>What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.
>Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?
This dude goes so hard, I've been kind of obsessed with him lately. What do you guys think? True ubermensch or weirdo contrarian edgemaster?
>Up and down his torso, neck and head, at those points which Indian holy men call chakras, his friends observed swellings of various shapes and colors, which came and went at intervals. On his lower abdomen the swellings were horizontal, cigar-shaped bands. Above the navel was a hard, almond-shaped swelling. A hard, blue swelling, like a large medallion, in the middle of his chest was surmounted by another smaller, brownish-red, medallion-shaped swelling at the base of his throat. These two 'medallions' were as though suspended from a varicolored, swollen ring -- blue, brownish and light yellow -- around his neck, as in pictures of the Hindu gods. There were also other similarities between the swellings and the depictions of Indian religious art: his throat was swollen to a shape that made his chin seem to rest on the head of a cobra, as in the traditional images of Siva; just above the bridge of the nose was a white lotus-shaped swelling; all over the head the small blood vessels expanded, forming patterns like the stylized lumps on the heads of Buddha statues. Like the horns of Moses and the Taoist mystics, two large, hard swellings periodically came and went. The arteries in his neck expanded and rose, blue and snake-like, into his head.
>I do not want to be an exhibitionist, but you are doctors. There is something to the symbolism they have in India -- the cobra. Do you see the swellings here? -- they take the shape of a cobra. Yesterday was the new moon. The body is affected by everything that is happening around you; it is not separate from what is happening around you. Whatever is happening there, is also happening here -- there is only the physical response. This is affection. Your body is affected by everything that is happening around you; and you can't prevent this, for the simple reason that the armour that you have built around yourself is destroyed, so it is very vulnerable to everything that is happening there. With the phases of the moon -- full moon, half moon, quarter moon -- these swellings here take the shape of a cobra. Maybe that is the reason why some people have created all these images -- Siva and all those kinds of things. But why should it take the shape of a cobra? I have asked many doctors why this swelling is here, but nobody could give me a satisfactory answer. I don't know if there are any glands or anything here.
Here's the website where all his stuff is uploaded.
http://www.well.com/~jct/
>True ubermensch or weirdo contrarian edgemaster?
The first would imply he achieved or conquered something, the second that he opposed or was against something, both would imply there was anything particular about him, and he, would deny all of the former.
>What do you guys think?
I've been listening to his conversations while walking to and from uni for about half a month now. It's produced this sort of calming effect on me, in which ı can stop thinking awarely and not be affected by the general miasma of the city. The conceptual side of things also has made me come to grips with the formal nature of existence, and produced this sort of void, which isn't either joyful or sad and has rather made me question if ı want to go on living without sentimentality. His idea of fear as a necessary delimitator for being is also pretty illuminating--not really that original an idea, but he's the only guy that seems to just come and say it with the brutal honesty it needs.
Is Asian Watts a hack or legit?
what he says is so true that it can only be understood by those who reached it by their own means.
it reminds me of the tractatus' preface where wittgenstein said that 'the thoughts contained here will only be understood by those who have had them before'. or something like that.
ug also struck me when i first crossed him, and i have all hi stuff on my to-read, looking forward to get there. but, like lw who is said to be a philosopher for philosophers, ug seems to be only manageable when you have tried a few of the different eastern ways. from scratch it will sound like plain nonsense.
>>8163508
>Mfw just ealier today ı came across an affordable edition of the Brown and Blue Books which ı almost buy.
Fuck it, ı'm getting it. Do ı need to read the Tractatus before to understand them?
>>8163533
nah go for the bb books. thats the best intro. actually the tlp has a quite specific place in his body of work. it stands on its own.
but not to derail the thread, heres a couple of nice ug quotes:
>the so called self-realization is the discovery for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to discover
>Man is just a memory. You understand things around you by the help of the knowledge that was put in you. You perhaps need the artist to explain his modern art, but you don't need anybody's help to understand a flower. You can deal with anything, you can do anything if you do not waste your energy trying to achieve imaginary goals
>>8163562
Thanks a lot. Sorry for getting side-tracked.
As for quotes, ı found this part onwards of this video to be great: https://youtu.be/WwGjkuFW0cY?t=29m10s
I gather that our culture conceives the mind as something that can be individuated and then work on an alien world, but for UG all of it is a memory, and all that is compared or in conflict is remambrance against remembrance. His comments about creative activity rings specially true with me, as writing aspirer, as everything ı create seems to be already there, even when it seems new.
calamitous bump
