Gaia: Integral Post-metaphysical Spirituality - Re-visioning the Great Traditions - Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://kelamuni.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:55:39 GMT

that would be another straw man. yes, i know: i should address my parties directly. i don't have access to that pod as of yet.

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:36:05 GMT

Some people used to think so, especially when I returned from Asia. But not so much nowadays...

So you were responding to my post to Tom on Integral Archipelago? What I was calling a strawman was the suggestion that Buddhists deny conventional reality to the self.

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://kelamuni.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:32:57 GMT

haha. that bad hair creature looks like a muppet. just reading your various posts for entertainment, bruce. hey, do you speak with a cool accent? :-)

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://maryw.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:12:20 GMT

Steven and Bruce --

Even though I mentioned previously that I was born "steeped in myth," my upbringing has some similarities to yours -- born and raised Roman Catholic by parents who could pretty much take it or leave it, and educated in progressive Catholic schools with teachers (some of them non-Catholics or ex-Catholics) who often encouraged us to look beyond the literal level in the Bible and in the tradition. When I was the age that most kids go through their first holy communion, I was asked if this is what I wanted to do, and I said no -- in part because even then I wasn't sure that God had died and become a wafer (and if by chance it was true, wouldn't He then be really mad at my hypocrisy in taking communion?) Besides, my mother no longer took communion, even though she took us to church sometimes. From her I got the sense that there are some things of value here, but don't take it too seriously. The world is much bigger than this. It was a pretty liberal religious upbringing, and for much of my youth the literal and the metaphorical and the symbolic co-existed -- sometimes beautifully, sometimes uncomfortably -- and I was allowed the freedom to question all of these things.

Just goes to show you in how many directions things can go ....

Mary

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:59:13 GMT

This is a little cryptic! What is it in response to?

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://kelamuni.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:22:16 GMT

Re: just say no to two worlds. This resonates with Eckhart.

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://kelamuni.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:17:33 GMT

Buddhists say that particularity is illusion and samsara? Strawman indeed.

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:39:32 GMT

Hi, Steven,

I actually had a vaguely similar upbringing to yours, at least in this area: my parents were very loosely theistic Episcopalians (my father attended church more to play french horn in the brass section than to worship a deity), and once I was old enough to reflect on these things (7 or 8), they encouraged curiosity and inquiry rather than dogma, suggesting God might be a way of talking about the universe rather than a separate entity. They never tried to encourage or enforce belief in a sky god.

Anyway, I enjoyed the way you "backed in" to a response -- I really enjoy your artful recollections -- but I'm doubtful that your conclusion can stand as a "generalizable truth" -- that holding a "god concept" is entirely without consequence for perception or behavior. It may have been the case with your father, since the term seemed to be largely transparent and undefined, as you said. But I don't believe that's the case with everyone.

Best wishes,

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://theurj.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:21:44 GMT

Here's Caputo on what I'd call the two-truths doctrine, from TWOG:

...rather than speaking of God's transcendence at all, it might be better to speak of God's in-scendence...or "insistence" in the world (45).

I steadfastly oppose a two-worlds theory, in which the kingdom of God is one thing and the world is entirely separate....The kingdom is the salt of the earth, the leaven of the world's bread...the outside that insists and insinuates itself inside the world and saves the world from itself (52).

The opening verses of Genesis make no use whatever of a metaphysical distinction between an eternal, infinite and supersensible being creating finite, temporal being, which is an un-Hebraic conception that is unconceivable outside of the two-worlds schema that Christianity inherited from Hellenistic metaphysics (62).

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://theurj.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:44:04 GMT

Yes, it is interesting that Greg criticizes the use of the word "God" as having too much baggage to describe what Derrida means by différance. Which is the point of making up a new word like the latter. And then he and D turn around and use the word "justice." Even though Greg takes pains to recontexualize that as he and D use it it's not the same as the bastard justice of the world that leads to so much injustice. But why not, like in the case of God, just create a new word?

* * *

It was a cold day in the courtroom, as the heating system had broken down the night before during the worst blizzard those parts had seen in 20 years. It had been raining earlier that night before the freeze set in. The gale-force winds had loosened some of the roof tiles, causing a leak. Hence a few wet spots on the courtroom rug had frozen over.

Billy was sitting with his mother in the gallery, watching his father's trial for stealing a loaf of bread. The jury had passed its verdict ten minutes prior: Guilty. The judge announces the sentence: One month in jail. A well-tailored man sitting behind Billy yells out: "That's justice!" Billy, transfixed on one of the frozen ponds on the floor, says weakly: "No, it's just ice."

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://kabiri.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:45:58 GMT

Edward

I'll buy most of what Greg and Jacques were talking about. I would throw out the word "future" in favor of saying simply that potential is either more or less imminent or more or less latent, a small matter. I'd also throw out the words, "beauty, terror, and strangeness" as unfitting assumptions, a larger matter. And finally I would throw out the word "justice," one of the biggest whore words of all time. Justice, to the winners, is that which has been served and justice, to the losers, is that which has been betrayed. No one will ever be able to put lipstick on that pig and make it any less of a whore; too bad for it sounds so good but it puts out service to all.

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://theurj.gaia.com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:44:12 GMT

I' ve been reading over prevous posts in various threads. We have amassed quite a bit of fascintating dialogue here. Here's a quote from Gregory Desilet that I find relevant to our discussion on God:

I recall Derrida saying in an interview that "all experience is experience of the other." And I think Derrida strongly resists the possible tendency to think the "other" in terms of "God." The word "God" has way too much baggage associated with it for it to stimulate the kind of "newness" or fresh approach to questions surrounding the meaning and quality of life that Derrida would like to initiate. In this respect the word "God" is similar to "Jesus." Those who would like to initiate a profoundly new or nontraditional approach to understanding the teachings of the New Testament are burdoned with the history and the hermeneutics of interpetation of Jesus' words that work to derail any attempt to talk "differently" about what Jesus may have meant and how he should be understood. To separate himself from traditional theology Derrida speaks of himself as one who " passes for an atheist." The "other" is not God for Derrida and it is possible, at times, that the "other" could be what in other contexts may be called the "devil." The "other" is the future coming at us in all its potential beauty, terror, and strangeness. The impossibility in it is the impossibility to predict what it will bring-which is the operation of differance and the other as the impossible because the radical way in which these must be theorized precludes nothing in the way of events and experience.

Think of it this way: suppose someone says to you after you report a certain experience, "You cannot have that experience. That experience is impossible." Will you trust the a priori or analytical dictate that such an experience is impossible and revise your assessment of your experience? Or will you favor an empirical approach and allow experience to inform your definition of what may count as experience? If we are in some broad way "open" to experience we will remain open to it even to the point of including what would seem impossible. This is the kind of opennnes to the other Derrida advocates. This kind of openness is also what he means by "justice"-which is an allowing of the other to be other (rather than forcing the other into some category of the same). And so justice, as the other, is also "undeconstructible" in Derrida's view because, like the other (and like differance) it remains beyond the register of particularity necessary for deconstruction (such as civil law and religious ritual, for example).

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:43:34 GMT

Yes, exactly, that's why I said "relatively." Ati teaches a great equalization, all empty, all immaculate, all of single taste. All Vajrasattva's face.

No problem with that!

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://kelamuni.gaia.com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:30:55 GMT

"...but for me it would be problematic, relatively, if it formed the basis of an ethos that denied the validity of all 'ranking' or developmental distinctions."

So... some things are less empty than others? ;-) Chandrakriti explains that all things are sama, the "same," or ekarasa, or of "one taste," insofar as all things are empty. Perhaps samata and tulyata (equality) can be taken as referring to things seen from an ultimate point of view, i.e., gradations exist only from the point of view of a relative truth. The very point of tulyata seems to be to deconstruct all such hierarchies, or "onto-theologies," like the medieval Great Chain of Being. Many of the themes of what I call spiritual anarchism appear in the ati-yoga teachings. Ati yoga, as I see it, appears to be an "institutionalized" version of the sahajayana teachings, analogous to the Pratyabhijna an-upaya teachings of Kashmiri Shaivism.

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://kabiri.gaia.com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:26:29 GMT

Balder
I wrote: I guess to me the Weak God of pomo is a functionally transparent but still present velo; remove it and the fundamental perception of the phenomena will still be the same. It might be totally vestigial.

and then

You asked: Steven, can you clarify what you mean here? Are you describing a particular type or range of phenomena? And are you suggesting that all interpretive lenses or veils do not fundamentally affect the fundamental perception of phenomena, or just this particular pomo one?

I'll back into this:

First I want to thank Edward for posting that Google Book link to Caputo's The Weakness of God. When I linked in I had an immediate deja vu and then remembered back in the day when Greg was holding forth on Derrida, I had searched Caputo and found the same site, scanned the material on a couple of pages, raised a question in the thread, but for some reason Caputo didn't spark any interest. But good things do come for those who wait...I'm sure in some subliminal mode John D. can sense we are abuzz about him here.

From now on out it is a phenomenological quasi-Sufi style-story:

I just read fairly closely several of Caputo's early pages and realized this was the version of God on which I was raised. My mother is a devout, relatively "high church" Episcopalian and my Father went along because there wasn't a Unitarian congregation within 200 miles of where we lived. The Episcopalians were a fair compromise to his particular sensibilities. (I think toward the end of his life he began to prefer the Native American Church to which he had a standing invitation despite the fact that heritage-wise he was just a plain old mongrel-American cowboy. But he was damned good with horses and the Arapaho Tribe, in whose midst we lived, were damned good with horses too; they own some of the finest herds in the U.S.A., and such was their fundamental connection to him.)

Early on my parents gently disabused me of any sky god illusions. And I think my father also corrected any illusions I might have of needing a god or a religion as the basis of either my ethos or my moral code. He once told me that his certainty as to the existence of God was the only thing that kept him from being a hard core communist and he was really thick with the radical left when he was younger. But on the other hand, he also told me that if you really need that horse, steal it, its a game. If you really feel that some man should die, kill him. Be reconciled to the consequences. God is a long way off. To him, god was not an event, but events were his god's only manifestation and I think my father was fairly well assured that he...along with everything else...was one of his god's events.

What more could a man of radical autonomy want? His logic was not of a singularly formal sort, but such was the way he lived his life. He was one of only two men (women aside for now) that I ever respected. (Rev. Will D. Campbell, a former neighbor and editor and a friend long ago, is the other.)

That's part of the subjective lens through which I view all phenomena, or at least that which relates to this particular thread.

I recall a time, maybe I was 8, and bored with a sermon one Sunday morning, I made a close reading of The General Confession in the Episcopalian Prayer Book along with (maybe a few months later) the Articles of Religion, as found in the Appendix, and rejected them both; thus when I was "confirmed" at the age of 9, I had a true humorously ironic feeling of being a total hypocrite. I got the wine and the bread while repudiating the basic principles behind it all. In other words by the time I was 9 I believed that Christianity was a total debasement of what I thought was the essence of the human race...with me as the standard, of course. (Later in life my mother assured me that this was totally okay--I could reject all the basic principles of Christianity and still be a good Episcopalian.) And from the same perspective, somewhere between the ages of 16 and 34, somewhat under the influence of Jung, I concluded that if the culturally generated dogma of a religion could so easily, so forgivably, go away, so could the culturally generated conception of the agent behind all dogmas be dismissed without changing in anyway whatsoever my absolutely delicious experience of this world. And so the god of my father died.

What I realized was that what my father called god was essentially what I called the authentic being of a mortal, fallible, outlaw, mongrel-American cowboy. He thought, for whatever reason--maybe it was a streak of mysticism--that god was somehow an agentic factor in his life, a middleman through the grace of whom he worked. To me the god was weak, the man as the standard, as the measure, was by far the strongest agent. My father looked at the world through this functionally transparent lens that he called god. I can throw that lens aside--it doesn't matter whether it was named after a strong god, or a weak one--and know that neither one of us would ever have changed a thing if he had done the same. I can say that because we knew each other very well. I was the only person alive to whom he would trust his ranch...the first time he put it into my care I was 13.

Vestigial? It goes without saying.

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://theurj.gaia.com — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:59:16 GMT

Postmetasalsa: a mythologeme to the core-a.

From Peter Heltzel's review of Caputo's book, in JCRT 7.2 (Spring/Summer 2006):

In a delicate dance with Catherine Keller's notion of creation ex profundis, Caputo imagines creation as a concert of fluid and free-floating forces that shape pre-existent elements into a new and good life. Like unto the Derridean khora, the pre-existent elements are "mythologemes" of uncertainty and undecidability (72). They bear prophetic testimony to the open-endedness and riskiness of material, human and divine life. Caputo is inspired by the "beautiful risk" of creation as the right way to think about the God-world relationship with the two partners functioning interdependently as the ebb and flow of two salsa dancers.

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:17:12 GMT

I can see value in such an "equalizing" and (self-)erasing approach -- it's not only a "Green" artifact, as you know, and exists in other contemplative traditions -- but for me it would be problematic, relatively, if it formed the basis of an ethos that denied the validity of all "ranking" or developmental distinctions.

Speaking of which, you never got back to me on this post....

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://kelamuni.gaia.com — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:13:55 GMT

"God as event" = existential Crisis ?

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://kelamuni.gaia.com — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:08:55 GMT

or how about "her- archy?" ;-)

topsy turviness one of the themes in spiritual anarchism, in the pashupata literature, e.g.

i was about to write a blog: "The Principles of Spiritual Anarchism" for a musician friend who had asked me what i meant by the term, and as i was about to start, the irony of writing about the principles of anarchism struck me. but there they are: as principles or themes that pulverize other principles and dissolve themselves in the process. one such principle is seeing all things as "equal." another is "letting be." another is "letting go." these are not moralistic categories, they are reflections of equinamity and detachment, but one can see how an ethos might develop from them.

yes, of course, there will always be the threat of "mere relativism," "pure nilhilism," "reductionism," "flatlandfuckheadism," and so on, which may be a source of fear for the faint of heart.

Re: Raimon Panikkar's Cosmotheandric Vision

http://kelamuni.gaia.com — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:56:31 GMT

sacred anarchy. yes.

caputo has written on the later heidegger and eckhart, as has reiner schurmann. the theme of anarchism is present in both.

all of which i relate to radical immanence.