A blueprint to get out of lust - Part 1
(read this when you’re ready to fight)
You’re alone.
Just another ordinary moment.
Then it happens.
A flash, a thought, an image. It’s small, you say. Harmless. So you entertain it… just for a second.
That second is all that’s needed.
Here’s what many people miss: lust does not begin in the body. It begins as a thought.
The devil cannot force you to lust. He has no direct power over your will. So instead, he whispers in your ear.
Because he needs one thing:
your consent.
Every fall into lust follows the same path. The thought comes first. Always.
The tactic of the devil is to subtly plant those seeds, little by little. Every time, he comes back with another thought, and it grows stronger, clearer, into a full image, and then a full movie.
By that point your body is involved. The thought became chemistry, and your will weakens. Suddenly you’re not choosing as freely, you’re reacting.
The only place to stop it easily is at the beginning. At the thought.
But here is what nobody tells you about why this is so hard.
The game doesn’t begin at the level of the body.
You are not just a body trying to resist bad images. You are body and soul. Not a soul trapped in a body, but the union of both. What happens in the soul moves the body just as much as the body shapes the soul.
Ok so. Catholic teaching says the soul has three faculties.
Stay with me, this is where it gets useful:
Intellect - the capacity to know or to reason about something. This is where thoughts originate.
Will - the capacity to choose. Your consent to a thought is where sin happens.
Memory - this has two dimensions.
First dimension: the biological hard drive. the brain stores sensory images, experiences, and patterns that the intellect draws from. This is the hard drive.
Second dimension: the soul’s memory. Your grasp of what love means, what dignity is, what God is. These are not stored in neurons. They are held by the soul itself.
Neuroscience has been trying to explain this for decades. I found 4 scientific studies that show consciousness is not fundamentally physical. 1 2 3 4
These three faculties are the soul, not the body. They work with the brain, but are not the brain.
Here is how you know.
The brain is material; it can only process what has physical form. A hard drive can store the word "justice" but has no idea what justice means. A camera with still doesn't know what it photographed.
Matter stores, but matter cannot understand. Therefore what grasps these things must itself be immaterial.
Your intellect does something your brain cannot do: it grasps things that have no physical form whatsoever: the meaning of justice, infinity, truth, and God.
The leap from matter to meaning is not biological. Because thoughts are not just neurons firing. Thoughts are also processed in the soul, the spiritual realm.
And here’s why that matters for everything that follows.
Because the soul is spiritual, it is not limited to the material world. It is capable of touching what is beyond matter entirely. Which means, it is capable of being united to God.
This is the soul’s purpose: to reorient your whole person (body included) toward heaven.
This is also why scripture uses spirit and soul interchangeably. They point to the same reality: the part of you that is infinite in capacity and was made to unite you with God.
And it’s why the devil targets the soul first. At the thought.
He doesn’t come for your body.
He comes for your soul.
Because if he can get the soul, the body follows. If your soul leans toward the intrusive thought, your body will act on it.
"Everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Matthew 5:28). This is where the sin is committed long before the body acts on it.
Christ was not interested in the surface. He goes straight to the heart (your intentions, your soul), the place where the real decision is made.
But here is the deeper question few ask:
What’s up with your heart? Why does it keep wanting more in the first place?
Not just more lust. More of everything. More pleasure, more comfort, more sensation, more love, more meaning… An appetite that never fully ceases.
Here is the answer:
Your soul was made for the infinite. It can only be filled by Him! [more here].
And you’ve experienced it your whole life without having words to express it!
No amount of pleasure will ever fulfill you because pleasure is finite and your soul is not. If you were purely material (only a body), a material satisfaction would be enough. If lust could fill you, a set amount would suffice. You’d stop. You’d be done.
BUT… you keep going back :/
That’s your soul starving.
And to fill it, you grab at anything that looks like nourishment.
A starving soul reaches for any junk food.
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