In the Beginning Were a Couple of Triangles?

In yesterday's post we spoke of what must be the first vertical polarity or distinction within the Godhead. In it, according to Schuon,  

are prefigured or pre-realized all possible complementarities and oppositions: subject and object, activity and passivity, static and dynamic, oneness and totality, exclusive and inclusive...

I'm thinking that this ultimate Principle of Complementarity must be the basis of Bohr's complementarity principle in quantum mechanics -- at least if the latter is ontological and not just an epistemological limitation. 

I'm no physicist, but back off man, I'm a metaphysician, so I certainly reject the idea that our act of observing creates the reality. If that were the case, then the Dodgers would have won last night, and Trump would still be my president. And if I created Brandon, then being God isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Says here in this book (The Creator and the Cosmos) that there are at least ten other interpretations of quantum mechanics, some of which are actually sane, others even more woowoo than the Copenhagen Weed interpretation -- for example, that "The physical realm is the materialization of pure thought," or "All possible outcomes will actually occur."

Okay Deepak.

Some people will believe anything in order to avoid God. At which point they really become religious. 

Back to that principial and primordial complementarity within the Godhead. I would say that we can and indeed must arrive at this principle via natural reason alone. What we could never know -- at least with certainty -- is of God's tri-complementarity. This must either be revealed or not known at all.

As it pertains to the horizontal, I'm gonna say that every true complementarity we encounter must be rooted in Big Vertical. Importantly, some oppositions are genuine complementarities, while others are merely contraries, dualisms, or privations.

For example, male-female is as true a complementarity as there could be. Likewise subject-object, time-eternity, and self-other. 

Conversely, the progressive left is by no means the complement of conservative liberalism, rather, its negation -- as feminism is the negation of femininity, "homosexual marriage" the negation of marriage, and secular humanism the negation of man.

I say time and eternity are complementary, because I suspect there is something analogous to time in God, only a kind of higher dimensional temporality. The above referenced book got me to thinking about this subject as well, because I've never liked the idea that God is utterly static and changeless. Ever since Plato -- and even before -- a lot of eggheads have considered time to be a mere privation or entropic deterioration.

Well, I say our experience of time is a distant reflection or analogue of an eminent perfection in the Godhead. Of course I could be wrong about this, but in my opinion the party never stops up there. Yes, I am fully aware of the fact that the Father has generated the Son from all eternity, and that there is no time "before" this. But be reasonable. Even timelessness takes time!

If we see true complementarities all over the place, there must also be -- and for all the more reason -- genuine tri-complemenarities in our horizontal world. Let's try to find some.

The most obvious one would have to be Mother-Father-Child. These terms cannot be reduced to anything less, and each implies the others. Or, how about the substance, or constitution, of the human person, who consists of Intellect, Will, and Sentiment; or Truth, Freedom, and Virtue.

There's also science, which is rooted in the subject's conformity to the object, which results in knowledge. Likewise art, which is something like creator-creation-beauty.

There's also the Sat-Chit-Ananda of Vedanta, but I want to stay in my westernmost lane.

Although not coming at it from a strictly Christian perspective, Schuon goes into a little riff on the divine ternary. He explains that it can be regarded from two perspectives, as upright (∆) or downright (▽) triangles. Both are "dynamic," in the sense that the horizontal base forms a duality moving toward, and harmonized in, the point (which is either above or below).

In the upturned triangle,

the duality of the base is contemplative in the sense that it indicates, through the summit, a turning back towards unity...

It is also "relativity intent on conforming to absoluity (sic)," and it very much reminds me of the psychic movement that takes place spontaneously in a healthy mind, and which my old pal W.R. Bion referred to as PS <--> D, i.e., the sudden emergence of meaning out of the scattered elements of thought. 

Which in turn reminds me of Michael Polanyi's triad of subsidiary particulars, the focal target, and the knower who links them in a kind of endless progress from tacit knowledge toward explicit meaning. I could explain it better, but I'm a little rusty on my Polanyi.

In the downturned triangle there is movement

through the inverted summit, towards extrinsic radiation or production.

Or just say toward creation, or "infinite Possibility," or overflowing manifestation with "numberless refractions." 

I say, let's put the triangles together with their ascending and descending currents, in which case we come up with (✡︎), and why not? Seems like a good place to end this meshuggana post. Let's eat!