Author: Nick Hilton

Our lives are not truly meaningful until we can accept our own mortality. Regardless of our beliefs about an afterlife, the satisfaction and serenity we may attain in this life is contingent on how we conduct our lives on this plane of existence. Overcoming death — being reconciled to the pain and suffering of old age and loss — is one object and benefit of the spiritual life; another is sure and steady guidance in the everyday contributions we make in this world. Prayer and meditation teaches the art of appreciation of each and every moment of life; misery is comparing what is with what “might be.”

All of life is a preparation for the end of life.

The day will come when you have outgrown the instructions of your chosen teachers, when your spiritual search will be the prospect of a journey through an uncharted wilderness, a solo sea voyage, a flight on wings of your own. At that moment you will realize that God has a message for you, a calling, and a mission that is yours alone, unique to initiate, to perform, and to understand. No longer dependent on lessons, you will realize that you have learned all there is to learn, and that the rest of life is perfecting the practice. And you will know, intuitively, by God-given instinct, how and where you are to go.

Does God allow evil to exist? If God is universal, infinite, and omnipotent, then what is evil? If God is the essence of life, of health, and of selfless, nurturing love, then where does malignant will and selfishness, hatred and harmful behavior, come from? What is evil?

The answer must be that God is Itself in a condition of expanding, penetrating and enlightening the universe. God is constantly becoming. And we who recognize the becoming of God as the underlying trend of all life can will ourselves to be carried along by the positive energy and become part of the force for good, the antidote to evil. We are the light shining into the darkness of chaos, illuminating the human soul.

God is only as real as your comprehension of God is real. The extent to which we are able to “realize” God, through our own spiritual work, is the extent to which It has an effect on our consciousness, our outlook and our actions. To say “I believe in God,” but to have no immediate sense of the action and power and majesty of His presence, is simply wishful thinking: necessary to make a start, but personally unrewarding.

Maybe the sheer awesomeness of existence is too much for us to comprehend – too much to actually feel. Maybe that is why we allow ourselves to be constantly distracted by our thoughts, plans, worries, regrets. Maybe that’s why we keep ourselves so busy all the time, so that we are not completely caught up in the miraculous majesty of our ordinary surroundings, because if we were to really notice, we’d be paralyzed: transfixed by beauty.  So it is a paradox that we must study, and work to learn how to experience the Truth of Being: that all life is amazing, stupendous, and wonderful every moment just because it is.

The Kingdom of God is everywhere around us. We breathe the spirit of the living God at every moment, from conception until the life force departs from our human form. Our feeling of separation from God is a state of our own psychological construction, and since God is perfect health, this state may be called a self-induced sickness. Any degree of alienation from the wonder and joy of life in God is a degree of spiritual illness. Our real life’s work is to see, feel, taste the reality of God in all we experience. This is perfect health: a condition of perfect being, a transcendent state of mind, a daily Garden of Eden we enter by study, prayer and meditation.

The beauty of any orthodoxy is the clear path it offers the follower. To a questioning and unsettled mind, claims of “This is the way” are comfortingly definite. However the problem with orthodoxy is that it can stifle the curiosity and expansiveness of the spiritual student, actually preventing the fuller realization of the Presence. But we must be careful not to reject any path or religion just because it is common or easily understood. It is not by the rejection of ideas and beliefs that our faith grows, but by putting what Truth we find — wherever we find it — to good use.

My father used to say, “Work as though everything depended on you, but pray as though everything depended on God.” This describes the correct attitude for us to achieve the gifts we are capable of — in every area of our lives.

The results of the God-centered life are not usually the things we expect. Our ego-centered will and outlook says “This is what I want. That is what I need.” But we have no idea what the future holds and we are mistaken to believe that we can foresee the conditions and situations of our own contentment. But those who live in God and rely on prayer, meditation and study to enlarge their spiritual understanding, these folks realize, when they look back, that Divine Grace has led them to a wonderful place they never expected to reach. They have not been driving all along.

The humble person recognizes perfection as the unattainable goal of existence, and accepts painful mistakes as milestones on the upward path.  Only self-love — the warm, forgiving embrace of one’s self as a vessel of God’s Grace — allows these painful lessons to influence behavior, because we are no longer in denial, or self-defensive. We want to learn. This is the paradox of spiritual growth. We cannot learn to love ourselves without first having some good reasons not to; but the qualities we detest in our nature will not go away unless we love ourselves enough to do the work required for their elimination. True humility is accepting correction and admonishment without complaint or self-defense.