Text of the meditation
There is no sure foothold in prosperity or peace except by orderly advancement in knowledge. Perhaps the chains of poverty hang heavily upon you, and you are friendless and alone, and you long with an intense longing that your load may be lightened; but the load continues, and you seem to be enveloped in an ever-increasing darkness.
Perhaps you complain, you bewail your lot, you blame your birth, your parents, your employer, or the unjust Powers who have bestowed poverty and hardship on you so undeservedly, and affluence and ease on another. Cease your complaining and fretting; none of these things you blame is the cause of your poverty; the cause is within yourself, and where the cause is, there is the remedy.
There is no room for a complainer in a universe of law, and worry is soul-suicide.
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.
