From Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: Book 2, Part 2 of 2

Today, we continue with “Book 2” from Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.” While emphasizing the ephemeral nature of all things, the wise emperor highlights the importance of focusing on one’s power within, and respecting the Divine reality of the present. “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. If the gods exist, then to abandon human beings is not frightening; the gods would never subject you to harm.” “And how man grasps God, with what part of himself he does so, and how that part is conditioned when he does. Nothing is more pathetic than people who run around in circles, ‘delving into the things that lie beneath’ and conducting investigations into the souls of the people around them, never realizing that all you have to do is to be attentive to the power inside you and worship it sincerely.” “To worship it is to keep it from being muddied with turmoil and becoming aimless and dissatisfied with nature - divine and human. What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us. And our pity too, sometimes, for its inability to tell good from bad - as terrible a blindness as the kind that can’t tell white from black.”