Panikkar Seminar: Silentium

Raimon Panikkar insisted, during the last years of his life, on the need to open the “third eye” of knowledge, beyond the senses and the mind. Plato already distinguished discursive reason (dianoia) from intuitive reason (Noesis), and Panikkar recovers the medieval idea of the three eyes of knowledge of Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, and of St. Bonaventure.

We have at least three forms or faculties of knowledge: the eye of the flesh (oculus cárnicos), which perceives the external spatio-temporal world; the eye of reason (oculus mentis, ratio), which perceives the world of concepts, ideas, symbols… and the “third eye”, the eye of the spirit, the eye of contemplation (oculus fidei, intellectus) which perceives transrational realities.

If interculturality is one of the imperatives of our time, meditation, contemplative practice, the experience of silence, is another to be able to exercise this “third eye”.

Taking up this invitation, this seminar wants to do a determined work in this sense, but also a pedagogy and diffusion. And for the moment it has as a project, to make possible some spaces of meditation in the university environment.

Prior to the regular monthly session, where we share the work of study, the members of the seminar leave a space for stillness and silence, and as the Taoist Zhuangzi says: “we sit in oblivion to fast body and mind”.

Since the second semester of the 2008-09 academic year, coinciding with the flower festival in the old quarter of Girona, although taking advantage of the good spring weather, we began to do the sittings in the cloister of the Faculty of Letters.

A beautiful, excellent and inspiring space to conjure up a time, today, too busy.

You are invited to sit with us, every second Wednesday of the month and from 18h. to 18,30h. A tempo marked by the bells of the Cathedral of Girona.