6 ideas
Death is either the complete extinction of the self or the soul's passage to another state, and in neither case is it an evil. If there is no one left to experience anything, there is no one to suffer deprivation; if the soul survives, death is a release from the body. Fear of death therefore rests on imagining a subject who is both gone and still present to feel the loss.
Distress arises from a belief that something bad has happened plus a belief that it is right and fitting to be upset about it. Because the second belief is chosen and socially reinforced, as with mourning customs and the sense that ceasing to grieve betrays the dead, grief can be reduced by showing that the lamenting is neither required nor useful. The proof is that time eases grief even though the loss itself has not changed. Only the opinion about the loss has faded.
All emotional disturbances fall into four types, sorted by whether the perceived object is good or bad and whether it is present or expected. Present good produces delight, expected good produces desire, present evil produces distress, and expected evil produces fear. Each passion is a false belief about value, pushed to excess, so each can be treated by correcting the underlying opinion.
The Peripatetic view that emotions should be kept within a mean is rejected, because a disturbance that has begun cannot be reliably stopped at a moderate point. It is like a man stepping off a cliff and trying to halt partway down. Anger, fear, and lust are sicknesses of the mind, and a sickness is not made healthy by being kept small.
Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, let the flatterer Damocles enjoy a royal banquet, then hung a sword by a single horsehair over his head. Damocles lost all pleasure in the luxury and begged to leave. The tyrant had shown that wealth and power give no happiness when fear hangs over them, which illustrates the argument that happiness depends on inner security rather than external goods.
Pain is treated as a test of character rather than a pure sensation, and the capacity to bear it is located in a person's refusal to act unworthily, whether by wailing, collapsing, or abandoning duty. Training, habit, and the examples of soldiers and athletes show that the same pain feels different when the mind holds itself firm. The practical move is to answer pain by asking what conduct is fitting, not by asking how much it hurts.