Text of the meditation
All pain and sorrow is spiritual starvation, and aspiration is the cry for food. A person's essential being is inward, invisible and spiritual, and as such it derives its life and strength from within, not from without. Outward things are channels through which its energies are expended, but for renewal it must fall back on the inward silence.
In so far as a person seeks to drown this silence in the noisy pleasures of the senses, and endeavours to live in the conflicts of outward things, just so much do they reap the experiences of pain and sorrow, which, becoming at last intolerable, drive them back to the feet of the inward Comforter, to the shrine of the peaceful solitude within.
It is in solitude only that a person can be truly revealed to themselves.
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.
