What you are doing is worth doing, and worth persisting in. Keep working toward a clear mind and a sound understanding. Do not imagine you must go to a temple for this, or lift your hands to the sky, or bribe some priest for the chance to whisper into the ear of a statue, as if the gods would hear you better that way. God is close to you. God is with you. God is inside you.
This is what I mean, Lucilius. There is a sacred presence living in you now, something that sees what you do and what you fail to do, something that stands guard over you. The way you treat it is the way it will treat you. No one becomes genuinely good without its help. No one rises above fortune without it. It is the source of every honest and noble thought you have ever had. In every good person some god lives, though which god that is, no one can say.
You already know this feeling. Think of the last time you walked into a forest of ancient trees, so tall and dense that the canopy shut out the sky and the branches locked together overhead like a vault. The height, the silence, the continuous shadow in open air, something in you registered a presence. Or think of standing at the mouth of a cave carved by nature deep into a hillside, the rock arching overhead, an entire mountain resting on nothing you have built. Your mind falls quiet in a way it rarely does. We build altars where great rivers surge out of hidden ground. We call hot springs sacred. We treat a pool that is very dark or very deep as something not entirely ours to touch. In all of these we sense the same thing, that something is here which is larger than we are.
Now put a human being in that place. Imagine a person who faces danger without flinching, who has no taste for what most people spend their lives chasing, who stays at ease in the middle of catastrophe, calm in the storm, looking down on ordinary ambitions from a height and looking up at the gods almost as an equal rather than as a subject. Would you not feel something close to reverence. Would you not say that whatever is living in that body is too great for it. The divine has entered that person. It has come down.
When a soul rises above the noise, when it is master of itself, when it moves through every disaster as if it were a small thing, when it can smile both at what terrifies the rest of us and at what the rest of us spend our whole lives hoping for, that soul is being moved by something that did not begin here. Nothing that large can keep itself upright without help from its source. The greater part of such a soul still lives where it came from. Just as a ray of sunlight touches the earth and yet belongs entirely to the sun, a great soul is among us in that way. It is with us. It speaks with us. But it is always leaning back toward its origin, always turning its gaze in that direction, always drawn to return. It is involved with our affairs only as something better than us is involved with anything.
What does such a soul look like in practice. It shines with its own light. It carries nothing that belongs to someone else. Nothing is more foolish than praising in a person what was handed to them or what could be taken away tomorrow and handed to another. A gold bit in a horse’s mouth does not make the horse better. If you go to the arena, you do not honor the lion that has been broken by training and draped in gold. You honor the wild lion, sharp as nature made him, magnificent in his ferocity, so formidable that no one can look on him without something tightening in the chest. That lion prevails, not the decorated one.
Take pride only in what is yours. Nothing else counts. A vine earns praise when its branches are so heavy with fruit that they pull the supports to the ground. Would you trade that vine for one hung with golden grapes and golden leaves. The virtue of the vine lies in what it actually produces, and so does a person’s. Someone may have a large household, a beautiful house, more land than he can use, more income than he can spend. None of that is in him. It is all around him. Praise instead what cannot be given or taken away, what is in fact his own. What is that. His mind, and the reason that mind can bring to its full strength. A human being is a reasoning animal. The highest good available to a human being is to fulfill the capacity that nature built into the species at birth.
And what does reason ask of us. Almost nothing. Live in accordance with your own nature. That is the whole instruction. If this feels impossible, that is not reason’s fault. We have made it feel impossible together. We herd each other into vice. We are each other’s pressure and each other’s downward pull. So the question remains. How is a person to find the way back when no one is drawing them upward and the whole world is pushing the other way.