Mentalism and Vibration: When Ancient Hermeticism Meets Quantum Physics

Two of the seven Hermetic principles sit at the foundation of the whole system like twin pillars holding up a temple. The first — Mentalism — says that consciousness is the fundamental substance of reality. The second — Vibration — says that this consciousness expresses itself as frequency, that nothing in the universe is static, that everything from a granite boulder to a passing thought is a pattern of oscillation. Together, they make a claim so radical that Western science spent three centuries dismissing it — only to arrive at essentially the same conclusion from the opposite direction, armed with particle accelerators and interferometers instead of incense and meditation.

The Principle of Mentalism: “The All is Mind”

The first Hermetic principle, as stated in the Kybalion, reads: “The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.” This is not a poetic metaphor. It is a precise ontological claim. It says that the fundamental nature of existence is not matter, not energy, not information — but consciousness. The physical universe, in this view, is something like a thought sustained within a cosmic mind. Everything you see, touch, measure, and calculate exists within consciousness, not the other way around.

For most of modern scientific history, this idea was heresy. The materialist paradigm that dominated from Newton through the nineteenth century held exactly the opposite: consciousness was a byproduct of matter, an emergent property of sufficiently complex neural networks, the foam on the wave. Matter was primary. Mind was secondary. End of story.

Then quantum mechanics arrived and burned that story to the ground.

The Observer Effect: Mind Re-enters Physics

In the early twentieth century, physicists discovered something that still makes materialists uncomfortable: at the quantum level, the act of observation changes what is being observed. This is not mystical speculation — it is one of the most thoroughly verified findings in the history of science.

The double-slit experiment, first performed with electrons and later with photons, demonstrates this with devastating clarity. When particles are fired at a barrier with two slits and no one monitors which slit each particle passes through, they produce an interference pattern on the detector screen — the hallmark of wave behavior. But when a detector is placed at the slits to observe which path each particle takes, the interference pattern vanishes and the particles behave like bullets, hitting the screen in two clusters. The mere act of measuring — of looking — collapses the wave function into a definite state.

This is not a limitation of our instruments. In 2025, MIT researchers stripped the double-slit experiment down to its quantum essentials and confirmed that the phenomenon persists at the most fundamental level. The observer is not a passive recorder of pre-existing reality. The observer participates in the creation of what is observed.

Wheeler’s Participatory Universe

No one took this implication further than John Archibald Wheeler, the theoretical physicist who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole.” Wheeler was not a mystic — he was Richard Feynman’s doctoral advisor, a contributor to the Manhattan Project, and one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century. And he spent the last decades of his career developing what he called the “Participatory Anthropic Principle.”

Wheeler’s famous phrase was “It from bit” — the idea that every item of the physical world has an immaterial, information-theoretic origin. He wrote: “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe.” He stated flatly that “no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”

His delayed-choice experiment — proposed in 1978 and experimentally verified multiple times since — showed something even more startling: the choice of what to measure in the present can determine the behavior of a particle in the past. The observer does not merely collapse the present — the observer reaches backward through time, retroactively determining the path a photon “already” took. Wheeler wrote that quantum mechanics “destroys the concept of the world as ‘sitting out there,’ with the observer safely separated from it by a 20 centimeter slab of plate glass.”

This is, in precise scientific language, the Principle of Mentalism. The universe is not a machine grinding along independently of consciousness. The universe is a participatory process in which mind plays a constitutive role.

Now, Wheeler himself was careful to distinguish his physics from parapsychology — in 1979, he asked the American Association for the Advancement of Science to expel parapsychology as a pseudoscience. He was not saying that your thoughts magically rearrange matter. He was saying something subtler and, in some ways, more radical: that the very fabric of physical reality is woven from information, and that observation — measurement, interaction, participation — is what converts quantum possibility into classical actuality. The universe does not exist in a definite state until something looks at it. Mentalism, indeed.

The Principle of Vibration: “Nothing Rests”

The third Hermetic principle states: “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.” At first glance, this seems obvious — of course things vibrate. But the Hermetic claim goes deeper than “things shake.” It asserts that vibration is the fundamental mechanism of manifestation. That the difference between matter, energy, and thought is not one of substance but of frequency. That the entire spectrum of existence — from the densest stone to the most ethereal spiritual state — is a continuum of vibration.

Modern physics has arrived at a strikingly similar picture through two very different paths: quantum field theory and string theory.

Quantum Fields: The Vibrating Void

In quantum field theory — our most successful description of particle physics — particles are not little billiard balls. They are excitations of underlying fields. An electron is a vibration in the electron field. A photon is a vibration in the electromagnetic field. A quark is a vibration in the quark field. The “stuff” of the universe is not matter — it is vibrating fields. What we experience as solid reality is patterns of oscillation in an underlying quantum vacuum.

This vacuum itself is not empty. It seethes with what physicists call zero-point energy — ceaseless quantum fluctuations that persist even at absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature. The so-called “empty” space inside every atom, between every galaxy, everywhere you look, is a roiling ocean of vibration. Nothing rests. Everything vibrates. The Hermetic principle, stated in the language of quantum field theory.

String Theory: The Universe as Symphony

String theory takes this further. In its mathematical framework, the most fundamental entities in the universe are not point particles but one-dimensional vibrating filaments — strings — approximately 10^-33 centimeters in length. Different particles are not different substances; they are different vibrational modes of the same fundamental string. Just as a single violin string can produce different notes depending on how it vibrates, a single cosmic string produces different particles — electrons, quarks, photons, gravitons — depending on its frequency and mode of vibration.

The mass and charge of every particle are determined by how its string vibrates. The strings are so small that they appear to be dimensionless points, but their vibrational patterns encode all the diversity of the physical world. In string theory, matter is literally frozen music. The universe is a symphony.

String theory requires extra spatial dimensions — typically ten or eleven total — for its mathematics to be consistent. The exact geometry of these hidden dimensions determines which vibrational patterns are possible, much as the shape of a French horn determines which notes it can produce. If string theory is correct, then the fundamental architecture of reality is vibration shaped by geometry — frequency dancing within form. This is pure Hermeticism translated into mathematics.

Cymatics: Vibration Made Visible

While string theory operates at scales too small to photograph, the relationship between vibration and form can be directly witnessed through cymatics — a field pioneered by Swiss physician and natural scientist Hans Jenny (1904-1972). Jenny spread fine particles — sand, powder, liquid — on vibrating plates and membranes, then subjected them to specific sound frequencies. What he documented was extraordinary.

Low frequencies produced simple, symmetrical geometric patterns. Higher frequencies produced increasingly complex and elaborate forms. As the frequency changed, the patterns would dissolve and reorganize — the same material expressing completely different architectures depending purely on the frequency of vibration applied to it.

Jenny used crystal oscillators and his custom-built tonoscope to generate precise frequencies on a sixty-centimeter black drum membrane. When he sang through a cardboard pipe into the membrane, the sand arranged itself into the symmetrical Chladni patterns first documented by Ernst Chladni in the eighteenth century — but Jenny went further, systematically cataloging how different frequencies create different geometries.

One of his most profound insights was the concept of “formative forces” — underlying vibrational principles that govern the emergence of patterns in both organic and inorganic matter. The patterns Jenny photographed are not random. They are the visible signatures of vibration organizing matter into form. A specific frequency does not suggest a form — it commands one.

This is directly observable. You can watch sand leap from chaos into a perfect mandala when the right frequency is applied. You can watch it dissolve and reassemble into a completely different geometry when the frequency shifts. The medium does not choose the pattern. The vibration does.

Frequency Medicine: The Body as Vibration

The implications extend into biology and healing. Every cell in the human body vibrates. Cell membranes oscillate at specific frequencies. DNA emits biophotons — ultra-weak light emissions. The heart generates an electromagnetic field measurable several feet from the body. The brain produces electrical rhythms across a spectrum from delta (0.5-4 Hz) through theta (4-8 Hz), alpha (8-13 Hz), beta (13-30 Hz), to gamma (30-100+ Hz) — each frequency band associated with different states of consciousness, different cognitive functions, different modes of being.

The emerging field of biofield science investigates how these endogenous frequencies relate to health and disease. Research into pulsed electromagnetic field therapy (PEMF), photobiomodulation, and sound-based therapies is building an evidence base for what the Hermetic tradition has always claimed: that the body’s state of health is fundamentally a vibrational phenomenon, and that shifting frequencies can shift physiology.

Mentalism and Vibration: The Two-Stroke Engine of Creation

Mentalism and Vibration are not two separate principles — they are two aspects of a single mechanism. Mentalism says: consciousness is the substrate. Vibration says: frequency is the mechanism by which consciousness differentiates itself into the ten thousand things.

Think of it this way. Mentalism is the ocean. Vibration is the wave. You cannot have waves without an ocean, and an ocean without waves is a theoretical abstraction — it does not exist in nature. Consciousness without vibration is undifferentiated potential. Vibration without consciousness is mechanical oscillation with no source and no experiencer.

Together, they describe a universe in which awareness gives rise to frequency, and frequency gives rise to form. Wheeler’s “It from bit” is the modern physics version of this ancient insight — information (mind) manifests as pattern (vibration) which crystallizes as particle (matter).

The Hermetic sages did not have particle accelerators or wave function equations. They had contemplation, observation, and the kind of direct perception that comes from sustained interior investigation. What they saw, sitting in silence, is what our most powerful instruments are now confirming at the edge of measurable reality: the universe is not made of things. It is made of mind, vibrating.

When a quantum physicist says that particles are excitations of underlying fields, and a Hermetic philosopher says that all manifestation is vibration within the universal mind — are they saying the same thing in different languages, or are they describing two different realities? And if they are saying the same thing, what does that tell us about the nature of the language barrier between science and wisdom?