/lit/ - Literature

>Someone wrote recently, "The only Reality is you. You don't have to follow, you don't have to walk, you don't have to approach, you don't have to reach anything. You already are. You only have to see yourself, your true nature."
Said in this way and out of all context, these words risk creating the illusion of a somewhat gratuitous result, and those who wrote them would have had a duty to remember that such insight is possible only at the end of rigorous discipline, and not through some kind of mental autosuggestion.
>It will therefore be unnecessary to reiterate the remarks made in this regard by René Guénon:

>Why make efforts to attain "Liberation," if the "Self" (Âtmâ) is immutable, and always remains the same being unable in the least to be modified or infirm by anything? Those who raise questions such as these show that they stop at a too exclusively theoretical view of things, which implies that they take into account only one aspect, or rather confuse two points of view, which instead are quite distinct though in a sense complementary to each other: the principial point of view and that of manifested beings. Certainly from the purely metaphysical point of view one could strictly speaking stick only to the principial aspect and disregard everything else; but the initiatory point of view must, on the contrary, take into account the present conditions of manifested beings, and precisely of human individuals as such, its purpose being precisely to lead them to free themselves from such conditions; it must therefore of necessity, and it is also for this reason that it differs from the standpoint of pure metaphysics, take into consideration what may be called a state of affairs and connect it in some way to the principial order. In order to eliminate any possible misunderstanding, we shall say again the following: it is evident that in the Principle nothing can be subject to change; it is therefore not the "Self" that needs to be liberated, because it cannot be conditioned or subjected to any limitation, but the "I," which cannot be so unless the illusion that makes it appear separate from the "Self" is eliminated.
R. Guénon, Initiation and Spiritual Realization, pg. 56-57

There will never be another writer as profound, as beautiful, as mysterious and as deep as Plotinus

>>21559028

>>21557505
I would say that what we get in the Enneads reflects his experiences quite beautifully. Pic rel is from On Beauty I'm pretty sure.