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hey what's up this is Leo for actualised org and today I wanted to cover the meditations which were written by Marcus Aurelius he was a Roman Emperor and really about the lessons that can be drawn from the meditations and applied to your life in order to get more peace and contentment with the way your life is right now so what are the meditations just to give a little bit of a history of where this work comes from really it's a diary written by Marcus Aurelius Antonius who was a Roman Emperor back in 200 AD there abouts and he was really considered one of the one of the quote unquote good emperors who ran the Roman Empire before it ultimately collapsed 200 years later and what's really interesting about Marcus is his worldview and how he viewed life and how he applied that to running the Roman Empire and and the kind of peace that this man has and just the kind of the kind of brilliance in in his way of thinking because what's unique about the meditations which is actually the only I believe this is correct the only surviving work of a Roman Emperor written work is is that you really get a picture into how he thought and I think it's very instructive because if I could if I could sum up the gist of it the gist of his philosophy which was by the way stoicism was that everything that people usually tend to associate with the problems in their life is external and there's this dichotomy between the external things that are bothering us and also our internal state of mind and how we're feeling and how we're thinking and what stoicism does it really flips that coin on the other side so usually what we're doing is we're always concerned about how are people thinking about us what are we accomplishing why is that person making me feel bad how can I make my save myself feel better by stimulating myself with food drugs or some other sort of addiction or just stimulation being entertainment so all of that is external and then you have the internal and the internal is how you're feeling how you're thinking and how you're composing your thoughts and what was really amazing about the meditations and instructive for me was the purpose that it served so for Marcus the way that he used the meditations because they were written to himself he basically wrote this personal diary to himself he didn't intend anybody else to read it and he himself would read it on a daily basis and it would serve as a refresher for him as to his higher ideals in the way that he wanted to live so it was a way for him to get back in touch with his higher self with his values with his with the principles by which he wanted to live his life and with larger perspective I think the problem is that when you're living in life and you're you're completely in meshed in it and you're identified with all the problems that you're having on a day to day basis you're so identified with that that you lose sight of the bigger picture of life like what is actually happening here you know you lose sight of kind of the majesty of life and also the shortness of life which is a which is covered in depth it's like a recurring theme throughout the meditations which is Marcus's attempt to really grapple with death and to come to grips with it and to not fear it I think that's a natural fear for everybody so how how did the meditations work well really there were there were two I think strands to it two functions that it served one was to to put it back in touch with this higher self like we already said and the second was a consolation function so it served as a way to console him when he was feeling down or Unruh source phille or basically when he had that tendency to go into his lower self reading the meditations would prop him back up into the higher so so if he was if he was struggling because he got mad at somebody in lost his temper because somebody was uh was not respecting him or was trying to undermine him then that would that would throw him off his track and he would use meditations to put him back on that track or if something was happening with politics that that he was having trouble handling or in court life or you know he was an emperor so he was also leader of the army so military campaigns that were being waged that were causing problems and there were some particular campaigns and we're really causing Marcus or a lot of problems during that time with rebellions up in up in the north in the Germanic provinces and so whenever he was getting getting flustered by all that stuff that was happening all that external stuff the meditations would would bring him back to Center and get him back in touch with the internal I think it's a really valuable lesson because a lot of times we tend to think that our problems are external and that the solutions to our problems are external whereas in fact a lot of that can be solved internally and in fact it should be because it's very hard to attain peace if that's something that you're looking for in your life it's very hard to get that by always looking for it out there what happens is you look at it for out there and then eventually you realize that you have to go inside to find it you have to stabilize yourself I think what was most admirable about Marcus was the kind of equanimity that he had the kind of stability and just conscious self restraint and if I was to sum up stoicism in in one word I think it would be self restraint and I don't mean that in a negative sense I mean in a positive sense there's there's a sense in which when you tell someone about stoicism and they hear that they say well stoicism that isn't that's not something that we should aspire to that's not something that's positive because it in some way implies a lack of emotion and it implies the person is rigid and stilted in robotic and it also implies that if you're turning in within yourself and your you're grounded and your your your internally focused then how are you supposed to go out there and achieve the big things you want to achieve how are you supposed to be accomplished how are you supposed to go and hold down a career how are you supposed to manage raising a family and and all these other goals that you might have that are practical and that are out there in the real world they're not just in your head well I think that is a simplistic way to look at stoicism I think there's a lot of depth there and there's definitely some stuff you can draw from stoicism without going into it full bore so one thing that you'll you'll notice right off the bat the reason that Marcus is such a good example here to use is that he wasn't just a some sort of hermit philosopher living high in the mountains and and and studying textbooks and then just spouting the stuff off this guy is what you would consider in modern times probably what up the president the United States would be an equivalent position in modern times or the CEO of some fortune 500 company this guy was responsible for a lot he had a lot of mundane things happening in his life that were that was drawing on his attention so he had military campaigns to worry about he had internal politics he had revolts and saboteurs to worry about he also had his reputation to consider and the reputation of his family he also had his own family he had he was married he had children and all of that was important to him and he was just a normal guy like you or me but he was trying to figure out how to make sense of all that but also stay calm and grounded and peaceful in it and also really stay true to his higher self so here's the interesting thing is that if you're living your life and you're happy the way you are right now and you're happy chasing after the externals in life then really there's no problem with that you can you can keep doing that and Who am I to judge you for doing that but I think there's something to be said about always thirsting for the externals and chasing after it because eventually what it does is it starts to undermine you and your higher-self starts to feel neglected for example you might have certain values that like you like to live up to like honesty and positivity and contribution to others things of that nature and maybe you're not living up to those because what's happening is that your lower self is dragging you down so it tends to be that the case that the default position in life is if you're just kind of going along with the flow of life and you're living in modern society and you're watching modern entertainment and you're listening to your friends into your family what tends to happen is that you kind of go with the flow and they'll go and the go with the flow is that you're chasing after externals you're you're valuing things that society values and a lot of those things are pretty shallow so a lot of those things are just entertainment or money or fame or external success whether it's a shiny shiny new car or house or whatever that might be and I'm not discounting any of those things those things can be great if that's what you're into but recognize that if some part of you says that there's more to life that you're not partaking in and you want more of that and you also may be suffering a little bit because you don't have enough of that that those higher ideals that you're actually living up to then there's some lessons to really be drawn from the meditations now what's really cool is the meditations really need to be read so I first of all I highly encourage you to read them because of the mood of the words that Marcus has I can't really do them justice by talking about them this is just a little bit of analysis and so my thoughts on it really go down further into the article and read some of the excerpts I think I did a pretty good job of summarizing the general themes and I took a lot of excerpts out of the book too to mention in the article so you get a taste for it if you don't have time to read the whole thing but I also encourage you to actually buy the meditations and read it maybe even a couple of times because as you do you really get a sense of what the man's thinking was like and what a stoic mindset is and also how different probably from the way that you're thinking and it'll give you some ideas about how to think differently about various various things well let's let's talk about what the meditations really covers there's a big focus on death and coping with death and the prospect of death and how to be calm and at ease with that I think that a case can be made that a lot of stuff that we do in life a lot of stuff that we distract ourselves with like entertainment and fame and success in some ways can be boiled down to to a fear of death and not really wanting to face it because even though it can be gloomy to think about death like this the way that Marcus thinks about in the meditations it's also a realistic way to think about it because the way that Marcus thinks about is like this ultimately your life is very short in the life span of the whole universe your time on this earth is just like a millisecond there it went it's gone and everybody that you know all your friends all your family your kids your kids kids one two three three generations gone just like that in the life span of the universe so really it's like dust it's like ash it just blows away with the wind it doesn't matter it's insignificant and your time you're so short but do we really think about that do you think about that everything every morning you wake up probably not right maybe you think about it like once a year when when you get in that kind of a pensive mood but usually we don't think about that but the fact is that this is this is reality right your life is short this is this is just scientific fact and it was apparent 2000's - as a parent 2000 years ago as it is today maybe even more so because today we're just distracted by a by all the titillation that modern society offers and so we kind of lose track of the the brevity of life and also as a result we kind of lose track of our priorities too because we kind of think that we have all this time to do anything we want and that we can just kind of wander around aimlessly and you know if that's if you're happy with that if you want to live that kind of life more power to you but also I some of us most of us will sense that if we live a life like that then on your deathbed you're going to kind of regret it you're going to regret not having lived up to those higher ideals that the higher self has you're going to have probably regret not being as honest as you were you're probably going to regret not not living the virtues that you want to live to you're probably going to regret not having contributed more to society you're probably going to regret for not having deeper relationships or not um or just getting distracted by all the pettiness in life right just on a day-to-day basis for Marcus it was no different than it is for us like he would in the missions he talks about how how he has to restrain himself from getting sucked in to negative thinking or from getting sucked in to thinking about how somebody said something bad about him and how that's going to reflect on his on his legacy or on his fame or on his prestige or how people think about him but ultimately what happens is that when he really thinks about we digs into it he meditates on this stuff he comes to find that none of that matters because how important is the opinion of somebody else when that person is gonna be dead in just the snap of a finger you know Marcus is going to be dead and then everybody that thought something bad about him is going to be dead and all their children who they taught bad things about Marcus too will be dead and soon all that will be forgotten and all that will be insignificant so worrying about it on some level is entirely entirely trivial and all it does is it just a jeté to so that is one topic death big topic I think it's like an underpinner of everything else but other topics that he talks about we already cover a little bit of the this notion of the pettiness thinking having petty thoughts and picking and concerning yourself with petty things throughout the day that really distract you from your core values so that one he also talks about how to restrain yourself from desires certain desires that draw you in but that might be unhealthy for you or bad for you in the long run how to abstain from those he also talks about topics like self-restraint and how to how to cultivate self-restraint in oneself how to be grateful about the things that you have in life how to bring yourself to peace when you're agitated by things and more topics basically along all of those lines how to be calm when you're in pain so when you have illness or how to cope with the death of other people so Marcus was a family man he had a family and wife he had children so how to deal with that in in a composed kind of way not to say that you just totally detach in your robotic but that you deal it with with a certain calmness and a certain empowerment rather than pulling your hair out and throwing temper tantrums or getting mad at people when they say things about you that you don't particularly like so basically how to come out of how to live up to virtues in life now what's interesting to me about the meditations is that Marcus wrote them to himself and he had to read them on a daily basis to kind of bring himself back to his higher self because here's the thing and it's interesting how the human mind works like this is that we tend to forget usually when we are in touch with our values with our deepest values and our purpose in life we get very excited and we see all the possibilities are all the potential and we get starry-eyed and everything seems great but then you wake up the next morning and life has a way of just coming in and washing over all that because your higher self even though that voice is very powerful it's also very subtle and faint and it can be easily overwhelmed by the background noise and the background noise is all the external stuff right because there's the internal voice this is the Higher Self and then to some extent there's also an internal lower self but then there's also like the back around noise of society that it's kind of goading the lower self on because it really feeds into it so this would be advertising this might be your family and your friends and what they're doing and what they think of you this might be your co-workers and your your job this might be media and what you're watching on television and those values that are getting reinforced there and through marketing commercials entertainment all of that good jazz so there's really something to be said from disengaging yourself from that background noise as much as possible so you can hear the faint higher-self beat of your drum and then really march to that beat rather than the beat of everyone else or your own lower self beat and that tends to be difficult to do so you need to keep reminding yourself but it's really fascinating how your mind easily forgets this in fact I could make the case that this idea of forgetting for getting your higher purpose your values is maybe one of the most challenging aspects of personal development is why self development is so difficult and why changing your habits is so difficult because a lot of times we're just running on autopilot and it takes conscious effort and awareness to to make changes in yourself because if you're running on a certain routine all the time you do that unconsciously and you don't need to engage that higher self you don't need to listen to that higher self to do that and really you don't need to keep anything in in conscious memory up here like your short to medium term memory you can call it your ram so to speak if your ram gets filled up then there's only so much of it so let's say that you decide to start going to the gym next week and you've never gone before all the sudden that's a new thing that has to be sitting at the forefront of your mind for you to do it because if you don't put it in the forefront of your mind you're gonna forget you're quite simply just gonna forget you know it might be the case that you make a resolution right now and the next Monday when it comes time to go to that gym you're just gonna you're just gonna sleep in or you're gonna you're gonna you're going to go out and party with friends or going to watch a movie in of going to that gym not because you were lazy that certainly happens a lot but simply because you forgot that it's even on your agenda anymore how often has that happened to you where you just forget to make the change that you want to make with the gym maybe that's a little bit less plausible because it's a pretty big kind of commitment that you're making it's also quite noticeable but if you're trying to make very subtle changes in your behavior or in the way that you run your life it can be a very pernicious problem because you simply forget like one example that I had was that I was working on eye contact and I was for a long time had a problem with making eye contact with people simply because when I was growing up I wasn't very social I was a little bit shy lacked self-confidence and so I didn't have good eye contact for example just a simple thing when I'm you know when I'm talking to a clerk at the store or a waitress or or a friend I don't look them straight in the eyes the way I want them to and that that's not the kind of communication that I was happy with so what i'd resolved to do is i really wanted to build that stronger eye contact what I found was that it's just such a subtle change because eye contact is usually an unconscious thing if you're doing it it's probably unconscious if you're not doing it it's also probably unconscious and what I found was that I just kept forgetting like it didn't it doesn't take that much actual practice to develop solid eye contact that's not the problem the problem where you slip up if you're trying to do that is that you simply forget to be doing it so maybe that first day or two you're really going to make a conscious effort and every store that you go to the every clerk you talk to everyone you shake hands with you're going to really look them straight in the eyes and you're gonna you're gonna say yeah I'm going to do that and you can remember to do that and while you're doing it you're getting a little bit of you can kind of feel that you're getting stronger with your eye contact becoming more natural for you but you need to keep doing this for weeks maybe even months to really to really lock it in as a habit and make it something that's that's again part of your your natural way of being and but what happens is that after just a few days of that conscious effort you know something else comes and something else comes in and fills that RAM that you have and all of a sudden this this notion or this this idea that you had your higher-self idea of developing better eye contact just gets just gets thrown out and something else gets lodged in so maybe your friends tell you about the new movie that's coming out on Saturday and so now you're you're thrilled to go to the new movie on Saturday and you forget to do your eye contact practice that's Saturday and then the next the next day you have something else come up and you're too busy so you don't do it then and then you just forget and then all of a sudden two weeks pass and all of a sudden after two weeks only then do you go oh what happened to that eye contact thing I was working on I totally forgot about that and all of a sudden you're back at square one because you really haven't ingrained that new behavior of yourself and that's just one example I think that's kind of illustrative of how this works but I see this I see this in my own life in in so many other facets whether it's nutrition or stuff I want to be doing in my career or if I want to be reading more books and I'm not doing that so any of this stuff that I want to work on myself at if I don't if I don't make the space for it in in the forefront of my mind if my ram so to speak then I'm not going to really get it done and I think Marcus realized that on some level because for him the meditations were in place as a tool to counteract that right and it's interesting that the human mind requires this it's not enough to just sit there come up with a list of values come up with your goals come up with a vision and then all the sudden your life is on track no you have to keep it on track every day right if you want to be good at your career you have to be practicing it every day if you want to be good at speaking and eye contact you need be practicing that all the time or whatever else and especially during those critical phases where you're making the transition from not doing it to doing it that's where even more effort is required and so there's this theme with the meditations that I think we can take away which is if you want to really encourage your higher-self and you want to be living up to it then find ways of reconnecting to your values again and again and again and the more you can do that the more you're going to be living by them because otherwise it happens you're simply going to forget let's say you value honesty if you don't remind yourself every morning that honesty is something that you want to live by well you might have some situation that will come up throughout the day that means that you can be dishonest and still get the short-term a short-term benefit from that and what's gonna happen is you can just you're going to choose the easy route and you're going to choose that short term benefit because you're not noting the values that you have there they're very deep somewhere and you're in your brain and they're not at the forefront of it so when you're doing the meditations every morning as Marcus did you're bringing it up and up and up and you're going to tend to to see those things throughout your day so if if you have a vision for yourself maybe there's a new career that you want to move into or you want to hit a certain way to the gym or you want to be eating cleaner or you want to have a better you want to you want to change up your relationship so it's working more smoothly well you need to focus your attention on that as consistently as you can in order to get the the results that you want otherwise what's going to happen is you're going to go with the status quo and that's what you've got right now so if you're happy with it great but if you're not then there's probably some changes that you got to put in place so besides besides this idea that you really need to be bringing ideas to the forefront of your mind I think what's really cool about the meditations is that that second element that consolation element that that I mentioned is that Marcus really takes a lot of time to strengthen his inner self so he really reminds himself of first of all all the great things that he already has in life and how blessed he is with everything that he has how happy he is with the parents that he's had with upbringing that he's had with the parents I mean uh with the with with just all the opportunities they he's been given in life and how that has shaped him and so he takes to effort to to really bring that back up into his attention because again if you're not bringing what you already got and what you've already achieved in your accomplishments back up into the forefront of your mind at least once in a while what's gonna happen is you're gonna take that stuff for granted and you can be the most successful person on earth you can be making millions of dollars and if right now it might seem like well if I was making five million dollars a year I would just be so ecstatic I'd be so happy and if I had all the fame that that some actors have I would be so happy and my life would just be perfect but the fact is that once you start getting a taste of that maybe maybe there's something you do and you get a little bit of Fame maybe there's something you do any little bit of money maybe that's a five million maybe you get a good you get a good job you get a good raise whatever you start to see that you know what where I am now is so much better objectively speaking than where I was five years ago but I don't actually feel much happier and what you'll realize is you don't feel happier because you don't remind yourself of that difference right now you might be sitting in your you know in your in your two-bedroom apartment in a relatively nice city in America and you might be struggling with your job and you might be complaining and whining that certain things in your life aren't right and I encourage you to fix all that stuff but on the other hand what happens when you zoom out and you take the larger perspective on all that I mean if you're living in America honestly you should be your life should be already awesome and you should be feeling very very grateful because think about the people that are living in Africa they don't have anything even close to what you have they don't have any of the many's that we have any of the freedoms that we have people living in countries and villages and tribes where they have barely any access to clean water any shelter just the basics of food and even stuff like protection from government where chaos is is running rampant and you are you actually have pretty high probability of getting shot or stabbed or machete to death when you walk down the street you know compare where you are right now with that kind of scenario and all the sudden you start to feel pretty good about your life right you're suddenly all that that little problem that you have at work with with your boss all of a sudden somewhat insignificant almost makes you kind of feel bad about even whining about it but I think this is important putting stuff in perspective because if you think that you're just gonna amass a bunch of things in your life houses cars and money and jobs and even more if serial things like Fame like you're going to become famous and all that's gonna make you happy well I think there are many many cases where were you that you can read about in biographies and you know newspaper articles magazines etc or just talking to people that will tell you and confirm this this has been very well confirmed that's not at all the case there's not a direct link between just how much money and fame you have and how happy you are and that in fact a lot of times people that are mega successful in this in the sort of cultural external sense like many musicians and rock stars and actors are actually quite miserable because they they are hooked on drugs and they use food and other stimulation to to try to get happiness for themselves because the money and the fame wasn't enough and so Marcus I think has some good antidotes to this and the antidote to that it really is is gratitude and doing that consistently you can't just be grateful once this is something you have to cultivate as a habit for yourself in fact Marcus is a really negative view on Fame he really he really kind of ridiculed it rather meditations and in fact there's a little antidote about him told about him that he hired a servant or a slave at that time to basically follow him around throughout the courtroom where he lived and the servant his only job was to follow Marcus around and periodically he would whisper in his ear you are only a man and you will soon be dead too and so the reason for this it's kind of striking ila I love that that antidote is because it would it would get Marcus to remember that he's no better even though he's an emperor he's really no better than that his subjects right and that more mortality is is a gift that he has been given just like everyone else and that he will be dead and soon all of all the things he's done and everything he's written and all the good deeds he's done in all the wars he's won all that will be forgotten all that will be ash and all the people that have that I've known about it will be dead too and so ultimately what's what's the point in chasing after that if it if it means that you're going to sacrifice your higher ideals so what else did I want to really say about the meditations I think the ultimate lessons is that you can can start changing your life by putting focus on your higher self and the way to do that is well one way to do it is to actually make your own meditations don't do it with Markus's do it with your own so maybe make a list of the things that are really important to you what kind of goals do you want to accomplish let's say over the next few years what kind of values do you want to live your life by and what kind of values make you feel good is it helping other people is it being honest is it having a lot of success in achievement is it doing something that you're really passionate about you know whatever those things are it can be anything write those things down and come back to them very very often so that you are seeing it in front of your eyes and you're not forgetting about it also trying to console yourself when you're feeling bad so if you're feeling bad because someone said something bad about you having some sort of principles written down a paper that you can turn to is very effective strategy so if someone said something nasty D at work and you come home and you're all upset about it and you're thinking about it you're ruminating about it and it's spoiling the rest of your evening if you were to look at a little piece of paper that told you all the important things that were important to you in your life and one thing on there would be would be that life is short and that you really don't have time to waste on pettiness and that well the time that you're wasting right now ruminating about this argument that you had at work or someone says something nasty about you maybe that's the time you could go spend watching the sunset or spending it with your loved ones or working on something important maybe like helping people or working on that business idea that you have or doing something just positive overall maybe reading a book instead of ruminating on this petty petty nonsense and so having those kinds of principles that are guiding your life is is very powerful I've actually tried this I went about 30 or 40 days where I wrote out a list of things that were important to me and every day in the morning I would read through it you know it only takes about five minutes and maybe pick one or two of those points that you really want to focus on that day so maybe that day you want to focus on being nice to people and just you know tolerating all the that they throw at you without getting upset so pick that one and go through your day and see how that feels or maybe it's going to be something something else you know maybe there's going to be some other principle like the fact that your life is short and you're just going to focus on that for the day and how is that going to change your life what kind of things are you doing right now that you're kind of tolerating you're telling yourself oh you know this is fine I'm comfortable where I'm at right now whereas in fact when I when you really have this idea the forefront of your mind that your life is very short and you don't have a lot of time to get the stuff you want to get done then maybe we're going to do is you're going to start thinking your brain is going to start thinking of ways to get the stuff that you want done so if you have that business idea maybe your brain will start getting jogged up and start actually contemplating ways to make it happen rather than just dream about it right or maybe if if you wanted to start that diet that you've been putting off maybe now you'll start to realize that well I got to start it now or never so think about that think about what your values are think about what kind of meditations you could be doing and go ahead and read through the rest of the article here and just get a sense just kind of get a sense of what stoic philosophy is like and what a amazing individual a Roman Emperor from 2,000 years ago the way he thought and the way that he managed his life and also ran the Roman Empire alright that's it for today peace out you