Text of the meditation
Every holy person is a saviour of humankind. When people, lost in the devious ways of error and self, have forgotten the "heavenly birth," the state of holiness and Truth, they set up artificial standards by which to judge one another, and make acceptance of, and adherence to, their own particular theology the test of Truth; and so people are divided one against another, and there is ceaseless enmity and strife, and unending sorrow and suffering.
Reader, do you seek to realise the birth into Truth? There is only one way: let self die. All those lusts, appetites, desires, opinions, limited conceptions and prejudices to which you have until now so tenaciously clung, let them fall from you. Let them no longer hold you in bondage, and Truth will be yours.
Cease to look upon your own religion as superior to all others, and strive humbly to learn the supreme lesson of charity. To be in the world and yet not of the world is the highest perfection.
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.
