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  • And I met lots of people who were

  • suicidal because of that but also unwilling to take care of themselves, you know

  • because they were so guilty about who they were ... and their mode of being in the world that they just felt that

  • they weren't worth the damn trouble, you know, and,

  • well, and they all had their own particular reasons for believing that their own

  • failures, their own

  • improper sacrifices, let's say, their own acts of individual malevolence;

  • but they're summed up in a lovely metaphorical manner, a horrifying metaphorical manner, in those ancient stories and

  • those stories explain to us, too -

  • why as well that our consciences

  • don't sit well with us, and why we always feel that there's something undone that we should be doing in the world

  • which is a much better pathway to take, by the way, than to

  • degenerate into nihilism and

  • catastrophe and so

  • and that's really cool too - it's like

  • well, you should treat yourself

  • like you're someone responsible for helping and the first question is "Well, why don't you?" and the answer is -

  • well, there's a lot wrong with you

  • you know and

  • it's hard

  • to

  • exercise

  • enough

  • love and

  • care in a deep and non-naive way to care properly for

  • something like that

  • but, you know, you do it for people that you love, despite their inadequacies, and - there is this idea that

  • there is a spark of divinity within us and it is possible that

  • the fact that you have that spark of divinity (with you) within you

  • also means that you have the capability

  • to withstand

  • that terrible vulnerability;

  • that's what I was trying to get at in Chapter 1 - which was to stand up straight with your shoulders back that you could actually

  • voluntarily accept the onslaught of the tragedy of being and that you can

  • constrain the proclivity for malevolence that's part of you and that's part of the world, and in that - you can discover your own value,

  • your own intrinsic value in your own nobility and all of that might be more powerful than the forces of

  • vulnerability and malevolence themselves

  • which I also happen to believe and I think that that is in some sense the fundamental hallmark of faith

  • and so, Chapter 2

  • and, to some degree, Chapter 3 wishes to surround yourself with people who want the best for you is a

  • it's an encouragement to

  • assume, to act out the proposition that even if life is as

  • difficult as

  • it seems to be and if you're as vulnerable and

  • weak in a fundamental sense as you definitely are and

  • characterized by this terrible propensity for

  • the

  • infliction of voluntary suffering on yourself and others and that

  • destructive tendency that there's still something within you that's so

  • remarkable and so

  • aligned with

  • with

  • order and being in the proper manner that you can climb above that, let's say like Abel, and that you can make the proper

  • sacrifices and that you can set yourself right and you can set your family right

  • and you can set the world right and that the mere possibility

  • that that might occur, that that might be within the realm of

  • potential - means that you have a moral obligation to exercise the

  • responsibility to take care of yourself as if you're something that matters and that if you did that

  • properly - it might turn out that:

  • what you did would matter, that it would matter to you, that it would be meaningful in the way that things that matter are

  • meaningful and that it would matter to everyone around you

And I met lots of people who were

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