Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.56

To the jaundiced honey tastes bitter, and to those bitten by mad dogs water causes fear, and to little children the ball is a fine thing.

Why then am I angry? Do you think that a false opinion has less power than the bile in the jaundiced or the poison in him who is bitten by a mad dog?

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6 (tr Long)

The state of our bodies, the conditions we are subject to, and the objects around us can have a powerful effect on our feelings and perceptions. I still have a very vivid memory of one day trying to teach about the separation of the soul and the body from Plato’s Phaedo, and how these two aspects of ourselves exist in two very different realms. Yet I was suffering from a very nasty flu, and all I could think about was the aches and pains. I had also taken some pills that made my head quite fuzzy, which meant that there actually wasn’t much clear thinking happening at all.

There I was, trying to explain a great concept in the history of philosophy, and the room around me seemed to be a single pale color, the faces of others appearing as shapeless blobs, my head throbbing rhythmically, and I couldn’t quite feel my fingers as I tried to write on the blackboard. I had pushed myself too far, I realized, and now my very awareness was being assaulted on all sides by illness, weakness, and medications. It’s hard to speak about the purity of spirit, when matter is very busy pulling you down.

Now if outer circumstances such as these can so influence my experience, I think of how much more my own inner judgments will modify how anything and everything is apprehended. Instead of being pulled from the outside, I am being pushed from the inside. If I am thinking that something is bad, I will be moved to feel with pain and resentment. If I am thinking that something is good, I will be moved to feel with pleasure and desire. How I perceive events will be shaped by the measures of true and false, of right and wrong, that I am working with.

I have at some times surrounded myself with people who were cynical opportunists, and at other times put myself in the company of people who were dogmatic ideologues. As my own thinking gradually accommodated to theirs, the very way I saw things inevitably began to shift. The same situation appeared completely different to me, and my passions reacted accordingly, depending on the estimation I had adopted. What seemed beautiful or ugly, desirable or threatening, would change with my opinions.

What I needed to remember, however, was that while I couldn’t really control whether I got the flu, I could certainly control the root of my own estimation. The way the world looked to me would rise and fall with the merit of my own thinking, and the truth of my own judgments. A false appearance may follow from a fever, or it may follow from a false opinion, but while the former lay outside of my power, the latter was most certainly within my power. Let things in the world happen as they may, but let my thinking be my own.

A mad dog may bite, but my own disordered judgments are the more powerful, and the more dangerous, influence on my life.

Written in 7/2007