/lit/ - Literature

>>17784412
That painting is mediocre by Western standards, in technique and otherwise.

Don’t kill yourself.

Kill your self.

>>14428297
Those are good questions. I will try to explain, but it will be lengthy.
As for methodology, some arrive at these conclusions through philosophical reasoning, some through reading religious texts, some through meditation or drugs, but ultimately what you're looking for is always present. The true method is introspection. The scientific method is thought to examine what is external, but what it really does is examine the sense-experience of the brain. But what about when you pull back the sense-objects? When you realize that seeing and hearing are just tools of the brain created for survival?
Pull back vision and feeling, the ego, language, like and dislike, pleasure and pain. This is what it's like to be dead, of course. What remains there is timeless, spaceless, without concepts, invisible, unqualified, essentially empty. Those things I listed are all created by an animal brain, but even in their presence we can apply reductionism and see they are not existent in-and-of-themselves. That is to say, they all comprised of infinite layers and aspects which can be peeled apart, and at the infinitesimal core there is something so ineffable that the closest word humans have is "nothing" or "emptiness": something that is beyond all other concepts of existence.

Core tenants of Buddhism which describe this further are "sunyata" or the emptiness of reality, and "anatta" or the fact that objects lack self-sufficient existence, and in a way have "no self". In Kabbala, the highest sefira is Kether (sorta imagine the positive aspects of God in religion), but beyond that are the "negative veils of existence": Ayn Soph Aur, Ayn Soph, and Ayn, Light Without Limit, Without Limit, and finally Without.

Introspecting on waking experience, we see there is always something eternal and ineffable in its core, something beyond all other qualities. While science experiments which and describes what we see and hear, the mystics deconstruct seeing and hearing, and move beyond it. I am not sure how to prove it too you, maybe further reading on the subject will help, but I have proved it too myself, through introspecting on the illusory nature of consciousness and the eternal, all-pervasive thing which not only forms being, but is beyond being and non-being.
I am not sure if that explains it well, but I tried, as language is so limited. After all, many things in mysticism are symbols for things which mere language has failed.

>>13067297
All things in moderation, OP. There's nothing wrong with seeking out women or good food or drink--it's when those begin to dominate your life that you've taken a wrong turn.

Aristotle made a point in the Nicomachean Ethics that virtue is the middle way between two extremes, and in order to truly possess virtue, one must chose it for themselves. This kind of logic would imply that, in order to make a true and conscious decision, we would have to be tempted by the extremes on either side of the virtuous choice.

So, if we take the pleasures of the flesh, one extreme would be unbound hedonism and lust, and the other extreme would be ascetic and cold, devoid of human touch and contact.

Don't let the fear of your desires control you any more than the desire itself. Seek the middle way and find true virtue the best you can.