In playing the piano, pressing one key is hardly making music. Intoning one note does little to inspire. Pressing two keys is not much better, offering a musically lean sound; an incompleteness. It is only the intoning of three, a full chord ( the 1st, 3rd and 5th), that we move toward music. Interesting, too, is that the chord itself is made up of notes a third higher up to the perfect 7th.
With chords in mind, we then sequence them and orchestrate their intersection to form musical phrases. So, until we reach the triads, we are missing dimensionality and fullness. One thinks of Bach and the exquisite, complex interweaving and harmonics that leave us amazed – all of it an evolving musical phrase with roots in the Law of Three.
This reference to the mathematics of music serves as an experiential anchor for understanding the Sacred Trinity. A flight to thinking reductionistically in terms of Unity alone, is the intellectual equivalent of intoning a single note. This arguably diminishes the natural experience of the tri-fold movement that is so essential to music and, in fact, to the very structure of the universe: (e.g., the attraction of atoms to form molecules and molecules to form the complex chemistry of life).
Dualism, conceiving things in dyads, adds more dynamism but operates only along a tense two-dimensional polar axis: right – wrong, heaven – hell, love – hatred, light- dark, etc. The tension has no hope of resolution until arrival of the 3rd. Mother and father join to conceive a child and thus family is born. In this example, the family is the arising 4th made possible by the triad ( Father, Mother, & Child). At the molecular level, two elements join to form a new molecule that has characteristics different from either of its constituent parts. With greater and greater complexification, as reasoned by Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, whole systems emerge. Each triad gives rise to a new entity, the 4th. The Law of Three is also at the heart of the thinking of Russian Mystic Gurdjieff who founded an entire system on the idea.
In matters of mystical theology, this idea has great import. Reference to the “Heavenly Father” alone marks a first monotheistic step in human thinking about the sacred. Yet, the Father was still “ein sof, the unknowable One”, “the Other” and often fearsomely distant. Through the mystery of the Incarnation, we came to see the Father in the Son – the epitome of love and compassion. That relationship gives rise to the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, completing the sacred musical chord. Once complete, consciousness moves inexorably toward greater complexity and the grand orchestration of the musical spheres carries us toward inner experiences that reason can never manufacture. Reason sets the table for epiphany but then must be transcended if we are to have the true knowledge of the Heart.
Trinitarian thinking is concordant with nature itself. Anything less weakens the spiritual engine driving us toward true knowing.
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