The View From Above | Stoic Exercises For Inner Peace

It’s funny to look at ourselves and see how we quarrel about the smallest things. Like the behavior of an annoying coworker during a meeting or the person who cuts us off in traffic. From my own experience, it’s very easy to get dragged along by a minor event, in a way that a dog is obsessed with a stick. We worry, anxiously, about the future, and endlessly ruminate about the past.

But, from a cosmic point of view, how significant are the things we invest so much emotional energy in really? In this video, I’d like to present to you a Stoic exercise that calms the mind, called ‘the view from above’. Even though practicing Stoicism can be considered a very serious undertaking, there’s also a sense of looseness to find in the words of Marcus Aurelius when he speaks of the insignificance of our lives in relation to the bigger picture. I quote: “The earth will cover us all, and then be transformed in turn, and that too will change, ad infinitum. And that as well, ad infinitum.”

Think about them: the waves of change and alteration, endlessly breaking. And see our brief mortality for what it is. End quote. In these eternal cycles of life and death, creation and recreation, we are even less than a grain of sand in the Sahara desert compared to what we are in the universe. This doesn’t take away that the human experience is intense and our senses are constantly tingled during our short lives on our tiny, blue planet. Sometimes we get so entangled in the human drama that we experience emotional disturbances like anger and anxiety.

Some people are obsessed with wealth and fame, willing to make great sacrifices to get to the top, while, most likely, their names will be forgotten a hundred years from now. And even if you belong to the lucky few whose names will be preserved throughout the centuries; it’s still insignificant when we look at it from a wider perspective. Considering the entropic nature of the universe, the earth will disappear one day. If we don’t destroy it ourselves, and the planet escapes the destruction by a meteor, it will eventually be swallowed by the Sun when it enters the red giant phase.

Who cares, then, how much money you had in your savings account? Who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Even the bloody wars we humans have engaged in will become insignificant. I quote Seneca: “All things move in accord with their appointed times; they are destined to be born, to grow, and to be destroyed. The stars which you see moving above us, and this seemingly immovable earth to which we cling and on which we are set, will be consumed and will cease to exist.” End quote.

The idea of our insignificance could lead some people to despair. But it can also be a very calming thought. The day-to-day problems that caused us so many headaches, the constant striving for goals that we deem utterly important, over-analyzing the past and future, obsessive thinking about what should be and should have been; what if we could view all this from a distance and reduce it all to what it really is: a mere dot in one of the countless galaxies in the universe? What foundation will be left for worry, greed, or anger?

The modern Stoics have turned the musings about humanity’s place in the cosmos into an exercise called ‘The View From Above’. This exercise gives us a temporary break from our daily affairs and puts them in another light. Changing our position towards external things changes the way we think about them which, in turn, changes how we feel. It’s a Stoic form of meditation to calm the mind.

You start the ‘View From Above’ by visualizing yourself within your close and direct environment. It’s like you are being watched through the lens of an advanced telescope that’s placed thousands of light-years away. Imagine an alien civilization that’s able to observe Earth in real-time, looking at you sitting on a chair or lying in bed in your room. Now, the telescope zooms out a little and focuses on your house. Then, your neighborhood. You’re already quite small in comparison to all the streets and other houses.

Now, it looks at the city and its environment. See how small you are. It has become impossible to observe you with the naked eye. Then, compared to the vast countries or oceans that surround the city, it has become nothing more than a small dot. The continents are spread around the globe, which predominantly consists of oceans that hold vast areas that we haven’t discovered yet. Earth is only a small planet compared to other planets like Neptune or Jupiter, which, in their turn, are tiny compared to the sun.

The sun isn’t really a big star compared to, let’s say, Antares, which is 850 times its size. Both the Sun and Antares are part of the Milky Way, which contains between 150 and 250 billion stars. When the aliens turn the telescope away from our galaxy and direct it outwards, it registers millions, even billions of other galaxies, many even bigger than our own. Meditating on how small we are in the grand scheme of things, how short our lives are and what we see as important matters less than we think, is both freeing and humbling.

Thank you for watching.