What are good books to read for a person in a spiritual crisis?
It's not baby's first, I've already had more than three existential crises that were at least double as profound as yours etc.
Also concerning the picture, how to reconcile living in the present moment with the necessary learning-from-experience and planning-ahead that is needed to function in daily life?
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Drop the E-kart Tolle crap, drop the spiritualism crap, live with the pain that you are just a complex mass of cells, and then read Nietzsche you pleb.
I read some Nietzsche about 10 years ago. I'm Austrian so I could read the original. I didn't particularly like it.
I also don't like Tolle, as far as my friend who read all his books told me about him. But I think that the question of living in the moment vs. learning and planning is interesting.
I'm just a 30-year old guy that wonders and feels like he needs a new perspective. When I was 15 I would have subscribed to what you wrote about the mass of cells, but I think that once you have made some basic life experiences you know with certainty that this is not a fitting description of a human and not a well-functional perspective on life, growing old and sick, then death.
practice learned autism
>how to reconcile living in the present moment with the necessary learning-from-experience and planning-ahead that is needed to function in daily life?
by also learning from not only your past but the many past of others in hope to change your future in a way you think is of the most healthy to you and the others in your life.
>I'm just a 30-year old guy that wonders and feels like he needs a new perspective.
I'm only 23 so my experience is certainly lacking compared to yours, but I had a pretty big existential crisis when my father died. What got me through it was a mix of ethical and natural philosophy and religion (namely, Aristotle, Plato, a little stoicism, and the Bible). If you haven't read them, I suggest an intense study of works such as Ecclesiastes, Job, Aristotle's Metaphysics, and Plato's Phaedo to help with your spiritual health.
Do not listen to I went through an edgy scientific phase when I was younger, being an engineer, and it is a miserable way to live. It also becomes quite apparent the more you learn that science does not conduce toward happiness, and, in fact, does not even seek to explain the true reason for things. Science is just a method of transforming observable phenomena into theories that are sufficient to manipulate the world around us and predict interactions. Modern science is strictly utilitarian.
not so i can not talk for him but when he says "live with the pain that you are just a complex mass of cells" it does not seem to be in a scienceism way but rather to have a base of looking at humanity and then to read nietzsche to begin looking not only at oneself but to also look at religion in a very strong armed sense that may bring you closer to it.
Mircea Eliade
Chesterton, Everlasting Man
>Aristotle, Plato, a little stoicism, and the Bible). If you haven't read them, I suggest an intense study of works such as Ecclesiastes, Job, Aristotle's Metaphysics, and Plato's Phaedo
Thanks will look into
Read Stirner.
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no
Oops
It's Therapeia, by Robert Earl Cushman, a guide to Plato
I liked it a lot
>how to reconcile living in the present moment with the necessary learning-from-experience and planning-ahead that is needed to function in daily life?
why this hyperbolic all-or-nothing perspective?
>oh, so i should just keep eating poisonous berries and not put any money in a savings account!?!?!?! how would that ever work? CHECK AND MATE
don't interpret what he said as meaning having no memories and no ambition. he's saying don't LIVE in the past or the future. it's a painful existence as it is, you don't need to experience your failures over and over, or to ignore what IS while preoccupying yourself with what MIGHT BE
there's a definite willful ignorance when it comes to interpreting thoughts that are different from our own
>there's a definite willful ignorance when it comes to interpreting thoughts that are different from our own
Maybe. But it isn't a black-and-white thing, it's a continuous trade-off between cherishing the moment and working hard towards the future. Between experience and achievement.
That's unfortunate.
Don't need to read anything. Stop worrying about things. Learn to laugh at everything that makes you upset or mad. Every time you get upset or mad, there's another person who would just laugh at the situation happening to them....I mean you can't laugh at EVERYTHING, like a loved one getting cancer or passing away. But laugh at everything that happens to YOU. I got in a car crash, and my first reaction was "Hahaha, oh man, I did it! I got in a crash."
Laughing at mishaps isn't hard for me, if bigger bad things happen neither, that's more the awe of a routine being broken.
I just feel uncomfortable by who I am, although I'm doing well overall. Perhaps just read some self-help books and really want to believe.
You should read Johann Kaspar Schmidt.
Laughing at everything is like burning your ship and refusing to leave.
But when shit invariably happens it's better to laugh than to be lastingly sad.
...
Marcus Aurelius meditation really helped me when I was sad. Also, Epictetus' manual.
Fight me irl, pussy
taoism trumps all
Dude I am also having a spiritual crisis due to Eckhart Tolle.
Is he teaching nonduality, or is he teaching living in the moment as a human being?
Because I don't get nonduality at all, and if that's what he's teaching, then I don't want it. These nonduality teachers consider themselves disembodied balls of light or some shit.
But being in the moment, and shutting down the mind. That is something I can get behind.
I have applied his teaching of 'presence' of living in the moment. Basically keeping perpetual continuity of mind and awareness of awareness.
He says shit like 'Be present to the moment', which I love, and has helped me greatly, and then goes on to say 'ultimately you ARE the present moment.'
So what the fuck am I. Am I a human, or am I the present moment? What the fuck is he teaching? What's going on here?
Is presence being human, but having nondual awareness in the background, or is it perpetual nondual awareness?
Is anyone following me? I'm probably going to end killing myself.
Don't kill yourself over semantics.
It's a biological thing more than anything to understand.
