How Desire Takes Control: Three Stages Of Stoic Practice

Desire becomes a problem when wanting an external result starts to run your life. This episode maps three stages of attachment and three ways the Stoics worked with desire so it loosened its hold. I originally used the word enlightenment loosely. The subject is more ordinary than that: noticing when a preference has become a demand, separating what you want from what you need, and getting less yanked around by outcomes you cannot control. Use the framework on one desire that keeps stealing your attention.

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The Stoic philosopher Epictetus believed that the first stage in training wholeheartedly as a practicing Stoic was to gain some level of mastery over our aversions and desires. The goal, he believed, was to become aligned with nature. While he did think that logic and reasoning were very important components of Stoicism, they should come after this first step of managing our desires and aversions. For many of us, this is a strange idea. How do we master our aversions and desires? Does that even make sense? What do we do? Just know what to avoid, learn what to desire. Should we stop desiring things? Should we ignore our desires? Should we suppress our aversions? It's not necessarily easy to figure out what that would entail. And that's why imagery and principles and concepts can be very illuminating. So in this talk, we are going to be looking at three stages to mastering our attachments to desires. The external world, and that includes people, possessions, things. Your own body to some degree is not within your direct control. And because of that, we can't say that it is essentially good. Things breaking, things getting stolen, body parts getting injured, people rejecting us. We label these things as bad, but they are not essentially bad. Why? Because good things could come from those bad things. And so would they even be bad at all? And also it depends on the perspective. Death may be unpleasant and distressing and give family members of the deceased grief. But to say that death is bad is an oversimplification. Death makes way for new life, for new ideas. In fact, it actually gives life meaning. If you knew you would never die, what would be the urgency to do anything? Finitude is the thing that gives our life meaning, that gives our romances depth. We know that we won't have unlimited opportunities. Many of us go through life labeling things good and bad, and also become attached to the external world. The Buddhists recognize that we identify with thought. Thoughts come and they go. Arguments happen in our head, stories unfold, but we grasp onto them as if we are the thinker of those thoughts. We believe we thought those things, and that's what identification with thought is. We tell ourselves that we were the selves that decided to think what they were having for dinner, not realizing that the very thought itself came from almost nowhere, that we didn't have before us all the possible thoughts in the world, and then we carefully chose the one we want to think about. The thought just arose, and then we identified with it as if we were the thinker. We can do this with external things too. We have a new fancy piece of tech and we become happy when it's delivered. We want to show it off to people. It's almost as if we are saying this item is a part of us. Look how good we are, how great we are, because we possess this thing. Epictetus himself was a slave at one point, and then he became free. But he would often remind his students that you can be technically a free person, but still a slave to externals. Externals can shackle you in some ways. You can see this clearly when one has a craving or an addiction, which can be defined as the compulsive behavior to do something that causes one harm. Think of binge eating or social media addiction, pornography addiction, or addiction to drug and alcohol. But on a slightly less extreme level, whenever we allow the external world, which is not within our control, to dictate how we feel, we are in a sense enslaved to that. And this would be the first level of attachments to externals. So very simply, when we are attached to the external world in some way, we put ourselves in the external world. Our happiness and sadness, our self-esteem is bound up in the things that happen externally, we are enslaved. The second stage would be moderation with externals. And the third stage would be no concern for externals. We could say that as you go through each stage in your stoic practice, you go from enslaved to wise to divine. So let's bring to mind an image. You're sitting on an airplane. I've been fortunate enough to be cramped up on an airplane for many, many hours, a long flight. You look down the aisle, physically you're not comfortable, the noise is very loud, you're sitting awkwardly, and you see the trolley with food coming down the aisle. You're just waiting for the trolley to get to you. Takes its time. As it comes, you're thinking, what do I want? Do I want coffee, soda, tea, food, a snack? In this particular case, however, you realize that the trolley has already passed you. The food is gone. You were napping. You missed it. When this happens, do you feel regret? Do you get frustrated and upset? You just want this trolley to come back. You feel this energy rising in your system. Come back, come back. I want the drink. If this happens, we ought to practice moderation. So, yes, okay. We can still want our drink. I still feel some regret over the fact that this trolley has passed. But let's not make a big fuss and allow this feeling to poison our body and the people around us. Let's practice acceptance. We missed it. In a different scenario, we are waiting for the trolley of food to come to us. It's taking a while. As the flight attendant comes closer to us, there are new issues that they have to deal with, and it's taking a very long time to get to you. Now is an opportunity to practice patience. On the one hand, we are not getting the food or the drink, but on the other hand, we are getting the opportunity to sit with this feeling of wanting this thing to come sooner. And wanting it to come sooner doesn't make it come sooner. And finally, when the trolley gets to you and the flight attendant hands you what you ordered, do you need to reach out aggressively to grab it? Or can you just accept it politely and calmly, put it on the table? Now you might be wondering why am I talking about the scenario of being on a flight and this food trolley passing or coming to you or arriving at your seat. This is a metaphor for desire and attachments and aversions. When it comes to our family, our finances, and our status, let's not try and force things to happen prematurely. Let's be patient and be content where we are as things come to us. If we notice that we've missed an opportunity or something has slipped by or we've lost something, regret is natural, commotion and destruction and despair is unnecessary. And when things do come to us, let's handle them gently. Let's accept them graciously. Let's allow ourselves to receive gifts. And as we practice in this way in life, allowing things to pass by if they already passed, not forcing things to happen prematurely if they're taking their time, and accepting things calmly and graciously when they arrive, we will start to develop in mastery of aversions and desires. And eventually we can go even further and get to a point where we don't even regret the thing that passes us by, and we don't even long for the thing that is coming to us, and we don't even accept the gifts of reality, the gifts of the external world, because we are already as fulfilled as we can ever be. Because there is nothing outside of ourselves that will make any difference to the way that we feel. We do not anymore rely on the external world. When you no longer concern yourself deeply with externals, everything that happens in a sense can have this flavor of being chosen by you. I broke a cup, I'm happy with the fact that I broke a cup. Why? Because it happened and it could have been no other way. It is what it is, and in that sense I choose it. And when you choose everything that happens to you because it has happened to you, it's almost as if you've created it in some sense. If you go through life with this sensation of having chosen everything that has happened to you, which is deep acceptance, there is something divine and mystical about that. And at that point, one could say that the world no longer happens to you, but simply is you.