Wholeness

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.

-Aldous Huxley , Island

Such bad poetry(as most Oriental art), read Charles Swinburne instead.

and then there’s this…

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. … What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.

-Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Thats some good stuff bro, first time I am seeing something sensible on this forum. Post more. I dont agree with the psychoanalysts and psychologists but this is at least interesting and coherent.

Has Huxley ever written anything on Christianity?

The perennial philosophy.

Terror management theory

I don’t have a problem with psychology but with their dishonesty as to what is possible to be established and what isn’t. Most of them talk about things like fear or hatred as if these were some rigorous and observable phenomena when we simply and plainly lack the technological and scientific ability to penetrate the mechanisms of brains and cognition and emotion in general to any meaningful degree. And psychoanalysis is complete quackery that is completely discredited and scientifically hopeless, psychology has to wait and accept it is only relevant as a branch of biology and sociology is not a science, like philosophy or economics, and that’s completely fine.

I know what fear and hatred are. I don’t need to wait around for science to tell me.

:sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses:

:sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses:

Which one I can think of three.
Julien, Thomas Henry, and Aldous

Not really about Christianity, though is it.
It is a failed attempt atfinding a “highest” common denominator to a series of incompatible religions, only to conclude with a sort of half baked atheism.

Grand father Thomas Henry mentions God only to dismiss him, coining the term agnostic.

2 Other notable Huxley’s were eugenicists, so probably not much use to the discusion.

Science can tell you more about them, beyond your own personal experience of them.

If you scroll up you will see that he was responding to a quotation by Aldous Huxley.

How did Aldous Huxley fail? What do you mean by “half baked atheism”?

That’s true. And you could know everything that science can tell you about them but without your own personal experience of them you wouldn’t know what they were essentially.

“Any entity whose essence is made up of existence, is essentially opposed to the possibility of our getting it in our grasp as an entity which is a whole.”

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, H233, page 276

10 Simple Ways to Relieve Depersonalization

[size=85]By Shaun O’ Connor
Last updated: 14 Jan 2020
~ 4 MIN READ[/size]

1. Read Aloud. … I do sometimes, but not always.
2. Cut out Caffeine. … Not my morning coffee, No!!!
3. Listen to Podcasts and Music. … Music is the food of love, so I do listen on - podcasts… sometimes.
4. Avoid Drugs. … (I) Don’t do drugs, kids.
5. Get Up Early. … But not if I can’t…
6. Go to Bed Early. … But not if I can’t…
7. Practice Your Hobbies. … But not if I can’t…
8. Don’t Overreact. … I never do…
9. Don’t Avoid Any Activities. … But not if I couldn’t help, but to…
10 Be Social! But not if I couldn’t help, not to…

Detoxing, resting up well, exercising, hydrating, are also all good aids to becoming less derealised/more Whole again.

I’m glad you’re feeling more whole. The personal is the highest rung on the ladder of intelligibility below spirituality. Thus it is the fulfillment of all our mundane goals. But as such it is the level of ego anxiety. Depersonalization is a means of defending against that anxiety. When the psyche springs it on us involuntarily, it can seem strange. When it is consciously and voluntarily employed as method of coping it can temporarily be an effective strategy for dealing with stress. Used in this way it is a form of compartmentalization. The Buddha’s teaching about the five skandas employs this method as a means of relief from existential suffering.