| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: Are dim and pearled.
Gold and gleaming the empty streets,
Gold and gleaming the misty lake,
The mirrored lights like sunken swords,
Glimmer and shake.
Oh, is it not enough to be
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky.
Oh, beauty are you not enough?
RIVERS TO THE SEA
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: Athenians are ill advised, in their adoption, namely, of the less
respectable party, in a state divided by faction. But if so, they do
it advisedly. If they chose the more respectable, they would be
adopting those whose views and interests differ from their own, for
there is no state in which the best element is friendly to the people.
It is the worst element which in every state favours the democracy--on
the principle that like favours like.[19] It is simple enough then.
The Athenians choose what is most akin to themselves. Also on every
occasion on which they have attempted to side with the better classes,
it has not fared well with them, but within a short interval the
democratic party has been enslaved, as for instance in Boeotia;[20]
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: sexual thought and feeling. But in the early days of religion the
two things were inseparably bound together; the fury of the Hebrew
prophets, for example, is continually proclaiming the extraordinary
"wrath" of their God at this or that little dirtiness or
irregularity or breach of the sexual tabus. The ceremony of
circumcision is clearly indicative of the original nature of the
Semitic deity who developed into the Trinitarian God. So far as
Christianity dropped this rite, so far Christianity disavowed the
old associations. But to this day the representative Christian
churches still make marriage into a mystical sacrament, and, with
some exceptions, the Roman communion exacts the sacrifice of
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