Controlling Thoughts

Years ago I read an essay by Truman Madsen which gave me a lot of insight. The ideas it expresses proved helpful in some of my most trying moments, as I struggled to learn to control thought. The following quotation from that essay is taken from "Christ and the Inner Life," the chapter entitled "Christ and Conquering Thoughts," published as part of Five Classics by Truman G. Madsen (Deseret Book Company, 2001).

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So suppose a diabolical picture comes to mind, a thought of which we are ashamed (or is it the feeling we have toward the thought that makes us ashamed?). The force of it may blot out all that we ordinarily see and feel. Spiritual sensitivities are the first to go. We isolate this fraction of consciousness (I've got to have this out!), build up syrupy anticipation, convince ourselves that this is what we really want, and become numb to all else. Thus, it is fitting to speak of blind rage, blind greed, blind passion. In his Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis has the devil say to a henchman, "It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds; in reality our best work is done by keeping things out." We have forgotten that we would "always remember him" (which is more than remembering his teachings).

In such a moment of distress how can you pull him into your consciousness so that strength replaces weakness? I designate two ways from the prophets.

1. Picture Christ and remember how you are bound to him. In the crisis for example, when your temples thunder, imagine what you are tempted to do as if it were a large sledge hammer. See! See if you can stand at the cross and by this act or indulgence swing that hammer on the nail. That will break your compulsive pattern and restore enough to your consciousness to enable you to cry out and mean, "No!"

2. The other picture is positive. It is the more calm but daily vision to overarch all else.

It is the vision of the real-in-prospect.

Take, for example carnal thoughts, the bubbling erotica which imbue our environment and, mysteriously, the subconscious. Ask yourself what you really want. But as you ask, invite and invoke your spirit, the deepest and best in you, and the Master's Spirit. Search with him for the vision of love and marriage that can claim your whole being, to include, but not end with, the chemistry of the flesh.

Such a vision will bring into focus a queen or king, an anticipation of the real thing. You will be inspired by your righteous thirst for such kinships and excitements. You will envision love that glorifies a pathway through the temple of God, and finally the culmination in which there is whiteness and joy.

Thus you take raw subliminal impulses that corrode. You sublimate (literally make subline) them into conscious, desirable pictures. You light corroding fire with redeeming fire. And Christ who is the exemplar of all forms of godly love becomes the revelator both of your own possibilities in the world of affection and of the pathway that will make them actual.

Without such a vision the heart is sort of a mixer of cheap poisons for our veins. But with it life takes on a deep-breathing color of godliness. But isn't it sinful or at least impractical to have such visionary fantasies? Listen to Orson Pratt: "There is no danger of loving too much, but only of loving too little." Lurid, lustful desires are a form of the "too little." But the effulgent dream of godly love is "at the foundation of everything worthy to be called happiness."

You doubt? You fear to open up your own caldron to the Christ?

Then go on pretending, if you must, that there is a way to hide. But hear in the distance what, if you will, you can feel in the marrow of your bones. It is a contemporary voice the Lord expressed in Doctrine and Covenants 6:36: "Look to me in every thought; doubt not, fear not."