A spiritual exercise in which consciousness mentally rises above the terrestrial scene and contemplates human affairs from a cosmic height. The aim is to relativise the passions, to make out the smallness of an individual life against the whole, and at the same time to feel one's own belonging to that whole (cosmopolitanism).

An imagined ascent: look down on cities, armies, festivals, and funerals as on an anthill; then on the succession of epochs, seeing the sameness of human life across all times; finally on oneself as one of the participants in the spectacle. The exercise is symmetrical with the "withdrawal into oneself" (hegemonikon): what is within and what is above disclose the same truth about proportion.