How does philosophy help us find psychological peace in times of crisis?

In times of adversity and crisis, life becomes harder and more difficult, and our need for what guides us increases to what tells us how to hold together and the world around us collapses. That need is not limited to us in the present time only, but rather is a common denominator between all human beings in all times. That need has limited a group of philosophers in the Hellenistic civilization to create a philosophical school aimed specifically at helping us find peace and inner peace even in the most severe crises, to become that school one of the greatest philosophical schools, and the most able to overcome the barriers of time and help us in the present as it helped many to Two thousand years have passed, it is Stoic philosophy. 

Unlike many other philosophical schools, the Stoic philosophers themselves did not occupy themselves much with the big questions, they did not write volumes in which they tried to internalize the origin and fate of existence, nor did they conduct hundreds of dialogues in search of the meaning behind the existence of evil, nor did they raise dozens of controversies about the nature of the God who created the world, The goal behind their philosophy was different from all this, they wanted to get an answer to a question: How does one live his life optimally?

This question will seem simple compared to the questions posed by other schools, but it is more elusive than it appears. Life by its very nature is not easy, it is filled at every turn with the adversity and pain of our surprise and rob us of our tranquility, most of the time reflects our safety and does not respond to it, and when some dreams that we prayed for and come to us come to realize, we realize that they were in fact only disguised nightmares. Amid all these difficulties, we find ourselves often under the burden of sadness and gloom, and even in times of happiness that passes by us, we do not have the resistance to the ghosts of anxiety that paint for us our worst fears and have become reality, and prevent us from fully enjoying the moments of bliss when they come. 

Today, in an exceptional situation in our recent history, those fears and concerns have turned into a general situation that encompasses humanity as a whole. A small object not seen with the naked eye revealed to us how fragile our lives can turn upside down in a few months. Concern for our livelihoods, which are no longer sustainable, is guaranteed, our lives and the lives of those we love that can be annihilated now in a moment, are a daily reality for millions around the world. Now, under these circumstances, we do not find a philosophy better than stoicism to resort to and search through what was written by her philosophers for an answer to a question: In the midst of adversity and pain, how do we live our lives in an optimal way?

Philosophy as an antidote

The suffering was not alien to Stoic philosophers, so the Zenon founder of Stoicism one day rode on a ship that crashed and destroyed everything he owned, and Seneca the Roman philosopher found himself a game in the hands of the Roman rulers, he was subjected to exile and isolation for eight years, and after obtaining the emperor's approval made him a landmark for his son. But that son was nothing but the craziest and craziest ruler in the history of Rome, Nero, who found no fault when he grew up ordering his teacher Seneca to kill himself, which the philosopher complied with.

As for Marcus Aurelius, the most just and merciful emperor and famous Stoic philosopher, seven of his sons died after children, and the country prevailed in a period marked by turmoil and the plague plague erupted. As for Epictots, one of the greatest and most important Stoic philosophers, a slave owned by others was born and subjected to this to various types of insult, we know from her that his master beat him on one leg violently, and he lived as a result of this what remained of his lifetime limp (1).

In the face of all this suffering, these men resorted to philosophy and found in them a haven and comfort. For them, philosophy was not a study of the theory of life-related theory. Rather, it was like the light they seek in the darkness of the soul. Marcus Aurelius likened philosophy in his memoirs to medicine that relieves pain (2). Of all the lessons of stoic philosophy, the most important lesson that helped them to cope with the vicissitudes of fate and the tragedies of life was the following: Do not link your happiness and psychological peace with the outside world that you have nothing of. 

The risk of your happiness being commented on by external causes

The stereotype of happiness in the minds of many of us is associated with a beautiful house, a bank account with money, a healthy body, loved ones who surround us, and a life that is free from pain and suffering. Such a life would probably be beautiful, but the real problem is that all the elements that make up it - wealth, health, love - are simply things we have no control over. You may wake up tomorrow to find that your wealth is no longer valued as a result of fluctuations in currency prices, or you lose all of it on the stock exchange. 

Even if you keep all of this, you must have experienced the fluctuations of destiny in the past, which makes you sure that nothing lasts, and that everything you enjoy may disappear in the blink of an eye. Then the ghosts of anxiety will enter you from time to time, and they will paint you all possible bad scenarios of your loss of all or some of these things. You will become a distraction soul distributor, do not enjoy inner comfort even in the presence of everything you want. 

Or maybe you do not have that beautiful house and wealth in the first place, maybe your health is not right, maybe you have not yet found someone to love and love you. Does this mean that you have to live in misery? Since you associate your happiness with those external causes, yes, you will not enjoy happiness in her absence, and even if you have it, as we have seen, you have no control over it and you may lose it easily at any moment, and then anxiety will enter you even in its presence, and grief if you lose it. Is this how happiness is? For stoics, linking your happiness to external causes is just the perfect way to live a life filled with misery and anxiety. 

The Stoics divided everything in this life into two parts, things that you could control, and things you had nothing to do with. Among the things that you cannot control, according to Apectots in his book "The Summary": "Our bodies, our property, our reputation and our positions, and in general all that is not of our work and work." All that is not in your hand and you cannot control "are fragile things, slavery, subject to prevention, and their command is entrusted to others." Then it becomes foolish to associate your psychological peace with such things (4).

This psychiatrist Adel Mustafa writes: “If happiness is the aspiration of all people, then those who hang his happiness on external conditions will live our time for the fluctuations of time. Suspicion and remorse "(5).

What the Stoics simply say is that whatever you do, you will not be able to control the destiny and the ups and downs of life, and all the anxiety that your soul pays on you and every care to keep what you love will not benefit you in anything, because in the end you are a pure impotent person who has little of his command, and you will not get from this concern And that anxiety is only misery and fatigue. On the contrary, Seneca finds the only way to happiness is “to stop worrying about what you cannot afford to do” (6). If happiness does not lie then in external causes, then where is it?   

The only place for true happiness

There is no good or ugly thing, it is the thought that makes it so.

(Hamlet, Shakespeare)

According to the Stoics, true happiness resides within yourself. Your self, your thoughts, impulses, and desires, are the only thing in this life that you can fully control, and with some effort and flexibility you can make it a place of comfort and calm, no matter how much you suffer from fluctuations. Time and again, in his diary which he wrote and published after his death under the name of "reflections", he likened the self to a strong fortress that one would resort to from the storms of the outside world, and in this would become the best sanctuary, he writes: "They are looking for resorts for them; in the countryside, on the sea On the hills, and you are particularly vulnerable to this suspicious desire, but this is a smell of minerals. You can still whenever you want a sanctuary in yourself that is between your sides; there is no place in the world more calm and no further from the turmoil than one finds when he comes to himself, Especially if his soul was rich in thoughts that if it kept him flooded him with complete peace and no And confidentiality "(7).

If your self is full of turmoil and involves anger and resentment against life and destiny, you will not find calm anywhere. On the contrary, if you fill it with ideas that help you to coexist and accept your destiny as it is, you will be able to find something of solace and serenity even in the darkest of circumstances. The human soul of the Stoics is a stand alone universe, and of the ideas in which the ability to determine the way we receive what is going on in life is conducted. What you feel of sorrow, discontent, and pain is due not to the outside world and its events that you have nothing to do with it, but to yourself and how you explain what is happening and judge it. 

According to the Stoics, what is appointed is not what happens to us in life, but what we call judgments. Marcus Aurelius says: “If you suffer from distress from something external, what disturbs you is not the same thing, but your opinion about the thing, and you can erase this opinion now.” Epictus writes: “Things are not what makes people angry, but their judgments about things. So when we come across Frustration, upheaval, or sadness, we should not blame anything but ourselves; I mean, not our own judgments. ”It is the same pivotal idea upon which two thousand years later the psychologist Albert Ellis will build the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy school, the most famous psychiatric school today. 8).

Hence, you do not become unhappy when you get sick because the disease itself is a bad thing, but rather because you judged it bad. According to Marcus Aurelius, “Things are in themselves idle, but it is we who produce judgments about them and imprint them in our minds” (9). For the Stoics, sickness is nothing more than a natural part of life. It will inevitably happen to us, and there is no benefit in resisting it. On the contrary, all misery is found in your desire to resist what you have no control over, or as Epictus writes: “Try to avoid disease or death.” Or poverty will expose yourself to misery ", and then the wise behavior here is to stop making judgments, and accept what is happening to us with the same content (10).

Neither disease, nor poverty, nor death per se is evil, the real evil lies in our mind that sees it as such. The wise soul accepts what happens with consent, and does not panic from hardships, nor is it deceived by what it tells us of time from bliss and thinks that it will live forever in joy and joy, but settles itself on the fact that change is the only constant in life, and that this change will not always come in Her interest, and prepares for it. 

Marcus Aurelius says: “A healthy eye should see everything that is visible and does not say“ I only want green things. ”This is the condition of a sick eye, and good hearing and healthy smell must be qualified to realize everything that can be heard or smelled, and a healthy stomach should It accepts all the food in the same way that the mill accepts whatever it was made for grinding, as well as a healthy mind that must be prepared for all possibilities ”(11).

And since suffering inevitably occurs, Stoic philosophers see that instead of wasting your energy in dark thoughts when calamity occurs, and instead of dispelling your psychological peace in discontent with what happened and you do not have to change it, it is more wise to do what you really can, which is coping with Any of what is happening. Marcus writes: “Thorny twigs on the road? Leave it. This is all you need, and you do not have to ask.” And why were such things made in the world? ”This is a funny question for the naturalist, just as a carpenter or a shoemaker laughs at you if he sees you resenting the appearance of a scaler or Scrapbooks, left over from their work, on the ground of the workshop "(12).

Falling in love with fate

To death, the most feared and feared by humans, for the Stoics, there was nothing but natural change and an inevitable part of life, "just as we arise and grow old, and as we grow and mature, and our teeth, melodies, and gray hairs grow, and as we marry and give birth, so we die and disintegrate, so who has a thousand thoughts and reason He shall not be alarmed by death, nor be disheartened, nor alienated from him. Rather, he awaits him, just as he is awaiting an act of nature. ”

Aurelius sees that we have already been told about death, at least figuratively, by dozens of times: “Now turn into the phases of your life; childhood for example, then adolescence, youth, and old age. Here, too, all change is death (stage): Is there something scary? Now to your life with your grandfather, then with your mother, then with your father. Wherever you find many other examples of decomposition, change, or termination, ask yourself whether there was anything to fear? ”(14).

Frequency of death is mentioned in the writings of the Stoics, as the most feared by humans, freedom from his prestige becomes the ultimate emancipation from fear, the primary cause of our misery on this earth. The Stoics go a step further, seeing that until you reach the ultimate happiness on you rather than resisting your destiny to fall in love with it, “Do not ask things to run as you want, but rather that you do things as they happen, and so your life goes on in peace and peace”, “Not You love except what is in your pain and weave for you from the thread of your destiny, nothing is more appropriate for you than this "(15).

This meaning was crystallized by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche after his own method under the concept of "love of fate" (Amor Fati), he says: "My characteristic of the arrival of man to greatness is" love of fate ", that one does not want anything to change, neither in the past, nor in the future, nor In the whole eternity. ”(16) If you are able to reach that stage of coexistence with life so that you do not accept your destiny only reluctantly but fall in love with it, nothing will be able to disturb the peace that will permeate your soul, and then you will tell the true happiness, the happiness that is liberated from the earthly causes, which are not subject to the whims of fate and fluctuations Life.