Text of the meditation
Selfish thoughts and bad deeds will not produce a useful and beautiful life. Life is like a piece of cloth, and the threads of which it is composed are individual lives. The threads, while independent, are not confounded one with another. Each follows its own course.
Each individual suffers and enjoys the consequences of their own deeds, and not the deeds of another. The course of each is simple and definite; the whole forms a complicated yet harmonious combination of sequences. There are action and reaction, deed and consequence, cause and effect, and the counterbalancing reaction, consequence and effect is always in exact ratio to the initiating impulse.
Each person makes or mars their own life.
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.