/lit/ - Literature

Congrats buddy. You're seeing the world as it truly is, and few are as fortunate.

Any recommendation of which Greek books I should tackle? Im not asking for chart books, just personal recs.

Sure-fire path to mental illness OP.

>>6753904

The issue with your request is that "the Greeks" is already vast as fuck. Do you want an overview of the different philosophy currents by modern academia or do you want to read it from the Greeks themselves ?

>>6753917
Greeks themselves preferably.

>>6753914
>schizophrenia is a mental illness.

:^)

>It's like everything comes together and then points upward to God.
Duh

>>6753610
avoid psychedelics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

>>6753610
Reading a lot of one thing can fuck with you, OP.

A few years ago, I read half of everything PKD ever wrote in the period of a couple months. Towards the end, while reading VALIS, I was beginning to enter a severe hallucinatory state where I was experiencing minor "coincidence" on a daily basis, every day, multiple times a day. As in, undeniable small coincidences would occur, i.e. would be thinking about something and a few minutes later hear people walking by discussing the obscure topic I was thinking about, would read a character name in a book while on the bus and look outside to see a street name with the same name as the character etc, daily all of the time every day. Was really fucking with my head. I was becoming convinced that existence was simulated, and perhaps solipsistic in nature. Was more fucked up when a girl I met at a bar that my buddy was hitting on pulled pic related out of her bag when I was carrying it with me, as it was what I was reading at the time.

I put down PKD for awhile after that. Didn't feel like going down the schizophrenic path, especially considering I'm among the most susceptible in the population(my grandfather is a schizophrenic who killed 5 of his family members in the 70s). No PKD, no.

>>6754975
dude that's literally me except w/ orthodox judaism , but i don't want to go back to that. christianity is cooler but i don't know if i really feel the need to go to any religion specifically, just do some kind of perennialist thing

>>6755066
it only took one book to make that happen to me: foucalt's pendulum

>>6754975
Ahaha faggot

>>6753914
This. Soon you'll be rambling about star trek and the matrix being proof of the book of revelations playing out
>>6754965
>>>/x/

>>6755101
If you read Emily Gyde's blog and things like the rants of Francis E. Dec or Gabriella Chana you can actually feel it getting stronger as you read. You start to get light-headed and dizzy, hypnotised by their writing. It's fucked up.

>>6755094
Just join Jews for Jesus tbh

>>6755066
I read the Phenomenology of Spirit and started intuiting spirits everywhere (volksgeists, the weltgeist, etc.)

>>6754995
Haha man. Why? I think this guy should take a big dose.

I took 400ug LSD and ate a thick 16 inches of San Pedro cactus (mescaline) and I plotted out an hierarchial web of scholarly disciplines in my head and god was in the center. I'm not even a theist, lol.

>>6755132
Did you actually eat it? Holy fuck dude boil it down.

>>6755144
Yeah man it was holy. I actually enjoyed the taste of the cactus it reminded me of green pepper. I almost puked from the nausea, though.

I only do really big doses of psychedelics. I don't even drink or smoke. I used to use weed but it was so childish and boring I just stopped. Same thing with video games. I just stopped.

>>6755132
>why

personal experience.

I've experienced similar things, inexplicable coincidences like this guy >>6755066 is talking about. The radio participating with my mental dialogue, jesus speaking to me through an empty chip bag in a 7-11 parking lot, strange irresistible compulsions to wander through neighborhoods in the night that I've never been to.

It's uncomfortable frankly.

Slowed down for me as I slowed down my psych/weed consumption.

>>6754995
I'm >>6755066, and honestly psychedelics(specifically LSD and MDA) have produced some of the most important, life-changing moments in my life.

Ego-death is an incredible experience, and full-blown ego-death well, I wouldn't be the same today had I not experienced such a thing. Lying on the side of a mountain in Montana, and for an indiscernible amount of time I had no idea what I was, what made me was simply the area that immediately surrounded me. I knew I had thought, and that I existed, but beyond that not much more.

I was very aware of the state of the earth around me, the boulders, and trees sprouting from the soil between them. The soil being a mixture of weathered stone and decomposing life, allowing for the tree to sprout at that location. Lots of indescribable feelings and senses occurring. Was not particularly sure what I was amongst the surrounding objects in the forest. Probably the human, because humans think. Everything, all concepts temporarily felt unified and perfectly comparable. I wish I had the linguistic abilities to properly describe such an experience.

During that same trip, I realized that a specific thought pattern I had that was recurring, it was not wrong, but it was wildly different than the typical patterns of thought that pervade society. I realized that if I were to stay in that pattern of thought, that society would reject me as insane or schizophrenic, and that I would have to come out of that train of thought if I wished to participate in society, even though I knew that there was nothing inherently wrong with the recurring patterns of thought I was having. They applied to reality as I experienced it at the time perfectly, and were very interesting, though I have no rational way to explain them.

Psychedelics can be a very useful tool for gaining insight and perspective into reality. They can also fuck you up pretty bad, but this usually only happens when you do way too much at once, do it way too many times over a period of time, or mix the wrong two things.

>>6755167
how much were you taking per week? my friend developed acute schizophrenic behavior after smoking weed everyday for years and taking LSA (which I'd like to try) too much. He'd synthesize the shit out of morning glory seeds himself

>>6754975
Pure cringe.

>>6755192
Don't take LSA, the bodyload isn't worth it. Dat constriction.

>>6755162
ya weed is lame. used it for the first time in a couple of months the other day. i suspect it might go well with meditation if done alone in the right in environment though. i still like alcohol. alcohol is profound when used properly

>>6755232
Tfw no good dealers in the suburbs and can't use DNM because my mail is opened by my parents

>>6755192
I've tripped a lot.

Weed everyday until recently. Acid, shrooms, LSA, pharmahuasca. A couple times a week at highest height.

I'm saying avoid psychedelics because OP is experiencing acute symptoms, he's on the edge of the screaming meemies

>>6755191
without a doubt psychedelics, in the right time and place can be a beautiful beautiful thing.

But, as you recognized, they can fuck you right up.

>>6755192
> weed for years
> schizophrenia
if he developed schizophrenia only after years of consecutive use what makes you single it out as a causal factor?

>>6755167
so, being this guy >>6755191

what I will say is that excessive or long-term psych/weed consumption is really bad on the mind, obviously. I'm not condoning the use of psychedelics blindly or anything. They're a good thing to experiment with temporarily, and then discontinue when you've taken what you can from them.

I used to smoke a loooot of weed, much more than the average person. Lived in a growing hub city in washington state, so it was incredibly cheap and good, and at my worst I would smoke 2oz a week. Weed perpetuates your state of being imo, and I stopped smoking it altogether. I'll occasionally smoke a bit when performing music with friends, that's about it.

I also feel like I've gotten everything I can out of LSD that isn't reaching into dangerous territory. I have done 20 hits of 1500ug, and lost all control of reality having a series of very deep, powerful experiences. Smaller amounts have resulted in increasingly psychotic trips, so I stay away from the stuff. You have to know yourself pretty well to experiment with psychedelics.

The only thing I'm interested in every messing with again is combining LSD and MDA, because well, at least in my own subjective reality at the time that I did this, I had super powers. I found people by knowing where they were going to be at a music festival, multiple times, and found strangers that I wanted to have conversations with, including some guy who happened to live in a conspicuous apartment that a friend of mine used to live in. above a karate studio. Regardless of how fucked up my sense of reality at the time was(and oh boy it was fucked up), I got to experience super powers, and it was fucking sweet.

>>6755241
The opportunity will come eventually, don't worry.

>>6755232
LSA when extracted properly is very interesting. I'd describe it as a cross between DMT, LSD and Psilocybin in terms of effects. DMT in that there's a very strong period of hallucinations that encourage you to lie still and introvert for a certain amount of time while peaking, LSD in that the trip feels kindof similar, and psilocybin in that the trip also has earthy asf qualities to it, if you know what I mean by "earthy". Weird concept that I think can only be explained by people who trip on mushrooms. Sort of a gnarliness, dirtiness to the trip, but not necessarily bad, though I don't usually like it.

to get semi-back-on-topic, are there any "monastic" type organizations that one joins on a temporary basis (let's say 1-3 years) in order to abstain from worldly things in the company of other people who have taken similar vows? can belong to any religion. buddhsim would be cool, for example.

>>6755313
Most monasteries involve a try-out period before you make your vows. You do have to be a practising member of their religion first though.

>>6755167
>Charles Freck, becoming progressively more and more depressed by what was happening around him, decided, finally, to off himself. There was no problem in the circles where he hung out in putting an end to yourself. You just bought a large quantity of downers and took them with some cheap wine. The planning part had to do with the artifacts he wanted found on him by later archeologists. He had spent several days deciding, much longer than he had spent deciding to kill himself. He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and an unfinished letter to Exxon, protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card. That way, he would indite the system, and achieve something by his death, over and above what the death itself achieved. At the last moment, he changed his mind on a decisive issue and decided to drink the pills with a connoisseur wine, instead of Ripple or Thunderbird. So he set off on one last drive, over to Tiny's Liquors, which specialized in fine wines, and bought a bottle of 2001 Azalea Springs Merlot, which set him back almost seventy dollars. Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it, tried to think of something meaningful but could not, and then, with a glass of Merlot, gulped down all the pills at once. However, he had been burned. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed, looking down at him disapprovingly.

>>6755268
Wait you took 20x 1500ug tabs? You took 30000ug lsd? That's overkill...

>>6755265
I was referring to the LSA as the causal factor

another question: are there any cool off-shoots or sects of either catholicism or orthodoxy that engage in interesting or secretive practices. kind of like the khlysti, or like the initiation ceremonies of the knights templar

>>6755410
I wasn't aware of the purity of the LSD when I took it. It was 4 sweet tarts with 5 liquid doses on each one. Later on after my friend purchased the vial, from the guy, we realized how intensely pure the acid was, and we diluted it so that we could safely consume it.

Full-blown visual hallucination, perception of time skewed entirely, I would walk to the same point from two directions and then continue off from that point in opposite directions, I would watch the sidewalk become "inside-out" before me, arching into the sky, I had intense realistic visions of myself dying in various potential situations I could have gotten into that night such as being ran over, I had moments where people would walk by me or drive by me and I didn't know which person I was, having distinct thoughts between each person that was in that area. It was extremely disorienting and powerful. I couldn't say it was fun, but I also couldn't say that it was bad.

Can't help you OP but watch the movie PI it's fucking cool and is about this basically.

>>6753610

You'd probably like Hamann, though I haven't read him myself.

Or you might not like him, if you're trying to avoid insanity.

>>6753610
t-teach me master