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.
目次
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
