https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bm5ybQOGWXI
Welcome everyone to a special episode of Voices with Verveki. This is episode six of the Philosophy of Meditation series. I’m very happy to be here, and I’m gonna turn things immediately over to my ongoing partner in this wonderful series. Just so much has happened. I’m really excited about today, and I’m gonna turn it over to Rick Rapetti. He’ll do a microintroduction of himself, because if you don’t know who he is by now, that would be very odd. And then he’ll do a more extensive introduction of Massimo. So take it away, Rick. Thank you, John. Well, I’m the author, the editor rather, of the Rutledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation. I’m a faculty member, philosophy professor at CUNY, and John, of course, wrote a chapter, and so did our special guest today for that handbook. And that handbook inspired this series, so that’s why we’re here. So enough about me, let’s get on to our guest. Like John, Massimo’s a philosopher, scientist, author of important works, contributor to my recent anthology, which I just mentioned, which promoted this series. But Massimo’s also a leader in the contemporary initiative to promote philosophy as a way of life. More particularly in this regard, he’s an APPA, American Philosophical Practitioners’ Association Certified Philosophical Counselor, but more importantly, he’s a leading figure in the revival of Stoicism. I first met Massimo personally at an American Philosophical Association convention in a hotel restaurant when Ben Abelson and Marie Frequignon, two more contributors to the Rutledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation, introduced me to him as he was sitting at an adjacent table. Massimo, do you remember that? Yeah, it’s a small world, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, there was a little coincidence, and then you wound up in my book because I thought, oh, I know Massimo does Stoicism and they do philosophy, and they do meditation in there. Let’s see if he’d write a chapter for the book, and he did, and we’re very happy that he did. It was a great chapter, by the way. So in this series, we like to mention connections with previous or future guests. So this is episode six. In episode one, John and I introduced the series, and we also focused on John’s work that’s relevant to it, as if John was both the cohost and the guest, what John might describe as integrating four E cognitive science with Eastern and Western contemplative philosophy. In episode two, we interviewed Pierre Grimes, one of the first contemporary Western philosophers to try to bridge Western philosophy, particularly Neoplatonism with Buddhism. He’s also a philosophical counselor connected with APPA. In episode three, we interviewed Lou Marinoff, the founder of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, or APPA, whose work similarly bridges Western and Buddhist philosophies. In episode four, we interviewed Thomas Metzinger, whose work integrates analytic philosophy four E cognitive science and meditation as a key tool in the exploration of consciousness. And in the previous episode, episode five, we interviewed Evan Thompson, who does similar work and is renowned as a trailblazer in bringing into existence four E cognitive science and bringing it to the attention of philosophers. So far, all of us who’ve been here are interested in the links between philosophy, meditation, and the nature of consciousness, conceptions of the self, and so on. And we share attempts to integrate meditation with cognitive science and philosophical analysis and with philosophy as a way of life. So four of us by now who’ve been on this series are APPA certified philosophical counselors. In our next episode, we’ll be interviewing Mark Miller, another cognitive scientist and philosopher interested in contemplative studies. Well, we’re delighted to have you here today, Massimo. Before we begin with our list of questions for you about which we might go off script, I’d like to ask John if you’d like to say anything else or otherwise we’ll just dive in with some questions. John? Either then, it’s a great pleasure to have Massimo here. I regularly involved with the stoic community. I’ve spoken at two stoicons, the most recent one that was online, and I’ve contributed to stoicism today. And so I’m very interested in this connection and I’m very interested in the connections between stoicism and some of my current work of trying to revise a more ancient notion of rationality that is not so centered on logicality but is centered on self-correction and the affordance of flourishing and connects a lot more with the notion of reasonableness than it does to our more logical notion of rationality. And so stoicism obviously provides a nice framework to consider in connection with that. And so those are some of the themes I might want to explore with Massimo, but I’m really happy to follow his lead wherever this goes. All right, so Massimo, tell us a little bit about yourself in your own words. What are you working on these days and what else should the audience know about you upfront? My gosh, what do I start? So let’s see, my background actually is in evolutionary biology, very different from this kind of stuff that I’m doing now. I was a practicing empirically minded evolutionary biologist for a couple of decades early on in my career. And then at some point, midlife crisis hit, I decided to veer toward philosophy, went back to graduate school, got my PhD because I didn’t want to just play at a scientist pretending to be a philosopher. I really wanted to do the real thing. So, and it worked out. Of course, my technical field of expertise within philosophy is philosophy of science has nothing to do with ancient philosophy at all. But then I got, because of the same sort of midlife crisis that triggered the academic shift, I also got interested in practical philosophy. I grew up as a Catholic in Italy, in Rome, and then I left the church very early on. And ever since I consider myself a secular humanist. But when the first serious crisis in my life started hitting, things like a divorce or my father dying or something like that, I discovered that actually I did not really have a lot of tools to deal with these kinds of situations. And so I thought, oh, let me take a look at the philosophical traditions. Surely I’ll find something useful there. And I immediately zoomed in on virtue ethics as what I think was the most promising approach. I did the usual stops Aristotle, the Epicureans, things like that. Neither one of them really spoke to me. And then one day on Twitter, now X, hopefully to go bankrupt very soon. Yeah, you can tell I have opinions about that. I actually got this tweet that said, help us celebrate Stoic week. And I thought, Stoic week, what the hell is that? And why would anybody want to celebrate the Stoics? I thought at the time I kind of had the usual misconception about the Stoics basically as Mr. Spock from Star Trek. So try to stiff upper lip and suppress your emotions kind of stuff. But then I remember, wait a minute, but I did read Marcus Aurelius when I was in college. I read Seneca, I translated Seneca when I was in high school, Latin. And I never actually put the two of them together into the same boat. So I was, ah, let’s take a look. And the rest is history, as they say. That really caught me. And ever since I’ve been there, I’ve been spending more and more of my time to the study, practice, and public presentation of Stoicism. Great. All right, so you answered my next question was how did you come upon Stoicism? So we can jump down to the next one. John, at any point, if you want to ask me these questions. Yeah. All right, well, I’ll ask the next one. So in the book, the Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation, I foregrounded three questions. And I’m curious what your take is on any or all of them. One, can meditation contribute to philosophy? Two, is there, can there be, or ought there to be a philosophy of meditation? And then three, is meditation itself a form of philosophy? Yeah, those are very good questions. And you can answer them in different ways that all make sense to me. Let’s start with the second one, I guess, in terms of the way I think about things. So is there or can there be a philosophy of meditation? Yes. Well, there is. As a matter of fact, the book you put together, it’s clearly an obvious example of the fact that there is. Also, can there be? Yes, for the simple reason you can do philosophy of anything. If by philosophy of, we mean critical reflection on a particular topic based on an understanding and discussion of the corpus of that topic, yes, you can do philosophy of pretty much anything. And in fact, people do, as you know. The philosophies of have been the major area of development of philosophy throughout at least the second half of the 20th century in the first part of the 21st century. So we have philosophy of science, which is my field, which in fact is not even philosophy of science. Now it’s gotten specialized into philosophy of biology, philosophy of quantum mechanics, and so on and so forth. You have obviously philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of almost anything. So yes, there certainly can be. Well, what are there ought to be? That’s an interesting question. I would say if a topic is interesting enough and if enough people are having discussions about that topic that might be confused by conceptual issues that are concerned with that topic, then yes, there ought to be a philosophy of X. In this particular case, clearly a lot of people are interested in meditation, and not just scholars, but the general public. There does seem to be a significant amount of confusion or at least disagreement about meditation, mindfulness, and related terminology. So yes, I think there ought to be, I guess, a philosophy of meditation. Now, can meditation contribute to philosophy? Ah, that is a good question actually. And I’m not sure what the answer can be because I think that that depends on what one means by philosophy, right? And there are different opinions about what that means. So I think I can give a response from the specific perspective that I adopt, which is Stoicism in particular and virtue ethics more generally. Yes, in that case, the answer is very clearly yes. Since Stoicism, as we’ll see hopefully when we get more into the details, but meditating in Stoicism is a kind of activity that’s very much philosophical in nature. It has a practical import. The goal is practical. It’s to help people live a better life, but it most certainly is a type of philosophizing. You’re supposed to ask yourself questions about values and how you rank your values and therefore also at some level defend those rankings, at least with yourself. Why am I valuing certain things and not valuing other things? And that is philosophizing from a very, as I said, practical orientation, but it certainly is. And that answer is, I think, again, from the stoic perspective at least and from the virtue ethics perspective in general, answer is also the third question, is meditation a form of philosophy? Certainly the kind of meditation that we do in Stoicism is because it’s explicitly reflective, deliberative about whatever it is that you’re thinking about in terms of values, priorities, actions, why act in certain ways and not other ways. So I guess the answer, at least from my perspective, is all the three questions is yes. Can I ask a question? Oh, yeah. So that brings a question to my mind and I sort of have an intuitive judgment about this, but it’s not well formed, so I’m open to correction. But it seems to me that in that sense, stoic meditation and mindfulness practices, because I think there’s also contemplative practices that are part of Stoicism, but it seems like they have a concern for a connection to rationality. Again, broadly construed, a pre-Cartesian notion of rationality that doesn’t seem to be foregrounded, explicit, and is often even in fact challenged in more Asiatic types of meditation. And I wonder if you think that’s a legitimate intuition and if you could comment on that if you think there’s some fruitfulness in there. Yeah, I think the intuition is correct, at least as far as I can tell. And the way I would put it is this. The Stoics, first of all, as you were saying earlier on, are not interested just in logic as in formal, I mean, they do do that. For sure. They contributed, in fact, their propositional logic was a major contribution to the history of the field in the first place, and it was in fact pretty much the way to do things up until Gottlieb Frege in the late 19th century. So they were certainly interested in what we would call today formal logic. But for them, logic in general really meant reasonableness. It meant a much broader set of activities that include pretty much anything that improve or has the potential to improve the human ability to reason. So it would include, in modern terms, it would include all of psychology, cognitive science, certainly the study of biases, the study of cognitive biases or fallacies, informal fallacies as well as the formal ones. So it is a much broader conception. And I agree that it would be better to call that reasonableness rather than logic, even though the term the ancient Stoics themselves did use is logic. But so long as we understand that what they meant was much broader than what we mean today. Now, all of this is connected to the fact that the Stoics thought that a good life is the result of studying and understanding three interrelated fields of inquiry, which they refer to as physics, logic and ethics. But again, in all of those three cases, what they meant was much broader than what we mean today. Physics really came from<|el|> is that it’s going to be difficult to live in the world if you have profound misunderstandings about how the world works. Specific example. If you find yourself in the middle of a pandemic and you don’t understand a little bit about viruses and how they work, you might die. You might make the wrong choices. And you or your loved ones are going to suffer as a result. So we’re not talking about science and metaphysics in the general, very broad sense of, oh, I want to spend my life studying quantum mechanics. That’s fine. That’s what you want to do. Go ahead. But in terms of what the Stoics were interested in, we’re talking about a sufficient understanding of the general way in which the world works so that that’s going to help you specifically live your life. Second was logic, which as I said a minute ago, is again much broader. Why? Well, because you can know everything you want about the world, but if you don’t reason correctly about that knowledge and you try to apply it in a way that makes sense, then it’s like you didn’t have it. So you have to have the understanding, but you also have to have to reason correctly about that understanding, the implications of a certain view of the world. And then finally, ethics, which also had a much broader understanding in not only for the Stoics, in general for the Greco-Romans. Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. By ethics today, typically we mean the study essentially of right and wrong actions, right? So if you do a Kantian deontology or euthanitarianism or that sort of stuff, basically what you’re trying to do is to come up with a universal understanding of what makes an action right or wrong. For the Stoics, that certainly is part of it, but the general idea is much, much broader. Ethics really is literally the study of how to live your life, every aspect of your life. So because any decision, from a Stoic perspective, any decision you make has to be appropriate. Any action has to be appropriate. Kata konta was the term that the Stoics used. Kata konta are appropriate actions. That is, you act in the world, every action that you carry out in the world has implications for yourself and for other people, and therefore it is inherently ethical. That is, it concerns the way in which you want to live with other people. After all, the word ethics itself comes from a toss in Greek, which means character, and it was translated or has connections with the notion of character, and it was translated by Cicero in Latin as Morales, from which we get morality. So ethics and morality were not distinguished, at least according to the ancient Stoics. Morales had to do with mores, that is with societal rules and actions in society at large. So the general idea is that ethics or morality has to do with both your character and how that character manifests when you act in society. And if you put all those three things together, then it becomes obvious that, yeah, you do want to study logic, but by which one doesn’t mean necessarily the intricacies of modern technical aspects of logic. In fact, you don’t want to do that. One of the things that the Stoics are very clear, both the Pictitos and Seneca, is that if you get yourself too much lost into the details of a technical field, then you’re losing perception of what is actually important. You’re losing, you’re not paying attention to what is actually important. This is one of my favorite passages in Epictetus, however, is about the use of logic, and it’s a student who comes up and says, you know, why should I study logic? Why shouldn’t I not just focus on what’s important, which is the ethics? And Epictetus’ response is, well, would you like me to give you an argument for why you need logic? And the student says, yes, absolutely, go ahead. And Epictetus says, and how are you going to understand the argument if you don’t actually know logic? Like, yeah, right. So yes, logic is important so long as, again, it’s applied to actually the general goal, which is to live a eudaimonic life, a life worth living. So if I could follow up on that and maybe bring the connection back, that was excellent, by the way, that was really good. But bring it back to the topic of meditation proper. One thing in that sort of logic psychology thing, well, you mentioned two things that really I’m interested in. One was implied, and the soics, of course, do talk about this, and Hadeu has drawn this out, and I wanna know what you think about that. And this is a place where it’s converging with sort of cutting edge coaxai, which is the importance of attention to being reasonable, that the training of attention is as important as the training of argumentation. So paying attention appropriately and being able to judge situations according to their appropriateness, their proper proportioning. And then that notion of appropriateness, I mean, this is where my personal academic bias comes in, and of course, everybody’s obsessed with their own work. But I do a lot of work in connection with artificial general intelligence and rationality around this ability to zero in on relevant information and connect up to it in a relevant manner. And this is turning out to be, I would argue, and I think more and more people are agreeing with me, that this is turning out to be sort of the key thing about what makes us intelligent, as opposed to merely sort of instinctively reactive to the world and the kind of entities we are. And so there has been an increasing interest within cognitive science because of the notion of the connection between relevance realization, selective attention, sort of comporting yourself so you fit the world correctly on mindfulness as trying to get at the core of that. Now, it seems to me at least a reasonable proposal that the Stoics were kind of prescient about this and on to this because they have, stuff about paying attention pro-saucer, and they have another aspect of mindfulness pro-chiron because the original meaning in sati is not the Kabat-Zinn paying attention to the present moment, it’s reminding, it’s being able to bring things into the present moment when it’s appropriate to do so and you’re trying to train that. And that seems to line up, now I’m not the first person to do this, and I’m really hesitant to easy equivalencies across Buddhism and Stoicism or something like that. So I’m not quite making that claim, but there seems to be a more general convergence around, if we move to reasonableness and the way you’ve talked about, attention is playing a really important role because attention is the first and also significant place in which we’re doing this appropriateness, judgment and realization and the training of that, but also the training of it so that we remember, so it transfers to the rest of our life. And those seem to be proper themes of mindfulness within the Asian philosophy. But I wanna give you a chance, maybe all I’m doing is giving you a chance to advertise Stoicism, but it seems to me that Stoicism is also properly prescient in talking about attention, that sense of appropriateness, that mindfulness has this reminding aspect to it. Could you comment on that? And before you do, Massimo, before you do, I just wanna mention that this is a very more complex version of the next question I was gonna ask you, which is to just compare the stoic concept of prosocial and contemporary understandings of mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, it’s all in a league as one bigger question. Right, and I definitely wanna go back to the comparison both with my understanding at least of the early Buddhist conception of mindfulness and also with the Kabat-Zinn variety, modern version. But first let’s talk about, so what is it the stoics actually mean? The word you used is the key one, prosoche, which is typically translated as attention, but sometimes increasingly it’s being translated as mindfulness, often with the modifier stoic mindfulness to distinguish it from what might be other kinds of mindfulness. Now, Epictetus devotes an entire section of the discourses, section 412 to the topic. In fact, the title of that section is on attention. Now, let me give you a flavor of what it is that he’s talking about. He says, to what things should I pay attention then? In the first place, to those general principles that you should always have at hand so as not to go to sleep or get up or drink or eat or converse with others without them, namely that no one is mastered over another person’s choice and that it is in choice alone that our good and evil lie. And next, we must remember who we are and what name we bear and strive to direct our appropriate actions according to the demands of our social relationships, remembering what is the proper thing to sing, the proper time to play, and in whose company, and what will be out of place and how we make sure that our companions don’t despise us and that we don’t despise ourselves, when we should joke and whom we should laugh at and to what end we should associate with others and with whom, and finally, how we should preserve our proper character when doing so. So this is a long list, which basically summarizes a lot of Stoic philosophy, at least Epictetus’ version of it. Basically, what Epictetus is saying is you need to pay attention to everything you do whenever you interact with other people. He says you have to remind yourself basic principles, remind yourself of basic principles of Stoicism. In this particular case, one of the principles he’s talking about is the fact that we pretty much are our choices, and our choices, our judgments, are the things that define us. That’s the only thing that we control. This is the only thing that, you know, deliberate choices, the kind of things that you sit down and say, okay, should I do this or should I do that? That is, in the end, that’s who you are, and that’s the only thing you control. You don’t even control the outcome of those choices because, of course, externals can get in the way, right? I may decide, for instance, to do, well, it’s a good idea for me to go to the gym and get a little healthier. Right, that’s a good choice, and that is up to me. Whether I’m actually going to be able to do it or not depends on external circumstances. It’s very possible that I’m going to go to the gym, you know, across the street, and then a car hits me and I break my leg, and I’m not going to go to the gym that day, right, as a result. So then he’s also telling us, you know, we need to remember to pay attention to who we are and what name we bear. This is a reference to an important aspect of Stoic philosophy, which is referred to as role ethics. So this notion that in life we have, we take on a number of roles, varying from roles that are imposed on us or attributed to us by the circumstances, you know, you’re somebody’s son, for instance, that’s not your choice, to roles that we choose within the circumstances of our lives. I decided to start one particular career rather than another, so on and so forth, and the broader role of being a human being. The Stoics were cosmopolitan, so the most important thing for them was, in fact, to remind yourself that you are a member of a broad family that encompasses all humanity. A bunch of things follow from those reminders and from those roles, and Epictetus is saying, you should pay attention to it. Now, why should I pay attention to it? Because, he says in the same section, when you relax your attention for a while, do not fancy you will recover it whenever you please. But remember this, that because of your fault of today, your affairs must necessarily be in a worse condition in future occasions, right? So he says, look, it’s not like you can do, you know, you can go and do other things, not paying attention to what you’re doing, and all of a sudden you say, oh, let me go back to it. And as you know, there is actually a lot of research today that backs up this point, that is, it’s not easy to multitask, as we would say today, to shift your attention back and forth to different things. The more you do that, the worse you’re gonna be carrying out each one of those tasks, which I keep trying to repeat to my students. There’s no such a thing as multitasking. Exactly, there is only very rapid sequential tasking. Right? And finally, Epictetus says, very little is needed for everything to be upset and ruined. Only a slight lapse in reason. It’s much easier for a mariner to wreck his ship than it is for him to keep it sailing safely. All he has to do is had a little more upwind and disaster is instantaneous. In fact, he does not have to do anything. A momentary loss of attention will produce the same results. So he’s saying, the reason you wanna pay attention is because nothing has ever been improved by not paying attention to it. If you just do things without paying attention, you’re not gonna get them done well. So attention, prosoche again is the word that Epictetus uses and Marcus Aurelius uses, is in fact crucial to stoic practice in that sense. Interestingly, Seneca translates that in Latin because both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek. And so they both use prosoche. In Latin, Seneca uses the same concept, but he uses two words, animum advertere, which means to turn the mind to. So you are turning your mind, you’re paying attention. You are, if you’re doing something, if you’re carrying out a task, you pay attention to that task, like what I’m doing right now. So I’m having a conversation with you guys, what did I do? I’m looking at my computer screen. So the first thing that I did before we started the conversation was to turn off all the notifications on my computer because for the duration of this meeting, because otherwise I’m gonna start getting distracted. Like, oh, there’s something popping up out there, right? And I’m trying to be in an environment in my home, in my apartment in Brooklyn. There’s nobody else in the apartment, there are no sounds. I turned off the dishwasher, that sort of stuff. Why? Because I want to pay attention. Once we’re done, then I can go back to whatever else needs to be done and pay attention to it. So that’s pretty much what the stoics mean by mindfulness, by prosoche. Now, Rick, you wanna go back to the comparison with Buddhism. Well, I know you wrote about it in your chapter for the book. I’m just, well, like, what’s the major difference, would you say, is between the stoic approach to not just meditation or prosoche, but to contemplative and meditative practices versus maybe, you know, John Kabat-Zinn or what the popular Western secularized interested, which is not the same thing as all the ancient Asian traditional practices, but just say a little bit about any of those differences for the audience. Yeah, that’s a great question, which of course comes up often, because as John was saying, there often are people pointing to parallels between or convergences between Buddhism and stoicism. And I do think there are a number of them, especially in the ethics, the metaphysics is very different. But at least between the ancient versions of the metaphysics, modern Buddhists may actually agree more with modern stoics. But in terms of the ancient philosophy, the metaphysics is very different. In terms of the ethics, on the other hand, there are a lot of parallels. However, there are also some differences, and it is important to keep the differences in mind, not because we need to engage in any kind of, this is better than the other one. You know, whatever works for somebody, if Buddhism works for you as a philosophy of life, go for it. If stoicism works for you, go for it. And I’m interested, I tend to be more interested in the parallels, in the convergences, than in the differences. But nevertheless, the differences are there. Now, that said, the big caveat here is that I am not an expert on Buddhism. I have read about Buddhism, and I have, some of my best friends are Buddhists, as they say, but I’m relying basically on secondhand sources. So my understanding is that these are the major differences, especially between the prosoka, understood as stoic mindfulness, and the Buddhist tradition. Let me start with perhaps the easier one, which is the John Kabat-Zinn version, the modern version of mindfulness, as in his famous mindfulness-based stress reduction kind of thing. So Kabat-Zinn says that mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. Now, stoic mindfulness is in fact paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, and in the present moment. However, it’s very much judgmental. The notion of non-judgmental, no, that’s kind of the point. I mean, you’ve heard of pictitus, right? You have to pay attention to what you’re doing, because otherwise you’re not doing it well. So you have to constantly correct the way in which you’re doing things. You pay attention to the way you’re acting, and it’s interesting that he uses the example, the analogy of a mariner, of somebody who is piloting a ship. What do you do when you pilot your ship? You try to do your best, you pay attention, you also correct your course constantly, right? So you have, which implies that you’re making judgments about, well, is the course the one that I want? And if it isn’t, if I’m going off course, you also have to come up with a judgment, a reasonable judgment of how do I correct it, in which direction, and by how much. So a major difference, I think, between the Kabat-Zinn version of mindfulness and the stoic one is about these judgments. Could I just, for Kabat-Zinn, could I just interject there, Mr. Esmol? You’re being kinder than I have been in publication. I think the Kabat-Zinn runs into a self-contradiction of describing what is meant by non-judgment, when of course there’s all kinds of judgment happening. You bring your attention back from the distraction. You try to look at it in a certain kind of way. You’re trying to follow. I think there’s a confusion of judgment with inference in there. I get what I think what Kabat-Zinn is trying to say is you don’t get into any inferential elaboration or something like that, or theoretical generation, or emotional reactivity. But to claim no judgment, I think there’s either a contradiction there, a performative contradiction, maybe a propositional one, or there is a misunderstanding of judgment as something that is equated to theorizing, which I think is just an inappropriate understanding of what judgment means. That makes sense to me. I would add that just judging that something is a distraction or that mind wandering is something negative, and all those things involve judgments. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I think he means something simplistic, don’t be angry at yourself because your mind wandered, or don’t think anything less of yourself because of the peculiarly bizarro thought that you just had about your mother-in-law or something like that. Don’t judge on that level. But that’s not don’t judge at all. Yeah, that makes no sense. Right, and again, you’re being a little bit kinder, Rick, than I would be. I think that’s fair if mindfulness-based stress reduction was a new thing. But it’s not a new thing, and it has a long history in which people have gone off on this tangent of confusion that we are talking about, and there has been no significant correction to that. Oh, in the traditional Buddhism, it’s so much more like what Massimo’s saying about stoic judgment, which is something is either Dharmic or Adharmic. It’s either leaning toward the telos of nirvana and mental freedom and all that kind of, like virtue epistemological growth, or it’s the opposite. It leads to mental bondage. So there’s a pro or con attitude about the things that arise in traditional Buddhist meditation. I deemphasize or down-regulate those kinds of things, but that’s a good, compassion is good. I’m gonna up-regulate those emotions and thoughts when they happen. So there’s so much more going on in the traditional thing than in this kind of neutered, secularized thing, yeah. Well, now, sorry, go ahead. The Buddha in one of his parables compares it to a person forging a sword, the metal working and the forming of the sword, which is very much the kind of judgment that Massimo is talking about right now. The person making the sword and the person sailing are engaged in a very similar kind of flowing, ongoing, procedural, skillful judgment. Right, with this feedback loop, Yeah, exactly. with the sea captain, okay? The navigation was off a little, or the wind, or so I have to, I’m taking feedback from the environment. If I wasn’t paying attention to what actually the world, what the metaphysics or the science is showing me, right? And reasoning properly about it, I can’t do the right thing. So all those factors are present, and I think in the stoic sense of mindfulness, which by the way, Massimo, I wanted to say when you were talking about what’s the point of it, if you could lose it in one moment of inattentiveness, and I’ve used this in a way that I know John disagrees with me about this, that I’m even in favor of what they call mic-mindfulness, because I’m in favor of anything that reduces mindlessness, even if it’s sort of confused in the way that we were just talking. Mindlessness is what happens in that moment of inattention. So any exercises that will increase anyone’s attentiveness skills, to me, that’s an improvement over the absence thereof. Now, by the next bit, I’m very happy to be corrected by you gentlemen, but my understanding is that sati, mindfulness in the early Buddhist tradition, is a practice of watching four objects of attention as they arise and then pass into our consciousness, and these are the body, feelings, the functioning of the mind, and the qualities of the mind. Now, the goal seems to be, from what I understand, is for the agent to remain focused on those four areas, and while at the same time, setting aside concerns about anything that is external to it. Therefore, in a sense, it’s really studying, carefully studying, paying attention to one’s own phenomenological experience of thinking, the way your mind works. And one does take note of what phenomena are helpful or hurtful, how are they helpful or hurtful, and what makes them arise and cease, et cetera. So sati seems to me to be the careful self-study of one’s physical and mental experiences. Does that make sense? I would add to it the part about the remembrance that’s in the notion of sati. In fact, a lot of this feedback, you’re not going to get in the act of the sitting meditation. You’re not going to get it as you’re enacting the eightfold path, and that it’s understood that that mindfulness functions organically, ecologically, within the eightfold path, and not as an isolated technique. Although it is a disciplined practice, that you practice separate from the activity, but there is the other elements like in stoicism of the discipline of desire and the discipline of judgment. They’re just kind of framed slightly, like right belief, right intention, right speech, right action. So you are supposed to integrate it, but you can practice it just like practicing lifting weights will improve your muscles, but then you need to use your muscles when you’re doing other things. Excellent, I like that analogy. So again, there seems to me to be both similarities and perhaps a little bit of a difference with the stoic approach. The stoic approach is also, the stoics often use the analogy with athletics. You go to the gym, you exercise, or the analogy with medicine, with health. You’re doing whatever it is that it’s gonna make you healthy, not in a physical sense, but in a mental, in a character sense. One of the possible differences lies into these, thing that I mentioned that while you’re doing the sati, you’re setting aside concerns for externals. It comes later, it comes in the eightfold path. For the stoics, the concern for the externals is pretty much the point of doing the exercise. I love one of the analogies that Epictetus uses. He says you should play ball like Socrates did, meaning that when you play ball, the important thing is not the ball. The ball is the external, represents the external, right? And the ball is given to you by the circumstances. And it doesn’t matter what the color is, what the material is, what the size is. That’s not the point. The point is, can you play skillfully? Can you play in a way to the best of your abilities? The circumstances are given to you in stoic metaphysics by the universe. Your only choice, your only agency consists in, okay, given these circumstances, what am I gonna do? Because a virus hit me. All right, am I gonna bitch and moan about it, and I’m gonna be nasty to the people that are gonna take care of me or something? Or I’m gonna say to myself, well, this happens. Let’s try to get through it. Let’s try to be nice to the people that are helping me because after all, they’re trying to help me. That sort of stuff. So things happen, and your major locus of decision-making is how am I going to deal with this thing? And so the attention to the externals is very much the focus for the stoics, not because the externals themselves are actually inherently important. What’s important is how you play with those externals, how you actually handle them, right? Virtue, in a sense, from a stoic perspective, consists precisely in the ability to play correctly with the externals, right? So for the stoics famously and somewhat paradoxically, happiness doesn’t depend on things like health and wealth and reputation and career and all that sort of stuff. It depends on how you handle whether you’re healthy or sick, whether you’re wealthy or poor, whether you have a career or not. Emperor or a slave, yeah. Right, whether you’re an emperor or a slave, exactly. Excellent. All right, so let’s ask you another question to maybe shift the topic a little bit. Could you like, would you like to share some of your own stoic meditative practices or trainings, anything like that? Yeah, with my friend Greg Lopez, who is incidentally both a stoic and a practice Buddhist, we actually co-wrote a book a few years ago called The Handbook for New Stoics, where we put together a number of practices, not just meditative, but actual exercises from the stoic tradition, mostly from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and a little bit from Seneca. And I have also a nice personal subset of those practices, which I actually do on a regular basis. So the major, there are some meditative or contemplative strategies that the stoics use. One of the ones that I like a lot is what it’s called the premeditatsio malorum, thinking about bad things happening, basically, which needs to be done in a particular way because otherwise it can actually backfire. If you do it in a very emotional way, if you start thinking, oh my gosh, all sorts of bad stuff is gonna happen to me, you’re just gonna freak yourself out and you’re gonna get into a cycle of anxiety. The idea is to prepare yourself mentally for a negative outcome of something that you’re about to do so that you know how to handle it, so that you can develop, first of all, you accept the negative outcome because sometimes in life things go your way and other times they don’t. So, and you ready yourself to deal with that situation, with that outcome. So for instance, let’s pick a particular example. Let’s say that tomorrow morning I’m scheduled to go for a job interview. It comes natural to us to, first of all, hope that we’re gonna get the job, which for the Stoics already is starting off on the wrong foot because getting the job is not up to you, it’s up to external circumstances. It depends on a number of factors that you don’t control, such as your competition, who are doing the interview, how they’re doing the interview, et cetera, et cetera. What is up to you is to do the best interview you can, to prepare in the best way you can. The primiditatium malorum consists of before you go to the interview, you very slowly and very deliberately and non-emotionally you describe to yourself as if you were a camera what might happen and what might go wrong, so that if in fact things go wrong, they don’t go the way you hope, you’re okay with them. You’re mentally prepared. Seneca says, you know, the best thing that a mind can do about events is to prepare itself for any kind of outcome, because that way you’re gonna react properly. You’re going to say, okay, well, I knew that this was a job interview. I knew that there was a chance that I wouldn’t get the job. That’s fine, I’m gonna go and apply for another job. There are gonna be other chances. So there is evidence in modern cognitive behavioral therapy that this is actually very useful, if you do it properly, as I said. If you start doing it emotionally, it’s like, oh my God, I’m not gonna get my job and this is gonna be a catastrophe and I’m gonna never recover from it. But then you’re actually doing it very much the wrong way. So that’s one of the things that I do on a regular basis. A broader kind of sort of contemplation technique that the stoics have also will sound very strange to non-stoics and that is a contemplation on death. And there are a number of ways of doing it. The reason to do it is because, you know what? It’s gonna happen to everyone, right? At some point, you’re gonna get there. And in fact, Seneca even goes so far as saying that philosophy is largely the preparation for your ultimate test for what’s gonna happen when you’re facing your own mortality. That may be perhaps a little bit of an exaggeration, but certainly is part of what you wanna do. And there are a number of ways to do it. My favorite one is simply from time to time to go into a nice cemetery and walk around, paying attention to the headstones, read the names, read the dates, pay attention to all these people that are gone and I’m gonna be joining them at some point soon. It could be 20 years down the road, it could be tomorrow. You don’t know. Part of the exercise is to remind yourself that you actually don’t know that. Again, if you do this emotionally, it’s not gonna be pleasant because you’re gonna, again, freak yourself out and say, ah, I’m gonna die. This is gonna be a really bad thing. But if you do that reasonably, to use John’s term, not rationally in the strict sense of the term, but reasonably, then what you’re doing is you simply prepare yourself to accept something that is natural, that’s unavoidable and therefore it will be irrational or unreasonable not to accept it. And at the same time, you get out of that experience, you do your little round around the cemetery, you get out of it and say, hey, but it’s not happening today. So what can I do today in order to enjoy my life for the next day, for the next year, for the next decade, whatever it is, the time that I have left? Promethecation on death is in fact a way not only to prepare yourself to accept something that is inevitable and natural, but also to remind yourself that that very point is to live life to your utmost precisely because it has an end date and because you don’t know what that end date is. And so you don’t wanna waste your time doing things that you’re not gonna regret not doing on your deathbed. But Massimo, just curious, I mean, you said like a camera with the Promethecetatio Malorum, but like for a beginner listening to this right now who wants to go and try this, what is specific instructional advice that you might give them? Good question. So there are different ways of doing it. My favorite, since I tend to be more a person oriented on writing rather than visualizing, for instance, then I actually do it by writing in my personal journal. I sit down in a journal about it, right? But that’s because the way my mind works. Other people do it visually. And so what you do is you get a moment in your house when it’s quiet and there’s no disturbances. You close your eyes and you imagine the specific situation we’re talking about, let’s say the job interview, very slowly and very deliberately, as if you were a camera, as if you were describing the situation. You’d zoom in or zoom out, whatever it is that needs to be done in your mind’s eye. And then you repeat that a number of times, as slowly as possible. For some people that really works. And as I said, for other people on the other hand, I get distracted too easily when I try to visualize things for a sustained period of time. So I prefer to write. So two ways of doing it are either journaling about it or close your eye visual meditation. Yeah, would you say that journaling at night, this is a stoic thing, reflecting retroactively on the day and thinking about one thing you could have done better as a kind of post-meditatio, maybe, a way of describing it? Correct, that’s right. And that is actually something that I do almost every night, just for a few minutes. Both Seneca and Epictetus explicitly describe that technique. Epictetus says, do not let your tender eyelids close before you examine what you’ve done during the day. Ask yourself, what did I do right? What did I do wrong? And what could I do better? And those are three nice, interesting questions. What did I do wrong? It’s not in order so to beat yourself up because regret is not a stoic thing. Whatever you did, it’s done. It’s not like you can go back in time and change it. However, you do wanna learn from your experiences. So when you write down, in using ideally non-emotional language, and in fact, the stoics even suggest to use a second person, like Marcus Serrinius does in the meditations. So you write as if you were writing a letter to a friend. And there is evidence from modern kind of the science that doing it that way, using non-emotional language and the second person actually is helpful because you distance yourself from the emotional aspect of the experience. So what did I do wrong? You wanna learn from your experiences. What did I do right? Well, that’s because you also want to pay attention, prosoca again, to the kinds of stuff that actually you did right because over time, the goal is to do fewer and fewer of the things that went wrong and more and more of the things that went right. So you need to have both points of comparison, so to speak. And probably the third one, the third question is the most important one. What could I do better the next time? Even though we tend to think of our lives as endlessly fascinating and varied, they kind of repeat themselves, situations repeat themselves on a regular basis. We get up in the morning, we go to, we see the same people, we go to work, we see the same people and do pretty much the same thing. Then during the weekend, we go out for friends, et cetera. So there’s not that much variety, which means that similar situation will repeat themselves over and over. And so if I have encountered a situation which I did not handle particularly well, I’m gonna wanna make a note of it. And also I wanna make a note of, well, should something like this happen again, let’s say a discussion with a colleague or a fight with my wife or something like that, how am I going to do it next time? What can I do better the next time? Again, the idea being your mind needs to be prepared. If you’re prepared, you’re gonna react better the next time around. Great, well, we only have a couple of minutes left. So we like to always let the guests end with whatever they like to say, but also which includes plugging your work or how to contact you or any thought that came to your mind that you didn’t get to share with us. But we’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Marcelo. Thank you, this was very enjoyable. Well, in terms of sort of parting words, I think one important thing to understand, in my opinion about practical philosophy is that whatever works for you, as we were saying earlier, do it. The important thing is to engage into reflective exercises about what do you wanna do in life, why you wanna do it, and what is the best way to do it. Whether you adopt a stoic framework or a Buddhist framework or something else that works matters much less than actually doing it. Of course, there are also really bad philosophies of life. I wouldn’t recommend fascism to anybody, for instance, as a life philosophy. But among the ones that work, there is a number of choices. And to some extent, people wanna pick whatever resonates with them, both culturally at a level of individual character and personality and so on and so forth. As for where to find me, well, I’m not on social media, deliberately, on purpose, but I am on Substack. And so I published there under a newsletter called Figs in Winter, which is about stoicism and virtue ethics more generally. And if people are interested, they can find me there. Great, thank you so much, Massimo. John? You also have a wide variety of books that I’m sure that people can find on Amazon that are excellent presentations of your work as well. Massimo, this has been a great pleasure. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m really pleased with the connections that you were making and the comparisons. I think that’s very helpful. I think one of the biases that people carry around in the West is that only the East can talk about a lot of these topics with any philosophical or spiritual depth. And I think what you’re doing is making a very clear case. Know that the West has within its history also a profound cultivation of wisdom, philosophy as a way of life. So thank you very, very much for that. Yeah, thank you, Massimo. This has been excellent. It has been a pleasure. Thank you both.