About
What this is, who it is for, and what it does with your data
Why it exists
The Master Key System was sold in 1912 as a weekly correspondence course at a price that would be a month's rent, wrapped in promises no honest book can keep. Strip the salesmanship and what remains is a genuinely practical training manual for attention, habit, visualisation and self-belief — the same machinery that modern psychology studies under names like self-efficacy, implementation intentions, and attentional control.
The people who need that most are usually the ones least able to push through a dense 1912 text: someone demoralised, someone who has just failed at something that mattered, someone for whom hope currently feels like a bad bet. So this project does three things. It translates every one of the 759 numbered points into plain English and organises them into 125 sublevels you can finish in a sitting. It turns the exercises into something you can actually do, with timers, logs and visible progress. And it adds the part the original lacks entirely: an honest safety layer, because this genre has hurt people and that is a fact, not a marketing risk.
What is Haanel, and what is ours
- Haanel's text — every numbered point, every quote, every study question and answer, reproduced verbatim and attributed. The 1912 text is in the public domain and used freely.
- Our layer — the translations, the 54 bridges, the modern-lens notes, the exercises as presented, the gamification, the warnings, the practice tools. Written for this project and reviewed against a clinical standard; the audit is published in the repository as
CLINICAL-AUDIT.md. - Not affiliated — with any author, publisher, estate, or organisation selling courses, coaching or seminars. Nothing here is for sale, and there is no email list.
What we keep, and where
Everything lives in a single PostgreSQL database on the same server that serves these pages. There are no third-party analytics, no advertising networks, no embedded fonts, no social pixels, and no external scripts of any kind — the whole site is served from one origin.
| What | Why | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | Sign-in, email verification, password reset | Never shown to other users. Never used for marketing. |
| Password | Authentication | Stored only as a bcrypt hash (cost 12). We cannot read it. |
| Progress, sittings, moods | So your course follows you between devices | Visible to you; aggregate counts visible to the site owner. |
| Journal entries | Your private notes | Encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM) before they reach the database. |
| Page views | Counting which parts people read | Path, day, and an anonymous id. No IP address in the table. |
You can delete your account from the dashboard at any time; deletion removes your progress, journals, sittings, badges and sessions immediately and cannot be undone. Export everything as JSON first if you want a copy.
Cookies
| Cookie | Purpose | Details |
|---|---|---|
mka_session | Sign-in session | Only set when you sign in. HTTP-only, SameSite=Lax, 30 days. Deleted on sign-out. |
mka_you | Display hint | Your first name, so the header can say hello on static pages. Contains no secret and grants nothing; clears on sign-out. |
mka_anon | Anonymous visit counter | Random string so repeat visits are counted sensibly. 12 months. Not linked to your account. |
Reading it offline
The project also ships a single-file edition — the same 24 parts, 125 sublevels, exercises and safety layer in one self-contained HTML document with no server, no account and no network. It is the version to keep for a hostel wifi, a long flight, a kiosk, or anyone whose device should not be asked to trust another service. Progress in it is saved in the browser only.
Running your own copy
The whole application — course content, safety layer, tests, deploy scripts — is a single Next.js project with no proprietary services. The repository ships a preflight script, systemd units, an nginx vhost and a runbook, so it can be self-hosted on one small Linux server. Canonical site: https://masterkeysystem.in.
Contact
Corrections are welcome, especially from clinicians and from people who found a passage unhelpful. If something here reads as harmful, say so — that is a bug, and bugs get fixed. See the questions page for the rest of the small print.