A student went and stayed three years in India, where he studied various religions and witchcraft. He tried to discover the truth through religions and other things. In the end he went to a famous wizard and he was stunned to hear him saying: Why did you come here? You shall find in Orthodoxy what you are seeking. There is the light. Go to the Holy Mountain and read the Philokalia. There you shall find what you seek. Then this man got confused, because he didn’t expect to hear such things from a wizard. He returned to Greece, came to the Holy Mountain and related everything to me.
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The tempter brings the thoughts to the man according to his own state.
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In order to stop our factory (meaning our mind) to produce bad thoughts, it is required to be without guile. Then the man has spiritual health.
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The man has to shelter Christ inside himself; otherwise he is a mere pumpkin.
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The easiest and shortest way is obedience. In obedience grace is the one that guides us.
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Ripeness is continued and perfected in the afterlife.
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In many situations there are trials from God but the devil interferes and makes them much darker. There lies the great difficulty.
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There are demons who do not let you speak and others who do not let you listen the advice of the spiritual fathers.
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When someone makes spiritual progress, he has joy, peace and contentedness inside.
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In order to help people become spiritual, we must not wrong them. We wrong them when we want to make them be like us. Meaning when we give them to eat what we eat. We don’t take into account his own disposition, his thirst and hunger.
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When there is rightness in our life, even if we hid behind the sun the people would find us.
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Christ will pity the world for the condition it will reach and will show us a sign. This sign will not be the Second Coming of Christ. After this there will not be any unbeliever. Everybody will believe in Christ. But this faith will have no value.
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The world will go crazy. There will come a time when people will enter their houses on the window, not on the door (meaning that they will do crazy things). To those who will enter on the door they will say: Look at these fools!
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When you work your hands should be at work and your mind at God. You should stop from hour to hour and pray for a while then resume your work for a while. Always keep an open spiritual book in your cell. Enter and read a few passages, to make your mind become focused, then go back to work. A little bit of prayer with the rosary then work again. We, the monks, should not work like the laymen.
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Someone has told to elder Paisios something inappropriate said by someone else. The starets without condemning that one, said: Who knows with what intention he said that? Some other time when they related to him what happened to a monk, although he knew the cause of that, answered just this: Who knows God’s judgments?
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If we remove our grimaces, we’ll advance on well, he said jesting.
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A priest complained to me that he had a parish of only 100 people. I told him then: A disciple is not satisfied with two elders, he wants one in the morning and another in the evening. And you are saying that 100 souls means a few?
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If someone admits his mistake, the spiritual progress is half done. It is a great thing when someone admits his own helplessness and tries to straighten himself. This one is better than the one who struggles a lot but doesn’t admit his impotence.
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If we said ceaselessly the Jesus prayer and our mind focused on it, then the bodily thoughts couldn’t harm us.
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We should not say that we want to love Christ, but that we don’t want to upset Him. To ask in our prayer to love Christ is like an insolence.
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We forget easily what we read because our heart doesn’t take part at that at all. Our heart doesn’t hurt us, that’s why we forget.
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Our heart must suffer for each sin, otherwise we easily fall in the same one.
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Let us pray for the others. Then our Good Lord sends His Grace.
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If we want to find out the will of God relating to a certain matter, we should pray and ask our spiritual fathers about that.
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In the spiritual life the good thought is everything.
From the book From the Ascetic and Hesychast Tradition of the Holy Mountain –Evanghelismos Publishing, 2016.
