Text of the meditation
Where duties, however humble, are done without self-interest and with joyful sacrifice, there is true service and enduring work. It is given to the world to learn one great and divine lesson: the lesson of absolute unselfishness. The saints, sages and saviours of all time are those who have submitted themselves to this task, and have learned and lived it.
All the scriptures of the world are framed to teach this one lesson, and all the great teachers reiterate it. It is too simple for the world, which, scorning it, stumbles along in the complex ways of selfishness. To search for this righteousness is to walk the Way of Truth and Peace, and whoever enters this Way will soon perceive that Immortality which is independent of birth and death, and will realise that in the divine economy of the universe the humblest effort is not lost.
The world will not have finished its long journey until every soul has entered into the blissful realisation of its own divinity. A pure heart is the end of all religion and the beginning of divinity.
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.
