Greetings Friends!
Here is the next volume of our series — Letters to a Young Seeker (Catch up on previous volumes: Don’t Forget to Live, Break Bread with the Dead, Live an Examined Life, Carry the Fire, The Art of Optimism, Think Like a Mortal, Trust Thyself, The Art of Being, Freedom and Responsibility, Becoming Who You Are, Certainty Brings Ruins, Beyond Mountains, Are More Mountains, and Nothing to Excess).
Dear Fellow Traveler,
Honore Daumier’s painting of “thirty-five heads of expression” is a good illustration of why we need to test our impressions. In his Discourses, Epictetus advised, “Don’t let the force of an impression when it first hits you knock you off your feet; just say to it: Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test.” The Stoics suggested that these impressions (or pre-cognitive judgments) originate from our previous experiences or subconscious thinking.
Let’s review a few Stoic concepts:
Impression (phantasiai): appearance, the way in which something is perceived.
Assent (sunkatathesis): approval to impressions, enabling action to take place.
Impulse (orgē): a movement of the will toward action based on an assent to a given impression.
Impression > Assent > Impulse
Because these impressions (or perceptions) are not always accurate or wise, they must be tested (or examined). But to truly understand impressions, we need to make sense of how our minds work. When we understand how our minds work, writes Shaila Catherine (author of Beyond Distraction and previous podcast guest), we can strengthen focused attention, clear away trivial distractions, and reduce the destructive forces of craving, aversion, and delusion. Training the mind begins by recognizing that a thought is just that — a thought — a creation of our own minds.
