Caught the last of the Extreme Pilgrim series on iPlayer last night. Like him or hate him, this is an excellent series and the last was the best doing a retreat in the Egyptian mountains near the monastery of St Antony the Great.
3 take home points:
1) He is advised that any attempt to do spiritual practice will be met with opposition by the devil, and the greater the progress the harder the tests. This is identically echoed in eastern religions also where it is described as the accelerated fruition of negative karmas.
2) He is advised that the mentality is that if he prays and purifies then all mankind has prayed and is purified, and if he does not then all mankind is the worse. With this mentality he will be encouraged in the right path. Again this is similar (tho not the same) as the eastern practice of transfering merits and seeking to benefit others through our practice.
3) He discovers that he has been numb, and the clarity and life flows back into him as he begins the struggle to separate good from evil within himself. This reminds me of a similar realisation many years ago, that the centre of life is the continual quest to seek good over evil (that is truth of falsity - not in the knowledge but in the moral sense). I hadn't realised that the failure to pursue the truth makes us dead inside - a problem i feel is becoming epidemic.
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