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“If someone tried to take control of your body and make you a slave, you would fight for freedom. Yet how easily you hand over your mind to anyone who insults you. When you dwell on their words and let them dominate your thoughts, you make them your master.” — Epictetus
The above is one of my favourite quotations from the ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus, a man born into slavery in the Hellenistic world and disabled from a young age, either by an accident, or because, or so the rumour goes, that his master wanted to see what it would be like to break someone’s leg!
That’s why Epictetus is always shown in pictures with crutches, to be honest most commentators think the latter to be unlikely, slaves were property and very few people would have gone out of their way to break their own possessions. The modern-day equivalent would be to slash your own tyres or smash up your own television. Yes, these things do happen, but it’s rare and usually the product of something else, some deeper psychological condition that’s acting out it’s darkness in the full of light of everyone else’s gaze.
Epictetus, however, was allowed to study philosophy and joined the Stoic School. On a personal note, I like the stoics, they were my first introduction to rational philosophy, the disciple of mind as opposed to the rambling incoherence of religious beliefs or the scrambled together metaphysics of online sects.
One of the things that stands out from the stoic disciplines is this, nobody can insult you without your consent! If someone says something unpleasant that you find to be offensive, then you are complicit in the offence. You can just as easily decide to be unbothered by the insult and shrug it off. Offence is something that can only take place within your mind, you can agree or disagree with any unpleasantness that comes your way, and crucially you can simply choose not to be offended by it.
This is mastery of the mind in action, to consciously choose to reject all offence in order to protect your most precious possession, that being your ‘peace of mind,’ or ‘ataraxia.’ Stoicism is a mental discipline, open to anybody who is willing to take control of their rational faculty, thus controlling the passions. The good stoic does not even allow the pains and tribulations of the body to disturb their peace of mind.
In the undisciplined man, the passions are like wild horses, they run riot through our psyche, and we alone are left to feel the results, that might be anger, sadness, insult or anxiety and a occasionally happiness, but a good life is not lived this way, to not have control of your own mind is a terrible thing, but with rational attention these wild and beautiful beasts can be tamed and their vast energies channelled into the things that we find to be good.
Anger is sometimes useful and so is anxiety if you know how to master its energies, all emotions, all psychic energies can be channelled into productive outlets. The good stoic would take anxiety and turn it into excitement, thus propelling him forward towards his goal, eventually after much more self-discipline he wouldn’t feel anxiety at all, and that’s because all of his goals would be within his power. If you can achieve whatever it is that you want, why worry? Your goals, wishes and wants are within your power, all you’ve got to do is act!
This is another essential pillar of stoicism, to honestly sit down, examine your own life and look at your goals, to assess how realistic they are, to determine if they really are within your own power, and then to act. That’s why Epictetus also asks us not to agree to do things that are beyond our abilities, we might do a bad job, fail miserably or not even do the job at all, and that would reflect badly upon our character.
Your character you’ll understand is your most precious possession, so don’t overreach, nobody likes an overachiever, people value competence, and this means that the really big goals, those things that you’d like to do but are presently beyond your abilities must be broken down into lots of little, smaller objectives that you can achieve one step at a time!
If you must achieve, then you will achieve, the obstacle becomes the way, that’s what Marcus Aurelius teaches us, he’s my favourite stoic and the man I think of, whenever anyone says, ‘Emperor of Rome.’
Stoicism is often portrayed as the absence of emotions, like Mr Spock of Star Trek fame, but this isn’t the case. A true stoic listens to his feelings like a composer listening to his orchestra, the pleasing notes are kept, the discordant ones discarded, all that remains is a beautiful symphony of mind, that’s ‘ataraxia,’ or ‘peace of mind in action.’
You are the keeper of your own estate, and that property is entirely mental, it’s only within your mind that you alone reign as emperor with the power to do anything that you’d like, your mental landscape can be changed at any time, and you alone have this power! The utterings of other minds might be unpleasant, but what goes on in within their skulls is their business and nobody else’s, so, should you be affected by it? Of course not!
You wouldn’t believe the number of times over the years I’ve tried to point this out on various internet forums and comment boxes underneath some hot button topic in an attempt to calm people down, to cool tempers and so on, and each and every time I’ve done so, my comment has been deleted! I’ve even been banned. Some media thrives on offensive or so it seems.
