/lit/ - Literature

>>14028023
"Like the ocean, I am boundless. I am no more bound to the body than the sky is to a cloud, so how can I be affected by its states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep? Imagined attributes added to one's true nature come and go. They create karma and experience its effects. They grow old and die, but I always remain immovable like mount Kudrali. There is no outward turning nor turning back for me, who am always the same and indivisible. How can that perform actions which is single, of one nature, without parts and complete, like space? How can there be good and bad deeds for me who am organless, mindless, changeless and formless, and experience only indivisible joy? The scriptures themselves declare "He is not affected" - Vivekachudamani

From the perspective of the Hindu school Advaita, limitation is only apparent, this apparent sense of limitation only seeming to exist due to the power of maya belonging to the very same spiritual being. Once liberation is attained, the ever-same true state of the being as boundlessness and freedom is realized as having existed all along. The true nature of the spiritual being is absolute freedom, which includes freedom from will and desires, as long as we will we are not truly free. The apparent freedom of will that we experience now is really bondage, and stems from the illusion of agency and embodied existence that we impose on ourselves.

>>13832032
>Hindus tremble before Anatman.
In reality what happened was that anatman and various other Buddhist doctrines got debunked and exposed as logically inconsistent by Hindu thinkers like Shankara and Kumārila to such a degree that Buddhism was no longer taken seriously in its homeland and went nearly extinct there

>>13760324
Guenon and Coomaraswamy are your best bet. Evola is worth reading but more so for his writing on society and practical spiritual stuff, he occasionally makes some amateur mistakes about eastern metaphysics. Schuon was a megolamaniac nutjob, some of his writing is not bad but it's all thrown out the window by his personal behavior, Sedgewicks book especially shows how unhinged he was. Eliade is just Guenon et al but watered down and made palatable to "academics".

Guenon and Coomaraswamy I don't consider to be larping, they actually do a good job of showing how there is a thread of non-dualism running throughout many (but not all!) traditions. Guenon is comparatively sparse on the citations but still knew his shit, Coomaraswamy's writings on metaphysics have like 20-30 citations and quoted primary texts per pages. Don't just read them and call it quits though. You are hardly better off than where you started if you read them and then don't read a bunch of primary eastern writings afterwards, Guenon and Coomaraswamy's writings are an invitation or call to read the actual texts of the thinkers they reference. If you want to see why the both of them wrote the things they did about perennialism, then after reading them read through the works of Adi Shankara, beginning with his shorter Upanishad commentaries. Advaita Vedanta forms the central reference point of both their visions and should be studied if you want to understand why they reference it so often in relation to perennialism, although they supplement it with Taoism, Sufism, Neoplatonism, Christian mysticism etc which are all worth studying too in addition.