6 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 these notes. Panikkar’s acosmic tendency, so to speak, forms a cloud of uncertainty around his own words, including those utterances dealing with his acosmic tendency. In his words, the ordinary separation between heaven and earth is replaced with a vague although indisputable distinction in unity. Yet, the blending of heaven and earth in Panikkar creates a super-reality, or surreality, in which it is difficult to distinguish what is in his mind and what is out there. Thus, a certain degree of misrepresentation in these notes is probably inevitable, due to the personal, otherworldly predispositions of their author. Like in the surrealist painting The Persistence of Memory of Panikkar’s compatriot Salvador Dalí, Panikkar’s memory seems stylistically rooted in realism yet unrealistic in subject matter. Remembrances flow in familiar, realistically rendered landscapes, yet those remembrances appear to have lost their integrity [5]. 3 An Intellectual Mystic If Panikkar was an intellectual mystic (intellectual is the adjective, mystic is the noun), what kind of mystic was he? In Fragments, Panikkar (2018a, 57–58) [6] wrote: I began life with the ‘divine’ experience: only much later did I go through the ‘human’ experience, all the time longing for the theandric one, which was there since the beginning (for there is neither purely human nor merely divine experience). Now I could and should reach the fullness of the theandric experience: mystical detachment and intellectual involvement, celibacy and love, East and West, science and philosophy, Church and world, richness and poverty, alone and in company, professor and sadhu. Panikkar explained the meaning of the second part of the sentence as follows: Panikkar can be multidimensional as long as he does not identify himself with any of those dimensions. In other words, the fullness is the integration of all, or it is the overcoming of fragmentation. Clearly, Panikkar’s experiment is existential in character. His own life is the locus of integration. The intellectual elaboration, so to speak, plays an accessory role. Helping others find their way in a pathless land without points of reference, in fact, became Panikkar’s mission for the last decades of his life. Yet, he was not a guru [7]. The decryption of the first part of the section is instead left to interpretation. This “divine” experience – which anyone is welcome to reduce to a solely psychological phenomenon – is the “pure” experience, the experience that is independent of any given historical (and religious) context in which it occurs. When Panikkar confirmed he was living “on an ontological level,” he meant that the ontological level is unmediated, and consequently the mystical experience shaped at the ontological level is independent from any major mystical tradition (Panikkar 2018b, 31). This “perennial” interpretation is one among many. It brings the advantage of explaining why Panikkar claimed that in his vision Christ is present everywhere, and the Church is “a small part… of the world” (Panikkar 2018a, 42–43). Against the background of this interpretation, the above quote means that Panikkar came down from a pristine, pre-predicative state in which he had grasped transcendental reality in essence, in the same state implied in John 18:36. He came down to the historical, concrete, human level, a level that is, simultaneously, māyā (Sa. “illusion”) (Panikkar 2018a, 43–44) or “the mystical experience of reality on the material level” (Panikkar adopted both expressions in his notes) (Panikkar 2018a, 64–65). It is māyā because, of course, the
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