#mentalism

The same emphasis on connection appears in discussions of mycelial networks, systems theory, symbolism, literature, and even the reports of those who describe psychedelic experiences as a sudden awareness of interconnectedness.

Perhaps correspondence persists because it reflects a deeply human way of perceiving the world: not as a collection of isolated facts, but as a web of relationships where patterns echo across scales, revealing unexpected similarities between the inner and outer, the personal and collective, the microcosm and the macrocosm. Instead of a search for hierarchy, it becomes a search for integration.

Alongside correspondence, the principles of Mentalism and Alchemy are some intriguing aspects of Hermetic thought.

This is perhaps why I was not surprised to see artificial intelligence described as a form of modern alchemy. Alchemy was never merely about transforming lead into gold or altering the physical properties of matter but was equally concerned with transformation itself—the transmission of forms, the transmutation of states, the movement between the concrete and the abstract.

In many ways, it was a philosophy of becoming. Mentalism extends this further through the proposition that reality is fundamentally mental in nature, drawing attention to the extraordinary capacity of imagination, symbolism, and thought.

Hence the popular phrase "imagination has no limits" echoed this principle for me, for the mind can conceive of worlds, possibilities, and structures far beyond the constraints of the body.

Yet Hermeticism is not a rejection of material reality. Rather, it exists in the tension between possibility and limitation, between what can be imagined and what can be enacted. To think alchemically is not simply to dream but to ask what can be transformed? what can be directed? and what remains bound by the conditions of existence.