The Purpose and Design of Life

Hildegard of Bingen’s depiction of the Trinity

(Continued from Part 10.)

The Trinity of Father, Mother, and Child – 2

We thus have heard the masters of antiquity and modernity identify the Holy Family or Trinity. Now let me give a description of these three levels of Reality.

The Father

The Father, when in its original and unmanifest state, is called the Impersonal God, the formless God, or the unconditioned Brahman. It’s also called the Transcendental Absolute when unmanifest or formless. It’s further called Mahashiva, Parabrahman, Paramatman, the Supreme Self, the All, the One without a second, all that is, etc.

The Father, when manifest or given form by the Mother, is called the Personal God, God in form, or the conditioned Brahman.

In its absolute formlessness, it’s spoken of as Sat-Chit-Ananda or infinite wisdom, being and bliss. It is transcendent, supreme, unchanging, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, with and without form, with and without attributes, and altogether unfathomable and indescribable.

All of the Father’s manifested states and unmanifest nature share the same attribute: namely, stillness. When movement stops, the manifest dissolves back into the unmanifest.

The Father is formless, permanent, but beginningless and endless. And no matter what name is used to point to it and no matter the deficiencies of the pointer, the object pointed at remains the same. Only the names differ.

The Mother

The Divine Mother was called by Jesus and his disciples the Holy Spirit, the comforter spirit, the spirit of truth, the Word of God, and the Amen. She (“She” is not a she) was called by Solomon and the Old-Testament prophets, Wisdom, the Voice of one crying in the wilderness, and the noise of many waters.

She herself acknowledged on An Hour with an Angel: “”Yes, I am … the voice crying in the wilderness. … Sometimes you tend to think of me as the Holy Spirit, but there is more to me than that.”(1)

By Hindus, she is called Shakti, Kali, Aum, the Sound-Brahman, Sphota, Prana, primordial energy, the universal creative vibration, Prakriti (Procreatrix), and the creator, preserver and transformer of matter, mater, Mother. She agrees that it is her that is being spoken of:

“I am thought of in many forms — … as Shakti, as Mare, which is very close because it is the word of ocean in your world and language. It represents the movement and the giver of life, the creator of life, of love, of form, of substance, of essence.” (2)

The Mother has form; the Father in “his” original nature (“He” is not a he) is formless. When the Mother is coupled with the Father in form, they are often spoken of as the cosmic male and female, Shiva and Shakti, yin and yang. I have often spoken of the Mother as being the Phenomenal, which means all of matter, the whole of the created world, anything apart from the formless and immaterial Father.

The Father is characterized by stillness but the Mother by movement as she herself explained: “I am known by the movement within you and the movement within your Earth, within all things, within all universes.” (3) Sri Ramakrishna explains the matter this way:

“The Primordial Power is ever at play. She is creating, preserving, and destroying in play, as it were. This Power is called Kali. Kali is verily Brahman, and Brahman is verily Kali. It is one and the same Reality. When we think of It as inactive, that is to say, not engaged in the acts of creation, preservation, and destruction, then we call It Brahman. But when It engages in these activities, then we call it Kali or Sakti.” (4)

The Mother is created; only the Father is uncreated. She can be realized as the light in all creation, the highest enlightenment short of the Father. In fact she is all we can know because the Father is unknowable, as she herself attests:

“When you are with me in the fullness of union, as full as you can know it while in form, then you are connected, and in, not only my creation, but my wisdom and my love, in that is all. It is all you need to know or can know or will know.”

No matter what name is used for the Mother, the same phenomenon is ultimately being pointed at.

The Child

The Child is the individuated soul, called by Jesus the only begotten Son of God, the Christ, the Savior, the Prince of peace, the treasure buried in a field, the pearl of great price, and the mustard seed.

It’s called by Hindus the Atman, the Self, and Brahman-within-the-individual.

It’s known to other religions as Fire the Son of the Lord, the firebrand plucked from the burning, the lamp always burning on the altar, the God-spark, and the flame in the heart.

I called the Self the Transcendental in the Phenomenal, the Transcendental itself being the Father and the Phenomenal being the Mother. This is equivalent to saying the God-spark within the heart of the individual, the treasure (the Self) buried in the field (the Body), the Father in the Mother’s womb as the Child of God, etc.

No matter what name is used for the Child or Self, the same phenomenon is being pointed at.

We can now understand more of how we (God the Child, the Christ, or Atman) left God the Father (Brahman, Allah, the Transcendental Void), travelled out into the domain of God the Mother (the Holy Spirit, Shakti, the Phenomenal World), went through lifetime after lifetime in matter, mater, Mother evolving, until we realize God the Father in one final, complete and permanent moment of illumination, return, and submerge ourselves in Him.

It is this Trinity that we realize in enlightenment to perfect our knowledge of the God that we are.

I’d like to pause here. I may resume the series later by discussing several design elements of life to cement our understanding of how life is designed.