Trinity of Mind

 

 

Meat wagon come

Born on the rays of the morning sun

Thy kingdom come

Thy will be done

 

Amebix, ICBM*

* Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile

 

Carl Jung used the term synchronicity to describe the seemingly coincidental aligning of events that appear to have no casual reason to be associated with each other.  Describing coincidences, whether spatial or situational that seem to defy probability Jung tried to validate such phenomena as being more than the result of simple chance. The most mundane examples of synchronicity occur when you suddenly think of someone and then within moments they appear or call you on the phone, or after you’ve dreamed of someone you’ve haven’t see in years and then bump into them that day at the gas station. Other more elaborate forms of synchronicity occur as well, for instance when certain themes or subjects insert themselves into your attention. One example might be that at your child’s third birthday party frogs appear in random, unrelated circumstances, and not just frogs, but pairs of frogs. First the grandmother comes with a double candlestick of two frogs as a gift for the family. Secondly a friend places two temporary frog tattoos from a large collection of options on each arm of your child. Thirdly, a gift of a t-shirt with two frogs on the front is opened at the end of the night. In each example the frog pairs are symmetrical images of each other. We all have experiences like this that we typically dismiss as simple coincidence even when statistically speaking the circumstances’ are bewilderingly unlikely.

I had such an experience in 2023 with the repetitive reoccurrence of two seemingly unrelated themes that came together suddenly.  One was the Prometheus myth and the other was the doctrine of the Trinity.  The Prometheus story is one I have always liked and something I actually enjoy meditating on from time to time.  In 2023 however the story kept presenting itself to me from several different directions, not just from the wandering of my mind.

As a farmer I always found it interesting that Prometheus hid the Olympian fire inside of a fennel bulb.  Fennel seemed like an prudent choice to me for two reasons:  One, the fennel bulb is vase shaped and perhaps reminded ancient Greeks of a vessel.  The other was that fennel is a remarkably cooling vegetable, great to eat on a hot summer day.  Using fennel may have seemed like a wise choice because as a cool vessel it would be ideal in containing hot fire.

Ancient Greeks believed that human beings contained an inner fire and that the emanating fire light manifested human senses.  They believed that light from this fire within the body shown through the eyes acting like a laser beam gathering information and translating it into the phenomena of sight and understanding.   As we understand modern optics today we know that light enters the eyes and conveys meaning through neural pathways starting with the retina. But to the minds of ancient Greeks this process worked in reverse order making the human eye a conduit to the outside world for the ultimate source of reason and understanding, the inner light.   The movie The Lighthouse, based on the Prometheus myth, includes a scene where Thomas stands like a naked Greek statue while light emanates from his eyes into Ephraim’s face. This allows Thomas to simultaneously see and understandthe younger man. Being in the presence of a being containing the inner fire of reason, something the young, mad lighthouse keeper seems to lack, terrifies Ephraim. Under the beams of light he is totally exposed.

For Prometheus to present fire to human beings hidden inside a fennel bulb always made sense to me.  The Olympian fire needed to get inside of human bodies so tucking it inside a accommodatingly cool vegetable like fennel seemed to me very considerate of Prometheus, as well as elegant.  This myth to me, and this is all my own speculation based on what little I know of ancient, Greek-speaking people, does not represent the literal gift of fire as a tool but rather the bestowment of soul that comes with it sight, will, and reason.  Modern psychology uses the Prometheus myth as an allegory in this way as well but it seems to me that ancient Greeks also probably viewed the story in this light. The gods had no reservations with human beings acquiring literal fire.  The Olympian gods all appreciated that human beings had the capacity to build fires and roast bones in sacrificial hecatombs in their honor.  It was the acquiring of divine insights and perspectives that the gods disapproved of.  The inscription at the oracle of Delphi describes the god’s position on this subject:  Know Thy Self.  Know that you are not a god.  Prometheus’ crime was that he had begun the process of human intellectual and technological development that would at some point in the future provide human beings with godlike powers.

As a newcomer to Unitarianism (my family belong to a UU congregation in Providence, Rhode Island) I was curious to understand the origins of this oddly unreligious religious organization.  I had always assumed that the root word of “Unitarianism” referred to a unity of world mystical traditions. This is not the case.  Coincidentally (or perhaps by synchronicity?) the name of this humanist religion that is informed by mystical insights is not referring to any fuzzy fraternity with world religions but is so named for it’s earliest defining heresy: the rejection of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

To those who don’t know the doctrine of the Trinity represents one of the earliest and certainly the most important schism within the dominant (or orthodox) schools in early Christianity.  Reconciling the nature of Jesus to the nature of God and their juxtaposition to the logos, or word of creation, or Holy Spirit, demanded the spilling of a lot of ancient ink. This debate was largely settled in an ecumenical council known as the council of Nicaea (325 CE), which was overseen by the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great.  The argument came down to whether Christ was not only equal to god the father but was literally the same stuff, the same material (homo-ousios).  Or was Christ made of slightly different stuff and distinct from the father (homoi-ousios). The single “i”, or iota in Greek, is where the phrase “an iota of difference” comes from. Sometimes an iota makes quite a big difference.

Those that argued that Christ, god the father, and the logos were coequal won the day and the doctrine of the Trinity became a cornerstone paradox in the Christian intellectual world. Accepting the clearly contradictory nature of the Trinity in which three distinct things are at once the same thing was a sign of faithfulness and deference to the most important mystical mystery of Christianity.  By the end of the Roman Empire, and the beginning of the medieval period rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity was considered a severe heresy, punishable by death.

Unitarians like to trace their heretical beginnings back to the Christian third-century intellectual Origen.  Origen was greatly influenced by pagan philosophers of his day (this was a period when academic schools were a mix of pagan, Jewish, and Christian thinkers) and he had organized a very Platonic (based on the philosopher Plato) cosmology.  To Origen souls were in a process of falling into and away from Grace, being endlessly reincarnated in a great “chain of being”.  Within this scheme of reaching for and falling from salvation souls could manage to achieve Christ-like divinity while others, even enlightened souls, could fall and be reincarnated as devils.  This of course sounds similar to the Buddhist concept of samsara, that of endless rebirth in the search for final enlightenment.  Although Origen lived in a time of intellectual openness and creativity, the church under the emperor Justinian later condemned him during the Byzantine period.  After this more open period of theological cross-pollination heretical teachings straying from Trinitarian thinking were aggressively condemned. It was not until the 17th century that unconventional, anti-Trinitarian thinkers become influential again. It’s during this period of the late Renaissance and the early Enlightenment that began the modern Unitarian movement.

For whatever reason Trinitarian thinking has robust and lasting appeal even outside of mainstream Judeo-Christian theology.  Philosophers have enjoyed thinking of reality in terms of threes for centuries.  Plato’s book the Timaeus uses a three-part cosmology.  Some modern Tarot interpreters such as Rachel Pollock point to the first three cards of the Tarot’s major arcana (the fool, the magician, and the high priestess) as emblematic of the whole of human experience.  The Tarot is often related to the Jewish mystical writings of the Kabbalah, which has it’s own tripartite cosmology.  The controversial scientist Rupert Sheldrake conceptualizes the popular modern philosophy of pan-psychicism in a Trinitarian format.  Over and over again we see examples of the nature of things described in this triangular way.

Over the spring and summer of 2023 I gave my mind wandered often to thinking about the subject of the Trinity. I revisited some writings by Bart Ehrman on the subject and read about Unitarian history. I thought about things in terms of threes and meditated on the right-brain idea of things being together yet apart at the same time, distinct yet whole. It was fun, and like all the people throughout history who have thought about the Trinity it was elusive to me. It continues to be a paradox. As the first harvest of fennel arrived in the summer or 2023 I also found myself meditating on the Prometheus myth. I watched The Lighthouse for the first time and discussed it with several of my employees and my wife. The two subjects circled in my mind together, like heat and water in a little, mental hurricane.

 

In 2023 the blockbuster movie Oppenheimer was released based on the exhaustive biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb.  My dad gave me a copy of the biography and I was slow to pick it upAt the time Oppenheimer and Barbie (the other blockbuster of the 2023 summer) were synonymous to me (“Barbenheimer”) and I didn’t want much to do with either of them. Because the film was so prominent in my mind and the subject of the book’s name (rather than the title) was displayed in such big text on the cover I didn’t even notice the title of the book when I finally started reading it.  As I dug in and flipped through the photographs in the center of the book I found a picture of the first nuclear explosion carried out at Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1945.  I was reminded reading the same print footer below the photo that the name that Oppenheimer chose for the first test of this new weapon was Trinity.

Trinity? I got one of those funny feelings, the kind you get from déjà vu or when the phone rings and bad news is on the other line.  I flipped to the front cover and saw the title of the book for the first time.  The biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer is called American Prometheus.

The code name Trinity, as Oppenheimer considered it, refers to the Hindu notion of trinitarianism in which Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), and Shiva (destroyer) form a tri-part godhead. The famous quote attributed to Oppenheimer (“now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”) is a paraphrase from the Bhagavad Gita in which the Hindu godhead speaks through Krishna in the form of a charioteer. The line from the Gita is “I am Time, the destroyer of worlds, grown immense here to annihilate these men.”

Oppenheimer was warned by his fellow physicist Isador Rabi that his invention of the atomic bomb would be the sad “culmination of three hundred years of physics.”  Regardless both Oppenheimer and Rabi worked together to produce the bombs that would be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.  Despite a brief period of elation for bringing about the end of the most destructive war in world history Robert Oppenheimer quickly became appalled at the use of the bomb(s) in Japan against an enemy he would learn, through his extensive access to the Truman white house, was considered already at the brink of surrender (still a controversial subject).  Oppenheimer’s dogged motivation to develop these weapons was his belief that they were required in order to defeat Nazi Germany considering that the Nazi’s, under his old classmate Heisenberg, were developing their own nuclear weapons program.

Foundationally the Gita is a text driven by karma, a fatalism that it’s main character needs to embrace and resolve. Arjuna, a warrior prince, is pitted against family and friends on the battlefield and is encouraged by the gods to persist, to understand that he has the moral upper hand against his tyrannical opponents.  Instead of throwing away his weapon and bending at the prospect of potentially killing his own family on the battlefield Krishna steadies him to persevere and fulfill his destiny. In the context of the burden placed on American scientists to develop the atomic bomb, a weapon that once built would threaten humanity’s survival perhaps indefinitely one can imagine why J. Robert Oppenheimer might have turned to the Gita to help steady his hand in this terrible work.

It is interesting to consider Prometheus in the light of the Gita’s message as well.  Prometheus was himself driven by selflessness and perhaps fatalism to bestow onto human beings the gifts of godly insights through the metaphor of fire.  Unlike his twin brother Epimetheus, who represents a kind of hand wringing regret fullness of potential lost or karma shunned, Prometheus is spurred on by his foresight to fulfill his destiny.  Despite the potential consequences for the people now enlightened with his gifts and despite his own eternal punishment metered out by the gods Prometheus carried through and realized his dharma.

The Trinity is a cosmic metaphor, and one that is almost cherished in its lack of decipherability, it’s mystery. In many of its forms Trinitarianism expounds in its contradictory formulations.  In the Hindu form the Trinitarian arraignment attempts to remove time by placing Creator and Destroyer within the same context, the same thing,while simultaneously invoking Time as its manifestation.  In much the same way human beings attempt to conceptualize a world that can somehow be at peace while arsenals of nuclear weapons fill silos across the globe.  Oppenheimer spent his career after Los Alamos in an attempt at international cooperation to stymie the development of more powerful bombs.  The man most pivotal in summoning the genie tried and, of course, failed at putting it back in the bottle.

In a very short time bombs were developed in the United States and in the Soviet Union that made the weapons used in 1945 look like toys.  The development of the hydrogen bomb (the “Super”) replaced the antiquated “city-busting” fission bombs Oppenheimer had invented by the 1950s.  Oppenheimer protested against their development.  One of the arguments he put forward to resist the urge to create such powerful and pitiless machines was that they would in fact have no plausible military use.  They were simply too destructive to use against any military target.  A large hydrogen bomb of the 1950s, if detonated, could destroy up to one-thousand square miles, an area about two-thirds the size of the entire state of Rhode Island.  These weapons were truly world-killers and their deployment would be genocidal by design.  The most powerful bomb ever detonated was tested in 1961, a Soviet bomb named Tsar Bomba with a blast of 50 megatons of TNT with a potential for twice the magnitude depending on the uranium deployed.  It seems the public knows little about the modern destructive capacity of current world arsenals.  However we do know that the USA alone has over 5,500 warheads with over 1,500 deployed around the world while Russia has a similar amount.

Fire and destruction are common themes in religious and mythological metaphors.  Christians anticipate an Apocalypse (a “unveiling” or “revealing”) where destruction is facilitated by fire (“fire this time”) ushering in an ordainment of the resurrected Jesus.  The Bhagavad Gita uses a very similar theme in this verse:  “If the radiance of a thousand sun were to burst at once in [the] sky, that would be the splendour of the mighty one.”  In this Hindu verse the tripartite God is revealed though a tremendous conflagration.  Perhaps this is an explanation of the Hindu trinity with the instantaneous, timeless glimpse of the Creator during the final act of destruction.  Since the days of Prometheus people have seemed to anticipate humanities rise and fall through our hubris of fire.

And yet here we are. Decades of anxiety have passed us by while intercontinental nuclear war has failed to materialize.  Popular culture has remained fixated on this un-ignorable drama with 2023’s Oppenheimer the most recent addition. This mostly quiet, historical biopic is something of a relief to the overwhelming pile-up of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic films and novels in our lexicon.  A recent film review I heard on the radio described a movie where Los Angeles was obliterated by a nuclear bomb.  The reviewer yawned and asked: “Really?  Again?”

So, what about this synchronicity I experienced? One reason people are typically so undistracted by synchronized events is that they are often quite mundane. The frog example I mentioned from my son’s third birthday party is one that didn’t keep those of us that noticed it up at night. The old theme of Prometheus resurfacing has given me some pause though, especially seeing it so explicitly tied to the most contemporary popular take on the nuclear age we all live in, American Prometheus. Spending too much time trying to substantiate the mystery of the Trinity is clearly a fool’s errand too. After all, people have been chewing on that recalcitrant cud for centuries. Without requiring him to fully unwind this mystery Oppenheimer’s choice of the name Trinity for his first bomb places him at the center of his cherished Gita. For him I believe the fatalistic philosophy of ancient India helped him cope with his terrible burdens.

Personally I see this Trinitarian aspect in a more holisitc view, one that describes all of us and not just the gods of world religions. If we are all inheritors of Prometheus than inside of each of us we hold the Olympian fire and that allows us a burdensome rationalism that divides us into three minds. As inheritors of the earth we strive as all life does to persist (Creator) yet we are distinct in that we bear the unprecedented power to ravish the world (Destroyer). Within this cruel binary we reach for a timeless moment in between birth and death: a time of peace (Preserver). In the Gita we must remember that this preservation cannot be achieved, perhaps can only be witnessed in the moment of annihilation. The landscape of the Gita is of course a great battlefield.

It is a distasteful metaphor to see the world, especially the natural world, as such but a view easy to slide into when we think of the struggles of our own lives and the world we’ve imposed on nature. I’ve heard it said that when synchronicities arise, like déjà vu, then you are “on the right path”. Perhaps synchronicities like this are no more than random joining of quantum decay, each of us influencing each other’s behavior in tiny, occult ways, ways that lead us to predicting phone calls or picking out movies we dreamed about the week before we watched them. Often it seems to be the case yet sometimes it is hard to believe that they are not something more than mundane psychic static. Sometimes it’s hard not to see them as warnings.

Maybe the gift of synchronicity is the same as the gift of the Trinity, a compelling exercise in meaning making that can never really be solved. Even more compelling though, to me, is that I’ve come to believe, like Jung, that these are more than just simple coincidence. They are real phenomenon, real mysteries, that tie us together in the present, in the past, and perhaps to a some-what predetermined future. A already determined teleological future is something that rightly boggles the rational brain and yet in our midst are agents like Prometheus, versus Epimetheus, that move history forward into the space of natural possibility. A space where possibility lays open like a natural mold, hands grasping to find it’s definitions and it’s limits.

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