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Philosophy For Our Times
The search for higher states of consciousness | Philosopher Jessica Frazier
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I have this theory that humans feel ready for magic and dragons and quests and beauty and glory and grandeur. We just don't get it as much as we kind of naturally ought to.
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Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times. Today we have Indian philosophy at the Search for Unity with the charismatic Jessica Frazier, lecturer in theology and religion at Oxford University. Jessica is an incredibly inspiring speaker who will challenge us with her insight from Indian philosophy, from yoga, and from meditation on whether we are really free and living as consciously and awarely as we can. So without further ado.
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So I'm going to start. I always start with stories about my childhood. It means there's some sort of psychological thing I'm trying to work out. But they also say that sometimes that's where philosophy starts. It starts. Children are the best philosophers. That's strange. Seeing the world as strange and noticing what later in life we become so used to, we just accept it can be the beginning of thinking philosophically. When I was a kid, I remember thinking already it's like an eternal midlife crisis. Thinking, okay, this is good. I'm waking up, getting dressed, eating my breakfast, doing some stuff, going to bed, doing it again and again. The grownups are doing the same thing too. What's the next step? Right? What's the even better bit like? And you're reading all these fairy tales and da, da, da, you know, and you're like, oh, when do the dragons come in where's the flying and the da da da and the shining and the. And in a way, I think later in life when I ended up studying mystical traditions and so on and so forth, it's still that child search for that something more somehow that we all feel we're ready for. I have this theory that humans feel ready for magic and dragons and quests and beauty and glory and grandeur. We just don't get it as much as we kind of naturally ought to in a weird sort of way, right? So in some ways this talk is trying to think about what that means. Someone said to me recently, yeah, I'm having trouble changing my life. I might have to change my inner life instead. And I thought that was a really interesting insight. This talk is sort of about all those traditions in history, of philosophy, of psychology, sometimes of religion that are there to try and give us ways, tools to change the inner life, change the nature of our lives, and kick us up to some sort of higher level of experience. So that's kind of a pitch. And so I'm going to put that in terms of higher states of consciousness. I'm going to draw a little bit on Western thought, a little bit on Indian thought, and try and answer some of the questions about how do we get to the next level. What else is possible than just what gives me great sadness every day when I wake up and I'm like, I want to think about the higher things, but I've got to answer emails, get some coffee, you know, go on to the next task. And by the end of the day, I haven't had a chance to think about much more than the next thing that comes like an hour, an hour and an hour on, right? So. And I'm not sure that I feel like the human mind is made for that, that we just naturally want more. So we're going to take this topic by thinking about the nature of the self. It's funny, this word, the self. Four little letters, S, E, L, F. And everyone gets very excited about it. And sometimes I wonder why. But there's something important in here because it's asking, what are you? That can seem very banal. I'm like, I'm me. I'm experiencing stuff now. Shrug. I'm in a body. Shrug. But most philosophies in the world have sometimes said to people, you are more than just what you appear to be right now, in whatever way. This little physical body, thinking about a small scale of experiences, you're more than that. It's just that we forget so if we look across different philosophies, we can ask these questions. Are you, Are you just a ghost in a machine? Or imagine a self driving car, just someone sitting in an automatic body and mind that cycles through the same habits, the same physical capacities and patterns day after day? Are we just kind of people who are basically passengers in our own lives, following through everything that's around us? So we go in a machine or a self driving car, alienated from everything else, in a sort of an uncaring urban desert, just following through part of the mechanisms around us? Are you. I'm thinking if that's maybe almost like the Cartesian individual inside their body being pushed around by forces, here's maybe a slightly more Buddhistic angle. Are you a sort of a dream that's happening, not ultimately real, a sort of a program that's playing out, waiting to be wakened up and freed from this world of space and time and experiences, to be wakened up, in some cases wiped out and liberated? Or here's another way of looking at it, I think much more Western, modern, materialist way of looking at it. Are you a sort of small and temporary spotlight on a highly localized moving stage? Are you really just the sum of your thoughts in their little local experiences, moment by moment as you move through the world? So at the beginning of the day you were in your room and that little sphere of thought is you. And here you are now in this little sphere of experience is you. And you extend a bit backwards in your memory and you extend a bit forwards in your plans. But we don't have time to think much larger than the little spotlight we're in most of the time. So are we just that little circle of experience that characterizes us most of the time or. And I think these are where they start to get more interesting. Are you a sort of a traveler in the whole cosmos, a traveler in being by virtue of the capacities of your mind, which are not just a flashlight showing what's around you, your mind is an imagination. Your mind is able to access concepts, stories, possibilities, plans and other things. So are you a traveler and being able to use reason and imagination to lift yourself above your physical body and access the hidden threads that span all of reality? Last night I was so tired and I went to bed and I thought, oh, I'm just going to. And then I don't like to do it with my phone, but I picked up my phone, I checked some stuff and I suddenly interested in this idea. And then I was like, oh, that's interesting. And then There's a book, my body was still, but my mind went elsewhere. Right. And is that something really important and fundamental about us? We're not stuck here. We have this capacity to lift, in some sense, out of and beyond body and travel. And even more than that. Are you something like an artist of possibilities? You're not just receiving what the world is telling you to do, forcing you to do moment by moment, you're making it. We don't get much chance to exercise the artistry of our lives, I think, sometimes, right. So many possibilities. But we all every day wake up to certain expectations and routines many times which we have to fulfill. Right? But that artistry is there sometimes. I have to say to my students, if you really want, you can walk out right now. And if you really feel it, then do. Don't do it just because it seems like fun and you got some. You know, you're a bit bored, you know, but if you really have something more, get out of the routine, right? But we don't generally, especially once you grow up and you've got a job and you don't get to do that very much. Children notice that about the adults around them. They have this power that the children don't have. And yet we're almost more constrained in what we do. Right? Child outside agrees in a way. This speaks to an idea that we particularly, I think, in Western thought, almost feel like victims. The way that our self ends up evolving is almost as a victim of the outside world. Right. As soon as you grow up. I remember as a kid just thinking, asking my parents, how long am I going to have to go to school? And my parents basically said, every day until you're 16 or 18. And I just. And I was like, can I just not go? And my parents were like, no, you have to go. And I thought, what the hell? This is like slavery. This should be illegal. I could not believe it. And that was totally. You know. And in some ways, yeah, school had some good ideas, but the kids weren't always nice. And it was a very weird phenomenon from that, from school onward into work, through so much of life, we are, in a sense, victims of the outside world. And we end up experiencing the world as a kind of a struggle. The mind can be depicted as a kind of a monad, a little hidden spark seeking protection from the external world. And some of the thinkers who shaped Western civilization, Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Kant, to some extent, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Riccur, Freud, Jung, they kind of depict us in that way. They all see Us as these little creatures fighting a world that in some ways is fighting back against us. And so sometimes I felt that hell is. Who is it who said hell is other people. Such. Sometimes I think hell is me. And don't get me wrong, I quite. It's okay, Beam. I mean, I'm not that great. As for family, I have a million problems, you know, I'm grateful that my subconscious gives me nice dreams. I have flying dreams a lot. So I'll be like, that was a crap day. And then I'll fly for an hour in my dreams. Thanks. So my mind is kind enough to me, but still the idea is just this, just Jessica in her mind again and again, day by day by day. As it is, as I'm stuck being actually is not that appealing. Hell could be being stuck with yourself only as you presently are. Right. Hell could be the sense of the end of possibilities. I think sometimes that's what a midlife crisis is. It's that age at which you start to go, I don't know if I'm going to make it to those other dreams and possibilities that I held not just for my life, but for myself and who I want to be. That's, to me, almost the most important part. And when you lose that sense, there's something very dark going on. Heaven could be then, in a sense, the higher states that we're always seeking. We're not even sure what all of them are. There's not an exhaustive list. But, for instance, the intensities of life, you can call it philosophical, language, aesthetic, intensities of value. The moments in your life when you look back and you say, that moment was bright and vivid and beautiful, I'd almost give up all the rest of it for that moment. If you've had those moments. Most people, somewhere, something that matters, but we get so few, in many cases, absorption in great good. My mum is very sentimental. And she sees someone being kind to someone, or a little child having fun or something, she just suddenly starts to burst into tears. It's very embarrassing, but very charming. And it's because she feels the good, the abstract reality of good happening every time it happens. She gets really excited about it, right? And so she's constantly moving in awareness of that, touching on that level, presence in the moment. A lot of people who are Buddhists will say to me, actually, I don't want to connect to something outside my. I don't want to. I want to be able to be with just this right now. And actually even just this, a light through that Beautiful skylight, the sense of other people around you, the immediacy of these things, the thoughts in your mind. We don't even get to be with that most of the time. We're already skiing ahead to the next thing we have to worry about, right? Expansion to the community. Those moments when you. You don't feel isolated, but you realize you're suddenly connected to this much larger group of people. Those can be powerful. The view from above. A sense that I'm not just little Jessica. Even when I'm dead and gone and forgotten, this strange larger reality will go on generating things I can't even imagine. So many ways that we can go beyond the little monadic self and connect to some sense of what it is that really is of greater value. We can be a self that is happier and more meaningful. And I think that we've always, through history, had a kind of hunger for more than we get on the everyday scale. And we see it. So my job is, I teach my research in philosophies and religions and kind of spiritual traditions from different parts of the world, and I work particularly on Asia. But I see it again and again through history, whether it's in yoga and meditation, mystics in the west, phenomenology, It's a modern 20th century European tradition. A lot of my students will say, you know, I'm exploring it through psychedelics, cool meditation, people traveling. I'm. I love to travel. And I think in some ways my search for beauty on the largest possible scale I can find. It is my way of trying to connect arts, whatever your things are. I'd be interested to hear what are the ways that people try and make those shifts into the higher register. Right. But I think those are important. These are. We're taught that our job and our everyday life is important, but I think these might be the most important parts. And we have a hunger for that. And I think that reflects the idea that the self that you are currently is not the only you. Maybe it's not even the realest you. You know, if you have that sense of looking back at your childhood self, maybe teenage self, middle aged self, self first in love self whose heart is broken. Right. All the different phases of person that you've been, you can both get a sense of like, oh, maybe I'm not any of them, but you can also have a sense, well, actually you're not fixed who you are can be other people. I think that we love stories, books, films, myths, narrative because it helps us be someone else. Have you ever used a. Ever felt In a film, you've become that other character you've ever read and enjoyed being that other person. Almost woken up feeling as if you are that person for a while. I think that speaks to something incredibly important and philosophically central to our understanding of what we are. I don't think I am, most fundamentally, Jessica Fraser. I'm so ready to be someone else in a certain kind of way. I think there's something more fundamental underneath this current identity. And actually we get to sort of borrow other selves through stories. But one thing I do want to kind of point out in this talk is that most of the time we escape from the limitations of our current self by kind of jumping into escaping through, whether it's through a beautiful film, whether it's through a book, whether it's through an experience. You go on holiday and part of the thrill of being on holiday is you get to be someone other than your everyday self. Right. Or psychedelics. Someone said to me just yesterday here, he said, yeah, it was amazing. I took blah, blah, blah, and then I was like an infinite being at the bottom of a pit in eternal time, being deconstructed by tiny robots in the space outside of time. I was like, wow, sounds exciting. I was like, so what happened? He said, well, then I just came back to being me again. So there's something interesting that we crave those things, but they're always like holidays. They're always at mini escapes. And then we come back again to being ourselves. And again, I don't mean that who we are is a bad thing. I think that's really who we really are as the center. It's a beautiful thing, but we kind of want something that is maybe a more permanent form of power and control over the self. What if we could make changes? We could move forward. We could become who we most fully want to be and keep it that way. Make the change, have control, not be permanently this sort of victim of life. You've ever had that experience of a time of great inspiration and beauty and meaning in your life. And that feeling when it starts to go and you can't quite keep it, sometimes I think beautiful music does that. The music that's been most meaningful to me in my life just filled me with rapture and a connection to all that I value and that. But that feeling when you've played that song too many times and it won't do it for you anymore. Oh, it's like losing. It's like falling out of love. You lose a kind of a source of inspiration. It's quite dark. So I'm interested in the way that there have been traditions that try to give us the tools to make it more permanent, more enduring, take us beyond helplessness and a sense that all we can do is escape. And actually, I think ancient cultures and religions often try and do that for us. We can look into them to try and find resources for that. Actually, there have been many thinkers. If you go back through the history of the 20th century, some in the 19th century, there was a brilliant period there when people were looking for resources to improve the self permanently and to give them to everyday people. Right. One of the famous ones is Carl Jung, and he's finding kind of new renewed interest. And we'll come back to him and people who took up his ideas. James Hillman, Joseph Campbell in the States was really influential. He ends up influencing things like Star wars stories about people trying to rise to higher states. Jordan Peterson is interesting. He's not my favorite guy necessarily, personally, but I do see how many people are inspired by him. Right. Just as an academic, I have to say. He's. A lot of people say, yeah, but. And it's often the Jungian aspects. Right. So there's something that he's touching on, which is interesting to people, but also in literature, anyone who's an old hippie will remember Hermann Hesse, perhaps. Yeah, Right. And people who. The people like him, even CS Lewis, interestingly, was used for that. Charles Williams, who was the third Inkling in Oxford. Carlos Castaneda, who helped bring in a sense of exploring other cultures and sort of interesting psychedelics, but also spiritual practices as ways forward and history of religions. That's not Jeremy Corbyn, but Henri Corbin, who was a French scholar of Sufi mysticism, who was one of the men to make Islamic Sufi mysticism an important spiritual journey for many people in the 60s. People sometimes forget that that was an important story. Source of inspiration. Gershom Sholem brought in Kabbalah as a big thing to explore. DZ Suzuki was one of the people who got people interested in Buddhism. The way that Buddhism is so common in the west now is partly due to people in this era. And somewhere between the 1920s and 1960s, and there's a whole bunch of them talk about Mircea Eliade, existentialists like Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, also artists. Pollock, Jackson Pollock. People see this big, messy canvas. But he said his work was part of a kind of a mystical search from some deeper, more primeval self. Kandinsky, with his wacky shapes here and there, wrote a great length about the spirituality in art. Right. Mondrian Hilma AF Klent Recently, I think, apparently I'm told it was the Mets most well attended exhibition ever was paintings by the Swedish mystic Hilma of Klint. So people are hungering for these things and there are people who gave their lives to it. I kind of feel like we're ripe for a renewal of these interests now. Carl Jung said this is linked to the conditions of modernity. We do want more than the modern world is giving us. He said for modern man, the various forms of religion no longer appear to come from within, from the psyche. They seem more like items from the inventory of the outside world. So we're getting religion as we get it, for a lot of people is coming in at them and you're being told what to do. And it's not necessarily resonating with what's in yourself in some sense. He says no spirit, not of this world. Vouchsafe vouchsafes him inner revelation. Instead, the modern man tries on a variety of religions and beliefs as if they were Sunday attire, only to lay them aside again like worn out clothes. And it's interesting, you see this practically people trying different things, moving here, there, try that, try this. And often they don't stick. Right. So what is it that we need to make things a little bit more ongoing, concrete? He says about the psyche. It seems almost incredible that though we receive signals from the mind every night in dream, deciphering these communications seems too tedious for any but a few people to be bothered with it. Man's greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of and is often mistrusted and despised. It's only psychological. Too often means it's nothing, it doesn't matter, it's not real. Right. And Jung's point is interesting. We live with our minds every night. If you have a dream, you, your mind is sending you all kinds of crazy stuff. There's almost like another person, an ocean of possibility within us that most of the time is not getting tapped, not getting touched. Right. So there's a sense that we've had in the past, inner explorers trying to chart the way to get to those hidden inner states, those higher possibilities to regions of experience that we map and need to give new names to again. So how do we get there Now? I want to give us a little bit of a map of how old religions say you can go forward towards having control, starting to find more permanent possibilities for your mind. So it's supposed to be like a recipe book. And at the end you'll be like, oh, that's not the recipe I wanted. But I can at least tell you what their suggestions were. Carl Jung and a scholar called Mercia Eliado, who wrote at length about yoga, one of the first Westerners to bring yoga to the modern world as a major tradition, said, you know what? India went particularly far on this plane. Why was India so good at thinking about the self? Well, one of the reasons is yoga. And yoga originally, remember, doesn't mean like physical yoga, it means meditation. It's not control over your body, strengthening your body, it's control over and strengthening your mind yourself, Yoga, meditation. So if we look at the beginning of the Yoga Sutras, this is the ancient text that sets it out for you. I'm about to give you a tiny Sanskrit lesson. Meditation. Yoga is the stilling of the turnings of consciousness so that the seer, who you really are, dwells in its own nature, because otherwise it will take the form of those turnings of consciousness. Let's break it down. The beginning of the Yoga sutras says ata yoga anushasana. So now ata yoga meditation teachings or instruction in yoga. And its first message for all of you is this yoga. Citta vritti, nirodaha chitta is consciousness. Vritti is turning nirodha road like to turn, the stopping, turning, nirodha of the vrittis, the changes in consciousness. Your mind is running, running, running, running, running. If anyone's ever tried meditation, you know how fast your mind will jump back into its own little stream and go running again, right? And it's about, it's trying to stop that. If you don't stop it, your mind will keep having the same form as those turnings. What we need to do instead is allow the seer, the drashta, the seer, to be not influenced by what it's experiencing, the outside world, but to sit in its own fundamental nature and take that control. There's connections to contemporary cognitive psychology here. If you look at cognitive psychologists, they'll talk about how what makes you different from animals and plants is that we have something called executive consciousness. Your mind can not only respond to the outside world, it can observe its own decision making about how to respond. You can think, shall I go and eat or shall I stay and rest? That ability to see possibilities and choose between them is what they call the executive mind. It's kind of affected by something called attention. You're able to direct your attention to your thoughts. Imagine the sleeping, imagine the reading, imagine the running, the different possibilities. You can push yourself in one direction and achieve what these ancient texts called sovereignty. Sovereignty means you get back to a kind of central space within the self, which is what you need to discover where you have power. You're not being driven here or there, but you yourself can be the one who thinks, wait, I don't have to go to work today. I may choose to, but I don't have to. I'm more than that automatic push to do what the outside world is telling me. Interestingly, the Katha Upanishad, very ancient text, uses the same image as Plato. You are a person inside of a chariot, and the horses of your life, of your passions, of your duties, are going to run away. Your mind are going to run away with you, but you need to rein them back in. That's what yoga means, to yoke. It's literally linked to the same word. Yoga and yoke are linked to yoke your own mind, get yourself back and take back control. Now I'm going to run out of time, so I'm going to rush through. Mircea Eliade, who's an interesting scholar, wrote about the idea that we live inside of a danger, that we lose control of our minds and then lose control of our lives, and then our life is done, and our last thought is, what was I meaning to do and to be? And he says meditation represents a possibility that we can take back control. What happens if we do? He talks about the idea that you can use meditation to become a kind of a wizard, right? Harry Potter isn't supposed to go around just, you know, killing Voldemort. A real wizard takes control of his own mind. A real wizard harnesses the possibility inside himself. And what other possibilities are there for the human self? All right, I'm going to run through this super fast, and then I'm going to get you to choose one of five possibilities, different directions you could go with your own mind. Imagine I'm giving you a compass of possibilities of higher states of consciousness that are achievable through meditative and other practices. They're going to be these five different points of the compass. One, the ancient texts point out that you can scale yourself up or down. You can focus in on this very moment. You can focus out on your whole life, on the world, on all of history. So in a sense, they use this term, Samgraha, grasping together your mind to either to little things or to large things. You could be a small scale self. And Buddhism tends to say that that's a good thing. Learn to recognize each moment, each tiny detail. Focus inward and get your joy out of short circuiting this idea that you should be doing something larger. Get your joy out of being able to appreciate the smallest fleeting moments of life, become smaller as a self, and then actually you'll be able to enjoy the moment fully. So Buddhism of different kinds ask you to reach a kind of a way to respond immediately to present experiential data with active, responsive awareness just of the contents of your experience as directly experienced. Right? So in this moment, I won't be like, oh, what happens after the talk? I'll be like, appreciate this moment. That's the smaller scale self, each bit, bit by bit appreciated in itself. And in Buddhism, that can go all the way to the idea that you're no longer worried about Jessica, you're even more focused on each moment that constitutes our reality. Or you might want to expand to a larger scale self, a self that Marcus Aurelius, so out of India over to Roman Greece, talks about as going back to the inner citadel of the self and achieving a conquest of all space from within your own mind. To look back over history, to look back across cultures, to look out at the people around you and share their experiences is precisely to have that ability to kind of go beyond your smaller self. And Indian texts also often talk about this. It can have implications for becoming a politically more engaged self with the people around you. And in ancient Indian thought, it means you can immerse yourself into the cosmos as a whole, into the whole of reality. Right? Again, you lose the ego. Because I'm not just worried about Jessica and what's going to happen after this talk. I'm seeing being as a whole and I've become part of that, right? So that's the large self, you've got the small self, and the large self, you have the intense self. Someone said, why are Bollywood films so crazy intense? But actually they're linked to an ancient Indian tradition that's about intensifying and savoring experience. Right, We've got. I won't go through the poetry, but there are all these poets from the ancient world that try to say, if I am a limited being, going through difficulties, losing people, falling in love, trying our best, seeing beauty, then it dies, something else comes. At least enjoy it fully. Immerse into it. You'll be an intense self, you'll feel pain as much as joy, but maybe that is the point of life, right? So you've got the intense self, you've got what Plato would advise, the eternal self. Don't worry about this moment, don't Worry about physical things, don't worry about love, and so connect to the highest, most eternal realities, to number, to truth. For Plato, truth, beauty and the good itself. And Plato said, if you become, if you identify as those realities, you get beyond the limitations of time and space. You become part of the eternal and not merely of the transient physical world. So you could become that eternal self, somehow impersonally achieving a kind of immortality. And finally you could become the creative, the imaginal self. Imagination is often seen in the west as something negative. Imagination was seen in the Enlightenment as the problem of humans. You need reason, not imagination. Right? But actually imagination is where so much comes from. But problem is we don't get much chance to explore it, to use it, to activate it. So you could be the creator self. One of the ancient Upanishads talks about this magical ability that we have in dreams, in daydreams, and says, that's the most core you, that's the ability of creation itself. That's the cosmos speaking through you. But we don't use it very often. Artists get too. We dream, we daydream, we come up with some. How often, if you're not a professional artist, how often do people ask you to be creative, to use and make your imagination? So you could also be that creator self. Now meditation essentially says once you start to use certain techniques to still down, to sort of calm the way that the outside world is claiming you, to push it back, to reclaim that sense of your inner self, the one who can be someone in another story, the one who can empathize with other people, the one who isn't just your young, middle aged or older self, but is underneath all of that. You can start to activate these possibilities for shifting the kind of person you want to be. So I want to end by just trying to activate that sense that there's more out there. You could be the smaller self immersed in the moment. You could be the larger self connecting with your community or with all of nature. You could be the intense self, saying for better or for worse, this is me. I'm going to enjoy and really feel every emotion that's involved. Or you could be the eternal self who is connected, who wants to get beyond this worldly stuff and connect to the higher realities of pure concept, of pure value. And you can be the creative self who activates the imagination, takes all that you've experienced and makes more with it. I'm going to ask you to throw up your hands for each one in turn. And that gets me, lets me see what kind of Things people are interested in now. And it also makes you have to say, what are the things that I really care most about? About who would want to be the smaller self, that self that is able to be in the moment more fully. We've got scatterings here. People who want to take each moment in itself. Maybe people who have a sense of what Buddhism is trying to teach. Cool. You could be the larger self, the self that wants to expand beyond just this. Limited you to a larger world, a larger community, a larger cosmos. You want to be the larger self? Oh, a few, but not more than the smaller self. Some people will be smaller, some people want to be larger. You could be. Let's do the eternal. You could be the person who, like Plato says, you know what, the physical transient realm is all very well, but we need to become part of these higher realities. Who wants to be the Platonic eternal self? Oh, that's doing fairly well, but okay, not this way. Better than the others. How about the intense self, that self that in a certain period of Hinduism they say, be brave enough to feel it all no matter what. Oh, interesting. Existential. I feel like Nietzsche would like you guys. And finally, who wants to be that creative self? Who says, let me bring out the imaginative creative side and get going with that? More? Yeah, everybody wants more of that. It's time for us to make our reality and not just receive it. Okay, well, that's helpful. It's almost equal on different sides. Everybody does want to be more active and engaged though. And I just want to end by saying, remember that meditative traditions are there to push back that outside world's force on you, to bring out your inner agency, to activate your sovereign capacity to decide and to remind you of other possibilities that are there. And in that light, it has impact for ethics, has impact for spirituality. And I think what we want to say is bring back that self making ability, your sovereign self. Take control, get creative and shape yourself. Don't let the world do it for you. And I'll stop there. Gone over time.
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Thank you for listening to Philosophy for Times. I hope you found that as fascinating as I did. It's my ally's last episode here at Philosophy for Our Times. And I wanted to end with one that I particularly liked in this piece. She teaches me, and hopefully you as well, that not to live in bad faith and to consider every day, every piece of your routine a kind of choice and something that you should treat it being part of your life, as sacred and worthy of consideration. If you have any thoughts, please don't hesitate to email the email address in the show notes below and tune in. The podcast will continue next week. Bye.