Text of the meditation
When a person aspires to know and realise the Truth, they give attention to conduct, to self-purification. By concentration a person can scale the highest heights of genius, but they cannot scale the heavenly heights of Truth; to accomplish this, they must meditate.
By concentration a person may acquire the wonderful comprehension and vast power of a Caesar; by meditation they may reach the divine wisdom and perfect peace of a Buddha. The perfection of concentration is power; the perfection of meditation is wisdom. By concentration people acquire skill in doing the things of life, in science, art, trade and so on; but by meditation they acquire skill in life itself: in right living, enlightenment, wisdom and the like.
Saints, sages, saviours, wise people and divine teachers are the finished products of holy meditation. Love Truth so fully and intensely as to become wholly absorbed in it.
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.