A rebirth of the temple
Within what could largely be described as a global cultural die-off of religious ceremony, so also is a sort of death of the institution of the temple. A sacred space where special rules and special permissions gave us a special opportunity to practice different ways of relating with ourselves, others, and with life itself. When we enter a temple, we enliven a set of different qualities that lay latent within our beings which would otherwise remain undiscovered. Qualities such as humility, deference, humbleness, and contrition which arise naturally in response when confronting the sacred. We leave our egoically conditioned “normal” rules of operation at the temple entrance, shedding the past as we awaken to the new opportunities found within our very presence.
Modern life leaves us very few of these temples. Few spaces which invite us, in fact demand we be reborn anew through the sheer majesty, the awe-inspiring sacred beauty dripping from its interior space. A primeval reckoning with something without which is so powerful it can only be responded to by the most virtuous parts of ourselves that lie within. When seen, our ego bows, surrenders, and for at least a moment we catch a glimpse of what we are beyond the constraints of what our mind has had us caught-up in. Caught-up in believing that we were something so small, so insignificant, so separate. Catching this glimpse can change us forever, by our being breathed with the knowledge of how significant, how vast, and how important we truly are. A breath of Truth which shapes our perspective and shapes the character who must move on from this momentous rapture with a sacred secret.
Every passing moment is a chance, an opportunity to turn it all around. A chance to be reborn anew, baptized so to speak, in the cleansing waters of presence itself. But, we can only see this chance if we give ourselves permission—if we allow a special set of rules to inhabit our mind. If we allow ourselves to truly be reborn into presence itself, knocking everything down within us which is in dis-service—unalignment with what is inspired to be when presence itself is directing our every motive, action, and thought. A new life and new karmically-reduced timelines become possible when we invite the special permissions of a temple space to inspire the next moment…
Triveni (Sanskrit: tri = “three” + veṇī = “braid” or “plait”) literally means “three-braided”, and it came to mean the meeting (confluence) of three rivers, imagined like three strands of hair braided into one. The most historically important usage is the Triveni Sangam at Prayagraj (Allahabad) in North India:
Ganga (Ganges)
Yamuna
Saraswathi (traditionally described as an invisible/underground river)
This confluence is central to pilgrimage traditions and major festivals like the Kumbh Mela. In older South Asian cosmology and ritual thinking, “three” often signals completeness and balance (like a stable tripod). So a Triveni is not only a physical confluence, but also a symbolic one:
earthly geography + sacred meaning
visible rivers + invisible forces
movement, purification, and renewal
Baptism in water, the shamanic view of the cleansing nature of water, these symbols are a reckoning with rebirth and renewal as a fundamental metaphysical mythos. The Hero’s Journey—not only an idea, but as an experience of the great mystery which lies just beyond the reach of our ego’s self-absorbed, self-defending worldview. Which requires a true ‘reaching beyond’; a transom crossed when we give up, let go, and surrender our past as a holy sacrifice to the temple guardians. And when we arrive there, when we are purified of the remnants of what wasn’t aligned with Love itself, we are permitted to experience the Truth of the “three-braided” foundation of life…
To experience Unity is to experience the fundamental mirror of duality. The One True Being and its reflected multiplicity. One side is whole, complete, perfect, and unchanging and the other is fractionated, incomplete, imperfect, and always changing. The One True Being is always already in Unity. The reflection is always becoming, unifying through aligning the inner and the outer with the One. The third aspect of the Universal Triality is the relationship. The relationship that you, the free agent, has with the visible and the invisible, with the purification and the already pure, with the sacred and the profane. It’s the realization that, to arrive at the gateless gate which protects the temple’s purity, only everything belongs. Only everything led you to this moment. Only everything you’ve ever chosen—every seeming mistake and misfortune, every sign and symbol, every triumph and failure, both the light and the dark—permitted your discovery of what has been missing. Nothing was an accident. The perfect and the imperfect were always a Unity of opposites, played out through the drama of our little cosmic dance called human life.
Triveni Temple is a story of the temple reborn. A realization that the physical temple was always just a vehicle for special permissions—a physical representation of the temple that we carry within ourselves. One that only comes alive when we accept the sacred invitation: by giving ourselves permission to be free from what the temple could never permit within the boundaries of its deeply sacred dimensions. All you have to do to enter is the same that has always been done: ritual. Whether that’s meditation, contemplation, dance, or by making your personal relationships—the most profoundly challenging, inspiring, and love-generating practices—your intentional ritual. Making their practice the path that leads to the sacred by exposing the profane. Making their practice a ‘reaching beyond’ what your conditioned mind alone can show you. Making their practice powerfully transformative by remembering why you came here at all. And when you enliven your life with these rituals, they ask something of you. What they request becomes your quest: a raw revealing of yourself through the long and arduous pilgrimage required to reach the land promised.
Taking with you only that which refreshes. Leaving behind all that has held you back. A pilgrimage which only asks of you nothing more than your continual death and rebirth. The price of which can only be paid by the wisdom gained through your willingness to try again and again and again…
Cass and I welcome you to your Triveni Temple of Sacred Union. A home to discover and cherish the sacred dimensions found hidden in the mundane modes of modern life. Thank you for following us and we look forward to your sharing your sacred ways with this community, so that we may follow you too.
October 2025 — one month into our relationship, at Cory’s Soul Sanctuary, our home in Oregon, where this chapter began.
