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.
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