Christianity as creative myth

life around us, and even of mineral existence, with all of which we feel some kinship. This could be described as the triunity of God, Man and Nature.

A similar triunity can be clearly perceived in our direct experience of our willing, thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling are both conscious. Willing is unconscious. My decision to raise my arm is a conscious thought in my mind, but the willing by which I actually achieve that act is beyond my consciousness. The whole of my subjectivity—all that I call ‘’—is in my willing, thinking and feeling. We have no grounds at all for affirming the existence of any other ‘I’ objectively transcending the unity of these three, as Immanuel Kant has shown and Buddhism affirms. I say ‘I will’, ‘I think’ and ‘I feel’. What then is the relationship of ‘T’ to these three? My willing is I, my thinking is I, and my feeling is I; they are all three distinct, and yet there are not three ‘I’s but one T’, This is exactly the relationship described in the Athanasian Creed between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Willing in Man, which is essentially unconscious, corresponds to God the Father, to whose will Jesus assented. Thinking corresponds to the Son, as the Word or Logos. The correspondence between the emotions and the Holy Spirit is made clear by comparing the Christian Trinity with the triunity in Vedanta, Sat-Chit-Ananda or Being, Consciousness and Bliss. Being corresponds to God the Father, consciousness to the Son, and Bliss—which is clearly related to feeling—to the Holy Spirit.

This triunity is reflected also in our physical bodies, in which there are three main systems: the metabolic, by which nourishment is taken into the body and substantially transformed and waste matter excreted: the nervous system, which receives sensations from the outer world; and the respiratory and circulatory system, which breathes in air, extracts oxygen and sends nourishment to the whole body through the blood circulation. These three functions of taking nourishment, receiving sensations from the outside world, and breathing are in some form or other inherent in every living cell. Thus the notion of triunity describes the essential morphology of organism and provides the model for organic thinking.

Finally the most complete example of triunity in our direct experience, both in simultaneity and in succession, is the human