Meditations Session 9: Keep Practicing
There is a simple test to see if you have reached the starting gate to unlearn.
This week, we conclude our consideration of Meditations with Notebooks 11 and 12. On April 20th, we will begin our study of Man’s Search for Meaning.
Here are some relevant entries from Meditations Notebook 12 to go with my mid-week essay on Sisyphus.
12.26 “The present moment is all the life that anyone has, and all the life that he loses.”
12.32 “Think nothing important except acting in compliance with your nature and being acted upon by whatever universal nature brings your way.”
Can you spot any others?
As we approach the end of our formal study of Meditations you may notice while Marcus’s words may inspire you, in daily life you may disassociate from what you have studied. You may be disappointed in your reactions to events.
When will I learn, you might think? Or, putting it another way, when will I unlearn my false beliefs?
When in 12.6 Marcus advises, “Keep practicing even when there seems no hope of success,” he means that literally. There are no shortcuts.
You’ve come farther than you realize and have a lifetime ahead.
We would be foolish to overlook how poorly we teach ourselves, how often we apply our false beliefs, and how we fail to learn from the field of our experiences. We go along with our brains wired to react to impressions mindlessly.
In 11.5, Marcus reminds himself of the importance of purpose and that learning requires the lab and the field: “What’s your job? Being good. How else can that come about except with the help of the philosophical theories that explain the nature of the universe and the specific nature of human beings?
Reading Meditations and other works in the perennial philosophy gets us to the starting gate for change. Yet theory explored in the lab is not enough. As Marcus did daily, practicing in the field begins a process of inexorable change.
There is a simple test to see if you have reached the starting gate to unlearn.