 So this might seem kind of irrelevant to the video title, but recently I got a Jordanville prayer book This is something that the Russian Orthodox Church uses a lot. I highly recommend this look into this But interestingly enough in this prayer book a lot of the evening prayers that they have Which I'll do every night. They will have specific requests that Lord grant me a dreamless sleep like you don't want to have dreams while you're asleep And I thought that was a little weird when I first read it and I was like, well, why what's so bad about dreams? I don't know. I just have inane Liminal Bucky's core dreams. What's the problem with dreams? Well, the reality is and this this is a narrative I've never heard in my life. I had never heard anyone Suspicious of them and not just of dreams really the Orthodox are more widely suspicious of all Imagination they're so they're suspicious of any time where your mind is passive when it is a Target for, you know, demonic or, you know, carnal influences any of that kind of stuff And this actually makes a whole lot of sense, right? And I've come to it's changed the way that I look at a whole bunch of things now Let's be specific about this. So firstly Let's just say dreams are part of a larger category called imagination. Okay, just maybe you have less control over dreams I don't know who cares. That's for another video, right? So in terms of imagination imagination is actually where a lot of bad habits come from So right off the bat like everyone knows like oh like sexual fantasies things like that that that comes from imagination, right? I've said actually before That I definitely think it's the case that when like teenagers or whatever they start watching pornography I don't actually think it's because they're just young and sexual and hormonal. I don't think that's the case I actually think what causes mass consumption of pornography and stuff like this nowadays Is because kids are freaking bored. They don't have even They don't have anything in their time to do like they're they're sitting unsupervised with the computer for like hours on end in a lot of cases cell phones um And so like that sometimes happens not because initially these kids are looking for this kind of stuff But because it just happens to them because uh, you know, I can sit here and think about what I want I can kind of be this passive consumer of whatever happens to come to me, right? And that actually is where I really think this kind of stuff comes from like people don't Get into this abnormal sexual stuff Just by living real life They get into the stuff by being detached from real life And you know in this like weird imagination world of like Degenerate pornography and stuff like that, right? So that sexual stuff is a very obvious case of this But I think it's also the case that imagination is like just really when you really think about it when you have time alone And you are letting your thoughts your thoughts like control you Um, they lead you in like really bad ways Think about this like, um, you know when you're thinking about other people, right? That is the time when you really like you overanalyze people's personalities You you find faults in them Uh, it's like it's a place for you to be prideful about yourself because you're comparing yourself to other people And you know in real life in a lot of cases you're not like You're not going to reach those conclusions if you're in a constant rapport with different people But if you uh are in this imagination world There are a lot of cases where you can kind of make these mosaic representations of people that aren't really they might be 95 Accurate, but that five percent accurate is always going to be uh, kind of I don't know against It's always going to work in your favor. It's always going to be like arrogant or a prideful way of looking at people Um, so I think it's really harmful You know gossip is a harmful thing and even gossip with one person when you're like thinking about what people are doing I think that's something that I don't know. I've tried to cut out and I think other people should as well Um, but even more than that even when it comes to like productive Things like this is where they really get you, right? Um, and again like to the orthodox this is like when you're when you're in a state of imagination or when you're like, uh Uh, when you can have all these kind of dreams and stuff that is always you being kind of spiritually passive And you can be influenced by demonic forces or like just your carnal Impulses right, you know by your passions you can be influenced by them a whole lot more easily than otherwise But as I was going to say like one of the worst Kinds of I don't know one of the most counter-intuitive things is that I think that a lot of times Uh, if you have some productive goal and you end up fantasizing about it too much You will end up not doing it at all There comes a point like let's say you want to accomplish something you want to do I don't know I I shouldn't even provide a hypothetical because I know for a fact that there's probably something in your life Where you know, oh, this is oh, I this is what he's going to be talking about But let's say you have some specific goal that you want to accomplish And so you you plan it out, right? You you spend too much time Planning it and you start to enjoy that planning you start to enjoy you're really immat You're you're thinking of all the scenarios that can happen Um And instead of actually acting on this you you find so much pleasure in thinking about it That you don't like the pleasure of thinking about it becomes greater than the actual desire to do it And you end up not doing it and that's kind of an ironic thing and that can happen Uh in a whole lot of domains not just like productive things that you want to accomplish Um, but also social things like you can uh one thing I think when I was younger I used to do this a lot. I used to like act out Conversations with people in my head. I don't know like That's kind of a weird thing. I really don't do that anymore. I just kind of I don't know but Maybe I do a little bit But that's another thing like people will imagine Scenarios in their head and they'll forget that oh like it's not the imagination is not the real part, right? I mean the world that we are in a totally bizarre hyper reality It's really a hypo reality because like this whole all this internet stuff. It's like it's it's fake It's it's not real um and a lot of people seem to think that like their imagination or the the internet is somehow real or because People are living in imagination more and more often, but that is that's not the case, right? So what I'm trying to get out is this this just totally changed my perspective It's just a little thing and you you can look up a lot of orthodox people talk about imagination and dreams and why they're You should always be suspicious And this is actually a big difference. I should add this is a big difference between Uh, I guess the Protestant upbringing that I got growing up, right because there's this sense where Like Protestants turn tend to especially like lower church we're talking about like Pentecostal people or something like that They have a tense to like divinize or like Deify their own thoughts like if this thought came to my head. It must be god, which is Incredibly wrong and incredibly blasphemous because most of the time the thoughts that come to your head They're just inane or they're frankly just bad and that's a suspicion that the orthodox Have of all this kind of stuff and kind of puts them on a a separate Ends of a spectrum From a lot of this so I think it's important to be suspicious of thoughts and I will just say for purposes of my youtube Uh, you know me putting up videos on the internet. I will say there's a sense in which Um, uh Like you I notoriously and this is probably a bad thing on occasions. I will get annoyed by people on youtube I think that realistically speaking and I'm sure lots of you guys will agree with me There are lots of people watch this channel who are freaking weirdos Uh, and uh, like the whole I don't know. There are a lot of times I just get uncomfortable with like doing videos and stuff like that But realistically speaking in the same way I I cannot let myself my own emotions my own the things that pop into my head that are like Oh my goodness. This is so cringe. Uh, it's kind of bad for me to get let that get in the way of me doing stuff realistically speaking Um, I know like I I think I try not to have a bad attitude on live streams when I like start cringing it something stupid That some of it's not most people right? It's just like, oh my goodness Like this this guy is like falling for all this stuff and you know a lot of times We get angry at people for doing things that we used to do right like that's the easiest thing in the world So sometimes that happens to me But either way what I'm saying in in this is that like your emotions are not necessarily a good guide to what is right and wrong Um, what is right might actually be very emotionally painful to do. It might be miserable when you act through it Um, and you can't take too much pleasure in just enjoying thoughts and follow enjoyable thoughts Enjoyful thoughts. Um, because that's not good because you're gonna be again, you're gonna be prideful You're gonna be lustful. You're gonna be lazy all that kind of stuff So that's all I have to say. Uh, that's something I've I've learned in the past couple of weeks. See you guys next time