Salvador Pániker

Approaches to the Origin

Original title:

Aproximación al origen.

About the book:

Approaches to the Origin

What are “problems”?  What does “crisis” mean?  Where is the world going to?  What does this illness called Man consist of? How long will the gestation take of a species that is both planet-wide and in equilibrium? How long before attaining pluralist concepts of peoples that are non-sovereign and open transculturally?  How long before the advent of a new type of human animal, simultaneously “mystic”  and “creative” with its moral consciousness supplanted by an ecological one?

This book asks these and other searching questions taking them to their most profound implications. The begins with an inventory of the signs of the times. It continues with the (by now) much thumbed concept of the “new paradigm” and moves on to clarify the more general hypothesis: the trauma of distant origins, the great “irreality syndrome” which affects us all. From here the author outlines what could be the great therapy of our times, the evolutionary leap into a new culture, a culture of diversity and of uncertainty, but also of a new mystic sensibility. A culture, in short, the reconciles the most profound of the legacy of the East with the most irreducible adventure of the West.

About the author:

Salvador Pániker, with a doctorate in industrial engineering and a degree in philosophy, is the author of, amongst other books, Asimetrías (Asymmetries), Los signos y las cosas (Signs and things) La dificultad de ser español (The difficulty of being Spanish), Segunda memoria (Second Memory), Filosofía y mistica (Philosophy and mysticism) and Cuaderno amarillo (Yellow notebook). He was formerly a lecturer in oriental philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.