In the introduction, Sister Elizabeth Siepak wrote of Saint Faustina, “The austere lifestyle and exhausting fasts that she imposed upon herself even before joining the Congregation, weakened her organism to such an extent that already during her postulantship (her probationary period) it became necessary to send her to a hospital treatment center to restore her health.” This kind of asceticism is common in monastic life and settings. Why is this kind of life widely thought necessary for spiritual advancement and lofty attainments? What is Creator’s perspective?

This seemingly punitive and harsh lifestyle is just that, it is a self-imposed penance many of the religious have been inculcated to believe is a path to holiness. You see this commonly in spiritual writings, including the Eastern traditions of the Buddha, that ignoring the self, neglecting earthly pursuits and earthly pleasures, leads to a kind of purity of intention separate from the personhood and ego. So this is well-intentioned but becomes excessive when it harms the person and limits them. It is one thing to have a lifestyle that can impose discipline and isolates a person intending to devote themselves to a passionate pursuit of something important, from the many distractions life can bring. With ceaseless interruptions, the attention and time keep getting redirected, and thus interrupt the flow of awareness, and that works against doing things of a spiritual nature involving the intuitive reach that are favored by a setting of quiet contemplation and meditative thought, as when communing with the divine. But the idea this needs to be arranged in a way to make a person a kind of prisoner, with a restriction of personal needs to an extreme of deprivation, is a corruption of thinking done deliberately to mock and punish the devout for their perceived folly in believing in the divine to begin with. This was imposed through mind control manipulation thousands of years ago by extraterrestrial beings who run the world from behind the scenes and manipulate everyone through the culture and the actions of individuals they manipulate. They have corrupted every institution in some way or another, and this is true of religion—all religion—the way they are practiced, even the spiritual doctrine itself, and this includes intervening in the personal lives to corrupt and manipulate in many ways. So the whole idea of subjecting the self to a penalty, a restriction, a punishment of some kind, even with extremes like self-flagellation, is corrupted thinking from first to last. We are love based in all we do. It makes no sense to base devotion to us on self-punishment as a necessary contingency to be accepted by us and worthy. That is the purpose of the corruption, to impose a self-isolation of the victim, because every thought and action devoted to withholding something from the self is a distraction from divine purpose and alignment and will accomplish the goal of disempowering the one on a spiritual path following a misguided distortion of thinking.