Art, Faith, and The Koko Lion: The Trinity Withinity

Saturday, May 7, 2011

The Trinity Withinity – Connecting Our Three Main Parts

Have you ever noticed how lots of things have three parts? Like a top, a bottom, and a middle. Or The Three Musketeers. Or Goldilocks? I mean The Three Bears...Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear.

Spiritually we see "Trinities" all over the place, like the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; or The Buddha (Unified Consciousness), The Dharma (the way, or path), and The Sangha (the community). In Hinduism, there are a few versions of it – as deities: Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), and Shiva (destroyer); or in categories ranging from the greater Self to the personal self, as Brahman (the All), Atman (the soul), and Asmita (the ego, or "I am this"). Sri Aurobindo called them The Transcendent, The Universal, and The Individual; all of which correlates as Sat (the greater Being), Chit (the vehicle of Awareness), and Ananda (the way to personal Bliss). That last, littlest part is always you, or me, and this experience we have through our human senses—our bodies, our minds, and all too often, our Egos.

In a more scientific sense these three aspects of our relationship to everything can be related to Consciousness (the sensory universe), the Right Brain (parallel processing, or quantum reality), and the Left Brain (serial processing, empirical or egoic reality).

I also think it works pretty well in terms of The Marx Brothers: Groucho (the mind of The Divine), Chico (the link to The Divine), and Harpo (the unconscious expression of the Divine).

"The common name for God used by the sages is HaMakom, "the place." God is the place of the world, the field in which all things arise and return."

Rabbi Rami Shapiro, on The Pirke Avot

When we talk about that top billing as "The Father," of course we're talking about God – The Creator, Omniscience, the Source of Every-thing, all being. Personified, this can be The Big Bearded Guy; Divine Mother; Brahma, etc., and conceptually, it's The Source, Transcendent Unified Consciousness, The Universe, or Brahman – the benevolent power that we know is the responsible for all being. It's a power that we'd like to get to know better (but often have a hard time doing it), under whose protection and care it would always be nice to live. It's the power of the Universe, like it or not. Einstein has a great quote about it:

"The most important decision we have to make is whether we believe in a friendly universe, or in a hostile universe."

Is God friendly? Well, since Life is quite plastic, then it's really up to you and the attitude you bring to Life – so why not? If you have a friendly attitude, you tend to have a friendly God, and vice-versa. It's especially easy if we see The Father/The Transcendent/The Universe, as the overarching power and expression of Love. As Dr. Wayne Dyer used to say: "The way you look at the universe is the way the universe looks at you."

Our biggest problem often comes in finding a comfortable, practical connection to that Source – a two-way street that helps us experience a loving, supportive Universe. That's where the second of our three parts comes in.

With the Christian trinity, while the path to God (the dharma for Buddhists and Hindus) is often proclaimed to be through Jesus, our true intermediary might be better described by "The Holy Ghost" – you know, that Angel on our shoulder; our Spirit Guide or soul connection whose guidance we receive through prayer, and in meditation or contemplation. It's the buffering shepherd through which we find our connection to what Native Americans call "The Great Spirit."

The Quakers refer to it as: "The still,small voice," also known as our "voice of reason." It comes to us as intuition – intelligent thinking without intellect. Thinking from the heart. It arises from a place that's accessible to everyone, the place Yeshua (the Gnostic Jesus) talked about when he said:

"The Kingdom is inside you, and it is outside you."

Logion 3, The Gospel of Thomas

That universal awareness comes when we forget about "who we're supposed to be" in this world of matter (that doesn't really matter); when we quietly and humbly pray for the answer to a hard question (we ask), and then meditate to clear our minds (we get the answer). In short, it's still and always Love.

As a Near-Death survivor, I can tell you that this information could actually be coming to us directly by way of our Angels or Spirit Guides, whispering in our ear from another dimension; but if you don't believe in that and you can still hear them, well, what difference does it make? It's almost always through the process of prayer, meditation, and reflection that we can find this guiding voice, "The Holy Spirit," that affirms the Love and the natural benevolence that Life and the Universe really holds for us.

If we consider it agnostically, with a layman's sense of neuroscience, we could correlate the activity of our Right Brain to the actions of our angels. It occurs in the right hemisphere of our brains (where what might be called parallel processing takes place) when we realize holistic thought, and experience an understanding of "one-ness" and Being. That's our connection to Source, our link to God Consciousness, Buddha Mind, The Transcendent. This short talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, author of A Stroke of Insight describes it brilliantly. Our Left Brain is where we can get stuck in the material world – the day-to-day serial processing that dictates our rigid Ego-based consciousness. All that exhausting demanding, organizing, judging and comparing is definitely the hardest part of "being me."

But what if I'm not just me, but also the "Son of Man" too! Then right here in this body is where I can try to experience bliss, where I can learn, intuitively, to be authentically my self – our Self. To know what it's like to be the unique expression of Source that I Am – an antenna for sensory collection...a blossoming flower. You've got to really be a human being to experience Christ-ing, moksha, nirvana, samadhi, Heaven, or Unified Consciousness.

All it takes is a little work to make a better connection...