Text of the meditation
The early stage of transmutation is painful but brief, for the pain is soon transformed into pure spiritual joy. Along the Saintly Way toward the divine life, the midway region of Transmutation is the Country of Sacrifice, the Plain of Renunciation. Old passions, old desires, old ambitions and thoughts are cast away and abandoned, but only to reappear in some more beautiful, more permanent, more eternally satisfying form.
As valuable jewels, long guarded and cherished, are thrown tearfully into the melting pot, yet are remoulded into new and perfect adornments, so the spiritual alchemist, at first loath to part company with long-cherished thoughts and habits, at last gives them up, and discovers a little later, to their joy, that they have come back in the form of new faculties, rarer powers and purer joys: spiritual jewels newly burnished, beautiful and resplendent.
The wise person meets passion with peace, hatred with love, and returns good for 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.
