/lit/ - Literature

>>19030551
>Mediterannean
Based
Based
Based
>Mesopotamia
Based
Based
Based
>Arabia
Based
Based
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>Far East
Based
Based
Based
>Israel
Cringe
Cringe
Cringe

>>18624439
but anime is cute and sojak makes me want to vomit

>>18573962
The paradoxical non-salvation of salvation is salvation itself. It's not unique to Vedanta, but is present explicitly in some form or another in all the eastern soteriological traditions, as well as, with a moderate amount of exegesis and interpretation, in the Christian ones. The fusion of egoconsciousness with the Godhead is a denial of otherness to the extent otherness is constitutive of the divide in the first place. You logically cannot have the one without the other, if you pose salvation as a problem of delusion. The only tradition I can think of which preserves otherness, albeit in a minimal form, is the Christian Gnostic wherein the soul is of the Father's essence and imaged on Him, but never strictly identical.

>>18574216
>Advaita is atheist, materialist
Shankara wrote hymns to the qualified deity. There is always a clear distinction between dry soteriological doctrine and the associated metaphysical precepts, and the mythopoetic worship which make up the former's inspiration. It is clearly religious, and the clay anecdotes are metaphorical and already material, used to try sketch the nature of a higher reality. To think a material re-interpretation in this context has truth value is to misunderstand the goal of the metaphor. Advaita moreover also only equates the consciousness(es) of the differentially constituted Jiva with the Brahmic consciousness to the extent it is not caught up in delusion. It is a mistake to think Brahmic consciousness as one with qualities. In Western terms, Advaita is solipsistic and its metaphysics concern reality as it presents itself to the subject. I'm reminded somewhat of Husserl's phenomenology. The problem of multiple consciousnesses hasn't found an entry into Eastern soteriology, and its focus on individual self-realization has remained rather pure. As a personal speculation I would say that might be the mark between Occidental and Oriental philosophy, the extent to which intersubjectivity is understood to be constitutive of phenomenal reality. Descartes really did a number on us.

Holding fringe philosophical and political views does not make you interesting and is not a personality

>>18256009
Isn't dragonball derivative of classical Chinese literature? If it even gets one person to read a book it's worth more than some professor's butthurt tweet.

>man forms government to ensure security of private property
>man himself was incapable of forming personal security sufficient for his household
>man himself was incapable of being self-sufficient due to limited resources on a single planet
>what happens in 1000 years when we can each have our own personal armada of drones equipped with cheaply acquired nuclear weapons systems?
>what happens when we start building homes on satellite systems - anywhere from large asteroids to planetary moons or personally guided satellite systems with collision-avoiding AI thrusters
>Technology will become too powerful for any government to control
>Societal collapse is not only imminent but it is inevitable
>Ted was right

A political ideology is not a personality

>>17788281
>doesn't align with our experience of having a continuum of unchanging sentient presence in which everything else comes and goes, while this presence remains which is what allows us to retain our identity from moment to moment and observe change and so on.
That's a big fucking assumption there buddy. What's your earliest memory?

>>17372601
It's a bit more nuanced than that, reading from >>17372610.

If I steel-manned the argument into its propositions, it'd look like

>Assertion 1:
People typically argue that souls hold soul control over one's choices, such as the choice to move or not move your hand.

>Assertion 2:
Moving one's hand is moving matter, a physical action.

>Implication 1:
By Assertion 1 and Assertion 2, souls must be interacting with matter, as the soul choice at some point is translating into a physical action

>Implication 2:
Resulting from implication 1, there is some mechanism by which that translation occurs

>Assertion 3:
There are ONLY four forces we're aware of, gravity, the weak and strong nuclear force, and electromagnetism, and none of them much appears to resemble what religions mean by a soul - measurable, physical, modelable, destructable systems with predictable behavior, versus souls, which are claimed to be immaterial, immortal, and inviolable.

>Implication 3:
By assertion 3, and Implication 2, we're therefore facing a serious issue - We think souls exist and interact with matter, but we've exhaustively ruled out the four ways we're aware of for the soul to interact with matter. So what soul-to-physical mechanism, specifically is enabling the soul to make actions?

The author would posit only four possibilities exist:

>Soul-physical interactions ARE wholly emergent from these 4 physical properties
In which case, why call it a soul when it's a wholly physical thing? The author would argue that without huge amounts of mental gymnastics, this is just dualism giving up and admitting defeat.

>Souls emerge from physics we don't or currently can't understand in or outside the above systems, eg. maybe randomness in quantum mechanics or dark matter
Which sounds a lot like a "God of the gaps" fallacy, a tendency by the religious to try to see "acts of God" when explaining phenomena for which science has yet to give a satisfactory account. This would include creating ancient gods of lightning for when you don't yet understand much electromagnetism, and also creating souls when you don't understand much neuroscience

>There's some other property than these four physical forces, a fifth one, that we're unaware of, that gets around this problem
Which probably has the same problem as God of the Gaps above and the author does not believe is the case, as no such force has yet been found despite extremely precise measurement for one.

And last, but most likely given everything we know right now and what we can prove,
>Souls don't exist

video games are more stimulating than books

>>17350001
This sounds a little Lanian/Moldbugesque desu

The one thing you can all do to make /lit/ better is post less.

Geometric shapes that have different personalities based on how pointy they are. They are extremely xenophobic to less pointy creatures than themselves.

all you need is Plato

The world is everything that is the case.
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
The world is the totality of facts, and by these being all the facts.
For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not what is the case.
The facts in logical space are the world.

>>16882976
Leftists like his self-help advice but hate the extremely eyebrow-wiggly political implication

To understand what leftists mean, imagine being in a close friend group. One of these good friends, though, is repeatedly saying something like
>Have you guys noticed that Greg never shows up on time, is kind of a weird guy, is lazy, and we don't know if he actually cares about us?

But it's weird because when you ask him to clarify,
>Okay, so if Greg's got issues, are you saying we should kick him out of the friend group?

He immediately backs up and says
>No, no, that's not what I mean, I just mean <REPEATS EVERYTHING AGAIN BUT SLIGHTLY REPHRASED>

This goes on for months, and any time you try to pin him down by asking
>Practically, what ought we do about Greg, then?
You never can get a straight answer out of the guy, and he just repeats his rant slightly rephrased.

Eventually you'd get to thinking the friend has a chip on his shoulder with Greg, and he's just not saying what he'd want done about Greg because he wants YOU to take action against Greg, while he maintains plausible deniability and avoids social responsibility for his recommendations.

People on the left argue that JP is hardcore Greg-ing for common rightist philosophies. So
>get your house in order,
>You are responsible for your issues
>focus on your local life

Are smokescreens for political stances they dislike including:
>People, not systems, are primarily at fault for bad things that happen to them - so if someone's house isn't in order, that's on them, and society shouldn't be expected to help or need to be a part of their ordering.

>If people are responsible for their issues, they're also at fault for them. To be successful is a moral good, to be a failure is a sign of moral or personal failings.

>People need to focus on their local, personal life - so when someone fights for policy solutions on systemic issues, you should tell them to sod off because they're wrongly focused

>>14526535
>How are you doing anons?
I think I'm done about now, just accepting the fact that by the end of this year I'll no longer be alive. Nothing chronic, I've just given up.
>Is the New Year off to a good start?
(:
>Also, what are you currently reading?
Starting the year with some Kobo Abe, will probably read Alan Watts after this.

>>14196724
I like to memorize poems partly because it makes me look for patterns in ways that I might not have done it otherwise. I also do it because I like the idea of carrying a perfect copy of an artwork with me at all time. I can not do this with any other artform.

page 8

>>13937674
>And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.

>>13011294
It's not sad at all. I highly doubt that this type of attitude is driven by anything other than condescending arrogance. People who don't read just don't want to. If were the sort that values reading they would read as well. There's no point in trying to shame them into reading because just reading is not enough. You have to seriously consider what you're reading and understand it. This requires sincere desire on the part of the reader. Shaming people won't foster that desire. It will just create yet another prick who posts his stack on /lit/ or Reddit before going back to doing whatever it is he enjoys.

>>12833898
It's only shit because people view socially destructive things as fun, instead of valuing close friendship, arts, and family like Yui. Be more like Yui and everything will be daijobu.

>>12804447
Plato

>>12177518
>how does one nerdy Japanese guy

If it's just one guy doing it then he's not going to be limited by a committee of television producers telling the director/writer to cut down on the politics and have more sex.