I would wager that you did, if only for an instant. How did that happen? In order to process the command, you have to know what a Green-faced monkey looks like before you can obey the thought that you shouldn't think about it. Like any command, the heart threw the thought up to the Eye of your Inner Man to see if you were going to obey it or not. At the same time, it initiated some side-thoughts that began the process of digging up the picture of a monkey's face and painting it green. That processing happens in parallel and mostly unconsciously: the brain is incredibly well wired to support parallel processing, by which it overcomes the slowness of neuronic circuitry based on chemical and ion flows. By the time your Inner Man decided to obey it, the parallel thoughts bore fruit, and your heart threw them up to the eye of the Inner Man for consideration. However, obeying the command requires that those thoughts NOT be thrown up. By the time the Inner man decides to obey, and selects the menu option to obey the command, the selection is going down to the Heart while the image of a green-faced monkey is coming up the bitstream.
It is this parallel processing of temptation that makes it have two aspects, not one as I had formerly thought, and what I had labelled as "temptation suppression". The first requires counteraction of the actual thought and the anticipatory side thoughts already generated. The second aspect is the process of suppression that I thought was all that was happening.
This should not surprise us, and I trace my confusion to continued mental adherence to obsolete ideas of the mind that were not subjected to a re-analysis when the new model of the human heart was developed. This has to do with the modern, but incorrect, assumption that the conscious mind thinks independently of the unconscious mind. In retrospect, the new model denies this: there is a lot of parallelism going on, with thoughts being thought at many levels. However, "consciousness" is merely awareness of the thoughts presented to the Inner Man. Awareness does not imply control, and one's choices are not always strictly obeyed. This is the moral foundation of the belief that temptation is not a sin in itself. Rather, temptation becomes sin when temptation is consciously selected by the Inner Man. (I point this out because I anticpate a "moving of the goal posts" by those who will oppose the ideas behind Stage 1 when people start reporting success: they will change their expression of doubt from "If this is true, then you shouldn't give in to temptation" to "if this were true, you shouldn't even experience temptation!" The first is reasonable, but the second is being perverse, deceptive, and manipulative. Remember that you heard it here first.)
These two aspects of the temptation life-cycle requires two different counter responses. Counteraction requires the emission of appropriate neurotransmitters that are the behavioral opposite of the transmitters being used to propagate the side-thoughts and the thought itself. This reflects the way the brain works, where for every neurotransmitter that has a specific effect, there exists a counter-neurotransmitter that has the opposite effect, with the net effect arising from the partial, or complete, cancellation of the initial effect. The subsequent act of suppression prevents the heart from secreting the neurotransmitters necessary to re-create the thought. In the first, the Holy Spirit touches appropriate neuronal vesicles to release the necessary counter-neurotransmitters, while in the second, He suppresses the rupture of the neuronal vesicles themselves in the first place. The first expends certain neurotransmitters, the second prevents expenditure of the opposing neurotransmitters.
In my mind, I thought that the Holy Spirit was keeping thoughts under control by keeping things from happening, when in actuality, He has to both actively counteract as well as subsequently keep things from happening. This misunderstanding accorded to my internal belief that, for the Holy Spirit, "keeping things from happening" was easier than "acting constructively to counteract".
But now that we have a right understanding of what is happening, we can have a true appreciation of the implications of what is really happening.
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