The purpose of this learning circle is:

- to delve into meta-Reality and cosmotheandry as articulated by Roy Bhaskar and Raimon Panikkar respectively,

- to thus with every grace experience the world in a revolutionary and radically new way, eyes borne anew with possibilities hereforeto unseen.

On this track of The Magellan Courses we’ll take a sea-borne meander through Roy Bhaskar’s ‘Reflections on Meta-reality’ and Raimon Panikkar’s ‘The Rhythm of Being’, alternating the readings each week, seeking to nourish the view nurtured by one with seedlings of grace from the other, and vice versa.

Via ‘The Rhythm of Being’, we come to appreciate direct contact with the divine augmented with a triple interdependence – the cosmos, the theos and anthropos. Each contributes to a cosmotheandric intuition or a radically new cosmology, the seeds of which are to be revealed, tracking the homoeomorphic equivalents of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. Silence, Being and emptiness together become tropes through which we may newly appreciate body, mind, will and senses, and contemplation is proposed as a rich exploration ground wherein we might witness the marriage, of theory and practice.

Engaging ‘Reflections on Meta-reality’ we cruise a different trajectory, bringing a philosophy of the present into direct contact with the social moment, on the way to non-duality. Deeply engaging with the Marxist suggestion that the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all, and grounding praxis via an ontology birthed within the movement of critical realism, this journey through questions of ‘Who Am I?’ and ‘What is Co-presence?’ asks us to consider the mutual and individual structure, difference, absence and transformation available for witness and embrace/release, in each moment.

Both theorist-philosophers use certain words and concepts in common, but with (sometimes startlingly) different connotations. We’ll orient some of our focus to:

- ‘emancipation’

- ‘nonduality’

- ‘dharma’

- interior/exterior relations

- transcendental dialectics

- emergence

- ontology/epistemology

to engage the possibility of new approaches to being-in-the-world, shaped through a cross-fertilisation which embraces and emerges from the con-joining of these works in our awareness.

Our first call starts with Chapter 1 of ‘Reflections on Metareality’ – ‘Critical Realism: Beyond Modernism and Postmodernism’, and we begin on Monday 28th May, 7pm AEST. A link to the material is below:

Ch1 Reflections on meta-Reality – Modernism to Postmodernism

The forward to The Rhythm of Being by Joseph Prabh is here: (note a better quality copy will be posted soon for Ch 1):

The Rhythm of Being – forward by Joseph Prabhu

Ch1 The Rhythm of Being – Introduction

In the first instance please message Trish Nowland at nowlandtr@gmail.com if you would like to take part in the call. To take part in the circle you will need to be registered as an author on the Magellan Courses site, to post snippets of material and responses to the material (and each other), as we sail along.

It will be very lovely to meet you online, as we circle the seas of Meta-Reality and The Rhythm of Being.