Text of the meditation
To seek selfishly is only to lose happiness. Sink into self and all its gratifications, and you sink into hell; rise above self into that state of consciousness that is the utter denial and forgetfulness of self, and you enter heaven. Self is blind, without judgment, not possessed of true knowledge, and always leads to suffering.
Correct perception, unbiased judgment and true knowledge belong only to the divine state, and only in so far as you realise this divine consciousness can you know what real happiness is. So long as you persist in selfishly seeking your own happiness, so long will happiness elude you, and you will be sowing the seeds of wretchedness.
In so far as you succeed in losing yourself in the service of others, in that measure happiness will come to you, and you will reap a harvest of bliss. Abiding happiness will come to you when, ceasing to cling selfishly, you are willing to give up.
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.
