Scupoli continues, offering a second solution,

 In this case, resign yourself with all patience, humility, and resignation to the conviction that your desires may after all not have the effect that you supposed, inasmuch as you are weaker and more unstable than you thought yourself to be.

This is a very particular “how to.” It is a positive admonition, not a useless negative one (not something like, “Don’t let this kind of thing bother you.”) – consider, he says, that in your presently weakened condition, these desires of yours to do some good yet are doomed to fail just because you are so weakened.

But as we can tell from the rest of his writing, his last fix is his best:

Or else think that perhaps God, in His secret counsels, or for your unworthiness, does not intend you to do this good work, but, rather, intends you patiently to humble and abase yourself under the loving and mighty hand of His will.

If we think about this advice in terms of the effect it must produce in the believer (rather than worrying ourselves about the right or wrong of the belief itself), we may see a state of mind not far different from that which much Buddhist admonition induces in its true believers.

This is an existential question – what does it feel like to say to oneself, truly believing, that we must humble and abase ourselves under the loving and mighty hand of God’s will? My best estimate goes two ways depending on directions “humble and abase” can take..

There is the sense of nothingness and insignificance tout simple. For instance, as found on pages 90-91 of Spiritual Combat.

Regard yourself as nothing

The crafty and malicious serpent fails not to tempt us by his subtle devices through the virtues we have acquired. With these he would work our ruin, by inducing us to think too much of them or of ourselves, and thus would lead us to lift up ourselves on high, and thereby to fall into he sin of pride and vainglory.

    To protect yourself from this danger, always fight your own battle, placing yourself on the safe ad level ground of a true and deep conviction that you are nothing, that you know nothing, that you can do nothing, that you have nothing of your own....

And then there is the sense of same that comes along with the self-flagellation of the continuation of that passage –

... nothing of your own but misery and imperfection, and that you deserve nothing but eternal damnation

The former may be aligned with the Buddhist conception of emptiness and instructions to consider this fact in one’s efforts to attain inner peace and tranquility, but the latter is entirely foreign to any Eastern thinking I have so far encountered.

{I lack some energy of caring at the moment to complete a thorough presentation of this material. 1/9/09}