‘Here is the place for the function of the third eye in the mystical intellect. If an aristotelian epistemology offers the basis for empirical and rational knowledge, the advaitic vision requires illumination from a superior source of knowledge. This third degree of knowledge comes into being not when we see or know, but when we are conscious that we are seen or known. It is nether sense knowledge nor rational knowledge, yet it is inseparable from both. It is not irrationalism. It emerges when the dynamism of knowledge inverts its direction, as it were, we are aware that in touching we are touched, in knowing we are known. It is conscious that there is an illumination from ‘above’. I know fully a thing not when the thing is sensible that I may sense it, or intelligible that I may understand it, but when both subject and object are illumined by a light that comes from neither subject nor object. Then it produces an ‘understanding’ that is more than sense or rational experience; it creates a union between subject and object that is of an order other than a sensuous touch or a rational contact. It is a more holistic participation, which produces a conviction that is more than physical or rational.’
Panikkar’s ultimate question is: What is the destiny of Being?
“Nevertheless, I cannot approach the ultimate question excluding myself, nor can I properly ask about my destiny without also involving the destiny of the entire human race, the whole earth and the universe in its totality. Nor can we exclude the Divine in this adventure or else our personal dignity will become an idle word.” P59.
Two more quotes which resonated with me from our last call:
“Silence “is”, rather that Emptiness from which all sound emerges as sound. It is not so much the negation as the absence of sound, the concomitant absence of the presence of sound. The absence that accompanies every presence could be a way of making indirect room for a description of Emptiness.’ P 90
“Being is that symbol that embraces the whole of reality in all the possible aspects we are able to detect, and in whose Destiny we are involved as co-spectators, actors and co-authors.” P94