Text of the meditation
The direct outcome of your meditations will be a calm, spiritual strength. If you are given to hatred or anger, you will meditate upon gentleness and forgiveness, so as to become acutely alive to your harsh and foolish conduct. You will then begin to dwell in thoughts of love, of gentleness, of abounding forgiveness; and as you overcome the lower by the higher, there will gradually and silently steal into your heart a knowledge of the divine Law of Love, with an understanding of its bearing upon all the intricacies of life and conduct.
And in applying this knowledge to your every thought, word and act, you will grow more and more gentle, more and more loving, more and more divine. And thus with every error, every selfish desire, every human weakness: by the power of meditation it is overcome; and as each sin, each error, is thrust out, a fuller and clearer measure of the Light of Truth illumines the pilgrim soul.
Great is the overcoming power of holy thought.
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.
