The James Allen Free Library

James Allen daily

This page offers you a daily dose of James Allen. Here you’ll find today’s entries from James Allen’s book of meditations for every day in the year and Morning and evening thoughts:


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The death of the body can never bestow upon a man immortality.

September Eighteenth.

SPIRITS are not different from men, and live their little feverish life of broken consciousness, and are still immersed in change and mortality. The mortal man, he who thirsts for the persistence of his pleasure-loving personality, is still mortal after death, and only lives another life with a beginning and an end, without memory of the past or knowledge of the future.

The immortal man is he who has detached himself from the things of time by having ascended into that state of consciousness which is fixed and unvariable, and is not affected by passing events and sensations. He is as one who has awakened out of his dream, and he knows that his dream was not an enduring reality, but a passing illusion. He is a man with knowledge, the knowledge of both states—that of persistence, and that of immortality.

The immortal man is in full possession of himself.


Eighteenth Morning

The gospel of Jesus is a gospel of living and
doing. If it were not this it would not voice
the Eternal Truth. Its Temple is Purified
Conduct, the entrance-door to which is
Self-surrender. It invites men to shake off
sin, and promises, as a result, joy and
blessedness and perfect peace.

The Kingdom of Heaven is perfect
trust, perfect knowledge, perfect peace. . . .
No sin can enter therein, no self-born
Thought or deed can pass its golden gates;
no impure desire can defile its radiant
robes. . . . All may enter it who will, but
all must pay the price-the unconditional
abandonment of self.

Eighteenth Evening

I say this-and know it to be truth-that
circumstances can only affect you in so far
as you allow them to do so. You are swayed
by circumstances because you have not a
right understanding of the nature, use, and
power of thought. You believe (and upon
this little word belief hang all our joys and
sorrows) that outward things have the
power to make or mar your life; by so
doing you submit to those outward things,
confess that you are their slave, and they
your unconditional master. By so doing
you invest them with a power which they
do not of themselves possess, and you
succumb, in reality not to the circumstances,
but to the gloom or gladness, the
fear or hope, the strength of weakness,
which your thought-sphere has thrown
around them.


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