Students of the works of James Allen all over the world will welcome with joy another book from his able pen. In this work we find the Prophet of Meditation in one of his deepest and yet most lucid expositions. How wonderfully he deals with fundamental principles ! Here the reader will find no vague statement of generalities, for the writer enters with tender reverence into every detail of human experience. It is as though he came back to The Shining Gate, and, standing there, he reviewed all the way up which his own feet have travelled, passing over no temptation that is common to man; knowing that the obstacles that barred his ascending pathway, or the clouds that at times obscured his vision, are the common experiences of all those who have set their faces towards the heights of Blessed Vision. As we read his words now, he seems to stand and beckon to us, saying, "Come on, my fellow Pilgrims; it is straight ahead to the Shining Gateway ; I have blazed the track for you." In sending forth this, another posthumous volume from his pen, we have no doubt but that it will help many and many an aspiring soul up to the heights, until at last they too stand within The shining Gateway.
LILY L. ALLEN.
"Bryngoleu," Ilfracombe, ENGLAND
Behold the shining gateway
He who attaineth unto Purity
The faultless Parthenon of Truth doth use
Awake ! Disperse the dreams of self and sin ?
Behold the Shining Gateway! Enter in!
1. The shining gateway of meditation
Be watchful, fearless, faithful, patient, pure:
By earnest meditation sound the depths
Profound of life, and scale the heights sublime
Of Love and Wisdom. He who does not find
The Way of Meditation cannot reach
Emancipation and enlightenment.
The unregenerate man is subject to these three things ? Desire, Passion, Sorrow. He lives habitually in these conditions, and neither questions nor examines them. He regards them as his life itself, and cannot conceive of any life apart from them. To-day he desires, to-morrow he indulges his passions, and the third day he grieves ; by these three things (which are always found together) he is impelled, and does not know why he is so impelled; the inner forces of desire and passion arise, almost
automatically, within him, and he gratifies their demands Sans question; led on blindly by his blind desires, he falls, periodically, into the ditches of remorse and sorrow. His condition is not merely unintelligible to him, it is unperceived: for so immersed is he in the desire (or self) consciousness that he cannot step outside of it, as it were, to examine it.
To such a man the idea of rising above desire and suffering into a new life where such things do not obtain seems ridiculous. He associates all life with the pleasurable gratification of desire, and so, by the law of reaction, he also lives in the misery of afflictions, fluctuating ceaselessly between pleasure and pain.
When reflection dawns in the mind, there arises a sense (dim and uncertain at first) of a calmer, wiser, and loftier life; and as the stages of introspection and self-analysis are reached, this sense increases in clearness and intensity, so that by the time the first three stages are fully completed, a conviction of the reality of such a life and of the possibility of attaining it is firmly fixed in the mind.
Such conviction, which consists of a steadfast belief in the supremacy of purity and goodness over desire and passion, is called faith. Such faith is the stay, support and comfort of the man who, while yet in the darkness, is searching earnestly for the Light which breaks upon him for the first time in all its dazzling splendour and ineffable majesty when he enters the Shining Gateway of Meditation. Without such faith he could not stand for a single day against the trials, failures, and difficulties which beset him continually, much less could be courageously fight and overcome them, and his final conquest and salvation would be impossible.
