| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: been made to the sympathetic devotional poetry of Rabindranath
Tagore; he stands for a movement in Brahminism parallel with and
assimilable to the worship of the true God of mankind.
It is too often supposed that the religious tendency of the East is
entirely towards other-worldness, to a treatment of this life as an
evil entanglement and of death as a release and a blessing. It is
too easily assumed that Eastern teaching is wholly concerned with
renunciation, not merely of self but of being, with the escape from
all effort of any sort into an exalted vacuity. This is indeed
neither the spirit of China nor of Islam nor of the every-day life
of any people in the world. It is not the spirit of the Sikh nor of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: he did not complain of ingratitude. He did them in the hope that his
patron would put him in a position to be elected deputy; Marcas wished
for nothing but a loan that might enable him to purchase a house in
Paris, the qualification required by law. Richard III. asked for
nothing but his horse.
In three years Marcas had made his man--one of the fifty supposed
great statesmen who are the battledores with which two cunning players
toss the ministerial portfolios exactly as the man behind the puppet-
show hits Punch against the constable in his street theatre, and
counts on always getting paid. This man existed only by Marcas, but he
had just brains enough to appreciate the value of his "ghost" and to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne: I do it so mechanically, that, when I walk the streets of London, I
go translating all the way; and have more than once stood behind in
the circle, where not three words have been said, and have brought
off twenty different dialogues with me, which I could have fairly
wrote down and sworn to.
I was going one evening to Martini's concert at Milan, and, was
just entering the door of the hall, when the Marquisina di F- was
coming out in a sort of a hurry: - she was almost upon me before I
saw her; so I gave a spring to once side to let her pass. - She had
done the same, and on the same side too; so we ran our heads
together: she instantly got to the other side to get out: I was
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