You Are the Universe Knowing Itself: Indra's Net, "As Above, So Below," and What Modern Cosmology Is Starting to Confirm

Kelley Eckhardt

6 days ago

7 min read

A Little About Why I'm Writing This

For those of you who are new here — welcome. My name is Kelley Eckhardt, and I want to start by telling you something most people find hard to believe until they've sat with me for a while: I was born remembering.

I remember my past lives. I remember my time in the spiritual realm before I arrived here. And I remember my own birth and the first years of my life in vivid, complete detail. My very first thought, the moment I was born, was not wonder or peace — it was stress. I was cold, I was annoyed by the bright lights and the adults fussing over me, and I remember thinking, clearly, in full sentences, exactly the way I think today. I simply had no control over the body I'd just landed in. I was, in every way that mattered inside, still me — I just happened to be an infant.

One of the last things I remember from before I arrived was a kind of instruction: Never forget anything. Remember it all. And I have. My earliest real memory is from four months old, during the 1971 San Fernando earthquake — I remember the weather that day, the smell in the room, who was there, and the time of year. That's how I remember almost everything in my life: not as a fading photograph, but as a full sensory moment I can still step back into.

That instruction — remember it all — has shaped everything I believe and everything I teach. Because what I came back remembering, more than any single fact or date, is this: we are all connected. The universe itself is something like a soul, with its own thoughts and emotions, and each of us is one small part of that soul, living inside a body that is itself its own little universe. I believe we were meant to remember this — that what we do doesn't only affect us. It ripples out to the people we surround ourselves with, to our community, to the world, and yes, to the universe itself.

That's the thread I want to pull on with you today — because it turns out I'm far from the first person, or the first tradition, to feel this.

There's a feeling many of us have had in a quiet moment — standing under a night sky, sitting with a client during a reading, or simply noticing how one small kindness seems to travel further than we expect. It's the sense that nothing exists in isolation. That you are not separate from the person across from you, from the earth beneath you, or from the stars overhead — that everything is, in some way, woven into one continuous fabric.

This isn't a fringe or "new" spiritual idea. It's one of the oldest, most persistent threads in human thought — appearing independently across Buddhist temples, Hermetic texts, and, now, the equations of theoretical physicists. Let's trace it.

The Jewel Net of Indra

In 7th-century China, the founder of Huayan Buddhism, a monk named Dushun, described a vision of the god Indra's palace: an infinite net stretching in every direction, with a brilliant jewel hanging at each intersection. Look closely at any single jewel, and you find something extraordinary — it reflects every other jewel in the net. And within each of those reflections is a reflection of all the other jewels, and so on, infinitely.¹

The teaching is this: each individual thing contains the whole, and the whole is expressed through each individual thing. Touch one jewel, and the vibration moves through the entire net. Nothing stands apart. Centuries later, the beloved Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh built his teaching of "interbeing" on this same image — reminding us that a sheet of paper "inter-is" with the cloud that became the rain that fed the tree it was made from. Nothing exists independently; everything inter-is with everything else.

As Above, So Below

Halfway around the world and roughly a thousand years earlier, a very similar idea was taking root in the Hermetic tradition. The phrase "as above, so below" comes from the Emerald Tablet, a text of unknown authorship dated to at least the 8th or 9th century: "That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above."²

This became the seed of what scholars call the microcosm–macrocosm analogy — the idea that the human being is a "small universe" structurally mirroring the "great universe" of the cosmos. It wasn't a fringe idea even in its own time. Plato taught that the cosmos itself possessed a mind, a "world soul," and that the human soul shared its nature. Centuries later, the Renaissance anatomist Vesalius examined the human body and concluded it "corresponds admirably to the universe" — which is precisely why the ancients called it "the little universe."³ Physicians, philosophers, and mystics across Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, and the Islamic and Jewish philosophical traditions all arrived at some version of the same insight: know the small, and you begin to know the great.

What Modern Cosmology Is Discovering

Here's where it gets genuinely exciting — because contemporary physics keeps rediscovering echoes of this same architecture, from a completely different direction.

We are, literally, star matter. Carl Sagan's famous words — "We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the Universe to know itself" — weren't just poetry. The carbon in your cells, the oxygen you breathe, the iron in your blood were forged inside the nuclear furnaces of stars and scattered across space by supernovae, long before they became soil, then plants, then you.⁴ The cosmos isn't just "out there." It's the literal material you're made of, still finding its way to look back at itself through your eyes.

Small changes ripple through the whole system. Chaos theory — the branch of physics and mathematics behind the famous "butterfly effect" — shows that in any deeply interconnected system, a small disturbance in one place can cascade into large, distant consequences elsewhere. The philosopher Fichte wrote as early as 1800 that you couldn't remove a single grain of sand "without thereby changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole."⁵ It's the same intuition as Indra's Net, arrived at independently through mathematics: touch one point, and the whole system feels it.

The part may encode the whole. Perhaps the most startling echo comes from the holographic principle, one of the most serious ideas in modern theoretical physics. Developed by physicists including Gerard 't Hooft, Leonard Susskind, and Juan Maldacena, it proposes that all the information contained within a region of space can be fully encoded on that region's boundary — meaning the "whole" can, in a real mathematical sense, be reconstructed from a lower-dimensional "part" of it.⁶ Physicists apply this narrowly, to black holes and the fabric of spacetime itself — but it's hard not to notice how closely it rhymes with a jewel that reflects an entire net within itself.

Holding Both Truths

I want to be honest with you about where the poetry and the physics currently part ways. Cosmologists aren't claiming that your personal choices send a measurable ripple to a star in the Andromeda galaxy — that leap belongs to the metaphysical tradition, not the physics journals. What the science does confirm, with real evidence, is that you are physically composed of the same material as the stars, and that in any truly interconnected system, no action is ever fully isolated.

Maybe that's the deeper point. Three entirely different traditions — a Buddhist monk in 7th-century China, a Hermetic philosopher in the ancient Near East, and a 21st-century theoretical physicist — arrived at strikingly similar visions of reality through completely different paths: intuition, revelation, and mathematics. When that many independent roads lead to the same place, it's worth pausing to consider that they might all be pointing at something true.

You are a jewel in the net. You are star-stuff, looking back at the sky it came from. Above and below were never really two different things.

Something to Sit With

Here's what I want to leave you with this week, because I don't think this idea is meant to just be beautiful — I think it's meant to be useful.

If every action really does ripple outward — through the people you love, into your community, out into the world, and yes, even into the universe — then here's my question for you:

What is one small thing you could do today that would positively change your own life, and someone else's, at the same time?

It doesn't need to be big. A kind word to a stranger. Forgiving something you've been holding onto. Calling the person you've been meaning to check on. Choosing patience over frustration in one moment you'd normally lose to it. Remember — a single jewel touched sends light through the entire net.

I'd love for this to become something we build together. Imagine if every one of us reading this made just one small positive choice this week — and then another next week, and the week after that. That's not a small ripple anymore. That's a movement. And I believe, down to my bones, that a better world is built exactly this way: one small, connected action at a time.

So this week, I'm asking you to try it — and if you feel moved to, write back and tell me what you chose to do. I read every single one, and I'll be sharing some of your stories (with permission) in a future newsletter.

We're all one net. Let's make it glow.

With love and light,Kelley

Sources