The Unifying Perspective of the Middle Way

In my last blog I had mentioned THREE axioms that I have found are to me universal laws that apply to anything and everything.  It was after a period of fasting for 21 days or what some cultures call a vision quest that led to an epiphany that three principles are at work in everything and anything we see and or experience.   It came in a flash, a Photizo moment if you will which of course is the name I use in appreciation of its meaning.  A Greek word that means “to enlighten, render evident, to give understanding to.”  Like a flashbulb that goes off in a darkened room to reveal what was once hidden in the darkness of ignorance of Plato’s cave.

For years I have held the belief in the principle and meaning of the trinity that acts as the underlying reality of all things but is manifest into creation through the fourth principle of intention which leads to our experience. But it was during those contemplative moments while fasting that the three principles that are the pillars and axioms of my experience here in this biosuit revealed themselves as:

Perspective – Relationship – and Environment
which through my own volition create my experience.

The key as I saw it was differentiating the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd perspectives
in relation to whatever environment the particular perspective understood to be the real.

Like Einstein says,

Reality is merely an illusion,
albeit a very persistent one."

Suddenly literature, art and science had new meaning and I was immediately apprehended by the words of Friedrich Nietzsche

"And those who were seen dancing were thought
to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

It became apparent that there were those who were awakened and expressing through writing, painting and numbers a universal language that acted like a code, there for everyone to see, but for few to understand. The music has always been playing, but few were dancing and it didn’t take long to find those who were awake once the code was broken. There are some of you reading this I’m sure know exactly what I’m saying.

Vitruvian Man
 Leonardo da Vinci

For me, a key to breaking some these universal codes was when I understood FOR ME, the three universal principles that I use to appreciate my waking experience in the illusory Mayan dream we call reality. But I always found it interesting that there was always a tripartite law at work in everything.

Like the Tao, there is the ever present duality of this or that, up or down, past or future. But centering or underlying  all creation is the unifying singularity point that is neither this nor that, up or down, past or future, but is NOW, the neutral principle or non duality.

 We speak of the

Beginning – Middle and End
just as we speak of
Active and Passive
that is
Reconciled
through
Balance
or the

Middle Way.

When we look at what we call reality or the
Mayan world of illusion, what do we SEE?

Time + Space + Matter

Where Time can be expressed as

Past – Present- Future

And Space expressed as

Length – Breadth – Width

Matter as

Energy – Motion – Phenomena

Or if you like,

Liquid – Solid – Gas

such as…

Water – Ice - Steam.

Just as Energy again can be expressed as

Source – Generation – Procession

so Plato understood

The Good –  The Beautiful and The True

or…

Of Course Ken Wilber broke this down to

I- We and It

and thus AQAL was born of what Ken calls the

BIG THREE

This idea of the trinity is not new and has been expressed throughout time. Pythagoras said that when the triangle is once established any problem is already twho thirds solved as the foundation of all existence is triangular. One of my favorite explanations of the universality of the trinity comes from Charles Pierce who tried his entire life to disprove his own theory on the trinity as he saw it in everything, but could not.

Charles. S Pierce

Best Friend of William James

Pierce was an American physicist and philosopher who obtained his BA and MA from Harvard and was the innovator in fields such as mathematics, research methodology, the philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphysics. But more than anything he considered himself a logician first and foremost.

Bertrand Russell opined,

"Beyond doubt [...] he was one of the most original minds of the later
nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever."

Max H. Fisch in Sebeok, The Play of Musement says of Pierce,

Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer "Charles S. Peirce" is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician and metaphysician. He was, for a few examples, the first modern experimental psychologist in the Americas, the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of "the economy of research." He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two.

"[The fundamental hypothesis of science is:] There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect out senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are out relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion."

Peirce goes on to divide all of our experience into three general, universal categories and names them firstness, secondness, and thirdness.

Peirce's writings are pervaded by triadic divisions, which, given that he felt himself to be at heart a mathematician, he expressed most basically in numerical form as Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. While still in his twenties Peirce first began to formulate these divisions using personal pronouns:

I (Firstness),

IT (Secondness), and

THOU (Thirdness).

In Peirce's evolutionary cosmology, Thirdness, or triadic relation, or semeiosis, is considered to be a fact of the universe and not simply limited to the human mind.

Peirce explains that while phenomenology is the study of phenomena in their Firstness, normative science is the study of phenomena in their Secondness, and metaphysics is the study of phenomena in their Thirdness .

Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are the three categories or modes of being which give meaning to all phenomena and to all objects of thought. All phenomena may be regarded as manifestations of either  Firstness, Secondness, or Thirdness.

Peirce further explains that philosophy may be divided into three areas of study:

1) phenomenology (i.e. the study of phenomena as objects of perception),

2) normative science (i.e. the study of the proper relations of phenomena), and

3) metaphysics (i.e. the study of the nature of ultimate reality).

It was in Pierce that I had found my three axioms of Perspective, Relationship and Environment confirmed and was later to find Ken Wilber through searching Pierce’s ideas of 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd person perspectives. Views which are quite similar in many respects to Ken's as Pierce further breaks down Normative science and divides it into:

1) aesthetics (i.e. the science of ideals),

2) ethics (i.e. the science of right and wrong conduct), and

3) logic (i.e. the science of the laws of thought)

Having found this relationship of a unifying perspective again and again expressed in the cardinal number that is the sum of one and one and one, I realized the balance of the middle way.

When one realizes oneself, one realizes the essential nature of the universe and the existence of duality is only an illusion. When the illusion is undone, the primordial unity of our own nature and the nature of the universe is realized. We become aware that we are literally self-reflecting mirror-images of God and self-realization of our self is our responsibility to awake beyond fear of this fact. As Meister Eckhart has said,
 

This can only be appreciated through the singular eye of what some call the witness, the watcher or what I will title the next blog,  The Viewmaster.

Viewmaster

1971 - GAF Viewmaster w/ Jodie Foster and Henry Fonda

Stay Tuned!

DEO