| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: does not want to do as he did or to be as he was before. And so he runs
away and is constrained to be a defaulter; the oyster-shell (In allusion to
a game in which two parties fled or pursued according as an oyster-shell
which was thrown into the air fell with the dark or light side uppermost.)
has fallen with the other side uppermost--he changes pursuit into flight,
while the other is compelled to follow him with passion and imprecation,
not knowing that he ought never from the first to have accepted a demented
lover instead of a sensible non-lover; and that in making such a choice he
was giving himself up to a faithless, morose, envious, disagreeable being,
hurtful to his estate, hurtful to his bodily health, and still more hurtful
to the cultivation of his mind, than which there neither is nor ever will
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: I lay upon the headland-height, and listened
To the incessant sobbing of the sea
In caverns under me,
And watched the waves, that tossed and fled and glistened,
Until the rolling meadows of amethyst
Melted away in mist.
Then suddenly, as one from sleep, I started;
For round about me all the sunny capes
Seemed peopled with the shapes
Of those whom I had known in days departed,
Apparelled in the loveliness which gleams
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: supplied by feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with
the matter which feeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb,
and unable to give an account of itself. It allows that its
results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them
rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even
pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the
opposite attitude. Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and
paradox whatever territory she touches. To find an escape from
obscure and wayward personal persuasion to truth objectively
valid for all thinking men has ever been the intellect's most
cherished ideal. To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy,
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