Text of the meditation
Heaven and hell are in this world. Nothing comes unbidden; where the shadow is, there also is the substance. What comes to the individual is the product of their own deeds. As cheerful industry leads to greater industry and increasing prosperity, and labour shirked or undertaken discontentedly leads to a lesser degree of labour and decreasing prosperity, so with all the varied conditions of life as we see them: they are the effects of deeds, destinies wrought by the thoughts and deeds of each particular individual.
So also with the vast variety of characters: they are the ripening and ripened growth of the sowing of deeds, a sowing not confined solely to this visible life, but going backward through that infinite life that traverses the portals of innumerable births and deaths, and that will also extend into the illimitable future, reaping its own harvests, eating the sweet and bitter fruits of its own deeds.
Life is a great school for the development of character.
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.
