and the concept of the Trinity
by Roger Mock
Many Christian churches celebrate the feast of Pentecost this Sunday, the culmination of the Easter season and a commemoration of the Gospel story of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s followers. It is followed one week later by Trinity Sunday which honors the Christian theology (promulgated in AD 325 at the Council of Nicea) of three-persons-in-one-God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The idea of the Trinity, however, predates Nicea; in fact it predates Christianity and variations on it are found in many religions.
In Hinduism, for example, Brahman is the name of the One True God. All the others Hindu deities are manifestations, or faces, of Brahman. Chief among these are the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva – the Creator, Sustainer and Destroyer. Each of these has their female consort, by the way – Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati.
In Buddhism we each have three Buddha Bodies. The ordinary body is called the Emanation Body.Speech is the Beatific Body and the mind is the Truth Body. These can be seen as corresponding to body, mind and spirit. Marie D. Jones,author of the book The Trinity Secret: The Power of Three and the Code of Creation, suggests that it also correlates with the concept of the Father as God, the Son as personhood and the Holy Spirit as the process by which a person becomes one with God.
And the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah speaks of the three original manifestations of God (“Ein Sof” or the Endless One) as Nothingness, Wisdom and Understanding.
There’s more, and this is where it gets really interesting for me. There’s an even older esoteric understanding of the triad which begins with two opposites: an active side and a passive side. They are brought into balance by a third force – the reconciling side. The concept is embodied in the Egyptian Sphinx: it has the active courage of the lion, the passive strength of the bull and the intelligence of the man which reconciles the other two forces. Note how well this fits with the Hindu trinity the opposites of Creator and Destroyer and the reconciling Sustainer, Vishnu, who incarnated upon the earth in many forms, including Krishna.
We live in a world of duality, of opposites – life and death, darkness and light, the world and eternity. This is our struggle as humans, the eternal attempt at reconciling these opposites. We live in that uncomfortable crucible. All of our searching, all of our science, all of our philosophizing is an attempt at achieving that reconciliation. But our mystical wisdom traditions seem to have found that “third force” within. The indwelling Spirit of Pentecost, the Truth Body of Buddhism, the Wisdom/Sofia of Judaism all point to a connection with the Holy accessible to the human soul. When that connection is realized the experience is one of wholeness, of completion, of unity with the One, of peace.
There is a reinterpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity in A Course in Miracles. TheCourse sees the human condition as a state of self-imposed (and ultimately impossible) separation from God. With that experience of separation comes duality: truth and illusion, knowledge and perception, right-mindedness and wrong-mindedness. The Trinity in ACIM terms consists of 1.) God, the Father; 2.) God’s Son, the Christ, our true Self; 3.) The Holy Spirit or Voice for God.
What it comes down to is this: we somehow chose to leave Oneness behind. We are cut off from our own right mind. God’s answer to our dilemma is the Holy Spirit – that right Mind, our connection with the Divine, held in trust for us while we play our little duality game. It is the Voice within which guides us through the far country of this world if we allow it to. It is the reconciling Third Force.
It struck me this week that the Hindu and Taoist concept of the “third eye,” situated in the brow, forms a triangle or trinity with the physical body’s two eyes (duality again). It is seen as the seat of higher wisdom and to awaken the third eye is to achieve enlightenment. Christian teacher Fr. Richard Rohr says the third eye is a metaphor for non-dualistic thinking and he equates awakening the third eye to “putting on the mind of Christ.”
This brings me to Unity’s understanding of the Christ within and of the Trinity. Unity co-founder Charles Fillmore states, “Christ is the mind of God individualized.” And Myrtle Fillmore says, “Christ is the life principle within each of us.” In Unity’s concept of the Trinity, God is universal or Infinite Mind. The Son is God’s Idea, the Christ of God. The Holy Spirit is the Expression of the Idea. So the Christ within is the Idea from the Mind of God that is given expression in human form. (www.unity.org/resources/articles/christ-within). Pretty cool!
Surveyors triangulate three points to figure out the lay of the land. If we want to know where we are and who we are, we have to triangulate, too. We’ve got to connect with that Third Force, that Indwelling Spirit, that Christ within. “God is home and we are in the far country,” as Meister Eckhart said and as I have quoted here before. But as my friend Jon Mundy likes to say, we have a built-in GPS – God’s Plan for Salvation – and that is the Still Small Voice within, the Holy Spirit.
Happy Pentecost.
love and light,
Roger