Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives

Rewiring character, rebuilding the marriage, and restoring hope

Happy Monday!

This will likely be a quick one because I’m in the midst of patching up some great big fissures in my personal life at the moment. It’s good. There is so much good happening right now. I attribute it to a great struggle my wife and I have been going through, but at end of it, in what seemed like The End of All Things, a friend gave me a life-changing book. 

The 100,000-foot version: my wife and I have had some trouble getting along. We’re a couple of ideological people, and while there should be a lot of overlap in our thinking, the differences turned into disagreements, which metastasized into contempt, and that contempt bore some pretty malignant fruit. 

So, in what simply cannot be called a coincidence, a friend handed me a book called “Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives” by Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica. She reads it several times a year, apparently, as do the half-dozen other people who have mentioned this book to me over the last year or so.

If I’d found this book ten years ago, I don’t know that it would have changed anything. It might not have even had the same effect if I’d read it two weeks ago. Let’s just say that I needed a couple of decades of demonstration of the opposite of the wisdom in its pages before I could really appreciate it.

The very first paragraph:

“Our life depends on the kind of thoughts we nurture. If our thoughts are peaceful, calm, meek and kind, then that is what our life is like. If our attention is turned to the circumstances in which we live, we are drawn into a whirlpool of thoughts and can have neither peace nor tranquility.”

Simple, right? Maybe even obvious? Uh huh. I’m going to play the odds here and challenge the reader to going one hour without having a negative thought. Can you get through one single minute? Skeptics will respond with a negative rebuttal immediately. “BS,” says the rational, well-adjusted, person of cherubic peace…

Paragraph #2:

“Everything, both good and evil, comes from our thoughts. Our thoughts become reality. Even today we can see that all of creation, everything that exists on earth and in the cosmos, is nothing but Divine thought made material in time and space. We humans were created in the image of God. Mankind was given a great gift, but we hardly understand that. God’s energy and life is in us, but we do not realize it.” 

If you’ve read a few of these recent posts, you know that I’m fired up by Dr. Cuddeback’s “Life Craft” work. The big revelation there, for me at least, is not only that we’re obligated to craft a life in accordance with the true, good, and beautiful, but that we can. I don’t think I’m the only one who struggles with this radical, life-changing idea, but when it hits you, that we can overcome and - not to be too on-the-nose - rise above the circumstances of our lives, everything changes. 

That’s when we start to become co-creators with God, our first and maybe highest calling in life.

The elder continues:

“Neither do we understand that we greatly influence others with our thoughts. We can be very good or very evil, depending on the kind of thoughts and desires we breed.”

Here’s the thing: what we allow to happen in our heads isn’t private. As Earl Nightingale said in “The Strangest Secret,” “We become what we think about.” (If I had the time, I’d research the origination of his ideas in relation to Elder Thaddeus’ ideas - they were born around the same time, in the same century, which leads me to believe there was something going on out in the aether…) So, whatever germinates in the brain isn’t locked safely away in some inner vault - it manifests in our attitudes, speech, and even in our faces. 

I’ve been told an uncomfortable number of times that I broadcast negativity. That was disturbing because I thought I was doing a pretty good job of being calm and collected. On the contrary - my thoughts often betrayed me, and I’m only beginning to really understand the damage that my depression and despair wrought. However well I thought I was managing it, I wasn’t. 

The number of things still “up in the air” with the marriage nearly occludes the sun. However, this book landed at just the right moment. Whatever else comes next, whatever struggles we have yet to face - together, for a welcome change - this one thing seems to be the “secret code” to overcoming it with grace: “Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives.” I mean, I knew that already, in some part in the back of my mind, perhaps, but I knew it. It’s not about “attracting” what I want from “the universe” or similarly repackaged New Age hogwash. It’s about giving no place for evil to take root.

I’ll be back on track with this project on Wednesday. Like I said - good things are happening.