“If then you do not make yourself equal to God you cannot apprehend God. For like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal and make yourself to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure. Rise above all kind and become eternal, then you will apprehend god. Think that for you too nothing is impossible. Deem that you too are immortal and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and every science. Find your home in the hearts of every living creature make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths, bring together in yourself all opposites of all qualities, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity. Think that you are everywhere at once. On land, at sea in heaven. Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave. Grasp in your thought all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together, then you can apprehend God.

But if you shut up your soul in your body and debase yourself and say, I know nothing, I can do nothing, I am afraid of earth and sea, I can not mount to heaven. I know not what I was nor what I shall be. Then what have you to do with god? Would that be possible for you to grow wings and soar into the air? Poised between earth and heaven you might see the solid earth, the fluid sea, the streaming rivers, the wandering air, the penetrating fire, the courses of the stars and the swiftness of the movements of the heavens which encompasses all. What happiness were that my son to see all these born along with one impulse. And to behold him who is unmoved, moving in all that moves and him who is hidden made manifest through his works.”

– Hermes Trismegistos, Corpus Hermeticum

Colline du Languedoc, Lausanne | Vaud, Suisse · Nikon Z6, Nikkor Z 24-70mm 1:4 S