The Cosmotheandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness

by Raimon Panikkar

Raimon Panikkar has lived on the boundaries between Euro-America and Asia; Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity; philosophy, science, and theology; mysticism and prophecy. For him, our old habits of mind have been dying for several generations, outmoded by the arrival of a new way of intuiting reality. Panikkar calls this intuition the cosmotheandric experience.
This cosmotheandric experience enables us today to enter into the hermeneutic circles that for thousands of years have hindered persons of different faith traditions from truly understanding the central experience of "other" religious families. The term denotes an intertwining of the "cosmic," the "human," and the "divine" - all interpenetrating one another as different dimensions of the Whole.

Genres: Religion, Philosophy, Nonfiction

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1993

About the author

Raimon Panikkar was a proponent of inter-religious dialogue. He continued to work as a Roman Catholic priest and a scholar specialized in comparative religion.

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raimon Panikkar is brilliant, brainy, but feet planted firmly on the earth. This is another book in which the ideas are so complex and far-reaching that I would not attempt to describe it here. I will say this: Pannikar will make you think and he will give you hope if you are one of those people who sees him/her-self as part of a Universal ecological system. His thinking, in my opinion, dovetails nicely with the work that Campbell does in My Big Toe. But it's more readable.

[Amos Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my all-time favorite books on the Trinity from an agile minded author who has championed inter-faith dialogue. Panikkar's brilliant approach to the Trinity is as follows:
1) Cosmos: All matter, from the heaviest metals to the lightest gasses, which make up everything from planets to rocks.
2) Andros: All biological life leading up to the climax of evolution, the human being, with its profound potential and liabilities.
3) Theos: All knowledge that fills up books and the internet. Understanding that the root of knowledge is Theos or theology--that all knowledge has its source in God.
When we experience these spheres of being emanating from the Source that we call God, it illumines and transforms us.
-Amos Smith (author of Healing The Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots)