/lit/ - Literature

I can’t stop withdrawing from family and friends. I can’t even stomach saying “hi”. They try to talk to me but I’m just so disgusted with everything. They obviously notice and feel bad but I can’t seem to stop this. I’m really scared.

>>19406257

>>16389196
Lambs have been resonating with me too. Have a painting.

>>15760358
>but it cannot become a self-reinforcing mechanism, it has to be uniquely chosen each time.

I'm seeing your point, as if the gnostic can't really rise up to the challenge of a patient, SELECTIVE dismissal or aversion to the world; it's just easier to impulsively damn the whole thing to hellfire. You know I've had this exact same impression? There's a relief and almost an elegance in just tossing the whole thing out, but also a refusal to sift the wheat from the chaff, spiritually (or, the refusal to believe that that act of sifting won't just produce more chaff as a by-product, as it were: cleaning a spill with Hegel's dirty mop, if you want it dialectically).

>A more radical phrasing: suffering itself is affirmation, and all Life is the affirmation of suffering, of Being.

Interesting you say that, and then bring up Buddhism, Tiantai's answer to the whole dilemma is that the liberative negation the “gnostic” craves (contorted towards an Outside), is always-already being accomplished as the incessant arising and passing-away of forms... this really did me a think, the idea that (crudely put) reality is already “compensating” or “correcting” for suffering just by being what it is. As you say, Life is suffering as affirmation, affirmation as suffering.

One of my core thematic concerns has always been the problem of consumption. I cannot reconcile my intuition of God with predation on any level. I CAN sort of accommodate the intuition that nature probably transcends us in its “anarchic” equanimity to such an extent that the Zizekian picture of (civilized, human) Good being the exception to all-pervasive Evil, is itself inverted... and, of course, we're back to a more optimistic, classically ordered cosmos (I understand this isn't exactly what you're saying, but I struggle even with a qualified interventionist approach).

>Gnosticism is tricky that way, it bemoans the body in order to later say that the Body is too good for it.

I experienced a very powerful vision looking at pic related a little while ago. I approached it with a gnostic interpretation: the Lamb is, of course, Christ, but as Christ, the archetypal passive sufferer, light crucified on matter, the murdered World-Soul, etc. I won't say anymore about that vision because I don't want to do any violence to it. Its philosophical content I might divulge in a future thread, if it ever happens, though it won't be news to you, I imagine, and honestly tangential to your own concerns.

(1/2)

>>13833924
The Recognitions