Around two thousand years ago, a body of teachings emerged in Alexandria, Egypt, attributed to a figure called Hermes Trismegistus. Whether he was one person, several, or a symbol for a tradition of thought is genuinely debated by historians — but the ideas themselves survived, copied and passed down, eventually collected in a text called The Kybalion.
One of its central principles is called Correspondence: “As above, so below; as within, so without.”
The idea is simple to state and takes a lifetime to actually live: the patterns inside you — your beliefs, your internal images, the reality you rehearse in your own mind — correspond to the patterns you experience in the world around you. Change what’s happening within, and what’s without begins to shift too.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the exact mechanism “True Me” is built on.
What This Looks Like in Practice
When you do the True Me meditation, you’re not just relaxing — you’re deliberately constructing an internal representation. Seeing it. Feeling it. Believing it, as if it’s already yours. That’s not a modern self-help invention. It’s a specific, disciplined application of a principle that’s thousands of years old, expressed here through the language of NLP instead of ancient Alexandria.
The Hermeticists didn’t have neuroscience, but they were pointing at something real: your nervous system doesn’t fully distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a lived one. The internal state you rehearse becomes the lens you actually perceive the world through — which shapes the choices you make, the opportunities you notice, and the way you show up. That’s not mysticism claiming to bend physical reality; it’s a genuinely well-supported idea about how internal states shape perception and behavior, dressed in ancient language.
Try This
Next time you sit down with True Me, hold the principle of Correspondence in mind as a frame, not just a nice idea:
‘Whatever I construct within, right now, is the seed of what I’ll meet without’
Notice, afterward, whether that framing changes how seriously you take the internal image you’re building — whether it feels less like a relaxation exercise and more like the first real step of something.
This is one thread in a much older tapestry. Hermeticism is one tradition pointing at this — you’ll find the same idea, from a different direction, when we look at it through modern psychology, and later, through what quantum physics can and can’t actually tell us about the observer’s role in reality
True Me — the guided meditation this piece is built around — is part of the full Mental Core Training Membership. Explore the full guided meditation →