While a rational consciousness grasps many truths, Gananath Obeyesekere believes an even richer knowledge is possible through a bold confrontation with the stuff of visions and dreams. Spanning both Buddhist and European forms of visionary experience, he fearlessly pursues the symbolic, nonrational depths of such phenomena, reawakening the intuitive, creative impulses that power greater understanding.
Throughout his career, Obeyesekere has combined psychoanalysis and anthropology to illuminate the relationship between personal symbolism and religious experience. In this book, he begins with Buddha's visionary trances wherein, over the course of four hours, he witnesses hundreds of thousands of his past births and eons of world evolution, renewal, and disappearance. He then connects this fracturing of empirical and visionary time to the realm of space, considering the experience of a female Christian penitent, who stares devotedly at a tiny crucifix only to see the space around it expand to mirror Christ's suffering. Obeyesekere follows the unconscious motivations underlying rapture, the fantastical consumption of Christ's body and blood, and body mutilation and levitation, bridging medieval Catholicism and the movements of early modern thought as reflected in William Blake's artistic visions and poetic dreams. He develops the term "dream-ego" through a discussion of visionary journeys, Carl Jung's and Sigmund Freud's scientific dreaming, and the cosmic and erotic dream-visions of New Age virtuosos, and he defines the parameters of a visionary mode of knowledge that provides a more elastic understanding of truth. A career-culminating work, this volume translates the epistemology of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers for western audiences while revitalizing western philosophical and scientific inquiry.
About the Author: Gananath Obeyesekere is professor emeritus of anthropology at Princeton University. His books include Cannibal Talk: Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Sea; Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth; Land Tenure in Village Ceylon; Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience; The Cult of the Goddess Pattini; Buddhism Transformed; The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology; and The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, which won the prize for most outstanding book in sociology and anthropology from the Association of American Publishers and the Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.
Author(s): Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Year: 2012
Language: English
Commentary: scantailor made
Pages: 647
City: New York
Tags: comparative religion;buddhism;hinduism;christianity;enlightenment;jungian psychology;rapture;spiritual experience;awakenedonesphen0000obey
The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience
Contents
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Book 1. THE VISIONARY EXPERIENCE: Theoretical Understandings
The Awakened Buddha and the Buddhist Awakening
Time and Space in Visionary Experience
Critique of the Cogito: The Buddha, Nietzsche, and Freud
Daybreak: The Space of Silence and the Emergence of Aphoristic Thinking
Schreber and the Pictorial Imagination
Book 2. MAHAYANA: Salvific Emptiness, Fullness of Vision
Hinge Discourse: The Movement Toward Mahayana and the Rise of Theistic Mysticism
Introducing Tibetan Treasure-Seekers: Visionary Knowledge and Its Transmission
Picturing the Tibetan Cosmos
The Waking Dream in a Buddhist Text on Illusion
Ambivalence, Fakery, and the Validation of the Buddhist Vision
The Tibetan Dream-Time and the Dissolution of the Self
Book 3. THE COSMIC “IT”: The Abstract Being of the Intellectuals
Plotinus: The Mystical Reach of the Absolute
Plotinus and the Buddha: The Discourse on the Ineffable
Secular Spirituality in the Metaphysics of Physicists
Book 4. PENITENTIAL ECSTASY: The Dark Night of the Soul
Showings: The Christian Visions of Julian of Norwich
Dryness: Psychic Realities and Cultural Formations in Female Visionary Religiosity
Replenishment and Rapture: The Case of Teresa of Avila
Analysis: Deep Motivation and the Work of Culture in Christian Penitential Ecstasy
Historical Tableaux: The Participatory Visualizations of Margery Kempe
Margery’s Grief: A Postpartum Depression and Its Transformation
Book 5. CHRISTIAN DISSENT: The Protest Against Reason
Hinge Discourse: The Occult Worlds of Early European Modernity
William Blake and the Theory of Vision
The Cure at Felpham
Aside: The Work of the Dream-Ego
Back to Blake and the Wide Realm of Wild Reality
Blake’s Peers: Poetry and the Dreaming
Book 6. THEOSOPHIES: West Meets East
The Visionary Travels of Madame Blavatsky: Countering Enlightenment Rationality
The Production of Psychic Phenomena
The Cold Snows of a Dream: The Death of Damodar Mavalankar
Colonel Olcott and the Return to Euro-rationality
Epistemic Breaks: Blavatsky and the Hindu Consciousness
Book 7. MODERNITY AND THE DREAMING
Hinge Discourse: Dream Knowledge in a Scientific Weltanschauung
A Postscript to Freud: Rethinking Manifest Dreams and Latent Meanings
Carl Gustav Jung and the “Natural Science” of Oneiromancy
On Synchronicity
Jung’s Psychosis: When the Dead Awaken
The Tower: The Dark Night of Jung’s Trance Illness
Book 8. CONTEMPORARY DREAMING: Secular Spirituality and Revelatory Truth
Lucid Dreaming: Visionary Consciousness and the Death of God
Eroticism and the Dream-Ego
Edwin Muir: A Myth Dreamer of Death and Transcendence
ENVOI—INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY: The Ethnographer’s Dream and the Return of the Vultures
Notes
Glossary
Index
