The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience

Obeyesekere, Gananath (著)

著者

Obeyesekere, Gananath (著)

出版年月日

2012

ページ

644

出版者

Columbia University Press

出版サイト

https://cup.columbia.edu/

出版地

New York, NY, US [紐約, 紐約州, 美國]

資料の種類

書籍=Book

言語

英文=English

ノート

Author Affiliation: Princeton University, USA.

抄録

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.

Preface xi
List of Abbreviations xix
Introduction 1
Book 1. The Visionary Experience: Theoretical Understandings 19
The Awakened Buddha and the Buddhist Awakening 19
Time and Space in Visionary Experience 30
Critique of the Cogito: The Buddha, Nietzsche, and Freud 35
Daybreak: The Space of Silence and the Emergence of Aphoristic Thinking 45
Schreber and the Pictorial Imagination 62
Book 2. Mahāyāna: Salvific Emptiness, Fullness of Vision 75
Hinge Discourse: The Movement Toward Mahāyāna and the Rise of Theistic Mysticism 75
Introducing Tibetan Treasure-Seekers: Visionary Knowledge and Its Transmission 94
Picturing the Tibetan Cosmos 99
The Waking Dream in a Buddhist Text on Illusion 108
Ambivalence, Fakery, and the Validation of the Buddhist Vision 109
The Tibetan Dream-Time and the Dissolution of the Self 113
Book 3. The Cosmic "It": The Abstract Being of the Intellectuals 127
Plotinus: The Mystical Reach of the Absolute 127
Plotinus and the Buddha: The Discourse on the Ineffable 138
Secular Spirituality in the Metaphysics of Physicists 156
Book 4. Penitential Ecstasy: The Dark Night of the Soul 169
Showings: The Christian Visions of Julian of Norwich 169
Dryness: Psychic Realities and Cultural Formations in Female Visionary Religiosity 178
Replenishment and Rapture: The Case of Teresa of Avila 186
Analysis: Deep Motivation and the Work of Culture in Christian Penitential Ecstasy 201
Historical Tableaux: The Participatory Visualizations of Margery Kempe 217
Margery's Grief: A Postpartum Depression and Its Transformation 223.
Book 5. Christian Dissent: The Protest Against Reason 243
Hinge Discourse: The Occult Worlds of Early European Modernity 243
William Blake and the Theory of Vision 263
The Cure at Felpham 276
Aside: The Work of the Dream-Ego 289
Back to Blake and the Wide Realm of Wild Reality 303
Blake's Peers: Poetry and the Dreaming 316
Book 6. Theosophies: West Meets East 325
The Visionary Travels of Madame Blavatsky: Countering Enlightenment Rationality 325
The Production of Psychic Phenomena 342
The Cold Snows of a Dream: The Death of Damodar Mavalankar 345
Colonel Olcott and the Return to Euro-rationality 351
Epistemic Breaks: Blavatsky and the Hindu Consciousness 355
Book 7. Modernity and the Dreaming 363
Hinge Discourse: Dream Knowledge in a Scientific Weltanschauung 363
A Postscript to Freud: Rethinking Manifest Dreams and Latent Meanings 376
Carl Gustav Jung and the "Natural Science" of Oneiromancy 381
On Synchronicity 402
Jung's Psychosis: When the Dead Awaken 409
The Tower: The Dark Night of Jung's Trance Illness 427
Book 8. Contemporary Dreaming: Secular Spirituality and Revelatory Truth 441
Lucid Dreaming: Visionary Consciousness and the Death of God 441
Eroticism and the Dream Ego 455
Edwin Muir: A Myth Dreamer of Death and Transcendence 461
Envoi—Intimations of Mortality: The Ethnographer's Dream and the Return of the Vultures 473
Notes 477
Glossary 597
Index 601

ISBN

9780231153621 (hbc); 9780231527309 (E-book)

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