538 The Spiritual Man
The evil spirits will suggest many lies to serve as excuses:
Those sudden beautiful thoughts of yours are from God.
Those flashing revelations are the fruits of spirituality.
That bad memory is due to your ill-health.
It is natural for you to become abruptly forgetful.
Your over-sensitiveness is because of your temperament.
Your weak memory is inherited.
Insomnia is an outgrowth of sickness. You are simply tired.
You cannot think because you have worked too hard.
That incessant contemplation at night stems from your mind’s
overexhaustion in the daytime.
Impure thoughts arise from your sins.
You already have fallen.
You cannot listen to others because of your particular environment and
because of their faults.
The evil spirits can manufacture sundry other excuses. Unless
God’s children realize they are really being attacked and have
actually fallen from the normal state, the enemy will engage these
and other excuses like them to cover up the ground they have gained.
But the true reason lies in the fact that the mind is passive and
vacuous, and thus occupied by these satanic spirits. Every one of
these phenomena is the effect of their pernicious working. We grant
the possibility of natural causes being mixed in with these excuses,
but the experience of so many saints confirms that the powers of
darkness are extremely subtle in operating alongside natural causes
so as to deceive the saints into accepting these natural causes—such
as temperament, physical condition and environment—as the only
explanation, forgetting altogether the subtle mixing in by the evil
spirits. The latter are very delighted in hiding their works behind
some little natural cause. There is one test which can be brought to
bear here, however; and that is, that if the cause is natural the man’s
condition will be restored to normal once the natural factor is
eliminated: but were there something supernatural added to the
natural, then the man will not recover even though the natural
element is removed. If you have insomnia, for example, the enemy
will suggest it is due to your overwork and your mind’s