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 that underly 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, reflected in William Blake's artistic visions
and poetic dreams. He develops the term "dream-ego" through a
discussion of visionary journeys, Jung's and 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 not only translates the
epistemology of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers to western audiences
but also revitalizes western philosophical and scientific
inquiry.
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