| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: is nothing less than the sudden revelation to him one day of the
fact of his own personality.
Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to
sensitiveness as the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained
by the five bodily senses is being fused into the wisdom of that
mental one we call common sense, the boy makes a discovery akin to
the act of waking up. All at once he becomes conscious of himself;
and the consciousness has about it a touch of the uncanny. Hitherto
he has been aware only of matter; he now first realizes mind.
Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly ushered before being, and
stands awe-struck in the presence of--himself.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: general as a condition of "truth" being anywhere possible, into
an omnipresent universal consciousness, which he identifies with
God in his concreteness. He next proceeds to use the principle
that to acknowledge your limits is in essence to be beyond them;
and makes the transition to the religious experience of
individuals in the following words:--
"If [Man] were only a creature of transient sensations and
impulses, of an ever coming and going succession of intuitions,
fancies, feelings, then nothing could ever have for him the
character of objective truth or reality. But it is the
prerogative of man's spiritual nature that he can yield himself
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being
tramping close behind him! and how often was he thrown into
complete dismay by some rushing blast, howling among the trees,
in the idea that it was the Galloping Hessian on one of his
nightly scourings!
All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms
of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many
spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in
divers shapes, in his lonely perambulations, yet daylight put an
end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasant life
of it, in despite of the Devil and all his works, if his path had
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
