Our intrepid producer Bruce Alderman sits down with John O'Neill to talk about the life, work, and ongoing relevance of Fr. Raimon Panikkar. Panikkar, who passed away in 2010, was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, and scholar of comparative religion who became a major pioneer in interfaith dialogue. John O’Neill, now retired, worked as a social worker, mostly for the Australian government’s Social Security Department. Since his retirement in 2011, he has become very involved with the integral community, locally and worldwide. He has attended 7 conferences and workshops in the US, two of them with Ken Wilber present for some of the time. He presented a paper at the Integral Theory Conference in San Francisco in 2013, titled “Towards a MetaIntegral Philosophy: Mysticism in the Philosophies of Bhaskar, Panikkar and Wilber,” since published in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, December 2013, Volume 8, Numbers 3 & 4. His recent article on attending the World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing in 2018 was published in the December 2019 issue of Integral Leadership Review. He is a staunch, active member of the Sydney Integral group and a member of the Australian Integral community. He lives alone, close to the bush, on the outskirts of Kurri Kurri, a small country town in the Hunter Valley, near Sydney. He has a large extended family. He is a practicing Catholic, a Christian meditator, and a member of the local diocesan ecumenical and interfaith council. He is a keen student of the work of Raimon Panikkar and now of Christopher Hareesh Wallis with his Classical Tantra teachings. He has a growing interest in Hindu and Indian philosophies.Raimon Panikkar's website:https://https://raimon-panikkar.org/
