ARKCODEX
Meditations
1At dawn, tell yourself: Today I will meet the meddling. The ungrateful. The arrogant. The deceitful. The envious. The selfish. All this befalls them because they do not know good from evil. But I have seen the nature of the good. It is beautiful. And the nature of evil. It is ugly. And the nature of the one who wrongs me. He is my kin. Not by blood or seed. But as a sharer in mind and a portion of the divine. No one can harm me. No one can wrap me in shame. I cannot rage against my kin. I cannot hate him. We were made to work together. Like feet. Like hands. Like eyelids. Like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against each other is against nature. And resentment is opposition. And turning away is opposition.
2Whatever I am comes down to this: a bit of flesh, a breath, and the ruling mind. Put down the books. Stop being pulled in every direction. That is not granted to you. Instead, as one already dying, look down on the flesh. It is blood and bones and a web of nerves, veins, and arteries woven together. Consider also what the breath is. Just wind. Never the same from one moment to the next. Always being expelled and gulped back in. The third thing is the ruling mind. Think of it this way. You are old. Do not let it remain a slave any longer. Do not let it be jerked around by selfish impulse. Do not let it resent what fate brings now or dread what is to come.
3The workings of the gods are full of providence. The workings of chance do not occur apart from nature. They are bound and interwoven with what providence governs. Everything flows from that source. Alongside it stands necessity. Alongside it stands what benefits the whole cosmos. You are a part of that whole. For every part of nature, the good is what the nature of the whole brings. The good is what preserves that whole. The cosmos is preserved by change. The elements change. Compounds change. Let these truths be enough for you. Let them be your fixed principles. Throw away your thirst for books. Do not die complaining. Die truly content. Die grateful to the gods from your heart.
4Remember how long you have been putting these things off. Remember how many extensions the gods have granted you that you have not used. You must finally come to understand what universe you are part of. You must understand from what power governing the universe you flow. You must understand that a limit of time has been set for you. If you do not use it to clear away the clouds, it will be gone. You will be gone. And the chance will not come again.
5At every hour, focus with full strength on the task at hand. Act like a Roman. Act like a man. Bring to it genuine dignity. Bring warmth. Bring freedom. Bring justice. Clear your mind of all other distractions. You will succeed at this if you perform each action as though it were your last. Free yourself from carelessness. Free yourself from emotional resistance to what reason chooses. Free yourself from pretense. Free yourself from self-absorption. Free yourself from resentment toward your fate. See how few things you must master to live a life that flows smoothly and honors the divine. The gods themselves will ask nothing more from the one who keeps to these.
6Go ahead, degrade yourself, my soul. Keep on degrading yourself. Soon you will have no chance left to honor yourself. Each person has only one life. Yours is nearly spent. You have not respected yourself. You have placed your happiness in the souls of others.
7Why do you let outside things distract you? Make time to learn something good. Stop wandering. But guard against the other kind of restlessness too. Those who exhaust themselves with endless activity are also lost. They have no aim to which they direct every impulse and every thought.
8Those who pay no attention to what happens in another person's soul are rarely seen to be miserable. But those who fail to follow the movements of their own soul are bound to be miserable.
9Always remember these things: What is the nature of the whole. What is my own nature. How mine relates to that greater nature. What kind of part I am within what kind of whole. And this: no one can stop you from acting and speaking in harmony with the nature of which you are a part.
10Theophrastus speaks as a true philosopher when comparing different kinds of wrongdoing. Using ordinary standards of judgment, he says that sins of desire are worse than sins of anger. The angry person turns away from reason with a kind of pain and hidden anguish. But the one who sins from desire is overcome by pleasure. He appears more undisciplined in his wrongdoing. More soft. Theophrastus was right to say, in a manner worthy of philosophy, that wrongs committed with pleasure deserve greater blame than those committed with pain. The angry person seems like someone who was wronged first. He was forced into rage by suffering. But the one driven by desire moves toward wrongdoing on his own. He is carried along by the urge to satisfy his craving.
11Do everything, say everything, think everything as though you could leave this life at any moment. As for departing from the world of the living: if the gods exist, there is nothing to fear. They would never hand you over to harm. And if they do not exist, or if they take no interest in human affairs, why would I want to live in a world empty of gods or empty of providence? But in fact they do exist. And they do care about human affairs. They have placed entirely within our power the ability to avoid what is truly evil. As for everything else, if any of it were genuinely harmful, they would have made provision for that too. They would have given us the power to avoid it completely. But what does not make a person worse—how could it make a person's life worse? The nature of the universe would not have overlooked these things out of ignorance. Nor would it have recognized them yet lacked the power to prevent or correct them. It would not have made so great an error through weakness or incompetence. It would not have allowed good and evil to fall randomly upon good people and bad people alike. Yet death and life, fame and disgrace, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty—all these things fall equally upon good people and bad. They are neither honorable nor shameful. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.
12How quickly everything vanishes. Bodies disappear into the world. Even their memories fade into eternity. Consider all things perceived by the senses. Especially those that lure us with pleasure. Or terrify us with pain. Or win acclaim through vanity. How cheap they are. How worthless. How sordid. How quick to decay. How lifeless. Let the mind's power settle on this. Who are these people whose opinions and voices confer fame? What is death? If someone looks at it directly and dissolves the phantoms surrounding it through clear analysis, he will see it as nothing but nature's work. And whoever fears nature's work is a child. Yet death is not only nature's work. It also serves nature's purpose. How does a person touch God? Through what part of himself? And in what state must that part be?
13No one is more miserable than the person who circles around investigating everything. He probes "the depths beneath the earth," as they say. He tries to read the minds of those around him through guesswork. Yet he fails to realize that it is enough to attend only to the spirit within himself. And to serve it faithfully. This service means keeping that spirit pure from passion. Free from thoughtlessness. Free from resentment toward what comes from gods and humans alike. For what comes from the gods deserves reverence because of their excellence. What comes from humans deserves affection because of our shared nature. And sometimes even compassion. For they do not know good from evil. This blindness is no less severe than the one that prevents a person from telling white from black.
14Even if you will live three thousand years, or thirty thousand, remember this: no one loses any life but the one they are living now. And no one lives any life but the one they are losing. The longest life comes to the same as the shortest. The present moment is equal for all. What passes away is equal for all. What we lose is revealed as a mere instant. No one can lose the past or the future. How can anyone take from you what you do not possess? Remember these two truths. First: all things from eternity are the same in kind. They cycle and repeat. It makes no difference whether you witness the same things for a hundred years, two hundred, or forever. Second: the one who lives longest and the one who dies soonest lose exactly the same thing. The present moment is all anyone has to lose. And what you do not have, you cannot lose.
15Everything is what you assume it to be. The sayings attributed to Monimus the Cynic make this clear. And the usefulness of this idea is clear as well. If you can accept its sting without losing sight of the truth.
16The human soul violates itself most of all when it becomes an abscess and tumor on the universe. As far as it can manage. To resent anything that happens is to separate yourself from Nature. And Nature contains the natures of all other things within it. Second, the soul violates itself when it turns away from another person. Or moves against them to cause harm. This is what angry people do. Third, the soul violates itself when it is overcome by pleasure or pain. Fourth, when it wears a mask. When it acts or speaks with pretense and falsehood. Fifth, when it directs its actions and impulses toward no purpose. When it does anything carelessly and without attention. Even the smallest acts should point toward the goal. And the goal for rational beings is this: to follow the reason and law of the most ancient city and commonwealth.
17Human life: its time is a point. Its substance flows away. Its perception is dim. Its body decays quickly. Its soul spins like a top. Its fortune cannot be predicted. Its fame cannot be trusted. To sum it up: everything of the body is a river. Everything of the soul is dream and vapor. Life is warfare. A stay in a foreign land. And afterward? Oblivion. What then can guide us through? One thing alone: philosophy. This means keeping the spirit within unviolated and unharmed. Master of pleasure and pain. Acting with purpose, never at random, never falsely, never for show. Needing nothing from what others do or fail to do. Accepting what happens as coming from the same source from which we ourselves came. And above all, awaiting death with a calm mind. For death is nothing but the release of the elements from which every living thing is formed. If there is nothing terrible in each element continually changing into another, why should anyone fear the change and dissolution of all? It is natural. And nothing natural is evil. Written at Carnuntum.