Close your eyes and let the world in
The Art of Stoic Meditation
1. Desire
Desires are like water, they take the shape of their surroundings. We’re thrown into the world at birth and the world that we come to know shapes what we want and how we want it.
Fashions and customs change, and therefore the things we desire. What would be unthinkable or an abomination in one place or time, is a delicious pleasure in another. Desire is blind, it grasps out like the tendrils of a vine for whatever we believe is necessary for pleasure.
In Stoicism, there is the notion of the “discipline of desire”. To understand why we ought to meditate, we need to understand desire.
Most of what we know about the discipline of desire comes from Epictetus, the first-century philosopher. Epictetus would have known well what it was like to have unfulfilled desires because he was raised as a slave.
Epictetus, through Stoicism, came to understand an important lesson. The Stoic understands that there is a double bind at the heart of our desires — we think we need ever more pleasure to be happy, but when we don’t attain that pleasure we feel more pain. What makes us unhappy is the very mechanism of seeking happiness — desire itself.
