🧠 Fasting of the Mind 🕊️ The fasting of the mind begins with abstaining from bodily-minded intellectual preoccupations that strip us of the image of God within us. This is the fasting required of a Christian, which he must practice as long as he lives on this earth; for this fast is the beginning of life in the age to come. For through the fasting of the mind and the contemplation of heavenly things, we partially enter the coming life until we attain perfection on the day of judgment. The fasting of the mind liberates the intellectual will from subjection to passions and makes man yearn for grace and able to taste it. He is not distracted like one who puts two or more types of food in his mouth, failing to perceive the taste of each separately. Rather, when these foods mix in his mouth, they prevent him from eating with discernment or moderation. Similarly, the mind that concerns itself with vain, transient, temporal matters—those that do not draw man closer to communion with the mysteries of God—makes his thought mixed and his imagination incapable of an accurate conception of what pertains to God and the coming delight. And when the mind becomes mixed, lacking spiritual simplicity (or purity), it falls into hesitation and is unknowingly captured by anger; for the mind has been stripped of simplicity. However, we must say that the simplicity and purity of thought do not in themselves enable man to behold the mysteries of God; for these mysteries are given by God the Father through the revelation of Jesus Christ, who granted us the grace of adoption, illumined us by the Holy Spirit in the mystery of holy baptism, and gave us to know heavenly things. #FastingOfTheMind #SpiritualLife #ChristianAsceticism #Contemplation #Simplicity #DivineMysteries #Grace #HolySpirit