/lit/ - Literature

>>17833319
>>17833333

Ignore these anons

>>17833405

Listen to this anon.

Wilson has absolutely no good books worth reading beyond Science of Breath and Oriental Occultism. The Kybalion is Hermetic fanfiction and there is no point in reading it when there is Corpus Hermeticum. Manly Hall is alright and is a fine place to start.

>>15518892

And if you don't have the discipline to steady and command your body, you will never have the discipline to steady and command your mind. You will buy some shit selfhelp book, maybe read it but probably not, or at bested read it and never commit the words to heart.

>>12470684
>Are there any texts you've read that actually teach it to you in a didactic manner,
Yes, there are several that I've read that are like that which I've found to be very helpful. There are two texts both highly recommended by Ramana Maharshi, both of which entirely consist of didactic conversations between a master and disciple, the Advaita Bodha Deepika (The Lamp of Non-Dual Knowledge) and the Kaivalya Navaneeta (The Cream of Liberation). You can read them both online here at these two links. The Advaita Bodha Deepika is my favorite of the two and I'd recommend reading it first but both are very good. On amazon they have a paperback book available for purchase which combines the two of them into one book.

https://archive.org/details/AdvaithaBhodhaDeepika

http://ramana-maharshi.weebly.com/uploads/2/4/7/2/24723372/kaivalya_navaneeta_-_cream_of_liberation.pdf

> not Dzogchen Buddhism nor Sufism, what are the major discrepancies to Advaita? I imagine Sufism is still a theism, while Advaita, or at least Sankara, did not believe in a theism.
Sufism includes a sort of conditional theism but in many parts of Sufi texts it shows forth that they understand exactly what Advaita talks about, as an example Ibn Arabi writes in his work 'Fusûs al-hikam' "Although, apparently Creation is distinct from the Creator, in reality the Creator is but Creation and Creation is but the Creator. All these are from one reality. Nay, it is but He who is the Only Reality, and it is He Who manifests Himself in all these realities". There are a lot of passages like these in his works and those of other Sufis. They sort of have the standard Islamic theism as the mythic framework/background that they cloak their esoterism in but within that context they weave an Advaita-like understanding (and in their view it's cryptically taught in the Quran and Hadith). With Dzogchen it's more similar to Advaita, they have more of an emphasis on 'emptiness' and insist on there being no 'self' but at the same time their texts describe a primordial all-pervading infinite 'ground' and they talk about it with 90+% of the same language Shankaracharya uses to describe Atma so it's very easy to over-look the semantic aspects and focus on the ideas in the texts themselves which still seem IMO to lead to non-dual awareness.

>Have you had a full-blown ego-death before?
Yes, but only momentarily, I intend to study more texts and pursue it more at the right time and place (I have sort of a busy life at the moment and am both in school and working when not in class) however, the taste that I did have of it was such that I gained an inner peace from it which has not gone away, and I am content with taking things as they come day by day knowing that one day I'll have the opportunity to go deeper, but at the same time not fixating upon it or letting it become an object of desire. I agree entirely with how you describe it.

>>12366357
I'm not the poster you replied to, but can I ask you where does the motivation for the desire to subsume everything into an ultimate Whiteheadian-Dao 'movement' come from? It seems an oddly dogmatic position to take for someone who is into Daoism. The first line of the TTC is about how the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao, not that the name of the Dao is eternal flux. Insisting that the non-dualism spoken of in eastern metaphysics (or even just Daoism or whatever your preferred schools are) can best be characterized in the manner you mention seems to contradict the spirit of the Daoist texts which have a much more hands-off approach.

>anybody can do algebra abstraction of A and B representing something. what matters is how developed their view of that A and B are not meta arguments and semantics involving it. numbers are just representations of "something". your "God" might as well be z or y because it doesn't even do anything except try and extrapolate vague conceptual ideas you have about the world to the utmost you can imagine. humans imagination is limited so ideas and their utmost "God"/X, Y, Z/infinity are meaningless.
Do you not realize that all of this applies equally to whatever position you are advocating? The idea of everything as an interdependent flux of eternal movement/change and the opposite of an unchanging Parmenidean monism are both equally the products of human minds. There is absolutely no logical basis to say 'okay one of these is closer to reality independent of human consideration and the other has an anthropomorphic bias'. You can claim to recognize perpetual change as self-evident, but this doesn't address the question of whether our minds/perception are limited to such an extent that we don't understand what's really happening in the first place (such that our perception of change might be wrong), or the point that all observation and witnessing of changes ultimately takes place within one unity which for all intents and purposes is inseparable from itself so long as flux continues to be experienced. You seem eager to deconstruct whatever notions that poster is mentioning without holding yourself to the same standard.

>>12310305
based and red-pilled, you're right it is kind of funny, not to mention all the theology they swiped from the Persians

>tfw the textual background/history of the Semite faiths are the most embarrassing so as a massive cope they decided to be super antagonistic to everyone else by default

It's too bad too. I go out of my way to be conciliatory to you clowns by talking about how perennial wisdom is shared in all the faiths including the one you belong to but its pointless because even suggesting that can often trigger autistic rants

>>12168925
It has been dumbed down and distorted for the masses but the key message of Jesus's teachings was a more mystical 'wake up! this is divine! right here and now the bliss and freedom of God is within you!' and then this became propped up as an institution which over time changed. Under this understanding hell is more a state of ignorance or separation from God, mundane existence and normal stress could all be considered hellish in comparison to the tranquility of being united with the Lord. Many Christians seem to get offended when you imply that it has been somehow misunderstood or that it had this more radically mystic bent, but generally the views of many Christian mystics often seem to roughly align with this.

>>12029160
The Upanishads themselves don't specifically talk about that, but the overall system of thought that Advaita Vedanta teaches based on the principle Upanishads does have answers for those sorts of questions. Everything below Advaita would consider taught in the Upanishads and they often cite them in Vedanta texts to prove it.

Advaita considers the connection between the Self/Atma with the mind to be such that the Atma observes the intellect, (which falsely believes itself and the body to be the self) this intellect itself observes the activity of the mind and the mental modifications which are the objects of thought and appear as phenomenal experience (which is what all sensory data is). In addition to that you have the hierarchy of degrees of manifestation ranging from the unmanifest to the unmanifest (all of this existing only conditionally because in an absolute and real sense the eternal Brahman is eternally undivided and unchanging). You have formless manifestation, and then onto subtle formal manifestation (to which the mind belongs) and then lastly gross (material) manifestation which includes bodies. The Supreme principle is beyond both but insofar as determinations go, the unmanifest is considered infinitely more real than the manifest for various reasons and it gets gradually less real as you proceed down through the formless and subtle onto the gross.

With regards to deep sleep, Advaita states that (like in dreaming) the subtle body of the mind and the intellect withdraw into themselves (from the less real gross manifestation, which continues in its lesser unreality); however unlike dreaming there is no activity of the mind but the pure intellect (which is separate from the mind) continues abiding in its own undifferentiated state. At this stage though, there is still no knowledge of reality which is why it's distinct (among other reasons) from the pure awareness/witness of Atma which observes and is unaffected by the intellect in this state. Advaita would consider general anesthesia to be something similar occurring. It's not as though showing something equivalent to deep sleep being induced by a drug would 'disprove' it, Advaita would just consider it all part of the same self-contained illusion. Whether or not it's gross manifestation seeming to interact with the mind and other things which belong to the domains of the subtle and formless manifestation; ultimately all of manifestation is unreal and Atma observes all of it which remaining unaffected by any degree of it in the slightest.

ok time to go to bed

>>12024157
i took a shitload of acid with my ex gf and it was the single worst experience of my life. i was so out of reality that i couldnt even feel her tiddies despite grabbing them with all my strength. i had no physical sensation, the whole time it was like i was a dead spirit watching my soulless body from behind a glass wall.

>>11969849
this version is so boring