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Practice like a Stoic: 8, Meditate on nature and the cosmos
When was the last time you saw the Sun rise?
[This series of posts is based on A Handbook for New Stoics — How to Thrive in a World out of Your Control, co-authored by yours truly and Greg Lopez. It is a collection of 52 exercises, which we propose reader try out one per week during a whole year, to actually live like a Stoic. In Europe/UK the book is published by Rider under the title Live Like A Stoic. Below is this week’s prompt and a brief explanation of the pertinent philosophical background. Check the book for details on how to practice the exercise, download the exercise forms from The Experiment’s website, and comment below on how things are going. Greg and/or I will try our best to help out! This week’s exercise is found at pp. 61–63 of the paperback edition.]
“The Pythagoreans bid us every morning lift our eyes to heaven, to meditate upon the heavenly bodies pursuing their everlasting round — their order, their purity, their nakedness. For no star wears a veil.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.27)
Contemplating the universe as Marcus describes helps us view ourselves as part of the cosmos. This approach actually predates the Stoics, as it goes back to the Pythagoreans of a few centuries earlier. Marcus uses the Pythagoreans’ meditation to observe the…
