8. Unsatisfied Wishes and Sublimation - Square Circles Publishing

SOURCE 8: THE MIND AT MISCHIEF
8:8.8 I can remember meeting, in my
student days, a young man who was an
inordinate scrapper; he was all the time
fighting, quarreling, contending. He was
unpopular among the students and always
in trouble with his teachers. I recall a
heart-to-heart talk in which he told me
that he longed to get over this fault, but
that whenever he tried to put it away, it
would come up in some embarrassing
situation, and he would fly off the handle,
hit somebody, or do something else that
was foolish. He was always suffering
from remorse and filled with regrets as a
result of these emotional sprawls and
temperamental outbreaks.
[See 9:6.4.]
8:8.9 This young man had a difficult
time deciding what to do in life.
Eventually, in connection with the revival
efforts of a well-known evangelist, he
“got religion” and decided to become an
evangelist. He jumped into his training
for the ministry in dead earnest; he
enlisted in a very active and somewhat
spectacular campaign of fighting sin and
the devil. As the years have gone by, I
have watched him. He exhibits a changed
disposition. True, underneath his religion
he still has a highly irritable and unstable
temperament; but it is usually controlled
now, and he is not ill as a result of
emotional suppression. He has made a
profound transformation of his
pugnacious temperament. He is still a
fighter, but now he is fighting evil. He
has sublimated his former high-tempered,
fiery disposition into the righteous
indignation of a man of God who is
engaged in making continuous assaults
upon the strongholds of sin. He has found
the psychic equivalent to give balance to
his former disagreeable and scrappy
disposition.
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