Stoicism is one of the most practical philosophies out there and as such, its teachers have come up with exercises and meditations for the most common woes of human existence. One such technique is the so-called View from Above Meditation, which asks the Stoic student to use big picture thinking to consider their place in the Universe and thus gain perspective on his or her life and troubles.
What is the View from Above in Stoicism & How Does it Relate to Stoic Perspective?
The ‘view from above’ exercise invites us to consider our importance (or rather, lack thereof) in the vastness of the Universe and to gain humility. This is a very useful trait to possess if you want to be successful in your personal development journey, since thinking you are the best and have nothing to learn will never allow you to evolve.
In other words, the technique allows us to gain a bit of Stoic perspective by meditating on the futility of all of our pursuits by showing us that they are just as effective at changing the world as a drop of water falling into a river is of changing its course. (The vanitas vanitatum vibes are strong in this one!) This is not meant to discourage us from ever attempting anything too ambitious, but merely to remind us to not take ourselves so seriously.
You can think of Stoic perspective in this context as the opposite of main character energy. Instead of seeing yourself as the center of attention - a protagonist going on unique adventures - it asks you to consider how insignificant you are in the grand scheme of things and how commonplace your struggles and activities appear when looked at from a distance. The idea is to make you aware that there is something bigger than yourself out there and to offer a transcendental experience that will bring you closer to the rest of humanity, who is facing a similar condition.
I bet that Marcus and the gang would have been elated to know that their intuition was proven right by the overview effect, a phenomenon reported by astronauts observing the Earth from a distance and feeling that it is “a tiny ball, hanging in the void”.
Practicing the view from above is helpful not only in gaining humility and putting adversity into context, but also in cultivating rationality. Remembering the big picture in the moments of heightened emotion is no easy feat, but training yourself to do so will help you become a more grounded and less reactive individual in general. Why is that a good thing? Because if you don’t react to your (negative) emotions immediately, it is much harder for others to manipulate you into acting against your best interest.
Of course, taking the view from above will not make your problems disappear, but it will make you sufficiently calm that you can deal with them properly. If you’ve lived long enough, you may have already noticed that the decisions you make when you’re feeling strong emotions - even if they are positive! - tend to be suboptimal, so this is a way of tuning them down in the moment so that you can hear yourself think.
To gain an even better understanding of the exercise, let’s go to the original Stoic texts and explore some quotes that deal with the topic.
Quotes about the View From Above that Reveal Its Meaning
This section focuses exclusively on quotes from Marcus Aurelius because he used this technique frequently in the “Meditations”, but there is no doubt that Epictetus and Seneca would have found it useful.
Being a Roman Emperor, you can imagine that he had much bigger problems to deal with than you and I: wars, a plague and internal power struggles to name just a few. As he had no military experience, one can imagine that he often felt unequipped to deal with whatever life threw his way. He conquered these challenges by practicing the view from above in order to gain what he called a “cosmic perspective”. Consider the following quote:
“Think of substance in its entirety, of which you have the smallest of shares; and of time in its entirety, of which a brief and momentary span has been assigned to you; and of the works of destiny, and how very small is your part in them. ” - Marcus Aurelius
I suspect that thinking in this way helped him realize that no matter what decision he would make, it would be an insignificant blip in history, which gave him the courage to proceed even when he did not have all the information. This is a useful perspective to embrace when you are caught in analysis paralysis.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, adopting the view from above helps us regain some control over our situation:
“The agitations that beset you are superfluous, and depend wholly upon judgments of your own. You can get rid of them, and in so doing will indeed live at large, by embracing the whole universe in your view and comprehending all eternity and imagining the swiftness of change in each particular, seeing how brief is the passage from birth to dissolution, birth with its unfathomable before, dissolution with its infinite hereafter.” – Marcus Aurelius
What Marcus is trying to say is that even if it is impossible for us to control the outcome of the situation, we are always in charge of how we respond to it and nobody is stopping us from treating it as it is: insignificant.
You should have gotten the gist of the exercise by now. It’s time to see how you could use it in practice, perhaps when something bad happens and you need to decompress from all those negative emotions. Let’s talk about…
How to Meditate using the View from Above Exercise
You’ll need about 20 minutes to complete this exercise. Sit in a calm, quiet place where you will not be disturbed for the duration of the meditation. I like to do this in nature, when taking a break from a hike (there’s something particularly humbling about being in the mountains!) and go through the following steps:
Imagine you are able to step outside of yourself and observe your body in its usual surroundings: at home or at work, as you are going about your daily activities. Your perspective should be that of a camera that has zoomed in on you. This is where our story starts.
As the camera continues to slowly zoom out, think of how little you are occupying the room or rather, how much bigger the room is compared to you.
Zoom out even further and think of how the room you are in fits into the building, then how the building is a tiny part of your city.
Keep going and imagine the city slowly fading as you zoom out to reveal the borders of the country you are living in, the continent and eventually the globe.
If you were a pin on a map, you should be barely visible by now. Go on and continue zooming out to reveal that the Earth is just a tiny dot in the Milky Way which, in turn, is but an insignificant part of the entire Universe.
Spend a few moments thinking about the situation that was causing your negative emotions and think of how it fits in this big picture view.
Here is an interesting video that walks you through the exercise, in case you prefer to listen to it while you’re out and about:
P.S.: The steps I’ve listed above to guide you on considering your place in the Universe relate to a spatial perspective. If you’re interested in the temporal side of the problem (how you relate to the age you live in), I recommend reading this post, since identifying the Zeitgeist is a helpful starting point for contemplating your place in the bigger picture of history. You might just conclude that your insignificance can be proven in many different directions. 😉
If you’ve gained some strength from knowing that your daily sorrows pale in comparison to the scale of the Universe, but you’d still like to add one more tool to your misfortune-vanquishing toolbox, have a look at this other Stoic exercise, called premeditatio malorum, which invites you to imagine that the worst case scenario has already happened in order to rob it of its power over you if it does.
