If you study the ancient Hermetic traditions (Astrology, Alchemy, Tarot, etc) you'll run into this phrase many times. Probably not the whole thing, usually half of it. I've just combined them. It's usually either "As above so below" or "As within, so without." And it means essentially the same thing as "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you."
It means you have a tendency to see things happening around you, outside of you, that are also happening within you. The terms Above and Within both refer to your psyche, and without and below to the external world. This phenomenon of duality is what psychology refers to as Projection.
See, you have these little people inside you. Well, really they're more like little gods and goddesses, heroes, monsters, devils, and demons. You know they live inside because they come out and play in your dreams, and if you're a perceptive person you understand your dreams are telling you things about you, interior things. And they often do it by showing you these figures, these characters, that each embody some trait.
But the way we recognize these traits is often through projection. It's hard for us to see certain traits (namely the more negative or embarrassing ones) inside ourselves, but we sure can see those in other people! You've seen many Caines walking around in your life, many Lokis, been tempted by many Satans. And if you're lucky from time to time you run across a more enlightened person who might help you or get you through a difficult spot.
I did a post some time back called The Gods Are Abstracted Human Traits covering some of this, specifically how it seems people arrived at the notion of personifying various traits in the form of gods and goddesses and the rest of the mythological/religious figures.
As within, so without. You see people who seem to personify certain traits, and in your dreams you'll encounter one of those people, or perhaps it's more like a combination of several of them. Or better yet a distillation of the trait itself, abstracted from a lot of them but seen in a more pure form.
This doesn't only happen in dreams of course, that's just where we become most easily familiar with the process, which happens inside the psyche itself. Deep in the unconscious somewhere, where mysterious things are always happening.
It's a bit unfortunate that we call it the unconscious. In a way it's the right term, because it refers to that part of the mind (by far the biggest part of it, at least ten times the size of the part we can consciously monitor) where things happen without our being aware of them. In other words the part of our mind that exists below the threshold of conscious awareness.
So unconscious doesn't mean it's 'asleep' or knocked out, it just means we aren't able to become consciously aware of what's going on in there. It has what seems to be an autonomous life of its own, as if it's a completely different personality, doing things we have no knowledge of. Or more properly many separate intelligences, working on us without our awareness.
It communicates with the conscious part of the mind, most noticeably through dreams. And since language isn't really a function of the unconscious (or embodied mind as I've heard it called, which is a great term for it), it doesn't communicate with words in proper sentence structure, the way we're most familiar with communication. It works through symbols and metaphors.
This is why Jung maintains that the way to understand dreams is to see the figures not as external people. In other words, if you dream about your brother or your dad or a friend, it isn't really about that person, at least not entirely. The thing to do is to think about how you would describe that person in one sentence to somebody who's never met them, especially in relation to what they did in the dream. For example—you dream about a friend who (in the dream) does something terrible. You wake up and think "Oh that jerk, why would he do that? What is the dream telling me, is he going to betray me? I'd better keep an eye on him."
No. Dreams can't predict the future, and they don't know what people you know are going to do.
It's trying to tell you something about yourself, some inner truth, that you need to be aware of. And it's doing that symbolically, by showing you particular people who have particular traits. Think about that friend—what is he like? If you go back through your memories of interacting with him, what are the most egregious kinds of things he's done? You want to pay attention especially to the most emotionally charged memories. Has he betrayed you? Maybe more than once? And does he have a history of doing that? He may be what your unconscious has chosen to represent The Betrayer (a Judas, Caine, Loki, or at the most pure level a Satan).
So the microcosm is literally like the macrocosm—a little reflection or copy of it. As within, so without. What's happening inside of you, symbolized by these figures who act out their roles in your dreams, is a reflection of what's happening around you in the 'real' world. The physical world. There are betrayers in both worlds, and helpers, and various other kinds of figures who play their roles. What's important in interpreting dreams is to try to discover the roles.
As above so below is just another way of symbolizing the same truth. The empathic people, the ones most sensitive to these hidden realities, the shamans or witch doctors or prophets or messiahs etc, could see this more clearly, and they were able to figure it out. They didn't have a clinical language of psychology, and they had to come up with ways to communicate ideas that went sometimes entirely beyond their understanding of what they had experienced, so they spoke of a magical land, a place where these figures dwell and they can do amazing things (isn't that true in dreams?)
But they knew it was more than just dreams. Dreams are merely a reflection of the processes happening inside the psyche. They were aware of this, but again they didn't have technical language to frame it through, so they spoke of this magical land, in fact two of them. A good place where you can dwell if you avoid the dark temptations offered by the inner betrayers, and live according to the principles they enumerated as the virtues. But they advise to steer clear of the vices, such as anger, greed, jealousy, gluttony etc, because they learned if they gave in to those then it became much more difficult to enter into that realm, that inner state of calm and peace and bliss. In fact if they gave in to the temptations, that inner place became more like a seething snake pit filled with fire and pain.
So they taught to avoid those temptations. To walk the straight and narrow path of clean living, and it will lead to the succession of spiritual awakenings they had experienced many times, at many different scales. If you remain on that straight and narrow path the awakening experiences get bigger and more powerful.
There are all manner of awakenings, some very small and quite common, and some larger and far less common. At the small end of the spectrum it's little more than just joy and a sense of inner wellbeing. But as a person progresses on the path and learns to avoid the sins more and more and to treat others as they themselves would like to be treated (with love and respect), you begin to experience the larger and more powerful awakenings now and then, leading up to the really overwhelming ones like Jung had at the end of his period of Active Imagination sessions, when he dreamed of attending a big wedding between two mythological gods and was filled to overflowing with pure bliss of an unimaginable intensity. He woke from it and for a long time (weeks?) he retained the bliss and the sense that all is connected, that all is filled with pure love, and in fact that all is made from pure love. Science is getting close to discovering this. They're right that matter is made of energy, but they haven't yet discovered that that energy is love.
This is The Word, the Logos. It's what God is. It's what He is made of, and what he made the world and everything in it from, including us. Including you. It's just difficult to discern this until you clear yourself of all the vices that block you from experiencing it, and awaken the inner Christ consciousness that will grow (like a thousand-petaled lotus) and bless you infinitely. You reach this inner state through meditation, or that's one very effective method anyway. It's what is often called Silence in ancient disciplines, or symbolized as wandering through the desert, far from contact with the madding crowd, which will contaminate you with boundless vice.
If you saw the Jill Bolte Taylor video I posted a couple of times, it becomes clear it has a lot to do with the left and right brain hemispheres. She had an aneurysm in the left hemisphere that shut down her language centers and apparently also whatever filters prevent us from experiencing this pure bliss, this sense of absolute connectedness with the entire universe and everyone in it.
What the heck, I'll drop it here again:
![[IMG]](proxy.php?image=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FCfNapVKVIAM1k1s%3Fformat%3Djpg%26name%3Dsmall&hash=b654d2b1a9069f5d6b3c750d319927c2)
Search
Comments
Sort Comments By