"How good it is when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this is the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood!

And in sexual intercourse that it is no more than the friction of a membrane and a spurt of mucus ejected.

How good these perceptions are at getting to the heart of the real thing and penetrating through it, so you can see it for what it is!

This should be your practice throughout all your life: when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.

Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason: when you are most convinced that your work is important, that is when you are most under its spell."

~ Marcus Aurelius

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I don’t really know how to take this piece of advice. On the one hand, I agree. I agree that looking at things in their stark nakedness can help us confront the truth behind them, no matter how uncomfortable or ugly. But on the other hand, the truth can sometimes lie in the pretence itself or in its symbolism, rather than in the material substance. That is why we have such a thing as rituals I would think. The death of a person could be seen as simply the expiry of a body but it is certainly much more than that…? Which is why we have funerals to commemorate the “much more”. Even marriages for that matter celebrate much more than the meeting of bodies. I’m not sure if stripping away the appearances or symbolisms in these cases helps us get to the truth because in a way these appearances construct the truth rather than hide them. Though I suppose it’s easy to get carried away by the appearances of things and make more of them than they really are. Perhaps that is what Aurelius asks us to guard against.