Well, this helped me kill a lot of trivial items from my RSS reader:
“As the uneasiness and reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures the vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo...you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say...’I now see that I spent most my life doing in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
And this helps me notice if, when I’m trying to decide how to act, I keep thinking only about me or about abstractions and have ended up very different from the person I might have the chance to serve:
“Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him, and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the state of his own mind—or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties of directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate the most useful human characteristics, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.”
Well, this helped me kill a lot of trivial items from my RSS reader:
And this helps me notice if, when I’m trying to decide how to act, I keep thinking only about me or about abstractions and have ended up very different from the person I might have the chance to serve:
Very interesting. I should probably put that book somewhat higher on my reading list.