

Thinking changes feeling.Īgain, you should use this strategy to avoid evil. If you think and talk about the person in those terms long enough, you’ll be constantly reminded of how much there is to appreciate about this person, and you’ll actually begin to appreciate him and it’ll be easier to treat him charitably. Think and talk about his good points, his virtues, and maybe especially the gifts he has that you don’t. Your bad feelings for him are making it really hard. Let’s say, for instance, you really dislike someone. This practice will start to get the soul back in order. We are ruled by our feelings which tend to like what is bad for us and dislike what is good for us.īut we can change the way we feel by how we think. threeīecause of Original Sin, our soul is out of whack. That might be ok except for the fact that, because of Original Sin, we tend to like what is bad for us and dislike what is good for us.

So, we let the intellect go to sleep and let our feelings decide what we do. It takes a lot of effort to really think things through. The intellect has been darkened, we suffer from ignorance and intellectual laziness. With Original Sin, these three powers of our soul have been wounded. The feelings are meant to be good servants but if left in charge they become very bad masters. Thinking should rule our lives, not feeling. Thinking should inform our feelings which prompt our choices. The will chooses the apparent good and avoids the evil The feelings respond to what the Intellect presented with, “I like this,” prompting the will to choose it or “I dislike that,” prompting the will to avoid it. The intellect then presents its perception of reality to the feelings as “this is right and good for me” or “this is wrong and bad for me." The intellect perceives or becomes aware of reality through the five senses, the imagination or the memory.

There are three powers in the soul, the intellect, the feelings, and the will. The 6th Beatitude is “Blessed are the Pure of Heart, for they shall see God.” To be capable of seeing God, the powers of our soul must be purified and re-integrated.
