‘Three as one and in one, and one as two and acting as two” is a riddle about the Trinity that ends up having everything to do with how Christ is described in the book and why his teachings are important. But it’s important to talk about primary relationships within the Paradise Trinity first and how they end up factoring into what’s masculine and feminine in our own experience to get to it.
The Urantia Book expands on who the three-in-one, the Paradise Trinity, are as co-eternal individuals in relation to one another within the godhead, which is comprised of the seven Absolutes. The Universal Father is primal in the godhead and in a source relationship to the other six, manifesting through them as all that is spiritual, material, actual, potential, mind and source of pattern, on co-absolute levels. The Eternal Son, also called the Mother Son, is sourced as the primary and absolute spirit personality. The Infinite Spirit, sourced by both Father and Mother Son in turn, is the ancestor of all mind, divine pattern and fields of action. And all this rather obscure sounding stuff has everything to do with how we end up with the dual interplay of feminine and masculine, yin and yang, in experience. Ancient but complementary dualities in the finite universe spring from triune relationships at their root.
It’s important to remember the thin golden disc at this point. The First Source and Center, perfectly cohered on the eternal side, acts to manifest polarities within that only become visible through a temporal light on the other. If we can break free from using only the pronoun ‘him’ for a bit, it might be helpful to think of the Creator’s relationship to the three persons of the Paradise Trinity like this: The eternal God first acts as ‘himself’ as a potent, loving source, whose creative ideas pertaining to spirit and matter, actuals and potentials, and mind and action, move into and throughout the godhead.
That Source then fuels both ‘himself’ and ‘herself’ in the Eternal Son as all that is abidingly personal and receptive and so capable of taking those originating thoughts into a deeper flowering to give them heart and dimension. Then simultaneously sourcing an Infinite Spirit that derives its nature from both polarities but is more. In this manifestation, even more of the feminine energies emerge as Source generates mind, the bridge between loving spirit and matter. The movement of love into thoughtful action is a deeply feminine dynamic in the godhead.
This is an example of how the relationships in the Trinity, of the ‘Universal Father, Eternal Son and Infinite Spirit’, are revealed more fully in the Urantia Book. It’s no longer a simplistically masculine conceptual framework. First Source and Center fuels and sustains both masculine and feminine and the spirit that moves forward from both of them. Urantia students love to word play with these relationships and it might be a little helpful here: love, mercy and action; thought, word and deed; truth, beauty and goodness; seed, flower and fruition.
It isn’t hard to see how apparent duality, the dance between yin and yang, arises from its triune origins, though. It isn’t that any of the three are missing in our experience at all, but by occupying the conjoined field, the dynamic of the third is absorbed more as an intermediary experience. The mind that conceives of an idea and feels idealistic about it doesn’t often think about the mechanism of mind that made thought possible to begin with. Likewise, the movement into action from thoughts and ideals seems so perfectly in unison with thinking and feeling that action itself isn’t parsed as something separate from them. Yet the Infinite Spirit, also called the ‘Conjoint Actor’, makes that field of action possible as an experience. It also feels natural to have uncanny synchronicities and help arise in connection with plans for projects, and that is also through the agencies of the Infinite Spirit.
As the First Source and Center acts in the godhead to move into its spiritual and material manifestations in experience it might be useful to think of the resulting creation as an organic and living mechanism. Reflecting on the relationship between all seven of the Absolutes, the three Absolutes of Potentiality provide the soil of endless possibility while the three in the Paradise Trinity are its seed. Paradise, as the Absolute which is ancestor of matter and the reflective source of the alpha and omega–containing the projected patterns for all that is and ever will be–is more the living germ of that seed.