The Integral Message

Panikkar's Creator-Creation Polarity

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To elaborate upon the wholistic non-dual attitude, Panikkar explores the cosmotheandric polarities by discussing the three relationships, Creator-creation, Creation-creature, and the Creator-Creature.

Panikkar addresses the issue of the Creator and the Created to explain his non-dual awareness. Initially, he points out a primary issue confronting faith traditions of our day, by drawing attention to a major concern of some theologians of the medieval world. He speaks of their concern to preserve a separation between the divine and creation, lest the nature of God is reduced to a similar status as the creature.

 

This duality of God and creation is no longer meaningful to Panikkar who seeks an explanation of the non-dual for the Creator and the creation, for he speaks of them as both ‘contemporal’ and therefore ‘coexisting’.

 

The implication of the co-existence of God and creation is a significant point in understanding the non-dual nature of creation. Creation is to be understood beyond the notion of chronological or historical time. Herein lays an extraordinary challenge for the human mind. Human perception reaches the limits of rational perception when addressing such fundamental notions of reality. If we speak of God as before creation, we can only do so within a dualistic perception that is subject to time and space. Dualism has contributed to the philosophical notion of God as primarily transcendent and ultimately, struggles with the notion of God as immanence. Christians have had to cross the divide between the dualistic understanding of transcendence and immanence by describing the life of Jesus as the incarnation of God, hence the bridge between God and humanity. But then the challenge continues in understanding the relation between Jesus and creation. The non-dual does not diminish the nature of Jesus, as Christians have defined him, but releases the limits that dualistic perception places upon the incarnation. Similarly, it is the integral advaitic approach which is breaking this pattern by removing the limits of understanding that dualism places upon the transcendence and therefore God. Non-duality opens our perceptions of God to broader understandings which are so necessary in the dramatically new world being perceived by humanity in recent times. Such new understandings include examples like the ‘presence of God’, to be known in all realms of being, for God is the totality of Being in Becoming. We have traditionally faced the danger of reducing God, on the one hand to only that which we know, or on the other hand, that which we don’t know.

 

The rationally-shaped scientific paradigm stretches human comprehension and speaks of the Big Bang, Black Holes, Worm Holes and Multi-verses as it seeks to break through previous boundaries of knowing. Yet, it still operates out of a paradigm of its own construction. Astro-physicist, Lawrence Cruz, in his book, 'Creation out of Nothing' supported by the scientific method, theorises on the process of creation by postulating the meaning of ‘out of nothing.’[3] He acknowledges that he has been challenged by theologians who argue that he is not really speaking of nothing as ‘no-thing’. I believe this human dilemma illustrates the limits of the rational mind to address these ultimate questions. Panikkar (along with authors like Wilber and Gebser) is calling humanity into the new realm of the integral perception. The integral is opening the mind to realms of knowing to which the human mind has rarely been previously awakened. The conventional, rational mind has served humanity well, but the new challenges require new capacities. For Panikkar, it is crystallised in the realm of the advaitic polarities of knowing. The polarity created by the non-dual approach to life, based upon the inter-dependent notion of reality, enables the mind to cross the divisions previously created in the dualistic approach to reality. The separation between transcendence and immanence, the mystical and the material, are examples of such divisions. Thus, the non-dual transforms our perception of reality to understand that we must not limit our conclusions of our understanding of God. Rather than closed definitions, we are to be more concerned about an open and humble attitude to the possibilities of Being.

 

[1] Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Gifford Lectures, 285.

[2] ibid., 286.

[3] Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, 142.