“As above, so below.”
I've come across those words before, usually in spiritual or esoteric conversations.
Then I saw the images.
A lightning bolt and the branches of a tree.
A tree and the human nervous system.
The nervous system and the branching structure of brain cells.
And suddenly, the phrase felt much more tangible.
How many patterns in life we simply don't notice because we're so used to seeing them?
The Same Pattern at Different Scales
The idea of as above, so below comes from the Hermetic tradition and is often understood as the principle of correspondence: the suggestion that patterns found at one level of existence can be reflected at another.
The larger and the smaller.
The cosmos and the individual.
The outer world and the inner world.
I don't take that to mean that everything is literally a perfect copy of everything else.
But the more I looked at these examples, the more fascinating the similarities became.
A tree sends its branches outward from a central trunk.
The human nervous system branches through the body.
Neurons branch into smaller and smaller pathways.
Even lightning creates those familiar branching patterns across the sky.
Different things. Completely different functions.
And yet, somehow, the same kind of geometry keeps appearing.
We Are Part of the Pattern
The human body itself is full of these repetitions.
We have branching blood vessels.
Branching lungs.
Neural pathways.
The intricate structures of cells.
And then we look outward and find branching rivers, trees, lightning, root systems and other forms in nature that echo something strangely familiar.
It made me think about how easily we separate ourselves from the natural world.
We talk about nature as though it is something outside of us.
But our bodies are made from the same physical world we are looking at.
The minerals, water and elements that make up our bodies didn't come from somewhere separate.
They belong to the same Earth.
So maybe it isn't so strange that some of the same patterns appear within us.
Maybe we are less separate than we usually imagine.
As Above, So Below
If the outer world can reflect patterns found within us, could the reverse also be true?
Could our inner world influence how we experience the outer one?
I've explored this idea before through consciousness, thought, manifestation and the way our perceptions shape our experience.
But as above, so below gave me another way of looking at it.
What happens inside us doesn't stay neatly contained inside our heads.
Our thoughts affect our emotions.
Our emotions affect our bodies.
Our bodies influence how we move through the world.
And the world around us, in turn, affects what happens inside us.
It's a constant exchange.
Inner and outer.
Microcosm and macrocosm.
We aren't observing life from completely outside of it. We're participating in it.
And Then There Was the Fibonacci Spiral
The Fibonacci sequence is another example that made me curious.
The sequence appears in certain patterns found in nature, and the familiar spiral associated with it can be seen approximately in things like human ears, plant and some shells.
Symbolically, I understand why people have found it so fascinating.
A pattern that grows from something very small can continue outward, repeating its underlying relationship at a much larger scale.
That reminded me of the original idea.
Something small containing a pattern that seems to belong to something much larger.
And I kept thinking about that in relation to consciousness.
What if some of the things we experience within ourselves are also reflections of much larger patterns?
I don't know if we can prove that.
But I find it an interesting.
What I See Differently Now
The more I thought about as above, so below, the less I saw it as a mysterious phrase and the more I saw it as an invitation to pay attention.
To actually look.
At the world.
At the body.
At the mind.
At the repeating shapes and relationships that surround us.
There is something humbling about realizing that the human experience sits somewhere between the enormous and the microscopic.
We can look up at the stars and feel incredibly small.
Then we can look inside a cell and discover another universe of complexity.
And somehow, we exist right in between.
Maybe that's part of what this old idea has been trying to express all along.
Maybe the universe isn't always speaking to us in words.
Maybe sometimes it simply repeats itself until we finally notice.
♡𓂃adetriyani
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