https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xkfEb1FnRRM
Welcome to the Saturday Sangha Cultivating Wisdom with John Vervecki. If you’re joining us for the first time, there’s a lot that’s happened. We’ve done an entire meditation and contemplation course drawing from the Eastern traditions of Buddhism and Taoism. So to catch up with that, check for links in the description. Go and do Lesson 1. Do one or two lessons every week, but you can continue meeting with us. You might also want to take a look at Lesson 1 of the Wisdom of Hypatia course that we’re now on. After we finished with the examination, the deep study of the wisdom cultivation we can gather from the Eastern traditions, we’re now seeing what we can gather from the Western wisdom traditions using Brian McClellan’s book, The Wisdom of Hypatia, drawing wisdom, inducing wisdom from Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism. We’ve done Epicureanism. We’re finishing up Stoicism. We’re going to move into Neoplatonism. So as always, what we’re going to do first is we’re going to begin with a set, and we will start with some chanting, and then we will go into the silent set. We’ll come out of it. We’ll switch cameras. I’ll go to the whiteboard, and we’ll have some Dharma. We’re going to wrap up with looking at Vasari’s reconstruction of a stoic form of meditation. I think it’s actually a form of meditation and contemplation. It’s analogous in some ways to prajna, but we’ll get into that. Right now, get yourself in your posture. Set your phones on do not disturb, and we will begin together when I say begin. Begin. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Begin your silent set. 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. 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. 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. Okay, I’m going to move over to the whiteboard so we can begin the Dharma talk. So we are finishing up with Stoicism and I want to remind you about the pedagogical structure that we’ve come through. So here’s Epicureanism, Epic for short, and here’s Stoicism, and we’re heading towards Neoplatonism. And so we can think of these as overlapping. And we can think of the core practices within Epicureanism. We can think of, like inside here is the Pleasure Diet. We talked about structuring your pleasures. And then we talked about disciplining imagination, practices for stopping imagination from terrifying us. And then there’s the savoring practice. And then in here there’s an overlapping practice, which is the Philosophical Fellowship practice, the Philosophical Fellowship. Ran Lav emailed me, he’s fine with that. He and I are going to talk, so that’s very cool. Of course in Stoicism we have self-examination, Culpation of Virtue, we have active open-mindedness, we have the view from above, we have objective seeing, we have the pre-meditatio. Now we’re going to do a practice that is going to be that bridges between, overlaps with Neoplatonism. And this is what Buzari calls Stoic Meditation. I think a better way of putting it, because it involves both meditative and contemplative, I want to call this practice, and I think it’s going to be much more helpful to us this way, I want to call this Invoking the Logos. Invoking the Logos. And then that will take us into Neoplatonism proper, where we’re going to talk about Theoria, Theurgia, Theologia, don’t be put off by this term if you happen to be a non-theist or an atheist, and then ultimately dialectic into the Logos. Okay. So there’s a whole bunch of practices here. We still have to go in Neoplatonism, but now we’re going to do this practice based on Buzari’s work. Now why do I say it overlaps with Neoplatonism? She has drawn this from Hesiatic prayer. Hesiaticism, I think that’s the way you pronounce it, Hesism. Anyways, it comes from Hesia, which is a Greek word for divine quietness, divine silence. And this is drawn from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and that is deeply Neoplaton. So while I think she is right in capturing that this overlaps with Stoicism, it clearly overlaps with Neoplatonism. And trying to actually divide these two is not that helpful, because Stoicism actually gets taken up into Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism combines Stoicism, aspects of Aristotle, and aspects of Plato, all together. So we’ll see that, of course, when we begin the Neoplatonic, when we begin the University, when we move into the Grove. Okay. Garden, porch, and grove. Elementary school, high school, University. Okay. So let’s concentrate on this practice today, invoking the Logos. So this notion of Logos is deeply important to the Stoics, and they got the notion from Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher. And so let’s talk about what Logos means. So Logos means a gathering, ordering. Gathering things together, ordering them so that they belong together. Like when you pick a bunch of flowers, you gather them together, and then you order them together into a bouquet, or you gather together a group of soldiers, and you organize them into a company so that they can fight together. So the Logos is a gathering, ordering, principle, and process. Now that’s a lot, but that’s because this word Logos is almost, it’s very similar to the Eastern term Dharma, which means so many things all together, all at once. And so let me try and give you a more concrete example of this. From a word that is directly derived from this, logic. Okay, so what are we doing with logic? We’re gathering words or thoughts together, but not just higgledy-piggledy. We’re gathering them and ordering them into propositions. And then what we’re doing is we are working according to certain principles, like non-contradiction. And then what we do is that principle is put into practice, it’s put into practice or process, when we do something like deduction. So notice what’s going to happen here. I’m going to gather words together so they belong together into sentences, and then I’m going to abide by the principle of non-contradiction in the process of deduction. All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. I gathered and ordered according to principles, and then I put that into process. And so logic was taken as a quintessential example of Logos, but the problem is we have tended to forget that logic is only an example of this. This word, Logos is often translated also as word. So if you read the Gospel of John, it gets us to try to re-figure, reconfigure, reinterpret the creation of things. So Genesis begins with, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The Gospel of John begins with, in the beginning was the word. But that’s the English, but what it says in Greek is, in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. This idea that the Logos has this especially intimate relationship with ultimate reality and the grounding of our experience of what is sacred. Or if you’re more religious, what is divine. So you have to think of the Logos as translogical. It’s not just logical. It’s the gathering, it’s not just the gathering, ordering, principle in process of thought, it’s the gathering, ordering, principle in process of everything. Everything and systems of things all have Logos. They all have this kind of dynamic intelligibility that makes them to be what they are and makes them knowable. It makes them both to be and to be known. So insofar as everything has a structural functional organization that makes it be what it is, it has a Logos. And to know it is precisely to grasp that structural functional organization, to grasp its Logos. That’s why we put Logos at the end of all of our studies. Anthropology is Anthropos Logos. Psychology is Suke Logos. Logos of the Suke, Logos of what it is to be a human being. If you gather all of these threads back together, you can reweave the tapestry of what Logos is and what it is for the Stoics. So one way to ultimately think about this, gathering this all together, is to think about it as the self-presencing of everything. So everything is presenting. It’s presenting itself as something to you, but there’s always more that it can present itself as. So here’s a marker. I’ve grasped part of its features, its structural functional organization. It’s present to me as a marker, but it could also be present to me as a spear, etc. And so you have to think about the fact that this, don’t think of this as just a static snapshot. There is an ongoing process by which this is being and by which it can be known. It’s an unfolding. It’s a dynamic intelligibility. Everything is self-presencing. Notice that when we want a word that talks about how we think about things, we use this idea of representation. A representation, like words, here’s cat, that’s a representation of cats, or a picture of a cat. What it does is it makes the cat present itself to me again. So this making sense is the act of presencing, presencing to the mind. So the idea is it was presencing in the world as a cat, and now it’s re-presencing in your mind as the thought or concept of a cat. So you’re trying to, with the logos actually combines those two together. The presencing of the cat and the presencing of the concept of the cat are actually interpenetrating. They’re one process by which the intelligibility, the structural functional organization of the cat is made available to you. This sounds fairly abstract, but like I said, if you think about it, we’re invoking this all the time. We’re invoking the idea that things are making sense to us, and that that making sense is something we’re doing, but also something we’re receiving. It’s ultimately something we’re participating in. We’re participating in that. So from Heraclitus, the Stoics got the idea that all of reality is ultimately governed by logos. So I use logos with a capital L, because what I’m talking about, you can think of, here’s all the individual logo called logoi, but here’s the logos of anthropology, the logos of psychology, but here’s also the logos of specific objects, here’s the logos of a river. And then the idea is they are all in, and the Stoics invoke this term, sympatheia. They are all resonating with each other. It’s very much like layers of music and rhythm and melody are all in harmony with each other. So that overarching logos is the logos with a big L, and that’s what the Gospel of John means when it says, in the beginning was the logos. It means this, that principle by which things are, and by which they are intelligible, and by which we can participate in their self-presencing. Okay. So everything I was doing here right now was logos. That was logos. We could call these, instead of dharma talks, it would be completely legitimate if we were speaking it from within the Western tradition to call them logos talks. Okay, now what about this notion of invocation? It comes up, of course, in philosophical fellowship. This notion of invocation. Okay, well, first of all, when we’re making use of invocation, what’s it doing in us? It should be provoking insight, and it should be evoking a sense of emergence. Something new is being realized by us. To practice this, what you’re basically doing are practicing two things together. Sorry, three things, and I’ll give you an acronym for it. Oh, that was a mistake. Okay, so first there’s realization, and this has that double meaning that I was trying to convey with logos. It’s Janus-faced. It means making sense to me and realizing that process of presencing. Turn reality into a verb. Realizing self-presencing, but also affording and making possible my realization of its realization. That’s the term that is being used here. Your realization. And it’s beyond you’re not just representing things. I’m partially doing that. I need to use a technical term here from philosophy. You’re also instantiating. So I’ll show what I mean in concrete example. I can represent to myself the fact that within Earth’s gravity I have weight. I can think, oh, I experience weight. That’s a representation. But I actually instantiate it. I’m actually undergoing. Weight being heavy is self-presencing in me right now. So you have to think about this as you will be using representations, but the point of that representation is to get your mind to couple to. To get it deeply conformed, connect dynamically, couple to the actual process. Think about the difference of just merely representing love with a heart and instantiating love by kissing somebody. You’re not just thinking about it. You’re actually activating and actualizing. You’re making an instance of, that’s what this means, you’re instantiating love. So when you’re realizing what you’re doing here is you’re not just representing. You’re actually, you’re actualizing. You’re actualizing how something is disclosing itself to you. You’re activating it. You’re actualizing it. You’re opening yourself up to its self-presencing. So you are, of course, directing your thinking towards it. That’s the one sense of realization. But you’re also letting it realize itself in you. You, everything that we talk about now is not something you just think about. It’s something that you are. You know it by participating in it, by being it. Okay, so realization. And then appreciation in the three senses of the word. I’m going to come to a deeper understanding like when I take a musical appreciation class. I’m going to experience gratitude. I appreciate what you just did for me. Thank you so much. The value is going to increase. Oh, that is appreciating in value. All three of these senses, understanding, conjoined. You’ve got understanding, gratitude, and a sense of value increase. This creates a sense of reverence. Deep understanding that is coupled to deep gratitude, that is coupled to a deep sense of the emergence of new value, new meaning, new connectedness. And then participation. So this is knowing by being. I’ve already talked about this. If you do these other ones, it leads into this. You know it by being it. You are at one with it. You are enjoying it. Remember the whole point of Stoicism is this kind of joy where you realize and appreciate and participate in the depths of the flow of nature. That flow of nature also comes from Heraclitus. Because Heraclitus thought that the flow of nature is a logos. So this gives you an acronym by the way, RAP. I want you to rap as a verb, the logos. Because rap is this combination of music and speech. Imagine if you take everything in music, everything in speech, and put them together. That’s the state you have to be in to invoke the logos. You invoke it the way you invoke music, the way you appreciate it and participate in it. But you’re also speaking out. You’re making sense. Okay? I’m going to take you through this exercise now. First of all, I’ll explain it on the board. Then we’ll go back and we’ll sit and we will go through it together. I’ll talk you through this practice. Okay. So let’s use what she talks about. She says, first sitting like a mountain. This is number one. And this is the Greek Hexis. She doesn’t translate it for you, which is odd. But this means state or trait or habit. This is you realizing how you inhabit your mind and body. You inhabit your mind and body. So what you’re trying to get here is, what we’re going through here is we’re going through layers of the logos. Here you’re picking up on the stability, the self-perpetuation of self-presencing. There’s a stability to things. They’re not just flipping in and out of existence. There’s a stability to them. The stability of self-perpetuation. Think about how logic stabilizes your thoughts. And then we’re going to move to sitting like a poppy. I don’t know why poppy in particular. Just like a flower. Okay, so this is the Greek word phusis. It’s where we get physics from. But phusis doesn’t mean what we now mean by physical. Phusis means blooming forth, springing forth from itself. It has to do more with self-organized emergence. And so what you’re picking up now is the vitality of everything. There’s a logos to it, but that logos is making everything emerge. All the atoms of this are being gathered together, ordered together, so that this marker emerges. Everything has that kind of vitality to it. The vitality of self-organization. Third one is there’s an ascent here as you can see. Sitting like an ocean. Here, what you’re trying to pick up on, I think she’s a little bit, oh, I wanted to pick, this has to do with hexis. This has to do, as I said, with phusis. And this has to do with sucke, where we get the word psyche from. She writes it this way. The Greek is in between our Y and our U, so that’s why you see these double writings. Here, what we’re talking about is an ocean. Now think about the waves of an ocean, and you’ve got your waves of your breath to help you, right? And think about prajna. So when you’re taking the in-breath, the moreness, right? All of the possibilities, all of the relations. So the mystery of the moreness, and then it comes into the shining suchness, the particular thing. So this is how everything is self-determining. So we’ve got how everything is self-perpetuating, hexis, how everything is self-organizing, that vitality of self-organization, and now we have how everything is intelligible because it’s self-determining. This is a way of talking about this from a scholar named Pearl. Look at this word. It’s great. So when you’re trying to determine what something is, you’re trying to make sense of it, figure its order, but when you’re determined, you’re also setting yourself onto something. And people talk about determinism. That means that everything is ordered in the universe. Everything is a self-determining thing. Everything. Spinoza talked about this, I guess, kinetis. So everything is self-perpetuating, and you’re saying these all are similar. That’s the point. They’re all different aspects. They’re all layers of the logos. Everything is gathering together, right, ordering, so that it has a stability, it has a vitality, and it has an intelligibility. You can determine what it is, and it is determined to be what it is. And then finally, sitting like a sage. Back to internalizing the sage. And the part of this is nous. This comes from the Greek word noine, which means to notice, but not through discursive thought. It means to notice, to have an integrative, comprehensive insight that sizes things up and gets you to put you in contact with their logos. And here, what are we trying to pick up on? Here, we’re trying to pick up on how everything has an aspect of self-transcendence to it. Everything is much more than it seems to be, and everything is much more than we think it to be. Notice what we’re doing here is we’re intensifying the self-presencing. So she says when we’re sitting like a mountain, we want to sense the weight of presence, that stability. And then when we’re sitting like a poppy, it’s like a flower turning towards the sun. We want to sense the energy, the weight of self-presencing, the energy of self-presencing. This is like the music, the rhythm, the measure of self-presencing. And this is the source, sensing the source, ascending, reaching in ineffability towards the source. Because in the beginning, it’s not only, right, in the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God, but somehow the logos also is God towards the source. So this gives us our grounding, right, we’re picking up on our grounding. This gives us a sense on how things are emerging. This gives us a sense on how things are ordered, how they’re determined. And this gives us a sense of how things are ascending, how they are pointing back to the ineffable, inexhaustible source of it all. Alright, so the thing we’re going to do now is we’re going to go, I’m going to go back, we’re going to switch camera again, I’m going to sit and I’m going to just take you through this practice. Okay, so we’re switching the camera now. Alright, so let’s take a moment of silence. I’ll try to do this as briefly as you can, but I want you to find your core four, I want you to center, find your center, find your root, find your flow, very important for this practice, and find your focus. So we’ll take a moment of silence and then I will basically talk you, walk you through the practice. So a couple moments of silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Paying your attention to how you are rooted, how you are sitting like a mountain, though still alert as a warrior. Invoke the stability within you. The way you’re inhabiting your mind and body is premised on the fact that there’s a stability, a self-perpetuation of your body and your mind that you participate in. You don’t make it, you participate in it. Sense that layer of the logos. The way there’s a stability that allows you to inhabit your mind and your body. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Sense the weight of the self-presencing of reality. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Now sense that also outside of you. Resonate with it. There’s a stability to things that allows you to inhabit the world. A stability in the flow. That’s the logos. That’s the logos without. And it corresponds and is at one with the logos within. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Now sitting like a poppy, like a flower. Feel the vitality within you. The life within you. The self-organizing flow of life. That vitality. The energy of self-presencing. The energy of the logos. Silence. Feel it as continuous with the stability of the logos. Silence. Silence. Now sense that vitality outside of you. Everything is self-organizing. Everything has energy flowing through it. Silence. Silence. The vitality within and the vitality without. Sense the vitality at one. Sense that energy of self-presencing. Silence. Stability within and without. Energy within and without. Silence. Silence. Silence. Everything about you is making sense. In a felt way, but also in a conceptual way. It’s like music. It’s making sense. It’s self-determining. You can determine. Everything is structured to be the way it is, but to be knowable in the way that it is. Sense that music within. The intelligibility of the logos. Silence. That music is continuous with the energy. The vitality. And the stability, the weight. Silence. Sense the intelligibility without. Everything is in process, but not as chaos. It makes sense. It’s intelligible. You can connect to it. You can appreciate it. Silence. The music within and the music without are one music. The music of the logos. The energy of the logos. The weight of the logos. Silence. Silence. Sitting like an ocean. It’s flowing in and out. That rhythm, that pattern, that music that we’ve been talking about. Pick up on it. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Sitting like an ocean. The waves of being. Listen to moreness. Silence. Silence. The weight of the logos. The energy of the logos. The music of the logos. Now sitting like a sage. The source of this all. The source of all these layers of logos. Of the weight of self-presencing. The energy of self-presencing. The intelligibility of self-presencing. The music. There’s an eternal source of it all. From which it emanates and to which it always returns. The logos was with God. The logos was God. Silence. Silence. Silence. Sitting like a mountain. The weight of self-presencing. Sitting like a poppy. The energy of self-presencing. Sitting like an ocean. The music. The self-determination. The waves of being. Of self-presencing. Sitting like a sage. Everything pointing towards the source of it all. The ineffable source. Silence. Silence. Slowly come out of your practice and we have time. We’re going to take a couple of questions. We’re just waiting for the first question to come up. This is from Aleph123. This goes back to a previous lesson you said, not start with Pre-Meditatio as you might go too deep and struggle with fatality. Do you have any suggestions on what to do if one thinks one has things figured out but lack this virtue of respect? If you think you have things figured out, it is perhaps a good chance or a good time to take up Pre-Meditatio. The Stoics were always reminding us of the more-ness. There’s sort of a positive and negative sense of the more-ness. There’s a happy sense of interconnectedness. There’s so much more. And that should induce awe in the sense of awesome. And that will help to get you out of the sense that you figured it out. But then there’s the sense of, there’s so much more than me in the sense of impermanence. Everything will pass away. And of course the Buddhist notion is that impermanence and interdependence are completely identical in a non-logical way with each other. So there’s so much more. I’m so connected. Awesome. There’s so much more. Everything is passing away, arising and passing away. The waves of being arising and passing away. The music of being. The ocean of being. And the ocean can be not only awesome, the ocean can be awful. And I think that’s what we call the practice of remembering in the sense of invoking and internalizing. There’s so much more of you. Do both. If you do just one, you inflate and you think yourself a god. If you do just other, you fall into despair and think of yourself as nothing more than a passing insect. The two together. Optimal grip. Tanas. Manual post. I’ve been struggling with good methods of gathering feedback on practices. Any suggestion? So if you mean from yourself or from others, so from others, the standard practices you want to do is you want to try and create a questionnaire and then you want to make sure that the questionnaire is reliably giving you the kind of information that gives you both what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. And so you often have to keep reconfiguring, keep rewriting the questionnaire until you get a set of questions that seems to be reliably predictive of how well people are doing. So once you’ve run the test on people, like to get it, then what you do is you turn it around. You don’t ask people where they’re at in their practice. You ask them these questions. You get feedback from answers to the question and then you try to predict how they’re doing in their practice. When you, when your questionnaire accurately can predict how they’re doing with their own self assessment and any external measures, remember what’s more important is transformations in their life, then your questionnaire is considered to have a kind of validity to it and then you can start using it. You can of course try the same thing with yourself. It’s a little bit more difficult, but the thing might be to try and work this out with other people and then apply it to yourself. Manual post. I tend to rotate my head in the direction I’m putting my awareness in meditation. I think this results in me losing my posture over time. Any suggestions? Is there, yeah, this is something that people fall into. Is there a way of you, like perhaps when you’re not even meditating, sit and practice moving your attention around without altering your eyes or your head. You can do this, by the way. It’s called a covert shift of attention. It’s well established and you can get better out of the practice. So practice covert shifting of attention while you’re just sitting. You’re not meditating. Just sitting looking out in your room. And train yourself and teach yourself confidence, faith in yourself, having faith in yourself that you can shift your attention without having to actually enact even moving your eyes or even more so moving your head. So practice that a lot until you get to that ability where you know in practice what it is to exercise covert shifts of attention. Mark the Feb. I find this concept of all bad acts being assigned to ignorance to be in conflict with the concept of justice. Any thoughts on how to resolve this? Does Neo-Platonism fix this? I find this concept of all bad acts being assigned to ignorance be in conflict with the concept. So I think Mark is talking about the stoic idea, which actually comes from Plato, that nobody knowingly commits evil. And so you have to mark if you perhaps understood ignorance in a much more comprehensive sense of illusion and self-deception. And so the basic idea here is people do what is wrong because they misapprehend it. They misconstrued it as something good. And in so that sense the ignorance is not sort of a lack of basic knowledge. It’s a lack of a correct understanding. That’s why right understanding is part of the eightfold path. Without a right understanding, people fall into self-deception. And then the idea is it’s ultimately self-deceptive behavior, self-destructive behavior. Then this is analogous in some ways to karma. That’s a pattern that promulgates out from you. Other people catch it. So your self-destructiveness also becomes other destructiveness. And that’s why it is considered the source of bad acts. So perhaps what was concerning you about justice is that justice requires a sense of responsibility. But I don’t think that is being violated here because the central Platonic claim is these people are failing living to fail, and this is the core stoicism, they’re failing to live up to the deepest, most important part of responsibility. That which is actually most in your control, which is your ability to overcome self-deception, to see things as they are, to have insight and wisdom. So there’s a sense in which people are failing to live up to the fundamental responsibility to themselves because that fundamental responsibility to yourself, the cultivation of wisdom, is what is needed to overcome self-deception and prevent doing immoral or unjust acts. And Plato also turns it the other way. Before you consider doing anything evil or bad towards other people, you have to first partially destroy yourself because you have to use your self-deception to do something that is not good for you. You have to destroy yourself because you have to give in or you have to avoid or give in to self-deception, which is ultimately self-destructive. So the person, this sounds strange and it may rankle us a little bit, but Plato argues that the person that does evil is actually even more harmed than any harm they do to each other because the idea is to do that to another person and that is self-deception and self-destructive harm. So you’re ultimately self-harming. And then the idea is nobody would willingly self-harm. Again, when people do self-harm, they cut themselves, but they’re deluded that that will actually alleviate their psychological pain and that cut and physical pain is the best way of ameliorating the psychological pain, which is incorrect. So I think that would answer your question mark about this. This is a really, this has always been a famously challenging idea from both Stoicism and Platonism and therefore also Neoplatonism. Augustine, for example, Augustine famously rejected it. One of the distinctions between Christianity and Neoplatonism, although he integrated the two together, or between Christianity and Stoicism is Augustine thought that people were actually capable of doing evil for its own sake, that they were always licking the earth or scratching the open sore of lust, that sort of thing. That’s one of the big division points. And it’s hard to find evidence for this. Augustine said he did something just because it was wrong. And I mean, I take him to be sincere, but when you look at his situation, that love of destructiveness, it seems to be part of a pattern of reciprocal narrowing on his part. And so I don’t think that it’s the correct way to put it. I ultimately don’t agree with that notion of Augustine. I think a better way of interpreting original sin, that’s his notion, is not like a disease within us, but more like the Buddhist notion that the very processes that make us adaptive are the processes that make us vulnerable to self-deception. So I prefer thinking of it in terms of Dukkha rather than original sin. Random name. How should one go about learning all of these Greek words? Are there books specific to this or other online resources? Yes, there’s books you can get that translate. I’ll put it in the description. They give you a translation of Greek philosophical terms. There’s Greek philosophical term dictionaries you can purchase. You can also look the terms up online. And most of them are given a definition. Is there a glossary in the Kualman? There might be. I’ll have to double check. Deborah Wagstaff. Just waiting for the question to come up. The intelligibility, the music, the determinism in everyone, the music we’re all making together that everything and everyone has. We are not making it. We are participating in it together. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly correct. Notice that this is Sati. What we’re doing is in the way we’re wrapping the logos, invoking it, we’re doing a deep, profound kind of remembering that reconnects us. It regrounds us. It causes us to participate in the emergence. It helps us to recognize, to make sense again. That’s what recognize literally means. To recognize, to make sense again, and ultimately to participate to be at one with it. A profound sense of integration and unity. Okay, everyone. That’s it for today. Oh, I’ll take one more question. It just came up. Random name. I’ve been reading Spinoza’s collective works. Which parts would you say once you pay extra attention to and which parts are easily misunderstood? Is there an email I can reach out to? I’ll talk to Ammar about the potential email. Which parts you should pay extra attention to? I mean, the ethics, I think, is the part that ultimately on the correction or the improvement of the understanding is very important. The ethics is the central text. It’s too easy to misinterpret what Spinoza’s doing as a theory, but it’s not called a theory. It’s called the ethics. The most important misunderstanding and misapprehension, people of Spinoza, is they read it and think what they’re doing is gathering a theory. The theory is totally in service of theoria. You’re supposed to go to a place where you’re not believing the theory. You are seeing reality the way Spinoza did. That all at once understanding of how everything fits together, all these layers of logos interpenetrate and mutually constrain and afford and are at one with each other. Not in a homogenous sense, but in this dynamic coupled sense. I want to thank everyone for joining. I want to thank Ammar and Jason. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified in the next video. Follow me on Twitter for any updates about these streams. Invite others who might benefit by sharing this series. Please join the Discord server to engage in a lot of these practices and join a community. There’s a link in the description. We’re doing this every Saturday morning at 10 a.m. Eastern time. We will have a general Q&A. We were supposed to do it yesterday, but we’re postponing it. My health has not been good the past couple of days. We’re postponing it to next Friday. Please remember if you can to send me a clip of yourself no more than 10 seconds for the compilation video. Send it to Ammar at JohnVervecky.com So please remember, continuity of practice is more important than sheer quantity of practice. Don’t hold yourself to a standard of harsh perfectionism, but virtuous friendship. For there is no friend better than your own mind and body. Be lamp-centered to yourselves and to each other. Take good care everyone. See you next Saturday. Bye bye.