We all want some portion of our lives to live beyond midnight. We gain palpable security from our possessions and there are serious drawbacks to the soul in the abstraction of experience. We can stop to compose ourselves at any time. Composure is the result, not the precondition, of assembling the events of our lives into a meaningful whole. The intellectual attempt to live in a known World deprives ordinary life of its unconscious elements, those things we encounter every day but know little about. If we are fortunate, we get to take a long pause before we pass into Heaven. When frailty or something else limits our external activities, we are given the opportunity to expand our reach into ourselves. The unconscious and the soul are similar, and so when we try to live fully consciously in an intellectually predictable World, protected from all mysteries and comfortable with conformity, we lose our everyday opportunities for the soulful life. The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised. Intellect, looking outward, wants enlightenment and the pleasure of burning enthusiasm. The soul is always drawn inward, and seeks contemplation and the more shadowy, mysterious experiences of the terrestrial. Our places and people are composite in space and time, constructed from various sources and from widely separate periods of life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10

To varying degrees, we all accumulate things as appendages of ourselves. Our recollections are mosaics, composed of fragments of what we actually experience and arranged to suit our need for meaning. At each juncture, we decide what to reveal to others, what to keep for ourselves, and what to forget. When our spirituality is not sufficiently profound, it sometimes sneaks out a backdoor and takes on bizarre forms, all kinds of strange enthusiasm. Often, when spirituality loses its soul it takes on the shadow-form of fundamentalism.  The long hours of lying in bed or being confined to home invite us to use the interlude to make order out of life’s disarray. We construct a World which is constantly within reach and which endures more reliably than anything human. Things literally stand by us. Their constancy becomes all the more valuable when we move from place to place, or when the rest of our lives seems to be in flux. The intellect wants a summary meaning—all well and good for the purposeful nature of the mind. However, the soul craves depth of reflection, many layers of meaning, nuances without end, references and allusions and prefigurations. All these enrich the texture of an image or story and please the soul by giving it much food for rumination. Ruminating is one of the chief delights of the soul. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10

Many people have their closest relationships with things. Ownership is the most intimate relation that one can have to objects. The longer we own our belongings, the more we belong to them. Time after time, when we are feeling low, something inside of us lets us know, it is alright. Love is on our side.  When the World becomes a lonely place, we have a dream that will not leave a trace of the blues. We just think of our possessions and feel like we have a real thing here by our side. Something that needs us and these memories hold us tight. And these special feelings will never fade. These objects and possession put a move on our hearts. Our love is like a melody. The collector dreams our way not only into a remote or bygone World, but at the same time into a better one in which these things bring special feelings that time cannot erase, and we are liberated from the drudgery of uselessness. Collecting preserves the past while it elevates objects in value and cancels out their ordinary functions. They will love us to the end of time. Accumulating and remembering are parallel phenomena, one external and the other internal. The accumulated past makes the shrinking future more bearable. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10

The infinite inner space of a story, whether from religion or from daily life, is its soul. Over time, our need to call up memories of someone wanes, but we resist the waning of this need as if it is a disloyalty and not a slow process of yielding. Saving a keepsake becomes a refusal to yield. If we deprive sacred stories of their mystery, we are left with the brittle shell of fact, the literalism of a single meaning. However, when we allow a story its soul, we can discover our own depths through it. Fundamentalism tends to idealize and romanticize story, winnowing the darker elements of doubt, hopelessness, and emptiness. It protects us from the hard work of finding our own participation in meaning and developing our own subtle moral values. The sacred object or teaching of a story, which has the potential of deepening the mystery of our own identity, instead is used defensively in fundamentalism, to spare us the anxiety of being an individual with choice, responsibility, and a continually changing sense of self. The tragedy of fundamentalism is any context is its capacity to freeze life into a solid cube of meaning. The capacity to become unencumbered by the past lies in the nature of our leave-taking, not in cutting ourselves off from sentiment. When we attain a flexible relationship with the past, we thrive. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10

Biologically, only the future matters; the aim of all creatures is to go on living. Unique to the human condition is the privilege and burden of the past. When our biological aims recede in prominence, what is most distinctive in us can finally gain ascendance. In this age of psychology, many people convince themselves that they have certain troubles in their lives because of what happened to them in childhood. They take developmental psychology literally and blame their parents for everything they have become. However, unless your parents are still somehow manipulating your life, working with a cult, and prying into your business to try to accomplish something they have been trying to do since you were a child, it is time to let that go. If one could see through those childhood stories, listen to them as myth, grasp their poetry, and hear the eternal mysteries singing through them, the situation might change. Soul provides a strong sense of individuality—personal destiny, special influences and background, and unique stories.  When caring for one’s soul, a person must begin in the simple making sense of one’s story. Many people insist that they find little value in going back over the past, even as their future shrinks and their past becomes their most extensive possession. Sorrow, regret, and guilt accompany their passage into their memories. When they cannot sleep, such people ruminate, captured by the ceaseless reiteration of all that remains unsolved. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10

When they can work, they can put other problems to the back of their mind, but the problems tend to grow out of al proportion, and they occupy the dark hours of the night. Closing oneself off from significant parts of the past is a common self-protection. For some people, it is not good to look back, it makes them more miserable than they have to be. Trying to discern a theme that makes sense or offers solace may seem fruitless. One difficulty is that our most important stories have to be lived before they can be spoken. We repeat painful parts of our past through our actions long before we are able to call them forth as actual memories. When one reproduces an earlier event not in one’s memory, but in one’s behavior, the individual repeats it without of course knowing he or she is repeating it. The soul’s complex means of self-expression is an aspect of its depth and subtlety. When we feel something soulfully, it is sometimes difficult to express that feeling clearly. Since soul is more concerned with relatedness than intellectual understanding, the knowledge that comes from the soul’s intimacy with experience is more difficult to articulate than the kind of analysis that can be done at a distance. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10

Our satisfaction is experiencing the incomplete becoming complete and the Universal law of symmetry fulfilled. Soul is also always in process, having, as its own principle of movement; so it is difficult to pin down with definition or a fixed meaning. When spirituality loses contact with soul and these values, it can become rigid, simplistic, moralistic, and authoritarian—qualities that betray a loss of soul. Recalling earlier versions of ourselves is initially quieting. The life review process is an ongoing one. Peace may be won, but it is usually something like a truce between renewed outbreaks of conflict. Yet, if we persist in the effort to sort through and to make order of our experiences, we may eventually come to peace with conflict itself. Once we are able to discern value in the whole, we may begin to reconcile ourselves to the contradictory pieces that comprise a life. In human life, we resolve the problem of meaning by joining the disparate parts of our lives together into coherent while. When feelings bound to the past are suddenly emancipated, we need someone to take the time to hear us out. This inclination to return to the beginning to make an ending arise in every form of human expression. We read novels for the resolution of the initial themes, and we listen to music with an ear toward the completion of what was set in motion with the first few notes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10

The process of attaining completion may not be as orderly in life as it is in music and literature, but the striving for symmetry is the same. A recollection plays out the original experience and changes it, just as an octave both repeats the beginning note and alters it. An event gains meaning by its repetition, which is both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it. We construct endings by returning to familiar events and making more of them than we did before. In telling our most painful stories to someone else, we simultaneously repeat out suffering and allow it to evolve into something we can bear. We all desire a satisfying ending, to have our lives culminate in something that makes sense. Sense-making requires that the disparate parts of our lives fit together into one whole, comprehensive story. Such consonance is necessary for the attainment of meaning. For even the highest and strictest forms of spirituality can coexist with soulfulness. The problem is never spirituality in itself, which is absolutely necessary for human life, but the narrow fundamentalism that arises when spirituality and soul are split apart.  There are many different kinds of spirituality. The kind with which we are most familiar is the spirituality of transcendence, the lofty quest for the highest vision, Universal moral principles, and liberation from many limitations of human life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10

We know that most mental and emotional congestions, with their inner repressions and unconscious conflicts, are due to a lack of proper assimilation of emotional ideas. We widen our solitudes by esteeming our memories and making use of them, instead of hoarding them, disregarding them, or keeping them to ourselves. There cannot be proper circulation in the mental body unless the spiritual body, to which the mental is attached, circulates through the mental; we cannot even be physically whole until there is a circulation of the spirit through the mind, and the mind through the body. The divine spirit is already perfect, inwardly. Be therefore, perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect. We believe that humans are rooted in pure spirit; we are a spiritual entity right now, here in this World, and it is impossible for a person to be completely well physically unless one is happy mentally. Equally, we believe that it is difficult for one to be happy mentally unless one’s mind has the assurance that it is rooted in something stable and permanent, something transcendent and altogether whole within itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10

Humans are spirit, soul, and body. Try to live in the physical organism without the mind is impossible. Try to live on the intellectual thoughts without feeling is equally impossible. However, not to realize that even the mind, wonderful as it is, is dependent upon something greater than itself, is disastrous. For if many of our physical troubles are the result of an inward emotional conflict based on a sense of inadequacy or defeat, and an unconscious feeling of guilt and rejection, then nothing is more certain than that the mind and the feeling must have the assurance of a power greater than themselves, governing, guiding, and enveloping. In God we live, and move, and have our being. If we seek the truth, develop faith in God, and sincerely repent, we will receive a spiritual change of heart which only comes from our Savior. Our hearts will become new again. This is how we assist the healing process of the soul. Draw near unto God and he will draw near unto you; seek God diligently and you shall find God. God knows the heart of each of us. He knows the pains of our hearts. If we seek the truth, develop faith in God, and if necessary, sincerely repent, we will receive a spiritual change of heart which only comes from our Savior. Our hearts will become new again. Repentance brings about a spiritual healing of the soul. The demands of divine justice do awaken our immortal soul. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10