H,
It is never simply fine to do as we please. We know what happens to the
heart. There is no free lunch, even in the soul. Things will affect you. Dwelling
in the darkness has its effect. We cannot simply seek the disbalance of feeding
one side of ourselves. We are whole people for a reason. We are all made for bigger
things and should not be slaves to any one thing or anything at all.
This is the main problem with addiction. It reduces us to our needs and
then to one single need, all the time. We cannot function without succumbing to
it, and this over and over again. It takes a toll on who we are and who we can
be. Sin, defined as turning our nose up at the light, has much the same effect.
It is not a single thing but a “posture of defiance”, a push away from God and
a worship of the transient and the temporal. Without the context of eternal good,
we fall into the trap of self-reference. It becomes a matter not of the
validation of self but the preponderance of self over everything else. The heart
becomes removed from the universal nature of existence and becomes trapped in today
but spread over a lifetime. Living for today and tomorrow and then the next is
the most limiting view of existence there is.
And the heart cannot fold itself into this new meaning. It continues to
beg for more. It needs more. It cannot be healthy in this state. It cannot be
full. It is constantly hungry and constantly wrought. It begins to look for
thrills and not wholeness, for power and not love, and, finally, for glory and
not meaning. The only hope there is to become what it was meant to be in the
first place: the House of God.