| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: a convulsive extreme. When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is
once grasped by the feeling that a certain superhuman person is
worthy of its exclusive devotion, one of the first things that
happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself. To adequately
realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the one
great merit of the worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities
by which savage tribesmen have from time immemorial exhibited
their faithfulness to chieftains are now outbid in favor of the
deity. Vocabularies are exhausted and languages altered in the
attempt to praise him enough; death is looked on as gain if it
attract his grateful notice; and the personal attitude of being
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: This was what perplexed and oppressed me. I needed all
the time until the next Saturday to think the question
through, to decide what should be done. But the matter was
taken out of my hands. After our latest expedition Keene's
dark mood returned upon him with sombre intensity. Dull,
restless, indifferent, half-contemptuous, he seemed to
withdraw into himself, observing those around him with
half-veiled glances, as if he had nothing better to do and yet
found it a tiresome pastime. He was like a man waiting
wearily at a railway station for his train. Nothing pleased
him. He responded to nothing.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: repression of their first desires at the moment when all their forces
are developing; to artists sick of their own genius smothering under
the pressure of poverty; to men of talent, persecuted and without
influence, often without friends at the start, who have ended by
triumphing over that double anguish, equally agonizing, of soul and
body. Such men will well understand the lancinating pains of the
cancer which was now consuming Athanase; they have gone through those
long and bitter deliberations made in presence of some grandiose
purpose they had not the means to carry out; they have endured those
secret miscarriages in which the fructifying seed of genius falls on
arid soil. Such men know that the grandeur of desires is in proportion
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