The Life Triumphant by James Allen

Author:James Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: G&D Media
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Calmness and Resource

He who has Truth is always self-possessed. Hurry and excitement, anxiety and fear have no place in the purified mind and the true life. Self-conquest results in a perpetual calm. Calmness is the radiant light which adds a lustre to all the virtues. Like the nimbus round the head of a saint, it surrounds virtue with its shining halo. Without calmness a man’s greatest strength is but a kind of exaggerated weakness. Where is a man’s spiritual strength—where, indeed, is his ordinary manly strength—who loses his balance with almost every petty disturbance from without? And what enduring influence can a man have who forgets himself in sinful abandonment or unseemly rage in the hour of temptation and crisis?

The virtuous put a check upon themselves, and set a watch upon their passions and emotions; in this way they gain possession of the mind, and gradually acquire calmness; and, as they acquire calmness, they acquire influence, power, greatness, abiding joy, and fulness and completeness of life.

Those who do not put a check upon themselves, whose emotions and passions are their masters, who crave excitements and race after unholy pleasures—these are not yet fit for a life of joyful victory, and can neither appreciate nor receive the beautiful jewel of calmness. Such may pray for peace with their lips, but they do not desire it in their hearts; or the word “peace” may only mean to them another kind of periodic pleasure which they desire to enjoy.

In the life of calm there are no fitful periods of sinful excitement followed by reactionary hours of sorrow and remorse. There are no foolish elations followed by equal foolish depressions; no degrading actions followed by misery and loss of self-respect; but all these things are put away, and what remains is Truth, and Truth is for ever encircled with peace. The calm life is one unbroken bliss. Duties which are irksome to the ungoverned, are things of joy to the calm man; indeed, in the calm life, the word “duty” receives a new meaning; it is no longer opposed to happiness, but it is one with happiness. The calm man, the right-seeing man, cannot separate joy from duty; such separation belongs to the mind and life of the pleasure-hunter and lover of excitement.

Calmness is difficult to attain because men cling blindly to the lower disturbances of the mind for the passing pleasure which those disturbances afford. Even sorrow is sometimes selfishly gloated over as a kind of occasional luxury. But though difficult to attain, the way which leads to its attainment is simple; it consists in abandoning all those excitements and disturbances which are opposed to it, and in fortifying one’s self in those steadfast virtues which do not change with changing events and circumstances, which have no violent reactions, and which therefore bestow perpetual satisfaction and abiding peace.

He only finds peace who conquers himself, who strives, day by day, after greater self-possession, greater self-control, greater calmness of mind. One can only be a

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