It is not necessary to roam heaven and earth after God or to send our mind to seek Him in different places. Purify your soul, O son of man, remove from yourself the thought of memories outside of nature; hang the veil of chastity and humility before your impulses. By means of these you will be able to find Him who is within you.
¶118. The devil suggests to those living in obedience the desire for impossible virtues. Similarly, to those living in stillness he proposes unsuitable ideas. Scan the mind of inexperienced novices and there you will find deluded notions: a desire for stillness, for the strictest fast, for uninterrupted prayer, for absolute freedom from vanity, for unbroken remembrance of death, for continual compunction, for perfect freedom from anger, for deep silence, for surpassing purity. And if, by Divine providence, they are without these to start with, they leap in vain from one thing to another, having been deceived. For the enemy urges them to seek these perfections prematurely, so that they may not persevere and attain them in due course. But to those living in stillness the deceiver extols hospitality, service, brotherly love, community life, visiting the sick. The devil’s aim is to make the latter as impatient as the former.
¶49. When I consider the actual nature of compunction, I am amazed at how that which is called mourning and grief should contain joy and gladness interwoven with it, like honey in a comb. What then are we to learn from this? That such compunction is, in a special sense, a gift of the Lord. There is, then, in the soul no pleasureless pleasure, for God consoles those who are contrite in heart in a secret way.
A small but always persistent discipline is a great force; for a soft drop falling persistently, hollows out hard rock.
¶7. [Despondency] reminds those standing at prayer of necessary duties. And, brutish as she is, she leaves no stone unturned to find some plausible pretext to drag us from prayer as with a kind of halter.
¶6. A hesychast is he who strives to confine his incorporeal being within his bodily house, paradoxical as this is.
¶76. All attacks which we suffer from the demons come from these three causes: from sensuality, or from pride, or from the envy of demons. The last are blessed, the middle are very pitiful, but the first are failures till the end.
