Re: supressing desires/thoughts
Submitted by jeroen on January 21 2001 06:51:37
In reply to supressing desires/thoughts submitted by Splash! on January 21 2001 05:07:03
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God bless you, my brother. If what you say is true, then I will pray to you as a saint when you die. :-> In all seriousness, though, I believe what you are experiencing is not "suppression", but "sublimation". Suppressing--or worse, REpressing--strong passions is never a good idea. The energy builds up and either comes out stronger than ever, or gets diverted toward other passions. (Repressed sexual desire can come out not only as uncontrollable sexual activity, but even as uncontrollable eating and drinking, or in fits of violent anger.) What you are experiencing sounds like what the church Fathers call "guarding the heart"; that is filling the imagination with something good to such a degree that there is no room for evil thoughts to enter. In your case it sounds like you have succeeded in filling your heart with an image of the Holy Spirit. I mean "image" in the full sense of the word, not necessarily a picture in the mind. The result of guarding the heart with regularity leads to the state of "dispassion", which you have described so well, I need not elaborate. It is, as you note, a temporary state, but it gets greater the more you practice. (This is why we refer to spiritual self-discipline as "ascetic" practices--fol- lowing St. Paul, we think of them as akin to the self-disciplne of the athlete.) I was not being facetious in my opening remark (well, not much, anyway). You are on the right track, and don't let anyone knock you off it by calling you names, which I guarantee some people, out of jealousy or ignorance, will certainly do. A saint is no more than a person who serves as an example to us all, and someone who achieves dispassion is always a good example to those of us who don't. (However, do avoid the delusion of spiritual pride--no one is a saint in his lifetime.) May God grant you many years! --Jeroen |
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