I honestly don't get why so many authors, philosophers, you name it, are so jubelant about shit like "ego death", or get excited about the fact that subjectivity is an illusion, like some post-structuralists do.
I don't even agree with that, but even if it is so, it is a terrifying prospect and I cannot even perceive it as a release.
Why do people feel such a release from being an "I"? Or even wish to extinguish that idea? If anything being an "I" is a release from the tyranny of the 'greater whole'.
>>7881878
you're spooked
It's a continuation of the eastern/schopenhauer take
the ego though is the newer concept
>>7881878
Hard to do magick without suppressing the ego.
>>7881878
> never experienced thing
> doesn't understand thing
But who is the one who finds it terrifying, anon?
>>7881878
take mushrooms
>>7881936
>>7881909
I did/do all those.
You do hocu pocus for the ego. You take in all of these experiences on shrooms or sober through and for the benefit of the ego.
What would sentience be without ego? Awareness is ok I am me, what awareness can be beyond being you. sorry but ego loss is death. We are our ego's and nothing besides
>>7881953
nah, ego is a social mental adaptation.
awareness is perception of sense qualia
not necessarily self-awareness
self awareness would be something like a dense interconnected system of feedback loops, whereas say, piscine, or vegetable awareness would be more disparate
>>7881962
Again, even if so, why would you get excited about that?
"Oh finally, for a moment I thought I was doomed to forever not belong, but this gives me an inkling I might finally be reabsorbed into the greater whole, what a relief I'll be recycled and this self-awareness will end."
>>7881978
excited about what? Ego death?
Well, it's a fairly intense experience, especially pharmaceutically induced. People talk about it for the same reason they talk about childbirth
even your attempt to mock people who get excited about ego death falls flat because it sounds sincere, many people do suffer from a kind of basic anxiety like that.
>>7882006
But is that really ego death? You were still there.
That's why I think most of what is described as "ego death" is just transformation.
If you consider old habits, old perceptions and your usual behaviour and outlook "ego", well then we're just talking semantics and not actual ego/ the I.
If anything, what happens is a enlarging of yourself, not an extinguishing.
And changing your coat is not changing your soul.
but the self doesn't actually exist
I know a professor who is deep into mysticism, and his grand quest is to find systems or ideas that don't involve the final or idealized dissolution of the self. He finds it weird that so many mystical, esoteric, metaphysical etc. traditions seem to assume that the unique individual is wholly derivative, wholly in privation from the divine, just an evil or deceitful illusion. Try looking into personalism, OP.
There are some things out there. Oddly, medieval philosophy can be pretty good on this issue too, because they often wanted to reconcile the dignity of humans and individual humans (as God's creations), while their inspirations (Plato, Aristotle, Neoplatonism, Augustine) often didn't do so, or did so only in materialistic ways. So you get interesting arguments about whether human souls are themselves Forms known to God, whether God knows us by our intimate natures, etc. Also Protestantism is good on this (and includes mystical strains, of course), because it has the "direct relationship with God, no intermediaries" thing built into it.
But it is rare. A lot of the problem comes from the East, which is steeped in a kind of indifferentism toward life. A lot of older theories, out of vogue and mostly considered racist essentialism nowadays, were pretty casual about saying that the East never escaped the Bronze Age mentality of fundamental fatalism, which manifests in a dozen deep ways, e.g. being the reason Egyptian, Persian, and Chinese civilization manifested as abject slavery to the top of the pyramid, and Islam as ultimate submission, why Chinese and Islamic philosophy became closed and ossified, why Orientals are fundamentally dead on the inside in subtle ways. Toynbee directly says it's that they never had the Greek moment of individualism, and particularly that they never had Greek+Jewish=Christian civilisation, which restricts some of the radical, dissolute materialism and fatalism of the Greeks by infusing God's grace, but also restricts some of the Oriental-style abject slavery to God in the Jewish tradition (cf. Toynbee, On Hellenism). But the thing is, so many mystical traditions stem from the East or from things with Oriental infusions like Late Roman theosophy.
tldr: Don't listen to Buddhists and Taoists. They're plebs.
>>7883060
>why Orientals are fundamentally dead on the inside in subtle ways
??
>>7883100
There's a reason Orwell made them death worshipers, why the Tartar yokels keep finding themselves new czars, why Chinese civilization constantly organizes itself into an antheap.
Something wrong in their brains m8.
>>7883119
I don't understand your sentences. Must be because I'm not well read.
>>7881878
from my perspective all ego death really is, is the realization that the self and the external world are not entirely separate.
>>7883119
>There's a reason [...] Chinese civilization constantly organizes itself into an antheap.
Yeah, it's called Confusianism.
so is one happier if that thing dies?
>>7884597
depends on many other factors, happiness is overrated anyways
There is literally nothing wrong with the ego.
>>7884597
you stop being an heodnist
>>7883060
>>tldr: Don't listen to Buddhists and Taoists. They're plebs.
found the hedonist
>>7881878
I actually visited this cuck's grave the other day.
>>7884804
Tbh this was back in a time when open relationships still favored men.
Listen to Bouvier describe her and Sartre's open relationship.
I think Max took all her money and fucked around and calling it a marriage was a legal formality
>>7881878
§ 1. “The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this: for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of ideas; whereas the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes, is that form under which alone any idea of whatever kind it may be, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical, is possible and thinkable. No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea.
>>7884939
In this first book, then, we consider the world only from this side, only so far as it is idea. The inward reluctance with which any one accepts the world as merely his idea, warns him that this view of it, however true it may be, is nevertheless one-sided, adopted in consequence of some arbitrary abstraction. And yet it is a conception from which he can never free himself. The defectiveness of this view will be corrected in the next book by means of a truth which is not so immediately certain as that from which we start here; a truth at which we can arrive only by deeper research and more severe abstraction, by the separation of what is different and the union of what is identical. This truth, which must be very serious and impressive if not awful to every one, is that a man can also say and must say, “the world is my will.”
>>7881878
Once you can start admitting you're wrong you can start finding out what's right.
