IS there no way out, Veeky Forums? How legit is he?

But feynman is a total pleb

that's not a way out technically but it still solves the problem.

get that ephektikos, UG is just edgy pyrrho who is just a greek sadhu

There's no problem.

This is why the west created a million sects and batshit religions ?

he also said that enlightenment was a painful process for him that involved lots of physical torment. honestly it sounds like he just had a bad stomach infection and confused this with spiritual enlightenment.
I think he was very skeptical of the tradition of enlightened gurus, and since he was pretty much raised to follow this path from a young age, he never had much of a choice. So he made up things about himself to play the part, but his writings are clearly the work of someone who's bitter and resentful

i'm grateful for having read him because he has a skeptical point of view regarding commonly held beliefs about gurus etc.
ultimately his own "Level of enlightenment" is irrelevant. unless you can see through your own illusions, how can you judge another's ability to do so?

Gaining enlightenment is an accident. Spiritual practice simply makes us accident-prone. --Suzuki Roshi

Picture realted guy agrees, talks about his own Enlightenment openly and says it' just as awesome as old texts claim minus magical stuff

You'll find each of those Christian sects usually just have very particular spiritual disagreements. The massive divide between the Baptist Church and Eastern Orthodoxy is nothing compared to what a walk to the other village can be in India or rural China

then what are you trying to get out of, basterd?

>had a bad stomach infection and confused this with spiritual enlightenment

Nietzsche says something about working on his most 'dialectically clear' philosophy while having heavy gastrointestinal pain in Ecce Homo. The rest of your post reminds me of him too, is he the N of eastern thought?

>the N of eastern thought
that's an interesting idea, and one which I am woefully unprepared to judge, since I've hardly read any N (at least not OC). From what I've read of u.g. (mostly q&a style interviews), he doesn't really have any particular thesis he's trying to expound on, other than "most of this spiritual mumbo-jumbo you people talk about is horseshit" (which is refreshing to read)

he just rediscovered the carvaka philosophy in his own way. the fact that he recognizes no predecessors is part of this philosophy

nothing new but interesting to see it in a contemporary form, tho he also mixed a lot of opinions with it.

any rec reads on carvaka?

one thing i like about ug is is aesthetic. sort of an indian cioran

*Do you mean to say there is nothing to the creativity of artists, poets, musicians and sculptors?

Why do you want to place art on a higher level than craft? If there is no market for an
artist's creation, he will be out of business. It is the market that is responsible for all these
so-called artistic beliefs. An artist is a craftsman like any other craftsman. He uses that tool
to express himself. All human creation is born out of sensuality. I have nothing against
sensuality. All art is a pleasure movement. Even that (the pleasure) has to be cultivated by
you. Otherwise you have no way of appreciating the beauty and art that artists are talking
about. If you question their creation, they feel superior, thinking that you don't have taste.
Then they want you to go to a school to learn how to appreciate their art. If you don't enjoy
a poem written by a so-called great poet, they forcibly educate you to appreciated poetry.
That is all that they are doing in the educational institutions. They teach us how to
appreciate beauty, how to appreciate music, how to appreciate painting and so on.
Meanwhile they make a living off you. Artists find it comforting to think that they are
creative: 'creative art', 'creative ideas', 'creative politics'. It's nonsense. There is nothing
really creative in them in the sense of their doing anything original, new or free. Artists pick something here and something there, put it together and think they have created
something marvelous. They are all imitating something that is already there. Imitation and
style are the only 'creativity' we have. Each of us has our own style according to the school
we attended, the language we were taught, the books we have read, the examinations we
have taken. And within that framework again we have our own style. Perfecting style and
technique is all that operates there. You will be surprised that one of these days computers
will paint and create music much better than all the painters and musicians that the world
has produced so far. It may not happen in our lifetime but it will happen. You are no
different from a computer. We are not ready to accept that because we are made to believe
that we are not just machines--that there is something more to us. You have to come to
terms with this and accept that weare machines. The human intellect that we have
developed through education, through all kinds of techniques is no match for nature. They
(creative activities) assume importance because they have been recognized as expressions
of spiritual, artistic and intellectual values. The drive for self-expression is born out of
neurosis. This applies to the spiritual teachers of mankind too. There is no such thing as a
direct sense-experience. All forms of art are nothing but an expression of sensuality.

well there is nothing written by them, as it is usual with these kind of philosophies, but there is a short account of their philosophy in the Sarva Darsana Sagraha, and a bunch of short overviews on every decent indian philosophy book.

and cioran is a hack.

>and cioran is a hack.
cioran's literally the opposite of a hack

>Cioran is a hack

I never made this connection before. Ha. I wonder how much of my liking of UG and Cioran is just derived from how good their photos are....

>and cioran is a hack.

please, the guy just paraphrased others in order to vent his mind shit while living a happy bourgeois life with his wife in a good neighborhood in paris.

the opposite of ug who travelled all his life and had no emotional attachments and very few relationships, his words are an expression of his life not some unoriginal parallel world to be able to live in the normal one.

Russell Brand tier

I don't think you know what hack means.

Both travelled while being poorfag expat bums and both charmed their way into becoming kept men while doing pretty much nothing except for sitting and walking around and delivering a few financially unsuccessful booklets.

Bloom was a hack all along!

Very Gurdjieffian, surprising he never mentioned Gurdjieff. I also find it funny how many people criticize good ol' U.G. for being "resentful", "bitter", "negative", "angry", "unenlightened" and so on, just because he doesn't trade in bullshit, is completely honest, and doesn't act the saintly guru type. U.G. himself constantly tries to say he is not enlightened, that he doesn't believe in enlightenment, and yet people try to judge him by standards of the typical "enlightened guru".

but he does in fact claim to have undergone a process of enlightenment.
the fact is that his statements are quite contradictory and inconsistent.
but he does have some interesting proto-scientific intuitions about the neural basis of experience, even though his understanding of the brain and perception is clearly quite rudimentary.

He claims that he underwent a strange, what most would call mystical experience, but he doesn't call it enlightenment, because he doesn't want to say this is an objective experience that could/should happen to everyone, or has happened to anyone else, and because of all the baggage of the word "enlightenment". He himself was not proud enough to definitively say "I experienced enlightenment", because he was humble enough to know that he couldn't truly tell that this was the same "enlightenment" spoken of by other mystics and saints throughout history, and that no one could tell.

And yes, I do agree, his psychology/amateur-neuroscience is pretty interesting.

This doesn't make his writings any less kino

only Indian English writers worth reading are Rushdie and Raja Rao

>Rushdie