08.10.08
The Three Faces of God
I just listened to a dialogue between Ken Wilber and Brother David Steindl-Rast. They were talking about what Wilber calls the three faces of God. To me, this is an interesting concept. So far as I know, it is something Wilber developed himself.
I am going to try and paraphrase the idea for you here but if you really want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, you will need to sign up for Integral Naked.org and listen in to the dialogue yourself. (No, I am not getting any credit for touting that here! It’s just a suggestion. I like trying to spread these ideas, you see. I am not doing this for the money.)
So here goes: starting with the Third Person. This is described as the “great web-of-life,” and can sometimes be experienced in the presence of beautful art or music - or the grandeur of nature. In this case, this type of god is always spoken about in the third person. “It” was beautiful or magnificent or whatever. Wilber says this refers to a vast web of interconnected beings..
The second person God is the “Thou.” ( a great “other”) or in simpler terms, the God of most organized religions. This God is always a being separate from the self. An “OTHER.” It implies something a little bit more involved than the third person God. Now it is not just an impersonal connection among beings. There is some type of intelligence to it, a consciousness, a “person” of some sort.
The first person God is the “I” speaking. The feeling that can be experienced by every person - the feeling that God is not so much a separate being as part of himself. At this point Brother Steindl-Rast stepped in and quoted a line in a poem by e e cummings: “I am who you so I.” Ok, I totally don’t get that but he later rephrased it this way, which to me makes more sense: “I am only because the Thou (the second person God) comes before me.”
So anyway, according to these two guys, each of these three perspectives shows us something new about the spirit. Some religions focus more heavily on one of these “faces” when explaining their God and others focus on a different one. But the most spiritually evolved people evidently can integrate all three of these perspectives into one overarching concept.
On the other hand, people with a limited spiritual concept focus on only one of these aspects. That would be the Ann Coulters of the world - just to get in a dig here that I can’t resist 
They see only the second person God. They surely don’t see any of God in themselves and certainly don’t see him in their neighbor.
In any case, it is evident that our society needs to redefine its concept of the word “god” to incorporate these newer ideas. The concept of the old bearded guy in the sky who stands in judgement of our every move begins to sound more and more limited and inadequate as an explanation for anything.