Trinity: Part Two

The Law of Three: Foundational Principles for Change and Transformation

Thursday, May 16, 2019

Trinity: Part Two

The Law of Three
Thursday, May 16, 2019

Cynthia Bourgeault, one of our core faculty members and an Episcopal priest, has helped Christianity rediscover the powerful model of the “Law of Three.” This was originally developed by the Armenian-born spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) who saw it comprising what he called the “Laws of World Creation and World Maintenance.” Based on Trinity as flow and movement, this “law” describes the ways in which different elements work to create change and ongoing evolution. Today I’ll share a brief introduction from Cynthia’s work, but I invite you to read her full book The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: 

From a metaphysical standpoint, the Trinity is primarily about process. It encapsulates a paradigm of change and transformation based on an ancient metaphysical principle known as the Law of Three.

[The basic foundational principles are:]

1. In every new arising there are three forces involved: affirming, denying, and reconciling.
2. The interweaving of the three produces a fourth in a new dimension.
3. Affirming, denying, and reconciling are not fixed points or permanent essence attributes, but can and do shift and must be discerned situationally. . . .
4. Solutions to impasses or sticking points generally come by learning how to spot and mediate third force, which is present in every situation but generally hidden. . . .

Let’s consider a simple example. A seed, as Jesus said, “unless it falls into the ground and dies, remains a single seed.” [John 12:24] If this seed does fall into the ground, it enters a sacred transformative process. Seed, the first or “affirming” force, meets ground, the second or “denying” force (and at that, it has to be moist ground, water being its most critical first component). But even in this encounter, nothing will happen until sunlight, the third or “reconciling” force, enters the equation. Then among the three they generate a sprout, which is the actualization of the possibility latent in the seed—and a whole new “field” of possibility.

Actually, the entire Paschal Mystery can be seen to play itself out as a fairly straightforward configuration of the Law of Three. If you assign affirming as Jesus, the human teacher of the path of love; denying as the crucifixion and the forces of hatred driving it; and reconciling as the principle of self-emptying, or kenotic love willingly engaged, then the fourth or new arising, which is inescapably revealed through this weaving, is the Kingdom of Heaven, visibly manifest in the very midst of all the human cruelty and brokenness.

Reference:
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three:Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity (Shambhala Publications, Inc.: 2013), 15, 16, 24-25, 74.

Image credit: Haystacks at Giverny (detail), Claude Monet, 1884. Private collection.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Creativity that makes the world is built into the world as its own essence. . . . Randomness, the pool of all possibilities, is part of how it’s done. . . . The divinity is so intimately present in the world that the world can be regarded as an incarnate expression of the Trinity, as creative, as expansive, as conscious, as self-realizing and self-sharing. —Beatrice Bruteau