**These are excerpts from the book of "Meditations of Marcus Aurelius"**
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[2.1] When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they cannot tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
[2.2] Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted. That is not allowed. Instead, as if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries. Consider what the spirit is: air, and never the same air, but vomited out and gulped in again every instant.
Finally, the intelligence. Think of it this way: You are an old man. Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future.
[2.3] What is divine is full of Providence. Even chance is not divorced from nature, from the interweaving and enfolding of things governed by Providence. Everything proceeds from it. And then there is necessity and the needs of the whole world, of which you are a part. Whatever the nature of the whole does, and whatever serves it to maintain it, is good for every part of nature. The world is maintained by change – in the elements and in the things they compose. That should be enough for you; treat it as an axiom. Discard your thirst for books, so that you won’t die in bitterness, but in cheerfulness and truth, grateful to the gods from the bottom of your heart.
[2.4] Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognize what the world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.
[2.5] Concentrate every minute like a Roman – like a man - on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can – if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods
can ask of you.
[2.6] Yes, keep on degrading yourself, soul. But soon your chance at dignity will be gone. Everyone gets one life. Yours is almost used up, and instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your own happiness to the souls of others.
[2.7] Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time — even when hard at work.
[2.8] Ignoring what goes on in other people's souls – no one ever came to grief that way. But if you won't keep track of what your own soul's doing, how can you not be unhappy?
[2.9] Don’t ever forget these things:
The nature of the world.
My nature.
How I relate to the world.
What proportion of it I make up.
That you are a part of nature, and no one can prevent you from speaking and acting in harmony with it, always.
[4.4] If thought is something we share, than so is reason – what makes up reasoning beings.
If so, then the reason that tells us what to do and what not to do is also shared.
And if so, we share a common law.
And thus, are fellow citizens.
And fellow citizens of something.
And in that case, our state must be the world. What other entity could all of humanity belong to? And from it – from this state that we share – come thought and reason and law.
Where else could they come from? The earth that composes me derives from earth, the water from some other element, the air from its own source, the heat and fire from theirs – since nothing comes from nothing, or returns to it. So thought must derive from somewhere else as well.
[4.5] Death: something like birth, a natural mystery, elements that split and recombine.
Not an embarrassing thing. Not an offense to reason, or our nature.
[4.6] That sort of person is bound to do that. You might as well resent a fig tree for secreting juice. (Anyway, before very long you’ll both be dead – dead and soon forgotten.)
[4.7] Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed.
Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been.
[4.8] It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you – inside or out.
[4.9] It was for the best. So Nature had no choice but to do it.
[8.35] We have various abilities, present in all rational creatures as in the nature of rationality itself. And this is one of them. Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it – turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself – so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.
[8.36] Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer.
Then remind yourself that past and future have no power over you. Only the present – and even that can be minimized. Just mark off its limits. And if you mind tries to claim that it can’t hold out against that … well, then, heap shame upon it.
[8.37] Are Pantheia or Pergamos still keeping watch at the tomb of Verus?
Chabrias or Diotimus at the tomb of Hadrian? Of course they aren’t. Would the emperors know if they were?
And even if they knew, would it please them?
And even if it did, would the mourners live forever? Were they, too, not fated to grow old and then die? And when that happened, what would the emperors do?
[8.38] The stench of decay. Rotting meat in a bag.
Look at it clearly. If you can.
[8.39] “To the best of my judgment, when I look at the human character I see no virtue placed there to counter justice. But I see one to counter pleasure: self-control.”
[8.40] Stop perceiving the pain you imagine and you’ll remain completely unaffected.
– “You?”
Your logos.
– But I’m not just logos.
Fine. Just don’t let the logos be injured. If anything else is, let it decide that for itself.
[8.41] For animate being, “harmful” is whatever obstructs the operation of their senses – or the fulfillment of what they intend. Similar obstructions constitute harm to plants. So too for rational creatures, anything that obstructs the operation of the mind is harmful.
Apply this to yourself.
Do pain and pleasure have their hooks in you? Let the sense deal with it. Are there obstacles to your action? If you failed to reckon with the possibility, then that would harm you, as a rational being. But if you use common sense, you haven’t been harmed or even obstructed. No one can obstruct the operations of the mind.
Nothing can get at them – not fire or steel, not tyrants, not abuse – nothing. As long as it’s “a sphere … in perfect stillness.”
[8.42] I have no right to do myself an injury. Have I ever injured anyone else if I could avoid it?
[12.1] Everything you’re trying to reach – by taking the long way round- you could have right now, this moment. If you’d only stop thwarting your own attempts. If you’d only let go of the past, entrust the future to Providence, and guide the present toward reverence and justice.
Reverence: so you’ll accept what you’re allotted. Nature intended it for you, and you for it.
Justice: so that you’ll speak the truth, frankly and without evasions, and act as you should – and as other people deserve.
Don’t let anything deter you: other people’s misbehavior, your own misperceptions, What People Will Say, or the feelings of the body that covers you (let the affected part take care of those). And if, when it’s time to depart, you shunt everything aside except your mind and the divinity within…if it isn’t ceasing to live that you’re afraid of but never beginning to live properly…then you’ll be worthy of the world that made you.
No longer an alien in your own land.
No longer shocked by everyday events – as if they were unheard-of aberrations.
No longer at the mercy of this, or that.
[12.2] God sees all our souls freed from their fleshly containers, stripped clean of their bark, cleansed of their grime. He grasps with his intelligence alone what was poured and channeled from himself into them. If you learn to do the same, you can avoid a great deal of distress. When you see through the flesh that covers you, will you be unsettled by clothing, mansions, celebrity - the painted sets, the costume cupboard?
[12.3] Your three components: body, breath, mind. Two are yours in trust; to the third alone you have clear title.
If you can cut yourself – your mind – free of what other people do and say, of what you’ve said or done, of the things that you’re afraid will happen, the impositions of the body that contains you and the breath within, and what the whirling chaos sweeps in from outside, so that the mind is freed from fate, brought to clarity, and lives life on its own recognizance – doing what’s right, accepting what happens, and speaking the truth – If you can cut free of impressions that cling to the mind, free of the future and the past – can make yourself, as Empedocles says, “a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness,” and concentrate on living what can be lived (which means the present)… then you can spend the time you have left in tranquility. And in kindness. And at peace with the spirit within you.
[12.4] It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. If a god appeared to us – or a wise human being, even – and prohibited us from concealing our thoughts or imagining anything without immediately shouting it out, we wouldn’t make it through a single day. That’s how much we value other people’s opinions – instead of our own.
[12.5] How is it that the gods arranged everything with such skill, such care for our well-being, and somehow overlooked one thing: that certain people – in fact, the best of them, the gods’ own partners, the ones whose piety and good works brought them closest to the divine – that these people, when they die, should cease to exist forever? Utterly vanished.
Well, assuming that’s true, you can be sure they would have arranged things differently, if that had been appropriate. If it were the right thing to do, they could have done it, and it were natural, nature would have demanded it. So from the fact that they didn’t – if that’s the case – we can conclude that it was appropriate.
Surely you can see yourself that to ask the question is to challenge the gods’ fairness. And why would you be bringing in fairness unless the gods are, in fact, fair – and absolutely so?
And if they are, how could they have carelessly overlooked something so unfair – so illogical – in setting up the world?
[12.6] Practice even what seems impossible.
The left hand is useless at almost everything, for lack of practice. But it guides the reins better than the right. From practice.
[12.7] The condition of the soul and body when death comes for us.
Shortness of life.
Vastness of time before and after.
Fragility of matter.
[12.8] To see the causes of things stripped bare. The aim of actions.
Pain. Pleasure. Death. Fame.
Who is responsible for our own restlessness.
That no one obstructs us.
That it’s all in how you perceive it.
[12.9] The student as boxer, not fencer.
The fencer’s weapon is picked up and put down again.
The boxer’s is part of him. All he has to do is clench his fist.
[12.10] To see things as they are. Substance, cause, and purpose.
[12.11] The freedom to do only what God wants, and accept whatever God sends us.
[12.11a] What’s made of.
[12.12] The gods are not to blame. They do nothing wrong, on purpose or by accident. Nor men either; they don’t do it on purpose. No one is to blame.
[12.13] The foolishness of people who are surprised by anything that happens.
Like travelers amazed at foreign customs.
[12.14] Fatal necessity, and inescapable order. Or benevolent Providence. Or confusion – random and undirected.
If it’s an inescapable necessity, why resist it?
If it’s Providence, and admits of being worshipped, then try to be worthy of God’s aid.
If it’s confusion and anarchy, then be grateful that on this raging sea you have a mind to guide you. And if the storm should carry you away, let it carry off flesh, breath and all the rest, but not the mind. Which can’t be swept away.
[12.15] The lamp shines until it is put out, without losing its gleam, and yet it you it gutters out so early – truth, justice, self-control?
[12.16] When someone seems to have injured you:
But how can I be sure?
And in any case, keep in mind:
• that he’s already been tried and convicted – by himself. (Like scratching your own eyes out.)
• that to expect a bad person not to harm others is like expecting fig trees not to excrete juice, babies not to cry, horses not to neigh – the inevitable not to happen.
What else could they do – with that sort of character?
If you’re still angry, then get to work on that.
[12.17] If it’s not right, don’t do it. If it’s not true, don’t say it. Let your intention be…
[12.18] At all times, look at the thing itself – the thing behind the appearance – and unpack it by analysis:
• cause
• substance
• purpose
• and the length of time it exists
[12.19] It’s time you realized that you have something in your more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.
What’s in my thoughts at this moment? Fear? Jealousy? Desire? Feelings like that?
[12.20] To undertake nothing:
i. at random or without a purpose; for any reason but the common good.
[12.21] That before long you’ll be no one, and nowhere. Like all the things you see now. All the people now living.
Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.
[12.22] It’s all in how you perceive it. You’re in control. You can dispense with misperception at will, like rounding the point. Serenity, total calm, safe anchorage.
[12.23] A given action that stops when it’s supposed to is none the worse for stopping. Nor the person engaged in it either. So too with the succession of actions we call “life.” If it ends when it’s supposed to, it’s none the worse for that. And the person who comes to the end of the line has no cause for complaint. The time and stopping point are set by nature – our own nature, in some cases (death from old age); or nature as a whole, whose parts, shifting and changing, constantly renew the world, and keep it on schedule.
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