A cause of our distracted state is constantly seeing and listening to things that prevent recollection. If this is checked, inner peace will be undisturbed. Obviously, the quickest way to achieve this would be to shut off all feeling, but not everyone can or ought to do this. So the holy Fathers devised a salutary remedy: It is to direct your sensitivity towards the things of the spirit. This fortifies it instead of letting it become distracted. This is accomplished by giving spiritual significance to everything - to the point at which a glance at an object will not bring an awareness of the object itself but of its spiritual interpretation. Whoever does this with everything he meets will grow in understanding. Light and darkness, man an beast, stones and plants, houses and fields, everything from great to small will be a lesson for him, and how salutary this can be.
His pupils once asked a staretz why he wept when he saw a beautiful but heavily made up woman. "I weep", he replied, "at the destruction of God's intelligent creation, but also I weep because I have not so much zeal for the salvation of my soul as she has for the spoiling of her body." And another elder who heard a woman; mourning at a graveside remarked: "That is the way in which Christians should mourn over their own sins.
+St. Theophan the Recluse, quoted in The Heart of Salvation, The Life and Teachings of St. Theophan the Recluse, Chapter 2, Spiritual Vision
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