Peace is the project. Tranquility is the goal.
In part I of How to Be Free — Like Epictetus, we discussed that “If you wish to have peace and contentment,” observed Epictetus, “release your attachment to all things outside your control. This is the path of freedom and happiness.”
Although knowing the path does not necessarily mean it’s easy.
Radical Acceptance
The path to being free is one of radical acceptance. At the beginning of Discourses, Epictetus explains that the person getting an education ought to approach this process with the following aim: “How can I follow the gods in everything, how can I be content with the divine administration, and how can I become free?”
Epictetus taught his students,
You are free if nothing happens that conflicts with your will and if no one is able to obstruct you. What does that mean? Are you telling me that freedom is madness? No, of course not. Freedom and madness don’t go together. But I want my every wish to come to pass, however crazy that may seem. You really are mad, you are raving. Don’t you know that freedom is something fine and wonderful?
Peace, tranquility, and wisdom all connect with acceptance and joy (not madness). Becoming free is the path to enjoying one’s life. Constantly wanting things to be different leads to suffering and delusion. As the late spiritual writer Ram Dass put it, “As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be, you can't see how it is.”
For Epictetus, education is learning to want all individual things to happen just as they do happen. To the question, how do they happen? Epictetus says, “In the way that the one who has arranged them has arranged. He has arranged for there to be summer and winter, plenty and dearth (scarcity), virtue and vice, and all such opposites on behalf of the harmony of the universe.”
Signs of Progress
How do we know if we are making progress on the path to being free? According to Epictetus in Discourses, “The signs of a person making progress are these: criticizing nobody, praising nobody, blaming nobody, accusing nobody, and saying nothing about oneself to indicate being someone or knowing something.”
Progress connects with personal responsibility.
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