| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: thing. The only value it possesses, for even a moment, is the
spiritual value back of it: remove that end and it is at once
worthless--like the hat.
Y.M. Can you extend that to money?
O.M. Yes. It is merely a symbol, it has no MATERIAL value;
you think you desire it for its own sake, but it is not so. You
desire it for the spiritual content it will bring; if it fail of
that, you discover that its value is gone. There is that
pathetic tale of the man who labored like a slave, unresting,
unsatisfied, until he had accumulated a fortune, and was happy
over it, jubilant about it; then in a single week a pestilence
What is Man? |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: eerie and fantastic to behold. Even I, who am well enough read in
Herbert Spencer, felt a sort of silence fall for an instant on my
mind. The next, I was pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her
like an unruly ship through the open. In a path, she went doggedly
ahead of her own accord, as before a fair wind; but once on the
turf or among heather, and the brute became demented. The tendency
of lost travellers to go round in a circle was developed in her to
the degree of passion, and it took all the steering I had in me to
keep even a decently straight course through a single field.
While I was thus desperately tacking through the bog, children and
cattle began to disperse, until only a pair of girls remained
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "Yes, David," he replied, "I know precisely where we are.
We have made a magnificent discovery, my boy! We have
proved that the earth is hollow. We have passed entirely
through its crust to the inner world."
"Perry, you are mad!"
"Not at all, David. For two hundred and fifty miles our
prospector bore us through the crust beneath our outer world.
At that point it reached the center of gravity of the
five-hundred-mile-thick crust. Up to that point we had been
descending--direction is, of course, merely relative.
Then at the moment that our seats revolved--the thing
At the Earth's Core |
