Text of the meditation
Before a person can know Love as the abiding Reality within them, they must utterly abandon all those human tendencies that frustrate its perfect manifestation. A person can consciously ally themselves to the Vine of Love only by deserting all strife, and hatred, and condemnation, and impurity, and pride, and self-seeking, and by thinking and doing loving deeds.
By so doing they awaken within them the divine nature they have until now been crucifying and denying. Every time a person gives way to anger, impatience, greed, pride, vanity, or any form of personal selfishness, they deny the Christ, and shut themselves out from Love.
And it is thus, and not by refusing to adopt a formulated creed, that Christ is denied. Christ is known only to one who by constant striving has converted themselves from a sinful to a pure being, who by noble, moral effort has succeeded in relinquishing that perishable self which is the source of all suffering and sorrow and unrest, and has become rational, gentle, peaceful, loving and pure.
Such glorious realisation is the crown of evolution, the supreme aim of existence.
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.
