⁷Quote from Discourses, IV.1.175. The whole Chapter IV.1 in Discourses is dedicated to explaining how the goal of Stoicism is freedom, in particular, freedom from “being constrained or impeded by any external circumstance or emotional reaction” according to Long (2002, p. 27). Seneca talks about our slavery in more specific terms, related to something like valences in On a Happy Life, 4: “See (...) how evil and guilty a slavery the man is forced to serve who is dominated in turn by pleasures and pains, those most untrustworthy and passionate of masters. We must, therefore, escape from them into freedom.”; see his also Letters to Lucilius, LXXV.18. Emphasis on freedom is ubiquitous in Buddhism as well, even if the word may be used in various meanings. While the whole goal of the Buddha’s teaching is often formulated as “freedom from suffering”, this is rather uninformative and uses the word “freedom” in a different sense than considered here. Ancient Buddhist texts also consider the metaphysical goal of freedom from reincarnation, but that is clearly outside of the scope of this book. For our purposes, a very useful cognitive interpretation is given by Peacock (2018) who formulates the goal of early Buddhist philosophy as freedom from “reactive patterns” triggered by valences. This is of course related to freedom from desire (and aversion) advocated in the third of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.