To begin with when I speak of the laws this time, I am not talking about the two great laws which Mr. Gurdjieff tells us are the primary laws governing reality, the law of three forces and the law of seven, or the law of the octave, which is most easily seen in the musical realm. I am talking about the law of three but in a special way, so that the laws that I speak of are laws like gravity and electromagnetism, all the way down to the laws that govern man's imagination and sex, etc..
We will begin at the top, with unity at the level of the Creator. Although this level is primordial (before number), pre-spatial (before space) and pre-durational (before time), and in physics is called a singularity, thousands of years ago in the Samkya (enumeration) of the Sanatana dharma (permanent and unchanging wisdom), it was known as the Trimurti, or three faces of God, and this Trimurti has three attributes which in Sanskrit are known as Satchitananda. Satchitananda is a compound word containing three other words within it. Because Sanskrit is multivalent (meaning that each word has multiple meanings harmoniously embedded in it and it means all of them at the same time -- like a Chinese pictogram or ideogram), most Sanskrit words are not easily rendered into English, which is a finely nuanced surface language.
But we will divide up Satchitananda and try to glean what its meaning might be in English.
Sat can mean reality, truth, being, IS-ness. I would like you to consider a thought experiment, of the kind that Einstein was famous for; imagine a single mind residing in emptiness -- beyond emptiness, and consider that that mind can think of anything whatsoever. Since there is nothing else but this one mind, anything it would think of would have as much reality as anything that actually exists in reality as we know it. What would it think of? Personally, as I look around the room and consider the universe, I am staring at the answer.
Chit means awareness or consciousness. Now let's refer back to our one single mind. Anything it thought of would be imbued with awareness. Notwithstanding the unconscious processes within the human body, anything consciously imagined at least at the outset must be imbued with awareness and intention, which leads us to our third component of this compound word.
Ananda can be translated into English as bliss, or unsullied happiness. Again let's return to our single unencumbered Mind. With nothing opposing it, and an ability to think of anything whatsoever and have it BE, this entity or mind must exist in a condition of unceasing happiness or bliss.
This is the state of the universe from the top down. We might call it Hydrogen One. It is All and Everything. It has no bounds, no constrictions, no opposition. But it has three attributes : reality, awareness and bliss. This is what is meant by three in one, and its symbol is a triangle with a circle in the middle of it. And as far as the three forces of affirming, denying and reconciling; or centrifugal, centripital and revolving, all three exist simultaneously and permanently in one. This Trimurti and its attributes of Satchitananda are the origins of the Christian holy Trinity where the father is the mind or awareness, the son is reality or phenomenological being, and the Holy Ghost is the bliss of love which exists between the father and the son.
Now we will view the opening of Genesis as well as the creation hymn from the Rg Veda of the primeval Sanatana dharma:
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In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said: "let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
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That's enough for our purposes. This was the beginning of number, by the separation of light and darkness and of heaven and earth, but this is not the number two, or duality, but rather the number three, because there must be a line of demarcation between light and darkness; between heaven and earth, and in the Chinese Taoist tradition most people know about Yin and Yang and would recognize the symbol of a circle with a curvy line (which is a backwards S), but between them it that line, which is called the Tai Ji, or "grand ultimate limit." Therefore three is the first number, and the "Godhead" is Three in One.
Here is the creation hymn from the Rg Veda:
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The non-existent was not; the existent was not at that time. The atmosphere was not nor the heavens which are beyond. What was concealed? Where? In whose protection? Was it water? An unfathomable abyss?
There was neither death nor immortality then. There was not distinction of day or night. That alone breathed windless by its own power. Other than that there was not anything else.
Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning. All this was an indistinguishable sea. That which becomes, that which was enveloped by the void, that alone was born through the power of heat.
Upon that desire arose in the beginning. This was the first discharge of thought. Sages discovered this link of the existent to the nonexistent, having searched in the heart with wisdom.
Their line [of vision] was extended across; what was below, what was above? There were impregnators, there were powers: inherent power below, impulses above.
Who knows truly? Who here will declare whence it arose, whence this creation? The gods are subsequent to the creation of this. Who, then, knows whence it has come into being?
Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not.
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Now let's imagine that the Creator did say "let there be light", and let's move into the realm of modern physics using the theory of relativity to help us see something extraordinary.
The theory of relativity describes something called "Time dilation". This means that time is relative to motion and velocity. There is a well-known description about time dilation that uses the following thought experiment. You have two clocks. Next to each other they will keep the same time, but if you leave one on earth and you place one in a rocketship which goes to a nearby star at close to the speed of light and returns, the clock on earth will show more time elapsed than the clock which returns after traveling near the speed of light.
Einstein declared that speed of light is a line of demarcation cannot be passed. He did not declare that nothing can move faster than the speed of light (although that has proved unlikely and unwieldy) but that anything in motion must be either sub luminary in speed or super luminary in speed, and a physicist named Fitzgerald described what happens to an object as it approaches the speed of light. It is called the Fitzgerald contraction and it states that as an object approaches the speed of light its length compresses, its mass increases and it's time dilation slows down more and more until it reaches infinity of mass and cessation ot time, rendering the speed of light unattainable except for light -- that is, photons and other luminary particles.
Now here is the most interesting part. Using another thought experiment we are going to imagine that we are traveling at the speed of light alongside a photon and we are carrying a flashlight. If we turn the flashlight on and face it forward we should imagine that the light which would normally leave the flashlight at the speed of light wouldn't move at all because we are already at the speed of light, but this is not the case. The surprise is that if we were traveling at the speed of light and turned on our flashlight, the light from the flashlight would still travel away from us at the speed of light. This would seem to indicate that the light traveling from the flashlight would be traveling faster than the speed of light by simple addition -- the speed of light we are traveling plus the speed of light from the flashlight, but here is where relativity comes in and ruins our ordinary thinking.
The speed of light is not relative but objective, and no matter what speed we travel, relative to us, light will travel at the speed of light. So if we chase a wave/particle of light, we can never catch up to it and as we get closer and closer to the speed of light, the Fitzgerald contraction increases our mass, shortens our length, and slows down our time relative to an observer. So nothing that is sub luminary in speed can ever catch up to the speed of light and nothing that is theoretically moving faster than the speed of light can ever slow down to the speed of light. The speed of light is an impenetrable barrier.
Now here's an even crazier idea, but according to physics it is absolutely a fact. If we could attach a clock to a particle of light and have the clock travel at the speed of light, the clock would not tick at all. At the speed of light there is no time, and since there is no time, there is no distance because it takes time to travel distance.
Therefore, even though for us little critters living on planet Earth with our atomic clocks and wristwatches and clocks all over the place it is said to take light 8 1/2 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth, and according to our clocks that is absolutely true, but as far as the light is concerned, it has taken no time whatsoever, and as far as it is concerned, it hasn't traveled any distance either. Since this is just true for light, it's just as true for the furthest galaxy as it is for the closest -- as far as light itself is concerned, all the light in the entire universe is everywhere it is simultaneously. For light itself, there is no time, no distance, and therefore no space. This is the glory of the Godhead. And as light is used as a synonym for consciousness, or awareness, the "Godhead" sees the entire universe all at once -- no past, no future, only a seamless NOW. It is only us sub luminary creatures that experience time and space.
Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it. We will continue soon, traveling down the Ray of Creation. Till then...
2 comments:
I find each part confusing but overall it seems to make sense. I'm going to continue to attempt to understand this.
Thank you for reading the blog. I understand that it is not an easy read. I follow Einstein's dictum that thing should be simple as possible but no simpler. What I am trying to explicate are some extraordinarily difficult concepts, which once understood make perfect sense and seems simple, but when first meeting with such ideas, they seem quite complicated. Part of the problem is language. I do not ponder these subjects in language form but rather in image and metaphor. I then have to translate into English, which is a language with half a million words each of which is highly nuanced. This is the opposite of ancient languages like Sanskrit or Chinese pictograms or ideograms, where each word is multivallic, containing many meanings all at once. This renders them difficult to translate into English, because in the ancient languages the meanings are only narrowed by the subsequent words. Thus it is said among scholars of ancient Chinese, "To know the meaning of the first word of a book, one needs to have read the entire book."
Although Mr. Gurdjieff delivered some lengthy lectures and talks in his early teaching, he soon left that to his students, and he almost never filled in all the blanks -- in fact, he often spoke in oblique statements and terse broken language -- like the comment that "time is breath". One could spend a lifetime contemplating this three word phrase. And yet he brought an entire science of Being, and a new perspective on "God" and human beings purpose, place and function in the cosmos. I have chosen to challenge my brains, and all the parts of myself, to explicate some of his ideas using both ancient knowledges and modern sciences. It is not an easy task either to write or to read these essays.
Thank you for trying. If you read everything three times as Mr. Gurdjieff recommended, first like a regular book, second, reading it aloud as if to another person, and then only thirdly to try to understand some of its meaning, you may find it easier.
--rlnyc
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