> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Introduction to Meditations - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/meditations-introduction-to-meditations/ - Published: 2026-01-02T00:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-02T18:28:11.000Z - Description: Brown sets Marcus Aurelius's private notes against the plague and wars he wrote them through, then lays out the two Stoic ideas that hold the book together. - Author: Andrew Wessels - Tags: Derren Brown on Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, #video Derren Brown opens by admitting he is an odd guide: a magician, hypnotist and mind reader whose day job includes exposing faith healers. He then puts Marcus Aurelius's *Meditations* where it belongs, in the hands of an emperor writing private notes to himself through the Antonine Plague and nineteen years of near-constant war. Brown sketches where Stoicism came from, between the Cynics and the Epicureans, and why so much of it feels familiar: Christianity had to win the Stoics over, and absorbed them. The turn is his reading of modern optimism as a faith healer's bargain. Set your goals, believe in yourself, and if it fails the fault is yours. Against that he sets the Stoic Fork, the line between what you control and what you don't, and the claim that our judgments, rather than events, make our trouble. He leaves you with an emperor asking how to stay sane, and a book that never tries to convince you of anything. ## Transcript Hello, I'm Derren Brown. Welcome to Marcus Aurelius's *Meditations* on Rebind. In the UK, I'm a magician and a hypnotist and a mind reader, and perhaps an unusual guide through Marcus's *Meditations*. But what interests me is the stories that we tell ourselves, and that's something that straightly crosses through magic and Stoicism and Marcus's *Meditations* themselves. So it's an extraordinary book, this 2000 year old collection of little notes to self written by the most powerful man in the world at the time. Marcus was the last of a group of emperors known as the Good Emperors, and they themselves formed the end of a 200 year period of Roman history called the Pax Romana, which was this relatively stable, relatively peaceful time of great expansion and prosperity. And then it sort of ended with Marcus's death. And really he, and maybe the emperor before him, were the truly good of the five good emperors. He was a great man. He was loved, he was respected, and clearly a thoughtful and decent man who found himself as emperor. Part of what makes this book so extraordinary and the Stoic lessons so valuable is that not only are they being written by this powerful emperor, but an emperor in the most awful, difficult, dangerous, life-threatening situation. First of all, there's a plague. There is the Antonine Plague, which will wipe out about 10% of ancient Rome, which is something between five and 10 million people. Not only is he dealing with that, but also his entire period of rule, he became emperor 161 AD until 180 when he died, and it's just wars all the time. And at the same time, somehow in the midst of that, writing about how you keep a steady mind and how you find kinship with your fellow man. It's a really wonderful, touching, extraordinary thing. And another thing that makes it quite unique is the fact it was never written for publication. It wasn't written as a way of convincing us to do anything. It really was his little private notes to self. It is not a book that easily breaks down into clear themes. There's a lot of repetition. There are quite a few things in there that might not be immediately apparent what they mean if you don't understand about Stoicism, because he is not trying to teach us about Stoicism. He is writing to himself and he knows about it already. So there's things that we'll unpack together and understand together, this really extraordinary philosophy that was the main middle class Roman approach to life, to the extent that when Christianity exploded onto the scene, it was the Stoics that they had to win over. They were the pagans that the Christians had to bring across. Stoicism arrived in ancient Greece. So before the Roman times, a chap called Zeno had a big shipwreck and then arrives in Greece, kind of looking for wisdom. There are a couple of rival schools around at the time, and likewise are in Roman times as well, that it sort of draws from. So you've got the Cynics, and the Cynics said that we should live quite an ascetic life of simple pleasures, but we should disregard societal rules. And they were famous for masturbating in the street. They kind of had their thing going on. And then there were the Epicureans who lived out the garden, and they were kind of like an original hippie commune. And again, it was about a simple kind of life, and they were about pleasure. So we have this word epicurean nowadays, but it suggests something a bit more about luxury. Back in the day, they were about pursuing pleasure, but really simple pleasures, because if you do things to excess, if you drink and party too much, you're gonna end up feeling terrible. So they wanted to avoid that. So again, it was about a very simple life, but it was rather more kind of relaxed and they kept themselves to themselves. And somewhere in the middle of these two worlds Stoicism arrived. As we move into the Roman period, what remains of Stoicism is what it is to live a good life and to achieve what they called eudaimonia, which means a sort of flourishing. Of course, that's such a human question, and that question is still with us today. And an extraordinary thing about Stoicism is, because Christianity had to win those Stoics over, it sort of brought them into its fold by adopting a lot of those Stoic ideas. So a lot of them still feel familiar to us nowadays because they've come from that Stoic period 2000 years ago and have come through a kind of Christian filter up to us. Even more interesting for me, at least, is the fact that the original Stoics were from the east. So actually, when you look at the Stoic ideas, they cross very easily over into Buddhism, and they have this sort of pan-hemispheric feel that brings it east and west. And I think that the ancient Greeks, then the Romans, became this sort of western holding place for Eastern ideas. Everything spoken about in terms of the rational mind, which isn't such an Eastern mode, but it's a much more comfortable mode for us to understand. So what is it? What does Stoicism mean? There are different ways of understanding happiness, and this has changed throughout history. And for a long time, happiness was just about what your relationship with God was like. Like God just answered those questions for a big chunk of our history. But prior to that, so the pre-Christian era, people were looking around for their own answers. A big thing that separates the Stoic idea of the good life and happiness from nowadays is that what we live in today is a very optimistic model. There's an American model that has sort of spread across the world, a lot of it, saying that if we believe in ourselves and if we set our goals, we will get where we want to be. The universe will somehow sort of bend to our will. It's a strangely religious model. First of all, you're climbing a ladder. You're climbing a ladder to reach the top, which has religious roots. You are sort of deferring happiness all the time. The idea is if you get these things right, there's some sort of salvation for you on the horizon. And also it's a hangover from quite a Calvinist Protestant work ethic, that you will find your salvation through your own hard work. And I've done a lot of work with faith healers, the sort of people that get you up out of your wheelchair and make you walk on stage. I've looked into their techniques and I've exposed charlatans in that world as part of my day job. And it struck me there's a very similar dynamic at work, which is a sort of faith model, because they will tell you, throw away your pills, and if the disease returns, it's your own fault. It's your own fault. You didn't have enough faith, which of course puts the blame on you. And that's the trouble with the optimistic mode of happiness. Set your goals, believe in yourself, and you'll get where you want. Which then of course means if things don't work out, you don't get where you want, you must have failed. The blame is on your shoulders. You must have done something wrong. So that's our modern mode. And it's interesting to bear that in mind because the ancient mode is so different. And what the Stoics are saying is that actually you can look at happiness as an absence of disturbance, an absence of anxiety, first of all. So rather than it being an actual thing, like it's your birthright, happiness is this clear, obvious thing that I'm entitled to, you can acknowledge the fact that it's a very slippery fish. Like it's really hard to actually identify what happiness is, but you can see it clearly in terms of what it isn't. So the Stoics are very interested in how do we achieve an absence of anxiety and disturbance and emotional distress. That's their main aim here. So starting with that, they then look at, a lot of distress is gonna come from trying to control things that you can't, right? So if you try to wield control where you have no remit, you're gonna make yourself upset. So they look at that. What can you actually control in life? And they say that the things you can control, your thoughts and your actions, that's hard enough. But that's your kind of area of concern. Everything else that happens in the world, all the stuff you cannot control, what other people do, what they think of you, how things turn out, how results just come into your life, it had nothing to do with you. And you can decide that those things are fine, just as they are. So this is called the Stoic Fork. There's a fork between things I can control and things I can't. And all the things you can't control, you can decide are okay as they are. Now, that might sound like that's a recipe for complacency, and it isn't, but we'll discuss that more as we go along, because there are some interesting gray areas between the two. So the other big idea associated with it is that it's not things in the world that cause our problems. It's the stories that we tell ourselves about those things. It's our judgments that we make towards those things that will create our problems or make them fine. That's a big idea. And of course it's true, because you may say, well, clearly this thing in my life is making my life miserable, and clearly it's the fault of that thing. But you can always imagine somebody else dealing with the same situation differently and not being so brought down by it. So allied to this idea of the Stoic Fork is the idea that your control of how you do react to something and the effect that it has on you is always down to you. There's always the judgments that you're making, the story that you're telling yourself about the things that are happening. Those I think are the two big Stoic ideas, and you can't really argue with either of them. Whether they present you the whole picture that's important in life, I don't know. And I think there are some edge Stoicism and areas where it maybe isn't as strong. But in terms of going through life with some really helpful ideas that might make you feel more resilient and give you an inner source of strength in the face of a world that is throwing all sorts of things at you, I think it's very helpful if you are trying to achieve a more relaxed and tranquil approach to all the stuff that life is throwing at you. Because he isn't trying to convince you of anything, there's no sense that you are being preached at. You are looking into the mind of this extraordinary ruler of the Roman world who's clearly very thoughtful, introverted, slightly uncomfortable in the role that he's found himself. He was adopted, and that those last emperors rule adopted. So he wasn't even born into the bloodline of this. It was sort of thrust upon him, and is navigating, how do you keep your mind solid? How do you remain sane in this mad world? And that is such a universal human question that it remains with us. It's part of all our experiences, and the answers he found in their own way are gonna still be relevant to us nowadays. There are a couple of interesting things to unpack as well. Some of the language he uses is quite theological. He's gonna talk about the soul. He's gonna talk about God and gods and divinity within us. And that might be a little off-putting at first, but actually, again, really easy to unpack. And he's not really talking about a religious mode at all in the way that we understand it nowadays. We'll unpack those things together. It is a unique and extraordinary book. I'm really looking forward to going through this with you. I've taken so much from it. I know you will as well, maybe not even on the first read, but it's the sort of book you'll come back to again and again. So thank you for doing this with Rebind and I will see you soon.