Text of the meditation
One becomes the master of the lower by enlisting in the service of the higher. A person repeats the same thoughts, the same actions, the same experiences over and over again, until they are incorporated into their being, until they are built into their character as part of themselves.
Evolution is mental accumulation. A person today is the result of millions of repeated thoughts and acts. They are not ready-made; they become, and are still becoming. Their character is predetermined by their own choice. The thought and the act they choose, that, by habit, they become.
Thus each person is an accumulation of thoughts and deeds. The characteristics they manifest instinctively and without effort are lines of thought and action that have become automatic through long repetition; for it is the nature of habit to become, at last, unconscious, to repeat itself, as it were, without any apparent choice or effort on the part of its possessor; and in due time it takes such complete possession of the individual as to appear to render their will powerless to counteract it.
Habit is repetition. Faculty is fixed habit.
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.
