Page 22 - 102717-James Allen-Byways to Blessedness-flipbookversion_Neat

18 BYWAYS TO BLESSEDNESS

Eliminate passion, folly and selfishness from your mind and conduct and you will eliminate
suffering from your life. Burden-dropping consists in abandoning the inward selfishness and
putting pure love in its place. Go to your task with love in your heart and you will go to it light-
hearted and cheerful.
The mind, through ignorance creates its own burdens and inflicts its own punishments. No one
is doomed to carry any load. Sorrow is not arbitrarily imposed. These things are self-made. Reason
is the rightful monarch of the mind, and anarchy reigns in his spiritual kingdom when his throne is
usurped by passion. When love of pleasure is to the fore, heaviness and anguish compose the rear.
You are free to choose. Even if you are bound by passion, and feel helpless, you have bound
yourself, and are not helpless. Where you have bound you can unbind. You have come to your
present state by degrees, and you can recover yourself by degrees, can reinstate reason and

dethrone passion. The time to avoid evil is before pleasure is embraced, but, once embraced, its
train of consequences should teach you wisdom. The time to decide is before responsibilities are
adopted, but, once adopted, all selfish considerations, with their attendant grumblings, whinings,
and complainings, should be religiously excluded from the heart. Responsibilities lose their weight
when carried lovingly and wisely.
What heavy burden is a man weighted with which is not made heavier and more unendurable
by weak thoughts of selfish desires? If your circumstances are “trying” it is because you need them
and can evolve the strength to meet them. They are trying because there is some weak spot within
you, and they will continue to be trying until that spot is eradicated. Be glad that you have the
opportunity of becoming stronger and wiser. No circumstances can be trying to wisdom; nothing
can weary love. Stop brooding over your own trying circumstances and contemplate the lives of
some of those about you.
Here is a woman with a large family who has to make ends meet on a pound a week. She
performs all her domestic duties, down to the washing, finds time to attend on sick neighbours,
and manages to keep entirely out of the two common quagmires — debt and despondency. She is
cheerful from morning to night, and never complains of her “trying circumstances.” She is
perennially cheerful because she is unselfish. She is happy in the thought that she is the means of
happiness to others. Were she to brood upon the holidays, the pretty baubles, the lazy hours of
which she is deprived; of the plays she cannot see, the music she cannot hear, the books she
cannot read, the parties she cannot attend, the good she might do, the friendships she is debarred
from forming; of the many pleasures which might only be hers if her circumstances were more
favourable — if she brooded thus what a miserable creature she would be! How unbearably
labourious her work would become! How every little domestic duty would hang like a millstone
about her neck, dragging her down to the grave which, unless she altered her state of mind, she
would quickly reach, killed by — selfishness! But, not living in vain desires for herself, she is
relieved of all burdens, and is happy. Cheerfulness and unselfishness are sworn friends. Love
knows no heavy toil.
Here is another woman, with a private income which is more than sufficient, combined with
leisure and luxury, yet, because she is called upon to forfeit a portion of her time, pleasure, and
money to discharge some obligation which she wishes to be rid of, and which should be to her a