Hazrat Inayat Khan lays before us the explanation of a very subtle matter.
In Sufi terms the self of God is called Zat, and His qualities, His merits, are named Sifat. The Hindus call the former aspect of God Purusha and the latter Prakriti, which can be rendered in English by the words spirit and matter. Zat, the Spirit of God, is incomprehensible, because that which comprehends itself is intelligence, God’s real being; and comprehension has nothing to comprehend in its own being. No doubt, in our usual terms it is the comprehending faculty in us which we call comprehension; but this is not meant here, for intelligence is not necessarily intellect. Merit is something which is comprehensible; it is something, which is clear and distinct, so that it can be made intelligible; but intelligence is not intelligible except to its own self. Intelligence knows that I am; but it does not know what I am.
Such is the nature of God. Intelligence would not have known its own power and existence if it had not known something besides itself, so God knows Himself by manifestation. Manifestation is the self of God, but a self which is limited; a self that makes Him know that He is perfect when He compares His own Being with this limited self which we call nature. Therefore the purpose of the whole of creation is the realization which God Himself gains by discovering His own perfection through this manifestation.
Among Christian ideas there is one which, if we can solve its riddle, helps us to discover the truth of life. It is the idea of the Trinity. What keeps the soul in perplexity is the threefold aspect of manifestation, and as long as the soul remains puzzled by this, it cannot arrive at the knowledge of the One. These three aspects are the seer, sight, and the seen; the knower, knowledge, and the known. In point of fact these are three aspects of life. One aspect is the person who sees; the second aspect is the sight, or the eyes, by the help of which he sees; and the third aspect is that which he sees. That is why one cannot readily accept the idea that what one sees is the same as oneself, nor can one believe for a moment that the medium by which one sees is oneself, for these three aspects seem to be separate and to be looking at one another’s faces, as the first person, second person, and third person of Brahma.
When this riddle is solved by the realization that the three are one, then the purpose of the God-ideal is fulfilled. For then the three veils which cover the One are lifted, then they no longer remain three, and then they are found to be One, the Only Being. As Abdul Karim al Jili, the fifteenth-century mystic, says, ‘If you believe in one God, you are right; if you believe in two Gods, that is true; but if you believe in three Gods, that is right also, for the nature of unity is realized by variety.’