 When I lectured to you last, I pointed out, I described Nietzsche and Dostoevsky's summation of the world situation and really the world psychological situation at the end of the 1800s. And that was that our new modes of thinking had undermined our faith and our old modes of thinking. And that was a problem because people need something firm to stand on, to orient themselves, and to move forward. And so Nietzsche and Dostoevsky basically both prophesied that the consequence of that dissolution would be increased probability of nihilism and everything that went along with that. And Dostoevsky wrote about that actually quite extensively in a book called Notes from Underground, which, if any of you are interested, especially in clinical psychology, that's a book you should really read because it's one of the most brilliant psychological studies of a psychologically disturbed man that's ever been written. It's very accurate. And there are sections in crime and punishment that are like that too. I think they're unsurpassed in their representation of psychological phenomena. I don't know how he managed it. I mean, Dostoevsky was epileptic. I don't know if you know that. But he was arrested by the Tsar's men in the late 1800s for being a student radical. And they threw him in the main prison in Moscow. And then one day, they took him out in front of a firing squad and shot him at 6 in the morning. But they only used blanks, which of course he didn't know about. And that scared him so badly he developed epilepsy. And then he had epilepsy. That can happen, by the way. And then he had epilepsy for the rest of his life. But he had this strange kind of epilepsy, which is actually not all that rare. Sometimes when people have epilepsy, they experience this phenomena. They call an aura, which is an altered state of consciousness before the epileptic seizure hits. And they can be very strange to these auras. So I read a case study once about a guy who his aura was that his hand was being possessed by devils from hell. And he could feel the possession move up his arm and into his shoulder. And once it hit his head, he'd have an epileptic seizure. And so then there was another case where this man, his aura was that his exact double had appeared behind him. But if he turned to look, then he'd have an epileptic seizure. But if he didn't turn to look, then he wouldn't. So these brain disorders are very strange things because they're, well, the system that is disordered is alive. And it's capable of any number of extraordinarily peculiar misbehaviors. Anyways, Dostoevsky's aura was a world revealing aura. And so what Dostoevsky would experience was that the meaning of things got deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. And then just as he was on the verge of discovering the secret to everything, he'd have an epileptic seizure. But he said that the quality of experience during the aura was so high, so overpowering and so deep, that he would have traded all of his normal experience just to have had those experiences. And he had them repeatedly. And I really do believe that it was this broadening of his vision and concept by his epilepsy that transformed him, among other things. I mean, he went through some pretty damn rough experiences because he was in prison with rapists and murderers for a long time in Siberia, even though he was kind of an aristocratic guy. I mean, he had a rough time of it. And I imagine that that also broadened him tremendously, given that it didn't kill him. But I really do believe that the epileptic insight was key to his unsurpassed genius. And so his aura, and other people do experience epileptic aura symptoms like that, by the way. And some people are so enamored of the aura that they won't take their anti-epilepsy medication because they don't want to forego the experience that precedes the aura or the actual epileptic seizure. So Dostoevsky's experiences, the awe element of the aura, is also relevant to what we're going to talk about today because both Binswanger and Boss were very interested in how meaning revealed itself in the world. And they had opposing explanations. I actually think they're parallel explanations. But the meaning that Dostoevsky experienced is an amplification of the normal manner in which meaning reveals itself in the world. I mean, and people experience that sort of thing in various altered states of consciousness.