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Lesson 3.3: The Inner Citadel
14 Plays1 month ago
In a cruel Roman world, Stoicism offered its students—including former slaves, senators, and emperors alike—a way to stand firm amid chaos, to cultivate peace in the storm, and to live well regardless of what fate delivered.
Topics discussed:
- Stoicism as Psychological Training:
Stoic ethics is not a list of rules, but a discipline of mind. It teaches that emotional disturbances arise from irrational judgments, and that inner peace (euthymia) is achieved through rational mastery of impressions. - The Dichotomy of Control:
Only our judgments are truly “up to us.” All else—fortune, reputation, others’ behavior—lies beyond our power and should be met with acceptance. This insight lies at the heart of Stoic freedom. - The Stoic Toolkit:
Practices like the reserve clause, morning and evening meditation, and the memorization of Stoic principles help one build a stable inner citadel of the mind—resistant to the chaos of the world.
For more, go to theluxuryofvirtue.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to Roman Stoicism
00:00:02
Speaker
Now that we are in the Roman imperial era, today we dive back into Stoic philosophy. In a previous lesson, we focused on Stoic physics and Stoic logic.
00:00:15
Speaker
Today we look at Stoic ethics. But before we do that, let me give you a little bit of context for what's going on in the first two centuries of the common era.
00:00:28
Speaker
During this time period, even though all the schools of philosophy made their way throughout the Roman Empire, Stoicism really becomes the unofficial philosophy of the upper classes.
00:00:40
Speaker
It seems like the upper classes in general really took a liking to Stoicism. And of course, it was changing over time, switching towards being a little bit more focused on ethics itself.
00:00:53
Speaker
But It really provided for, just to give you an example of how much it really influenced the upper classes, it served as the standard by which they would judge the emperor.
00:01:05
Speaker
So an emperor might be really un-stoic and that's, you know, the way that people would see it. They would say this person sort of lacks, you know, self-control and and suffers too many emotional disturbances to be a good
Stoicism in Roman Society
00:01:20
Speaker
emperor. So Soicism is like ah an evaluative standard for Roman upper class pretty important. too On top of that, several prominent public figures are Stoics.
00:01:32
Speaker
Seneca is one very famous person. He was the advisor to Emperor Nero. Now, Nero did grow increasingly volatile and cruel and maybe some mental health problems in there.
00:01:45
Speaker
And so Seneca did actually ah try to overthrow Nero. ah For that reason, he was forced to commit suicide in the year 65. But Seneca is one very important and prominent person in this time period.
00:02:02
Speaker
There's also Gaius Musonius Rufus. He is a teacher of Soic philosophy, and one interesting factoid about him is that at a certain point, the Roman emperor Vespasian banished all the philosophers from the city of Rome because they were promoting pro-Republican ideas, apparently.
00:02:23
Speaker
But Musonius Rufus was allowed to stay. And, you know, that goes to show you that he had kind of a high stature. So this is another very prominent public figure that was a Stoic.
00:02:37
Speaker
And two more for you. Epictetus was a former slave that turned into a Stoic teacher. And he was so popular that Emperor Hadrian sought his company. He died in 135.
00:02:51
Speaker
Epictetus did. And of course, the very famous Marcus Aurelius, he was none other than the emperor of Rome. He died in 180 CE.
00:03:03
Speaker
So Stoicism really rising to philosophical prominence.
Foundations of Stoic Beliefs
00:03:08
Speaker
And well, let's begin to transition into their ethics by doing a very quick review of what we covered last time, really just some key ideas here.
00:03:20
Speaker
First of all, Stoic determinism is kind of a big deal. This idea is that, well, for starters, the whole cosmos is one radically continuous organism.
00:03:34
Speaker
And this organism, by the way, is God, is Zeus. And all events within it are determined by the thoughts of Zeus, by the thoughts of God, by divine reason.
00:03:48
Speaker
Expressed very pithily, everything that happens has to happen. The only thing that is within your control is whether or not you assent to your impressions, to your thoughts.
00:04:03
Speaker
Given that this is the only thing that is within your control, it makes sense that this is the only thing that is a moral good. What does this mean? Well, again, the only thing that has moral value is what can actually be within our control. It doesn't make sense to give something moral value if you can't control it.
00:04:24
Speaker
For example, if I stopped a bank robber, because I have a you know weird cramp on my leg and just it just kind of stretches out and I tripped him and he fell and we caught him.
00:04:35
Speaker
That doesn't seem like I should get moral praise. If anything, it might be funny, but I shouldn't be counted as brave, for example. It's just a twitch in my leg that made me do that, right?
00:04:47
Speaker
So only things that are within your control ought to be labeled as you know morally good actions. Well, the only thing that is within our control, according to the Stoics, is whether or not we assent to our impressions.
00:05:01
Speaker
So, ipso facto, the only moral good is only assenting to these cataleptic impressions. That is a term from the last lesson. It just basically means that your thoughts are faithfully representing reality.
00:05:18
Speaker
On the Stoic view, emotions, by definition, entail having assented to non-cataleptic impressions. In other words, the way that Stoics define emotions is as saying that, you know, you are accepting an irrational or inaccurate thought.
00:05:39
Speaker
They basically divvy up emotions into two categories. There's just emotions and there's good emotions. If you want to call one bad emotions and good emotions, that's okay.
00:05:51
Speaker
And the special term, by the way, for the good emotions is eupatheiae. Two more quick notes here as part of our review. The first one has to do with the spark of the divine. All humans, according to Stoic doctrine, possess divine pneuma, this inner fire that is actually what gives us the power to control what impressions we assent to, which thoughts we accept.
00:06:20
Speaker
And because of this, we all have inherent moral worth because pneuma, if you recall, is the archae. It really is God. That is God in its purest form, this fiery thing.
00:06:33
Speaker
And so because we have that within us, we have a little bit of the divine in us, and that's very important. So we all have moral worth. And last but not least, Even though there's actually many, many ways that one can have non-cataleptic impressions, many ways that one can inaccurately represent reality, the Stoics focused on emotions, right?
00:07:00
Speaker
Those thoughts, irrational thoughts that would take us to some sort of emotional disturbance. So that's a little bit of review While we're on the topic, let me just say that I'm going to not use a lot of Stoic jargon in this lesson.
00:07:24
Speaker
Stoic jargon gets pretty tricky, right? Cataleptic impressions and propatheiae and eupatheiae, and it's it's confusing. Moreover, sometimes when you use a jargon, even when you use English translations of the Greek terms,
00:07:41
Speaker
People fall into this trap of thinking that the Stoics wanted to get rid of all emotions or all affect to use more scientific language. And that is not true. As I mentioned earlier, they have the regular emotions, which are actually bad, and the good emotions, the upatheiae.
00:07:58
Speaker
But you see how this happens, right? This is confusing. So for these reasons, I will be forgoing the technical terms. And I'm simply going to say that the Stoics were opposed to assenting to irrational judgments, irrational desires, irrational fears.
Stoic Ethics and Self-Control
00:08:21
Speaker
Perhaps a a catch-all phrase we could use is emotional disturbance. That's what we're going to focus on. If I can just kind of speak very plainly for a second, what the Stoics wanted of us is to be okay with those things that are out of our control, to learn how to manage ourselves and to prevent us from falling into periods of emotional disturbance.
00:08:48
Speaker
That's all that stoicism really is. Because remember, everything that happens has to happen. So there's not really anything you can do about it. Moreover, everything that happens is governed by divine reason. It is rational.
00:09:02
Speaker
So to be bent out of shape by what's happening is irrational, right? So what they were really doing, again, now maybe I'm speaking too plainly here, but They were providing a therapeutic philosophy so that we can develop rational, emotional states, calm states, tranquility, right? Don't get riled up.
00:09:29
Speaker
and That's stoicism, nutshellized. Okay, here now is me transitioning to Stoic ethics proper.
00:09:40
Speaker
There are three disciplines to Stoic ethics, just so that you don't get confused. There's also three Stoic areas of study. That's what we covered last time, right? Physics, logic, and ethics.
00:09:54
Speaker
And then within ethics, there's again, three different camps or three different areas of study. And we call these the three disciplines. The first one is the discipline of the passions. This has to do with accepting our fate.
00:10:11
Speaker
So it's a series of practices that get you to be okay with what's happening. The second is the discipline of action, which has to do with philanthropy, right?
00:10:22
Speaker
Being good to other people, love of humankind, that kind of stuff. And the third one is the discipline of assent. And that has to do with mindfulness of our thoughts, really making sure that you only accept cataleptic impressions.
00:10:41
Speaker
Okay, with all this in mind, let me present to you now key idea in Stoic ethics.
00:10:53
Speaker
It's called typically the dichotomy of control. And we can actually get a summary of this from the very first sentence of a book written by Epictetus called the Enchiridion. And here is that first sentence.
00:11:11
Speaker
Some things are up to us and others are not. Some things are up to us and others are not. Okay. Well, that seems to make a heck of a lot of sense.
00:11:26
Speaker
And if you accept that, it's very easy to begin to work your way into other Stoic principles. So here are two principles that are implied by and related to this key idea from Epictetus.
00:11:44
Speaker
<unk>s the first one. Stoics should cultivate continual self-awareness so as to be always mindful of the judgments they assent to, which is, again, the only thing that is truly within their control.
00:12:01
Speaker
So if some things are up to you and other things are not, you need to be hyper-tuned to your thoughts so that you make sure that you spend your time and energy on those things that are actually up to you.
00:12:17
Speaker
And thus, here's the second closely related principle. Stoics should accept those things that are not within their power to control as ultimately indifferent.
00:12:31
Speaker
The indifference are things that we talked about in the last lesson, but remember most people, according to the Stoics, are just confused about what goods are. We think that fame and wealth and good looks and all that are goods. No, they are preferred indifference.
00:12:53
Speaker
The only good is moral good. Always keep that in mind, right? So as we go through Stoic ethics, you'll really get a feel for You know, how Stoicism is really all about accepting only rational thoughts and withholding assent from irrational thoughts.
00:13:16
Speaker
Now, if the dichotomy of control is the starting point for Stoic ethics, a very helpful insight to always keep in mind as we're working through Stoic ethics is is this.
Managing Emotions and Rational Thinking
00:13:32
Speaker
Thoughts are clearly the problem here. When you accept irrational thoughts or give in to irrational judgments, that is the beginning of your troubles.
00:13:44
Speaker
However, thoughts are also the solution, according to the Stoics. So we're going to see time and time again that you want to replace those irrational thoughts, those irrational judgments, irrational desires. Replace those with rational thoughts, judgments, and desires.
00:14:05
Speaker
That's how to be a good stoic.
00:14:09
Speaker
Let me try to speak once more very plainly. Emotional disturbances are the result of ah thought. You either became way too absorbed in something that you don't have any control over or you're attached to something that, again, you don't have a whole lot of control over.
00:14:31
Speaker
Maybe pleasure, maybe wealth, maybe the praise of others. You don't get to choose if you get the praise of others or not. You can do your part and that's it. The rest is up to them.
00:14:43
Speaker
Maybe you're really anxious about pain or poverty or criticism. Again, you only have partial control over some of those things. So you can't get yourself too absorbed in them. You should focus always on those things that you actually have full control over.
00:15:01
Speaker
so that's the part about, you know, thoughts being the problem. Now let's move on to thoughts being the solution. You can supplant or replace irrational desires and judgments with rational desires and judgments.
00:15:17
Speaker
So I have here a quote by Seneca on how irrational thoughts give rise to emotional disturbances and how to cure them. So going give you this quote here and I'm going to take a couple of pauses to explain what's going on.
00:15:34
Speaker
But here is Seneca, by the way, speaking to you from 2000 years ago me, and tell me if it doesn't seem just as applicable now as it was then. Quote, Now to make plain how passions begin or grow or get carried away. There is the initial involuntary movement, a preparation for the passion as it were, and a kind of threatening signal.
00:16:09
Speaker
There's a second movement accompanied by an expression of will not stubbornly resolved to the effect that I should be avenged since I've been harmed or this man should be punished since he's committed a crime.
00:16:25
Speaker
The third movement's already out of control. It desires vengeance, not if it's appropriate, but come what may, having overthrown reason. Let me pause right there.
00:16:39
Speaker
Let me give you an example here so that we can really dig into what Seneca is talking about. In the last lesson, I talked about getting cut off, but basically any situation where you feel offended will work here. So let's just say someone does something and you interpret it as being inconsiderate or maybe downright hostile.
00:17:05
Speaker
And here's the very first thing that happens. what Seneca calls the initial involuntary movement. What that means is that your body's natural reaction will be some sort of negative affect, some sort sort of negative mood.
00:17:23
Speaker
And as I mentioned, perhaps you'll remember in the last lesson, a lot of us feel this in different ways. I feel heat come up from my chest and onto my shoulders.
00:17:35
Speaker
Sort of like, a what was that? Why would you do that? But not with thoughts, right? There's no words yet. It's just a feeling, a negative feeling. And Seneca calls it a threatening signal.
00:17:48
Speaker
The second movement, that and involves a thought, a judgment. And so it might be something like, I should be avenged since I've been harmed.
00:18:00
Speaker
Or the other one that Seneca gives us is, this man should be punished since he's committed a crime. Yeah, these are thoughts you might have afterwards. You'd say to yourself, I'm angry and it's right that I'm angry. This person did this and that's wrong.
00:18:16
Speaker
Someone should get them back. These are thoughts. And exactly these thoughts are the ones that are going to lead to you getting upset, getting frazzled, having an emotional disturbance.
00:18:34
Speaker
That is not good. That would be an example. These thoughts are examples of non-cataleptic impressions.
00:18:45
Speaker
You're thinking that what happened is is bad, it's an evil. But the only evil is what you're about to do, accept an inaccurate, irrational judgment.
00:18:59
Speaker
And so the third part, that's out of your control. Once you've accepted a non-cataleptic impression as true, now you're on the road to getting angry.
00:19:10
Speaker
So Seneca continues here. We cannot avoid that first mental jolt with reason's help, just as we cannot avoid having another's yawn provoke our own, or avoid closing our eyes at the sudden poke of another's fingers.
00:19:27
Speaker
Reason cannot overcome those movements, though perhaps their force can be lessened if we become used to them and constantly keep a watch for them. That second movement, which is born from deliberation, is eradicated by deliberation.
00:19:47
Speaker
So you can't do anything about that mood. The mood will strike. The body's natural response will be some kind of negative feeling. But you have another part of your brain that adds the judgment to that person should be punished.
00:20:08
Speaker
That is a judgment and you can replace that judgment with an accurate one. You can say to yourself instead, that person did something which seems to me inconsiderate but I will retain my composure.
00:20:22
Speaker
Maybe they had a reason for it. It doesn't help me to get frazzled by it. Let's move on. ah You can replace irrational judgments with rational judgments, things that actually get you to live in accordance with reason.
00:20:39
Speaker
I have here one more quote, this time from Marcus Aurelius. He really is taking the advice from Seneca and another Stoic philosopher named Epictetus. And he repeats to himself, Marcus Aurelius does, that he has to stop, you know, and really just kind of judge what's going on. He has to be very mindful of what's going on, because otherwise these pre-emotions, these little feelings that flare up, they can become full-blown emotional disturbances.
00:21:09
Speaker
Here is a quote from Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, by the way, speaking to you 2000 years two thousand years ago Quote,
00:21:20
Speaker
the mind is the ruler of the soul it should remain unstirred by agitation of the flesh gentle and violent ones alike not mingling with them but fencing itself off and keeping those feelings in their place when they make their way into your thoughts through the sympathetic link between mind and body Don't try to resist the sensation. The sensation is natural.
00:21:51
Speaker
But don't let the mind start in with the judgments, calling it good or bad. So here, Marcus Aurelius being very precise with his language.
00:22:02
Speaker
You can't stop that mood, that feeling. But you can stop yourself from starting in with the judgments. right? That this is an evil. I need to be avenged.
00:22:12
Speaker
Those are thoughts. Those are judgments. And so once you give into those, the emotional disturbance is bound to come.
00:22:24
Speaker
With this background in place, it's time to look at some ethical practices from Stoicism.
00:23:09
Speaker
So for the rest of this lesson, what I'm going to do is just go over different ethical practices from Stoicism.
The Reserve Clause and Self-Worth
00:23:17
Speaker
And i labeled this the Stoic armamentarium.
00:23:23
Speaker
This is from the psychologist Donald Robertson. He's also a historian of Stoicism. And, you know, these are just different practices that the Stoics used for staving off emotional disturbance, right? Always trying to stay rational and composed.
00:23:43
Speaker
I'm giving you these in no particular order. It's just, you know, basically how they've flowed together. And let's begin with the reserve clause.
00:23:55
Speaker
The reserve clause is a verbal clause added to the end of each sentence concerning one's own actions or intentions. That sounds like a very heady and abstract definition, and it is, but it's very, very simple.
00:24:12
Speaker
When you say you're going to do something, always acknowledge that there's a slight chance it might not go your way. And you do this by adding the phrase Zeus willing or God willing or fate willing after your expression of whatever you're going to intend to do. Right.
00:24:37
Speaker
So, for example, maybe you might say we have big plans for this weekend. We're going to go on a road trip to, you know, Big Bear Mountain or something. Well, that's just saying it plainly, like it's going to happen, right?
00:24:52
Speaker
What you should say is we have big plans this weekend. We're going to go to Big Bear Mountain, Zeus willing. Just adding that little bit helps you realize that, you know what?
00:25:07
Speaker
The world isn't under your control. Things might happen. And by reminding yourself of that, you are almost, you know, preparing yourself for potential disappointments.
00:25:21
Speaker
Here I have a quote from Seneca. The pain caused by failure must be lighter for one who has not promised success to themselves beforehand.
00:25:33
Speaker
right So if you promise success to yourself, you're going to be pretty bent out of shape. Or you're at least going to more out of shape than if you say to yourself, I'm going to do my best, but it's not entirely up to me.
00:25:47
Speaker
I'm just doing what I can. So this is one thing that you can put into action literally today. right And the example that I'm going to focus on is something that i when I talk about it,
00:26:01
Speaker
People do seem to say, yeah, I do that. I do that. Now, don't have to admit this to me or anything, but people have told me this. We have to try to disentangle two different things.
00:26:15
Speaker
Obviously, we want to commit ourselves to success. We want to do the best we can in various important tasks, right? At work, at school, with our family, in our relationships, whatever.
00:26:28
Speaker
We're trying to do the right thing. However, there's this other idea. Some of us not only commit ourselves to success, but we also make our self-worth contingent upon personal success.
00:26:47
Speaker
Some people, in fact, basically our workaholics or work really, really hard because they feel that they are not allowed to be happy unless they are successful.
00:27:01
Speaker
They are not allowed to be happy unless they win, unless they get that raise, unless they get that A, unless they get into that four-year university that they wanted to get into, unless they get that one partner they wanted to get, whatever, right?
00:27:18
Speaker
This is a lot of pressure and it leads to reduced self-esteem if you're not successful. So what you should do instead of that is say something like, I will try my absolute best to succeed.
00:27:34
Speaker
But even if I fail, i will accept myself fully. If you say things like this with a reserve clause, hey,
00:27:45
Speaker
Zeus willing, right? And if I fail, it's okay. I'll try again. You can begin to disentangle this idea that you only have self-worth if you win, if you succeed.
00:28:00
Speaker
You don't. You have self-worth, according to Stoicism, no matter what, you have the inner pneuma within you. And so the general idea here is there's a reserve class. Just always acknowledge that it's not all up to you.
00:28:14
Speaker
You have your part and you're going to do your best. And if it doesn't go your way, that doesn't mean anything about your self-worth. Let's move on now to these pithy little sayings that basically all the schools of philosophy had.
00:28:29
Speaker
Indeed, this is one of the most common therapeutic techniques, right, in ancient philosophy. You get the key elements of a school's philosophy, their dogmata, and you repeat and you rehearse and you memorize them and you meditate on them and they will help you live according to your school's philosophy.
Philosophical Techniques for Daily Life
00:28:51
Speaker
I have here some examples that ah sound very stoic, but they actually come from the Delphic shrine of Apollo, right? The oracle at Delphi. Here they are, you've probably heard them before. Know thyself.
00:29:06
Speaker
And here's another one. Nothing in excess. The Epicureans also had their pithy little statements. In fact, I began my lesson on Epicureanism with their fourfold cure.
00:29:23
Speaker
and So you can check that out if you want to live like an Epicurean. Pythagoreans also had their own little list of aphorisms. They were called the, if you remember, the Akuzmata.
00:29:35
Speaker
But today, of course, we're focusing on Stoicism. So let's move into some of these. And let me begin by saying this. It's not just a pithy little saying, right? So basically all the schools of philosophy that I just mentioned, including the Stoics, they all had these you know, little sayings, but they paired them with other, you know, mental aspects, other mental tools.
00:30:06
Speaker
So what I mean by this is that you're going to say this, you know, a little saying to yourself, but you're also going to try to produce a certain imagery in your mind. And you are also going to try to produce maybe a certain emotional tone, usually a positive emotional tone,
00:30:24
Speaker
And so it's not just saying these things, but you you also want to almost like visualize something positive too. So it's it's more complicated than just the little saying, the pithy little saying.
00:30:36
Speaker
that's the first thing I want to say. The second thing I want to say is that, you know, negative thoughts are very difficult to deal with. And that's exactly what Stoics are trying to deal with.
00:30:47
Speaker
And so they realized, the Stoics did, and that it's going to take some patience and some time to get rid of these negative thoughts, especially if they are automatic and chronic, right? You just, you immediately jump to a negative thought and it's very regular. If you have that sort of situation going on,
00:31:07
Speaker
then it's gonna be a little more challenging for you. And so you're gonna need these pithy little sayings. You're gonna need that visualization technique too. You're gonna have to train yourself to you know put yourself in a more positive emotional tone.
00:31:21
Speaker
And all of this will will take some time and practice. And the Stoics in multiple places say that you really need to practice these things, putting yourself in it right emotional tone, saying these things to push away negative thoughts.
00:31:37
Speaker
um Marcus Aurelius, compares this process to becoming like a boxer. And what does that mean, right? how but What does this have to do with boxing? Well, boxers always carry their weapons with them. They just have to clench their fist, right?
00:31:54
Speaker
And so the same thing here with these pithy little sayings, you wanna make it so that as soon as you become aware of a negative thought, You say your little saying, you try to visualize something positive and you try to put yourself in a positive mood.
00:32:12
Speaker
And so you're always ready to do that. Just like a boxer is always ready to just clench their fist and be dangerous, I guess. You're always ready to push away non-cataleptic impressions.
00:32:25
Speaker
Here's a sidebar that I don't want to forget to say. This is hard, obviously. And in the ancient world, as well as in Christianity, since they borrowed some ideas from Stoicism,
00:32:39
Speaker
They would sometimes use art to aid their memory. So they would sort of look at an art piece and that art piece had all the right associations to get them into the right mood and the right you know frame of mind.
00:32:52
Speaker
i don't know much about this. You'll have to ask an art historian. But sometimes art was an aid in this practice. So I'll give you a list of several stoic sounding pithy little statements that you can use to push away negative thoughts in a bit.
00:33:12
Speaker
Let's begin just with one and we'll kind of really flesh it out. And then I'll sort of just give you a list of these. Let's start with this one so you can put it into action. Maybe today, right?
00:33:25
Speaker
Guard what is your own. Guard what is your own. You can't control everything. In fact, you can control very little, as is very clear from Stoicism.
00:33:36
Speaker
So that's what you need to focus on. That which is actually within your control. And so I'm going to give you a you know a little bit of Epictetus. I won't read you the quote, but I'll give you you know his basic ideas behind social anxiety and And he's talking about musicians. So he says musicians get social anxiety because they want to perform well. Sure. Yes.
00:34:03
Speaker
And they want people's praise. OK. They want to perform well and they want to be praised. Well, if you're a musician, guess what?
00:34:14
Speaker
Only the first part is up to you. If you want to be an exceptional musician, you have to practice a whole lot. And that part really is up to you, right? You have to put in time on your instrument.
00:34:28
Speaker
But people's praise, that isn't yours to give to yourself. That's not up to you. In fact, you can do everything right.
00:34:40
Speaker
And if you just have the wrong crowd, They're not going to like what you're doing and they're not going to think it's very much you know worth praising. So what you need to do is focus on what's actually up to you. In fact, if you were to focus on what's not up to you, right the praise of others, you might actually be hindering your own performance.
00:35:03
Speaker
You are, in other words, giving yourself social anxiety. You're saying to yourself, I hope they like it. Not up to you. Not up to you. So here's the punchline, concentrate on what is within your control.
00:35:20
Speaker
The rest is indifferent. Don't worry about it. There's not much you can do about it. So don't think about it. And the way to not think about it is once more, say your little phrase, guard what is your own, visualize yourself in this case, maybe being successful, being, a you know, playing through your piece very well.
00:35:46
Speaker
And putting yourself in a positive you know mood, those are the things that you do with these pithy little statements. And hopefully that gets your performance to be as good as it can be. It still doesn't guarantee that people will praise you, but you've done your part and that's all you can rationally ask for.
00:36:08
Speaker
So here are some other pithy little statements from the Oracle at Delphi that have a like a stoic flavor to them. Follow God. course, for the Stoics, you know, their God is the whole cosmos, but follow God.
00:36:24
Speaker
Think as a mortal. Master yourself. Control anger. Cling to discipline.
00:36:35
Speaker
Long for wisdom. Praise virtue. And of course, love your fate.
00:36:47
Speaker
Let's move now to the morning meditation. This is also known as perspective meditation, right? And this is an opportunity to kind of just think about the day ahead and picture and visualize and plan for getting through it in a rational way with composure.
00:37:11
Speaker
So this practice, like many of the practices that we'll be talking about, can be traced back to other schools of philosophy. In this case, it is the Pythagoreans.
00:37:23
Speaker
Let give you real quick a quote from Iamblichus describing these Pythagoreans because it's a really good example of how to you know engage in this practice in the morning.
00:37:34
Speaker
So here's a quote. They took solitary morning walks to places which happened to be ah appropriately quiet, to temples or groves or other suitable places.
00:37:46
Speaker
They thought it inadvisable to converse with anyone until they had gained their inner serenity, focusing on their reasoning powers. They considered it turbulent to mingle in a crowd as soon as they rose from bed.
00:38:02
Speaker
And that is the reason why these Pythagoreans always selected the most sacred spots to walk. In other words, wake up and get inner serenity first, right? Collect your thoughts.
00:38:16
Speaker
Collect yourself, plan for the day ahead, and make sure that you live through it as rationally as possible. Well, let's move into a stoic example of this. I'm going to take this from Marcus Aurelius.
00:38:32
Speaker
Marcus Aurelius, of course, very famous because he gave advice to himself and he wrote it down. It's called Meditations. And he would write about how to prepare himself for a difficult day ahead.
00:38:44
Speaker
So here is Marcus Aurelius. I'm going to give you the quote first. And then afterwards, I'll sort of clarify some ideas because it's very easy to misinterpret this. But here is Marcus Aurelius.
00:38:57
Speaker
Quote, begin each day by telling yourself, today i shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence.
00:39:09
Speaker
disloyalty, ill will, and selfishness. All of them due to the offender's ignorance of what is good or evil. So let me clarify what's going on here. He's not cranky, all right?
00:39:24
Speaker
What he knows is that it's going to be a tough day. He knows what's going to happen that day. And you probably have found yourself in situations where you know the day ahead is going to be tough.
00:39:36
Speaker
So you have to psychologically prepare yourself for this. It would be maybe in other words, irrational to expect things to go well when you know you should expect some interference, some kind of adversity in that day.
00:39:54
Speaker
And so that's what he's doing. He is preparing himself for what's going to happen that day. And he's reminding himself that, hey, you know, People might be mean to you.
00:40:05
Speaker
They might be disloyal. They might be selfish. And in many cases, it's because they don't know what's good for them and they don't know what's good in general.
00:40:16
Speaker
And so they're going to act this way. If anything, you should feel bad for them. You know what's not going to help? Getting bent out of shape, throwing a fit, right? Those things won't help. You almost want to see these people as needing guidance. So you almost want to be like a teacher to them.
00:40:32
Speaker
So how can you put this into practice? and Tomorrow when you wake up, take the time to plan your day and plan it in a way so that you can preserve inner peace but throughout the day.
00:40:47
Speaker
closely related to the morning meditation is the evening meditation. This is also called retrospective meditation. And well, this one's a little more complicated. There's actually multiple goals to this meditation.
00:41:02
Speaker
And as I describe it, you you you can think about how to put it into practice for yourself. But here's the very first thing that you have to do in evening meditation. You have to recount the entire day to yourself according to some people, three times.
00:41:19
Speaker
And the reason for this is that, well, there's two things you're training here. You're training attention and memory. Now, trip out on this.
00:41:30
Speaker
I tried this. I tried everything here, right? I did it so that I'm able to talk about it, obviously. Or, you know, I also want to try things and hopefully they might work.
00:41:42
Speaker
And it's very, very difficult to go through your entire day without getting sidetracked and and letting your mind go on a different train of thought.
00:41:55
Speaker
So for example, in my case, I was going throughout my day and then I had like another thought and it just kind of took me for a loop and I went with it for a little while and and then I came, oh, I forgot.
00:42:06
Speaker
I'm going through my day. And so it's actually really good for developing attentional autonomy, right? To train yourself to only think about the things that you want to think about.
00:42:17
Speaker
So that's one thing. The ancients would also use this evening meditation to train their memory, right? Because you want to be as precise as possible in detailing your day. And so this here's a fun fact.
00:42:30
Speaker
The Pythagoreans did this apparently because they wanted to improve their memory all the way to the point where they could recollect past lives. I hate to break it to you. I don't think that you can do that, but it definitely will at least get your memory better for this life.
00:42:50
Speaker
And, you know, hey, maybe that's all you can ask for sometimes. So cool. The next part of the evening meditation or the next point to the evening meditation is probably more important.
00:43:03
Speaker
It's the process of going through and grading yourself on whether or not you actually followed your stoic principles throughout the day or whatever values you'd like, to be honest.
00:43:15
Speaker
And if you find mistakes throughout your day, things that you kind of flubbed a little bit, don't ruminate on them. What you really want to do is consider what you could have done differently.
00:43:28
Speaker
Put another way, you should develop workarounds, right? Next time you find yourself in this situation, you will do x y z And then you're going to hopefully have a plan for overcoming obstacles next time.
00:43:43
Speaker
That's the whole idea. To close off the eating evening meditation, you want to congratulate yourself on anything positive you did that day, right? If you overcame some irrational desires, awesome. Pat yourself on the back.
00:43:59
Speaker
If you withheld ascent from irrational judgments, right? You had a thought and you said, nope, not today. Perfect. Give yourself a pat on the back. If you started, you know, working on getting rid of a bad habit.
00:44:12
Speaker
Awesome. Give yourself a little kudos. So this is the way you want to close off the evening meditation. and Seneca writes that after this, your sleep will be much sweeter. Right.
00:44:25
Speaker
After this little self-examination. So let me nutshell this for you. Evening meditation, right? The point is to examine your day to see if it was actually conducive to inner peace, to eudaimonia and to good mental health and to give yourself kudos if you did that well.
00:44:47
Speaker
And if you didn't, at least you'll have a plan for the next time.
00:45:17
Speaker
Let's talk about anger.
00:45:21
Speaker
Many Stoics wrote about overcoming anger.
Role Models and Mindfulness
00:45:26
Speaker
i'm going to steal this little bit from Marcus Aurelius. He gives a, ah you know, just wrote down a little list of things that he said to himself when he felt offended by others. So again, this is all from his meditations.
00:45:43
Speaker
And I'll just kind of give you each of these principles and then maybe talk about them a little bit. In no particular order from throughout the meditations, here we go. First thing you can do, remember the effect of negative ways of thinking on people, such as the misplaced confidence it gives them.
00:46:04
Speaker
So when someone has negative ways of thinking and they just recently offended you, remind yourself that, you know what? They don't have it great, right? If they have...
00:46:16
Speaker
automatic negative judgments that are making them be rude and and misbehave in public to you, for example, just remember that it's not a good condition they're in. They don't have a very healthy mental life.
00:46:33
Speaker
And so rather than being offended by what they do, maybe have a little sympathy for them, right? they're They're going through something and maybe you can even say, hey you know, have a nice day. Hope your day gets better, um right? So that's one thing you can do.
00:46:51
Speaker
Instead of getting angry, have some sympathy. Number two, remind yourself you've been at fault before. Whenever someone does something that offends you,
00:47:04
Speaker
Maybe you can search your mind for a time that you've done the same thing and say, oh man, yeah, yeah, I, you know, it happens sometimes. And again, that will give you a little bit of sympathy.
00:47:16
Speaker
Three, remember that you have no guarantee they're doing the wrong thing. This is sometimes called reframing. Instead of someone, you know, seeing them as offending you, maybe they're telling you something that you need to hear.
00:47:34
Speaker
Sure, they're doing it in a rude way and it's not very pleasant to hear, but it might be some useful information. Maybe you can use it to better yourself.
00:47:45
Speaker
So, okay, that's another thing you can do. Four, remind yourself that life is brief and it's no good being upset over things that in the long run um nothing, right? So maybe someone says something that offends you.
00:48:01
Speaker
Yeah, you could lose it. or You know, we only get a certain number of ah spins around the sun. So maybe try to just not spend time on negative thoughts, negative emotions.
00:48:17
Speaker
Picture your life from a zoomed out perspective, right? From a more long-term view. And from this perspective, hey, someone, you know, offending you a little bit on a random Tuesday,
00:48:32
Speaker
It's nothing. It doesn't matter. You won't remember this in a couple of weeks. Heck, you might not remember it in a couple of days. So forget it now. What's the point? <unk>s another thing you can do. Number five, make a decision to quit thinking of things as insulting. Okay, what does Marcus mean by this?
00:48:52
Speaker
He means that the only real evil is emotional disturbances, right? And that you do to yourself. So this person offending you, they're not really causing you evil.
00:49:04
Speaker
They're trying to bait you into doing something wrong, having an emotional disturbance. Don't let them. The only thing you're gonna worry about is your own mental health.
00:49:16
Speaker
And if you do that, you're basically saying to yourself, yeah, you know, insults, that doesn't matter. I'm not gonna worry about that anymore. Six, remind yourself that anger and frustration often hurt us more than the things that made us angry and frustrated.
00:49:35
Speaker
Isn't that the truth? Sometimes what you do because you're angry is way worse than whatever it is that made you angry.
00:49:48
Speaker
So think of that. Think of the consequences of what you want to do. And usually it's going to be pretty bad. and never works out quite the way you want it to. So think of that and say, okay, well, you know what? Anger, it's a form of temporary madness.
00:50:06
Speaker
Let's just not do this. I don't want to be crazy. i want to be rational. So let's just let it go. Seven, remind yourself that to expect bad people not to do bad things is just madness.
00:50:22
Speaker
If you get insulted by someone who always insults you, honestly, you know, whose fault is that at that point? That's sort of yours. You should expect it from this person. you know, it sucks for them because they have to live with these, you know, this negative mentality all the time.
00:50:38
Speaker
Don't let it bother you. Say, you know, i sort of expected it from you. Whatever. Eight, remind yourself that this is an opportunity to display virtue.
00:50:52
Speaker
So this is what sometimes gets called the stoic God challenge. And so what this is, is that someone offends you. Okay, rather than this being a social situation where you have to protect your honor, blah, blah, blah.
00:51:08
Speaker
This is like a game. are have just received a challenge from Zeus. He threw you a curve ball and now it's up to you. What are you gonna do?
00:51:20
Speaker
Are you gonna get upset or are you gonna find a workaround, a witty comeback, a sympathetic response? Just let it go, whatever. What are you going to do show, basically to show off how good you are at displaying virtue?
00:51:40
Speaker
that's ah a little game you can play with yourself.
00:51:45
Speaker
Let's move on now to the practice of contemplating sages. This is kind of cool. Once more, many, many different philosophical schools engage in this kind of thing.
00:51:58
Speaker
And the general idea is that you have a sage. A sage, by the way, is a perfectly stoic person, right? Someone who has mastered stoicism.
00:52:09
Speaker
You can have a sage that is your mental or maybe even, you know, actual role model. Now, it's hard to find role models like this. Maybe it could just be a mental role model. But you just, you think about them and how they would deal with particular situations, right? So if you've been in certain situations where you just don't do the right thing, well, try to picture what a sage would do in that situation and try to copy them, right? So you can think about this, not in the heat of the moment, but later on when you're a little more level-headed, how would a sage have handled that?
00:52:51
Speaker
Now, let me just make one clarification right off the bat. This is not supposed to be like a self-flagellating self-criticism, right? It's not supposed to be that you have some mental role model that is just like tearing you down, always criticizing what you're doing.
00:53:10
Speaker
I would have done it like this. It's not like that. Definitely don't do that. Maybe I don't actually know where this idea came from, but maybe it came from Socrates. And so, you know, that might be the sort of role model that you want to develop.
00:53:27
Speaker
If you don't know the story, Socrates said that he heard a divine voice that guided him. He called it his daimon. And, you know, that's probably one of the reasons why he was condemned to death.
00:53:41
Speaker
To be honest, his contemporaries were confused by by that. But whatever. The idea here is that it's supposed to be a very caring, a very kind, a very wise voice, not someone that tears you down.
00:53:57
Speaker
So how can you put this into practice? There's quite a few ways to do so. you can find actual real role models in life.
00:54:10
Speaker
So what I mean by this is that finding the perfect stage, probably not gonna happen. But there's people that are good at certain domains of life.
00:54:22
Speaker
I met this woman who was so good and dealing with ah like customer service people. Sometimes people mess up your your stuff, your order, your whatever, right?
00:54:35
Speaker
And this person just like was so good at talking you know, through it with them and being very clear about her needs and how she wanted to get it resolved, but never sounding angry, never making the other person feel belittled.
00:54:53
Speaker
They were just so good at talking to people about mistakes that they've made, which is kind of bananas. Anyway, so what you could do is find a real role model for certain behaviors that you find difficult.
00:55:09
Speaker
So maybe, you know, this woman is a good example. What I should have done, i haven't seen her in a while. What I should have done is sort of asked her like, hey, can i shadow you? Can I watch you, you know, go through some of these exchanges? And that's actually one thing that you could do too.
00:55:28
Speaker
Maybe you know someone that's really good at social events and they know how to talk to people and all that. Just kind of watch them. Ask them, obviously, don't be weird.
00:55:40
Speaker
But, you know, you can learn something from them. And it's very likely the case that they want to help. Right. Some people are really good at their job. And if you work with them, you know, say, hey, how do you do this? How do you do that?
00:55:55
Speaker
Real role models are very, very valuable. And this goes back to at least Xenophon, if you recall that lesson. So that's one thing you can do, one way you can put this into practice.
00:56:06
Speaker
Another way, is this. You can pick out someone real or fictional that you want to emulate ah in a more complete kind of way, right? So the first one was certain aspects of life.
00:56:21
Speaker
What about someone sort of in general, someone whose life you say to yourself, that's a good life. You can think about how they might respond to certain situations, how they spend their day, what qualities of theirs you like and would like to develop.
00:56:39
Speaker
What sort of advice would they give you? All these things, right? And you can think to yourself, am I... Emulating them, how far away am I from them? What do I need to work on?
00:56:50
Speaker
And so this person can sort of set a standard for you to try to live up to. And even someone that can help you visualize how to get there. So that's a very good use of a mental role model.
00:57:06
Speaker
Let's move into something called ProSoK. Prosoke is a Greek term that means attention to oneself. And so what I will be calling this is Stoic mindfulness.
00:57:23
Speaker
First things first, I know that you probably think of mindfulness as having to do with Buddhism. Well, it's Lots of Greek schools of philosophy advocated mindfulness too.
00:57:37
Speaker
It really is a case though that Buddhism has all sorts of different mindfulness in mind and the Greeks maybe focus on one kind of mindfulness. So that is true.
00:57:48
Speaker
But you know this idea that only the Eastern philosophies have mindfulness as an ideal, that's simply not true. Stoicism really is... a here and now philosophy just like Buddhism.
00:58:03
Speaker
Sidebar, this invocation to be mindful in the West goes back to at least Pythagoras. And so just what I want to mention here is that Pythagoras traveled all over the place getting his ideas. So it might be the case that he got his ideas from, for example, Egypt.
00:58:26
Speaker
So there might might have been some sort of mindfulness practice in Egypt, right? Northern Africa that is separate from, you know, the mindfulness that was practiced in the East and in Buddhism and all that. So very interesting, you know, mindfulness shouldn't be labeled just an Eastern thing.
00:58:44
Speaker
It might come from multiple places, which is kind of cool. Anyway, and sidebar, let's get into what some of the Stoics said about being mindful.
00:58:56
Speaker
Let's just look at one quote, this one coming from Seneca, and the main message of it is that the root of irrational fears and irrational desires, they come from thinking too much about the future or thinking too much about the past.
00:59:15
Speaker
In other words, they come from you not being here and now. What Seneca says is that foresight, which he calls, by the way, the greatest blessing humanity has been given, can be a curse.
00:59:30
Speaker
So all of us have foresight. It is an evolutionary adaptation. It allows us to plan for the future, right? So you can even call it an evolutionary gift.
00:59:42
Speaker
But what Seneca is saying is if you if you let it get corrupted, you have these ah negative thought loops that you can't get out of. You're just stuck in this pattern of negative thoughts. That's depressive rumination.
00:59:55
Speaker
You might also get anxious worrying, right? You might get into these... ah worries about the future that lead to more worries about the future that lead to more anxiety that lead to even more negative feelings and so you know even though foresight is good for humans it can get corrupted and cause real evil right so here is the quote from Seneca wild animals run from the dangers they actually see and once they have escaped them worry no more
01:00:27
Speaker
We, however, are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come. A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear, while foresight brings it on prematurely.
01:00:45
Speaker
Here is my paraphrase. The capacity to plan, the capacity to remember the past, awesome things, right?
01:00:56
Speaker
But if you don't train them right, if you let yourself go into negative thought spirals, memory can torment you and foresight can just leave you drowning in anxiety.
01:01:11
Speaker
The solution that Seneca gives us is to be present, not in the past, that's memory, or the future, and that's foresight. too And once you're in the here and now, once you have returned to your body, right, you're not in the past, you're not in the future, you can realize that the reason why you were feeling that rumination or that anxiety is because you were too easily being lost in thoughts about the past or the future thoughts that non-cataleptic impressions because you have no control
01:01:49
Speaker
over the past, and you only have limited control over the future. So being in the here and now is what allows you to realize this and push away anxiety and rumination.
01:02:01
Speaker
Putting this into practice, what you should do is, well, i mean, easier said than done, but stop ruminating, stop your anxious worrying. And you can do this by returning to the present, right?
01:02:16
Speaker
Now, one way to do this is by using the dichotomy of control as a mantra to remind yourself what is within your control and what is not. So you can ask yourself, is this something which is under my control? And just repeat it over and over again and try to answer it, right? You know, can I really fix that? No. What can I do?
01:02:38
Speaker
And by working through what is actually within your control and what is not, you can remind yourself that you are doing what you need to be doing. And the other stuff, that's not something that you can actually do something about right now.
01:02:52
Speaker
And by the way, if you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing, you can make a plan to do so, right? So instead of worrying, you can plan. One of those is rational, right? So stick with the rational one.
01:03:04
Speaker
Let me give you here a quote from Epictetus that also provides us with a few mindfulness methods. Quote, in the first place, do not allow yourself to be carried away by its intensity, but say, impression, wait for me a little.
01:03:23
Speaker
Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me test you. Then afterwards, do not allow it to draw you on by picturing what may come next.
01:03:34
Speaker
For if you do it, it will lead you wherever it pleases. Or rather, you should introduce some fair and noble impression to replace it and banish this base and sordid one.
01:03:49
Speaker
If you become habituated to this kind of exercise, you will see what shoulders, what sinews and what vigor you will come to have. So let me break this down for you a little bit.
01:04:03
Speaker
First of all, he says, just stop and think. Stop. Honestly, stop. Like literally stop moving and think. Think about the thought that you're having.
01:04:15
Speaker
Identify the impression. You can literally label it. Is it a desire? Is it a fear? Is it an automatic judgment about someone else?
01:04:30
Speaker
This step sometimes it gets called cognitive labeling. We get lost in our thoughts so easily. Why don't we pause for a second and say, i going to just make up an example here, but I guess what I really want is to get a little credit to for this thing that I did.
01:04:51
Speaker
That's a desire. And by doing that, by saying, oh, I have a desire here, you can now really Take a moment to analyze it.
01:05:03
Speaker
Is this desire we're we're whatever it is, right? Fear or judgment, is this rooted in rationality or not? Now, if you judge it to be an irrational thought,
01:05:16
Speaker
Picture where this irrational thought will take you. That's what Epictetus is saying, right? If it's no good, picture where you'll end up if you go through with it.
01:05:28
Speaker
That should lessen the intensity of the desire or judgment or fear or whatever it is by seeing that it will lead nowhere good. And literally picture something bad happening. That way you say, yeah, that that's going to take me nowhere.
01:05:44
Speaker
In many cases, some of our desires, all they lead to is more worrying and more you know dissatisfaction and that's no good. If it's a rational desire, that actually tells you that, you know, maybe you need to do something about it. That's that's the other direction.
01:06:02
Speaker
The last thing that Epictetus is saying here is that you should replace your irrational judgment or desire or fear or whatever with a rational one.
01:06:14
Speaker
So for example, and i mentioned that maybe you feel like you're not getting enough credit. Getting credit is something that is not up to you. That's for other people to give.
01:06:26
Speaker
So what would be a rational desire that you can replace here? Well, the only thing that's actually within your control is what you produce. So you should always just focus on the quality of what you put out into the world.
01:06:41
Speaker
So you can ask yourself, are you fully satisfied with what you've done? How can you improve on what you've been doing. And so you can, you know, and that might not be the solution for every case, but depending on your situation, you can move towards a more rational frame of mind as opposed to ruminating and and just getting all worked up for nothing.
01:07:06
Speaker
Let me focus now on another thing that Epictetus says in that quote, but also in other quotes. Let me give you you here the quote from Epictetus. You are just an impression and not at all what you claim to be.
01:07:20
Speaker
right So Epictetus says to his students that when they have a troubling impression, right i just a negative thought that is just persisting over and over again, you have to try to see it as a thought. Too many times we accept our thoughts without realizing it.
01:07:40
Speaker
And that's when we get lost in those thoughts. But you have to tell the thought, hey, you're just a thought. You're not what you claim to be. You're claiming to be true, but you're not, at least not necessarily.
01:07:54
Speaker
so let me inspect you, right? So you recognize thoughts as thoughts. And that's a mindful moment, an opportunity to assess whether or not it's actually a cataleptic impression, whether or not it's actually rational.
01:08:09
Speaker
And here's one more piece of advice from Epictetus that has a mindfulness flavor to it. He also advises students to pause and wait and merely observe their are thoughts.
01:08:23
Speaker
So he says you don't actually have to always replace your irrational thought with a rational one. Sometimes just... Look at your thoughts. You say, oh, I just had a thought that's, ah you know, irrational, right? I have an irrational desire. Oh, there's an irrational desire.
01:08:41
Speaker
And just, you know, sit with it for a second. Accept to yourself. Yeah, I just saw an irrational desire. And just wait.
01:08:53
Speaker
And it will naturally go away, right? Don't get fused with it. Don't accept it. look at it and just wait.
01:09:05
Speaker
And eventually it will of its own accord float on by and that's it.
01:09:14
Speaker
The lesson there is that you don't always have to challenge a belief to diffuse it right? To make it less volatile, to make it less dangerous to you. Sometimes you can just change sort of your psychological relationship to it.
01:09:29
Speaker
You can just be aware of the thought as a thought and wait and wait. It'll go away. The negative feeling will eventually go away. So that is another method from Epictetus.
01:09:45
Speaker
Let's move into a closely related practice to that of Stoic mindfulness.
Mortality and Present Awareness
01:09:51
Speaker
The English label for this is sometimes given as premeditation of death, which sounds really hardcore.
01:10:01
Speaker
A Latin phrase that means the same thing is memento mori. I'll give you a more literal translation in a second, but let me just kind of tie this together with Stoic mindfulness.
01:10:15
Speaker
Here's the basic point. By acknowledging our mortality, we are giving more value to the here and now, right? Life slips away from us if we don't take the time to enjoy the present.
01:10:30
Speaker
Believe me, right? So instead of living in dread of the future or reliving the pain of the past, Remind yourself, hey, you know what? I have a short amount of time on this blue marble spinning around in space.
01:10:47
Speaker
Let me try to enjoy it. Let me not fritter it away. So and there's a close tie here to Stoic mindfulness, as you can see.
01:10:59
Speaker
Like so many of the practices we've discussed, there are a whole lot of schools that use this practice. You can find it in Pythagoreanism, Epicureanism.
01:11:10
Speaker
There are some other Socratic traditions that use this kind of thing. But let's, of course, focus on the Stoic version of it. And this once again comes from Epictetus and he alludes to the practice of a Roman triumph.
01:11:28
Speaker
Now you maybe don't know what this is. When a general, a Roman general would be victorious in battle, typically they would fight. Get a whole lot of stuff from whoever they beat, a bunch of war booty, many, many captives, sometimes maybe even a high profile captive, maybe even a king sometimes or a tribe leader or whatever.
01:11:55
Speaker
And so what a Roman triumph is, is that you get to go back to Rome and throw a little parade for yourself where you show off everything that you've, you know, ah i was going to say earned, but that that you got from your ah recent military campaign.
01:12:13
Speaker
Well, during this practice, there would be a slave, allegedly, who would whisper into the ear of the Roman general, Memento mori.
01:12:26
Speaker
Remember, you must die. Or sometimes remember you are mortal. And what this was supposed to do, I mean, there's, you know, a bunch of reasons here, but not get you to think that that you are an immortal God, right? It must feel so good to get all this praise and and you know the whole day or maybe a couple of days is for you and everyone's cheering for you.
01:12:54
Speaker
Don't let it get to your head. don't Certainly don't get the idea that you should be you know king of Rome or whatever. They were very much against kings in Rome for a very long time until they weren't, until they became an empire with an emperor.
01:13:08
Speaker
But the general idea here was don't let it get to your head, right? Well, what the Stoics did is took this same phrase and they, you know, kind of reframed it so that you say it to yourself to remind yourself of your own mortality, of your finitude, right? You are not going to be here forever.
01:13:32
Speaker
You have only a little bit of time on this planet. And in fact, you're not even sure of how much longer you get. And by reflecting on this, you are increasing the value of the present moment.
01:13:51
Speaker
according to the Stoics, it also helps you prepare yourself for death because death is an inescapable fact for all of us, right? We have to eventually die.
01:14:03
Speaker
And what you want to do to be a good Stoic is face it with serenity, right? So live right now to the fullest so that when your time comes, you're ready.
01:14:14
Speaker
I have here a few lines from Marcus Aurelius that really give you this ah this message, right? So here we go. Quote, you could leave your life right now.
01:14:26
Speaker
Let that determine what you do and say and to think. Here's another one. Do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life.
01:14:43
Speaker
One more, perfection of character to live your last day every day without frenzy or sloth or pretense.
01:14:54
Speaker
In other words, imagine every day is your last day. If you really thought today was your last day on earth, would you be doing what you're currently doing? Maybe not.
01:15:10
Speaker
So stop listening and go do something. Well, before you do that, here is how you put this into practice. There's lots of things that you can do sort of think about your own mortality in a very vivid way.
01:15:25
Speaker
One thing people do is they write their own eulogy, right? They think about how they want people to remember them. And, you know, in this process, you have to ask yourself, are you living in a way that will lead to the kind of life that you desire?
01:15:45
Speaker
Hopefully the answer is yes. If not, well, it's time to make some changes.
01:15:52
Speaker
Let's do one more practice. I don't really have a label for this. It's just a phrase that I kind of put on top of my page here, but tracking and challenging persistent irrational thoughts.
01:16:09
Speaker
So you can see this in quite a few Stoics, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca. And basically, they recognize that there are certain patterns of reasoning that if you let them go on unchecked, they will become stronger and stronger and eventually they will be very bad mental habits.
01:16:34
Speaker
And these bad mental habits lead you to become more susceptible to unhealthy emotions, right? Excessive rage and other kinds of emotional disturbances.
01:16:48
Speaker
Here is a quote from Epictetus ah about anger. If therefore you wish not to be hot-tempered, do not feed your habit.
01:17:00
Speaker
Set before it nothing on which it can grow. As the first step, keep quiet and count the days on which you have not been angry.
01:17:12
Speaker
If you go as much as 30 days without a fit of anger, sacrifice to God, for the habit is first weakened and then utterly destroyed.
01:17:25
Speaker
so Epictetus here telling us that we sometimes need to labor for you know ah month, more months, years. to get rid of bad mental habits.
01:17:39
Speaker
And if you kind of piece together from different Stoic writers, you can get some practices that you might, you know, do this. And by the way, you can even look beyond the Stoics.
01:17:50
Speaker
Xenophon writes some things that are very much applicable here, especially his analogy about being like an athlete and training persistently. But Let's stick with the stoic ideas.
01:18:03
Speaker
One way you can put this into practice is by keeping a thought record. So in a notebook, or there's many apps for this on on smartphones nowadays,
01:18:16
Speaker
keep a log of your automatic thoughts. So record not only the the frequency of these, let's just say you had a particular kind of negative thought three times in one day or 10 times in one day or whatever it be, keep track of that, but also track the intensity of those negative thoughts.
01:18:37
Speaker
And if you wanna be really thorough, keep track of your attempted rational responses to these negative thoughts, right? So not only the ones that work, but the ones that don't.
01:18:52
Speaker
So what you really wanna do is have a list of the negative thoughts maybe those things that gave rise to those negative thoughts, how intense those negative thoughts were, and things you tried to stop those negative thoughts along with whether or not they worked.
01:19:14
Speaker
Now, the most famous example of this practice is, of course, coming from Marcus Aurelius. His meditations were By the way, they were probably never supposed to be published.
01:19:30
Speaker
But in these, you can just see, you know, the practice of him constantly repeating to himself his personal regime of verbal and cognitive exercises for psychological fitness.
01:19:44
Speaker
He wanted to get rid of negative emotions. And that's what this is. It's basically a journal for doing that and and what worked and what he should say to himself.
01:19:56
Speaker
So that's what you can try to do as well. Now, there are already pre-made workbooks and all this. you know If you have a specific problem, maybe anger, these workbooks already exist. And I think in many cases, they do line up with what the Stoics thought.
01:20:14
Speaker
So you can kind of look for that and and check that out if you wanna apply it to your life. One key thing that I should focus on though, is that you need to come up with rational responses to these emotional disturbances.
01:20:28
Speaker
And maybe you can even memorize them or repeat them to yourself whenever you need to. So one thing that I picked up from a book on stoicism is that you can train yourself in the following way, right? So let's just say you're trying to deal with anger.
01:20:47
Speaker
Every time that you actually are able to fight off anger with some cognitive tricks, some visualization, some whatever, write that down and put it in a jar.
01:21:02
Speaker
And so after a couple of weeks, maybe you'll have lots of notes in this jar. And so your training to continue to get rid of this bad habit of excessive rage is every day pick out one or two.
01:21:17
Speaker
And read them to yourself. Try to memorize them, maybe. And what you're doing by this practice is, first of all, you're reminding yourself that you've been able to stable way emotional disturbances in the past.
01:21:33
Speaker
Basically, it's a way to give yourself a little bit of kudos. On top of that, by continually reminding yourself of the things that actually have worked, you're going to internalize those and be able to use them even more reliably. And over time, eventually,
01:21:51
Speaker
you won't have you know fits of rage maybe at all anymore, or in the very least, radically diminished instances of rage. So that's one thing you can do.
01:22:06
Speaker
And let me close off this this section with ah with a bit of a sidebar that you know it's sort of linked to its own practice. So let me let me riff on this based on the um ah tracking of irrational thoughts.
01:22:22
Speaker
So sometimes the irrational thought that we are grappling with is our own inner self-critic.
01:22:36
Speaker
right Some of us have this basically psychotic person in our head, and I'm not talking about schizophrenia or anything, but some people have internalized a really harsh critic that whenever they do something you know kind of a little stupid, the voice in their head just keeps saying, why did you do that? You're so stupid. Why?
01:22:57
Speaker
And the you know psychological label for this today is negative self-esteem or poor self-esteem. And so what's happening here, according to psychologists today, right? And and you can also find this in in the Stoics, is that you're being a harsh critic to yourself because you probably train yourself to always trash other people.
01:23:23
Speaker
In other words, the way this started was by you regularly judging others negatively, trashing people in your head.
01:23:36
Speaker
And when you do that, it's only a matter of time before A, it becomes a habit and B, you turn this internal critic on yourself.
01:23:48
Speaker
So if you want to get rid of negative self-esteem, the trick is often to retrain yourself to not automatically judge others.
01:24:01
Speaker
And once you can eliminate these automatic negative judgments of others, Now you're on your way to stopping them from tormenting you. And so this is yet another kind of you know regular negative thought patterns that you can stave off with Stoic methods.
01:24:21
Speaker
You just keep a record of these things and and slowly start to whittle away at this bad habit. So I did say that some Stoics said something you know very similar to this and let's stick with Marcus Aurelius, why not?
01:24:36
Speaker
He's talking about people who are overly critical of others. And so here is a quote from Marcus Aurelius. Enter their minds and you'll find the judges you're so afraid of and how judiciously they judge themselves.
01:24:59
Speaker
So this is what people do. They judge others and eventually that internal judge turns on them.
01:25:08
Speaker
That's only a few stoic practices that you could use to um avoid emotional disturbances. i didn't even mention something called depreciation by analysis, something else called the trans life comparison.
01:25:23
Speaker
i only briefly mentioned something called the premeditatio malorum. That's when you... you know, prepare yourself for facing adversity by imagining that adversity. So I didn't really dive into those. so This is just beginning, right? If you want to dive further into these, you can look at the my reading materials and you can do that on your own.
01:25:44
Speaker
I want to close off this lesson with yet one more quote from Epictetus because he's trying to get his students to take this seriously, to really work at it.
01:25:59
Speaker
So many of us don't take our mental health seriously enough. And this is what Epictetus is doing. He's basically you know haranguing his students for not making progress. You can kind of tell in this quote.
01:26:15
Speaker
but it's a really positive message because he wants them to be mentally fit. i don't He doesn't mean smart, right? He means don't torture yourself. Don't torment yourself, right?
01:26:29
Speaker
This is a way to get rid of emotional disturbances. This is therapy. So in this quote, he's he's questioning them about why they're not advancing.
01:26:43
Speaker
So here's a quote from Epictetus to to send us on our way, hopefully motivated to engage in some Stoic practices.
01:26:54
Speaker
Here we go. He's asking them why they're not advancing. Quote, Is it because it's not up to us? It is the only thing in the world that is so.
01:27:09
Speaker
Wealth isn't up to us, nor is health or reputation or anything at all except the correct use of impressions.
01:27:20
Speaker
This alone is naturally unhindered and unimpeded. so why don't you finish the work? Tell me the reason.
01:27:32
Speaker
For either it is due to me or to you or the nature of the thing. The thing itself is possible and the only thing up to us. Therefore, the failing is mine or yours or more truly, it pertains to us both.
01:27:50
Speaker
Do you want us to begin here and now to execute this project? Let's say goodbye to the past. Let's simply begin.
01:28:01
Speaker
and trust me, you will see.