Premeditatio Malorum translated from Latin means ‘the premeditation of evils’. It is a fundamental stoic exercise for inner peace.
Imagine that someone close to you passes away suddenly. Perhaps your father or mother, partner or sibling. How would that feel?
Imagine losing your job and not being able afford your rent. Picture sleeping outside in the rain. Imagine losing your daughter or son before they are born. Imagine ageing; watching your body decay slowly, then seeing yourself return to the dust.
Why would anyone be so bleak and imagine such things?
Why not visualize what we want…like the Law of Attraction? We imagine these things because we are not afraid of reality. We imagine these things to obtain inner peace.
Seneca once said,
“Fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant.”
The nature of life is a flux between what we call good and bad events.
As long as you are breathing, you are not immune. We inevitably will experience tragedies in life, and what makes these tragedies burn our soul is the fact we did not expect them.
Stoics believed that for humans to live in accordance with nature, they must learn to accept nature. Mother Nature is neutral; there is no such thing as good or bad, only happenings.
The Benefits of Negative Visualization
Premeditatio Malorum helps you accept life for what it is and be better prepared. It’s often called negative visualization.
The exercise is simple: Imagine some contingency that could possibly happen in life, for example, the death of a loved one. Feel the emotions briefly and ask yourself “How could I deal with this situation with reason?”
– Perhaps you could allocate a savings account with enough money for emergencies (that inevitably happen at some point). This will alleviate the financial stress that often accentuates the pain of tragedies.
– You could meditate more often to learn how to deal with the powerful emotions that will arise. To be able to make decisions under chaos. Separate your inner and outer circumstances so you can maintain peace during tragedy.
– You could spend more time with the loved one to avoid the common grief trap, of not having done enough while they were still here, that many people feel.
Not all visualizations have to be worst case scenarios. Some can be smaller troubles. Imagine yourself dealing with a difficult person at work.
How would you deal with such a person?
– You could read a book on dealing with difficult conversations such as ‘Crucial Conversations’.
– You could learn to be more assertive with your boundaries, so people don’t cross them.
– You could learn more about human psychology so you can understand their issues have more to do with them than you, transforming anger into empathy.
Negative visualization is best done about things that are likely to happen at some point in your life. There is no point in thinking about alien invasions and your solution to them. It’s not a fascination with the morbid, I am not asking you to go to a graveyard and pick up a skull (like Shakespeare’s Hamlet did to Yorick).
That would just be creepy.
It’s about confronting reality as it is, and not choosing to live in an illusion. We live in the most distracted age. With social media, video games, Netflix, and a torrent of other novelties, it’s easy to forget the human condition.
The fact that life is not all sunshine and rainbows. The fact that we will eventually have to deal with some real shit.
And that’s why we contemplate the evils.
The exercise has two main benefits.
It allows you to have peace of mind through acting out the situation before it happens, so when it happens you can say,
“I have been here before. I have felt this”.
Then the sting of the event will not be so bad.
Negative visualization also allows you to practice gratitude for your current situation, and really appreciate what you DO have by imagining you lost it.
It’s similar to the feeling you get when you think you have lost your wallet; you search everywhere to find it. Just when you are about to lose hope, you find it in a pair of paints you forgot existed.
That brief moment gives you a profound sense of joy. You become grateful for something that is there, because you thought you might have lost it.
A similar effect happens when we negatively visualize.
When we visualize, our brains have a tough time discerning fact from reality. This is why a memory can bring you to tears or make you laugh. The brain feels it as if it were happening in that very moment.
This is what triggers the gratitude response once the visualization is over.
Many scientific studies are now finding frequent associations between practicing gratitude and having a happier life.
Something the Stoics knew long ago:
“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not,
but rejoices for those which he has. ”
― Epictetus
The exercise is not meant to be compulsive.
Do not spend most of your day contemplating negative events. It’s meant to be brief and practical; a solution-oriented exercise to better prepare you for life. You were given a brain to reason. The reasonable thing to do would be to accept life for what it is.
A dance between what we subjectively call good and bad, with the black swan events we call tragedies and miracles. Nature waits for no man and is a neutral bystander.
This is why we need to meditate on the evils.
Negative visualization is best done about things that are likely to happen at some point in your life. There is no point in thinking about alien invasions and your solution to them. It’s not a fascination with the morbid, I am not asking you to go to a graveyard and pick up a skull (like Shakespeare’s Hamlet did to Yorick).
That would just be creepy.
It’s about confronting reality as it is, and not choosing to live in an illusion. We live in the most distracted age. With social media, video games, Netflix, and a torrent of other novelties, it’s easy to forget the human condition.
The fact that life is not all sunshine and rainbows. The fact that we will eventually have to deal with some real shit.
And that’s why we contemplate the evils.
The exercise has two main benefits.
It allows you to have peace of mind through acting out the situation before it happens, so when it happens you can say,
“I have been here before. I have felt this”.
Then the sting of the event will not be so bad.
Negative Visualization and Gratitude
Negative visualization also allows you to practice gratitude for your current situation, and really appreciate what you DO have by imagining you lost it.
It’s similar to the feeling you get when you think you have lost your wallet; you search everywhere to find it. Just when you are about to lose hope, you find it in a pair of paints you forgot existed.
That brief moment gives you a profound sense of joy. You become grateful for something that is there, because you thought you might have lost it.
A similar effect happens when we negatively visualize.
When we visualize, our brains have a tough time discerning fact from reality. This is why a memory can bring you to tears or make you laugh. The brain feels it as if it were happening in that very moment.
This is what triggers the gratitude response once the visualization is over.
Many scientific studies are now finding frequent associations between practicing gratitude and having a happier life.
Something the Stoics knew long ago:
“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has. ”
― Epictetus
The exercise is not meant to be compulsive.
Do not spend most of your day contemplating negative events. It’s meant to be brief and practical; a solution-oriented exercise to better prepare you for life. You were given a brain to reason. The reasonable thing to do would be to accept life for what it is.
A dance between what we subjectively call good and bad, with the black swan events we call tragedies and miracles. Nature waits for no man and is a neutral bystander.
This is why we need to meditate on the evils.
Do this and you will be one step closer to living and dying well.