Book 12

God sees all ruling minds naked, stripped of their material containers and shells and dirt. With his intelligence alone he touches only what flows from himself into these minds. If you get used to doing this too, you’ll rid yourself of most distractions. Someone who doesn’t see the meat wrapped around him—will he really waste time looking at clothes and houses and reputation and all that costume and stage set?

You’re made of three things: a little body, a little breath, and mind. The first two belong to you only in the sense that you have to take care of them, but the third alone is truly yours. If you strip away from yourself—meaning from your mind—everything others do or say, everything you yourself once did or said, everything that troubles you as a future possibility, everything tied to your body or breath without your choice, and everything the outside whirlwind drags along, then your mind will stand free—pure, doing only what is just, accepting what comes, and speaking only what is true.

If you clear your ruling mind of what’s bound up with emotion, of what belongs to the past or future, and make yourself like Empedocles’ sphere, “round, rejoicing in its circular solitude,”[1] and practice living only the life you’re living—the present—then the time left until death can be spent without turmoil, kindly, and at peace with your own spirit.

I’ve often wondered how everyone loves himself most of all, yet values his own opinion about himself less than other people’s opinions. If some god or wise teacher ordered someone never to think or consider anything to himself that he wouldn’t also say out loud, he couldn’t stand it for even one day. So we respect our neighbors more—what they’ll think of us—than ourselves.

How did the gods arrange everything so beautifully and lovingly, yet overlook just this one thing: that some people who are very good and have made the most contracts with the divine, who through holy deeds and religious acts have become most familiar with the divine, once they die never come back again but are completely extinguished forever? But if this is really how it is, know well that if it should be otherwise, they would have made it so. If it were just, it would also be possible, and if it were natural, nature would have brought it about. So from the fact that it’s not this way—if it’s really not this way—be convinced that it shouldn’t be this way. You can see that by asking this question you’re arguing with god. But we wouldn’t argue with the gods this way if they weren’t perfectly good and just. And if they are, they wouldn’t have overlooked anything unjustly and unreasonably in their arrangement of things.

Practice even the things you despair of. The left hand, which is weak at most things because it’s not used to them, grips the reins stronger than the right hand—it’s practiced at this.

Think about what condition death should find you in, both body and soul: the shortness of life, the vastness of time before and after, the weakness of all matter.

Look at the causes stripped of their shells. Look at the purposes behind actions. What is pain? What is pleasure? What is death? What is fame? Who causes his own troubles? How no one is blocked by anyone else. That everything is opinion.

In using your principles you should be like a boxer, not a gladiator. The gladiator puts down the sword he uses and gets killed. The boxer always has his hand and only needs to clench it.

See things by dividing them into matter, cause, and purpose.

What power a person has to do nothing except what God will approve of, and accept everything God assigns to him—what follows nature.

Don’t blame the gods—they do nothing wrong either willingly or unwillingly. Don’t blame people either—they do nothing except unwillingly. So don’t blame anyone.

How ridiculous and strange is someone who’s amazed by anything that happens in life.

Either there’s the necessity of fate and unbreakable order, or kindly providence[2], or chaos of randomness with no guide. If it’s unbreakable necessity, why fight it? If it’s providence that accepts being appeased, make yourself worthy of divine help. If it’s chaos with no leader, be glad that in such a storm you have some guiding mind in yourself. Even if the flood carries you away, let it carry the little body and breath and the rest—it won’t carry away the mind.

Does a lamp’s light shine and keep its brightness until it goes out? Will the truth and justice and self-control in you be extinguished first?

When someone gives you the impression he did wrong: What do I know if this is really wrong? Even if he did do wrong, he’s already judged himself, and that’s like scratching his own face. Not wanting a bad person to do wrong is like not wanting fig trees to produce juice in their figs, babies to cry, horses to neigh, and all the other necessary things. What do you expect from someone with that kind of character? If you’re bothered by it, fix the character.

If it’s not proper, don’t do it. If it’s not true, don’t say it.

Always aim to see everything—what is this very thing that’s making an impression on me?—and unfold it by analyzing it into cause, matter, purpose, and the time within which it must stop.

Finally realize that you have something better and more godlike in yourself than what causes emotions and jerks you around like a puppet. What’s in my mind right now? Fear? Suspicion? Desire? Something else like that?

First: don’t act randomly or without reference to an end. Second: refer everything to nothing other than the common good.

In a short time you’ll be nothing and nowhere, and nothing you see now will exist, and none of the people now living will be alive. Everything naturally changes and turns and gets destroyed so that other things can come next.[3]

Everything is opinion, and that’s up to you. Remove the opinion whenever you want, and like a sailor rounding the point—calm water, everything steady, a bay without a wave.

Any activity that stops at the right time suffers no evil by stopping. The person who did this action suffers nothing bad just because it stopped. So the whole system made of all actions—which is life—if it stops at the right time, suffers no evil just because it stopped. The person who brought this sequence to an end at the right time wasn’t treated badly. Nature gives the timing and the limit—sometimes your individual nature when you’re old, but always universal nature, whose parts changing keeps the whole universe always fresh and in its prime. Everything that benefits the whole is always good and timely. So ending life for each person isn’t evil—since it’s not shameful either, if it’s involuntary and doesn’t harm the community. It’s good if it’s timely for the whole and beneficial and fitting. This way someone is god-carried who moves in the same direction as god and carried toward the same things with his judgment.

Keep these three things ready: About your actions—that you do nothing randomly or differently than Justice herself would act. About external events—that they happen either by chance or by providence. You can’t blame chance or accuse providence. Second: what each thing is from conception to getting a soul, and from getting a soul to giving it back, and what it’s composed of and what it breaks down into. Third: if you were suddenly lifted up and looked down at human affairs and their variety, you’d despise them, seeing at the same time how vast the population of air and sky beings is around you. And however many times you were lifted up, you’d see the same things—sameness, short duration. This is what we get proud about.

Throw out the opinion—you’re saved. So what’s stopping you from throwing it out?

When you get upset about something, you forgot that everything happens according to universal nature, and that whatever wrong was done is someone else’s business, and also that everything that happens has always happened this way and will happen and is happening everywhere now. You forgot how close the kinship is between a person and the whole human race—not of blood or seed, but of mind sharing. You also forgot that each person’s mind is god and flowed from there. That nothing belongs to anyone, but child and body and life itself came from there. That everything is opinion. That each person lives only the present and loses only this.

Constantly remember people who got extremely angry about something, who reached the peaks of fame or disasters or hatreds or any other kind of fortune. Then ask: where is all that now? Smoke and ashes and myth, or not even myth. Let all examples like this come to mind: Fabius Catullinus in the country, Lucius Lupus in his gardens, Stertinius at Baiae[4], Tiberius on Capri[5], Velius Rufus[6]—and in general any obsession with anything along with conceit. How cheap everything people strain for is, and how much more philosophical it is to show yourself just, self-controlled, obedient to the gods simply with the materials given to you. Pride disguised as humility is the hardest of all to bear.

To people who ask “Where have you seen the gods or how did you figure out they exist that makes you worship them so much?”—first, they are visible to the eye. Second, I haven’t seen my own soul either, and yet I honor it. So with the gods—from the power I experience from them constantly, from this I understand that they exist and I revere them.

Life’s salvation: see each thing throughout for what it really is—what’s its material part, what’s its causal part. Do just things with your whole soul and speak true things. What’s left except to enjoy living by joining one good thing to another, not leaving even the tiniest gap?

One light of the sun, even if it’s broken up by walls, mountains, thousands of other things. One common substance, even if it’s broken up into thousands of individual bodies with their own qualities. One soul, even if it’s broken up into thousands of natures with individual boundaries. One intelligent soul, even if it seems divided up. Now the other parts of what I mentioned—like breath and solid matter—have no sensation and no kinship with each other, yet even these are held together by unity and gravity pulling toward the same place. But mind especially stretches toward what’s like itself and joins with it, and the feeling of community isn’t broken up.

What are you looking for? To keep breathing? But feeling? Moving? Growing? Stopping growing? Using your voice? Thinking? Which of these seems worth wanting to you? If each one is easily despised, go on to the final one: following reason and God. But it conflicts with honoring these things to be upset if death will rob you of them.

What a tiny portion of vast and endless time has been allotted to each of us—it quickly vanishes in the eternal. What a tiny portion of all substance. What a tiny portion of all soul. On what a tiny clump of the whole earth you crawl. Thinking about all this, imagine nothing as important except doing as your nature leads and accepting what universal nature brings.

How does the ruling mind use itself? Everything depends on this. Everything else is either chosen or not chosen—dead and smoke.

The most stirring thing for despising death: even people who think pleasure is good and pain evil have despised death.

For someone who thinks only what’s timely is good, who doesn’t care whether he does more or fewer right actions, who doesn’t care whether he looks at the world for a longer or shorter time—for him even death isn’t frightening.

Human, you were a citizen in this great city. What does it matter to you if it’s five years or three? What’s according to the laws is equal for everyone. What’s terrible if nature sends you away from the city—not a tyrant or an unjust judge, but nature who brought you in? It’s like if the commanding general dismissed an actor from the stage after the general had hired him. “But I haven’t said my five acts, only three.” You spoke well. But in life three acts is the whole play. The one who was responsible for your composition then and your dissolution now decides what’s complete. You’re responsible for neither. So leave peacefully—the one dismissing you is also peaceful.[7]