The restless mind creates and observes at the same time. Indeed, there is scarcely any popular tenet more erroneous than that which holds that when time is slow, life is dull. It is very often and very much the reverse. If we look back on those passages of our life which dwell most upon the memory, they are brief periods full of action and novel sensation. People have set their mark on humankind forever, as they thought, but time has washed it out as it has washed out mountains and continents. Direct experience not only establishes the reality of time and freedom; it also testifies that each of us is a body, subject to the same laws as all other bits of matter. Have you ever met people that you find attractive and think are smart and want to spend time getting to know them, eating dinner with them, watching movies with them and finding out what kind of music they like and what their hobbies are? Well, bodies are interpreted as images; that is, objects perceived in space. Among these images is one that I know from the outside by perception and from the inside by sensation or affection. This is my own body, which I also know to be a center of action.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

Life may as properly be called an art as any other; and the greast incidents in it are no more to be considered as mere accidents than the several members of a fine statue or a noble poem. If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like antiquated banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place. What is the relation between the body and the mind? Materialism holds that mind, or consciousness, is either identical with brain activity or existentially dependent on brain activity. However, it is also possible that there is vastly more in a given occasion of consciousness than in the corresponding brain state. In majority of cases, conscience is an elastic and very flexible article, which will bear a deal of stretching and adapt itself to a great variety of circumstances. The considerations to which the appeal comes mainly from the examination of memory. The great remembrance by which that time is marked in my mind seems to have swallowed up all lesser recollections, and to exist alone. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

Living organisms, unlike nonliving objects, retain their past in the present. This phenomenon is manifested in two kinds of memory. Once kind consists of sensory—motor mechanisms or habits fixed in the body organism and designed to ensure adaptation to a present situation. When an appropriate stimulus arises, one of these mechanisms unwinds as a response. The other kind of memory, which humans alone possess, records in the form of memory images all the events of daily life as they occur in time. These images provide the content of occasion recalling. This is pure memory, which is wholly spiritual. Consciousness signifies, before everything, memory. Not until we have passed through the furnace are we made to know how much dross there is in our composition. We are always in the forge, or on the anvil; by trials God is shaping us for higher things.  However, the belief in pure memory contradicts any correlation of memory images with hypothetical memory traces stored in the brain. Physiologically, the brain consists of a vast number of neurons, synapsing with each other and with afferent and efferent nerves. It resembles a telephone exchange, not a storage device. There is no evidence that memories are located spatially within it.  #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

In life there is every the intellectual and the emotional nature—the mind that reasons, and the mind that feels. I have seen, have seen ahead, seen where all is dark, read the unwritten. The brain of the human is Jove’s eagle and his lightning on Earth—the title to majesty henceforth. Moreover, if a visual recollection of an object were dependent on a brain trace, there would have to be thousands of traces, corresponding to all the variations due to different points of view from which the object has been perceived.  However, what we actually have in each case is one practically invariable memory image of an object, not a large class of different images. This is thought to constitute proof that something is quite distinct from mechanical registration is involved. While magic still retains the full omnipotence of ideas, some have ceded part of the brain’s omnipotence to spirits and thus have started on the way to form a religion. Philosophy and religion may be called the exercises of the mind, and when this is disordered, they are as wholesome as exercise can be to a distempered body. Now what could have moved primitive human to this first act of renunciation? The beginning of a motive life must be in the head.  #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

It could hardly have been an insight into the incorrectness of human assumptions to believe that the mind retained magic. As pointed out elsewhere, spirits and demons were nothing but the projection of the primitive human’s emotional impulses; they personified the things they personified their affects, populated the World with them and then rediscovered their inner psychic process outside of themselves because they thought that the fixations and detachments of memory reflected in the fates of the God-rays, which these early humans invented to explain cognition. There are facts associated with the loss of word memory and its restoration which point to the conclusion that the recollective process is independent of brain traces. It follows that materialism and psychoneural parallelism are untenable doctrines. How, then is pure memory related to the brain? Pure memory retains the whole of our past. And if this is the case, something must prevent all our memories from being simultaneously present to consciousness, since we do in fact recall one or two things at a time. The brain must therefore act as a filter for our memories, allowing only those that are practically useful to emerge on a given occasion.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

In other words, the brain is a mechanism invented by nature to canalize and direct our attention toward what is about to happen, in order to assist our actions. It is designed not so much to promote remembering as to promote forgetting. By bringing pure memory into contact with practical actions, it also establishes a link with habit memory, since most of our everyday actions tend to be habitual and routine. In this way, the two kinds of memory are united. Although some scientists will not countenance the idea that memory traces are stored in the brain, they will allow of the storage of images in pure memory. Pure memory retains all our conscious states in the order which they occur. This leads many to accept the conclusion that part of the mind is unconscious or subconscious. It is erroneous to suppose that the existence of physical sates depends on their apprehension by consciousness. To suppose this is to vitiate the concept of mind by casting an artificial obscurity over the idea of the unconscious. The significance of pure memory can be understood only by supposing that past psychological states have a real, though unconscious, existence.  #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

It is now possible to explain the relation between the body and the mind. Here, as elsewhere, there has been a strong temptation to think in spatial terms, envisaging two separate substances that have to be connected. However, the relation between body and mind must be understood in temporal, not spatial, terms. The point becomes clear when we unite the insight derived from our consciousness of real duration with the recognition that the body is a center of action, for on an occasion of action, body and mind are related by a convergence in time. No spatial representation of this convergence can be adequate. It can be grasped only by noting what takes place whenever we act. A familiar example is our perception of the external World. We were created to grow, to move forward, and to prosper. We should constantly be breaking the barriers of the past, taking new ground for our families and advancing God’s Kingdom. However, throughout life there will always be forces trying to keep us from where we are going. They cannot stop the progress we have made, but the will do their best to contain us, to limit our influence. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

The power of your mind is uncontainable. The mind will run away with the body at any time. The forces in you are greater than the forces trying to contain you. If you are to become everything that God has created you to be, do not get stuck in negativity nor sadness. Always know that you are not limited to what you have now. Keep increasing your faith in God-rays, looking for new opportunities, new idea, and new ways to expand your influence. You were made for more, you were made to influence more, to accomplish more, to love more, to give more, and to have more, and to be loved more. God will take you places you have never dreamed of. He will bring opportunities that give you amazing influence.  Nothing is ever wasted in the Kingdom of God. Not one tear, not all our pain, not the unanswered questions or the seemingly unanswered prayers. Noting will be wasted if we give our lives to God. And if we are willing to be patient until the grace of God is made manifest, whether it takes nine years or ninety, it will be Worth the wait. A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and vice.  #RandolphHarris 8 of 8