Author: Nick Hilton

Compassion is the sum and substance of all religion. We are here because of the love of the universal Life Force, and our true purpose in life is to spread this perfect love throughout the world. Love of God enlightens and strengthens us. We love ourselves as His creatures and we increase this love by our service to others. By a spiritual paradox this self-love results in the lessening of our self-importance and selfishness, so that we are able to love the world and one another without fear and without a desire for reward. This is our purpose for living.

Confidence is optimism in action. It is the unity of thought and belief which encourages effort.  When we trust in the Truth and act in accordance with it, we know our goals are obtainable. We can do the things that we want to do and have to do. We can live in harmony and without fear. Confidence is faith in ourselves as God’s children and in the integrity and righteousness of our aims and ambitions. It is trust in the universal force which fosters and sustains us.

Clear mind. The ability to remain engaged mentally on a single subject or purpose until either the task is accomplished or the time available to accomplish it is exhausted. This requires an ability to concentrate the attention and to simultaneously record and store what is important in the inevitable numerous interruptions — other thoughts arising, unbidden intrusions from without — in an orderly and memorable way so that we may return to them at a time when we can give those matters our full attention and the benefits of a clear mind.

Prayer changes things. This is my heart-felt belief, even though there is no rational explanation for it. This belief always creates a conflict for me, because another of my beliefs is that all spiritual Truth is in accord with natural and ordinary principles and occurrences. But prayer changes things. In my early years some fervent and earnest prayers seemed to go cruelly unanswered; I stopped believing in a God who did things. But spiritual longing persisted, and the result for me was the need to create for myself a vision of a God on whom I could always rely, a God who lives within all that happens but does not make it happen or prevent it. This way my God cannot be blamed for misfortune or cruelty. My God lives within the everyday existence and ordinariness of the world. He is not a force so much as a presence. This is what I believe. Nevertheless, prayer changes things. Perhaps it does so simply by changing me.

If prayer is speaking to God and meditation is listening to God, there is another activity in spiritual practice which is just as important to our growth. It is contemplation. This is the concentration of the mind along a path from initial insight to personal practice. For example, I may read or hear that God created God and all of the universe from nothing and out of himself brought everything into existence. This strikes me as a great revelation; but until the everyday, underlying belief dwells in me naturally that I am thus a part of God and that all things are made of God, the insight remains just the germ of an idea. Contemplation of the revelation, deep consideration of what it means — to me, in my life — brings this insight from outside of me to inside, from germ to fruition, from Word to Life.

Fear, worry, regret, resentment. We may feel that these gloomy emotional states are inescapable; that the world is threatening us, or punishing us. This sense of ourselves as victims is a pernicious illusion from infancy, brought on by an absence of belonging and self-confidence and made worse by our craving for the shallow comfort of sympathy — a small substitute for love. In fact, negative thinking is a self-generated and self-fulfilling prophesy. If we are able to maintain an attitude of grateful awareness in each moment, the threatening ghosts of life disappear and our fortune — as well as our past — we will see as a continuous stream of wonderful opportunity.

A part of our mind is always experiencing the now, being in the moment. It is that part which notices that we are thinking, doing, and busy, so distracted from the beautiful presence of being. The fruits of meditation are that we become more aware of and guided by this inner, quietly seeing, more sensitive essence of ourselves. It is not something we must adopt or import from outside; it is more like a precious gem within us which we must uncover and allow to shine. The gleam of this gem is pure consciousness. It is the light of the world.

Somehow I got a message (or rather an illusion) that folks just know how to be themselves, but for me the “I” that I am has never seemed to remain. I have trekked a vast and varied wilderness over years, finding myself from time to time on plateaus from which the view was grand, seemingly infinite. At other times I have been caught, snagged by thorny brambles in dense woods. The way I feel at these two extremes is so different it were as if my body was inhabited by different people. One thing is certain: the plateaus continue to get brighter and higher, the views more spectacular; the brambles more forgiving and the thorn bushes less dense. “Be not afraid,” Jesus said. Keep on trekkin’. And so I do.

Let go… Of conditions, situations, outcomes, and possessions, of people and relationships… Fill the mind with a consciousness of unity, of sacred reality, of pure existence… Cultivate a positive, grateful spirit… And let God… Continue to unfold as the beautiful and eternal source of everything that ever was or is, or will be, including yourself…

Spiritual work has two essential components. The development of our faith in God by prayer and study is first. We must have an understanding of what we believe — a feeling for God that we can relate to during our days. The second component is the training of our minds to make our faith determine our behavior. We must develop a guiding, instinctive, habitual pattern of thought so that our minds reflect our beliefs in determining our actions.