Quote by Soren Kierkegaard ~ Our own torment!

“The more consciousness there is in such a sufferer who in despair wills to be himself, the more his despair intensifies and becomes demonic. It usually originates as follows. A self that in despair wills to be itself is pained in some distress or other that does not allow itself to be taken away from or separated from his concrete self. So now he makes precisely this torment the object of all his passion, and finally it becomes a demonic rage. By now, even if God in heaven and all the angels offered to help him out of it- no, he does not want that, now it is too late. Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of this agony, but he was kept waiting; now it is too late, now he would rather rage against everything and be the wronged victim of the whole world and of all life, and it is of particular significance to him to make sure that he has his torment on hand and that no one takes it away from him- for then he would not be able to demonstrate and prove to himself that he is right. This eventually becomes such a fixation that for an extremely strange reason he is afraid of eternity, afraid that it will separate him from his, demonically understood, infinite superiority over other men, his justification, demonically understood, for being what he is.”

― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening    

“Just as the weak, despairing person is unwilling to hear anything about any consolation eternity has for him, so a person in such despair does not want to hear anything about it, either, but for a different reason: this very consolation would be his undoing; as a denunciation of all existence. Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author's writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error; perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production, and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No! I refuse to be erased! I will stand as a witness against you; a witness that you are a second-rate author.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening    


Source:

http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/50772-sygdommen-til-d-den

some thoughts:

Thinking about this, it appears, to me, that this is something we do rather easily. We are made good by God, this is not a doubt; however, we enter into error or sin or missing of the mark by our thoughts and actions. When we live in error, we are no longer what we were made to be. So then we rebel again the Great Author. We see our darkness as light. Our ego maintains this darkness as our own and reveals it as light and this is how we see ourselves. When the Great Author comes to us to reveal our works, we can't stand the fact that our light is darkness before the Uncreated Light and thus exposed for what it is. We are pained at this revelation, because light dispels darkness. This is the last great deception we will face. We in fact must hate this Uncreated Light of God because it exposes us as shadows and therefore nothing substantive, of which, we lived life in thinking we were substantive, that we were real substance. The fact is that light is substance and darkness is not. Darkness is modified by light and not the other way around. When light comes darkness flees and reveals itself as nothing. Now we imagine an ego that has built its own darkness as a castle and lives there, maintains this darkness, defends it and calls it its own. Once accepted, this darkness, as light, who can convince us that it is nothing... for we have sweated and strained to keep it and bring it into the world as adored like as a woman with child. Who can separate it from us?