What is Important in Life – Day 4
NOTE: This post has been updated and is available as Stoicism On Fire, Episode 20
What Is Important in Life – Day 3
NOTE: This post has been updated and is available as Stoicism On Fire, Episode 19
What Is Important in Life – Day 2
NOTE: This post has been updated and is available as Stoicism On Fire, Episode 18
What Is Important in Life – Day 1
NOTE: This post has been updated and is available as Stoicism On Fire, Episode 17
What Is Important in Life – Introduction to a Week-Long Meditation
What is most important in human life? That is a perennial question which all of us ask ourselves, in one form or another, at some point in our lives. Unfortunately, many of us only confront that question either late in life or when tragic circumstances force the question upon us. Often, it is only after the raging fires of our youthful passions and career ambitions have exhausted our enthusiasm that we stop long enough to contemplate what is truly important...
Restoring the Soul of the World
“We have the greatest technological knowledge of any civilization, but we have forgotten what it means to be alive in the world, to be alive in a living universe. Yet without this living connection to the world, our lives become trivial, routine, and mechanical. Being cut off, we start to wonder about the meaning of life and raise other abstract questions, while meaning itself is an experience of being bonded to the world and others at the very deepest level.”...
Universal Reason – The Guide to Stoic Practice
What defined a Stoic above all else was the choice of a life in which every thought, every desire, and every action would be guided by no other law than that of universal Reason. ~ Pierre Hadot[1] The Stoics placed a rational, divine, and providential cosmos at the center of their philosophical system and relied on it as a guide for their every thought, desire, and action. For the Stoic, Nature is the measure of all things. As an expression...
Stoicism turns lives upside down
The practice of Stoicism requires that we understand the theoretical essentials of the Stoic philosophical system. However, we must be vigilant not to get sucked into the trap of academic philosophy where analysis leads to paralysis, and philosophy becomes meaningless to all but those holding PhDs in the subject. Likewise, we must not apply Stoicism as a psychological balm or existential add-on to a twenty-first-century lifestyle otherwise focused on material success. We need to remember the purpose of Stoic practice,...
Providence or Atoms
If I know Providence, I know my good and can follow it; so, no complaint. If I know not my good, I do not in reality know Providence. So if I complain, I complain of a specter and not a Deity: I complain as an animal, not as a man.[1] Either providence or atoms. By repeated use of this simple disjunction, Marcus Aurelius condensed and contrasted the worldviews proposed by the Stoics and the Epicureans, and emphasized the importance of...
The Piety of Marcus Aurelius
Everything suits me that suits your designs, O my universe. Nothing is too early or too late for me that is in your own good time. All is fruit for me that your seasons bring, O nature. All proceeds from you, all subsists in you, and to you all things return. (Meditations 4.23) The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a deeply spiritual person and that fact comes across clearly in his Meditations. American philosopher and religious scholar Jacob Needleman suggests...
