Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:11 – To the above supports let one more be added. Always make a figure or outline of the imagined object as it occurs, in order to see distinctly what it is in its essence, naked, as a whole and parts; and say to yourself its individual name and the names of the things of which it was compounded and into which it will be broken up. For nothing is so able to create greatness of mind as the power methodically and truthfully to test each ...
Oct 28, 2020•7 min•Season 1Ep. 29
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:10 – Therefore throw all else aside, and hold fast only these few things; further calling to mind at the same time that each of us lives only in the present, this brief moment; the rest is either a life that is past, or is in an uncertain future. Short then is the time which every man lives, and small the nook of the earth where he lives; and short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this only continued by a succession of poor hu...
Oct 26, 2020•6 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:9 – Reverence your faculty of judgment. On this it entirely rests that your governing self no longer has a judgment disobedient to Nature and to the estate of a rational being. This judgment promises deliberateness (or: freedom from hasty judgment), familiar friendship with men, and obedience to God. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you have questions, commen...
Oct 23, 2020•5 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:8 – In the mind of a man of chastened and purified spirit you will find no trace of festering wound, no ulceration, no abscess beneath the skin. The hour of fate does not surprise his life before its fulfillment, so that one would say that the actor is leaving the stage before he has fulfilled his role, before the play is over. You will find nothing servile or artificial, no dependence on others nor detachment from them; nothing worthy...
Oct 22, 2020•3 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:7 – Never value as an advantage to yourself what will force you one day to break your word, to abandon self-respect, to hate, to suspect, to curse another, to act the hypocrite, to covet anything that calls for walls or coverings to conceal it. A man who puts first his own mind and divine element, and the holy rites of its excellence, makes no scene, utters no groans, will need neither the refuge of solitude nor much company. What is m...
Oct 21, 2020•3 min•Season 1Ep. 25
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:6 – If you discover in the life of man something higher than justice, truth, temperance, fortitude, and generally speaking than your understanding contented with itself, where it presents you behaving by the rule of right, and satisfied with destiny, in what is assigned to you and is not yours to choose; if, I say, you see something higher than this, turn to it with all your heart and enjoy the supreme good now that it is found. But if...
Oct 20, 2020•6 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:5 – Do not act unwillingly nor selfishly nor without self-examination, nor with divergent motives. Let no affectation veneer your thinking. Be neither a busy talker, nor a busybody. Moreover let the divine element within be the guardian of a real man, a man of ripe years, a statesman, a Roman, a magistrate, who has taken his post like one waiting for the Retreat to sound, ready to depart, needing no oath nor any man as witness. And see...
Oct 19, 2020•7 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:4 – Do not waste the balance of life left to you in thoughts about other persons, when you are not referring to some advantage of your fellows—for why do you rob yourself of something else which you might do— I mean if you imagine to yourself what so and so is doing, and why; what he is saying or thinking or planning, and every thought of the kind which leads you astray from close watch over your governing self? Rather you must, in the...
Oct 16, 2020•5 min•Season 1Ep. 22
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:3 – Hippocrates, after curing many sicknesses, himself fell sick and died. The Chaldean astrologers foretold the death of many persons, then the hour of fate overtook them also. Alexander, Pompeius, and Julius Caesar, after so often utterly destroying whole towns and slaying in the field many myriads of horse and foot, themselves also one day departed from life. Heraclitus, after many speculations about the fire which should consume th...
Oct 15, 2020•3 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:2 – We must also observe closely points of this kind, that even the secondary effects of Nature's processes possess a sort of grace and attraction. To take one instance, bread when it is being baked breaks open at some places; now even these cracks, which in one way contradict the promise of the baker's art, somehow catch the eye and stimulate in a special way our appetite for the food. And again figs, when fully mature, gape, and in r...
Oct 14, 2020•10 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:1 – We ought to take into account not only the fact that day by day life is being spent and a smaller balance remaining, but this further point also that, should we live longer, it is at least doubtful whether the intellect will hereafter be the same, still sufficient to comprehend events and the speculation which contributes to the understanding alike of things divine and human. For, if the mind begin to decay, there will be no failur...
Oct 13, 2020•3 min•Season 1Ep. 19
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:17 – Of man's life, his time is a point, his existence a flux, his sensation clouded, his body's entire composition corruptible, his vital spirit an eddy of breath, his fortune hard to predict, his fame uncertain. Briefly, all the things of the body, a river; all the things of the spirit, dream and delirium; his life a warfare and a sojourn in a strange land, his after-fame oblivion. What then can be his escort through life? One thing ...
Oct 02, 2020•4 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:16 – The soul of a man does violence to itself, first and foremost when it becomes an abscess and, as it were, a tumor on the universe, so far as it can. For to be vexed at anything which happens is a separation of ourselves from nature, in some part of which the natures of all other things are contained. Secondly, the soul does violence to itself when it turns away from any man, or even moves towards him with the intention of injuring...
Sep 30, 2020•5 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:15 – “Everything is what you judge it to be. [1] ” While the retort made to the Cynic philosopher Monimus is obvious enough, obvious too is the use of the saying, if one only take the gist of it, so far as it is true. [1] Alternative translations: “opinion,” “assumption”; hupolepsis , hypolepsis, u(po/lhyis ; Seddon writes “opinion covers our beliefs and judgments, how we regard things, and especially how we evaluate things , generally...
Sep 29, 2020•3 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:14 – Even were you about to live three thousand years or thrice ten thousand, nevertheless remember this, that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing. Thus the longest and shortest come to the same thing. For the present is equal to all, and what is passing is therefore equal: thus what is being lost is proved to be barely a moment. For a man could lose neither past no...
Sep 25, 2020•4 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:13 – Nothing is more wretched than the man who goes round and round everything, and, as Pindar says, “pries into the things beneath the earth,” and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his neighbors, but fails to perceive that it is enough to attend to the divinity that is within himself and to do it genuine service. Now that service is to keep it unsullied by passion, thoughtlessness, and discontent with what comes from God or ...
Sep 24, 2020•5 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:12 – How all things are vanishing swiftly, bodies themselves in the universe and the memorials of them in time; what is the character of all the things of sense, and most of all those which attract by the bait of pleasure or terrify by the threat of pain or are shouted abroad by vanity, how cheap, contemptible, soiled, corruptible, and moral: - these are for the faculty of mind to consider. To consider too what kind of men those are wh...
Sep 23, 2020•4 min•Season 1Ep. 13
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:11 – In the conviction that it is possible you may depart from life at once, act and speak and think in every case accordingly. But to leave the company of men is nothing to fear, if God exists; for He would not involve you in ill. If, however, He does not exist or if He takes no care for man’s affairs, why should I go on living in a world void of God, or void of providence? But He does exist, and He does care for men’s lives, and He h...
Sep 22, 2020•4 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:10 – Like a true philosopher Theophrastus says, when comparing, as men commonly do compare, various faults, that errors committed through desire are graver than errors committed through anger. For clearly one who loses his temper is turning away from reason with a kind of pain and inward spasm, whereas he who offends through desire is the victim of pleasure and is clearly more vicious in a way and more effeminate in his wrongdoing. Rig...
Sep 21, 2020•5 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:9 – Always remember the following: what the nature of the whole is, what is my own nature, the relation of this nature to that, what kind of part it is of what kind of whole, and that no man can hinder your saying and doing at all times what is in accordance with that nature whereof you are a part. ---------- If you have questions, comments, or feedback, I would love to hear from you! Please feel free to contact me at rabbischneeweiss ...
Sep 17, 2020•2 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:8 – Men are not easily seen as to be brought into evil case by failure to consider what passes in another’s soul; but they who do not read aright the motions of their own soul are bound to be in evil case. ---------- If you have questions, comments, or feedback, I would love to hear from you! Please feel free to contact me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail. ---------- Stoic texts: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Letters from a Stoic Mast...
Sep 16, 2020•4 min•Season 1Ep. 9
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:7 – Do things from outside break in to distract you? Give yourself a time of quiet to learn some new good thing and cease to wander out of your course. But, when you have done that, be on guard against a second kind of wandering. For those who are sick to death in life, with no mark on which they direct every impulse or in general every imagination, are triflers, not in words only but also in their deeds. ---------- If you have questio...
Sep 15, 2020•5 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:6 – You are doing yourself violence, violence, my soul; and you will have no second occasion to do yourself honor. Brief is the life of each of us, and this of yours is nearly ended, and yet you do not honor yourself, but commit your well-being to the charge of other men’s souls. ---------- If you have questions, comments, or feedback, I would love to hear from you! Please feel free to contact me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail. ---------...
Sep 14, 2020•5 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:5 – Each moment think valiantly, as becomes a Roman and a man, to do what is to your hand, with precise … and unaffected dignity, natural love, freedom, and justice; and to give yourself repose from every other imagination. And so you will, if only you do each act as though it were your last, freed from every random aim, from willful turning away from the directing Reason, from pretence, self-love and displeasure with what is allotted ...
Sep 11, 2020•6 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:4 – Remember how long you have been putting off these things, and how many times God has given you days of opportunity, and yet you do not use them. Now it is high time to perceive the kind of universe of which you are a part and the nature of the Governor of the universe from whom you subsist as an effluence, and that the term of your time is circumscribed, and that unless you use it to attain calm of mind, time will be gone and you w...
Sep 10, 2020•6 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:3 – The work of God is full of providence: the work of fortune is not divorced from nature or the spinning and winding of the threads ordained by providence. All flows from that other world; and there is, besides, necessity and the wellbeing of the whole universe, of which you are a part. Now to every part of nature – that is good which the nature of the whole brings, and which preserves that nature; and the universe is preserved as mu...
Sep 09, 2020•7 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:2 – This whatever it is that I am is flesh and vital spirit and the governing self. Disdain the flesh: blood and bones and network, a twisted skein of nerves, veins, and arteries. Consider also what the vital spirit is: a current of air, not even continuously the same, but every hour being expelled and sucked in again. There is then a third part: the governing self. Put away your books and be distracted no longer; they are not your por...
Sep 08, 2020•6 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:1 – Begin the morning by saying to yourself: “Today I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, the arrogant, the deceitful, the envious, and the unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and bad. But I, who have seen the nature of the good that it is right, and of the bad that it is wrong, and that the nature of the man who does wrong is akin to my own – not of the same blood and seed,...
Sep 07, 2020•8 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! Welcome to The Stoic Jew podcast! If you're new to the podcast, here's my advice: do NOT start listening from Episode 1. Instead, either start with the most recent episode and work your way backwards OR skip around and choose which episodes to listen to based on the titles and/or synopses. There's no need to go in order, and although I stand by the ideas in the first set of episodes (i.e. the ones without titles), they were recorded info...
Sep 06, 2020•3 min•Season 1Ep. 1
