Trinitarian Model of Consciousness

The Akashic Field

Synaxis of the Holy Hierarchs - Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, and Gregory the Theologian

In Rational Spirituality we argue that the doctrine of the Trinity can serve as an edifying metaphor for a scientific model of human consciousness. First, a succinct definition of Rational Spirituality and our primary postulates.

1. Rational Spirituality - a reality-based, spiritually-grounded approach to the sciences of quantum theory, electromagnetism, and information theory.¹ We aim to mitigate religious doctrines with fresh ideas rather than negate them.

2. Non-local Consciousness - the theory that consciousness exists independently of the brain and survives death.² It’s often said that looking for consciousness inside the brain is like looking for the announcer inside a radio.

3. Panpsychism - the theory that consciousness is omnipresent throughout the cosmos and is a constituent, fundamental property of matter. In other words, we afford consciousness the same status as gravity, energy, and mass.³

4. Spiritual Naturalism (SN) - unlike Western Civilization’s Biblical Worldview, Spiritual Naturalism perceives the universe as a sacred whole best interpreted through science and the faculty of human reason. SN spurns all notions of supernaturalism.⁴ We believe all phenomena have rational explanations.

5. Panspermia - (Information Panspermia) - the theory suggesting that life exists in various parts of our universe. According to this theory, life on Earth originated from encoded, compressed information that served as seeds for the development of life forms. These seeds may have come from different sources, such as a mother universe in the context of multiverse theory, a previous universe as in cyclic universe theory, microorganisms present in our own universe, or chemical precursors to life⁵ within our universe.

Humanity has grappled with various manifestations of a rational spirituality since the 17th century when science and religion were alienated from one another by the so-called Cartesian Bargain: scientists no longer would meddle with Church teachings on matters of faith; the Church, on the other hand, no longer would meddle in science, e.g. teaching that “the Earth is the center of the universe.” One positive upshot of this split — it liberated science from the oppressive clutches of the Church and a revolution in scientific thought consequently was launched by Copernicus, et al.

This bargain or accommodation added momentum to the then century-old Copernican Revolution (that planets revolve around the Sun), a major scientific paradigm shift, and fueled an Age of Enlightenment in Europe. However, as with many blessings, there came a curse.

The Church was imbued with the freedom to continue promulgating dogmas that flew in the face of science and reason, e.g. virgin birth, physical ressurection, creationism, Hot Big Bang theory, etc. “In science, faith without evidence is a vice, while in religion it’s a virtue.”⁶

In the book The New Universe and the Human Future (2012), the authors argue:

The human race needs a coherent, believable picture of the universe that applies to all of us and gives our lives and our species a meaningful place in that universe. It’s time to reconnect the two different understandings of the word cosmology—the scientific and the mythic—into one: a science-based appreciation of our place in a meaningful universe.

God the Father - Cosmic Feedback Loop

Physicist Nassim Haramein once noted there has been insufficient time in the 4.5-billion year history of Planet Earth to randomly evolve even a single blade of grass, let alone a complex human being. This is not intended to argue for creationism, as some might assume, but rather for a biologically-driven dynamic feedback/feed-forward loop that functions between Earth’s biosphere and a cosmic field of boundless quantum energy/information.

This energy field exists not only in Earth’s unique, finely tuned biosphere, but throughout the entire cosmos. The feedback loop is the mechanism for creation. Biology provides the requisite feedback.

In Rational Spirituality we call this mechanism Gaia and will devote a future article to it (which has since been written and is here).

The field of subtle energy/information was at one time called aether. The ancients, on the other hand, knew this Life Force as chi or qi, mana, prana or by a number of other cultural-specific terms detailed in the chart below. The energy-information component of this cosmological spiritual architecture is referred to as The Akashic Field. The Akashic Field includes a protonic memory module called the Akashic Record.⁷ Akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning "primary substance from which all things are formed."

The protonic memory component, The Akashic Record, includes C.G. Jung’s realm of archetypes commonly known as humanity’s Collective Unconscious. The collective unconscious will be the subject of a future article, as will its function within the human psyche (which has since been written and is here).

As a function of higher consciousness, the human psyche (personal consciousness) has the remarkable ability to access information stored in the Akashic Record. The realm of archetypes is capable of transpersonal communication with human consciousness via prayer, meditation, and numerous other modalities. We find evidence of this communication when we experience synchronicity.⁸

We further can assert that the Akashic Field, which is grounded in sound science, is all-powerful (harnesses the ability to create and destroy); all-present (exists throughout the cosmos), and all-knowing (the mystical and spiritual Akashic Record) — omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.

Given these attributes, we regard the Akashic Field and its persistent interaction with matter and spirit as analogous to God the Father. This is the first aspect of trinitarian consciousness.

God the Son: Avatar of Divine Nature

Indian scholar, poet, philosopher, and mystic, Sri Aurobindo, defined avatarhood as, “roughly speaking, one who is conscious of the presence and power of the Divine born in him or descended into him and governing from within his will and life and action; he feels identified inwardly with this divine power and presence.”

Christ, Krishna, and Buddha, explains Aurobindo, were all avatars of the Divine Presence. When Western Christians (but not Eastern) hear this following quote from St. Athanasius, “God became man so that men might become gods,” they recoil in fear of devilish influences from contemplative Eastern mysticism and/or pantheism.

Belief that reality has an affinity with the Divine Nature and that God exists everywhere and in everything is called pantheism. Given what we know about the Akashic Field, pantheism is not a far-fetched proposition. But it remains a heresy in the Catholic Church.

Among the major revelations of Jesus’ ministry was that we all share in the Divine Nature, which has been termed by mystics as the highest form of consciousness known. We call it Superconsciousness. When we integrate this Christ-taught reality into our personal worldview, we ourselves embark on a personal quest to superconsciousness and enlightenment. This encapsulates the foremost goal of Rational Spirituality: that humanity embraces this teaching of the Divine Nature, which is known as theosis.⁹ All creation is interconnected and in union with God.

Gregory of Nazianzus, another great champion of “correct views” about the Trinity and Christ’s divinity, stated: “Man has been ordered to become God.” His close friend, Basil the Great, said, “From the Holy Spirit is the likeness of God, and the highest thing to be desired, to become God.”

These two Church Fathers are depicted on our banner art.

God the Holy Spirit: The Feminine Nature of Divinity

In Judaic mysticism (kabbalah), the Divine Feminine is called the Shekinah. To other cultures the Divine Feminine reveals herself simply as the Great Mother. Among the Great Mother’s many archetypes, and in rare cases avatars, are Shakti, Gaia, Maat, Ishtar, Kali, Aphrodite, Sophia, Isis, and in our own time, Mary, the Mother of Jesus,* and her eastern counterpart, Kwan Yin, a Buddhist bodhisattva.

On a personal note, I lived for a while in a small village in the former Yugoslavia called Medjugorje, the site of ongoing Marian apparitions since 1981. They are like those that occurred at Fatima in 1917 and Lourdes in 1858. I’ll write a piece later about apparitions and about my experiences in Medjugorje. I also will explicate Rational Spirituality’s scientific hypothesis of an apparition’s non-supernatural reaction mechanism. Note that ~70,000 people, both believers and non-believers alike, witnessed the Miracle of the Sun following the final apparition at Fatima, Portugal.¹⁰

* I hasten to qualify my inclusion of Mary in the preceding examples of Great Mother Goddesses. More correctly and appropriately, Mary should be referred to as the divine quintessence of the Great Mother archetype rather than as a Divine Feminine avatar. She is unique in human history. The quality of ‘divine quintessence’ is a topic we shall revisit in a future essay on Marian apparitions.

As universal mother and supreme mediatrix between humanity and the Divine, Mary nurtures and participates in the spiritual direction of every individual’s psyche or soul, continually nudging it forward on its journey toward higher integrative states of consciousness and superconsciousness.

Quan Yin (Buddhist) is similarly compassionate and caring; her goal is to awaken humanity to truth. These two feminine (yin) forces are hugely involved in today’s spiritual warfare. Quan Yin as bodhisattva earned the right to enter nirvana. However, having heard cries of anguish from earth, chose to remain behind to alleviate suffering. She is known as the Mother of Mercy, as is Mary, the mother of Jesus.

When we speak of masculine and feminine aspects of the Divine, we allude not to biological gender but to yin and yang energies, which are thought of as opposite, yet interconnected and interdependent forces in Chinese philosophy.¹¹

Quan Yin

Trinitarian Consciousness

In terms of the states of consciousness, God the Father is analogous to Universal Consciousness or Hinduism’s Universal Soul (Om). Theologian Paul Tillich termed this state, The Ground of All Being.

Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.

~ Albert Einstein

We should perceive God the Father’s divine nature as both immanent and transcendent — both within us and outside us. It seems that all great philosophical propositions are both, and propositions rather than either, or.

We can envisage the Akashic Field using the same terminology. The Field is certainly transcendent in that we cannot detect or observe it with our senses. Yet as the primary medium of all consciousness, it also is certainly immanent.

God the Son is analogous to Universal Consciousness and to each individual’s personal or local consciousness (psyche). Moreover, this state underscores the teaching, by Jesus and other spiritual masters, that we too are both human and divine, although our divine nature, during our time on Earth, is subordinate to our human nature. We can posit that while on Earth our divine nature is passive (yin) while our human nature is active (yang).¹²

It then becomes a short step to grasping why our world is falling apart. When we deny our divine nature, its moral precepts and responsibilities, our human nature is free to run amuck. It becomes its own god.

The divinity of God mingles with our humanity so that we can function as gods on this side of eternity. The divine nature is a ruling nature; it is a kind of nature that is always in-charge of itself. The image and likeness of God in a man sustains His divinity in him.

~ Chris Christian from God in the Likeness of Men.

The Divine Feminine, God the Holy Spirit, is the nonlocal lifeforce of our personal consciousness and psyche, which is the Greek word for soul. Joseph Campbell wrote in The Power of Myth that the foundational substance of all myth is message, not fact.

The timeless message of Arthurian and Holy Grail legend is clear: the overarching quest for over a thousand years before Camelot and for over a thousand years since has been the quest to achieve yin/yang balance on a global scale; a quest to return and re-enshrine the Divine Feminine, the virginal essence of the Holy Grail that was woefully exiled from humanity’s collective soul.

Joseph Campbell

The Return (or rise) of the Divine Feminine from exile infers a metaphysical phenomenon occurring today, a phenomenon that shapes and informs the Aquarian paradigm shift now taking place. Metaphorically, this return is an invocation for global conscious awareness, now suffering from an acute and inharmonious imbalance in yin/yang energies. It illustrates the importance of rebalancing these energies on both the individual and collective scales.

N.B. The phrase “global conscious awareness” has nothing to do with political Globalism or a New World Order, both of which are inherently evil concepts.

The exile of the Divine Feminine finds its cultural analog in the separation of the cosmic soul. This is a predictable consequence not only of overt patriarchy but also of the materialist worldview that insists upon the primacy of matter and prunes consciousness down to a function of matter — specifically, a function solely of the gray matter inside the human skull.

Your personal consciousness, your psyche, is your eternal soul, which ideally should always exist in harmony and balance with the Cosmic Soul. The human Ego, which is inversely proportional to, and consequently threatened by, self-awareness, actively seeks to disrupt this balance.

Ego and self-awareness engage in a perpetual conflict — one seeking dominance, the other seeking truth. Acknowledging this conflict allows one to navigate life with greater wisdom and humility.

1. What Does Quantum Theory Actually Tell Us about Reality? (Article)

2. The Evidence for Non-Local Consciousness. (Article)

3. Panpsychism: A Fantastic Theory About Consciousness. (Article)

4. What is SN? (Article)

5. Have Astronomers Found Chemical Precursor to Life? (Article)

6. Yes, there is a war between science and religion. (Article)

7. Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything. (Article)

8. The coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (such as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality - used especially in the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. (Webster’s Dictionary).

9. Theosis: Partaking of the Divine Nature. (Article)

10. What Happened at Fatima? Today in History. (Article)

11. What’s the Difference between Yin & Yang Qi Energy? (Article)

12. Yin and Yang of AI