Description

Eric Rhode takes on some of the most fundamental aspects of human experience, thought, and meaning. He journeys into fascinating corners of ‘monsoon Asia’ – and into areas in mind, and spirit that are both knowable and unknowable. He conveys the thrill of a personal quest to understand some of the meanings that come together in Plato’s vision of the axis mundi.
He interprets the axis mundi not as an expression of a perennial and unchanging pivot of the cosmos, but as an enabler of revelations of a sort that cannot be acquired through experience. His familiarity with ancient mythologies and cosmologies enables him to make clear that axiality involves the crossing of a threshold between human relations and a range of meaning that can be conjectured without reference to experience. He enters the many dimensions of myth, art and artefact, geology, geometry, the human mind and body, ritual and ceremonial, philosophy, psychology, and religion. This book examines ‘the truth of the mind and the truth of experience. It is truly a tour de force.
Margot Waddell

About the author

Eric Rhode, formerly a writer on film, became a psychotherapist in private practice, now retired. He is the author of a number of books, including Psychotic Metaphysics, Plato’s Silence: A Study in the Imagination, and Notes on the Aniconic: The Foundations of Psychology in Ontology.

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Contents

1. Axials and disappearance
2. Cranial cord
-Virtual negation
– Dragon ship
– Pagoda, Stupa and the geometry of revelation
3. Crossing the threshold
– Temple compound
– The moon on a shutter
– An arrow’s release
4. Disturbing gaits
– The impress of a footprint
– Oedipus, hemiplegia and the gait of sacred kings
5. Deep time
6. The subtleties of the ordinary
– The disappearance of Lao Tzu
– Split representation as an icon to the sacrifice
– Without bells, there would be no temples: ‘wandering at the beginning of things’
7. A shining light
– Architecture of fire
– Borobudur or the relic in the Stupa
8. An agony at the core
– The masks of Shiva
– Rahu’s fate
9. Reflections of pure light
– Axiality and grace
– Surface and enclosure
– The iconism of relic, mask and fetish
10. The weight of an excluded world
– The chariot of the moon and the sun
– Truths of the mind and truths of experience
– The noonday of forms

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