While a rational consciousness grasps many truths, this book argues for an even richer knowledge through a confrontation with the stuff of visions and dreams. Spanning both Buddhist and European forms of visionary experience, the book pursues the symbolic, nonrational depths of such phenomena, reawakening the intuitive, creative impulses that power greater understanding. The book argues for a combination of psychoanalysis and anthropology to illuminate the relationship between personal symbolism and religious experience. The book begins with Buddha's visionary trances wherein, over the course ... More

While a rational consciousness grasps many truths, this book argues for an even richer knowledge through a confrontation with the stuff of visions and dreams. Spanning both Buddhist and European forms of visionary experience, the book pursues the symbolic, nonrational depths of such phenomena, reawakening the intuitive, creative impulses that power greater understanding. The book argues for a combination of psychoanalysis and anthropology to illuminate the relationship between personal symbolism and religious experience. The book begins with Buddha's visionary trances wherein, over the course of four hours, a person is able to witness hundreds of thousands of their past births and eons of world evolution, renewal, and disappearance. It then connects this fracturing of empirical and visionary time to the realm of space. The book 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. It 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 it defines the parameters of a visionary mode of knowledge that provides a more elastic understanding of truth. This book translates the epistemology of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers for western audiences while revitalizing western philosophical and scientific inquiry.