“There Is A Demand For Spirituality”
Interview with Agustín Pániker, editor of Kairos and author of essays on spirituality in India. It speaks to us of spirituality for the day to day.
Kairós, the publishing house run by Agustín Pániker and founded by his father, the engineer and philosopher Salvador Pániker, is now 50 years old.
Agustín Pániker is a living example of the confluence of East and West in the same soul, something that he has been able to bring to the Kairós catalog, which has been providing readers with wisdom from both worlds for more than half a century.
─You are the son of Salvador Pániker and nephew of Raimón Panikkar, how do you grow up in such a spiritual environment?
─Probably the education I received from my father was a little different from that of the other children, although it did not seem that way to me.
My surname marked me for better and for worse, because they recognized me as the son and nephew of these philosophers but, on the other hand, they expected me to have the same mystical discourse. I am an editor who likes to disseminate his ideas, which are focused on India.
Practical spirituality of the East adapted to the West
─Kairós is closely related to transpersonal psychology, do you think this genre is still in fashion?
─The term transpersonal was invented by Maslow, who was unrelated to religion.
It aims at an introspection that goes beyond the psychoanalytic, behaviorist or even humanist paradigm, incorporating mystical and meditative dimensions.
Perhaps today transpersonal psychology does not have the avant-garde tone of the eighties of authors such as Wilber, Grof, Wals or Vaulhan, but there is a new approach to other currents of deep psychology. I don’t give her up for dead.
─Your catalog pays a lot of attention to Buddhism and meditation. Do you have a vested interest in delving into these topics?
─Yes, there are three lines that converge.
On the one hand my personal interest, because I feel very close to Buddhism and its meditative traditions; on the other hand Kairós, who carries in his DNA the introduction of Eastern philosophies, thought and traditions; and finally, the fact that today there is more demand for practical spirituality. We are pioneers in publishing mindfulness as a logical consequence of having previously published on Buddhism.
─What other topics are you interested in?
─Perhaps now, because I have relatively young children, I am interested in the whole pedagogical subject.
─What do you think of the so-called “alternative schools”?
─I like them a lot, what I don’t like is the alternative name because it places them on the margins of society.
Waldorf, Montessori or other methods should be included in common education, and there should be less obsession with the school curriculum, the PISA report and all that competitiveness. Results are only evaluated because emotional intelligence is not quantifiable. The obsession with the exams, the blackboard and the teacher seems to me really antipedagogical.
