Who is Raimon Panikkar
and
What is the Cosmotheandric Vision?
Philosopher and theologian Raimon Panikkar has been and continues to be, one of the major influences in the unfolding
of Skyline Harvest. As a young undergraduate student in religious studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara,
his spiritual vision of the inter-relating human, cosmic and divine dimensions of reality entered Diane's consciousness like leaven.
That leaven is still working through our eco-contemplative vision, a source of inspiration, of hope and possibility.
His cosmotheandric vision of reality unites the human with heaven and earth, with the divine and the cosmic. He perceives reality to be
tri-fold, constituted by the cosmic, human and divine dimensions, each irreducible to the other, but each inextricably related to the
other. What this means is that the human is not elevated above the natural world, or the divine elevated above the human. These
hierarchies, which have served to alienate modern humans from the natural world and God from the earth, are challenged by a vision that sees
each of these as irreducible dimensions of one and the same reality. Nor is the human denigrated as the cosmic dimension assumes its proper
stature. Today we often hear that the earth would be better off without humans, but the cosmotheandric vision understands human consciousness
as permeating everything that is. As Panikkar says: a cosmos without Man and consciousness would not be and is not, certainly, the cosmos we
inhabit. And in regards to the divine dimension, which he understands to be the dimension of freedom, of interiority, of depth and infinite
possibility, he continues: A cosmos without this divine urge, this dynamism built into its innermost core, is surely not the cosmos we
experience. +(p.74)
