This question should always be at the forefront of our minds, but during times like these - times when the air around us drips with malicious psychological noise and demonic cues reinforced by the instinct to socially conform - it becomes imperative and indispensable.
To reiterate a point I have made countless times on this blog, we live in a world where the default setting is 'war all the time'. By war, I am referring primarily to spiritual war. As a result, everything we experience, either directly or vicariously, contains a spiritual element. These spiritual elements tend to play out in the material world through the attitudes, thoughts, and assumptions that fuel our actions and states of being.
The forces working against us aim to become the primary source of our thoughts and motivations. These forces appeal mainly to base emotions and false selves, and one of their objectives is to deaden our higher senses and stimulate our lower senses.
One trick is to get us to forget the spiritual in favor of the material in the seemingly rational name of well-being and survival. It's a devilish trick because it builds up a false sense of security - a false sense of security that is often only dispelled when the doom one has worked so hard to doggedly avoid becomes inescapable.
The old adage of no atheists on a crashing airplane springs to mind.
Yet doom may not come, nor must it be impending for the trick to work. In fact, the trick is far more effective if doom never really arrives because the smug, false sense of security can be sustained right until the non-doomsday end, thereby diminishing the chances of any sudden acknowledgements of error or sincere cries of repentance.
No, the trick works best if you can be convinced that you are doing the right thing, the prudent thing, the practical thing, the pragmatic thing, the responsible thing, the level-headed thing right up until the very end, whenever that end may be.
Now doing the right thing is always critical, especially during times like these, but we must be able to intuit and confirm, to the best of our ability, that the right thing we choose to do ultimately originates from thoughts and motivations inspired by the right source. If it does, we have nothing to fear. If it doesn't, then there is little chance that the right thing is really right. On the contrary, we can be assured the opposite is true.
Right thoughts and motivations leading to right action can only emerge from the right sources. Action from the wrong sources may seem right, prudent, practical, etc., but they never are, particularly from a spiritual perspective.
A little something to think about if you have recently felt the urge to load up an a year's supply of toilet paper or some other seemingly prudent notion.
What are the sources of these thoughts and motivations?
Are you certain these sources have your best interest at heart? Do they focus on crucial matters of pressing importance?
Or are they literally making an ass out of you?
To reiterate a point I have made countless times on this blog, we live in a world where the default setting is 'war all the time'. By war, I am referring primarily to spiritual war. As a result, everything we experience, either directly or vicariously, contains a spiritual element. These spiritual elements tend to play out in the material world through the attitudes, thoughts, and assumptions that fuel our actions and states of being.
The forces working against us aim to become the primary source of our thoughts and motivations. These forces appeal mainly to base emotions and false selves, and one of their objectives is to deaden our higher senses and stimulate our lower senses.
One trick is to get us to forget the spiritual in favor of the material in the seemingly rational name of well-being and survival. It's a devilish trick because it builds up a false sense of security - a false sense of security that is often only dispelled when the doom one has worked so hard to doggedly avoid becomes inescapable.
The old adage of no atheists on a crashing airplane springs to mind.
Yet doom may not come, nor must it be impending for the trick to work. In fact, the trick is far more effective if doom never really arrives because the smug, false sense of security can be sustained right until the non-doomsday end, thereby diminishing the chances of any sudden acknowledgements of error or sincere cries of repentance.
No, the trick works best if you can be convinced that you are doing the right thing, the prudent thing, the practical thing, the pragmatic thing, the responsible thing, the level-headed thing right up until the very end, whenever that end may be.
Now doing the right thing is always critical, especially during times like these, but we must be able to intuit and confirm, to the best of our ability, that the right thing we choose to do ultimately originates from thoughts and motivations inspired by the right source. If it does, we have nothing to fear. If it doesn't, then there is little chance that the right thing is really right. On the contrary, we can be assured the opposite is true.
Right thoughts and motivations leading to right action can only emerge from the right sources. Action from the wrong sources may seem right, prudent, practical, etc., but they never are, particularly from a spiritual perspective.
A little something to think about if you have recently felt the urge to load up an a year's supply of toilet paper or some other seemingly prudent notion.
What are the sources of these thoughts and motivations?
Are you certain these sources have your best interest at heart? Do they focus on crucial matters of pressing importance?
Or are they literally making an ass out of you?
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