It occurs to me that the appeal of writing in dialogue is that it gives me the opportunity to converse with myself. I make a statement, then I respond. The story that arises is almost secondary to the exercise of meeting my own mind. The story told, then, is often the story of myself. I suppose then the hope is that as I reflect myself to the world, the world sees something about itself, though not quite itself, useful in what I find in me.
Finding One’s Self
“Who are you?”
“This is a trick question, right? Do you not see the name-tag on my chest. Isn’t that why I’m wearing one of these things, so that you don’t need to ask exactly that question?”
“I mean aside from the name. Who are you?”
“Well, the name is a designation assigned to the circumstances of my creation and the history that followed up until this point in time. I would answer with the name you see on my chest, but it is merely representative of what my singular point of consciousness has perceived up until now. I would describe myself as that history designated by the name upon my chest, but, in my humble opinion, that would take too long, and so again I indicate to you once more reading the tag for the sake of saving time.”
“So for starters, you’re easily irritable, verbose, and take your time about dwelling in sarcasm?”
“I’m also fond of concision. Have I more or less answered your question?”
“So you believe yourself to be your history, not your present?”
“I believe my present is a representation of the entirety of my history. I am also that history combined with its interaction with whatever stimuli exists at present; in this case your question and the pressure of our audience.”
“So you are your cumulative experience combined with the experience of the moment. You are your uniqueness as an identity individuated, combined with the circumstance created by all other individualities?”
The other week, as an acquaintance of mine was babbling something interspersed with the term “holy trinity,” (and I wish here to make perfectly clear for the sake of not offending anyone that this acquaintance of mine is absolutely NOT catholic) my mind glommed onto the notion that briefly going over the basic common-cosmic law of three would not make for a bad topic. Everything = God, therefore, even more so that most basic universal law upon which all of existence without exception is derived. God’s engine, if you will . . .
G.I. Gurdjieff wrote it out this way:
” . . . three holy forces of the sacred Triamazikamno the said science calls as follows:
the first, the Affirming-force’ or the ‘Pushing-force’ or simply the ‘Force-plus’;
the second, the ‘Denying-force’ or the ‘Resisting-force’ or simply the ‘Force-minus’; and the third, the ‘Reconciling-force’ or the ‘Equilibrating-
force’ or the ‘Neutralizing-force.’”
The Tao Te Ching’s says: From the Tao is one; one begets two, two begets three, and three begets the myriad things. – A paraphrase of different translations of chapter 42.
Jewish mysticism speaks of three, the Hindus have the Trimurti, even the catholics have their famous trinity. And so, all this talk of three in just about every deep teaching on creationism naturally gives rise to the question: is there truth to these teachings of three, and if so, what does the teaching mean? And it is quite simple, and the foundation, three-dimensional as it may be, upon which the universe as we can conceive it as three-dimensional beings, exists.
Let’s start with the conceptual, the squeeze your brain stuff, and work our way back to the basics, shall we? I hear no dissent, here we go!
The Tao says first is the Tao. I like that term better than the term God, personally, it seems more dispassionate, and thus somehow more objective. Of course, the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. But it is all encompassing and omni-present and eternal through all of everything, and thus, from the limited concept of numbers, since it is perfectly all-inclusive in every way, it is pretty safe to call it One. Which immediately, of course gives rise to Two. Why? Because the second you start calling something One, that means there must be something other than One; a Two if you will. And Two doesn’t necessarily mean an existence; it could mean a non-existence, like “On” “Off.” But the idea is that if you can call something “One” there must be a “Two” to compare it to, otherwise, instead of “One” there’s just Tao, or, if you like, God. And if there is a Two, then there must be Three, and here’s why . . .
Two implies the complement of each other. Being and not being. On and Off. Back and Front. In and Out. Plus and Minus. In between, the whole of their disparate existences, their net sum, the Tao itself, becomes three. One means Two, thus One plus Two is Three. Which is two say that two forces perfectly opposite do not destroy each other, they go exist as themselves, but when they try to interact, something not quite either emerges. A harmonizing effect based on what happens between the two, that is one and two, and thus is created from these sacred basic existences all the many many different things we can be aware of, or in other words, three begets the myriad things.
So first is all of existence indivisible. Then, when one perceives the reality of that whole, two is distinguished because in indivisible there is no perspective but omni-perspective. And thus, to be able to know that, one must be able to consider the illusion of differentiation, which sets oneself from the whole of All, and thus is born two. And the interaction between All and part is the third force, the holy spirit of creating existence, which is how the different things of existence comes to be.
Ready for the easy part? Force Plus, Force Minus, and Force Equalizing. So it goes like this: you put together two opposing forces and they find their balance based on whichever of the forces is stronger.
You push down on a soft piece of bread, there now exists bread with a dent. You apply heat to dough, bread rises and won’t get moldy for a lot longer than if that same substance were instead left in a cool dark place. You keep water and flour separate, there is water, and flour, and no new creation.
Proton, Electron, Neutron.
Male, Female, Child. From this most sacred of impulses amongst polarized sexuality within them, for the most part, comes a chromosome-equal entity that will exist based upon the sum of its parts internally, and its experiences externally; which if you think about it gets into the number 6 as 1.
And so, what the trinity means is one plus two equals three in all creations without exception. For an existence may lean more one way or the other, but where both directions intersect, no matter which direction one leans toward, that is where the harmonization of their existence reconciles the two disparities, and that is where the culmination of all existence exists within it.
Unless it is dead, in which case it is about to become a tree, which, personally, I believe is only a plus!
When I think about organized religions, especially the western ones, and I compare them to the way I perceive God, it looks to me something like this:
Many, maybe most, not all, who subscribe to the organized bunch generally seem to have some, if not in the very unfortunate cases all, of their thoughts on the matter written for them somewhere in some book, or thought into their minds, without a direct experiencing of what it is they think they believe. I have trouble believing something in a book, no matter how old it is or how many people buy it, because, I have read a lot of books. What is on a page, and what I can feel with my hand, seldom mesh. Mother Goose and Grimm is nice in its way. Porridge is better than starvation, and when one falls down a hill their likely-hood of death does increase. But, on a whole, I’m able to perceive that a story is not necessarily written to be congruous with my life as I am living it. It may contain a good example of something. Maybe make me think of something that does have an actual, real world, application. But on a whole, a story is a story, and when I’m not a crazy person, I can usually leave it in the book it came and walk away happily.
But when one can’t tell the difference between a story in a book, and the life they are living, there seems to me to be a problem. When a person takes the words of some man, or woman, and believes that the validity of their life rests solely in the words written by a human being, they have stopped seeking their own individuality and have stopped seeking their own connectivity to the divine form the perspective of their own unique individuality.
So, since everything, from my perspective, is God, and since every person is given the capacity to choose, if they choose to use that capacity, I see a metaphor for two distinct approaches to God. In this metaphor one has no choice but to serve the divine. One may be serving the adversarial aspect of the divine, HaSatan, but nonetheless, no one has choice but to serve wherever they are best suited to serve, within the context of an Omni-Divine universe. That being the case, the choice lies in this: In one version, in which one lives out the words of a book as though it were their own perspective, one chooses slavery to a God they choose never to want to have a direct interaction with. In the other version, one chooses to serve God and take their orders directly from a living entity creating existence in real time.
Because they think that stepping outside of their book and having a real relationship with God is too scary, one would bow their eyes below the light of the divine and see its light cast only on a man-made representation of the world. In the other version, one serves actively the creation of the world as it exists and is being made to exist by the light provided; their eyes resting where the intention of creation is at hand.
Not that one can’t derive good inspiration from some words passed down over the ages, but at the point in time in which one has been conned into being afraid that someone believing something different is damned to Hell, they seem too over-joyfully to begin creating that Hell amidst us on Earth in order to save us from the very thing they are so anxiously afflicting upon us living folk. At which point the desire for death to “go to Heaven” or in different terms “make it stop” suddenly becomes all too clear.
The alternative seems to be to eat our food with bits of salt. While understanding what we are creating in some moments hinges on once glancing and cognizing a handful of words in a book, it is the results we live outside that book that is the real test of the validity of our capacity to serve all creation in all its form. And may we be able to serve all its forms well, for appearance may deceive, but a kind action from one’s own hand never lies.
Hi! I'm Tygarjas Twyrls Bigstyck. Currently the home of the long work in-progress "The Chronicles of the Angels of Eden." Prior to this, I wrote about a conception of divinity that might be helpful for those willing to think outside of organized religion, and subsequently a place for me to flex my creative muscles as I devoted a year of blogging to short fiction. Enjoy!
Tygarjas Twyrls Blog 