Today’s Lunchtime Exercise: The View from Above
On our
final day we turn to think about our place within Nature as a whole:
A
fine reflection from Plato. One who would converse about human beings should
look on all things earthly as though from some point far above, upon herds,
armies, and agriculture, marriages and divorces, births and deaths, the clamour
of law courts, deserted wastes, alien peoples of every kind, festivals,
lamentations, and markets, this intermixture of everything and ordered
combination of opposites.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
7.48
The ‘View from Above’ is a guided visualization that is aimed at
instilling a sense of the ‘bigger picture’, and of understanding your role in
wider community of humankind. You can download a recording of the View from Above
from the main Stoic Week 2013 page:
Anyone who reads the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is
bound to notice a recurring theme that involves contemplating the vastness of
the universe, of space and time, the multitude of stars, and also the smallness
of life on Earth when viewed from above. The French scholar Pierre Hadot called
the deliberate effort to mentally visualise human affairs from high overhead
“The View from Above”, and he found references to it throughout ancient
literature, particularly in Stoic writings.
In a sense, these passages invite us to think like an ancient
natural philosopher and simply to contemplate cosmology, the nature of the
universe as a whole, in a detached manner. However, the Stoics clearly believed
that doing so had profound “therapeutic” value and, as Marcus put it, can purge
us of our over-attachment to trivial things by expanding our minds beyond their
habitual, narrow perspective. We’re less upset about things when we literally
picture them as occurring in a tiny corner of the cosmos: as a grain of sand in
cosmic space, and the mere turn of a screw in terms of cosmic time. Why should
we picture things in this way? First of all, for the Stoics, totality is
reality. It’s a form of self-deception to ignore the wider context and it helps
create the illusion that the events we face are somehow more important
than they actually are. Second, the ancient Stoics sought to emulate the
divine, and the View from Above happens to be the perspective of Zeus. We can
even think of it as the Olympian perspective, what Zeus might have been thought
to see when looking down upon human affairs from high atop Mount Olympus. If
that seems too mythological, then for a more philosophical theology, the
perspective of Zeus was perhaps that of omniscience, contemplating the
whole of space and time in a single timeless vision. Again, the Stoics and
other ancient philosophers aspired to glimpse that vision, and thereby to step
into the shoes of Zeus for a moment.
This exercise appears to weave together many different threads
within Stoic philosophy. That’s something that may become clearer to you if you
practice it regularly. You don’t need to listen to an elaborate guided
meditation, though. Just reading the passages from Marcus Aurelius may be
enough to inspire you to close your eyes and contemplate things from a more
“cosmological” perspective, in this way. Don’t worry if you find it tricky to
literally visualise the whole of space and time – that’s normal. Just picture
things that evoke the concept for you symbolically. You could draw a circle on
a piece of paper, symbolising the totality of space and time, and imagine your
whole life as an infinitesimally tiny dot in the middle. The Neoplatonic
philosopher Plotinus, who was influenced by the Stoics to some extent,
describes a contemplative exercise that involves visualising the whole of space
and time as if encapsulated in a glass sphere, like a kind of cosmic snowglobe.
Take your time. Allow these images to interact with your wider understanding of
Stoic philosophy and practices. Try to take away some piece of learning or
sense of change from each meditation of this kind.
Complete
the Post-Week Questionnaires
As this is the final day, it is now time to
complete the online scales that you filled in before the week, using the same
name (email or pseudonym) as before.
Visit the main Stoic Week 2103 page for the links:
No comments:
Post a Comment