The Second Face of God

Cohen: You know, I’d always wondered why, in all of your great work, where you honor and revere Spirit in all its many forms, I had never heard you speak about surrender or having to come to one’s knees in the face of God. So when I read the chapter on “Spirit in second-person,” where you define the “three faces of God,” I was thrilled and relieved. It had always seemed to me that a fundamental component of spiritual evolution was missing in your work. Until Integral Spirituality, it seems that you had emphasized God as the Self, or I-I, and God as the entire evolving Kosmic process that we are all part of. But this is the first time I’ve heard you speak so specifically, eloquently, and passionately about God as the great Other before whom we all must ultimately submit.

Wilber: You’re right. There are three topics I’ve written very little on. One is psychic phenomena; one is rebirth and reincarnation; and one is God in second-person. Because as soon as you open your mouth and say anything about any of those, nobody takes you seriously in the influential academic world.

You know, I’ve been talking to Father Thomas Keating for a decade and a half about God in second-person and what it means. But in my own mind, it was not until I was writing volume two of the Kosmos Trilogy that I really started to, in a sense, download my own ideas, start eating them and chewing them up and seeing what they meant. And that’s when this whole idea of perspectives became incredibly alive, and that’s where this recognition of the three faces of God came from. The clarity of it comes from me really ingesting what first-, second-, and third-person meant; what the quadrants meant; what all of that stuff really meant.

So the 1-2-3 of God or the three faces of Spirit basically mean that Spirit can be approached in first-person perspective or second-person perspective or third-person perspective. First-person Spirit is the great “I AM,” the pure radical subjectivity or witness in every sentient being. And then Spirit in the second-person is the great “Thou,” something that is immeasurably greater than you could ever possibly be in your wildest imagination, before whom surrender and devotion and submission and radiant release and gratitude is the only appropriate response, and from whom all blessings and all goodness flow unreservedly. And a relationship to that Other, in love and devotion and ecstasy, is the only appropriate response if you have any sanity at all.

Cohen: [Laughs]

Wilber: And Spirit in third-person is the great Web of Life, the Great Perfection of everything that’s arising. Those are third-person terms, “it” terms, and Spirit is indeed the supreme radiant perfection of all manifestation. And my point is that all three of these perspectives are correct.

So when this became clear to me, I was just fascinated and then almost shocked to find that not a single tradition, East or West, had ever put together first-, second-, and third-person perspectives of Spirit; they tended to focus on one or the other, or sometimes two. You do find in some of the traditions an acknowledgment of all three, for example, in some of the Vajrayana traditions (at least the ones that use guru yoga), but there isn’t an actual framework relating all three. You find Vedanta emphasizing first-person virtually exclusively and Christian mysticism emphasizing second-person quite extensively. And I found that as I started speaking about this with various spiritual teachers, it was an idea that just lit them up. If they were Western Buddhists in particular, the chance to include a devotional approach was so freeing because it had gotten truncated someplace back in their childhood when they stopped believing in God in second-person.

This is one of the criticisms that I develop in Integral Spirituality, which is what I call a level-line fallacy—that the second-person view of Spirit got truncated in the West. It got chopped off at the mythic level of development. Spirit in second-person has become stunted and identified merely with God the Father, the old white-haired gentleman, the mythic patriarch of the Bible that nobody believes in anymore.

Cohen: The guy we freed ourselves from in the Western Enlightenment.

Wilber: Exactly.

Cohen: Without all three faces being included, one will have only a partial perspective on who and what God is. One’s interpretations of one’s own God-experiences will always be incomplete. And it’s been apparent to me ever since I began teaching twenty years ago that especially for us postmodern extreme narcissists, the second face of God is absolutely essential. Without God as Thou, the great Other before whom we all must ultimately submit, becoming a living, felt dimension of our own direct experience of Spirit, I wonder whether it’s possible to ever move beyond ego in any kind of authentic way.

Wilber: That’s so true. Because green pluralism won’t allow any principles higher than its own head, because it won’t allow any form of hierarchy, it ensconces its own first-person imprisonment. And without a second-person Spirit, I think you’re right, I don’t think they’re going to get out of it. And that’s a problem. But too often, we in the postmodern West tend to use only first-person and third-person—we use Vedanta and science, or Buddhism and science, and so on.

Cohen: Exactly. And because of that, when we have profound spiritual experiences, our ego remains unthreatened and secure.

Wilber: Well, yes. Because in a first-person approach, there’s nothing the ego has to surrender to except its own Self. And let’s just put it this way: In your attempt to go from small mind to big mind, you can end up going from small ego to big ego!

Cohen: Yes. [Laughs] Because there is—

Wilber: —nothing to surrender to.

Cohen: Exactly. The ego can survive intact before God in first-person and God in third-person.

Wilber: That’s right.

Cohen: But when face to face with God in second-person, one’s ego is on the chopping block. Unless an individual lines up with this absolute dimension of spiritual evolution and transcendence, it won’t really matter what kind of experiences he or she has—the fundamental narcissistic core will remain untouched. And unless a serious dent is made in that narcissistic core, I wonder how deep our participation can really be in the creation of the future. I really wonder whether we’ll be free enough to actually be able to do it, unless at the deepest level we’ve been brought to our knees.

Wilber: That’s an incredibly profound point. And I think you’re right that if we don’t come to terms with that in some way or another, we’re not going to actually be as free as we can be because unknowingly we will be mistaking some remnant of our ego—some remnant of our first-person perspective that we have now turned into an I-I, an Atman, a grand pure Vedanta witness—for the Absolute. That’s the last refuge of the ego.

Cohen: Absolutely. And the subtlety in all this is staggering.

Wilber: So you have to say: “Wait a minute. I have to face something that I completely surrender to. I have to face something greater than I could ever imagine myself possibly to be.” You have to utterly surrender with devotion and actually want to do it, because second-person perspective carries a naturally welling up infinite love and gratitude. So it’s not something that can be forced. If you’re forcing it, then it’s not really a true transcendental surrender. You’re not truly in love; you’re just faking it.

Cohen: That’s right.

Wilber: And God can spot faked orgasms.