Text of the meditation
Our life is what we make it by our own thoughts and deeds. A person attains in the measure that they aspire. Their longing to be is the gauge of what they can be. To fix the mind is to foreordain the achievement. As a person can experience and know all low things, so they can experience and know all high things.
As they have become human, so they can become divine. Turning the mind in high and divine directions is the sole and needful task. What is impurity but the impure thoughts of the thinker? What is purity but the pure thoughts of the thinker? One person does not do the thinking of another.
Each is pure or impure of themselves alone. The person of aspiration sees before them the pathway up the heavenly heights, and their heart already experiences a foretaste of the final peace. There is a life of victory over sin, and triumph over evil.
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.
