What do you think lies at the epicentre of so many of our social, political and global challenges.
We are not being manipulated by aliens! What is happening in the world will always and only EVER be a reflection of the combined choices of individual humans.
In today’s episode we check in with first century AD Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. It turns out that before he appeared in Gladiator with Russel Crowe he was actually a famous Stoic philosopher.
He has something to teach us about the role of character and and how it shapes our lives and destinies.
Grab a free copy of my book Bridging the Gap here:
https://go.jonathandoyle.co/btg-pdf
Enquire about booking Jonathan to speak:
https://go.jonathandoyle.co/jd-speak-opt-in
Watch the Youtube version here:
Find out about coaching with Jonathan here:
https://go.jonathandoyle.co/coaching
Transcript
Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan Doyle with you.
Speaker:Once again, welcome back to the daily podcast.
Speaker:Great to have you with me, please make sure you've subscribed.
Speaker:Hit that big subscribe button and, uh, make sure you check out all the
Speaker:show notes because we have the link across to the YouTube versions.
Speaker:You can get free access to my book, bridging the gap.
Speaker:You can book me to speak.
Speaker:It is all there.
Speaker:My friends, it is all there.
Speaker:So, uh, please check out those show notes.
Speaker:If you want to get in touch, give me some feedback or let me know a
Speaker:topic that you'd like me to cover.
Speaker:Today.
Speaker:We're going to jump into, uh, some stoic and Epicurean philosophy in just a moment.
Speaker:But I want to, I always try and look for things throughout the day that have been.
Speaker:Uh, you know, interesting and useful that I can share with you guys.
Speaker:You know, it's really on my heart in so many recent episodes to keep talking
Speaker:about the importance of movement.
Speaker:Uh, we tend to be a very Very civilization at the moment.
Speaker:And one of the best ways to just increase your energy, your mental clarity
Speaker:is just literal physical movement.
Speaker:Um, I'm actually having a rest day today, which is a bit different for me.
Speaker:Uh, I've been pushing it pretty hard the last few weeks with a lot of long
Speaker:distance training, a lot of work.
Speaker:So, uh, today's a day off.
Speaker:It's a Sunday in the studio.
Speaker:And, uh, today I'm just going to kick back, relax a little bit.
Speaker:And, uh, enjoy family and a little bit of rest, so I can rip back into it tomorrow,
Speaker:but movement my friends movement.
Speaker:As I've said in recent weeks, whether it means that you
Speaker:start walking to the letterbox.
Speaker:Or you start running ultra marathons as I do whatever it is.
Speaker:I cannot express to you enough, just that we are designed to move.
Speaker:The cosmos is in motion.
Speaker:And we are part of that one.
Speaker:Great cosmos.
Speaker:So I just want to offer that to you regularly just to say, Hey.
Speaker:The more that you can do to be active and engaged, the more, the quality
Speaker:of your life will improve over time.
Speaker:I think I said yesterday that when I had my accident back in 2019, I think
Speaker:it was about the fourth day in hospital.
Speaker:When I could, uh, I could stand up again.
Speaker:I started doing laps of the hospital ward and tracking my times.
Speaker:I had a drip in my arm, but I was really keen just to get moving
Speaker:again, just to get my body moving.
Speaker:And, um, it was, uh, just a little insight into my relatively obsessive
Speaker:personality, but listen, let's get moving.
Speaker:I hope that's useful to you.
Speaker:The other thing I wanted to share from today was, um, I
Speaker:was up super early as usual.
Speaker:And, uh, jumped in the car.
Speaker:To go and get some petrol, some gas from my American listeners.
Speaker:And I was in a really good mood.
Speaker:It was like, I don't know, 5:00 AM or something.
Speaker:And, um, it was slightly less freezing than usual.
Speaker:And I get down to the petrol station and put the petrol in and.
Speaker:I just think I was just radiating some positive vibes.
Speaker:I kind of just felt really good about the world.
Speaker:And I walked in there and you know, the guys working behind the
Speaker:county's been there all night and.
Speaker:He just seemed really friendly.
Speaker:And we had this little quick conversation, which was really positive and, uh,
Speaker:which is unusual because normally.
Speaker:These poor guys have been working all through the night and they're
Speaker:often a bit non-committal, but we had a quick positive conversation.
Speaker:And as I walk out back to my car, there's this big dude there, a big
Speaker:kind of working class guy looks like he's seen a fair bit of life.
Speaker:And walk towards me and we kind of just sort of smiled
Speaker:and acknowledged each other.
Speaker:And now I know you're listening to this thing and Jonathan, this is not profound.
Speaker:Like this is this today's message.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:But it struck me that if we tend to put out.
Speaker:Um, a sense of positivity and acceptance and kindness towards people.
Speaker:So much of the time it tends to get radiated back.
Speaker:It's not always, I know that there is the occasional office psychopath, but I
Speaker:think it's just worth being conscious of.
Speaker:What we are putting out there into the world.
Speaker:Uh, and as much as it depends upon us in cooperating with grace, I think
Speaker:just choosing deliberately choosing.
Speaker:To have a positive disposition towards reality itself and towards the people that
Speaker:we encounter can make a big difference.
Speaker:So friends, two things quickly in this podcast movement.
Speaker:And a radiating positivity towards the people around you and always going to do
Speaker:a perfectly, we're going to have off days.
Speaker:But I just want to offer you that to you guys.
Speaker:And just something to think about.
Speaker:Just one more idea, just to file away as you go throughout
Speaker:your day, night, evening.
Speaker:Just bring a little more.
Speaker:I don't know, radiation of joy into the cosmos, because it
Speaker:certainly is a challenging time.
Speaker:If you've made that awful mistake of turning on mainstream media or
Speaker:looking at too much social media.
Speaker:You will be convinced.
Speaker:Otherwise you'll be convinced that it's all going to hell in a hand basket.
Speaker:As people used to say, But friends, it is still a beautiful world.
Speaker:Is that great poem?
Speaker:The decider art I found in St.
Speaker:Paul's church in Baltimore, in the 16th century beautifully said.
Speaker:You know, it is still a beautiful world, you know, it's still a beautiful world.
Speaker:There's still so much goodness out there.
Speaker:This.
Speaker:So many wonderful people trying to do good things.
Speaker:So be encouraged today.
Speaker:We're going to start a little bit of a journey with a, I got a new translation
Speaker:of, uh, emperor Marcus meditations.
Speaker:One of the great figures of stoic philosophy and a really
Speaker:fascinating figure of history.
Speaker:If you're not familiar with Marcarelli.
Speaker:you will recognize him.
Speaker:Um, as the emperor in the movie, gladiator, before
Speaker:the bad emperor came along.
Speaker:Everyone's uh, but, uh, the more scholarly of my listeners will,
Speaker:of course know that he was a.
Speaker:Uh, an, an emperor.
Speaker:Uh, in the decline of the Roman empire really is in the sort
Speaker:of later in the first century.
Speaker:And of course,
Speaker:Um, there is.
Speaker:Gradual decline due to the overextension of the empire and.
Speaker:Look, I could refer ages on Marcus Aurelius.
Speaker:I want to talk about him in, in a lot of future episodes.
Speaker:I'm just going to pick a little bit of stuff each day.
Speaker:Why because he was part of a tradition.
Speaker:Of.
Speaker:Thinking very deeply about the nature of reality, how to cooperate with reality and
Speaker:how to live appropriately, how to live.
Speaker:Well, I think we're in a, a cultural moment of excess
Speaker:and, um, and cultural decline.
Speaker:And, you know, there's nothing new under the sun, right?
Speaker:Men and women for thousands of years have been living.
Speaker:Well, and heroically and, and obviously not everybody, but we have
Speaker:this great tradition in the west, particularly that we can draw upon.
Speaker:That's very much worth drawing upon.
Speaker:I was talking to my son today.
Speaker:We went to church this morning, we're driving back and we often have
Speaker:these really great conversations.
Speaker:He's 12.
Speaker:And as you do with your 12 year old, we were talking about, um, the American
Speaker:revolutionary war and the thoughts of the first us president George Washington
Speaker:on the nature of moral people as you do.
Speaker:And.
Speaker:I was sort of saying to him, you know, that when one of the great comments
Speaker:that, uh, George Washington made after the revolutionary war, after
Speaker:the declaration of independence,
Speaker:He made the point that the project that they were undertaking
Speaker:the form of governance that the constitution delineated.
Speaker:Was a form of government that George Washington said very
Speaker:specifically could only function for a moral and virtuous people.
Speaker:So he sort of felt that if the society became it'll begin to lack morality
Speaker:and virtue, then it would become tyrannical and it would collapse.
Speaker:So that was said way back at the birth of the American project or the
Speaker:American governmental project, at least.
Speaker:And I just think we're in that.
Speaker:And I think that we are in a moment of.
Speaker:An obsession with self and obsession with personal ends and goals are
Speaker:utilitarian moment yesterday.
Speaker:I talked a lot about nihilism.
Speaker:So, what has this got to do with you and our daily podcast?
Speaker:We're going to go back to some of the great thinkers.
Speaker:We're going to go back to the people that can help us.
Speaker:Think consistently about how to live well.
Speaker:And I was thinking before I came in this Julio.
Speaker:You know, I do this every day, you know, and there's times when
Speaker:I'm tired and I'm like, why am I doing this every single day?
Speaker:Am I, am I holding myself to account?
Speaker:Or a bunch of reasons?
Speaker:One is, I want to show you guys that you can hold yourself to
Speaker:account and stay committed to things that you believe are important.
Speaker:It's an important thing for Saul to remember.
Speaker:And secondly friends I'm doing this because I need to teach
Speaker:it to myself every single day.
Speaker:I need daily, constant reminders.
Speaker:Um, to keep moving forward.
Speaker:So today we're going to jump into a first part of Marcus.
Speaker:Aurelius has meditations where he's literally just writing down.
Speaker:What he has learned from the significant people life.
Speaker:He goes back to his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his father, his mother.
Speaker:But I want to take you to paragraph seven, where he talks about what
Speaker:he learned from a friend of his called rusticness great name.
Speaker:I liked that name, Russ stickers.
Speaker:It's like, where are you going?
Speaker:I've got a rustic.
Speaker:This is house mom.
Speaker:Be back soon.
Speaker:Don't stay out late.
Speaker:It's like I'm on the emperor in training.
Speaker:I can stay out as long as I want now.
Speaker:What did he learn from Rustica?
Speaker:Paragraph seven?
Speaker:Listen to this very beautifully, says the recognition.
Speaker:That I needed.
Speaker:To train.
Speaker:And discipline.
Speaker:My character.
Speaker:The recognition that I needed to train and discipline my character.
Speaker:So why did I shit want to share this with you today?
Speaker:Because I think it's so.
Speaker:Uh, possible it's it's so likely in this current cultural moment.
Speaker:That life happens to us.
Speaker:There is so much distraction, so much consumption.
Speaker:We out homo economics.
Speaker:We, you know, I was talking to Aiden in the car, as I
Speaker:said, coming back from church.
Speaker:And I'm like I said, mate, so many people, I said their, their lives in the absence
Speaker:of a, of a deeper divine, spiritual sense of meaning and the purpose of their lives.
Speaker:I said, humans.
Speaker:Profoundly spiritual creatures, even raving atheists to
Speaker:profoundly spiritual creatures.
Speaker:Why?
Speaker:Because in Latin, we refer to, what's known as CapEx day, that which has
Speaker:the capacity for God, that which has the capacity for the divine.
Speaker:So you can bury that.
Speaker:You can ignore it, you can gloss it over, but that deep religious impulse is
Speaker:utterly essential to the human experience.
Speaker:It has been for from the Dawn of civilization.
Speaker:Even in prehistory, we were a deeply, you know, we were obsessed with
Speaker:the cosmos, the stars, the movement of the world, the natural world.
Speaker:We had this deep sort of mystical spiritual sense.
Speaker:And my point here.
Speaker:Is it in the absence of the practice of organized religion that hasn't gone away?
Speaker:What's happened.
Speaker:Is that it has been veneered over with immediacy, with pleasure, with
Speaker:comfort, with security and safety ism.
Speaker:As the last few years have taught us.
Speaker:But I said to Aiden, I said so many people, their life is nothing other
Speaker:than the accumulation of staff and, and trying to protect their future.
Speaker:And it was interesting because at church today,
Speaker:You know, father made the point where he said, you know, Uh, he
Speaker:was caught out late, uh, on Friday night to, for a hospital visit.
Speaker:Somebody had tragically died with no warning, just completely unexpected.
Speaker:And he said that.
Speaker:You know, Uh, that, uh, he was just shocked.
Speaker:It was quite stunned with consoling the family.
Speaker:That life can just go and change so rapidly that we all assume
Speaker:that we're going to live forever.
Speaker:We're going to die in comfort in our old age, surrounded by loved
Speaker:ones while people play violins.
Speaker:But friends, that's not what actually happens.
Speaker:Life is fragile.
Speaker:It can be taken from a set of heartbeat.
Speaker:As I learned back in the accident in 2019.
Speaker:What's my point is that.
Speaker:We've lost track of the deeper purposes and meanings of existence
Speaker:and the magnificence of our creation and the potential that we carry.
Speaker:And so many of us are living our life on a daily basis in a highly distracted
Speaker:and consumptive mode that we consume.
Speaker:And we were obsessed with financial success and financial accumulation.
Speaker:These are a good things.
Speaker:These are not bad things.
Speaker:They have their place.
Speaker:But what I'm getting at here in Marcus Aurelius, as he's calling us back
Speaker:to a, to a deeper level of living.
Speaker:So my point is that when we're surrounded by so much comfort, when
Speaker:we're surrounded by so much, Distraction that I, life can just become automatic.
Speaker:Did you ever do this?
Speaker:Do you wake up?
Speaker:And we were highly habitual creatures, you know, I used to wake up and I'd get
Speaker:my, I had my coffee machine on, but I'd be reading social media and reading news
Speaker:websites and blowing an hour apart there.
Speaker:And then.
Speaker:Wandering through the day, sometimes doing a bit of this bit of that,
Speaker:but really the day would end.
Speaker:I'd be like, what did I do?
Speaker:So, this is why this paragraph is so important.
Speaker:Um, paragraph seven of the first book of Marcus Aurelius has meditation's listen.
Speaker:He says the recognition that I needed to train and discipline my character.
Speaker:What is that character?
Speaker:What is your character?
Speaker:I used to teach this all the time in seminars, character.
Speaker:Actually comes.
Speaker:We first hear about it in middle English, back in about the 15th
Speaker:century, maybe earlier it was, uh, it's.
Speaker:It comes from, um, I don't remember the exact translation, but it means a mark
Speaker:or an indelible mark upon the soul, like a tattoo upon our very spiritual core.
Speaker:And our character is nothing other than the sum total of our
Speaker:choices, decisions, and actions.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So think about it.
Speaker:If you steal all the time, you become a thief.
Speaker:This is what Dostoevsky was getting at in, um, crime and punishment.
Speaker:That once we move from contemplation or something to actually doing something, we
Speaker:eventually become what we repeatedly do.
Speaker:If we do lots of exercise and training and take care of our
Speaker:health, we become healthy.
Speaker:If we eat terribly and do no exercise, we become something different.
Speaker:If we speak the truth, as often as we can courageously, we become honest.
Speaker:If we don't, we become liars.
Speaker:So you see that even in the ancient world, they understood
Speaker:this profound meaning of character.
Speaker:Then what we do on a daily basis really, really matters.
Speaker:And what I'm convinced of is this is actually really hard because it's hard.
Speaker:Like it's, I find it incredibly hard to live with character day
Speaker:after day and to keep working at it.
Speaker:But what has learned from his friend rustic as here is
Speaker:his eyes have been opened.
Speaker:He has realized my friends that he has to train.
Speaker:And discipline his character.
Speaker:You know, imagine if you've got some kind of, you know, a great big dog though.
Speaker:You've got a puppy and, uh, but it was one of those huge, big Ridgeback things or
Speaker:some kind of Malamute or German shepherd, and you never train this thing, right.
Speaker:Or a pit bull, you never trained it.
Speaker:It just kind of wanders around the house.
Speaker:Does whatever it wants does, you know, never gets any kind of training.
Speaker:This thing eventually has a good chance of going off the reservation.
Speaker:Doesn't it?
Speaker:I mean, this thing eventually has a chance of doing what reverting.
Speaker:To it's animal nature to doing things that you may not like, because
Speaker:that's its nature because it's never been trained or discipline.
Speaker:And Marcus earlier series telling us that we have this in us.
Speaker:We have this.
Speaker:Untamed unrestrained, ASCA.
Speaker:Personalities that if we don't tame them and discipline and train them over time.
Speaker:They're going to be problematic for us and our character will fall apart.
Speaker:Friends.
Speaker:Turn your attention for just a second to the political landscape.
Speaker:What do you see?
Speaker:I see two problems.
Speaker:I see.
Speaker:Firstly.
Speaker:Uh, an obsession with save your ideology.
Speaker:I see, uh, a belief that we are looking for a man or a woman constantly to save
Speaker:us to be different to the other ones.
Speaker:I would like that to be the case, but I'm a realist of what it means to be human.
Speaker:We are angels we're in.
Speaker:Perfect.
Speaker:We'll do good things.
Speaker:We'll do problematic things.
Speaker:So, you know, I think that's a problem.
Speaker:And I also think we have this problem with character.
Speaker:We have this constant problem of character in, in our institutions,
Speaker:in politics and civic, civic life.
Speaker:Am I putting myself up here is perfect.
Speaker:Like I've got it figured out.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:But at least I understand that what the questions are and what I need to do.
Speaker:And this idea of daily disciplining my character daily, being
Speaker:hard with ourselves daily.
Speaker:And consistently saying no to some things yes.
Speaker:To other things.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:To somethings, yes.
Speaker:To some things.
Speaker:So, what I'm trying to do is put this on your rider.
Speaker:Training and disciplining your character, learning when to say no learning.
Speaker:When to say this is not a good thing for my life.
Speaker:The last thing he says here in paragraph seven is that rustic has
Speaker:taught him to read attentively.
Speaker:Not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of it.
Speaker:I like that to read attentively.
Speaker:I'm a voracious reader.
Speaker:But this jumps out at me, because again, though, I don't use social media.
Speaker:I read a lot of high level, uh, sub stack content.
Speaker:You know, I try to read some really good people.
Speaker:And I find that you can be rushing and not paying attention.
Speaker:And if we want to grow, we want to learn it is worthwhile creating the context,
Speaker:the environment, my dear friend, where we can concentrate and read deeply and
Speaker:read attentively and think carefully.
Speaker:About what's important to us and what matters in the world.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:So summary today.
Speaker:What have we done?
Speaker:I've talked about movement.
Speaker:Get moving, my friends, get moving, get moving.
Speaker:Let me be encouraging of you here.
Speaker:Stop that gym program.
Speaker:Make that phone call walk that extra 500 meters.
Speaker:You know, do that thing.
Speaker:That's going to get your body healthier.
Speaker:Why?
Speaker:Because the healthier you are.
Speaker:And the longer you are healthier.
Speaker:The more, you can be a blessing to the people in your life.
Speaker:It's not about having ripped abs, so that's a benefit.
Speaker:If you can have it.
Speaker:I have a couple of friends.
Speaker:That just have genetically like no body fat.
Speaker:And I, I don't want to say that I hate them because that would just be cruel.
Speaker:But my gosh, there are some people that don't have to work too hard.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:But for the rest of us,
Speaker:The fact that we look after ourselves mean we can, we can love for longer.
Speaker:We can be more present in the lives of our friends and family and kids.
Speaker:And we can just keep contributing to the lives of other people.
Speaker:We talked about movement.
Speaker:We talked about.
Speaker:My gas station, petrol station experience of radiating positivity to other people.
Speaker:And then we've got a little deeper with Marcus.
Speaker:Arrelia says reflections on what he learned from his friend Rustica.
Speaker:God bless you.
Speaker:Everybody.
Speaker:Get out there amongst the go train and Disney character today.
Speaker:Let me be that nagging voice in your conscience.
Speaker:When you go for that third cookie today.
Speaker:And then you go.
Speaker:Jonathan said.
Speaker:Don't take the cookie.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Whatever it is, whatever your cookie looks like, have one, maybe
Speaker:two, but don't have the third.
Speaker:God bless everybody.
Speaker:Would you do me a favor?
Speaker:Would you subscribe to this podcast?
Speaker:And would you do something else for me?
Speaker:Leave a review and maybe send this to some friends.
Speaker:Chuck it on your Facebook feed.
Speaker:Put it as a Lincoln, some social media and, um, but just send it out to somebody
Speaker:and say, Hey, have a listen to this because I just love seeing this grow.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:God bless everybody.
Speaker:My name's Jonathan Doyle.
Speaker:This has been the daily message.
Speaker:And you and I are going to talk again tomorrow.
