One day I was reading the four canonical Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas for the zillionth time. But this time, with an Integral framework in mind, twelve simple, transforming words popped into my mind. Jesus talked about God, to God, and as God. We can too!
Jesus modeled a key dimension in my understanding of Integral Christianity—the vision and practice of the Three Faces of God. I now bring this with me to every setting in my practice of Christianity. My understanding of the three faces of God originated with Ken Wilber. He postulated that we can view every situation from three perspectives —about, to, and as:
3rd person
from a reflecting viewpoint “about” it.
2nd-person
from a relational viewpoint “to” one another.
1st-person
from the viewpoint “as” the viewer.
One day in conversation, I pointed out to Ken that Jesus talked about God, to God, and as God. Interestingly, Ken began saying that whenever he talked about Christianity. I asked him why he never gave me credit for that. He responded, “I only borrow from the very best.” I just smiled since my motto is to avoid arguing with the smartest person in the room.
THE THREE FACES OF GOD
When Jesus talked about God, to God, and as God, he was viewing God from the three perspectives in which every situation can be experienced. We learned this in grade school as third-person, second-person, and first-person. We can talk about someone or something using third person forms such as “he/she/it.” We can talk to someone using a second person word such as “you.” We can talk as someone using the pronoun “I.” This gives us the following three faces of God:
The Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us is accessed in and beyond the spiritual knowing of the head space.
Infinite Face of God
GOD-BEYOND-US
A God Big Enough for Our Mind
Behind the God that Jesus talked about was always the awesome Creator of heaven and earth. Moses was told this face of God-Beyond-Us is the I AM of Infinite Being. Paul taught the Infinite Face of God is “one in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Something of this Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us was always there in the Jewish culture of Jesus’ day, even though the world was seen in a much smaller and more limited way. When Jesus focused on the closeness of a personal, intimate, and loving God, he was bringing this vast, transcendent face of God into a face that could be experienced personally.
However, our understanding of the world today is much bigger. In today’s world, we have the “overview effect.” Astronauts report a cognitive shift in awareness during spaceflight while viewing Earth from outer space.
Astronaut Bob Behnken said, “It is the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, ‘hanging in the void,’ shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this ‘pale blue dot’ becomes both obvious and imperative.”
At an even larger scale, I am fascinated by the glorious images of the vast cosmos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. When I put myself into them, I experience a little something of the overview effect while contemplating how immense, likely infinite, our universe is.
If the universe is infinite, how can God be greater than infinity? If God is not a being but being itself, then God as Infinite Being and Consciousness holds all things, even infinity itself.
Theologically, this is an objective, transpersonal, nontheistic, cosmic face of God that we reflect about. We can experience this Face of God when we move into a non-ordinary, transcendent state of consciousness some call the formless causal state. This is the Infinite Face of God-beyond-us.
This awesome Face of God Beyond Us can rise up within us when we reflect about God in everyday, thoughtful, mindful consciousness, such as seeing the beauty of God revealed in nature, reading, and talking with others about the spiritual dimensions of life.
The Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us can be deeply experienced in transcendent consciousness, which is also called formless causal consciousness. It is accessed in the spiritual knowing of our head space.
Intimate Face of God
GOD-BESIDE-US
The Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us is accessed in the spiritual knowing of the heart space.
A God Close Enough for Our Heart
Jesus magnificently modeled what the Intimate Face of God looks and feels like. This divine personal presence is pure love. However, not just love in the abstract, but love in the most intimate, dynamic way we first experience it — from a loving mother and father.
Incredibly, he talked to God, calling this personal divine presence by the same name he called his father, Abba (“Daddy” or “Papa” in today’s language). We should note that father was the corporate personality that included mother in Jesus’ day in a way that is not true today. God is beside us as a loving father and mother.
This presence of God is now also found in the presence of the Living Jesus as Christianity’s originating and defining figure. This is the personal, spiritual presence of Jesus available to anyone at any time. The first Christians began talking with Jesus in his non-physical spirit body immediately after the resurrection, along with countless others have down through the centuries. We can too!
Jesus also found divine guidance and help in two of his spiritual friends, Moses and Elijah, on the Mount of Transfiguration. Talking and praying to saintly figures such as Mary began around the third century and was later affirmed by church leaders such as Augustine and Aquinas. Just as they were for Jesus at the Transfiguration, these evolved spiritual beings are available and present for us and can find a meaningful place in our circle of spiritual helpers. We can engage in conversation, emotional interaction, touch, sensation, vision, and olfactory experience with these spiritual presences.
Theologically, God-Beside-Us is the intersubjective, personal, and theistic face of God that comes in many forms (God, Jesus, the saints, nature, a friend, etc.) that we may talk to. This is the Immanent Presence of God as a “Someone,” to use Teilhard’s word. God loves to be everywhere at the same time! This is the Intimate Face of God-beside-us.
Often called prayer, the WE Space of God arises whenever we rest in God’s presence in intimate communion God’s motherly fatherly presence, Jesus, and other saints in awakened (subtle) mystical consciousness. This non-ordinary state of consciousness is a vibrant relational field of divine/human energy. This may occur when we gather to authentically worship, reflect, meditate, and practice integral prayer. This divinely saturated WE Space is full of spiritual beings and energy fields such as the Risen Jesus, God’s palpable presence, cosmic images, and vast information fields.
Inner Face of God
GOD-BEING-US
The Inner Face of God-Being-Us is accessed in the spiritual knowing of the gut-womb space.
A God Us Enough for Our Deepest Identity
Jesus so identified with God inwardly, that he acted as God’s hands, feet, and voice to the world around him. Torah and Temple were the two sacred representations on earth of God in the religion of Jesus. Yet, he claimed authority over both. He was so united to God that he acted as God was being him.
Jesus invites us to that same identification. This is the inner realization that everyone of us is already made in the image and likeness of God, the very first thing the Bible says about us in Genesis. Jesus expressed this identification in the fullest way possible, even to death. We seem to do that much less so. However, that does not change the reality of the inner truth from which we are working to make manifest.
“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.” ― Hafiz of Shiraz
Early in the book of Matthew, Jesus makes a stunning declaration: “Jesus said to them, ‘You are the light of the world’” (Matt. 5:14). How could others be the light of the world when Jesus was to later say that he was light of the world? This could only be possible if we, along with Jesus, are all the light of the world because we all hold the divine image of God within us.
The writer of 2 Peter 1:4 says that “we are participants in the divine nature.” Later, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius and others, declared that “God became humanity so that humanity could become God.”
God has a first-person face which is the subjective, mystical, inner face of God, which is called by such names as True Self, Christ Consciousness, Buddha Nature, Enlightened Self, or Divine Self. This is the God us enough for our own deepest identity in our womb. To the degree that we lose our identification with our egoic personality and instead identify with our God-Self, to that degree we walk and talk like Jesus did as God in healing the world. This is what Jesus called losing our self to save our Self (Matt: 16:24-26). The more we look at the world and act from this place of deep inner divine Light, the more we are manifesting what Jesus was talking about when he made the audacious claim that we are each the light of the world. This is the Inner Face of God-being-us.
All of this is not just a theological concept or an interesting idea
The Three Faces of God can transform your life, each in its own way. As we spend time, both alone and together with others, in Whole-Body Mystical Awakening meditative prayer, we can find ourselves changing.
We can have mystical experiences with each of the three faces of God and centers of spiritual knowing if we take the time to let them emerge. This can be the simple but awesome sensing of the presence of God-Beside-Us in our heart as Love. It can be the bliss of immersion in God-Beyond-Us which carries us away to refresh in nondual union with God. It can emerge in visions and bodily sensations of God-Being-Us. We can know the increasing sense in our gut of our divine identity as God-Being-Us. We sense powerful new courage and the creative emergence of our divine self that flows as living water out to the world that needs so much healing and help.
Engaging the Three Faces of God together with others is intensified by the energy field generated in the group. We can experience the beautiful flow of healing love with others tuned into the same energies. And we can actually experience the reality of Jesus’ extraordinary promise, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18:20).
With Jesus present, the possibilities are wonderful and endless.
Mystical experiences with the Three Faces of God are not an end in themselves. However, they are marvelous and beautiful in themselves. Through transformed understanding and experiences of God, we are opened up to being more deeply transformed ourselves. And this transformation is not only for ourselves, but for the transformation of the world.
COME, JOIN US IN CREATING A COMMUNITY OF EVOLUTIONARIES ENGAGED IN OUR OWN TRANSFORMATION LEADING TO THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE WORLD.
© Integral Christian Network (text only)
Our most holistic and integrated Christianity embraces and pursues all three.
We seek to do this and practice Integral Prayer in our lives and in community.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE THREE FACES, SEE
Is Your God Big Enough? Close Enough? You Enough? Jesus and the Three Faces of God
“Please trust me as I tell you to trust the wisdom you are about to uncover here. . . . a book that will be at the top of my recommended reading list for all of my students.”