/lit/ - Literature

>>11160059
here's a question that sort of percolated in my mind also: suppose you were giving advice to some kind of space-alien traveler that had to spend some portion of life here on earth without being detected. or maybe it's some transmigrated soul come up from a buddhist hell looking to escape the great wheel of karma, death and rebirth. the metaphysical care and feeding of this alien is your priority: what kind of advice do you give a being like that? in some sense this is borrowed from the stoics, who have this simple piece of advice: be your own friend. be your *own* combination virgil-dante through this thing.

i don't know if this is interesting or not, but it's sort of like a thought experiment: some other being, a tabula rasa, is obligated to get through this world, in some way, without falling into the death-traps of guilt, reciprocity, and mimesis. just get through it for some space of years. how the fuck do you deal with humans so addled by their desires?

or maybe this is just what it feels like for the buddhists and the christians all the time, thinking on the afterlife and so on. that you're shuttled down to this world for a bit, and you do your thing, and then you go back upstairs at the end of it all and they grade your report card. i don't know. but the longer time goes on the more sense theology makes and the less sense everything else makes. but hegel was just so fucking interesting for keeping it dialectical: *you are going to repeat this.* i thought for a while that nietzsche was the truth in this regard, but all nietzsche did was make me fucking brittle and shitty to the point of implosion. the hegelpill goes down a *lot* smoother.

will splice in some more SMAC here. mostly for the flavor text on this one, if you can read it. you can be paranoid, you can be naive, or you can be in that sweet spot in between. acceleration is good times for that romantic nihilism, but you cannot beat that feeling for the evolution of consciousness.

anyways, pardon the schizo-ramble posting. i know i'm all over the place, but...well. you only live once.
>and maybe not even that