Category: meditation

Raven Song

A raven came to me this morning and woke me pecking on my head. 

She said I had work to do. 

“There is something you have to say.” she said. 

“Let er rip!” …I sang her my song. 

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.“

—Bertrand Russell

I do not consider myself wise. I am just a wanderer in the deep woods who sometimes comes to the closest town for some food and companionship. I quickly tire of people though. I prefer solitude and the close companionship of my woman and dogs, my pack. My woman is the only master I have in life. I have willingly enslaved myself to her. She keeps me from running around the town naked. She makes a warm home for me to rest and be completely myself. She lets me stare at the wall for days even and scream at the sky. She is my muse and my closest companion. Such things are rare, but do exist. 

I am allergic to fanatics, I used to be one, but I will suffer fools for a bit, if for no other reason than a sentimental feeling of brotherhood, for I know myself as the greatest of fools. I have a soft spot for them, for I was born a fool and will die as one. I do not say that from false humility. I know how easy it is for one’s feelings and thoughts to quickly become unclear amongst the buzz of our civilization. It is a terrible state to be in. Stripped of all certainty, one is completely and wholly their authentic selves, naked and shivering before raging nature all around. Terrified at the cracks of lightening. Cold when the sun sets. Longing for warm spring to return. This is my god. I can only know what touches me outside through my senses and inside through my intellect. I do not live in other’s contrived heavens or hells. When I read a book, I eat the pages to really absorb them. The books only satiate my hunger for as long as I digest them. They leave me ravenous. It is some kind of hellish torture to read the words of others. They never satisfy. Including my own. I will eat the pages these words are written on. My own words fill me up a bit longer than the words of others. I am cannibalizing myself in a way. I may visit though others’ heavens and hells from time to time. I have not found one that smells of reality to me. I quickly run back naked into the deep woods laughing as I realize how blessed I am to have this brutal bitch, we call nature, caring for me in the passive way she cares for all things. 

Nothing in this life is given freely. One has to scratch in the dirt until their nails fall off to make anything of this life. One has to kill or be killed. I do not like killing anything really, not even cutting a plant. So I have others do it for me. I live cowardly. The whole eating to live thing seems barbaric to me. But I can’t deny my biology, so it is true, I am a born killer. Love does not maintain my body, it feeds my soul, my heart. And this is the really strange thing about us, we are beings, or acts of a play, in three parts. One must feed and nourish all three parts mind, body, and heart to be healthy, to maximize your life, or you die with a whimper. I tell you truly, no one who has gorged on love dies with a whimper. So it seems to me heart is the most important part of us to feed. Even when the mind and body whither, the heart keeps us going. Though some with crazed minds can last a very long time. So what the fuck do I really know?! 

Not much it seems. 

One cannot endure the elements long in a naked state. Stripped down, you can remake yourself as you see fit. Choose your coverings as you see fit. Paint your body as you see fit. Make and wear whatever mask you like. I like my horned masks best. I systematically removed every certainty I could find within myself over the last 10 years. It was smelly god awful work. The stink of certainty is toxic to the human heart. Nothing will kill your spirit faster than certainty and your mind as ideology. To be yourself is to be wild and spontaneous, a beast. At first, anger was my weapon of choice in battling my certainty, but over time, that anger was transmuted into love. My woman didn’t break my heart, she healed it. I became more gentle with myself and others. I invited certainties back later for tea, but they knew they could not stay for long. I am a goat after all and often would overturn the table and headbutt my guests. How rude of me! Rudeness can be transmuted to compassion and kindness too given enough work and heat. 

What others do is not my concern. What others realize is on them to realize or not. I live authentically now, spontaneously, at peace with life and death. I live as a wild smelly goat mostly and at times as a happy bunny, and rarely, as a hunting wolf. Empathy is the real glue between human beings, not power. Power as an end is the greatest lie. For truly, no one has power over others, power can only truly be exercised over oneself and even then, it becomes a deep love of life and death and kindness. This is natural. There is no need to be hostile to those certain, they can just be avoided or taunted for fun. We need certainties earlier in life, no doubt. It takes humans a good 30 years to fully mature. This makes us freaks of nature. Due mostly to our large brains and small hearts and bodies. It is a way of protecting ourselves. But true maturity transforms us into lions of plain. Powerful, lazy, ready for action. Fortunately, we live in a time where one can explore themselves completely. The young are resisting the cruel lies of our culture. But they will succumb, as we all did. Fight the good fight though. Give em hell! We can strip naked and run through the streets if we want to. Well, we aren’t quite there yet, but they got close in the 60s to burning all the cruel lies down. I see many stripped down and ran around naked. They later clothed themselves though with money mostly and became shells of who they could have become. But there are a few authentic wild souls who kept going deeper into the wilderness I have found. They left breadcrumbs. You can follow them up to a point, but when all signs of a path have been lost, the only way forward is to shed your skin, lose your mind, fill your heart with passion, and run naked into the hills. The hills do have eyes. The 60s was an eruption of spirit of a kind that the establishment has fought hard to stamp down for over 60 years. It was not religious; it was raw spirit. Religion quickly came though and grew like mushrooms around their feet and stopped them moving. The establishment has done a very good job reenslaving the beautiful butterflies who escaped in the 60s. But some escaped them. Thank mother god for that. Some of their seeds fell on fertile ground. 

The 60s birthed the Jesus movement. That is the spirit I came to know Jesus through. I never was religious. Though my mother became a fundamentalist evangelical, what an irony for a religion supposedly based on love, and terribly certain of many things I have always seen as lies. The maturing of a man takes a severing of their connection to their mothers. I took a sword and hacked that connection to pieces. I was a Jesus freak through and through as a kid though. I loved him it seems more than most of those around me. They hated me for that. Really hated me. It was shocking to experience. As a boy I had intense spiritual experiences. I saw visions and heard voices inside myself. Too many. Unlike most of my friends around me who were just there because they liked this girl or that boy. Well, my first crush was Jesus. I was always strange and weird. A true believer in love. I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Khalil Gibran as a kid for God’s sake. I was a born radical. I never fit in anywhere. This would be crucial to my later awakening. My alienation became my own personal salvation later in life. I burned with a frantic intensity as a boy. My mother never shared a faith of love with me. She was so broken and lost herself and struggling in a very difficult marriage, dirt poor on top of it all. She needed the certainty of her cult. Later she would go on to embrace the prosperity gospel, a twisted mockery of the real Jesus’ Gospel. The old tent reivial preachers created a new uniquely American cult based on prosperity. My mother fell hook, line, and sinker for every one. I hated her for it for a long time. They are the ones who have helped Trump rise to his position today. They were the first to get behind that orange pumpkin. How I detest him. So ironic they love a man who hates them so. Sweet irony to me those poor bastards waiting for the rapture would become the ones who would surround themselves with snakes who would tell them what they wanted to hear. 

I walk with Jesus today. Not as a believer of any kind, but as a friend. This is true religion in my view, authentic and based on a common love, a shared heart, a deep empathy and trust. Jesus would not recognize the church today. He would turn over the money changer tables in the temple. He would spit out their false love. I’m being poetic of course and romanticizing the figure of Jesus. He was a man, as I am, but a man thoroughly with himself. He did not die I know for anyone else but himself. He did not physically rise from the dead, he arose in every heart who awoke to love of the other as themselves. We can love others as ourselves, because they are ourselves. This is a great riddle and secret. Carl Jung explored this through his theory of the shared unconscious. Jesus demonstrated a deep compassion that moved mountains. Our stories of him are mostly made up and manipulated, but don’t try to reason with a certain believer. They will claim authority based on this book or that book as their own actions expose them as liars and frauds. They fail to see embracing their lies and eating them is the first step to becoming a true human being. They want to kill you and cut you off for denying their faith, as they killed Jesus for denying the mainline religion in power long ago. He showed us an example of dying to oneself. His was a naive natural spontaneous love. He didn’t really speak of hell, that was a later addition added by the liars and cheats. The church became a controlling force in our culture for 2000 years. But love always finds a way through. It pools in the low places, not close to power. One’s actions makes a heaven or hell of their lives. Resurrection is of the true human being inside all of us, possible only while alive. Rapture is not a physical event, it is the smell of being close to love, filled with it, love for yourself, others, and nature, our real god. He shames those who wear the lie of religion today. I believe he was a true atheist, as I am now today. I and Jesus are certainly atheists. 

The word atheism in English originates from the Greek word ἄθεος (átheos), which means “without gods.”
• ἄ- (a-): A prefix meaning “without” or “not.”
• θεός (theos): Meaning “god” or “deity.” 

The term passed into Latin as atheos and later into Old French as athéisme. It entered the English language in the late 16th century, around 1580, during a period of religious upheaval and philosophical inquiry. Originally, atheism was often used pejoratively to describe anyone who rejected the dominant religious orthodoxy, even if they believed in some form of spirituality. Over time, the term evolved to its modern meaning of disbelief in deities. I am allergic to orthodoxy of every flavor and kind and glad to be. I know nature and it within myself, and this is all I or anyone really can know. As Carl Jung said, he had no faith, here in the middle of reality, none is needed for we can know ourselves fully, certain of nothing but that we are alive and will die. But within our lives are all the gods that have ever been and are yet to be. In fact, we are all gods!

We are all gods!

Heresy?  Haha, the fool will say so. They will kill you for saying such things and acting thusly. A god is wild and unbidden and must learn on its own to lay down with the lamb and the lion. We don’t even understand our own language as it has drifted and evolved from the original symbols and meanings we uttered as thoughts and words as humans evolved. We are fools lost in a sea of meaningless words and groundless thoughts that seem to appear from nowhere, but they do come from somewhere, the nowhere within ourselves. What can we know? We can know love, we can be filled with it, consumed by it, giving of it. It can directly be perceived before all words. So how can any fool justify their faith with words?! Why can they not see through themselves and the lies we cloth ourselves with?! Not my problem now is it and I’m not theirs. But they can’t touch this. They can only hate this freedom and long for it themselves. How dare anyone live so free, right, haha. I’m just an Epicurean in the end I guess. So was Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln. I’m in good company. I’ll not get into Epicureanism now. Most can’t touch their intellect or get even close. Us smelly goats wander close to it now and then by accident. Reality has only briefly broken through the mud of our minds across time. Very rarely indeed. This is the pearl you will sell all to attain. It’s never free or given. One must dig their nails off to grasp it. Holding it is a whole other thing. Because the pearl destroys most who touch it. Vaporizes them. There is a trick to it, an ancient magick. 

What I learned through this process was how much fear dominated my life. That is the ultimate puppet master who uses certainty to cover itself with. A human being can do the most awful things out of certainty. I remember the blanket of faith that I would wrap myself with. It was so warm and comforting. I could bury my head under it and keep out the world. But boys grow to manhood. Childhood comforts slip away as the stark reality of life and death are thrust upon us. There are natural saints who love spontaneously from all creeds and none and then there are those who love from fear. Truer today more than ever. Fools grip to their sacred books and thoughts because certainty provides security and identity, but they betray their fear by drawing such distinctions. 

It is up to a human to take responsibility for their actions and willingly enter into unknowing. It takes time and a certain amount of heat to loosen one’s grip upon certainty. Nothing is certain but your death, period, full stop, end of story. We can’t be certain of what life and death is in the least or our love would be meaningless. To love in spite of this uncertainty is the purest thing in the universe. Yes, I understand this is terrible to most. But if one is being honest and authentic with themselves, this is the only conclusion. 

All my love, and I mean that, because it’s all I have of value to give.

A Labor In the Dark

Here is how Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, describes the compulsion of the mystic to capture the fleeting unity of consciousness:

YES IT IS TRUE; THE ECSTATIC [MYSTIC] CANNOT SAY THE UNSAYABLE. HE SAYS THE OTHER THING—IMAGES, DREAMS, VISIONS—NOT UNITY. HE SPEAKS, HE MUST SPEAK, BECAUSE THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. . . . HE DOES NOT LIE WHO SPEAKS OF UNITY IN IMAGES, DREAMS, VISIONS, WHO STAMMER OF UNITY.. . . HE SAYS THE FORMS AND SOUNDS AND NOTICES THAT HE IS NOT SAYING THE EXPERIENCE, NOT THE GROUND, NOT THE UNITY, AND WOULD LIKE TO STOP HIMSELF AND CANNOT, AND FEELS THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SAYING IT, LIKE A SEVEN-LOCKED GATE WHICH HE RATTLES, KNOWING THAT IT WILL NEVER OPEN, YET HE MUST GO ON RATTLING IT. FOR THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. ECSTASY IS DEAD, STABBED IN THE BACK BY TIME, WHICH CANNOT BE MOCKED; BUT, DYING, IT HAS FLUNG THE WORD INTO HIM, AND THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. AND HE SPEAKS, SPEAKS, HE CANNOT BE SILENT, THE FLAME IN THE WORD DRIVES HIM, HE KNOWS THAT HE CANNOT SAY IT, YET HE TRIES OVER AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL HIS SOUL IS EXHAUSTED TO DEATH AND THE WORD LEAVES HIM. THIS IS THE EXALTATIO OF THE ONE WHO HAS RETURNED INTO THE COMMOTION AND CANNOT RESIGN HIMSELF TO IT; THIS IS HIS INSURRECTION, THE INSURRECTION OF A SPEAKER: RELATED TO THE INSURRECTION OF THE POET, SLIGHTER IN POSSESSION, MIGHTIER IN EXISTENCE, THAN HIS. THIS IS THE BENDING OF THE BOW FOR THE SAYING OF THE UNSAYABLE, AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK, A LABOR IN THE DARK. IT’S WORK, THE CONFESSION, BEARS ITS MARK. (9-10)

I would venture to say that we all know the burning of the Word. We know the work in the dark. And indeed, such confessional work bears its mark.

Like prophets, we go into our caves. We know the peace beyond the commotion of the every day, and we cannot entirely resign ourselves to this ordinary commotion. There is something deeper. Something below the surface, beyond the clatter. There are ways to transcend the commotion and seek an inspired insight that transforms human life.

The Ethics of Attention

“The great human error is to reason in place of finding out.”

—Simone Weil

She was a force.
She shames me.
She lived her philosophy.

She defined the price and purpose of philosophy. Attention for Simone was a crucial skill to develop if you were not going to live at the mercy of the the forces around you.

How to properly focus your attention was key to her philosophy.

A different experience of everything you do is available to you…right now. Or you can just accept your default perception.

You have to be open to receive what is beyond the circumstances of the moment.

This requires for you to pay attention to what is happening around you. Most just settle for their default state of attention.

Simone’s attention saw the world as sacred.

She didn’t care about becoming a famous philosopher, she was too busy living her life.

She became a teacher. She encouraged her students to think openly.

Staying open is the key to everything!

What if there is no single right answer, so common in life.

People find a position and then just vehemently defend and die on that hill.

A shame.

One must avoid this collectivist thinking.

Acknowledge at the beginning of any conservation you only have a partial truth and that there is always more to learn.

Don’t chain yourself to a fixed position. How to pay attention?

The middle path between no activity and too much activity, is to put in effort, but you remove your own prejudices from your experiences.

You look and listen and wait.

I am in awe of her focus, attention, and openness.

Amor Fati – Accept what is necessary

What Makes One Great

“If, at some point in your life,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “you should come across anything better than justice, truth, self-control, courage—it must be an extraordinary thing indeed.”

I think the greatest lesson in life is beyond all work and play, it’s learning to love and be loved.

It’s the only true thing in my experience.

Do not seek for your own gain, seek to lift others up and you will be great!

Leaders, serve the people you lead. Seek their best and not your own. This is true capitalism.

We have certainly lost our way to greed and progress and fear of not having what we want.

I have found nothing greater than forgiveness, kindness and patience. Lifting up the least of us, makes us great.

Make yourself available to invest in others and you will be great.

I’m just a dreamer you may think, no, I stand in the sun sunny I know the hard won freedom of true love.

One has to learn to love themselves first and best and from there, give from an overflowing abundance.

This is all I have really learned of value in my life and I will never cease sharing it, until my dying breath.

I am crazy 😜 for love and that is my only truth.

girl in the car

There were plenty of questions.

But I found there ain’t no right or wrong answers. 

There is just old Uncle Charlie’s bar down by the pier. 

I found my way to the end of the bar one fine orange fall day when all my questions had flown away like a murder of crows.

There I was, sippin a bitter warm beer at the end of the bar.

Old Uncle Charlie sat down beside me, he laughed and clinked his beer against mine, “L’chaim!”

“How’s life so far kid?” he growled in that old wise sandy voice. 

His words were sharp and sank deep. 

Silence hung between us forever it seemed, until we both burst out laughing. 

I shot him a side glance and blurted out, “My favorite part was kissin the girl.” 

“There was something about her that was different.”

“Something that gave me hope.”

“That’s my boy! Love is really never lost!” he shouted as he smacked me on the back.

“What happened?!”

“She’s waitin for me outside.”

“Well hell! Why did you end up here again then at the end of the bar with a groovy girl outside?!”

“I just wanted to say thanks.”

“My pleasure.”

Peace Beyond All Understanding

When your life is said and done, it won’t matter anymore what the meaning of it was.

You lived it.

One day I will look back and say, if I am fortunate, I had a fine life, no regrets.

It was filled with wonders and doubt and fear and courage and love.

I spilled ink on the paper.

I left my blood in the dirt.

I made my mark.

Kindness and compassion are the best things in us.

Pray they do not die in thee.

For surely then, you are dead to love.

The worst tragedy a human being can experience.

When no one is looking, can you look at yourself in the mirror?

Did you hurt others?

Surely.

Did you make the best amends you could, hopefully.

Did you find your passion in life?

At the moment of your death, all the passions will be silenced.

No one will ever know when you hit your stride maybe, if you did.

Your life will flash before you.

May it not be an ugly sad ending to your story.

May you have learned, as Scrooge did, to give all the love you can while you can.

It is never too late to fall in love with life.

Don’t live with regret.

Don’t hurt those you love and love you.

Do better now.

I must say about life, it surprises me everyday.

The joy grows deeper now every moment.

As the world appears to be unraveling, it isn’t here.

Things just work out for the best.

There will be a moment, when it is your best time to die.

May that day be far from you.

Once you find love, you want it forever.

It bubbles over inside you sometimes at a mad boil.

Other times it just simmers on low.

It just doesn’t matter what’s happening out there.

Here, in the middle of life, one can find a peace that surpasses understanding.

If you are at the bottom, get up.

I was and did and I’m glad.

I look back on the birth of love within me.

I smile and I am thankful to have known life up and down, inside out.

As the loons rage against those they hate, one can experience peace beyond all understanding.

What a world!

What a life!

Life is inspiring and calls one up and out of their doubt and fear.

Sometimes you can see that hand from nowhere reaching out to you.

Take it.

Offer that hand to the other, and you will realize what love is.

Hold that hand offered to you long enough, until you are steady on your feet.

And then run!

Run like the wind 🌬

Run as far and as long as you can and don’t look back.

Don’t try to understand or explain, you can’t.

And then maybe at the end, nothing will be left to regret.

Peace to you Minerva, my sweet aunt.

You showed me kindness when my own mother couldn’t and wouldn’t.

Much respect ✊️ and love.

RIP

Thunder Perfect Mind

I know both her faces. 

I have met her in the women I have loved.

She was born of the source and she birthed the source in time. 

I have hated and loved her.

I have cursed and praised her. 

She is the wisdom of the Greeks.

She is the knowledge of the Barbarians.

She is the White Buffalo Calf Woman.

She brought the Seven Sacred Rites to the Lakota. 

History is not fact, it is narrative. 

What does she want of us?

She will never let me go.

She echos in my heart and mind. 

She soothes my soul and makes me rage.

Every real man has had to contend with her in time.

Lilith and Eve. 

How to pierce her duality?

When I go to my resting place beyond time, she will meet me there and I will live and not die again. 

My head hurts. 

But I am sober. 

My heart longs to be worthy of her, but I fear her. 

I feel she wants to eat my heart. 

Maybe I have to give it to her willingly.

I would not be here now without her.

The way my wife clings to me, is like how she grasps for me. 

I have always pushed my women away. 

Out of fear of being loved and known and maybe exposed as the weakling I can be. 

But now, I am falling into a black hole.

Free Falling into Mystery

Dune has been a favorite sci-fi book series of mine since I was a kid.

I have been writing about how reason leads into mystery.

I have been writing about the inner fire of our will.

Sharing poetry that flows.

So yesterday all those themes came to a head when I saw the new Dune movie.

I was moved by a vision Paul had seeing a man he would kill tell him about life after his people had been betrayed and his father killed.

“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.” – Jamis

Paul hears Jamis in one of his visions where the Fremen explains how people “must move with the flow of the process” and “join it,” making sure that they “flow with it.” While he likely wasn’t referring to controlling aircraft, Paul uses his advice to get away from the storm and land safely in the desert. By simply going with the flow and experiencing “the mystery of life,” the young heir learns an important lesson about learning to let go.

What is noteworthy is how he stops trying to fly his aircraft in a sand storm and he closes his eyes and the flow takes him out of the storm.

This is how life can flow.

This is how you let go and let the mystery take you.

Happy flyin and free fallin.

Crane in Motion

Caught in Amador, CA last weekend.

Stoic Practice vs. Christianity

“No person is free who is not a master of himself.”

This quote is usually attributed to Epictetus, but found in works attributed to Pythagoras, and stated as: “None can be free who is a slave to, and ruled by, his passions.”

—As quoted in Florilegium, XVIII, 23, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p.368

“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks.”

—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 7.61

I often see Christians projecting their beliefs on Stoicism, let us compare them and be clear how these world views differ and overlap. I practice Stoicism and like to associate with others doing so, ancient and modern. There seems to be a tendency toward atheism these days among Stoics. Ancient Stoicism had the concept of Logos which represented a God figure, Zeus, but this concept was not defined by a personal relationship, as it is in Christianity. Zeus represented nature. I am not debating those differences between Stoics in this little essay. Disclaimer, I have no interest in Jesus or Christianity, beyond studying their historical impacts. I grew up as an evangelical Christian. I find the Stoic spiritual practices of ethics and virtue to live the best life, far superior to belief and faith in things unseen. Stoics help themselves using their reason and will.

Stoicism and Christianity are both concerned with how best to live, but Christians feel this life is a shadow of a life to come. The Stoics didn’t talk much about an afterlife and were agnostic about what, if anything lies beyond death. For the Stoics, what matters isn’t so much what may or may not happen after death, but how we make best use of the time we have now. This is one of the main reasons I practice Stoicism and not a religion idolizing people or worshipping a god beyond nature or the life we know now.

I do not agree with the Christian world view on original sin and death, which is why I practice Stoicism and not the Christian or any other religion. Stoics are focused on the life we have, not one to come. The Stoics viewed death as natural, a return to Nature. The Stoics believed that life should be lead through actions rather than words. I concur. What we do matters to us. The Stoics provide practices to help you control your reactions to thinking and difficult physical circumstances now, which is the only thing in your control.

Discourses Book 1.1 “About things that are within our power and those that are not.”

Epictetus speaks for Zeus/Nature, from Discourses,

“…I’ve given you a certain portion of myself, this faculty of motivation to act and not to act…the power to make proper use of impressions.”

—Epictetus Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, translated by Robin Hard, Book 1.1.12

Stoicism is an Ancient Greek philosophy formed in Athens while the Greek world was in chaos after the death of Alexander the Great. Zeno of Citium founded the Stoic school of philosophy, which he taught in Athens from about 300 BC. Stoicism is based on the moral ideas of the Cynics. Stoicism laid great emphasis on goodness and peace of mind gained from living a life of virtue in accordance with nature.

“Now, If virtue promises to enable us to achieve happiness, freedom from passion, and serenity, then progress towards virtue is surely also progress towards each of the states.”

—Epictetus Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, translated by Robin Hard, Book 1.4.3

(Epictetus does seem to often have a personal view of the divine as related by Arrian in Discourses.)

The Greek term for word is Logos. Five hundred years before Jesus was born, Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, used Logos (the word) to explain what he saw as the universal force of reason that governed everything. He said all things happen according to the Logos. This belief became the foundation of Stoicism. Greek speaking Jews came to view the Logos as a force sent by God. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is referred to as the Word, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; he is the driving force sent by God.

Modern day Christianity has a splintered past and is practiced differently between the Protestants and Catholic Church. Eastern Christianity is often thought closer to the original church that formed after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. I would argue that the Pauline Gospel is the foundation for the modern Western church more than other competing strains of early Christianity. This form of Christianity developed from the beliefs and doctrines espoused by the Hellenistic-Jewish Apostle Paul through his writings in the New Testament. These are muddy waters.

According to Christianity, it is only through Jesus of Nazareth that people can achieve eternal salvation. Humans save themselves through grace instead works, while the forgiveness of sins comes by faith alone.

I do not concur due to my experience. I take no one’s word as final on life and death. I am living this life now. Christian belief to me is a tyranny and not well reasoned or aligned with natural life and death. There are no similar concepts in Stoicism, where what you do is its own reward or punishment now, in the moment. We practice to be ready to act with reason and not be overwhelmed by emotions or fear.

Stoicism and Christianity are both monotheistic. Stoicism follows Heraclitus and believes in one Logos; Christianity follows Jesus, and requires followers to believe in the one true God and have no other gods before him [her]. Additionally, both Stoicism and Christianity serve the will of the Logos/God. They teach we can liberate ourselves from fear and anxiety by submitting to the will of the Divine.

In Christianity, the Word (Logos) was made flesh and dwelt among us. In Christianity, a relationship with the Logos is much more personal.

“The Stoics also referred to the seminal logos (“logos spermatikos”), or the law of generation in the Universe, which was the principle of the active reason working in inanimate matter. Humans, too, each possess a portion of the divine logos. The Stoics took all activity to imply a logos or spiritual principle.” — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos#Stoics

“The Stoics often identified the universe and God with Zeus, as the ruler and upholder, and at the same time the law, of the universe. The Stoic God is not a transcendent omniscient being standing outside nature, but rather it is immanent—the divine element is immersed in nature itself.”

— https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoic_physics#God

“The Stoics [defined] free will as a voluntary accommodation to what is in any case inevitable. According to this theory, man is like a dog tied to a moving wagon. If the dog refuses to run along with the wagon he will be dragged by it, yet the choice remains his: to run or be dragged. In the same way, humans are responsible for their choices and actions, even though these have been anticipated by the logos and form part of its plan.”

—(xix-xx) Gregory Hays

Another big difference between the two worldviews is Christians ask God for help, while the Stoics seek help from within. Through prayer, Christians ask to be released from suffering, healed when sick, and comforted in sorrow. By contrast, Stoicism tells us that if we want any good, we need to get it from ourselves. No spirit will relieve us from our pains.

Stoicism and Christianity have competing views about human nature as well. For the Stoics, nature has instilled people with the capacity to reason, which we can exercise to live out virtuous, dutiful lives. Christians, on the other hand, believe people are born with original sin, which has corrupted our internal moral compass. While it is possible to better ourselves by using reason, it is only by the grace of God that people are improved and saved.

This was just a high level survey of some of the differences between Stoicism and Christianity. I have nothing against Christians or anyone practicing Stoicism. The historical Jesus was not a Stoic as far as we know. We practice Stoicism here to live the best we can in a chaotic world beyond our control, bounded by birth and death. I’d argue Stoicism is about being the best Human Being we can be here now. We should not hold dogmatically to the ancient Stoics or cultural beliefs in my personal view. Epictetus said roughly the same. I think discussing these and other worldviews is beneficial if you can keep an open mind. But the words are just pointers to how to choose the best action any given moment.

“Such is the law that God has laid down, saying, ‘If you want anything good, you must get it from yourself.’”

—Epictetus Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, translated by Robin Hard, Book 1.29.4