Text of the meditation
Whatever happens to the good person cannot cause them perplexity or sorrow, for they know its cause and issue. In looking back on the self-life they have transcended, the divinely enlightened person sees that all the afflictions of that life were their schoolmasters, teaching them and leading them upward, and that in the measure that they penetrated their meaning and lifted themselves above them, they departed.
Their mission to teach having ended, they left the person triumphant master of the field; for the lower cannot teach the higher; ignorance cannot instruct wisdom; evil cannot enlighten good; nor can the pupil set lessons for the master. What is transcended cannot reach up to that which transcends.
Evil can teach only in its own sphere, where it is regarded as a master; in the sphere of good it has no place, no authority. The strong traveller on the highroad of truth knows no such thing as resignation to evil; they know only obedience to good.
James Allen (1864–1912), Book of Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1913) – public-domain text, gently modernised.
The original 1913 text is in the public domain.
