What is of crucial importance in the world today is the process of purification of one's self. On the physio-mental front, I aim to keep food from over-riding my higher self (with the tell-tale belly as evidence of failure). In order to keep myself in fighting form and in "ketosis" I do not eat until @ noon, even though I'm up each day @ 4 AM. (Of course fasting is easier/more efficient when one is actively engaging the muscles of the body, as in working in a physically demanding job.) I believe this causes the body to draw caloric energy from cellulite, while freeing the mind from the lead-weight, down-rushing blood caused from ingesting foodstuffs.
If I eat early in the day, my food-addicted stomach begs for more so that my mind and soul become totally distracted by this devouring monster. It makes me wonder about whether this is the real lesson of being tempted by an "apple" in the Garden of Eden—the apple representing all food. (The extreme obverse of this is that if you achieve pureness of spirit you can actually live without food and only on "prana," as in being a "breatharian.")
The point is this: that after enough time passes, when you actually do eat, after ketosis has already kicked-in, what you do eat isn't as damaging to your body/mind because it is not adding more bulk onto bulk, as it were—at least this is my take on it.
The rest is judicious mindfulness and prayer and avoidance of "sins of impurity." In this regard, I look back almost in horror now at my past guilty pleasures!
I had, for the longest time, a bias that favored esoteric practices such as meditation over prayer. While there is a therapeutic gain from quieting the mind, finding that still-point, prayer, especially praying the rosary, is as efficacious, perhaps more efficacious and "pleasing to God" than "yogic practices." To the modern mind this sounds quaint I'm sure. But I believe that prayer actuates tremendous benefits and imparts grace.
(Now there's an odd-ball detour for this old horn-dog and all-around raconteur of all that's under the radar. Just giving you, the reader, heads up about where this old guy's intuition and interests are taking him these days.)
And one last observation: I mentioned in a previous post how I identify with the notion of sede vacante (sedevacantists are those who hold that the Chair of St. Peter is empty). Well, when there is an anti-Pope occupying that Chair it may as well be empty. Out of a total of 266 Popes there have been perhaps 50 anti-Popes over the past 2,000 years. However, if one holds that the "Chair is Empty" would that sever the chain of succession from (and to) Jesus Christ, similar to how, in real estate parlance, a break in a property's chain of ownership causes a cloud on title?
Taking that analogy further, consider real property that is possessed despite some fraudulent acts by its occupants concerning the property, as opposed to it only having been abandoned for a short periods of time during its overall existence. Clearly, fraud adversely affects clear title, whereas abandonment may only cause the property to go into disrepair until re-occupied. Similarly, if the proper process of choosing a Pope is followed then whatever Pope is chosen by the Cardinals has been duly and properly installed; however, if most or all of the Church has been infiltrated and corrupted from within, affecting the judgment of even those at the highest levels of the Vatican, the judgment may be extremely flawed but not necessarily a fraud, per se.
Such thinking and analysis might be criticized as legalistic nit-picking that would only rationalize, only "paper-over" grave Ecclesiastical error and maybe it is. But, if "duly elected," I would favor begrudgingly "tolerating" an anti-Pope, however humanly flawed and dogmatically distasteful, as a bona fide occupant of the Chair of St. Peter, despite non-acceptance of his heretical pontifical teachings, i.e., rejecting his "modernist," "globalist," "mindless ecumenism and indifferentism" as anathema. (You know, as in the political realm, you might deal like-wise with a McConnell or Pelosi or Mueller or Trump [name your political villain-of-the-moment.])
On the foregoing basis I conclude that the notion of sede vacante is a valid metaphor, though not a stance to be taken literally.
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