The Pattern Beneath the Chaos
ยท @ErikaSmithIluszko
Life is not random. It is patterned.
Most of us were raised to believe that things simply happen. Some people are lucky, some are not, and the best we can do is keep our heads above water.
The traditions I have lived inside all my life tell a different story. Advaita Vedanta, Traditional Chinese Medicine and the teaching of karma each describe a world that moves according to recognisable patterns. Not commandments handed down from above. Patterns you can observe in your breath, your body, your relationships and your history.
Recently I came across a popular piece on Hermeticism and its seven principles, most often quoted from The Kybalion, a 1908 book that draws on much older Hermetic writings. What struck me was not how exotic it felt, but how familiar. Many cultures, separated by oceans and centuries, looked closely at life and arrived at similar maps. Here is how the territory looks from where I stand.
Everything appears in awareness
Advaita Vedanta begins where Hermeticism begins: with consciousness. Its central claim is that there is one reality, Brahman, and that the awareness you call “I” is not separate from it. Tat tvam asi, the Upanishads say. You are That.
This is not a claim that the world is fake. Advaita calls the world mithya: real as experience, but dependent on something more fundamental, the way a wave is real yet never apart from water. Everything you know, from galaxies to grief, shows up within awareness. Awareness itself never shows up as an object.
Why does this matter in daily life? Because what we experience is coloured by avidya, a basic misreading of who we are, and by samskaras, the deep impressions laid down by past experience. Shankara’s famous image is the rope mistaken for a snake in dim light. The fear is real. The snake never was.
So two people can walk through the same event and live two completely different realities. Much of what we take as “how the world is” is conditioning: family, school, culture, colonial history, the stories repeated until they felt like truth. Practice does not replace one story with a prettier one. It turns on the light, so we can see the rope for what it is.
This is where the witness, the sakshi, comes in. Sitting, breathing, noticing a thought arise and pass, we begin to rest as the one who sees rather than the thing being seen. Nothing has to be forced. Clarity does the work.
As in the body, so in the cosmos
Hermeticism says “as above, so below.” The yogic traditions say yat pinde tat brahmande: as in the body, so in the universe. TCM says it in its own language, describing the human being as a small landscape held between heaven and earth.
In TCM, the body is mapped through the Five Phases: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. Each phase links a season, an organ system, an emotion and a quality of movement. The Liver belongs to Wood and spring, to rising energy and, when blocked, to frustration and anger. Your inner weather and the weather outside are read as one continuous system.
I see this every day in the studio and in bodywork. Fascia does not respect our neat anatomical borders. A held breath shows up in the jaw, the shoulders, the pelvic floor. A life lived in constant alarm shows up as tissue that never quite softens.
The invitation of correspondence is practical. When something outside keeps repeating, look for its echo inside. Not to blame yourself, but because the inner landscape is the one place you can always begin.
Nothing stands still
In TCM, health is qi that moves freely. Illness is very often stagnation: something held, stuck or blocked. Even what looks still, a mountain, a sleeping body, is in slow, constant motion.
That movement has a rhythm. TCM describes qi moving through the organ systems over the 24-hour day, which is why waking at the same hour of the night is something a practitioner pays attention to. It follows the seasons too, asking us to expand in summer and conserve in winter. The cosmologies of India speak of whole cycles of creation and dissolution, srishti and pralaya, on a vast scale. The same pulse lives in a single breath: in, pause, out, pause.
Our economy asks us to be productive in a straight line, 365 days a year. That is not how living systems work. Burnout is often not a personal failure. It is what happens when a cyclical being is forced to perform like a machine. Honouring rhythm is not laziness. It is intelligence.
The dance of opposites
At the heart of TCM is yin and yang. Not two enemies, but two aspects of one whole. Each contains the seed of the other, and at its extreme, each turns into the other. Midnight is the deepest yin and the moment the day begins to return.
The Bhagavad Gita speaks of the dvandvas, the pairs of opposites: heat and cold, pleasure and pain, praise and blame. Krishna does not tell Arjuna to escape them. He asks for samatvam, evenness of mind within them. “Yoga is equanimity,” the Gita says. Not numbness, not a forced smile. A steadiness that can feel everything and still not be thrown.
This is also how I read the paired forces that Hermeticism calls masculine and feminine. In TCM it is yang and yin. In the tantric traditions that sit close to Vedanta, it is Shiva and Shakti: pure awareness and its creative power, inseparable, like fire and its heat. Advaita speaks of Brahman and maya, the power through which the One appears as many.
None of this is about men and women, or about which body does what. Every person, of every gender, holds both stillness and movement, receptivity and direction. Using these principles to box people into roles misses the teaching entirely. The point is wholeness, not hierarchy.
Karma is not punishment
Karma simply means action, and the law of karma says that actions have consequences. Every cause bears fruit, sometimes quickly, sometimes across years. The tradition speaks of karma already stored, karma already ripening in this life, and karma we are creating now.
That last one is where our freedom lives. We cannot choose everything that happens to us. We can choose how we respond, and that response becomes the next cause. In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that his right is to the action alone, never to its fruits. Act well, act fully, and let go of controlling the outcome.
Karma has also been weaponised. It has been used to say that the poor deserve poverty, that the oppressed earned their oppression, and to justify caste. I reject that reading completely. Responsibility is not blame. Many of the effects we live with, racism, colonial extraction, economic exclusion, were caused by systems, not by the people who suffer them.
There is a Filipino word I return to often: kapwa, the self shared with others. It sits close to Advaita’s vision of one Self in all beings. If we are not truly separate, then karma is never only personal. What our societies set in motion, we inherit together. What we do now, we shape together.
And Advaita adds one more turn. From the highest view, the Self is not the doer at all. Actions arise, consequences unfold, and awareness witnesses it all untouched. That is not an excuse to stop caring. It is what lets us act without the weight of the ego, and with a lot more love.
Not a master key, a way of seeing
Popular spirituality often sells these ideas as a toolkit for getting what you want: the perfect job, the perfect partner, the life you manifest. The traditions I study point somewhere quieter and more radical. Not toward getting more, but toward seeing clearly who is doing the wanting.
I do not offer this as the only truth. Hermetic, Vedantic, Daoist, Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing each light up different parts of the same mystery, and I have learned from many of them. These are the maps that have held me, through decades of practice, teaching and living in many places.
What they share is simple. Knowledge that stays in the head changes little. Bring it to the mat, the breath, the way you speak to the person in front of you, the way you show up for your community. That is where philosophy becomes practice, and practice becomes a life.
Practice it with us
If these ideas resonate, don’t leave them on the page. Come and explore them in the body, in community, at Manas Yoga Vienna. Our classes, workshops and Modular Teacher Training weave Advaita Vedanta, TCM and somatic inquiry into practice you can feel.
Book a class or explore our trainings at manas-yoga.studio
And I’d love to hear from you: which of these patterns are you living with right now? Share it in the comments, or pass this on to someone who needs it today.