“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VIII
You have almost certainly encountered a shorter more modernized version of this: “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
It appears on posters, in productivity books, and at the top of a great many articles. It is a beautiful line. It is also, as far as I can establish, missing a key element of what Aurelius’ original writings were perhaps aiming to convey. It is a modern compression of the passage above, and it has traveled so far from its source that the popular version now says something meaningfully different from the original.
I think the difference is worth an article, because the compression removed the hardest and most valuable part.
What The Popular Version Removed
Read the two side by side.
The modern rendering says you have power over your mind. It is a statement of jurisdiction; here is your territory, and here is what lies outside it. While it may be true, the distinction comes in the power to augment meaning and perspective. The pain is not in the event. It is in your estimate of the event. And it says that the estimate is something you have the power to revoke.
This is the essence of Albert Ellis’ excellent work on Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) in the 50s, of which Aurelius might be worthy of some credit. It also reminds me of Gabor Mate’s work, when he says “Trauma is not what happens to you, it is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” Though in the case of significant trauma, we cannot be as egoic as to say we are in full conscious control of our reaction; it is guttural, visceral, unconscious, and may even be a soul wound.
The Word Doing All The Work
The Greek term underneath this is hypolepsis, usually rendered as judgment, estimate, or supposition. It appears throughout the Meditations and it is arguably the load-bearing concept of the whole book. Marcus returns to it routinely, which tells you something about how difficult he found it. A Roman emperor writing notes to himself, at night, in a military camp, about a discipline he was still failing at.
That context matters enormously and it is usually stripped away. Meditations was never written for publication. It has no argument, no audience, and no interest in persuading anyone. It is a private notebook of a man trying to talk himself into behaving well, and much of its power comes from the fact that he clearly had to keep doing it.
It is assuring to consider that a person wielding such power of influence over the known world was focused on acting from his highest sense of self-actualization.
Self Actualization Vs Aggrandizement
I want to be careful here, because there is a viewing of Stoicism circulating right now that I think does real damage, and it uses this exact quote as its foundation. It is akin, in some regards, to the Ashrams that remove you for coming down with an illness under the guise that it was your lack of ‘mastery’ or ascension that was its ultimate cause (and therefore you are not good enough).
This concept says: your suffering is a judgment, judgments are chosen, therefore your suffering is chosen, therefore you have no grounds for complaint. Some go further to say that any ill event is yours of the making and you therefore ‘deserve’ it. This disrespects and is oblivious to the power of the unconscious. It is used to dismiss grief, to shame people out of legitimate anger, and, in its worst applications, to tell someone that their response to genuine mistreatment is a personal failing.
That is not what the passage says, in my view. Nor do I think it reflects Aurelius’ efforts in praxis. He was a man who lost several children, presided through a plague, and spent much of his reign at war on a frozen frontier. The Meditations are not the writings of someone who found suffering optional. They are the writings of someone who found it survivable, which is a very different claim.
Why This Overlaps With Something Much Older
What I find striking is how many traditions arrive at this same observation by completely different routes.
Bishop Berkeley worked toward it through a theory of perception, arriving at conclusions about the relationship between mind and the perceived world that I have written about previously. The depth psychologists arrive at it from the direction of the unconscious, observing that we are largely reacting to material that has nothing to do with the present circumstance. It would be easy to equate this to many traditions of the indigenous, who tend to — from a really deep sense — respect the powers of the numinous; and is the numinous anything more than the depths of the unconscious?
And each of them is describing the same gap: the space between what occurs and what we make of it.
I have argued before that we are almost never looking at things as they are, but at things through the accumulated fog of our own perceptions, most of which we did not consciously select. Aurelius seems to be making the practical case that this fog is not fixed weather. It is something you are producing, continuously, and production can be interrupted.
The convergence does not prove anything. But when a Roman emperor, an Irish bishop, a Swiss psychiatrist, and several thousand years of contemplative practice keep pointing at the same seam in human experience, it seems worth walking over and looking at it.
A Notebook, Not A Doctrine
The reason I keep returning to this book, and the reason I would recommend it, is that it never once reaches a conclusionary point of view that is found in grandiose world views.
Marcus Aurelius held more worldly power than nearly any human being who has ever lived, and spent his private hours reminding himself not to be irritable, not to be vain, not to postpone becoming the person he intended to be. He engages in true praxis, and reports the journey which is the whole of the teaching.
The popular quote promises ability over the mind in a broad sense, which at a spiritual level opens the dialogue of where the mind sits in the hierarchy of ‘mind, body, spirit’. The actual passage covers the ability to frame, reframe, and view the situation without falling into the trap that Shakespeare warned about: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”
Aurelius says the estimate can be revoked at any moment, in its entirety. That is not only the conclusion as to which box its placed, but the estimation in its entirety (the box in its entirety). Which means the moment is always available, which means you have not missed it and cannot miss it.
Further Reading
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by Gregory Hays or by Robin Hard
- Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
- Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life
- Epictetus, Discourses and Enchiridion
