Text of the meditation
Looking back to happy beginnings and forward to sorrowful endings, a person's eyes are blinded, so that they do not behold their own immortality. It is wisdom to leave behind what has not arrived and to attend to what is, and to attend to it with such consecration of soul and concentration of effort that no loophole is left for regret to creep in.
When a person's spiritual understanding is clouded by the illusions of self, they say, "I was born on such a day, so many years ago, and I will die at my allotted time." But they were not born, and they will not die, for how can that which is immortal, which eternally is, be subject to birth and death?
Let them throw off their illusions, and they will see that the birth and death of the body are mere incidents of a journey, not its beginning and end. The universe, with all that it contains, is now.
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.