CYCLE II Book Two Addendum

Xibalba  Bible

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Book II

ADDENDUM

SATISFACTION 

Introduction  

Initiation and Practice I  

Initiation and Practice II      

Introduction  

It might be a universal human sensibility to believe thatsatisfaction with one’s life is possible. People want to be satisfied, often are not, but still believe that it is possible. Even despair suggests the possibility of an absent satisfaction.   

Satisfaction might imply satisfaction in the things of God, or Gods, or Absolute Realization. Ultimate satisfaction might imply the integration of perception or the unity of knowledge.  Satisfaction might imply meaning, or purpose in life, or justice, justification, or making satisfaction in the sense of making up for something, atonement, or doing penance. I use this word,satisfaction, to commence a discussion about an important, but elusive phenomenon. Terms like composition or form might serve as well to open this analysis. But these seem too literary, not quite universal enough for my interest. There are other such options, but for the purpose of this essay satisfaction will do.  

I am not primarily interested in what are considered here secondary or tertiary levels of satisfaction such as sexual satisfaction, or the satisfaction gained from accomplishment, intellectual discovery, or winning at cards, for example. Although any of these might play a part as one intuits the possibility of complete satisfaction.    

METHODOLOGY    

The methodology that developed along with the intuition that complete satisfaction is a viable topic for analysis, is unique to this subject and includes elements unusual in critical evaluation. For instance, because this study is not a physio-chemical experiment, but continues an investigation into discursive and non-discursive perception,¹ a certain amount of autobiographical information is justified, even necessary. This is not only so that the reader may know better my bias or understand better the angle from which I approach this topic, but because this subject matter can only be comprehended as it is situated within the context of human personality and culture. The phenomenon itself alters with culture and personality while still remaining a universal phenomenon in human perception. My practice of the religio-cultural traditions and techniques to be commented upon here, have both formed my personality and influenced the conclusions I deduce in this investigation.  

What I have done to understand the content and impact of this intuition is to “study” religion and art. Within this context, I am a fully initiated priest in an ancient and rigorous dispensation. I remain a practicing artist and poet–my B.A. is in Art and English Literature.² For my Masters and PhD. studies in theology, comparative religion and aesthetics, I “read” under one of the great contemporary masters in the History of Religion and the Philosophy of Science, Raimundo Panikkar.³ I am familiar from my youth with some of the inner workings of shamanism. I have lived in the cultures that I study and am now on intimate terms with the history of mysticism and its techniques. I mention all of this because the pursuit of the SPIRIT, INSPIRATION, GEN-I-(US) in this intuition about the nature of satisfaction now results in a complex of elements that required such trainings. I intend in this essay to describe this complex of elements and how they have been and still are important for the formation of culture and definition of personality.        

ART, the SHIFT OF CONSCIOUSNESS, MYTH, and SCIENCE  

Art, as a mode of commenting upon ineffable states, especially in certain religions such as Buddhist Tantra and the Christian Hesychasm, is one of the vehicles used to explore this complex of topics. The ability to shift into other states of consciousness is also an element explored here.⁴Myth and history cut revealing facets on the face of our stone. Literature, science and world philosophies: Critical method is employed as well as ancient practices traditionally used to transform reality or one’s perception of it. These, within an interdisciplinary context, are engaged to comment upon the perception and means of ultimate satisfaction.      

TIME  

Consideration about the nature of time is pertinent here as well. Temporal and atemporal categories are compared. Temporal rule opposed to atemporal consciousness is contained in the contrast between the more primordial Animistic Shamanism of hunter-gatherer societies and civilization, for example. How we view time and structure life styles as the result is at the heart of our issue. It is a collective shift of consciousness in history that leads away from nature toward technocratic civilization, changing the quality or even the possibility of satisfaction. An example of Christian techniques for such altering of consciousness to a more atemporal realization would be 1700 years of Christian monasticism or the archetype of the monk generally.⁵      

THE ENERGIES  

Any examination of ancient world philosophies reveals a secondary strata of cosmological and physiological belief developed from a world wide experience of psychic, physio-mystical “energies.” A description and evaluation of these is a necessary element in this complex of issues related to satisfaction and perception.      

ERRING  

In a similar way, concepts and practices associated with the practice of erring are an important consideration here.⁶ The medieval knight errant wandered the realm doing good and heroic deeds, waiting for and seeking to do God’s will in a manner dependent upon the shift, i.e., to find the Holy Grail.⁷ One abandons oneself to the mercy of God. The Hesychast or Tantric monk uses specific practices to accomplish similar goals–ultimate realization of absolute reality. The Vedic sunyasin takes to the roads and depends upon the divine spirit for sustenance. Is this satisfaction?     

THE SHIFT

The shift of consciousness between linear, logical, analytical thought, to non rational states of consciousness as found in some forms of prayer, art, or Zen, for example, suggests an underlying world of primary importance in the construct of human identity and culture. One example of this shift comes from Zen and the Art of Archery.⁸ The Zen archer stands with bow drawn and arrow cocked. The archer aims, then waits awhile. As the archer waits, consciousness shifts so that the target and archer identify as one, letting the arrow fly to its target. It is the shift of consciousness that (re)defines humanity and its capacities. The shift is a capacity that people have exercised since the dawn of human consciousness. It is a natural but specialized experience for which the religious practitioner ardently prepares, yet it remains an essential human trait. While the shift is a specific phenomenon, it is also a reference to and implicit in the more general, yet fundamentally significant temporal/non-tempora^l9 considerations about human perception.  

The shift of consciousness is an essential thread that weaves itself through most religious traditions. That the shift occurs is an anthropological fact. For the shaman, it is at once a spiritual and a technical process. It gives access to the sacred as it engages the Realm of Power (of the gods or archetypes) that enables the shaman to resolve the problems of his/her concern. For the Buddhist, the shift overcomes the object-subject dichotomy of identification, having abandoned a solely sensate-based perception. This makes possible all the great Buddhist accomplishments, especially compassion, detachment and the Bliss-wisdom of the Void. For the Christian, the shift accompanies a more general metanoia and the emptying of self in kenosis. The superficial self, the egotistical self, is overcome or re-integrated; and the ineffable, original self is revealed–the Go[o]d News! By such self-abandonment, the rhythms of the Divine Spirit might be known.  

The shift is, by its very nature expressive, not only in the lives of individuals as well as cultures but is as well, the foundation of various archaic cosmologies. Panikkar, relates this telling anecdote about a Native American peoples’ objection to the construction of a new atomic site. To the natives, the intrusion of the atomic site would cut their common relationship with their ancestors. The engineers, however, could not understand their position. Panikkar explains:  

In fact, ancestors, spirits, etc., are all absolute nonsense unless one is ready to undergo that emptying of self, to enter into that kenosis about which we have spoken. Otherwise, we are not ready for dialogue. Dialogue does not consist in offering hospitality. It may perhaps consist in asking hospitality, and asking it without sandals, without money, without preconceived ideas, allowing the right hand not to know what the left is doing. Not thinking beforehand what one will say, but receiving it with one’s whole heart.¹⁰  

This research about the nature of satisfaction reviews three religious traditions and one sub-topic which is pertinent to all three religions: (A) Shamanism, (B) Buddhism, (C) the Christian Hesychasm, and (D) the Energies. By the time this material has developed and displayed its influence,  

…the most ancient religious traditions of mankind [will have met] the most modern trends of secular Man…[sic.] When comparing our contemporary situation with problems of the past, we have to take into account the different horizons of intelligibility; in other words, we have to consider the different myths which underlie the cultures we are discussing… our culture not excluded.¹¹          

ART AND RELIGIOUS AESTHETICS  

Icons, Mandalas, and Abstract Expressionism contain elements important to this discussion; i.e., such artbridges opposite realities as temporal and non-temporal worlds. In fact, such art can be an active, animate agent to make these connections necessary for satisfaction. Panikkar, who is both traditional and progressive, stands together beneath this aesthetic valence with the more traditional Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Catholic apologist of eloquence. Both are masters of influence in reference to the arts operative in religious culture. Von Balthasar’s theology of aesthetics is founded upon a self-justifying, inner-radiance of the divine in-dwelling that expresses itself in the image, and images of God, i.e., in art and sacramental religious perception.¹² Most simply, art, by its physical nature and gestalt content, can make the connection between spirit and matter, between the non-temporal and the temporal.  

Panikkar, appreciating both traditional and contemporary world-views, proposes a schema that allows human culture to maintain the threads of tradition while addressing the concerns and realizations of modernity. From a literary perspective, according to Panikkar’s “response” to Paul Ricoeur, the subject-object epistemology fails to provide a valid tool for understanding the central, hermeneutic problem of human knowledge. According to Panikkar, “a text is only a text when it is interwoven with the texture in which we live and understand.”¹³ An integration of perception is necessary in many areas of analysis in order to appreciate the meaning of a text, or those who produced the text.  

Such a cross disciplinary approach is also commented upon in George Landow’s book, Hypertext¹⁴ as it describes the function of such thinking in: (1) a Shamanistic milieu; (2) with certain modern artists such as James Joyce; (3) in computer and media-generated approaches that have resulted in a revolution in critical theory. Hypertext compares Shamanistic thinking with computer-generated approaches to the processing of knowledge.  Both use similar methods of non-linear association as the connecting function that accesses/uses knowledge in a network of relationships to produce understanding. This is opposed to solely, linear, scientific logic.¹⁵  

Thus, my eventual conclusions, as well as the process that produces them, should properly reflect such a network of reasonable, interdisciplinary relationships to present their point of view. Otherwise, we are asking the wind to keep the flag from flapping by trying to fit these particular patterns of human knowing associated with the shift of consciousness into a solely discursive format. In other words, I use this approach because I believe that this is the only reasonable way to approach this topic.  

This perspective reflects how religious histories in the past have expressed themselves about this intricate connection between temporal matters and eternity. For instance, for thousands of years there has been a tendency to interpret the co-incidence of natural phenomena– earthquakes, storms, etc.– as spiritually significant to a particular person or people. History becomes folktale, fiction mixes with fact, to become sacred scripture. An example would be the plagues in Egypt that preceded the Exodus of the Hebrews.

There is substantial evidence indicating more than one exodus of Hebrews from Egypt over a period of time during which Egypt was subject to various natural disasters. Yet, this overall experience has been poetically and mythically re-interpreted since ancient times in a way typical of religious literature/histories that try to come to terms with the interaction between time and non-time, the world and God. Whatever the motivations of various peoples who might use or abuse such literature, this artistic format is a most effective vehicle for evoking certain invaluable states of consciousness. One can find the same format in much Shamanistic experience. A ritual is performed or asceticism practiced and a storm happens. Therefore, the gods are thought to have responded. Nature is not merely mechanical.¹⁷ The universe does not have to respond only according to scientific precepts. Science must respond according to the precepts of nature. For example, what to some might rightfully just be a breeze, or a gust of wind, to another might be a valid form of communication from an ineffable quarter of reality. That scenario has been expressed in various ways according to the means available in any given culture. Both the scientific and the mystical interpretation must be important for the evaluation of any perceptible phenomenon.  

The myth-making function in the intellect and imagination of human culture is a vital issue within the operation of perception. For instance, it is important for me to be a priest to understand this consciousness from within. A Catholic priest functions as a living symbol, a person ontologically changed¹⁸ to mediate in service, the mercies of God. This maintains a necessary mythos that is by its very nature, symbolic. Being what it is, ultimate reality is unknowable in the sense that it precedes anything conceptual. This might be experientially perceived according to religious or philosophical intuitions, but can only be referenced metaphorically.  

Art is the intuition of the whole.¹⁹ Religion is re-connecting to the original and eternal “moment” of consciousness. Mythic thinking creates a visionary consciousness more open to the color and neg-entropic meaning important in both worlds. Symbol or sacrament is the bridge between different things or worlds. The satisfactions associated with ancient symbolic traditions that seek integration of consciousness–discursive and non-discursive–are described in terms of bliss, ecstasy and love.  

Such a symbolic lifestyle as lead by the shaman, priest or monk, for example, encourages a shift in cultural attitude, evidenced in the re-structuring of reality, of time itself, into a sacred reference. In this, one is living the myth in which the whole culture participates. This might be found also in the seasonal feasts and calendar observances of cultures like the Zuni of New Mexico or the Highland Guatemalan Mayas; observances that also make the connection with the sacred. This might be further exemplified by the seasonal cycles found in the festive and ordinary cycle of Masses and the Divine Office of the Church.²⁰  

If I may speculate more freely about art for a moment, perhaps Abstract Expressionism is at one end in a spectrum of possibilities for spiritual art, that includes artistic development back through the Renaissance to the classical and primordial worlds.²¹ Existentialists felt it necessary for human society to start over somehow. The Western world and therefore the entire world,²² is quickly becoming a technocracy and has, since the end of the medieval period in Europe, increasingly rejected a theocratic/centric social and cosmological model for society and the universe. I have re-explored the beginnings of art and religion–shamanism, yogic mandala, fetish, icon–given obvious limitations–from the personal experience of practice and study, so that I can know what we have done now that the Renaissance has run its course. Now that the high satisfaction possible in symbolic systems of practice, such as those of Tibet or medieval Europe, fades more and more rapidly…      

THE NUDE  

Attitudes towards the human body as primary symbol of the person are of pivotal concern here. The Tantric operation, if practiced in full, would involve a whole cosmology of associations in which the body is the central symbolic model. In particular, it involves the circulation through the whole body and personality of a system of vital, psychic energies, analogous to the system of the universe. Raising these energies from the psychic center near the base of the genitals or perineum (Muladhara) up through the psychic central nervous system to the crown chakra (Sahasrara) at the top of the head is the action that re-unites heaven and earth, (Kundalini and Shiva) female and male–all dualities in fact–to produce the Nirvanic condition of Enlightenment. In the Hesychasm, something comparable is in progress when the Great Robe Monk, or the thaumaturge ²³, draws the sexual energies up, and pushes the intellectual energies down, into the heart–the symbolic center of the personality–to experience a spiritual Eucharist of the divine indwelling. Panikkar proposes something similar, on a universal level of human consciousness, when he tries to draw together the elements of time: past-present-future, into one moment of trans-temporal, eternal consciousness.²⁴      

DISREPUTE  

There are also certaindisreputable elements in spiritual lore that are important to our topic as well. Among these might be: torture motifs such as found in the Plains Indian Sun Dance; and others that involve extreme physical, emotional, or psychic exertion, including transsexual trauma; and various other asceticisms and yogas; psychoactive substances such as peyote, San Pedro cactus, alcohol, etc.²⁵ Extraordinary as these might seem to some, they are secure in the anthropological inheritance of sincere religious practice.  

An adjacent understanding that lends a cohesive effect to our study of satisfaction refers to a state of consciousness that sees all reality as a body of connections. At one end of a spectrum this might be represented by the sublime Buddhist teachings of subject/object unification, with detachment at the heart of one’s practice, or by the highly exalted Body of Christ that extends into both temporal and non-temporal worlds. At the other end, the unitive body might be seen in the more pragmatic effects of the thaumaturge, for example, who travels the full range on this spectrum between Christ and the Magi. A model for this is, of course, the Gospel miracle stories that provide evidence for the people that Jesus, as human paradigm and icon, had “other world” powers. (Some thought them Satanic then, and labeled him as a drunk and a glutton as well. Matt. 11:19) In some cases, perhaps because of the disreputable and inhibition-quelling qualities of inebriation, for example–Jesus’ first miracle was to turn water into wine–combined with deep-seated, often subconscious intentions and belief patterns, one’s conventions are circumvented and new realms open up.²⁶  

Substance abuse is not the issue under discussion here… Beginning with the cultural and individual phenomenon of Shamanism, rooted in the early Stone Age, we can see a complex of insight, practice and techniques for achieving insight and power. Inebriation is one from a group of radical techniques not uncommon in Shamanism and many subsequent religions: transsexual trauma, terror, torture, alcoholic inebriation, use of sacred (psychedelic) substances, humiliation and sickness. All are “ingested” in combination with mythological belief patterns and perhaps used along with more moderate practices such as meditation, chanting/singing and others. The danger is initiation of psychological unbalance or even death. Some young Eskimo shaman novices, when forced into a transsexual experience, commit suicide, others adjust. (Eliade, Shamanism, p. 258) A positive effect, for example, would be to disorient one enough, or to separate one enough from one’s personal or cultural context to discover access to fundamental elements from the sub-strata of consciousness, the instinctual “stuff” of personality; i.e. Knowledge, Powers, and Transcendence arise. Jung might refer to what this process conjures as “figures” or “powers” that arise, even spontaneously, from the Unconscious. (Jung’s Introduction and Commentary, Secret of the Golden Flower, p.120.)  

One can discover the use of such techniques simply by reading Castaneda, or by more laboriously doing comparative religious study and experience. For an example of radical personality adjustment, a male might be exposed to the archetypal feminine and thus display in one’s life transsexual behavior in such a way that loosens the vice-like grip of “ordinary” consciousness, allowing for the extraordinary archetypal experiences. Through experience of extreme alcoholic inebriation, for another instance, one does not just come to understand perceptive faculties that are not apparent when one is “in control” but one experiences these faculties in such a way that integrates and empowers both in the extraordinary world of the psyche and the ordinary world of “daytime” consciousness. This is not to claim that simply getting drunk or getting high or having unusual sex will do this for you.  But in certain circumstances with certain individuals, unusual phenomena evocative of the satisfaction pertinent to this study sometimes occur.  

An archetypal shadow of Dionysian ritual hovers about all this, with the maenads pausing in their dance just before the orgiastic dismemberment of their sacrificial victim. But the high altruism of many religious traditions might mediate the fury of being for us, such as in Tantra.  

Let us conclude this erring introduction with a final note about just that, erring. An oft berated and sometimes exalted role in human society is that of the pilgrim. This is one who has given up on society and the domestic scene, and goes out on the roads of the world to abandon self. As mentioned previously, in India this would be the sunyasin. From Orthodox Christian countries, accounts found in books such as the Philokalia, or even The Way of the Pilgrim, tell revealing and charming stories about being “On The Road…” This is also called “serpentine wandering,” or “sauntering, a la sainte terre.”  

From Mark Taylor’s book Erring, we have in the first selection below a passage from Henry David Thoreau:   

Sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, until the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.  

Taylor continues:  

The time and space of graceful erring are opened by the death of God, the loss of self, and end of history. In uncertain, insecure and vertiginous postmodern worlds, wanderers repeatedly ask: “Whither are we moving? … Are we continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we erring as through an infinite nothing?” While the death of God is realized in the play of the divine milieu and the disappearance of the self is inscribed in markings and traces, history “ends” when erring “begins,” and erring “begins” when history “ends.”²⁷      

I believe what you will find herein are the essential elements of a complete cosmology. But, by the very nature of the creature, such a cosmoplan cannot be only a list of critical ingredients, but must also allow within and between such elements for the embrace of an intuitive grasp–aha! This is an opportunity for the reader, critic, or seeker that cannot be forced, only prepared. It lies in the construct of this total presentation. But I hope the mix to be dynamic, pacific and not deadly–in either the awesome, often terrible energies of the Twentieth Century or the convalescent wisdoms that have guided our survival for fifty thousand plus years of Homo Sapiens Sapiens until this, our own volatile era.

Initiation and Practice

 Part I  

The primordial format of initiation and practice from animistic shamanism describes the overall form of the experience that this work investigates. But initiation into what? From where or what? Practice of what? Most importantly, who is it that seeks satisfaction in such practices and initiations and what are the modalities of entrance into the realms of ultimate satisfaction? Traditionally, that is, before the 14th Century in Europe, one might or certainly would be initiated into a cosmology of symbolic references and values within religious, political, economic, social and ecologically referent constructs that promised to engage the fullest possible spectrum of human perception, thus making possible and obtaining satisfaction. (Refer to notes #1 and 2 below.) This end was described in terms of bliss, enchantment, beatific vision, sanctity, power… Initiation was seen to precipitate and engage the fullness of reality. It was, at least, the fullness of perception, since it involved both fundamental perceptive categories, the temporal and the non-temporal.¹ Around the 13th century in Europe a shift of paradigms took place that moved away from practices in Christianity that had focused upon conversion, integration and the fulfillment of nature in the Spirit. That is, this temporal world and the non-temporal world were interpreted to be inextricably connected and constantly seeking engagement and resolution of their mutual duality.² The logical-critical method surfaced as the lonely survivor from other, more wholistic systems of perception that begin to melt away–or get liquidated as in Tibet later on, for instance. As in Tantric Tibet, the Christian expression of a more wholistic modality through the medieval period in Europe reflects a distillation of spiritual sensibility in people and cultures from the earliest moments of human consciousness. Discovering the essential elements that maintain necessary modes for obtaining satisfaction from of old is an important aspect of the task here. After six hundred years since that medieval shift of paradigms took the field (see note #2), is there something else happening now that has produced the post-modern agenda of questions, threats and challenges, but also, perhaps a salvific element? Are we constructing a new civilization, or are we only dangerously, powerfully decadent from the heights of the last 6,000 years of civilization, or even from the simple, direct truths of animistic shamanism–anxiously, increasingly unsatisfied in the new mix?

Grandmother Spider

RELIGION AND ART: Abstract Expressionism First, let us consider the function of art as an agent of the shift of consciousness from the temporal to the non-temporal realm in the one who is initiated and who practices modalities of satisfaction. Many of the major artists in the twentieth century were fascinated by archaic religions and art forms.3 Pollack was influenced by Tantra.  Kandinsky as well, was influenced by the East, through Theosophy.  Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and Debussy’s “Afternoon of the Faun” and Picasso’s African masks are among many such references that evidence Modernist fascination with archaic religious patterns.⁴ When Jackson Pollack, in reaction to Greek poetics, says, “I am nature”, he declares a unitary metaphysic that combines ‘knowing’ with what can be known. One’s art does not contemplate or imitate nature, one is nature contemplating itself. One is again primordial man standing on the plains of Altamira in terms of self-reflection, but at the other end of a critical spectrum.⁵ (Some used a quart of Gin a day to shiftconsciousness. But then, in a spiritually less duplicitous era, the Lord Christ changed volumes of water into wine at a reception as His first public miracle.) The experience of modern artists is described in terms of their influences; existentialism, religion, even their titles [of art works] are important in the milieu of interest they indicate. Some feel that titles to such abstract works are superfluous. For others, including many of the artists, the titles indicate in an important manner the milieu out of which these works develop and help the viewer to find landmarks of meaning to better appreciate such work. There is perhaps a plagiarist’s superficiality to such titles with references to other peoples’ religions, and mythologies. But, I think that the titles represent the secular, Modernist movement’s attempt to deal with the unavoidable ontic questions of our existence and therefore are religious gestures even if seemingly confiscated from the more ancient religious traditions that actually produced such references. This use of titles in my own paintings describes the milieu of my interests consistent with Abstract Expressionist practice.⁶ Perhaps the Abstract Expressionist method of assault on the unconscious was a form of suicide–few died of old age or natural disease. Or, perhaps they are heroes sacrificing themselves for the liberation of human knowledge. I believe the Abstract Expressionist experience is one of the great insightful moments of human history–a spiritual exploration from a secular base. Here is a moment in the evolution of secular humanism that makes solid inroads into mystical consciousness: Generally, their ethic is humane, as represented by such as Barnet Newman among others. The action of their creativity demonstrates the conscious/unconscious or temporal/non-temporal moment at once, the union potent between the apparent and the mysterious. Or, are the Abstract Expressionists merely the last gasp of the classical world? While still appreciating the vigor of their image, I feel the Abstract Expressionist contribution is somehow incomplete, ultimately unsatisfactory. We achieve direct contact with the unconscious and by the gesture of direct and nearly formless creativity define our primordial being. Some survive the glance of God, some do not. What is the value of an existentialist return to primordial consciousness? Is it even possible to obtain a consciousness that is free of, or ignorant of the cosmological nuance necessary for the conduct of classical culture?⁷ This is a systematic nuance that has developed with civilization itself. Von Balthazar, a Roman Catholic theologian, defends just such a cosmological schema, as did Robert Cardinal Bellarmine against Galileo’s enthusiasm for the Nova Sciencia and the hardball politics of the period.⁸  The interest of Abstract Expressionist and Surrealist artists in “automatic” writing and drawing is famous and comparable to the more highly developed techniques for accessing the unconscious, such as Tarot Cards or the Chinese I CHING.⁹ Since Abstract Expressionism died out as a movement in the early Nineteen Sixties, perhaps their endeavor has failed to influence culture in any lasting way. Just as the German Expressionists failed to influence German society sufficiently to forestall Nazi depravations. Now at the end of the century, capitalist technocracy seems to have taken the field of world domination– has won the battle that surfaced in the Renaissance and Enlightenment for control of the penitential systems of Europe, of the world.¹⁰ Though many artists still paint in the Abstract Expressionist style, perhaps in the end, the Abstract Expressionists only contributed to the ascendance of technological and capitalist dominance in culture and everything else by helping to divide and dismiss traditional religious practice and belief. What is missing in their effort? Am I expecting something from the arts that properly is the province of other powers? In that regard, why has neither art nor religion–nor politics or science for that matter–been able to help more effectively to prevent the moral and martial horrors of the Twentieth Century? That is, if either can make any real claim to moral stature or spiritual influence. Panikkar suggests that perhaps we went wrong at the very outset of the history of civilization by the shift of consciousness that civilization itself requires.¹¹ But in stirring the cauldron of the universal unconscious, perhaps modern artists point the way for others to develop, not just imitate.¹² Perhaps Abstract Expressionism is the end of art’s possibilities given its development from the Renaissance, since the Classical age long ago distilled the essence from a vast pool of primordial sensibility. Perhaps, it is necessary to start over with the Shamanistic vision–the Existentialist theme again—though spiritualism seems more accessible to some. The Western world, and therefore the world(!) is fast becoming a technocracy and increasingly rejects, since the end of the Medieval period in Europe, a theocentric, theocratic social structure.¹³ But is there something more valuable here, even threatening when left unsatisfied, that is basic to being “fully human” as Panikkar would have it?¹⁴ Is there something that must be fulfilled in order to provide satisfaction, perhaps even, to avoid universal self-destruction? This would explain the sense of urgency that one finds laced through Panikkar’s perspective. Panikkar discerns that consciousness itself is participation in eternity. (Reflection upon, or analysis of, the original conscious moment is always a temporal, linear process within the vales of perception, subsequent to the original non temporal sense of consciousness. The original experience of consciousness, though derivative, never seems to be touched by that subsequent linear, temporal process.) Thus, the function of religion is to resolve these two realms in the individual persons and cultures. In this regard, there is little religious purpose to demythify the scriptures, for instance, since the authentic mythic intention, as found in sacred scriptures, is to draw the two worlds, temporal and non-temporal, together. The function of symbols, also, is to bridge these differences. The purpose of art is to make these connections. When Jackson Pollack says “I am Nature”, he is not only redirecting Aristotelian poetics–art imitates nature–but re-establishes an existential connection with the world. In Panikkar’s perspective, consciousness itself is an epiphany. Original consciousness is non-temporal. This is simple, rational observation in Panikkar’s system. One might deduce then, that everything after the original moment, or reflection upon that moment, is art–i.e., images, literature, myth, history/science–or religion. One’s temporal life is an art form in the sense that our temporal consideration of original experience is an artful means, a catalytic reference to the first and always, original moment. All categories of science and art might have equal veracity and be equally mythic, being once removed from the original experience, but always explicitly or non explicitly referring back to, or in the presence of, that more original experience of consciousness. Without that reference back to the other side of consciousness, one is reduced to the insane denial, or ignor-ance of, fundamental perceptive reality. Consciousness begins not with thinking but with non-thought, with the fecund void of eternity. Perception is confined to the recognition or experience of this shift of consciousness from void to manifestation. High art or religion (or science), then, is that which best reflects the non-temporal, original moment, or truth in relationship with its progeny; the best of the best being that which resolves, or re-engages most fully, intercourse between the two: Satisfaction?

Secrets of the Golden Flower III

SATISFACTION

Initiation and Practice

Part II

  RELIGION AND ART: Icons, Mandalas and the Nude Icons, like mandalas are not the viewed 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 primarily the painting but the spirit, then creation, then human form, then the realization of the devotee. The significance of an icon, like a mandala, is not only 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. It is also required for the maker of icons to fast, pray, make pilgrimage or other forms of ascetical discipline in order for those icons to be infused with holy energy. In order to benefit from this type of experience, it is necessary for the viewer to do the same. Put yourself in the presence of God. 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 the Deity. “As regards the character of the Transfiguration,” … “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.¹

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.²

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 spiritually deep and true perhaps, was also culturally 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 enmeshed. 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. The mortal body of the church changes… to…? 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 to focus a beatific vision into the heart of heaven itself. Traditional religion claims that we have a capacity for heaven, Nirvana if you like, or Godhead, the Source, Absolute Value, Being. As well, we have an imagination that can image ultimate reality in radiant terms, suggestive of that which is beyond ourselves and promises satisfaction. What is left is the ability to help draw the two worlds together, which is the heart of the tradition–the heart of any really religious tradition anyway. The shift of consciousness is a capacity that suggests much about the nature of human personality and perception. As well perhaps, the shift suggests something about the ultimate nature of reality. This is reinforced by Christ’s own sense of intimacy between ordinary reality and the Kingdom, 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 that in the past described the parameters of Satisfaction. For just this reason, there is vast wisdom when such figures–as the Zen archer–say, “if you really understood what is happening when you move your hand from here to here [a few inches], then you would be enlightened;” And the Chinese Taoist rainmaker who ended a severe drought, simply by setting up housekeeping at the edge of the stricken 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 or iconic realms of ultimate reference that tie the factual world together with its original, unnamable, mythic context. The shift of consciousness is an anthropological fact. It is the fundamental agent of the sacrifice that is the underlying format of both religion and art. Theshift of consciousness is the function of the physical manifestation of consciousness in the body. The shift is 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, the always concurrent original moment of consciousness. 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. It is there to ‘draw back the curtain’, revelo, of time and connect us with the singular, original moment of incarnation/transfiguration/ascension/creation. 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. This capacity is an aesthetic function of consciousness necessary, I believe, for satisfaction. The process of this resolution is the great art from which we derive certain catalytic artifacts of theshift, i.e., paintings, sculptures, etc. Art is a physical extension of the body in the world. Body is the physical extension of the non-temporal world into the temporal. The body is a physical and real vehicle of transcendence, thus, the importance of the nude in art. As such, it is the metaphor of existence, as 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 anatomical part. In the battle for influence in the hearts and minds of humanity since the Renaissance, the Church resisted the demise of its cosmologies, often symbolically depicted by references to the body. Those cosmologies were the spiritual bond between individuals, society, and the cosmos. Capitalism and technocracy are without cosmology except the bare requirements of production and consumption. Neither science nor religion seem to have won out, according to Panikkar. We are in the process of not only surviving in the midst of this but piecing together/preserving an environment for when, possibly once again, the body and psyche of Being are in rhythm.³ A new cosmology must arise that pierces through to the non-temporal heart of time. 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.  In either case, who remains to be satisfied?

Home by the Sea 2

Introduction: ¹ Random House Dictionary, 1993, defines “discursive” as an adjective: “passing aimlessly from one subject to the other; digressive…” “discursive” is the term used by Panikkar in reference to logical rationalist domination of knowledge in Western culture. In this study, “discursion” refers to ordinary, linear, logical consciousness.

² A major characteristic of this study has been that I personally experience as far as possible that which I study. Therefore, I should explain briefly what that has involved. The character of this background and my understanding of these topics and traditions is strongly influenced by experience lived within the fold of their wisdoms. This includes six years of formal art studies and twenty years of making art; five years of monastic studies, two of which were lived in Benedictine and Trappist monasteries; five years of Roman Catholic seminary training which allowed the M.A. project, including the first trip to India for Buddhist studies as well as Shamanistic study and initiation; subsequently, there were ten years of continued interest in Buddhism starting with the first trip to India in 1980 to study with a high Nyingmapa lama in Derha Dun, Utter Pradesh (U.P.), followed by two subsequent trips to India and Nepal, one to study the art form and content of the Tibetan mandala with high Gelugpa lamas at the headquarters of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala and another Nyingmapa lama, His Holiness Mindriling Rimpoche. This Buddhist research concluded with my Nepal excursion and the Manirimdu festival in 1992, which included Lama dancing and the construction of an elaborate sand mandala within the ritual pattern. As well, there were exploratory visits to Hesychasic monasteries and the related practice over twenty years of frequent and long pilgrimages as a technique of conversion and alteration of consciousness.   I chose Buddhism for this study because, among other reasons, it represents a certain distillation in the yogic traditions of India which contain many of the world’s important schools of metaphysical training. Buddhism reforms these dominant Vedic systems of India out of which also grew the later Hinduism. I chose the Hesychasm to represent the Western phenomenon of Christianity since the Hesychasm best incorporates art and yogic practice in one completely Christian and still extant system. I studied Animistic Shamanism because I believed it to be a universal matrix of perceptive capacities out of which grows most, if not all mystical experience. In the Spring of 1990, this study included a three month stay at Zuni, New Mexico, one of the best preserved Native American cultures in the Northern Hemisphere with important Shamanistic elements still operative. Zuni was the climax of many such visits to Shamanistic or partially Shamanistic cultures and an ongoing interest in Shamanism. Another long stay, this time on the Navajo reservation for about six months to one year, more or less, concluded my Native American studies. Certain Chinese martial arts refer in brief to the spiritual schools of the Far East, since Tai Chi and her sister arts are heavily influenced by both Buddhism and Taoism in the resolution of duality–stillness/action, empty/full… By exploring these vast territories under the guidance of some of the best minds and practitioners in each pertinent discipline, I hope to provide a more universal ground for the discussion of my topic.

³ Though I will refer to many authorities, Panikkar’s format has proven the most effective in my research–thus, my studies with him. In fact, one might say that much of the statement here is to a great degree, as per Panikkar.  Although I suspect, there are some aspects of my research that Panikkar would not like to claim–as Socrates to Alcibiades.^{1     4} Many anthropological studies have established the ‘shift of consciousness’ as a nearly universal phenomenon. Eliade is one among these to describe this catholic quality. The shift as the operative function of the mystical dimension in human experience or of its exercise in modern consciousness, is necessary for a thorough discussion of human identity, or even for epistemological considerations. ⁵ Raimundo Panikkar, Blessed Simplicity, (New York, 1982). ⁶ Mark Taylor, Erring, p. 149ff. ⁷ P. L. Travers. “Le Chevalier Perdu,” Parabola, (Sp. 1991). Claude J., Peifer O.S.B., Monastic Spirituality (New York, 1966) p. 182. ⁸ Eugin Herrigel, Zen and the Art of Archery (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) p. 39. ⁹ “Atemporal” versus “historic” consciousness is a major theme here. Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice–the Sacrifice of Time and the Ritual of Modernity”, ed. J. T. Fraser, Study of Time III (New York, 1978) p. 689. As well, see Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya.   For Panikkar, reality consists of the temporal world of matter subsequent to and including the non-temporal world unconstrained by time or matter.   Also for Panikkar, “full human activity” would involve the full employment of discursive and non-discursive faculties–mystically, sensually, intellectually, culturally. This is not only for persons but for culture operating in a cosmotheandric reality; cosmos, deity, humanity. Panikkar, “A Christophany for our Times”, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine Lecture (St. Louis: St. Louis University Press, 1991) p. 11.   Panikkar’s doctorates in chemistry, philosophy and theology as well as his subsequent studies have given him the expertise to carefully observe and comment upon various issues of world concern. He has contributed major texts to the philosophy of science and religion, and has taught at universities in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. As a Roman Catholic priest, he has taken an active part in the cultural and philosophical life of Western Europe and India. I feel that a valid approach to his work should reflect something of the professional depth, yet, at the same time convey the personal, experiential nature of his expertise since this combination results from his strongest positions regarding human knowledge and its fragmentation in modern culture. His effort overcomes natural vs. supernatural, science vs. nature (and God) dualities. ¹⁰ Raimundo Panikkar, “The Future of Mission”, Interculture (Fall, 1987) p.27. ¹¹ Raimundo Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice…”, p.704. ¹² Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 1 p. 18-20. ¹³ Raimundo Panikkar, “The Texture of a Text: In Response to P. Ricoeur,” Point of Contact. (April/May, 1978) p. 51-52. “What I am contesting here is the application to a text of the physio-chemical method of analysis. What I am reacting against is the mirage of the natural sciences in the philosophical enterprise of reaching intelligibility. To understand a text we do not apply different tests and reactors and observe how the “stuff” reacts. Understanding a text is not like analyzing a chemical substance. It is not we alone who shift perspectives; the text itself undergoes change when we approach it differently. A text is not a dead physical substance with which we experiment or manipulate ad libitum. A text is only a text when it is interwoven with the texture in which we live and understand.” ¹⁴ George Landow, HYPERTEXT, (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) p. 115. ¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 27-30. ¹⁶ Such demythicization is common enough to be included in an otherwise reasonable, recently published description of an archeological excavation in the eastern Mediterranean. Charles Pelegrino, Unearthing Atlantis, (New York: Random House, 1991) p. 78. ¹⁷ Panikkar, R. “Time and Sacrifice”, p.704. Panikkar reacts against the creationist model of reality as fanatical and childish. But he also reacts against the model of evolution as too mechanistic. Both of these concepts, along with the concept of history, come from the same root in early Semitic consciousness. ¹⁸ Council of Trent: 23rd session, Chapter IVff, Canon #4. Rev. H. J. Schroeder O.P., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, pp. 161-163. Also see St. Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews, 5:6 and 6:20. ¹⁹ All of these references are founded upon the belief that there is an order in the universe, Ved in Sanskrit, that is, the rhythm of being. This becomes the overall topic of Panikkar’s Gifford Lectures. Besides conversations with Panikkar himself, I have this from the official synopsis distributed at the Gifford Lecture in Edinburgh, 1989. The text of the lecture is yet to be published. ²⁰ One may consult Making Holy the Day (Library of St. John Seminary, Camarillo, California) by Charles Miller; Or, The Mass by G. Jungman (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 1976) for a general review of this topic. ²¹ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord vol. 1 p. 18-20.   Also, in a conversation with Dr. L. Rothkrug and Dr. Louis Lancaster, (Fall, 1993, GTU library, Berkeley), Dr. Rothkrug allowed as reasonable that the activities and interests of the Abstract Expressionists along with many other artists in the modernity were a continuation of the “battle for control of the penitential systems of Europe”, [how one reaches ultimate satisfaction or God] that he identified in his article, “Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation.” Historical Reflections, Ontario, 1980, p..262.²²  Panikkar believes that we now live in the world of technocracy which he calls the Fourth World. Second and Third Worlds are the world of the gods and the world of humans.* To Panikkar and most of humanity, both these worlds are realities, although they are the “worlds” of the past. Modern humanity no longer needs to appease the gods or even be on good terms with them in order to live peacefully. The same applies to our relationship to the tyrant, king, or the authorities that be. There is no longer a need to understand nature in its own terms, the sun, the climate, the elements, etc. We have created another world, “the meager machine which now we feel we are caught in and find more difficult than to appease the gods or to kill the tyrant or to tame nature.**  The Fourth World [of technocracy] operates in autonomy. It does not leave room for freedom and spontaneity. For Panikkar spontaneity is the act of letting being be. Letting being express, without self-conscious interference.***  It is intimately related to and necessary for creativity, for art.**** [Notes for Note #22]

*Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice”, p. 711.

** See Cargas interview, p. 71. Harry James Cargas PhD., “Interview”, p. 81. Dr. Cargas conducted a long, recorded interview with Panikkar, January 6-11, 1982. It is from the text of this interview in my possession that these references are taken. There is a tentative publication of this interview being planned for 1996 or 1997.

*** Cargas interview with Panikkar, p. 5.

**** Cargas interview, p. 83, story about “Alfaire X.”

²³ Wonderworker. ²⁴ Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice–the Sacrifice of Time and the Ritual of Modernity”, ed. J. T. Fraser, Study of Time III (New York, 1978) p. 689ff. ²⁵ Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, p. 33ff. ²⁶ Mark Taylor, Erring, p. 149ff.

Home by the Sea 1- Totem

ENDNOTES: Satisfaction Part I   

¹ “Atemporal” versus “historic” consciousness is a major theme here. Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice–the Sacrifice of Time and the Ritual of Modernity”, ed. J. T. Fraser, The Study of Time III (New York, 1978) p. 689. As well, see Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya.   Also see note #9 above.

² Note on St. Anthony re: 12th century shift of paradigm influential in our contemporary situation: Fr. Romuald Dutcher, Superior of Epiphany Monastery, New Hampshire, a recently founded daughter house of Immaculate Hermitage in Big Sur, California, makes an excellent presentation about a shift of cultural paradigms that has greatly influenced our current post-Modern situation. Though this note runs the risk of over simplifying a complex of issues, as well as Fr. Dutcher’s longer presentation, still…   One might trace this important influence from such works as St. Athanasius’ third century Life of St. Anthony the Hermit–the third most read book between 400-1200 A.D. after the Bible and St. Benedict’s Rule for Monks. This work depicts the ideal human as one in union with nature and nature fulfilled by the Spirit. This is opposed to the ever present tendency in human culture to denigrate nature, human and otherwise, as evil or hostile– to be conquered at all costs. This latter tendency began finally to take the field around the twelfth century as the monasteries lost influence during the re-urbanization of Europe. The result is a wide spread cultural development with God and nature even more completely distanced; and, nature to be conquered eventually by the then nascent technocracy. Gestalt meaning is lost, integration of humanity/nature/spirit is fragmented and the very environment of our survival is threatened at an accelerating pace. Literal rather than poetic interpretation of venerable cosmologies makes them the object of justifiable scorn. Holiness is reduced to an ideal, religion to ideology, not a real experience, not a life.   The figure of St. Anthony of the Desert portrays a serious method for dealing with the inner life and communal relationships in union with the spirit. Here, temporal and non-temporal factors operate in healthy intercourse. The product of this approach exemplified in St. Anthony was: ‘He has become natural, he is living reasonably, in harmony according to nature–the monk goes into the desert to fight the devil, i.e. self! After twenty years he comes out of the desert manifesting deity. He was described as natural; not fat not skinny, he looks younger than his years. Emotionally, he is warm and present but not swayed by emotion. As a teacher, intellectually, he speaks to the actual situation–the local legal community trusted his clear discernment in many issues. Spiritually, he heals some by touch, but this is not emphasized. What is emphasized is that he is a great ‘consoler of hearts.’ He is simply natural, humanity divinized. It is sufficient to become fully human since nature is built to carry the illumination of divine glory. Nature and humanity are taken seriously. One such is fully alive–Theopoeisis=To become divine is to become truly human.’   As the influence of rurally based monasteries waned, the active Franciscan and Dominican orders were established. The Dominican, St. Thomas Aquinas, starred in a Scholastic movement that developed a powerful tool, a scientific tool, for the clarification of Christian theology. For those of Thomas’ intellectual and moral stature, this use of Aristotelian logic dealt magnificently with many difficult philosophical and theological issues. However, subsequently, in lesser minds this method of discursion reduced theology to stereotypic arguments like the infamous angels dancing on the head of a pin, fostering not piety but a petty competitive spirit. No wonder, that by the time of the Reformation, many serious people were ready to toss out the old system retaining little more than Scriptural authority, as disputed as that might be. Thus reduced, Christendom split into three camps; reformation, counter-reformation, and scientists (latter day scholastics.) The ones to seemingly profit most by this disassembly, are the newly liberated agents of commerce and politics. St. Thomas was only the first to use the term “supernatural” as opposed to the natural, further separating what existentially, practically must be one.   In spirituality, a similar thing happened. St. Francis is the great genius of his age in this regard. But he had a very negative attitude towards his body and rather browbeat the natural world with his paranormal powers. Once again, Francis was great enough to hold together the old system and the new mood, but subsequently, the gestalt is lost. What takes its place is a more devotional, sentimental, personal yearning for an increasingly distant God. Morality, originally of cosmological proportions, is reduced to one of its own sub-categories, Ethics, in Fundamentalist obeisance to the Nova Sciencia. The older Benedictine monastic systems maintained the mytho-poetic genius of generations–perhaps now best preserved institutionally in a few eastern Orthodox monasteries.   The figures of Anthony [ala Athanasius], Francis and Thomas Aquinas are milestones in a larger curve of perception. It is the task of our age to re-evaluate both science and religion operating in the construct of culture and human perception, then discover anew the “tempiternal” core of reality, according to Panikkar (“Time and Sacrifice… p.711). [Temporal+Eternal=Tempiternal]   See: Jean LeClercq, Love of Learning and Desire for God, 600-1200 A.D. and Life of St. Anthony, by St. Athanasius, Paulist Press, especially the long introductory commentary in this latter work.

³ That is, objects or figures whose nature it is to represent and give access to states of consciousness described traditionally in terms of heavens or hells, powers, deity, revelations, union, integration, etc.

⁴ Panikkar’s article “Deity” from Encyclopedia of Religion, (Mircea Eliade, ed.): “As a symbol, deity represents the human struggle at its highest; it represents man’s effort to discover his identity in confrontation with the limits of his universe. Deity is the symbol of what transcends the human being and the symbol of what lies hidden most deeply within him…”, p. 264.

⁵ See ‘Existentialism’ under ‘Abstract Expressionism’ in Frost PhD Appendix, www.nepsis.com.

⁶ Stephen Polcari,Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1991) p. xx.   “The artists seldom worked with programmatic intent, that is, they never planned their paintings as doctrinal or merely intellectual thesis. Titles were most often added after the paintings were finished–sometimes several months after in titling sessions with friends…   [The titles] can be from Greek myth, Native American ritual or nature… If one probes beyond the surface to the underlying, overlapping themes; however, the titles fall into place at different points along the thematic stream… The classic case is Pollack’s “Pasiphae” of 1943, which was originally entitled “Moby Dick.” It was retitled after the suggestion of a critic and friend, James Johnson Sweeney. Moby Dick was a symbol of the struggle with the dark animal nature of human beings in the period. The story of Pasiphae restates the struggle with the physical union of a Cretan queen and a powerful bull that leads to the issue of the Minotaur, half human, half animal. While not identical, the two titles address the same idea from different angles… They [titles] often can be interchanged from painting to painting. For example, Lee Krasner’s “Gaea and Combat” of the mid-1960s with their dramatic, swirling, mythic biomorphic forms, or Adolph Gottlieb’s “Voyager’s Return” with its sailing ship imagery and “Untitled–Heavy White Lines” with its ship-rowing forms, both of the mid-1940s–as long as the intended underlying associations are recognized. Such associations originate from the artists’ and the culture’s themes. That a critic suggested “Pasiphae” as a title to Pollack also indicates how widespread were particular themes and associations in the period. As Lee Krasner once said of Pollock’s titles, Abstract Expressionist titles ultimately had to agree with the artist’s “thinking.”

⁷ According to Panikkar: 1. The ancient ages were characterized by the theological belief that Man’s life is part of the divine adventure. And the rituals express the struggle of men and gods all together. The first Hellenic and Vedic ages are examples. 2. The middle ages are represented by the cosmological belief that man’s dignity consists in collaborating in the sustenance of the world. The ancient rituals and sacred mysteries are thus converted into expressions of and means for the human participation in the destiny of the universe. The Gita, the Hellenic, and Christian mysteries here come to mind. 3. Modernity is shaped by the humanistic belief that man’s life justifies itself by being of service to the human race and working together toward the progress of society. The ancient rituals are here transformed in the ethical behavior of the community, be this nation, state, party, church, academia, or any other group.

*   …Panikkar believes that we now live in the world of technocracy which he calls the Fourth World. To Panikkar and most of humanity, both these worlds are realities, although they are the worlds of the past. Modern man no longer needs to appease the gods or even be on good terms with them in order to live peacefully. The same applies to his relationship to the tyrant, king, or the authorities that be. There is no longer a need to understand nature in its own terms, the sun, the climate, the elements, etc. We have created another world, “the mega machine which now we feel we are caught in and find more difficult than to appease the gods or to kill the tyrant or to tame nature.” ** The Fourth World [of technocracy] operates in autonomy. It does not leave room for freedom and spontaneity. For Panikkar spontaneity is the act of letting being be. Letting being express, without self-conscious interference. *** It is intimately related to and necessary for creativity, for art. **** This spontaneity is necessary for the Shift and defines artistic creativity.

*Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice–the Sacrifice of Time and the Ritual of Modernity”, ed. J. T. Fraser, Study of Time III (New York, 1978) p. 689.

**Cargas interview with Panikkar, p. 5. Dr. Harry James Cargas, an outside reader for the Panikkar material of Frost dissertation, conducted a long interview with Panikkar, tape recorded, January 6-11, 1982, published 1997. These references are taken from the typed text of the interview, p. 79.

***See Chapter Two of Frost dissertation (GTU, Berkeley, 1995 note # 30, p. 61-62. Or, Cargas interview p. 71.

****Cargas interview, p. 83, story about “Alfaire X.”

⁸ Panikkar, R. “A Christophany for Our Times”, Bellarmine Lecture, 1991, p.1. There are problems with the new science that its early enthusiasts did not anticipate; such as, atomic weapons, massive population explosions and environmental degradation. We, at the other end of the enthusiasm, inextricably enmeshed in scientific thinking need not reject science, but must now re evaluate both science and religion in terms of their effects upon society and environment, according to Panikkar.

⁹ Landau, Ellen. Jackson Pollack, (New York: Abrams, 1989) p. 89ff.

¹⁰ Rothkrug, Lionel. “Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation,” Historical Reflections, (Concordia University, Ontario, Canada, 1980). Lionel Rothkrug in this article posits that the period following the Renaissance in Europe was a period of battle for control of the Penitential systems of Europe. That is, who is it that seemingly controls how you get to heaven. In a conversation with Rothkrug in the GTU library, Fall 1993, he agreed that this conflict was still a central characteristic of the modern period, with the artists carrying the Modernist banner. This was reflected in such movements as Kandinski’s “Blue Rider” group, the Surrealists, and American Abstract Expressionists, as well as in literary and philosophical circles.

¹¹That we are far from… paradise would be a major under-statement in Panikkar’s evaluation of our current condition. According to him, it is not that we have made a mistake. Nor is it that we make the kind of mistakes that prophets and wise men traditionally warned us about. These mistakes, on the whole, leave our general direction uncontested. For the first time on a global scale, it is becoming clear to us that what is wrong is not that we have made mistakes but that the very flow of history, the very direction which we collectively are engaged in is wrong and ultimately destructive. (Cargas Interview, p. 18.)

¹² Fr. T. Yang PhD (Louvain), my first monastic teacher, when responding to my question about the stripping of Catholic liturgy during Vatican II of so many of its ancient symbols and actions, said that ‘…we need to develop a new system of symbols around the basic sacrament that speaks of our own lives and times. This might take several centuries….’ Fr. Yang was well-versed in the liturgical changes of Vatican II. Panikkar disputes the Teilhardian passivity of such evolutionary patience. But perhaps Fr. Yang is just more fatalistic than Fr. Panikkar.

¹³ Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists used certain techniques to access the unconscious by overcoming preconceived notions about reality. For instance, in learning to draw one might use the opposite hand of orientation in order to produce images out of normal control. Or at a more advanced stage, one faces a blank canvas without a preconceived idea about subject or image. One just paints and allows the sub and unconscious to express… “Automatism” is probably the most famous technique.   Also, since the Renaissance, the artist is critical commentator rather than anonymous illustrator working for the Church or other patrons. (Artists in traditional Tibetan culture are also “guided” by the dictates of lamas or other patrons which fixes their status as artisans.) Art and artist as mystic and critic, becomes a weapon in what Rothkrug’s perspective sees as the battle for control of Europe’s spiritual vision. See note #26, Chapter Four, p. 87, Frost dissertation, GTU, Berkeley, 1995.   The problem: No cosmology, no sense of the whole or its value, therefore no sense of its parts, or persons or how to behave: Rather businessmen and careerists, blithely headlong upon mental steeds edging the precipice of extinction: Satisfaction? Rather, exploitation and a dilettantes obsessive, discursive curiosity about bits and pieces of the universe… ¹⁴ For Panikkar, “full human activity” involves the full employment of discursive and non-discursive faculties–mystically, sensually, intellectually, culturally. This is not only for persons but for culture operating in a cosmotheandric reality; cosmos, deity, humanity. Panikkar, “A Christophany for our Times”, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine Lecture (St. Louis: St. Louis University Press, 1991) p. 11. ______________________________________________________

Day at the Beach

NOTES Satisfaction Part II  

¹Ouspensky, L. Meaning of Icons New York: St. Vladimir Press. p.34.

² Ibid.

³Panikkar, 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…?”

Dana Point Pyre

1. The Theology of Raimundo Panikkar provides a context large enough to accommodate a wide array of important human elements. This is of particular significance since an expansive context is necessary for the operation and discussion of the shift of consciousness between discursive and non-discursive perception. Perhaps that is the signal characteristic of Panikkar’s schema in relationship to the interests of this project. His work, his system of values referent to the history of religion and modern consciousness, provide the context in which the operation of the shift of consciousness is always implicit and sometimes an overt requirement. Three terms, Pratityasamutpada, Nairatmyavada, Avyakrtavastuni, from Panikkar’s Silence of God, describe generally the parameters of our discussion. I use them to subtitle, respectively, the three chapters of this section.   In Section II: Panikkar: Chapter 2 discusses the general themes and positions that characterize the works of Raimundo Panikkar necessary to the research.1 Pratityasamutpada refers to the primordial law or essence of how things work, from the Buddha’s point of view. This understanding results from the Buddha’s enlightenment experience in Bodhgaya, when he came to understand the past, present, and future in its essence. Thus, Chapter Two displays the essence of Panikkar’s system of thought in the face of what he calls ecstatic consciousness 2 or that particular shift of consciousness studied here from the prehistorical period to our own age of rationalism and logic.   Chapter 3 treats specifically the role that the shift of consciousness plays in his work. 54 Nairatmyavada refers to the question of a self, or human identity, Atman or Anatman. What is the nature of human experience in time and out of it? Who is it that has the experience? Is there no self to experience? “…there is no ‘itself’ to change skins: the ‘selves’ are precisely dynamic points” in a network of relationships of dynamic points, according to Panikkar.3   Chapter 4 projects these views into the future of the world and into certain cosmological concerns, such as “the rhythm of Being”, that develop in Panikkar’s world-view pertinent to the shift of consciousness, art, and the experience of religion. Avyakrtavastuni refers to the typical Buddhist calm. “The gentle, smiling Buddha does not refuse to speak, but as we see from our texts, he surely refuses to answer”, i.e., to enter into a dialectic about ultimate things, about God.4 Without avoiding the issue of eternity, in Chapter Four we explore Panikkar’s projections about the world in the face of the unspeakable. In other words, building upon the discussion of temporal and non temporal reality from Chapter Three, we examine the processes of the world that bring us to silence, the peace of Christ. 55     SECTION II: CHAPTER TWO SURVEY(PRATITYASAMUPADA: PRIMORDIAL LAW)   Panikkar’s vision is one of integration. He resolves conflicts by finding new concepts which afford unity in the face of opposition and exclusivity. Neologisms abound in his work–for instance, his “cosmotheandric” view of reality. This term unites cosmic, divine and human dimensions on a level of identity, though not necessarily on levels of quantity or equality. While these three are one in a sense of spiritual identity, the nature of reality for Panikkar is not monolithic–even ultimate reality is not monolithic. The real world is a world of variety and complexity. In his words, “Pluralism penetrates into the very heart of the ultimate reality.”5 He applies this principle to religions: “Each religion has unique features and presents mutually incommensurable insights. Each statement of a basic experience is to be evaluated on its proper terrain and merits, because the very nature of truth is pluralistic.”6 How then, one might ask, do we communicate with others who stand on another truth which is not ours? According to Panikkar, we must engage in dialogue, but not in the usual dialectical manner. Dialectical dialogue, which exists to convert or even to understand is not enough. Panikkar presents the option of dialogical dialogue which is “opening myself to another so that he might speak and reveal my myth that I cannot know by myself because it is transparent to me…”7 The other person helps me in an unusual way. “A myth is something in which you believe, without believing that you believe it.” One who aids us in de-mythologizing our myth actually forces us to establish new myths. Humankind cannot live without myths nor without changing its myths, and in dialogical dialogue we are able to acknowledge this truth without the threat of destroying the thread 56 of one’s tradition or the fabric of one’s culture.8 “The Church’s attitude is no mere stratagem for ingratiating herself with the other religions but something far weightier: she looks on the religions of the world as paths to salvation for those who go along them in good faith.”9 “To speak of man as an individual is, in my opinion, totally insufficient and eventually wrong.”10 Panikkar often makes the distinction between the individual and the person. The perfection of the human individual is not the fullness of human nature; it is not the individual, but personhood that is the fullness of the human; individuality is not the essence of humanity, but the ineffable and unique existence of the person.11 According to Panikkar, “everything in the world is interrelated and … beings themselves are nothing but relations.”12 Panikkar remarks that unlike the King James translation of Luke which says that the kingdom of God is within you, or the New English Bible which has God’s kingdom among you, he finds it more correct to know that the kingdom of God is between you, which is what the Greek preposition “entos” means and which clearly emphasizes the relational nature of both person and God.13 Here is the basis for the significance that he places on the relational attitude of cosmos, theos and anthropos–Cosmotheandric–nature of not only the world but heaven as well. In this is emphasized the importance of the dialogic approach to communication, for only in such dialogue is pluralism, co-existence, democracy, even justice and peace possible.14 It is important to note that the role of icons and mandalas in their respective cultures are examples of integrated, holistic communication of cosmotheandric dimensions. Yet, each of these is the particular product of its own religious cultures with its own unique features. Still, it is the ability to shift consciousness in a particular way that gives one access to the meaning of such art forms. It is the shift of consciousness to 57 these other realms of mystical significance that have given rise to these art forms in the first place. Their function within religious culture is part of the dynamic relationship between this world and the “other” states of consciousness that Panikkar would identify as appropriately relational in the cosmotheandric sense.15 These are art forms which treat of that about which one can say nothing directly but only experience. Thus, such art is primarily an aid to ineffable experience, an artifact of such experience once it has passed.16 Beyond certain important references to the trinitarian nature of Deity, Panikkar does not say much more about God. His approach is remarkably Buddhist for a Catholic priest. Panikkar has explained the deep rooted theism behind the Buddha’s lack of reference to God. Buddha perceived that God is beyond all possible naming. “He tells us that any speaking of the name of God, that any talk about God, and even all thought, are just so many blasphemies.”17 There is nothing more to be said about God, then. God is that about which there can be no talk. However, as mentioned above, Panikkar does talk about the trinitarian structure of all creation, certainly of human perception, a structure upon which Christianity does not hold a monopoly. He mentions that every bit of reality carries the trinitarian imprint, i.e., his cosmotheandric principle of Gods, Men, and Cosmos. He declares, “I know of no culture where heaven-earth-hell, past-present-future, gods-men-world, and even pronouns I-you-it… are not found in one form or another.”18 In this vein of unity and plurality, Panikkar develops an important approach to the major philosophic problem of the “One and the Many” in his book Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics. Here, he explains that Advaita Vedanta “understands itself as the culmination of all religions and philosophies insofar as it leads to and interprets the 58 “ultimate experience” of non-duality, i.e., the essential non-separability of the Self, atman, and God, brahman.”19 This unity finds its importance in Panikkar’s work as his thought unfolds about pluralistic and relational aspects of persons, nations, cultures, and religions. The significance of the shift of consciousness finds its place in all these categories, but most clearly in the experience of individuals and the development of cultures and religions. Through this ecstatic shift–the fundamental characteristic of universal Shamanistic experience, indispensable attribute of meditation, and necessary vehicle of any mystical realization–we move outside ourselves in relationship with the “other” and discover our in-depth personhood. According to Panikkar, peoples and world religions can no longer exist, isolated by mutual indifference. “The expression ‘our pluralistic society’ has almost become a cliché. In spite of the technical supremacy of the West, they impact each other and none can avoid the omnipresent action of the various world views.”20 Panikkar sees this question of the one and the many as perhaps the central human question as “one becomes aware of both the need for diversity and the need for unity.”21 According to the famous Tibetologist, Herbert Guenther, in his book The Matrix of Mystery, the Nyingmapa doctrine of Dzog Chen, which relies heavily on mandalic perceptions, deals with this question of diversity and unity in terms of what Guenther refers to as the “Fury of Being” and its “Rectification.” The Mandalic configuration describes a process of creation, integration, and disintegration in a dynamic, experiential–the human body and the universe are the first mandalas after all–yogic ritual that incorporates individual(s), cosmos, and Nirvanic or transcendent realizations.22 Still, some people resolve in favor of monism, others prefer dualism but Panikkar suggests the more accurate reflection is in advaita, neither one nor two, but a non-dualism in which a tensile polarity is maintained.23 59 “To take religions seriously and, further, to experience them from within, is to believe, in one way or another, in what these religions say.”24 Here, Panikkar goes beyond such schools as Process Theology because “they want to be universal from a perspective which is seen as universal only from within the system.”25 We must view these issues not from “my” Christianity, “his” Hinduism, or “her” Islam. The differences which appear in world religions are basic and ultimate. “If we take religious pluralism seriously we cannot avoid asserting that truth itself is pluralistic–at least for the time being, which is our being in time, and on which we need to rely for our very thinking.”26 A brief commentary on these last words is required as they serve to introduce the next category of Panikkar’s point of view. Panikkar’s concept of time is crucial to his understanding of reality and meaning. This will be developed more fully in Chapter Three, since important connections are provided there by which this study of the shift of consciousness relates to Panikkar’s work. But, in brief: Time should be measured not only horizontally but as a spiral and vertically as well, not only in duration but in cycles and depth. For instance, the phenomenon that impressed me the most during my stay with the Zuni Indians, was how the festal calendar structures their lives while describing the passage of time so differently than that of the business world in mainstream America. How time is transformed by the Zuni year might be compared with the festal cycles of the Catholic Church with its Christ feasts, solemnities, and saint’s days, as well as Buddhism’s full moon festivals, Kalpic eons, among many such practices.27 60 Panikkar observes three modes of consciousness which are neither mutually exclusive nor dialectically opposed. They are kairologically related. He distinguishes three moments in history: the non historical, the historical, and the trans historical.   When the past is the paradigm through which we experience time, we have the nonhistorical moment (memory and faith are central); when it is the future, historical consciousness prevails (the will and hope are predominant); and when past and future are lived in terms of the present, we share in the trans-historical experience of reality (the intellect and love become fundamental.)28 Before the invention of writing, humanity had no way to project all of its creations into the future. The past had us in its grip; tradition was paramount. Time comes from the beginning: Mythos.29 With writing, progress is key. Time is seen to move forward. The future belongs to God, God to the future: History.30 But when Man split the atom, the apparently indestructible elements of reality became vulnerable, the past broke, the future collapsed. Only the present is left: Mysticism.31 According to Panikkar, time must be seen not as the construct of culture but as the rhythm of nature. Panikkar gives an example of other-worldly time as seen in the lives of certain monks for whom all hurry loses its meaning. Efficiency and purpose fade away. The person who lives in this other worldly condition “was, is,” “not does, not has.” Being is unified. “Doing” and “having” entail multiplicity. But, Panikkar makes this important distinction between the nature of this unity and creativity. Being is a “kind of total spontaneity.” The Indian effort is not “thinking and being” but “being and wording”: “being and letting being be; being and letting being escape. This element of spontaneity is also found to a significant degree with self-expressive art of modernity. It is being and letting being express itself, without the reflection of self-consciousness, without going back to the being from which you have departed. It is a kind of total spontaneity. Being 61 explodes itself into being, into word, into the expression of that being… being is just… explosion!”32 There is an implicit connection here between the explosion, the Word, and creativity. In Panikkar’s framework, creation and creativity is absolutely connected with sacrifice. Since God had no primal “stuff” from which to create, he had to use himself. “By sacrifice the world is made and maintains itself in existence; by sacrifice the entire cosmos returns to its source.”33 Panikkar stresses in Worship and Secular Man: “sacrifice is by its nature a theandric act, an act in which God and man have to work together in order that the world be maintained; it is a cosmic act, for the subsistence of the world depends upon it.”34 Panikkar suggests that God cannot perform the sacrifice without human cooperation. Similarly, Man requires divine help, since he alone is impotent to make the sacrifice acceptable. From these archaic notions, Panikkar maintains the fabric of tradition and culture by projecting into the future, or the present, a contemporary vision of value for secular or religious appreciation.   To be engaged in the perfection of the cosmos is not vanity, but the fullest realization of the person. The crisis of our contemporary human period, at the same moment its great opportunity and vocation, is to realize that the human microcosm and material microcosm are not two separate worlds, but one in the same cosmotheandric reality, in which precisely the third ‘divine’ dimension is the unifying link between the other two dimensions of reality. Otherwise, to withdraw into the business of saving one’s soul becomes sheer egoism or cowardice, and to fling oneself into the taste of saving the world sheer vanity or presumption.35 It is for this “divine” cohesion that the integrative capacity in the shift of consciousness is essential. Panikkar voices these concerns with great urgency:   Today’s world is in effervescence and even more, it is at a boiling point. Those who abstain become decisive factors within the mutation which is taking place. If mankind’s venerable traditions do not contribute in forging a new mentality, the latter will be formed without their 62 immediate impact… there is no way we can avoid the urgency of the situation.36 We must understand the part that this shift of consciousness plays in these “venerable traditions” in order to understand Panikkar’s urgent concern here. The difference between the “venerable” vision and this emerging mentality is vast and vastly nuanced.37 It is only by a radical, in-depth experience facilitated by the shift that we can “know” the world in a way that Panikkar understands will contribute positively to the emerging “new mentality.”38 Panikkar would say along with St. Paul, “Show me your resurrection. The rest does not matter one bit.”39 The resurrection, not unlike the somewhat more humble psychokinetic event recorded in the story “EBACY ’91” to be found in my art catalog at the end of Chapter Five, is evidence of the shift of consciousness. Like an archeological artifact, it is the evidence of a cultural and personal complex perhaps otherwise missed. One participates in this transfer of self, this communion, when one goes out of oneself dialogically, assimilating along the way other views of reality that change one’s own profoundly.40 In this process one not only engages levels of reality that might resolve one’s terrestrial issues, but one must encounter “deity,” if “encounter” is an adequate reference, since it is meta-ontological, beyond being. According to Panikkar: “The apophatism is absolute. The deity neither is nor exists, nor is it thinkable or speakable. Possible names for this deity are sunyata, …neither Being nor Nonbeing… To think about it would be idolatry… In a word, deity connotes the highest form of life.”41 Thus, the only proper attitude toward it is silence since silence best befits it; silence says nothing, there being nothing to say. 63 Avoiding idolatry, the shift of consciousness is a human capacity, a creature whose activity, sustenance, and mystical dimension, indeed, whose life, whose ultimate purpose is described by this imageless, apophatic emptiness. Yet, it is an emptiness whose product is the creative fecundity that Panikkar tries to describe with new terms and concepts: dialogic, cosmotheandric, ontonomy, mutual fecundation, and many more. One can say that a sunyasin–i.e. one who is inspired to renounce the world of domestic, civil life, to become a pilgrim depending upon divine mercy–experiences the shift of consciousness. What makes the mere yogi into a sunyasin is that which results from and happens in the shift, inherently within the heart of this primary human characteristic. Panikkar’s work is an open door, an icon, that allows passage between the world of the mystic, that is, the world of the shift, and the world of critical thought. 64               SECTION II: CHAPTER THREE THE SHIFT (NAIRATMYAVADA: IDENTITY)   The shift of consciousness between “discursive” and “non discursive” states admits to a wide spectrum of descriptions and occurrences throughout history. It can be identified as a specific action or experience associated with an adept, such as a shaman or Zen master. It can become enmeshed in cultural phenomena as sophisticated and complex as one finds in Tibet wherein a society has come to be influenced and altered by its attributes. The very nature of the shift often is only apparent as the artifacts of its effects are discovered and considered. The story of the resurrection of Christ itself might be considered such an artifact, especially in association with such Christian categories as metanoia and kenosis.1 The shift itself is universal and pan-functional precisely because it is the agent, occasion or quality of transfer between temporal and non temporal realms. The following review of Panikkar’s understanding of time, including references to the importance of myth and dream in this consideration, will begin to display the environment in which the shift of consciousness operates. Eventually, this will indicate a complex of activities and states accessed by the shift of consciousness. This complex of activities and states is the properly human and natural framework for individual lives and whole cultures, what Panikkar calls “fully human life.”2 This finds models of reference across a full spectrum of human experience, from the Stone Age to the era of computer technology. For instance, Hypertext, mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation, considers a revolution in theories of knowledge which have taken place in this 65 generation. There are a vast number of sources and resources immediately available to the computer operator, interwoven in a web-like context of references. This changes the brain’s process of processing information from a linear, logical, narrative mode to connect the age of the computer and modern media to networks of associations typical of Shamanistic thinking. This contextual approach suggested by the network of associations discussed in Hypertext3 is pertinent since the context of the shift defines much of the nature of this phenomenon.4 The shift has operated often as a quality of phenomenological associations, a world view, found in such categories as myth and archaic theories of time.5 The shift operates, as well, as an innate human capacity giving one access to various experiences in these categories. The story of the Zen archer, told in the introduction to “Interstates,” wherein subject and object lose their dichotomy, illustrates this capacity that opens doors to all the accomplishments of Buddhist mysticism, especially highly relational compassion. 66 Panikkar’s approach to the topic of time is generally twofold. He compares ordinary, everyday time, that is, linear, chronological, historical time, to liturgical mythic, ritual or dream time, which is qualitative, ambivalent, and polydirectional. The basis for this comparison and a resulting synthesis is the use of the paradigm of sacrificial time in Hindu and Christian traditions. Panikkar suggests that the objective and the subjective derive from the philosophical assumptions which underlie traditional theologies and the classical history of religions respectively. He suggests a possible synthesis by presenting the traditional category of sacrifice as still valid for modernity.6 This study encourages us to overcome the subject/object dichotomy at the epistemic level and the natural-supernatural dualism on the ontological plane when dealing with ultimate human problems. “The nature of time is not an a priori occurrence in our minds or in the phenomena themselves, nor is it a posteriori, i.e., detectable only as a given external fact. Time is at the crossing point between consciousness and matter.”7 Any reference to it becomes at once metaphoric or mythic. Its very existence posits the existence of non-time or eternity. There is no evidence of the experience of time after death, for instance. Eternity is the appropriate appellation for this condition of non-time. To these matters, human diction or even mental concepts may not refer directly, if at all. Panikkar’s and the Buddha’s admonition concerning reference to God is quite clear: Silence. One may only experience it as ineffable.8 The operation of artistic metaphor as an expression and exploration of this experience is none-the-less universal, and vital to this dissertation: i.e., the production of the art in the form of stories and paintings documented in the art catalog of Chapter Five. The grimoire-shaman’s technical journal – “Nepsis,” and the novel 67 Adam’s Way, which derives from “Nepsis” and integrates Panikkar’s themes in a fictional context, along with the catalog, document the author’s journey of appreciation for the operation of this metaphor. I have mentioned the operation of myth and dreams and rituals as important to Panikkar’s discussion of time as well as the themes of the shift. If we can agree, as common knowledge, that the operation of the symbol is central to these topics and generally synonymous with the artistic metaphor mentioned above, let us take a brief detour here to discuss symbol as a technique of the shift. This is a usage which engages other states of consciousness, which in turn, alter our experience of time. Panikkar speaks here in a specific context about the use of symbols   …to express an experience of reality in which subject and object, interpretation and interpreted, appearance and its noumenon are inextricably united. God, being, matter, energy, world, mystery, light, man, spirit, and idea are such central symbols. The symbol symbolizes the symbolized in the symbol itself, and not elsewhere. It is different from mere sign.9 Christ is the Christian symbol of all reality. Nothing short of this first and capital sutra will do justice either to Christian belief or to the experience of practically all human traditions. The Christian tradition, emerging from Jewish monotheism and confronting Greek polytheism, regained the trinitarian, age-old intuition of reality as Heaven, Earth, and Man; as God, world, and humanity; Spirit, Matter, and Consciousness. For the Christian, Christ is the central symbol which embodies the entire reality. Christ is that “light which illumines everyone coming into this world”; “all has been made by him” and “in him all things subsist”; “he is the only begotten” and “first born”; the “beginning and end”, “alpha and omega” but also beta, gamma, delta… of everything, the Son of God equal to the Godhead, the icon of the entire reality the “head of a body” still in the making, in the pangs of birth. The adventure of reality is a temporal and spatial egressus from God, coming back, regressus, to the source by going ahead toward the end. This spacial ex-tension and temporal dis-tension is being bridged by the human in-tension of man in “growth to the full measure of Christ.” “God becomes Man in order that Man may become God…” all through the remarkable efficacy of a symbol.10 This is suggestive of the power of the mandala, the icon, the fetish, and the Abstract 68 Expressionist struggle to explore the boundaries of the human psyche and experience. This directs our attention to the power of art both to represent and engage the full spectrum of reality through its efficacy as the symbol that is a technique of the shift that (re)engages this world with the other. The function of Art and Symbol in this reference will be further developed, especially in Chapters Five and Six. Let us now return to our other focus of interest here; Time, Panikkar, and the shift of consciousness. The concept of time as a moment of meeting between matter and consciousness, is of major importance to the contextual approach in this study of the shift, especially to the experiential and personal nature of part of this research. The shift does not exist solely as a temporal phenomenon, a shaman altering consciousness to cure someone’s sickness, for instance, but also as a quality that must be captured in the net of associative, temporal and trans-temporal human perceptions.11 It is the quality of a certain category of experience that claims to move between the temporal and non temporal, the personal and the universal. It is a phenomenon, the real existence of which there is convincing and illuminating anthropological evidence. The capacity of human beings for the shift of consciousness is perhaps basic to all mystical religion as will be further developed below. I had to be a shaman or a priest of a certain type in order to know, even to examine up close, the otherwise transitory and ineffable character of the qualities associated with the shift. One has to be a practitioner in order to know the elements of what is practiced. It is only the full religious capacity of human personality that can experience the full implications of being temporal creatures in the face of the non temporal. This is where the shift operates. Thus, it is only more fully human consciousness, i.e., scientific, artistic, and religious consciousness, that can engage and then comment upon this phenomenon. The rational, discursive dimension of human abilities is not enough to examine this subject as per Panikkar’s methodology. For instance, I had to be an Abstract Expressionist artist in order to access the unconscious realms of interest to the Abstract Expressionist branch of Modernism, in order to appreciate their existential mysticism,12 and to understand the catalytic artifacts, i.e., the paintings and sculptures, of these other world encounters. Just to have read about other people’s experiences of these 69 phenomena, several times removed, produces an entirely different understanding of the subject. It might, according to Panikkar, produce a dangerously fragmented understanding of reality. Perhaps no real understanding at all. For Panikkar, the fragmentation of knowledge is one of the major philosophical issues of our age. From his perspective there cannot be a knowledge separate from the context, i.e., culture, temperament, and education of the one who is learning and acting. This is a problem that he addresses often but especially in the Christological arena where he develops what he calls, Christophany.13 Here he tries to draw together in a reasonable way orthodoxy and orthopraxis. Individual, culture, and cosmos are drawn together in a mystical milieu of gestalt awareness. It is from this perspective which actively encourages a holistic approach that this dissertation tries to engage more fully the full human personality in a perceptive network of discursive and non discursive associations. It is only thus that one can traverse the territory of the shift, according to Panikkar. Something of the rational of his own interdisciplinary and inter-cultural and even trans-temporal methodology is expressed in Panikkar’s Christophany as he roots the Christian temporal experience firmly in history as well as maintaining its coherence with universal and non temporal qualities. Creation is creatio continua, as the scholastics said. And according to Panikkar, it is not something which happened just at the beginning of time. It is not a mere cosmological assertion about where to place the Big Bang. Creation is at the basis of every time, of every temporal existence; it is the foundation on which time, concrete time, the temporality of every instant, rests. The protological, sometimes called preexistent Christ, is the same as the historical Christ, and the historical Christ is not separable from the eucharistic and risen Christ. And similarly the coming Christ, the parousia Christ is not separable from the eucharistic and risen Christ. So the eschatological Second Coming is not another Incarnation or a second Christ appearing here or there. We have been warned not to believe in any appearance of the coming Messiah here or there. The Kingdom does not come at a specific moment and one cannot tell by observation when it comes. (Lk 17:20-24).14 “It is in this sense that christophany helps us to live consciously our tempiternal life, the fullness of life which has integrated past, present, and future the trikala of some indic traditions so that life may be lived abundantly (Jn 10:10).”15 The Church 70 understands itself to be the place where the incarnation takes place. And here is a reference to the shift in its ultimate sense. Just as the Church, since Origen and St. Cyprian in the middle of the third century formulated that famous statement: extra ecclesiam nulla salus, outside the church there is no salvation, we are exposed to a tautological emphasis: Wherever salvation happens, there is the church. Ecclesia is understood as locus salutis. This is the cosmic and soteriological understanding in the primordial Katholike: the church which exists throughout the universe, space, time, and eternity.16 There is always an urgency that one senses behind Panikkar’s theology: The shift of consciousness changes our experience of time; it opens and breaths from eternity; it carries our perception from a one-dimensional track heading towards death, to a living ambiance of fulfilling experience that engages ultimate meaning: “Mankind peers longingly over at the other shore from its own milieu of limitations: Of knowledge (power), of space (communication), and of time (fullness).”17 The last of these is the worst according to Panikkar, since it implies not only the impossibility of gathering together the past and the future into the lived present, but also the shocking discovery of a normally inexperience able limit a quo, birth; and another, still more intriguing and equally beyond experience limit ad quem, death. Man’s temporal limitation touches him to the very core: We experience it as something painful, humiliating… My real ego cannot be only today’s ego, [What about last year’s ego that was different than today’s?] and yet [today’s ego] seems to be practically all that is left to me.”18 The most astonishing thing, however, remains the fact that we are conscious of this split so that, in a sense, in our present, there is a certain presence of our past and our future. Human consciousness seems to be peculiarly trans-temporal. “In a certain way, if I want to be my-self, I must somehow gather up all three times and most probably, transcend time altogether. In sum, conquering time- i.e. mastering my temporal dispersion- seems to be the fundamental condition of being my-self, [for modern consciousness]. But how to achieve it?”19 71 In suggesting the possible hows of this fundamental condition Panikkar describes a condition of consciousness that requires, consciously or not, the shift of consciousness that embraces and is the full three-dimensional spectrum of reality, the fullness of Being. For Panikkar, Being is simply, “everything that is” of this temporal world or the other, non temporal one.20 The art; Mandalas, Icons, and Abstract Expressionist pieces as well as the spiritual techniques such as pilgrimage, ritual, devotional attitudes, and study as well as other practices detailed elsewhere in “Interstates” are all possible vehicles to accomplish the translation between these two worlds and the unification of their mutual exclusivity. Panikkar sees this unification as fundamental to the nature of sacrifice. I suggest that the shift of consciousness is that interstate, the realm of the moment when this translation or unification takes place. It is the sacrificial, liturgical moment. This can only happen and be of significance in the human personality because of what Panikkar describes as the peculiarly trans-temporal nature of human consciousness that must master the temporal dispersion–past, present, future, and non-time as it struggles to conquer time. This in order to fulfill the fundamental condition for being one’s self. “In sum, conquering time, i.e., mastering my temporal dispersion-seems to be the fundamental condition for being my-self.”21 This capacity to operate in and to unify both temporal and non temporal realms is the defined stance of each of the representative religious traditions in Chapter One: Shaman as master of ecstasy, Hesychast contemplative as master of enstacy, and Buddhist as master of meditation (states). The Abstract Expressionist Artist is master and victim of this modern dilemma of fragmentation in knowledge and the capacities used to process knowledge in the human personality itself. Here is a primary characteristic of the dilemma about which Panikkar speaks so urgently, i. e., the wholeness of being or its diaboli, tearing apart.22 Myth and dream play important roles in all of these traditions of the shift. Panikkar often speaks of the myth of history23 as being the myth par excellence of the 72 West and of modern thought. That we view history solely as nonfiction contributes to the peculiar degree of tension associated with our temporality in the West. As also presented by Panikkar, the myth of history tries to ease the tension between past and present and also between present and future, performing the same function in both cases, namely that of linking time with non-time, namely eternity or at least bringing together the different fragments of time.24 There seem to be several ways of solving this fundamental human unease, dubkham. Panikkar classifies these ways as (A.) attempts to overcome the tension, or (B.) efforts to put up with it.   (A.) …either denies the basis of the tension, avoiding the subject altogether or B.) “it tries to transform the condition of the tension so that it can be conquered.” Buddhism represents A) typically by “denying the existence of the patient.” There is nothing permanent in an individual to sense the tension. There really is no individual. No soul. This denial is not merely intellectual, it is a “personal conquest” an experience that can be realized. (B.) Transforming the tension is either “gnoseological” (consciousness is identified with being–e.g. Vedanta), or ontological. If it is the second case, ontological, we have most the religious traditions of the world that believe in the ultimate transformation of humanity, including secular humanism, Marxism, and radical nihilism.25 This ontological category is represented in the art catalog of Chapter Five in the form of a story, “EBACY ’91.” It refers to a state of Being in the process of being transformed. It describes an occurrence of the shift, that caused a Shamanistic event involving psychokinetic powers.26 The story, “EBACY ’91,” tied this event, as evidence of the shift, to the intentions of the characters to change certain things about themselves and the world they lived in. But there is also what Panikkar might recognize as glimmerings of a Vedantic quality to this psychokinetic event. That is, what it took to get to the point so that this character in the story was able to engage paranormal functions 73 such as psychokinesis. The model for this story is, of course, the gospel miracle stories that provide evidence that Jesus had other world connections. This story also represents processes that cradle the teleological character of religious initiation, i.e., it describes an unusual baptism instruction in detail. In a highly abstracted way it portrays an unusual event to represent the process and the powers that might be engaged, Shamanistically, from the “other world” to resolve human dilemmas. An age-old religious phenomenon is presented in the form of a sacred drunkenness.27 That leads to the surprising but not unexpected, paranormal event. In a certain sense, this story represents the whole of “Nepsis” in so far as that work describes the context and experience of spiritual initiation and the Shamanistic encounter between temporal and non temporal, mythic and historic, dream and waking perception, finally being unable to distinguish between such dichotomies. For a Catholic priest to be radically drunk, often, as in my catalog story, with his college students is Tantric in its spontaneous, ritual, breaking of taboo in order to access other, important realms of reality, even ultimate realms: the holy.28 It is Shamanistic in that the use of mind altering substances within a sanctuary of the sacred is nearly universal in Shamanistic, agrarian cultures and because of the psychokinetic event that climaxes the experience. The relationship between the priest and the students, in this case, would be the sanctuary. This Tantric operation if practiced in full would involve a whole cosmology of associations. But in particular it would involve the circulation through the whole body and personality, analogous to the universe, of the vital, psychic energies. Raising these energies from the psychic center at the base of the perineum Muladhara up through the (psychic) central nervous system to the crown chakra Sahasrara at the top of the head is the action that reunites heaven and earth, male and female, Kundalini and Shiva, all duality, to produce the Nirvanic condition of Enlightenment, or energies for magical purposes. In the Hesychasm, something comparable is in progress when the Great Robe Monk, or the thaumaturge, draws the sexual energies up and pushes the intellectual energies down into the heart, the symbolic center of the personality, to experience a spiritual, eternal, Eucharist of the divine indwelling. Panikkar proposes something 74 similar when he tries to draw together the elements of time, past-present-future, into one moment of trans-temporal, eternal consciousness. It was my intention that this story, “EBACY ’91,” in a precise and disturbing way, depict an cosmotheandric attitude resulting from the mutual fecundation of cultures and religions, so important to Panikkar and at the same time display the urgency about certain issues, such as the fragmentation of knowledge and therefore personality and culture, that is of concern to Panikkar.   Attitudes about the phenomenology of time and shift of consciousness express themselves as central to any consideration of sacrifice and ritual. As Panikkar writes:   The case in point here is the recovery of the profound meaning of ritual, so often overshadowed by ceremonies and paraphernalia, not only in ritualistic practices but also in the philosophical and theological universes. Ritual is the act by which Man tries to reach, obtain, express, or do what is otherwise inaccessible by any other means… An embrace of peace can be ritual when it expresses more than what I can say and do, and a meal becomes a sacramental rite when it not only feeds the body… but also instills grace… A style of dress… becomes liturgical when it symbolizes what otherwise is not visible… It is on this common ground, with all the ambivalence it possesses, that the nature and function of sacrifice is situated.29 According to Panikkar, a phenomenology of sacrifice would yield the following:   1. Man wants something else, something more than his situation allows. 2. At first, he “stretches his hand out in space… and waits in time… to reach the expected maturity.” 3. …the temporal flow alone does not bring the expected results. …the machine reaches further than the hand and internal effort is required to obtain the glory and strength he desires. No wonder that an aura of sacredness surrounded the first material tools and the first spiritual exercises. 75 4. …the help of others is required, others who have more power: the hero, the elder, the ancestors and the God. Entreaty and supplication, imitation and emulation appear on the scene. The ritual appears. 5. Machines and techniques do not help. “A rupture of planes has to take place; [The shift] Man has to jump outside his given situation, he has to be initiated… This is the place of the sacrifice: the act by which Man transcends his factual human situation and reaches what he wants– health, riches, a prosperous family, heaven, wisdom, joy, divinity…” “… the action by means of which Men believe they will fulfill those desires which they cannot achieve alone, is the very core of the sacrifice. It is that ritual which breaks the planes in order to reach transcendence.” 6. “This act always takes the form of a rupture: something is destroyed, cut, burned, offered–precisely sacrificed– in order to reach the transcendent.” 7. “… the sacrificer seeks to deal with the temporal situation of Man in one way or another, and precisely by this fact, to save, redeem, enhance, make happy, enrich… the human being.”30 In this instance, the shift is the phenomenological capacity for moving one’s consciousness in a direction that passes through or causes this rupture in planes to address both material and spiritual issues. From the Vedic point of view, “by the sacrificial act, Man reaches the shores of the other world, and is saved from the grip of time.”31 This dissertation declares that it is because Mankind can shift consciousness in a particular way that the sacrifice can be made and time transcended. This capacity, then, seen as basic, begins to describe a common cosmology of perception that is universal, archaic, “developing out of the early stone age”32 and yet contemporary to the degree that it might also be a basic ingredient to religious sentiment of the future. Let us leave for now 76 further prognostications of this sort to Panikkar’s vision of the future to be treated at length in Chapter Four of this dissertation. The Christian sacrifice also performs a trans-temporal function. Christ’s sacrifice, already prefigured by Abel, Melchizedek, and Abraham, is a ritual over which Christ presides as High-priest for all humanity. In the liturgy of Christ’s sacrifice, the Christian is “entering into a relation with that act which was at the beginning of the World, has redeemed the cosmos and continues until the total divinization of the universe.”33 “…that sacrifice is an act which transcends time and space, an act by which past sins are forgiven and future grace is treasured, an act which connects us with the beginning of the World and has eschatological repercussions.”34 Navajos sand paintings perform a similar mythic function when used in a healing ritual.35 Christians who share in the mystery of Christ do so by means of the sacrifice. They lift up mundane life into the life of Christ himself, and by doing this, share in the mystery of the cosmotheandric universe. Time is overcome by sacrifice:   Time is sacrificed, destroyed, pierced through and a transtemporal core uncovered. But again time exists because of the primordial sacrifice (of god) that has called the temporal reality into being. Thus one could sum up at least these two highly representative traditions saying that time both springs from and dies through ritual. It is sacrifice that makes time, and ultimately destroys time and enables the World to reach its tempiternal core… It constitutes the dignity of Man to be able to perform this act.36 Panikkar usually does not mention the shift. The shift is a different level of reference from his usual topic. Sacrifice and ritual are great phenomenological, philosophical, theological categories. They might be noble actions performed consciously by Hindus, Christians, and many others. But from a practical point of view, it remains our immediately adjacent ability to shift consciousness that makes this noble action possible. This, I believe constitutes the power of humankind. However, Panikkar will posit that it is the act of consciousness itself which is different than the reflective response of being aware of being conscious of something. 77 The act of consciousness itself is non temporal. That is that it is not possible to be consciousness of an act of consciousness while one is being conscious of something. One can only reflect upon the fact that one was conscious of something after the fact. Therefore, this act of consciousness is not subject to time. “I may become conscious that I was conscious of something, and then situate the first act of consciousness in space and time, but this is after the fact and another act altogether. Any act of measuring the original act of consciousness is already another act entirely. Therefore, that act is the more fundamental.”37 First, that we are conscious at all; second, that we can reflect upon the fact that we are conscious, Homo Sapiens Sapiens; and then that we can manipulate states of consciousness, or they are manipulated by outside force, in such a way that evokes change minor or great, would seem to be the proper order here and indicates that the shift is active in this operation. The importance of this ability is total, according to Panikkar: “I am saying that the representation or presentation, the appearing or manifestation of reality that constitutes a conscious act, as such, is untouched by time.”38 Therefore, that which is the common trade, the exalted emblem of shamans, Zen masters, and the like, is the result of our fallen, samsaric condition, since Panikkar believes that the fundamental act or moment of consciousness is already, very democratically, outside time, having no need for the gifts and powers of adepts, psychopomps, masters or technocrats to access it. Our immediate temporality necessitates the ability to shift into the even greater immediacy of the original non temporal moment of consciousness. These things are unchartable except through dreams, the ineffable sensations of art, and myths; i.e., symbol and metaphor. Panikkar is an intellectual whose mysticism revels in the “timeless ecstasis behind any true act of understanding.”39 Panikkar feels that it is precisely because we have not a perfectly conscious act, because we are not pure consciousness, we go on living in time. “Could we become pure consciousness or see God face to face, to rephrase Hindu and Christian terminologies, we would jump outside temporal reality altogether and we do it, ‘momentarily’ each ‘time’ that consciousness dawns upon us.”40   78             SECTION II: CHAPTER 4, PROJECTION (AVYAKRTAVASTUNI: NO ANSWER)   This chapter projects Panikkar’s views, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, into the future of the world. Certain cosmological concerns in Panikkar’s world-view, such as “the rhythm of Being”, are treated in this chapter and are pertinent to the shift of consciousness, art, and the experience of religion. Panikkar’s position posits a hermeneutic of sacrifice that would help strengthen the thread between tradition and modernity, and thus help develop the proper approach, or even ritual, that in turn will help modern humanity cope with the discomfort that Panikkar has determined that it feels about its own temporality. Mankind contains a human invariant that can be identified as the “constitutive tension” in human consciousness between “being and becoming”, “the one and the many”, “identity and difference”, “change and continuity”, and also, between “time and eternity.” Parenthetically, Panikkar notes,   my conviction that handling this constitutive tension in dialectical terms expresses both the strength and the weakness of Western culture, and that other traditions approach the problem differently. Only a complementary approach can help us to overcome the increasingly dangerous cultural neo-colonialism of our times.1 The nature of this strength and weakness will become clearer as Panikkar’s analysis of the situation is presented. It should be noted that here is another, insistent encouragement for interdisciplinary, partially non discursive projects such as “Interstates.” The relationship between the shift of consciousness’ occurrence in the history of religions and Panikkar’s ideas about the nature of time, sacrifice, and ritual are the key to the cohesion of this dissertation. For Panikkar the ritual of sacrifice is the primordial and contemporary religious phenomenon. The shift is the function of sacrifice. It is 79 suggested there that the shift is the inherently human capacity that allows ritual to be something more than an intellectual construct. Without the actual shift there would be no internal substance to ritual, and subsequently no real sacrifice. Therefore, there would be no religion, in a traditional or secular sense as developed below. If religious phenomenon could be separated from the shift of consciousness, there certainly would not be mystical religion, or spiritual experience of ultimate import. The ability to shift consciousness within a religious construct is implicit within the gestalt of sacrifice. To understand Panikkar’s place in the contemporary philosophical and theological scene and to further evaluate his theories about time, ritual, and sacrifice, let us review his attitudes about the “science of religion.” In the West, history is the basis of truth. A fact is accepted as real if it can be proved to be a historical fact. This acceptance seems not to reflect upon its own process.   This, in fact, is a rather modern, Western myth probably of Semitic origins,2 and not an experience common to humanity.   To speak of sacrifice as the proper ritual for overcoming time may be easily accepted by the historian of religions when dealing with other people and cultures. But the question becomes much more delicate when applied to our present-day (largely Western) situation.3 Panikkar suggests that the function of the science of religion is not limited to investigating different, novel cultures, but entails broadening its scope and exploring the religious dimension of humanity, including ourselves and our culture. This broader understanding of religious studies which explores the ultimate self-understanding of Man, points to the significance of the underlying insights of the traditional doctrines of sacrifice in the modern secular world. Furthermore, by placing our understanding of our modern predicament in a wider and deeper context, this perspective allows us not only the opportunity to understand it, but also to reform and possibly restructure it. This is relevant since “knowledge and love” have given way to “making and acting.” “Homo sapiens et homo amans are increasingly giving way to homo faber et homo agens.” 4 To further place Panikkar in the modern context: Panikkar does not say 80 that intentional contemplation or wisdom, jnanamarga, and the intentional practice of love and devotion, bhaktimarga, are obsolete or that the traditional karmamarga, right action, is what modern secularized humanity is performing. But he detects a link with such tradition that is connected with a contemporary sense of sacredness applied to secular work. Panikkar sees the shift in the attitude towards time as being key to the transition underlying the industrial age, and therefore our attitude towards work and more importantly, human identity. The clock, a Christian, monastic invention meant for keeping the hours of prayer better, not the steam engine, is the machine that first revolutionized the beginnings of the modern era.5 Our appreciation of time moved from liturgical sacredness to utilitarian commercial production. However, there is in modern, secularized humanity a sense that we are still performing sacrificial actions: The efforts of the good citizen to increase the welfare of society, the concern of the genuine intellectual for the well-being of his fellow beings, the sincere ideal of the scientist in working for the progress of the world, the pains of the honest national or international official takes for the elimination of poverty, disease, hunger, injustice; and the like, could be adduced as examples. We should not minimize the religious pathos behind such attitudes.6 Educators, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and politicians are the dignified and well-honored priests of this modern religiousness. [Are businessmen then, wild warriors on the plains of culture, riding their steeds of commerce; raiding parties stalking the rich village of world resources?] Modern banks are better kept than churches. Sacred hours, hours of sacrifice are working hours. An employee who works overtime is naturally paid more, precisely because he sacrifices more time.7 To take up your time or to ask for some of your time, without compensation, amounts to exploitation.   By means of work the ordinary citizen becomes contemporary with the Founder’s dream, myth, or idea that inspires him to work. He also reaches the ideal of the end of times, when the hardships endemic to work will be taken away and life will be filled with justice and joy. If we organize ourselves well enough, and produce enough “time-saving” 81 technology for everyone, this will redeem us from the effort and pain of [the post-Eden] connection with work… Thus, the sacrifice, the sacrificer, and the sacrificed ultimately coalesce as in the Vedas and the New Testament. All traditional motive of sacrifice have been preserved in the process of being transplanted into another horizon. We have here a typical example of trans-mythicization.8 According to Panikkar: 1. The ancient ages were characterized by the theological belief that Man’s life is part of the divine adventure. And the rituals express the struggle of men and gods all together. The first Hellenic and Vedic ages are examples. 2. The middle ages are represented by the cosmological belief that man’s dignity consists in collaborating in the sustenance of the world. The ancient rituals and sacred mysteries are thus converted into expressions of and means for the human participation in the destiny of the universe. The Gita, the Hellenic, and Christian mysteries here come to mind. 3. Modernity is shaped by the humanistic belief that man’s life justifies itself by being of service to the human race and working together toward the progress of society. The ancient rituals are here transformed in the ethical behavior of the community, be this nation, state, party, church, academia, or any other group.9   From a popular perspective, modernity might also be shaped by Natural Law. But something different than that derived from scholastic thinking. In popular literature Natural Law is “the Law of the Jungle.” The Octopus, by Frank Norris would be an example of this. Capitalists, ranchers, and gangsters are generally free-market economists for whom the first law is to endure. This is the warrior’s motivation. Your honor is motivated by the ability to survive and endure suffering and then, after that, when one’s primary motive is secured, to take a profit, or your leisure, or your enemy’s/competitor’s horses, land, and women. Has Ayn Rand’s party carried the day? Or is it something else. From the latest novel by Robert Pirsig, Lila10 , the author quotes Anthropologist E. A. Hoebel’s conviction that the American Indian is the model for many 82 of the primary modern American values, or, at least values admired by Americans. To wit: The Cheyenne male   …moves with a quiet sense of self-assurance. He speaks fluently, but never carelessly… He is slow to anger and strives to suppress his feelings, if aggravated. Vigorous on the hunt, in war he prizes the active life… Usually quiet, he has a lightly displayed sense of humor… a firm grip on reality. His thinking is rationalistic to a high degree and yet colored with mysticism… He is “mature,” [sic] serene and composed, secure in his social position, capable of warm social relations. He has powerful anxieties but these are channeled into institutionalized modes of collective expression with satisfactory results.11 The author of the preceding quote attributes at least the (anti)-hero masque of the highly popular American cowboy to that model. As well, other traits, such as personal independence, individualism (Plains Indians), a confederacy of independent states (Iroquois), and even how American soldiers drank and fought in the World Wars, are credited to Native American habits. There was little of such values as personal independence or individualism that came from autocratic, hierarchical Europe or Asia. As Panikkar has often said, the defeated undermines and recovers/conquers from below. If true, Hoebel’s conviction is a prime example of the mutual fecundation of cultures. Though, Panikkar uses a European or Asian example, such as Greek culture transforming Roman civilization after Rome’s defeat of the Athens. According to Panikkar, there is now a very great opportunity for mutual fecundation between the old and new in this encounter of modernity and the primordial need to make sacrifice. The essence of the sacrifice is not the item to be burned, buried, or given away. The essence is “the ritual through which humanity finds salvation [which] spacially overcomes the dominion of time and is rescued from its slavery.”12 This had been the task of the shaman. In facing these trans-temporal issues, modern humanity is facing the Shamanistic task. The Modernists, particularly the artists, especially the Abstract Expressionists, attempted to turn their art-making specifically into a means and an experience of exactly this tempiternal reality.13 83 However, according to Panikkar, the secular sacrifice does not take us away from time into some atemporal realm. Secular sacrifice does not save us from time; rather it saves time itself because time needs to be redeemed, purified, sublimated, and eventually made to reveal its tempiternal core. “Neither accelerating [the experience of] time, on the one hand, as the pure secularist would recommend, nor stopping it, on the other hand, as the old shaman would command, would help us to ‘win our lives.'”14 To put it more explicitly, Panikkar believes that neither of the two extremes–creating a better, more humanized technology or destroying it altogether–are practically effective. Moreover, these solutions are theoretically wrong. Panikkar’s question remains: Can modern Man find a path to discover something built in the very heart of time, inseparable from time, and yet not to be confused with it? This is what he refers to as tempiternity, “which is neither an everlasting time, nor a ‘post-temporal’ eternity but the very soul of time as it were. Time without it, is a corpse, but the soul without its body is a mere abstraction.”15 From the perspective of this dissertation, in order to access this tempiternal condition, it will be necessary for both the modern secular mind and modern religion to give credence to the gift of the shift as being able to access, if not the soul of the world, then, at least, inherent capacities in nature for healing, regeneration, and integration. These are ecstatic capacities that are not available to solely intellectual, rational processes. That is, for an intellectual assent to the tempiternal realities to be more than a corpse, the body without the soul of actual experience, then this intellect must engage the shift. It is the task of the mystic or Shamanistic personality to realize that facing the difficult issues of our age are not like facing the evils of the past. Evils which would just pass away eventually. Now, it must be realized that these evils have an ultimate character to them that requires an equivalent largess of response.16 The shift needs to be recognized as an anthropological fact that gives access to realms not otherwise apparent to ordinary consciousness, but necessary for tempiternal realization.   Now, sacrifice is the set of actions which reach the tempiternal core of reality [the reason for religion] and thus gives us, first an 84 awareness of the transcendental value of our authentic acts, and second, the possibility of acting with the full power inherent to those acts.17 Panikkar believes that we now live in the world of technocracy which he calls the Fourth World. The shift is properly a vehicle for transport between the Second and Third Worlds, i.e., the world of the gods and the world of humans. To Panikkar and most of humanity, both these worlds are realities, although they are the “worlds” of the past. Modern man no longer needs to appease the gods or even be on good terms with them in order to live peacefully. The same applies to his relationship to the tyrant, king, or the authorities that be. There is no longer a need to understand nature in its own terms, the sun, the climate, the elements, etc. We have created another world, “the mega machine which now we feel we are caught in and find more difficult than to appease the gods or to kill the tyrant or to tame nature.”18 The Fourth World [of technocracy] operates in autonomy. It does not leave room for freedom and spontaneity. For Panikkar spontaneity is the act of letting being be. Letting being express, without self-conscious interference.19 It is intimately related to and necessary for creativity, for art.20 This spontaneity is necessary for the Shift and defines artistic creativity. Techniques as profound as Zen, or the gifts of the shaman engage the shift, but the complex of personality and culture must be such that all the requisite connections are made in the person for the shift to be most effective. The shaman’s use of hallucinogens would be an example here. In order for one to go on the right inner journey, in accord with the hallucinogenic deity, one must personally and culturally be immersed in the myths and attitudes of one’s world view. Traditional Shamanistic culture was structured to accentuate the experience for the greatest effect. Huichol culture of central western Mexico is but one example of such. In one of their rituals, the shaman goes on pilgrimage to the place where the peyote grows. The peyote is hunted ritually like a deer. The seeker is guided by the deer god to effect the goal of the hunt–for instance, divine realization and the proper resolution of practical problems.21 This is a vastly 85 oversimplified description, but it makes the point of the culturally structured personal experience that must be so deeply inculcated that one’s engagements of these archetypes is spontaneous and immediate, with or without the sacred substance. So, one’s act of consciousness is determined or at least effected by a large web of attitudes, knowledge, emotions, commitments, sentiments, and activities as well as other agents identified variously as gods, archetypes or powers, along with one’s technical understanding of world and experience. From a perspective such as this, and from Panikkar’s tempiternal perspective, the concept of a distant god separate from its creation is blasphemous. Therefore, some secular notions, even so-called atheistic notions have more theological basis because of their demand for self-sacrifice and the search for experience of an immediate totality, such as Abstract Expressionists, not to belabor a point. The Fourth World of technocracy, however, does not prohibit the tempiternal experience necessarily; it has simply made the traditional “webs” unnecessary, so our capacity for trans-temporal experience atrophies. Many already deny that it exists at all. A conscious, wide-spread interest in the shift of consciousness would be a stage of reverse evolution that commands a general audience only after themes such as Panikkar’s were widely attended. It would indicate the practical lived-out application of his philosophical, theological, and sociological concerns. Though it is a spontaneous phenomenon in human beings, the shift of consciousness would be the agent of an intentional integration that accomplishes the proper relationship between22 all things; when modernity becomes aware of its own practice of the universal ritual of sacrifice. That we are far from such a paradise would be a major under-statement in Panikkar’s evaluation of our current condition. According to him, it is not that we have made a mistake. Nor is it that we make the kind of mistakes that prophets and wise men traditionally warned us about. These mistakes, on the whole, leave our general direction uncontested. For the first time on a global scale, it is becoming clear to us that what is wrong is not that we have made mistakes but that the very flow of history, the very direction which we collectively are engaged in is wrong and ultimately destructive.23 This is why Panikkar feels that even works of mercy are tragic because: 86   if you don’t do them you are a callous scoundrel; if you do them, you are only prolonging the agony of an unjust system which would create more evil by its continuation… That’s why… here is a kind of a lack of any sense of direction that we are going [anywhere positive]. And as I am unable to change the general direction so I become a drop out, an outsider or a cynic, or violent or a terrorist or simply quit in a sarcastic way by which I save myself as much as I can.24 To a great extent, from the aesthetic perspective of our postmodern vantage, we do not care so much any more about what concerned the Abstract Expressionist. For many Abstract Expressionists and their followers, the artist was the great shaman making the connection between worlds as the spiritual arm of modernity, in deadly competition with other traditional Western religions for the soul(s) of Europe, America, and now the world.25 But, as in a Pirendello play, the characters are not so easily controlled. The European ideals of modernity have lost their grip. The blind warrior steeds of capitalism and technology are running wild along the precipice, the Grand Canyon of eternity!26 They are   running towards mutual destruction: depletion of the earth and elimination of the unfit and exploitation of the weak, etc. On a world scale. And that is what leads me to all of the analyses I am still doing of a very radical indictment of the very sense of the human project in the last 300 years and perhaps in the last 6,000 years. I think that the moment that we have disconnected pre-history from history and the whole thing of the Nuova Scienza, we have committed a sin–again in the etymological sense–putting asunder something which belongs together. This does not mean 87 that I am pessimistic. I would say that I am very realistic and that we need [a] radical metanoia.27 Panikkar is not totally pessimistic because he does not believe in the exclusively historical character of the human being nor of reality. For him history is not everything. Even if history “goes to the dogs,” the whole of reality is not for that matter destroyed or eliminated. History is the Western myth par excellence. In a minor way, it is part of the human project for the last 6,000 years. That is why he speaks of prehistorical, historical, and post-historical consciousness. Panikkar feels that while we come to the end of historical consciousness as the dominant mode of thought; to speak of post-history in even Teilhardian categories would be insensitive to the enormous human suffering that this mutation may entail. He finds it too cynical to witness three-quarters of the entire planet being destroyed while consoling oneself by saying that it is the “seed of a new thing.” To say, “Well, that’s the way it is,” and continue on is too heartless, cynical, and superficial. Similarly, to use the metaphor of a divine dance (Lord Shiva, the Manirimdu, and the Quaker hymn not withstanding)28 may be useful to display the traditional cosmic picture, but it is a flippant and cruel metaphor–it is that dance of the dead, according to Professor Panikkar.29 Panikkar reacts against the Creationist model of reality as fanatical and childish. But he also reacts against the model of evolution as too mechanistic. Both of these concepts come from the same root thought in early Semitic consciousness.30 Inorganic matter produces organic matter at an enormous price, organic matter produces vegetable produces animal produces human produces superhuman all at the expense of unimaginable suffering. Panikkar prefers another model: Humanity in creative intercourse with the divine in the full ritual of sacrifice.31 88 Panikkar confronts modern science from another angle: Science does acknowledge the value of Ontonomy, the recognition that the entire universe is an order, as in the Ved, a cosmic order, and as a result of this, man’s continued conquest of nature will ultimately harm him. As an example, he uses the view of modern medicine, which pits man against nature. From the medical perspective, the viruses that cause sickness are merely things to be destroyed rather than members of a larger universal system in which they interact with others. Panikkar states that ontonomy implies a radically different conception of science, of medicine, of politics, of metaphysics: “We cannot isolate anything because everything is constitutively interconnected.”32 This interconnectedness is also the underlying principal of Tantra,33 the energies, and all positive mysticism as well as the basis of compassion. In these following references to Adam’s Way, the novel that I developed out of “Nepsis,” I present part of Panikkar’s position regarding Ontonomy in a dialogue between Fr. Adam and his adversary, Fr. Pat. According to Fr. Adam, we are significant in the universe because we share the Mystical Body of Christ (the Sangha). Eternity surrounds us and we are permeated with this non temporal quality of being. For the fictional Fr. Adam, and for Panikkar, the diabolical part of the theory of evolution is that the definition of a person is reduced to being this self-conscious speck of dust in the universe, an accident with certain limited powers of self-determination, just enough power for self-destruction. Fr. Adam argues that God has tied his destiny to ours, making himself vulnerable to creation. If we abuse or now extinguish ourselves, and our ecosystem, perhaps we also extinguish God. Fr. Adam does not deny the validity of history and science. However, the perspective they offer does not fill the whole of reality. He believes that modern mankind has relied too heavily on the scientific perspective while denying all the rest of reality, the eminent character of eternity. In denying ourselves our whole self, we undergo the ultimate schizophrenic split. Wherever and however the “conversion of heart” happens and we become wholly human, the Church is there.34 …traditional Christian terms say that everyone is a temple of the holy spirit which infinitely transcends the spaces and the times and 89 everything. But once we have lost an organ to keep us in touch with that reality, we lose… [The concept/belief in the temple is such an organ. The shift is the function of the organ that has intercourse with the realm of the Holy]. …to have… technological consolation that some of us have been doing great things… I think that is a qualitative jump from that kind of technological ideology to the other side of human experience which is just a mother giving her breast to the new born child which touches the infinite in a way that is bigger than all the spatial magnitudes [of scientific accomplishments].35 Clearly, Panikkar stands with those ancient systems of wisdom that regard the search for and the union with the true “order” of things, the Ved, to be that true meaning of human life. In other words, there is a natural system of which we are part. But, such a natural system includes the supernatural. That is, there is in the natural, a capacity for the supernatural that takes nature beyond itself to full, though ineffable realization. This can be found in ordinary human affairs. The great technological revolution of the last four hundred years, or perhaps, the last six thousand years of history is largely a artificial drive away from, a distraction from this order. However, Panikkar’s position is not just a partisan reaction to the horrors of industrialization, as that of a nineteenth century romantic. Panikkar’s perspective, through the disciplines of science and religion, is a nuanced evaluation of contemporary and traditional culture. To illustrate the mood of what Panikkar is trying to deal with here, let us look at a depiction of justice and the Kingdom. Panikkar, without telling what century, relates the story of the northern Spanish king, Alfaire X, called “the sage,” in which he prohibits all the jugglers, entertainers, comedians, painters who find and give joy producing “works” of arts, from receiving any kind of pay lest their art be polluted. They do it for their own joy and for the joy of others, which is a necessary nutrient for the communal body. But in a subsistence economy, where salaries or careers are unthought of, this is possible because it is understood that the artist or artisan will receive necessary support. Beauty begins to be fouled the moment that one receives monetary reimbursement for something which should be done for its own sake and for the (spiritual) commune.36 It is easy to imagine the resistance of the contemporary entertainment industry to such a scenario. But we are considering a radical shift of consciousness that will bring 90 about a proper relationship of universal elements; that will bring order to the stars.37 Such considerations present an understanding for what is essential in Panikkar’s perspective when he is talking about metanoia. It is holistic; it is a gestalt of all possible elements. So, what is missing in secular consciousness, and that which is producing the modern dilemma, is the mystical dimension, according to Panikkar. The shift of consciousness is the phenomenon of, and the tool for, engaging the mystical dimension. Without it, we are all victims of a producer-consumer society that is becoming increasingly difficult to escape. But there is hope that historical, discursive consciousness is not the only level of reality. We might still escape the “horror of history.” There is, inherent in us and in the world, other aspects of reality to be considered. Access to these “other realms” is not escape, but the fulfillment, in its “self-justifying beauty,”38 that is necessary for the discovery and the application of a healing balm on an otherwise mortally wounded world. The shift of consciousness has traditionally been the vehicle through which the ritual of sacrifice is performed to unite the worlds, to access the “other states of consciousness” necessary for salvation and survival. This includes an appreciation of the underlying dynamics hidden within the folds of even our own cultural cloak. The ritual of the primordial sacrifice, especially of time itself, is the fundamentally active element in this regard. We maintain with extraordinary consistency, the traditional desire to draw together the temporal elements of our existence, past/present/future, into one tempiternal moment of conscious eternity. That, according to Panikkar, is at least the seed of the missing mysticism. According to this dissertation, that is accomplished by a radical, cultural, and personal metanoia, the seed of which is the shift of consciousness. Yet, this mystical dimension is always in counterpoint to social realities for Panikkar. “I maintain that this is one of humanity’s most important tasks: to incorporate the variegated experiences of the children of Man into a pluralistic awareness of the human condition.”39 As I have created Fr. Adam to say in the concluding chapter of Adam’s Way during his heated encounter with Fr. Pat, the Bishop’s agent: “Christianity has seeded the world. Now, perhaps, it must die itself in 91 order for Christ to live in the world. Perhaps, it is time for the Bishop to die!” This extreme statement simply uses a dream-like metaphor of death as important change to symbolize Panikkar’s call for radical metanoia. 92     Addendum to Section II: The following addendum from the Cargas interview of Panikkar, reports upon Panikkar’s presentation of these categories: a. Death, b. Sin, c. Freedom, d. Labor, e. Justice. This report upon Panikkar’s presentation of these categories will help flesh out some of the nuance of Panikkar’s critique of culture and provide further reference to be used in Chapters Six and Seven.     a. Death Death is not in the future but is in the past. The more one lives, the more life is obtained and the more one is distanced from death. Here is the relativity of any kind of value, even of that value which one would consider that everyone would agree on: that death comes. Death can be considered equally as before or behind. These are two metaphorical ways of seeing that. The synthesis would be–this is Panikkar’s personal idea–a kind of overcoming the negative side of the syndrome of death. Sometimes he puts it in a rather facetious way, but thinks it is more than that. When he says, “I do not die.” Others die. One sees one’s mother die; one may believe that one is going to die, but cannot really say in truth, “I die.” It is impossible to say. One can say, “You are dying.” One may say, “I shall die.” But one cannot say, “I die.” It is an experience of immortality equivalent to the moment of consciousness that cannot be stretched across a time frame. Though reflection about consciousness may be a temporal affair. None the less, because one cannot say “I die” is not to say that anyone is going to endure and live from now to the year 2155. No one will. But the “I” does not die. An example is the drop of water and the water of the drop. The drop disappears in the ocean, but the water does not. We go back to different ways of thinking before the loss of the metaphysical thinking and the weakening of the mystical experience. We are accustomed to seeing ourselves as drops of water and we lose sight of the water of the drop that we are.40 In losing the metaphysical training both intellectually, and practically, that is physically, and psychically, as found in the training of monks, yogis, shamans, and in the cultures that produced these specialists, we lose much of the spectrum of powers available through such capacities as the shift.41 Death becomes the end of life and we 93 are no longer able to consider the character of the after-life very well. Since “no one really knows,” we are told to “concentrate on what you can really know, what you can touch,” so we develop a world culture based on what you can touch physically or rationally. We know the drop, its configuration, its dimensions, but we have lost “touch” with the water, according to Panikkar. Underlying the problem of death is the conception of time. If time is linear and on the way from St. Louis to San Francisco you just get caught in San Luis Obispo, perhaps your automobile crashed, well, you have missed your life. You have not gotten to San Francisco, the whole thing is a failure, and death is a tragedy. If time is not a highway on which we drive but is instead the parameter of our own existence, and not an internal clock but simply the duration of one’s own being, the fact that one has been means that one is and one shall be. In this kind of span of time one’s time is limited. Here, time is linear time. So one’s whole effort has to be, on the one hand, overcoming individuality, and on the other overcoming the mirage of linear time. For instance, punishment is the direct consequence of the Fall. Our dread before death and our suffering before death is the natural punishment of falling victim to the two mirages: the mirage of our own individuality as a separate entity and the mirage of time as the highway on which we travel. A person is something different than an individual. A person is a nexus of trans-temporal relationships. Panikkar introduces another element. In the Jewish and Indian traditions, the real problem of death is not the death of the patriarch. It is not the death of the person already heavy with years, having seen one’s children’s children grow and flourish and having, as it were, exhausted one’s own life and karma. The real tragedy is what the Vedas say, the untimely death, the accident, the death of a young person; a death which by external causes has not been allowed to run its course. That certainly is a mystery from the point of view of the person, from the point of view of the people dealing with that person which belongs, perhaps to the dire dimension, the more tragic view of life. Death need not frighten. Suffering frightens, justifiably, not death. Because generally, death goes along with suffering, we say we are afraid of death. But there are many cultures and peoples which are not afraid of death at all. The Western world sees death in front of us and the more Indic world views sees death as behind us. A person is a torch sustaining the flame of life. That torch will come to an end but the important thing is that the flame goes on. If one is so selfish that one is only a torch and not a flame, then, it is a tragedy that the torch is soon exhausted. But there is joy when one sees the flame continue, which was in the torch, the same flame. In a 94 certain way it goes on in other torches. In more traditional societies, it goes on in the torches of one’s children! There is in the Vedic Indian way wherein the children are the redeemers of the parents. So, the father is redeemed by the life of the children because they continue what the father has been unable to fulfill. So, there is satisfaction in this traditional way even if one has not been able to have done everything one would have wished.42   b. Sin One can give many explanations or descriptions of what sin is. Sin is anything that puts reality asunder and cuts the harmony, the interconnectedness of reality. Sin is in the medieval sense, amor currus, that curved thing that instead of going in the direction of the harmony of the totality, for one reason or another, tries to have prior property, “my” own benefit for one little portion of the whole. So sin would be that kind of selfishness which intercepts the rhythm of the dance, the flow of the things in one particular direction, for “my” own sake instead of for the sake of the whole. This implies that I am converting myself into the center of the universe or into God. It is the divinization of “me” instead of “me” being for the whole and in that very thing finding my own realization and fulfillment. That would be, probably, the ontological explanation of sin. Sin is much more of an ontological reality than simply a moral behavior.43   c. Freedom A free act flows from your inner being. It is not a choice between this or that. Freedom is the practice of the right choice, for which there is no doubt. It is likened to the idea of sacrifice, which is not giving up something painfully or regretfully but bringing something to its fulfillment, its highest realization: God, Sacrum facere, to make sacred. In the modern sense it is the creative act. Unfortunately, especially in this country, we have inherited a Christianity at its lowest ebb. If Reformation is bad, Counter- reformation is worse. We have here only Christianity nearly devoid of the first fifteen centuries in which Christianity acquired solidity and roots. Even Cistercians and Benedictines live out of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century. All the rest is a little bookish knowledge for specialists, but nothing for the gut reaction of what a monk is supposed to be. The Orthodox monks have 95 perhaps kept it a little more. And that is a tragedy for the depths of Christianity, especially in this country. There are beautiful exceptions, but we miss the mystical dimension. We miss the cordial aspect. We miss even the political aspect. We have separation of church and state and that is sometimes interpreted as a separation of religion and life, which is a crime. We miss a cordial and temporal and physical standing of the Christian message. We have Christianity as an ideology, (not a life).44   d. Labor Panikkar makes a fundamental distinction between work and labor. Work is creativity. Work is not a curse. Work is wit, ingenuum. The doing of the human being. And man is made to work. On the other hand, Labor would be the negative aspect of work. Labor is what we have come up with in our civilization. Our technological civilization has killed work and instead has produced labor. Labor is for the sake of a salary with which one may do whatever is wished. Labor is a means for something else and generally speaking for somebody else. Labor is for capital, or capitalism. Capital needs labor. Work is arts and crafts; work is creativity. Work is technique, not technology. We have converted citizens into mere laboring ants and if you do not labor you are punished. We have degraded human culture by monetizing every kind of value.45   e. Justice The mystery of the Incarnation is what in Christian countries the theology of liberation wants to spread: Namely, the idea that human justice is not independent, not only from divine justice but from human salvation. The clearest proof for this in the Christian economy is this blunder which has been unchecked for so long. The New Testament uses one single word, justice, and we have, in all the languages translated it with two words, justice and justification. The New Testament says search the Kingdom of God and its justice. Panikkar further reminds us that St. Paul constantly speaks about justice by faith. We have translated justice for the political sphere and justification i.e., righteousness, to go to heaven. And so faith for righteousness and justification. “If you allow here slave exploitation, that is justice, that’s for the secular arm and that will take 96 care of it but that has nothing to do with going to heaven.”46 But, there is no justice without justification and no justification without justice and the whole New Testament uses only the word, justice. In the present day society only the mystics shall survive. The others are crushed or exploited. First we have to study. Second, if one speaks as a Christian, one must understand that salvation or identity does not come out of exegesis, of reading one book or of interpreting the Bible. The Bible does not contain message of salvation. What Panikkar means by that is as follows. First of all, what is the Bible? The Bible is not just a book. It is a book that must be read and understood properly. Salvation is one’s reading of it, an interpretation of the book.47 And it is an interpretation which is not just a hermeneutical action; anybody can interpret anything as they like. So the whole thing depends on the context, your intention, and what you are looking for. That comes from the Holy Spirit. We take it from our own lives, and then check and countercheck, use veto power and explanation and language, especially to formulate, to express, and to understand it better. That is how Panikkar explains the double edged character of Augustine’s dichotomy expressed as City of god and the City of Man. It is a dichotomy (i.e., justice/justification) which today has to be healed. But it is a dichotomy which saved, for a millennium at least, Christian life. Because the moment that fulfillment is not found in society, it has to be found somewhere else. Theological reflection has taken the right direction as it tries to discover that human justice is not independent of divine justification. After all, the two things belong together just as our temporal and eternal lives are one. 48 1 This chapter owes much to the work of Dr. H. J. Cargas on Panikkar. Especially see, “Approaching Wholeness”, McKendree Pastoral Review, Fall 1990, p. 49.   2 Panikkar, The Silence of God, (New York: Orbis Books, 1990) p. 84.   3 Ibid. p. 29.   4 Ibid. p. 62.   5 R. Panikkar, “Religious Pluralism: The Metaphysical Challenge,” in Religious Pluralism, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 110.   6 Ibid., p. 98.   7 R. Panikkar, Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics, (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), p. 242.   8 Panikkar, “The Mirage of the Future” Teilhard Review, vol. VIII (June, 1973), p. 42.   9 Panikkar, “Christ, Abel and Melchizedek,” Jeevadhara Vol. 5, Kerala (Sept./Oct., 1971) p. 396.   10 Panikkar, “The Mirage of the Future,” Teilhard Review, Vol. VIII, 2. London ( June, 1973) p. 45.   11 Panikkar, Blessed Simplicity, (New York: Seabury Press, 1982), pp. 12-13.   12 Panikkar, Worship and Secular Man, (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1973), p.1.   13 Panikkar, Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics, (New York: Paulist Press, 1979) p. 334.   14 Ibid., p.105.   15 Universe, Humanity, Eternity: The shift allows one to permeate the psychic veil, not only between the two -cosms of universe and individual but through the barrier of the non-temporal as well. See Panikkar’s “Bellarmine Lecture, 1991: Christophany…” for a Christian approach to the cosmotheandric realities.   16 Tucci, G. The Theory and Practice of the Mandala, (New York: Weiser, 1969). A mandala is a “psycho-cosmogrammata” to guide the yogi in his visualization, p. vii.   17 Panikkar, “Nirvana and the Nature of the Absolute,” The God Experience, ed. Joseph P. Whelan, S.J. (New York, 1971.) p. 83ff.   18 Panikkar, Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics, p.137.   19 Ibid., p. 228.   20 Panikkar. “An Emerging Myth,” Interculture, (Fall, 1987), p.17.   21 Panikkar “The Myth of Pluralism: The Tower of babel– A Meditation on Non-Violence.” Cross Currents XXIX (Summer, 1979) p. 205.   22 Herbert Guenther, Matrix of Mystery, (Boulder, Shambala, 1984) p.139ff.   23 Dominic Veliath SDB, Theological Approach and Understanding of Religions: Jean Danielou and Raimundo Panikkar: A Study in Contrasts, (Bangalore, Kristu Jyoti Collage, 1988) p. XII. Or, more succinctly, “…my pluralism which I consider not as a lesser evil, but as the very revelation of the ultimate character of reality, i.e. its trinitarian nature, and the very pluralistic aspect of truth”, p. 206.   24 It is Panikkar’s dialogic attitude here that insists upon the strongly experiential aspect of this dissertation. It was important for me to live among the Tibetan monks, especially as the great sand mandalas were ritually prepared. It was important to practice the visualizations and other yogas associated with this world view. It was important for me to experience a shamanistic initiation (see Nepsis in Appendix 1. p. 221) as it has been important for me to be a Abstract Expressionist artist as well as a Catholic priest, in order to reflect upon religions and Modern Art as a religious phenomena seriously and to understand more fully Panikkar’s perspective. When I was in the fold of these great religious and art traditions, over a period of twenty years, I identified with them as completely as possible. Though I am a “believer,” even credulous at times, I am also a critical thinker guided by one of the great commentators on perception and culture, Panikkar himself. Now, I am a creature of one of his main neologisms, Mutual Fecundation, the major characteristic of Panikkar’s (Dialogic) Dialogue. My interest in the shift of consciousness developed, as this capacity is a necessary technique of the larger dialogue.   25 D. Veliath SDB, Theological Approach…, p. 205. 26 Ibid., p. 111.   27 Also see, Barbara Tedlock’s Time and the Highland Maya, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1982)which details a highly developed and inter-worldly approach to time and its variable values.   28 Panikkar, “The End of History: The Threefold Structure of Human Time-Consciousness” Teilhard and the Unity of Knowledge, eds. Thomas M. King and James F. Salmon (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), p.85   29 Ibid., p.85-86.   30 Ibid., p. 86.   31 Ibid., p. 86.   32 Panikkar, Blessed Simplicity, p. 123.   33 Panikkar, Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics, p. 82.   34 Panikkar, Worship and Secular Man, p. 34.   35 Panikkar, Blessed Simplicity, p. 131.   36 Panikkar, “An Emerging Myth,” Interculture, (Fall, 1987), p.17. The character of Fr. Yang, mentioned often in this dissertation, while mainly representing qualities of “mutual fecundation”, also illustrates the movement of these “venerable traditions” as they try to influence our own new age.   37 See Mandala essay, Appendix #4, of this dissertation, p. 263, for an example for such nuance.   38 Metanoia, see Chapter Four of this dissertation, p. 88.   39 Transforming Christian Mission Into Dialogue” Interculture, (Fall, 1987), p. 21. 40 Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. M. Eliade, (New York: MacMillan Publishing Corp. 1987) p. 268, 274.   41 Ibid., p. 274.     1 Panikkar, “The Contribution of Christian Monasticism in Asia to the Universal Church,” Cistercian Studies, IX (1974) nos. 2 and 3. This is a Christian, monastic, but seemingly also universal definition of Kenosis: “This is what could be called the principle of kenosis, the total emptying of oneself in order to incarnate a higher principle. Does it not belong to the calling of the monk to be so well rooted in the transcendent that he does not fear to be monachos, alone? No need for me to say how easy this is to speak of, and how overwhelming to do.”   2 For Panikkar, “full human activity” would involve the mutual fecundation of cultures and religions, as well as a dilogic attitude in individuals. Dialogic implies an openness to one another that allows for not only an exchange of views, but for one to change the other, so that both grow from the encounter. This is not only for individuals but for cultures operating in a cosmotheandric reality; cosmos, deity, humanity.   3 Landow, Hypertext, p. 115. In a different vein, but similar to that found in Hypertext, Panikkar says this about a text. “Man speaks, but a text says. A text is not just a book or an engraved stone or a coded document of some sort. A text has more than just a body. On the other hand it is also a body. It is more than just improvisation; it does not consist merely of reading from a blank page nor of an arbitrary interpretation according to one’s private whim. There is no text without a material being, a carrier of the text, a sub-stance. But neither is there a text without an intelligent or spiritual being who reacts to and reads the document. A non-saying text is not a text. An undeciphered script or an untranslated document is not a text for those who cannot read or understand it. A text is a text only insofar as this inner relation between the document and the reader is maintained. A text is culture and history in a very special way. Only Man is a speaking being, but a text is also a saying reality. A text is not just an artifact, a tool, a dead product of Man’s spirit. A text– in this integral sense as I am taking it–is a real embodiment of Man’s spirit: its transcends human individuality without ceasing to be human. A text says just as a Man speaks…” p.58, “The Texture of a Text.” A text is not just the writing, but the interpretation as well which includes the culture and personality of the one who reads it.   4 Panikkar, “The Texture of a Text,” pg. 52. “The subject-object epistemology fails here, as elsewhere, to provide us a valid tool for understanding this…”   5 G.M. Mullett, Spider Woman Stories: Legends of the Hopi Indians, (Tucson, Az.: University of Arizona Press, 1991). The story of Tiyo, a precocious Hopi lad, growing to meet his destiny, which is a salvific encounter and friendship with the great mother goddess (Spider Woman) Kokyanwuhti, is an example of such a myth that describes the temporal passage of the “people” in a world viewed through the perspective of temporal and transtemporal values. This legend describes the shamanistic shift in which a hero figure, Tiyo, goes on a spirit journey to encounter a (the) deity to become empowered for the sake of resolving problems at home. In many parts of the world such a hero figure would eventually become a “sacred king” to be sacrificed in order to become a divine representative for the “people” with the gods. See Robert Graves, The White Goddess. Also, in Zuni, it is the deity itself, in the form of the Shalaco, that is sacrificed after the celebrations, for the sake of the “people.” The Shalaco is the main autumnal celebration in the festal cycle of the Zuni year, certainly it is the most popular and famous feast of the year in Zuni.   6 Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice–the Sacrifice of Time and the Ritual of Modernity,” The Study of Time III, ed. J.T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, D. Park. (New York, 1978), p. 683.   7 Ibid. p. 683.   8 Which, I repeat, is why the making of certain art and the practice of certain kind of religion can “study” this moment of passage, the shift, better than merely discursive reflection. Belief or the shift are necessary ingredients, like the myth or the archaic theory of time, to understand the phenomena. You can’t understand the mythic realm of consciousness that is engaged unless you are able to believe or experience it. That is, to take it seriously. At least, a combination of discursive and non-discursive methodology is preferable and perhaps necessary to approach these topics. The methodology of “Interstates: The catalog” p. 394, attempts to demonstrate the advantage to this approach. Chapter Five, p.99, explores the intellectual, artistic, religious milieu which produced the catalog of paintings and stories, and describes in part the interdisciplinary “research” that was undertaken to provide a deeper and more complete basis for this thesis. As well, “Nepsis,” (summarized in Appendix 1, p. 221) described the Shamanistic initiation possible as well as the integration or contrast of Buddhist concepts and practice with the Christianity of the author. This integration/contrast has altered considerably the eventual conclusions and experience of this dissertation and provides the basis for the methodology of this research.   9 Panikkar, Bellarmine Lecture, 1991. “A Christophany for our times”, p. 6ff.   10 Ibid., p. 6. All the Panikkar material on this page, 68, is from the same Bellarmine Lecture reference in note #9.   11 Panikkar makes this proposition often, as in Chapter Two where he refers to the “trans-historical” nature of our times in the language of mysticism, p. 60-63, in the quote identified by footnote #28.   12 See Chapter Five in this dissertation, pp. 119-122.   13 Panikkar, “A Christophany for our times”, Bellarmine Lecture, 1991, p. 1.   14 Ibid., p. 16.   15 Ibid., p. 16.   16 Ibid., p. 19.   17 Panikkar, R. “Time and Sacrifice…”, p. 688.   18 Ibid., 688.   19 Ibid., 688.   20 Panikkar’s Gifford Lecture, Edinburgh, 1989, p.3.   21 Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice,” p. 688.   22 Pannikar, Bellarmine Lecture, p.1.   23 Panikkar, “In Christ There is Neither Hindu nor Christian: Perspectives on Hindu-Christian Dialogue. The Myth of History…” Religious Issues and Inter religious Dialogues, p.484-485.   24 Panikkar, R. “Time and Sacrifice…”, p. 688   25 Ibid., p. 688.   26 This element of fiction is derived from an actual event witnessed by others. It continues the shamanistic initiation described in “Nepsis.” It was recognized by Drs. Al Bloom(GTU) and Louis Lancaster (UCB), both experts in the history of religions and religious phenomena, as a shamanistic occurrence. It is a small but important bit of evidence of the process of transformation going in the author that is part of the “research data” used in the formulation of this dissertation. (See Appendix 10, p. 392, for a letter of witness for this event.)   27 See note #27 in the general Introduction to this dissertation, p. 10.   28 Perhaps, certain elements of this access are not to be touched in the domicile of conventionality. See end of note #67, p. 50, Shamanism section of Chapter One, for Eliade’s question about the community’s appropriation or misappropriation of yogic accomplishments.   29 Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice…”, p. 692.   03 Ibid., p. 692-4.   31 Ibid., p. 695.   32 Halifax, Shamanic Voices, p. 3.   33 Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice…” p. 696.   34 Ibid., p. 696.   35 See page 175 of this dissertation, “…to harmonize the rhythm of the two worlds.” Or see Chiao, Navajo Sand painting and Tibetan Mandala… (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1982).   36 Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice”, p. 698.   37 Ibid., p. 700.   38 Ibid., p. 700.   39 Ibid., p. 700.   40 Ibid., p. 700.     1 Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice,” p. 687.   2 Ibid., p. 704.   3 Ibid., p. 705.   4 Ibid., p. 705.   5 Ibid., p. 705.   6 Ibid., p. 705.   7 Ibid., p. 706   8 Ibid., p. 706.   9 Ibid., p. 708. [But, from a Shamanistic perspective, humanism is a secondary consideration.]   10 R. Pirsig, Lila, (New York,: Bantam Books, 1991.)   11 R. Pirsig, Lila, all of Chapter Three of this novel, esp. p. 49ff.   12 Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice,” p. 708.   13 Ibid., p. 711.   14 Ibid., p. 711.   15 Ibid., p. 711.   16 Dr. Harry James Cargas, whose expertise in Panikkar earned him the role of outside reader for the Panikkar material of this dissertation, conducted a long interview with Panikkar, tape recorded, January 6-11, 1982. These references are taken from the typed text of the interview, p. 79.   17 Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice,” p. 711   18 Cargas interview with Panikkar, p. 5. Or, see note #16 this chapter.   19 See Chapter Two of this dissertation, note # 30, p. 61-62. Or, see Cargas interview p. 71.   20 Cargas interview, p. 83, story about “Alfaire X.”   21 Peter Furst, “Peyote Among the Huichol Indians of Mexico,” The Flesh of the Gods, (New York: Praeger, 1972) pp. 136-184.   Remember, “entos” means between… in Panikkar’s diction re: Spirit. Chapter Two of this dissertation, p. 57, note #13.   23 Cargas interview, p. 18   24 Cargas interview, p.11.   25 Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, (Cambridge, 1991), p. 99, Re: Abstract Expressionism and the figure of the shaman. Also, see the following note #26, in this chapter, re: Rothkrug.   26 Though this passage is editorializing, it validly extrapolates from Panikkar’s positions and begins to establish the context for the conclusions about the state of the shift in Chapter Four and in the general conclusions of Chapter Seven in this dissertation. It will be important to be clear about the context in which the shift currently operates, at least from Panikkar’s perspective. Lionel Rothkrug “Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation,” Historical Reflections, (Concordia University, Ontario, Canada, 1980). Lionel Rothkrug in this article posits that the period following the Renaissance in Europe was a period of battle for control of the Penitential systems of Europe. That is, who is it that seemingly controls how you get to heaven. In a conversation with Rothkrug in the GTU library, Fall 1993, he agreed that this conflict was still a central characteristic of the modern period, with the artists carrying the modernist banner. This was reflected in such movements as Kandinski’s Blue Rider group, the Surrealists, and American Abstract Expressionists, as well as in literary and philosophical circles.   27 Cargas interview, p. 11-12.   28 Traditionally, Shiva, one of the Hindu triune godhead, is considered the Lord of the Dance (of creation). The Manirimdu is a Tibetan Buddhist festival including lama dancing, that celebrates the Tantric Buddhist equivalent of the Lord of the Dance. The Quaker hymn, “Lord of the Dance”, sings the cosmic significance of the passion of Jesus Christ, who, in this case is the Lord of the Dance.   29 Cargas interview, p. 12   30 Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice”, p.704. 31 Cargas interview, p. 12.   32 Ibid., p. 16.   33 Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, (San Francisco, 1979) p. 129.   34 Panikkar, “A Christophany for our times”, Bellarmine Lecture, 1991, p. 19.   35 Cargas interview, p. 22.   36 Cargas interview, p. 82-83.   37 From the Cargas interview, p. 33, Panikkar provides the derivation of: “Consider”, which means to draw the stars together and “Desire”, which means to tear the stars apart. To study is to consider, in that studium means that one consecrates your whole being to the investigation of a subject.   38 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. I, (New York: Crossroads. 1993) p. 420-423.   39 Panikkar, “A Preface to a Hindu-Christian Theology”, Jeevadhara, (Kerala, India) p. 6.   40 Cargas interview, p. 38.   14 It was the “experiment” of “Nepsis” to try to regain these capacities which are centered upon the abilities associated with the shift of consciousness. 42 Cargas interview, p. 67.   43 Cargas interview, p. 57.   44 Cargas interview, p. 81.   45 Cargas interview, p. 83.   46 Ibid. p. 83.   47 Ibid. p. 83.   48 Cargas interview, p. 79-80. [↩]