Refrain from busying yourself, therefore, with charity bazaars, sewing meetings, and other such occupations. Busyness over many things is, in all its form, chiefly a poison. Look within, examine yourself accurately, and you observe that many of these apparently self-giving deeds spring from a need to deafen your conscience: that is, from your uncontrollable habit of satisfying and pleasure yourself.
Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
Tito Colliander
Category: TEMPTATION & LUST & VIRGINITY
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When we feel down or anxious, our aptitude for self-control is diminished, making us more prone to making bad decisions. Sadness, it seems, leads to more impatient thoughts, and a desire for immediate reward at the expense of greater future gains.
How to fake a shopping buzz without spending any money
Katie Beck -
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
—Emil Cioran -
…noonday devil and described with great precision this state in which the monk, after having known the spiritual consolations of starting out, begins to doubt his spiritual journey. It is the great doubt: Had he not after all been abused? What good has it served spending all this time in the desert? He no longer finds any pleasure in the liturgy or religious observances. God seems nothing more than a projection, a fantasy or a childish notion. Would it not be better, therefore, simply to abandon solitude altogether, to be of some use in the world, to do something? At times this noonday devil will incite this chaste and sober person to catch up on lost time especially in regard to sensuality and strong drink.
In his theory of individuation, C.G. Jung describes very accurately this moment of crisis, when a person in mid-life finds his or her whole life put into question. It is a time when repressed material can suddenly manifest itself with violence. But it can also mark a crucial moment of passage towards a deeper integration. The values of having are substituted for those of Being. From now on the person’s life is no longer oriented towards the affirmation of the ego, but towards this ego taking second place and being integrated into that archetype of wholeness, which Jung called the Self.
It is a particularly difficult time. All the former supports and certainties fall by the wayside, and nothing seems to be taking the place of this collapsing edifice. If the person seeks help or consolation, it only heightens the despair, the feeling of complete unknowing to which one seems condemned.
For this affliction, the desert fathers counsel much prayer. One is capable of little else. Their suggestion of manual labour won’t be of great relief. Nevertheless, it is necessary to occupy the mind with simple tasks and to live in the present moment without looking either to the past or to the future. The pain of each day suffices. It becomes a question of holding firm at the heart of the anguish. It is a time for fidelity.
Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition
Jean-Yves Leloup -
Sadness (lupe) appears to be a state of soul which, beside the simple meaning of the word, involves discouragement, debility, psychic heaviness and sorrow, dejection, distress, oppression, and depression most often accompanied by anxiety and even with anguish.
This condition can have many causes, but it always involves a pathological reaction of the soul’s irascible (thumos) and/or despairing faculty (epithumia), and as such is essentially tied to concupiscence or anger. ‘Sadness,’ Evagrius tells us, ‘tends to come up at times because of the deprivation of one’s desires (steresis ton epithumion). On other occasions, it accompanies anger. But it can also be a result of the direct action of demons on the soul, or it may even arise for no apparent reason.
First Cause—The Frustration of Desires
Evagrius tells us ‘Sadness is formed from an unsatisfied carnal desire.’ St. John Cassian likewise notes that sadness ‘sometimes results when we see ourselves deceived with regard to some hope,’ and that one of its chief kinds follows from ‘a desire that has been thwarted.’ In that ‘every desire is tied to a passion,’ every passion is prone to produce sadness. According to Evagrius: ‘whoever loves the world will often be sad.’
Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet -
Another point of the utmost importance is that you have lately been tossed and harassed by sexual lusts. This always happens when our practices of the Prayer are beyond our abilities and capacities. Read, in the foreword to Philotheus of Sinai,” how easily the sensation of heat, caused by prayer, can turn to sexual lust, setting the blind heart on fire, filling the mind with the smoke of lascivious images and thoughts, and causing flesh to yearn for the touch of flesh.
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He who becomes weak and falls, let him not postpone his repentance, lest he wallow more in sin and his determination become weaker. Also, let him not be ashamed, because of his sin, to offer his prayer to God in its appointed time, even if this were after falling into sin immediately, claiming that his mind and conscience have become defiled, and it would not be fitting for him to stand before God and lift up his hands to heaven. These, my brother, are demonic thoughts, with which the devil dominates you through his cunning, so that you may not run away from him quickly.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Pray
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“Desire is a mystery, and sex is its funeral,” remarks Parthenope at one point. But longing for her beauty to remain closed off to others—a vision to be admired, not a spectacle to be consumed—leaves her as alienated from the human experience as the timeless deities to which she’s compared.
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