The first Barway Dorje was a precious revealer of treasure and the rebirth of Nupchen Sangye Yeshe, one of Guru Padma's twenty-five disciples. Barway Dorje appeared in Tibet during the nineteenth century, and was praised and respected by the many holy beings of his time as an authentic treasure revealer. His many treasures include The Sadhanas of the Vidyadhara Guru, The Vajrakila Cycle, and The Dakini Cycle, all of which contain profound instructions pertaining to ripening and liberation. The previous Gyalwang Karmapa, Rikpe Dorje, displayed great interest in The Vajrakila Cycle in particular. In addition to his treasures, Terchen Barway Dorje composed many works of his own that have been of great service to the essence teachings, such as his Barom Kagyu Mahamudra and Six Doctrines.

Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.