The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience. Gananath Obeyesekere.

New
York: Columbia University Press. 2012. xx-622 pp.
Reviewed by:
Don Seeman, Associate Professor, Emory University
Gananath Obeyesekeres latest contribution is a long, challenging book that demands a
readers full attention as well as something more subtle: the kind of intellectual rigor that is
conditioned by spiritual openness. Anthropologists who are best familiar with the authors early
work as an ethnographer of personal symbols and religious experience in South Asia may well
be surprised by the sheer reach of this book as well as its deep facility with the complex textual
and conceptual systems of classical Buddhism, medieval Christianity, early modern occultism
and theosophy as well as Jung, Freud and the contemporary Lucid Dreaming movement. What
each of these settings has in common is either a strong visionary tradition or an analytic interest
in visionary experience. The frame is broad enough to include Tibetan vision journeys, Julian of
Norwichs Christian mysticism, Edwin Muirs dreams of death and transcendence and even
the visionary poetry of William Blakenor is that all. Obeyesekere divides the work into eight
separate books, each of which might really have been published under separate cover if but for
the cross hatching of certain major themes like the priority of visionary experience over
discursive formulations and the recurrence of visionary engagement with nothingness, which
some Christian traditions describe as the dark night of the soul.
This is a truly comparative work that resists the increasingly sterile debate between
perennialists and constructivists in the academic study of religion. Obeyesekere rightly rejects
the radical constructivist claim that there is no visionary experience that is not wholly determined
by discursive frameworks, but he is no nave perennialist either, and this book stands as witness
to the value of considered comparison grounded in respect for local contexts. For my part,
Obeyesekere admits early in book (p. 15), I cannot think metaphysically without first thinking
physically, that is, grounding my thinking in the actual lives of human beings whose experiences
are conditioned by their cultural traditions and the other way around. Visionary experience, he
tells us, is metaphysics prior (p. 15). Yet this is not an ethnographic work and Obeyesekeres
claims to access the actual lives of human beings should be qualified. The lived contexts
Obeyesekere does invoke here are primarily those that can be gleaned from religious and literary
texts, which he reads with a heavy emphasis on secondary scholarship. Yet the beauty of this
book for readers of a journal like Ethos is that the authors ethnographic persona nevertheless
shines through in passages that demonstrate how an ethnographic sensibility can be made to
inform broad historical reflections on the nature of religious experience across cultures.
Obeyesekere manages to demonstrateeven though he does not explainwhy anthropologists
of religion need to know more than they frequently do about the complex and often highly
conceptual textual traditions of the communities they study and why conversely disciplines like
history, comparative religion and psychology may benefit from an anthropological gestalt.
Despite its great length, much is left unsaid in The Awakened Ones that might have been
usefully articulated. The books influence in anthropological circles may, for example, be
diminished by its lack of systematic attention to the problems of comparison that it raises. How
far can the concept of visionary experience be stretched before it loses all coherence? Are there
systematic ways to distinguish the resonance of visions that derive from religious disciplinary
practices (like prayer or meditation) from aesthetic or substance-induced ones? Rather than

belabor these questions, Obeyesekere relies upon the force of provocative juxtaposition to carry
his argument forward, like successive dream images that both invite and resist interpretation but
whose true import can only be judged by gazing retrospectively at an image of the whole. It is
only late in the book, for example, that Obeyesekere posits his unpopular hypothesis (p. 365)
that the contemporary Western fascination with dreaming ought to be viewed as a return of the
visionary impulse repressed by Enlightenment biases for discursive rationality. This puts lucid
dreaming, psychoanalytic dream work and even the use of hallucinogenic substances on a strong
continuum with medieval penitential visions and visionary traveling to other worlds by Tibetan
lamas. Though conventional ethnographic wisdom tells us (p. 365), according to Obeyesekere,
that Euro-American dreams are nothing but ephemera, our continuing fascination with dreams in
both formal and informal contexts clearly suggests that we believe otherwise. Dreams may no
longer frequently be thought of as windows onto divine or transcendent wisdom, in other words,
but they continue to serve as privileged loci for the emergence of wisdoms poor analytic cousin,
which we call insight. It may be precisely the porous nature of the border between
psychological insight and soteriological wisdom that allows a scholar like Obeyesekere to probe
the grounds of modern secular spirituality alongside the imposing edifice of classical Buddhist
thought or Christian debates over unio mystica.
Obeyesekere also probably should have called more attention to the negotiated
relationship between visionary experience and other forms of consciousness or intentionality in
different cultural and religious settings. Amira Mittermaiers (2012) recent ethnography of
dreaming among Muslim Egyptians, for example, demonstrates the subjective importance of
dreamers sense of their own visions as literal eruptions of divine agency into the phenomenal
world. Mittermaier brackets modern psycho-causal themes to a much greater degree than
Obeyesekere in order to focus instead on the local phenomenology of dreaming, in which dreams
are always set off against other kinds of reality. A related example from my own research might
be the Talmudic tractate Berakhot (blessings), which is organized in such a way that
discussion of the most intense and focused of intentional acts, including prayer and meditation
upon the unity of God, gradually give way to discussion of the loosest and potentially most
fanciful of intentional acts such as dreams. Talmudic dream discourse is internally complex;
some sages describe dreams as nothing but vanity, while others link them to reflections of
conscious thought or insist that they contain at least a sixtieth part of elusive prophetic insight.
What Obeyesekere refers to as visionary experience cannot be separated in this literary
context from other kinds of intentional acts or from the ritual-affective frameworks in which they
are embedded. And what about Aristotles now long-neglected contemplative envisioning of
virtuous life that joined a kind of visionary experience with both rational analysis and ethical
praxis (Lear 2004; Seeman in press)? My point is that different kinds of intentional acts may be
related to one another in complex ways that are connected to everyday moral, ritual and
interpretive practices studied by anthropologists as well as historians of religion. Obeyesekeres
resolute focus on cross-cultural visionary experience to the relative exclusion of such broader
experiential matrices may therefore come at the expense of an insufficiently grounded analytic
context.
Despite the books subtitle (a phenomenology of visionary experience), it is in fact
noteworthy that Obeyesekere never really builds on the phenomenological tradition or any of its
broad anthropological offshoots but continues to struggle, as he did in his earlier work, with the
relationship between cultural and psychological models. This unresolved and possibly

unresolvable tension implicitly drives the work forward but does not come in for sustained
analysis. Obeyesekere may be willing to qualify his reliance upon Freud and Jung by reference to
Buddhist ontological self-skepticism, but it remains unclear how far he will really go in this
regard or whether he has recourse to a fully developed theory of mind beyond culture. Given the
importance of this theme to his work as a whole however, the reader will have no choice but to
grapple with these questions (Willen and Seeman 2012).
Like William James Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), The Awakened Ones
invokes a non-reductive desire to understand the psychological factors underlying religious life.
There are intriguing resonances with an earlier age of scholarship in this very long, very erudite
and audacious book that interrupts the categories of our hyper-specialized contemporary
academy. Yet the books ultimate importance derives precisely from the fact that Obeyesekere,
like James, had broad existential goals in mind. James sought to blunt the force of a medical
materialism that threatened, then as now, to deprive religion in its humanistic vein from a
legitimate place in modern life. Obeyesekere similarly argues that visionary experience and
visionary, aphoristic habits of thought represent devalued modes of engagement that need to be
recovered. This is not just an analytic argument but explicitly a moral one. Implicit in this
book, Obeyesekere writes (p. 15), is a plea to open our minds to forms of intuitive
understanding rather than shut the door on them. If that were to happen, Western thought might
not only be receptive to the epistemological thinking of Hindu and Buddhist philosophers, but
they might also be able to enrich their own philosophical and scientific traditions by opening
themselves to the varied forms of visionary and intuitive thinking that appear in this essay.
That is a vision to which both anthropologists and scholars of religion may contribute, and
Obeyesekere has served us well in forcing us to engage once more with these problems.

REFERENCES CITED:
James, William
1902 Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Random House.
Lear, Gabriel Richardson
2004 Aristotle on Moral Virtue and the Fine in Richard Kraut editor The Blackwell Guide to
Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics (London, Blackwell), 116-36.
Mittermaier, Amira
2012 Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities beyond the trope of self-cultivation.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (18) 247-265.
Seeman, Don
In press Reasons for the Commandments as Contemplative Practice in Maimonides, Jewish
Quarterly Review.
Willen, Sarah S. and Don Seeman
2012 Introduction: Experience and Inquietude. Ethos (40): 1-23.