https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_6GARWYrhI8
Welcome to Meditating with John Rovacki and we’re on the part of the course called Cultivating Wisdom in which we’re emphasizing the Western wisdom tradition that runs through Epicureanism into Stoicism and then into Neoplatonism. Epicureanism is our primary school, Stoicism is our high school, and Neoplatonism is our university and this is a complement to the Meditating with John Rovacki series where we covered a whole course of practices drawn from the Eastern tradition, primarily Buddhism, but also important elements from Taoism. So welcome. This is a course that is designed to give you a deeply enriched repertoire of practices and show you how they coordinate together in various ways. And then the idea is not that you’re not expected to practice all of these practices. The idea is to give you a rich repertoire from the Eastern tradition, East traditions, a rich repertoire from the Western traditions, various ways in which they can be configured, curated, constellated together. So that you can build for you a rich ecology of practices that will help you as you attempt to deal with the perennial problems of self-deception, the perennial aspiration to enhance our sense of connectedness to ourselves, to each other in the world. So welcome. If you haven’t done all of the meditation and contemplation course, please look for description, links in the description of this video. You’ll find links right all the way back to lesson one. I recommend going there immediately and doing lesson one, do one or two lessons a week. Keep meeting here on what’s called the Saturday Sangha at 10 a.m. Eastern time. And what you can do is you can catch up with the Eastern tradition and then integrate it with the Western tradition. So it’s great pleasure to be here. As always, we’re going to begin first by doing a sit together. So please get yourself into a comfortable position. We’re going to have a timer for about 15 minutes. We’ll begin as always with some chanting and then we’ll move into the silent sit. Once that’s done, we’ll come out of it. Perhaps you will recite the five promises to yourself. There’ll be a slight adjustment. We’re trying yet another configuration here. I’ll move my pillow out of the way. We’ll bring in the whiteboard and then we’ll have the Dharma talk about the psychologic, the psychoethics and the psychophysics of Stoicism. Next week will be our last week on Stoicism. Next week, I’m going to show you through the wonderful work of Buzari. She has attempted to reconstruct some Stoic meditations, meditative practices. So we’ll meet and we’ll go through a couple of those. That will be our final lesson on Stoicism. So if you want to start reading the third degree of wisdom in the wisdom of HaVai Pasha by McLennan as we start to prepare ourselves for the University of Neoplatonism, please do. All right, so one more time, get yourself ready. We’ll begin together. When I say begin, we will begin with chanting. Begin. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. One. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. Begin your silent sit. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you slowly come out of your practice, trying as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness, cognition, character, and communitats, perhaps by reciting the five promises to yourself you you you you thank you son alright, so just wait for the camera to focus good, so we’re doing stoicism and we’re following through McClellan and I’m I’m supplementing that with some excellent work from Bazaar’s book on stoic spiritual exercises and we’ll finish next week with I think her very insightful attempt to reconstruct some stoic meditative practices but let’s finish some of the overall orientation of the cultivation of wisdom according to stoicism and basically we’re looking at the idea of stoicism as training in aspirational rationality rationality rationality again is not just about the use of logic within argumentation, it’s much more comprehensive than that, it has to do with the comprehensive endeavor to systematically become aware of and ameliorate self deception and to help us aspire to becoming more virtuous virtuous where we understand virtue as the beauty of wisdom, virtue is how we are wise in any particular situation, the idea here is that that is something that’s going to awaken up to the process of co-identification which is at the center of stoicism and alleviate mood confusion and it is also going to be the process by which we can bring about the changes in our cognition that are needed to ameliorate the ways we suffer and how we’ve miss set our heart on things so this notion of aspirational rationality is what we’ve been talking about throughout and we reviewed some of the core ideas of stoicism and some of the preliminary, well not preliminary, basic practices, there that’s a better way of putting it, and we’ve talked about how there’s basically three aspects of this so there’s three aspects to it, traditionally it’s called the logic, the ethics, and the physics, but I like to call it the psychologic because again it’s not just about the logical control of argumentation, it’s about the reflective control of attention, control isn’t even the right word I like Hedeau’s work, the reflective disciplining of attention, the disciplining of assent, the disciplining of action, so these are the things we’re actually disciplining and then along the way we will discipline argumentation We talked about this last time about the idea of crisis, that’s a K, into the process of the lagine, so we’re trying to bring in judgment, a critical change, this means the destabilization but also opportunity, so all the meanings, if you can combine our current meanings of crisis and judgment and other things So we’re trying to bring in opportunity, that’s what’s actually being carried in this word, and we’re trying to introduce this into the epilagin, so remember we get these impressions and we have no control over them, they’re just part of the nature and the outcome of the machinery of our perceptual processing or unconscious processing So we’re trying to bring in these impressions, but what we can intervene on, what we can introduce crisis in the ancient sense into is all of the epilagin, all of the ways in which we’re doing something analogous to talking to ourselves, remember what Antisthenes said that, what Socrates, what he learned from Socrates was how to more appropriately talk to himself So this was the stoic interpretation of this, you internalize Socrates, which is a perspectival and participatory transformation, it’s something aspirational, in order to learn how to properly become aware of and manage this And so the point about this, of course, is to get to the possibility of a poke, which I mentioned is also a central practice within phenomenology coming out of Fusrel, he uses that term explicitly, by the way, and I recommended Don Ivey’s book on experimental phenomenology to give you, if you want to deepen your understanding and practice of this So this is the idea of bracketing the impressions, and what we’re doing is we’re withholding of sort of immediate ascent and assertion So this comes up, there’s an impression, and there’s a part of me that starts talking to myself and saying, oh, that’s a marker, it’s a good marker, so there’s an assertion here, a mental assertion, and I ascent with, and all of this is happening in a confused fashion, in that all of that is happening automatically, it’s happening unconsciously, and it’s getting fused to the impression, and I’m treating them all as one want to do is defuse this. And what I want to break it apart is, well, is it really, Marker, and should I think of it as good? And of course, what you want to do initially, you might have to coach yourself with that inner speech. But the point is not the inner speaking. The point is ultimately to introduce this into it. The point is to get a skill and ultimately the virtue being able to make sure that you are coming to the best possible assertion to which you can give the most reflective assent in the situation, right? You don’t want to be hammered, always just sort of stop reflecting, but to what your impressions are presenting to you. So remember, the impressions are just present and then we represent them to ourselves in a certain way. And it’s exactly in that moment when we go from the impression to representation that we want to intervene. We want to develop crisis, judgment, opportunity, destabilization, defusing, so that we can engage in the pocket. And so we’ve been talking about that. And we then moved into the beginning of the talk around the discussion of what the Stoics meant about physics or what I want to call psychophysics, because again and again and again, I want to emphasize it’s about how we are making sense of things, so it’s unlike modern physics where we’re just trying to concentrate on the sense made. We’re trying to get the best possible interpretation of the world, that’s all right. So that process is always going on, either explicitly in scientific physics or implicitly as we move around the world. But what the Stoics want us to focus on is we want to learn the best science we can here, but we want to pay attention to the way we have internalized that and to what degree we have internalized it well in our interpretive judgments. So this is typically known as, this is the training of desire. This is, and what that means is, the sets of wants and needs and drives and motivations that emerge from how we deem the world to be. So there’s a lot of things there that we’re engaged in in order to train desire. We talked last time about what I always talk called objective seeing, what McLennan calls physical description, what Bazzari calls, no, Bazzari calls physical description, McLennan calls neutral description. And so the idea here is when I am confronting some situation, what’s typically happening is I’m investing it, or to use more modern language, I’m projecting into it all kinds of meanings and values insofar as I’m desiring the object. Now remember, desire is meant here broadly, it means both how I’m desiring the object, but I may also be desiring the removal of the object because it could be something painful or unpleasant or unwanted or disagreeable, et cetera. So what I’m doing in the psychophysics, especially with the objective seeing, is I’m trying now to withdraw projection. So in the epoch, in the psychological logic, I’m trying to withhold assent and assertion. In the psychophysics, I’m trying to withdraw projection. And so what is the most prominent kind of projection that we need to step back and withdraw from? And this comes from, again, the stoic idea. Part of it, of course, is modal confusion, and those are broad themes. But one of the things I’ve talked about most was we wanna withdraw narrative projection. So narrative projection is to see a story unfolding, and a story is always a way of interpreting a situation according to desire. And so one of the things, for example, how I try to practice this, and it’s a challenging practice for me, but it’s a very good practice, is I’ll be in a situation and something will happen, and I’ll get angry, and I’ll realize, I can’t move this, I hate doing this. I start to tweak as if there’s a story here, as if this is an agent, as if it has motives. And what I do is I step back, and I say, wait, there’s no story going on here. There’s no agent going on here. All there is is my desire for a certain outcome. So I withdraw the projection. I let the, we say this, but, and Heidegger took this from Meister Eckhart, Galeisenheit, I let, I’m trying to get you to understand this very deeply. I hope I’m being successful. I let the objects be as they in, as those objects are in themselves. That’s the physics. I let them be. In my practice with objective seeing, or physical description or neutral description, I can bring that in and say, no, all that is, here’s a certain amount of matter taking up this, and that helps me withdraw narrative projection. And we like narrative a lot. And in fact, when people, often when I first present this to people, they get upset and they say, well, no, but narrative is, we’re narrative and narrative and myth and story, and all of that is important. And as many of you know, I talk about that at length. But what the Stoics remind us is something that I hope has become clear through a lot of what we’ve been learning. The processes that make us adaptive are the very processes that subject us to self-deception. Narrative is adaptive. It helps us to extend our sense of time and identity so that we can engage in long-term planning and we can better understand human motives in situations. And we can better pick up on people’s character. This is all valuable stuff, totally valuable. But again, the central lesson, that which makes us adaptive is also that which is right, the source of our self-deception. And so a lot of the time, we are engaging in narrative projection. And so what we wanna do is we wanna stop and withdraw that and let things be. Fuses, that’s where we get the word physics. Fuses means how things spring out of themselves, how they grow of themselves, how they are self-organized independently of me. And that’s important precisely because, right, as I said, we even create entire popular culture forms of entertainment that try and tell us that narrative is in some secret complicity with the fundamental laws of nature. Like you’re in a great love story and the universe will work to make sure that the lovers find each other and that the obstacles are overcome. And that is all wishful bullshit. That’s not, we know at some level, but we say, well, it’s just entertainment. The problem is parts of your brain don’t distinguish between entertainment and real perception. It is hard for you, if I do the following for you, ask you to, you’re in a room, ask you, imagine doing something. And then I ask you four weeks later, did you do that something or did you only imagine doing it? You won’t be able to tell the difference. So it’s very, very important to try and as much as possible practice the psychophysics, objective scene helps us to do this, of withdrawing projection. We also did the view from above. And the view from above gets you to withdraw from the first person perspective. So you’re withholding, right, you’re withholding ascent and assertion in this psychologic. And in the psychophysics, one thing you’re doing is you’re withdrawing, right, you’re withdrawing projections. And another one is you’re withdrawing from the first person perspective in the view from above, because that affords you taking a more comprehensive perspective so that you can do something analogous to internalizing the sage. So there are other practices for the psychophysics. There’s one that is recommended. It’s not clear how you do it, but it’s analogous to some of the Buddhist practices. You periodically reflect and remind yourself on how interconnected everything is, how interconnected everything is. And then aligned with that, the stoics, again, very similar to the Buddhist, had us constantly remember how impermanent everything is. And the idea is these two things are actually different sides of the same coin. We like the first one, everything’s interconnected. Oh, that’s fantastic. But the fact that everything’s interconnected means that nothing is completely self-sustaining. Everything is bound to everything else. And therefore, everything is ultimately impermanent. So the stoics have a very challenging practice associated with this, premeditatio. And what’s premeditatio? Premeditatio is the act. It’s kind of like, it’s analogous in its application, not in its content, to how you apply the five training precepts. The five training precepts are ways trying to create opportunities for applying mindfulness and realizing wisdom. In premeditatio, what you do is you practice, again, this is the way you’re talking to yourself, dialoguos with yourself. You practice reminding yourself of the fatality of all things. Fatality doesn’t mean just mortal. It means that everything is ultimately finite, subject to failure, and subject to impermanence in a way that is beyond your control, beyond my control, beyond our control. And so the stoics have some very, they have some very challenging practices around this. And it’s recommended by Buzari, and I agree with this, you don’t start with premeditatio. You do this after you’ve been doing all the other practices. But when you kiss your beloved good night, say to yourself, I’m kissing a mortal. I’m kissing a mortal. When you see one of your cherished objects, here’s, I really, really like these shoes. This is a thing that will pass away. These shoes that I like so much will pass away. So the idea is to stop and remind yourself that everything, everything you’re encountering, even the most beloved of things are impermanent. And in fact, your love doesn’t render them permanent. We want to believe it does. We really do. We have myths around that, like that somehow love gives us an access to the permanence of things. But the stoics challenge that. And they say all that is ultimately permanent and eternal, it’s the logos of the universe. That’s sort of their god. It’s that the ongoing patterning of reality that makes it intelligible for us and makes it a possible arena in which we can cultivate wisdom and virtue. That for the stoics, the logos, that which gathers together and orders everything so that our logos, dia logos is possible. That is what is eternal for the stoics. Everything else is constantly arising and passing away. And in that sense, it is very similar to Buddhism and the doctrine of impermanence and on up and many people have noted that. And so the stoics try to get you to, the point here is not to crush your love. That’s almost, that’s a mistake. Remember in Buddhism in the middle path, you’re trying to get in between self-indulgence and self-denial. The point here is not to deny your love. It’s to realize your love. It is to realize that you are loving a mortal. That doesn’t mean you should stop loving. It means you should pay attention to how you are loving and what kind of entity you are loving and what kind of entity you are as a lover. So pay attention to all the things you love. And the premeditatio is to remind yourself that tomorrow or later today, they could be gone. Absolutely, completely, without remainder, without recall, without recollection. This is a hard practice. Like I said, I do not recommend, yeah, just start this right now. I think you should be doing all of the, I think you should have done a lot of meditation, a lot of contemplation, both the seated and moving exercises. I think you should be doing the view from above a lot. I think you should be doing objective seeing a lot. I think you should be doing all of the self-examination processes, the journaling, the cultivation of acta will remind us you have to do that a lot. And then you start to practice the premeditatio and then maybe then when you have the depth of responsiveness so that you can be responsible to the reality of the fatality of all things. So the last, as I’ve mentioned, is the psychoethics. This is the training of impulse or the training of action. I don’t have too much to say about that because we’ve already been practicing that from the very beginning. That’s the primarily, what you’re trying to do is to create virtue where virtue is understood as the beauty of wisdom. Virtue is the way of most realizing how to bring principle, Sophia, into the situation, from thesis so that I can act most wisely in that situation. It is a kind of getting an optimal grip of beauty in action that renders our actions increasingly more and increasingly more and more virtuous, but also increasingly more and more beautiful. One of the great things that Plato reminds us in the Republic, sorry, in the symposium, but also in the Republic, is that we should eventually move from physical beauty, the beauty of particular people or objects to realizing the beauty of virtue, which is the beauty of a life well lived. Really, what is more beautiful than a life well lived? Well, if you think about it that way, that the greatest beauty is a life well lived, then virtue is the beauty of wisdom. And so what are the practices there? Well, you know them already. They’re the practices of self-examination that we’ve been talking about from the very beginning, at the beginning of the day, setting your intention. What do I intend to do today? You’re doing this already when you’re, for example, doing the five training precepts. At the end of the day, you check your journal, and you reflect on any vices you committed, any virtues you omitted, any bias you were able to detect, and any virtue you remember having engaged in. Always end with that because it’s a positive, it’s a motivating. You’re trying to get between arrogance and despair by getting a balance of noticing your errors and your successes. And so you want to, the project of cultivating wisdom is the project that springs from deep self-examination and a constant reflection on a daily basis of how virtuous you have been throughout the day. So that’s the basic stoic setup. What you’ve got is you’ve got these practices, and there’s more practices. You can read some more. There’s many books, as I’ve indicated, on stoicism. I’m trying to give you a core ecology, what I think the core ecology of practices is for stoicism, what you can do for the psychologic, the training of judgment, what you can do for the psychophysics, the training of desire, and what you can do for the psychoethics, the training of impulse and action. And there’s a lot more there. You could read Pierre Hedot’s Intercittital, which is a great reflection. I also recommend strongly start reading The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca’s Letters, Epictetus’s Discourse, and The Manual for Living. The Manual for Living makes excellent Alexio Divino material. The Soda is Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Next week, we will round this all out, because I want to tap into Pissari’s Excellent. I think it’s a very good reconstruction. I’m trying to do something similar. I’m trying to reconstruct Neoplatonic dialectics. She’s tried to reconstruct stoic meditative practices. And so that will be the final sort of culminating thing we can do, what you can do in a seated practice. You already have one, the view from above, but she has a few more she’s gonna share with us. I’ll share them with you. And then we will then be on the doorstep of Neoplatonism. We’ll be on the doorstep. We’ll be ready to graduate into the University of Neoplatonism. Okay, so what I’m gonna do now is I’m just gonna turn slightly to a side. I apologize if this is a little bit odd, but I need to take a look at any of the questions we might have. And so I’ve got all this stuff here. I’ll go over, I’ll read the question, and then I’ll come back. Okay, is this anything like Ed Slaterlin’s trying not to try research or something very different? Um, so, that’s from Robert, great. It’s similar in some senses, in that you’re trying to get to a place of prochiron where this is your, as we even have a phrase for this, which is very helpful, this is your second nature, so that it becomes natural to you to flow with the flow of reality as much as possible. So as reality shifts and changes, you stay continuously coupled to it. And that is thought to be the experience of joy. I do think, though, that there are significant differences between Taoism, we’re trying not to try, is I think the central thing, and Stoicism, which has a much more deliberative top-down aspect. I recommend, and this is what I found in my own practice, that the Eastern traditions tend to be more emphasized bottom-up, and that’s why they emphasize the spontaneous emergence and the trying not to try. You see that, I think, at the core of Buddhism and Taoism. The Western traditions are much more top-down and deliberative, and they’re much more disciplined in the sense, and remember that discipline originally means following. It doesn’t mean punishing. It means following and learning. It doesn’t mean punishing. They’re disciplining, they’re top-down disciplining. And given what I know as a cognitive scientist, I think it’s very clear you need both the bottom-up Buddhist and Taoist strategies. That’s why I’ve been teaching them to you. But you need the top-down Epicurean, Stoic, and Neoplatonic strategies. The interesting thing about the Neoplatonism, as we’ll see, is that what it basically does is it sort of takes the top-down to its limit so that it flips and inverts to being completely bottom-up. And in many ways, and many people have noted this, D.T. Suzuki and others, the deep similarities between Neoplatonism and Buddhism, for example. Vita Perez is asking, what is the name of the Stoic meditation authors he’s referred to? Here, I’ll bring the book out and say it again. So this is Ellen Buzare, Stoic Spiritual Exercises. Ellen Buzare, Stoic Spiritual Exercises. Oops, I think I hit the camera. Hope that’s okay. There’s a question from the Tricer or the Tricker. I find it odd that we are digging most of the wisdom from ancient Greeks, and since there was no one who was a New Age Plato or Aristotle or any other one, am I ignorant in this? I’m not quite understanding the question. Let me read it again. I find that we’re digging most of the wisdom from the ancient Greeks, and since then, there was no one who was a New Age Plato or a Aristoles or anyone. Am I ignorant in this? So I understand your question, Ellen. This has to do with a very long historical argument about why philosophy, as philosophia, the aspirational and communitarian love for wisdom that we are practicing right here, right now, why that fell into abeyance, and why philosophy instead, until very recently, became this very technical, conceptual analysis in order to address epistemological concerns around skepticism or the nature of science. I have got degrees in academic philosophy. I think it gives me a valuable set of skills, but what academic philosophy, until very recently, didn’t talk about, even though it’s in the name of the term, was wisdom and how to cultivate wisdom. So with the work of people like Pierre Hedeau, who you’ve heard me recommend a lot, who have brought back what is ancient philosophy and what is it like to practice philosophy as a way of life rather than an academic, purely conceptual, technical set of skills within some sort of academic institution. And so there have been philosophers who have brought recently, have brought back the topic of wisdom and have started to re-understand philosophy more as a practice. I mentioned the phenomenological tradition coming out of Ussrell and this way of training attention and seeing, and Don Idy’s work, Experimental Phenomenology. And then that tradition went into people like Heidegger, and what you get there is this tremendous, post-Heidegger, you get a reflection on a lot of people trying to cultivate practices in a Heideggerian vein that will allow us to recapture a lot of what ancient philosophy is. So my good friend and colleague, Guy Sendstock, has created the circling practice as a way of doing that. Within what is still properly called academic philosophy, there has been a return to the discussion about the cultivation of wisdom. It’s also been taken up very seriously now within psychology and within cognitive science. And within that, there are a lot of people doing excellent work, both in terms of the theory, the Sophia, and the practice, the premises of wisdom. So I hope that answers your question. If you want that more long-term historical analysis, please check out my series, Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, where I take you through the ancient Greeks and then I show you how this ramified through Christianity and then how we lost it. There are important pivotal figures who try to recover it. One person I don’t get to talk enough about is somebody who is in the midst of the scientific revolution, who really tries to recover this wisdom tradition and weave it into the scientific worldview, and that’s Spinoza. So you might wanna take a look at Spinoza as well. So, Marc Lefebvre, do you have a list of sources for practices in suggested order? How would I go about building that, needing this for the ecology of practice schematization? So, that’s something I’ve been working on periodically. I’ve been in partnership with people, and what happened is that those various partnerships have been fragmented and frayed, largely because of COVID. It’s not stopping the fear. It’s back. Sorry for that interruption. Marc, what I was saying is I’m gonna do as much good work as I can in a top-down fashion, but I’m also hoping to get a lot of feedback and existential experimentation within the discourse that we’re talking about. So, I’m hoping that you’ll be able to do that. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to do that. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to do that. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to do that. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to do that. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to do that. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to do that. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to do that. Hopefully, there’s gonna be some experimental experimentation within the Discord server community about how things are fitting together and how pieces fit together. Hopefully, with really good and cooperative phylia within distributed cognition, we can come up with a very good answer to that, very central question. Like I said, I’m doing some work on it. There’s gonna be some publication on it soon, but there’s much more that needs to be done. Really important work on the needed transformation in education. It’s called Education at a Time Between Two Worlds. In some of the videos, discussions I’ve had with that, especially as curated by Andrew Sweeney, might be valuable in that project. Okay, so we have a question from Random Name. What specific parts of Spinoza do you recommend? Also, have you looked into the use of peptides or cognitive enhancer? I recommend the ethics. Actually, I recommend getting the completed works. I recommend going through the ethics, reading a proposition and a proof on a daily basis. I’ve done that a couple of times. There’s a couple of excellent books. I’m actually gonna go off camera for a sec, because I wanna get those books. I hadn’t prepared this, so please just give me a sec. Sorry for that, but here’s a couple of excellent books on, so read the ethics, and then there’s a book called The Spirit of Spinoza, Healing the Mind by Neil Grossman. Just hold that up for a minute. And then this is interesting, especially when we talked about the pre-meditatio today, but you have to get into Spinoza to understand how he’s actually arguing for a form of stoicism and neoplatonism, but the next book is Think Least of Death, Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die by Steve Madler. Then I recommend for the primary texts, get the complete Spinoza. You could read The Improvement of the Understanding. You could read The Short Treatise, which is an excellent place to begin, much more sort of spiritually written than some of his latest works, and then you can, the main thing to get into is the ethics, and read that, like read it religiously, read a proposition and a proof, reflect on it, think about it through the day, and then build and build and build, and then try periodically to see the whole in each proposition, and then see how all the propositions fit together to make the whole, and that will give you what Spinoza calls schiancia intuitiva, you’ll see the whole in the part, and the parts in the whole, and then that suddenly becomes a lens by which you see the world, and that’s a powerful transformation that the interaction with Spinoza can afford. Spinoza is one of the philosophers that I deeply love, because he represents one of the epitome, for me, of an individual trying to bridge between spirituality and science, and do it in a profound way that is not just something you read about, but as you read Spinoza, the act of reading Spinoza is like Lectio Divina. It is a spiritual exercise that is not only transforming your belief, but transforming your very ways of thinking, and ultimately your state of consciousness, your very ways of seeing and being. The only other person that I found that is like that is Platinus. So I think that’s everything for today. So remember, we’re gonna do the stoic meditations next Saturday, Saturday Saga, 10 a.m. Eastern, but I would advise you to start reading the third degree of wisdom in the qualmin as we start to prepare for Neoplatonism at the University of Neoplatonism, and you’re gonna find it both more exciting and also more challenging than both stoicism and epicureanism, at least that’s what I predict. So thank you all very much for your time and attention and for joining. I hope you keep practicing. Thank you for Jason for all of his work behind the scenes. I think this new way of trying to make use of the space is a little less jarring than the weird angle. We are still working on getting the two cameras going. It’s turned out to be a very hard problem and Marr is really working on it a lot. Makes me appreciate the kind of videos that people put together. I’ve come to a deep appreciation of that. So remember, continuity of practice is more important than sheer quantity of practice. Don’t hold yourself to the standard of a harsh perfectionism but a virtuous friendship idea because there is no friend greater than your own mind and body. No true companion on the path better than your own mind and body. Be lads unto yourselves and to each other. Take good care everyone. See you next Saturday.