Text of the meditation
What your thoughts are, that is your real self. The world around, both animate and inanimate, wears the aspect with which your thoughts clothe it. "All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts." Thus said Buddha, and it therefore follows that if a person is happy, it is because they dwell in happy thoughts; if miserable, because they dwell in despondent and debilitating thoughts.
Whether one is fearful or fearless, foolish or wise, troubled or serene, within that soul lies the cause of its own state or states, and never without. And now I seem to hear a chorus of voices exclaim, "But do you really mean to say that outward circumstances do not affect our minds?" I do not say that, but I say this, and know it to be an infallible truth: that circumstances can affect you only in so far as you allow them to do so.
You are swayed by circumstances because you do not have a right understanding of the nature, use and power of 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.
