Greetings Readers!
Today’s meditation is Part VII of our Perennial Habits course. Last week, we discussed: A Simple, But Not Easy Stoic Exercise (Part VI) and What Do You Want Out of Life (Part V). As a reminder, our next meetup is on The Art (and Practice) of Stoic Wisdom. It’s scheduled for Wednesday, May 10th (at 6:00 pm EST); you can register here.
How to See the World — Like a Sage
According to the classicist Pierre Hadot, there is a conception of cosmic flight or view from above in each philosophical school as the best way to look at things. The Platonists, Epicureans, and Stoics all discovered an “exercise of imagination through the infinite vastnesses of the universe.”
The text from Philo of Alexandria describes philosophers in this way,
Their goal is a life of peace and serenity, they contemplate nature and everything found within her: they attentively explore the earth, the sea, the air the sky, and every nature found therein.
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself, “Watch and see the courses of the stars as if you were running alongside them, and continually dwell in your mind upon the changes of the elements into one another; for these imaginations wash away the foulness on the Earth. When reasoning about humanity, look upon earthly things below as if from a vantage point above them.”
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