Das Buch “Life in the Trinity” von Donald Fairbairn ist nicht nur kurz und verständlich geschrieben, es führt uns auch in das meines Erachtens am meisten vernachlässigte Thema des christlichen Glaubens ein: Die Trinität. Am Ende des dritten Kapitels (S. 41) beschreibt Fairbairn den Reiz des östlichen Mystizismus:
When Eastern mysticism (which is increasingly popular in the West today as well) speaks of oneness or unity, this is what it has in mind. People’s problem is not that they are disunited from the universe or from what can be called “god.” (I place the word god in quotation marks because Eastern mystical thought does not generally think of God in anything like the monotheistic sense. “God” is not a being distinct from the universe but an all-pervading, impersonal spirit within the universe.) Rather, the problem is that people simply do not realize their fundamental oneness with the universe. So the religious task is to recognize that we are one with the cosmos, to get in touch with the living divinity within ourselves, to actualize the “self” which is “god.” This kind of unity tends to blur the distinction between people and “god,” and it turns the spiritual quest into an attempt to get in touch with ourselves, rather than an attempt to know a God who is different from us. Thus there is a kind of self-focus in Eastern mysticism that makes it especially attractive to contemporary Westerners.This kind of spirituality appeals to our belief that we are the most important beings in the universe by affirming that we are, in fact, at one with the very spirit of the universe.
