HIM Blog #6: How Christianity unlocks the secrets to consciousness (part 3)- The Trinity and Creation.

So far, we have been focused on how the Trinity exists beyond creation in God’s eternity. However, we must now turn to the act of creation in order to see how the Trinity is, of course, behind this aspect of reality. Firstly, we must understand that God has no necessity for creating creation, as He is perfectly self-sufficient and fulfilled in His own eternal presence. “But God has no need of other things, seeing that His perfection depends on nothing external to Himself, and when He wills other things for Himself as an end, it is not that He needs them, but only that this reference befits His goodness.”^[1] Therefore, He has no innate requirement or need to create, as He is perfectly joyous and delighted in the infinite knowledge of His self-existence. However, despite His sovereign and independent nature, He indeed has self-evidently done so. But why? This is an age-old theological question, but the answer, in the context of Aquinas thought and implications of the HIM model make it perfectly clear.

Prior to creation God knew that, if He so willed, He could transform the immaterial uncreated memories of His mind (the Word) into material created memories, which effectively would give rise to a physical universe. Such a manifestation, driven by the divine will shared by Father, Son and Holy Spirit, occurs via the omnipotence of the Son who contains the power to incarnate the contents of the divine intellect. Although God already knew the possibilities of a created world, He would be giving Himself the chance to re-experience and re-actualise His memories as physical forms. However, we can see how this choice still doesn’t add anything new to God’s self-knowing. Thus, He wasn’t motivated by the prospect of gaining new ways of understanding Himself. So, why did He create? The answer is very straight forward, given that we understand that God’s essence is His self-consciousness; to glorify His existence, as an act of self-celebration.

God’s self-consciousness of His holy worth and value means that to manifest the Word into physical forms would indeed befit His greatness as the King of existence. Through the joy and delight God receives via His self-understanding, He free-willingly chose to create. The Father knows His Son has the power to make this choice come to fruition and, therefore, allows His Son to act on His will to know oneself in an infinite many ways. Although this will of the Son is already fulfilled in eternity, Jesus can utilise this will and redirect towards the act of creating. However, Jesus can not incarnate without the infinite memory chain of logical information that is the Word, which is where we can see the pivotal role that the Holy Spirit also play in God’s plan. Fortunately, the eternal structure of the Trinity ensures that the Holy Spirit is inseparable to the will of the Son, meaning Jesus has the will, power and knowledge to create the physical cosmos. “The Son is the image of the invisible God. The firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:15-17)

One way I like to think about the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in relation to creation, is that the Father graciously rests in His own love with an infinite many memories of Himself reciprocating this same love through His Spirit, while His Son, although experiences this exact same fulfillment in the love God has for Himself, wants to create an adventurous way in order revel in the joy of materialising the perfect spiritual order of His self-memories. Whilst both possess the same Spirit, the Father is content on His metaphorical rocking chair on His porch looking over the field of infinite possibility that creation unfolds as, while Jesus His Son, is playing in the field collapsing such infinite possibility into physical reality. Essentially, God the Father gives permission to incarnate His precious memories into created forms. Thus, Jesus delivers the Holy Spirit to the world. The singular love that reciprocates between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, therefore also runs through each possibility that is brought into creation, as each created possibility is, at its spiritual root, of the essence of God and, thus, is always in communion with the self-consciousness of God. Therefore, as created beings, our souls are forged by the essence of God and His infinite worth, through the inner-presence of the Holy Spirit, is within each human being. It is only when we turn towards God within us and reciprocate the infinite love He has always been giving that we can feel the real presence of His divine Spirit dwelling in the foundations of our being.

Although the Word has been associated with the Holy Spirit in previous paragraphs, it is often understood that the Word of God is Jesus Himself. In the gospel of John, he begins by referring to Jesus’ presence at the beginning of creation, where Jesus is identified as the Word in the following passage... “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2). The HIM model interprets this passage as there being only the essence/consciousness/memory of God existent before and at the beginning of creation, which implies the presence of the Trinity. However, this passage seems to only refer to God and the Word. So how do we recognise the presence of the Trinity in this passage? To do this I will offer a slightly different interpretation of this passage that aligns with Thomistic thought and with the information so far presented in the context of the HIM model. Consistent with the line of theology of this blog, I believe the Word, in its role in giving rise to creation, entails the presence of both the Spirit and the Son, as information/memories existent within God’s essence (Spirit) and the will to create such contents as the world (Son). More specifically, I would regard Jesus as the will of God that has direct and immediate access to the Spirit’s full contents of God’s consciousness. Therefore, the will of God is inseparable to the Logos/Word of God before anything created has unfolded. This idea obviously reflects the Christian understanding that Jesus in human form indeed was the embodiment of the Word. As we have already made clear, the Word refers to the virtual uncreated memories of God held together by divine logic within the Holy Spirit. However, each memory within the Word is given existence by the Son’s will, as the Word must be spoken by a will in order to be actualised as creation. Thus, the Son is also present with the Word and, through its embodiment, is the Word. To clarify, Jesus does not embody the Holy Spirit but indeed shares the same consciousness/essence as the Spirit. Therefore, the Holy Spirit was an ever-present companion with Jesus while He practiced His ministry here on earth, guiding Him along the righteous path and empowering and enabling Him to perform miracles.

This interpretation explains clearly how the Trinity was present in the beginning, as the structure of God’s self-consciousness. His simplicity, complexity and will to unfold His inner order of memory, as creation itself, represent the three persons of the Trinity working in perfect unity as the consciousness of God. Jesus beholds the omnipotence required to actualise the contents of the Lord’s consciousness from incorporeal uncreated form into corporeal created form. It is generally understood that God breathes or speaks the Word giving rise to creation. “By the word of the LORD, the heavens were made, their starry hosts by the breath of their mouth” (Psalms 33:6). Therefore, I believe it is accurate to say that Jesus is the one who breathes the Word and reveals the Spirit into creation, just like Jesus breathed on His disciples in John 20:22, allowing them to receive the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, although, has all the information required to form created reality, but cannot bring creation into being without the Son, who holds the will and power to incarnate the Word for the glory of the Father. In just the same way that “the Son can do nothing by himself, he can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.” (John 5:19) These last two sentences highlight the existence of timeless processions within the Trinity.

Personally, I also think John’s use of the term Word is very important in our understanding of the how the Trinity gave rise to creation. The Word, prior to creation, is silent, meaning it is perfectly fulfilled and actualised in uncreated immaterial form, without any movement towards potential. However, when the Son begins to breathe/speak the Word, He transforms this logic from atemporal stillness into a temporal state of the spoken Word, allowing it to move in an orderly sequential fashion, as the sound/unfoldment of creation. Aquinas refers to this understanding of God as the ‘First Mover’; the divine cause that starts the motion of creation. So, ‘God’s logic’ only existed in atemporal (eternal) time before creation but Jesus then created temporality and began the movement of time, as He delivers the Spirit and spoke the Word, revealing the contents of God’s consciousness, as the created world, from their original eternally immovable enfolded state. Therefore, the term ‘Word’ points to the innate desire of God (the Son) to incarnate His inner life (the Spirit) as the world in celebration of the Father’s existence and holy worth.

By framing the Trinity in this manner, we can see more clearly how God fully loves Himself and how love flows within His being. However, this line of theology presented here is axiomatically held together by the idea that, amongst the distinctions of the Trinity exist a unified immutable essence that is the consciousness of God, which is fundamentally structured by the holy infinite memory of Himself. It is this memory that is the source of love within God. This description of the nature of God, I believe, helps us see that Christianity is the key in exposing the origin and nature of consciousness, as this logic assumes that the structure of the Trinity is the structure of consciousness itself. This blog post is essentially about how God uses the enfolded memories within His consciousness to unfold created reality. In quantum mechanics, the notion that consciousness creates reality is basically a given aspect of how physics function on this scale of reality. Therefore, there is an implied characteristic of consciousness itself being presented here, which is that it is univocal. This consciousness that we all possess, in its pure form, is impervious to division and, at its root, is unified in God beyond creation. In other words, the consciousness that we possess indeed belongs to, and is powered by, God and, therefore, has atemporal origins whilst simultaneously giving rise to temporality. Thus, we humans possess a universal consciousness that is in a constant state of transferring possibilities from a potential state into an actualised state, which becomes internalised within us as ‘created memory’. Therefore, by simply being aware of the present moment, we are partaking in the great cosmic celebration that is God materialising His uncreated memory into created memory for His own pleasure, driven by the love He has for Himself. It is this underlying God-centred reality that we explore during the practice of holy infinite meditation.

Jesus is the will of God to know Oneself in an infinite number of ways, which proceeds from the simple will of the Father that knows oneself as the infinitely valuable individual possibility that the whole of reality depends on. These ‘infinite many ways’ that make up the virtual contents of God’s mind, are what occur in the Holy Spirit. Such divine contents are the Word within the eternal mind of God, which proceeds from the Son. Such images within His essence pertain to His perfection and befit His greatness. This makes sense in our everyday experience of reality, i.e. you can’t create anything until you have an inner will to create it. God’s Spirit, which holds the knowledge of all possible things within the infinite possibility that is God, must be willed into action, which is what Jesus does as the eternal Son, which makes perfect sense in relation to how creation occurs. Again, in our personal lives, if we want to gain more knowledge of something and gain more intellect/information about something, you must willfully attain that knowledge. There’s no such thing as constructing knowledge without a will behind it as its driving force. As long as you will it, you will receive it, aligned with God’s plan for you. The procession from the Son to the Spirit as love also makes sense. This love to know oneself in an infinite many unique original ways but of the same essence in meaning and purpose (telos), as a result of knowing oneself as the infinite possibility of reality that must be able to will infinite possibilities, is the eternal structure of God. This is how we can describe the nature of consciousness and God’s structure in eternity in relation to the Trinity.

[1] Aquinas, op cit, p. 156.

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