Text of the meditation
The death of the body can never bestow immortality upon anyone. Spirits are no different from people, and live their little feverish life of broken consciousness, and are still immersed in change and mortality. The mortal person, who thirsts for the persistence of their pleasure-loving personality, is still mortal after death, and lives only another life with a beginning and an end, without memory of the past or knowledge of the future.
The immortal person is one who has detached themselves from the things of time by ascending into that state of consciousness which is fixed and unvarying, and is not affected by passing events and sensations. They are like one who has awakened out of a dream, and they know that their dream was not an enduring reality but a passing illusion.
They are a person with knowledge, the knowledge of both states: that of persistence, and that of immortality. The immortal person is in full possession of themselves.
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.