What is Spirit?

[vortech]

Apologies if there is already a thread directed at this specific inquiry.

My question is what is Spirit? Is it measurable energy, like what we see in Kirlian photography? Or is it something 'etheric', an invisible force embedded in the fabric of the Universe? What is it that gives life Spirit? Does a single-cell organism have a spirit? If not, does a large animal have a spirit? If not then what is it that makes humans spiritual and not other life forms?

My belief which may be somewhat divisive is that spirit is composed of very real measurable energy along the electromagnetic spectrum. it is all the energy that drives our life force, a charge that flows inside us and throughout a field extending beyond the body. Prana, chi, orgone, it goes by so many names. The energy takes on different characteristics as it flows through the different chakra points, like white light passing through a prism. Our brains/mind decodes this energy into useful information just as it decodes all the energetic signals through our sensory systems. Music for instance can be thought of as a sort of spirit encoded into acoustical energy that we can embody if we are open to receiving it. From this interpetation, spirit is in all lifeforms as well as entwined with the fabric of the Universe, quantum fields, zero-point. The only difference between having spirit and being spiritual is consciousness, an awareness that we are these energy systems, and that this energy is what connects all life and all things together.

 

[Foreigner]

One of the oldest models is the ancient Daoist model, which pre-dates even the oldest Chinese texts.

Spirit is the shen, or consciousness. It is the force of awareness which inhabits a living being. It's governed by the heart and carried in the qi and blood of the body. Without spirit, no life form can have awareness. So your question about other living creatures is a bit semantic... if they're aware of their environments then they have spirit and consciousness. It may not be a higher ordered consciousness but it's still consciousness. There are many forms of non-material life in the universe just as there are many forms of material life. Lower ordered life forms, like cells and animals, will receive spirit from an equivalently ordered non-material life form. Thus humans may arguably be the most advanced consciousness on this planet, but not in the entire universe. This also debunks the notion that humans can be reborn as bugs or animals, which is what Buddhists claim can happen. Spiritual evolution generally follows physical evolution. You wouldn't be born into a previous version... it's all forward-moving. Thus humans tends to be reborn as humans, until they evolve beyond the human cycle into something else. Whether we can exit the cycle of rebirth entirely is debatable IMO.

The brain is not the seat of consciousness. It's the seat of logic. It governs the navigation of physical reality and all of the logistical requirements that entails. You could have full on dementia and loss of logic and still have present awareness witnessing the whole thing, because that awareness is not governed by the brain. The brain is merely an interface, much like how a radio is an interface for a radio frequency. If you smash the radio the signal is still transmitting, it just can't interface. That's essentially the difference between the spirit and the logic.

Kirlian photography captures the weiqi field, and that's about it. The weiqi or etheric field is the field closest to the physical body. It maintains the housing of your spirit so that it stays in the body. Anyone who has experienced sleep paralysis knows what the weiqi field feels like because when you try to leave the body it holds you in place. It also keeps outside invaders and pathogens from entering. Any time we get sick, the energetic signature of the pathogen invades the weiqi first. Once it proliferates enough of its own energy in your field, the physical pathogen may then take hold and you start experiencing symptoms.

If you want an excellent primer of our spiritual anatomy I highly recommend the intro Qi Gong books by Dr. Jerry Alan Johnson. There are four books but the first has all of this info. The ancient Chinese discovered and recorded this stuff a very, very long time ago and it's used empirically in qi gong, acupuncture and other eastern medicine practices to this day. I don't think you can equate prana to qi, orgone, etc... they all have cultural and epistemological associations which may not translate. But all of these systems, like religion, arise from the same fertile earth of spirit, so they're all trying to express things with language that are normally unexpressable.

 

[vortech]

Daoist is the same thing as Taoist, correct? I do very much resonate with the perspective you present, despite semantics differences with my explanation as you mentioned. I will certainly check out the intro Qi Gong books because I have experienced Qi Gong to be a very powerful modality for energy movement and attunement. I have friends who swear by it as well, especially under the influence of MXE, but that is the subject of another discussion. You have enlightened me to more than one thing to research further, thank you for the informative reply!

 

[Ninae]

The way I see this is that what is the life in us is the presence of God that is the minimum presence in all of us. So someone with little of God's energy or power can come across as "dead" or lifeless in a way.

But the human being is most usually described as a complex of several energy-bodies. Or, physical/etheric, emotional, mental, soul, and spirit body. There are also many different words for this. Your spirit body is often called your higher self or monad, and the part of you that is always one with God and the whole, where you go to experience unity and also gives nourishment to the lower layers of "self". While your soul, sometimes described as the "egoic body", is the individualised part of you that evolves through different embodiments and holds all your accomplishments.

I think it's only when our consciousness resides in our higher self that we feel really content and blissful and it's where we experience God-identification. Theosophy describes a lot about this and maybe teaches it best.

 

[-=SS=-]

Spirit is like consciousness.. totally depends on your concept structure and what you decide to attribute to that word. Kind of like 'God' too, everyone has a different definition.

 

[vortech]

I refer to the total of a life energy system as the spirit-mind-body complex, with each component residing in different levels and manifestations of energy. Each of the 3 components can be broken down further as you mentioned, and they aren't entirely distinct either because it is an interconnected system and each component has effects on the others. For instance the emotional body isn't a distinct form because it resides in or ripples through all 3 components.