4) Developing the Proper Attitude towards Shemiras Ainayim:
a) We need to tell ourselves that no matter how painful it feels not to look, it will always be even more painful to look. Because when we look, there are two acute pains we feel:
· We feel suddenly far from Hashem and from our goals.
· We know we can't have it anyway, and when we look - we desire it and it HURTS.
So essentially, the pain we feel when not looking is much better than the pain of looking! And as they say in the 12-Step literature, “No situation can be bad enough that a little lusting won’t make it worse”.
b) The pain we feel when not looking is HEALING pain, like the pain from surgery. The pain is healing us. On the other hand, the spiritual pain of looking is the pain of the disease getting worse. Which pain do we choose?
c) The pain we feel when not looking is not really our pain at all. It is the pain of the Yetzer Hara in his "death throes". He is screaming that we are hitting him hard. So we can actually enjoy the pain! We are feeling the pain of our enemy as he gets weaker!
d) The whole desire is a blown up bubble of hot-air, built around what we see and imagine in our minds. Experience has shown us all, that as soon as we get what we thought we wanted -- what we thought was going to be absolutely incredible (according to what we saw and fantasized), the bubble pops and all that's left is "hot air". We are left shaking our head and not believing that for this we sell our very souls.
e) Let us also reflect for a moment. If we were blind, chas veshalom, we wouldn't struggle with lust. If we didn't have this amazing gift of sight that Hashem gave us, would we be able to lust through our eyes? Scientists tell us that the human mind makes billions of calculations per second when processing information from the countless nerve endings that connect our eyes to our brains. How can we take this amazing gift and use it against Hashem's will?