The story of a soul, the successive stages of understanding and communion that you pass through is made up of contingencies; the various accidents which lead to this or that sense of the whole, to this or that ethic or revelation, are not the contents of a book either already written or being written, they fall into no necessary pattern and have no connection to a substrate that would be your own. What you advance on entering into each formation is not yourself or your destiny but the fulfillment of that very formation whatever it happens to be. If you discover that your ethic is one of compassion, say, rather than justice, this is to the purpose of compassion as a universal attribute of spirit, and your role is merely to help it along by making the irreducible contribution of one more thread of individual consciousness, a small and necessarily incomplete addition, depending on the precise mode in which you embody it. You might as well be perfectly detached and indifferent, aware of only playing a part, except that whether you are so or not is integral to the particular mode in which you enter on it. And what follows after could be anything at all. You are building the completed edifice of spirit but it is not your spirit, and not you as spirit. What you are is outside even this. You receive nothing but only give, and what you give is nothing of yours, only essence, only the essential, only what completes contingency in necessity, a difference without a difference.