/lit/ - Literature

>>11046009
>but then I felt great as each stride followed the other, the hind muscles tensing and relaxing, hips swaying floral patterns, pale, pink. Posing in stop aware of turns head towards eyegazed mischief and lipsmirked, knowing. Diverting your eyes, but smile. She wins the second, but you close in and say Hello, [Hello, whoeveryouare], I was just going to ask you what kind of dog that is and I've realised now that that's probably not your dog at all? Smile and chuckle, anxious, awkward - but an indifference too that makes it all charming. Her sneering, annoyance gone to warmth, worth. [Goodbye divinity. I was once charmed, but I am on my way to work now. I shall sniff that arse another day.]

This thread is complaints of existence from people who have too much freedom, too much luxury. This thread is complaints about insecurity, about being afraid, not to be turned down, but being so vulnerable you might feel ashamed to be accepted. The ego protection involved here is the beginnings of lifelong unhealthy narcissism, unhealthy because your superior self is never tested. This thread is suggestions to accept a job working for others, always for others, never motivation to become an entrepreneur, never to accept both a responsible path and a health amount of risk. You always hear people here on the way to some job or other people with jobs they hate, and no one recommends starting a business. There is never anyone in these threads that promotes self-reliance, never anyone who gives you the advice to learn how to evaluate and accept risks. Yet this is the path to success. This thread is complaints about society, about degeneracy, about faithlessness, and no of you ever do more than say to bow your head to a statue, to a sacred place, to a people. You listen to people complain about the world as though these transitions where just a part of life, that the complaints have always been the same, that humanity has the answers. But no one here says to you that these answer are unacceptable, that life is unacceptable, that conditions are unacceptable, that what is gone is not yours to assume, but what is yours, namely this world, must be. That this world is unacceptable seems frightening maybe because this phrase implies ethical beliefs, is still not as frightening as all your advice, all your feigned composer, all your nihilistic laughter and joking. I sense the weakness, I smell the fear, I'm agitated by your well-spoken, learned significance, your youthful, playful radiance. I hate your humanity from the sense of my animality, I hate with my sympathy for all that you should live and insects die, that children be born and animals be slaughtered, that each humane action, that each testament to empathy should end in justice, revenge, punishment. That a day that the gods live again and all is forbidden is my illusion I vanish behind, a coward fleeing from himself, his humanity, wrecking himself on whim, shattering himself into a thousand prayers, each spoken to give faith for a moment of silence that I might be brave enough to rely on my common sense, my ability to think, to be richer as the dragon coiled around a tree, feasting on the ripe fruit, ready at a moment to act, to do, to be conscious once more than I am only human, that my body will fail me one day, that I need others, that I want, and want only what my wants leads me to further want. I'm not given over to hope, I'm surviving, and I will not trade security and prosperity for this sense of a mockgod forever. I shall participate as I have done throughout the centuries and then I shall move on to the next, but I shall not speak about the universe conspiring with me, I will not say this.

I felt a strange thing happen recently that is hard for me to cope with, a feeling I haven't had since I was a teenager. I felt a weird optimism that couldn't be diminished by reason. I said on here to someone that I had faith without belief, and it was a joke, but this opened up something inside me that hasn't gone away. I ruminated on it for a long while, obsessively. Then after a stressful day I was thinking about my future and started reading a weird text then I had a flash of my childhood self, a joy that was so beautiful, I was for a moment the same kid I had thought I'd lost touch with long ago, and, I know that maybe I've constructed this vision and even the memory of me as a child, but the scene I daydreamed struck me and became me, who I was, that happy child, and it was me so profoundly that the experience hasn't left, nor has the sense of some purpose tied to some future happiness.

I've tried to reason myself into dismissing what all this could mean, but the pathway seems there inside me. I remember how moments before I was playing around foolishly with the I Ching copy I had and started imagining myself pursuing meditation more seriously, and from that I started to instantly feel reassured. Then the flash happened. And I know that, as most of the spooky shit that's been happening to me this last year has been me reading into connections too deeply and making something supernatural of my projection, I'm just magical thinking myself into a communion with something, but I can't help it. I'm not lost to the possibility of my experience being irrational, but I can't help but wonder that if this is helpful to me, why would I go to such lengths to invalidate it. And regardless if I need to just say, yes this was some new pills working to make me positive about my future, shouldn't I not still feel that ridiculousness? Maybe I've dabbled in the fantasy of a spiritual life too long alongside my rational, materialistic worldview which is there to give me strength in doubt. I've never had to leap for faith, I've have thousands of occasions to become a believer of something beyond, but all of them subsided before with time and research. But what of this, when no explanation removes a strange certainty not of my life, but of my character. Is it just that I accessed a place in myself because of chemicals and given enough days when I stop using them I feeling back to being lost and despondent?

I really want to be converted, I think. I really want to sit amongst other believers and not feel as though I there as an atheist who lacks community, lacks values. I'd hate to live in a country with no religions even as atheist, and I only call myself that because I can't explain my sense of gods to even myself without realising how ridiculous I sound. I don't want to be thought of as spiritual either, but I can't help musing about how profound and spooky so many omens and signs have been for me. I thought I'd grown out of this shit.

>>10827963
I imagine this is the same thought the guy who broke the world record for hot dog eating had during the competition. Must be weird to be known that way and be proud of it. But we must all make sacrifices to our vanity somehow, must we not?

>>10191765
The sacred has no need of traditions. What is sacred requires no attachment to the past nor dogma to understand it as such. What you are talking about is promoting a shared recognition of what some understand as sacred. This is absolutely profane, as no one can show another the sacred. But all can agree on it.

Language is cursed, and you sound like a rhetorician or a sophist who knows this is true. So then, accept the isolation of knowing the sacred and seek others slyly enough that you don't end up destroying what is.

Worship rather than proselytise. Gather and create the stage for the glory of the sacred.

>>9896760
Same thing happens every time Americans get a Republican into office. I'm not that old, but this is not a new reaction. In fact, this reaction is itself a product of mass stupidity, specifically where lack of rationality meets against a lack of historic and civic awareness. You'd be wrong to imply after reading this that the era of protest has ended with the identity politics of the woman's march - but you'd also be assuming America really is the bubble that Americans live within. Have fun in your cage.

>Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He say that most of them, in common with their cast off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgements, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the social order. Never could they realize that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in a dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.