I heard a voice, "Oh, that's the daimon." What does that mean? C- tell me more what it means to you, and what you think it meant to Thoreau.

The word daimon's been around for a long time.

Socrates talked about it in Plato's writings.

I mean, that's going back BC, you know, 250, 300 BC, uh, about living daimonicly.

Socrates was very much in favor of it, and he did it.

And, uh, and then throughout history, many people have said, "Well, if Socrates did it, I, I can do it, too." So there have been a lot of imitators who have used the word daimon.

And, uh, it, the way it is used, and now going way back in time, is that there's a presence that guides you.

Okay, Tom, and then because I have you here, and I think people learn so much from the hardships people go through, I'm wondering if there's an example from your own life and how it impacted you, what you learned, what we can learn through your passage through something really difficult.

But yeah, what do you think that we're coming to with all of this?

I don't know.

Of course, we don't know where it's going to take us.

It could be, you know, in the best of worlds, it could be an important tool for helping us sort things out, you know, that it's like a sorter-outer, you know, it kind of sort things.

And that's an important part of life, to sort things out.

What's really going to be good for us? What's going to be bad for us? It's hard to know those things.

But there are signs.

Talk to us a little bit about that so that the audience understands they're not all the same.

Mm-hmm.

I've done some work with medicine.

And the one thing that's constant is that people who are really sick, I mean, really in bad shape in the hospitals, very frequently say to me, they say that their sickness has healed them.

Like, being sick, they're lying there and they're sick and they have all this time to meditate.

It doesn't look like they're meditating, but there's a lot of reflection going on, a lot of meditating going on in hospitals.

And people are, are realizing what's important to them.

Like, what's important in life.

Mm-hmm