along the unconscious plane.  All individuals who have attained any degree of self-mastery, accomplish this, more or less unknowingly, and by refusing to allow their moods and negative mental states to affect them, they apply the Law of Neutralization.  The Master, however, carries this to a much higher degree of proficiency, and by the use of his Will he attains a degree of Poise and Mental Firmness almost impossible of belief on the part of those who allow themselves to be swung backward and forward by the mental pendulum of moods and feelings.

The importance of this will be appreciated by any thinking person who realizes what creatures of moods, feelings and emotion the majority of people are, and how little mastery of themselves they manifest.  If you will stop and consider a moment, you will realize how much these swings of Rhythm have affected you in your life—­how a period of Enthusiasm has been invariably followed by an opposite feeling and mood of Depression.  Likewise, your moods and periods of Courage have been succeeded by equal moods of Fear.  And so it has ever been with the majority of persons—­tides of feeling have ever risen and fallen with them, but they have never suspected the cause or reason of the mental phenomena.  An understanding of the workings of this Principle will give one the key to the Mastery of these rhythmic swings of feeling, and will enable him to know himself better and to avoid being carried away by these inflows and outflows.  The Will is superior to the conscious manifestation of this Principle, although the Principle itself can never be destroyed.  We may escape its effects, but the Principle operates, nevertheless.  The pendulum ever swings, although we may escape being carried along with it.

There are other features of the operation of this Principle of Rhythm of which we wish to speak at this point.  There comes into its operations that which is known as the Law of Compensation.  One of the definitions or meanings of the word “Compensate” is, “to counterbalance” which is the sense in which the Hermetists use the term.  It is this Law of Compensation to which the Kybalion refers when it says:  “The measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.”

The Law of Compensation is that the swing in one direction determines the swing in the opposite direction, or to the opposite pole-the one balances, or counterbalances, the other.  On the Physical Plane we see many examples of this Law.  The pendulum of the clock swings a certain distance to the right, and then an equal distance to the left.  The seasons balance each other in the same way.  The tides follow the same Law.  And the same Law is manifested in all the phenomena of Rhythm.  The pendulum, with a short swing in one direction, has but a short swing in the other; while the long swing to the right invariably means the long swing to the left.  An object hurled upward to a certain height has an equal distance to traverse on its return.  The force with which a projectile is sent upward a mile is reproduced when the projectile returns to the earth on its return journey.  This Law is constant on the Physical Plane, as reference to the standard authorities will show you.