Gospel Reading for the 22nd Sunday Ordinary Time
Jesus is very clear about what keeps us disconnected from God: “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.” We are attached to our thinking. Thoughts that we entertain become desires and behaviors. But we aren’t our thoughts. They are not our identity.
Thoughts come, and thoughts go. This should be enough to convince us that we are not our thoughts. But we rarely get, in a fully enlightened way, that our thinking keeps us from accessing our oneness with God but, instead, leads to an emotionally reactive life.
According to an ancient desert mystic named Evagrius Ponticus, there are recognizable patterns of thinking that enslave us: “There are eight general and basic categories of thoughts in which are included every thought. First is that of gluttony, then impurity, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and last of all, pride.” The problem with passionate thoughts is that they occupy our attention; they distract us from God.
Martin Laird, a contemporary contemplative teacher and Augustinian friar, calls this “mind-tripping.” Because we are so attached to our thinking, we end up constantly replaying thoughts, feelings, and memories all through our day. It is the incessant inner chatter and commentary, often judgmental, on an event, feeling, or person that loops—it is constantly being re-played like a song stuck on re-play. These thought-loops have a very subtle yet effective momentum. The more we listen to them, pay attention to them, the more we identify with them and the more we live them and out of them (as in acting them out!). And this inner noise is always going on, so we’re always watching it and following it, absorbed by it. We are slaves to our thoughts and feelings. We identify with the mental stream of thought content but that is not who we really are. In this way, we are led to behaviors directed away from loving God, others, and self. In other words, we sin.
Mind-tripping, or getting ensnared by one of the eight passionate thoughts, leads to many different compulsive attitudes that actively block out divine love. We can become resistant to change and desperately need predictability. We can freeze into repetitive and useless behaviors. We get distorted thinking when the unconscious is in control through denial, rationalizing, and projecting. We can experience backwards thinking in which we start with a conclusion and build a case to it rather than we reality. We rigidly adhere to an ideology, which is a sure sign of black and white, either/or thinking. We become impatient. We become superficial, unwilling to face the deeper mysteries of life. Thus, we do not entertain nuance or subtlety and have a low tolerance for ambiguity. We can fall into a victim complex as a way to get power. We can become manipulative for personal advantage. In the end, we repress, keeping ourselves unaware of unacceptable thoughts and feelings.
Evagrius gives us solid advice: “It is not in our power to determine whether we are disturbed by these thoughts, but it is up to us to decide if they are to linger within us or not and whether or not they are to stir up our passions.” We can become aware of our thoughts, and that is the first step in freedom. When do the eight passionate thoughts show up in my life? When do I display some of the aspects of mind-tripping described above?
The daily work of repentance is to bring one’s patterns of thinking into consciousness and then pray by abiding in contemplative silence. If we do not add a thought to an initial thought, they will disappear. And this means we do not judge our thoughts but simply accept them. We see our thoughts but do not talk to them, and that allows the Spirit to rush into our lives to awaken us to the divine presence.