You Have To Look This Way | Focus On The Present Moment

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2:12Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

2:49You have to look this way. In the muck and mire of daily life, it's easy to get frustrated with people. It's easy to prioritize the wrong things, to lose perspective. It's easy to get caught up in the moment or forget the actual magnitude of your problems. Which is why the Stoics remind us to zoom out. At least twice in meditations, Mark Surrealist talks of taking Plato's view. And by that, he means getting up high and looking down at humanity. To see them from above, he writes, the thousands of animal herds, the rituals, the voyages on calm or stormy seas, the different ways we come into the world, share it with one another, and leave.

3:26How high could Marcus Aurelius have gotten? The tallest mountain in Italy is about 15 ,000 feet, and as far as we know, he never climbed it. Nor do we have any record of Marcus Aurelius scaling his famous column, which stood about 40 meters high above Rome. So for him, the exercise was theoretical. He was trying to imagine what a bird saw looking down, what earth looked like to the stars or the clouds. But what he got from this exercise was real humility. How many people don't even know your time, the emperor of Rome reminded himself when he zoomed out and saw a larger world. He imagined how even his powerful armies clashing with powerful enemies in enormous battles would resemble ants swarming over a piece of food.

4:08Today, we can quite easily see our house from a satellite on a computer. A window seat on an airplane gives us the literal 30 ,000-foot view. We can scroll through centuries of history watching each era fold seamlessly into the next. This should humble us. It should give us perspective. It should remind us of what's important, what we share with each other, and how short a time any of us is here.

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5:55January 26, the power of mantra. This is today's entry from the Daily Stoic book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. I'm reading from the regular hardcover because that's what I had in front of me. You can grab a leather-bound edition that Steve and I did. I sell those at store.dailystoic.com. Our quote today is from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 829. Erase the false impressions from your mind by constantly saying to yourself, I have it in my soul to keep out any evil, desire, any kind of disturbance. Instead, seeing the true nature of things. I will give them only their due.

6:43Always remember this power that nature gave you. Anyone who has taken a yoga class or been exposed to Hindu or Buddhist thought has probably heard of the concept of mantra. In Sanskrit, it means sacred utterance, essentially a word or phrase or a thought, even a sound intended to provide clarity or spiritual guidance. A mantra can be especially helpful in the meditative process because it allows us to block out everything else while we focus. It's fitting then that Marcus Aurelius would suggest this stoic mantra, a reminder or a watch phrase to use when we feel false impressions, distractions, or the crush of everyday life upon us.

7:25It says, essentially, I have the power within me to keep this out. I can see the truth. Change the wording as you like. That part is up to you. But have a mantra and use it to find the clarity you crave. I've talked about this before, but it is funny, right? It's called meditations, but he's not doing meditation in the sense of it we think today. But then again, he also is, right? He's using mantras. What meditations is, is Mark Sreos talking to himself. That's what it translates to in Greek. And then he is reminding himself over and over again of the same ideas. In fact, that's one of the criticisms, ironically, of meditations that Marcus Aurelius is repetitive.

8:09But that's what he's doing. He's repeating to himself what he feels needs to be repeated. This isn't what he thinks the reader needs to hear or what he thinks would be most compelling or entertaining to the reader. He's not thinking about the reader at all. He's thinking about himself. And yet what he's saying and what I was trying to say there is actually something very similar to what they talk about in meditation is that you have this power over your own thoughts. Even that idea like I am not my thoughts. I don't have to identify this with detachment, presence, connection, breath. Some of the things that are popular in the meditation community or in meditation practices is what Marcus is doing there.

8:51And I really do feel like stoicism is a philosophy built around a series of mantras where that's the stoicism that I like, that I'm attracted to. I mean, I have a couple on my arm. I have stillness is the key. Ego is the enemy. The obstacle is the way. Little reminders, right? Aphorisms. And even when I sign the books, right, I tend to write the same things over and over again. I'll write a Morphati. I'll write one of my favorite quotes from Marcus. I think another great mantra is fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you. Or I talked a lot about this during the New Year New Year challenge when we were setting it up that my mantra in 23 was less.

9:31My mantra this year is about systems, right? And I've been talking about that. So the idea is what's your mantra? What are you repeating to yourself? What are you reminding yourself when you feel like the lower self taking over, when you feel yourself drifting, when you feel yourself going in the wrong direction? What do you repeat to yourself? What do you remind yourself? What do you need to know? And like, maybe it's cliche, maybe it's lame, but I like to write these things down. I mean, as I said, I literally have them tattooed. Mark Surrealis is writing them in his journal. Like if you were to read my journals, you'd think it's cheesy or even like weird how often And I'm having to say the same things over and over again.

10:10It's like, does he get it? Yeah, I get it. That's why I'm having to write it down. And if they were easy and natural, well, then I'm probably not pushing myself enough. So I'm trying to say these things over and over and over again. And you're hoping that it kind of becomes part of who you are, becomes part of your muscle memory, becomes second nature so that in the big moments, it's there, right? That you just go there, right? That the training kicks in. That's what Marcus is doing. That's what I'm trying to do. That's what I hope you do. So maybe think as a big picture, what's a mantra for the year, right?

10:49For you, as we're wrapping up January here, what's your mantra? But then also like, just what are some day-to-day mantras, reminders, little phrases that come to you from the Stilics that you can turn to always, right? Is this in my control? Is it outside my control? The serenity prayer is kind of a longer mantra. There's just so much of it. I mean, Epictetus said all of Stoic philosophy could be reduced down to this mantra of persist and resist. There's so many of them. Pick the ones that resonate with you. Repeat them to yourself. Write them down as Epictetus says. Talk to others about them.

11:26Let them become part of you and part of the training. That's what we're doing. I'll talk to you soon.

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