Why is it so easy to quickly slip into darkened thinking...I am not talking about some kind of blatantly sinful thought life or anything like that, but I mean DARK thinking. Unawareness of the presence of God. Not realizing that you have not been drinking of his spirit and are dying of thirst, until your soul is hacking blood out of its dry parched mouth, and only then finally plunging into his grace again to be new again. Why do I sometimes not breath until my spiritual lips are blue? I think I am more alive than I once was, because I notice when I am dying with greater ease than I once did.
Yet it seems so hard for me to keep a grasp on the fact that no good thing comes from myself, but that goodness and mercy are there for me to drink, freely, so that I may have it in myself. Then the good, the beautiful, the pure, is me and is in myself, yet not from myself but from him. I know this as I know any psychological event that occurs in my mind, yet so often I have trouble KNOWING this, since I still forget on occasion to drink.

..oh that all of all of us would drink by faith, and kill the foolish imagination which thinks it can quench its thirst by the sheer power of its own will.