Each person has to do many things in life, and not all of them turn out to be correct. Much of what people do is sinful from the point of view of the main world religions. Wrong actions in the most negative way affect the human soul.
A person's sins can be very different, from the notorious seven deadly sins to many seemingly small and insignificant offenses. But every wrong action, even the smallest, has a destructive effect on the soul. As water wears away a stone, so sins gradually burden the soul, make it dirty, dark, overwhelmed by base desires.
All of the above is by no means metaphors. People with the gift of clairvoyance can see firsthand how the souls of righteous people differ from the souls of sinners. Saint Theophan the Recluse wrote that the soul of a righteous person with pure thoughts is seen as light, while for a sinful person it is dark. This is confirmed by modern clairvoyants.
How the soul gets dirty
It is very important to understand how a spiritual fall takes place. In the mind of a person, there are some thoughts almost all the time. But the holy fathers, hundreds of years ago, said that not all thoughts belong to the person himself - many of them enter consciousness from the outside. Such a thought, entered into consciousness, is called an adposition. The important thing is that no matter how sinful a thought is, a person is not punished for it. Because she is a stranger who came from outside.
A righteous person will immediately recognize such a thought and reject it; it has no power over him. And the other person will listen to her - she becomes a thought. If a person agrees with the thought, accepts it, this is already a combination. This is followed by captivity, thought actively captures the consciousness of a person. The last stage of submission to someone else's thought (which has already become your own) is passion.
The easiest way is to drive away a sinful thought at the stage of an addiction. Of course, such work requires constant monitoring, observation of thoughts, which is very difficult, but possible. If a person drives away sinful thoughts, his soul gradually becomes more and more luminous. And vice versa, submitting to alien sinful thoughts, a person more and more pollutes his soul, makes it dark and insensitive to the truth.
Distinguishing between truth and falsehood
The issue of distinguishing between truth and falsehood is one of the most important for maintaining the purity of the soul. Not every person can immediately understand whether a true thought entered his consciousness or a false one. How not to be mistaken in this matter?
In Orthodoxy, it is believed that a person cannot independently fight a lie, since Satan is immeasurably smarter and more cunning than him. Lies can be so carefully disguised that even a righteous person can sometimes make a mistake and mistake a lie for truth.
The only correct way is to constantly ask God for help in separating truth from falsehood. With spiritual practice, a person gradually develops spiritual vision, he begins to very clearly see all the tricks of the dark forces, all their lies. His soul is becoming more pure and luminous.
At some moments, for example, during prayer, the soul of a pure person becomes so bright that this light can be seen with the naked eye. There are many testimonies of how the faces of Orthodox ascetics were enlightened at prayer - sometimes the light became so bright that it made people look away. The soul of such a person is completely freed from passions, therefore it shines with its true spiritual light.
