To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. They are like this because they cannot tell good from evil. In this way, Stoicism works best as preventative medicine.Ī great example of this technique can be found in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. Strong emotions are always going to be harder to navigate when they come up as unexpected reactions to events. To prepare ahead of time to negate obstacles.To rehearse acting wisely in the face of hardship.īefore going about their day, the Stoics would imagine in advance the obstacles that might come up for three reasons: having to abandon a minor pleasure, to as severe as total immersion in an imagined scenario in which the worst fear(s) of the practitioner has (have) really occurred, e.g. The severeness of negative visualization range from as mild as thinking of a minor inconvenience, e.g. Unlike the general focus of creative visualization of inducing an imaginary positive psychological and physiologic response, negative visualization focuses on training the practitioner on the negative outcomes of realistic life scenarios to desensitize or create psychological fitness in preparation for real-life losses and also to induce feelings of gratitude towards the real things or actual status that the practitioner has. It is thought to have been one of the common forms of Stoic spiritual exercises. The technique was made popular with publications of Seneca the Younger's Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium. The method originated with the Cyreanic philosophers and was later adopted by Stoic philosophers. Negative visualization or futurorum malorum præmeditatio (Latin, literally, pre-studying bad future) is a method of meditative praxis or askēsis by visualization of the worst-case scenario(s).
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