What is the spirit? Is it real?

Starting to characterise the spirit

A friend said to me once ‘You talk a lot about the spirit. What do you mean by that?’ I was taken aback, for two reasons. One part of me thought ‘How can she not know?’ Another part of me thought ‘How on earth can I describe it?’
Feeling these two rather contradictory thoughts in my mind, I smiled – rather arrogantly, I think now, and with no good cause as I understood, at that time, far less of what there is to know about the spirit than I thought I did. Anyway, I smiled, inwardly and outwardly, and tried to answer like this: ‘The spirit is not a physical thing; nor do I see it as a religious thing. You can feel it more than you can understand it. When someone walks out of a room and then returns, without you seeing them, you can still know, on some level, that they are there with you. What you are feeling is their spirit. When you’ve spent time with someone, say in their house, and then they go out somewhere for a few hours leaving you in their house on your own, the house feels different, cooler, lonelier, because their spirit is not there. When someone falls asleep beside you, you can also feel that little bit lonelier, because their spirit has withdrawn into them to rest too.
Or perhaps, a part - but only a small part - of their spirit is still there with you when they sleep beside you or when they leave their house for a few hours; what this does is make you notice all the more how the rest of their spirit, the major part, they have taken with them. It is similar to how we feel when someone dies and we are in their house alone and can still feel something of them or when we hold something that someone once owned – a watch or a cufflink, perhaps. We feel their spirit.’
Quite a long answer (and I’ve tightened up the language a bit!) – I’m not sure she expected quite such a lengthy reply. She looked at me quizzically, doubtfully.

At the time, I wanted to say more but sensed that I had probably said enough. I wanted to say that I feel the spirit is not particularly subject to physical laws. It can shake itself out like water off a wet dog’s back, like a myriad of motes of dust in sunlit air, like it’s starlight or stardust, but it loses none of its strength through this – it’s in no way diminished. It can be weakened (or halved, or quartered) in other ways, as we shall see, but, in itself, it is infinite, limitless because it is largely outside the confines of time and space. It works to its own laws, its own truths.
Thinking about it now, I recall that I’ve been asked that question about the spirit and received that quizzical response before and since. Strangely enough, the more I have considered that question and, indeed, that response, the more convinced I have become in the very real reality of the spirit.
It’s like when we sense something is true but are uncomfortable about it and want to run away from it. Truth can often make us uncomfortable, can it not?

The spirit and our mind-set

But there’s something else that can make us uncomfortable when talking or thinking about the spirit – at least in the West. And that is that the spirit, as a notion, has been somewhat taken over, appropriated, by various forms of organised religion. We have come to be conditioned into the thought that ‘if I take the idea of the spirit seriously, then I must be thinking in a religious way.’ If we do have preconceptions of that type, then we should feel free, very free, to lose them.
I, personally, am not religious in any conventional way; but I am a firm believer in the existence and the power of the spirit, although I can struggle as much as anyone to define and characterise it.

Okay, so, the mind-set I’m talking about here is that of seeing the spirit as an essentially religious notion or, by extension, as a particularly spiritual notion. Sometimes in order to escape from a mind-set, it’s a good idea to think about changing the words we use even if, ultimately, we decide to go back to the word we started with – a journey away from a word can help us to see that word slightly differently when we come back to it. So, instead of spirit with its religious connotations, we could perhaps use the word soul. Or maybe not, because soul can perhaps connect in our minds with the idea of 'death' (or with sadness, as with soul music). Whereas, spirit is about 'life' and 'energy' and 'feeling heady'. Also, soul does not have an adjective form; we can say spiritual but not ‘soulual’, or ‘soulistic’, or whatever. Invented words like ‘soulual’ or ‘soulistic’ seem very cumbersome and that suggests they are bhest not adopted in any way. And yet, on the other hand, the word spiritual does tend to raise ideas of religion in our mind and, indeed, of spirituality.
Okay, so perhaps, we should use the word psyche. Possibly because that word comes from Ancient Greek, it seems free of religious or spiritual connotations. (Interestingly, the word spirit comes from Latin, the word soul from German and, as I said, the word psyche from Greek.) However, the adjective psychic may have something of a connection in our minds with ghosts, as in a psychic experience and that seems potentially ‘messy’. The problem here, as I see it, is that if we use the word psychic, then it is not clear if we are talking about the physically living or the physically dead or some mix of the two. To leave things vague in that respect in our thinking and in our observation of our own experience can get us into problems of various kinds. These are problems where we are not sure if we, ourselves, are guiding our actions or we are being guided to some degree by the ‘departed’. I have, personally, experienced this kind of messiness and don’t feel it is a path of experience that I would want anybody to unkowingly go down.
Well, I said that, in exploring words, we can sometimes decide to go back to our original word. And I think I want to ‘stick with’ spirit, mostly, as the key word but I don’t want to generally use psychic as the adjective for the reasons explained above. So, shall we keep things simple and just use the adjective spiritual? The problem with the word spiritual is that it raises the notion of spirituality. What is spirituality? To my mind, spirituality is a mode of being that is quite aethereal, quite ‘other-worldly’, and quite self-denying. To be spiritual is to be these things as well. I think the spirit can be relatively aethereal and other-worldly, at imes, but it is not really self-denying. Anything but. I find it hard to express this any better, but I hope you’re geting some kind of a gist of an idea that I’m exploring here. There’s something very uncompromising and elemental about the spirit that rests uneasily with the notion of the spiritual, in my view. There’s also the matter of spiritualism, which is the practice of connecting with the physically dead. Once again, we’re getting into a messiness between life and death. Everything about the spirit is about life, nothing in it is about death. It lives on after death, but it has nothing intrinsically to do with death.

So, what are we to do? What is to be our adjective for the word spirit? Well, we don’t seem to have a word readily available, so let’s be bold and invent one. So, I propose that we start to use the word spirital. Spirital, in this book, will could be the adjective form of spirit and will carry no connotations of any kind. Why shouldn’t Aany discussion of the spirit is just going tojust be a spirital discussion. In the succeeding chapters, we will explore in greater depth the character and nature of the spirit and the spirital. Also, in this process, we will develop a separate and bigger idea for the notion of the soul, as something related to - but distinct from - the spirit. But let’s not rush to that idea yet.

But, hold up – we haven’t sorted out all our terms yet. The spirit and the spirital are just a part of what we are as whole human beings. To talk about the whole self, let’s not invent anything but just use the terms of psychology and psychological. Part III will offer a developed model for that psychology of self. But again, let’s not rush to that idea yet.
Oh wait, no, that doesn’t work either. A key part of the whole self is the body. To talk about the ‘self’ without giving due weight and significance to the body and to the dynamic between the body and the spirit, and the mind for that matter, seems ill-advised, I feel. The problem with the word psychology is that it does not give space and significance to the body. When we, say, might talk about psychological abuse, we are usually distinguishing that from physical abuse (even though all physical abuse is essentially psychological in its destructive impact). So, to get round that problem, let’s introduce the term psychophysical and use that as both a noun instead of psychology, and as an adjective instead of psychological.

The value of hesitancy and of openness

Let’s return for a moment to that look of questioning on my friend’s face when I talked about the spirit.
Her face, her look, still linger in my mind. Do you share her doubts? If so, good. Doubts and hesitancy are good. Don’t rush to believe anyone or anything.
I don’t want you, or ask you, to rush into any sort of belief. It’s good to be cautious, and it’s good to reserve judgement. But it’s also good not to be too quick to reject anything; it’s good to never reject anything out of fear or doubt, and only to reject when you are sure in your rejection on the basis of careful thought and considered feeling.