September 13, 2026

Lifted Above Yourself

Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty.

Plotinus, the third-century philosopher who founded what we call Neoplatonism, wrote this near the start of his treatise on the soul's descent into the body, after decades of teaching in Rome. His student Porphyry recorded that these experiences of stepping outside ordinary awareness happened to Plotinus many times during his life, moments when the body and its worries dropped away and something larger came into view. The passage describes rising out of the everyday self to see with a wider vision, one that revealed a beauty and order invisible up close. Stoics practiced a related exercise long before him: picturing the city, the argument, even one's own body, from a great height, so that quarrels and anxieties shrank to their true size against the size of the world and the sweep of time. Marcus Aurelius called this looking at things 'from above,' watching armies, crowds, and lawsuits shrink once seen from far enough away.

A principle of Stoicism: The View from Above →