Trinities

From time to time I talk about the importance of the number 7. See, for example, reference 2. Today it is the turn of the number 3, my attention having been drawn by Shelli Renée Joye, presently of California, to its importance.

As is proper for someone from the Christian zone, I start with the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost – the exact nature of which caused a lot of trouble in the first half of the Byzantine period. The sort of thing that the Byzantine proles squabbled about between chariot races – or put another way, before the invention of that modern circus called football. Sometimes they went so far as to burn, mutilate or to otherwise do away with the losers in these squabbles.

Then, at roughly the same time, there was a rival version in India called the Trimurti, the Trimurti being the triad of gods consisting of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer as the three highest manifestations of the one ultimate reality. Illustrated above.

Then, again at roughly the same time, the Buddhists had their version called the Trikaya. With this one being a little untidy, with the Tibetan schools adding fourth and fifth bodies to the canonical three.

Skipping a few centuries we come to Freud’s update with ego, id and superego. This was soon followed by various variations devised by the likes of the Theosophists (see reference 1). And, bang up to date, we have the triad which make up human consciousness: self, other and feeling – this feeling being the feeling of the self about the other which is the subject of the consciousness in question – with some people seeing connections with the Trikaya, the Buddhists being people who have studied consciousness, from the inside as it were, with great seriousness, for a very long time.

Lastly, I offer the important mathematical fact that chairs and tables with three legs are immeasurably more stable than those with any other number of legs. I am working on the connection between this fact and the other trinities.

With thanks to wikipedia for the illustration.

PS: I presume that the 'tri' bit of all these trinities points to their shared Aryan roots.

Reference 1: http://theosophy.org/.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/the-freudians-fight-back.html.