The Three Forms and the Trigon, the Design of Creation

It starts with a simple question: what can people create?

Scott Gehring

12 min readNov 9, 2022

At the most fundamental level, there are at least three forms of human creation.

The first form is the creation of other people, a child.

The second form is the creation of an idea.

When a person creates an idea or another person, they become a parent.

The parent, therefore, constitutes the third form.

All other creations are manifestations, variations, or extensions of these forms.

The three-way relationship of the parent, child, and idea produces the Trigon of Creation.

The triangle is the chosen design of creation, as it is the strongest shape in the known universe.

Due to its inherent strength, it yields the best odds of survival.

The long-term creative process needs all three legs to thrive.

Remove one of the bastions, and the triangle collapses, leading to decay and destruction.

If a material creation has a beginning, it must also have an end, as everything in the tangible universe is bound by time and space.

Thus, all forms, the parent, child, and idea, are ephemeral and will perish.

Like the speed of light is to time and space, death provides the constant from which to measure life.

Impermanence is the only pure equality among the parent, child, and idea.

Death equals equality, and equality equals death.

The method of demise, the duration of its life span, and the existential being of the forms are relative and non-equivalent.

Each form has an unequal staggered allocation of time.

Some forms have longer durations than others; thus, the parent-child-idea relationship is inherently hierarchical.

Without an unequal staggered parent-child-idea hierarchy, there would be no perpetual conveyor belt of growth, knowledge transfer, or human cultivation; consciousness would be reduced to just a brief flash of light, then extinguished forever, replaced by vivid blinding darkness.

If the three-way relationship is preserved and remains intact, it is then when transcendence and opportunity for life can blossom.

Death and equality become inescapable when the Trigon of Creation is broken.

The idea cannot live without the parent and child.

The child cannot live without the parent and the idea.

The parent cannot exist without a child or idea.

All three forms are co-dependent on each other’s survival.

The Three Interactions

At least three interactions can occur across the forms: parent, child, and idea.

There is the act of birth, the act of influence, and the act of transformation.

All three interactions lead to the final overall output of creation.

The first and most fundamental bastion of the three interactions is the naked act of direct creation: birth.

A person has a baby: child birth.

A person carves a sculpture: idea birth.

These are both direct creative acts.

Whereas the above examples illustrate direct acts of creation, indirect acts can also occur.

The contrast of indirect versus direct brings us to the second creative interaction between the forms: influence.

Influence is an occurrence of indirect creation. All forms exert influence on each other.

The parent can influence the child and the idea.

The child can influence the idea and the parent.

The idea can influence the parent and the child.

These relationships produce a circular reference of stimulus across the three forms.

An example of creative influence would be the teacher-student relationship.

Take, for instance, Cindy, a student attending university.

When Cindy is in class, the professor represents the role of the parent while she represents the role of the child.

The curriculum being taught is the idea.

Remove any forms from the system, and Cindy’s university experience collapses.

The schooling process exerts creative influence through the professor, the parent.

The professor encourages and develops the student, the child.

This cultivation affords the student the skills to create meaningful ideas, thus transforming the student from the child to the parent.

A person is not a single form all the time.

When looking across domains, one can embody all the forms at once.

For example, suppose our university student, Cindy, is a mother.

In the classroom domain with the professor, she is fulfilling the role of the child.

However, after class, when she returns home and is with her daughter, she is now the parent.

Cindy coexists as both parent and child, depending on the context of the domain.

Furthermore, supposing her young daughter, Elsa, is excited to see Cindy before her arrival home.

In anticipation of the excitement of seeing her mother, Elsa draws a picture of them holding hands.

In the realm of the drawing, Cindy is now an idea.

Therefore, within one day, Cindy has adapted all three forms in different domains.

As there are both direct and indirect interactions of creativity, a form also can be transmitted from one to another.

This transmutation yields the third type of interaction: transformation.

Like how liquid can convert to gas, gas to solid, and back to liquid again, the forms can undergo metamorphosis and change in state.

For instance, a parent can become an idea.

What happens when a famous author of a book dies? The book is the idea, and the author is the parent.

However, since the author is deceased, the writer exists only in memory and is no longer a living organic form.

Hence, the parent has transformed into an idea.

This transformative effect can work in the other direction.

An idea can become a parent. How?

Take, for example, an orphaned adolescent wishing she had a mother and father.

This wish of having a mother and father is an idea.

One day, she is adopted.

The act of adoption realizes her idea.

In this case, the idea materialized into physical parents. The forms transformed from one state to another.

Can the idea become a child? Is DNA not an idea? The creation of an infant transforms an idea, DNA, into a child.

Moreover, an organic person would be unable to conceive a newborn without the encoded double helix sequencing within them.

The parent, child, and idea are interwoven throughout the creative process.

Both the parent and child are representations of living organic forms.

The act of transformation enables an organic life form to transcend beyond death.

Transcendence is the gift of creative sacrifice.

When the organic form perishes, it can still live through its creations.

The more robust the creation, the more durable the imprint the parent maintains.

Notably, the Sphinx in Egypt has made a much more lasting impression than crackle nail polish.

The collection of human knowledge that flows through the billions of people on the planet is the ghost of parents past.

The Individual Form versus the Group

The Trigon symbolizes the group.

The form represents the individual.

The group can be composed of many ideas and children, with the parent as the leader.

Leadership and creativity are highly individualistic acts relative to the form.

Be it giving birth to a newborn, writing a book, typing computer code, running for congress, cooking, catching a ball, changing a diaper, painting a picture, reading your children a bedtime story, hammering a nail into wood, playing the piano, or laying out an enterprise company growth strategy, all these examples are individualistic.

While creativity is individualistically centered and conducted by a particular form, the group is a cooperative membrane that encircles the form, one that applies rigor, assistance, encouragement, or critique for the new creation to become robust.

For example, while childbirth is individualistic at its center, in the modern world, most people deliver in the hospital, not as an act of solitude in the woods.

The mother bears the independent act of birth.

The hospital participates through influence, providing support, skills, and care, and ensuring the infant is born healthy and under sanitary conditions.

The group and the individual work together.

The group can also act as a rejector for negative forms that are not in its best interest.

The individual creative act also pertains to ideas.

The popular series, Game of Thrones, was conceived by a single man, George R.R. Martin.

He is the parent; the Game of Thrones is his idea.

However, the success of George R.R. Martin did not occur in a vacuum.

Martin, over his career, has had a vast support network of publishers, advisors, editors, and even film studios to help materialize his creation most effectively to the universe.

Individual versus group. Yin vs. Yang. Imbalance these at the peril of society.

On the one hand, hyper-individualism (narcissism, hoarding, “it’s all about me,” “my truth,” etc.) is isolative.

It separates the forms from the Trigon relationship and forces them into seclusion, utter loneliness, unable to thrive.

On the other hand, equality (compassion, altruism, collectivism, etc.) does not recognize the full individual autonomy and healthy function of the forms, thereby imposing diminishment of their respective roles.

The net result of hyper-individualism and equality is the same: a reinforced single-node approach, hence the destruction of growth, flourishing, and creation.

The creative act is a gateway to the golden mean between hyper-individualism and equality.

It helps stabilize the two domains, requiring sacrifice and individual independence, thereby fostering harmony.

Those Who Can Organically Create and Those Who Cannot

Some forms can give birth to both people and ideas. Other forms can only give birth to ideas.

For that reason, the forms that can give birth to people and ideas have a wider breadth of capabilities and wield the most intrinsic power.

Those-who-cannot are limited to a single avenue, whereas those-who-can have all available avenues.

Those-who-can are more divergent in nature, with a broader and more holistic set of interests and opportunities.

Those-who-cannot are more convergent in nature, with the focus of their resourcefulness more concentrated in their realm of capability.

To achieve excellence as a parent, the ability to commit one’s resources to a single form over time is paramount.

In this way, while those-who-can are endowed with the gift of two avenues of creation, they are also faced with a choice — where does one concentrate their resources?

How does the allocation of means affect themselves, the group, and the Trigon? What is the right choice?

The power of choice is a simultaneous gift and impeding burden that bears both creative freedom and responsibility.

Since resources are scarce and limited, choice requires sacrifice.

Since those who can have the power to select, they are the ultimate deciders of the course of the group and humanity as a whole.

The Act versus the Word

What is more fundamental to the creative process: actions or words?

The answer lies within the Trigon and the three interactions between the forms: birth, transformation, and influence.

First and foremost, creativity is an act.

The raw act of birth, the central bastion of creation, and its final wretched closing, death, thus transformation, requires no words.

The birth of a child? Words optional.

The painting of a picture? Words optional.

The passing of a loved one softly into the night? Words optional.

Therefore, in the domains of birth and transformation, actions reign supreme.

Influence, on the other hand, unlike birth and transformation, provide a conduit for words to project their shadowy magic.

Albeit, one can still influence with actions, ergo a punch to the jaw.

A physical strike can have a massive influence and be conducted in silence.

Also, a word, in some sense, is an action. For example, speaking requires kinetic motion of the jaw and tongue.

Nevertheless, despite actionability being a significant factor, it is in the domain of influence where words can maximize their total capacity.

In the realm of influence, words can drive and overcome action. The power of words to wield their impact is magnified within groups.

Shakespeare’s 16th-century play Othello is a marvelous illustration of the power of words within the realm of insidious creative influence.

In this play, Othello is the tragic hero sadly destroyed by the villain Iago.

On the surface, Othello outmatched Iago in every noble characteristic.

Except, Iago was clever, and he understood the power of words.

Wielding the supremacy of language within the realm of dark influence, he facilitated Othello’s ultimate demise.

Similar to how the march toward death is unremitting, another constant of life lurks among us: the genetic code.

The genetic code is a list of instructions, a blueprint for creation, the words of human design.

So while birth is first and foremost an action, the DNA spiraling below the surface orchestrates the act.

The words of genetics, the idea, bind the parent and the child.

Productive Cultures

Murder, physical violence, and property destruction are principal wrongdoings in constructive cultures.

These acts directly attack the Trigon and tear down the creative essence of society.

Murder and physical violence strike the parent and the child.

Property destruction strikes at the idea.

These pernicious behaviors inhibit cultural design, which in turn hinders human flourishing.

It may seem obvious to most that murder and theft are foul, but in many ways, this deeply rooted notion is seemly taken for granted, especially in enlightened societies.

Productive cultures hold creativity sacred and protect its vital bastions. In the modern world, the measurable manifestation of the idea is reflected in the form of property.

When someone engages in property destruction, they purposely steal not just another’s vital lifeblood of industrious output, time, failures, risks, lessons, and rewards but the maker’s ability to transcend beyond themselves.

They are partaking in a dead-end of the Trigon for the creator.

Why do people get so upset when fine art is defaced?

It is not just the material, as much as the destruction of knowledge, the demolition of the artists’ journey from flesh to lasting memory.

It’s a form of theft.

The potency of these concepts has been reflected in many world religions as a divine trinity.

Sumerians, Babylonians, Ancient Egyptians, Hindus, Greek-Roman traditions, and Christianity have representations and interpretations.

For example, the Christian religion uses a trinity in the form of The Father, The Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Does The Father not depict a parent?

Is The Son not a child?

Is the Holy Ghost not an apparition of past human knowledge and forward-looking aspirations — the idea?

The cultures that have proven to flourish the most over time have had a healthy balance of the parent-child-idea relationship.

Not All Creation is Positive

The act of creation can be wondrous, life-promoting, and nourishing, but it will occasionally yield insidious beasts.

The incessant flow of depraved people and ideas seems neverending. The Trigon acts as a corrective mechanism for the dysfunctional and harmful forms, be it people or ideas, and encourages the positive and valuable to grow.

In simplest terms, flawed forms diminish the interaction of birth within the Trigon, thus causing atrophy of the defective form.

Positive forms promote the opposite, expanding the birth interaction, thus stimulating the expansion of the healthy form.

The self-corrective nature of the Trigon can be illustrated with The Heaven’s Gate cult led by Marshall Applewhite.

Marshall Applewhite proposed that an alien spaceship would come for him and his followers and take them to the “kingdom of heaven.”

In this scenario, Marshall Applewhite was the parent.

The “kingdom of heaven” was the idea.

The cult members were the children.

During the earth-bound trajectory of the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997, Applewhite and his followers poisoned themselves, hoping to leave their bodily vessels, and enter the comet, thinking it was the extraterrestrial craft they had long awaited.

The cult was found dead.

This circular relationship of negative creativity resulted in the killing of the parent — the idea’s creator.

It also killed the child — the believers in the idea.

In addition, it killed the idea — the idea needs the containers of the parent and the child to live through.

Put differently, this relationship triggered a collapse in the structure of the Trigon, therefore mitigating proliferation and reducing the overall trail of influence of its participant forms.

Thus, a universal law unfolds before us: ideas that kill people kill ideas.

People that kill ideas kill people.

The reason the idea was not completely eradicated from existence was the fact it was documented.

As a result, the shadow of the parent and the children still transcend beyond death.

The only way to completely eradicate the effects of the Trigon is to destroy its information footprint.

The Tragedy

A most appalling of all conditions is when a form, either by nature or nurture or antonymous behavioral choices, has not created anything.

An example is a permanent child, incapable of absorbing roles and responsibilities and sacrificing beyond themselves.

This ultimate act of self-regard and ineffectualness breaks the Trigon and prohibits the evolution of one form to another.

A break in the Trigon is a bullet wound in the chest of human flourishing. Creation is the vehicle of transformation; the Trigon is the roadway.

Lack of contribution in the creative process results in a catastrophic and permanent dead-end.

No outlet. A certain finality of expiration.

Without participation in the reach beyond oneself, there is no transmutation of form.

The pinnacle of tragedy is the death of a toddler, a young blossoming life robbed of the opportunity to create through no choice of its own and denied transcendence.

Upon descent into the domain of first principles, none is arguably deeper rooted than the act of creation.

For without creation, there is nothingness, only the abyss.

About the Author

When producing his work Strategic Engagement of Force, a Field Guide for Martial Arts Strategy and Tactics, Scott Gehring became intrigued with the nature of people and ideas.

For instance, in combat, one could devise strategies to attack the person, the place, or the thing.

However, what about an attack on the strategy itself? Is the strategy, the idea, an extension of the thing, the place, or the person?

This thought process leads one to realize that ideas are an abstract autonomous form and thus need to be handled uniquely.

The writings in this article are some of Scott’s initial thoughts on this topic.