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. --- from the publisher Reviews: "The Awakened Ones is the most sustained and powerful treatment since William James of the forms of knowledge and life that visionary experience makes possible. It is a remarkable combination of panoramic reference, detached analysis, and the most personal intensity of feeling and style." — Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University "In his impeccable style, with an unmatched eloquence, a series of sparking, sparkling insights, and an expansive comparative vision, Gananath Obeyesekere gives us what can only be called a spiritual-intellectual testament. In the process, he calls on us to unite the rational and the nonrational at the highest levels of scholarship and cultural work and to envision a cross-cultural enlightenment that is as indebted to the visionary teachings of a Buddha or a William Blake as to the humanities and social sciences. A stunning and edifying achievement from a major intellectual." — Jeffrey J. Kripal, Rice University, author of The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion Contents: Preface List of Abbreviations Introduction Book 1. The Visionary Experience: Theoretical Understandings Book 2. Mahayana: Salvific Emptiness, Fullness of Vision Book 3. The Cosmic “It”: The Abstract Being of the Intellectuals Book 4. Penitential Ecstasy: The Dark Night of the Soul Book 5. Christian Dissent: The Protest Against Reason Book 6. Theosophies: West Meets East Book 7. Modernity and the Dreaming Book 8. Contemporary Dreaming: Secular Spirituality and Revelatory Truth Envoi—Intimations of Mortality: The Ethnographer’s Dream and the Return of the Vultures Notes Glossary Index 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.
|