What was the most profound reading experience you had?

What book was it?

What was that book that really hit you with a lot of new knowledge or profound insights; moreso than every other book.

For me, it was probably Plato; the Trial and Death of Socrates dialogues, and The Republic.

Tryhatd

When I was a teenager, The Art of Love by Fromm blew my fucking mind.
Applied it to my life quite successfully. And sounded like a pseud cunt throughout.
Took a couple years to understand that analysts are thinly veiled sophists tho.

Ego and it's own

Phenomenology of Spirit

Encyclopedia Brown taught me that suspicion and paranoia should always be present in my life. That an curious and investigative mind is the vanguard against chaos, debauchery and the rapish edge of tomfoolery. That while my genius and analytical prowess may always separate me from that which my heart desire that every blessing will hold its curse. It is in my solitude and dedication to truth that I also found kinship with White Fang and Buck, a minor character in Call of the Wild, because I too am alone against nature with the lives of the world in my hands. It is no accident that I live alone with my dog. I often dream of Encyclopedia Brown and wonder how his life would be as an adult. I like to think it would be like mine.

Spinoza's Ethics, Plato's Republic, or Dante's Inferno (this is because I read it while living in Florence, and would walk the same streets he walked, finding stones carved with his words).

Either The Society of the Spectacle or The Book of Lies

Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy tbqh mia familia.

The Trial, Hamlet, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Reading 'the stranger' oddly enough started me on the road to getting medical treatment for PTSD

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Slaughterhouse Five, man. So it goes...

The Birds, The Frogs, & The Mosquitoes

fiction : breakfast of champions, by kurt vonnegut

besides that... the new earth, by eckhart tolle (read it, trust me)

Cosmic Trigger 1, 2, and 3. Without question.

tolle zeems like a pseud

Thus Spoke Zarathustra unironically changed my life

He isn't pretending to be an intellectual at all. In fact, he is probably closer to anti-intellectualism. His lessons can be summed up as "stop thinking so much, your life will get better if you can spend time conscious but without thought."

once I was reading a copy of the tunnel that I found in a train station. when I got to page 169 I noticed that a hole about 2 inches wide had been cute through the center of the remainder of the book! before I fully came to terms with this I saw emerging from the hole the wrinkled erect cock of an old homeless man! well I can't quite explain my thought process but what happened much has weighed heavily on my pysche. the only rationale I can come up with is someone must have drugged me or used some subliminal hypnosis because the next thing I know I'm sucking his dick as though it contained the elixir of eternal life.

in the interest of brevity and decency I won't continue but this is the most profound experience I've had while reading a book.

very well i shall continue. as I sucked and licked the old man moaned and played with my hair and whispered nonsensical philosophical statements
>death is an impostor
>theft is all my father left his children
>God believes in your capacity for the violence that becomes His will.
I hastened the pace of the fellatio overcome with a sense that I must finish this bizarre trist in order to return to the way things were or should be. little did I know nothing would ever be the same again...

>republic
>we're metal bro

Moby Dick awakened me

As a kid - The Catcher in the Rye
As a student - Beyond Good and Evil
As an adult - Ulysses

Reading Train Dreams while coming down from acid. Hours of sustained emotional tightrope walk holding back tears contemplating the beauty and sadness of life.

>acid
you know what book you might like?

Peter pan
it's about a little boy who never grows up

Burned the fuck out

But he never even said how old he was when he did it? That's how I know you're full of shit. That, as well as your position based on ignorance.

the prince and atlas shrugged.

The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil

The art of war

The Analects - Confuscious , gotta get that GOAT Ann ping chin commentary though

holy shit you too

I read The Analects fairly recently, although a different translation. It was quite good, easy to see some parallels to stoic philosophy within it. Good general, age-old advice for living.

I snorted an entire bottle of cloves and then read Armor

Women and Men

I think different translations only really change the meaning to a couple of the passages. I just enjoyed her commentary because it offers the historical context and provided commentaries by different Confucian scholars over the years like Lin biao and Mencius

Malone Dies

I never had a 'profound' experience when reading, even though I read mostly the classics. I'm an uneducated brainlet and a philistine.

Wtf I love The Tunnel now

Cuck

Prometheus Rising for me. My life before and after that book are utterly dissimilar

...

If you can get on board with what he's trying to do with his writing, and personalise it, his work is fucking powerful.

>Me
>turbo Hikki
>find gf
>talk with gf every night
>one night ask if she wants to call
>she says she's already in a call
>don't freak out because she doesn't talk much to people and I think it's nice she's finally socialising
>next day message her
>It was a guy and now she's with him k bye
>literally the last time I heard her voice I heard from her was how much she likes me, now she's with some other guy
>hit me pretty hard
>think "I'm just gonna read my book some more to ignore my feels"
>speaker for the dead
>Quote: "He had thought that he valued his solitude; now, though, with solitude forced upon him, he felt an urgent need to talk, to be heard by someone, as if he could not be sure he even existed without someone's conversation as evidence."

fuck you book.

a math textbook. Made me realize how I was wasting my time with philosophy.

>>turbo Hikki
>>find gf
Stopped reading there

Online gf

>he doesn't take psychedelics


Enjoy your conditioning pleb.

TBK but I'm just a baby

This passage from A Passage to India has always stuck with me. Ronny is complaining about how shit his situation in India is but he's so self-satisfied about how hard his life is that it's hard to take him seriously.

Sounds like some of the people you meet on Veeky Forums.

this

Baron Trump's Marvelous Underground Journey

Blood Meridian but only for the aesthetic quality. It didn't make me think of things I've never thought before. Just put it in beautiful language.

Mediations made me do a 180 on life

Beautiful

i hope we never meet; we wouldn't be friends

Okay, I don't mind not being friends with someone online. I'm curious why you say that, though.

You fucking faggot. You absolute fucking faggot. The psychological issues one must have to make a post like this is staggering. You need to lock yourself in a padded room and starve to death.

1984 fucked my shit up when I was a kid and it continues to haunt me to this day (considering I haven't read it since, the impression it left on me when I first read it is the same as I've grown older).

Made me see the world in a very different way and honestly gave me a stronger sense of anxiety.

Wooooow you must be soo powerful, user.

Oh look it's the "Stoicism is for cucks" guy.

Good deal, user. A glimpse into the mind of a Roman emperor is no small thing.

Poo-tee-weet.

this and Escape from Freedom both in my teenage years

Bhagavad-Gita

The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Mine was Edgar Allan Poe works
"Left and Right" by Norberto Bobbio
"The Flowers of Evil" by Baudelaire
"Starship Troopers" by Heinlein
And "World Order" by Henry Kissinger.
Oh yeah, "Leviathan" by Hobbes.
These are my husbandos.

So much this, it's been my spiritual guide for a while now

Deleuze Difference n Repetition plucked apart my flaccid brain wrinkles n remade them in the image of TIME ITSELF

Also Being n Time was my introduction to Real Fuckin Philosophy and it my brain a gooder too. It also lead me to Kant's Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics reading which basically gave me a framework to understand the fundamental intellectual framework which EVERY ACTION AND WORD perpetrated in the last 200 years has been based on. Still ain't done Critique of Pure Reason though.

Whoa, stay mad. Or give actual critiques of the work. I mean, if you've read it at all.

come one dude meditations is fucking gay

>rape

the last five years or so have been mostly devoted to heroin addiction, and oddly enough the experience was bookended by two readings of infinite jest- the first, a binge of a week while house sitting and listening to Lunar New Year celebrations going on outside, the second (4 years later) writhing uncomfortably in a sleazy motel room for a week as i detoxed

both times I read it I got a lot out of it. I'm like Hal but I gotta be more like Gately.

I don't understand what you're saying. You're speaking to me like I understand your tardbabble.

The Prince
The Art of War

Made me realize that politicians are malevolent and evil, that men in power strive for power instead of advancing humanity.

I would have said this a few years ago.

it made me go from edgy teenager to realize that maybe I wasn't grasping the reality of the situation I was dealing with. two years of affirmation and that was tight but then I read it again and it was just a book from the past.

then I read hume enquiry concerning human understanding like 3-4 years ago and I'm still reeling

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky

fuckin beautiful

The Magic Mountain

you need power to do good

...

good choice

The Republic also was probably my most profound reading. Particularly the three "systems" being appetite, the heart, and the mind. Appetite is just out there chilling all it wants is nourishment to survive. However, the heart and the mind are two vastly different things. You can't completely neglect or focus the most on one of them you must find a balance for the, to live together peacefully.

It's been a while since I read it but that's what I remember taking away from it

Siddhartha, Narccisus & Goldmund, Steppenwolf, Under the Wheel, Gertrude, and Demian were all awesome.

Italian Journey by Goethe
Rilke's poetry
Suttree by McCarthy
Pessoa's poetry
The Confidence-Man by Melville

all completely changed my life

Collapse by Jared Diamond.