No, do not attempt to persuade him it was all illusion! He isn't as excited as he was, but the memory is too fresh, and the feeling will come and go. You'll waste a powerful weapon if you deploy it now. Save that attack for when he has grown reattached to the world.
So he has heard of fasting and wants to try it. Discourage him if you can; it develops self-control and other vices.
But if it must be, persuade him that he already knows what that means, and that a hard fast is the only "real" kind of fast. If you guide his diet the night before he'll be especially hungry.
When he becomes hungry during the day, urge him to try to push the hunger out of his mind with will power. Focus hard on that. Don't let a hint enter his mind that he should pray. Bring to his mind the food waiting for the end of the fast.
Overindulging in water to deal with his hunger can have pleasing effects too. Then, when you remind him that fasting is bad for the sick or old, he will have reason to feel himself excused in the future.
I must repeat: make it a matter of pride that the only fast he attempts is the hard fast. Keep him from learning how much of his life runs without conscious thought. I knew a patient for whom standing in the doorway listening to the rain, by unconscious links, led to lust hours later. Your patient's habit of comfort-eating under stress will be very useful to you, if you can make sure he never learns of it. Fasting could lay that link bare.
Yes, having him agitate for creating a ballfield for the young creatures is a good plan. It doesn't feel like a great accomplishment—where is the great sin in it?—but it reduces him from what he was. The _direction_ is good.
The more abstract his plan is, the better. The wretch doesn't actually know what games the young play today. He remembers his idealized past. Objections to his arguments will feel like personal attacks. Make sure his letter emphasizes his Christian care for the deprived. That should annoy his readers, and escalate bad feelings. Find out who is likely to respond, and have her tempter make sure her reply mocks his poor grammar. Attention to detail wins the game, my apprentice.
Yes, absolutely you must involve him in attending to the nightly news. Weren't you briefed on the available tools for this zone? We have trained them to think it their responsibility to keep abreast of the latest gossip (never called that) and the terrible events they cannot do anything to help or worsen. It tickles their little minds with trivia, excites their little emotions over ephemera, and trains them to be passive. And for many of them, overextending their sense of compassion numbs it.
If your patient wants to pass judgment on the people he learns of, so much the better. Self-righteousness grows well in that kind of soil. And he will learn of, and by habituation start to think normal, their fashionable Balaam-Christianity. If he starts to be shocked, remind him of "judge not" and let immersion take care of the rest.
This ties together very well with our goal to involve him in secular pursuits, and it ties up more of his time.
You have a long way to go yet. Do not be careless. And you are wrong, I will not be blamed along with you if you fail.
Your mentor, Baldagon
2 comments:
You have really had fun with this, haven't you? Beware, Lewis found that though the writing came easily, it left him a bit demoralised, having to think in revers all the time.
Lewis covered so much of the ground that there's not much room left. (Longenecker's work explores the demons more logically and satisfactorily, but doesn't do as well with the patients as Lewis did.)
But yes, it was fun.
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