I used to say this often, but I haven’t in a while: a soul extends to the limits of what we mean when we say “everything”.

Each soul is universe-sized. This is why I sometimes refer to everythings, plural.

Materialists who believe that a soul (psyche) is an emergent property of our nervous system, and folk-believers who understand souls as spiritual bodies enveloped within our carnal bodies — both believe they have nothing in common, but they are wrong. They both confuse souls with person-sized mental entities: ghosts.

And because they see souls as ghosts, they fail to recognize their true everything-sized self for who it is: themselves. They call their own all-encompassing everything-soul whatever God or God-equivalent term they’ve adopted. Misapotheosis is the result of failure to comprehend the true nature of selfhood and mistaking it for the Absolute.

Self is ultimate comprehension. God is what incomprehensibly comprehends each and every self.

God is incomprehensible, but the fact of God’s realness can be comprehended (“God is both real and incomprehensible”).

More important than this theoretical knowing is a practical know-how. We can adopt an attitude toward incomprehensible reality that learns first to expect the unexpected, then to expect the inconceivable (and therefore unimaginable), and eventually learns to recognize and welcome inconceivable realia as the very substance of life.

Let us call this attitude or relation suprehension — the everted complement of comprehension.

Our own conception “everything” is comprised from without by infinitely more than what any or all of us can mean by everything.

Mine is a metaphysic of surprise.

Not only our religious life, but our human relationships depend on this attitude of suprehension — of openness to realities transcending our own compressive self.

Some come by it naturally. Others of us must cultivate it through effort.