Desire, Time, and Change

Don’t insist that what happens should happen as you wish; wish that things happen as they actually happen. Then your life will go well.

- Epictetus

The idea that one should desire that things be the way they actually are, that things happen the way they actually happen, is one of the most powerful tools I’ve come across in Stoicism, but also one of the most difficult to practice consistently. It’s also very easily misinterpreted, and is one to which I’ve had to apply some extra logical analysis in order to fully convince myself (and the imaginary skeptics who live inside my head) that it is a valid, logical and useful path towards well-being and happiness.

The simplest difficulty, and the one that is to me the easiest to deal with, is in remembering to invoke that attitude while enduring any kind of hardship or suffering, accepting the fact that given how everything in the universe has gone the way it has gone up to this moment in time, the current moment is inevitable. If you accept at all the idea that the present moment in time is the result of what has occurred in previous moments in time, to wish for things to be different in this moment is the same as wishing that the universe had developed differently in the past, going back to the beginning of time. And to the extent that wishing for things that you can’t have will cause you distress, anxiety or suffering, that is definitely a wish that will only lead to even more distress, anxiety or suffering, on top of whatever you are already experiencing.

The more subtle difficulty occurs when I think of how this idea could be misinterpreted as a form of either defeatism (“there’s nothing I can do about what’s happening, so don’t try to change it”) or of simply upholding the status quo (“I’m benefitting from what’s happening, so don’t try to change it”). But both of these misinterpretations are ignoring a couple of very important aspects of this advice, which are discussed in other contexts in Stoic literature, but which I haven’t seen applied directly to this idea of wanting things to be the way they are. Those aspects are time and change. And considering those two aspects in light of this idea leads to another potential form of practice that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere.

Both criticisms/misinterpretations that I mentioned above, defeatism and upholding the status quo, ignore the fact that the advice only applies to the present moment, this particular moment in time. In other words, desiring that things happen the way they do is not the same as desiring that things continue being the way they are now. It is an acceptance of how the past is inevitably shaping the present moment, but does not in any way imply any particular desire about the future.

This limiting of the advice to the present moment solves part of the problem with both misinterpretations, but there is something else that can be added to it in order to bring in other aspects of Stoic physics, and that is the inevitability of change, especially in the sense that Marcus Aurelius emphasizes. Everything is constantly changing, whether or not we want it to, so it seems that there is a logical corollary to the practice of desiring that things in the present moment be the way they are – the desire that things in the future be different from what they are in the present moment.

In my previous posts, starting with this one, I described the way that I like to categorize Stoic advice into a few different categories, depending on whether the advice is about:

 - things (or experiences) we want vs. things we don’t want

- things we have vs. things we don’t have, and

- things within our control vs. things not in our control.

In this schema, the advice to desire that things be the way they are is a strategy most commonly used for dealing with things or experiences we have, which are not within our control, and which we don’t want, such as pain or sickness (although it can of course be theoretically applied to any category of experience).

This new idea (at least, new as far as I can tell), desiring that things change in the future, would apply most directly to things that we have that are not in our control, and to both things we want and things we don’t want:

Things we have, that are not in our control, that we want: for instance, a nice place to live, a partner or child you love, etc.

- This practice of wanting things to be different in the future is a more active (and radical) form of the advice often given to consider how anything you have that you want could be taken from you at any moment. This is usually done more passively, as in Epictetus’ description of thinking “Tomorrow you might die” while kissing your child, while this potentially new advice is not only more active but also not about a specific outcome in the future. More like, “I desire that tomorrow, my relationship with you will be different than it is right now.” Which is of course inevitable anyway, if you accept the idea of constant universal change.

What I find helpful about doing this more active practice in relation to things I have and want (as opposed to passively accepting that things will change) is that it even more strongly brings up the sensation of resistance in me to the idea that things will be different in the future, even when I thought that I had already taught myself that lesson through contemplation and meditation. It's like a gut-check to see how much I've really internalized that lesson.

Things we have, that are not in our control, that we don’t want: for instance, pain, ridicule, poverty, etc.

 - In this case, this advice of actively wanting things to be different in the future is more obviously applicable, and is a way of strengthening the resolve to endure hardship. But again, not directed towards a specific outcome, such as getting out of pain or poverty, because what happens in the future is outside of your direct control. But it will inevitably change, one way or the other.

It is this idea of not only the inevitability of change, but also that change will occur in “one way or the other”, i.e. either in a way that you want or a way that you don’t want, that also seems to be the important aspect to this advice in both situations. And as with the advice to desire that things be the way they are now, regardless of whether you want them that way right now or not, it seems like another valid way of aligning yourself with the inevitable flow of cause and effect in the universe in a way that helps you avoid unnecessary distress.

Gears and Granularity: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Three Speed Transmission

Note: This post includes some ideas that have somewhat specific and technical definitions in Stoicism and Buddhism, and I’m working on a series of posts that will be reference pages for terms like these, so that they can be referred to when reading a post like this that assumes a certain amount of background knowledge. I was going to add all of that background information into this post, but it would have made it really long, so I’m going to turn those into separate posts in the next few weeks.

The Buddhist meditation teacher Kenneth Folk once came up with a really interesting way of categorizing and relating different kinds of meditation practices - he describes the different kinds of practices as expressions of what he calls different “gears” of practice, like the gears of a transmission. My understanding of his basic idea is that meditative and contemplative practices are like riding a bike –

- there are low gear practices for dealing with the changing nature of moment-to-moment reality, which require a higher moment-to-moment expenditure of energy and attention. In Buddhist practices, an example of this would be vipassana (aka Insight or Mindfulness) practices such as breath counting, noting or body scanning. In terms of riding a bike, this is the equivalent of being a bike courier in rush hour traffic in New York City.

- there are high gear practices where you don’t focus on details as much and you gain a kind of momentum by “coasting”, with a much lower expenditure of energy and a less focused attention. Examples of Buddhist meditative practices like this could include zazen (especially Soto Zen shikantaza, “just sitting”), but also Daoist practices like zuowang “sitting and forgetting”, or practices like Douglas Harding’s “Headless Way”. This is the equivalent of riding down a long, straight stretch of road at 30 mph in your highest gear, without any need to make quick decisions or deal with specific details of experience.

- There are middle gear practices in between the low and high gear, which require some energy and deal with some of the specifics of moment-to-moment reality, but not with the level of granularity of lower gear practices, but which can also provide some coasting momentum of higher gear practices. Examples might include things like the Brahma viharas (practicing experiencing sympathetic joy, equanimity or compassion relative to other beings, with varying degrees of specificity), or practices from the Indian nondual teachers like Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta Maharaj where you are constantly drilling down to answer a question like “Who am I?” or dwelling on the sensation of “I Am.” This is the equivalent of riding your bike through a somewhat busy residential area.

If you are interested, you can see his original idea in this podcast - https://secularbuddhism.org/episode-189-kenneth-folk-enlightenment-and-three-speed-transmission/ .

I realized recently that the Stoic disciplines of Physics, Logic, and Ethics can be considered to basically align with these gears, as they can also be described in terms of the degree of granularity with which you are paying attention to events. I will write another post explaining these three areas of study in more detail, but for now I will offer just a basic definition of each so that the rest of this post makes sense.

In Stoicism, the fundamental theories and practices are thought of as belonging to one of three basic areas of study – Physics, Logic, and Ethics.

Physics

Physics is the Stoic description of how the world works, which forms the basis for the rest of the philosophy. For the classical Stoics, the world is a rationally structured entity where all things and events happen as part of a single, unified process. As human beings, we are a part of this larger process, all parts of which (except our rational will) occur outside of our control. Physics in this sense is a description of the relationship between an individual and the rest of the universe, and provides the basis for understanding what is Internal and External to us; that is, what is, and what is not, under our control.

Physics is also called the Discipline of Desire, as it posits that learning to align your desires with what is outside of your control, that is, with what the universe wants to happen (what is actually already happening) is the best way to approach what is outside of our control in a way that supports our well-being.

Logic

Logic is the ability that individuals have to analyze the ideas and images that occur in their mind. Epictetus noted that “We are not bothered by events, but by our reactions to them,” and for the Stoics, our irrational judgements, opinions and reactions to the world are the things that cause us problems, not the events of the world in and of themselves. Therefore, the best way to handle these reactions is to analyze them and not allow ourselves to entertain any parts of them that are not rational and objective.

For that reason, Logic is called the Discipline of Assent, as the Stoics realized that it is within our power to improve our lives by rooting out the irrational aspects of our thinking by not assenting to them, not letting them live in our heads unchallenged.

Ethics

Ethics is the study of how to act towards all those things that are outside of our control, especially in terms of our social responsibilities. As all of humankind is part of the same universal, rational process that runs the entire universe, we take part in this most clearly and beneficially when we look at all other people as part of the common, universal human family, and act accordingly.

Ethics is also called the Discipline of Action, and suggests that we will be doing what we are meant to do (and therefore will be happiest) when we consider how our actions benefit all of humanity.

Physics, Logic and Ethics as the Stoic Three Speed Transmission

Having given a basic definition of each of these three disciplines, we can now see how they might relate to this idea of different gears of contemplative practice:

Low gear: Logic

- You are analyzing the rationality and objectivity of each of your thoughts and reactions with the greatest amount of granularity and detail that Stoicism is generally interested in.

Middle gear: Ethics

- You are making decisions about how to act in the world, and in relation to other people, in a way that requires some degree of granular analysis (of what is Just, of how to be Courageous, of how to engage in Temperance, etc.) and expenditure of energy, but not to the degree that Logic does.

High gear: Physics

- You are accepting everything that happens in the moment (and learning to actually want it to happen) because it is an expression of what The Universe wants right now, and it is all outside of your control. Once you have gotten to the point where you can function in this gear, it requires the least amount of energy expenditure and granularity in what you are paying attention to.

Life

Life, of course, requires you to be able to function in all three gears, and to be able to shift smoothly between them to respond to the needs of any individual moment in time. There are probably multiple different ways of categorizing them in terms of which ones to start with, or which ones depend on the others and are therefore more primary, but I’m not going to get into that in this particular post.

As with riding a bike (or any other kind of exercise that can be done in either a high or low gear mode), it seems like spending time in each gear helps with the other ones - faster-paced and detailed low gear practices help give you the confidence to navigate a more varied environment so that you are more able and willing to work at higher gears, while spending time in higher gears both conserves some energy and develops long-term endurance that makes the lower gear practices less exhausting.

The Structure of Stoic Practice, Part 3: Dealing With Things We Don’t Have

Continuing on from where I left off in the previous post, let’s look at how to deal with the various categories of things and experiences that we don’t have (or at least don’t have yet). Again, this is just an outline, so that I can get the framework of the ideas down on digital paper. I will flesh all of this out with more examples and quotes from classical Stoic literature in future posts.

Things that we don’t have and that we want

-          Things that we don’t have and that we want, that are under our control: This is an extension of the things that we have and want, and that are under our control; basically a wish-list for how we want to continually improve in the future.

o   Examples: Greater self awareness. Greater ability to analyze logically, see clearly, and choose rationally. Increased ability to accept what we have no control over. Increased capacity to choose to act in the ways that we determine are the most beneficial for ourselves and for others. Healthier and expanded sense of perspective.

o   Potential problems:

• Complacency

• Inattention and lack of self-awareness

o   Strategies and practices:

• Review every evening not only what you did well, but what you could have done better.

• Analyze where you are, and how your actions lead to results.  

-          Things that we don’t have and that we want, that are not under our control:

o   Examples: Anything you can desire that is external to you. Wealth, fame, respect, health, longevity. Certain experiences. Guarantees of happiness or pleasure.

o   Potential problems:

• Becoming distraught over not attaining them.

• Becoming distracted by your desire from them and away from what is more valuable.

o   Strategies and practices:

• Practice seeing all of these things as external to you, and therefore not worth valuing too highly.

• Accept that many of these things may be preferable to have, and therefore do not need to be denied, but that they are not necessary for your sense of well-being in the Stoic sense of the term.

• Contemplate how the pursuit is often more enjoyable than the acquisition; having a thing tends to bring about indifference or contempt towards it.

• Practice wanting what you actually have right now.

• Instead of trying to win praise, practice the art of not needing it.

• Be aware of the hidden prices that come with gaining something, and the intengible benefits that can occur when you lose something.

• Consider how changing your perspective can alter your outlook on life:

  • It is better to love than to be loved

  • Not wanting something is better than having it.

Things that we don’t have and that we don’t want

-          Things that we don’t have and that we don’t want, that are under our control: This is probably the smallest and least important category, as it is the one you probably need to spend the least amount of time and energy worrying about. Or not worrying about, if you are a good Stoic.

o   Examples: The potential that in the future you could have any of the experiences that you don’t want but that you could control, as listed above - irrational reactions to fear, anxiety, thoughts. Irrational, incorrect or exaggerated representations, opinions and judgements.

o   Potential problems:

• Worrying that although things are fine at the moment, you could succumb to any of these weaknesses at any time.

• Becoming complacent by being too sure of yourself that you are beyond them.

o   Strategies and practices:

• Practice gratitude for having made good use of your will up to now.

• Practice returning to focusing your attention on the present moment, and on your present capacity to deal with things rationally, and trusting that you will have the same capacity to do so in the future.

• Accept the fact that you will forget, slip up and make mistakes in the future, and that all that matters when you do is that you try to recover and do better the next time.

• Remember that every time in the future that you make a mistake, it will be another chance to strengthen the qualities that restore your equilibrium.

-          Things that we don’t have and that we don’t want, that are not under our control:

o   Examples: Any unwanted adversity listed above (pain, ridicule, disease, discomfort, etc.) that you are not currently experiencing, but that you could experience in the future.

o   Potential problems:

• Assuming that you won’t have to deal with any of these things, and then not being able to handle them when they occur.

• Allowing yourself to become anxious and distressed at the possibility that they will occur.

o   Strategies and practices:

• These are mostly the same as the ones you would use if you were actually experiencing any of them, as listed above, with a few additional ones.

• Anticipate that you will have to deal with them in the future, so that when they happen, they will be less unexpected and therefore cause less distress than they otherwise would have.

• Actively visualize and rehearse how you will handle various adversities (but in a way that is helpful and doesn’t just cause you more anxiety). Analyze a potential situation you might need to respond to, and figure out how you could apply Stoic principles to help deal with it.

  • When visualizing a potential future adversity, ask yourself, “So what if this happens? Then what?”

• As with things that we don’t have, don’t want, but can control, trust that you will have the same capacity to deal with things in the future as you do now. Be confident in the fact that every moment now spent practicing will actually increase your ability to deal with things in the future.

• Analyze the degree to which each of these experiences consists of things that are outside of your control.

• Practice accepting the aspects of these experiences that are outside of your control.

• Do not add anything extra to things external to you. Do not magnify their meaning or significance.

• Remind yourself that nothing matters outside of your voluntary, rational reaction to the present moment.

• Practice patience, and the endurance of fatigue, discomfort, and hardship (physically and mentally) now, in anticipation of having to utilize those skills in the future.

• Look at your future adversities as a training ground, or as a way to prove your resilience and wisdom. You can learn to almost look forward to them.

• Contemplate how a painful or unpleasant experience in the future might have hidden benefits or lead to a better outcome later. Dealing with it well might provide you with other opportunities later, or give you skills that come in useful.

Meditation and the Practice of Clinical Medicine

This is an interview that I did with Daniel Ingram, a meditator and former ER physician whose book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, I first read in about 2010. I had wanted to talk to him for many years about a number of topics, and when I reached out to him, he graciously agreed to talk to me for a couple of hours. What we ended up with is a combination of fanboy interview and back and forth discussion about a wide range of topics, centering around the relationships between the practice of clinical medicine and the practice of meditation, including some side journeys into talking about trigger points. You can listen to it as is, or you can read a little more below to get some background on some of the more technical terms we use when we are talking about meditation.

One last thing before we get started: Daniel wanted me to make sure I gave a disclaimer to anyone listening. So I will simply quote one of the last things he says in the interview:

“Just make sure you give an appropriate qualifier that you need to practice within the scope of your own license and take responsibility for your own decisions. Some dude on the web, or whatever, like, is just some guy, but you need to maintain proper professional standards and take everything I said with an appropriate grain of salt.”

One more last thing . . . if you are not familiar with the technical terminology used in Theravada Buddhism to describe the stages of meditative practice, you might want to read the brief description of some of them down below before getting too far in the interview.

One of the topics we discuss in some detail is the fact that when people start training in meditation (or in any form of attention training, and sometimes just spontaneously), they tend to go through fairly predictable stages of experience, regardless of the tradition they are in. Daniel has spent many years talking about the map of these stages as they are described in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, which is the main tradition that he trained in. The topic is somewhat controversial in modern meditation circles, as there are quite a few different maps, depending on the tradition, and there are quite a number of teachers who feel that talking about the various map theories of meditative experience is a bad idea.  

We go straight into the discussion about maps without much preparation, so I thought it would be helpful to define a few technical terms used to describe the stages of meditation for the benefit of those of you who don’t have any formal training in Buddhist terminology. The following terms are ones that come up in the conversation, and they describe some of the first few stages of progress in meditation in the Theravada Buddhist tradition:

1.       Mind and Body – a generally pleasant state where you first learn to differentiate physical sensations from mental sensations and thoughts. This is what most people mean when they use the term “mindfulness meditation.”

2.       Cause and Effect – the difference between mental and physical phenomena become more clear, as does their relationship (such as between intentions to act, and the actions themselves), on a number of levels. As this stage develops, the relationship between phenomena can seem to become more mechanical or jerky.

3.       The Three Characteristics – in this stage, meditators start to notice the three aspects of phenomena that define our experience in Buddhist philosophy: nothing lasts, nothing will ever provide a lasting sense of satisfaction (alternately, everything will eventually be the cause of suffering), and nothing has any inherent, independent existence (or “self”). This can be a physically and emotionally unpleasant stage with varying degrees of bodily and psychological tensions and pains.

4.       The Arising and Passing Away (aka “The A & P”): in this stage, meditative practice kicks into high gear, and people often have various very impressive physical or spiritual experiences and increased perceptual abilities, often involving explosions or bright lights. This stage doesn’t last, and is followed by a series of challenging stages named for what people experience as they go through them: Dissolution, Fear, Misery, and Disgust. These more challenging stages are what Daniel refers to as the “Dark Night” stages of spiritual practice.

There are more stages after this, leading up to various experiences of spiritual awakening, followed by more repetitions of the whole cycle, but these first four stages are the ones we refer to in the interview.

Official bio:

Dr. Daniel M. Ingram, MD MSPH is a board certified emergency medicine physician who practiced clinically and taught medicine for 12 years, mostly in large emergency departments.

 Daniel has been having meditation-related experiences since he was a child, and started formally meditating and going on retreats in 1994.

 He is the author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, available for free at www.mctb.org, and co-author with Shannon Stein of The Fire Kasina. He runs a website dedicated to open discussions of meditative experiences, techniques and theory at www.dharmaoverground.org, and co-runs www.firekasina.org. His personal website is www.integrateddaniel.info.

 He is interested in the deep end of meditation practice, the maps of meditative terrain, phenomenology, researching the positive, negative, and unusual effects of meditation, and living a useful life.

The Structure of Stoic Practice, Part 2: Dealing With Things We Have

Before starting this post, I recommend reading Part 1.

Let’s take a look now at each of eight realms mentioned in the previous post in more detail. I’ll talk about examples of things that fall under each category, some of the potential problems that might arise in relation to those things, and some of the common strategies and practices that show up in Stoic literature for dealing with the things in that category. In the future, I may come back and highlight each strategy with a quote from a Stoic text that illustrates that particular practice, but for now, I’m going to focus on just writing all of this out in outline form so I can revisit it later. 

The way that I am describing most of these ideas and practices comes from taking obsessive notes on Ward Farnsworth’s The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual, Donald Robertson’s Stoicism and the Art of Happiness and The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy, and Pierre Hadot’s The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, all of which I highly recommend.

Things that we have and that we want

-          Things that we have and that we want, that are under our control:

This is both the smallest category, and in one sense the most important.

o   Examples: The ability to direct our attention. The ability to apply rational analysis to a thing, idea or event. The ability to make a rational choice (if you believe in that sort of thing).

o   Potential problems:

• Not valuing them enough. Taking them for granted.

• Not using them enough.

o   Strategies and practices:

• Practice valuing these abilities by choosing to use them instead of reacting to events automatically and uncritically. Learn to value them above all else.

• Gradually learn to think of these capacities as what actually defines you. Contemplate what it would mean or feel like to identify yourself as being only what you can control.

• Cultivate the deep conviction that your conscious, rational response to the present moment is the only thing worth valuing.

• Practice gratitude for having them.

• At the beginning of each day, plan for how you will use them in different situations that might come up.

• During each day, actively cultivate them.

• At the end of each day, note which ones you practiced well, and be grateful for having done so.

-          Things that we have and that we want, that are not under our control:

o   Examples: Anything that you own or experience that you like, but that is outside of your sphere of control. Anything that you have and that you like that you could potentially lose. Money, food, shelter, good relationships, social respect, your health, positive and rewarding experiences. Any useful resource.

o   Potential problems:

• Becoming attached to them to the point that their loss, or even just the idea of their loss, causes you suffering and causes you to lose your equanimity.

• Allowing your experience of these things to blunt your appreciation for them, so that you take them for granted and you lose the ability to enjoy them.

• Allowing your desire for these things (especially if it has been dulled by ingratitude) to turn into obsessive craving for more of them.

o   Strategies and practices:

• Cultivate gratitude for what you have.

• Practice wanting what you actually have.

• Cultivate enough detachment about things you have no control over that their loss would not unduly disturb your peace of mind and your ability to function.

• Practice moderation in your indulgence in the pleasure that comes from utilizing these resources, so that your enjoyment of them does not become dulled over time.

• When using and enjoying these resources, ask yourself how you can do so in a way that serves the greater communities that you are a part of.

Things that we have and that we don’t want

-          Things that we have and that we don’t want, that are under our control:

This is kind of a weird category, because you would think that if you have something you don’t want, and you have control over it, you could just get rid of it. And that is true, so the question is, why would you have them in the first place? It is best to think of this as the category of psychological behaviors that we have let become unquestioned habits, but that can be changed, at least in the present moment (which is the only time or place where you have any control). Although you can’t completely control whether or not you will experience them at any point in the future, continued practice in the present moment, right now, will start to influence how you do or do not experience them in the future.

o   Examples: Irrational reactions to fear, anxiety, thoughts. Irrational, incorrect or exaggerated representations, opinions and judgements.

o   Potential problems:

• Allowing them to take over your mental and emotional life, causing you to become more irrational, judgmental, and anxious.

o   Strategies and practices:

• Withhold your assent from all inaccurate representations.

  • “Withholding assent from representations” is a technical term for the aspect of Stoic practice that involves analyzing the judgements and opinions that you have about events and only allowing yourself to entertain the aspects of them that are rational and objective. This falls under the general practice of Stoic Logic, and I will post about this topic later. Hadot goes into great detail about this in The Inner Citadel.

• Break your fears and anxieties down into smaller parts. Challenge them.

• Remember that all representations of events in your mind are just appearances, and are not the things they represent.

• Remember that we are not upset or harmed by things and events, but by our opinions about them.

• Compare how your reaction to a situation would be if it occurred in a different context.

• At the end of each day, review how you have made these mistakes and consider how to act differently next time.

-          Things that we have and that we don’t want, that are not under our control:

o   Examples: Any kind of unwanted adversity. Pain, disease and discomfort. Poverty. Unpleasant memories and experiences in the past. Bad relationships or loss of good ones. Contempt, criticism and insults from other people, real or imagined (including the voices inside your head).

o   Potential problems:

• Allowing the experience of these things to undermine your sense of wellbeing.

• Allowing the experience of these things to distract your attention from what is important to you.

o   Strategies and practices:

• Analyze the degree to which each of these experiences consists of things that are outside of your control.

• Practice accepting the aspects of these experiences that are outside of your control.

  • These first two obviously go together, but they are not the same thing. I can accept the obvious things that are out of my control without realizing how much more I could be accepting, because I haven’t analyzed the situation correctly. And I can analyze a situation in the abstract without putting in any work to actually, viscerally, feel the sense of acceptance.

  • A stronger version of acceptance would be to practice actually wanting things to be the way they are, which is one of the most important Stoic practices, also known as “amor fati”, or “love fate.” Although the term doesn’t appear in the classical Stoic texts (it was popularized by Nietzsche; the term is Latin, and the early texts were all written in Greek, even by the Romans), it is to Stoicism what “Yes, and . . .” is to improvisational theater. This will get an entire post later on.

• Do not add anything extra to things external to you. Do not magnify their meaning or significance.

• Remind yourself that nothing matters outside of your voluntary, rational reaction to the present moment.

• Practice patience, and the endurance of fatigue, discomfort, and hardship (physically and mentally)

• Look at your adversity as a training ground, or as a way to prove your resilience and wisdom.

• Contemplate how a painful or unpleasant experience now, or any short-term loss or setback, might have hidden benefits or lead to a better outcome later. Dealing with it well might provide you with other opportunities later, or give you skills that come in useful.

In Part 3, we’ll look at how to deal with things we don’t have, both the ones we want, and the ones we don’t want.

The Structure of Stoic Practice, Part 1: The Rationale

The root causes of the fundamental problems in life that most philosophies and religions try to solve can be summed up in one saying –

We don’t get the things we want, and we get the things we don’t want.

“Things” here can be anything – actual quantifiable things, like food, shelter, toys, money, friends, leisure time, or any other resource, but also less quantifiable things, such as certain experiences you might want (happiness, pleasure, admiration and respect of your peers) or not want (suffering, pain, rejection, ridicule).

We can break this down into two main issues: wanting, and having.

There are things we want, and things we don't want.

There are things we have, and things we don't have.

Pretty much every human problem is some mixture of these two, which can be combined in all four possible ways.

There are things we want, which we have.

There are things we want, which we don't have.

There are things we don't want, which we have.

There are things we don't want, which we don't have.

For people who like charts, graphs, and tables:

 This way of categorizing things into four possibilities is enough to cover pretty much all problems and situations a human might come across. But there is one more way of categorizing things and events that the Stoics were particularly interested in –

There are things we can control, and things that we can't control.

Or, as someone somewhere on the Internet once described it:

Another way of phrasing this that shows up in Stoic literature is –

There are things internal to us, and things external to us.

“Internal” and “external” in this case refer to your conscious will, with “internal” referring to anything you can will to do that you have complete control over, such as where you direct your attention, or how you analyze and react to the thoughts, images, and emotions that you experience. Pretty much all of the things in the category of “internal/things you have control over” can be subsumed under the phrase “things you can do in response to the current moment.”

“External” here means anything outside of the control of your conscious will, so not only everything in the external world, but also things like your health, what has happened in your past, what is going to happen to you in the future, what thoughts or images come unbidden to your mind, and other people’s opinions about you.

Note that all of these “externals” are things that you can influence, but they are also being influenced by a huge number of other factors, so the ultimate outcome is not something you have complete control over.

In practice, this distinction between what we can and can't control, or what is internal and external to us, is not always very simple, and can get fuzzy. I will flesh out more of the details about this in a separate post, which will have to get into topics such as what you mean when you say “me”, and even probably things like determinism versus free will. But for our purposes now, we're going to take a simplified, pragmatic approach to this distinction. Meaning an approach that, if applied correctly, will give us the greatest chance of getting the results we want – a life full of eudaemonia, a deep sense of well-being (also a topic for another post).

Back to the four-fold division in the table above – we have to figure out how to add in this variable of control/lack of control. Instead of completely redoing the table, let's just add this one more dimension to the structure we already have –

 This may be starting to look a little overly complicated, but it turns out that this division of the main issues in life into eight distinct realms is important because each of these eight realms are not only describing different situations but also for the most part require different strategies or approaches (although there is some overlap between some of them, so the same problems and strategies show up in a few different places). Let’s take a look at each of these in turn, what some examples are in each category, what kinds of problems might come up in that realm, and what strategies for action in response to these problems will be the most helpful.

A note about valuing what matters

One of the ways that I’m going to describe of dealing with these various situations is to practice or learn how to value things that are worth valuing, instead of valuing things that will potentially cause you to suffer when you don’t get them. This is a vague concept, and I want to talk about this idea in a little more detail to clarify what I mean so that the rest of the ideas I’m presenting come across as more coherent. You can read my ideas about what it means to value something here.

In the next post, we’ll start getting into specific examples of each realm, as well as the problems that can occur with each one, as well as the practices that Stoics have promoted to deal with each of them.

On Valuing Things

The following was first written as part of a longer post on the structure of Stoic practice, but I decided to separate it out to simplify things.

What do we mean by the word “value”?

We usually use that word as either a noun or a verb:

Noun: What is the value of this stock?

Verb: Her house was valued at $300,000.

Or we modify it into an adjective: That is a very valuable necklace.

In just about every use of the word, “value” is fundamentally about exchanging one thing for something else. It is a term about economics and trade, which is obvious when you see it in the context of discussions about buying and selling either physical or abstract resources, but is less obvious when you talk about it in the context of human emotional and social life. For example:

Noun: I believe that all human lives have equal value. It is important to have a strong sense of values.

Verb: I really value your time.

Adjective: Your opinion is very valuable to me.

This way of using the word “value” is describing something that is less quantifiable than a monetary price, and on the surface seems like it has nothing to do with a mercantile sense of trade. I’m guessing that for many people, thinking of the phrase “all human lives have equal value” as an economic proposition, as a reference to trade, is at least mildly offensive.

Having said that, I am going to argue that the more you think of the idea of “value” in terms of trading, even in this more social and emotional sense, the better off you are going to be, both in terms of your own actions and when dealing with other people.

I’m also going to argue that we are better off thinking of the word exclusively as a verb describing a subjective opinion, and not as a noun describing any kind of objective, intrinsic quality that something can possess.

What does it mean to say “All human lives have equal value?” To start with, I would say that using the word as a noun in this example is problematic, because unless you are talking about a value in a marketplace where you are buying and selling humans, the word doesn’t really mean anything. How do you measure what that value is? Value compared to what?

Let’s start by turning it into a verb and see what happens:

“I value all human lives equally.”

This is slightly less unclear. At the very least, it is eliminating the confusion of referring to “value” as some kind of objective quality when we can’t measure or quantify that quality in any objective way.

Also, by turning it into a verb, it is also describing a situation where there is some potential action or choice that might take place. I really think that this sense of action, of choice, is what is most fundamental to the idea of value. Valuing something always implies that you are valuing it in comparison to something else. You can’t say that something has value without at least implying that there is something else that does or does not have the same value.

It also implies that given a choice, you will choose what you value more over what you value less. Looking at the idea of value in this way, we can come up with the idea that if you want to know what someone’s actual values are, look at their actions and the choices they make instead of listening to what they say their values are. The easier the choice is made, the stronger you value what you are choosing.

If you consider people’s actions to reveal what their actual values are, then you will inevitably have the experience, especially when reflecting on your own behavior, that there is very often a disconnect between what we say we value and what our actions say we value. This disconnect occurs because the word “value” in this context might be referring to something completely disconnected from our potential actions and choices. Taking “All human lives have equal value” as an example, it could have a range of meanings –

-          It could be a statement about aspirational self-image: “I experience pleasure when I think of myself as the kind of person who would agree with the phrase ‘all human lives have equal value.’”

-          It could be a form of social signaling, of jockeying for position in the hierarchies of social status: “I want other people to have a particular idea of who I am when I say the phrase ‘all human lives have equal value.’”

-          It could be a rule for deciding how to act, how to make a choice: “I would give up the exact same amount of my own important resources (time, money, energy, etc) to help any human being, regardless of who they are or how I feel about them.”

There are more ideas here to flesh out, which I will probably eventually get to . . .

-          Therefore valuing something means choosing it over another alternative, or exchanging something for it that is of equal importance to you

-          Valuing things you can actually control, such as your ability to voluntarily and rationally respond to the present moment, means actually choosing to do so over letting yourself get carried away by automatic, habitual or socially programmed reactions.

-          Saying you value it as a form of aspirational self-image is mostly useless, although it at least keeps the idea in your conscious mind and reminds you that it is a possibility.

-          Saying you value it as a form of social signalling is mostly silly, except if you are doing it consciously as a way of recruiting other people to help keep you honest, since they will usually gleefully point out when you are acting contrary to the way you talk.

But for now, that is enough, at least in terms of how I like to think of phrases in philosophies such as Stoicism that talk about learning how to value things correctly, or learning to value the correct things.

Apophatic?

Years ago, in the early days of the internet, I was a lurker on, and occasional contributor to, various forums (fora?) related to martial arts and Daoism. On one Daoist forum, long since inactive, there was a frequent poster named Raymond who always had a very particular take on one of the most important Daoist texts, the Zhuangzi (also written Chuang-tsu). At the time, the Zhuangzi was my favorite Daoist text, and had been from undergraduate school, when I did a translation project on one of the chapters for a Chinese class, all the way through graduate school, where I continued to study classical Chinese. I was pretty familiar with the most popular translations, each with its own way of describing the significance of the text, and it was always interesting to read Raymond’s take on it. His was different; very personal, but also compelling in a way that was different from most interpretations.

Being a recent refugee from academia, I started off somewhat skeptical of his approach, but as he continued to post and interact with everyone on the forum, his earnestness and willingness to engage with people started to grow on me. And then, at one point, he announced that he had written a book explaining his particular take on Zhuangzi’s approach to mystical practice - In Love With Everything. So I ordered it.

In Love With Everything

The first time I read it, it struck me as weird, almost painfully personal despite not including more than a small amount of autobiographical information, but very well-written, and possibly profound. But I didn’t quite know what to make of it. He described his approach as “Apophatic Mysticism,” which was a term that I had not heard much before reading the book. Doing a little research, I learned that the word comes from Greek and refers to knowledge, often in a religious or mystical sense, gained through negation, as opposed to knowledge gained through affirmation. As an approach to spiritual practice, the seeds of it were present in the pre-Socratic philosphers, and the approach became more developed as time went on, eventually influencing aspects of not only Greek philosophy but also Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It also parallels an approach to the divine in the Vedantic tradition of India, characterized by the famous phrase “neti, neti,” meaning something like “not this, not that,” that is, achieving mystical unity with the divine through negating all the things it is not. In the twentieth century, it was expressed in the philosophy of the Richard Rose in terms of becoming a reverse vector; he pointed out that since we don’t know what the truth is when we start searching, we must “back away from untruth.”

Raymond’s particular way of using the term “apophatic mysticism” is best illustrated with some quotes from the book:

We might describe mysticism as an uncannily responsive dynamic whose presence can become all-pervasive; a phenomenon by which we can continually establish harmony with whatever comes our way and, thereby, profoundly increase our enjoyment of life.

Apophatic mysticism is the uncanny state of psychic integration resulting from the suspension of all mental estimates of the source, identity, meaning, purpose, or value in the world of phenomena.

Apophaticism implies giving up guarantees, for guarantees are incompatible with the openness apophaticism requires . . . To capture what we are aiming for, we have to let go of any guarantee that it will be found.

The apophatic mystic does not care about what is true . . . she is only concerned with what is mystically effective.

Zhuangzi As Apophatic Mystic

More specifically in terms of the text of the Zhuangzi, here is a passage where he breaks down a particular Chinese phrase from the text in a way that, while probably not impressive to scholars of classical Chinese, was nonetheless something that I found very compelling:

清靜為天下正 Clarity and Tranquility cause things to fall into place.

清 To obtain a clear and open view, one must eliminate anything which is preventing a lucid vision of the entire perceptual field.

靜 Clarity allows me to see and perhaps correct misperceptions. With those continually corrected as needed, I no longer have to spend time and energy defending inconsistencies, which is a subconscious waste of energy that is felt as agitation. Clarification resolves conscious and unconscious contradictions that previously agitated me, and I achieve tranquility.

When the surface and depths of the mind are quiet, the deep intuitive processes may detect and take advantage of the many opportunities to be found in the perceptual field. With clarity and tranquility, coincidences in the field of perception become nearly continually evident, as if by magic.

為天下正 The mystic has made no prior plan or agenda for what he might like to happen . . . The mystic's power is neither directive nor sovereign; it is catalytic and collaborative.

As I kept rereading Raymond’s book off and on over the years, playing with his approach in my own various meditative and contemplative practices, his basic ideas about what mysticism is, and how and why to practice it, started to make more sense as I not only experimented with them on a personal, perceptual level, but also continually cross-referenced them with other approaches that were very meaningful to me. Including, eventually, Stoicism.

Josh Discovers Stoicism

When I first started to learn about Stoic philosophy, from the ‘Stoic Week Handbook’ from 2013, it was exciting and engaging in a way that was different from other philosophies I had studied and practiced. After three decades spent immersing myself to varying degrees in some of the major East and South Asian contemplative and philosophical traditions, especially enjoying the more abstract and mystical aspects of them, Stoicism was like a splash of cold, practical water in the face. It pointed out what our main problems are in very direct and down to earth terms that spoke directly to me, and offered solutions that were not only rational and logical, but which had also stood the test of time, as evidenced by the fact that some of the most important aspects of modern psychotherapy, such as Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (and its various derivatives) are based explicitly on Stoic ideas and practices. And as a philosophy that informed the fundamental basis of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, the basic ideas were already a part of the language and education I had grown up with, without me even knowing it, so there were fewer cultural and linguistic layers that needed to be translated in order to be understood.

A Problem Arises

As I started to delve deeper and deeper into Stoic philosophy, graduating from reading books and web pages about it, to reading the Big Three authors directly (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca), to reading more in-depth academic works analyzing those authors, I started to notice a problem that needed solving. The problem being that Stoic philosophy is based in large part on a teleological cosmology, where the universe runs according to Universal Reason, meaning that everything in it has a purpose and reason for being the way it is. The Stoics also often mention God (meaning Zeus) as a being who designs the world and imbues the things in it with purpose. The Stoic conception of God, while being very different from the Judeo-Christian concept of God, still did not resonate with my fundamentally naturalistic and scientific point of view of how the universe works. The rest of Stoicism, however, made so much sense that I needed to figure out where the problem was, to what degree the aspects of Stoic philosophy that resonated with me were actually dependent on its underlying cosmology, and to what degree the ideas still made sense without it.

Part of the solution involved hints found in the Stoic texts themselves, particularly in Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, when they reference the intellectual rivalry between the Stoics and the Epicureans. I won’t go into all the details here, as there are plenty of places on the Web where you can read about it (like here). The gist of it is that both philosophies attempt to provide a way to live a happy life, starting from very different assumptions about how the world works (which is what is called physics in classical philosophy), and ending up with very different suggestions about how to act in the world in order to be happy. In many ways, Epicurean physics are more closely aligned with modern physics (if we ignore quantum mechanics) - the universe is composed of atoms that are bouncing off each other, producing all phenomena through random interactions without meaning or purpose, especially not from any supernatural source. This was much closer to my own assumptions about the world, yet the philosophy that arose from it was considered completely wrong by most Stoics. Now what?

Maybe Not Really A Problem

It turns out that despite the rivalry, important Stoic thinkers like Seneca and Aurelius were perfectly fine with aspects of Epicurean philosophy. Seneca notes multiple times in his letters how Epicurus was right about a number of things, even going so far as to promote emulating certain Epicurean practices. But that wasn’t really enough to defuse the tension between the Stoic and Epicurean (and, by extension, my own) view of the world. Marcus Aurelius, however, points out that on a practical level, it actually doesn’t matter whether or not your fate is determined by Divine Providence or random atoms smashing against each other - you still have to figure out how to act, right now, and your capacity to make that decision right now is all that matters.

Reading that idea from Aurelius was the first thing that started to solve that puzzle, by suggesting that if you want to be happy, understanding the logic behind thinking and acting in certain ways is the determining factor, not your concept of how the world actually works. So it started to become obvious that the fundamental logic of a philosophy like Stoicism, which explains how certain attitudes and actions promote happiness, can be largely independent of its physics.

Interestingly, after coming to this conclusion, I discovered that I was not the first person who felt like they had to wrestle with this topic. It turns out that the American philosopher Lawrence Becker wrote A New Stoicism, a book that interprets Stoicism, according to the blurb, “without the metaphysical and psychological assumptions that modern philosophy and science have abandoned.” I will probably post more on it later after I’ve had a chance to digest it.

Back To Apophaticism

While working through these ideas, it started to become obvious that the approach to Stoicism that I was being drawn to was fundamentally apophatic, in the sense that Raymond’s work was describing. It was pointing to a Stoicism that not only had no teleological, Divinely-designed cosmology, but actually functioned best while holding no certainty about how the world actually works or what the world actually means. And in suspending those assumptions and certainties, it becomes a Stoicism that has more room for the potential for mystical experience that Marcus Aurelius hints at occasionally. It becomes a Stoicism where the moment to moment acceptance of whatever reality wants to present to you is not just a begrudgingly accepted practical necessity, or, as Aurelius points out, treated like you are throwing garbage on a bonfire to make the flames fan even higher. It becomes a Stoicism where the momentary suspension of judgements about events is itself the doorway to the possibility of eudaemonia, the Stoic state of well-being.

Welcome To My Practice

Welcome! This blog is an externalization of my own contemplative practice, where I will be working through ideas and practices from a number of traditions that have been meaningful to me over the last few decades. I expect that it will include not only repetitive musings on Stoicism, but also Daoism, Buddhism, the works of Douglas Harding, the Bicameral Mind theory of Julian Jaynes, and attempts to work through these ideas not just in daily life in general, but possibly also within the more specific realm of clinical medicine (I am an acupuncturist when I am not absentmindedly staring off into space).

As much as I would like publish posts consistently, and for it to be systematic and follow some kind of logical order, it will most likely be sporadic and random. Random not only in terms of topic, but also in the length, depth and breadth of each post. Putting any kind of pressure on myself to organize a Magnum Opus is a way of ensuring that I procrastinate and avoid ever writing anything, so I’m going to treat writing posts as a form of daily (or weekly, or monthly) practice, similar to how Marcus Aurelius composed his Meditations, except with the expectation that anyone on the internet might be looking over my shoulder as I write instead of writing only for myself in absolute privacy.

So, again, Welcome! If you are moved to have a conversation about something I’ve written, feel free to either comment on the posts or email me at joshualerner@comcast.net. You can also check out the website of my clinical practice at www.wellspringacupuncture.com.