Von Balthasar argues that the historical-critical method has permeated theology and philosophy. The world is becoming imageless and valueless, where facts created by conceptuality and thought technique banish faith to the realm of the absurd. According to Von Balthasar:
What is at stake here is not the sentimental mediation of a Madonna cult, but the far deeper vision of the real uniqueness of the Bride of Christ as God’s people in the world, the vision of Mary’s really efficacious and archetypal significance–between Zion and the Church–for man’s adequate answer to the God who surrenders to him…
…Then, in maternal fashion, the Church can enhance this correspondence, adding fire and wax, fragrance of incense and the gesture of kneeling, the color of her vestments as a sensory and spiritual indication of mood, sounds to represent the all-penetrating harmony of the confession of faith… These enhancements remain variable; they in no way claim divine institution and, lying below the image instituted by God, they always need our experiential sensibility to direct them upwards into the sphere of the experience of faith. There should be no confusion here. And, nevertheless, the Lord of the Church, as he reveals and makes himself present, remains free, if it so pleases him, to manifest himself and bring himself closer to man even through the aesthetic symbols and the ostensive images of the world.1
Both Panikkar and Von Balthasar protest, from very different perspectives, that we have moved into an age insensitive to holistic systems of the past. Yet, Panikkar also remarks that we have moved into an age not of deeper contemplation but of action2 Karma yoga, which is the yoga of right action, is now the primary modality of virtue. This is a reference to moral philosophy that has survived in contemporary culture and to the humane concern of those who want to perfect the world.
Attitudes about the human body in a certain context are considered in this dissertation to be a vehicle of evaluation for the political, cultural, and religious problems discussed in this chapter about which all complain but none agree. The shift is a quality or capacity of the body and the focus of its intelligible spirituality. The Western Church is the religious body that has dealt most with this revolution in consciousness represented by technological capitalism. For a consensus of information among readers, let us review briefly a general Christian understanding of the body from both theological and scriptural references.3
Christian understanding sees the body as more than the compound of flesh and bone a man possesses during his earthly existence. The apostle Paul believed that in addition to giving unity to a totality of parts, the body symbolizes the person in the significant spiritual phases of his life: his inchoate state as a sinner, his consecration to Christ, and his life of glory.
Paul stresses the dignity of the body, reserving for the body one of man’s human dignities, the ability to reproduce life. When Paul speaks of the transient and ephemeral, sinful, qualities in man, he attributes these aspects not to the body but to the flesh. Thus, he does not draw a catalogue of sins of the body.
Jesus enters into the form of sinful flesh. He has “been made sin for us.” But His death and rising was definitive death to sin. In dying, He also incorporated us into Himself so there is now but “one” risen body, the Body of Christ.
In Christian theology, the transcendence of the body does not occur on earth, but rather in a “spiritual body.” In the New Testament, the “body of Christ” is crucial in the mystery of the redemption. The phrase itself, however, has a variety of meanings, sometimes indicating the individual body of Jesus, sometimes His eucharistic body, and other times that body which is the Church.
To emphasize that Jesus shared our bodily life, the apostle John speaks rather of the flesh of Jesus. Christ’s death on the cross has special meaning in the mystery of salvation since it was through his death that God reconciled us to Himself, sanctifying us once and for all. This body of Christ, the true paschal Lamb (1 Co 5-7), serves in our redemption.4
The sign of bread and wine makes present on earth the body of Jesus which was delivered up and His blood which was shed. By this eucharistic ritual experience, the Church participates in a singular experience, the sharing in the body of Christ, which allows the Church to live out once again all the elements essential to the mystery of salvation. It is the power of liturgical ritual to fuse the real worlds of matter and spirit through the agency of artistic form, the ritual itself. Through this, our participation allows us entrance into this new world, and our bodies are transformed to resemble His glorified body.
The Greeks looked upon human beings as an incarnated spirits. However, the Hebrews regarded the human person as an animated body. We do not have a soul and a body; we are soul and body. The notion of immortality of the soul reflects an understanding basically dissimilar to the Bible’s content. Such a notion is more akin to Greek philosophy which viewed humanity as incarnated spirits than to the Hebrew teaching which viewed the person as animated body.
Human existence, in the Old Testament, is coexistence with other persons. That coexistence is, in turn, founded on our primary relationship with God. Each of us is equally powerless in the face of God’s transcendence, and at the same time of equal value before God.
Coexistence with and interdependence upon one another is highlighted in a special way in the sexual relationship. Human existence, in which we are both dependent upon one another and on God, requires responsibility. The Old Testament portrays human existence as sinful existence; we are presented as sinners whose hearts are filled with pride, therefore, turning ourselves away from our natural relationship with God and our fellow man.
Thanks to Darwin, we can no longer reflect on the meaning of human existence separate from the physical universe. We are bodily creatures, physically linked with and dependent on the rest of creation and its other living beings, although our reason, emotions, will, sexuality, and our aesthetic may place us on different levels of reality.
From Xavier Leon Dufour’s, Dictionary of Biblical Theology, Edward Schillebeeckx, a Catholic theologian, approaches the meaning of existence similarly to the basic approach Von Balthasar followed earlier in his treatment of the sacraments.5 Schillebeeckx argues for a theology of human existence based on “anthropological constants.” These constants are lasting human impulses, orientations, and values: (1.) the relationship between us and our own bodiliness (a human being is and has a body); (2.) our coexistence with other persons; (3.) our relation to and intrinsic need for social and institutional structures; (4.) our relation to space and time; (5.) our capacity to imagine an ideal state which drives our hope for the future.
Let us continue this reflection about religion and the body by comparing briefly the following readings from the Roman Catholic lectionary readings for the Mass, with Tantric theory. I choose lectionary readings to involve both ecclesial and scriptural authority:
Defer to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be submissive to their husbands as if to the Lord because the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of his body, the church, as well as its savior. As the church submits to Christ, so wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church. He gave himself up for her to make her holy, purifying her in the bath of water by the power of the word, to present to himself a glorious church, holy and immaculate, without stain or wrinkle or anything of that sort. Husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. Observe that no one ever hates his own flesh; no, he nourishes it and takes care of it as Christ cares for the church–for we are members of his body.
”for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cling to his wife, and the two shall be made one.”
This is a great foreshadowing; I mean that it refers to Christ and the Church. In any case, each one should love his wife as he loves himself, the wife for her part showing respect for her husband. (Eph 5, 21-33.)
Notwithstanding the patriarchal sexism in this reading, Paul might be an improvement on his contemporaries’ attitudes in this regard, let us compare it with the Tantric notions about such union of the masculine and feminine. Shiva, a supreme male sky or heaven, deity, waits passively at the crown chakra, at the top of one’s head, for the earth goddess, Kundalini, to awaken in her residence near the perineum. He waits for her to ascend, up the psychic central nervous system to have union with him. Thus are heaven and earth, male and female brought back into union and balance. Duality is sexually resolved to unitary vision. The arising of the goddess, Kundalini, can happen spontaneously or through certain yogic disciplines. Besides connecting with many spiritual “ascent” motifs in various other religious traditions, this ambition seems to resonate with the Biblical resolution of the tragic split between creation and creator through the epithalamian symbol of marriage.
From the Gospel of the same Mass as above, Tuesday of the Thirtieth Week of the Year–Year II:
Jesus said: “What does the reign of God resemble? To what shall I liken it? It is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a large shrub and the birds of the air nested in its branches.”
He went on: “To what shall I compare the reign of God? It is like yeast which a woman took to knead into three measures of flour until the whole mass of dough began to rise.” (Lk 13, 18-21.)
Is the tiny thing that we study here, the shift of consciousness, whose function it is to unite the temporal and non temporal worlds, comparable to the reign of God? Is the immediacy of this fundamental human function a reference to ‘The Kingdom of God which is at hand.’ The immediacy in the relationship between the sacred and profane, which I mention as a significant element from the story in the catalog, remarks upon this.6 The study of the shift from the effable to the ineffable is not quantitative but qualitative anthropology. This is not a matter of faith, but of our perception of time.
The two attitudes about the body that we have just covered in brief, that of Christianity and Tantra, indicate a similar belief that the body is a symbol of the whole person and that this person is somehow allegorically comparable to heaven and earth. Art appeals to many levels of our personalities, but it can be said that art appeals more than other expressive faculties to our physical sensibilities. This appeal is of great significance in this highly sensate, very visual, media-oriented, contemporary moment. This appeal is significant because art also remains capable of opening for the viewer an ultimate vision of divine radiance.
Let us return to a consideration of the significance of the art image in human perception generally, and specifically what that significance portends for the Postmodern agenda. In that regard, let us first examine a little more of the Abstract Expressionism that influenced so much the contents of “Interstates: The Catalog.”
The Abstract Expressionism of the 1950’s was explained by Harold Rosenberg’s theories about Action Painting. In this theory the artists expressed themselves on a blank canvas with little attention to form, style, or subject matter as an autobiographical act of self-creation, the expression of individual personality.7
However, the New Criticism and formalism of Clement Greenberg and his supporters dismissed Rosenberg’s theories as subjectivist melodrama, substituting in its place the advancement of certain principles of a virtual international modernist art as the Abstract Expressionist’s primary goal. Greenberg linked it with Cubism, Impressionism, and Surrealism. This new approach focused on Abstract Expressionism’s stylistic evolution: purifying the medium, ridding it of illusionism, and recreating space as optical rather than tactile. Abstract Expressionism, according to Greenberg, sought to tighten the range of subjects covered to personal expression and daily experience, with few commentaries on the human condition or nature.
Abstract Expressionism evolves from a complex of ideas present in culture between the war and peacetime years. Abstract Expressionist formed many of their images and ideas from figures such as Joyce, Jung, and T.S. Eliot. Abstract Expressionists sought to tap the unconscious in order to paint directly from the roots of human perception. This “seismic tapping of the unconscious” remains attractive to me. However, I feel now that I have moved away from these sources, if not beyond the quality of their painting, because of long-term exposure to traditions of the inner radiance mentioned throughout this chapter.
In the first monastery where I lived, when I first became a Catholic, there was a very astute monk who told me that artist converts such as myself usually and disappointingly use their art to be apologists for the Church. I, here, hope to investigate religious and artistic phenomena without being an apologist for any particular part of it. Detachment is not just a requirement for discursive processes, it should also be the product of those processes. “Self” has been the topic here, that is my self, since that is the self by which it is possible to know “Self.” To the degree that one pursues the truth of something deeply enough, then perhaps, that pursuit itself is conducive to the shift of consciousness out of discursive processes into non discursive realization beyond self. I am working on the topic of the shift of consciousness operative as a central element in perception not only because of what it has been in the past but because it still seems to be important in a postmodern era. This seems to be an era not at all closed to the agencies of the shift, feeling free to explore all levels of reality.
Through the next three pages of this chapter, Von Balthasar’s insights are presented about the relationship of the modern philosophical aesthetic to that of religion as the modernist perspective has led, eventually, to our own postmodern situation.
‘The efforts to place the scriptures in its entirety in the context of art can be traced to a period that no longer tried to fuse biblical revelation within the total form of a theology which includes philosophy. This was aided by the ever-growing autonomy of the sciences and of philosophy. At this time, even “beauty” is made into an object of its own with its own methodology. This transformation has its beginnings in the Renaissance and gained full momentum with the Italian philosopher, Bruno, to greatly influence Germany.
During the age of German Idealism, many endeavored to link the theory of beauty, which by now had become self-conscious, with Christian revelation. The impetus to achieve this union stemmed from the humanistic sense of tradition that wanted to preserve the Christian reality as one of the last possessions of humankind’s spiritual heritage. Still, others hoped to provide the Christian religion with new vestments after the Protestant Reformation.
The conflict of religion with an aesthetic that had become so self-conscious, created a crisis. The question was whether the secular, aesthetic elements (i.e., as in Idealism and Romanticism) could be integrated by considering their historical origins or whether this aesthetic has to be abandoned. Von Balthasar argues that it is obvious that theology deprived of aesthetics is far from satisfactory. Thus, we must decide on how to integrate the two. He believes that there is the distinct possibility of there being a true relationship between theological beauty and the aesthetic beauty of the world.8
Von Balthasar determines the inner-radiance of religious experience to be source of the image(s) of God, icons, thus providing a primary place for images in theological consideration. From the tradition of St. Bernard and St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas continues along the same lines in his explanations of this knowledge distinguishing between affectus and pietas.Von Balthasar explains Aquinas’ position like this:
This is not at all a question of irrational feeling. Not even of feeling as understood by Schleiermacher and late Modernism, not a question of mere ‘religious sensibility, but of something far deeper’; the ontological empowering of the human spirit by qoudam spirituale esse to grasp the interior mysteries of God.
…Love will then be seen to be the first to open its eyes, the first to want to believe everything about him which the Beloved offers her. Faith is the dark inchoatio visionis. Together with love and hope, faith constitutes the conscious side of grace in so far as grace is the ontological assimilation to God’s being. Faith knows in its own way because of a connaturalitas, an essential kinship, which Thomas himself and, even more emphatically, Eckhart portrays as the egregious insertion of the creature into the trinitarian act of begetting and giving birth (‘co-naissance’ with the Son from the Father).9
Pascal ignores the Platonic theoria characteristic of the early Augustine while not abandoning true Christian theoria. He recognizes the manifestation of God’s hiddenness in Jesus Christ, and this form of evidence becomes the center around which other kinds of evidence concentrically gather. This center resolves all paradoxes concerning the Being of man and the world which would otherwise remain unresolvable; arguably, all great Christian thought has developed along the law which Pascal here formulates since it has always been the characteristic of such contemplation to let itself be constantly determined by the form of evidence proper to its object.
According to Von Balthasar, the Gospel according to Mark’s portrayal of Jesus seeks hiddenness and wants to have its mystery preserved and enclosed. John does not even need this anymore because what is incredible about Him itself has a mode of hiddenness and requires careful study and searching to see it. The revelation of the way exists in its concealment.
In between Mark’s and John’s perspective are contemplation and appropriation, both being essentially the same things. Christian contemplation is not the distanced consideration of an image; the beholder interacts with the vision he sees, becoming it, ‘realizing’ what the image expressed. One can only access this consciousness by sacrificing one’s own self-identity and assimilating oneself to the dimension of the image. The image unfolds its secrets to its beholder, affecting his life. According to Von Balthasar, Christ’s hiddenness can only be revealed through our own hiddenness in the same way that only the person who can truly recognize the Messiah knows how to keep his secret.’
Thus Von Balthasar, an eloquent apologist for traditional Catholicism, provides a perspective that allows the image the forefront of conceptual influence in religious thought. With this, a vast program of graceful potential is accessed to radiate this inner luminosity.10 Icons are a mode of access for this state of consciousness, this program of grace in human potential, encoded in the very flesh of our existence. God remains hidden in his Christ and in his essence, but is apparent in the radiance of his divine energies, in his Christ, and in his Icons.
Icons, like mandalas are not really the image in the sense of being a painting or drawing, etc., but the world of intentions, a world of radiant beauty, that leads to the production of the art that in turn refers back to that world. And like the mandala, the icon is not the painting but God, then creation, then human form, then the object or painting that is called most commonly the icon. The significance of an icon, like a mandala, is not the aesthetic form itself but what it evokes in the viewer, in the world. It is a reference point for the meditator, a portal of transcendence for those who understand its function. Just as it is required for the maker of icons to fast and pray and do pilgrimage, to practice perhaps many other forms of ascetical discipline in order for those icons to be infused with holy energy. It is necessary for the viewer to do the same in order to shift into the other realm of the divine presence, to access that capacity to benefit from this type of experience. Put yourself in the presence of God. The whole of Nepsis explores the possibility of doing this. One commentary on the icon describes the intention like this:
The revelation of this future transfigured corporeality is shown to us in the Transfiguration of our Lord on Mount Tabor. “And he was transfigured before them; and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (Matt. xvii, 2). In other words the whole body of the lord was transfigured, becoming as it were a radiant raiment of Deity. “As regards the character of the Transfiguration,” say the Fathers of the II Ecumenical Council, referring to St. Athanasius the Great, “it was not that the word laid aside His human form, but rather that the latter was illumined by His glory.” …St. Simeon the New Theologian describes his personal experience of this inner illumination in the following words: “In other words, beauty is holiness, and its radiance the participation of the creature in Divine Beauty.”11
In the Transfiguration, not only does the God appear to men, but humanity becomes a full participant in the Divine glory. By joining with the Deity, man becomes illumined by His Uncreated light, becoming like the radiant body of Christ.
In the icon, beauty is judged by its conformity of the image to its prototype, of the symbol to what it represents–to the Kingdom of the Spirit. But for an icon its beauty is of the acquired likeness to God and so its value lies not in its being beautiful in itself, but in the fact that it depicts Beauty. The Fathers of the VII Ecumenical Council say the following:
Although the Catholic Church depicts Christ in his human aspect, it does not separate his flesh from the Divinity conjoined. On the contrary, it believes that the flesh is deified and professes it to be one with the divinity.12
The icon represents not an animate but a deified prototype, flesh transfigured, radiant with Divine light. Represented by material means, the icon is beauty and Glory, represented in physical form and visible to the eyes. A portrait of a saint is not an icon since it portrays his carnal state and not his transfigured state. Liturgical art is not just our offering to God, but also God’s presence amongst us.
Von Balthasar does not avoid the problems associated with traditional Catholicism in his discussion. He admits that Western religion has lost much of its gestalt cohesion since the Renaissance, reduced as it often is to pietistic devotions or moralistic obsessions. This ancient tradition, while deep and true, was also narrow, xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, patriarchal, and authoritarian. This, of course, like every other religious tradition, was consistent with the cultures in which it was traditionally enmeshed. I suppose what really lost much credibility for the Church was that her influence has not been sufficient to avoid the horrors of colonialist expansion or the economic wars of the twentieth century. As a matter of fact, the Church’s involvement with colonialism was seen as an opportunity for spreading the faith.13 Some view it as a degradation of indigenous cultures around the world. For many perhaps, it was an improvement. None-the-less, most would, with Gandhi, invite the imperialists to leave. The Church is finally denuded of empire, (Pio IX was left a prisoner in the Vatican), and must face itself without its imperial regalia for the first time since the Fourth Century. What is left: Singular spiritual insight? When all else is stripped away by the harsh realities of our age, that much remains. We can, given the right state of consciousness, with St. Stephen Protomartyr, see the heavens open and from our physical frame draw forth the icon catalyzing a beatific vision into the heart of heaven itself. What is the capacity that allows that? That capacity is the Shift of consciousness. Traditional religion claims that we have a capacity for heaven, Nirvana if you like, Godhead, the Source, Absolute Value, Being. And we have an imagination that can image ultimate reality in radiant terms, suggestive of that which is beyond ourselves–Deity. This is a capacity, mentioned throughout this chapter, that suggests much about the nature of human personality and perception, and perhaps something about the ultimate nature of reality. This is reinforced by Christ’s own sense of intimacy between ordinary reality and the Kingdom of God and the part that the shift of consciousness plays as a means of mutual access. Religious art, then, is that which reveals, or evokes the inner-radiance of being, what a Hesychast might call Uncreated Energy. Religious art is both the occasion of and a technique of the shift of consciousness. Icons, or mandalas, are aesthetic tools of such technique to obtain these states of radiant realization. For just this reason, there is vast wisdom in such figures – as the Zen archer – who say, “if you understand what is really happening when you move your hand from here to here [a few inches], then you would be enlightened.”14 And the Chinese Taoist rainmaker who ended a severe drought, simply by setting up housekeeping at the edge of the strickened village. Enlightenment, salvation, is inherent in who we are when our temporal and non temporal capacity is fully engaged. That great opening between the two worlds is the shift into mandalic realms of ultimate reference that ties the factual world together with its unnamable, mythic contextÉ
The shift of consciousness is an anthropological fact. It is the access to meaning through the lace-like folds in the memory of generations, myths, and sacred tradition. It is access to the source of our existence. In the Roman Catholic Mass there is a section called the memoria. But it exists not just to remember or commemorate the event referenced there but is to draw back the curtain, revelo, of time and connect us with the singular event, the nature of which is eternally lived out in individual lives. What we are dealing with here is not a matter of faith but a quality of human perception that Panikkar talks about in terms of time and non-time dualism. The resolution of this duality is the shift of consciousness. The processes of this resolution is the great art from which we derive the certain catalytic artifacts of the shift, i.e., paintings, sculptures, etc.
The body is a physical and real vehicle of transcendence; as such, it is the metaphor of existanze. When the Hesychasm refers to the “way of the heart,” it is using the heart as a symbol of personality, not as a reference to sentimental emotion or its anatomical function. In the battle for influence in the hearts and minds of humanity since the Renaissance, the Church has reacted to, and resisted not the advancement of science, but the demise of the cosmologies, often symbolically depicted by references to the body. Those cosmologies were the spiritual bond between individuals, society, and the cosmos.
Capitalism and technocracy, rather than either science or religion seem to have won out, according the Panikkar. We are in the process of not only surviving in the midst of this milieu, but piecing together/preserving an environment for when, possibly once again, the body and psyche of Being are in rhythm.15 Modern art and modern humanities in general have been the branch of modern secular culture that attempted to do this. As I recall Fr. Yang commenting, “we are in the process of developing a new system of meaningful symbols.” Or we are in the process of destroying ourselves, as many fear.
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- Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. I, p. 420-423. [↩]
- This reference to Karma yoga is taken from eight hours of video taped conversation with Raimundo Panikkar, Spring, 1986. This video is in my possession. [↩]
- For this over-view of the “body” in Church and scripture, see Richard McBrian Catholicism, pp. 105-106 and Xavier Leon Dufour, Dictionary of Biblical Theology, pp. 53-56. Since this presentation on the body is so general for the sake of mutual reference and comparison with other very general overviews, I deem these sources to be sufficient for present purposes. The intention here is to show how certain systems of perception associated with the shift, art and the human body/personality as symbol are constructed around such functions. [↩]
- Further suspicions and speculations strike me as significant but I would like to distinguish them here from the general progress of this chapter by putting them in a footnote. I do not claim that these suspicions are yet conclusive, but their content will at least color any final conclusions about my art catalog and other fictions developed in this Ph.D. project.:
If Christ became flesh, and used his flesh–that is his human body and personality–to set us free, so may Christians not use the flesh as do the Tantric yogis who use their physical body, subtle bodies, and their sexuality to gain liberation? The discomfort in retention of semen required by most such yogic practice during high arousal would fend off dilettantes. May we not use our flesh, in any way that sincerely serves the salvation of the world?
The model of Christ’s use of his body might be compared with the mandala of the body in the Buddhist mandala section, p. 127, above with its absolute deity as reigning monarch of the mandala palace. It is this construction of a microcosm in the human body that reflects the macrocosm. Here the yogi or meditator identifies totally with said deity until the yogi becomes the deity. Might not this process of identification be compared with the third century A.D. dogmas of the Church that define the deification or divinization of the body? (McBrian, Catholicism, p. 152 )
The first mandala is the world, the second is the body, the third is the art form (perhaps derived from the sanctuary of the Mesopotamian temple)! Which is what takes us back to the beginning of historical civilization in the Ancient Near East and back again eventually to Jesus born in Bethlehem, with ourselves as heirs not only of the Christian epiphany but also the origin of the whole mandalic consciousness. [↩]
- This reference is cited in note # 62 of this chapter. [↩]
- See p. 102 #C in this chapter. [↩]
- The information in this and the following four paragraphs is taken from Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism…, p. xix ff. [↩]
- Once again I speculate: Is there still a place for art in the relationship between theological beauty and the beauty of the world? Has the classical age and the Renaissance finally died with Abstract Expressionism? Is there a new definition of art that post-modernity only discovers the need for now? Is the “body” as symbol and vehicle of ultimate meaning a common denominator that is consistent with the past and still of interest to a contemporary mentality? [↩]
- Von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. I, p. 161-2. [↩]
- Ibid. p. 79-80. [↩]
- L. Ouspensky, The Meaning of Icons (New York: St. Vladimir Seminary Press) p. 34. [↩]
- Ibid. p. 34. [↩]
- According to Panikkar, Christianity, with some brilliant exceptions, has been at its low ebb since the 16th century. See p. 95, this dissertation under “Freedom”, second paragraph. [↩]
- Ven. Shinzen: See Buddhism essay in Appendix 3, p. 263, and Curriculum Vitae in Appendix 8, p. 379. Though, this particular reference came from our conversations. [↩]
- Panikkar, Gifford Lectures, 1989: “Being designates all that there is. We designate it with a verb. Being is flowing, rheon, rhythmic. It moves, but it cannot go anywhere else. Humans have life and conscious life. Life seems superior to or independent of its bearers. Has it a destination…?” [↩]