Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

I was reviewing this essay in relation to the Paradoxes of Transcendence thread, but decided that it is interesting enough to highlight in its own thread.  I'll post an excerpt below and the full essay can be found here.

Before getting to the excerpt (which is about Panikkar rather than by him), here is a quote by Panikkar to contextualize some of the observations below:

The world, humankind, and God are as it were incompatible as three separate, independent entities. They are intertwined. A world without human beings is without meaning; a God without creatures would cease to be God; humankind without a world would be unable to subsist and without God would not be truly human. God is sublimated, as I have said, but the sublimation must now be condensed somewhere, and it is the human interior that will supply the walls on which God will crystalize in humanity – not, however, as a distinct being, come to take refuge in our interior, but as something that is ours by right, and that had only been momentarily removed. But all metaphor is dangerous here, especially if it be interpreted in a substantialistic key. Perhaps God did die; but in that case what is happening now is that God is risen, albeit not as “God” but as humankind. But something similar should be said about humankind. Human beings are not God, not the center either. There is no center.

With this thesis, Panikkar puts himself sharply at odds both with a purely other-worldly religiosity and with a secular “worldliness” destructive of religious faith. In the encounter of worship and the world, he notes, a mutual “total risk” emerges: namely, that worship may wish to “eliminate or anathematize secularization, as being the main evil confronting man,” while secularism may try to “get rid of worship as being a remnant of an age dead and gone.” To make headway in this confrontation, Panikkar first of all elucidates some of the key terms employed. As he states, worship in this context means a “human action symbolizing a belief” or, more precisely, a “symbolical act arising from a particular belief” (where “symbolic” carries transcendental or ontological significance). On the other hand, secularism can be traced to the Latin saeculum denoting a particular world-age (in the sense of aion or kairos). To this extent, the term secular—as previously noted—designates the “temporal world” or the “temporal aspect of reality,” and its status or worth varies with the evaluative assessment of temporality If time and temporality are viewed negatively, then saeculum will mean the “merely” secular and transient world as distinct from the sacred and eternal world; in that case, secularization will be seen as the process of “invading the realm of the sacred, the mystical, the religious.” By contrast, if temporality is positively valued, then saeculum will stand as a symbol for “regaining or conquering the realm of the real, monopolized previously by the sacred and the religious”; accordingly, secularization will denote the “liberation of mankind from the grip of obscurantism,” with “secular man” emerging as the “full human being” shouldering genuine responsibility in and for the world. Phrased differently, secularization will mean the “penetration of [ultimate] eality into the world, the process of making the world real” or else sacred or divine.  As Panikkar writes, with characteristic verve:

Now, what is emerging in our days, and what may be a “hapax phenomenon,” a unique occurrence in the history of mankind, is paradoxically—not secularism, but the sacred quality of secularism. In other words, what seems to be unique in the human constellation of the present kairos is the disruption of the equation sacred = non temporal with the positive value so far attached to it. The temporal is seen today as positive and, in a way, sacred.

The revaluation of temporality, in Panikkar's view, is linked with a reinterpretation of human existence: a shift from the traditional conception of the “animal with reason” (animal rationale) to that of a symbolic or symbolizing being (homo symbolicus) designating a distinctive mode of being-in-the-world open to, or standing out into, the meaning of reality (or Being). In a phrase deliberately patterned on Heidegger's key notion of ontological difference, Panikkar speaks of a “symbolic difference” indicating the differential entwinement between symbol and (ontological) reality—an entwinement which allows him to say that reality “discloses itself only as a symbol” with the result that “what reality is, is its symbol.” With regard to human experience, symbolic difference entails that human “secular” worldliness is genuine only in an “ek-static” mode which reaches out to “the other pole, the other shore.” This aspect inevitably puts pressure on secularization, revealing it as a “constitutively ambivalent” process, a process implying a change—for good or ill—in fundamental human and religious symbols: on the one hand, it can erode or destroy traditional forms of worship while, on the other, it can purify and renew them. The fruitful or promising dimension of secularization emerges only against the background of an “integral anthropology” which sees human personhood as ultimately symbolical or liturgical. The basic aim of his book, Panikkar observes, is to affirm:

the liturgical nature of man, thus considering worship to be an essential human dimension, while, at the same time, recognizing secularization to be a major phenomenon of our age, a phenomenon which, from now on, is assuredly destined to assist the growth of man's consciousness. Today, anyone who is not exposed to secularization cannot hope to realize his humanity to the full, at least not in terms o the twentieth century. On the other hand, man without worship cannot even subsist.

…What is coming into view in our age—partly as a result of secularization—is the perspective of a “theandric” or else “cosmotheandric” ontonomy which stresses the integral connection between the divine, the human, and nature (or the cosmos). What this outlook opposes above all are traditional metaphysical dualisms or dichotomies: “The field of the sacred is no longer defined in opposition to that of the secular, nor is a development of worship made at the cost of work, politics or any other human activity.” Human beings in this view are considered neither as sovereign agents nor as passive victims of authority but rather as participants in the ongoing disclosure or epiphany, of “being,” in the effort of a consecratio mundi pervading the deepest strands of reality. Whereas heteronomy typically views secularization as a “blasphemous” undertaking soiling the garment of hierarchical authority, and whereas autonomy greets secularization as the “grand achievement” of modernity and the “greatest victory for the liberation of man,” ontonomy construes the same process in a different light: namely, as the tapping of the  hidden potential or promise of the world. In doing so, Panikkar comments, ontonomy seeks to “enlighten our vision” so as to make us realize “that the worship that matters is the worship of the secular world”—interpreting this genitive all the while as a subjective genitive: “it is the worship of (possessed by, coming from, corresponding and fitting to) this secular world.”

About a decade after Worship and Secular Man Panikkar returned to the topic of secularization and the meaning of “secularity,” focusing now more specifically on the relation between religion and politics. In the new text‑titled “Religion or Politics: The Western Dilemma”—the earlier notion of “symbolic difference” was modified or amplified by a further difference or differential entwinement equally opposed to both fusion and separation. According to Panikkar, the history of Western civilization has been dominated by two contrasting models: either, religion and politics have been fused or identified, leading to forms of theocracy or caesaropapism, or else they have been separated and pitted against each other “as if religion and politics were mutually incompatible and antagonistic forces.” The first model gives rise to such dangers as religious opportunism, fundamentalism, and even variants of totalitarianism; in the second model, favored by agnostics and “all types of liberalisms,” separation readily leads to degeneracy in politics by reducing it to a “mere application of techniques.” Adopting again a secularization perspective (focusing on our saeculum), Panikkar sees our age as capable of moving beyond the “Western dilemma” of monism/dualism. As he notes, various developments in our time warrant the conclusion that “we are approaching the close of the modern Western dichotomy between religion and politics, and we are coming nearer to a nondualistic relation between the two.” This rapprochement is liable to be beneficial to both sides by rescuing each from an endemic mode of pointlessness or aporia: “Religion without politics becomes uninteresting, just as politics without religion turns irrelevant.”

As in his earlier text, Panikkar attends again to a clarification of terms. In his view-distantly echoing Aristotle—”politics” denotes the “sum total of principles, symbols, means, and actions” whereby humans endeavor to attain “the common good of the polis”; the term religion, on the other hand, refers to the “sum total of principles, symbols, means, and actions” whereby humans expect to reach “the summum bonum of life.” Differently phrased, politics is concerned with the “realization of a human order,” while religion aims at “the realization of the ultimate order”—with the two concerns highlighting the tensional polarity (though not segregation) between politics and religion. In the history of Western culture, the latter polarity has often been captured in institutional terms, for example, by opposing to each other papacy and empire, church and state; on a different level, the opposition has been between professional clergy and laity, or between private faith and public neutrality (vis-à-vis all faiths). Panikkar's aim is to challenge these and related dichotomies… All too often, he notes, it is taken for granted that religion is “only concerned with the divine, the supernatural, the eternal, the sacred,” while politics is consigned to “the earthly, the natural, the profane.” The task today is to move beyond these dualisms without lapsing into monistic coincidence:

God and the world are not two realities, nor are they one and the same.  Moreover, to return to our subject, politics and religion are not tow independent activities, nor are they one indiscriminate thing.  There is no politics separate from religion.  There is no religious factor that is not at the same time a political factor…The divine tabernacle is to be found among men; the earthly city is a divine happening.

To illustrate the history of religion-politics relations in the West, Panikkar offers the image of a somewhat tumultuous marriage.  While at the outset the partners promised each other “eternal fidelity,” soon mutual disenchantment set in, with accusations and recriminations being levied on both sides. Eventually, accusations gave way to a legal divorce, followed finally by attempts to “declare the marriage null and void”: in the view of both fundamentalists and agnostics, politics and religion should never have been married and there must have been a “misunderstanding” on both sides. In Panikkar's account, this story has played itself out over the past centuries. However, the situation we face in our time, in our saeculum, is rather a question of “legitimizing or recognizing the son [or daughter] born of this union”: an offspring in which the respective natures of the parents are correlated in such a way as “to offer us today a new intuition about both politics and religion.” This offspring, he adds, is not yet baptized and thus has no name; but, heeding the “signs of our times,” we can already describe his/her physiognomy. For today, people speak of a “politics of engagement” and a “religion of incarnation”; in doing so, people are discovering “the sacred character of secular engagement and the political aspect of religious life.” In the confines of “Christian” societies, one witnesses the growth of a faith that is “less and less ecclesiastical” and of civil and political activities that are “less and less subject to party disciplines” or ideologies. Using Augustinian vocabulary, one might say that the heavenly or celestial city is not “a second city for the elect” but rather represents, so to speak, “the channels of communication and the joy of earthly paradise constantly lost and refound.” By the same token, “love of God” cannot subsist without “love of neighbor” and vice versa. With regard to the goal of salvation (or moksha) this means that “one does not enter heaven alone” but that somehow “the earth enters [or must enter] with us”; for, “those who are deaf to the cries of men are blind to the presence of God.”

By referring to a concrete “politics of engagement” and its religious significance, Panikkar ultimately undercuts the institutional division of church and state, shifting attention instead to the ordinary life-world where religious and “wordly” motifs are inevitably linked. For the proverbial “man in the street,” he notes, the institutional division is remote and opaque. Seen from this vantage, humans do not have “two natures, two countries, two vocations”; rather, religion is impregnated with politics and politics with religion. Using language distinctly resonating with contemporary “political theology” or “theology of liberation,” Panikkar asserts that a “religion for our times” must be political in the sense that it cannot keep itself aloof of “problems of injustice, hunger, war, exploitation, the power of money, armaments, ecological questions, demographic problems.” By the same token, a politics that is really concerned with the well-being of the polis and desires to be more than “a technocracy at the service of an ideology” cannot ignore the deeper religious and (perhaps) metaphysical roots of the problems beleaguering our age. For Panikkar, none of the preceding means that politics and religion can simply be fused or identified, for there always remains an excess or left-over. For believers in the “transcendent” life's aspirations can never be reduced to private whim or political manipulation; and even for non-believers life is likely to retain an “imponderable factor” or even a “mystery” Hence, politics is always “more— or other—than just 'politics',” just as religion is always “less—or other—than 'religion'.” Ultimately, for Panikkar, the relation between the two domains is “non-dualistic” or “advaitic” (in the sense of Indian Advaita Vedanta):

It is an intrinsic and thus nonmanipulable relationship that distinguishes but does not separate, allows for diversity but not for rupture, does not confuse roles, but equally does not raise roles to ontological status.

[Full essay here]

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Bumping this old thread, in response to the recent discussions on atheism and spirituality.

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Hey Bruce…

What do you think?

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Have you read it?  If you have, I'll enjoy discussing it with you. 

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

yeah, i read it, but i would rather hear what you think in your voice…
as far as i can tell, panikkar views reality much like the Hindu's do…

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

he's very political, it seems, but then that was the very foundation of the Catholic Church…yes?

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Yes.  But as I read him, he's not describing or advocating either a conventional Catholic or Hindu perspective.

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Well of course not…what do we need with that?  His views are evolved and more polished, but it is just a new spin on some ancient knowledge…

What is new that attracts you so?  I really want to know why you like this guy so much…

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

I enjoyed reading this text. Emotionally and physically I felt I was at a moment drawn towards secularism, and then suddenly I shifted towards worship, symbols and mysteries. After a while of being tossed from one side to the other, a child was born… I like that idea. 

I don't see him advocating a hindu perspective, as there there seems to be sufficient room for activism (vs social apathy that was seen in India before 1900's) and enough space for doubting the existence of God.

This is my first Pannikar reading, and I enjoyed his call to create a dynamic in the psyche of atheism vs worship. 

I personaly think that these two poles need to fight - or should I say flirt?
The child which is born of this intercourse is of interest to me.

Hugs,

P.

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Hi, Patrick, if you enjoyed this, you might appreciate this summary of Panikkar's work.  Like you, I appreciate the discordant, creative dance Panikkar invites between atheism or secularism and worship.  Panikkar has an 'integrative' or 'concordant' impulse, but I appreciate how he honors plurality and does not try simply to collapse opposites into a fully integrated final system or perspective, but rather continually opens space through appreciation of the fecund tension between contradictory impulses or perspectives.  Panikkar's dynamic, perichoretic nondualism is like Nishida's notion of contradictory-identity in that regard.  Both approaches have deep appreciation for immanence, but a panentheistic one (e.g., a perspective on the sacred-in-and-of-the-world which doesn't end up in a simple non-contradictory identity (such as pantheism)).

However, Panikkar's view on 'theism' (as I understand it) is not straightforward, or at least not conventional (for a priest!).  He regards atheism, at least as it has found expression among some thinkers, as an evolutionary step beyond monotheism, and has said he'd like to put a moratorium on the word, 'God.'  For Panikkar, the divine is not some entity or being 'out there,' or even a reified entity 'within,' but rather the depth dimension or openness of things, the inexhaustibility and infinity of being that can be intuited in and through and 'as' all particular things.  Panikkar argues that Western atheism is, in fact, the child of monotheism, and the modern heir to its former position in the world; they are inseparable, and traditional religionists would do well to recognize and honor the 'new' in atheism that 'monotheism' has borne. 

But, as in the essay above, he also argues that both 'positions' can be taken as partners in a further dance, one that can result in the recognition of their deep relation – birthing a new child through this intercourse, as you say.  A child of our (postmodern, postmetaphysical, time-loving) kairos, which sees man as a symbolizing/storying (therefore liturgical) being, and sees man-in-the-cosmos in deeply participatory terms, as an ongoing, open-ended evolutionary enactment*.   A transcendence-in-immanence that is not only celebratory but deeply political, engaged.

Best wishes,

B.

* From Hall's Multifaith Dialogue in conversation with Raimon Panikkar:

Panikkar's intention is to show that genuine human experience involves the triad of senses, intellect and mystical awareness in correlation with matter, thought and freedom. Each act en-acts the cosmotheandric mystery: 

We cannot sense, think, experience, without matter, logos, and spirit. Thought and mystical awareness are not possible without matter, indeed, without the body. All our thoughts, words, states of consciousness and the like are also material, or have a material basis. But our intellect as well would not have life, initiative, freedom and indefinite scope (all metaphors) without the spirit lurking as it were, behind or above, and matter hiding underneath.34

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Hey all –

I'll have to come back and re-read this essay (with a dictionary by my side) – but I really do love this stuff! And, as someone who appreciates interspiritual cross-fertilization, including the dance of the secular with the religious, I can't help but be enamored with the last paragraph of the essay, which includes a Panikkar quote:


As he writes, in our present situation we need “a mutual fecundation among the different human traditions of the world—including the secular and modern traditions,” without lapsing into a bland syncretism. At this point, the “essentially liberating character” of the religion of the future comes into view. For, just as the global future of humankind tends toward conciliation (not uniformity), so contemporary religiosity can and should contribute to the “conciliation between persons and peoples”:

[What follows is Pannikar's words]: – It is not a matter of speaking the same language nor of practicing the same religion, but of remaining with an awake consciousness, aware that we are intoning different notes in the same symphony, and that we are walking on different paths toward the same peak. This then is faith (religio): the experience of the symphony, of catching a glimpse of the summit, while being attentive to the path we follow, and trying not to stumble on the way.”

Thanks for bumping the thread, Bruce.

Agape,

Mary

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Hi Balder

I have read that essay.
well this is an old classical debate. 

I see Panikkar´s theological assertion as inspired from a sort of mysterium tremendum in a process like atomization of the hierophanic representation of the Holy Trinity. This can be a way to solve the dialogical aporias raised at that unfathomable horizon of disseminating meanings where Spirit and Flesh meet, the drama of divine incarnation, the Verb made flesh of the gospel of John, and all the socio-historical and political acts following.

In a parallel thread, I rose the importance of actualizing the ancient ritual of the eucharisty . Trans-substantiation in our days can be comprehended as a psychological introjection of transcendental meanings, very much like the alchemical phase of coagulatio described by Jung. Alchemy is also a form of mystical immanentism.

It is about this  fragility of a possible “transcendental immanentism” . We could in secular term see it as dynamic field, metaphorically seen, as a constant interplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces, a structural relationship center/periphery. I sound classical Levi-Strauss here just for the sake of illustration.

cheers

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Hi Balder,
Thank you for the link that I will definitely check. You write beautifully and it's a delight to see you expose Panikkar's view.

I specially was touched by this paragraph: ”He regards atheism, at least as it has found expression among some thinkers, as an evolutionary step beyond monotheism, and has said he'd like to put a moratorium on the word, 'God.'  For Panikkar, the divine is not some entity or being 'out there,' or even a reified entity 'within,' but rather the depth dimension or openness of things, the inexhaustibility and infinity of being that can be intuited in and through and 'as' all particular things”


It's the first time I see that idea formalized and I think that it is supported by the experiences of many of us. I was also reminded by the reports of hindus spiritual seekers entering advaita vedanta that suddenly found themselves closely linked with atheists.


On a personal level, this dance of the secular/worship “opposites” has brought me to my senses! I mean by that, that this friction has kind of melted my brain into my body, as if experience sensed from the body in the here and now, was a place were this apparent contradiction ends. 


Xibalba talked about “transcendental immanentism” and it's as if this dance of opposite -or is it more appropriate to say koan? - resolves itself in the awakening of the felt sense in the words of Eugene Gendlin.


Be well,


P.

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Howdy again –

Balder, you wrote of Panikkar: “he'd like to put a moratorium on the word, 'God.' ”

… As recently as 2006, however, he still uses the word, at least in certain contexts. Here are a few quotes from the epilogue of his book The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery (said to be one of his more “reader-friendly” works) –

Those who have lived the experience of God in one way or another have lost their everyday working identities. All that is left to them is what we might call their profound identity. The experience of God is understood, therefore, as subjective genitive – God's experience. It is not my experience of God. God is not an object – of either faith or experience. It is the experience of God that occurs (experiri) within me, in which I participate more or less consciously …

The man of God does not consider himself identified or limited by any given label: Spanish, Indian, academic, phlosopher, believer, Catholic, priest, or male. He does not even believe the label of human being or living being is appropriate.

This is the experience of total stripping that the mystics speak about. Those who consider that the label “Christian,” for example, separates them from “nonbelievers” confuse their experience of God with their interpretation of the experience of God. The one who speaks as an “American,” a “scientist,” a “male,” except on predetermined scientific subjects, leaves aside or confuses the experience of God with his or her experience of God. Such an experience is not the oceanic, prelogical, or primitive feeling that has frequently been criticized. Rather, it is the ultimate and universal experience incarnated in the concrete and the particular. The experience of God cannot be separated from a stroll with a friend, a shared meal, the love that we feel, the idea that we defend, the conversation that unfolds, the pain that we endure – discovering in all this a third dimension of depth, of love, of the infinite–and hence, the ineffable. It is a discovery that discloses the value that lies hidden in the deepest and most real of our human acts… .

It is not a question of pantheism or even panentheism – except when we complete our thought by calling it a “panen-psychism” and a “panen-cosmism.” Everything is in God just as, analogously, everything is in Consciousness and in the Universe. Each of these three dimensions is interwoven in the other in a way that we have called the cosmotheandric experience, the perichoresis or mutual indwelling of the real, the life of the radical Trinity…

In this sense, the experience of God coincides with the fact of seeing God “in” all things – and all things “in” God, if such is the name we wish to give to the Divine…

This is not the supposed “presence of God,” like the prae-essentia of a Being whom we are facing, but the more interior, more personal experience, not as if we were moved by another but conscious that the source of our actions and the ultimate object of our being belongs to that infinite sea that we call God.

We repeat that the experience of a transcendent God is literally impossible: we would soil its spotless transcendence. Such a God does not exist; he is a projection of our mind, the fruit of a monarchical civilization.

The trinitarian God is different; we are inserted into the divine perichoresis. I experience myself then as “son” – to repeat a traditional designation that, as St. Thomas remarked, is only a metaphor. For this reason, St. Thomas says, John the Evangelist speaks of the Word, not of the Son… .

The experience of God thus consists in touching the totality of Being with the totality of our own being: to feel in our body, our intellect, and our spirit the whole of reality both within us and outside us. And paradoxically, it is the experience of contingency: we merely touch the infinite at a point.

The experience of God is the experience of the Mystery that governs our lives from both within and without.

(Okay. Back to my own writing!!!!)

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Hi, Mary, yes, he still uses it.  I believe it was actually in the book you just quoted that he mentioned he'd like to put a moratorium on the word – that he thought it might be a healthy move to do so – but then suggested that, rather than trying to change convention, we could also go with it and use it in new ways (as I think he tries to outline in his Nine Ways Not to Talk About God).

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

I think secularization is but an experiment.
That as of yet, hasnt worked well.
Also, worship is an invention of exoteric religion. It probably will go the way of secularization soon.
The guy is erudite, but frankly, I see nothing unique in his voice, just an amalgam of post modern social philosophy.
Probably, a reflection of his education.

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Zak, when you have time, I invite you to contribute a post with a positive statement of your own spiritual vision.  I'd welcome something substantive and constructive from you, perhaps a statement of what you consider to be authentic spirituality for the modern age (as opposed to the post-metaphysical, postmodern, and integral imposters). 

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Balder forgive me, for when I read your post I laughed  out loud because I know you feel I have again, thrashed one of your heroes. I apologize for that, but I think you exaggerate my position.  I don’t think those guys are at all imposters, just not too advanced in relationship to others. In other words indeed, advanced thinkers, but I believe not advanced in metaphysics, post or otherwise.  I could be wrong, of course, but believe me, Balder, once you know the archetype you know the man. As for me indulging in what you suggest, well, I have written a book that took thirty five years of research to do, and that’s my contribution at this point. That may change in the future.  And btw, I am not concerned that, at best, maybe 100 people have read it.  For do you honestly believe that if the truth entered this world, the world would or could recognize it? Also, I might add, I have written intellegent, comprehensive, and cogent essays on IPM, and a 20,000 word essay on Sufism [ which I plan to turn into a book ] so I dont think I am just a negative critic. I recomend reading my essay, Cowboy Ken Wilber: The Good,  the Bad, and the Ugly, on Integral World

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

Calling Panikkar a 'hero' of mine is too strong, but I do respect several aspects of his work (especially for what they can contribute to integral/postmetaphysical spirituality and progressive interfaith work).
 
I am aware of your book, and have read some of your stuff on Integral World, but I'm referring now to the content you contribute to this forum. 

I asked you to contribute more positive posts, or posts expressive of your own spiritual vision, because it is relatively easy to dismiss or criticize people with various general dismissive remarks – “not that advanced,” or “not that original,” or whatever – but remarks like that don't really “go” anywhere.  They don't provide much nutrition, or much to work with in terms of carrying a discussion forward.  So I was letting you know I'd welcome more “meaty” contributions, with more information about what your own perspective or “model” is.

 

Re: Rethinking Secularism with Raimon Panikkar

That's reasonable, but generally I don’t proselytize my views on metaphysics - which are in my book - because it appears too self-serving.

The aspects of metaphysics are based on certain levels of insight. Most of the thinkers quoted on this forum are on a level of philosophy and opinion on the outer layer of metaphysic, IMO.

Not to sound arrogant, but I don’t have to read much of a guys work to understand their level. The fact that they have a lot of published material means nothing to me.

At least Wilber has some kind of coherent system based on his insight. It took me a long time, longer than most, to gauge his level. It is an advanced level, but I fear he may be going backwards because of the age old ego-trap of world accolades he gets, that may be blocking his progress, which is unfortunate.


In fact, that's why probably beyond yourself, I am the biggest fan of Wilber on this forum, though I do have differences that I have expressed in-depth.
I agree with Wilber’s doctrines far more than I disagree with him.

Regarding my contribution, I have given some of my  views on the topic of Christian doctrine from a mystical interpretation.

What I will consider doing [ maybe] is a synopsis post on the essential idea in my metaphysics, at some time