/lit/ - Literature

>>6392984
TFioS, it really helped me when I caught the cancer

What is your problem? Having an "anxiety attack" because of the stress of living in suburbia and mommy's not there to pick up your xanax script?

>>6392984
Talk to a friend about it, read The Call of the Wild and get well soon dear anon.

>>6392991
>Having an "anxiety attack" because of the stress of living in suburbia and mommy's not there to pick up your xanax script?

30mg of man the fuck up.

>>6392984
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
Charles Bukowski

>>6393142
>there are people on /lit/ who consider this poetry

>>6393191
>helen
bad bitches love Bukowski
Helen was a bitch
helen loves Bukowski

get a load of Aristotelian logic in your boypussy
next time choose the right picture faggot

>>6392991
I have lung cancer.
Fucking thank you for being an asshole.

>>6393385
Just forget about it. Have a nice glass of brandy, a cigar, and kick back with with a classic novel.

>>6393097
it's called SIU pill with a can of hard

>>6393385
alright i'll bite op.
from From Light Into Darkness: The Evolution of Religion in Ancient Egypt by stephen mehler

how religion evolved of spirituality.
sold the concept of death for those who would make benefit.

consciousness is independent of brain function.
as we spiral counter clockwise upwards towards the light,

the sands of paradise wait us all in eternity

>>6392984
Former cancer patient here

While I was doing chemo I read the Upanishads, a collection of Mahayana sutras, Bardo Thodol, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Letters from a Stoic, Tao Te Ching, A collection of poetry by Hafiz (though I have been told a lot is lost if you can't read it in Farsi), Leaves of Grass, the Doors of Perception, most of William Blake's poetry and I also learned to meditate.

My main concern was wanting to be able to accept the idea that I will die, and to come to some sort of peaceful state where I could accept myself and my flaws before that event came. I found I could only consume media that dealt with concepts of transcendence, I lost all of my patience for minutia, fleeting adventures, ephemeral cultural issues and nitpicking at society etc. I am not religious but there is something about religious texts that just scratched the itch I was having, maybe I was just looking for some easy answers before the end, but I can whole heatedly say that those books, the meditation, and a daily regimen of cannabis infused muffins got me through the hardest times and made me a happier person when I came out the other side.

Good luck OP, I hope you are as lucky as I was.

>>6392984
Christopher Hitchens - Mortality

>>6395066
Did you arrive at any conclusions?

>>6393385
>>6393416
kek

why are you looking for something that will remind you of your problems? read poetry, look into nature, relax as much as you can outside of structures.

>>6395066
So, did you die?

>>6395105
I don't think I could successfully articulate them. All I can say is that I arrived at a place in my own mind where I felt about as peaceful as I think I could ever be, and the prospect of dying didn't feel that scary any more, I was more worried about how the people who care about me would feel after I go.

Its funny that now that I know I'm not going to die I have slowly fell away from that feeling here and there, the world has a way of putting dents in your armor over the years, but I can confidently say I am better for the experience even if it didn't turn me into Buddha.

>>6392984
Somewhat unrelated to lit but I recommend that you trip on dextromethorphan. This always helped me get over my mindset issues(depression, suicidal thoughts, 1 attempt) and I know cancer is much more deadly but It may illuminate some on your thoughts on death or at least help your thoughts about it.

Read the bible OP. Particularly Ecclesiastes and Job. I hope you find what you're looking for.

>>6392988
I actually read that, the last couple of chapters can be very crude (and I have seen people dying in their beds slowly for years, pissing and shitting) maybe not so much fun for op.

>>6395066

Hey m8, question for you...

I'm recovering from a sort of near death experience and I've seem to hit a road block. I can't seem to accept the fact that I'm not going to die. I've lost my drive, I don't care about anything aside from going to church and thinking/reading about god, the eternal and death.

Before all this happened I was breezing through grad school, working and writing. Now I'm at home taking probably a year off from uni, not working and just volunteering and going to church since it seems to be the only thing that helps. Do you have any advice?

I'm really glad to hear that you survived the cancer, that's amazing!

>>6393787
>consciousness is independent of brain function.
[single shred of evidence needed]

>>6392984
a rebours

>>6396158

>>6396158
Have you ever orgasmed inside of a woman before. Don't answer that.

>>6393142
I got to agree Helen. The Buk had the the cock-key for life!

>>6396138
Honestly I think that coming to terms with dying is the most personal thing a human being can do. I can't tell you what will work for you but I can describe my personal turning point though it might be frustratingly unhelpful and unsciency:

I was walking along the shore near my house after chemo after finishing the Katha Upanishad. It was a clear and sunny, warm breeze, birds chirping, it was as nice a day as I've ever experienced, it almost felt like an acid trip it was so colorful and beautiful. I sat down on an old ruined cement structure and looked out over the water at the mountains and I started worrying about dying (as I tended to do whenever I was alone back then). Out of nowhere I started laughing uncontrollably, this overwhelming sense of joy came over me, it filled my whole body and felt like it was going to burst out into the world around me. It was like nothing I had ever experienced, I had been depressed for so long that the massive swing in emotion almost scared me. I had this feeling of complete connection to my surroundings, it was like my death was this tiny event that was part of this unimaginably vast and beautiful divine system, and there was nothing happy or sad about. It seemed obvious to me in that moment that what happens when I die doesn't really matter, it will be what it will be, and to fight against it almost seems childish and petulant and worse it's like fighting nature itself. So I just let go of that existential anxiety I had been carrying around ever since I learned that I would die, its still there somewhere, but it's been defanged, it doesn't haunt me like it used to.

I said I'm not religious but I only mean that in the institutional and ritualistic sense, I felt the presence of "God" that morning. Not God the angry, vengeful anthropomorphic creature with a beard and robes, of but a sort of all encompassing, unintelligible, omnipresent unifying force that experiences itself, it's nothing you could define or draw a circle around, not bound by time or space, it just fucking is and it pervades everything. Whether it was "real" or not is inconsequential to me, even if it was just a delusional oddity within my brain. Whatever happened gave me comfort that I desperately needed at that moment and it helped me stay positive and helps me to this day. There will always be some part of me that fears the unknown, and death is still completely unknown, but I am comfortable in the certainty that I will experience it one day and I'll get to find out what lies on the other side (unless its nothing, but obviously I won't be bothered if I simply cease to be). It almost kind of excites me, to quote Peter Pan: "To die will be an awfully big adventure". That being said, I still want to get the most out of my time as me because for all I know its the only chance I'll get.

>>6396638
>>Honestly I think that coming to terms with dying is the most personal thing a human being can do
it is the first thing to do in our life

>>6396138
I have come to believe the same thing and I can't un-believe it, not truly.
Consider taking on the Warrior stance of every day impeccability and continue what you are doing, otherwise you might enter devolving spirals of unsatisfactory general regression only to be lucky to get back to something similar to the point you are at currently, much later on. You might be having general anxiety, but I would argue you shouldn't seek to medicate it away. It's perfectly normal. You are at a phase of self education, perhaps you even will have to re-learn curiosity-driven self-teaching. Consider mundane and everyday situations to be your school, and look for things that light up with a peculiar significance, and study them. Don't worry about school, or the future; you're good. Imagine existing on a very long spectrum of time - thousands of years, and try to work on yourself so as to free up your inner intelligence for the benefit of yourself and the ones you hold dear and for the development of the race and our future. Be humble. Don't proselytize at all.
Best of luck.

>>6396638
>>6397237

Thank you so much this is very helpful. Most people just tell me to snap of out it and go back to my old routine but what you wrote is really insightful.... I've saved it so I can read it over again when the anxiety kicks in.

Very well written too!

>>6396638
mein pantheist. the ataraxia is fucking beautiful

>>6397249
Not at all. You're welcome. Oh and one more thing, if you feel a lot of anxiety, perhaps try writing through it, that's what I do increasingly. As with reading, it does not matter much what you write - post, poem, sentence, paragraph, chapter, schlock, erotica, ya.

>>6396638
and people argue that not everything is balanced

I gotta say OP, seems like you've got a lot on your plate. I've never been in a life-death situation like this, so I'm probably not the best person to give an advice. But I've did go through some dark times in my life. I pretty much hit lowest of my lows in the terms of personal phillosophy back then - the issue I had was the impossibility of free will and 'meaning' in life, when faced with determinism (both theistic and atheistic). It may sound like bullshit, but it really fucked me up. I didn't exactly have depression, but I was in this weird catatonic state of nihilism - nothing had any 'flavou'r to it - in which I assumed I was gonna stay for the rest of my life. And the worst of all - I didn't even care.

I somehow got a hold of C.G. Jung's Red Book. Immediately, from the first page, I knew that this was actually something, that I needed all along. I was on the verge of tears several times in the book, other times it made me feel nauseaus and sick. But it had a pretty amazing transformative effect on me, in a way that it lead me to an entirely different outlook on life, and well, pretty much everything. Later, it would lead me to reading christian apocrypha, Phllip K. Dick and other weirdly amazing stuff.

If I had to name one book, which I would recommend to someone who was in a really deep shit, it would be this one. I hope you won't be discouraged by the fact that it was written by a psychologist - this is not a self-help book, far from it. Not many people know this, but Jung was a phillosopher as well, I would even daresay as much as he was a psycholgogist. And this book...it's fascinating. It's hard to compare it to anything, save for maybe Nietzsche's Zarathrustra - it has a similiar narrative structure and mytho-poetic motives, but otherwise I think there's a vast difference between the two. It was also unknown for a long time, because Jung never published it/gave instructions regarding it after his death, so it was only published quite recently, 50 years after his death.

just remember that i am going to die as well, and i know a few people that have died and they were as significant as you are

>>6396638

hey cool, I've never seen that woodprint repainted like this

>>6397377

Will give that book a try anon, thanks. I feel ya btw, when doing my religious studies and researching Calvinism the whole predestination thing really fucked me up. There was a period of my life where I just stopped giving a shit because of it.

further studies have led me to believe that orthodox Calvinism just doesn't make theological sense. That conclusion made my life infinitely better.

The Magic Mountain

>>6397393

Yeah, some of those protestant theories are pretty brutal. I remember doing that stuff in phillosophy class in highschool. The thing is, it's really hard to find a way out of that situation. It is the real samsara, in my opinion, and the wide majority of people live in it everyday.

The worst of all - you can't really explain the trick, because then it loses its significance. You can only show, and hope for the best.

Good luck man, I hope you get better. I dunno if there's an afterlife or not, or reincarnation, or some completely different stuff - I mean, it's all possible - but if I feel I've learned anything regarding that in the past years, it's that death is in some way insignificant. I don't know...I hope that this doesn't sound disingenuous, since I'm really not sayin much....but I don't know how but it's probably (I'm being selft-critical here - I 'know' it's that way) not a big deal. We are lead to believe it is, and it's not.

Take care.