To your horror, you see yourself growing down and down into a dark pit. For a while you think the only way to deal with temptation is to abandon yourself to emotion, food, drink and drugs.

By not denying yourself any experience, and living life more fully, you convince yourself that you will find fulfillment for your lack. But as the smoke clears the morning after the night before, you see how much more diminished you are.

You tended to misinterpret your guilt feelings; to believe you were guilty and inadequate because your abandon was not complete and honest enough.

For a little while, we all try harder to feel more complete by using emotion, food, sex and whatever as a basis for feeling more complete.

The truth is inescapable—sensual experience takes us away from wholeness and we become dissipated animals.

The truth is there, ever-present, always trying to tell us we are becoming part of a wrong identity. A wrong completeness is involved.

It may take a while for the awful truth to dawn on us that through emotion we are becoming basically a devil’s pawn, with a choice of the pit or the pendulum facing us: let our hair down and “go ape,” or die from some terrible degenerative disease caused by repressing “natural” desires.

"sensual experience takes us away from wholeness and we become dissipated animals"

Remember—rebelling against the Demon King takes emotion also, so you become more like the image of that king.

The rule remains: emotion of any kind that provides for escape and security causes a wrong sort of growth. You become like what you respond to—and if temptation stimulates and caters to you, you will look like the devil.

What you need to find is God’s Grace—turn in and turn on. Discover more patience with yourself and with others. If you don’t, you will be more rash and impatient with yourself, which is the reason for the guilt, conflicts and anxieties you suffer.

The reason why you will be impatient is because your ego has learned to need to be upset and excited by people. Impatience is an emotion that gets you moving and feeds your egomania.

Impatience is the motivation of the beast, the substance of pride’s continuance, a means of escaping the inner judgment and a way to provide drive for the things you are made to want—all the way to hell.