 Spinoza attaches an epistemic challenge to this ontological picture. He writes that we always “understand” and “feel” “that we are eternal” (E5p23s): presumably this means that we have some joyful, i.e., empowering (E3p11d), intellectual grasp of our own eternity (even if we often join these adequate ideas with inadequate ones [see 3.2.2], such as reward or punishment). But he also suggests, prima facie puzzlingly, that we can increase the degree of our own eternity: “the more the mind understands things by the second and third kind of cognition, the greater the part [maxima pars] of it that remains” after the destruction of the body (E5p38d). This suggestion might seem puzzling if we assume that the “eternal part” of my mind is just the eternal idea of the eternal essence of my own body. For then there seems to be nothing that would be subject to improvement or enlargement: my eternal essence just is my eternal essence.