirit differ from matter only in the rate at which they vibrate.

The move was not the book's invention. William Walker Atkinson had published Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World in 1906, arguing that mental states radiate and draw like states from others. Reading the two books side by side is among the strongest reasons to think one hand wrote both.

What follows in practice is the doctrine of mental transmutation. If states differ only by rate, then changing a state is a matter of altering rate rather than defeating an opposite, and the later chapters build their whole method on that. It is worth separating the method from the analogy that dresses it. The analogy is nineteenth century and does not survive contact with modern physics, which has no scale on which grief and granite are the same substance at different speeds. The practice it recommends, deliberate attention to shifting an emotional state instead of fighting it, is not answerable to that failure and did not depend on it.

Sources The Kybalion: The Definitive EditionPhilip Deslippe (ed.) with Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought WorldWilliam Walker Atkinson