The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy's own ground.

The Enemy can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the category I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below.

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?

Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences.

Your business is to fix his attention on the stream.

Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real'.

At his present stage he has an idea of ‘Christians' in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial.

His mind is full of togas and sandals and armor and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real - though of course an unconscious - difficulty to him.

Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like.

Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar category of clarity which Hell affords.

work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman.

The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavor.

He has not been anything like long enough with the Enemy to have any real humility yet.

What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors.

Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the states of his own mind - or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see.

Encourage this.

Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones.

Aggravate that most useful human characteristic - neglect of the obvious.

Take care, in the meantime the Enemy will not be idle for whenever there is prayer, there is danger of His own immediate action.

The Enemy is cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position, and ours, as pure spirits, and to human animals on their knees He pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion.

Even if the Enemy defeats your first attempt at misdirection, we have a subtler weapon.

The humans do not start from that direct perception of the Enemy which we, unhappily, cannot avoid.

They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives.

If you look into your patient's mind when he is praying, you will not find that.

If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients.

There will be images derived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during the discreditable episode known as the Incarnation. There will even be some of his own reverence (and of bodily sensations accompanying it) objectified and attributed to the object revered. I have known cases where what the patient called his 'God' was actually located up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall.

But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it - to the thing that he has made, not to Him who has made him.

You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer.

If all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, we will have lost him.

There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy.

The Enemy wants men to be concerned with what they DO; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross, but only of the things he is afraid of.

Unfortunately fear becomes easier to master when the patient's mind is diverted from the thing feared to the fear itself, considered as a present and undesirable state of his own mind; and when he regards the fear as his appointed cross he will inevitably think of it as a state of mind and be relieved, so do not let him do so.

Human's are amphibians - half spirit and half animal.

(The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father Below to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to eternal reality, but as animals they inhabit time.

This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.

Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation - the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

As long as a human lives on Earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and spiritual corruption.

Now it may surprise you to learn that in the Enemy's efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.

The reason is this: To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense; But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing.

One must face the fact that all the talk about the Enemy's love for mankind, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth.

The health and spirits which you want to use in producing lust can also, alas, be very easily used for work or play or thought or innocuous merriment. The attack has a much better chance of success when the human's whole inner reality is drab and cold and empty.

It is to be noted that the trough sexuality is subtly different in quality from that of the peak - much less likely to lead to the phenomenon which the humans call 'being in love', much more easily drawn into perversions, much less contaminated by those generous and imaginative and even spiritual concomitants which often render human sexuality so disappointing.

It is the same with other desires of the flesh.

You are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary then by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy and expansive.

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy's ground. Although we have won many a soul through pleasure, all the same, it is His invention, not ours.

The Enemy made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, in incorrect ways, or in an excessive obsessive way.

Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable.

An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.

It is more certain; and it's better style.

To get the man's soul and give him nothing in return is really what gladdens Our Father Below.

-from the screwtape letters

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive … those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

-C. S. Lewis, British author