Stoicism and Buddhism

I need some advice related to this topic.
One of my friends reads books written by a new age charlatan called tolle. It seems he peddles a mash up of stoicism and buddhism.
I need some book recommendations written by knowledgeable people that are easy to grasp for readers of these frauds.

why are you yelling, Willis?

They are. If you read a bit into Greek-Indian history, you'll realize that some. If names went to India to learn philosophy and then they tried teaching it to the Greeks back home. Things don't always translate well but I'm pretty sure the founder of Stoics/skeptics/cynics are all influenced either directly or indirectly via teacher-student relationship.

One of the strange things I got into during my last retreat at the beach for the first 17 days in February was karma magick.

I had had some conversations about karma with a guy named Logan who is big into resolving karmic complexity, have been studying Chaos magick over the years in general, then listened to The Intention Experiment, which described a study that randomized sick patients to two groups, one of which was prayed for and one of which wasn't, with the twist that the sick patients had been sick some years in the past, and they still found a statistically significant difference in outcomes between those prayed for and those not. Anyway, make of that what you will. Then, I had a discussion about Lazaris (the modern spiritual teacher, not the guy from the Bible), who conceived of the Future creating the Present against a backdrop of the Past.

Then, while contemplating karma during my meditation retreat, which had heavy magickal influences and overtones, I suddenly decided to do some very strange temporal magick, except that it would be temporal magick that asked for the current outcome, thus dodging the thorny problem of creating some divergence in the time-stream.

Specifically, I started with the fact that this life has so far ended up going very well, at least at this point, knock on wood...

Given that, as some past life experiences I had in 2003, it would seem that this life presented a remarkable opportunity to generate good karma by service and meditation practice to counterbalance what happened in some of those lives, particularly the past one. In this very magickal way of conceiving of karma and causality, I sent a pulse of magickal energy back to the moment of my death in the last life to direct the rebirth to this one.

Even more magickally strange, and drawing on the multiple worlds theory, and presuming that there must be some quantum entanglement between each of the divergent possible lives that could have resulted from that bardo junction point, it is easy to imagine the collective resulting lives joining together to perceive the most optimal of all the possible outcomes, judging this life to be it, and so choosing this one as the one that would be represented in this consciousness.

So, this turns the typical sense of regret or disappointment that many might have for their lives on his head, making this life the chosen life by magickal means having reviewed all possibilities and determining that this was the best possible rebirth and lifestream to go down. This makes regreat feel instead like a great relief that all the worse outcomes didn't occur, thus causing a great surge of relief and gratitude.

Further, by choosing a life that involved the opportunity for generating good karma and then using that good karma to retroactively and magically make that chosen life the one that occurred, it is hard to find the sort of paradoxes that arise in temporal magick, as I asked for exactly what occurred.

In that same vein, my current vantage point is vastly more sane, stable, emotionally balanced, and clear than most previous versions of me, particularly if I reach back to my childhood. I was lucky in my childhood in numerous ways, but, like nearly all childhoods, it was not all roses and puppies. It was a childhood that had the potential to go horribly wrong at a few critical junction points but somehow didn't.

On this retreat, after deciding to choose this rebirth, I decided to go back to some earlier points of difficulty and send strength, wisdom, fortitude, good judgement, endurance, perseverence and luck to some of the more key critical junction points that lead to this current outcome, thus making situations that at the time seemed like partial tragedies and trials into options that were vastly better than they might have been as a result of the magick sent back from this future time.

It is hard to explain the beneficial psychological effects of having done this. It feels like something was profoundly cleared out, lightened, eased, and made a source of joy rather than pain, like numerous bullets were doged, like numerous traps were avoided, like numerous pivotal junctures were guided in the right direction, that direction that lead to right now, and a now whose capabilities allowed those good outcomes to occur.

Anyway, might be worth playing with this sort of strange magick that asks for things to have gone exactly as they went and to end up precisely as they are and to delight in that outcome and ongoing causal stream.

Wrong. There's nowhere to transcend to. There's only here, you just have to realise it.

t. nonduality

YOU MEAN "MATERIALIST"

INDEED, FOR SOULLESS FLESHVESSELS LIKE YOURSELF THERE IS NO OTHER PLACE BEYOND THE KOSMOS.

>the Buddhist thinks himself better to others

Nice self-comprehension retard.

Yes.

no

>the dharma is not about the material world

Why do you talk about things you don't understand and confuse people who want to clarify their understanding? Please drop your egotism and polemics. That is not the way.

>buddhism
>soul

What is anatman

Don't believe the meme

They aren't the same at all

Stoicism is about being a beta and enduring hardship, while buddhism is about training your focus until you reach nibbana.

>MUH ANATMAN
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_Sutra
>What the Buddha says here is that he spoke thus to meet the occasion. But now the thought is established [of non-Self], he means to say what is true, which is about the inner content of nirvana itself [...] If there is no more any non-Self, what there exists must be the Self.'

I'm gonna level with everyone else in this thread. I am a novice scholar and ever since I had the misfortune of having a class with a 100% certified batshit Christian mystic who thought Buddhism was proto-Christianity, and regularly relied on orientalist and romanticist interpretations of scripture with some western Platonist thrown in to justify his claims, I've been treating any claim about "Buddhist" tenets very carefully.

What I keep finding is that "Buddhist studies" is one of the most ideologically and politically driven fields I have ever seen. Sometimes its even worse than Christian theology. But what could you expect from a field in which a Traditionalist was a key founder.

For every claim made there is a text contradicting it. Arguments from authority (ITS NOT WHAT SIDDHARTHA SAID) don't work because a lot of these texts claim to be exegeses of parts of the canon, rather than departures. I doubt there is any true consensus as to what is "real" Buddhism and what isn't for the reasons stated above.

>nonduality
This is dualism.

oh, fuck off with your buddhism contaminated by atheism

I think that the point of Buddhism is realizing that there's no "self" per se. What you call self wasn't the same even 5 seconds ago; cells died, cells were born. Somewhat like the ship of Theseus dilemma.

By recognizing that there's no real "self", you could detach yourself from any attachment to this world and existence and reach Nirvana.

>buddhism contaminated by nagarjuna

Ok

Your aggravation seems to come from seeking to fit reality into a dualistic logical framework, but it doesn't. Shakyamuni buddha knew that. Therefore we get the teaching of anatman, but also the teaching of not-anatman once we've grasped anatman. Teachings are a raft: the point is to arrive and not need it any more.

The tetralemma might be a useful tool for you.

>nonduality is dualism

Only if it remains a concept and not a practice.

Buddhism does not assert the existence or non-existence of a self, it only proposes thorough analysis and discarding elements that aren't fit to be called "me" or "mine", things subject to decay. If this leads one to various philosophical conclusions, one is still stuck in theoretical gymnastics

The correct approach is to discard the burdens of conceiving body and mind as myself or mine and enjoy the subsequent liberation - the question of the self should not even occur because it is a non-issue

If we go even further, it does not entail any weird nihilism like westerners believe - you're able to do things perfectly well without obsessing over this idea of self all the time. it is even appropriate to regard a provisional self in the body for conventional purposes like discussion

So it's just despooking yourself?

The dhamma is nihilist since it says that there is no value in dukkha

Not him but i would say yeah 100%

But there is. Once you know your own dukkha, you know the dukkha of others. Once you know the dukkha of others, you can act to help them overcome it.