 So, welcome, and today I'm in conversation with Ashvini Mokashi, and we're going to talk about philosophical health and the practice of philosophical counseling, because I believe you have been practicing for several years. Yes, yes, that's true. How did you decide to help people via philosophy? Where was the moment that made you jump in this strange activity? Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me, Luis. It's a pleasure to be here. My pleasure. Thank you. It was, I think I would just call it a serendipity. You know, it was not planned as such, but the week it happened was totally sort of, you know, by accident. And I was, I was still in, I was still a student at the time. I was doing my master's in philosophy, and I was invited to give a talk on Indian philosophy at a girls detention center in Pune in India. And when I went there, I talked to, like, you know, a bunch of teenagers, like somewhere between 8 to 15 year olds, and there were quite a few of them. And I gave them some information about our ancient culture, Indian philosophy, and, you know, what our tradition is. And I asked them what they know about their tradition. And in the process, I learned so much from them. A sort of whole world of their beliefs and their values and principles that was completely, you know, otherwise ignorant of. And all the stories are completely negative. They were not, this is our tradition and we are proud of it. But all the stories were like, this is what you do. And this is how life punishes you. And they were obviously there because their parents, or at least one of their parents was in jail. And they were like, you know, trying to sort of make sense of their life. And a lot of these children didn't have any other family to, you know, to rely back on as a support structure. So they were invited to stay there. So it was a very sad kind of situation. And I felt terrible about, you know, hearing all the stories. And it felt like if these, if these children are not taught, like, you know, anything that's good about our ancient philosophy, our culture, and how life can be viewed positively, then they're sunk because they're only going to see it as like sort of, you know, as some form of punishment. And they're going to feel victimized all the time. So then just at that moment, I started turning those stories around and I started saying to them, okay, let's, let's try and see, you know, how we can view this story differently. And why it's not goddesses punishment, but it could be a blessing and how we could view that as a blessing. And is there any opportunity in the current situation? So for example, the detention center offered a lot of courses for them to, you know, to pick up some profession when they turn 18. And we kind of started off, you know, on that, on that thought and trying to see how they are protected, they have roof over their head, they have food on the table. And it really worked. So the center asked me to come back. And every time I went back, I would get all these 20 little girls, you know, wanting to give me hugs and wanting to talk to me. And like, you know, this sort of like really beat it for me to come and talk to them. So I thought, okay, that's, there's something here, like, you know, that I can sort of cultivate on. And at that time, I still thought of it as a, you know, one-off incident and one-off pleasant experience. But it taught me a lot. And after that, whenever I was forced to sort of do this kind of counseling, I would just do it. And there was a lot of, like, you know, life provided me ample opportunities. So I continued with that sort of practice of, like, you know, trying to help somebody just think differently. Like, you know, look at the positives. And what is it that they need to read to look at this? And there was a student in London doing my, I guess, it was after I finished my master's. So at that time, also, I had various opportunities because I was surrounded by people who were, like, you know, in their early 20s. And some of them were struggling to make sense of life. And I was studying my research at that time, was on the concept of happiness. And in the process, I was also looking at various different emotions, like emotion of anger and this and that. So a lot of my friends and colleagues became my guinea pigs. And in the process, this just kept developing. It took me a very long time to understand the photo streamers, philosophers of counseling. But every time I give talks, you know, people would come to me and say, like, could you help us? Because we want to, you know, resolve our problem in a positive way. And it seems like the philosophical texts might have something to offer. So I can continue with that. Right. But there's a distinction, right, between positive psychology and philosophy, because not everything needs to be positive or positiveize all the time, right? And you can have value for reflection. For example, there is this view that world philosophy is important, right? Not just learning from the usual Western classics. And I completely agree with that. But then I think we go too far when we have this, in my view, condescending and paternalizing idea that you notice that every time we mention a tale or a story from another culture, it has to be beautiful and positive. And I, for example, let's take Rama and Sita, right? That story, I was working on it today. That's right. And it's very interesting. Most people will hear us might not know the story. I won't get into the details, but basically it's a story where this Rama is constantly challenged between what he would like for himself and the duties that he owes to his family or to the community and to the point that he is made to banish his own wife that he loves. For the sake of what people think. And there's no way this story or let's say there's no way what Rama did there is completely positive, right? Of course, we can say, well, when in doubt, you can try to follow the norms that are established around you. But I think the real value of this story is that they provide food for debate, right? How much of the self should be independent or autonomous if that ever is not an illusion, of course. How the self should comply with a certain idea of values virtue, but then is it the virtue of the collective, the pre-established virtue, or is it an ethic step? And then we can elaborate on that. So I think it's important for me to be on this perhaps the electric or the thin line where we don't want to feel that we criticize all the time, right? There is this view of philosophy that's going to criticize all the time. Philosophy, I agree with you as this tremendous power of making the world a better place. I agree. But I think we need to distinguish between positive psychology and this urge to always positivize everything. I'm with you on that because the point is not to sort of look at black and say it's white when it's not. So it's not whitewash things as such. But I think most people want to study philosophy or want to read anything about philosophy only when they're completely stuck in a corner in life. Or they feel like they need to come out of this kind of judgmental thinking. Like they don't want to be judged. They don't want to sort of do something that they might regret later. But they want to have a new thought, a new perspective. And they want to see is there a way to get out of it? So for example, you brought up a very, very beautiful example of King Rama abandoning his wife, Sita, whom he loved very much. And for whom he had fought a big war. And at the end of it, did you fight the war to regain her in order to lose her again? And that doesn't make any sense. Especially if you're a woman growing in India, like you start wondering what was the whole point? And why would you do that? Was he really a good king or a good husband? So in that particular moment, for example, it was a very controversial moment. Or likewise, if you go to the Mahabharat where Prince Arjun is standing on the battlefield. And he looks at his enemies whom he's supposed to kill and they're all his relatives. And he suddenly gets so overwhelmed that he says, I can't, I can't do this. Because these are the people who raised me. They taught me. You know, pick up the weapon against them. So it's these situations in life, you know, when you're confronted with choices and the choices don't seem good choices. Like they're not easy choices. And then you, you know, turn to philosophy and then you wonder, like, what values am I going to use? What criteria I'm going to use to justify whatever choice I make. Right. And we could say then that humanity at this moment is perhaps turning more to philosophy. I mean, we, philosophical councils, we have always the feeling that more people are interested in philosophy. Maybe that's a bias. Maybe they're not. But the situation of the years to date clearly calls for some sort of a shared understanding, or at least some sort of conversation on a higher level that is not really happening. There is a lot of divide, a lot of wars of ideologies. But at the same time, one could say it's a little bit sad that people wait to be stuck in a corner to start deep thinking, right? It's true when we look at the fact that people can go about 10, 20, 30 years without really stopping and asking themselves, what's my purpose in life? And suddenly out of the blue, they lose a dear one or someone leaves them or they lose their job. And then they start thinking, right? And I think one of the lessons of philosophy is the anticipation, right? Yeah. The thought experiments about things that are only possible, which leads me to a very interesting point. But this is sort of disguised under a question is, what would really be your specialty if you define it? Is it business? Is it psychology? Is it philosophy? Is it a bit of everything? It's hard to answer because I had a very non-linear career in science. My primary interest definitely lies in comparative philosophy. And my book is a comparative philosophy. And I have a copy of it just to show you what it looks like. So this is a study of a wise person or the concept of a wise person between cynical stoicism and the Bhagavad Gita. So I originally started with wanting to be a philosophy teacher or something. And I was a lecturer at Pune University for three years. But after I moved to the US, I realized that I needed to be able to work with analytical philosophy. And I was not interested at the time. There's a bunch of people who have the same problem as I do, but it's a very, very small number of people. And I now actually really appreciate analytical philosophy. But I felt like the kind of work I wanted to do, the kind of research I was doing, it just wasn't possible to explain it in analytical way. Because in some ways, analytical philosophy promises a lot of arguments that the arguments that we defined are explained and validated in terms of other arguments. But they don't leave any space open for any action whether this can be put to practical use. Whereas I wanted to do research on something that is both theoretical but can also be practical. So anyway, so my research was not in analytical philosophy. And then I felt like, in our case, I'm not going to get a job in academia. So I might as well try something else. So I went into the business sector and I worked for 10 years in the US corporate industry. And then as luck would have it, I stopped doing that. And then I turned to philosophy again. And then I was doing a lot of volunteering work and I did some non-profit tour. And I became the president of Princeton Research Forum for a few years. And it's an organization of independent research scholars. But throughout this time, there was one continuity in my life, which was the philosophical counseling. And for some reason, I just kept getting people to come to me and ask me. And I guess I always talked about my passion for philosophy. So it was very interesting that I never thought of philosophical counseling as a way to, as a professional kind of, but as a way to give back to the community and to help anybody who might be stuck in any situation. And then my volunteering work provided me a lot of those opportunities. And I started thinking, no, it has to be something more serious than just like, you know, sort of having those conversations. So that was a time that I came across ever. And here at the work of Brasileu Merynov and I joined them and then became very sort of more of an enterprise as such. But I can tell you some of my clients sort of like, you know, come from this area, they were like seriously in situations which required emergency actions. And then they really needed to think like, you know, are they going to make choices which are going to be life-threatening? Or are they going to make choices which they could sort of like, you know, come to terms with even 10 years later? And sometimes it became very difficult to work with such clients. But once the emergency passed, then they were very open reading philosophical texts. And they would read either a strike text or the Bhagavad Gita. That's when I got my book published because I felt like, you know, I need to make the knowledge very transient in the sense like, I wanted to give it to them, saying that these are the concepts that I'm working with. It's not something that I'm just coming up, you know, coming up with at the spot of the movement. So to give you an idea, like, you know, there was one case I saw which was really inspirational for me. This person was not my client, but I was working with the emergency medical services, and we went to help somebody who was trying to basically kill herself by taking an overdose of drugs. And maybe she didn't consciously think that she was going to kill herself, but she was like, you know, in a really bad state when we went there. She was unconscious and we needed to call the medics to revive her. But when she improved and thankfully she improved with some, you know, sort of emergency level medication, it turned out that her problem was that she had lost her job and she was a single mom. She had a daughter and she wasn't sure how she was going to deal with the situation. And it felt like the philosophy would have helped, you know, if she had the understanding that ups and downs in life are very common. And if you just, you know, think about how life could give you different opportunities or, you know, it's possible to just stay strong and let this pass and then worry more about the daughter who she was responsible for than about the fact that, you know, they might not be able to support their lifestyle. So philosophy kind of teaches you, you know, really things which are seriously important and not worry about things which are less important. So it's that kind of, you know, that kind of sense of detachment one needs to develop can only come through philosophical thinking or reflection or understanding. Well, this is very good because there's good transition to the question that was sort of attached to my or more of a comment that was attached to my question, which is the following. People have sometimes a hard time distinguishing between philosophical sense and willpower. And I think it's very important to distinguish otherwise psychology would do the trick. The fact is that philosophy brings a, as you know, a way of thinking that is structuring. So that is the long term, right? What has been called by some thinking slow, right? And it has been showed actually by psychology. So by all means, I don't mean to pretend that there's a war between psychology and philosophy. I think there's a lot of results in psychology that show the importance of philosophical health, for example, or the science of purpose. And so what we know is that the brain is very bad at dealing metacognitively in a rational manner with matters at stake in the here and now, right? The brain is constantly triggered by emotions, stimuli, that it reacts to usually in the fast mode, which is the instinctual mode, which is the rivatillian brain, is it? And that's no, I mean, you need to be really a guard to control that if you have no structuring system. So what philosophy in a way is always trying to do is sort of transform the brain into a structuring machine. And that is done through repetitive training of higher values, system of thought, I said, which is the slow thinking. And it has been showed that actually there can be, we cannot self-program it through will, right? Like if I have no reason why to stop eating chocolate, I will just continue eating chocolate all my life. There's no way out of it. However, if I have a long-term model that sort of as a consequence that I should eat butterflies instead of chocolate, it's a metaphor, but this will work better, let's say. It never reaches 100%. So my experience, and I've also dealt with people who are suicidal, et cetera. I usually banged them on the head with a version of Plato's Republic. No, just kidding. But what I've seen is that it's true that people who are more, let's say, emotional, more governing emotions. They are going to be more hard to do philosophical counseling with precisely because their brain is not used to the long-term mode, to the structuring mode. They are most of the time in a triggering mode, right? And we also know that there are moments of our life, or even ways our organisms are built, depending on the fact if we're women or men or fish or whatever, that has different kind of an ecology, physiological dependence. So the question is, is philosophical health really for everybody? In the long term, perhaps, right? But with a lot of education, but go ahead. I see you want to go ahead. Yes. So it's a question I've bought the doper for some time. And, okay, so my answer might be more generic, but I think the answer is yes, absolutely. So the way I look at it is that if you look at the entire range of spectrum of what kinds of individuals there are. So if you look at very emotional people and they're triggered, do you think they enjoy being triggered? They don't, you know, because it's a lot of ups and downs for them. So you kind of have to help them like, you know, come to some kind of a balance. But when they're in the state of balance, they're open to reading philosophical material or open to discussing their thoughts and open to discussing if another reaction was a possibility for them at that particular moment. So they can still benefit from that. And what happens is that like, you know, in a way, I feel like there's no, there's no conflict between philosophy and psychology. And we can create a structure or society which is so healthy or at least in a stronger, in a way that they don't fall into, you know, sort of mental illness or like crazy situations like being suicidal or something like that. And we don't know whether we'll be suicidal at some point in life because we don't know what kind of gurgles that, you know, life is going to throw at us. But the question is, can we prepare ourselves in advance so that when there's the crisis, you know, in the next 10 years or 20 years, you know, are we able to deal with that? So that's like, you know, for one kind of sort of category. Most people who are sort of mainstream, you know, have emotional reactions. Some of the times and some of the times they're more analytical and they can also benefit by like, you know, just doing some kind of reflection about who they are. And if I just sit here and think, who am I? You know, I might think I'm a princess. I might think I'm a beggar. I might think like, you know, I'm nobody or everybody. I mean, the options are, you know, just amazing, enormous. So the question is, you only figure out, or at least this might not thinking I could be wrong about it. But I think you only figure out when you're in a situation and then you kind of observe how you're reacting or how you want to resolve that situation. Until then, you don't really know like, you know, what's going to happen when sort of like, you know, you actually have to produce something or when you are in a crisis. So that's one thing. And then there are people who are extremely analytical and they sort of, you know, lack the balance of analytical brain and the emotional brain. And they could also benefit by knowing that, you know, there's another option available of like, you know, understanding themselves or the emotions by reflecting upon that. So, so I really think that philosophy or philosophizing is possible for absolutely everyone. Right. So I think it's, it's interesting you criticized earlier analytic philosophy and I, and I, and right now you made a point. It's, it's true that it's I think it's important to dissociate philosophical health from analytic thinking, right. And analytic thinking you divide the real into parts that you know, it's not very creative. It's very useful to sort of understand a situation from different perspectives. But that doesn't mean you're going to, you're not going to fall into the same traps because in a way it's, it's quite contingent to the situation at stake. And that's the first thing. Secondly, it's usually deterministic. So, historically, as you know, analytic thinking is deterministic in a way is going to say okay there's everything is determined by causes and events and basically if you apply that to live you end up with with the idea that we have a pre written destiny. And then for people who are more into tensions and relationships and all relations between different situation. Then that's the dialectic thinking more in in the Aegean term this tension of opposites and there's a problem again because is often ended up in because our, our, again the creative capacity is limited. So we tend to see the world as a binary opposites, right. So me, my husband, me against my job, etc. Right. And, and so the, I think there's a third mode of thinking that is actually connected with philosophical thinking, which I called dialectic, which means that it's, it's not deterministic. As you were suggesting yourself. There are always options and they are infinite. In fact, of course, confront to reality we might want to see a set of options not infinite right but still at the source of things there is this infinite possibility, which is created which is deterministic. The world is not predictable. If you take it as a, and, and so I think it's important to explain to people that. And I think that's a gateway through sort of democratizing philosophical health, which is the relation to the spiritual right so philosophical constantly is always a bit stuck between these two. The psychological field and the spiritual field right and I think there's a little bit of both. Of course, there is a relationship to higher powers or at least a higher purpose or that is very important for the way we conduct our lives because if we're very analytic and don't believe in anything. We will, as you were suggesting, end up in some trouble. However, it's not this sort of element of faith or leap of faith that is, that is important for, for some long term purposeful thinking. It's not aching to a religion in the sense that I think, and I will stop here but I think there's a fundamental thread going on in the history of philosophy that is usually not very emphasized, is that since Plato I was talking about the which I don't use as a weapon, or at least not physically is, is the idea that there can be paradise on earth. And that's the difference we religions, most religions say paradise not here and now can't be. It's in a remote place, either after we die, or in a cave, but not. We can be quite convincing when we look at our fellow humans and how chaotic they can be. But I think philosophy has been over and over attempting to say, no, we can make this world a better place, which is exactly what you're saying. In that sense, I think this is what you mean by the positive, right, is the idea that we can, we can't contribute to a better harmony here. I mean, it's going to take some time, right, it's perhaps indefinite in time, but it's imminent. But I find beautiful, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, I do mean to interrupt. But it's like, you know, the it also depends on what the idea of paradise is. Like, for example, you know, my work is on the concept of wise person who is supposed to be very happy and like, you know, they are supposedly in complete harmony and in balance and, you know, they have the good balance of being sort of having the right kinds of judgments, the right kinds of virtues, and the right ideas about, you know, happiness, like they're not expecting to sort of get excited about getting a million dollar lottery every day, or they are not expecting to lose everything they have just the next day. So they're sort of like you're in between in a balanced kind of stage. I remember when I used to do this survey with all my friends in our 20s. Everybody had a completely different idea about what happiness was. And then I came across this text from strikes and text from the guitar which I heard about in my childhood. It doesn't make any sense because all of us want to go on the beach, eat ice cream, and like, you know, just have a great time and that's our idea of happiness. So when you come to the philosophers, it really doesn't make any sense in your 20s or in your early life. But then you start seeing the wisdom because if you apply the conventional criteria of happiness, they're very short term, they're very temporary and just doesn't continue. Like, you know, as you said, chocolate is something fun, you can have it, but if you have it the whole day, you're going to be very sick the next day. So then is it worth being happy, wanting and being totally sick the next day? Or is it worth having the balance in eating maybe a little bit of chocolate in a day and saving the rest for the remaining days or something of the kind? So it's not like that. It's depending on how you define paradise. You can have it, but it takes work. It's not easy. Right. Yeah, I agree with you that it's going to be very hard to find a philosopher that says that paradise is eating ice cream at the beach. But I think you mentioned two words that I think I connected to what you just said. You mentioned serendipity. And you mentioned also more an idea than a word. The calling, the fact that in your life it looks like people want you to be a philosophical counselor without you over trying that. And that brings a nice contrast to the idea that people might have when they listen to us that philosophical health is about planning, like, you know, having this 30 years plan and having always this long view. There is an idea of that. But in my view, it's not an analytical plan is more an admiration for certain virtues, values, ideas. And then it's sort of a repeated practice of meditation on those. But then in relationship to the more mundane events of life, that allows for more openness. So it's exactly what the sense of purpose does and people, young people that I do counseling with are usually they make usually this mistake between goal and purpose, right. So they would say, oh, my purpose is to become a doctor. That's not a purpose. Of course, that's just one goal, which can be a strategy. But there are many purpose for which one might want to become a doctor making money. For example, is it a good purpose? I don't think so. But so, and people find it hard to understand that a purpose is usually something that is transcendent and precisely because it's transcendent, it can be very precise and repeated leaving place for what you said about serendipity, the, you know, encounters of destiny, because it sort of creates a field, an epistemic field that tends to filter perhaps what you let happen to you and not. And, and it's true that when we're young, you were mentioning, we don't understand the science because we don't have that. The glass is the that filter that would allow us to listen to what's going on around us. And then 10 years later, oh, actually, that's what it meant. I should have done that. So what feels like saying is that, well, in a way, it's like, you know, we know we're quite old. Maybe we are in our fifties and we've done those mistakes. Maybe we can help you see in life. And what is doing and not. Yeah. Yeah, no, it was, it was really interesting. And you know, for me, like, even my personal journey was a little bit like that. I wrote my book in my youth as a sort of, you know, PhD student. I thought it was a nice topic to work on. But I never thought that this was actually applicable. And then it took me a long time because every time I was, you know, talk to my family about my problems in life, they would say, just read your book, read your book. And I said, what's that supposed to be. But yeah, I mean, there was a lot of moments, you know, moments of crisis or moments of decision making. And then I felt very compelled to go back to these concepts. And, you know, I would go back several times to the Gita and to strikes and coming to a point about like, you know, the purpose of life and the spirituality or the spiritual philosophy. On field that still remains, you know, unexplored in some ways, even though, you know, everybody's been talking about meditation or, you know, related concepts from Buddhism, Hinduism. I don't think we have quite explored spiritual philosophy as such, and its connection with, you know, philosophical health. So my current research is on that and I've been like, you know, studying the medieval scenes from different parts of India to see like, you know, what are the, what are the tenets in Hinduism that are sort of like, you know, that are applicable that can be brought to life in different ways. And one of my, one of my sort of councillors, so to say, was was an ideal councillor that any philosophical councillor would like to have. And the question that this person had was, okay, so I lived my life in the western world. I have been brought up on Sathra, but I want to have the results of the Vedanta. So how do I make the journey from Sathra to Vedanta? So I said, you can't have, like, you know, the Sathrian philosophy to produce non-Sathrian results. So if you want Vedantic results, you have to practice the Vedanta philosophy and for a very long time. And I think it was just a beautiful conversation and multiple conversations talking to this person because, you know, we were talking sort of theoretically, but there's absolutely the positive, not the positive, but there was a result that was awaited. Like, you know, how the life is going to be? What are the important things about life? And what do we need to do? You know, how do we conduct ourselves? So they are all sort of, you know, related back to the theory that we discussed initially about Rama and Sita. Rama was confronted with making a choice about what is his duty and what duty is more important or primary? Is duty as a king or is duty as a husband? So those are all the choices that one has to make, right? And one also has to live with those choices, like we have to be able to accept ourselves for making those choices. Right. And you had me, I started working on the relationship between nothingness in Sarsra and nothingness. But that would be for another session of dialogue. I think we're going to wrap up. What would you consider to be the most important element of philosophical health based on your experience? Well, I mean, well being, I think is the most important. And for different people, well being, you know, can be reached in different ways. So as long as you have some idea about how to accept life as it is, because life and well being are, I think, the most important things. So depending on the kind of person you are, like the kind of makeup you have, you just need to come to the balance. And once you're at the balance, it's also still an effort to maintain that balance. Right. Yeah, because I mean, that's, we still have just a few minutes, but that makes me think that people, because of the influence of psychotherapy, people might think that people come to philosophical health always with complaints, right? With problems, with suffering, which is in a way sort of true, but you can have, you can also realize that things are going too well. There's too much well being in your life. You're not of the right kind, right? So a redefinition of well being. I had, I had this beautiful story of a lady who came to me one day, and she said, well, I am too joyful, because as long as I am alone with myself, it's great. I'm pure joy, but every time I am in relationship with the other, whether close relationship, then I get a little bit sad because the other is not as joyful as me. So I always to sort of adapt, go down. And I found that very interesting because I think it is in human nature. Also, to always want more, right? So some people are going to tell you, oh, well being is boring is bourgeois. I want adventure. I want to feel possibility. And, and to this, I think philosophy always answers. Historically, I don't know much about the Indian tradition. You're going to tell me about that. But in the ancient Western tradition, there is this idea of apotheosis, of becoming Godlike. And we don't talk so much about that because it's sort of taboo. But if I would, yeah, it's sort of taboo to say, oh, I can become a God. But a lot of philosophers thought that, of course, it's not in the sense of a superhero, we're not going to start to fly, but we're going to start to fly with our minds. So if you don't play so plotinous, et cetera, there is this idea that it becomes an adventure also because we sort of become more than human. And this might satisfy, I would say, the, the need for some people to, to, which I think it's, it's understandable, the need for adventure, right. But philosophy is not only about the stoics who, you know, take their pain and accept all the humiliations with a smile and, and are apolitical and a little bit masochistic. No, being philosophical healthy, there are many ways of being philosophical. One of them can be very exuberant. Why not if it fits your character. And in the traditional Indian philosophical way, is there an idea that of becoming God like, or is it, is it something else? I don't know how to start this. Yes. Do you mind just repeating your question? Yes. Is there in the Indian tradition a also a calling to, you know, what the overman or this sort of a, I'm using a controversial Nietzsche's concept here but the sort of the two becoming a bit more divine as Plato or plotinous or even Aristotle. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there's definitely this concept in Plato, and you find this concept in the Vedantic philosophy and in the Upanishads. Or even in the Gita, like, you know, the wise person eventually has spiritual depth and the divine nature, and they get to that point. So by, you know, doing meditation and by becoming one with the Brahman as the Vedanta would tell you. So the same concept exists even in Stratism if you look at it very carefully, but their idea of divine is somewhat different. So for them, divine is sort of, you know, ethical or moral person who is as perfect as a human being can be. But the perfection in the Vedantic philosophy is really sort of, you know, becoming one with the Brahman. And it goes to the point that the person has the understanding of the world. I mean, I don't want to call it superhuman powers or something because that doesn't quite happen that way. But they have the understanding of the world, which is so far superior and so fine compared to any of us that, you know, they sort of like the fountain of wisdom themselves. Right. Now, I think it's a beautiful point to conclude that oneness. And I want to thank you very much for this wonderful clarification and conversation about... Well, thank you for your invitation. You're welcome.