Synopsis
There are many mysteries associated with religious symbols down through the ages and in every culture, but prominent among these is the recurrent mystery of the Holy Trinity. Widely recognized and revered, particularly by Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics, a significant majority of the planet’s 2.2 billion Christians honor “The Holy Trinity” as a numinous reality in daily private and communal prayer. At this very moment we can imagine thousands of Christians around the globe “signing themselves” (touching forehead, heart and each shoulder in the sign of the cross) while reciting silently or audibly, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”Yet those same Christians would likely be surprised to learn that an additional billion people are also devotionally praying to the Holy Trinity even though they are not Christians. Over the millennia there has grown within India a clear and deeply religious approach to the Holy Trinity which they call in the Sanskrit language “Sat-Chit-Ananda,” a term which is found in texts composed in the 4th century CE. Synchronistically, it was in that very same time period that early Christians in Constantinople (381 CE) codified the Holy Trinity doctrine in the Nicene Creed. What may be even more surprising to many is the existence of yet another 400 million humans, neither Christian nor Hindu, who frame their belief within the Buddhist Trinitarian perspective, viewing the Holy Trinity through the metaphysical perspective of what they call the “three Bodies of Buddha."Yet all of these Trinity-revering Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists might be surprised to learn that millions of Muslims also revere the Holy Trinity as a central doctrine in their faith. Among the five million Sufi Alawites living in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon, the Holy Trinity is honored as the three intersecting, hypostatic emanations of the One God: the “Essence,” the “Name,” and the “Gate.” A common Alawite prayer is the recitation: “I turn to the Gate, I bow down before the Name, and I adore the Meaning.”This book presents a multi-dimensional, cross-cultural, picture of the Holy Trinity. It does this through applying a recently developed method called “the integral approach,” initially developed by Jean Gebser, Aurobindo Ghose, and Ken Wilber (and discussed in Chapter I). By comparing and contrasting approaches to the Holy Trinity from widely different areas of specialization (e.g. Teilhard de Chardin’s Christian vision of Omega, Sri Aurobindo’s Vedantic Trinitarian metaphysics, David Bohm’s holoflux physics of “the Whole”), new patterns begin to appear in the form of interconnecting threads of understanding. These offer a broad and rich range of ideas which are a springboard to realizing the multiple levels of meaning inherent within the phrase, “The Holy Trinity.”It is hoped that these diverse subject areas presented here will provide a rich conceptual map about which the reader may emerge with a deep understanding of the physics and metaphysics of the Holy Trinity.
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