How To Understand Spirit Without All The Baggage

What I found when I least expected it

I’ve wrestled with this question for years and years. Just what is it, exactly?

In my journey to find a working answer, I visited all sorts of (pretty eclectic) places.

In no particular order: A Course in Miracles, The Urantia Book, The Tao Te Ching, Stoicism, The Bible, Western Philosophy, Buddhism, meditation, spiritual practice, neurobiology, psychology (and maybe a few others that subconsciously influenced me but I can’t remember).

Despite all this, I could never really evolve a satisfactory answer.

Is it something you can build stuff out of? As to opposed physical, atomic material? I have a material body, do celestial personalities have spirit bodies?

Is spirit a set of values, something encompassed by a mindset or worldview? Spirit(ual) as opposed to materialism?

Is spirit some third thing besides these two, or maybe in addition to these?

What I found after I gave up looking

What helped me the most in finding an answer was getting older (and weaker).

Like most unbearably important things in my life, this one arrived when I wasn’t looking.

I can’t tell everything that spirit is, but I can at least tell what I found.

In March of 2021, my wife and I got sick with Covid

It was really bad. As soon as it hit, we also started developing pneumonia. Both of us laid in bed all day, every day for twelve days.

Thank God for our three teenage boys.

Not only did they not get sick, but they kept us alive with a cellphone, Uber Eats, and an outrageous delivery bill ($900 in 6 days). We had enough energy (barely) to get up twice a day(maybe) to use the bathroom, but not enough to watch Netflix, much less cook.

My wife slept 12 hours a day, but I couldn’t sleep, despite exhaustion. Maybe it was the electric headache shooting lightning bolts through my cranium. Pain killers didn’t touch it.

Perhaps it was the pneumonia constrictor inexorably squeezing the life-breath out of me.

Or possibly it was lying awake for 20 hours at a stretch, listening to my wife’s ragged, painful breathing, hoping against hope it wouldn’t stop.

Either way, all that was left to do was think.

The result of twelve days of waking meditation

Spirit chooses loves first.

Love is the divine motivator in relationships and relationships between personalities and is why the cosmos, and everything in it, exists. Spirit looks outside itself to give love first. It knows love naturally returned after it’s been freely given is the greatest love of all.

Spirit practices patience.

Why? Because it’s eternal. Time is a real thing, it’s a real mode of reality, but the spirit also knows that time fits inside of eternity. And because the spirit itself is connected to eternity, it’s not in a rush. Ever.

Spirit forbears.

Spirit sees the aim of life that lies beyond the mortal horizon. It knows this human condition is the short, intense, and quite necessary start of our eternal career. All the fear, pain, desperation, anger, mistakes, hope, angst, and more are just our thrashing efforts to find the light. It bears with us, in love, as we stumble/walk/dance our way through the experience.

Spirit seeks wisdom.

Wisdom is a master craftsman. It moves deliberately. It looks like it doesn’t know what it's doing, it appears to creep and do things backward. Left alone to run in its unparalleled channel though, it builds an incomparable masterpiece of your life.

Spirit is a mindset.

It looks at us, at the world, at life, through the lens of elevated values. It doesn’t put undue priority on the material things we tend to chase so hard: money, power, influence, education, pride, position, respect, a high standard of living. While these are important, they are not of the highest importance.

Spirit looks at life like this: if you only had 5 minutes to live, who would you call and what would you say? You’d madly dial the phone to stammer out your heartfelt apologies and love for everyone you knew.

This is the attitude, the mindset, of spirit.

Knowing versus living

It’s one thing to grasp the theory. It’s something else to do it well.

Some things just can’t be known until you’ve experienced both halves.

In the dark hours of illness, I got an insight into theory, and somehow, through the combination of nature and grace, I got a second chance to practice doing it well.

If you’re reading this, you’ve got a second chance to practice your theories as well.

Here’s to the beautiful chance each sunrise gives us.