Meditation

To live in the present is literally the only way. Our entires lives are composed of a succession of nows. We never quite reach the future, and the past is endlessly generated and endlessly remote. This was not lost on the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius writes:

You consist of three parts — your body, your breath, and your mind. The first two are yours to take care of, but the latter is properly your person. Therefore if you abstract from the notion of yourself, that is, of your mind, whatever other people either say or do, or whatever you may have said or done yourself formerly, together with all that disturbs you under the consideration of its coming to pass hereafter; if you throw the necessary motions of your carcass out of the definition, and those of the vortex that whirls around you, and by this means preserve your rational faculties in an independent state of innocence, free from the allotments of fate, holding close and steady to the virtues of justice, truth, and acquiescence; if I say, you keep your mind separate and distinguished from the objects of appetite and the events of time, both past and future, and make yourself like Empedocle's world, "Round as a ball in joyous rest reposing," and concern yourself to live no longer than your real life, that is the present moment; if you do all this, you may move on till death stops you, with credit, and in harmony with the deity within you.

The focus on the present is not often talked about in Stoic writings. Other philosophies put more emphasis on living on the present. Mindfulness meditation seems to be the key to this practice, according to some. I wonder what the Stoics would think of meditation, as a useful practice to train ourselves to live in the present. Was there any concept of this in ancient Greece or Rome? I've never heard of any. Somehow, mediations and Stoicisim doesn't seem like a natural fit.

I'm going to write up some more thoughts on mediations, as well as my experiences, in the next blog post.