…Amazon sells books from the greatest thinkers in recorded history for free or nearly free on the kindle store. Aristotle, Plato, Nietzshe, Lao Tzu, Seneca, Jacob Boehme, Julius Ceasar, Tabula Smaragdina and the Corpus Hermeticum from Hermes Trismegistus, even the Bible, the Koran, Bhagavad Gita, the Upanisads, and many others sell in the range of $0-$5. This is unbelievable!

I’d immediately downloaded some as soon as I bought the device (which I bought also because of the free roaming features by the way). I normally read a couple of things in the same time but nowadays I am mostly reading the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius (it was also free).

The key is death. Forgetting this is what makes life an illusion.

Lie down, close your eyes and try to die. Feel the body giving up and drifting away, gather the strength to focus, not to pass out, to stay alert so you can preserve yourself.

Maintain control in the face of the most elemental fear with an irrevocable determination to fight till the very end and not to succumb to nature. With the death of the body the significance of time becomes minimal – you’re still perceiving it but you know it’ll be gone, too. You realize that your life was nothing and that you got it all wrong.

You were dead and now you have the chance to live.

You remember only the small things now. The smallest things you missed; you realized how and where you screwed up. You realize: it was all about control. The control you need now to gather the power to survive this trauma. The rest was just a setting: parents, lovers, enemies, religion, kids, career, home; sogar dein Auto! If only you had been aware of this. You realize that this is your last chance to control your destiny. Not to forget! Not to let the experience overwhelm you, not to let it put you to sleep.

You understand: if you identify with what you experience, you are lost. To preserve yourself you must dominate your experience! You! Your mind screams: this is not me!!! Whatever you see and feel: this is not me!

You have always been alone!

And you remember the small details: the conflicts, the love, the hate, the anger, the pride, the shame, the guilt, the lies; …and the fear! That sneaky fear that remained under your radar but you always felt and that you let yourself get used to; all the instances when you forgot, fell asleep and let yourself be used by thoughts and emotions that you never owned.

You were owned.

You have been weak and stupid. You just didn’t know!!! The question of control never even came up. Your whole life was a void and now you see that it amounted to nothing. Only now that it’s gone it has become clear: this moment is the point. This moment has always been the point from the very beginning. What will you do? What can you do?

Are you going to fall asleep now or triumph?

Nobody really understands the greatest minds without this vantage point. Without experiencing this ultimate struggle, everything is just an abstraction, an illusion.

Marcus Aurelius starts his thoughts by taking stock of what he learned from whom. Taking stock of the “small things” where control and balance must be exercised:

Taking the time; thinking before speaking; not to speak unnecessarily; being considerate; not to get angry because of small things; not to be judgmental; not to daydream; not to be passionate(!); not to succumb to fame and fortune; acting in accordance with one’s own nature; not to identify with others, not to be concerned with what others think, understanding and appreciating differences and many other things that require you to use all your powers to preserve yourself, just like on your death bed when the stakes are the highest.

The greatest lives and the greatest works all exude an intimate atmosphere of death.

This vantage point is what turns mundane activities into rituals and this is what makes the differentiated man. NOT the 80/20 rule, not the ability to introduce balanced scorecards, not the brand message (God forbid: personal band), not executive education programs, celebrity coaches or books by Steve Jobs or Jack Welsh, not a dedication to perfection in product development, not the value investing “philosophy”, not anything in the business domain: these are just settings.

I have really no idea how to finish this one. Now I am going to write business proposals, have business meetings, the usual stuff. Hopefully I’ll manage to bring an element of life into the whole thing.

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