Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Satchitananda -- The Glory of the Godhead

So now we have discussed the three faces of God according to the Trimurti or Holy Trinity of the permanent and unchanging wisdom -- the Sanatana Dharma. And we have seen that it contains three attributes: being, awareness and bliss. These exist together, three in one. We have also looked at the attribute of light, which as we have seen, is not subject to any law whatsoever; light is the mandate of the Creator, and it is it's own law. For light itself, there is no time nor distance (space). The "speed" of light is objective. The fact that we consider that it travels 186,000 miles a second or 300,000 km second is only relative. For itself, it is outside of time or space and is everywhere and everywhen simultaneously.

We will call this "World One". It is All and Everything.

Now the Creator creates a new "World", which we will call "World Three", because now the three attributes forces separate like the strands of a braid. This might be called the World of All Galaxies -- of everything that IS. Each of the three laws or forces now manifest at each of the three points of the triangle. Each point of the triangle can manifest any of the forces but will only manifest one at a time. This brings about time, and with time comes the existence of space, duration and the existence of matter and energy as seemingly separate entities. According to Einstein's famous formula E=MC2, matter is congealed energy, and using the mathematical constant of the speed of light squared, matter could be considered condensed light because by simple algebra E=MC2 equals E/C2=M.

As C. squared is such an enormous number, matter can be considered not only as congealed energy, but energy so tightly packed that it becomes opaque, using the formula C2 x E = opaque mass. But one could say not only that matter is simply scrunched up energy tightly bound, but also that energy is material, only, extremely diffuse compared with it being rolled up or bound into matter. This aligns perfectly with the philosophy of the Samkya which states that everything exists in reality, even thoughts and dreams and forms of energy are all material.

It's opposing philosophy is that of the Advaida Vedanta, or non-dual teaching of awareness, which goes in the other direction, stating that nothing phenomenological can be real, because it is subject to change, and being subject to change, it's reality is a phantasmagoria.

One could say that these are opposites but they are simply two ends of one stick. One could declare with objective insight that Samkya is top down and Advaida Vedanta is bottom-up, but since the ladder of creation is like a musical scale, it doesn't matter much you play a descending scale or an ascending scale, they are the same scale. But if you take the solfege of a musical scale, the half steps will appear in very different places depending upon whether you play an ascending scale: Do -Re -Mi Fa -Sol -La -Si Do or a descending scale: Do Si- La -Sol -Fa Mi -Re -Do.

For the purposes of this explication we are using a descending scale - a top down approach to reality. The first note is Do, or what we might call the divine fiat, and its energy itself fills the missing semitone leading down to Si, where the three attributes or as they are called in Sanskrit, Gunas (Raja -- active, Tamas -- passive and Sattva -- reconciling) seperate from one another.

When we reach Si, we can call this the "World of all Galaxies"; in other words, the entire phenomenological universe, and as the three attributes are un-braided, they can re-couple in various ways. In fact, three separate forces can combine in six different forms, which in Mr. Gurdjieff's teachings are called triads. This is also musical, because triads are chords which contain three notes. They come in four qualities, but this is only because the musical scale denies the formation of the final two numerical triads.

In order to describe the six triads of World Three, we will simply reduce them to Hindu/Arabic numerals (although we call 123456789 Arabic numerals, the Arabs got them from the Hindus).

We will call the affirming force 1, the denying force 2, and the reconciling force 3. Thus we can have six different configurations:

123, 231, 312, 321, 213, 132. And there is a seventh, but it would be outside the realm of phenomenological reality, because it would be a triad with all three numbers in all three places, which is the condition of the Godhead, which we have already discussed. For the time being we are not going to discuss the difference between the six triads, and only consider that in world three, described as the "world of all galaxies", there are only three laws. We might consider stating that these are time, space and revolving movement, which are objectively unvariable, but this would be a conjectural speculation. I believe that these are likely to be the three laws which first appear in world three, but I would be a fool to state it unequivocally as dogma.

It is enough to say that in World Three, the three Gunas or attributes cease to exist simultaneously at each of the corners of the triangle, but that they are un-braided so as to allow for the creation to manifest. This is the World of All Worlds. It is very far above us. As we follow the creation downward through what is called the Ray of Creation, we will find our place, but to our dismay, we may find that we are not, as some people have been hypnotized into believing, the apex of creation, or created in the image of the Creator. We could be, because we contain all the parts to create souls for ourselves that would be in the image of the Creator, but we are like an image of the Creator which has been cut into jigsaw puzzle pieces and placed into a kaleidoscope, where we can turn and turn forever, but never solve the puzzle. There is one way to solve the puzzle, but it is extremely rare for a man to find it himself. In fact I would go so far as to say that no one can find it on their own, because the perimeter of a problem never contains its solution. This is a firm law. Till next time...

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