Dharma Paths

The private diaries of one of Rome’s greatest emperors, the personal letters of one of Rome’s best
playwrights and wisest power brokers, the lectures of a former slave and exile, turned influential
teacher. Against all odds and the passing of some two millennia, these incredible documents survive.

What do they say? Could these ancient and obscure pages really contain anything relevant to modern
life? The answer, it turns out, is yes. They contain some of the greatest wisdom in the history of the world.

Together these documents constitute the bedrock of what is known as Stoicism, an ancient philosophy
that was once one of the most popular civic disciplines in the West, practiced by the rich and the
impoverished, the powerful and the struggling alike in the pursuit of the Good Life. But over the centuries,
knowledge of this way of thinking, once essential to so many, slowly faded from view.

Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only they truly live. Not satisfied to merely keep good watch over their own days, they annex every age to their own. All the harvest of the past is added to their store. Only an ingrate would fail to see that these great architects of venerable thoughts were born for us and have designed a way of life for us.

Just as we commonly hear people say the doctor prescribed someone particular riding exercises,
or ice baths, or walking without shoes, we should in the same way say that nature prescribed
someone to be diseased, or disabled, or to suffer any kind of impairment. In the case of the
doctor, prescribed means something ordered to help aid someone’s healing. But in the case of
nature, it means that what happens to each of us is ordered to help aid our destiny.

Won’t you be walking in your predecessors’ footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I will blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these paths aren’t our masters, but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone, it has not been monopolized.