Text of the meditation
Self and error are synonymous. Error is involved in the darkness of unfathomable complexity, but eternal simplicity is the glory of Truth. Love of self shuts people out from Truth, and, seeking their own personal happiness, they lose the deeper, purer and more abiding bliss.
Says Carlyle, "There is in man a higher than happiness. He can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness. Love not pleasure, love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him." One who has yielded up that self, that personality most people love, and to which they cling with such fierce tenacity, has left all perplexity behind, and has entered into a simplicity so profoundly simple as to be looked upon by the world, involved as it is in a network of error, as foolishness.
At rest in the Infinite.
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.
