Germian: Difference between revisions

 

The discipline of desire has to do with acceptance of our fate. Don't waste time on things you can't control or influence. You can do your best to avoid things you don't want, but don’t desire what is out of your control e.g. never to die, never get sick, never get in an accident etc. Once something that's outside of your control happens, you make the best of what you got at hand to deal with it. Prepare yourself for the worst possible outcomes based on the true nature of things and hope for the best. Having an idealized fantasy as the expected outcome (desiring something unnatural) is going to crush you every time. It’s ok to prefer that the thing you desire won't turn bad, but know it is in the realm of possibilities that it will. Play by nature’s rules, and don’t desire the outcome to be anything outside of the realm of possibilities.

The discipline of action has to do with philanthropy or love of humankind. Mastering impulse to act and impulse not to act. This is a gentler form of desire and aversion. We are to appeal to different roles we have. These form a hierarchy.

1. Universal role as a human being.

At the top of the list is health and taking care of ourselves. The next thing we do is to appeal to our particular talents, and cultivate what we're best at and most interested in. This is going towards your nature. To go against your nature would be to pursue things that you're not really interested in.

2. Appealing to our specific relationships with other people. Am I a parent, a partner, a friend?

An example that Epictetus uses is a parent who is not able to care for their sick sick. They leave the house and runs away from their child, they can't handle the fact that their child might die.

 

The idea here is that this is not someone who has mastered desire and aversion. They think death is a bad thing, they're afraid of their child dying, they haven't come to terms with what their ultimate value system should be under the Stoic picture. And because of that, it is interfering with their capacity to fulfill their obligation to other people. They're not able to fulfill their obligation as a parent because they're still afraid.

If it doesn't go against reason, if it doesn't go against your interests, if it doesn't go against your relationships with other people, you are free to choose whatever you prefer.

The Discipline of Assent has to do with mindfulness of our judgements. Assent means agreement. The discipline of assent involves making correct judgements about the nature of the external world and events that occur in it.

 

We assent to value judgements of things that occur around us that were made by us consciously or unconsciously. This can affect how we feel about the event.

Use the process of- Stop it, Strip it and See it.

Step 1: Stop it- Stop the value judgment in its tracks. See that you can stop it before it can affect you.

Step 2: Strip it- Strip the value judgment and see through it. Most things that we perceive are nothing more than mere indifference that we can see through if we take a moment to observe it more clearly. As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, "When you have savories and fine dishes set before you, you will gain an idea of their nature if you tell yourself that this is the corpse of a fish, and that the corpse of a bird or a pig; or again, that fine Falernian wine is merely grape-juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool dipped in the blood of a shellfish; and as for sexual intercourse, it is the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of mucus." (VI.13)  

Step 3: See it- See the event from a cosmic viewpoint. Whatever is happening at that moment may seem out of ordinary and inconvenient but try to look at it in the grander scheme of things. Maybe this was always supposed to happen and what has happened may have set a new course for you.