Trinity

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TRINITY & OTHER DOCTRINES OF GOD: PROF. M. M. NINAN • God is infinitely loving and at the center of every life. • Truth is love in action. Actions performed out of love are genuine expressions in a physical form of what love means. • There is one God whose essence is Divine Love and Wisdom. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all aspects of God just as body, mind, and soul are all aspects of one person. • The Bible is the inspired Word of God that provides inspiration and help to lead better and more fulfilling lives. The literal sense of Scripture tells the story of the people of God, and contains a deeper meaning that illumines the journey of the human soul. • People are essentially spirits clothed with material bodies. At death, the material body is laid aside and the person continues to live on in the world of spirit choosing a heavenly life or a hellish one, based on the quality of life choices made here. • God gives everyone the freedom to choose their beliefs and live their lives accordingly. Salvation is available for people of all religions. • The Second Coming has taken place—and in fact still is taking place. It is not an actual physical appearance of the Lord, but rather his return in spirit and truth that is being effected as a present reality. • God is infinitely loving and at the center of every life. Swedeenberg was a Physicist and he applied them in his derivation of theology. one page of it as presented by Rev. Dr. George Dole on Tue, July 10, 1984 Here is Physics tells us that matter has both particle properties and wave properties. I'm suggesting that we take our own wave properties seriously, using as a guide our basic theological understandings of influx. In this model, all reality is a vast and impossibly intricate pattern of intersecting waves. It's a little as though there were an absolutely still pond, and someone dropped in thousands of pebbles all over its surface. But let's think of reality as being three-dimensional, and following our theological clues, let's posit two basic kinds of waves. The primary ones are coming down from the Lord. The secondary ones are coming horizontally. They are actually the vertical waves deflected. Each one of us is a point or region of intersection, a place where the direct inflow from the Lord meets the indirect inflow from our environment. These are the two forces that hold us together-- immediate influx is the force from within, and mediate influx is the force from without, to put it in more traditional terms. At this point, there is already a significant difference from the mechanical model. It will, I hope, be clearer as we go along, but I think you can already see that if we are intersections, it is impossible to define ourselves solely from the inside or solely from the outside. For example, I'm never just plain angry. I'm angry at something. I never just plain love. There must be objects of love. Nor am I ever just the product of my circumstances. Things don't make me angry, and people don't make me love them. It simply is not an either-or situation, and to pretend that it is would be like trying to define an intersection by just one of its roads. 117
TRINITY & OTHER DOCTRINES OF GOD: PROF. M. M. NINAN There's another phenomenon very closely related to this. Listen to the following description from Soul-Body Interaction (n. 1). Since the soul is spiritual substance, and by reason of order is more pure, more primary, and more inward, while the body is material and therefore more crude, more secondary, and more outward, and since it is in keeping with order for the more pure to flow into the more crude, the more primary into the more secondary, and the more inward into the more outward, it is therefore in keeping with order for the spiritual to flow into the material, and not the reverse. This means that the thinking mind flows into the sight, subject to the state imposed on the eyes by the things that are being seen-- a state which that mind, further, organizes at will. In the same way, the perceiving mind flows into the hearing, subject to the state imposed on the ears by words. Swedenborg is saying that we are neither passive receptors nor sheer hallucinators. He is saying something that is in part obvious-- that sensory experience is a process of intersection, but he is insisting that the primary energy of perception is from within. To put it another way, there is no such thing as purely subjective or purely objective perception. Perception is the intersection of subjective and objective forces, with the subjective ones being primary. The primacy of the subjective forces is consistent with the principle already cited, that immediate influx is primary and mediate influx secondary. But there is another quite challenging way in which waves differ from particles. Waves have no boundaries. If you think of a sine wave-- the perfectly regular wave that represents among other things a pure tone in sound-- you can measure it, sort of. That is, you can measure the distance from crest to crest. But you can also measure the distance from trough to trough, or from any point to the corresponding point on the next wave: it makes no difference. And if you happen to think of a sine wave as a two-dimensional view of a spiral, then you realize that every point on it bears just the same relationship to what precedes and follows it as every other point does. If you were climbing a spiral staircase in a featureless tower, every step would look like every other. Beyond that, waves just go on and on until they bump into something. If that something is in the same medium, then the wave is altered-- that's the interference pattern-- but in a very real way it is still there. There is a tendency for waves to decay over distance in a physical medium, and the more viscous the medium, the more sluggish the wave, as anyone can tell you who has ever stirred white sauce while it was thickening. We'll come back to that later, though. Now let's see what is implied about our own wave properties by this lack of boundaries. I'd suggest that it turns out to be a very appropriate image for the ways our ideas work. This whole lecture, for example, is using things I've seen and heard and read. It's using them in a particular way, a way no one else could use them, if you want to be persnickety about it. I'll readily grant that someone else might have very similar ideas, in fact, I'll insist on it before too long; but I defy you to imagine anyone but me sitting down and coming out with these particular words in this particular sequence. This means that it is awfully hard, probably impossible, and quite probably pointless to try to draw a boundary between what's "mine" in this lecture and what is "others'." These ideas are how I intersect with some aspects of my environment, to put it crudely. To be more precise, this lecture represents some of the ways in which immediate and mediate 118
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Trinity

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