| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: "About how old might you be, Sandy?"
"Seventy-two."
"I judged so. How long you been in heaven?"
"Twenty-seven years, come Christmas."
"How old was you when you come up?"
"Why, seventy-two, of course."
"You can't mean it!"
"Why can't I mean it?"
"Because, if you was seventy-two then, you are naturally ninety-
nine now."
"No, but I ain't. I stay the same age I was when I come."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: I should have shaken off both shoes, but I was hungry. I learned
better later. Yes. And so I fed and rested me; but when I was
ready to go to the river again the flood had fallen, and I
walked through the mud of the main street. Who but I? Came out
all my people, priests and women and children, and I looked upon
them with benevolence. The mud is not a good place to fight in.
Said a boatman, "Get axes and kill him, for he is the Mugger of
the ford." "Not so," said the Brahmin. "Look, he is driving the
flood before him! He is the godling of the village." Then they
threw many flowers at me, and by happy thought one led a goat
across the road."
The Second Jungle Book |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: the person refuted; attend only to the argument, and see what will come of
the refutation.
I think that you are right, he replied; and I will do as you say.
Tell me, then, I said, what you mean to affirm about wisdom.
I mean to say that wisdom is the only science which is the science of
itself as well as of the other sciences.
But the science of science, I said, will also be the science of the absence
of science.
Very true, he said.
Then the wise or temperate man, and he only, will know himself, and be able
to examine what he knows or does not know, and to see what others know and
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