Um, again, just briefly introduce you, yourself and then, um, take it away.

Great.

Thanks, John.

It's a delight to be back with you again.

Um, my name is Charles Stang, and, uh, I teach at Harvard Divinity School, where I am professor of early Christian thought, and I also serve as the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, um, at Harvard.

And John and I have known each other for a few years, and we have some wonderfully, um, rich conversations around shared interests in ancient philosophy and its legacy today.

So what I'm proposing to do is pick up the conversation where John and I left it last, which was, uh, largely focused on Plato.

Now, that isn't really a dimension of the entity, but it is nevertheless a dimension of the space in which the entity is being conceived or received, right? Are people paying attention to the history or are they coming at this with a static ahistorical set of categories?

So what is, why do I need to know the Greek thing?

Okay, fair.

Um, yeah, the idea of a higher self is part of the kind of spiritual vernacular of our age, right? Um, uh, so it's not as if this, you only find this in the ancient material.

What I think you find in the contemporary world is obviously downstream of some of these older traditions, but you're asking a different question, is what's really gained by drilling deeply into a tradition of reflection on this? And what I would say, uh, first, Ethan, is, um, if you have a tradition, um, that a tradition of theory and practice of the higher self already that you feel is deep, um, great.

I, I, I, I'm not suggesting that the ancient Greek philosophical tradition is somehow uniquely insightful.

I actually think this is a structure that you find across history and across the globe.

But the Greek philosophical tradition is the most influential, uh, on, in, in, in the West.

Right? Um, but what do you imagine this course would afford someone who comes out of the, uh, the other end of it?