The worst states of your heart and mind should become retrospectively milder

People who pay attention to their faces, their interiors, while God orchestrates their several regenerations will notice the recurrence of troughs; when one uses the word "trough", one means the nastiest 'visitors' -- thoughts and feelings -- which arrive in the inside of the cup, the mind, and the inside of the platter, the heart. 

If you are genuinely being regenerated, then you will certainly notice that the troughs become milder over time. Utterly vile feelings and thoughts become gradually and perceptibly milder, in such a way that the process is obvious. 

For instance, someone whose head regularly filled up with sexual fantasies involving violence, death, cannibalism, absence of consent, multiplicity of partners, etc, will perceptibly notice that the worst sexual scenarios become obviously milder to the mind's eye.

It is the same with other classes of sin and error. If someone was extremely contemptuous of others or bitter about the past, they should -- if God is orchestrating their regenerations and they are effortfully applying the truths of faith from the Word to the evils which visit their hearts -- notice that the trough of the wave form of the particular category of sin and error is not so low as it was before.

If the feelings and thoughts of the Old Man -- we are to put off the Old Man and put on the New Man -- arise in the heart and mind of a regenerating person, then they will seem less fascinating and gripping; they will seem like a childhood game that has lost its interest the playing of which would even be tedious.

It is very important to note that shadows of the feelings and thoughts which visited the inside of the cup and inside of the platter of the Old Man will recur within your face, your interior. But instead of being central to your feeling and thought, these visitations will seem pale and shadowy and irrelevant, like something unimportant glimpsed out of one's peripheral vision. 

In the terminology of New Jerusalem, this pale and shadowy, peripheral existence and recurrence of the Old Man's vile thoughts and feelings is called 'sins being pushed to the side of one's life'. The doctrine is clear: they do not go away, just like the rubber part of a deflated balloon does not go away. If you blow air back into that rubber balloon -- if you "turn back" in the Bible's words -- then the Old Man's feelings and thoughts can cease to be peripheral to you and become central to you again.

This is thus a warning that you are not out of danger just because you have put a considerable spiritual distance between you and it.

Again to place this process in the context of New Jerusalem, when people's troughs -- the worst feelings and thoughts which they feed -- become perceptibly milder, this is called going from a harsher Hell to a milder Hell and then finally exiting Hell into the outskirts of Heaven. Please note that this journey is something which happens in this life, like someone jumping from one stepping stone to another while appearing to remain physically in the same place. But we are never in the same place: we are always shifting our spiritual location as to the heart and mind and in relation to the spiritual world. 

It is even as the Divine Human said during the First Advent:

"Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you". 

Just so is the Kingdom of Hell within you! And just so are a variety of Heavens and Hells within you, according to the spiritual location of your heart and mind according to the choices you have made between good and evil, truth and falsehood, at forks in the road along the perilous way.

This looking back retrospectively over one's regeneration is "tasting the Lord and seeing that He is good".

For you see, not having to doubt or fear some deception, that This Thing Is On, that the Lord lives, that you are a better person than you were. And you become more resigned to the difficult exams which your heart and mind must sit, more trusting in the Lord even when frustrated with the process.

It is even as the Divine Human said during the Second Advent:

"For in consequence of his hereditary evil a person forever goes panting toward the lowest hell, whereas the Lord by His providence is constantly diverting him and drawing him back from there, first to a milder hell, then out of hell, and finally to Himself in heaven. This operation of Divine providence is unceasing" (Divine Providence 183).

"As for you, my son Solomon, know the God of your father, and serve Him with a loyal heart and with a willing mind; for the Lord searches all hearts and understands all the intent of the thoughts. If you seek Him, He will be found by you; but if you forsake Him, He will cast you off forever" (1 Chronicles 28:9).