I had this dream...should be the beginning of this essay. For as I was brooding over what message wanted to come forth from the material through my lens, it would, (unbeknownst to me before the dream,) have to be what this holograph symbolizes. I dreamt of this symbol, carved in a huge slab of ancient stone, which is actually true, but also without previous awareness of it. At the end of the dream the word "Perturbation" echoed loudly as I awoke. Perturbation means a disturbance, sometimes a catastrophe, which sends something stable into crisis so a new state can emerge.

I searched for images of what I presumed to be a Celtic knot of some kind. I found it is an infinity symbol known as a triquetra.

The Universe seems structured in antithesis: a cosmos of polar opposites.

One of the first psychological functions we develop is the ability to discern opposites: the difference between this/that/, he/she, hot/cold, and happy/sad. It is not until much later in our developing consciousness that we begin to intuit we are also what we think we are most not. Hindus say, tat tvam asi, "I am that, That I am."

The triquetra points to another ancient understanding of thirdness that we see Christians adapted into their Holy Trinity: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, but its earlier use points to the Divine Feminine in her triple aspect: Mother, Daughter, and Crone. It reminds one of the triple-nature of the cosmos which suggests the existence of the middle road between opposites: body, mind, soul, / thought, feeling, emotion,/ creation, preservation, destruction, / life, death, rebirth, past, present, future,/ Underworld, Earth, and Heaven.

Joseph Campbell recognized this wisdom and wrote about a transcendent third reality that mystics and poets help us to see, a path in which we reconcile opposites into this unified and transcendent third. Campbell suggests that when reading the language of mythology, one primary function of myth always serves the hero's quest to return to this unity. He says, "The universally distinguishing characteristic of mythological thought and communication is an implicit connotation through all its metaphorical imagery of a sense of identity of some kind, transcendent of appearances, which unites behind the scenes the opposed actors on the world stage." (81) Stanley Keleman maps archetypal path of Campbell's hero:

Everyone is hero. This is a given.

We have a call to adventure.

We refuse.

A crisis ensues.

We cannot turn back-and we answer the call.

We collect helpers, teachers, guides.

And we cross the threshold into the unknown.

We lose our identity and enter an abyss, a nadir, the belly of a whale.

We emerge.

We begin traveling back home to what we have known-

re-crossing the threshold.

We return.

We have changed. (xv)

Dennis Slattery calls Campbell a mystic because he so keenly works to recognize the emergent third in all the mythologies of the world.  and even followed his own three step process with his life's work by recognizing we begin with the literal, but behind that is the mythical, one step past that and the aim really, is the mystical.

Slattery says of the mythologist:

I sense that Campbell is perhaps one of the most astute and persistently practicing yogis in that his work sustains this quality of "linking back," of sensing analogies where someone else might see only differentiation, separation, even alienation. His work reveals to me the writer's intense desire to burst through "the illusion of duality, [which] is the trick of maya. ‘Thou art that' (tat tvam asi) is the proper thought for the first step to wisdom. By collapsing the I of myself into the Thou of the other, dualism is usurped, a linking is established, and a consciousness of wholeness is achieved. Herein lies the heart beat of Campbell's life work as I understand it (4.)

In his book Field, Form and Fate, Michael Conforti explains the existence of an archetypal field which exerts force on us through non-local communication, a force that cannot be measured, except by the effects it has. Although an archetypal field acts within the time-space continuum, it is not contained there. The third path must emerge as a necessary occurrence in evolution:

Every organism and environment will naturally resonate with that which is habitual and familiar. The habitual is most often identical to repetitive behavior. Yet, at a certain point, the failure to move beyond familiarity halts evolution. Evolution and life, like the T-cells struggling for survival and victory, will not be denied without a struggle. In some way, and for some over-arching purpose, the archetypal fields at play in any given relationship will cause movement toward the establishment of a new pattern...Just as the phoenix bursts into flames so that it may rise anew and immortal from its ashes-winged, soaring creature that it is- it appears that all life endures the encoded partial destruction of key elements at special moments to ensure evolution. (127-128)

Richard Tarnas, in his book, Cosmos and Psyche, quotes a letter C.G. Jung wrote to his friend, Frau Frobe, who was caught in the tension between her career and motherhood:

There can be no resolution, only patient endurance of the opposites which ultimately spring from your own nature. You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life. Everyone goes through this mill, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly. We are crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture until the -reconciling third‖ takes place. Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you, and let whatever may happen, happen. The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels. (266)

Tarnas followed with a poem by Rilke.

Take your well-disciplined strengths

and stretch them between two opposing poles,

Because inside human beings

is where God learns. (266)

Therefore, this reconciling third is often realized in mythology as the hero's journey, and in Jungian terms, the path of individuation. The triquetra itself has evolved to include a circle in the middle of it. The circle represents the unifying principle of the Third Path, bringing the triple-natured universe into focused harmony. Behold: it is a song from home. _Ω 

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph. Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and Religion. Novato: 1986.

Conforti, Michael. Field, Form and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature and Psyche. New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 1999.

Keleman, Stanley. Myth and the Body: A colloquy with Joseph Campbell. Berkeley: Center Press. 1999.

Slattery, Dennis. "Mystic faces, History Traces, Joseph Campbell, Irish Mystic." Irish Culture & Depth Psychology Spring vol. 7. New Orleans: 2008.

Tarnas, Richard. Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of A New World View. New York: Plume.2007

Triquetra images courtesy of wikipedia.com