Acharya Prashant explains that if you have a thought but do not favor, support, energize, or turn it into action, that thought gets weakened and loses its power. It is because the thought is not gaining any sympathy from you. When a thought arises and prompts you to act in a certain way, if you refuse to go by its demand and freeze the action, the thought itself will die down. A thought requires your support, which you express by turning it into action. When you do not turn the thought into action, you have told the thought, "I do not respect you." You are not its ally. The thought, humiliated and de-energized, falls down. A similar relationship exists between the latent tendency that gives rise to thoughts and the thoughts themselves. A thought demands action, and a tendency demands thought. When a tendency comes to you demanding that you think in a particular way, if you do not support the tendency by letting it turn into active thoughts, the tendency itself will gradually shrivel. You are not energizing the tendency, so it has no source from which to continue. When action is destroyed, that destroys thoughts, and when thought is destroyed, that destroys the tendency. When false action, false thought, and false tendencies are all gone, you are left with nothing but the Truth. This is how you proceed from the gross to the subtle. The process of dwindling innate impulses like anger, greed, pride, and fear is to not let them turn into thought or action. You enfeeble a thought by not acting on it. Let the thought keep coming, but you keep disregarding it. When the thought finds no traction with you, it will feel insulted and retreat. Let your impulses rage, but do not let them occupy your mind or actively think along their lines, and they will gradually fall silent. You have the choice; nothing happens to you without your consent. Impulses and thoughts appeal to you, but you are the judge who decides whether to accept their appeals. You are not a slave to your thoughts; you are the one who decides to go by them, and if you have decided, you can also reverse the decision. That power is there to be exercised judiciously. If a thought is surviving in you, it is because, according to you, it is a good thought. If you know a thought is bad, it will not remain because it requires your support to survive. If a so-called bad thought is persisting in your mind, it means you are only calling it bad superficially; deeply, you are supporting it and are pleased with it. Had you honestly thought it was bad, it would have gone. Our minds are full of so-called bad thoughts because we find them attractive. Conversely, our minds are not full of good thoughts because while we call them good, we consider them bad and do not support them. This is our relationship with our bad thoughts: we enjoy them and then feign piety, like a man who enjoys a prostitute but then refuses to accept water from her hand out of supposed purity.