Hey everybody, this is Steve and your thoughts are not your own.
Back in episode 103, we talked about how emptying your head can help jumpstart your spiritual
life, and said we’d cover how exactly we should deal with our thoughts in a later episode.
Well, if you’ve ever tried to be silent and still, you know how challenging it can
be to deal with your thoughts.
The word “thoughts,” or λογισμοί in Greek, refers to the distracting and misleading
ideas that can pop into our heads.
They’re the imaginings and fantasies that can pull us away from God and further into
sin and death.
Evagrius of Pontus, a 4th century monk, referred to prayer as “the laying aside of thoughts.”
Not a fierce combat necessarily, but a gentle laying aside of the things that guide us away
from God, so we can instead draw closer to Him.
If you’ve ever tried to be silent then you know that just sitting there, even in a perfectly quiet
room, our heads can be full of memories of the past, or ideas of the future.
We may even be startled by the random, surprising, perhaps even scary thoughts that can flash
through our minds.
Yet the thoughts running through our heads aren’t only challenging when we’re trying
to do our prayer rule; they can be a challenge all day, every day.
When we meet particular people, we might have angry or judgmental thoughts.
When we see particular things on TV or online, we may have lustful thoughts.
When we see particular foods or drinks, we may have gluttonous thoughts.
And those thoughts can very quickly turn into actions that lead us further from God and
deeper into sin and death.
So what do we do about these thoughts?
Way back in episode 8, we talked about what St Porphyrios called the “easy way” to
defeat darkness: not by struggling against the darkness, but by welcoming the light of Christ.
This advice has been repeated by great saints throughout the history of the Church.
Sts Barsanuphius and John, for instance, great ascetics from the 4th and 5th centuries, offered
this incredible advice:
This advice is especially important because it identifies a key truth: that our thoughts
are not our own.
The imaginings and fantasies in our heads may be random thoughts that fire in our brains
or, to be blunt, they may be placed there by the demons in an attempt to make us stumble.
Either way, it’s important to distance ourselves from those thoughts rather than identify with
them.
If you have an angry thought, don’t say “I am angry.”
Or if you have a lazy thought, don’t say “I am lazy.”
Remind yourself that you, a child of God made in His image and likeness, is simply having
a thought that’s angry or lazy or whatever it may be.
It’s not you.
It’s a thing that’s happening to you.
As St. Paisios the Athonite once said, thoughts are like airplanes.
They can buzz around all they want.
But they can’t touch us as long as we don’t build them a runway.
So recognize that angry thought, with honesty and humility.
But don’t start dwelling on it, focusing on the things that have made you angry, or
all the ways you’d love to get revenge.
Don’t build that thought a runway and let it enter your heart.
And don’t try to fight it head on either.
Instead, pray for the person that inspired that angry thought.
Reach out to God for patience and compassion and love.
Because you are not angry.
You are not prideful.
You are not jealous, or judgmental, or lazy, or lustful.
You are a child of God who is often tempted, just like everyone else.
You are a child of God who is free to keep those negative thoughts at arms length, to
recognize them and replace their darkness with the light of Christ.
Do you see the difference?
Having an angry thought doesn’t mean you’re inevitably going to fall into anger.
Having a prideful though doesn’t mean you’re inevitably going to fall into pride.
Those thoughts, placed in our minds by the forces of evil, don’t need to find their
way into our hearts.
Because you are a child of God, and you can choose what to do with those thoughts.
So let’s be the bee, and remember that our negative thoughts are not our own.
Be the bee, and live Orthodoxy.
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I'll see you all next week.
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