1.All those things,which thou prayest to attain by a roundabout way,thou canst have at once if thou deny them not to thyself;that is to s ay,if thou leave all the Past to itself and entrust the Future to Provi dence,and but direct the Present in the way of piety and justice:piety,that thou mayest love thy lot,for Nature brought it to thee and thee to it;justice,that thou mayest speak the truth freely and without fine sse,and have an eye to law and the due worth of things in all that thou doest;and let nothing stand in thy way,not the wickedness of others,n or thine own opinion,nor what men say,nor even the sensations of the f lesh that has grown around thee;for the part affected will see to that.
If then,when the time of thy departure is near,abandoning all else thou prize thy ruling Reason alone and that which in thee is divine,and dread the thought,not that thou must one day cease to live,but that th ou shouldst never yet have begun to live according to Nature,then shalt thou be a man worthy of the Universe that begat thee,and no longer an a lien in thy fatherland,no longer shalt thou marvel at what happens ever y day as if it were unforeseen,and be dependent on this or that.
2.God sees the Ruling Parts of all men stripped of material vessels and husks and sloughs.For only with the Intellectual Part of Himself is He in touch with those emanations only which have welled forth and been drawn off from Himself into them.But if thou also wilt accustom thyself to do this,thou wilt free thyself from the most of thy distracting care.For he that hath no eye for the flesh that envelopes him will not,I t row,waste his time with taking thought for raiment and lodgin g and pop ularity and such accessories and frippery.
3.Thou art formed of three things in combination-body,vital breath,intelligence.Of these the first two are indeed thine,in so far as th ou must have them in thy keeping,but the third alone is in any true sen se thine.Wherefore,if thou cut off from thyself,that is from thy mind,all that others do or say and all that thyself hast done or said,and all that harasses thee in the future,or whatever thou art involved in i ndependently of thy will by the body which envelopes thee and the breath that is twinned with it,and whatever the circumambient rotation outside of thee sweeps along,so that thine intellectual faculty,delivered from the contingencies of destiny,may live pure and undetached by itself,do ing what is just,desiring what befalls it,speaking the truth-if,I sa y,thou strip from this ruling Reason all that cleaves to it from the bo dily influences and the things that lie beyond in time and the things th at are past,and if thou fashion thyself like the Empedoclean Sphere with its circle true in its poise well-rounded rejoicing,and school thyself to live that life only which is thine,namely the present,so shalt thou be able to pass through the remnant of thy days c almly,kindly,and at peace with thine own genius.