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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What your thoughts are, that is your real self.
THE world around, both animate and inanimate, wears the aspect with which your thoughts clothe it. " All that we are is the result of what we have thought ; it is founded on our thoughts ; it is made up of our thoughts." Thus said Buddha, and it therefore follows that if a man is happy, it is because he dwells in happy thoughts; if miserable, because he dwells in despondent and debilitating thoughts. Whether one be fearful or fearless, foolish or wise, troubled or serene, within that soul lies the cause of its own state or states, and never without. And now I seem to hear a chorus of voices exclaim, " But do you realty mean to say that outward circumstances do not affect our minds ? " I do not say that, but I say this, and know it to be an infallible 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.
Sympathy bestowed increases its store in
our own heart and enriches and fructifies
our own life. Sympathy given is blessedness
received; sympathy withheld is blessedness
forfeited.
In the measure that a man increases
and enlarges his sympathy so much
nearer does he approach the ideal life,
the perfect blessedness; and when his
heart has become so mellowed that no
hard, bitter, or cruel thought can enter,
and detract from its permanent sweetness,
then indeed is he richly and divinely
blessed.
Sweet is the rest and deep the bliss of him
who has freed his heart from its lusts and
hatreds and dark desires; and he who,
without any shadow of bitterness resting
upon him, and looking out upon the world
with boundless compassion and love, can
breathe, in his inmost heart, the blessing:
Peace unto all living things,
making no exceptions or distinctions-
such a man has reached that happy ending
which can never be taken away, for this is
the perfection of life, the fulness of peace,
the consummation of perfect blessedness.
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