This chapter provides the first detailed examination of the views on consciousness of Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), the famous nineteenth-century Indian monk who introduced Hinduism and Vedānta to the West. First, I present Vivekananda’s metaphysical framework of panentheistic cosmopsychism, according to which the sole reality is Divine Consciousness, which manifests as everything in the...
This chapter explores how Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical testimony and teachings enrich contemporary analytic debates about the epistemic value of mystical experience. These debates center on a key question: are we warranted in taking mystical experiences—either our own or those of others—to be veridical? After briefly delineating Sri Ramakrishna’s views on the scope of theological reason, Maharaj...
In a letter written in 1927, the French writer Romain Rolland asked Sigmund Freud to analyse the ‘oceanic feeling,’ a religious feeling of oneness with the entire universe. I will argue that Rolland’s intentions in introducing the oceanic feeling to Freud were much more complex, multifaceted, and critical than most scholars have acknowledged. To this end, I will examine Rolland’s views on...
Why Poetry Matters:The Transpersonal Force of Lyric Experience in Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos Ayon Maharaj (bio) pandars to authoritypets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,obscuring the texts with philology, hiding them under their persons,the air without refuge of silence . . . Ezra Pound, Canto 14 Recent critics in modernist studies have been eager to expose the often unsavory...