The Gurdjieff Law of Three in the Trisagion Hymn.
Agios O Theos (O Holy God),
Agios ischyros (Holy, Strong),
Agios athanatos, eleison imas (Holy, Immortal, have mercy on us)
“What if Holy God is first force, Holy the Firm is Holy denying Second Force, and Holy the Immortal, is Holy Reconciling, Third Force, have mercy on us. Gurdjieff makes a very, very heavy implicit tie-in between that classic Kontakion prayer of the Eastern Orthodox tradition and the Law of Three. Disregard at your own peril.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont Oct 2019 Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 09:12 09 – THU PM Teaching.
In the 2022 Wisdom School on Rebuilding Trust, Cynthia broke down a passage from Jacob Boehme into a process of a willingness to wrestle in the Presence. She said “if you stand firm” can sound like the opposite of surrender but it means to stand firm in our own being, that deeper Self that is standing firm on the vertical axis. This standing firm is the opposite of fleeing and the paradox within it is that we can’t stand firm unless we are surrendered to a higher possibility, a higher intelligence. This is a long quote, but it bears much fruit when considered:
“[Jacob Boehme] says, ‘here now is the right place for you to wrestle before the divine face. If you stand firm, if you do not bend, you will see and perceive great wonders. You will discover how Christ will storm the hell in you and will break your beasts.’ Well, I think that is a really interesting quote. It’s basically the making moon practice in a nutshell, if you can decode the language. So I propose to do that right now.
“Here now is the right time for you to wrestle before the divine face. And there’s wrestling involved. And he acknowledges that right off. Gurdjieff acknowledges the same thing. He says that all our spiritual growth comes through friction. Friction between what? Well, just to put it really simply, you could say going back to that image of we live in two worlds at once. We live in the infinite and we live in the finite. That would be a good and not inaccurate way to picture what causes the struggle. The struggle between the nature in us which is free, spacious, unboundaried, accustomed to the infinite. And the part in us that is contingent, time bound, protected, defended, anchored here. It’s funny how often they get caught at cross purposes. And I like to look at it this way rather than just calling it our higher nature or our lower nature. You can language it that way, but it winds up so judgmental so fast. And then we wind up calling this poor thing that’s been trying to protect us all our life our false self. What kind of ingratitude is that? The poor thing has been doing its best to keep us alive.
“But if we really see it as the inbuilt conflict between these two selves that are used to living in two different environments with two different core centers, of course, they’re going to get crosswise. And of course, it was set up that way for the first place because it’s in the friction between them that the generation of the energy is going to happen.
“So Boehme starts by saying here now is the right place for you to wrestle. If you stand firm, if you do not bend, you will see and perceive great wonders. Well, standing firm and not bending means not collapsing the tension. Standing right there in the heat of the clash between the two of them. And the normal thing that happens when we get in those situations is that we’ll run off downwind, as they say in sailboat language, into our lower self, and we’ll immediately remove ourselves from the stress zone. We’ll rationalize, we’ll defend, we’ll attack, we’ll do whatever is our classic defense.
“But we forget all about that higher nature out there, that infinite. I mean, to hell with it at this point. It is just, get me out of here! And so we cut ourself off from the part that actually knows how to solve the problem. And we do this automatically. So the standing firm is simply not to let that happen. To stand there in the anguish, in the face of God. Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief. It’s a very good statement of that quandary. And [Boehme] says, if we do our part, if we don’t collapse attention, if we don’t just immediately seek refuge in our habitual defense system and response system, then we will see and perceive great wonders. You will discover how Christ will storm the hell in you and will break your beasts.
“Now, what’s interesting to me in this is that he sees Christ as entering. Our part is to hold the tension bravely, courageously, honestly. Then Christ enters. It’s a perfect, for those of you who’ve been introduced to the law of three, it’s a perfect law of three setup that there’s affirming as the thing that’s pushing you to, you know, just let’s get back in that false self. Let’s defend, let’s counterattack, let’s end this discomfort. The resisting force is at this point, your determination to stand firm, to not collapse attention. And into it, Christ himself enters as the reconciling force. If instead of saving yourself, you stand absolutely there in the breach between the infinite and the finite and allow your suffering to become the occasion to be transfigured and alchemized by Christ, you will get something out of it. You’ll get a second body.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Rebuilding Trust February 2022, 10:08 Day3.2-Crucible-Welcome-Practice.
“Without the existence of denial there can be no spiritual work. It allows us to generate the energies essential to work by giving us the reason, the friction, and the fire to affirm our presence on a higher level. The mechanism of like and dislike will always remain, but through our conscious relationship to it we awaken Being in ourselves.” Kabir Helminski, Living Presence, p147
“To be conscious in First Force is to know what one wants; to be conscious in Second Force is to know what difficulties stand in the way; and to be conscious in Third Force at the same time is to be conscious of how what one wants and what opposes it can eventually reach some solution.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p517
“The level of your being will always attract its own quality of Second Force. And no matter how you alter your external circumstances, if you can, and how much money you are left, and so on, you will have the same Second Force which arises from yourself.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1463
“Everyone will have to meet Second Force in some form or other, whether he is in comfortable circumstances or not. Second Force exists externally and internally, and unless you see this, you will always blame someone. Second Force is in the nature of things, and is not an evil god but an aspect of God in which you have to fight with Him in order to develop. Perhaps you will understand that without Second Force no one could grow internally.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1464
“The idea is don’t try and play it clean. Dive into your anguish. Dive into your sadness. Don’t regret a minute of it. But transform, transform, transform. As Boehme said, pain is the ground of motion. So that’s the thing. And as you can see, it creates a radically different map from what we’ve looked at in classic sin and remediation. You don’t dismantle the false self. You basically use it as the fuel to push you forward as something that knew that if it’s going to be the holy denying, there’s not going to be any new manifestation without it. And [Boehme] is intuitively working in his transformational map with a law of three principle.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Jacob Boehme Claymont 2014, Sunday am Teaching, 35:00-36:00
Logion 68
Yeshua said:
Blessed are you when they hate you
and persecute you.
There is a place where you are not persecuted
that they will never find.
This Impression on Chiastic Center also touches on the idea of Second Force and Standing Firm.
This Impression on the Trisagion Prayer also touches on the idea of the Law of Three in the Trinity.
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020)
Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Thomas, Inner Traditions, 2005
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
Thank you
Thank you, John!