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THE COSMOTHEANDRIC EXPERIENCE
Emerging Religious Consciousness
Raimon Panikkar
Edited, with Introduction by
Scott Eastham
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Maryknoll, New York 10545
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The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America (Maryknoll) recruits and trains people for
overseas missionary service. Through Orbis Books, Maryknoll aims to foster the international
dialogue that is essential to mission. The books published, however, reflect the opinions of
their authors and are not the official position of the society.
Copyright © 1993 by Raimon Panikkar
Introduction © 1993 by Scott Eastham
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Panikkar, Raimundo, 1918-
The cosmotheandric experience : emerging religious consciousness /
Raimon Panikkar : edited, with introduction, by Scott Eastham.
ecm:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88344-862-9
1. Religion. 2. Religions—Relations. 3. History (Theology)
4. Man (Theology) 5. Cosmology. 6. Spirituality. I. Eastham,
Scott, 1949- . II. Title.
BL48.P275 1993
291 —dc20 92-46195
CIP
CONTENTS
Introduction by Scott Eastham
1. Context: The Multireligious Experience Vv
2. Text: “The Integration of Reality” at “The End of
History” Vill
3. Texture: A Window on Catalunya xi
Part One
COLLIGITE FRAGMENTA
For an Integration of Reality
Introduction
1. The Open Horizon 5
2. The Human Perspective 1
3. Summary 15
Il. The Three Kairological Moments of Consciousness 20
1. The Ecumenic Moment 24
2. The Economic Moment 32
a. Scientific Humanism 32
b. The Ecological Interlude 38
3. The Catholic Moment 46
Ill. The Cosmotheandric Intuition 54
1. Some Assumptions 55
2. Formulation 59
3. Some Objections 66
4, Description Wn
Part Two
THE END OF HISTORY 79
The Threefold Structure of Human Time-Consciousness
Methodological Reflection 83
1. The Subject Matter: Man 83
CONTENTS
2. The Human Scale: The Astrological Rhythm 87
3. The Crossing of the Human Ways: A Threefold Typology 90
Il. Nonhistorical Consciousness a
Il. Historical Consciousness 100
The Crisis of History 108
Transhistorical Consciousness 120
Postscript 131
EPILOGUE 135
Aspects of a Cosmotheandric Spirituality
Anima Mundi-—Vita Hominis— Spiritus Dei 137
1. Anima Mundi 137,
2. Life as the Time of Being 139
3. Personal Relationships 142
4. Life and the Word 144
5. Toward a New Cosmology 149
6. A Cosmotheandric Spirituality 150
Index 153
INTRODUCTION
SCOTT EASTHAM
1. CONTEXT: THE MULTIRELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
You are invited to dance, but you have never heard such music before,
and the dance step appears to be unusually challenging. Will you falter,
or fail to try, or do you dare let the strange rhythm carry you away? You
are invited to read a book with an unfamiliar word in the title... The
subject matter appears at once fascinating and forbidding, and you are
not quite sure what to make of the author. Do you close the book right
now, or are you open to the unknown? You have already taken the first
step...
Raimon Panikkar is too often described as a sort of conundrum, a human
oxymoron whose life and works would seem to be a contradiction in terms.
You are told that his father was Indian and Hindu and his mother Spanish
Catholic, that he holds doctorates in the sciences, philosophy and theology,
that he speaks about a dozen languages and writes books and articles in at
least six. As if this were not enough, he himself says, “I ‘left’ as a christian,
‘found’ myself a hindu and ‘return’ a buddhist, without having ceased to
be a christian.” Panikkar, now 75, is also a Catholic priest with strong
contemplative leanings, a world-renowned teacher and prolific writer who
may well be today’s leading scholar of comparative philosophy and religious
studies, and yet in the past few years a man who has chosen to live quite
simply in semi-seclusion in a pre-modern Catalan village. How can it be?
How can one fellow be all these things, and besides that be living alongside
the rest of us in the modern, secular world? It just does not seem possible,
or credible. And yet there it is, or rather, here he is. ...
We live in a world wracked by conflict, split by seemingly insurmountable
barriers of language, culture and religious tradition, ripped apart by appar-
ent dichotomies of belief, ideology and worldview. Ours is a world fast
approaching economic collapse, ecological collapse, and maybe even the
collapse of the human endeavor altogether. From the one side, we in North
America hear loud calls for a return to the classical and supposedly “uni-
versal” values of Western culture, which we are told will lead us to a New
Vv
vi INTRODUCTION
World Order. Yet to many the prospect of such an artificially imposed
“unity” sounds about as alluring as another Thousand Year Reich. From
the other side, we are at long last beginning to hear the cries of the poor,
the persecuted, the women, and all the cultures long trodden underfoot in
the global march of Western “progress.” Yet ideological vehemence, sys-
tematic discrimination and new forms of intolerance have already begun to
give this kind of “pluralism” a bad name. Is there a middle way?
It is here that the case of Raimon Panikkar becomes cruciaJ/He points ,
out that true pluralism is neither an unrelated plurality nor a new ideolog-
ical superstructure designed to keep everybody in their assigned cultural
slots/Genuine pluralism is of another order altogether, and it derives from
lived expeIrs iti posesibnle tco eexpe.rien ce the truth of more than one
cultural tradition without alienation or schizophrenia? Well, many people
have multicultural experiences, either at home or abroad. Most commonly,
our “modernity” permits us to compromise the values of one or both cul-
tures; we skate over the surfaces. So the question should be rephrased: Is
it possible for one human being to penetrate to the core, the soul, the
religion, the deepest values of more than a single culture? A much riskier
venture, since the entire person—body, mind, spirit—will be put at risk.
Even more: Must such a journey be always a one-way ticket, or is it possible
to return? Raimon Panikkar’s life and work testify that both the crossing
over and the return are not only possible, but imperative in our day when
formerly insular cultures are encountering one another (and more often
than not colliding) on an unprecedented scale/Panikkar is a living Rosetta
Stone, if you like, who demonstrates not only that the multireligious expe-
rience is possible and real, but that it is going to profoundly transform both\
the people and the traditions involved.
And, really, it must be so. Otherwise we would have to stay locked up
in our little houses of language, religion, skin color, gender and so forth.
We would find ourselves stuck in either the monolithic structures (and
strictures) of Western culture alone, or in the fissiparous partisanship today
doing business as “politically correct” multiculturalism. Once we concede
that Asian or African religion is only for Asians or Africans, or that wom-
en’s experience is totally incompatible with that of men, we have begun to
parcel off the human heritage, to hoard and thereby to squander what little
wisdom we humans have been able to garner down the millennia. Of course
we should study the classics of Western culture, by all means—along with
the classics of India, China and Japan, and all the very rich unwritten
traditions from cultures still not broken to the saddle of literacy. But by
the same token, sharing this wisdom does not mean just tossing everybody
and every culture into the same hopper. To the contrary.
There can be no branching out unless the roots grip down ever more
| deeply/The case of Raimon Panikkar illustrates that genuine multicultural,
| multireligious experience is only possible if you are capable of deepening
|y our understanding of your own “stand” or tradition, while at the same
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