| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: consciousness so much vaster, so much more glorious, than
all that has gone before that the little candle of the local self
is swallowed up in its rays. It is the return home, the
return into direct touch with Nature and Man--the liberation
from the long exile of separation, from the painful sense
of isolation and the odious nightmare of guilt and 'sin.' Can
we doubt that this new birth--this third stage of consciousness,
if we like to call it so--has to come, that it is indeed
not merely a pious hope or a tentative theory, but a FACT
testified to already by a cloud of witnesses in the past--
witnesses shining in their own easily recognizable and authentic
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: known.[16] Other teachers--Paul, Mohammed, Sakyamuni--have come
merely as preachers of righteousness, speaking in the name of
general principles with which their own personalities were not
directly implicated. But Jesus, as we shall see, before the close
of his life, proclaimed himself to be something more than a
preacher of righteousness. He announced himself--and justly, from
his own point of view--as the long-expected Messiah sent by
Jehovah to liberate the Jewish race. Thus the success of his
religious teachings became at once implicated with the question
of his personal nature and character. After the sudden and
violent termination of his career, it immediately became
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: to the turn of Lawless, there was found under his gown a sheaf of
arrows identical with those that had been shot.
"How say ye now?" asked the tall man, frowningly, of Dick.
"Sir," replied Dick, "I am here in sanctuary, is it not so? Well,
sir, I see by your bearing that ye are high in station, and I read
in your countenance the marks of piety and justice. To you, then,
I will yield me prisoner, and that blithely, foregoing the
advantage of this holy place. But rather than to be yielded into
the discretion of that man - whom I do here accuse with a loud
voice to be the murderer of my natural father and the unjust
retainer of my lands and revenues - rather than that, I would
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