Our modern world is bursting with angst. News of an impending environmental crisis, worldwide political turmoil, gratuitous violence, wars, and human suffering are delivered instantaneously, twenty-four hours a day, to the smart devices in the palms of our hands. It seems there is no escape from the incessant stream of allegedly newsworthy catastrophes short of ignoring the news, abandoning all forms of social media, and sequestering ourselves in some form of safe space, far away from the mayhem of human...
Prepare for Death to Discover Freedom What is most important? Having your soul on your lips. This makes you free not according to the law of the Quirites, but according to the law of nature. A free person is one who escapes enslavement to himself, which is constant, unavoidable, oppressing by day and by night equally, without break, without respite. Enslavement to oneself is the most severe enslavement, but it is easy to shake it off if you stop expecting...
The Good Fight Against Fortuna What is most important? Raising your spirits high above chance events; remembering your human status, so that if you are fortunate, you know that will not last long, and if you are unfortunate, you know you are not so if you do not think so. (Natural Questions III, praef. 15) Fortuna—fortune in English—is a prevalent theme in Seneca’s writing. He uses some form of the word more than two hundred times in his Letters and...
A Contented Mind and Pure Hands What is most important? Refusing to let bad intentions enter your mind; raising pure hands to heaven; not seeking any good thing if someone else must give it or must lose it so that it may pass to you; wishing for a sound mind (something that can be wished for without competition); regarding the other things rated highly by mortals, even if some chance brings them into your home, as likely to exit by...
A Courageous Mind for Courageous Action What is most important? A mind that is brave and defiant in the face of calamity, not just opposed but hostile to luxury, neither courting nor fleeing danger; one that knows not to wait for fortune but to create it, to go to face both forms unafraid and undismayed, unshaken either by the turmoil of the one or the glitter of the other. (Natural Questions III, praef. 13) As practicing Stoics, our equanimity is not...
Love of Fate (Amor Fati) What is most important? Being able to endure adversity with a glad mind, to experience whatever happens as though you wanted it to happen to you. For you ought to have wanted it to, if you had known that everything happens according to god’s decree. Crying, complaining, and moaning are rebellion. (Seneca, Natural Questions III, praef. 12) From the perspective provided by the cosmic viewpoint (Day 2), we can learn to love what happens in...
The Cosmic Viewpoint What is most important? Raising your mind above the threats and promises of fortune, thinking that nothing is worth hoping for. For what have you to desire? Whenever you sink back from engagement with the divine to the human level, your sight will go dim, just like the eyes of those who return from bright sunlight to dense shadow. (Natural Questions III, praef. 11) The cosmic viewpoint is a central theme of Stoicism, and Seneca’s Natural Questions highlights that...
Seven Days with Seneca What is most important in human life? That is a perennial question that almost all of us ask ourselves, in one form or another, at some point in our lives. Unfortunately, many of us neglect to confront that question until late in life or when unforeseen circumstances force the question upon us. There, amid the faintly glowing embers of a long life approaching its end, or within the smoking and smoldering embers of a cataclysmic life...
Many people who were introduced to Stoicism by popular books that were written in the twenty-first century are surprised by the religious nature of Stoic philosophy when they first encounter it in the surviving Stoic texts and scholarship on those texts. That is because none of these popular authors address the deeply religious nature of Stoicism positively. Instead, they either ignore it or attempt to discredit it as the unwarranted beliefs of ancient philosophers who lacked our modern scientific understanding...
This podcast episode refers to the blog post on The Discipline of Action, which is currently being updated. If you are looking for an exceptional way to jump-start your Stoic practice, consider the Theory & Practice Course offered by The College of Stoic Philosophers. This course is a mentor-guided, four-month-long course that provides an excellent foundation in both Stoic theory and practice.
