Just for clarification, by "Mythos" do you mean "a pattern of beliefs expressing often symbolically the characteristic or prevalent attitudes in a group or culture "? Or does the author have a specialized philosophical meaning for that?
Panikkar uses the word in a couple of ways which are distinct but where he sees a connection between them. I think of all his terminology it might be the hardest word to fully grasp everything he's trying to get at.
He does indeed use the word "mythos" as something like a synonym for worldview, but what he is emphasizing in the sutras, I think, is the idea that experience is
immediate and
unquestionable in the way that "myth" as worldview is unquestioned by those for whom it truly functions as myth. Once you question your myth, it is no longer really your myth. Myth must be innocent if it is to be mythos. This idea might explain why certain attempts to rescue traditional myths (think of young-earth creationism) are so damaging. We have lost our innocence, and it can't be regained. We can no longer believe them in an immediate and unquestioned way. This is not a bad thing, as the phrase "lost innocence" might seem to imply, i'm only trying to tease out what mythos is attempting to get at here.
The phrase "ultimate horizon" is meant to signify the connection between the unquestionable immediacy of experience and the fact that our worldview, the sort of background or horizon of all our subsequent thinking, is unquestioned, but conditions all of our thinking and understanding.
Further, the point is that the "conscious touch" of reality is prior to the analytical mind which distinguishes the subject from the object. Reality itself, and our participation in it (we "touch" reality, we have a direct contact with it) is prior to any such analysis. He writes: "
In Summary: Reality is the substrate on which we rest in order to say anything about it. It follows that we can neither objectify nor subjectify it. It is the given -- what is given to us, our starting point that we have called
mythos."
#4 says "the first step of consciousness": Does this mean mythos gives rise to consciousness in our heads, or that consciousness expresses itself first in mythos before expressing things via rationality?
The latter, that consciousness expresses itself prior to rationality.
There is also a progression here
. Experience is elaborated as
conscious touch, which does not have the character of subject/object epistemology but of the foundational quality of
mythos. This may be called
presence, a synonym for conscious touch, but one which notices also that it's not just my own presence. While reality is neither subjective nor objective, I am aware of presence which is not merely my egoic self, my own "subject", and yet is not purely an object "out there" either. That presence is found in
consciousness, and when my consciousness becomes pure, transcending awareness of things and of the self, this presence is full of love. That flow of terms in the first six sutras is what particularly draws me to these. It seems to say very well what is my own experience.
In this context, what is meant by "integral"? It makes me think of Ken Wilber.
#7 needs some elucidation on the grounds of vagueness. What kind of direct relation? A reflection of the human condition?
(1) and (7) are related in that the crucial idea is that of totality and integration. Mystical experience is the experience of the Whole of Reality, which is not merely the sum of the "parts", even if it is an experience of "wholeness" in and through the part, as for example if one experiences the whole while looking at a flower. "Every flower which wafts its scent into the outer world speaks of the mystery of the Whole", goes one translation of a line from Rumi.
But that experience is also an experience that requires your entire person. Your "whole" and "integrated" person. The usage in (1) is certainly similar to how Wilber describes integral life or consciousness. The point here is that it's not just an intellectual experience, or even only a "spiritual" experience, but in order to be complete it must integrate everything that I am, whatever anthropology is conceived of. Body, mind, spirit, emotion, aesthetics, and even the importance of those parts of your "person" which are not strictly individual: family and culture and worldview.
