Text of the meditation
When a person's soul is clouded with selfishness in any or every form, they lose the power of spiritual discrimination, and confuse the temporal with the eternal. People cling to and gratify the flesh as though it were going to last forever, and though they try to forget the nearness and inevitability of its dissolution, the dread of death and of the loss of all they cling to clouds their happiest hours, and the chilling shadow of their own selfishness follows them like a remorseless spectre.
And with the accumulation of temporal comforts and luxuries, the divinity within people is drugged, and they sink deeper and deeper into materiality, into the perishable life of the senses; and where there is sufficient intellect, theories concerning the immortality of the flesh come to be regarded as infallible truths.
The perishable in the universe can never become permanent; the permanent can never pass away.
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.
