Stoicism
Gist
Stoicism was a school founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium around 301 BC.
Three Stoic principal leaders: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca
“Stoicism teaches how to keep a calm and rational mind no matter what happens to you and it helps you understand and focus on what you can control and not worry about and accept what you can't control.”
A. 10 principles
1.Live in Agreement with Nature – The Stoic Goal of Life
The ultimate goal of life was agreed by all ancient schools of philosophy to be ‘Eudaimonia’. Eudaimonia – is a bit tricky to translate. Think of it as the supreme happiness or fulfilment attainable by human beings.
‘Living in agreement with nature’ is about behaving rationally like a human instead of randomly (and out of passion) like a beast.
2 Live by Virtue – It Is the Highest of All Goods
What the Stoics meant with ‘virtue’ was excelling or flourishing in terms of our rational human nature. .. ‘Virtue’ really refers to excelling at one’s own character and applying reason in a manner that’s healthy and praiseworthy. .. The Stoics classified these different forms of virtue under four broad headings, the four cardinal virtues:
Wisdom or Prudence (vidya, jnanam)
Justice or Fairness (samatvam)
Courage or Fortitude (dhairyam)
Self-Discipline or Temperance (yama and niyama)
Virtue must be its own reward. You do something because it is the right thing to do. Doing the right thing is enough, it’s your nature and it’s your job. (Cf. Buddha’s teaching).
3 Focus on What You Can Control, Accept What You Can’t
(This message comes like a refrain in Swami Paramrthananda’s discourse on Gita.)
Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. ‘Up to us’ are our voluntary choices, namely our actions and judgements. Thoughts, judgements, actions are up to us; everything else like body, health and death, job, wealth and reputation, outside events and other people’s actions, are not up to us.
“It makes us completely and utterly responsible for the single most important thing in life, depriving us of any excuses for not flourishing and attaining the best possible life, because this is always within our grasp.” Donald Robertson
“We can control our behavior but not their outcomes – let alone the outcomes of other people’s behaviours.” Massimo Pigliucci (Cf. karmanyevadhikaraste).
4 Distinguish Between Good, Bad, and (‘Preferred’) Indifferent Things
The good things include the cardinal virtues; the bad things include the opposites of these virtues (folly, injustice, cowardice, and indulgence). Indifferent things include all the rest, but mainly health, wealth, and reputation.
We should learn to be ‘indifferent towards indifferent things’ and learn to be satisfied with whatever nature puts on our plates.
Stoics differentiated between ‘preferred’ and ‘dispreferred’ indifferent things. Indifferent things such as good health, friendship, wealth, and good looks were classified as preferred indifferents, while their opposites were dispreferred indifferents.
People will always prefer joy over pain, wealth over poverty, and good health over sickness – so go ahead and look for those things, but in accord with virtue.
It is not what you have or don’t have but what you do with it that matters.
5 Take Action – The True Philosopher Is a Warrior of the Mind
Donald Robertson, “Events are not determined to happen in a particular way, regardless of what you do, but rather along with what you do… The outcome of events still often depends on your actions.” (ma sangostvakarmani.)
Stoics were doers. .. A stoic goes out in the world and practises his ideas.
6 Practise Misfortune – Ask “What Could Go Wrong?”
The Stoics vaccinated themselves for misfortune. (Tapas is perhaps the Indian equivalent. Sri Ramana simulating death is perhaps a case in point.)
Be ready for things to go differently than planned. Have a backup plan.
Seneca is saying that we’d be crazy to want to face difficulty in life. But we’d be equally crazy to think that it isn’t going to happen.
7 Add a Reserve Clause to Your Planned Actions
8 Amor Fati – Love Everything that Happens
“Seek not for events to happen as you wish but rather wish for events to happen as they do and your life will go smoothly.” – Epictetus
Imagine a dog leashed to a moving cart. The leash is long enough that the dog has two options: (1) either he can smoothly follow the direction of the cart, over which he has no control, and at the same time enjoy the ride and explore the surroundings, (2) or he can stubbornly resist the cart with all his force and end up being dragged for the rest of the trip anyway.
Do not get carried away by initial impression about external, but (1) look at the events objectively and (2) choose to use them for their best.
10 Be Mindful – Stoic Mindfulness Is Where it All Begins
We basically give up being philosophers, and Stoics, when we are not mindful, when we act on autopilot and forget about what we’re doing.
Take 5 minutes each night and go through your day and find opportunities where you could improve.
B. What Does a Stoic Look Like?
The Classic Misconception – Stoics Are Unemotional. The feelings are normal. But the Stoic tries to not act out of feeling but out of reason. The Stoic is not a man of stone without any feelings. He does have feelings but he is not enslaved by them.
Donald Robertson:
“A brave man isn’t someone who doesn’t experience any trace of fear whatsoever but someone who acts courageously despite feeling anxiety. A man who has great self-discipline or restraint isn’t someone who feels no inkling of desire but someone who overcomes his cravings, by abstaining from acting upon them.”
Stoic Ryan Holidays:
“Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist.”
“A good person ‘displays love for all his fellow human beings, as well as goodness, justice, kindness and concern for his neighbour’, and for the welfare of his home city.” – Donald Robertson
We live in accord with virtue and therefore benefit ourselves when we act for the common welfare. Also, the better a person has developed himself, the better he can serve mankind. As Rudolf Steiner said, “If the rose adorns itself, it adorns the garden.”
Do good for the sake of doing good. Expect nothing in return.
Don’t hate the wrongdoer, he does not know any better.
True Beauty Lies in Character. .. The true value of a person lies in their core, their character or personality, and it does not matter if it’s a banker or baker.
https://www.njlifehacks.com/what-is-stoicism-overview-defi…/
THE INFLUENCE OF VEDIC PHILOSOPHY ON NIKOLA TESLA'S UNDERSTANDING OF FREE ENERGY
http://arizonaenergy.org/CommunityEnergy/INFLUENCE%20OF%20VEDIC%20ON%20TESLA%27S%20UNDERSTANDING%20OF%20FREE%20ENERGY.htm
Consciousness
Importantly, conscious level is not the same as wakefulness. Rather, consciousness seems to depend on how different parts of the brain speak to each other, in specific ways. .. Tononi argues that consciousness simply is integrated information. This is an intriguing and powerful proposal, but it comes at the cost of admitting that consciousness could be present everywhere and in everything, a philosophical view known as panpsychism. The classical view of perception is that the brain processes sensory information in a bottom-up or ‘outside-in’ direction. Helmholtzian view inverts this framework, proposing that signals flowing into the brain from the outside world convey only prediction errors – the differences between what the brain expects and what it receives. A number of experiments are now indicating that consciousness depends more on perceptual predictions, than on prediction errors. But just as consciousness is not just one thing, conscious selfhood is also best understood as a complex construction generated by the brain. Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind. It now seems to me that fundamental aspects of our experiences of conscious selfhood might depend on control-oriented predictive perception of our messy physiology, of our animal blood and guts. We are conscious selves because we too are beast machines – self-sustaining flesh-bags that care about their own persistence. The-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one.
Simple Life
The good life is the simple life. Through much of human history, frugal simplicity was not a choice but a necessity – and since necessary, it was also deemed a moral virtue. But with the advent of industrial capitalism and a consumer society, a system arose that was committed to relentless growth, and with it grew a population (aka ‘the market’) that was enabled and encouraged to buy lots of stuff that, by traditional standards, was surplus to requirements. As a result, there’s a disconnect between the traditional values we have inherited and the consumerist imperatives instilled in us by contemporary culture. Living simply now strikes many people as simply boring.(It becomes imperative from environmentalism also now.) But if our current methods of making, getting, spending and discarding prove unsustainable, then there could come a time – and it might come quite soon – when we are forced towards simplicity. In which case, a venerable tradition will turn out to contain the philosophy of the future.
Limits of Knowledge
It would be one thing to concede that science may never be able to explain, say, the subjective experiences of the human mind. But the standard take on quantum mechanics suggests something far more surprising: that a complete understanding of even the objective, physical world is beyond science’s reach, since it’s impossible to translate into words how the theory’s math relates to the world we live in. The theory only predicts what scientists may see at the instant of observation — when all the wave function’s latent possibilities appear to collapse to one definitive outcome — and provides no narrative at all for what particles actually do before or after that, or even how much the word “particle” is apropos to the unobserved world. The act of observation itself is then posited to somehow convert this nonsensical situation into the world we see, of objects having definite locations and other properties. "Success is nothing,” his father taught him. “Proper work is what counts.” (Bassi's) “Yes, it is like that,” he said. “The idea that there is truth and simplicity behind phenomena, if you wish, you can relate it directly to a faith in God that is a unity that gives rise to everything.” “The simple things in life are the more genuine ones,” he explained. “When a person is simple, he’s a better person. ”Even if the world is ultimately not understandable, there is no reason to believe we have hit the bottom with quantum mechanics.
Evolution
The article from Aeon on evolution discusses how it is not just about adaptation, the species shapes the environment too, not only sapiens, others too. Some detailed research material on earthworms (6000 varieties) is also discussed. [T]he organism influences its own evolution, by being both the object of natural selection and the creator of the conditions of that selection,’ acc. to the evolutionary biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin "Researchers need to understand not just how niche construction evolves through natural selection, but how the environmental sources of natural selection are themselves transformed by niche construction." Organisms-are-not-passive-recipients-of-evolutionary-forces.
Knowledge is of our Ignorance
The discovery of Higgs Boson and gravitational waves were no ordinary triumph of physics and confirmation of scientific predictions made rather speculatively. The laws of physics hold true and explain natural phenomena rather consistently. But, there are riddles that daunt physicists; we have no idea what actually happened at the beginning of the Universe; if it was inflation, what was driving it; how it came about; and how it ended. If what happened at the beginning of the Universe is a mystery, what’s happening now is no less puzzling. "We know little about dark matter which outnumbers ordinary matter by a factor of six to one. So with dark energy that accelerates the expansion of the universe. "These three puzzles – how the Universe began, what dark matter is, and what dark energy consists of – make a compelling science case for future. There is yet more confidence that there’s some form of dark matter, some form of dark energy, and that the beginning of the Universe did undergo inflation. But we still won’t know what the dark matter or dark energy is, or what drove inflation. We’ll have a much more precise statement about our ignorance but nothing more." In this field, scientists work 'not pushed by experiments but pulled by imagination. "They come up with possibilities – such as a huge family of new particles, or the notion that space-time should have more than four dimensions. Or even more exotic proposals – e.g., that space-time doesn’t really exist as such, and instead emerges from the relationship between the quantum building blocks of the Universe." "While the hardcore theorists are driven by lofty ideals, the phenomenologists are more practical and crave a more immediate connection with the observed Universe. There's no clear guide, apart from personal or aesthetic inclinations about how to choose the correct solution." "There’s a limit to how much of the whole sky we can observe, and how far we can look back in time." "..;a sound principle is to keep your eyes on the fundamentals, being careful not to jettison the things we know to be true." "There’s a glorious history of research in fundamental physics driving technological change – forcing researchers to come up with ingenious new devices and experiments that allow them to measure elusive phenomena." Einstein: ‘Let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels._
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