| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be
told, for religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The
other half has no accumulated traditions except those which the
text-books on insanity supply. Open any one of these, and you
will find abundant cases in which "mystical ideas" are cited as
characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind.
In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we
may have a DIABOLICAL mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism
turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the
smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new
meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake: Sweet joy befall thee!
A DREAM
Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.
Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangled spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:
'O my children! do they cry,
Songs of Innocence and Experience |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: II.
Before a little waxen image of the Mother and Child,--an odd
little Virgin with an Indian face, brought home by Feliu as a
gift after one of his Mexican voyages,--Carmen Viosca had burned
candles and prayed; sometimes telling her beads; sometimes
murmuring the litanies she knew by heart; sometimes also reading
from a prayer-book worn and greasy as a long-used pack of cards.
It was particularly stained at one page, a page on which her
tears had fallen many a lonely night--a page with a clumsy wood
cut representing a celestial lamp, a symbolic radiance, shining
through darkness, and on either side a kneeling angel with folded
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