Saturday, April 18, 2009

Spiritual Self Experimentation

I am going to do some self experimentation to try to develop some virtue. Yes it's time to use science as a means to holiness. To biblically proof text what I'm doing Paul tells us to,
"Test everything; retain what is good." (1Thes 5:21) and that is what I'm going to try to do. Seth Roberts in this 10-minute talk has two main points when doing self experimentation.

1. You learn by doing not over thinking an experiment. You will learn what’s wrong with your experiments by starting to do them.
2. When you do something, do the smallest easiest thing that will help, that will tell you something you don’t know.

The problem that I want to address is my lack of progress in holiness. Every time I go to confession it is the same sins that occur at about the same incident of occurrence. This has been happening for the past 8 years and it is amazing to me how consistent my confessions have been. When I was younger I always thought that with age comes wisdom and holiness. All I needed to do was to go to church on Sunday and try to be a good person and I would continue to grow. It hasn't been working out like that.

So here is what I am going to do. Every night I am going to do an examination of conscious, record my sins using a short hand that no one but me will understand , and pray an act of contrition. In a month, I am going to go to confession and I will see if I made progress. I can tweak and tinker from there. There are a lot of types of spiritualities and devotions that I want to try out but for now I am going to stick with Seth's point number 2.

1 comment:

not so ancient dialogues said...
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