Daily meditation, June 11th: James Allen

The body is the image of the mind.

JUNE ELEVENTH

ONE who sutlers in body will not necessarily at once be cured when he begins to fashion his mind on moral and harmonious principles; indeed, for a time, while the body is bringing to a crisis, and throwing off the effects of former inharmonies, the morbid condition may appear to be intensified. As a man does not gain perfect peace immediately he enters upon the path of righteousness, but must, except in rare instances, pass through a painful period of adjustment, neither does he, with the same rare exception, at once acquire perfect health. Time is required for bodily as well as mental readjustment, and even if health is not reached, it will be approached. If the mind be made robust, the bodily condition will take a secondary and subordinate place, and will cease to have that primary importance which so many give to it.

Mental harmony, or moral wholeness, makes for bodily health.

Daily meditation, June 10th: James Allen

By thoughts man binds himself.

JUNE TENTH

IT is true that man is the instrument of mental forces—or to be more accurate, he is those forces—but they are not blind, and he can direct them into new channels. In a word, he can take himself in hand and reconstruct his habits; for though it is also true that he is born with a given character, that character is the product of numberless lives during which it has been slowly built up by choice and effort, and in this life it will be considerably modified by new experiences.

No matter how apparently helpless a man has become under the tyranny of a bad habit, or a bad characteristic—and they are essentially the same—he can, so long as sanity remains, break away from it and become free.

A changed attitude of mind changes the character, the habits, the life.

Daily meditation, June 9th: James Allen

He becomes the master of the lower by enlisting in the service of the higher.

JUNE NINTH

MAN repeats the same thoughts, the same actions, the same experiences over and over again, until they are incorporated with his being, until they are built into his character as part of himself. Evolution is mental accumulation.

Man today is the result of millions of repetitious thoughts and acts. He is not ready-made, he becomes, and is still becoming. His character is predetermined by his own choice. The thought, the act, which he chooses, that, by habit, he becomes.

Thus each man is an accumulation of thoughts and deeds. The characteristics which he manifests instinctively and without effort are lines of thought and action become, by long repetition, automatic; for it is the nature of habit to become, at last, unconscious, to repeat, as it were, itself without any apparent choice or effort on the part of its possessor ; and in due time it takes such complete possession of the individual as to appear to render his will powerless to counteract it.

Habit is repetition. Faculty is fixed habit.

Daily meditation, June 8th: James Allen

Nothing can prevent us from accomplishing the aims of our life.

JUNE EIGHTH

MAN’S power subsists in discrimination and choice. Man does not create one jot of the universal conditions or laws; they are the essential principles of things, and are neither made nor unmade. He discovers, not makes, them.

Ignorance of them is at the root of the world's pain. To defy them is folly and bondage. Who is the freer man, the thief who denes the laws of his country, or the honest citizen who obeys them? Who, again, is the freer man, the fool who thinks he can live as he likes, or the wise man who chooses to do only that which is right?

Man is, in the nature of things, a being of habit, and this he cannot alter; but he can alter his habits. He cannot alter the law of his nature, but he can adapt his nature to the law.

He is the good man whose habits of thought and action are good.

Daily meditation, June 7th: James Allen

The man is the all-important factor.

JUNE SEVENTH

A MAN imagines lie could do great things if he were not hampered by circumstances—by want of money, want of time, want of influence, and want of freedom from family ties. In reality the man is not hindered by these things at all. He, in his mind, ascribes to them a power which they do not possess, and he submits, not to them, but to his opinions about them, that is, to a weak element in his nature. The real "want" that hampers him is the want of the right attitude of mind. When he regards his circumstances as spurs to his resources, when he sees that his so-called drawbacks are the very steps up which he is to mount successfully to his achievement, then his necessity gives birth to invention, and the " hindrances " are transformed into aids.

He who complains of his circumstances has not yet become a man.