Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.56

No longer let your breathing only act in concert with the air that surrounds you, but let your intelligence also now be in harmony with the Intelligence that embraces all things.

For the Intelligent Power is no less diffused in all parts, and pervades all things for him who is willing to draw it to him, than the aerial power for him who is able to respire it.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8 (tr Long)

Stoic philosophers will speak of oikeiôsis, a term that can be difficult to translate. Though I can muddle my way here or there with a phrase or two, I am hardly a scholar of Ancient Greek.

I speak only for myself when I say that I translate it in my own head as “affinity” or “belonging”, seeing all other things as immediately joined to myself, and seeing myself as immediately joined to all other things.

I do know it comes from the term for a household or family, oikos, and therefore I think of what makes a good family, or any sort of right association. So in my own set of values I believe that such belonging is really nothing more than the fullest expression of love. Your own mileage may vary.

I would often joke in class that it is much easier to say “I love you” than to say “I share in oikeiôsis with you.” For good or for ill, I’m the sort of fellow who prefers to use an earthy and direct term like happiness instead of eudaimonia, or virtue instead of arête. I am quite wary of linguistic snobbery. If I have to resort to another language, I worry that I’m not really expressing myself well enough in my own.

But the sort of love I mean here is not just physical desire, or emotional affection, or even friendship and brotherhood. It goes way beyond that, even as it may include all of the others. It concerns the total giving of oneself. It is “love” in the fullest sense.

It is about my responsibility to share in and with all other people, and with all other things. It is about my willing and giving engagement with everything in the world, recognizing that I am a part of that whole. Each piece is layered, nestled, and intertwined with every other.

When I breathe in the air around me, I will use it to nourish myself, and when I exhale air back into what is around me, I will in turn give something back from myself. I may not be conscious of it at the time, but I am sharing, in my own small way, with other beings, all of whom participate in the same Being.

Someone once told me that every time I took a breath, I was breathing in molecules also breathed by Caesar, or the Buddha, or Jesus, or Hitler. I am not bright enough as a physicist or mathematician to know if this is literally true, but I certainly understand it to be figuratively true.

It isn’t just about the physical act of breathing, but about the intellectual act of sharing in the same Universe. We might like to believe, out of our arrogance and pride, that our awareness has absolutely nothing to do with the awareness of others. We are sorely mistaken.

The thoughts of the Fascist may seem to have nothing to do with the thoughts of the Communist. The thoughts of the Christian may seem to have nothing to do with the thoughts of the Atheist.

Yet they most certainly do, since all human thought is nothing but an aspect of Universal Thought. Let me stop being obsessed with only the splinters, and let me see myself within a Unity.

Take a breath. We are all breathing that same air. Consider a thought. We are all sharing in the same expression of Mind. 

Written in  5/2008