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Applying The View From Above (Episode 51)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
Today, we talk about the View from above. It’s the one of the most popular Stoic practices for generating a sense of calm, perspective, and purpose.
What it is, how to practice it, and the risks associated with the practice. We also touch on the importance of consuming art and how you can use art to get into a Stoic mental state.
6 Ways to Practice the View from Above
(03:23) The View From Above
(16:48) How to Practice
(24:39) Philosophically Grounding the Exercise
(30:31) View From Above In Art
(34:53) Risks
***
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Transcript
Introducing Stoicism and 'The View from Above'
00:00:00
Speaker
And this exercise, this reminder gives you a kind of perspective on the world that you wouldn't have had otherwise. You can come to some real insights and better internalize the sense of, yes, this is my purpose. This is how I can make sense of myself occupying this narrow perspective in terms of the greater whole. This is how I can
00:00:25
Speaker
ensure that I have a role that I fulfill it and I feel at home in the universe.
Exploring 'The View from Above': Concept and Practice
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:00:51
Speaker
Today, we talk about the view from above. It's one of the most popular and powerful stoic practices. It helps many generate a sense of calm, perspective, and purpose. Michael and I discuss what it is, how to practice it, and the risks and benefits associated with the practice. We also discuss how you can use art to get into this stoic mental state. Here it is.
00:01:20
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Antiveros. And I'm Michael Trombley. And today we're going to be talking about the view from above, the contemplative practice, the stoic practice of the view from above. Do you want to say anything by way of intro reflections on the topic?
Benefits and Risks of 'The View from Above'
00:01:40
Speaker
This is one of the most popular exercises people like to do in their actual practice. This is
00:01:46
Speaker
a common way, I think, that Stoics, not sure if the Stoics invented this, but it's certainly a part of the Stoic practice, a way to get perspective, a way to change your emotional state, change your cognitive state, and really a kind of mindfulness. And we use this podcast to talk about Stoic theory and Stoic practice. And sometimes it gets confusing, well, what does practice mean? Because we're always kind of always trying to be
00:02:10
Speaker
good people, we're always trying to improve our characters. It seems like we're always practicing, but the view from above is something you can, you know, you can sit down and you can actually do that in 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
Practicing 'The View from Above': Methods and Texts
00:02:21
Speaker
You can sit down and do it as an activity and hopefully walk away with an improved perspective and improved devotional state. So in that sense, it's this really, it's this excellent, I guess, tool to have in your tool belt and excited to dig into it in more detail and chat about with you, Kel.
00:02:37
Speaker
Yeah, so we thought we'd talk about what this exercise is, why Stoics do it, and some of the theoretical historical background for the exercise. And then we'll discuss how to practice it, how to put it into practice, apply it in your everyday, either as a separate meditation technique or the type of thing you can do just by pausing and reflecting.
00:03:07
Speaker
And then we'll generally reflect on it and discuss what we think is excellent about the practice, any risks involved with it, and then see if there's anything else interesting that either of us want to touch on. Yeah, let's jump into it.
00:03:24
Speaker
All right, excellent. So the term was introduced by the French philosopher Pierre Hadeau, but the concept of course existed far before him. Sometimes people will also talk about cosmic consciousness, and that means essentially the same thing, it's taking the view from above.
00:03:45
Speaker
This is ultimately a spiritual exercise, a contemplative exercise, something one does in meditation. You see it in terms of the ancient Stoics most present in the writings of Marcus Aurelius. So here's a well-known passage from meditations that I'll read, and it gives you a sense of what this view is.
00:04:15
Speaker
Watch and see the courses of the stars as if you were running alongside them, and continually dwell in your mind upon the changes of the elements into one another, for these imaginations wash away the foulness of life on the earth.
Visualizing Perspective: Earth and Humanity
00:04:31
Speaker
when you are reasoning about mankind, look upon earthly things below, as if from some vantage point above them. And here you get this idea, of course, of viewing nature from above.
00:04:47
Speaker
You know, you can imagine those famous photographs taken by astronauts of the earth and picture that view from space of the earth and looking down on humans and our complex networks and seeing the whole.
00:05:09
Speaker
And when you do this, you are viewing nature as it is. That's the goal. You're trying to break free of our typically narrow standpoint on the world where we're just focused on a small amount of space, small amounts of time with whatever personal concerns or experiences are immediately popping up in our consciousness.
00:05:35
Speaker
And we're trying to enlarge that view to see that, of course, you are in a world where you are one human out of billions, one animal out of trillions, in a Earth that is relatively small and a tiny sliver of time.
00:05:56
Speaker
All these facts are ways of seeing nature as it is and avoiding the sort of near-term distortion, if you will. So that's a first pass at the description of what the exercise is. Is there anything you want to add to that, Michael? Yeah, a couple of things. So first, Caleb, you described the view from above as a spiritual exercise. That's also a term from Pierre Hado
00:06:25
Speaker
For those listeners who might not be familiar with that, it doesn't necessarily refer to spiritual, certainly not to spiritual in any sort of, you know, Christian sense or anything like this. The idea here is about the transformation of what the Stoics would call your soul.
Spiritual Transformation through Perspective
00:06:41
Speaker
the spirit right and for that that for them would refer to just you know your your particular character right so your mind your the particular matter that makes up the you that makes decisions has beliefs
00:06:56
Speaker
goes about the world, that part of yourself. So a spiritual exercise is something that is supposed to transform the spirit, transform that character. So it's a character exercise and it's viewed, but I think that the part of the spiritual aspect brings into it is that it's viewed holistically. So you're not aiming to change one small part of yourself. You're trying for a larger transformation towards, towards, you know, becoming a better person.
00:07:23
Speaker
That's one thing. The other thing that I really like about the quote that you said, the view from above the exercise itself is sometimes when I practice this exercise, I kind of zoom out. So I'm looking only at the level of, you know, maybe the city level or maybe the country level. Cause you don't have to zoom out very far to be like, well, I'm not that important.
00:07:42
Speaker
There's other things going on in the world that are more important than my problem or my particular issue. So I've been overestimating how important that issue is. What I like about the Marcus Aurelius quote you used is, he talks about being up and within the course of the stars. So I'm not just above like I'm looking down from a park, but I'm actually outside of Earth.
00:08:06
Speaker
I'm actually recognizing not just how my problem might be situated amongst the problems of other people, but how all of people might be situated amongst the entire universe. So that really, that depth and the perspective of that depth that Marcus had 2000 years before anybody was flying in space, I think is really cool and is a cool point to focus on. And the third point, building on what you were saying,
00:08:34
Speaker
This is something Marcus does a lot. He has those quotes where he talks about, if you're getting caught up in a situation, try to think about things the way they are, remove the stories, remove the narratives. So the important purple robe that the Roman aristocrats would wear, that's just die on a piece of cloth, or the feast is just dead animals. And so you're trying to remove the narrative and see things as they truly are.
00:09:02
Speaker
That's the objective. And then the view from above is one really, really effective way of doing that. So it's a, it's one thing to say, well, view things as they really are. And then Mark is saying the way you can do that, the way to actually wash away the foulness of these distortions is by assuming this view is by taking on this exercise. That's my thoughts from, from what you had to say.
00:09:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting how you have the decomposition exercise of stripping things down to their bare essentials, which is one way of getting a sense of how things are. And in a sense, the view from above is opposite of that, where instead of stripping things down to their parts, you're zooming out and situating those parts within an even greater whole in order to understand what it is.
00:09:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think about this a lot in stoicism, this kind of movement between extremes.
Balancing Perspectives: Cosmic and Personal
00:10:00
Speaker
So you might have something like the dichotomy of control, which is like this core tenet about the one thing that's up to you or the one key part of your identity. And then you might have this concept in stoicism of eukiosis about this expansion of the conception of the cell to include the family.
00:10:17
Speaker
uh the community and then the entire world and so it's like you're getting to the same end of being virtuous by going very small and very big and so the same thing here you're saying Caleb where you're getting to see the world as it is by going very small which is like i'm gonna zoom in
00:10:33
Speaker
outside of this, like I'm at a banquet. I'm worried about the politics taking place in the banquet. I'm worried about what people think. And I'm going to zoom in and say, no, this is, this is just a dead animal on the table. These are just people wearing like cloths, you know, they're not so you, that decomposition through zooming in, but also that achievement of the same goal by zooming out. That's just building on what you're saying. But I think that's kind of cool. The other thing that I think about too is like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.
00:10:58
Speaker
You get into this perspective from a slave, you get into this perspective from Emperor of Rome. So this kind of, you're achieving the truth, but from different directions, from big and from small, from rich and from poor. I think that's something that really appeals to me about stoicism in general.
00:11:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Another important note with this exercise is that when Marcus does something like this, he is picturing the universe as having a specific order to it, and I'm thinking of
00:11:32
Speaker
people in a sense as composing a larger whole being parts in a even larger organism. So he's not just zooming out and thinking about the universe as an epicurean might, which is just a bunch of atoms bouncing around in a void, sort of like
00:11:52
Speaker
You know, some physicists might zoom out and just see more dots bouncing around in their model or waves fluctuating, what have you. But he's thinking of this as an organic system, a whole. And I think that comes out nicely where in Meditations 11, 27, he mentions a Pythagorean practice. I'll just read as follows. The Pythagoreans tell us to look at the stars at daybreak.
00:12:22
Speaker
to remind ourselves how they complete the tasks aside them. Always the same tasks, the same way. In their order, purity, nakedness. Stars wear no concealment.
00:12:37
Speaker
And the assumption here is that you can see the order and things, the way they're structured, and the stars in particular, but you should also carry that to when you zoom out and think about everything as a whole, everything he's, you know, earlier in the earlier quote, continually dwell in your mind upon the changes of the elements into one another. And everything does this in an ordered way as part of a greater whole.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that I think is key. It's not nihilism. It's not an epicurean because what we said is basically this is a way to get away from false beliefs. And so the epicurean could say, yeah, I love getting away from false beliefs by like reflecting on the fact that everything is just atoms, everything is just matter, and we're just making up a lot of these problems.
00:13:26
Speaker
But when the Stoics are doing that, some problems are made up, some values are made up, but some values are true. Some things are actually good and bad. And the Epicureans weren't nihilists, I should clarify that, but they certainly wouldn't believe in the ordered nature of the universe, the providence of the universe.
00:13:44
Speaker
So when you're zooming out, you're, as you said, you're not just saying, well, none of this matters. You're recontextualizing what matters by contextualizing yourself as part of a greater whole that has order and meaning, at least in Marcus Aurelius's view.
00:13:58
Speaker
There's another stoic quote that helps me make sense of this, an Epictetus quote, where he talks about the foot and the foot would be happy if it understood what the body was doing, even though the foot is just getting smashed against the ground over and over again, or it's getting muddied. And so the part of the view from above is to say, well, you're stuck as a foot, take some time to think about what the body's doing. And that can provide some sense to it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
00:14:28
Speaker
I was actually leafing through the meditations today for not looking for quotes for this, but I assembled upon in book six, he actually has a long stretch of different sections that point on this. So book six, 36 to 38, if someone wants to poke around in meditations, I won't read it all, but I'll read one more a bit from Marcus just to help you all get a sense of how he practiced this, how he wrote about this to himself.
00:14:56
Speaker
Let's do meditations 36. Asia and Europe distance recesses of the universe, the ocean, a drop of water, Mount Athos, a molehill, the presence a split second in eternity, minus skill, transitory, insignificance.
00:15:15
Speaker
And then he goes on in 36, 37, 38 to notice different aspects of this. Everything is the same substance, has its own order, and then everything is related, implicated in one another, and in sympathy with each other. So there's, I think, a few more notes to give a sense of how Marcus wrote about these themes to himself, and then how he reminded himself to take this view personally.
00:15:44
Speaker
And I think, you know, I'm reading some of these passages aloud because when I first read the meditations, this aspect of it, Marcus's spiritual side, spiritual in a sense of spirit that Michael clarified earlier, really stuck out seeing was the most striking aspect of the meditations. So personally, it's what I found
00:16:09
Speaker
most sublime about the meditations as the way Marcus wrote about this cosmic consciousness, how he tried to instill it in himself and the ideas we get for our own personal practice. Absolutely.
00:16:30
Speaker
Yeah, so we chatted about the purpose of this practice, getting a sense of order of things, situating your life in a whole. And we can move on to discuss a little bit more practicalities of practice. Yeah, let's do it.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah, so how do you do this in a meditation practice? One way to do it is remind yourself of this larger view in the same way that Marcus does, but I'd like to talk about two other options, which is a structured meditation practice, and then the other one, which is by consuming art.
Meditation Techniques: Expanding Space and Time
00:17:08
Speaker
So, when it comes to meditation, this practice starts by expanding one's sense of space or time. You're trying to break that initial narrow and concealed vision. And so to expand your sense of space, instead we have several guided meditations where you
00:17:32
Speaker
focus first on imagining yourself, picturing yourself, looking down at yourself from the ceiling and then moving to the city, expanding out even further until you are picturing the planet as a whole. That's how you expand one's sense of space, fairly intuitive. You can also expand one's sense of time, civilization itself.
00:17:59
Speaker
has only lasted 6,000 years or so. Humans have been around for 200,000, 300,000 years, the Earth, 4 billion, and the universe, 14 billion years. A sense of scale, which when you compare to a single is
00:18:21
Speaker
difficult to accurately internalize. One can say these sorts of numbers abstractly, internalizing
00:18:33
Speaker
where your life fits in into this much larger pictures and altogether different matter. One way to do this is to imagine your life as a film reel and then adding in the stories of your ancestors, the stories of other humans.
00:18:51
Speaker
and at different advanced stages enlarging this picture further to expand one's sense of space and include the varieties of experiences that are having any particular time and space.
00:19:08
Speaker
So often you'll be expanding your sense of space or time, and then you'll end up at this larger view. And then one useful prompt, one useful next step is to inquire and ask questions like fundamentally, what matters from this standpoint? Or what is my role in this larger picture?
00:19:35
Speaker
And if you ask the first question, what matters, you'll often find that what is trivial falls away, whatever frustrations or daily encounters that might be causing anxiety can fall away and that what is important remains. And then if you ask this other question, what is my role, you might have more clarity on how best to live out your life and which roles to focus on.
00:20:02
Speaker
I would say the best answers for me usually from this perspective are, in a sense, simple. My role is to be a good partner, good friend, good member of my city, and so on, just as those are the roles of many of the humans that surround me. But by performing this exercise, one becomes better at internalizing that and situating
00:20:31
Speaker
you know, what that actually means, you know, what does it actually mean to be a good friend in this larger story? That's not, that's not merely, I'm not merely looking at my life as if it were the only thing that exists, but is a set of thousands and thousands of different lives.
00:20:53
Speaker
I find it interesting here that we call out both the space and the time because I think sometimes you can do it just spatially when you hear a view from above and I think it's a bit more intuitive, but the time one is very effective for me as well.
00:21:12
Speaker
Maybe you have to kind of zoom out a bit. You have to do a bit of both, but the time even conceptualizing over the span of my own life is very, very helpful for me. Kind of clarifying in terms of my personal practice in terms of clarifying or what's, what is important, what should I be doing and kind of, kind of assuming that broader perspective. So that's something I do myself a lot. I think one thing that we didn't hit on about the exercise itself.
00:21:39
Speaker
is this distinction between, you know, I don't want to get too in the weeds of the philosophy of it, but the distinction between propositional knowledge and then maybe experiential knowledge.
Experiential Insights: Cosmic Insignificance
00:21:50
Speaker
I don't know if that's the right distinction to make, but there just is a difference between saying there's eight billion people on the planet and, you know, seeing eight billion people or imagining, you know, eight billion people.
00:22:04
Speaker
And visualizing that or saying, you know, as, as you mentioned, you know, humans have been around for 300,000 years. You can hear that number and then you can kind of visualize that, you know, sometimes people will do that. They'll be like, this is a, I know for me, if I look at money, I'm very bad at abstracting out, but you'd be like.
00:22:19
Speaker
you'll have some sort of graph or visualization, like this is a million dollars, this is a billion dollars. You'd be like, wow, that's much bigger than I expected a billion dollars to be. And so the view from above for me is this kind of, this intentional practice of not just reminding myself, because you can say to yourself, well, you know, I'm going to live over a lifetime where this isn't going to matter in six months, or I'm just one person of many. You would say these things, but to sit down and to try to internalize that is really important through this visualization.
00:22:48
Speaker
The other thing that you mentioned that I really like is that idea of inquiring. So once you've assumed that perspective, you're not just floating there up in the clouds, but you're saying, now that I'm here, what do I think is the case? Now that I'm here, what do I think is important? And so that actual active mindfulness meditation, if you want to call it, or just questioning inquiry from that perspective.
00:23:09
Speaker
Those are things that I do that I find really helpful and I think for that kind of knowledge that are propositional versus experiential kind of difference in knowledge too. But yeah, that's really how I do practice it. One of the things that I practice, I don't know if this is the way Marcus envisioned it, but
00:23:28
Speaker
For me, taking the time view of just even a longer time horizon, like will this matter in five years and trying to, trying to expand that time out. That for me is, is, is how I'll often practice it in my, in my own self. And I just find that is so helpful for kind of clarifying what needs my attention and what doesn't need my attention, how I should structure my day and how I shouldn't. Yeah. All good points. I think especially so this point that often you can just take a larger view.
00:23:57
Speaker
by bringing your own life into mind and the span of your own life into mind. And that might be more tractable than trying to immediately jump to some of these other practices that involve picturing many more lives to the extent that you can.
00:24:16
Speaker
And thinking about, you know, this thing that I take so seriously today, is it really what will matter to me in a decade? Whereas this other boring chore that I feel like should get done, is this the sort of thing that I wish I would have done in 10 years. Maybe so, maybe no.
00:24:37
Speaker
That can also be exceptionally helpful. And then earlier you mentioned this point about the kind of knowledge, which is a good thing to go back to. One way of approaching the question is sometimes as an objection to this practice, people might say that space doesn't really matter. You know, space doesn't have any
00:25:03
Speaker
The amount of space we live in doesn't have anything to say about the significance of our life or not. You know, there's this idea that we just live on a pale blue dot and that renders our life insignificant. But why should that?
00:25:19
Speaker
make a difference. If we lived in a much larger planet, if you imagine that the universe surrounding Earth just shrunk, would that mean that our life suddenly became more significant? The things that we tend to think matter, all things considered, don't seem to be impacted. Relationships, virtue, pleasure, whatever it is, whatever philosophy you have,
00:25:42
Speaker
for the most part do not seem to be impacted by the size of the universe. So what's the importance of thinking about space, let alone time? And I think that objection is
00:25:58
Speaker
technically right, but it does seem to miss the point, which is that the space we happen to be in itself does not have any meaningful import for the significance of our lives. But what it does call attention to is it's a way of seeing what else is actually happening. What we are doing is we're not coming to
00:26:26
Speaker
new kinds of propositional knowledge. We already know that we are one human out of eight billion, but we are coming to know that from a new perspective. So you can think of this as knowledge from rather than knowledge that and this knowledge from is going to make some things more salient, more obvious, more noticeable.
00:26:50
Speaker
than others. That's how this practice fundamentally works is once you see the larger picture you have brought to mind how you fit in and that brings up all these questions about your roles, brings up these questions about whatever thoughts you had during that day and how do they fit in in this larger
00:27:18
Speaker
picture. And this exercise, this reminder gives you a kind of perspective on the world that you wouldn't have had otherwise. And when you take that next step and inquire, you know, how do I fit in here? What's my purpose in this larger picture? You can come to some
00:27:39
Speaker
real insights and better internalize the sense of, yes, this is my purpose. This is how I can make sense of myself occupying this narrow perspective in terms of the greater whole. This is how I can ensure that I have a role that I fulfill it and I feel at home in the universe.
Art as a Gateway to Cosmic Consciousness
00:28:04
Speaker
Yeah. And I want to pick up on that idea of salience because I think salience is a really, really nice word to describe something that I've been trying to figure out for awhile because, you know, sometimes you're doing, sometimes you're doing exercises to learn something new.
00:28:19
Speaker
I just had about maybe your roles, your purpose in the universe, or your relationships. Sometimes you just haven't thought about those things. You need to sit down and think about those things. And sometimes it's a question of salience. You need to think about them differently or have the right parts of them stand out to you with more intensity. And if I'm understanding correctly, I think about something like a near-death experience where
00:28:41
Speaker
Somebody necessarily doesn't learn anything new from almost dying, but certain aspects of their life gain greater importance. Maybe that's a connection to family. Maybe that's pursuing what they want to do. Maybe that's the triviality of risk or like you're not doing what you want because you're being more conservative with your life. Whatever that difference is, certain things are kind of standing out.
00:29:01
Speaker
You didn't learn anything. You always knew you were going to die and you didn't die there. So nothing changed, but the salience changes. And so, you know, maybe we could bungee jump or something. We could try to simulate that. But another way to do that, it's the view from above it's many things, but in one way it is a salience exercise. It is to try to see what stands out, see what still has a flavor of importance from that perspective. Totally, totally resonate with that.
00:29:26
Speaker
I still take the same approach to death where I think typically we think of death as it's something that is a certainty. We know it's going to happen, but it's not going to happen today. And often we're surprised then when it does emerge into either our own lives or the lives of our loved ones, even though that abstractly we know it's
00:29:49
Speaker
always possible for someone to come up with a certain freak accident or illness. And the stomach exercises around death, one part of them is to
00:30:05
Speaker
ensure that we don't lapse into this ignorance about our temporary nature. And I suppose you can think about the view from above in the same way. It's an exercise to ensure that we are not ignorant about the fact that we are part of a much greater whole and have particular purposes within that. Yeah, I love that. That strikes me as dead on.
00:30:32
Speaker
Well, one aspect I wanted to touch on about the view from above that is not as far as I know touched on as frequently by modern commentators is that
00:30:46
Speaker
meditation practices, very useful for many. They're exceptionally useful for me personally. I would say the view from above is one of the specifically stoic exercises that I find most valuable in my practice. But you can also consume particular parts of art, movies, literature, or music that help you get
00:31:05
Speaker
into this headspace that reminds you that the world is much larger than you initially think of it. So for me on the book side, if I read books on the history of the human species,
00:31:22
Speaker
doing that can help me better situate my life, make the human story feel more tangible and concrete and less vague. And by doing so, it makes it easier for me to internalize the fact that, you know, I am in fact a part of a much, much larger story. So books useful for me, some kinds of
00:31:46
Speaker
Movies movies like the tree of life. I don't know if you've seen that but for me, that's sort of the I have yeah, yeah, a periodic movie for causing Helping someone move into this perspective
00:31:58
Speaker
And then, of course, there's kinds of music, the music of Arvo Perk, particularly useful for me for taking on a larger perspective and has a sort of ethereal quality going back to Marcus's notes on the stars. And then, you know, I suppose one could go on and on, but the main point here is that, you know, you can find and shape your
00:32:24
Speaker
the way you view the world, what's salient to you by choosing specific kinds of art, whether that's movies, literature, music, paintings, what have you. Yeah, there's a lot to say there. I view that as a big function of art in my own life in terms of my personal development is the salience thing. Again, it comes back to that. I think that's the key point here for me at least.
00:32:49
Speaker
You know, whether that's you're watching a comedy, a drama, a romance. It's like, what do you want to be salient? What do you want to be kind of stick? Because the human experience is this whole range of experiences. There's a whole range of perspectives you can empathize with. And it's like, which perspective do you want to empathize with? Which headspace do you want to get into? Curious about the music comment. Is that something you listen to while you meditate or does it just happen? Do you just find yourself assuming the view from above while you're listening anyway?
00:33:19
Speaker
And who was the artist? Maybe we'll leave it in the show notes. Yeah, the Estonian composer Arvo Perks. And I was often just listening to music either in a concert setting or in a setting where I'm not necessarily meditating, but paying attention to the music and not trying to cause myself to take the view from above. But often I do find that it happens. Some music is just clearly sublime, clearly greater than what one ordinarily runs into in life. So I suppose it helps.
00:33:49
Speaker
One thing I was thinking about great music, I was thinking about this idea of ecstasy. Ecstasy coming from the Greek term of standing outside of yourself. That's what it literally means. It means to kind of just stand outside of yourself. And so you can think of in moments of great movies, certainly great music. I've had this happen, probably some movies, a little bit less of literature. Literature hits a little bit less hard in the moment.
00:34:12
Speaker
But you have these kind of ecstatic moments when you're living with great art, consuming great art, where you're standing outside of yourself, you've assumed this perspective, or you've kind of transcended against another metaphor of transcendence, of moving past yourself or your current perspectives, and then working from that perspective. I think music is great for that.
00:34:35
Speaker
I think anytime we can expand this kind of spiritual exercise work away from, you know, now is my, I'm doing my homework. I'm practicing. I think that's good. But if you can look for moments of finding this in moments of joy, in moments of things you enjoy about art, I think that's great. And it's a great way to do it.
00:34:53
Speaker
So to wrap things up, we have a little section on what's excellent about this practice or any risks, anything else you want to say. So I feel throughout this conversation, we've largely been touching on what's excellent, what is good. If I had to sum up, the main idea is that it integrates two perspectives on the world, this near term.
00:35:18
Speaker
perspective and this larger far-term perspective, it helps you feel at home, focus on what matters and is excellent exercise for asking questions like what ultimately matters, what is my role, what is my purpose.
00:35:37
Speaker
That's how it summarizes practice. And then one other quick note is that it's something one can do very quickly throughout one's day. You can quickly pause, picture either the span of your life, the place you are at the city, and by doing so, you might find that it's easier to focus on what's important and get a sense of.
00:36:03
Speaker
calm for whatever storm might be happening at the moment. Anything else you want to add on the good side? Yeah, just adding like your second point was that, look, it's something you could do as a quick exercise, which I agree. That's, that's one thing I was saying earlier, like, I agree with that, but it also has the depth, right? So it's something you can do as a quick exercise.
00:36:23
Speaker
But maybe it's something you do, you know, lying in bed for an hour, listening to a great band, and you kind of are able to get into this zone and stay there and have that be like quite a profound moving experience as well. So it's both a, it's both like a quick thing you've got to force yourself into an analytic
Depth and Risks of 'The View from Above'
00:36:42
Speaker
way. If you're like, I'm stressed, I need to do this, or I'm having an issue crisis, I need to do this. And it's something that I think you can have as more of a kind of a passive experience, again, connecting to that art.
00:36:53
Speaker
as a typical way. And so I think that kind of the depth of it mixed with the accessibility of it is a really unique combination, at least for stoic exercises. Yeah, I'd say it's a very deep, deep practice. Absolutely. I agree with that. It's the sort of thing one practices through years and might find that different things strike you at different times.
00:37:17
Speaker
Well, as for the risks, I would say that the main risk with this practice or way it may go awry for people is if they focus too much on detaching. They do too much detaching without actually latching onto anything that is important. So sometimes people might have this sense of
00:37:45
Speaker
You know, why does anything matter? Everything is going to come to an end. There's the Marcus Aurelius line, and a little time you will have forgotten everything, and a little time everything will have forgotten you. Why does this?
00:38:01
Speaker
matter at all. Anything we do can zoom out further and further and think we're just might be more tempted towards that epicurean picture where just atoms bouncing around in a void from the larger perspective.
00:38:15
Speaker
And I think that's where you need two things. You need, one, this positive view of nature where life is meaningful, whatever view you take on it. There is a real sense in which either nature has its own purpose, which is a traditional Stoic idea. Nature has a telos, or
00:38:44
Speaker
at least human lives, there are things that are valuable in our lives that do not disappear just because you took a larger perspective. And this is where if we go back to that objection I discussed earlier, there is something technically right about that objection.
00:39:00
Speaker
If relationships matter, it doesn't matter whether they're happening on a really tiny planet, really tiny universe, or a really big one. They matter irrelevant the size. So you need that positive account of nature. That's always a useful reminder. And I think the second
00:39:19
Speaker
way to address this, which also addresses another risk, which is maybe you get too abstract, is that you should always be thinking of integrating your term perspective with the much larger one. In the end, you are just an individual. You have that
00:39:39
Speaker
narrow perspective and because of that you do have particular concrete roles to play and the details do matter. So there's so much you can learn, so much that becomes more salient, so that's important when you take the view from above.
00:39:56
Speaker
But at the end of the day, you're integrating your own position and the universe with that larger whole. So those are my two reminders, I'd say, to address the risks of detaching too much and the risk of perhaps getting too abstract. Yeah, I agree. I agree with those. I mean, I think those are both.
00:40:20
Speaker
mistakes you can make when practicing this. So it's less effective. And then there's always that, that thrust denialism in a lot of stoic exercises. You know, you think of a mental morning, like we're all going to die. And there's like, there's two ways you can take that. You go, well, what's the point in doing anything? What does it matter? Or it can be like, wow, that really make me salient. How much decisions I make matter because.
00:40:45
Speaker
I'm only going to have 80 or so years to make them if I'm lucky. And I might even have this reasonable chance I'll have a lot less. So there's always that battle between detaching or increased salience, detaching or carrying more. And I think you're right to say that's the thing. I don't know if it's a bad part of the exercise, but it's the thing, as you said, you got to watch out for it. You got to try to avoid. Otherwise, it'll go the wrong way.
00:41:12
Speaker
I also think that it can be quite abstract and quite maybe unhelpful if you're beginning. I think we hit on this earlier. There's a lot of different views you can take.
00:41:26
Speaker
So if the view from the stars isn't doing it for you, maybe that view is looking down on top of your community, right? Maybe that's even just stepping outside yourself and seeing how you engage, how you're engaging with other people. Or maybe it's spreading the time temporally, saying, looking at the course of your own life, looking at the course of all of humanity and assuming there's different perspectives you can take. There's different.
00:41:50
Speaker
directions your little soul avatar can go. They don't all have to be up in the stars like Marcus in that passage. So if you're finding it ineffective from a perspective, I would say experiment with that a bit and play around with which one suits you and which one's most effective for you given your circumstance.
00:42:07
Speaker
not necessarily a criticism, but another warning to improve your practice. Like I said, I find the temporal aspect works a lot better for me than the being up in the stars. But we each have our own kind of our own way that that hits the sweet spot for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's another good point. But I think perhaps another one is that
00:42:37
Speaker
When you're in the position where you're inquiring, what's my purpose in a large scheme of things, from this standpoint, you can be reminded of the fundamentals, so the basic things that matter in the human life, these things that the Stoics are always emphasizing being virtuous, fulfilling your essential social roles. But it may not be the best ways to come up with
00:43:07
Speaker
to think about very precise questions. You know, is my purpose most fulfilled by taking this job or another one? You can try it, but that's not, I think, at least personally, I haven't found that I get that much clarity.
00:43:27
Speaker
by directly trying to answer those questions. Perhaps those questions are easier to answer in a life where you're taking the view from above more often, but using the view from above to specifically answer these kinds of questions is, I think, not how the Stoics, not how you see Marcus using it.
00:43:43
Speaker
It's not a, it's not a get out of jail free card. It's not like any issue that comes up. Well, just going to view from above it real quick. I'll be back in 10 minutes and I'll have the perspective. It's not going to work for everything. I think, as you said, those specific questions, but as you said, you might be the kind of person who has a better kind of self-knowledge is in a better position to answer those difficult questions. If you kind of, if you practice this often, I think there's something compelling to that, but yeah, not going to be, not going to be your, your go-to for every situation. Absolutely.
00:44:12
Speaker
Excellent. Well, anything else you want to add? No, I think, I think, well, for those listening that made this far, I'm interested in any arts that you have found effective and I will, I will watch it, read it, or listen to it. I'm very interested in helping you kind of assume this perspective, whether that's movies, literature, music, let us know. I'm interested for selfish reasons and maybe we'll, we'll share it out with the rest of our listeners in a later episode if we get some, get some interesting ones.
00:44:39
Speaker
And that's all I wanted to say. This is something that works for me. I think my big takeaway from this episode, you know, just having this conversation with you Caleb, is that idea of salient, that idea of, well, you know, if there's 10 things on the table, which one are we focusing on? And is it the right one? And how we can kind of shift that attention. And I think that's a reoccurring theme in Stoicism a lot is where is our attention going?
00:45:01
Speaker
And we get these tools like the dichotomy of control. We get these tools that we do above from above to shift that attention. And that's something that I'm going to think about a lot. And I really liked that idea of art as playing a role in shifting that attention. So that leaves me with a lot to think about. So thanks for the chat. Yeah, this is great. I hope that you all found it useful. Until next time.
00:45:23
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com, and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.