How To Stand Before Kings | Everything You Need To Know About Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

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1:49Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

2:25How to stand before kings. Just a short while earlier, Zeno had been homeless and penniless, and now he was advising kings. Cleanthes was a manual laborer whose humility earned him standing ovations from passing Athenians, and then he took over the Stoic school. Arius and Athenodorus both earned the ear of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. Hadrian would stop by Epictetus' classroom, and notes from those lectures would find their way to his successor Marcus Aurelius, a former slave entering the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in the world. What's so remarkable about it isn't just that the Stoics were humble men who were invited into the halls of power and influence, it's what a profile they cut while they were there.

3:08See a man diligent in his business, says the Bible, and he shall standeth before kings. The Stoics didn't just stand before kings, they came to them as equals, and in some cases towered over them, their virtue putting them above any kind of worldly power. Even in the case of Marcus Aurelius, who was himself a king, don't we see him as greater than the greatest conquerors, because he had first conquered himself? Musonius Rufus, who taught Epictetus, said that yes, kings should be philosophers, but more important, philosophers needed to be kingly people. By this, he did not mean grandiose and entitled and dictatorial.

3:47He meant that they had to be dignified and restrained. They needed to be the kind of person that other people wanted to follow. They had to lead themselves first. The greatest of the Stoics were great because they were humble, because they were decent, because they did the right thing, because they controlled the empire between their ears. And in this, the Stoics were so diligent in their business and their philosophy that they not only stood before kings, but stood above and apart from them. Anyways, if you want to learn more about the lives of the Stoics, you can check out the book by that name, Lives of the Stoics, from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius.

4:24I can grab that in the Data Stoics store also. And then we have this Stoic leadership course, which is lessons from the Stoics on how to be a great leader and what the Stoics learned from the leaders that they stood by and over. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Also, I think it's one of the best things we've done. We interviewed a bunch of modern Stoic leaders, including generals and GMs of basketball teams and people who run cities and large companies. I think it's one of the best courses we've done. You can check that out. And if you join Data Stoic Life, you can get it for free. So a bunch of awesome stuff to check out as follow-ups to today's episode, but just do your job and do it well.

5:11this is not only one of the greatest books ever in it's maybe the only one of its kind it's a book i've not just read but re-read and read again and again and again because every time i get something new out of it talking about marcus aurelius's meditations and what i want to do in today's episode is give you some reasons to read marcus aurelius i just want more people to read what I think is one of the greatest works, not just of literature, but of human, artistic, philosophical, and spiritual creation ever done.

5:47In book five, Mark Smeowicz talks about the proper role of philosophy in life. He says it's not as your instructor. He says it's as a kind of medicine, an ointment. He describes a sort of ancient remedy for this eye illness where they would crack an egg on you or something like that. But that aside, I think his general point he actually is taking from Epictetus who said, you shouldn't leave my philosophy class feeling good. You should feel like you just came out of the hospital. He says, because you weren't well when you entered. The point of philosophy is to challenge you. It's to make you uncomfortable.

6:17It's to fix the illnesses of the soul of the mind. Even though there are passages of meditations that are soothing and reassuring, a lot of them are jarring. A lot of them make you uncomfortable. A lot of them really make you think, or a lot of them maybe you instinctively disagree with. But that's the point. Philosophy is not supposed to be your instructor. It's supposed to be a kind of medicine.

6:40You have the most powerful man in the world in an empire 2 ,000 years ago who believed preposterous things about where the universe came from, and even their sense of right and wrong. And the Romans were like us and then were utterly not like us. And no one was more removed from normal modern life than the emperor. You crack open this book, Meditations, to himself, and it's not just, oh, I get a sense of what he's talking about, but it sounds like he's speaking to you with what you are dealing with right now. What it is ultimately is the specificity, the total insulerness of it makes it utterly generalizable and relatable.

7:23He was authentically being himself and in that way manages to speak to millions for all time.

7:34What's incredible about this book, one of the best-selling philosophy books of all time, one of the most influential philosophy books of all time, one of the most unique philosophy books of all time, because what Marcus Aurelius' meditation starts with is his list of debts and lessons, the things he learned, the people who made him who he was, the lessons that he wants to pass on. So it's not his pontifications, his theories about the universe. It begins with the people who helped shaped him, who formed him, who gave him insights, and how those lessons shape him even to this day.

8:11Marcus Aurelius's meditation should have no value to us whatsoever. It should be inaccessible, impractical, writing notes to himself on the front lines of a war in Greek, never intending it to be published, never expecting it to be published, not thinking of you or I at all. Writing totally about his own unique issues and problems and fears and worries and desires and aversions. But there's something, I think, about the specificity of it that actually makes it so general, that makes it so universal. The best comedy is incredibly specific and incredibly universal, and that's the beauty of meditations, is that it's not for you, it's for him, a human being who had a lot of similarities to us, he managed to create something timeless and universal and practical and real and authentic.

8:57So this is not only one of the greatest books ever written, it's maybe the only book like it ever written. Just imagine the most powerful man in the world sits down to write notes to himself, never expecting it to be published, not thinking about an audience at all. It's a book to himself, for himself. It's a book for the writer, not for the reader. And yet for almost 2 ,000 years, it's been a book that's changed the life and the lives of millions of readers, myself included. I'm talking about Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Now, if I was to describe to you a book that's only a couple hundred pages, there's no intense or complex philosophical concepts, that it's about seemingly simple things like how to deal with your anxiety, how to not be corrupted by success, how to deal with annoying or obnoxious people.

9:44You'd think this would be a straightforward, easy book to read, but it's not. So I've been answering that question now for almost 20 years. How do I read meditations? What translation should I read? What should I take out of it? So myself and the team at Daily Stoic have been hard at work on an awesome new course designed to help you do just that. Sort of a book club companion how to read Marcus Aurelius' meditations. Whether you're brand new to Stoicism or you're trying to take it to the next level, Well, that's the thing about this book. Even if you've read it, you get something out of reading it again and again and again.

10:15Mark Sturlus talks about how life is like a river and we never step in the same river twice. It's true for this book, which I myself have read now hundreds of times. It's a bunch of custom self-paced modules that give you everything you need to know about every little part of the book. There's video messages from me. There's a calendar to help you track your progress as you're reading. Then we're gonna have a little group where we all get together and talk about these ideas. There's a reason this book has endured for so long. and there's a reason it's changed the lives of so many people. If you want to get the most out of it, if you want to understand what's really going on between these two covers, you can head over to dailystoic.com slash meditations and sign up right now.

10:59I first read this book when I was 19 years old in my off-campus college apartment, and I took from it certain things. I've reread this book at least a hundred times every time I pick it up I get something different. There is this theme in meditations of rivers and change and ever-flowing nature of time. The Stoics were fond of this idea from Heraclitus that we never step in the same river twice. So what I got out of meditation is the first time when I read it as a teenager and what I read it now in my mid-30s having experienced things, gone through things, you know the book is exactly the same but I'm different.

11:35What I take out of it is different. When I read meditations for the first time and I hear Marcus Reulis talking about the plague, I think he's being metaphorical. And then 2020 comes along and we go through our own and we realize, oh, he's being metaphorical and literal. We have to understand that Marcus Reulis experienced so many of the things that you and I experienced through the course of our lives. But as the Zen saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Your experience is who you are in that moment, what's going on with you at that exact second in your life. That's what opens you up to this idea.

12:06So when I say you should read Marcus Aurelius' meditations, I don't just mean grab this book, the Gregory Hayes translation or whatever, and read it once. I'm saying no, you have to have a lifelong relationship with this text. It's a multi-year ongoing journey that you go through it over and over and over again because you get something different out of it each time you read it. And that's continued to be true for me every single time I read it, including the time I'm about to spend with it right now.

12:35We do ourselves a disservice when we make historical figures into more than what they are. When we forget that they were human beings doing the absolute best that they could. They weren't made that way, they became that way. One of the passages in meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you. It's important we realize that he was doing precisely that, fighting to be Marcus Aurelius. He wasn't just naturally this guy, He wasn't naturally wise, naturally courageous, naturally just, naturally disciplined. It was an effort for him as it is for all of us. It was a daily struggle.

13:07In fact, that's what meditations was. It's the log, the historical record of Marcus Aurelius fighting to be what he wanted to be, what he was trying to be, like all of us, not actually getting there the vast majority of the time. That's what we're trying to do. We're all trying to fight to be what the better angels of our natures know we can be. We're fighting to be what we're capable of being. We're fighting who we know we want to be. We fight to be the person that philosophy tries to make us.

13:38The reason we study the greats is simple. Wordsworth said, the lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime. We study Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and all the Stoics, all the greats and not so greats of history to remind ourselves what's possible. And then he says, and departing, we leave behind us footprints on the sands of time. His point was that our own exploits and deeds, our courage, our justice, our temperance, our wisdom, what we leave behind us can inspire the people who come after us. You think of Marcus really as leaving meditations behind him. What are you leaving behind?

14:14What's your legacy? What are you doing? That's the question for today.

14:22In one point of meditations Marcus Terrilis tells himself to take Plato's view, to zoom out to see things from above, and he does that. He talks about how enormous armies fighting over a border, a whole country, could be not that dissimilar from a far enough view to ants fighting over a piece of food on the ground. It's beautiful and quite impressive that he could come to this point of view because like in Marcus's time the highest he could have gotten off the ground was a couple-story building or maybe the top of a mountain. He didn't have the access to an airplane like all of us do. He would have never seen the blue marble photo which showed Earth from space.

14:56But when you get to Plato's view, you're just reminded how inconsequential most of the things we get upset about are. And then you are also reminded of how interconnected and interdependent and together we all are. Marcus says this too, that the borders don't matter, that vast oceans, no matter we're all in this same thing together and that we are tied together more than we'd like to think that we are.

15:24So this is what's crazy about Marcus. So Marcus lives in Rome, the Romans speak Latin, but the philosophical language at that time was Greek. So Marcus was writing to himself in Greek. When you read those passages or you listen to them and you're just like, that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. Like there's this one passage where he's like a stalk of grain bending low under its own weight, the way olive falls to the ground. He talks about the way that when you put bread in the oven, it breaks open on top. And we don't know why that happens. It's just this like beautiful inadvertent act of nature.

15:56He's just like writing like a poet, like a great writer. And again, he's writing in his non-native tongue to himself, never expecting anyone would see it. It'd be like finding out that's like a comedian is like funny in their diary. You're just like, wow, you're just naturally that. You're not turning it on or off. Right. It's just like intuitively part of you. Every day I send out one stoic inspired email totally for free. Almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time.

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16:43Thank you.