/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19374804]

Which books cam help me to radically transform my life mentally and physically
Ideally ones that therapists use to help clients with their self destructive habits

[Anonymous No.19374810]

What is the difference between the genius who founds a religion and other kinds of genius? What is it that has led him to found the religion?

The main difference is no other than that he did not always believe in the God he worships. Tradition relates of Buddha, as of Christ, that they were subject to greater temptations than other men. Two others, Mahomet and Luther, were epileptic. Epilepsy is the disease of the criminal; Caesar, Narses, Napoleon, the greatest of the criminals, were epileptics.

The founder of a religion is the man who has lived without God and yet has struggled towards the greatest faith. How is it possible for a bad man to transform himself ? As Kant, although he was compelled to admit the fact, asked in his " Philosophy of Religion," how can an evil tree bring forth good fruit ? The inconceivable mystery of the transformation into a good man of one who has lived evilly all the days and years of his life has actually realised itself in the case of some six or seven historical personages.

These have been the founders of religions. Other men of genius are good from their birth; the religious founder acquires goodness. The old existence ceases utterly and is replaced by the new. The greater the man, the more must perish in him at the regeneration. I am inclined to think that Socrates, alone amongst the Greeks, approached closely to the founders of religion; perhaps he made the decisive struggle with evil in the four-and-twenty hours during which he stood alone at Potidaea.

The founder of a religion is the man for whom no problem has been solved from his birth. He is the man with the least possible sureness of conviction, for whom everything is doubtful and uncertain, and who has to conquer everything for himself in this life. One has to struggle against illness and physical weakness, another trembles on the brink of the crimes which are possible for him, yet another has been in the bonds of sin from his birth. It is only a formal statement to say that original sin is the same in all persons ; it differs materially for each person. Here one, there another, each as he was born, has chosen what is senseless and worthless, has preferred instinct to his will, or pleasure to love; only the founder of a religion has had original sin in its absolute form; in him everything is doubtful, everything is in question. He has to meet every problem and free himself from all guilt. He has to reach firm ground from the deepest abyss; he has to surmount the nothingness in him and bind himself to the utmost reality. And so it may be said of him that he frees himself of original sin, that in him God becomes man, but also that the man becomes God; in him was all error and all guilt; in him there comes to be all expiation and redemption.

[Anonymous No.19374814]

Thus the founder of a religion is the greatest of the geniuses, for he has vanquished the most. He is the man who has accomplished victoriously what the deepest thinkers of mankind have thought of only timorously as a possibility, the complete regeneration of a man, the reversal of his will. Other great men of genius have, indeed, to fight against evil, but the bent of their souls is towards the good. The founder of a religion has so much in him of evil, of the perverse, of earthly passion, that he must fight with the enemy within him for forty days in the wilderness, without food or sleep. It was only thus that he can conquer and overcome the death within him and free himself for the highest life. Were it otherwise there would be no impulse to found a faith. The founder of a religion is thus the very antipodes of the emperor; emperor and Galilean are at the two poles of thought. In Napoleon's life, also, there was a moment when a conversion took place; but this was not a turning away from earthly life, but the deliberate decision for the treasure and power and splendour of the earthly life. Napoleon was great in the colossal intensity with which he flung from him all the ideal, all relation to the absolute, in the magnitude of his guilt. The founder of religion, on the other hand, cannot and will not bring to man anything except that which was most difficult for himself to attain, the reconciliation with God. He knows that he himself was the man most laden with guilt, and he atones for the guilt by his death on the cross.

[Anonymous No.19374842]

>>19374804
Not sure if it's exactly what you were looking for but I had full mental collapse partway through last year. My doctor recommended Russ Harris and Jordan Peterson.

[Anonymous No.19376085]

>>19374804
Read classics only. Avoid cheap bestsellers and self-help trash like the plague.
I would suggest you read Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, or Demons by Dostoievsky.