The Importance of Reflection

At the Sunday Night Thing vespers service on Sunday Rev. Mauro DePadua talked about some cool passages about the importance of reflection.

[T]o reflect is to concentrate the intellectual sight, and to observe whether a thing is so, and then that it is so. (Arcana Coelestia 5684)

When reflection is absent not [anything] comes into the memory. (Spiritual Experiences 2593)

The doctrine of reflection is a complete doctrine, and without it no one can know what interior life is, nor even what the life of the body is. Indeed, without reflection from a cognition of truths no one is reformed. Therefore written truths are delivered by the Lord to those on this earth because they live in a perverse state, so that therefrom, as from a fountain, men may draw the cognitions of truths by which they can reflect upon themselves; or more truly, from the cognitions inscribed on man's memory, the Lord causes him to reflect upon his falsities and like things. (Spiritual Experiences 739)

[C]ontinual reflection... is not innate with man, but that it is imbued by habit from infancy, so that at length it becomes as if natural. (Spiritual Experiences 4226)