 So, let's take this time to talk about virtue, what it is, how important is it and why it is your most important tool when facing extremely challenging, scary and ambiguous situations that are inflicting the danger on you, of having to bend. That means that, let's say, you get a store owner and you run a store beautifully. It's a small local store that's only managed by you, the people in the neighborhood know you and the days are pretty irregular so you know pretty much what's going to happen every day. You've been through things but now you're good. And suddenly some thugs come into your store and they basically try to threaten you to give them money every month for protection, quote unquote. This is a very ambiguous situation. This could also apply to relationships or any other field where we're subject to ups and downs and unexpected things happening, even our lives in general. When you're faced by those decisions, the first thing that happens is the part of your brain that's responsible for predator detection gets flared up. The anxiety that's in you becomes uninhibited and you start feeling intense stress. Your thoughts are no longer rational or at least they don't feel rational anymore. You begin thinking emotionally. Everything is caving in on you. Even if you somehow manage to put the stress aside, you still carry it with you, you become more irritated. You tend to make less conscientious decisions. You tend to treat others more poorly. So everything starts to basically fall apart. In these situations there's really not much you can do rationally. This is where the whole atheist logic rational science movement really fails because you can't apply a rational situation to an ambiguous and highly stressful event. Of course you can with the right guidance and people sit down and discuss it and come up with a solution. But we're not talking about that situation. We're talking about a situation that you have to deal with alone. In this kind of mode, your survival becomes the top priority, which means that you tend to sacrifice things which you value in order to preserve your situation. So you might lie to people about your situation to keep it away from them. You don't want to get them involved in your chaos because that will put the chaos in their world as well. Well by doing that you have to lie. You also have to bend other moral values that you have. Perhaps you view yourself as very direct, very honest and kind of person that says what's on his mind that treats situations directly, well here you are cowering away from the situation. These kinds of events even one of them can crush you because an animal or a creature mythologically speaking has just entered the village and you cannot avoid it anymore. So one day you go out of your house, do your thing and bam, this beast shows up and it has a look on its face like it wants to kill you. And it's looking at you and it's looking and waiting to see how you react. Most people don't act. They look at the beast once in the eye, turn away and proceed to act as if nothing happened while the beast is still in their periphery. The problem with that is that the beast is still there and it's sucking off of your life energy. So by ignoring it you're weakening yourself, you're making yourself more and more vulnerable to attack so that by the time that it actually does attack you, you're not even going to fight because at this point you've bent so much that you can't even react anymore. Now a cool thing about psychology is that what the psychologists found is that when you face a situation that is scary to you and this was initially done on rats and eventually neurologists saw this in people as well in the brain scans, the part of your brain that flares up that gets used in dealing with a threatening situation or at least a situation that is perceived as threatening, the part that is flared up when you consciously decide to confront that situation is not the same parts that flare up when you react to those situations out of necessity. So while that beast is there, if you consciously choose to confront it, the parts of your brain that will flare are related to the exploratory part of your brain, to thinking, reasoning, courage, rationality. When you are avoiding it and the beast eventually attacks you and now you're reacting instead of proactively acting, the parts of your brain that flare up are more related to fight or flight, stress, reaction, more of an animalistic level. So you're not really yourself when you react. The evolutionary wired reaction basically, the emotions, but when you choose to react, to act proactively, you are yourself. So you're who you are and you bring that into the table and that's where virtue comes in because virtue is not rational, sorry, virtue is not rational. Virtue is almost an abstract concept. So you can't rationalize virtue. You can't say rationally, okay, I think that the best situation in this, the best behavior in this situation is to act out of virtue, you simply cannot reach these kinds of cognitive levels while you're under intense stress, while the beast is staring at you. But on a spiritual level or emotional level, the call to virtue can override whatever you're facing where you will accept virtue. So if, for example, that beast is staring at you and it looks for a moment on your family and you realize that it's going to go for your kids first, virtue pops up, it comes immediately from within, you would rather sacrifice yourself than have something happen to your kids. But virtue doesn't have to be in the service of family, it can also be in the service of truth, it can also be in the service of courage or love or inspiration, many others. So when the beast is staring at you in your life and that may be something small as call you you're afraid to make, a confrontation you're afraid to face or it can be something large scale as fighting an addiction or saving somebody, maybe from themselves, maybe from yourself, call on a virtue. So look at the situation and see what's being bent here. Is this beast trying to slowly bend me how? Is it trying to bend me by getting me to be dishonest and gradually lie more and more? Is it bending me by keeping me from going after what I want because I'm afraid to go out of my house, my safe place, so it's my freedom? Maybe the beast is tearing me apart, me and my family by stressing me out and getting me emotional so maybe it's a lack of emotional control. Defend the virtue that is being encroached on and bent and decaying and destroyed slowly and decide to embody and defend that virtue. So whatever that beast is for you, fight it with exactly what you're facing and this requires a real sense of a genuine willingness to lose, to be in a situation where you can lose, to put yourself in harm's way for something bigger. This is the only way you can maintain your integrity and get out of the situation stronger. It's by fighting, it's not by outsmarting it. If you don't find that virtue, nothing's gonna happen. It's just gonna get worse and worse and worse because again the beast is there and it's draining on you and it's stalking you and lurking and waiting and waiting. That call to virtue is not irrational, again you don't think about it, you just feel it and act and you know you found it when you begin to feel brave because there's something deep within us that again atheists and various scientifically minded people, they won't admit it, they want to admit that there's something beyond the simple biology even though it appears to be so and what that is is a higher level of function, again of virtue where you could be in the worst situation, everything is falling apart or everything looks like it's gonna fall apart. That call to virtue comes up and suddenly nothing is scary anymore. It still is scary but your courage is so strong that it's almost like the fear disappears so it's like when you're eating some sort of food and then I give you another food that's ten times with a ten times stronger taste, you completely forget about the first taste, it's still there, it's still absolutely there but the new taste is so strong that you forget about the previous taste which is exactly how it works with fear. If you overwhelm it with courage that comes out of virtue, the right virtue, it simply disappears, it's still there but you're not gonna see it any longer. So this is my advice to you, find the virtue that is most relevant is a truth, family, honesty, love, abundance, freedom, find the proper virtue that is being encroached on, the one that will liberate you and ask yourself am I willing to embody it, am I willing to become this virtue, to become almost like a fighter of that virtue. So I'm no longer just plain old Robbie, I'm Robbie that's fighting for truth, I'm not even Robbie that's fighting for truth, I'm just truth fighting for truth, you become like a soldier, you know, you're nameless, you're just a tool, a utility in the name of something, something higher than you and then there's no fear anymore, again the fear is there but it's overwhelmed by spiritual and deep courage. So use it, use it to overwhelm that situation, there's no reason why any situation should overwhelm you. Now I'm not saying that really bad things don't exist, they absolutely do. That's like the fundamental fact of reality is that shitty things are there, really scary things, really bad things are there. But what I am saying is that you can fight them, so you don't have to succumb to them, you don't have to bend to them, again and you're not going to find that courage to get up and fight unless you submit to a higher level of moral authority to a true virtue whether it's God or simply a concept or virtue, something you believe in deeply that you want to become, that you want to lose yourself for, lose yourself in and this is how you never ever submit or lose yourself in life's hideous situations that pop up. This is how you act and confront the beast rather than escape or deny it or wait for it to devour you. You may not come out alive, you may come out intact but missing some limbs, you may come out completely intact but with scars or you may simply come back and realize that the beast was not even as bad as you thought. That's what you don't know but again you'll get that courage to face the unknown when you submit to a higher value. So that's my message and hope it helps you like it helped me, till next time.