and whatever he thinks; and everyone remains till death in the delights that are
inrooted by birth, unless they are subdued; and they are not subdued unless they
are regarded as sweet drugs that kill, or as flowers apparently beautiful that carry
poison in them; thus unless the delights of evil are regarded as deadly, and this until
at length they become undelightful. (Charity 2)
This means that as long as we are in evils we think of them as good – or
at least mild – because part of us is enjoying them. When we choose to try to
resist or leave that evil – because the Wor d teaches it is wrong – we begin to
recognize it for what it is. Still, when we first start, we don’t have the full picture
of how bad it is. This can lead to the impression that things are worse because
we are trying to resist when it is really just that we are seeing the evil for what
it is.
Another part of this illusion is that chains of bondage are not restrictive if
you are happy being a slave.
As a person wills and commits evil he advances into infernal societies more and
more interiorly and also more and more deeply. Hence also the delight of evil
increases, and so occupies his thoughts that at last he feels nothing more pleasant.
He who has advanced more interiorly and deeply into infernal societies becomes
as if he were bound with chains. So long as he lives in the world, however, he does
not feel his chains, for they are as if made from soft wool or from fine threads of
silk, and he loves them as they give him pleasure; but after death, instead of being
soft they become hard, and instead of being pleasant they become galling. (Divine
Providence 296)
This is a picture of what happens after death which should help us want to
shun evils while we still are alive, but it also shows us what happens when we
do try to shun those evils. If we want to experience the joys of being free from
slavery we will need to break those chains.
Unfortunately there is also a reality to the feeling that a problem gets worse
when we try to fight it. Like the Children of Israel, we have somebody who is
enslaving us. “Jesus answered them, Amen, Amen, I say to you that everyone
doing sin is the servant of sin.” (John 8:34)
Our taskmasters are the spiritual Egyptians which are falsities inspired
by the hells. Like the Pharaoh, those hells are enjoying or benefiting from us
being in evil. One of the main reasons evil spirits enjoy attacking us is that
when we do evil it is a service to them. The evil that we do is a greater delight
to them than anything they are permitted to do personally. They are already
bound with chains and so cannot do all that we can. They experience a great
amount of vicarious pleasure in our evils, so they don’t want to give us up the
moment we want them to leave. And they also enjoy seeing us as slaves.
Their pleasure is also what makes something delightful to us. This is why
with addictions there can be something more than just a physical problem. It
can be very hard mentally to quit a smoking or any drinking or drug problem.
But because there is a physical component, (that makes it hard), there is also a
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