readoldthings

 Let's move on with some more Sun Tzu.

Our next two conditions to take into account are Heaven and Earth.


We can say that Heaven refers to Time, Earth to Space. Or we can say that Heaven means Conditions, Earth, Locations. 

If we take these things into account, we can help achieve our goals-- military or otherwise. July is a bad time to apply for a ski resort in the northern Hemisphere, but a good time for a beach vacation; November is a fine time to release a Christmas album, but a bad time to invade Russia. And everyone who has ever been in a romantic relationship knows that there are good times and bad times for any sort of conversation. If what you want is an affordable home to rent or buy, the Midwest is a good place to look; Manhattan is not. Social media is a good place to market products such as online classes, but a very bad place to resolve political disputes. 

Those who practice spirituality or magic of any kind will know that there are esoteric dimensions to both of these. Astrological conditions and days of the week can be favorable or unfavorable for particular goals. Wednesdays, belonging to Mercury, are good for anything involving communication; Saturdays, belonging to Saturn, are good for settling debts. For Christians, the saints are traditionally evoked on their feast days, of course. Some also have days of the week or months of the year. In Western Christianity Saturday is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, for example, while Wednesdays are St. Joseph's. 

In spiritual practice, "Earth" can refer both to the terrain, material or otherwise, that you wish to "occupy," or to places in which to do your work. That is: If you plan to petition St. Joseph to help you get a job at a construction firm, the terrain refers to both the company that you want to work for and to a nearby church dedicated to St. Joseph, where you might go and light a candle or make a donation to ask the saint's intercession. If you're hoping, on the other hand, to make contact with Earth spirits, a forested mountaintop or a deep cavern is your best bet-- not a skyscraper!

For any action that we undertake to further our goals, let us ask ourselves, "Is this the right time for this? Is this the right place and setting for this? If not, what might be " 

Another note on Anger from Seneca.


Among faithful Catholics, for whom the confession of sins to a priest is necessary for salvation, there is an issue known as scrupulosity. This is the process of constant self-judgment and self-recrimination which can drive a person insane if it goes too far.

Now, whether the Catholic Church, by mandating confession, sets people up for this sort of mental disorder is beside the point. If you look at manuals on how to make a good confession, scrupulosity is often addressed, and the would-be penitent reminded that they do not have to confess, as sins, those fleeting thoughts and emotions which enter their minds in response to external stimuli.

The sin is not a sudden feeling or thought. The sin is acting upon the sudden feeling or thought.

***

I've noticed that the comments have dropped off as I've pushed this particular piece of Seneca's, and I'm going to turn to something else soon. But there are at least two reasons I want to work with this one.

The first is straightforward enough. I think Seneca is right about the passions in general and anger particularly. When I was growing up, when a family member would fly off the handle and go on a screaming fit, it would be attributed to their "Italian temper." Later on in life, I heard the same things about "Irish tempers" and "Polish tempers." On a similar note, I've heard the following reasons given for drunkenness: Irish, Polish, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean. I conclude that people simply like making excuses for their bad behavior. (It's worth noting that in almost every case, the individuals in question were American, at least according to their passports.) I don't want to be that way. 

The second is that anger, as I've written before, our society is designed to lead us about by our passions. PR men, advertisers, and political hacks use the instincts toward rage, fear, lust and sociability to overcome our reasoning minds and lead us toward whatever behaviors they like. They use tv shows, commercials, memes, and social media tricks like "Downvotes" and "Like buttons." And we end up like cattle, led to despise certain groups and behaviors, support this or that candidate, and repeat the words of others instead of thinking our own thoughts.

Just a few minutes ago, I looked at Facebook, and I saw the following "conversation." One woman posted a lengthy account purporting to be the story of a man who received the coronavirus vaccine and had a very bad adverse reaction. Another woman commented "I am grateful to have received my vaccine this week. Trust the science." Now, "Trust the science" is not even grammatical, since "The science" is not a discrete thing, preferably a person, in which one can place trust and distrust. Moreover, I can guarantee that the woman who insisted that we "trust the science" has not spent so much as 30 seconds looking at or considering any of the scientific research around the vaccine, nor would she even be able to do so if she wanted to. And, of course, the words "Trust the science" are not her own. It's a slogan which was probably cooked up by the kinds of think-tanks whose job it is to produce easily-marketable talking points. She either heard it on TV or read it on the internet somewhere.

Of course, the first woman is just as guilty. Her part in the conversation consisted of re-posting someone else's words, verbatim, without comment. Does she have her own thoughts on them? Who knows. In both cases, you have human beings acting not even like animals, because animals at least make their own yowls, cries and growls. They're acting, instead, like robots. When you were a kid, did you ever turn two wind-up toys loose on the kitchen floor, to try to get them to "fight" each other? That's virtually all that most of us are these days. Little toys, wound up and set against each other by people with the minds of children. 

In the name of God, let's try and be better than that! "If you can control yourself, no one else can control you."

More from Seneca's letter On Anger, this time concerning the punishment of wrongdoing: 
 
Seneca is talking about punishing criminals in an official capacity. Obviously, the great majority of us will never be in that position in a public sense. But most of us will find ourselves in exactly this position when we become parents. 

Even if you don't have children, you know the difference between the parent who punishes misbehavior appropriately, and the parent who resorts to wrath. The first instructs, the second abuses. This is true even if the official punishment is the same. To be told calmly but firmly that you will be grounded for the next month, coupled with some thoughts as to what you might have done to merit the punishment is an altogether different experience from the same punishment being accompanied by screaming, breaking things, or violence. 

We won't all have children anymore than we will all find ourselves appointed as judges, but we can all take these lessons to heart, and approach the world and our fellows as though we were just parents. I think that, to be a just parent of this kind is the literal definition of "maturity." And again, this is true whether or not one has any children. Many parents behave like children themselves, throwing the equivalent of temper tantrums when their kids misbehave. 

The extracts from the Stoics seem to have been the most popular things I've posted here, and I wonder if this isn't why. We live in a stunningly, absurdly immature culture. The generations currently passing away-- the Silents and the Boomers-- seem to me to have never grown up. I wonder if we aren't all desperate for an end to childhood. And that's what the Stoics offer: Follow their advice at any age and you can cease to be a boy or a girl, and become, at long last, a real man, a real woman.  

More On Anger:


If we need to rely on wrath and provocation to enter into any conflict, even if the conflict is worth fighting, the mere fact that we would not have entered into it without the aid of anger proves that we are-- by Seneca's standards-- "slack and cowardly."

 More from Seneca On Anger:


When I see people-- or  myself-- fly off the handle during (say) a confrontation over politics on social media, I wonder, what is the point? I don't mean that in a rhetorical way. I mean, literally-- when you become angry and shout at someone on the internet or elsewhere, what were you actually trying to accomplish? And did you manage to do so?

By way of illustrating the point, let me tell an embarrassing story. 

Upon a time, my cell phone was not turning on and I thought it was broken, so I went to the Verizon store. I was very quickly cornered by a sales guy who used a series of psychological tactics to get me to spend a bunch of money on a new phone. I would not be surprised if the guy had learned some kind of hypnosis or neurolinguistic programming. He got under my skin immediately, put me in an awkward and insecure position, and then got me to spend a bunch of money. I left feeling dazed and, if I may be honest, rather emasculated, like I'd lost a boxing match. Except worse, because I have lost boxing matches, and afterward felt like I'd kept my dignity and given a good accounting of myself. Now I just felt like a fool. 

Over the next two days, two things happened. First, I quickly discovered-- not at all to my surprise-- that my old phone worked just fine. Second, I broke the new phone by dropping it on the floor.

At that point I was furious, and decided that the state of fury was a perfectly fine time to go back to the Verizon store and demand my money back. 

The result?

I was kicked out of the store within 2 minutes, nor did I at any time get one penny back of the money I spent on the new phone. 

Sometimes we have to fight. When that happens, neither anger nor any of the other passions are any kind of aid. 

We'll get back to the Stoics in a few days. For now, another ancient writer tells us,

What's the advice to be found here, you ask? I see at least one per verse:

Not all children are born entirely of the race of men-- and may it not be that in the birth of all children is seen the entrance into this physical world of a Power which is beyond the physical world? (If you have ever been present at the birth of a child, you may answer yes);

Don't humiliate other people in public, even if you think they've done you a great wrong-- attend to your own vices, not those of others; 

And pay attention to your dreams; often they may contain messages from the spiritual world. I would include daydreams in this as well, and remind you that you can enter into these on purpose. 

Merry Christmas. 


 

As I mentioned yesterday, I want to take some time now to go through Seneca's essay On Anger. 

Let's start by getting an idea of his approach. What is the problem with anger, that we need a whole essay to discuss it? The answer is simple:

Seneca's conclusion to De Providentia is difficult and quite foreign to the modern reader. I was going to leave it out and go on to something else, but I feel like that would be cheating. We've come this far with Seneca; let's make it to the end.

Speaking on God's behalf, Seneca writes:


Yes, he's saying exactly what he seems to be saying. If it gets too bad, you can always kill yourself. Earlier on, he had praised the courage of Cato, who took his own life rather than fall into the hands of Juilius Caesar.

How do you react to this? 

My first instinct was simply to recoil, and shake my head at the horror of an earlier age.

After that I tried to argue with Seneca. Can suicide ever be right? No, I thought-- not if the duty to live is a higher moral duty. If God has given us a life, it's an act of impiety and ingratitude to refuse to see it to the end. It seemed to me that Seneca's earlier advice on bearing suffering was much better than this-- let us rather have the fortitude to bear the life we have been given, than to retreat like a coward into a death chosen rather by ourselves than by the gods.

We have a moral duty to see our lives to the end, and not to run away from suffering. By our suffering we may expiate our sins; we may train ourselves to endure; we may learn compassion for others who suffer; we may even offer our own pain as a sacrifice on others' behalf. By suicide we gain nothing.

I think that that probably is the right response. That said, I want to suggest that it is worth taking a moment-- just a moment-- and entering into Seneca's ideas on their own terms. Part of the point of reading these Old Things is that they are a repository of wisdom that we may need in these times. But the other point is less about the content of the Old Things than about their context. Whether it's Seneca or Aristotle, Louis de Montfort or Eliphas Levi, the authors that I post here all lived in different times, different places, and different cultures from ourselves. The result is that they were able to think thoughts that are unavailable to us on a day to day basis. If there is one thing that we as a culture desperately need, it's the ability to think other thoughts than those to which we have become habituated.

Do we need thoughts of suicide? Maybe not, but the very extremity of those thoughts may be work to jar something loose in our minds and open unexpected doors, when an easier thought could not have done so.

And so I repeat the suggestion: Take a moment and enter into Seneca's way of thinking. The way out lies open, and you can take it at any time. Don't fear what comes so quickly.

 What have you to share with us today, O Seneca?


"Why do bad things happen to good people?" we ask.

"They don't," Seneca replies. 

What is evil? "Sin and crime," "evil council and schemes for greed," "blind lust and avarice." Notice that all of these are things which are in our power to choose. By divine aid-- grace is the usual term-- we refuse evil things and become good. What does it matter in what condition are external things? They were never ours to begin with.