/lit/ - Literature

>>16901279
Borges, especially In Praise of Darkness

>>16901279
What have you read previously?

>>16901369
Relating to that subject? Nothing, that's why I'm asking.
I've read books related to dreaming (Jung, some Freud) but that's not what I'm looking for.

>>16901279
Buddhism obviously

>>16901506
I meant it in the literal sense. As far as I understand, Buddhists believe the perception of reality to be an "illusion" in the sense that we mistakenly believe there to be immutable and separate objects. It is an illusion of consciousness caused by ignorance of the true nature of things, but it is not an illusion in the metaphysical sense.

>>16901505
Nothing I know of, sorry. Why don't you write an essay on it?

>>16901516
So you mean like an actual dream and then you wake up in another reality? Well than that reality is also existence which doesn't make existence any less illusory.

>>16901279
The Zhuan Falun

>>16901525
I'm far from being knowledgeable or eloquent enough to write on this subject.

>>16901529
I'm not making any assumptions on whatever happens after, since there's no way to determine if our methods of reasoning would make sense if applied to whatever exists beyond the illusion.
>>16901538
Isn't that a book on qigong?

>>16901548
How can you worry about being uninformed if you're having trouble looking for books? Stands to reason that if you can't find any you're free to write as you see fit. Worrying about form here is just a meme too, content is what matters in the first instance.

>>16901565
I was thinking that some authors might have had the same idea, it's a simple enough concept that I highly doubt nobody's written on it before. Is it reasonable to write about something by basing your arguments only on your own intuition and reasoning?

>>16901573
Reasonable is a strong word. If you ask the average /lit/ reader, not by a long shot. If you ask me, it's an irrelevant question; If you feel you have an original idea you shouldn't restrict your creative agency to fitting the mold. Just don't publish your shit where a scholarly background and proper sourcing is required and you're pretty much fine in my book. Demoralizers are a nuisance you shouldn't worry about too hard.

>>16901573
>>16901598
Though, that's not to say you shouldn't read if you feel it'd be useful to you. I'm just saying that just bc you suspect somebody might've written on something before you, this doesn't imply it's imperative that you spend hours searching for said authors, if what you intend to do is merely to flesh your idea. You have to orient yourself by what you wanna do with your idea. Though, even then, some authors opt for not caring lick for what's already been said. Honestly, it's really not a big deal and as long as you're able to stand by what you're doing you're fine. Ultimately I can't tell you what to do.

>>16901598
>>16901626
I'll try that, then. Fleshing out my ideas by writing them down will allow me to get a more solid grasp on what currently amounts to a vague intuition, so at least it'll be useful for that.

>>16901632
Best of luck. I'm sure you'll conjure up something tangible and satisfactory eventually.

>>16901561
>I'm not making any assumptions on whatever happens after, since there's no way to determine if our methods of reasoning would make sense if applied to whatever exists beyond the illusion.
Well then, let's think about what the world would be if it were an illusion. Let's say an illusion is something untrue that deceives us and misdirects us from reality. Then, to find out something is an illusion we would need to know what reality is, only then we would say the illusion is misleading and false relative to our reality. You can't simply be an illusion, you would need to be an illusion relative to a reality. So if, as you say, we have no method of saying there is an underlying reality, then we have no grounds to say the world is an illusion. I wouldn't be so rash with that assumption though. Read Plato and Upanishads. If you want something with more of modern methodology, read Kant and Schopenhauer. Jung's later stuff would also be a good follow up to Schopenhauer.

>>16901686
Right, an illusion is a distortion of reality. Maybe using it interchangeably with the term "dream" is misleading and inaccurate. One is simply an obstruction of truth, while the other is an altered state of consciousness, with everything that implies on perception, reasoning, memory and thought.
>we have no method of saying there is an underlying reality
I just said that I was unwilling to comment on what the nature of this reality might be, because there is no benchmark or standard that can be refered to. It's not possible to assess what true reality might be if you've never (from your perspective and current perception) been exposed to it. Bar exceptions, only when you wake up do you realize you were dreaming.

>>16901738
Sure, I would agree to that. But how would you judge something is an illusion if you didn't know reality differs from it?

>>16901748
>how would you judge something is an illusion if you didn't know reality differs from it?
Not OP, but you just do, inherently. Thought belongs to one realm, not to another. I can tell a dream apart from reality because the dream, unless lucid, is marked by an absence of agency and the sense of being free in thought. Now the idea of lucid dreams is interesting, though.

>>16901748
>if you didn't know reality differs from it?
You mean if I didn't know how reality differs from it?
I'm not quite sure, my ideas on this are disorganized which is why I hoped some author would've already explored the subject. As the other anon suggested, I should take the time to write everything down coherently in order to answer this in a satisfactory manner.

>>16901753
That's interesting. I've also at times had dreams where realized that it was only a dream, but only by comparing that dream to my memories of how reality was like. You also said you compared your dreams to reality and found them more free-form and less intentional than reality. But OP is considering whether the world at large is an illusion. In this case, you would need to know something from the true reality beforehand to compare it with this the illusiory world. My point is that if you have no way of knowing about the true reality, you wouldn't be able to tell whether a reality is illusiory or not.

>>16901754
>You mean if I didn't know how reality differs from it?
Yes. Because to know what is an illusion you would need to know what is real, and if there is no way of knowing what is real then there is no way of saying what is illusion. Definitely I suggest writing down notes, but also you might want to look into those books I suggested above, because they are concerned with the exact same topic.

>>16901768
I guess you're right. I'll have to give that some thought. The inferred simile between reality as dream makes little sense when you have no knowledge of what's outside 'reality'. Nevertheless I think it'd be interesting to hear what this might look like.

>>16901754
Do you have a blog of some kind or a social media you'd feel comfortable sharing? I'd be interested in reading your treatise/essay when it's done.

>>16901774
I know that dreams are "not real" because I wake up from them into this reality. Fundamentally this is just applying the same process to what we currently perceive as reality. Of course I would be incapable of providing any kind of empirical proof, but I don't think that's the point.
Which of Plato's writing are you recommending specifically?
>>16901778
I don't have any social media or blog, but once I'm done (which won't be anytime soon), I'll probably post it on /lit/ and ask for opinions.

>>16901783
Shit alright, I'll try keep an eye out then

>>16901783
>I know that dreams are "not real" because I wake up from them into this reality.
Of course, but you would only know that after the fact. I wouldn't think there is a way of communicating with yourself from the future to ask him whether he (or you?) has woken up. The fact remains that you are, as of now, steeped deep in this reality, whether illusiory or not, with no prior knowledge of any other world. It's very simple in principle. What you are considering is a comparision between two worlds: (i) this world and (ii) the true world. If (i) corresponds to (ii), then the world is not an illusion, otherwise it is. So how do you plan on doing the comparison if you don't know anything about (ii)?
>Which of Plato's writing are you recommending specifically?
Most of Plato's writings that I've read deals with this. Maybe start with Phaedo.

>>16901279

thinking about it is one thing. If you honestly believe this please seek psychiatric help.

>>16901821
>you would only know that after the fact.
Putting aside the possibility of acquiring lucidity during a dream (noting that there are also several degrees of lucidity), yes. And you're right, there's no way to know when we "wake up". An obvious answer would be to say death is an awakening, but this is unverifiable and doesn't bring us closer to anything substantial. Although there's an interesting parallel to be made: Freud pointed out that the dream environment itself often reacted to external stimuli, as to provide a smooth transition from the dreaming state into the waking state. For example, you might experience someone shaking you awake as falling to your death inside the dream. So a comparison can be drawn between the end of the dream and the death of the dreamer.
>with no prior knowledge of any other world
A peculiarity of the dream state is that you experience events as a continuity even if that is not actually the case. You rarely ask yourself how you got there, and there is never any conflict between your memories of waking life (which may or may not be temporarily forgotten while dreaming) and your intuition that the dream is reality while you're experiencing it. This altered state of consciousness makes it so that you find your situation to be natural. So I don't see this as a problem.
So rather than comparing waking reality to whatever exists outside of it, it seems to me like it'd be more reasonable to start by explaining why the dream state is not fundamentally different from the waking state we experience now.
The most obvious counter-argument is "the dream state is more malleable", but the transience of dream objects rarely strike us as peculiar within dreams, or if they do, they are seen as explainable rather than unnatural.
>Phaedo
Alright, thank you.

The 36 Lessons of Vivec

>>16901831
Nah I'm fine

Just write one yourself if your just dreaming this.

>>16901279

https://realization.org/p/ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita.html

>>16901831
bullshit

you may as well tell someone to seek psychiatric help for believing in Christianity or any belief system then

>>16901279
Literally the fact that life is impermanent, i.e. death, makes it little more than a dream. If it's literally a dream or not makes little difference because it's already temporary, and it's already meaningless. The only difference really is that you can hurt someone here, so I at least hope you don't do that.

I literally have no idea what people mean when they say life is an "illusion"?

What is your definition of "real" ? What is the distinction between real and illusion in your mind?

>>16901279
>What are books on this subject?
What can reflection on everyday ordinary not yield which tells you that this is a shadow dream?

>>16902839
Basically what buddhists and others mean when they say life is an illusion is the same as nihilism, that it is meaningless and impermanent, but also that everything said about reality is a lie, every concept we use to describe reality is a spook. You can only perceive reality as stuff happening in front of you you cannot describe what it is because when you do you're no longer dealing with the actual reality but the one created in your head where you have created divisions, labels, ideas etc, none of which are actually real. What reality is, cannot be described, your descriptions are a limited viewpoint, simply an idea projected onto actual reality.

Think of reality as the same as a word, you think of a word as something with meaning, but this meaning wasn't always there, before we decided a word had "meaning" it was just an empty sound, that's the truth of the word, an empty sound and the meaning we attribute to it is a ghost it's just a projection. Reality is the same way, we attribute all kinds of meanings to it but they are all projections, they aren't "real".

>>16902928
So it's the opposite of platonism.

>>16901279
>How do I know that enjoying life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home? How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life? During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.

>>16901753
Maybe you just have that sense because Buddhists are right.

>>16902996
What do you mean?

>>16902996
What do the buddhists have to do with any of what I said?

>>16901279
how to find what isn't lost by Akilesh Ayyar

>>16903006
How would you know whether your feeling that reality is not quite what it seems is an intuition about reality being an illusion in the metaphysical sense, or the buddhist sense? How would you know the buddhists are wrong in other words? You wouldn't know for sure until you either had some meditative experience or full on "waking up" as the buddhists call it.

>>16903070
>How would you know whether your feeling that reality is not quite what it seems is an intuition about reality being an illusion in the metaphysical sense, or the buddhist sense?
1. it's the sense of self I was taught
2. it's the sense of self I choose to persist in
I know my reality is the way it is because I choose to, relativist cuck
awakening isn't the sure knowledge you imagine it to be. it, like my own presupposition, presupposes a certain sense of self. you have to buy the whole of the buddhist weltanschauung to be properly memed into considering yourself as constituted only by impersonal karmic flows, resulting in 'nirvana'.

>>16903103
>1. it's the sense of self I was taught
And this is how I would justify saying that dreams are distinguishable from 'reality', because in all likelihood, OP being a western person, has the same unconscious weltanschauung as me. The sense of being free in thought, sans self-generative pessimistic philosophies, is pretty deeply embedded in our concept of self.

>>16903103
So you think you're right because it's the "truth" you grew up with, and because you choose to believe in it. Sounds pretty relativistic.

>>16903226
don't try flip the script on me motherfucker. you can't invoke skepticism of the kind "how do you know that (...)", and then bridge the gap to a truth-condition which presupposes another set of axioms. the point is that radical ontological open-endedness is implied in your own reasoning. yes, my arguments are 'relativistic', but so is the reasoning you tried to invoke in your previous reply. what differentiates us is that you think you're making a substantial argument when you invoke open-endedness, when you're really only pointing to a fact which we're all implicitly or explicitly actively coping with.
in short: i'm right because i'm right, and likewise you think regarding your own thought, and unless we have a shared set of axioms there are no sensible discourse to be had

>>16903070
>How would you know whether your feeling that reality is not quite what it seems is an intuition about reality being an illusion in the metaphysical sense, or the buddhist sense
Because those two things are not related? I'm not sure what you're even asking. Intuition regarding the unrealness of subjective judgment is not the same thing as intuition regarding the unrealness of reality from an ontological standpoint

>>16901279
What's even your endgame? Why delve deeper into this? Do you really think you're gonna reach through the fabric of reality and find a door to the "real world"? This path of thinking is escapism. Even if you could escape this reality why would you want to? The other side is likely just as much of an illusion as this world. You might as well just become as comfortable as possible in this world. To do that you'll probably have to stop avoiding your problems by looking for magic to believe in.

>>16903633
>dont conjecture about the outside
t. inside-thinker
let OP come to the conclusion naturally, otherwise it won't have any staying power

>>16903633
Does it need an endgame? It's an idea that's interested me for a long time. You're making a lot of assumptions about me for no reason.

>>16903328
>don't try flip the script on me motherfucker.
You wanna get antagonistic? Words like karma and nirvana may very well be memes, but you don't need to accept these axioms before you meditate and find out for yourself. If you want to have discussions ad infinitum go to the psych ward and talk with the schizos about their views on reality.

>>16903679
>you don't need to accept these axioms before you meditate and find out for yourself
you do though. how can you find out without first fucking around? or to put it another way, even if you want to see if you could chuck a rock at my face for being an annoying prick, you first have to know me as an annoying prick, and the rock as being chuck-able. this extends to the idea of the self, as it's inscribed in the weltanschauungs. obviously, due to the nature of the pluralist ontology schema i've pointed out as fundamental, i can't convince you of this -- or to put it another way: you ahve to find out for yourself :)

>>16903679
>>16903713
also, i use 'memes' in a dual sense: both in the scientifically intended sense of self-perpetuating ideas, and the colloquial 'joke'. i don't fault you for not getting it though, my intellectual musings tend to be quite subtle and are missed by most

The Qur'an

>>16903103
>>16903328
>>16903713
I'm too much of a brainlet to understand this

>>16903713
Does this also extend to the instances of people who lost the sense of self involuntarily and then sought out eastern definitions afterwards to give words to their experience?

>>16903647
Either life is or isn't an illusion. There's not really a use looking for the mechanics of how it is or isn't. It's impossible to know which or how it works. All you can do is choose a premise and act accordingly. Though, the premise of wether life is an illusion or not will probably have very little impact on how you choose to live it.

>>16903858
>the premise of wether life is an illusion or not will probably have very little impact on how you choose to live it.
I'd argue that assuming it to be an illusion makes it easier to detach and let go from the obstacles life throws at you.

>>16901873
This desu, take the CHIMpill and play morrowind

>>16903802
worry not friend remember the gist of my words and they will be understood in due time. it's not so much an intellectual spawn of mine as it is a universal condition of existence. at least i think so, anyway.

>>16903812
i would with some hesitation say yes, though as i said there's nothing to invalidate or stand in the way of adopting the schema of eastern thought as your own, if you think it befitting of who you think you may be. the crucial point here is that the person 'loses' their initial sense of self, and is thrown into existential chaos. only out of the existential chaos do new configurations crystallize, and only by going through some semblance existential chaos can somebody classically western go about realizing their self-hood as something different than what they were originally taught.
assuming a relativistic state of things as the ontological ground is the only weltanschauung that allows you to account for the transitory period in which the self appears as an unknown to itself. sounds paradoxical but that paradoxicality is exactly what makes us despair when we discover in some manner that we aren't who we thought we were, and what drives us to seek out other configurations.
few are the ones who generate truly original thought, most settle into another schema or another, because there's little known to man which he hasn't gone through numerous times before, and preconfigured stability is more desirable than staring straight into the unknown and trying to pry apart and generate an entirely new sense of self. nothing new under the sun, and all of that.

>>16903870
Then do that. Either way, the experience is real to you, including the consequences of your actions.

What's the difference with simulation theory?

>>16903899
>assuming a relativistic state of things as the ontological ground is the only weltanschauung that allows you to account for the transitory period in which the self appears as an unknown to itself.
By definition enlightenment isn't transitory and no new personal self is taken on. A lack of self seems to me to be unequal to assuming yet another self.

>>16904345
If anything it's closer to solipsism
Simulation theory is just theism for redditors

>>16903113
How is what you call the western worldview different from the eastern one?