Gananath Obeyesekere, The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary ExperienceThe Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience by Gananath ObeyesekereReview by: Jeffrey J. KripalHistory of Religions, Vol. 54, No. 1 (August 2014), pp. 112-115Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/676509 .

Accessed: 17/08/2014 13:14

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Historyof Religions.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 130.243.141.75 on Sun, 17 Aug 2014 13:14:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ated mythology central to academic understandings of Tibet, an approach that is to be

welcomed. He also constructs a lively narrative tracing a history of Tibetan tantric vio-

lence and its relationships to differing political and social contexts. The book is worth

reading but with caution in relation to Dalton’s presentation of the primary sources in

Tibetan and the consequent misinterpretations of Tibetan cultural history.

CATHY CANTWELL

University of Oxford

The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience. BY GANANATH OBEYE-

SEKERE. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2012. Pp. xxþ622.

This book is at once an intellectual metastatement, a spiritual testament, and an

uncanny “meditation on death” from a major anthropologist of religion with a long

and distinguished career behind him and the inevitabilities of human mortality before

him, which he writes about poignantly and with which he ends. Toward all of this,

Gananath Obeyesekere takes up a series of rich case studies of religious prodigies to

reflect on a set of related questions, including and especially howwemight understand

the shared phenomenology of visionary experience across cultures and times and what

this phenomenology in turn suggests about the psychology of vision, the mediating

role of the religious imagination, and the fundamental and nonrelative duality of

human knowing. The author’s cultural and historical range is as impressive as his epis-

temological thesis is focused and tight. A word on each is in order before I offer my

own personal reflections.

1. Comparative sweep. The book is organized into eight “Books.” These books in

turn are arranged in rough, but not strict, chronological order—they begin with the

Buddha and end with the New Age and the modern era. Each book treats a different

historical figure or, in some cases, a set of figures related either by culture or by the-

matic concern. Obeyesekere employs two basic criteria to choose his case studies.

One—in response to the questions from friends and colleagues about why he does not

write more about the Hindu and Sufi materials—boils down to the simple confession

that he has written about what he knows best and has not written about what he does

not know well. Our time here is limited, he notes, and so each of us must be content to

focus on a few slivers of the historical and anthropological record. The second crite-

rion is a contested but fruitful method in the comparative study of religion, which we

might refer to as the instructiveness of the extreme. Accordingly, Obeyesekere does

not turn to the ordinary or to the banal to understand and theorize religious visions.

That would be odd, since religious visions are relatively rare and exceptional by

nature; that is, they are experienced as extraordinary by both the visionaries them-

selves and by those who record and pass on textual, artistic, and architectural revision-

ings of them. Rather, he turns to the extreme and the excessive or, in his own expres-

sion, to the virtuosos. This is an approach that goes back at least as far as William

James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, a foundational text to which Obeyese-kere is consciously and appreciatively indebted in The Awakened Ones.

Obeyesekere’s first and privileged hyper-case here is the meditative trances of the

Buddha, with which he begins in Book 1 and whose mythology acts as a kind of guide

112 Book Reviews

This content downloaded from 130.243.141.75 on Sun, 17 Aug 2014 13:14:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

and metaphor for all that follows about “the awakened ones.” For Obeyesekere, the

Buddha did not simply have visions and experience something called nirvana. He had

visions, knew nirvana, and then consciously and systematically fashioned these know-

ings into reasoned public forms that could be communicated, shared, and passed on

via mythical, social, and doctrinal traditions. Neither visionary knowledge nor doc-

trinal systematization is adequate. Both are required to produce a stable religious tradi-

tion. There is, then, a kind of back-and-forth between that which is directly known in

nirvana or mediated in vision and that which can be communicated to other human

beings via language and institution. As with a dream in Freud’s psychoanalysis, the

former is revised, worked over, and fashioned into form before it can take on a cultural

life and get traction in human history.

To further illustrate this process, Obeyesekere turns in the succeeding seven books to

a small crowd of other “awakened ones” and their specific visions and revisions. These

include: the aphoristic gems of Nietzsche (through whose “It” Obeyesekere reads

Freud’s later id and psychology of the unconscious); the psychoanalysis of Freud (parti-

cularly as it was expressed in the early dream book); that “brilliant madman” and the

anthropologist’s “favorite psychotic” Daniel Paul Schreber; the elaborate visionary cos-

mologies of Mahayana Buddhism, Tibetan treasure (terma) seekers, and Buddhist

dreams; the Absolute or Cosmic “It” of Plotinus and modern secular spiritualities, in-

cluding the twentieth-century metaphysicians of quantum physics; the penitential ecsta-

sies and transformations “of symptom into symbol” evident in the female Christian

mystics Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, andMargery Kempe; the pewter dish awak-

ening and subsequent esoteric writings of Jacob Boehme; the dissenting “Everlasting

Gospel” and inspired poetry of William Blake; the channeled texts and psychical pow-

ers—some faked, some probably not—ofMadame Blavatsky and Theosophy; the para-

normal interests of Carl Gustav Jung; the lucid dreaming and transcendent eroticisms of

the NewAge; and, finally, the ecological mysticism of EdwinMuir.

2. The double thesis. How does Obeyesekere relate all of these largely historically

unrelated figures? Through a simple metathesis about the dual psychology of human

beings and the two ways of knowing that this psychology produces in human history,

over and over and over again. It is at this point that one can see how the book com-

pletes a three-decade trilogy, with Medusa’s Hair (1984) and The Work of Culture(1990) constituting that trilogy’s first two installments (a fact that Obeyesekere him-

self notes). Those first two books turned to Sinhalese religious virtuosos, cultural

anthropology, and Freud’s psychoanalysis to reflect on the mutual cocreation of pri-

vate “psyche” and public “culture” and, more specifically, on the manner in which

psychological symptoms can be transformed—via vision and religious experience—

into public symbols and religion. The “work of culture” for Obeyesekere, then, is nei-

ther strictly something “outside” the individual, but neither is it something strictly

“inside.” Culture is created through a constant and complex loop effect, if you will,

between psyche and culture, with exceptional individuals and their sufferings playing

an especially powerful role in these psychosocial processes.

Here, with The Awakened Ones, that theorizing takes on a different, but obviouslyrelated form. Now Obeyesekere turns—and this is his most basic thesis—to what he

calls “It-thinking” and “I-thinking.” The former we might frame as intuitive, spiritual

(Obeyesekere embraces this term as unusually accurate and appropriate across cul-

113History of Religions

This content downloaded from 130.243.141.75 on Sun, 17 Aug 2014 13:14:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

tures and times), and often visionary. The author understands the latter term literally,

that is, in the sense that this It-thinking often expresses itself through hyper-real fantas-

tic scenes and encounters with divine or demonic beings. Visionary thinking involves

actual visions.

It-thinking, moreover, is a passive form of knowing, often in an unconscious or

altered state (dream, illness, or trance, for example) during which one sees symbols

and signs, as if a curtain is being temporarily lifted. One does not “do” visions. One isshown them. Visions are mediating forms of knowledge for Obeyesekere. Given what

we know about dynamic psychology, the anthropologist or historian of religions can-

not “believe” their mythical content, but one might well recognize that this same

visual content may be communicating real knowledge to the visionary. In James’s lan-

guage, visionary It-thinking can thus be “noetic.” It knows directly and immediately,

which is to say in a manner that precedes or transcends language and hence overflows

any abstract conceptual framing. Visionary experience is thus epistemologically prior

to public reason for Obeyesekere. This priority is rooted in human biology and evolu-

tion: hominids and primates, after all, dreamt for millennia before human language

appeared on the scene.We can and do “think” without language all the time, then, and

we have been doing so for a very, very long time. In the author’s own succinct terms:

“Vision and intuitive understanding are ‘reason’s prior’” (246).

I-thinking is different, really very different. I-thinking is an active form of knowing

defined by the intentional, conscious, and instrumental thinking of the Cartesian ego,

of the social self, of the state of awareness that I am in right now and, I assume, you

are in as you read this. I-thinking, unlike It-thinking, works with and through language

and logic. It actively constructs. It seeks to systematize, “to reason,” as we say. I-think-

ing is an expression of Enlightenment reason.

This is where Obeyesekere observes that, as a Sinhalese Buddhist anthropologist,

he is the inheritor of two very different forms of Enlightenment: that of the Buddha

and the Buddhist traditions, which he prefers to frame as an “awakening” (an expres-

sionmore literally true to the Sanskrit bodhi/buddha reference, hence the book’s title);and that of the European philosophical tradition and its institutional heir, the modern

university. In some sense, The Awakened Ones is an attempt to bring these two forms

of Enlightenment together, not in order to conflate them or to confuse them, but to put

them into creative and constructive conversation.

The awakened ones, then, are those historical individuals who have seen visions,

that is, who have received or been shown literal fantastic scenes, or who have been

overwhelmed with some intuitive and nonlinguistic form of knowledge and have

afterward employed human reason, culture, and language to make sense of this vision-

ary experience.What we call religion is a product of this dual form of knowing—it is a

cultural production (with all that implies about power, politics, and authority) that nev-

ertheless reflects and refracts the original intuitive vision or gnosis.

As such, Obeyesekere’s new book functions as a kind of manifesto on the ways that

human thinking and experience routinely bypass the Cartesian ego. It is also an implicit

(or just explicit) critique of that new scientific rationalism and materialism that must

make a measured object of anything to recognize it as real, as a thing. He sums this all

up beautifully at the very end of the book: “As I see it, some of our profoundest insights

of the spirit emerge from processes of thought outside the rational cogito even though

114 Book Reviews

This content downloaded from 130.243.141.75 on Sun, 17 Aug 2014 13:14:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

the final act of creativity might entail a coalition between the It and the I, my model

being the awakened Buddha” (474). That is the book in a nutshell.

3. Personal reflections. It is difficult for me to be anything other than enthusiastic

about this book, as I have argued for much the same double epistemology from some

of my earliest work in Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2002), where I tried to

show howmajor scholars ofmysticism theorized out of their own nonrational, ecstatic,

and erotic mystical states (Obeyesekere sees the same, by the way, and acknowledges

this text on the first page of his own); through The Serpent’s Gift (2007) andMutantsand Mystics (2011), where I explored the mystical humanism of the Human as Two;

to my work in Authors of the Impossible (2010), where I took up contemporary neuro-

anatomy and bilateral models of the brain to make sense of the semiotic (read: vision-

ary) nature of paranormal phenomena and to suggest that no model of the study of reli-

gion that relies only on left-brain primary functioning (read: the Cartesian rational

ego) can do justice to what we actually encounter in the historical record. One of my

concluding case studies of a modern virtuoso, the Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte

Taylor, even invokes the Buddhist language of nirvana to describe the state of con-

sciousness that she was ushered into during a massive stroke that shut down the left

(rational, linguistic, egoic) hemisphere of her brain. The model here, again, is not to

prefer the intuitive over the rational, the right over the left, vision over reason. The

model is to put them into conversation and so create forms of scholarship and thinking

that are not either-or but both. After all, whatever anyone says, we are both. No one

can turn the two hemispheres behind our thick skulls into one.

There are other things about this book than my own narcissistic reflections that

deserve to be celebrated and at least flagged here. Like its playful, self-mocking sense of

humor, evident in moments like when Obeyesekere comments on how “I am generally

classified as ‘male,’ for no doubt absurd reasons” (xii), or when he describes Sri Lanka as

“the classic abode of anthropologists and demons” (121). Also particularly refreshing is

his confessed conviction that he is “naı̈ve enough” to believe that not all of the “sensory

gifts” (read: psychical and paranormal phenomena) of the awakened ones are illusory

(17). Or his general abjuring of much of the obfuscating jargon of poststructuralist, post-

modern, and postcolonial thought for the richer territory of the visionaries themselves.

Finally (in many senses), the book is also punctured with the anthropologist’s

dreams, reflections on his own approaching death, and an uncanny vision of some vul-

tures “weirdly hanging” in a large tree that transports him back to Old Delhi and

appears to function as a dim but deeply felt memory of some past life (17–18). The

Delhi vultures return, this time in spectral form in a reported dream of the anthropolo-

gist, on the very last pages of the book under the haunting banner, “Envoi—Intima-

tions of Mortality” (475–76). Which is all to say that this book walks its talk. It shows

the reader visions, both comforting and disconcerting, and then reflects on them with

the systematizing tools of human reason, psychodynamic analysis, close textual read-

ings, anthropology, and the tools of the comparative study of religion. In the terms of

my neuroanatomical register, it honors both sides of our universally shared brains. It

does both—beautifully, poignantly, humorously, and without apology.

JEFFREY J. KRIPAL

Rice University

115History of Religions

This content downloaded from 130.243.141.75 on Sun, 17 Aug 2014 13:14:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions