Meditations

Meditations


Marcus Aurelius was born in 121 A.D., and was the last in a short succession of adoptive emporers.  If you haven't picked up the new translation of his journal Meditations, you should take the time to read it.  It is a beautiful translation, published by Martin Hammond in 2006.  Here is an excerpt:

2:17

In man's life his time is a mere instant, his existence a flux, his perception fogged, his whole bodily composition rotting, his mind a whirligig, his fortune unpredictable, his fame unclear.  To put it shortly: all things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusions; life is warfare and a visit in a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion. 

What then can escort us on our way?  One thing, and one thing only: philosophy.  This consists in keeping the divinity within us inviolate and free from harm, master of pleasure and pain, doing nothing without aim, truth, or integrity, and independednt of other's actions or failure to act.  Further, accepting all that happens and is allotted to it as coming from that source which is its own origin: and at all times awaiting death with the glad confidence that it is nothing more than the dissolution of the elements of which every living creature is composed.  Now if there is nothing fearful for the elements themselves in their constant changing of each into another, why should one look anxiously in prospect at the change and dissolution of them all?  This is in accordance with nature: and nothing harmful is in accordance with nature.

The Immediate Stages

A passage from Either/Or Part I: The Immediate Stages by Kierkegaard

From the moment my soul was first astounded by Mozart's music and humbly bowed in admiration, it has often been a favorite and refreshing occupation for me to deliberate on the way that happy Greek view of the world that calls the world a [cosmos] because it manifests itself as a well-organized whole, as an elegant, transparent adornment for the spirit that acts upon and operates throughout it, the way that happy view lets itself be repeated in higher order of things, in the world of ideals, the way there is here again a ruling wisdom, especially wonderful at uniting what belongs together, Azel with Valborg, Homer with the Trojan War, Raphael with Catholicism, Mozart with Don Juan.  There is a paltry disbelief that seems to contain considerable healing power.

Bertrand Russell: Why I Am Not A Christian

Why I Am Not a Christian




This excerpt comes from the 1957 text, edited by Paul Edwards. Bertrand's Russell's views on religion were largely disseminated through lectures, letters, and essays, which the editor has combined into a book. It contains Russell's arguments for an against the existence of God, his thoughts on the concept of an afterlife, and a modern examination of some of religions most central beliefs.



From the Chapter Seems Madam? Nay, it is.



All our experience is bound up with time; nor is it possible to imagine a timeless experience. But, even if it were possible, we could not, without contradiction, suppose that we ever shall have such an experience. All experience, therefore, for aught that philosophy can show, is likely to resemble the experience we know - if this seems bad to us, no doctrine of a Reality distinguished from Appearances can give us hope of anything better. We fall, indeed, into a hopeless dualism: on the one side we have the world we know, with its events, pleasant and unpleasant, its deaths and failures and disasters; on the other hand an imaginary world, which we christen the world of Reality, atoning, by the largeness of the Reality, for the absence of every other sign that there really is such a world. Now our only ground for this world of reality is that this is what Reality would have to be if we could understand it.

Christian Discourses

Christian Discourses
A selection on choosing a way of thinking in relation to one's own standing in the universe.  While longing for something is a natural human emotion, with self-discipline we can create a state of mind or being as a choice.

XI 29-30

"It is hard, it is not to be endured, when one is a lily and beautiful as a lily, then to be allotted to a place in such a situation, to bloom there is an environment which is as unfavorable as possible, as though expressly calculated to annihilate the impression of one's beauty; no, that is not to be put up with, that is indeed a self-contradiction with the Creator!" So it is we men would likely think and talk, if we were in the situation of the lily, and thereupon we would wither with grief.  But the lily thinks differently, it thinks thus: " I myself have not been able to determine the situation and the circumstances, and so it is not in the remotest way my affair; that I stand where I stand is God's will."