/lit/ - Literature

>>12365361
>It seems like you've covered most of the major areas, have you read any Sufi stuff yet?

hell yes i have! i read up on quite a lot of World Wisdom stuff on Islam and Sufism as a part of this thing, and you are *absolutely right* about that. the Sufis are very much like the Taoists like that. of course the major changer is the shift that comes from identifying with a personal or an anthropomorphic god, which can be quite unsettling...

...but yes. yes yes. yes most indeedy. one thing, however, i have not read is that link. so i will do that now.

urgh, i read too much stuff and now i have to squeeze it all out through these little boxes with my stupid and half-swamped memory. anyways, Schuon helped a lot in terms of understanding Islam and Sufi stuff, which i really didn't have that much exposure to. but of course there is no hating on the Sufis, they're pretty fucking wonderful.

i think a lot of it for me is this funny trajectory (and a very adolescent one): first, Catastrophe. God is Dead, Christianity is Over, blah blah. then continental philosophy, lots of that. but that also will drive you nuts with fear and rage. so you get nuked, and find yourself over in China and India (both the Hindus and the Buddhists)...and then you slowly make your way back West, through Sufi paths and perhaps through Islam...

...back to exactly what it would mean to really wrap your head around a fucking crucified visionary who says, hey, love people.

philosophy and religion eventually comes to feel like a fucking *horror* story, rather than a feel-good or self-help story. but that's how it should be, right? that's how i think it should be. if it is any other way, all it is is fucking readjusting the furniture in your room or the paintings on the walls. it leads to a terrible and disastrous shallowness that manifests as rage. the point of a humanities education, in my perfect world, would be to *break your shit in completely* and completely ruin your fucking day, even your life, at times, so that the things you read in books *begin to make sense to you again.* you recover your humanity in that way and in no other way.

this is the essential danger, i think, of an inhumanist turn in philosophy - which is, i should add, absolutely necessary, and even crucial for thinking. *in the absence of a humanities department that actually respects the nondual* you will get student activism instead of...well, lights lighting up within, and the mystery of reading, and everything else that you learn along the way. i am all-in on Land and Negarestani's intellectual projects, for various reasons...but i really think they are complemented well with the Long Scenic Trip through the East, if you know what i mean. *and* the West also. hating on the West is very, very stale.