During meditations these days, a triangle often appears in my mind’s eye. I also see it sometimes when I look out the living room window: A die-cut of lush, green trees.

Not long ago, I saw circles in meditation and in nature… in the shape of sunlight coming through the branches, a pond’s ripple, a stone.

I painted these circles with a feeling of great joy. I can’t tell you why I felt compelled to let them reveal themselves on canvas; I hadn’t picked up a paint brush since I was a wee one.

The time of circles was one when I was seeking that elusive “spiritual wholeness,” although I would not have expressed it as such, back then.

In trying to understand this triangle, I consider the obvious symbols:

The Holy Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in Christianity.

The quintessential love triangle of perpetually suffering or perhaps fulfilled, souls.

And, the great pyramids.

Mfuniselwa Bhengu  writes: “The pyramid always symbolises bigger consciousness of strength and energy… at the spiritual level [it’s] a symbol for the integration of self-and soul…”

Sometimes my triangle contains an eye, like the Eye of Providence on the American dollar bill that conjures up Illuminati conspiracy theories. Another interpretation is that an eye in a triangle represents a Divine, or God-like knowledge.

More often though, this triangle of mine appears as an entry point to a road that descends into a vortex. It’s tempting to associate the visual “path” with the wormholes that supposedly carry the traveler out of 3D time and space and into another universe.

I think also of Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual awakening, which he describes in The Power of Now.  In the depths of excruciating emotional pain late one night, a voice told him, “resist nothing.” He heeded the call and when he woke the next morning, he was completely free of all the emotional pain and mental chatter that had kept him in bondage all of his life.

For me, at least now, the triangle is a simply an archetypal shape of consciousness — like the circle depicted in the ubiquitous mandala.

I recognize this triangle as a wishful symbol of perfect unity… a non-dual gift relieving the mind of its constant push-pull between this and that, good and bad, now and never. It is a meeting place where opposites come together to form everything and nothing.