A stoic perspective to life...

...with quotes from "The Daily Stoic" by Ryan Holiday, "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius and "Enchiridion" by Epictetus

All of you would have noticed that people have started to embrace concepts like meditation, mindfulness and consciousness in recent times. All the three things mentioned have something to do with our mind and our thoughts and how we control them.

In all of these concepts, the first thing you will hear is to pay attention to and control your breathing. I've always been taught while growing up that breathing is involuntary and happens sub-consciously without us pushing ourselves to do it - hence I never got the point about voluntarily doing it. The astonishing fact is that when you start doing it consciously and try to visualise the journey of the air that you breathe from the moment it enters your nostrils till the moment it exits the nostrils - whatever anxiety or stress or anger or any challenge you found hard to solve suddenly feels easy. But what has really happened during the process - apart from the conversion of oxygen to carbon dioxide - Nothing! Just air coming in and going out.

The reason I started with this is because stoicism is a very simple practice to lead a happy life. Now, one may ask "Why should we be happy?" or "Why is happiness important?" or "Why should I keep others around me happy?" - Although some people will consider these questions to be insane but these are valid questions. All our emotions and feelings are determined by our internal biological sensations. These sensations may vary for different people - some may feel happy by seeing others smile or some may feel happy by seeing others in pain. The language we speak have specific words to define the latter. If happiness is defined as an outcome of setting goals for ourselves and accomplishing them, then what happens if fate intervenes? What if you’re snubbed? If outside events interrupt? What if you do achieve everything but find that nobody is impressed? That’s the problem with letting your happiness be determined by things you can’t control. Human mind is always an interesting thing to explore, it boils down to one curious question - "Why do we do what we do?" - This article is not going to focus on this but there are a lot of scientific researches done on this (Works by American-Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are a good place to start)

Coming back to Stoicism - the core of which is very simple - looking at life as a combination of things that you can control and things that you can't control. Always ensure that you know what you can and can't control and are sure that you have done your best in the former. It can be further broken down into 3 things:

• The Discipline of Perception: How we see and perceive the world around us
• The Discipline of Action: The decisions and actions we take and to what end
• The Discipline of Will: How we deal with the things we cannot change, attain clear and convincing judgement, and come to a true understanding of our place in the world

“Whenever you get an impression of some pleasure, as with any impression, guard yourself from being carried away by it, let it await your action, give yourself a pause. After that, bring to mind both times, first when you have enjoyed the pleasure and later when you will regret it and hate yourself. Then compare to those the joy and satisfaction you’d feel for abstaining altogether. However, if a seemingly appropriate time arises to act on it, don’t be overcome by its comfort, pleasantness, and allure—but against all of this, how much better the consciousness of conquering it.” - Epictetus in Enchiridion

I haven't read the book (Enchiridion by Epictetus) but this is such a powerful quote. Pleasure, as I mentioned before, is a biological sensation and every time we feel it, we want more of it irrespective of the consequences. And of course, different people derive pleasure out of doing different things. Consider this example - People derive pleasure out of smoking or taking in drugs and they seek for that pleasure time and again. Knowing that it is possible to go out of control, we can derive pleasure out of abstaining from using it again rather than indulging in it. A powerful thought indeed! The application of this is very subjective and based on circumstances that we face. There is no one size fits all solution but the synthesis of this is important.

“You shouldn’t give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don’t care at all.” - Marcus Aurelius in Meditations

Circumstances are incapable of considering or caring for your feelings, your anxiety, or your excitement. They don’t care about your reaction. They are not people. So stop acting like getting worked up is having an impact on a given situation. Situations don’t care at all.

"One becomes a philosopher when they begin to exercise their guiding reason and start to question the emotions and beliefs and even language that others take for granted." - Ryan Holiday in The Daily Stoic

Probably the closest match to "first principle thinking" - much necessary for our world today. It shouldn't just stop with asking questions - putting the same curiosity in unearthing the answers gets you more clarity.

“Were you to live three thousand years, or even a countless multiple of that, keep in mind that no one ever loses a life other than the one they are living, and no one ever lives a life other than the one they are losing. The longest and the shortest life, then, amount to the same, for the present moment lasts the same for all and is all anyone possesses. No one can lose either the past or the future, for how can someone be deprived of what’s not theirs?” - Marcus Aurelius in Meditations

The present is the "gift" that we possess. We always live basking in the glory of our past or live in anxiety of the future. The present is what is in our control and we must live in the moment.

"How often do we begin some project certain we know exactly how it will go? How often do we meet people and think we know exactly who and what they are? And how often are these assumptions proved to be completely and utterly wrong? This is why we must fight our biases and preconceptions: because they are a liability." - Ryan Holiday in The Daily Stoic

Always think about "What haven't I thought about?", "What is it that I'm missing?", "Could I be wrong here?" - Always fight your biases and prepare to change your status quo. We talk about being rebels and breaking rules set by others but are we strong enough to break our own inner beliefs? Something for us to constantly repeat in our minds - “Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.” (Should ideally be gender neutral but history happened)

It is so important to control the biases and lenses we bring to our interactions. When you hear or see something, which interpretation do you jump to? What is your default interpretation of someone else’s intentions? If being upset or hurt is something you’d like to experience less often, then make sure your interpretations of others' words make that possible. Choose the right inference from someone’s actions or from external events, and it’s a lot more likely that you’ll have the right response.

“These are the characteristics of the rational soul: self-awareness, self-examination, and self-determination. It reaps its own harvest…. It succeeds in its own purpose …” - Marcus Aurelius in Meditations

To be rational today, we have to do just three things:

1. Introspect / Look inward
2. Be critical of ourselves and the way we think
3. Make your own decisions—uninhibited by biases or popular notions

Stoicism is about looking at things from every angle—and certain situations are easier to understand from different perspectives. I often refer to this as "quantum thinking" - will write about this someday.

The definition of rational or irrational differs from person to person just as what is good and what is evil differs for each person. As cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson has explained, the cosmos fills us with complicated emotions. On the one hand, we feel an infinitesimal smallness in comparison to the vast universe; on the other, an extreme interconnectedness to this larger whole.

People who practice stoicism (the stoics) don't look for instruction or spoon-feeding, they cultivate skills like creativity, independence, self-confidence, and the ability to problem solve and unlearn and re-learn in the process. In this way, they are resilient instead of rigid. We need to focus on the strategic rather than the tactical.

Some closing thoughts/excerpts

• The next time you face a political dispute or a personal disagreement, ask yourself: Is there any reason to fight about this? Is arguing going to help solve anything?
• “Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe. For in a sense, all things are mutually woven together and therefore have an affinity for each other—for one thing follows after another according to their tension of movement, their sympathetic stirrings, and the unity of all substance.” - Marcus Aurelius in Meditations
• “Don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will—then your life will flow well.” - Epictetus in Enchiridion
• Accept only what is true. Work for the common good. Match your needs and wants with what is in your control. Embrace what nature has in store for you.

PostScript

I started reading about stoicism after one of my close friends introduced me to the word. The more I researched about it, I felt that I was already doing/practising it in my life and that made me connect more with the different literature published in the past.

Religion has always been about rules - instructions on what to do and what not to do and sometimes without any justification or reasoning. Stoicism is purely about ethics/guiding principles. I strongly feel that it is a way forward for humanity to be together and work towards the goodness of the collective whole irrespective of which nation you were born or what religion did your ancestry follow.