/lit/ - Literature

>>19273104
>The experience mystics have of an apparent non-duality is merely the first sta-

“This self was indeed Brahman in the beginning. It knew itself only as "I am Brahman." Therefore it became all. And whoever among the gods had this enlightenment, also became That Brahman. It is the same with the seers (rishis), the same with men. The seer Vamadeva, having realized this self as That, came to know: "I was Manu and the sun." And to this day, whoever in a like manner knows the self as "I am Brahman," becomes all this universe. Even the gods cannot prevent his becoming this, for he has become their Self. Now, if a man worships another deity, thinking: "He is one and I am another," he does not know. He is like an animal to the gods. As many animals serve a man, so does each man serve the gods. Even if one animal is taken away, it causes anguish to the owner; how much more so when many are taken away! Therefore it is not pleasing to the gods that men should know this."

- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10

Orpheus is his salvation.
One must imagine Sisyphus sanguine.
Eternity in a moment, the peace he must have felt as all reality fell silent.
Entering beyond the cave, to hear true beauty.


My mission is to find Eurydice,
A girl whose thoughts were innocent and gay,
Yet tripped upon a snake who struck his poison
Into her veins---then her short walk was done.
However much I took her loss serenely,
A god called Love had greater strength than I;
I do not know how well he's known down here,
But up on Earth his name's on every tongue,
And If I'm to believe an ancient rumour,
A dark king took a princess to his bed,
A child more beautiful than any queen;
They had been joined by Love. So at your mercy,
And by the eternal Darkness that surrounds us,
I ask you to unspin the fatal thread
Too swiftly run, too swiftly cut away,
That was my bride's brief life. Hear me, and know
Another day, after our stay on Earth,
Or swift or slow, we shall be yours forever,
Speeding at last to one eternal kingdom---
Which is our one direction and our home
And yours the longest reign mankind has known.
When my Eurydice has spent her stay on Earth,
The child, a lovely woman in your arms,
Then she'll return and you may welcome her.
But for the present I must ask a favour;
Let her come back to me to share my love,
Yet if the Fates say 'No,' here shall I stay---
Two deaths in one---my death as well as hers."

Since these pathetic words were sung to music
Even the blood-drained ghosts of Hell fell weeping:
Tantalus no longer reached toward vanished waves
And Ixion's wheel stopped short, charmed by the spell;
Vultures gave up their feast on Tityus' liver
And cocked their heads to stare, fifty Belides
Stood gazing while their half-filled pitchers emptied,
And Sisyphus sat down upon his stone.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

>>16907621
I can smell the neocon Israel supporter on you.

>>16586414
but you will

You have the ability to become a great Scholarch, OP, for you have been given a gift by birth the means to read all the extant works of the Greeks with ease. Don't squander these smoldering embers of curiosity and this access you've been given by abandoning reason for a blind religious cope.
Start with the Hellenes.

>I throw the apple at you, and if you are willing to love me, take it and share your girlhood with me; but if your thoughts are what I pray they are not, even then take it, and consider how short-lived is beauty.
>I am an apple; one who loves you throws me at you. Say yes, Xanthippe; we fade, both you and I.

>>16105902
the the light of the nous is not knowledge

>>15966093
t. actual Cave dwelling troglodyte

Leave the cave

>>15955947
>>15955919
>>15955931
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t1L34I7TFws

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
[5]
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
[10]
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
[15]
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
[20]
Let your indulgence set me free.

>>15936427
Berdyaev is a Neoplatonist with a little Gnostic tendencies, and is rejected by orthodoxy.

>The final goal for the contemplative philosopher is to remember and rediscover Dionysus in himself, the Monad united with the superior principles. Through this monadic purity one hopes to touch the purity of the transcendent One, of the unspeakable and hidden Amun, deus ineffabilis. The supreme Amun of the late The-ban theology surpasses all human and divine knowledge, veiling himself even before the gods, so that his essence is not known. This ineffable One, however, ‘makes himself into millions’, thus playing the dialectical game of unity and diversity. According to J. Assmann:
This god transcended the world not only with respect to the mysterious hiddenness of his ‘ba-ness’, in which no name could name him and no representation could depict him, but also with respect to the human heart, which was filled with him. He was the hidden god who ‘came from afar’ yet was always present to the individual in the omniscience and omnipotence of his all-encompassing essence. He was not only the cosmos—in Egyptian, the totality of the ‘millions’, and also neheh and djet, ‘plenitude of time’ and ‘unalterable duration’ into which he unfolded himself—but also history.
>Ultimately, the searcher for God and lover of Wisdom is God himself, secretly involved both into 1) a self-disclosure (which actually appears as a magical self-veiling), creative irradiation, manifestation, descent of the soul, and 2) reintegration, redemption, deconstructive unveiling, liberation. As Damascius relates:
When Dionysus had projected his reflection into the mirror, he followed it and was thus scattered over the universe. Apollo gathers him and brings him back to heaven, for he is the purifying God and truly the savior of Dionysus (kathartikos on theos kai tou Dionusou soter hos alethos: In Phaed. I.129.1–4). However, the soul is never united with the gods as an individual: through awareness and recollection it moves from particularity to universality, from plurality to unity, and, strictly speaking, this is not the individual’s journey but the journey of Dionysus, the cosmic drama of Osiris, imitated at all levels of being.

>>15891348
>Yes, to abandon a man-made morality.
For as many as have sinned without law will also perish without the law. As many as have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it isn't the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law will be justified (for when Gentiles who don't have the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience testifying with them, and their thoughts among themselves accusing or else excusing them) in the day when God will judge the secrets of men, according to my Good News, by Jesus Christ.

And my conscience screams against God creating souls that will hate him no matter how much he suppsedly "loves them" and tries to redeem them. If he truly loved them he'd choose to never create them, THAT would be mercy.

>>15720862
>ATHENIAN: I suggest we look at the problem in this way: let’s imagine that each of us living beings is a puppet of the gods. Whether we have been constructed to serve as their plaything, or for some serious reason, is something beyond our ken, but what we certainly do know is this: wee have the see motions in us, which act like cords or strings and tug us about; they work in opposition, and tug against each other to make us perform actions that are opposed correspondingly; back and forth we go across the boundary line where vice and virtue meet. One of these dragging forces, according to our argument, demands our constant obedience, and this is the one we have to hang on to, come what may; the pull of the other cords we must resist. This cord, which is golden and holy, transmits the power of ‘calculation’, a power which in a state is called the public law; being golden, it is pliant, while the others, whose composition resembles a variety of other substances, are tough and inflexible. The force exerted by law is excellent, and one should always co-operate with it, because although ‘calculation’ is a noble thing, it is gentle, not violent, and its efforts need assistants, so that the gold in us may prevail over the other substances. If we do give our help, the moral point of this fable, in which we appear as puppets, will have been well and truly made; the meaning of the terms ‘self-superior’ and ‘self-inferior’ will somehow become clearer, and the duties of state and individual will be better appreciated. The latter must digest the truth about these forces that pull him, and act on it in his life; the state must get an account of it either from one of the gods or from the human expert we’ve mentioned, and incorporate it in the form of a law to govern both its internal affairs and its relations with other states. A further result will be a clearer distinction between virtue and vice;
No matter the pulling force of vice, and the pulling is in all directions (virtue as Plato says long before Aristotle, is the Golden Mean), we always have the power to resist them for virtue, but our free-will let's go of the reign and we let ourselves be pulled by our demons, our lesser selves; how free-will functions is by definition not explainable since if it could be predicted and completely rationalized it wouldn't be free.

>>15653857
>>15653868
>>15653879
>>15653887
>>15653900
>>15653931
So, because of these two mingled sensations, [251e] it is greatly troubled by its strange condition; it is perplexed and maddened, and in its madness it cannot sleep at night or stay in any one place by day, but it is filled with longing and hastens wherever it hopes to see the beautiful one. And when it sees him and is bathed with the waters of yearning, the passages that were sealed are opened, the soul has respite from the stings and is eased of its pain, and this pleasure which it enjoys is the sweetest of pleasures at the time. Therefore the soul will not, if it can help it, be left alone by the beautiful one, but esteems him above all others, forgets for him mother and brothers and all friends, neglects property and cares not for its loss, and despising all the customs and proprieties in which it formerly took pride, it is ready to be a slave and to sleep wherever it is allowed, as near as possible to the beloved; for it not only reveres him who possesses beauty, [252b] but finds in him the only healer of its greatest woes. Now this condition, fair boy, about which I am speaking, is called Love by men, but when you hear what the gods call it, perhaps because of your youth you will laugh. But some of the Homeridae, I believe, repeat two verses on Love from the spurious poems of Homer, one of which is very outrageous and not perfectly metrical. They sing them as follows: [252c] ““Mortals call him winged Love, but the immortals call him The winged One, because he must needs grow wings.”

If you have trouble understanding Platonism.
Just watch The Land Before Time.
https://youtu.be/ezWeMQXxfbY

>"This self was indeed Brahman in the beginning. It knew itself only as "I am Brahman." Therefore it became all. And whoever among the gods had this enlightenment, also became That Brahman. It is the same with the seers (rishis), the same with men. The seer Vamadeva, having realized this self as That, came to know: "I was Manu and the sun." And to this day, whoever in a like manner knows the self as "I am Brahman," becomes all this universe. Even the gods cannot prevent his becoming this, for he has become their Self. Now, if a man worships another deity, thinking: "He is one and I am another," he does not know. He is like an animal to the gods. As many animals serve a man, so does each man serve the gods. Even if one animal is taken away, it causes anguish to the owner; how much more so when many are taken away! Therefore it is not pleasing to the gods that men should know this."

- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10.

“Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland”

before time?
https://youtu.be/oVijl8NtqdI

God Will Forgive Israel

14
Shepherd Your people with Your staff,
The flock of Your heritage,
Who dwell solitarily in a woodland,
In the midst of Carmel;
Let them feed in Bashan and Gilead,
As in days of old.

15
“As in the days when you came out of the land of Egypt,
I will show them wonders.”

16
The nations shall see and be ashamed of all their might;
They shall put their hand over their mouth;
Their ears shall be deaf.
17
They shall lick the dust like a serpent;
They shall crawl from their holes like snakes of the earth.
They shall be afraid of the Lord our God,
And shall fear because of You.
18
Who is a God like You,
Pardoning iniquity
And passing over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage?

He does not retain His anger forever,
Because He delights in mercy.
19
He will again have compassion on us,
And will subdue our iniquities.

You will cast all our sins
Into the depths of the sea.
20
You will give truth to Jacob
And mercy to Abraham,
Which You have sworn to our fathers
From days of old.

>>15140242
“But wouldn’t knowledge that belongs to us be of the truth that belongs to our world? And wouldn’t it follow that each particular knowledge that belongs to us is in turn knowledge of some particular thing in our world?”
“Necessarily.”
“But, as you agree, we neither have the forms themselves nor can they belong to us.”
“Yes, you’re quite right.”
“And surely the kinds themselves, what each of them is, are known by the form of knowledge itself?”
“Yes.”
“The very thing that we don’t have.”
“No, we don’t.”
“So none of the forms is known by us, because we don’t partake of knowledge itself.”
“It seems not.”
“Then the beautiful itself, what it is, cannot be known by us, nor can the good, nor, indeed, can any of the things we take to be characters themselves.”
“It looks that way.”
“Here’s something even more shocking than that.”
“What’s that?”
“Surely you would say that if in fact there is knowledge – a kind itself – it is much more precise than is knowledge that belongs to us. And the same goes for beauty and all the others.”
“Yes.”
“Well, whatever else partakes of knowledge itself, wouldn’t you say that god more than anyone else has this most precise knowledge?”
“Necessarily.”
“Tell me, will god, having knowledge itself, then be able to know things that belong to our world?”
“Yes, why not?”
“Because we have agreed, Socrates, that those forms do not have their power in relation to things in our world, and things in our world do not have theirs in relation to forms, but that things in each group have their power in relation to themselves.”
“Yes, we did agree on that.”

>>15135629

>"This self was indeed Brahman in the beginning. It knew itself only as "I am Brahman." Therefore it became all. And whoever among the gods had this enlightenment, also became That Brahman. It is the same with the seers (rishis), the same with men. The seer Vamadeva, having realized this self as That, came to know: "I was Manu and the sun." And to this day, whoever in a like manner knows the self as "I am Brahman," becomes all this universe. Even the gods cannot prevent his becoming this, for he has become their Self. Now, if a man worships another deity, thinking: "He is one and I am another," he does not know. He is like an animal to the gods. As many animals serve a man, so does each man serve the gods. Even if one animal is taken away, it causes anguish to the owner; how much more so when many are taken away! Therefore it is not pleasing to the gods that men should know this."

- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10.

"This self was indeed Brahman in the beginning. It knew itself only as "I am Brahman." Therefore it became all. And whoever among the gods had this enlightenment, also became That Brahman. It is the same with the seers (rishis), the same with men. The seer Vamadeva, having realized this self as That, came to know: "I was Manu and the sun." And to this day, whoever in a like manner knows the self as "I am Brahman," becomes all this universe. Even the gods cannot prevent his becoming this, for he has become their Self. Now, if a man worships another deity, thinking: "He is one and I am another," he does not know. He is like an animal to the gods. As many animals serve a man, so does each man serve the gods. Even if one animal is taken away, it causes anguish to the owner; how much more so when many are taken away! Therefore it is not pleasing to the gods that men should know this."

- Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10

We have all the lore we need.