#hedonism for ascetics

[tenth-sentence]

But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

"The Picture of Dorian Gray" - Oscar Wilde

[birgittesilverbae]

the funniest thing about Graendal isn't the psychologist part, the funniest thing about Graendal is the noted ascetic part (and the "world's fucked, guess I'll try out hedonism" part)

[mischiefxnight]

Hey you. Every time you think a nasty thought at yourself for normal human things like enjoying food and sex and money and comfort the Christians win, you know that right? Feeling guilty for *checks notes* not being miserable is how they want you to feel. Not that you need permission but you're allowed to like feeling good and wanting stuff. Diet culture, purity culture, emotional repression, minimalism, it's all part of the same multi-headed beast that's the puritan-ass concept that you can somehow depress and deprive yourself into virtue. You can't. If you were """supposed""" to lead a spiritual existence only and ignore your body then like. You probably wouldn't be born with a body to begin with dude.

Tldr: Anyways. Stop depriving yourself. Stop doing the oppressors work for them.

Tldrtldr: embrace hedonism to piss on an ascetic monk. Every time you stop counting calories a catholic guilt dies. Enjoy life to spite god

[tobacconist]

the hedonist who becomes dissatisfied with hedonism and turns to asceticism vs the ascetic who becomes dissatisfied with asceticism and turns to hedonism: which of these has truly wasted himself?

[why-bless-your-heart]

Weren't many Gnostics also hedonists?

Honestly I don’t know. My image of them is that they were ascetics, given the whole demiurge thing. I can see how a denial of the material as created by God & redeemable as a result would lead to a lifestyle of excess, though. The main point I was trying to make is that the purpose of life is not personal fulfillment or to maximize enjoyment (hedonism), nor are our spiritual natures divorced from our physical, with the higher nature good and the lower nature evil (gnosticism).

[nyxneon]

I'm very glad the fandom (or my fandom bubble, at least) is now full in the feral Hob phase (Hob being not-nice, dangerous, unapologetically hungry for more all the time).

I'm also loving the focus on Hob's hunger for life, things, experiences, enjoyment ... his hedonism and his greed (and I don't mean it in a negative way, absolutely), which also lead him to wait for Dream... (see what @landwriter wrote about this.)

I think it's very fitting that on the one hand we have Dream, who is basically denying himself lots of things, in a sort of morbidly "ascetic" journey towards death (suicide), and on the other we have Hob, who is always wanting more of everything, so much that he ended up denying Death. (I know that i'm setting myself up for controversy with how i've worded this thing...oops)

Anyway, I have two songs for Hob, and this way of seeing him. They're similar, although one is definitely more pessimistic than the other.

First, it's Want, by The Cure.

I'm always wanting more

Anything I haven't got

Everything I want it all

I just can't stop

Planning all my days away

Never find new ways to stay

Never feel enough today

Tomorrow must be more

More drink, more dreams

More bed, more drugs

More lust, more lies

More hate, more love

More fear, more fun

More pain, more flesh

More stars, more smiles

More fame, more sex

However hard I want

I know deep down inside

I'll never really get

More hope or any more time

Any more time

(Not the whole song, but most of it. Rather self-explanatory I think)

The other one is Hedonistic Gene by Inkubus Sukkubus

I would take more, I would love more

I would use oh so much more, oh so much very more

I would live more, I would give more,

My destiny's written in blood

Drink and consume, lead me far from this room

Love me and leave me, destroy and deceive me

I'll escape like a bird to the sky

Crush your intolerance, your stinking abhorrence

Of pleasure and laughter and life

The essences of life is to share our delights

Drink it down for there's more still to come

Not sure where I was going with all this, just wanted to share.

[bodiesonbodiesonbodieson]

When you start wielding the sword of discernment and look at every human gesture with a severity that makes it all seem futile and tasteless as every expression is born from the desperate attempt to be seen and legitimised as a social agent or the arrogance of the self to be in the shadow of its own self-perception, and you also aren't excluded from the fact for as long as your consciousness is set in a human body and that reaching God requires a transformation of the bodily experience to be neither human nor inhumane, neither beastly nor angelic, through rigorous analysis on what makes an experience an experience, making even spiritual hedonism despite inspired from the indulgence of Gods an ascetic practice with its own forms of mortification.

[whatdoyoumeanitsnotcanon]

I was looking at those pics of in game model of Morgott, especially now that people managed to remove his cloak and it suprised me how underfeed he looks like. He has some muscle mass but thats about it. I think that he probably dosen't eat enough, just to keep himself alive. Most likey he dosen't feel like he deserves to eat being omen and all.

Good morning, anon. Hope all is well on your end!

Before I start, let me say I didn't truly realize how broad Morgott's shoulders are until I saw those pictures. But what you say makes sense given that one thing I noticed is that his collarbone is incredibly pronounced. Same for his spine and the bones in his upper back.

I think due to the circumstances of his childhood (and no matter what, I will always side-eye the ever-living hell out of Marika for discarding her babies), Morgott leads the life of an ascetic even as King of Leyndell. I very much agree with the idea that he restricts himself because he feels undeserving of even the basic necessities; this is why I love my headcanon that he's a total foodie with a preference for sweets.

I also think his asceticism is a fitting parallel for Mohg's hedonism and you can definitely see how they're both fanatically devoted to their chosen lifestyles.

But just imagine the bashful, genuine smile on Morgott's face when you present him with a basketful of pastries. Imagine his eye twinkling with joy and excitement. Like a kid in a candy shop. As it always should've been.

[grandpasessions]

An important thing to point out here is that the hedonism of our consumerist society does not reside in the imperative of enjoyment. This imperative is, rather, fundamentally ascetic (as I have tried to show with the help of Nietzsche’s analysis—and the same could be shown with the help of psychoanalysis).

As strange as it might seem at first sight, hedonism does not dwell in the insatiable imperative of enjoyment; it dwells in the realm of that which is supposed to deactivate this enjoyment.

Hedonism is not in the realm of champagne (i.e. the stimulant), but in that of Xanax (i.e. the sedative). Hedonism is situated entirely within the very lack of caffeine that we consume with our coffee. To consume sugarless sweets and decaffeinated coffee is—far from being ascetic—a hedonistic act par excellence.

It is not so very different from the proverbial Roman hedonism, where people would make themselves throw up in order to be able to consume more food. It is also an equivalent of “how to will without (really) willing.”

But, of course—and this is the whole point—this modern hedonism needs the stimulation, the excitement, of the ascetic ideal, as well as the threat that looms on its horizon (rather Nothingness itself than . . .). It is a hedonism built upon the ascetic ideal, which is not a bad definition of passive nihilism.

Another important point here—a point that also marks the shift from active to passive nihilism—is that morality is now in the realm of hedonism.

Our contemporary hedonism is deeply moralistic. Our lives might very well be hedonistic, but this in no way implies that they are immoral, or even “beyond morality,” that is, “beyond good and evil.” On the contrary, morality thrives under the banner of hedonism, which is not all that surprising, since hedonism has taken the form of self-regulation.

(To “work out” regularly, to go on a diet, to stop smoking—such things are not perceived as restrictions on our enjoyment, but, on the contrary, as its forms or conditions. Regular sexual activity is advocated in magazines because it is “good for one’s health” [mentally relaxing and physically stimulating], which is probably the most perfidious form of moralism, of hedonist moralism: we have sex because it is good for our health, and for our personal and emotional development. This is an example of the way in which sexual excitement is enjoined in a deactivated mode: once we were encouraged to have sex only for the purpose of procreating children; today we should have it for health reasons.)

The Shortest Shadow A. Zupancic

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

A question for you. Morally, do you consider hedonism or "life denial" worse, and why?

well, i would actually consider hedonism a form of life-denial. hedonism and ascetism (which is what i assume you mean by "life denial") are two sides of the same coin. hedonists want to minimize pain and ascetics want to minimize pleasure.

they are both denying life, just in different directions. but any morality that is preoccupied with pleasure (whether for or against) is already questionable in my mind.

so yeah i consider them both about the same if i'm being honest.

[automatismoateo]

Christianity is the biggest offender of the No True Scotsman Fallacy. via /r/atheism

Christianity is the biggest offender of the No True Scotsman Fallacy. I'm really getting sick of those going around saying "So Called Christians", "These are not True Christians", "Jesus would be a radical leftist by today's standards" as if they're desperate trying to reclaim and defend this religion while we're witnessing affront of our eyes that it's solely responsible for Fascism we see today as it's root cause I think it's time to stop defending and reclaiming Christianity especially Abrahamic Faiths in general to see what they truly are in practice and I think our world would be a far better place if Abrahamic Faiths never existed or treated them as Mythology as we do to other Non-Abrahamic faiths. Also the most troubling is Jesus himself even though there's claims about "He healed the sick, feed the poor" and such but it seems that they're not seeing the bigger picture here at all especially Jesus himself was a ascetic which is really the main root cause of authoritarianism that demands suffering through life to achieve "heavenly awards" which is completely antithetical to the ideals of freedom which can really be found in it's exact opposite being hedonism which is what we should really be valuing. Submitted May 13, 2024 at 05:10PM by Jannol (From Reddit https://ift.tt/WuR6YKM)

[grasscore]

switching out of hedon mode and into ascetic mode

[thekultofo]

After this weekends Full Moon Weekender it's time for an hour of deep dark #ambient.

Original artwork: Old Father Christmas by William Ewart Lockhart

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[boubastis]

Like fuuuuuukkk life became so boring and mundane.. I can’t even remember my dreams!! The only thing that gave me pleasure in this existence. I’m so ascetic these days that I’m contemplating taking crack. Like tf are we so hedonistic

[bodiesonbodiesonbodieson]

Meditating on the separation of feeling and response to transform reactive action to conscious action. I’ve observed first that reactive actions come in the forms of habitual patterns or somatic responses where the former are engrained behaviours based on the solidified psyche of a person and the later are nervous responses sprung from bodily stimuli. Talking about the former, habitual responses etch themselves at the nerves similarly like somatic responses if our psyche is contained in the nervous system. I assume this is true since the body and the mind aren’t separate. Turning the distinction between habitual response and somatic response, where habitual response is the conditioning of the mind and somatic response conditioning of the body, into gradients that allows the disintegration of one to be followed by the other, we can then understand the role of fasting, self-flagellation, or other forms of ascetic or mortific practices as means to unbind the self from conditioned reactivity to stimuli. The aim of these practices are destructive, they breakdown the automatic connection between action and stimuli of an individual. Knowing this, we can then understand how these are means to pursue liberation, whatever one thinks that means. However, an issue lies in when those practices no longer become destructive to reactive responses but are those conditioned responses. We can see this in eating disorders, latent masochism, prudery, and general repression. When ascetism and pain becomes conditioned, it no longer acts as liberating. They become the wheel we are contained in. What then becomes destructive is indulgence and pleasure, but care needs to be taken to avoid hedonism becoming base by being conditioned into the person. If we seek to have no bases for our actions to come from, for actions to be both spontaneous and conscious, we need to alternate our methods of ridding reactivity; middle-path, as they say. Do not mistake the alternation as being like a pendulum, however, since ascetic and hedonist practices are sources to pull from and not just two separate modes of activity. The line of denying and indulging pleasure does not exist, denying the pleasure of eating to get the pleasure vanity, indulging the pleasure of pride while denying the pleasure of humility.

[tickfleato]

philosophy pisses me off sometimes like. you see, i think ascetism is stupid, but i also think pleasure at the expense of others is wrong. i only want ethical hedonism thank you very much