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.

"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. . . . Brilliant, erudite, and candid." - Current Anthropology

"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

"[Obeyesekere's] cultural and historical range is as impressive as his epistemological thesis is focused and tight." - 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

"This is an excellent book on visionary experience." - Biz India

"I have read no more profound book in many years and recommend this book to anyone who is interested in visionary experiences that are salvific, whether explicitly religious or not." - Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions