Without wishing to denigrate the value of your thoughts, there’s something quite contradictory about insulting people saying they lack fortitude and distancing yourself from them which is both unnecessary and does us all no credit. I can relate as I do the same or at least have done the same I think. Very much you assume an agog listenership but in other podcasts you scorn people who scorn themselves who turn to people who scorn them more. Furthermore, elsewhere you advocate kindness and I think a key component of that is compassion. Perhaps it’s hard to be compassionate with an imagined other such as might be a member of your audience, yet you do by imagining someone that you’re judging. I think it would be more helpful to go one stage further and wonder to use your terminology “what would make a man lack fortitude; and what then can I wish him to be true and kind?”. The answer, by the way, could be compassion. There’s a danger in judging some people as at our level and others somehow undeserving or beyond us. I disagree with Seneca too, in this at least, and because everyone has their own relative aka personal authentic truth this isn’t to insult Seneca or you guys, but offer simply this counter example, albeit unasked for: By being present with someone, accepting them as equally valuable, on their own journey, not your responsibility to carry or to run from or to fear or put in a box with a label saying “ignorable”, which is ignorance, hold yourself on your own path of integrity, and really listen to that person; enter their world; be compassionate with them so that they see their value and what’s more they experience kindness. To do that and not stay on in their world but remember your way home then you can thank the person for the footprints left on your soul without pollution because this sort of presence isn’t costing you, isn’t offering judgement or losing your healthy boundaries, and yet it is helping because it provides what any living soul needs at their most basic: the feeling of not being a ghost but actually capable of being heard and being felt. Consider how desperate is the converse, when we erect walls, and you will perceive perhaps why a lot of your excellent comments will risk alienating and are assuming a belonging that some of us (including me) do not take for granted and which are at the root of a lot of disconnection, compulsion, addiction, poor boundaries, anxiety, despair, depression and all sorts of other things that “normal good” people may label mad or bad but which also give the possibility of glimpsing something transcendental, and truly believe in it, such as kindness.
Without wishing to denigrate the value of your thoughts, there’s something quite contradictory about insulting people saying they lack fortitude and distancing yourself from them which is both unnecessary and does us all no credit. I can relate as I do the same or at least have done the same I think. Very much you assume an agog listenership but in other podcasts you scorn people who scorn themselves who turn to people who scorn them more. Furthermore, elsewhere you advocate kindness and I think a key component of that is compassion. Perhaps it’s hard to be compassionate with an imagined other such as might be a member of your audience, yet you do by imagining someone that you’re judging. I think it would be more helpful to go one stage further and wonder to use your terminology “what would make a man lack fortitude; and what then can I wish him to be true and kind?”. The answer, by the way, could be compassion. There’s a danger in judging some people as at our level and others somehow undeserving or beyond us. I disagree with Seneca too, in this at least, and because everyone has their own relative aka personal authentic truth this isn’t to insult Seneca or you guys, but offer simply this counter example, albeit unasked for: By being present with someone, accepting them as equally valuable, on their own journey, not your responsibility to carry or to run from or to fear or put in a box with a label saying “ignorable”, which is ignorance, hold yourself on your own path of integrity, and really listen to that person; enter their world; be compassionate with them so that they see their value and what’s more they experience kindness. To do that and not stay on in their world but remember your way home then you can thank the person for the footprints left on your soul without pollution because this sort of presence isn’t costing you, isn’t offering judgement or losing your healthy boundaries, and yet it is helping because it provides what any living soul needs at their most basic: the feeling of not being a ghost but actually capable of being heard and being felt. Consider how desperate is the converse, when we erect walls, and you will perceive perhaps why a lot of your excellent comments will risk alienating and are assuming a belonging that some of us (including me) do not take for granted and which are at the root of a lot of disconnection, compulsion, addiction, poor boundaries, anxiety, despair, depression and all sorts of other things that “normal good” people may label mad or bad but which also give the possibility of glimpsing something transcendental, and truly believe in it, such as kindness.