Text of the meditation
A person, as mind, is subject to change. They are not something "made" and finally completed, but have within them the capacity for progress. The purification of the heart, the thinking of right thoughts, and the doing of good deeds: what are they but calls to a higher, nobler mode of thought, energising forces urging people to effort in choosing thoughts that will lift them into realms of greater power, greater good, greater bliss?
Aspiration, meditation, devotion: these are the chief means that people in all ages have employed to reach up to higher modes of thought, wider airs of peace, vaster realms of knowledge, for "as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." A person is saved from themselves, from their own folly and suffering, by creating new habits of thought within; by becoming a new thinker, a new person.
A person's being is modified by every thought they think. Every experience affects their character.
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.
