The Threeness of the World(5/6)
Woo licences, the law of 3 and 7 in Bourgeault & Gurdjieff, the mystery of getting slapped in the face by an independent variable, Jung's fourness, Pyramids, Pianos, and why numbers are qualities.
Oneness: I am everything, obviously.
Twoness: Actually, relationships are everything.
Threeness: You’d both be stuck without me.
Fourness: I make you all whole, which matters more than you think.
Fiveness: You guys are boring. Who wants a play fight?
Sixness: Can I plead the fifth?
Sevenness: Welcome, Everyone, I’ve been expecting you.
It is easy to get caught up in this world of tariff fetishisation, trade wars, and other tribulations beginning with T.
It is not misplaced to feel both that we cannot look away, while also feeling like we desparately need new vistas to attend to, and new pastures to tend.
And when we go hunting for renewal, it is best to acquire a Woo Licence first. You can hunt without one, and many do, but if you feel - as I do- that we have to explore beyond the stifling conventions of legacy media and the staid perimeters of academically acceptable terrain, it’s good to feel proper legit while you’re doing it.
Woo is often understood as a low-nutrient weak sauce that fuels the rampant practice of spiritual bypassing, which is entirely unsuited for the challenges of our times. But I believe in the intellectual dignity of woo, which is better understood as a the social practice of exploring the threshold between the seen and the unseen worlds with ever greater epistemic agility and acuity.
I have always imagined that to get a woo licence, there would be an Official Department of Wooness to confer one. The point of creating a statutory authority for wooness would be to grant woo licenses with discernment, only to people who have the requisite respect for reason and science, a low tolerance for dogma, good imagination, a mature relationship to power, and no apparent personality disorder. Such an authority would of course have a written constitution, with a strict separation of powers (and campaign finance reform to maintain it) to guard against the concentration of wooness, and the tryanny that could result.1
In the absence of such an authority, I trust you’ll forgive me for granting myself a temporary licence for what follows.
This is the fifth post in a series of six inquiries into the threeness of the world but you can read it on its own terms. After an introduction to the metaphysics of threeness in part one, a necessary preamble about maps and territories in part two, an exploration of ontology and epistemology in part three, an enquiry into the axiology of truth, beauty and goodness in part four, we are ready to consider threeness not just as a way of describing the world but more like a way of dancing with it, by attuning ourselves to its deeper and subtler patterns, and gleaning how they implicate us.
The contention is that threenes is not just a useful way of organising the known world, but a dynamic pattern arising from what is also unknown and unseen that constitutes and even enchants life as we know it. In the process of making this case, I engage with Cynthia Bourgeault, a Christian mystic who has written extensively on ‘the law of three’, Carl Jung, the swiss analytical psychologist who seems to believe fourness is a more fundamental feature of psycho-spiritual life, and more briefly with the inimitable spiritual teacher Gurdjieff (a unique combination of “Indiana Jones, The Buddha, and Borat” - Layman Pascal) who advocates a law of seven that may or may not allow these positions to live within each other.
I began this series with a joke:
It has been said that students who achieve oneness will graduate, take a summer vacation, and move on to twoness. Those who achieve twoness will eventually seek threeness. Those seeking fourness are gauche, understand nothing, and will be sent to the back of the class to retake their threeness exam.
A few readers earnestly defended fourness, and I thank them for their service. However, in Scottish culture, making fun of something is often a means of showing respect and affection for it. Far from neglecting fourness, I was waiting for the right moment to let it shine.
As far as I can tell, threeness and fourness are cosmically entwined. While they perform different exoteric functions, esoterically, they implicate each other to such an extent that they almost appear to be the same phenomenon. In The Symposium, Plato wrote about men and women being part of the same hermaphrodite creature that was separated, and we look for each other thereafter as if searching for our missing part. Similarly, it seems to me that 3/4 and 4/3 can be understood as a hermaphrodite that was separated into 3 and 4, with the four perhaps leaning slightly male due to its relative squareness, and the three leaning slightly female due to its relative curviness. Another way to think of it is that three is green and four is blue and together they make turquoise; and we all know that on seeing turquoise, some see green, others blue. It’s not quite that simple though, becuase I do ultimately side with threeness.
In this respect I am making a standard metamodern Bothboth/andandeither/or move. If either/or is that we say either threeness or fourness is more fundamental, and both/and says that they both matter equally, what I have come to think is that they both matter a lot and they implicate each other, but threeness - in the guise of the law of three - is ultimately more fundemental. To make that case I need to start with a basic overview of Bourgeault’s Law of Three, which is lightly amended from my prior introduction to Cynthia’s work.
Cynthia Bourgeault’s ‘Law of Three’ Metaphysics elucidates the Christian Trinity but is fundamentally free from it; it is also distinct from Hegelian synthesis, and universal in application. If you’ve ever had that feeling of a tense or locked situation being released by an unexpected factor that appears laterally, or as if from nowhere, that is third force, which is about transformation, renewal, surprise, liberation. It is a real phenomenon, I believe, and worth familiarising yourself with.
The book is brilliant, but challenging, and the second half feels almost like a manual for advanced spiritual practitioners. The central idea is for everyone, though, and it is described in eight(!) foundational principles (my bold).
In every new arising, there are three forces involved: affirming, denying, and reconciling (or affirming, denying and neutralising).
The interweaving of the three produces a fourth in a new dimension.
Affirming, denying and reconciling are not fixed points or permanent essence attributes, but can and do shift and must be discerned situationally.
It is always at the neutralising point that a new triad emerges.
Not any set of three items constitutes a trinity, but only those sets in which the three can be seen to be dynamically intertwined according to the stipulations of the Law of Three.
Solutions to impasses generally come by learning how to spot and mediate Third Force, which is present in every situation but generally hidden.
New arisings according to the Law of Three will generally continue to progress according to the Law of Seven.
The idea of third force is found in religion in the concept of the Trinity.
I cannot do justice to all eight points here. What I can say is that I have been grappling with an issue at work for over two years now, something potentially huge that I can’t seem to get moving, where I feel the desire for the new and also the stuckness that won’t let it happen - the affirming and denying. And now I also perceive the absence of third force - the reconciling. In this context, I find it hard to perceive how third force might be ‘discerned situationally’, and I know I can’t summon it through willpower, but I hope it knows it is welcome to visit me any time…
Cynthia suggests - and I believe her - that most people are so caught up in binaries that they can’t perceive third force even when it’s present, because they can’t hold the tension between the affirming and denying. I hope that doesn’t mean me, not least because knowing how to “keep the tension” in a game with two sides is a key feature of chess skill, but it might.
In my experience, third force appears as grace, as a kind of gift of release, and it gets familiar over time - it has a quality of finding you, entering into where you are, of being distinct from the pattern you are caught up in, but also illuminating it and releasing it. It tends to be lateral in spirit; a stranger, a pet, a long-lost friend, an unexpected phone call, but the orthodox examples include sperm being ‘resisted’ by egg, and the third force being fertilisation, giving rise to a baby. This is what is meant by “The interweaving of the three produces a fourth in a new dimension.” (See below for why every new baby can be thought of as a pyramid…)
As far as I have noticed, third force is often surprising, but sometimes it has been with you for a long time, waiting to be noticed; in either case it feels alive, vivifying and validating. The example of overhearing a retired boxer saying “I lost the heart for it” in the sauna when I was struggling to make sense of my relationship to chess was a moment where I felt Third Force. I am not sure how to best to configure the three eleements, but there was love of chess (affirming), life context (denying) that was causing me a certain amount of identity pain, and then a lateral unbidden perspective that crystallised what I was feeling and turned stuckness into a kind of forgiving absolution (reconciling) and a new piece of writing as the fourth (new arising through the neutralising point).
While I am not a spiritual teacher, and have no real authority to speak on behalf of The Law of Three, I am fairly sure point two is the key operative principle, illustrated, for instance, with flour and water becoming bread only when fire is added. The diagram below from The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three (2013, p.107) offers a simple visual, and note that an equilateral triangle is a perfect visual representation of what it means for something to be one and three (and four) at the same time.
Cynthia does not seem to emphasise completeness as a quality, but it’s worth knowing that Aristotle did because he was by no means a mystic. Aristotle saw that three reflected in the stability of a three-legged stool, and the narrative sequence of beginning, middle and end, and it is therefore the first number to reflect completeness. In De Caelo (On the Heavens), he writes:
“...the triad is the first number to which the word ‘all’ was applied. For they say ‘all’ and ‘complete’ of things which are three in number...”
This is useful to know, because many (see below) believe four is necessary for completeness. More importantly, though not stated as one of the axiom-like principles, Cynthia is clear that the third force is an independent force and not produced by the first two forces (see, for instance, on page 26).
I have been wondering how best to understand and underscore this point, because a great deal depends on it. The independence of ‘Third Force’ makes the law of three fundamentally different from the more conventionally understood thesis-antithesis-synthesis dynamic, where the third element is an emergent property of some kind that is derived from the first two. The point is also subtle, however, because the third force can’t be independent from everything else that gave rise to the other two forces, nor can it be entirely independent of their shared context. One way to probe this conundrum is to ask where the third hand comes from in the following classic comic moment in the film, Naked Gun.
Is the third hand ‘an independent variable’?
It’s part of the scene, it is related to the purposes of the first two hands, and the apology issued suggests agency for it, yet it doesn’t emerge from the body or as a product of the relationship between the hands, so it’s murky. This example has limited value both because the law of three is about three distinct forces rather than three identical things (hands), and because it’s ridiculous. Yet I do not find it unreasonable to ask where this third force comes from, and what it means to say it is independent. If the answer is some other part of Cynthia’s cosmology like ‘the imaginal realm’ or ‘World 24’, or ‘the cosmic intertidal zone’ (all discussed here) that’s good to know.
It’s worth holding these queries in mind as Cynthia clarifies her difference from Jung which I’ll come back to shortly:
“The interweaving of the three creates a fourth.” In this sense, Jung was right in his instinct to “complete” the Trinity by extending it into a quarternity. But he failed to realise that the “missing fourth” was not simply a fourth leg on a two-dimensional cruciform shape; it was a whole new dimension that transformed the triangle into a pyramid.
Ah, pyramids.
That’s not the first time ancient Egyptian culture appears to have been on to something. To take the Great Pyramid in Giza, for instance: it has oneness (a pyramid), fourness (an almost perfectly square base), and threeness (triangles on three sides) (*a mistake- see below). It feels gratuitous to add three and four to make seven in this context, but when I look at a pyramid in the context of the apparent disagreement between Jung and Bourgeault it feels like threeness and fourness are somehow part of the same process rather than antithetical. And maybe it’s because they add up to seven, and seven feels right. Maybe.
**
Then again, maybe not.
(**In fact, definitely not! I made an amusing mistake here, as noted by Jeff Verge in the comments. The mistake is worth highlighting because it is consistent with the joyous struggle over 3 and 4. There are triangular pyramids with a base and three sides (4) and there are square pyramids with a base and four sides (5) but there are no pyramids with a square base and three sides! (Which is obvious when you shift from philosophy to geometry). Curiously, I notice that I don’t feel embarrassed by this mistake, because it feels helpful. As an aside, the Great Pyramid of Giza actually has eight sides because each of the four faces is slightly indented for engineering reasons, but in a way that is not visible to the naked eye. Though isn’t that nine including the base? I knew it was a mistake for me to get involved with Pyramids…🙃**)
Gurdjieff’s Law of Seven is well above my spiritual pay grade, and I only partially understand seven things about it (no, really).
First, it’s about World Maintenance (while the Law of Three is about World Creation). Second, it is a process of seven stages towards a new beginning. Third, it concerns the discontinuity of vibrations - it’s about force (or flow) resistance to force (or flow) and the role of intervention in reestablishing force (or flow). Fourth, these discontinuities are not random; they occur at particular points that correspond to the solfege in music. Fifth, the law of seven is a more complex holding pattern for the way the law of three does its thing; namely, three becoming one as a fourth in a new dimension. Sixth, the interaction of the law of three and the law of seven is featured in The Enneagram - a spiritual symbol long before it was used as a personality typology. And, seventh, the most useful reference point for the law of seven is not a pyramid but a piano.
“As every budding pianist learns, the intervals of the scale are called do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do. Five of these intervals are whole steps: do-re, re-mi, fa-sol, la-si. You can confirm this visually on the piano keyboard; if you play this pattern on the white notes beginning on middle C, you’ll see that there is an intervening black key between each of the two whites. But between mi and fa and between si and do the white keys are directly contiguous. These are the half steps - the two ‘stopinders’ (as Gurdjieff calls them) - and it is precisely here that the loss of force occurs.”
This is not about pianos, really, but rather recognising that music is metaphysical (it’s about time and space and flow and resistance and beauty etc) and musical octaves can act metaphorically (carrying meaning through redescription, not merely an analogy) as symbols for the entire “Ray of Creation” as Gurdjieff puts it. The underlying point, as Cynthia puts it, is: “Unless an additional energetic impulse is introduced at precisely these points, the whole line of development will tend to veer off in another direction.”
I find this idea fascinating partly because it chimes with my experience of playing chess professionally against excellent defenders. A winning position typically does not win itself. There is usually a pattern of play, and a type of acquired expertise, by which we have to transform one kind of advantage into another to overcome resistance, and invariably this has to happen a few times over an extended sequence of moves, but not at ever turn; for instance you have to give away your material advantage for positional gains, or shift from middlegame to endgame. A strong chess player knows how to keep the tension and when to to release the tension, and when to maintain the position and when to transform it. It’s not exactly the law of seven, I know, but that sense of agentic discontinuity being a feature not bug rings true for me because of my chess experience. More generally, the notion of resisted flow calling for the insertion of agency is… life-like.
**
I feel an affinity with the law of seven, though I can’t claim to understand it. But I do see a metapolitical dimension to the law of three, which places creative generativity at the heart of reality, always open and alive. At first blush, I did not feel the same way about Carl Jung’s hankering after the stability of fourness. I need to share a large extract from Cynthia’s critique of Jung before considering how he might have responded:
Cynthia highlights that the quaternity was first suggested as an “improvement” to the Trinity by Jung, who noted that the mandala, or square combined with the circle, has a greater stability and archetypal completeness than the triangle…
“But while the initial attraction of the principle of quarternity is strong, representing in Barnhart’s words, “the wedding of the masculine principle of structure and polarity with the feminine principle of wholeness, simplicity and unity”, in terms of the metaphysical system laid out so far, the flaw should be apparent. For the quarternity is in fact merely a double binary and hence operates under the earlier mythological law of paired opposites, in this case doubled pairs. While it does bring a “mandalic” completion to the Trinity, it has also switched tracks metaphysically and hence leads to a muddying of the waters and a weakening of the dynamic asymetrical driveshaft of the ternary system’s whole self-understanding. While binary systems seek completion in a “reabsorption into the whole”, as Clement observes, ternary systems seek completion in the drive into a new dimension. To find the “missing fourth” according to the Law of Three, we must seek for it at a whole new level. The fourth is not a stable completion but the new arising that inevitably emerges from the dynamic interplay of the three.”
There’s a lot going on there, and the key idea at the end is that ‘the fourth’ is not about stability and completion but an entirely new arising, the beginning of a new cycle of threeness. It sounds convincing at first blush, but Jung spent most of his life reflecting on such matters, and I felt obliged to look a little further. Surely Jung, master of symbols and esoterica, would not lightly confuse the fourth leg of a stool with a pyramid? And Jung was hardly a paragon of stability.
There must be even more going on.2
**
Jung’s fourness has something to do with his view of numbers as archetypes - in which four is completeness or stability, his mandalic symbolism from his direct experience - where four somehow speaks to and from the soul. More profoundly, it’s something about his struggle with the idea of God being good as opposed to merely Being, and Christianity’s trinity, in particular, failing to contend with God’s moral ambiguity and therefore being fundamentally lacking as an expression of divine reality.
Jung is therefore misunderstood (though doubtless not by Cynthia) when his fourness is seen as a kind of counting. In his autobiography, he spoke of his “sheer terror” of abstract equations like A=B. A prominent Jungian, Christophe Le Mouel, comments:
Jung’s struggle with mathematics was other than mere lack of skills; rather it was an early expression of his psychological perspective on the world, which shied away from abstract generalisations formulated at the expense of individual cases.
This statement chimes with Jung’s remark, reflecting on a conversation he had with Einstein in a letter to Carl Seelig in 1953:
One can scarcely imagine a greater contrast than that between the mathematical and the psychological mentality. The one is extremely quantitative, and the other just as extremely qualitative.
So for Jung, threeness and fourness are archetypes rather than abstractions; shared living realities with their own psychological grammar. Quantities have qualities, and numbers are not therefore just numbers, but also ideas, symbols, patterns, energies. There is a difference between the numerical 1, the word one, the concept of oneness, the ideas of uniqueness, unity, and, for instance, monotheism, individuation, or the image of Earth from space. There is a difference between 2, two, and twoness, which is also, for example, duality, coincidentia oppositorium, night and day, or marriage.
And Jung’s primary concern is individuation, that we should become who we are, and that does not mean some kind of gradual movement upwards on the developmental model de jour; on the contrary it often means a existential peril through confronting the unconscious, both individual and collective, and to overcome our inclination to project onto others what is an unintegrated part of ourselves. For Jung, the heart of that process of inquiry into our inner worlds is therefore recognising shadow material - lust, anger, envy, malice etc - the parts of ourselves and our cultures that we wish were not there and often pretend are not there.
Directly related to numbers as archetypes and his Jung’s critique of threeness is part of his broader grappling with Christianity in general and perhaps the limitations of his religious father in particular. (I am grateful to Mark Vernon, who recently joined Substack and is well worth subscribing to, for generously informing some of what follows, though all words and mistakes are mine).
For Jung, The Father, Son and Holy Spirit relationship doesn’t ring true as a way to understand God because it does not chime with human experience of the reality of evil, the power of the feminine, and the importance of dying to oneself. In other words, Christianity has a problem acknowledging its shadow, and its failure to do so is what has led to many historical horrors including, for instance, the inquisition, colonialism, and arguably fascism. (Jung is of course concerned with the Trinity in general, rather than Cynthia Bourgeault’s Law of Three which is a dynamic variant of it, and I’ll disaggregate them in a moment.) Jung believes the trinity lacks ‘the fourth’, which appears to be whatever is missing, whatever is lacking to achieve wholeness - the fourth is the perennial missing link but it manifests, for instance, as a lack of embodiment, the denial of death, the absence of the feminine.
The basis of Jung’s ‘fourness’ is laid out in his correspondence with Father Victor White from 1945-1960 about God and the unconscious. I have read summaries rather than the whole exchange, but orthodox psychology does several rounds in the ring with depth psychology, and it is not clear who is left standing. The essence of the disagreement is the Christian notion of Privatio Boni - the idea that evil does not have a reality of its own, but is just a denial or perversion of goodness. This point extends more broadly to whether darkness is something other than the absence of light, whether ‘shadow’ has a reality independent of whatever casts it.
I am reminded of my son Vishnu’s evocative question: Can God outrun his shadow?
I don’t know how to answer that, nor do I have a firm view on the ontology of evil, the existence of the Devil, or the reality of darkness that is more than the absence of light. What comes to mind is is how Simon & Garfunkel opened The Sound of Silence:
🎶 Hello Darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk to you again….
In a world featuring cruelty, avoidable suffering and devastating natural disasters, I can see why God might be somewhat morally ambiguous which appears to be Jung’s position, but not why God would be morally ambivalent. In other words, I can see that God’s goodness manifests unevenly, and begs some questions, but I don’t think God is at war with his own nature or fundamentally conflicted.
I am more inclined to side with Khalil Gibran in The Prophet when he asks rhetorically:
For what is evil, but goodness tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
*
Evil might also be acting without knowing who and what we are. In this respect, Jung insists that a fundamental feature of our encounter with shadow material entails another reckoning, with the ‘Syzygy’: the missing feminine (in men) - anima, and the missing masculine (in women) - animus. I believe this is partly what Cynthia means by “merely a double binary and hence operates under the earlier mythological law of paired opposites”.
However, perhaps what Jung sees is not just sources of psychological projection but also metaphysical priors rooted in Logos and Eros. Maybe this “double binary” is necessary to capture the relationships that characterise both the immanent and transcendent natures of reality. As far as I can decipher, the double binary in play is the coincidentia oppositorum of psyche and matter co-arising with masculine and feminine - it doesn’t get much more fundamental than that, and it does feel ‘whole’ in a way that threeness does not. Consider this line from Jung’s essay Aion, the writing of which apparently cured Jung of ailments relating to his experience of spiritual oppression - of not really saying what he thought due to fear of losing scientific respectability.3
Recapitulating, I should like to emphasize that the integra- tion of the shadow, or the realization of the personal uncon- scious, marks the first stage in the analytic process, and that with- out it a recognition of anima and animus is impossible. Theshadow can be realized only through a relation to a partner, and anima and animus only through a relation to the opposite sex, because only in such a relation do their projections become operative. The recognition of anima or animus gives rise, in a man, to a triad, one third of which is transcendent: the mascu- line subject, the opposing feminine subject, and the tran- scendent anima. With a woman the situation is reversed. The missing fourth element that would make the triad a quaternity is, in a man, the archetype of the Wise Old Man, which I have not discussed here, and in a woman the Chthonic Mother. These four constitute a half immanent and half transcendent quaternity, an archetype which I have called the 'marriage quaternio.
Moreover, some Jungians write of ‘the fourth’ in a manner even more intense than the way Cynthia writes about ‘third force’. Consider this reflection on Jacob wrestling the angel by Christophe le Mouel:
This biblical episode sheds singular light onto my series of dreams about the fourth. The fourth appears as the angel of god or god himself and the psyche becomes peniel, the place where the face of god gradually reveals itself through the confrontation with the ego. The encounter can be a staggering experience, and the terrifying intensity leaves us with our mouths shut. It marks a profound transformation, provided the ego does not let go. When the angel gives his blessing at daybreak, the reality of the soul’s experience in the night becomes an integral part of one’s life. In the daylight of consciousness, the experience appears as a wound, like Jacob’s limp. One becomes a new person with a unique perspective and a different way of being present in the world.
So I remain confused. Where I have got to is that both threeness and fourness can be seen as descriptive and/or dynamic and they are part of some larger and more mysterious cosmopoeitic process that may or may not be sevenfold and is definitely beyond me. There is the trinity (Reality/God as relationship) and then there’s the law of three (Hidden law of creation) and there’s the quaternity (stability) and then there’s ‘the missing fourth’ (integration of whatever is neglected/ignored/despised including ‘the marriage quaternio’). It all matters, and it’s uneven in nature, which is why seven, potentially carrying different kinds of three and four, may be even more fundamental.
I prefer the dynamism of the law of three’ to the descriptive quaternity, but I prefer 'the missing fourth’ to a complacent trinity. All these ideas need each other to make sense of themselves and each other. I do believe though that fourness arises from threeness in a way that threeness does not arise from fourness. And I believe threeness is connected to oneness in a way that fourness is not. And I believe fourness is not as stable as it looks, because fourness exists in time and the fourth element is often in some way related to time, which means change. And the propulsion arises from three, not four.
But I could be wrong. And I don’t know how to end this post, so I’ll just say:
1+1=2, 1+1+1=3, 3+1=4, 4+3=7
Q.E.D? 🙃
**Perspectiva is currently recruiting for two positions to help lead our publishing arm and to support with operations (Deadline May 2)
And there are still a few days before the deadline (April 15th) for the Realisation Fellowship for 18-35 year olds**
Full Series:
Perhaps the point of creating Perspectiva almost a decade or so ago now was to prepare the ground, but in different ways we might say the same for allies and friends like The Pari Centre, The Scientific and Medical Network, or The Fetzer Institute.
Over twenty years ago, I bought a green hardback book in a second-hand shop called Cross-Currents of Jungian Thought. While it has survived many a cull, I have never read it, so unless you can become a Jungian by Osmosis, I must confess, not for the first or the last time, that I have no expertise here beyond a dogged curiosity. I read Jung’s autobiography: Memories, Dreama and Reflections, and The Undiscovered Self, in their entirety, and I have read many extracts from his other books in compilations, for instance parts of Answer to Job, his introduction to the I Ching, his work on psychological types, and lots of secondary commentary, for instance in James Hilman. For this article I read most of his extraordinary essay, Aion, but I have never read his Red Book, which appears to be worthwhile, and I am only part of the way through Catafalque by Peter Kingsley, which is a reappraisal of Jung that many consider a must-read. I did however read Revisiting Jung's "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity": Some Implications for Psychoanalysis and Religion. byAmy Bentley Lamborn, and Four: A Reflection on the Wholeness of Nature, Part I, Psychological Perspectives, by Christophe Le Mouël.
The reference to ‘Chtonic Mother’ intrigues me because while I am not totally sure how Jung means it, Donna Haraway places emphasis on the chtonic as a source of renewal in her book Staying with the Trouble; she does so in a les mystical and more literal sense of learning from decidedly immanent creatures, for instance, the ‘tentacularity’ of spiders inspiring our own tentacular thinking.
Several people have recommended a book Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity by Peter Kingsley, and I'm well into it now. Kingsley argues that we have failed to understand that Jung is a prophet in the sense, I think, that he is literally speaking for the Gods that somehow live in our unconscious. It seems we are failing to rightly diagnose our spiritual malaise as being one in which we have killed our own gods because we are unwilling to let go of our sense of normality; our apparent collective sanity, thinks Kingsley, is a kind of madness, becuase it is cut off from its spiritual roots, which go back to Presocratic philosophy. I’ll reserve judgment on all that until I have finished the book, but I am not yet persuaded.)
Speaking here from the experience of multiple decades of meditation practice, working with Cynthia Bourgeault's concepts and various integrally informed developmental models. both personally, in business and in my coaching practice.
For me, the key here is the notion of Reconciling. What it takes to initially recognize apparent opposites, then hold the paradox in tension without collapsing to either pole. Typically the pattern is first to not even recognize you're holding to one side (that's just the way it is), to then noticing the opposing force but demonizing it, to then holding the two in some kind of (creative) tension. This is tremendously difficult. The act and intention of "just being" in the eye of the storm calls out latent capacities, evokes something deeper/ broader from within or beyond us. Possibly catalyzes an evolutionary/ developmental process, which is now a required response to challenge.
This ability to bear the tension can be supported by State practices (prayer, meditation, ++) and also by recognition that one may be growing up to some broader stage unfolding.
Long story short—I have found Law of Three a profoundly pragmatic support.
Great, Jonathan!
When the Latins were a disorganized rabble overshadowed by Etruscan civilization, they sacrificed a cow, divided themselves into three groups and shared the meat in a ritual. Division is combined as a unity. If anyone was attacked, the rest would fight under their temporary leadership.
They called being a member of this community socius and the whole thing societas; this is usually translated as an alliance. The equal groups was called tribus (tribe = a third) and the ritual was distribution (sharing among egalitarian tribes). But socius comes from the o-grade form of the Indo-European root sekw- (as in second, sequel and sign) meaning to follow.
This was a network society, and we now find ourselves as temporary followers of leaders like you on this occasion. The big names on the internet now encourage us to join their tribe or make one of our own. It was only in medieval France that society became a centralized territorial state, like the failed nation-states we live in now, undermined by the digital revolution and lawless money flows.
PS. The icon for three in Chinese also means many.