Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.60

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if you would ever dig.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7 (tr Long)

We will often search far and wide, looking for something that was with us all along. We will often have what we need right here, and we would see it if we only looked a little harder, and dug a little deeper. We are easily misled and confused by appearances. 

This applies to something as silly as finding that our keys were always in our pockets, and something as critical as finding that our happiness was always within us.

Now we will often be told to “just look inside ourselves,” even as such a phrase is quite meaningless without further explanation. It’s much like saying that something is “over there” without pointing toward anything at all. A problem with profound expressions is that they may still sound profound when we don’t really know what they mean.

What is it that is truly within me? I look, but I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I too easily look beyond it, since I will first feel drawn to what is all around me, to the comfort of images, to the pull of desires, to the security in the company of others. Sometimes that yearning for what is outside is especially strong when what I want is slightly out of reach, just around the corner, or promised for the future. I was trained for years and years by the world to think, speak, and act in just the right way, so that I could eventually get the success that would make me happy.

Yet I then feel empty, because it isn’t all that was promised. I try to look back inside myself again, and at first it doesn’t seem like there is anything there at all. Well, it may take time for my ears to adjust from all the grating noise, and for my eyes to adjust from all the flashing lights.

And there it is, what I was all along, a creature of many aspects and of many layers, but at the heart of it all, a being that can have mastery over itself through its own thought.

It isn’t simply that I have judgments, but that I make those judgments, and that those judgments order my choices, and those choices determine my actions. All sorts of things, both wonderful and frightening, may happen out there, but I am completely in control of the awareness within me. I am a creature of conscious activity, and fully capable of knowing myself, finding my place in Nature, and living with moral excellence.

In the simplest sense, if I always follow what I know is true, and if I choose to do what I know is right, I require nothing more. That is what is within me.

Once I recognize that this is completely sufficient for me to be myself, to be happy, and to be at peace, I won’t need to scramble to go out and buy something that I already own.

I don’t need to build a fancy aqueduct when I could have dug a well right in my own back yard. 

Written in 1/2008