Go away, I entreat you by the gods, as you did come, for I do not want you. But you have come according to the ancient fashion. I am not angry with you: only go away.23
“I am not angry with you,” he says to the painful feeling, because he does not perceive it as bad or harmful. It enters the mind in the age-old manner, through sensation, a natural physiological process that humans share with animals. Ironically, you don’t need to try to suppress or resist unpleasant feelings as long as you abandon the belief that they are bad. If you accept them with indifference, then they do you no harm. When your conscious mind, your ruling faculty, invests too much importance in bodily sensations, it becomes “fused and blended” with them, and it is pulled around by the body like a puppet on strings.24 However, you always have the potential within you to rise above physical sensations and view them with studied indifference. FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS
Once you’ve gained cognitive distance, you’re in a better position to consider the consequences of your value judgments (“functional analysis”). Given that suffering arises from our negative value judgments, the Stoics say that the fear of pain does us far more harm than pain itself because it injures our very character. Pain, by contrast, is harmless if you learn to accept it with an attitude of indifference. Epictetus stated this very succinctly: “For death or pain is not fearsome, but rather the fear of pain or death.”25 To live life fully, you have to get out of your comfort zone, as we say today. Fear of pain makes cowards out of us all and limits our sphere of life.
It’s important to have a firm grasp of a behavior’s negative consequences if we want to change it. For example, blood phobia might prevent someone from having medical tests they require—for some women it’s even an obstacle to giving birth. Indeed, most people are frightened of pain and illness to varying degrees. Realizing that fear of pain may be doing you more harm than the pain itself can motivate you to start regularly practicing the psychological skills required to overcome intolerance of pain and discomfort. OBJECTIVE REPRESENTATION
Marcus also learned to describe external events and bodily sensations to himself as natural processes, adopting the language of objective representation. As noted earlier, we can compare this to the neutral and detached way a physician might document the symptoms of illness in a patient. Epictetus and Marcus both do this when they describe painful and unpleasant sensations merely as “rough” movements, or agitations, occurring in the flesh.
Thoughts such as these reach through to the things themselves and strike to the heart of them, allowing us to see them as they truly are.26
It’s as if we were describing the problems of another person: with greater objectivity and detachment. I might say to myself, for example, “The dentist is working on Donald’s teeth,” thereby thinking of it dispassionately from a third-person perspective. DEPRECIATION BY ANALYSIS
Marcus also tells himself to avoid overwhelming his mind by worrying about the future or ruminating about the past. When we focus our attention on the reality of the here and now it becomes easier to conquer. By viewing things objectively, isolating the present moment and dividing it into smaller parts, we can tackle them one at a time, using the method we’ve called depreciation by analysis. He says, for example, that we should ask of each present difficulty, “What is there in this that is unbearable or beyond endurance?”27 Indeed, Marcus notes that the power of events to afflict us is greatly diminished if we set aside thoughts of the past and future and focus only on the present moment, the here and now, in isolation.
This divide-and-conquer strategy is still used in modern cognitive-behavioral therapy to combat unpleasant feelings; clients might be encouraged to focus on the present moment and deal with overwhelming experiences one step at a time. The Stoics move between this perspective and one that modern scholars call the “view from above,” which involves picturing your current situation from high above, as part of the whole of life on Earth, or even the whole of time and space. One strategy divides events up into smaller parts, and the other imagines the whole of existence and an event’s minuscule place within it. Both strategies can help us view external events, such as pain and illness, with greater indifference.28 CONTEMPLATING FINITUDE AND IMPERMANENCE
Having described any painful sensations or symptoms of illness to ourselves in objective language and analyzed them into their component parts, we can usually also view them as being confined to a particular location in the body. Marcus consistently reminds himself to view pain and pleasure as belonging to the parts of the body where they’re located—in other words, to think of the smallness of the sensation in contrast with the expansiveness of his observing consciousness. He thereby taught himself to think of pain remaining “over there” at a distance.
Let the affected part of the body complain if it must, he says. The mind doesn’t need to agree and go along with it by judging the sensation to be very bad and harmful.29 Think of the pain in your body as if it’s the barking of an angry dog; don’t start barking along with the dog by groaning about your own pain. It’s always within your power to consider the sensation as belonging to the body and limited to a specific location. You can choose to leave it there rather than becoming fused with it through worry and rumination.
The mind, too, can preserve its calm by withdrawing itself, and the ruling faculty comes to no harm; as for the parts that are harmed by pain, let them declare it, if they are able to.30
Therapists today help their clients objectify pain in this way by attributing an arbitrary shape or color to it, such as a black circle. This technique, called “physicalizing” the feeling, can help you picture it in your mind’s eye, from a detached perspective, at a particular location in the body. You might even think of yourself as looking at physical pain or another symptom of illness through a glass window, separating the body from the mind, or imagining the pain as temporarily outside of the body on the other side of the room.
In addition to viewing unpleasant sensations as limited spatially to the affected part of the body, Marcus frequently reminds himself to consider their duration and to view them as limited in both time and space. He employs this strategy with externals in general but particularly with painful sensations and symptoms of illness. It resembles advice given by Epicurus, to focus on the fact that acute pain is temporary. You might be familiar with the Persian saying “This too shall pass,” quoted by Abraham Lincoln, which makes a similar point. We can also remind ourselves how many unpleasant sensations have already come and gone in the past as a way of highlighting their transience.
This approach is one of Marcus’s favorite strategies for encouraging an attitude of Stoic indifference. Viewing things as changeable, like a flowing river, can help weaken our emotional attachment to them. Sometimes he goes further and reminds himself of his own transience—his mortality. We will achieve indifference to painful feelings, he says, if we remember that the demands they place on our attention will only be for a limited time, because life is short and will soon be at an end.31 STOIC ACCEPTANCE