January Twenty-Fifth.
DESPONDENCY, anxiety, worry, and irritability cannot cure the ills against which they are directed. They only add more misery to the troubles that prompt them. The cultivation of a steadfast and serene spirit cannot be overlooked if life is to yield any measure of usefulness and happiness. The trifles, and even greater troubles, which annoy would soon dissolve and disappear if confronted with a temper that refuses to be ruffled and disturbed. Personal aims, wishes, schemes, and pleasures will meet with checks, rebuffs, and obstacles; and it is in learning to meet these reverses in a wise and calm spirit that we discover the true and abiding happiness within our heart.
When impatience and irritability are put away, then is realised and enjoyed the blessedness of a strong, quiet, and peaceful mind.
The greatest blessedness comes to him who infuses into his mind the purest and noblest thoughts.
January Twenty-Sixth.
WE are becoming wise when we know and realise that happiness abides in certain habits of mind, or mental characteristics, rather than in material possessions, or in certain combinations of circumstances. It is a common delusion to imagine that if one only possessed this or that— a little more money, a little more leisure, this man’s talent, or that man’s opportunities; or if one had better friends, or more favourable surroundings—one would be happy with a perfect felicity. Alas! discontent and misery lie in such vain wishes. If happiness is not already found within, it will never be found without. The happiness of a wise mind abides through all vicissitudes.
Your whole life is a series of effects, having their cause in thought—in your own thought.
A sweet and happy soul is the ripened fruit of experience and wisdom,.
January Twenty-Seventh.
THERE is an infinite patience in nature which it is profitable to contemplate. A comet may take a thousand years to complete its orbit; the sea may occupy ten thousand years in wearing away the land; the complete evolution of the human race may occupy millions of years. This should make us ashamed of our hurry, fussiness, discontent, disappointments, and ridiculous self-importance over trifling things of an hour or a day. Patience is conducive to the highest greatness, the most far-reaching usefulness, and the profoundest peace. Without it, life will lose much of its power and influence, and its joy win be largely destroyed.
“So with well-ordered strenuousness Raise thou thy structure of Success.”
He who fills with useful pursuits the minutes as they come and go grows old in honour and wisdom, and prosperity abides with him.
No pure thought, no unselfish deed, can fall short of its felicitous results, and every such result is a happy consummation.
January Twenty-Eighth.
IF to-day is cold and gloomy, is that a cause for despair? Do we not know that there are warm, bright days ahead? Already the birds are beginning to sing, and the tremulous trill in their little throats is prophetic of the approaching love of a new spring, and of the bounty of a summer that as yet is but a sleeping germ in the womb of this gloomy day, but whose birth is sure, and its full growth certain. No effort is vain. The spring of all your aspirations is near—very near; and the summer of your unselfish deeds will surely come to pass.
Self shall depart, and Truth shall take its place;
The Changeless One, the Indivisible, Shall take up His abode in me, and cleanse
The White Robe of the Heart Invisible.
Go to your task with love in your heart, and you will go to it light-hearted and cheerful.
All evil is corrective and remedial, and is therefore not permanent.
January Twenty-Ninth.
BY earnest self-examination strive to realise, and not merely hold as a theory, that evil is a passing phase, a self-created shadow; that all your pains, sorrows, and misfortunes have come to you by a process of undeviating and absolutely perfect law; have come to you because you deserve and require them, and that by first enduring, and then understanding them, you may be made stronger, wiser, nobler. When you have fully entered into this realisation, you will be in a position to mould your own circumstances, to transmute all evil into good, and to weave, with a master hand, the fabric of your destiny.
Cease to be a disobedient child in the school of experience, and begin to learn, with humility and patience, the lessons that are set for your ultimate perfection.
Mediation centred upon divine realities is the very essence and soul of prayer.
January Thirtieth.
TELL me what that is upon which you most frequently and intensely think, that to which, in your silent hours, your soul most naturally turns, and I will tell you to what place of pain or peace you are travelling, and whether you are growing into the likeness of the divine or the bestial. There is an unavoidable tendency to become literally the embodiment of that quality upon which one most constantly thinks. Let, therefore, the object of your meditation be above and not below, so that every time that you revert to it in thought you will be lifted up; let it be pure and unmixed with any selfish element; so shall your heart become purified and drawn nearer to Truth, and not defiled and dragged more hopelessly into error.
Meditation is the secret of all growth in spiritual life and knowledge.
If you ceaselessly think upon that which is pure and unselfish, you will surely become pure and unselfish.
January Thirty-First.
IF you are daily praying for wisdom, for peace, for loftier purity, and a fuller realisation of Truth, and that for which you pray is still far from you, it means that you are praying for one tiling, whilst living out in thought and act another. If you will cease from such waywardness, taking your mind off those things, the selfish clinging to which debars you from the possession of the stainless realities for which you pray; if you will no longer ask God to grant you that which you do not deserve, or to bestow upon you that love and compassion which you refuse to bestow upon others, but will commence to think and act in the spirit of Truth, you will day by day be growing into those realities, so that ultimately you will become one with them.
Enter the path of Meditation, and let the supreme object of your meditation be Truth.
Unrest and pain and sorrow are the shadows of life.
February First.
S there no way of escape from pain and sorrow? Are there no means by which the bonds of evil may be broken? Is permanent happiness and abiding peace a foolish dream? No, there is a way—and I speak it with gladness—by which evil may be slam for ever; there is a process by which every adverse condition or circumstance can be put on one side for ever, never to return; and there is a practice by which unbroken and unending peace and bliss can be partaken of and realised. And the beginning of the way which leads to this glorious realisation is the acquirement of a right understanding of the nature of evil. It is not sufficient to deny or ignore evil; it must be understood.
Men remain in evil because they are not willing or prepared to learn the lesson which it came to teach them.
You must get outside yourself, and must begin to examine and understand yourself.
February Second.
EVIL, when rightly understood, is found to be, not an unlimited power or principle in the universe, but a passing phase of human experience, and it therefore becomes a teacher to those who are willing to learn. Evil is not an abstract something outside yourself; it is an experience m your own heart, and by patiently examining and rectifying your heart you will be gradually led into the discovery of the origin and nature of evil, which will necessarily be followed by its complete eradication. ... There is no evil in the universe which is not the result of ignorance, and which would not, if we were ready and willing to learn its lesson, lead us to higher wisdom,