*Un*realities

In response to this blog:

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"...instead of taking it as it is, im taking it as a thousand different things..."

Jonas recommended "The Screwtape Letters" (C.S. Lewis) to me a while back. When I passed by Coles at STC yesterday, I opened a random chapter (15), knowing what the basic premise was (as a collection of letters addressed from a demon to a demon-in-training.)

Believe me -- I also needed this (weird kind of) reminder to always live in the Present time. It's all about Emotional Purity, ya?

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"The Humans live in time but our Enemy destines them for eternity. He therefore...wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present... in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them (by the Enemy). He would therefore have them continually concerned with eternity (concerned with Him), or with the Present -- meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

"Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present... Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear... In making them think about (the Future) we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time -- for the past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.

"...the Enemy wants men to think about the future too -- just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present... He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. ...We want a man hag-ridden by the Future -- haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth -- (who is) ready to break the enemy's commands in the Present if by doing so we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other... ...We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now...

"It follows then, in general, and all things being equal, that it is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn't much matter which)... than for him to be living in the present. ...Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he as persuaded himself that the Future is going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real cause of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore, more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed."

-C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (chapter 15 excerpts, bold/underline emphasis mine))