| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: also.'
And his Soul besought him to depart, but he would not, so great was
his love. And the sea came nearer, and sought to cover him with
its waves, and when he knew that the end was at hand he kissed with
mad lips the cold lips of the Mermaid, and the heart that was
within him brake. And as through the fulness of his love his heart
did break, the Soul found an entrance and entered in, and was one
with him even as before. And the sea covered the young Fisherman
with its waves.
And in the morning the Priest went forth to bless the sea, for it
had been troubled. And with him went the monks and the musicians,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: Occasionally some fops have been sufficiently impertinent to press the
hand of the marquise while dancing with her. They gained nothing in
return but contemptuous glances; all were made to feel the shock of
that insulting indifference which, like a spring frost, destroys the
germs of flattering hopes. Beaux, wits, and fops, men whose sentiments
are fed by sucking their canes, those of a great name, or a great
fame, those of the highest or the lowest rank in her own world, they
all blanch before her. She has conquered the right to converse as long
and as often as she chooses with the men who seem to her agreeable,
without being entered on the tablets of gossip. Certain coquettish
women are capable of following a plan of this kind for seven years in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: the principle of ancient philosophy which is most apparent in it is
scepticism; we must doubt nearly every traditional or received notion, that
we may hold fast one or two. The being of God in a personal or impersonal
form was a mental necessity to the first thinkers of modern times: from
this alone all other ideas could be deduced. There had been an obscure
presentiment of 'cognito, ergo sum' more than 2000 years previously. The
Eleatic notion that being and thought were the same was revived in a new
form by Descartes. But now it gave birth to consciousness and self-
reflection: it awakened the 'ego' in human nature. The mind naked and
abstract has no other certainty but the conviction of its own existence.
'I think, therefore I am;' and this thought is God thinking in me, who has
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