[I’m typing this as I fly back from Grand Lake, Colorado, where I had the good fortune of spending the last four days with other members of the Squatch Frontier Fitness team. Hiking, cold springs, runs, sunshine, stretching, sauna, writing, reading, building, dreaming, and flying my drone. In a word: magic.
One of the unexpected joys of life in my last few years has been the companionship of my drone on trips. Many of us are familiar with the experience of going to beautiful places only to be disappointed when our pictures don’t do the views justice. The deflation that occurs when we find ourselves standing in the middle of majesty with a phone or camera that can’t quite capture what we’re in the midst of.
With my drone, that rarely happens. With my drone, it feels like I’m able to experience the magic of a place in a special way. It doesn’t matter if it’s somewhere I’m intimately familiar with (like my hometown) or somewhere entirely new to me (like Grand Lake), when I fly the drone, I fly with it. For a brief moment in time, I’m given (a small sampling of) Eternity’s point of view. It lifts me out of myself and into the Whole. It reminds me of how small yet infinite I am. It’s nothing short of a spiritual experience—one of my favorite meditative practices.
But long before drones existed, the Stoics came up with ways to take the cosmic perspective with only their mind. One such practice, known as taking the “view from above,” is the topic of the rest of today’s post.]
It is a feature of being human that we often get caught in the web of our individual lives. We focus on all the tasks we need to complete and problems we possess. Lost in the labyrinth within, we forget the world that exists on the other side of our eyes. Slowly, our world caves in and the pressure builds with nowhere to release.
As our sight stays on the specifics of our singular life, we become overly concerned with ourselves and alienated from others. The world becomes unfair and the people that inhabit it become inconvenient. We lock ourselves in a private cage and wonder why we suffer from diseases of despair—anxiety and loneliness, our only company.
Some get depressed as their vision narrows; others, narcissistic. Most experience a little bit of both as they reduce the world to population: me and sow the seeds of their destruction (as in the myth of Narcissus and Echo).
If we want to avoid this closing in, we must develop practices that regularly draw us out of ourselves and recenter us in the Whole. It’s this shift from the individual to the Whole that not only sweeps away our anxieties, but liberates us from the prison of our ego.
The View from Above
Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Stoics developed a visualization technique known as taking the “view from above” for the purpose of putting life (with its attendant worries) in the proper perspective. Used by Marcus Aurelius as a way to remind himself to be humble and hopeful, it remains a potent remedy for our human tendency toward self-centeredness and a useful cognitive tool in times of distress. Marcus introduces the idea in Meditations:
Take a view from above - look at the thousands of flocks and herds, the thousands of human ceremonies, every sort of voyage in storm or calm, the range of creation, combination, and extinction. Consider too the lives once lived by others long before you, the lives that will be lived after you, the lives lived now among foreign tribes… [y]ou can strip away many unnecessary troubles which lie wholly in your own judgment. And you will immediately make large and wide room for yourself by grasping the whole universe in your thought, contemplating the eternity of time, and reflecting on the rapid change of each thing in every part - how brief the gap from birth to dissolution, how vast the gulf of time before your birth, and an equal infinity after your dissolution.1
Here’s how we might apply this practice today:
We start by imagining ourselves where we are in time and space from a third-person perspective. With our awareness hovering somewhere above us, we start to distance ourselves from the fear, uncertainty, doubt, and desires our flesh and bone might be experiencing.
With this vantage point, we are able to see our concerns more objectively and our situation less emotionally.
As the meditation continues, we slowly send our awareness higher. Taken to its end, we move from a view of our self to the surrounding scenery to the city and so on, until we’re among the stars staring at this planet we call Earth.
From this “view from above,” the “self, by means of this process of realization, discovers both its limitations and its transcendence.”2
A Reminder of Life’s Limits
When we look at our lives with the lens of the Limitless, the limited nature of the world comes into focus. Suddenly we see just how temporary we (and everything else in this world) are, and both achievement and failure don’t seem so large after all. Returning to Marcus and Mediations:
Some things are hurrying to come into being, others are hurrying to be gone, and part of that which is being born is already extinguished. Flows and changes are constantly renewing the world, just as the ceaseless passage of time makes eternity ever young. In this river, then, where there can be no foothold, what should anyone prize of all that races past him?3
Or as he puts similarly in a separate passage:
What a tiny part of the boundless abyss of time has been allotted to each of us - and this is soon vanished in eternity; what a tiny part of the universal substance and the universal soul; how tiny in the whole earth the mere clod of which you creep. Reflecting on all this, think nothing important other than active pursuit where your own nature leads and passive acceptance of what universal nature brings.4
As we step into our best attempt at the eternal perspective, we start to see our anxiety, desires, worries, and fears for what they are: temporary emotions and concerns—existing only in moments rather than the remainder of our existence.
When things are bad, we can say with certainty that they won’t always be this way. There was a time before the struggle and there will be a time after. Every wave has a before, during, and after phase.
When we’re worried about our future, the infinite reminds us we don’t know enough to worry (because worry pressuposes we possess enough knowledge to project the future…and we don’t).
And when we start to feel self-important, the Ultimate is there to remind us just how small we (and our issues) are in the grand scheme of things.
A Reminder of Our Transcendence
Just as the view from above reminds of our limitations and life’s transitory nature, it also shows us our transcendence. Just as it shows us how small our egoic self is, it also shows us how large our true essence is. To cue this part of his “view from above” meditations, Marcus used this reminder:
Meditate often on the interconnectedness of and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe. For in a sense, all things are mutually woven together and therefore have an affinity for each other – for one thing follows after another according to their tension of movement, their sympathetic stirrings and the unity of all substance.”5
As your awareness rises into the sky, borders and differences disappear and everything connects. Individual concerns and worries dissolve in a sea of people facing a life just as complex (if not more) than ours. The minor disagreements and arguments that moments ago filled us with rage suddenly seem silly. It becomes obvious how we, on this tiny blue dot, are just different parts of the same transcendent Whole, mutually interdependent on each other. Different leaves of the same tree—our mission much bigger than any individual.
We see how the souls we carry inside our bodies are all drawn from the same source. How our lives are connected to all life, including all that came before and all that will come after. We are quicker to forgive because we understand how we would likely act as the ones who hurt us if were born with their genes and walked in their shoes.
Conclusion
Now that you know what it does, I urge you to try the practice on your own (either by returning to the outline above and visualizing on your own or listening to the script below). At the end of the exercise, when your awareness returns to viewing the world through two slots in your skull, I can promise you this: the afterglow will brighten every edge of your live. At least for a little while. Until the human experience manages once again to pull you in on yourselves with its pressures and distractions.
Then you’ll know it’s time to go through the exercise again.
—
P.S. If you want to be led through a “view from above” meditation, check out Donald Robertson’s Recording on SoundCloud. It’s not quite my favorite form of restorative meditation (that title belongs to Andrew Huberman’s NSDR (non-sleep deep rest) video below), but it’s a good way to spend 20 minutes.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.30-32.
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, p. 181.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.15.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12.32.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.38.