Book Review: Papal Teaching on Private Property – 1891 to 1981
+
How can the human ego, immersed in its own gratification, hide from the ever-present reality of God and the spirit? How else than by a constant state of distraction into sensual pleasures, thoughts, memories, and fantasies? Thus, man’s fall into disobedience was at once a fall into distraction, and that was how his consciousness started to become as compounded and fragmented as it is today.
To distract himself from facing his wrongness, man seeks out the very things that made him wrong in the first place: self-love and sensual pleasure. Gratifying himself in this way, he feels “right” again – but only temporarily. Actually, he has only become more wrong, so that now he needs even greater distractions, and even greater shocks, to make him feel that he is right. In this way he progresses further along the path of self-destruction, trying to overcome his predicament by its very cause.
Our ego seeks any reassurance that in fact, we are all right, that we did not make a mistake, and that we are God after all.
– Hieromonk Damascene