The 3 Books that helped me accept Life for what it is

[Steingar]

Like many people on this forum, much of my life has been defined by a search for meaning and fulfilment. I've read many books, both ancient and modern, trying to find a philosophy or world view that accords with a percieved "correct" way of how one ought to live their life.

This has included many religious and philosophical texts (Bible, Quran, Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhagavad Gita, Analects, Five Rings, The Prince, Meditations, Dao Te Ching, etc.) besides an enumerable number of fictional works.

Although I've reached the conclusion that fiction is probably the best conduit for expressing the "feeling" of what living a true life is like (think In Search of Lost Time or the Little Prince as examples), I can also appreciate why something a bit more non-fiction and didactic is essential as well. That's what I want to talk about in this post. I've identified three key texts which, at least for me, give a strong pathway for answering the why's and the how's of this complex thing we call living. And I wanted to share these so that maybe you guys can read them as well and get something from them.

• Ecclesiastes: This is one of the wisdom literature books in the Bible. It's only about 15 pages or so. Basically, it discusses the problem (or why) of living. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does chance and time come for us all? Although its conclusions are religious (which I personally reject) its meditation of the reality of life, suffering, and its affirmation on the value of living, really living, I think is an excellent primer for exploring the problem even further.
  
  Quote: "Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do... Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days...Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom."

• Walden: This is basically the author's retrospective on living in the woods for a few years. IMO this is one of the most misunderstood books in the Western canon; many people think it's a cottagecore peon to living in the wilderness, but it's actually more of a meditation on what are the essentials of living. The basic tenants the philosophy the book imparts are an appreciation with the natural order and the quotidian; a stripping away of the inessential facets of civilisation, including fame and material riches; a focus on cultivating the personal; leaving others alone to pursue their own destiny; and connecting the spiritual or transcendent with the physical.
  
  Quote: "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."
  
  
• The Book of Chuang Tzu: A Daoist philosophy text written several thousand years ago. It's quite long and obtuse, but in my opinion it's the greatest piece of philosophy ever put to page. Using humour, parable, and subversion, it illustrates a naturalistic perspective to viewing life. Its ideas include the value of being useless; the importance of non-action; the understanding of life and death as being part of a natural sequence of transformations; the acceptance of everything being part of a natural order; and the maintenance of health and living out the years allotted to us.
  
  Quote: "I dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no idea I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again. But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu? However, there must be a difference between the two! We call this the transformation of things".

If you combine the learnings of the above, you end up with something like the following:

The universe is essentially random and chaotic. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. But what is good and bad is impossible to know, so letting that impact your emotions too much is folly. Life is in tune with nature and shouldn't be seen as hostile or unfair; rather, you should learn to accept it for how it is and "be" in it. Many things like excessive fame, wealth or material possessions actually robs you of your life and happiness, and you should seek to cut down to what is truly essential. Because the universe is natural and you are part of the universe, even the simplest things, like lying on grass and watching the sunset, can bring unfathomable joy. Don't try to disturb others or yourself through excessive action, rather, live with the natural flow of life and focus on your health and wellbeing. And when death comes for you, see it as the next stage in a natural transformation, and come to terms with the life you've led.

I'd be curious if anyone has read any of the above, what you think of the conclusion I've reached, or if you have your own philosophy of life built off different resources.

 

[Enrofflesss]

Coolio mine 3 are
- metamorphosis of PI
- jours de Sodome 120
-インターネットの夢

 

[Steingar]

Coolio mine 3 are
- metamorphosis of PI
- jours de Sodome 120
-インターネットの夢

I've read 120 days of Sodom and I am very curious what you take from that? It could be read as the deluded ramblings of a madman, but I saw it more as a no-holds-barred transgression of social and moral norms to highlight hypocrisy. But I'm not sure what life lessons one can take from it.

Can you explain インターネットの夢 a bit more for me? Did you read it in Japanese?

 

[shinobu]

Here's my list:

• Tao Te Ching
• Bhagavad Gita
• Jung
  • Collected works 17
  • Collected works 16
  • Collected works 18
  • Collected works 9
  • Collected works 8
  • Collected works 7
  • Collected works 5
  • Man and his Symbols
  • Memories, Dreams, Reflections
• The problem of the Puer Aeternus (Marie Louise von Franz)
• Alfred Adler
  • Not much yet but this guy's ideas are very sound. I was first drawn to Jung's individuation and the search for wholeness, but in collected works 16, Jung's advice specifically for young people feeling stuck in life is to apply an Adlerian point of view or a Freudian point of view according to what they notice the cause of their neurosis or problem is
• Principia Discordia
• Chao Te Ching
• Xunzi
• Confucius
  • Analects
  • Great Learning
  • Doctrine of the Mean
• A whole bunch of Buddhist Sutras, can't name them all because I read them out of order
• A lot of other books I'm not remembering off the top of my head

Of all of these, the most useful for me right now are all of Jung, and the two discordian texts I named.

But I read a lot of Jung before getting to the part where he recommends Adler, and after checking out Adler, I found it to be quite on point.
So there's two important takeaways here: you don't really know what you need without knowing what's out there, so you have to read widely to even know what's going on. And the second is that you really need to introspect a lot to actually know what's going on in your head to have some direction when you're reading. Otherwise you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall, reading aimlessly. So there's no "3 books that work for everyone" because every single person has their own extremely specific circumstances...

But there's a deeper problem, which I found in my case and which may be yours too. I was using these texts as a substitute for actual action, because I wanted to be sure of what the "right answer" to life was, and I was scared of commiting to stuff when I felt confused or aimless, when I didn't understand the point of life.

Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but this phrasing jumped out at me

Although I've reached the conclusion that fiction is probably the best conduit for expressing the "feeling" of what living a true life is like

The only real advice I can say is live your life a little. The only valid answer for you is the one you can find by living your life. The other answers are all written by people after the fact, and of course a problem feels easy when it's already given with a solution.
We're driven to this kind of search when we don't want to face the difficulties of life, and that leads to different coping mechanism like this one

 

[Steingar]

But there's a deeper problem, which I found in my case and which may be yours too. I was using these texts as a substitute for actual action, because I wanted to be sure of what the "right answer" to life was, and I was scared of commiting to stuff when I felt confused or aimless, when I didn't understand the point of life.

Sort of, but maybe not to the same extent. You see, much of what I've read more or less pushes me less towards action towards a type of "inaction". In the Zhuang Zi this can be translated to "wandering at ease". It doesn't mean "do nothing" per se, but it means not being so focussed on a specific goal and taking action only when it's needed or pertinent to do so.

This might sound retrograde, lazy or unambitious, but I see these ideas as part of a Hegelian dialectic; in a society which endlessly encourages action, efficiency, responsibility and work, being told that its ok to "Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart..." or "step to the music hear..." or be as useless as a gnarled tree seems like it's swinging the pendulum back towards a calmer, more content, and purposeful life.

My bigger problem, which I think you can probably relate to as well is: is my life being tangibly impacted by these philosophies? Or am I simply being attracted to the philosophies that agree with my proclivities? Because if it's the second, then it's just intellectual and spiritual laziness on my part.

Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but this phrasing jumped out at me
The only real advice I can say is live your life a little. The only valid answer for you is the one you can find by living your life. The other answers are all written by people after the fact, and of course a problem feels easy when it's already given with a solution.
We're driven to this kind of search when we don't want to face the difficulties of life, and that leads to different coping mechanism like this one

Yeah sorry, what I mean by "fiction is probably the best conduit for expressing the "feeling" of what living a true life is like" was more in comparison to non-fiction. Non-fiction, I think, is great for logically understanding the world, but it can only be locally true. For example, a psychology paper about a murderer will ring true for that murderer or that scenario, whereas something like Dostoyevski's 'Crime and Punishment' universalises the theme and embeds it with emotional force.

So yeah, to clarify, fiction isn't a substitute for real life, but it is (in my opinion) the best way to interpret and contextualise the emotion behind real life. Proust might be able to put into words for us the majesty of listening to music, but we must first listen to music ourselves to feel what he is saying.

 

[InternetGeist]

This is a bit off topic, but I can't take Walden seriously anymore imagining Thoreau praising a simple life in nature while living barely away from civilization and waiting for mommy to deliver food and clean laundry.

I could not pick 3 books that shape my worldview and determine my perception of life since I am still on the journey of searching for a coherent theory that I can synthesize from past wisdom and take as guidance for my own life. Yet there are some books that I read in recent years that broadened my perspectives quite a bit:

- The Origins and History of Consciousness
for its elegant and detailed elaboration over the connection between universal themes in myths and the developing human psyche

- Tao Te Ching
for its promotion of a life simply going with the flow and discouragement of constant chase after knowledge that is only superficial

- Ethics (by Spinoza)
for its structured and geometrical proof for the existence of God as an infinite substance with infinite attributes from a pantheist view

 

[remember_summer_days]

Bros will read encyclopedias to avoid reading the Bible. Many such cases.

3 books that changed my life:

Oreimou.
Call of the Crocodile
I'm in love with the villainess

 

[Steingar]

This is a bit off topic, but I can't take Walden seriously anymore imagining Thoreau praising a simple life in nature while living barely away from civilization and waiting for mommy to deliver food and clean laundry.

Naa this is on topic. I've had friends try read Walden who bounce hard because of this fact. But that's what I mentioned before. If you go in expecting a cottage-core "Into the Wild" style book then it's totally not that. But the thing is, that's always been an inaccurate perception. Thoreau makes it clear in his book that he's close to civilisation, with people often visiting and the train tracks nearby and all.

But actually, the book is better because it isn't that. Running away into the wild is a child's "Robinson Crusoe" fantasy. Walden is about a man who both physically and spiritually lives tangential to society in order to strip away the irrelevent components and arrive at the core necessities of true living, imo anyway.

- The Origins and History of Consciousness
for its elegant and detailed elaboration over the connection between universal themes in myths and the developing human psyche

- Tao Te Ching
for its promotion of a life simply going with the flow and discouragement of constant chase after knowledge that is only superficial

- Ethics (by Spinoza)
for its structured and geometrical proof for the existence of God as an infinite substance with infinite attributes from a pantheist view

I'll have to check these out. One comment I will make is that I find the Tao Te Ching completely inscrutable. You either need to have a companion textbook handy to understand what it's saying (which will inevitably be 30x the length of the Tao Te Ching itself) or you'll need to draw your own conclusions, which is probably the better choice, but considering that it was written so long ago with a very distinctive cultural and philosophical context, your conclusions will honestly probably be wrong (no shade btw, mine certainly were when I read it the first time). That's why I've honest to god seen The Tao Te Ching of Business or the Tao Te Ching of Success in bookstores, which is antithetical to the original message.

I'd personally suggest the Book of Zhuang Zi, which is longer and (somewhat) clearer than the Tao Te Ching. They're actually essentially companion pieces, with Zhuang Zi referencing and clarifying many of the key points of the Tao Te Ching.

 

[Steingar]

Bros will read encyclopedias to avoid reading the Bible. Many such cases.

I've read the Bible over a feverish 8 week period. It's worth reading for the poetry and historical content, but honestly unless you buy into the central conceit a lot of it is boring and irrelevent, especially many parts of the Old Testament. That's why I said "read Ecclesiastes" and not "the bible", because I think just that book is sufficiently dense with wisdom. Job is also good as well.

Oreimou.
Call of the Crocodile
I'm in love with the villainess

Isn't the Crocodile one an internet meme?

 

[remember_summer_days]

I've read the Bible over a feverish 8 week period. It's worth reading for the poetry and historical content, but honestly unless you buy into the central conceit a lot of it is boring and irrelevent, especially many parts of the Old Testament. That's why I said "read Ecclesiastes" and not "the bible", because I think just that book is sufficiently dense with wisdom. Job is also good as well.


Isn't the Crocodile one an internet meme?

wdym you find the levitical law and genealogies spiritually irrelevant? You really need to tune in to your local bible radio hour.

Call of the Crocodile is full of esoteric wisdom, the whole novel is a meta commentary on the puer aeternus

 

[InternetGeist]

But actually, the book is better because it isn't that. Running away into the wild is a child's "Robinson Crusoe" fantasy. Walden is about a man who both physically and spiritually lives tangential to society in order to strip away the irrelevent components and arrive at the core necessities of true living, imo anyway.

That is a good point and I think I do agree. It is almost impossible to completely dissociate yourself from society considering the industrial convenience we now enjoy, and what Walden tries to accomplish is not to preach the primitivist philosophy, but just an alternative yet feasible way of living.

One comment I will make is that I find the Tao Te Ching completely inscrutable. You either need to have a companion textbook handy to understand what it's saying (which will inevitably be 30x the length of the Tao Te Ching itself) or you'll need to draw your own conclusions, which is probably the better choice, but considering that it was written so long ago with a very distinctive cultural and philosophical context, your conclusions will honestly probably be wrong

I am Chinese so I read the text in its originality, alongside with annotations from both contemporary and ancient scholars. There is a lot of controversy regarding certain ambiguous passages where Lao Zi seemed to be contradicting himself, but it could also easily be misinterpretation of the text.

This is just an interesting side note, but an ancient scholar once sarcastically criticized Tao Te Ching to be entirely pointless if Lao Zi claimed that the way of Tao is too mystical, abstract, and higher than any secular knowledge people desperately chase after for it to be conveyed and taught in the form of a book through words.

To understand Taoism better, I think it is also important to have some background readings on Confucianism, whose ideas have been challenged and refuted numerous times in Tao Te Ching, especially the Confucianist concept of "ren (仁)".

I'd personally suggest the Book of Zhuang Zi, which is longer and (somewhat) clearer than the Tao Te Ching. They're actually essentially companion pieces, with Zhuang Zi referencing and clarifying many of the key points of the Tao Te Ching.

That is on my to-read list

 

[Steingar]

wdym you find the levitical law and genealogies spiritually irrelevant? You really need to tune in to your local bible radio hour.

Haha clearly I've let my spiritual development slip recently, I'll get right on that.

Call of the Crocodile is full of esoteric wisdom, the whole novel is a meta commentary on the puer aeternus

I'll take your word for it. Reminds me the discourse around Eye of Argon.

 

[Steingar]

That is a good point and I think I do agree. It is almost impossible to completely dissociate yourself from society considering the industrial convenience we now enjoy, and what Walden tries to accomplish is not to preach the primitivist philosophy, but just an alternative yet feasible way of living.

100%. I kind of see it as part of a Hegelian dialectic (as I alluded to in a previous post). In a maximalist society that's about more work, more possessions, more...everything, something like Walden which stresses simplicity and less is a powerful tonic. It may not be totally right or efficacious, but anything that swings the pendulum back to the centre is a valuable read imo.

I am Chinese so I read the text in its originality, alongside with annotations from both contemporary and ancient scholars. There is a lot of controversy regarding certain ambiguous passages where Lao Zi seemed to be contradicting himself, but it could also easily be misinterpretation of the text.

That's honestly wild, considering how old and antiquated the writing is. Are you a scholar? Some of my Chinese friends told me that anything written in Chinese that's more than 500 years old is almost inscrutable to them, as difficult as someone in English trying to read Beowolf in its original form.

This is just an interesting side note, but an ancient scholar once sarcastically criticized Tao Te Ching to be entirely pointless if Lao Zi claimed that the way of Tao is too mystical, abstract, and higher than any secular knowledge people desperately chase after for it to be conveyed and taught in the form of a book through words.

Haha valid point. I love how there's millennia's of discourse around these texts. And yeah, that's why I didn't get much from the Tao Te Ching until I read the Book of Zhuang Zi, which is (relatively) more clear by comparison. The abstractedness and ambiguity I think is kind of interesting as a pedagogic tool, since it's like a "brain itch" that you need to spend time scratching. There's a fun meta-line at the end of Zhuang Zi which goes something like:

"Even though [Zhuangzi's] words are nonsense, their strangeness and monstrosity inspire contemplation".

But yeah the possibility of drawing spurious, contradictory, or "any" conclusion is also very possible too, and I'm sure the texts have been used to justify ridiculous claims and beliefs over the years.

To understand Taoism better, I think it is also important to have some background readings on Confucianism, whose ideas have been challenged and refuted numerous times in Tao Te Ching, especially the Confucianist concept of "ren (仁)".

Totally. I've read the book of Zhuangzi twice, and it was the understanding of it as partially as a commentary on Confucianism that really helped me make (more) sense of it the second time round. There's a fantastic channel on YouTube that does animated videos about this topic written by a scholar on Taoism. I'll link my favourite one here:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jhfDWTYFI0


But of course, more research is needed on my behalf.

 

[shinobu]

I am Chinese so I read the text in its originality, alongside with annotations from both contemporary and ancient scholars. There is a lot of controversy regarding certain ambiguous passages where Lao Zi seemed to be contradicting himself, but it could also easily be misinterpretation of the text.
This is just an interesting side note, but an ancient scholar once sarcastically criticized Tao Te Ching to be entirely pointless if Lao Zi claimed that the way of Tao is too mystical, abstract, and higher than any secular knowledge people desperately chase after for it to be conveyed and taught in the form of a book through words.

I know it sounds like bullshit but the contradictions are the point. A lot of alchemy, which was a big source of symbolism in chinese philosophy, is exactly about that integration of the opposites, about their tension together and then their sublimation into something else. Nondualistic teachings like those from the Advaita Vedanta school are similar to Zen koans in that they try to break your intellectual thinking, because it can't possibly encompass the true nature of things. The reason why the true Tao can't be spoken of is because it's tacit knowledge, impossible to express in words, so it's not that Lao Zi didn't want to disclose the mysteries of the Tao except to those willing to slog through the poetic language of the text, it's that he couldn't do anything except hint at its true nature. The same kind of conclusions can be found in western alchemy (e.g. the Tabula Smaragdina, Jung's psychology (he terms the process of the psyche that generates the opposite to balance things out in a lopsided mind enantiodromia, and he speaks many times of how in his medical practice he stumbles against the contradictory opposites that can integrate), Indian texts like the Devi Bhagavata Purana (see Book 3 chapter 6 for a description of the oneness of opposites))
And even setting aside alchemy, after reading a few translations of the TTC and reflecting on them, you start seeing this stuff in real life, and it starts to make sense. The opposites are only a problem because they're conceptions that exist only in your mind. They're damn useful (some of them, at least), but they're all illusions. If they don't have a practical value, they're useless. Meanwhile, reality is and will always be its own thing regardless of what we think about it or how we interpret it.

 

[InternetGeist]

That's honestly wild, considering how old and antiquated the writing is. Are you a scholar? Some of my Chinese friends told me that anything written in Chinese that's more than 500 years old is almost inscrutable to them, as difficult as someone in English trying to read Beowolf in its original form.

We had to study classical Chinese back at school. I was never good at it but ancient text is not that incomprehensible with annotations for key words and basic grasp of conjunctions.

"Even though [Zhuangzi's] words are nonsense, their strangeness and monstrosity inspire contemplation".

But yeah the possibility of drawing spurious, contradictory, or "any" conclusion is also very possible too, and I'm sure the texts have been used to justify ridiculous claims and beliefs over the years.

Love that line. The same thing can be said for any philosophical text and there are too many unfortunate examples throughout history...or even just random shit you will come across on a bookstore shelf.

 

[Steingar]

I know it sounds like bullshit but the contradictions are the point. A lot of alchemy, which was a big source of symbolism in chinese philosophy, is exactly about that integration of the opposites, about their tension together and then their sublimation into something else.

You raise a good point. One of the early chapters of the Zhuangzi basically describes the origins of the universe as initially being whole, before distinctions and contrasts came into being.

"In the beginning there was nothing. This was considered perfect knowledge, because nothing could be added or taken away."

Note the play on the word "nothing". The book is full of these sneaky paradoxes and play on words.

I will note that the philosophical Taoism, while providing the foundational and ideological bedrock to the religious/alchemical Taoism, is also quite distinct from it. As enamoured as I am with the ideas of Taoism, I'm not particularly interested in taking mercury to achieve immortality.

The opposites are only a problem because they're conceptions that exist only in your mind. They're damn useful (some of them, at least), but they're all illusions. If they don't have a practical value, they're useless. Meanwhile, reality is and will always be its own thing regardless of what we think about it or how we interpret it.

And thus the whole point of the yin-yang symbol: black coming from white, white coming from black, in an endless exchange. You're right that the book critiques the application of moral distinctions to contrasting ideals, but I'm curious what you mean by saying "they don't have practical value, they're useless". Can you clarify?