/lit/ - Literature

>>13001514
the Accursed Share is one of those go-texts for a lot of things, no doubt. i guess i've just been reflecting a lot on the sublimity of horror in the cosmic vision, and the Gita is a good example of this. Chapter Eleven of the Gita is a major thing, but this is also for the Hindus the beginning of wisdom also. Padmasambhava also appears to have terrifying and demonic aspects also, but these are perhaps part of bringing Buddhism to Tibet. perhaps nothing quite like this appears in Egypt (or in Greece), where visions of the afterlife are kind of gloomy. although the Ma'at doesn't lack for tension either. Hegelian Absolute Knowing would no doubt have been sublimely terrible as well...

my point i guess is just that i think there are aspects of Eastern thought which really do reflect ways of understanding cosmic horror in ways other than those of our own interpretations. and again, this isn't to shit on the West and its great nihilistic thinkers, because intense meditations in these ways can be profoundly illuminating. Deleuze, Spinoza and Bataille deserve their props. so too does Cormac McCarthy. or even Herman Melville, who has a pretty good view of his own! but sometimes i find myself asking if a boundless void is really the whole enchilada, or if - like many other things - the object of shattering the co-ordinates of one's teeny tiny local reality is itself the prerequisite for still other kinds of apprehending the mystery. it's not like i am arguing for some kind of neo-hippie turn or anything, it's more like just considering the possibility of looking at the kinds of things we are doing now from outside of the perspective of being maximally fucked-out, or if being blown to pieces in this way isn't something still very much like an initiatory process, in a way.

put another way, we may be able to say that the most important piece of any given puzzle is the missing one, because it is that missing piece that reminds you that the thing you are looking at is in fact a puzzle. and may it ever be so. the attitude we take to the unknown determines everything. and here again is my attraction to a slightly adjusted way of looking at things now. and it's not like Uncle Nick himself in his return to a Kantian view on the Matrix does not want exactly this also, or many other writers.

>>13001787
no BTFO received, no harshness either. i think it's hard to communicate tone via textbox. and indeed better earlier than never, i agree.

>>13001764
it is

>>13001850
i was reading something that made me chuckle about that, about how the Chinese became suspicious as Buddhist stuff trickled into China in a kind of haphazard fashion - first this sutra, then that one. so they were having their minds blown but were getting uncomfortable about not knowing quite was up with this stuff and if they were doing it right or not. so funny, and so relatable. so eventually they started doing their own things and synthesizing it locally. i love things like this.