Across decades of reading and travel, something has struck me again and again: wildly different traditions, from Daoism to Hinduism to Christianity, converge on a threefold or Trinitarian model of ultimate reality. In this talk I trace that pattern through philosophy, theology, and modern physics, and suggest it reflects something fundamental about the nature of things.
Many churches will be celebrating the Holy Trinity on Sunday May 31, Trinity Sunday.
This talk was recorded live at St James’s Church London, May 13th, 2026 as part of the Alternatives programme. The full transcript is included below.
Transcript
Holy Trinities: Threefold Models of Reality
I’m speaking this evening about models of ultimate reality. How do we conceive of the ultimate source of everything, where everything comes from, what is the ultimate ground of being? It turns out that if you ask this question in many different traditions in the world, the answer comes back that there’s something threefold, Trinitarian, about the ultimate nature of things.
Now, I’m not saying this is the only possible model. It isn’t. But it’s a very common one in many very different traditions, and so that’s what I’m talking about this evening.
The universe is reflective, so whatever you think might be the answer to the universe, whether it’s 42 or 7 or whatever, if you look at the universe you’ll see it reflected back. The Trinitarian model is one you can see everywhere, once you know what to look for. That doesn’t prove it’s true; it proves that it’s a very good model.
Daoism
We find this Trinitarian model in quite different traditions that have evolved quite independently. One well-known form of it is in Daoism. The Tao De Jing has this famous passage in it:
The Tao begot one, one begot two, two begot three, and three begot ten thousand things.
So basically, there’s a generative process that gives rise to this threeness, which itself can then generate everything.
Of course, the main Taoist model is of yin and yang, and I’m sure everyone here has seen the familiar yin-yang symbol. But that symbol is not a model of duality. Yin and yang are not a duality; they’re really part of a trinity, because there’s a circle around the yin and yang, which is that which unifies the two in a higher unity. In the Tao De Jing, the next line after this is about how the yin and yang embrace each other and interact through spirit, or chi, as the Chinese call it. So there’s a kind of Trinitarian model at the very heart of the Chinese conception of reality.
Indian philosophy
It’s also very common in Indian philosophy. I spent seven years living in India, and I spent two of those years living in the ashram of Father Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine ashram in Tamil Nadu in the south of India. One of the things that deeply impressed me about that was that there was a synthesis, or bringing together, of the Hindu and the Christian traditions. The ashram itself had a double name. In Sanskrit it was called Satchitananda Ashram, which is this threefold name of ultimate reality in the Vedantic tradition. In English, it was called the Ashram of the Holy Trinity. So there’s a kind of equivalence implied by this very translation of the name of the ashram as a Trinitarian model of reality.
There are many Trinitarian models in India. One of them is the well-known threefold system of gods. You have Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. Basically, that is saying that there’s a source of all things, Brahma. Vishnu is really the god of form, order, preservation, structure, maintaining all things. Vishnu has many avatars. The best known are Krishna and Rama, but he also has an avatar as a fish and in many other forms. So Vishnu is really the principle of form, order, structure.
Shiva is the principle of energy, really, of creation and destruction. He is sometimes portrayed as Nataraja, the dancing Shiva, dancing in a circle of flames. He’s really the energy principle, and his most famous representation is, of course, of the phallus, the erect phallus, which is the lingam, shown within the yoni, the female symbol. The central image is one of sexual energy. So Shiva creates and destroys. He’s a principle of change, movement, whereas Vishnu is the principle of form and order.
In another form of Hindu Trinity, in the form of Tantra, Shiva takes on the role of the form and ordering principle, and the principle of energy is Shakti, the feminine principle. The tantric image of Shiva and Shakti in a sexual embrace has these two principles coming together in a unity again. The third principle is the unity of the two.
It’s interesting that in India, the energetic principle of nature is feminine. In the West, there’s been a sort of traditional model that the female is receptive and the male is active. But it’s actually the exact opposite in India. The energetic principle is Shakti, this feminine principle. It actually affects the way people live and think in India, because it means that women are representatives of Shakti, this active energetic principle, which they also translate into the sexual realm.
One of the Indian theories of sex is that women, unless satisfied by their husbands or lovers, are so full of ungovernable lusts that they’ll become uncontrollable. So it’s very important, therefore, in traditional India, for girls to be married within a few weeks of puberty. When I lived in South India, I was working in agriculture in villages in Andhra Pradesh, where the average age of marriage for girls was 13, for boys 17. In the Tamil village where I lived, there was quite often a terrible racket coming from the village amplifiers playing Tamil film music. These were celebrations of a girl’s first period. When the girl had her first period, there was a whole special rite of passage from being a girl into womanhood, a general celebration, advertising it to the whole community, an enormous amount of noise. What that meant was she’s ready for marriage. The reason being that otherwise she’d become so full of ungovernable lusts that she’d bring shame upon her family.
In the Hindu theory, every time men ejaculate they’re draining their bodies of vital bodily fluids. Women are exhausting their male partners by draining them of their energy because they have so much themselves. So it’s an interesting opposite from our point of view. But nevertheless, it’s brought within this Trinitarian model of Shiva and Shakti in union.
Another Hindu model is in Kashmiri Shaivism, where you have the knower, the known, and the means of knowledge. The ground of the Trinity is the knower, consciousness, that which can contemplate and which can know. For the knower to function, there has to be something that’s known. So that is the other, as it were; the opposite of the knower is the known. Then they have to be linked together, and in that case it’s the means of knowledge.
But the most famous of all the Hindu models is Sat, Chit, Ananda, as I already mentioned. This really is the model of being, consciousness, bliss. Sat is being, the ground of being, ground of conscious being, the ground on which all things rest, from which all things come. Chit is consciousness, and involves that which is known, the ideas, forms, and what Hindus sometimes call namarupa, names and forms, the contents of the mind, the contents of consciousness. Ananda is joy or bliss. The idea is that these three aspects of ultimate reality are indivisible. They’re always linked together, but you can see them in these different aspects in ultimate reality.
The importance of ananda, or joy, being part of the divine consciousness is that bliss is part of God’s nature. God’s not trying to go anywhere, do anything, lacks nothing. Part of that fullness of consciousness is interminable joy or bliss. It’s a general belief of mystics in all traditions that when mystical experiences involve contact with, or a fusion with, or an openness to divine consciousness, these experiences are usually joyful or blissful. That’s because the bliss or joy is just inherent in divine consciousness. It’s the ultimate source of bliss, joy, or happiness.
The Christian Trinity
When we come to the Christian model of the Holy Trinity, we find very similar principles. Usually when you hear a blessing in a church, it’s a blessing in the name of God, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. But the word “Son”, in St. John’s Gospel, is really an incarnation of the Word. The basic principle is the logos, the Word. The Word in Christian theology is very much influenced by Platonic philosophy. When Christianity was developing, it was a Semitic religion developing within the Eastern Roman Empire, in a world where the main language that people spoke apart from their own languages was Greek. That’s why the New Testament is written in Greek. That’s what St. Paul was speaking and what the writers of the New Testament spoke.
As part of Greek culture, this assimilation of Greek ideas into Christian theology basically involved assimilating Plato’s idea of ultimate consciousness as a realm of form or ideas into the Christian Trinity. Essentially it’s the Platonic realm of ideas, the mind full of ideas, that becomes the logos. They become ideas in the mind of God. God the Father is the source of the ultimate being and consciousness. The content of the divine mind are these ideas, the Word. And Jesus is seen as an incarnation of that second person, or second principle, of the Trinity.
The third aspect of the Holy Trinity is, of course, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the principle of movement, change, activity. All these different models actually come back to the same kinds of principles. In the Hindu Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma model, Vishnu is the principle of form or order, and Shiva is the principle of movement, change, activity. In the Tantric model, Shiva is the principle of form and order, and Shakti is the principle of movement, change, activity. In the Christian Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the principle of movement, change, and activity, portrayed as flames of fire, as the rushing of the wind, as the flight of a bird, as in the symbol of the dove.
This Christian Trinity is actually implicit in the Jewish scriptures, right after the very beginning of the Jewish scriptures, in the book of Genesis. Verse one of chapter one of Genesis says:
In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.
That’s just a straightforward, bold statement. But then it goes on to much more detail about what happened. It says:
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters.
That’s verse 2. The same word, ruach, in Hebrew means spirit, wind, breath, and what we call spirit. So the Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters is basically the wind moving on the sea. That’s the image. And what does that create? It creates waves. So in verse 2, at the very beginning of creation, we have waves, vibration, movement, oscillatory movement.
Then verse 3 says, “And God said, let there be light, and there was light.” Verse 4: “God separated the light from the darkness.” So the creative word, God saying “Let there be light,” comes in verse 3. Light itself is a principle of movement or change. It’s an energy. It’s in movement, always in movement, and it’s energetic. But the word of God, which is the creative word, is the word principle, the logos principle, right there in the very beginning of the Old Testament.
What we have, then, is a model where the logos, the Word of God in the Christian Trinity, is this formative principle that ultimately gives rise to all the forms in nature, underlying every form there is: plants, animals, crystals, everything, and the forms of words as well. Words are forms. They have shapes, structures, patterns. The principle of form is the logos principle. The Spirit is the movement principle.
Speaking as the central metaphor
The principal metaphor of them all, the main metaphor on which all this depends, at least in the Western tradition, is speaking. When you speak, and this applies to every one of us, we’re all fractals of the Trinity from this point of view. If it’s the fundamental principle, all of us embody and represent these fundamental principles in our lives and in our activities.
When we speak, like I’m speaking now, speech involves the words. The words I’m saying each have their shape, their form, their structure, their meaning, their connection with other words. Computerized language recognition systems can pick up what I say. They can pick up what you say. They can recognize words because words have particular forms, vibratory patterns. But for you to hear those words, they have to be uttered while I’m breathing out. The breath is the outward flow of energy as I breathe. If I have just the words, they’re silent in my mind. They don’t come into manifestation; you don’t hear them. If I have just the breath, then there’s a kind of white noise, a flow of energy, but there’s no structure, no meaning. So the words and the breath that carries them in the spoken word are separate. You can think of them separately from each other, but they come together. I’m the speaker of the words and the breather of the breath. So that’s the third principle. I’m the source of both from which they’re coming.
There’s this threefold aspect every time any one of us speaks. Sometimes the Christian Trinity is put in a very confusing way. People talk about the three persons of the Holy Trinity. In modern language, “person” means a person. It’s utterly confusing. It’s much better to think of them as modes of being of the ultimate divine nature. My words, the breath, and me as the speaker are distinguishable. But when I’m speaking, all three are unified together. You can’t have the words without the breath, and you can’t have the breath without the speaker. So they all come together. This is actually one of the most helpful metaphors, I think, in thinking about the Trinity.
Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the Trinity in nature
What we find in the understanding of the Trinity in the Christian tradition, as we find in the Daoist tradition and the Hindu tradition, is that this ultimate principle is reflected in all nature. In the 13th century, this was made very explicit by two of the greatest theologians of their time, who were contemporaries. One was Saint Thomas Aquinas, and the other was Saint Bonaventure. Saint Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican. Saint Bonaventure was a Franciscan. They lived at almost exactly the same time, and both of them had the idea that everything in the world reflects the Holy Trinity. Everything in its very being reflects the Trinity.
Insofar as anything exists and has a unity (each of us has a unity, we’re ourselves and not somebody else; an apple has a unity, it’s an apple and not another apple or a pear), insofar as anything has a unity, it’s a unified existence which reflects the unity of ultimate divine being. Insofar as everything has a form, it reflects the logos, the second person of the Trinity, the Word. And insofar as anything has energy, movement, change, actuality, activity, it reflects the Holy Spirit. So these are all reflected in everything.
Thomas Aquinas thought that when a plant grows, for example, the ultimate end or goal of the plant, what the plant is striving for, is its best form, the ultimate form, its perfect form. As it grows, it moves towards its perfect form. When it achieves its perfect form, when it’s flowering, when the leaves are formed, the mature form of the plant, this form is a reflection of the perfection of the divine nature. The plant is striving for a kind of divine perfection by taking up its form as perfectly as it can.
Sometimes when I’m looking at a lot of wild flowers growing, for example ox-eyed daisies, or cow parsley growing on Hampstead Heath at the moment, all these beautiful flowers, thousands of them, each of them expressing its own perfection of form, which reflects the divine being. According to Aquinas, this is why plants and animals grow and develop, because the ultimate nature of God is to attract. The divine nature works by attraction. This was an idea present already in Aristotle. When Aristotle thought that God was the prime mover of the universe, what made everything happen, he didn’t think God was the prime mover by pushing everything from behind, but by pulling everything by attraction. God is the ultimate attractor, attracting through the ultimate form, the beauty of divine form, because part of the divine nature is truth, beauty, and goodness. Beauty is inherent in the divine nature. So plants, animals, everything in nature, crystals, are drawn towards the perfection of their form because they’re striving, probably unconsciously in the case of plants and crystals, to become as close to God as they can.
This was how he understood them as developing. He thought that the goodness of the plants, when they have their perfect form, is a likeness of the highest good. Their very existence as a unit, an organized structure, is a reflection of first being, or God the Father. There’s an interesting passage where he talks about blessedness or happiness in humans, and in any creature capable of happiness, including animals. He wrote:
Blessedness or happiness is simply the perfect good. Therefore all sharers in blessedness are blessed only by sharing in the blessedness of God, who is essential goodness itself.
What he’s saying, really, is that when we’re happy, it’s because we share in the divine nature, when things are in the right balance and in the right flow and in the right connection. This is very, very different from the modern materialist theory. The modern materialist theory would say we’re happy because serotonin levels reach a certain level and activate various bits of the brain, and there are sort of happiness circuits in the brain that make us feel happy, and it’s all just inside the head.
The materialist view is that there’s no consciousness out there. Obviously, there’s no such thing as God from a materialist view. There’s just matter in motion. This happiness, if you experience it, has nothing to do with some greater happiness beyond ourselves. Even if you have an intense mystical experience, a sense of extreme ineffable joy, then that’s probably just a kind of serotonin overload. There’s nothing out there to which it corresponds. So you see a completely different worldview. The traditional worldview in medieval Europe, in ancient Greece, in traditional India, in Daoist China, in fact practically everywhere in the world, is that our consciousness, our minds, our being is part of something vastly greater than ourselves. Our bliss or joy or happiness happens when we tune into it or become connected to it.
A theory of orgasm
There’s a particular theory of mine, which is not in St. Thomas Aquinas or Bonaventure, and I don’t talk about this very often because it’s something I’m still thinking about. That is: how do we understand the nature of orgasms? The nature of the orgasm, again from a materialist point of view, is just a kind of activation of a pleasure center in the brain. With neurotransmitters, it’s all just electrical and chemical, and that’s all there is to it. It’s been favored by natural selection because that’s why animals reproduce. It acts as a kind of reward or incentive for sexual activity.
But actually, if we apply the principles of Thomas Aquinas and these traditional views of the Trinity, if we see that all motivation is ultimately an attraction towards the good, the true, and the beautiful, is ultimately an attraction towards the divine being, albeit unconsciously so, then when people have an orgasm there’s a kind of opening up to this ultimate divine bliss, very briefly. That’s something that draws us. If you read the scandalous things in newspapers, all the scandal sheets are about sexual scandals, ultimately. Even the money ones are about people wanting to be rich because that’ll help them in their sex life.
Why is it that we’re all so drawn to, and animals too (it’s not just human), we’re drawn towards something that’s not a thing, it’s a sensation. It exists only in consciousness. Why is it that this is so ultimately attractive that it leads people to ruin their careers, to have disastrous adventures? It’s domesticated through marriage, of course. But this attraction, this drawing towards this experience, this opening to something beyond ourselves, a state of consciousness that’s not our normal mundane consciousness, opens us up to something vastly greater than ourselves. I think that God is the source of orgasms and the pleasure of orgasms, and I think that, contrary to what most people might think, the attraction we feel to others, the sexual attraction that’s consummated in an orgasmic experience, is actually one of the many ways in which we’re motivated and pulled towards the divine.
Of course, all human behavior can be misused. I’m not advocating free love, promiscuity, and so on. I’m just trying to make a general point about the ultimate nature of motivation.
Aquinas also thought that we’re drawn towards the good. Even when people do bad things, it’s because they’re drawn towards the good. If somebody is incredibly selfish, they’re still being drawn towards the good, except they have a very narrow conception of the good. It’s just their own good. The greater good involves the good of other people, not just of ourselves. But the drawing towards, the attraction towards the good, is just part of the motivation, not just of us, but of everything in nature.
Modern science: fields and energy
If we look at the modern scientific worldview and ask how some of these principles might apply to the natural world as revealed by modern science and physics, we find something very similar. Remember, the basic principle is that there’s a source of things, a principle of form or order, and a principle of movement or change. When we look at the modern scientific worldview, even in materialism, which is based on the ultimate reality of matter, we find that, as Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, said, through modern physics materialism has transcended itself. The ultimate principles in modern physics are not matter. It’s not matter that’s the ultimate principle. It’s fields and energy. An electron, a proton, an atomic nucleus, an atom, a molecule, are vibratory patterns of energy bound within fields, quantum matter fields. There’s an electron field, a proton field. So there’s vibratory energy bound within fields which give it form.
It’s very similar to words in that sense, as vibratory patterns with form. So we have this as the ultimate physical understanding of nature now: there’s a principle of movement, energy, change throughout the entire cosmos, called energy. There are principles of form, order, structure, which shape the energy, and those are called fields. They’re governed, according to modern physics, by mathematical laws, which are the ultimate ordering principles, beyond space and time, for the phenomena of the physical world.
The modern scientific worldview has principles of form and order. Within nature, they’re the fields which shape things. The round shape of the sun or moon is because of the gravitational field, and the round shape of the earth. If you look at a magnet, a magnetic field, you see the iron filings around the field, revealing the lines of force. The field has a structure over and above the magnet itself. Fields are regions of space which have form or pattern. They’re more fundamental than matter itself. Matter comes out of fields and energy rather than vice versa. Fields are not made of matter. Matter is made of fields and energy.
The form or structure of things is shaped by the fields. The form and structure of atomic and molecular processes is shaped by quantum matter fields and electromagnetic fields. The shape and form of animals and plants and crystals and molecules is, I suggest, shaped by morphogenetic fields, form-shaping fields, which shape the forms of self-organizing systems. In my own particular hypothesis these are generally called morphic fields, fields of form. Morphe means form. My own hypothesis is that they have an inbuilt memory, and that morphic fields shape the form and structure of everything in all self-organizing systems in nature. The principle of form, you see, is given by fields, and what makes things happen within them, what gives them actuality, is the energy.
All of us are combinations of form and energy. We all have our own form. We’re recognizable to other people over the years. We remain fairly much the same. And we all need energy. That’s why we have to eat. The energy that flows through us is the source of the activity that we can have. But it’s always combined with our form. So the scientific worldview is actually one of form and energy.
One of the great triumphs of 19th century physics was the unified theory of energy. Before that, people didn’t know that light, heat, moving billiard balls, a spring, all the different forms of energy, potential and kinetic, were actually interconvertible. The principle of conservation of energy and the beginning of the first law of thermodynamics in the 1850s was a massive unification. It’s saying that the whole universe is filled with energy. The actuality of everything depends on energy, and that energy is itself promiscuous. It doesn’t have any form. It can take on any form, and it’s convertible from one to another.
It’s the same principle as an electric plug. When you plug something into an electric socket at home, you can plug in a hair dryer, a toaster, a microwave oven. You can plug in a charging system for a mobile phone. You can plug a computer in, a radio. All these things have different forms, different structures, but they all depend on the same energy coming through that plug. The same energy coming through sunlight onto a garden, if it falls on the leaves of a rose, becomes part of a rose. If it falls on the leaves of a cabbage, becomes part of a cabbage. If it falls on the grass, it becomes part of the grass. The energy can take any form. It’s a bit like what Aristotle called prime matter, prima materia, which is pure potentiality.
So we have this fundamental principle of energy throughout the whole universe, which is a unified principle underlying everything: the distant stars, galaxies, the electric fields of the universe, the plasma flows, our own bodies, the sunlight. We have a universal energy, and we have form everywhere, and these have a common source. We don’t know what it is, but from the moment of the Big Bang we’ve had form and energy as the dominating principles, the guiding principles of everything in nature.
According to conventional science, forms and the nature of the flow of energy are governed by the laws of nature, which are mathematical equations. Those, of course, are not physical either. You never actually meet a law of nature. You don’t see one under the microscope. Scientists don’t crystallize them in test tubes. They’re abstract. Their historical ancestry is through Pythagorean philosophy in ancient Greece, where they thought that the ultimate principle of ratio, number, and mathematics was beyond space and time. Plato generalized the idea of mathematical forms to his philosophy of forms or ideas. Platonic forms or ideas then became the basis for the idea of laws of nature in the 17th century, with the foundation of modern mechanistic science. There’s nothing mechanistic about the laws of nature. They’re ideas, they’re concepts. They’re not in space and time. They’re supposed to govern everything that happens in space and time, but they’re transcendent of space and time. The reason they are is because they were thought of in the 17th century as being ideas in the mind of God.
Atheist theories that still look theological
Though many scientists are now atheists, they still have the ghost of the ideas in the mind of God in the laws of nature. Given this whole background, it’s particularly interesting, if you look at atheist theories of nature, how conventional they are in theological terms. One outstanding example is the physicist Lawrence Krauss, who wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing, which was his argument that you don’t need God to explain nature or the universe. You can get the whole lot from nothing in purely physical atheist terms. He was a great friend of Richard Dawkins, and they went on tours around America speaking on college campuses, a two-person stage show. They took it on the road together. Dawkins covered biology, about how you don’t need God for evolution, it’s all just random mutation and natural selection. And Krauss covered cosmology: you don’t need God for cosmology.
In fact, in his book A Universe from Nothing, there’s an afterword by Richard Dawkins saying this brilliant book puts Krauss in the same category as Darwin and The Origin of Species. So what does Krauss say to explain the universe from nothing? Well, what he says is that you don’t need God because the universe comes from nothing, because it’s all governed by the laws of nature, and they govern everything. It comes about through an initial fluctuation in the quantum vacuum field, which gives rise to the whole energy of the universe. So it’s all come from nothing, just from laws of nature and energy.
Well, as his critics have pointed out, where do the laws of nature and all this energy come from? He didn’t seem to have thought of that obvious objection. Basically, he puts forward a view of the whole universe and the whole of nature as being governed by principles of form, with the energy that makes them come to life.
Stephen Hawking did something very similar. You know his book A Brief History of Time, which some of you may have read, or have. It’s often said that many people have the book, but very few have actually read it. If you do read it, on the last page he comes to the idea that science will soon come up with a theory of everything. As one of his colleagues said, what we ultimately want in physics is a formula that explains everything, so simple you can print it on a t-shirt. Well, the theory of everything still remains elusive. It hasn’t happened yet. But in a reflective moment, one of the few really reflective moments at the end of the book, he says, even if we have the theory of everything, the equation that governs everything, what is it that puts fire into the equations? Because if you just have equations, they’re abstract, they’re outside space and time. They don’t give you a universe. You need basically the energy principle, fire. What puts fire into the equations? He just ends with that question. He doesn’t solve it.
So we keep coming back to these fundamental governing principles of everything, even in atheist materialist science. The same fundamental principles are invoked, because you can’t really get away from them if you’re interested in trying to go behind the surface of things to understand what is deeper reality. Most people aren’t very interested in what’s deeper reality. But if you are, you always come back to these kinds of Trinitarian models.
Spiritual practices
This is not just an academic exercise. It actually affects the way we experience things. In my most recent book, Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work, I discuss seven different spiritual practices, and I discuss another seven in my previous book, Science and Spiritual Practices. I’ve spoken here about them before, but briefly: what we find with these spiritual practices is that there are many different ways of connecting with a much greater reality than ourselves.
One way of doing it is through meditation. That’s probably one of the most popular spiritual practices at the moment. I meditate myself, so I’m all in favor of meditation. What meditation does, by concentrating on a mantra or on mindfulness, on the breath or on sensations, is enable us to let go of our normal thoughts, our attachment to our internal dialogue, what neuroscientists call the default mode network. That internal chatter that’s going on all the time in our minds, worries, ruminations, thoughts, and so on. If we go beyond that, which keeps us in tunnels of thought normally, if we can let go of it, and it often only happens quite briefly, then we find ourselves in a state of conscious being that’s not full of thoughts.
Through meditation, I think, we touch the ground of consciousness itself, that sat, as in Sat, Chit, Ananda. Or in the Christian terms, God the Father, who’s the ground, the conscious ground of being. When God introduces himself to Moses in the burning bush in the Old Testament, God says, “I am who I am.” So “I am” is about the most basic statement you can possibly have of conscious being in the present. This state of sat, conscious being in the present, is something meditation is one way of glimpsing or becoming part of for a while.
There are other spiritual practices. Chapter one of my book on ways to go beyond is on sports as a spiritual practice, because many people have spiritual experiences through sports. A lot of people often don’t talk about it, but when asked they say that one of the reasons they so enjoy skiing or mountaineering or playing football or whatever sport they’re taking part in, is that it shuts off their conscious mind. Meditation can do that, but it takes a while if you’re meditating to shut down the default mode network. If you’re on a rock face looking for the next finger hold and there’s a big drop below you, it doesn’t take long. It’s instantly shut down. You become completely absorbed in what you’re doing, the physical activity of what you’re doing.
Sports are one of the most common ways in the modern world in which people come completely into the present, into the flow of what they’re doing. They’re not worrying about whether they’ve paid the bill or what somebody said that really annoyed them, or something like that. They’re actually completely present in the flow. That’s very different from the state of meditation. In meditation you’re sitting still, you’re at the ground of being in a state of calm and stillness. If you’re hurtling down a ski slope at 60 miles an hour, you’re certainly not in a state of calm and stillness, at least physically. But it’s a way in which people feel they’re connected with something beyond themselves. I think that’s a kind of spiritual practice that makes us become part of the spirit, the moving principle of the Trinity.
So are spiritual practices that involve singing and dancing. There are many spiritual practices in all traditions that involve singing and movements like dancing. Entering into the sound itself, and entering into the changes of sound, and being part of the flow of sound, again, I think, connects one with the world of spirit. This is something my wife, Jill Purce, has been teaching for many years, and I’ve often seen that it can have a transformative effect on people’s consciousness. It’s a very quick way of changing your consciousness, through singing and chanting. So I think that relates to the spirit.
Then there are some forms of spiritual practice that involve beauty. Of course, music involves beauty. But if you think of beautiful buildings, this is a beautiful building. One of the things about churches, temples, mosques, and sacred buildings is that they’re often deliberately designed to be beautiful, because it’s part of the divine nature to be beautiful. As Plato said, the ultimate reality has the ultimate principles, of all the other principles, of truth, beauty, and goodness. Beauty is inherent in the ultimate. Our attempts to express it in the world, through buildings or through visual arts, are in a sense attempts reaching out to this sense of beauty. A lot of religious practices involve beauty, the worship of God and “the beauty of holiness,” as one of the Psalms puts it.
Yesterday I went on a small, short pilgrimage to Peterborough Cathedral. I didn’t start from London, I started from near Peterborough. I went to Choral Evensong in the cathedral, and there’s this magnificent building with this extraordinarily beautiful music. This is happening every day in our cathedrals and churches: in Westminster Abbey, five o’clock every day except Wednesday; in St. Paul’s Cathedral. This extraordinary beauty is a way of approaching a spiritual practice that connects us with the ultimate source. I think that’s mainly through the logos aspect, through the form aspect.
I myself love going to Kew Gardens. If I have a free afternoon, my favorite thing is to go to Kew Gardens. I love looking at plants and flowers in particular, and again, this is through the contemplation of the beauty of these flowers, each of which has developed in its striving for perfection as participation in divine goodness, as Thomas Aquinas would have said. Here are these flowers, utterly beautiful. I think a lot of this beauty is wasted on bees that sort of buzz there for a few seconds. They look at the flower, they go and take the pollen, and off they go. Flowers evolved in relation to insects. They were there 100 million years before humans evolved. They certainly didn’t evolve so we could enjoy them primarily. They evolved because of insects looking at them. Insects must have a sense of beauty, and I think there’s even much more beauty than they need in flowers.
Butterflies have beautiful wings. Darwin said this is because they need it for sexual selection to attract mates. When he was discussing peacocks and peahens, he said, well, the peacock has been selected for its beautiful tail because peahens will pick the most beautiful peacock as their mate. But then, Darwin was a very honest and thoughtful man, he didn’t then say, well, that explains it. He said, but where does the peahen get her sense of beauty from? He couldn’t answer that.
Even in animal species, if you look at the beauty of insects, of beetles and butterflies, the beauty of flowers, the beauty in the natural world reflects some source of beauty beyond nature, in the traditional view. Contemplating that beauty is another kind of spiritual practice that I think links us to the aspect of the divine, the logos or the chit aspect of the ultimate Trinity.
Beyond the Trinity
So this Trinitarian model helps us to understand ourselves, our own bodies, our own speaking. It helps us to understand our own desires and the desires of other animals. I think it helps us to understand the beauty we see in nature. But I don’t pretend that any intellectual model is the ultimate. In most traditions, people acknowledge this. In the Christian tradition, the great medieval mystic Meister Eckhart said that the Trinity is a model that enables us to understand the relation of God to nature and to ourselves. It’s like an interface. But the ultimate reality of God behind that, which he called the Godhead, is totally beyond our conception. We have limited minds, limited beings on one planet. We could hardly be expected to understand the ultimate reality of everything in every detail. Insofar as we can understand it, the Trinity is the best model we have. But behind that is something beyond words, beyond concepts.
We find something very similar in the Hindu tradition: that the ultimate reality, Brahman, which has this threefold aspect when we think about it in relation to ourselves and nature, is what the Hindus call Saguna Brahman, Brahman with qualities. But beyond that, there’s something we can’t conceive, which they call Nirguna Brahman, Brahman without qualities. It’s very similar to Meister Eckhart. The ultimate reality is completely beyond what we can conceive.
In conclusion, what I’d say is that there’s an ultimate reality which, when it interfaces with or connects with the whole created world, the entire universe, has this Trinitarian aspect. Though the details are beyond our conception, the broad picture of a Trinitarian model is fairly clear in these very different traditions. I think it illuminates many aspects of nature and of our own lives.
Thank you.
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Rupert Sheldrake
