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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThe 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 In a world subjugated by the reification, if not deification, of rationality and science, this is a sorely needed antidote... Highly recommended. Choice A stunning scholarly achievement. The Ecclesial University The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience is Gananath Obeyesekere's magnum opus, his summa, his valedictory volume, to use three Latinate terms that come down to, it's a great big book into which he's put all the wisdom of his long lifetime. -- Wendy Doniger Current Anthropology [Obeyesekere's] cultural and historical range is as impressive as his epistemological thesis is focused and tight. -- Jeffrey J. Kripal History of Religions In this finely written, massive essay, ethnographer Obeyesekere elucidates a dialectic epistemology that utilizes both rational-scientific thinking and what he calls "passive cerebration." Religious Studies Review
Table of ContentsPreface List of Abbreviations Introduction Book 1. The Visionary Experience: Theoretical Understandings Book 2. Mah?y?na: 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
