Text of the meditation
What you are, so is your world. All that you positively know is contained in your own experience; all that you will ever know must pass through the gateway of experience, and so become part of yourself. Your own thoughts, desires and aspirations make up your world, and, to you, all that there is in the universe of beauty and joy and bliss, or of ugliness and sorrow and pain, is contained within yourself.
By your own thoughts you make or mar your life, your world, your universe. As you build within by the power of thought, so your outward life and circumstances will shape themselves accordingly. Whatever you harbour in the inmost chambers of your heart will, sooner or later, by the inevitable law of reaction, shape itself in your outward life.
Every soul is a complex combination of gathered experiences and thoughts, and the body is but an improvised vehicle for its manifestation.
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.
