Part 2 of a series of posts on spiritual awakening.
Three Primary Creative Forces
Let us start with the understanding that the creative forces within God contain the master pattern or blueprint of all material reality.[1] Understanding God as a trinity is a useful way to comprehend the three primary forces of Creation:
This is also known as the Father, Son, and Spirit.
First and foremost, it is important to remember that these three forces work together as one. Just as we have different parts of our brain that perform different functions, these functions work collectively and as a whole. Thus, within these creative forces is one unified purpose. The entire Creation works together in an integrated fashion, and this “establishes the peace of God.”[2] This means there is no conflict between the forces of Creation as a whole. God’s will is goodwill, and there is an overriding order to all things.
Once again, we are looking at the concept of differentiation within unity. Each force serves a distinct purpose but works cocreatively with the others. Everything in the universe reflects the cocreative principle of the Holy Trinity, and this provides us with an important clue in understanding what we are here to learn.
God the Father—Divine Will
Let’s start with the first creative force of divine will, also known as God the Father in Christianity and the First Logos in Theosophy. As we just discussed in the Big Bang section, manifesting an idea starts with a desire to express it. Desire is will turned outward. The Father aspect of God is the personalization and activation of divine will. He is first in the triple forces of God. He is the parent, the initiator, and the directing force of creativity. Will, then, is the prime force from which all things are directed. Will is the outbreath and the in-breath of God. It creates and it destroys. The out-breath is God in action or manifestation, and the in-breath is the withdrawal from manifestation and a return to inactivity. God exists (and we as extensions of God exist) whether there is a form of expression or not and whether He is manifesting an idea or withdrawing from an idea, just as we exist whether we are expressing ourselves through a physical body or have withdrawn from it. With His will, God creates and destroys, but He exists either way. God’s will is that which directs both of these activities. And we, as his children, are also directors of will. We create forms of expression and we destroy them, but we exist either way.
The intelligent, loving will of the Father is the igniting energy of the universe. This powerful creative energy is at the center of all things and is absolute intention and the drive to extend, express, and reveal. It is the creative ignition switch, and central axiom or organizing principle of the Cosmos at large. This energy is inspirational and unifying and is the source of what we know of as “God’s will.” As His children, we have within us the free use of this same force of will. At all times, we are God in action whether we remember this or not. Therefore, we are employing our will at all times whether consciously or unconsciously. Our entire life is the result of the creative choices we have assertively made or passively been unable to make (thus making us the effect of other people’s choices) and is a reflection of how we are directing, or failing to direct, our will. As creators-in-training, we may not always be using this force well, but we are using it, or failing to use it, nonetheless and are learning about this force through our experiences. When we learn how to align our will with the greater unified loving, intelligent will of God the Father, we come into sync with the greater good of God’s plan and the peace and goodwill of God is established. We experience a glimmering of what this alignment is like when we feel deeply inspired, creative, and powerful and our life flows from a higher power manifesting with ease, certainty, and abundance.
The Father is the Source of our beingness and is That which granted us with the potential for personality status. What does it mean to have a personality? To answer that, we must turn our attention to the second force: God the Son.
God the Son—Personification of Love-Wisdom
The Son is the personification or the embodiment of God and is an expression of His loving, intelligent will. Because we are the sons of God, these are our innate qualities. In the physical realms of the universe, we are learning how to reveal these qualities in material form.
The Sonship as a whole is composed of all the Sons of God existing within the Mind of God. God distributes Himself into the Sonship gifting each Son with a specific existence that can come only from Him. In this way, God the Son is the “spiritual personalization” or revelation of God the Father. For now, let’s define personality as a self-aware collection or organized pattern of qualities and characteristics, an essential uniting principle that underlies all subjective experience and knows itself to exist. The Father has instilled Himself within us, and we could not exist without Him or outside Him. However, God in His pre-personal state as Source did exist without us. This means that even when God is not actively revealing Himself through His sons, He still exists. The Urantia Book tells us that God exists outside His current creation (because He is absolute infinity); therefore, there are “places” (for lack of a better word) beyond the edge of the Grand Universe where He is Present but nothing is manifest. He is existentially present but not experientially present. My analogy is that the manifested Grand Universe is the Tree of Life, and everything around the Tree is the unmanifest where God is still Present. However, within His creation, He is personally distributing Himself within every son. Hence, a reciprocal relationship springs up between God the Father and His Sons. Only as Source is God inherently eternal in that He had no beginning and has no end. Immortality (to exist without end) is the destiny of the sons of God. But they were created. That is, they have a beginning; there was a time when they did not exist. Never, however, did Source not exist.
The Urantia Book is quite definite about this. It states that the sons of God are gifted with a pre-personal “Thought Adjuster” by God the Father at the time of our conception in His mind. And we become eternal only if and when we develop our minds to the point where we can merge with the divine Thought Adjuster within us. When this merger happens, the Thought Adjuster (an aspect of God the Father) becomes personal through us (the individuated personal son), and we become eternal through this conscious merger with God the Father within us. Another way to say it is that the personality consciousness of the human being becomes an activated Son of God when we awaken to our Spiritual essence and identity. Jesus refers to this in a conversation with his disciples. At this point in his life, Jesus was already what is called by the Theosophists an “Ascended Master.” This means he had already merged his human consciousness with his indwelling Thought Adjuster or personal fragment of God the Father when he says,
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well." John 14:6-7
"Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves." John 14:10-12
Jesus points out that the only way to know ourselves truly and live as divine beings is to awaken to the fact of our existence within God as a divine expression (a Son) of the Father. And we can’t really know God except through the Sonship experience. Furthermore, as sons, we are inherently of the Father, for He dwells within us.
In summary, then, the ascending Sons of God (those entities who develop into Creators through their experiences in material existence) start as pure Spirit containing pre-personal Thought Adjusters, which contain the yet-to-be-manifested potential of Divine Mind. The Sons of God are destined to activate and actuate this potential in the material realms through
Their activity in matter,
The development of their ability to be in loving contact with greater levels of intelligence, and
The discovery of their divine purpose within the Creation.
The soul is the middle principle of the divine Self containing both our potential in the early stages and our activated abilities in the later stages of our evolution. Once we fully merge consciously with our soul and become soul directed, the gift of personal existence as divine beings given to us by the Father is made actual. It bears fruit. From there, the divine Son continues to expand and eventually emerge as a fully realized Son of God and divine creator in his own right.
In this way, God actively reveals His identity through His son, and the nature of that identity is love, intelligence, and goodwill. Where the Father aspect of God is universal and all encompassing (He is the entire Tree of Life), the Son is individualized and distinguishable in comparison to the whole. In this way, the Son is akin to the branches and leaves on the Tree of Life. However, at all times all parts of the tree exist within the whole and the whole always contains all its parts.
And while each son is distinguishable and contributing to the whole in unique ways, there is really only one Son (also called the Sonship), and we are all differentiated manifestations of the Sonship. Furthermore, the Son is the Father in action. There is no separation between Father and Son. Another interesting way to understand this concept is to look at it the way Jesus describes it in A Course in Miracles when he says, “If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts.”[3] This is another way of understanding the concept of differentiation within Unity or the at-one-ment and the interconnectivity of the entire Creation.
When Moses asks God for His name, God says, “I am that I am.”Exodus 3:14 When we get the inflection of this phrase right, we can begin to understand what He is saying. Try saying it this way out loud: I am that I am. What does this tell us? I saw for myself in a deep meditation one day that God the Father encompasses everything—He truly is All That Is. He extends beyond my horizons in all directions without beginning or end. The Son, on the other hand, appeared to me as a distinct light within this endless field of creative force. I heard His voice saying, “I Am.” From this experience, I was able to see for myself how the Son is the Word of God—the manifestation, the expression of God, just as The Urantia Book says, “the divine Sons are indeed the ‘Word of God’…God speaks through the Son.”[4] And as I continued to meditate on the Son, I saw that every divine spark in the Creation was also sounding “I am.”
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men."
John 1:1-4
When we speak, we are expressing something. We are putting a thought or feeling into form, bringing it to life with our breath, and releasing it out into the world. By giving voice to our thought we are revealing it; we are manifesting it, or making it known. For instance, when we communicate out loud with others, we enter into a relationship of speaking and listening, of giving and receiving, and yet nothing is lost and everything is gained. When we share an idea with other people and they take it up in their mind, we don’t become separated from the idea and the idea does not become separated from us. It doesn’t leave our head as it enters another person’s mind. Instead, the idea grows through the act of sharing; it expands and becomes greater than before. Because this is so, it is vitally important for us to consider how we express ourselves. When we “sound our word”—that is, use our life—correctly, we reveal our divinity. When we sound our word incorrectly, we obscure our divinity. Through the process of our evolution, we learn the difference. We learn to be the embodiment of love and light, which is our natural or original state.
The nature of love is to extend, connect, and share. Love and light are synonymous; light shares the same qualities as love, and vice versa. Light is the objective visible manifestation of love, which is a subjective experience. Love and light emanate, attract, radiate, and extend. Because our true nature is inherently loving, we intuitively seek to connect and share. Just like ideas, when light connects with light, nothing is lost or traded; instead, the light is magnified. It becomes brighter and extends farther. As we learn how to extend our love unconditionally into the world and seek out and acknowledge the light and love in all our brothers and sisters, we understand our true nature and the creative process of divinity. We awaken to the greater truth of who we all are and arrive at at-one-ment. Thus, the qualities of unconditional love, forgiveness, and compassion are important qualities we learn to activate within ourselves as we become all that we are meant to be. As we become aware of this creative power within us, we gain the wisdom of God and activate our fullest creative potential. Jesus teaches us this in his sermon on the mount when he says,
"You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven." Matthew 5:14-16
The Father and the Son are two inseparable aspects of God in relationship with one another. God shares His love with and through His sons. This act of sharing reveals the creative nature of God and that the Word of God is love. Together, the Father and the Son establish the fellowship of God and the cocreativeness of the universe can be seen. Therefore, when we consciously live in loving relationship with one another, we come to recognize ourselves as whole. We have within us the innate ability to know ourselves to be both unique and indivisible from God and one another and, in so doing, acquire the wisdom of God. The forms through which the Sons of God reveal themselves may look different from one another. But differentiation is not separation. God expresses this way and that way, but it is always God doing the expressing.
We, the Sons of God, are thus the revelation of God the Father in action. Jesus repeatedly makes this point in his ministry:
The Father and I are one. John 10:30
If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. John 14:7
Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. John 14:9
Upon awakening to our innate divinity, we come to know ourselves fully as the Sons of God in action. We understand that, regardless of race, religion, or any other apparent divisions we experience in the external world, we are all One. When we live from this activated spiritual point of view, we fully participate within God’s overall plan, creativity, and will. We are all instruments in the symphony of the Cosmos. Each one of us is a working part of the whole, cocreating with one another and with the Father (or the unified point of view) to manifest the music of His creativity. We can fully trust that our role and our divine creativity exist within the larger context of God’s loving, intelligent will and that all is well.
God the Spirit—Active Intelligence
"The divine Sons are indeed the 'Word of God,' but the children of the Spirit are truly the 'Act of God.'” [5]
The very instant that the divine forces of will and love come together as a full-fledged idea to be executed, the activating and actuating force of the Infinite Spirit, springs into existence.[6] The Spirit is Divine Mind—the executer of the plan, the universal manipulator of energy.[7] The Infinite Spirit is the revelation of God’s intelligence in action in the universe. It is the aspect of God that executes the Father’s plans and designs the environments within which His creations can experience themselves and evolve. The Infinite Spirit is also the bestower of intelligence to all things living, from the mightiest superuniversal Creator Sons to the minutest atoms of substance. It exists as a beneficent Presence in our minds and has oversight over the domain of the intellect. In this way, God as Spirit is knowable to us through our intuition and serves as a divine influence when we turn our awareness inward to seek the council of our inner wisdom.
The Infinite Spirit is the aspect of the Creator that organizes the Universe of Universes and ensures that His will is carried out. It is the vehicle through which God’s will is administered and manifested in the universe. On its own, or in cocreative concert with the Father and/or the Son, the Infinite Spirit ministers, administers, and manifests God’s will. Thus, the management and organization of the Universe is carried out by this aspect of God. This includes the creation of nonpersonalized things like matter, gravity circuits, the structural organization of the planets, galaxies, and universes, as well as certain personalities (beings) that minister to the evolving sons of God and oversee the management of God’s plan within the Creation.
What an interesting and varied revelation of God. The Infinite Spirit is the activator of the universe and material reality, source of the mind and intellect, and the divine minister and uplifter of mankind. As the creative source of all the ministering agents of the Grand Universe, The Urantia Book teaches that Infinite Spirit is represented by a diverse group of ministering spirits, messengers, teachers, and guides.
To summarize, Infinite Spirit is:
The loving intelligence of God shared directly with all the creatures in the Creation through the agency of the mind,
The source of intelligence in action in the universe,
The manipulator and administrator of energy, and
The source of atomic matter.
What can we learn about ourselves from understanding the Infinite Spirit and the creative force of active intelligence?
We have intellect—the capacity for rational thought, inference, and discrimination.
The Infinite Spirit works within our higher mind—the abstract, intuitive, illuminating superconscious mind—and serves to correct our thinking when we go astray.
The Spirit is always broadcasting higher-level thought patterns that we can tap into, and this helps us release the mental barriers that keep us unaware of ourselves as God in action.
The Infinite Spirit is the container of our intuition and higher consciousness.
The Spirit is That which manipulates energy to create forms (the divine Thinker within us) and that intelligence quotient within matter that enables it to respond to our creative demand. H. P. Blavatsky stated, “Matter is spirit at its lowest point of manifestation and spirit is matter at its highest [point of manifestation].”[8] This could also read as matter is intelligence at its lowest point of manifestation, and spirit is intelligence at its highest.
The Holy Trinity
Each of the three qualities of God has a specific function and works in a particular way. Once God became active, all other forms of spirit personality became possible. The seeds of potentiality were put in place, and numerous types of divine personalities developed from these seeds. Everything created in the Universe stems from the Holy Trinity in a successive line of creativity. This includes everything in the material (physical) and spiritual realms. The creative activity of the Holy Trinity establishes the master blueprint on which all things are based.
All divine spirit-personalities trace their lineage back to the original Holy Trinity, including us. We can trace our existence back to our inception point within the mind of God because (and I can’t say this enough) we are God in action or in active manifestation. The consciousness assigned to this physical lifetime is but one small aspect of a much larger, multidimensional self that rests within an even larger entity. This chain of creations-within-creations is reflected throughout the Grand Universe, and we will explore this more in our next chapter. What is exciting to note is that even at our smallest, we have within us the inherent qualities of God: divine will, love-wisdom, and active intelligence. We are creators and cocreators. We are, each of us, a unique creative expression or revelation of God. We remain connected to everything, even as we create and experience unique or differentiated forms of expression.
Food for Thought
1. What comes up for you as you consider the Holy Trinity?
In what way do you see the force of will or purpose working in your life?
In what way do you see love-wisdom working within you or in your life?
In what way do you see active intelligence working within you or in your life?
2. The Son—Love-wisdom: ll:
Can you think of a time when you aligned your will with the intention of serving the greater good of everyone concerned? What did you experience?
3. The Son—Love-wisdom:
When you think about diversity within unity, what comes up for you?
What does it tell you about yourself, others, and humanity as a whole?
4. The Infinite Spirit—Active Intelligence:
Reflect back and see if you can remember a time when you felt a divine Presence either within you or around you. What stands out for you about those times?
5. Use the space below to write down your notes on chapter one. If you have some questions, write them down and ask for divine assistance to help you discover your answers.
References
[1] Urantia, p. 8.
[2] ACIM, p. 39.
[3] ACIM, p. 33.
[4] Urantia, p. 111.
[5] Urantia, p. 111.
[6] ACIM, p. 90.
[7] Urantia, p. 99.
[8] Bailey. The Rays and The Initiations, p. 264.
This post is an updated excerpt from my book The Divine Journey. Available for purchase on Amazon.com