Wisdom Vault — onlinknow.co.za

evil destroyed in pain. There is a great ethical truth in the old fable of "The Book of Life", in which every thought and deed is recorded and judged. It is because of this — that your deed belongs, not alone to yourself, but to humanity and the universe — that you are powerless to avert external effects, but are all-powerful to modify and correct internal causes; and it is also because of this that the perfecting of one's own deeds is man's highest duty and most sublime accomplishment.

The obverse of this truth — that you are powerless to obviate external things and deeds, is, that external things and deeds are powerless to injure you. The cause of your bondage as of your deliverance is within. The injury that comes to you through others is the rebound of your own deed, the reflex of your own mental attitude.

They are the instruments, you are the cause. Destiny is ripened deeds. The fruit of life, both bitter and sweet, is received by Man: King of Mind, Body and Circumstance by James Allen 9 each man in just measure. The righteous man is free.

None can injure him; none can destroy him; none can rob him of his peace. His attitude towards men, born of understanding, disarms their power to wound him. Any injury which they may try to inflict, rebounds upon themselves to their own hurt, leaving him unharmed and untouched.

The good that goes from him is his perennial fount of happiness, his eternal source of strength. Its root is serenity, its flower is joy. The harm which a man sees in the action of another towards him — say, for instance, an act of slander — is not in the act itself, but in his attitude of mind towards it; the injury and unhappiness are created by himself, and subsist in his lack of understanding concerning the nature and power of deeds.

He thinks the act can permanently injure or ruin his character, whereas it is utterly void of any such power; the reality being that the deed can only injure or ruin the doer of it. Thinking himself injured, the man becomes agitated and unhappy, and takes great pains to counteract the supposed harm to himself, and these very pains give the slander an appearance of truth, and aid rather than hinder it.

All his agitation and unrest is created by his reception of the deed, and not actually by the deed itself. The righteous man has proved this by the fact that the same act has ceased to arouse in him any disturbance. He understands, and therefore ignores, it.

It belongs to a sphere which he has ceased to inhabit, to a region of consciousness with which he has no longer any affinity. He does not receive the act into himself, the thought of injury to himself being absent. He lives above the mental darkness in which such acts thrive, and they can no more injure or disturb him than a boy can injure or divert the sun by throwing stones at it.

It was to emphasize this that Buddha, to the end of his days, never ceased to tell his disciples that so long as the thought "I have been injured," or "I have been cheated," or "I have been insulted," could arise in a man's mind, he had not comprehended the Truth.

And as with the conduct of others, so is it with external things — with surroundings and circumstances — in themselves they are neither good nor bad, it is the mental attitude and state of heart that makes them so. A man imagines he 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.