Epictetus, Discourses 2.13.3

What do I mean by “having no lawyer”? 
 
I mean that he does not know that he is wishing to have what is not given him, and wishing not to have what he cannot avoid, and he does not know what is his own and what is not his own. 
 
If he did know, he would never feel hindrance or constraint or anxiety; how could he? Does anyone fear about things which are not evil? 
 
“No.” 
 
Or again about things which are evil but are in his power to prevent? 
 
“Certainly not.” 
 
If, then, nothing beyond our will's control is either good or evil, and everything within our will's control depends entirely on ourselves, so that no one can take any such thing away from us or win it for us against our will, what room is left for anxiety? 
 
Yet we are anxious for our bit of a body, for our bit of property, for what Caesar will think, but are not anxious at all for what is within us. 
 
Am I anxious about not conceiving a false thought? No, for that depends on myself. 
 
Or about indulging an impulse contrary to nature? No, not about this either. 
 
So, when you see a man pale, just as the physician, judging from his color, says, “This man's spleen is out of order, or that man's liver”, so do you say, “This man is disordered in the will to get and the will to avoid, he is not in the right way, he is feverish”; for nothing else changes the complexion and causes a man to tremble and his teeth to chatter, 
 
“and droop the knee and sink upon his feet." 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 2.13 
 
A few years back, I met a fellow who boldly insisted upon representing himself in a civil trial, and while I did not doubt the righteousness of his cause, I sadly knew that it would not end in his favor. The best of intentions are no substitute for an understanding of what makes it all tick. 
 
If you can stay off their radar, you might avoid a need for the lawyers, but there is no escaping the need to live your life from day to day, in the regular company of your neighbors, while making continual decisions about your desires and aversions. You cannot pay anyone to do this work for you—you will have to suck it up and become a philosopher. 
 
From a sound understanding of the human good, without the distraction of any academic pretensions or professional entanglements, you will discover why there is nothing you should want to get that you don’t already have within your power, and why there is nothing you should want to avoid that is already beyond your power. The crippling anxiety is a result of wishing for all of the wrong things. 
 
Since the fulfillment of any creature is in the excellence of its own nature, it follows that our happiness is from the exercise of our own virtues, to which all other circumstances must be relative. Do not confuse the essence with the accidents. 
 
Or put simply, the quality of my life is in what I choose to do, not merely in what is done to me. Some folks scoff at that old saying about lemons, but that’s probably because they have yet to outgrow a love of complaining.
 
So, if something is outside of my control, why am I permitting it to determine my well-being? And if something is under my control, what is keeping me from changing it for my benefit, right here and now? In either case, the good or the evil are grounded in my estimation: every situation, however imposing, allows me to act with integrity. 
 
Pleasure, riches, and fame are not always blessings, just as pain, poverty, and obscurity are not always curses. Everything hinges upon the presence or absence of character, which explains how a king can be crying while a beggar can be laughing. The distress and the fear turn out to be from a state of mind, never actually from the state of affairs. 
 
Far too often, I catch myself grumbling about various aches and pains, or trembling at the prospects of some wasting disease, when the decay of my body is inevitable, whether it happens sooner or later. Yes, I can take a pill that might give me more time, but what use is the time when the sickness is in my soul? The first task is to get my judgments into shape, so that I do not treat a preference as if it were a necessity. 

—Reflection written in 8/2001 

IMAGE: Titian, Portrait of a Sick Man (1515) 

James Vila Blake, Sonnets from Marcus Aurelius 23

23. 

Ὁ ἀδικῶν ἀσεβεῖ: τῆς γὰρ τῶν ὅλων φύσεως κατεσκευακυίας τὰ λογικὰ ζῷα ἕνεκεν ἀλλήλων, ὥστε ὠφελεῖν μὲν ἄλληλα κατ̓ ἀξίαν βλάπτειν δὲ μηδαμῶς, ὁ τὸ βούλημα ταύτης παραβαίνων ἀσεβεῖ δηλονότι εἰς τὴν πρεσβυτάτην τῶν θεῶν.

The unjust man is an impious man, and sins against the gods. For as the Nature of the Universe has constituted reasoning creatures for the sake of one another, that they may be useful and do good to each other in a due manner, but by no means ever to harm any one, so whoever goes aside from this purpose and will of Nature, plainly is impious, and sins against the eldest of all deities.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.1 

23. 

To act unjustly is a traitorous deed,  

Treasonable against the King of Kings, 

Fluent from whom the ancient heavens proceed,  

And marvelous multiplicity of things. 

Compacted all in oneness forth they go, 

And in their way a lovely order sings—  

Peasants, kings, commoners, friend and foe, 

And all assembled to the King of Kings! 

Nature is music’s vast conventicle, 

Wherein each life plays precious melodies 

That congregate in parts majestical, 

And justice is the solemn harmonies. 

Justice is many in One; uncivil to be 

Profaneth the most ancient Deity. 

IMAGE: Titian, Cain and Abel (c. 1544) 

Seneca, Moral Letters 71.11

And so, when one has just begun, or is on one's way to the heights and is cultivating virtue, or even if one is drawing near the perfect good but has not yet put the finishing touch upon it, one will retrograde at times and there will be a certain slackening of mental effort. 
 
For such a man has not yet traversed the doubtful ground; he is still standing in slippery places. 
 
But the happy man, whose virtue is complete, loves himself most of all when his bravery has been submitted to the severest test, and when he not only, endures but welcomes that which all other men regard with fear, if it is the price which he must pay for the performance of a duty which honor imposes, and he greatly prefers to have men say of him: "how much more noble!" rather than "how much more lucky!" 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 71 
 
The cynic will claim that the moral relapse is a proof of how virtue is impossible, and that we will forever be subject to debauchery, even as the man of conviction will continue to see it as yet another opportunity for improvement. I am always deeply frustrated when I fall down, once again, but I have learned to get back on my feet immediately, for hesitation merely breeds further doubt. 
 
While it may feel like the torment of Sisyphus, with no end in sight, I remind myself how the goal is not somewhere up there, at the top of a hill, and is instead to be found in the formation of my inner character, a reward that seeks nothing beyond the excellence of the task itself. Understood rightly, there is a profound joy in doing what I know to be right, regardless of whether anyone happens to be watching, or pats me on the back. 
 
On occasion, my wife will suddenly take note of some thankless task I am performing, and she will suddenly say, “You’re a good man.” 
 
I will object to this vehemently, and she assumes I am just humblebragging, not realizing how painfully aware I am of my own weakness. I never call myself a philosopher, only a student of philosophy, and I never claim virtue, only an aspiration to virtue. I am a constant work in progress. If I ever became sufficiently wise, or genuinely honorable, I would gladly take on such titles. Today is not yet that day. 
 
Where is the merit in being lucky? It has nothing to do with me. If, however, I can manage to make a sincere effort, I have nobility in my sights, and my achievement, as worthless as it seems, is a sign of growth. Boasting is never required, because the braggart is concerned with appearances, not with content. 
 
I see red when professionals, especially academics, list their impressive credentials, or refer to one another as “esteemed”. As Marcus Aurelius, would say, stop with the talking—show me with your deeds, in the face of the most severe hardship, and there will be the only proof needed. 
 
While my peers roll their eyes at poems by Kipling, I still find the deepest inspiration:
 
If you can make one heap of all your winnings 
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, 
And lose, and start again at your beginnings 
And never breathe a word about your loss; 
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew 
To serve your turn long after they are gone, 
And so hold on when there is nothing in you 
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!' 

 
—Reflection written in 9/2013 

IMAGE: Titian, Sisyphus (c. 1549) 

Stoic Snippets 207

Termination of activity, cessation from movement and opinion, and in a sense their death, is no evil. 

Turn your thoughts now to the consideration of your life, your life as a child, as a youth, your manhood, your old age, for in these also every change was a death. Is this anything to fear? 

Turn your thoughts now to your life under your grandfather, then to your life under your mother, then to your life under your father; and as you find many other differences and changes and terminations, ask yourself, is this anything to fear? 

In like manner, then, neither are the termination and cessation and change of your whole life a thing to be afraid of. 

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.21 

IMAGE: Titian, The Three Ages of Man (c. 1514) 

Seneca, Moral Letters 51.5

The soul is not to be pampered; surrendering to pleasure means also surrendering to pain, surrendering to toil, surrendering to poverty. 
 
Both ambition and anger will wish to have the same rights over me as pleasure, and I shall be torn asunder, or rather pulled to pieces, amid all these conflicting passions.
 
I have set freedom before my eyes; and I am striving for that reward. And what is freedom, you ask? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms. 
 
And on the day when I know that I have the upper hand, her power will be naught. When I have death in my own control, shall I take orders from her? 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 51 
 
Just as the fool paradoxically seeks to be free by enslaving himself to what is outside of his control, so he also believes that he can submit to one passion while avoiding any of the others. He wishes to pick and choose, to have it both ways, oblivious to the fact that once the door is opened to pleasure, it will inevitably be accompanied by pain. He laughs at one moment, and then suddenly weeps at the next. 
 
As soon as I crave gratification above all else, I am setting myself up for disappointment, and so I will then be further consumed by anger and envy. Before I know it, my head and my heart are being led around by my gut, and I am left with the constant anxiety of shifting and conflicting emotions. 
 
The whole mess can be avoided by placing my impressions in the service of my judgments, and thereby taming the appetites with the counsel of the virtues. One of the great insights of the Stoic Turn is the discovery of how the best feelings proceed from the best actions.
 
Fortune makes many promises about what we might “get”, and the way to resist her wiles is to remember why life is never about “getting” anything at all. Once I realize she has nothing I need, I have begun to approach true liberty, where neither an enticement nor a threat can compromise my inner worth. 
 
You say I can have luxury, or influence, or fame? What does that have to do with me? I know my purpose, and I am able to distinguish my principles from my preferences. 
 
You say you will leave me poor and forgotten? However unpleasant, these do not diminish my excellence as a man, so I will bear them with dignity. 
 
Death? I will not fear it, if I know what life is about. 

—Reflection written in 4/2013 

IMAGE: Titian, Cupid with the Wheel of Time (Love, Fortune, and Death) (c. 1520) 

Sayings of Ramakrishna 179

Some get tipsy with even a small glass of wine. Others require two or three bottles to make them intoxicated. 

But both get the equal and full pleasure of intoxication. 

Similarly, some devotees get intoxicated with celestial bliss by coming in direct contact with the Lord of the Universe, while others become full of ecstasy even by a glimpse of the Divine Glory. 

But both are equally fortunate, since both are deluged with Divine bliss. 

IMAGE: Titian, The Bacchanal of the Andrians (c. 1526) 

The Wisdom of Solomon 9:13-18

[13] "For what man can learn the counsel of God?
Or who can discern what the Lord wills?
[14] For the reasoning of mortals is worthless,
and our designs are likely to fail,
[15] for a perishable body weighs down the soul,
and this earthy tent burdens the thoughtful mind.
[16] We can hardly guess at what is on earth,
and what is at hand we find with labor;
but who has traced out what is in the heavens?
[17] Who has learned your counsel, unless you have given wisdom
and sent your Holy Spirit from on high?
[18] And thus the paths of those on earth were set right,
and men were taught what pleases you,
and were saved by wisdom."

IMAGE: Titian, Wisdom (1560)

Allegory of Prudence

Titian, Allegory of Prudence (c. 1550–1565)

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