Text of the meditation
Let a person put away egotism, and they will see the universe in all the beauty of its pristine simplicity. Let life cease to be lived as a fragment, and let it be lived as a perfect Whole; the simplicity of the Perfect will then be revealed. How can the fragment comprehend the Whole?
Yet how simple that the Whole should comprehend the fragment. How can sin perceive Holiness? Yet how plain that Holiness should understand sin. Whoever would become the Greater must abandon the lesser. The circle is contained in no form, but in the circle all forms are contained.
The radiant light is imprisoned in no colour, but in the radiant light all colours are embodied. Let a person destroy all the forms of self, and they will grasp the Circle of Perfection. When a person succeeds in entirely forgetting (annihilating) their personal self, they become a mirror in which the universal Reality is faultlessly reflected.
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.