https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ADJ4N7rV3to
All right, so Brad’s pit. Questions before, 5 question, Brad. All right, so, or how do you gain control of the passions? Also, what’s the symbolism of porn and why is it bad? So, I talked about this before, that the symbolism of Christianity, that symbolism itself, is the gathering in of the particulars of something into its unity and the coexistence of the particulars with the one, right? That is the symbolic process. And so the symbolism of sexuality has several elements and there is a, let’s say, a pleasurable, there’s pleasure, there’s communion with your spouse, there’s the creation of offspring and the family, and there’s how all of this is also, becomes an image or a way to manifest the union of humanity with God, okay? So that’s what sexuality is. Now, every time that you start to split those apart, every time you take one element, you just pull it and you try to keep it on its own, that will lead you towards a downfall. It’ll lead you towards an addiction, it’ll lead you towards being completely subjugated to your passion. And so, and it can do, and if you do it the other way around, like if you pull just the practical part of sexuality and try to make it just about having kids, it’s going to, when I talk about this, the idea that St. Maximus talked about, the right hand sins, you start with the right hand sin, where you try to control into the self-sufficient and then pride and then here comes the left hand in the wake of that. And so if you do that, then you see it in Quebec, you see that in the early 20th century, for example, the priests here, they had something called the revenge of the, la revanche du berceau, the revenge of the crib, where they thought that if French Canadians could have more children, then they would outbreath the English and they couch it in also spiritual terms and they force women to have kids every year and the priest would actually name the women at the front of the church when they weren’t having children every year to shame them into having children. And if you do that, what happens, you get a flip, you get a break and then it flips to the other side and it becomes sexual revolution or whatever. And so you need to keep those things together, that’s what sexuality is for. So how do you gain control of the passions? How do you stop watching porn? You have to pray and a good way to do it would be to have someone, I talked to you guys about confession, like confession is really great because one of the problems with not with a bad habit is that it becomes like this weird pattern that just repeats itself. And if you notice in your own self, when you have a bad habit, sometimes if you have a massive change in your life, then it can be an opportunity to get rid of a bad habit because the massive change disrupts these kind of incipient patterns enough to create what you could call like a new beginning. And so if you’re Protestant, for all the time that I’ve criticized the altar call, the altar call can do that, can help you. Going up for an altar call can be a moment, like a cathartic moment where you create a new beginning and then you can kind of ground yourself on that to start again. In the Orthodox Church, I think that’s what confession is the best use of confession is that every time you go to confession, try to see it as a clean slate to try to kind of, to start yourself again. And the second, okay, so here’s a more practical thing about that is that the problem that you have when you fall into those kinds of sins is you forget yourself, you forget. And there’s a moment, there’s a moment where you switch, there’s a moment where you could say you lose consciousness actually, you kind of lose consciousness and then the porn addicted version of you takes over, right? And it’s so strong that once you get, once you’re on the other side of your sin, once you’ve eaten the cake, once you drank the six pack, once you, whatever it is that your sin is, then it’s almost as if you immediately look back at that person who did that and you don’t recognize them because it’s like a demon, it’s like a, you have like a demon, you have a, there’s like an aspect of you which is completely isolated and is taking over. And so the way, one of the ways to not have, to not fall is to remember yourself, is to be attentive and to not forget. So be attentive to the times if you’re watching porn, be attentive to the times that you do that. Like when is it that I watch porn? What are the things that lead up to that? Usually there are a few things that will lead up and you kind of always end up in the same place. So what are those things? Identify those things so that you recognize the first things before you fully forget yourself, you see right away, it’s like, oh, I don’t know, like I don’t know what it is, depends on your story. Like, it’s like, oh, am I going to my computer at 11 at night? Like, why am I doing that? You know, or am I, like whatever it is you’re doing. It’s like, you know what the steps are. So you have to stop yourself before, you have to remember yourself. One of the ways that I’ve kind of gotten rid of bad habits is for example, I’ve given myself something I need to do before I indulge in the bad habit. So it’s like, okay, before I do this, before I fall, I have to do something. I don’t know what it is, like it could be anything. It could be you have to write down your name in a book or it could be anything. The idea is to create steps between the moment you fall and the moment that you’re, you know, the moments where you still remember yourself to create some intermediary step where you can break and you can stop the demon from coming in and taking over, you know. A good way is also to use the Jesus prayer that works for a lot of people too is to repeat, to repeat the Jesus prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner and to repeat that in your mind in order to not forget yourself and to not lose your, to not lose consciousness for that moment it takes for you to become that other person. So those are some tricks. You can have, there’s a lot, there’s so many things you can do, you can know, if you know the places where you are when you indulge in that kind of stuff, then you can create reminders of yourself, for yourself, you know, you can have something up on the wall, you could have your background of your screen being an image of Christ, you could, you could have, like there’s all kinds of things you could do in order to help you remember and not forget.