"Meditations" I figured it out 2,000 years ago
But there was one thing about Marcus Aurelius
Never did
alone
Dominion over an area of about five million square kilometers
Controls hundreds of thousands of troops
The most powerful person in the world
He lived to be 59.
During his fifty-nine years of life
He has fourteen children
Most of them died before him
He fought all his life.
In the barracks in the north all year round
Feet on ice and snow
With his back to a corrupt capital and a group of people he can't trust
He devoted all his life to his inner monologue
Written in a notebook
After writing
Never intended for anyone to see
That notebook
It's Meditations.
You open any book list video now.
Books that changed my life
Entrepreneur pillow book
Books Read by Successful People
"Meditations" is almost certain to appear in the top three
Bill Gates has publicly recommended it many times
It has been on the books of many US presidents
Silicon Valley founders collectively use it as a spiritual playbook
This Book
It's not a book anymore
It's a symbol.
Symbolizes rational self-control
Calm and restrained
Elite temperament
But today I'm going to tell you something.
The vast majority of people read Meditations.
I only read the surface
And they put that surface
The misunderstanding became the whole point of this book
But here's the thing.
Marcus Aurelius himself
One of the things I do over and over again in this book
Exactly what he has never been able to do in his life
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
This is the sixth installment of the series Deconstructing Classics with Buddhism
The first five issues
We've been dismantling classical Chinese
Seeds and Seasons of Mirror Flower Edge
The Dream of Red Mansions
Journey to the West
The love of the peony pavilion
The Five Ladders of Moral Benevolence and Righteousness in Su Shu
Today we cross civilization
Spanning more than 10,000 kilometers
Come to ancient Rome two thousand years ago
Take a look at a Roman emperor
How to use the language of Greek philosophy
Wrote a personal notebook that was strikingly similar to Buddhism
and
Which step is he at?
You come to a very different fork in Buddhism.
Make the basic information clear first
Marcus Aurelius
Born in 121AD
Died in 1800
Emperor of the ancient Roman Empire
He is also one of the most important representatives in the history of Stoic philosophy
He spent almost all of his imperial life in war
There are Germanic tribes who continue to invade by the Danube
There were rebellions and plagues throughout the empire
"Meditations" is not a philosophical treatise he wrote leisurely in his study
It was him in the barracks
On the battlefield
A private diary kept bit by bit
The book is written in Greek
There's almost no structure.
repeatedly
contradiction
Sometimes the same meaning is said seven or eight times
It wasn't even written for publication.
This is a person.
Talk to yourself
And what this guy said
Sometimes
And what Sakyamuni figured out 2,500 years ago under the Bodhi tree
So close that it gives me goosebumps.
We're going to start with the core skeleton of the book.
Stoic philosophy makes a fundamental distinction
It can be said to be the foundation of the entire building
Marcus Aurelius in Meditations.
I repeated it countless times: something
Within your control
Something.
not in
Within your control
It's your judgment.
Your desire
Your disgust
How do you choose to respond to the world?
Out of your control
Everything that happens outside
How do others treat you?
Is the body sick?
Is war coming?
Did the child die?
Is the empire corrupt in your hands?
The wisdom of the Stoics began here
Only work hard on things within your control
The rest.
let go
Hear here
Do you feel strangely familiar?
This is what our channel talked about
It has a very precise parallel structure.
stop
Is to reduce the accuracy and weight of that narrative machine
Don't let it keep making up stories about uncontrollable external events
superimposed meaning
view
It's seeing the data flow as it really is.
Don't twist it with your prior beliefs
Marcus Aurelius did it over and over again.
It's the same thing: paying attention to the uncontrollable external
Back into a controlled interior
It's not about changing the world.
Is to change the relationship between you and the world
It's called the judgment interface.
In the words of consciousness-only learning
What he's doing.
It is to reduce the weight of the whole system
He wrote this in "Meditations"
I am paraphrasing here.
It is not a direct quote from the original text: Why people suffer
Not because of the thing itself
But because of the judgment of the matter
Obstacles become the way forward
Something that blocks action
It drives action.
Everything that is external can disappear immediately
These sentences
If translated into the language of consciousness-only
And it goes something like this: it's not the flow of data that's generated by him that's bothering you.
It's what you superimpose on it.
Obstacles are neutral in nature.
Let it be bitter
It's the judgment label you put on
All external phenomena are based on him
Selflessness
impermanence
Can dissipate at any time
Stoic and Conscious
In a completely different language
Draw nearly identical diagnostic maps
This is what blows me away the most every time I read Meditations
With little direct cultural exchange
An ancient Roman emperor
And a group of ancient Indian practitioners
Facing the same source of human suffering
Made highly similar diagnoses
It's no coincidence.
It's the structure of consciousness itself.
The same fingerprints in different civilizations
But that's just the surface.
More interesting
Is a fork
The Stoics of Marcus Aurelius
Buddhism
After walking about halfway down the same road
Going in two completely different directions
Where is the fork?
On the question of who is judging?
Stoic philosophy tells you
You can control your judgment
You've got to be rational.
To censor every thought that comes rushing in
Determine whether it is real or fictional
Is it within your control or outside your control?
Then make the correct response
This logic has a premise
There is a stable and reliable psychological agent
Able to perform this review task
This subject
It's "you."
Buddhism asks the next question
The "you" who makes the judgment.
Who is it again?
The one who censors the thought, exercises reason, decides whether to let go or push.
How is it formed?
Is it reliable?
Does it have its own biases?
own persistence
Own prior weight
And in the shadows, it influences every rational decision it makes.
From the Perspective of Consciousness-Only
Stoics saw the plans made by Mornah
Then say
We use the rationality of the first six senses to manage the output of the last consciousness
Buddhism
And so forth.
The operation of the first six senses itself
Also infiltrated by the end of consciousness
The subject who thinks he is doing rational review
Its bottom layer
It's Mornah
You use Mornah to manage Mornah
It's like you're trying to grab the right hand with your right hand.
You are always so close
Certainly.
If you take the stoic position
The premises of Consciousness-Only can also be questioned in the same way
But that's exactly the problem
Constitutes the dilemma of Marcus Aurelius's life
It is also the deepest contradiction in < Meditations >
You read this book carefully
You will find something that makes your heart tighten
He keeps repeating
Same admonition
The same reminder
The same self-persuasion
Not once
Not twice
Dozens of times
Hundreds of times
Don't pay attention to other people's opinions
Next Chapter
He's writing about other people's reviews again. Why does it make him miserable?
External things can't really hurt you
Flip to a few more pages
He's writing again about his grief at the fall of the empire
Death is no big deal
And he went to great lengths.
Talk about the grief of losing a child
You try to imagine that picture
Late Night
Barracks
Outside the tent was a German bonfire.
An emperor in his fifties
Sitting under an oil lamp
And again, he wrote in his notebook, "Don't be disturbed by objects.
"When he wrote this sentence
Hands may still be shaking
Because I just received news during the day that another child is critically ill.
This repeat
It's not a matter of writing style
This is a person.
Got the right answer.
But can't
Then write to yourself over and over again
Trying to convince myself
There's a quote in Meditations that really impressed me.
to the effect that
I already know these truths
But why can't I do it?
Why does reason tell me to calm down?
Emotion still comes
This is the fundamental limitation of the Stoic training method
It's a cognitive reconstruction system.
Very powerful.
But the essence of cognitive restructuring
I work at a narrative level.
With a new narrative
Replace the old narrative
And Buddhism later went to the depths
There's another thing to ask: the narrative machine itself.
Can you be seen?
Not just managed
But to be seen
Using the framework of predictive coding
The Stoics are revising the content of their beliefs
What Buddhism needs to move towards is something lower
It's the precision of the belief system, the weights themselves.
Not just a change of belief
It's about reducing the inertia of the entire belief-generating mechanism.
Marcus Aurelius knew what to think
But the thought-generating machine
He can't really turn it off.
You can only keep chasing after the tube with reason.
This is why "Meditations" reads
Sometimes it can leave you feeling a deep sense of exhaustion
It's not the exhaustion of the emperor running the empire
Is a very smart person
Exhausted all cognitive resources
To manage a machine he never really saw clearly
That exhaustion
Now.
We're going to pull back from ancient Rome.
Ask a question of the moment
You turn on your phone
Today's self-improvement market
What is Mainstream selling?
cognitive framework
thinking model
growth mindset
habitual system
efficient working method
Did you notice
All of this.
Are essentially modern variants of Stoic methodology
With a better rational framework
Manage your thoughts and actions
This results in better output
It's not a bad thing.
The Frame of Marcus Aurelius
Than most modern self-improvement products
Much deeper.
Much more honest
But there's a catch.
The market never asks
Because once you ask
The whole business model collapses
You're using reason to manage your thoughts.
But the "you" who manages.
Who wrote that?
Who adjusted it?
You trust your judgment to be sound.
neutral
reliable
But your reason itself
Does it have its own blind spots?
Those blind spots don't appear on your rational checklist
Because they're the hand that writes the checklist.
Marcus Aurelius
It's one of the most serious examples of this in human history.
One of the most qualified
He is wise enough
Adequate education
Enough motivation
Enough time
Enough self-discipline
All his life
Didn't quite live up to the words he wrote himself
It's not his failure.
This is a man of integrity.
After hitting a real ceiling on a cognitive level
The truthful record left behind
That Buddhist step
What's that?
Instead of trying harder to manage your thoughts
It's seeing the thought-generating mechanism itself.
These two things sound similar
It makes a world of difference
management idea
It means a thought.
You evaluate it.
Accept or reject
Replace with better ideas
It's a never-ending battle
The battlefield is always at the level of thought
You always need to keep fighting
Marcus Aurelius fought all his life
Fight until the age of fifty-nine
Fight to the death
see mechanism
It means you're not paying attention to your thoughts.
And in the process of generating the thought
You don't judge the content of your thoughts.
You only see how thoughts are produced
When you can actually see the process
A strange thing will happen: the speed at which that machine is running.
Will naturally slow down
Not because you suppressed it
It is because of being seen itself
Changed the way it works
In the words of our channel before
stop
Not to drive the thought away
Is to make the machine that generates the idea slow down
view
Not checking the content of thoughts
It is to see the process of relying on others as it is
Marcus Aurelius has almost reached the beginning of the end
He constantly asks himself to come back to the present moment
Back to this moment
Stop grabbing outward
But he didn't go any further.
Ask the present-moment subject.
What is it?
It's not his problem.
This was his traditional boundary.
Stoic philosophy at the time of its birth
Has reached one of the limits of what human cognition can reach
It draws a line there: to here.
I can get here.
And Buddhism
To the other side of that line
One more step
I'm not saying who is tall and who is low
Not to mention that Marcus Aurelius lost
Here's the thing.
He lived in a cultural tradition
There is no knowledge-only tool.
He only has Stoic
He used Stoic to the limit
The notebook full of private conversations
Is a person without better tools
The most honest exploration of consciousness that can be achieved
This is what really moved me about Meditations
It's not because he's right.
It's because he never stops.
Even if he knew he couldn't
And he didn't stop to pretend he did.
And this leads me to a phenomenon.
In modern times, some people easily claim that their hearts are like still water
Completely indifferent to external evaluation
I highly doubt it.
Most people who say that
Or really have no ability to feel
Or they're lying.
Certainly.
Maybe someone did
It's just that we can't tell it from the outside.
But Marcus Aurelius
The man with the most power in the world
Admit in a notebook: I can still be influenced by people's evaluations
I will still grieve for the lost child
I still can't do what I know I should do
This honesty
Closer to the truth than any declaration of awakening
And finally.
I want you to think about something
Is there anyone like that around you?
I read a lot of books
We created a lot of frameworks.
Understand a lot
When should I take internal control?
When should I let go?
When should we respond rationally?
Well said
But take a closer look.
These people live their lives
In fact, with those who don't know anything
Just as easily overwhelmed by emotions
You will also make regretful choices at critical moments
The same things they say are not worth caring about
Hurt firmly
It's not mocking them.
This is Marcus Aurelius spending his entire life using the entire book
The same thing Meditations tells us: cognitive maps
Doesn't mean walking that road
Know the correct answer
And really do it
What's between?
That is the distance from understanding to evidence
The distance from understanding to evidence
It's between Stoic and Helium
The distance of that step
This distance
There are no shortcuts.
No frame.
No checklist
But when you really stop
Sitting there quietly
Saw the machine that kept turning
If only for a second
Really saw
That second
After reading the entire < Meditations >
More weighty
What are your thoughts on this issue?
Marcus Aurelius spent his life failing to write his own words
You see that as a failure.
Still a precious
The distance between recognition and evidence
Do you have your own experiences and feelings?
Welcome to chat with me in the comment area.
You can also tell me
What would you most like to hear in the next installment of this series?
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.