The Cosmotheandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness

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.