In the phenomenology of your daily life, your consciousness operates through three primary modes:
Thinking (Conception): The analytical, logical, and structural activity of the mind. This is the realm of the "Logos," where we conceptualize and categorize our reality.
Feeling (Perception): The intuitive, aesthetic, and relational activity of the heart. This is the realm of "Eros," where we perceive the qualitative resonance and beauty of our experience.
Being (Sensation): The direct, non-conceptual presence of the body and soul. This is the realm of "Ethos," where we simply are, grounded in the raw sensation of existence.
This mental architecture is not a random biological quirk; it is a holographic subdivision of the way the Universal Mind "thinks" the universe into existence. Your individual dynamics are a "dim reflection" of the Universal Trinity:
The Universal Mind Trinity:
- Truth (Sat)
- Beauty (Ananda)
- Goodness (Chit)
The Participatory Bridge:- Participating in the Logos
- Participating in the Eros
- Participating in the Ethos
The Individual Dynamics:
- Thinking is the act of discerning Truth.
- Feeling is the act of resonating with Beauty.
- Being is the act of resting in Goodness.
The Boundary of Order:
“Why is my mind so chaotic if the Universe is so orderly?”
The "flitting" of your awareness—the constant jumping between thinking, feeling, and being—is the result of the Multitasking Mechanism of the brain. To survive in a body, your mind must constantly scan the environment, react to threats, and process data.
The "Order" of the universe (the Logos) is the Deep Architecture beneath the noise. When you engage with Sacred Geometry, you are temporarily aligning your "flitting" mind with that "Orderly" mind. You are using the compass and straightedge to "tune" your individual whirlpool back to the frequency of the Great Ocean.
The Boundary of Solidity:
“If everything is mental, why does hitting my thumb with a hammer hurt so much?”
In the standard worldview, the hammer is "out there" and your thumb is "in here." In this alternative worldview, both the hammer and the thumb are patterns of information within the Visible Domain. The "pain" you feel is the Friction of the Boundary.
When the dissociated segment of mind we call "the ego" encounters a pattern it does not control (the hammer), the resulting collision is experienced as Qualia—in this case, the sharp, undeniable quality of pain. The hammer is "real" because it is a thought in a Mind vaster than your own. You cannot "think" the pain away because your individual mind is a subset of the Universal Mind, and the "Laws of Physics" are simply the Habits of the Universal Mind that your individual mind must respect for its own safety.
The Boundary of Will:
“If I am a part of the Universal Mind, why can’t I just manifest a better world?”
Your individual mind is like a small whirlpool in a vast ocean. While the whirlpool is made of the same water as the ocean, it does not control the tides. This is the Friction of the Ego.
Consider your dreams: you are the "creator" of the dream, yet you are often surprised, frightened, or chased by characters within it. This proves that even within your own mind, there are vast territories beyond the control of your conscious will. To "manifest" change in the shared world, your ideas must cross the Dissociative Boundaries between your mind and others. This requires the "Work" of the Logos—writing, speaking, creating, and building—to bridge the gap between your internal "Invisible Domain" and the collective "Visible Domain." That's what this site is about.
When you Think, you are tapping into the eternal logic of Sacred Truth. When you Feel, you are vibrating with the inherent Sacred Beauty of the cosmos. When you simply Are, you are resting in the fundamental Sacred Goodness of existence. By recognizing these movements, you begin to see that your subjective experience is a microcosm of the macrocosm: as above, so below.
Saturn's Golden Pattern ©Scott Onstott
The Triskelion reminds us that these are not three separate rooms, but a single, dynamic flow. To understand the Dynamics of Mind is to learn how to dance between these points without losing your center in the
Oculus. While the Triskelion describes the internal flow of our awareness, these dynamics manifest in the world as our 'Architecture of Intent'—the way we choose to engage with the challenges of life.
Tactics are the tools of the immediate. They focus on short-term actions to navigate the "here and now." When we are under threat—whether on a literal battlefield or the metaphorical battlefield of modern life—our biology drops us into tactical mode. It is a survival mechanism designed for getting what we want or need in the moment. However, a life lived purely in the tactical becomes transactional. When we lose our emotional regulation, we revert to a reactive state where we prioritize immediate gratification and often fall into the "victim-blame" loop—a state that is normative for a child, but becomes a "Cage of Emotional Reactivity" for an adult.
Strategy is the domain of the long-term horizon. It is the "Architect’s Compass" that sets the overarching direction and overarching goals. It takes immense discipline to see the forest through the trees when the world is "shooting" at you, but this is the hallmark of the Sovereign Adult. Strategy requires us to step out of the transactional and into the intentional. It is the realization that we are not just players in a game, but the designers of our own trajectory.
Presence is the "Center of Calm" over the roiling abyss. It is the state where the dynamics of mind find their equilibrium. While tactics and strategy are concerned with doing, Presence is concerned with being. It is the "Human Bridge" in its most realized form—the point where we stop reacting to the world and start showing up within it.
To "grow up" in this context is to take radical personal responsibility for our actions. It means recognizing when we have been triggered into a tactical survival mode and having the courage to climb back up the mountain toward Strategy and Presence. We move away from the reactive "tactics of the ego" and toward a life built on strategy and presence, where your unique human frequency can finally find its harmony within the collective.
To see the "Dynamics of Mind" playing out on a global scale, we need only look at the current state of our cultural mythology. In the video below, the critique of modern Star Trek reveals a startling trend: we have moved away from Strategic Storytelling—which requires an adult understanding of consequence, sacrifice, and long-term meaning—and toward Tactical Content and transactional relationships. We're no longer a team.
When movies are "written by children," they inhabit the "Cage of Emotional Reactivity." They focus on the transactional "win" of the moment rather than the "Presence" of a character’s soul. This is the "victim-blame loop" and the "immediate gratification" mode manifested as entertainment. By analyzing why modern movies often are so juvenile and unsatisfying, we can better understand the necessity of reclaiming the Sovereign Adult perspective in our own lives.
We must move beyond the tactical "quip" and back toward the strategic "quest"—recognizing that we are on a team together, in our family, work group, nation, and planet, if we are to ever take responsibility for our lives in a larger community.
In our past live 3 day workshops at the Academy (in Ireland), we used specific geometric archetypes—such as the Sri Yantra or Metatron's Cube or Squaring the Circle—and designed the experience around three states, which we iterated through with every drawing session:
- Concentration on the act of drawing with compass and ruler, pencil on paper, carefully following procedural instructions. The Thinking/Logos mode (The Drawing Instruments). Another act was concentrating on creating a sand mandala together in a group, working without speaking.
- Contemplation of a slideshow about the geometric archetype, pondering its meaning and personally how it applies to our own experiences. The Feeling/Eros mode (The Image).
- Meditation lying down eyes closed listening to ambient music allowing the forms into the many layers of the onion invites the hypnagogic liminal and Turiya states. The Being/Ethos mode (The Wordless Music).
