Daily meditation, June 20th: James Allen

Hatred severs human lives, fosters persecution, and hurls nations into ruthless war.

June Twentieth

MEN cry peace ! Peace ! Where there is no peace, but, on the contrary, discord, disquietude, and strife. Apart from that wisdom which is inseparable from self-renunciation, there can be no real and abiding peace.

The peace which results from social comfort, passing gratification, or worldly victory is transitory in its nature, and is burnt up in the heat of fiery trial. Only the Peace of Heaven endures through all trial, and only the selfless heart can know the Peace of Heaven.

Holiness alone is undying peace. Self-control leads to it, and the ever increasing Light of Wisdom guides the pilgrim on his way. It is partaken of in a measure as soon as the path of virtue is entered upon, but it is only realised in its fullness when self disappears in the consummation of a stainless life.

This inward peace, this silence, this harmony, this love is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Daily meditation, June 19th: James Allen

In the external universe there is ceaseless turmoil, change, and unrest; at the heart of all things there is undisturbed repose ; in this deep silence dwelleth the Eternal.

JUNE NINETEENTH

AS there are depths in the ocean which the fiercest storm cannot reach, so there are silent, holy depths in the heart of man which the storms of sin and sorrow can never disturb. To reach this silence and to live consciously in it is peace.

Discord is rife in the outward world, but unbroken harmony holds sway at the heart of the universe. The human soul reaches blindly toward the harmony of the sinless state, and to reach this state and to live consciously in it is peace. Come away, for a while, from external things, from the pleasure of the senses, from the arguments of the intellect, from the noise and the excitements of the world, and withdraw yourself into the inmost chamber of your heart, and there, free from the sacrilegious intrusion of all selfish desires, you will find a holy calm, a blissful repose ; the faultless eye of Truth will open within you, and you will see things as they really are.

Become as little children.

Daily meditation, June 18th: James Allen

Where duties, howsoever humble, are done without self-interest, and with joyful sacrifice, there is true service and enduring work.

JUNE EIGHTEENTH

IT is given to the world to learn one great and divine lesson—-the lesson of absolute unselfishness. The saints, sages, and saviours of all time are they who have submitted themselves to this task, and have learned and lived it.

All the scriptures of the world are framed to teach this one lesson, all the great teachers reiterate it. It is too simple for the world which, scorning it, stumbles along in the complex ways of selfishness.

To search for this righteousness is to walk the Way of Truth and Peace, and he who enters this Way will soon perceive that Immortality which is independent of birth and death, and will realise that in the divine economy of the universe the humblest effort is not lost. The world will not have finished its long journey until every soul has entered into the blissful realisation of its own divinity.

A pure heart is the end of all religion and the beginning of divinity.

Daily meditation, June 17th: James Allen

This only is true service to forget oneself in love towards all.

JUNE SEVENTEENTH

WHOEVER fights ceaselessly against his own selfishness, and strives to supplant it with all-embracing love, is a saint, whether he live in a cottage or in the midst of riches and influence ; or whether he preaches or remains obscure.

To the worldling, who is beginning to aspire towards higher things, the saint, such as a sweet St. Francis of Assisi, or a conquering St. Anthony, is a glorious and inspiring spectacle ; to the saint, an equally enrapturing sight is that of the sage, sitting serene and holy, the conqueror of sin and sorrow, no more tormented by regret and remorse, and whom even temptation can never reach ; and yet even the sage is drawn on by a still more glorious vision, that of the Saviour actively manifesting His knowledge in selfless works, and rendering His divinity more potent for good by sinking Himself in the throbbing, sorrowing heart of mankind.

Only the work that is impersonal can live.

Daily meditation, June 16th: James Allen

Man cannot immortalise the flesh.

JUNE SIXTEENTH

ALL nature in its myriad forms of life is changeable, impermanent, unenduring. Only the informing Principle of nature endures. Nature is many, and is marked by separation. The informing Principle is one, and is marked by unity. By overcoming the senses and the selfishness within, which is the overcoming of nature, man emerges from the chrysalis of the personal and illusory, and wings himself into the glorious light of the impersonal, the region of Truth, out of which all perishable forms come.

Let men, therefore, practise self-denial; let them conquer their animal inclinations; let them refuse to be enslaved by luxury and pleasure; let them practise virtue, and grow daily into higher and ever higher virtue, until at last they grow into the Divine.

Only by realising the God state of consciousness does man enter into immortality.

Daily meditation, June 15th: James Allen

When a man s soul is clouded with selfishness in any or every form, he loses the power of spiritual discrimination, and confuses the temporal with the eternal.

JUNE FIFTEENTH

MEN cling to and gratify the flesh as though it were going to last for ever, and though they try to forget the nearness and inevitably of its dissolution, the dread of death and of the loss of all that they cling to clouds their happiest hours, and the chilling shadow of their own selfishness follows them like a remorseless. And with the accumulation of temporal comforts and luxuries, the divinity within men is drugged, and they sink deeper and deeper into materiality, into the perishable life of the senses; and where there is sufficient intellect, theories concerning the immortality of the flesh come to be regarded as infallible truths.

The perishable in the universe can never become permanent ; the permanent can never pass away.

Daily meditation, June 14th: James Allen

Enter into perfect harmony with the Eternal Law, which is Wisdom, Love, and Peace.

JUNE FOURTEENTH

THIS divine state is, and must ever be, incomprehensible to the merely personal. Personality, separateness, selfishness, are one and the same, and are the antithesis of wisdom and divinity. By the unqualified surrender of the personality, separateness and selfishness cease, and man enters into the possession of his divine heritage of immortality and infinity.

Such surrender of the personality is regarded by the worldly and selfish mind as the most grievous of all calamities, the most irreparable loss, yet it is the one supreme and incomparable blessing, the only real and lasting gain.

The mind unenlightened upon the inner laws of being and upon the nature and destiny of its own life clings to transient appearances, things which have in them no enduring substantiality, and so clinging, perishes, for the time being, amid the shattered wreckage of its own illusions.

Love is universal, supreme, all-sufficing. This is the realisation of selfless love.

Daily meditation, June 13th: James Allen

The restful Reality of the Eternal Heart.

JUNE THIRTEENTH

THE spirit of man is inseparable from I, the Infinite, and can be satisfied with nothing short of the Infinite, and the burden of pain will continue to weigh upon man’s heart, and the shadows of sorrow to darken his pathway, until, ceasing from wanderings in the dream-world of matter, he comes back to his home in the reality of the Eternal.

As the smallest drop of water detached from the ocean contains all the qualities of the ocean, so man, detached in consciousness from the Infinite, contains within himself its likeness; and as the drop of water must, by the law of nature, ultimately find its way back to the ocean and lose itself in its silent depths, so must man, by the unfailing law of his nature, at last return to his source, and lose himself in the heart of the Infinite.

To become one with the Infinite is the goal of man.

Daily meditation, June 12th: James Allen

Reach out into a comprehension of the Infinite.

JUNE TWELFTH

WHILST vainly imagining that the I pleasures of earth are real and satisfying pain and sorrow continually remind man of their unreal and unsatisfying nature. Ever striving to believe that complete satisfaction is to be found in material things, he is conscious of an inward and persistent revolt against this belief, which revolt is at once a refutation of his essential mortality, and an inherent and imperishable proof that only in the immortal, the eternal, the infinite, can he find abiding satisfaction and unbroken peace.

Man is essentially and spiritually divine and eternal, and, immersed in mortality and troubled unrest, he is striving to enter into a consciousness of his real nature.

The common ground of faith—the root and spring of all religion—the heart of Love !