| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tao Teh King by Lao-tze: Thus he the constant excellence retains;
The simple child again, free from all stains.
Who knows how white attracts,
Yet always keeps himself within black's shade,
The pattern of humility displayed,
Displayed in view of all beneath the sky;
He in the unchanging excellence arrayed,
Endless return to man's first state has made.
Who knows how glory shines,
Yet loves disgrace, nor e'er for it is pale;
Behold his presence in a spacious vale,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: He fairly glittered in the gloom. "Not at all.
I sat up and read."
"And when did you go down?"
"At midnight. When I'm bad I AM bad!"
"I see, I see--it's charming. But how could you be sure I would know it?"
"Oh, I arranged that with Flora." His answers rang out with a readiness!
"She was to get up and look out."
"Which is what she did do." It was I who fell into the trap!
"So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at,
you also looked--you saw."
"While you," I concurred, "caught your death in the night air!"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: Not that Martin had been unkind, except negatively. Intuitively,
Rose understood that their first evening and night foreshadowed
their whole lives. Not in what Martin would do, but in what he
would not do, would lie her heartaches. Yet in her sad
reflections there was no bitterness toward him; he had
disappointed her, but perhaps it was only because she had taught
herself to expect something rare, even spiritual, from marriage.
Her idealism had played her a trick.
With the quiet relinquishment of this long-cherished dream,
eagerness for the realization of an even more precious one took
possession of her. She comforted herself with the thought that
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