| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached
by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from
life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and
transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as
it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final
balance, and can never be the thing intended for our lasting
worship. It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation
and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the
truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and
we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical
other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the
sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear,
of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did
therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them
into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They
were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren't really
sinister; at least they weren't as he had hitherto felt them -
before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the
Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on
tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels and Researches in South Africa by Dr. David Livingstone: formerly alight@mercury.interpath.net). To assure a high quality text,
the original was typed in (manually) twice and electronically compared.
[Note on text: Italicized words or phrases are CAPITALIZED.
Some obvious errors have been corrected.]
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa.
Also called, Travels and Researches in South Africa;
or, Journeys and Researches in South Africa.
By David Livingstone [British (Scot) Missionary and Explorer--1813-1873.]
David Livingstone was born in Scotland, received his medical degree
from the University of Glasgow, and was sent to South Africa
by the London Missionary Society. Circumstances led him to try to meet
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