What would Satan do?

I used to play this game to sort out my feelings. Sometimes, I don’t find it easy to know what I want. Here’s the game : I would imagine a funny character called Satan that would sit in the right corner of the room, and he would engage me in a conversation. I would talk for both him and myself. He, of course, would have a great sense of humor. I can do this easily : make up a character and put words in his mouth. (Some people are so good at this that they channel entities, archangels and interdimensional beings.) By not knowing how I feel about “stuff”, I end up sometimes fuming, sometimes depressed. Here’s a funny book cover. I haven’t read the book, but came close to ordering it from Amazon at some point.

I did order another book that proved to be among the best self-help books for women I’ve read (and I got an 85 % discount on it) : The Seven Lively Sins, How to Enjoy Your Life, Dammit. Written by Karen Salmansohn. Excerpt from the book : “What’s so deadly about envy ? Envy is a truth barometer for recognizing one’s deepest desires, a zeal that creates a drive for improvement.” Another one : “What’s so deadly about sloth ? Sloth is all about the path to rejuvenation, self-responsiveness... self-compassion.” Another one : “The same three things everyone on this planet is instinctively afraid of : anything new, anything more, anything different. Ironically the only way to grow and achieve greater happiness is to : attain anything new, attain anything more, attain anything different.” (Wait, anything new, anything different... isn’t that the same thing ?)

Some Christians believe in Satan and sin, and they think that you destroy your freedom by sin. Others think it’s the other way around : that you gain your freedom by sin, whatever that word, sin, means. Have you ever read La Philosophie dans le boudoir ? I don’t think that there’s anything evil in people, but I believe that there is something evil in how people in a threesome or larger “group” interact with one another. It’s in the group interaction, not in the individual. Ten years ago, I discovered that there was a non-personified Satan, a “root for all Evil” in the world, and that the root of evil and its consequences was to be found in envy & rivalry, mimetic desire and scapegoating. I read a book by René Girard, and it changed my outlook on life.

These days, I ask myself : what if I had a mentor, what would he tell me ? I am like an orphan. No one is showing me the way, giving me sound advice, the type of advice you can only receive one-on-one. But I can pretend that I do have a mentor, I can play that game. What would a mentor tell me now ?