Author: Nick Hilton

Thoughts are choices. My destiny will be a result of what I have chosen to think, good or bad.

That is the theme of my spiritual work and the goal of my meditation practice. But I don’t think it’s as simple as it sounds. Things arise in my mind seemingly out of nowhere, with no stimuli that I am aware of, often distracting me from the thing I am doing. Sometimes, when am I thinking about nothing in particular, a problem or a worry will arrive from my memory file drawer. My emotional nature is fearful, prompting thoughts that can affect my mood and outlook in a negative way. Once in a while, though more rarely, a joyful, grateful notion will arise in my mind and remain, a good mood, a feeling of enlightenment.

So it’s not that thoughts are voluntary, it’s the opposite. Some thoughts, ideas or musings arise from subconscious (or unconscious) emotional prompts, in turn provoking speech or action that is critical or destructive. My choice when this happens is simple: to immediately consider things that will inspire hope and gratitude. That is voluntary. When beautiful thoughts arise it is best just to smile and say Thank you.

Grace Emily Page was born a week ago yesterday to Catherine our daughter and her husband Sam. Their third child and, one expects, considering the happiness and charm of her two siblings, Hope (age five) and Emmet (two) she will be another Page child blessed with a joyful sense of love and security.

Everything she will learn out here in the world will be a distraction from pure consciousness. “I am hungry.” “My diaper is wet.” “Where is mommy?” The stillness and purity of the womb is being replaced by reality, or what we call experience: the clutter of information, physical, mental and emotional awareness, distractions from the purity of little Grace’s true self, the self she experienced before she had to think.

One day she will sit down to meditate, maybe, to try to regain the stillness, the separation from intellectual and emotional busyness that human life invariably entails. After crayons and dolls, school and work, love and disappointment, she will once again try to find the peace and fulfillment she came out of a week ago. This is her true self, pure and perfect.

That’s the name our daughter Catherine and her husband Sam chose for their first-born, a daughter. This five-year old, beautiful and funny kid is the personification of her name’s essence.

However, aside from being the name of a child I cherish, the word I think is problematic in its definition. On one hand it expresses negativity, on the other the source of joy.

The phrase “I hope so,” in anticipation of an outcome, expresses doubt. The verb in that phrase conveys pessimism, subtly anticipating a negative outcome. Hope, as a verb, seems a tepid synonym for desire; as if to reconcile one to the inevitability of failure.

As a noun, however, Hope has an opposite meaning. Hope is trust in the goodness of the universe; war will cease; disease will be cured. Hope, that my life will have purpose, meaning, and legacy. This signifies one’s putting mental, emotional and spiritual energy to work, to effect the ends one wishes to achieve.

Welcome back.

Some would call the things I am writing here meditations but the word is misleading because my daily meditations are intentionally blank, when they’re successful. Maybe I’ll be able to articulate that somewhere along the line.

These thoughts are things that don’t come up in ordinary conversations. Although I may be considering the subject that day, it’s hard to bring up, say, the human longing for reassurance and stability which is symbolized by authoritarian governments and dictatorial leaders, who, now that most religions are obsolete, seem to be taking the place of the old-fashioned concept of Gods. Making Washington, Moscow and Peking the new Olympus.

See what I mean? Not a meditation. It’s the kind of thought I have every day and I will learn something if I say it in writing. Perhaps a few of my friends, like you, will too.

Maybe they’ll be interesting to you. At very least I will understand these things better myself once I have striven to articulate them. And maybe they will be of some value to you. I hope so.

Adventure is attitude more than it is activity. If I approach this coming day in a spirit of anticipation, I will encounter challenges and discoveries, vistas of thought and ideas, things I have not seen before will be revealed to me. There is no humdrum in the adventurous life. What can I learn? What old view may be replaced by a novel position? My life is an adventure and every day my soul and my mind are enlarged and enhanced if I simply allow the truth and beauty to surprise and instruct me.

Was your life ever improved by resentment, indignation, or fear? It may be that you have learned lessons of morality in your negative reaction to thoughtlessness, cruelty, and dishonesty by others; that even your own guilt and shame have been necessary instructors for you in how to live a good and productive life. Remaining in the emotional morass of condemnation — of yourself or your fellows — is to remain in the tortured darkness, however. It will bring about nothing but more regrettable actions. Once having seen the error in the behavior we are meant to turn to God for help in accepting the Truth and for the Grace required to eliminate the negativity from our lives forever.

It is possible to live a good, productive and meaningful life without any thought or any effort given to spiritual considerations. It is possible to be compassionate and to contribute to the benefit and nurture of humanity and the world without any religious affiliation or any thoughts of God whatever. But what is the benefit of that? To abjure  spiritual ideas, to reject the calling and ignore the immensity of mystical teaching and thought is to shut oneself off from a dazzling inspiration, to isolate oneself from the richness of the human psyche. It is like sitting in a corner at a banquet with your own little sandwich and thinking, “This is enough for me.” The plus side is that you’ll have much more time to spend on Facebook, or watching the news.

I experience this paradox in my life: devotion to Christian churches and scripture in some cases produces people who profess to be followers of Jesus who are intolerant, even hateful, toward those who are not like themselves. (The use of the cross in the Ku Klux Klan costume and ritual is the most egregious example.)

I cannot find any instruction to hate anywhere, or for any reason, in my life-long study of the Gospel. Why should the passionate belief in one way of life produce anything but love of God and acceptance of our fellows, despite their flaws and misbegotten ways? How can you love God and hold hatred in your heart? I believe the reason for it is simple: fear. These folks are afraid; they are possessed of an underlying, unspoken, inadmissible suspicion that God may not be there, may not be not listening, may not answer their prayers. For if I am a follower of Jesus, my life is a light unto men, a city built on a hill; and of myself I am nothing, but the Father who dwelleth in me, He doeth the works.

As the totality of our life experience is with objects, visible realities, things, people, and sensations, it is therefore nearly impossible for us to have a full understanding of something that is only an idea. Spiritual truth is like this. Who or what is God, if I cannot see, taste, feel It? So the human race has made up stories to illustrate and explain Creation, to reinforce morality, to celebrate our existence and order our personal interaction. These stories are holy because they represent the development of the human soul; they teach us what countless generations have recognized before. They are not the Truth, but they point to the Truth, and so deserve our participation and our worship.