The ancient Hermetic saying ‘As Above so Below‘ is, in fact, a kind of shortcut in the acquisition of wisdom. Man mirrors the worlds around him. The more conscious he is, the deeper he perceives this unity in seeming multiplicity, and the more each of his lessons will affect the entirety of his learning. He can apply whatever he learns from below to the above, and whatever he sees without to the within.
This hermetic principle also explains why ancient wisdom is so often expressed through metaphor. Taking advantage of the similarity between cosmoses, a myth of the creation of the world simultaneously teaches of the creation of consciousness in man. An Ark myth of surviving a cataclysmic flood teaches of man’s efforts to sustain his lofty aims from moment to moment. Metaphors are possible only because wisdom manifests similarly on all cosmoses.
Below are listed the posts on expressions of As Above so Below in ancient wisdom:
Ancient Egyptian Wisdom There is a legendary Egyptian mystic called Hermes Trismegistus who coined the aphorism: as above so below and as within so without. This pearl of ancient wisdom formulates a universal truth: all worlds are essentially identical, and the microscopic atom is structured in the[...]
When I launched the Ancient Wisdom Network earlier this year, I presented it as an experiment in building an online Ark. The idea was inspired by a pattern I had discovered in all previous wisdom schools: from the beginning of recorded history till our day, wisdom has always been re-expressed in ren[...]
Comparative religion is a recent luxury. Until about two centuries ago, each religion was jealous and exclusive. If you preached Buddhism in Medieval Europe, you'd be stoned to death. If you preached Islam in the Aztec Empire, your heart would be sacrificed to the sun-god. Wisely, each culture minde[...]
"The purpose of archeology is to learn what the Past has to teach us, not to impose our own conceptions on the Ancients." - Schwaller de Lubicz There's a solitary marble gate on the island of Naxos in Greece (featured above), that is all that remains of a once magnificent ancient temple to Apollo. [...]