What is a Spirit?

What do you guys think a spirit is and what is it capable of?

I think spirits are similar to the traditional belief, simply something that resides inside the body for a time before moving on after death. After the death of the physical body I believe that the spirit can be put back into another physical body, I don't have an answer however for why this would or wouldn't happen. I also don't know whether the consciousness resides in the brain or in the spirit for the duration of the physical life, but I've started to think that the consciousness can be wherever you want it to, so most people have it in their brain most of the time, but at times like astral projecting, they can transfer the consciousness into the spirit. I also believe that animals have spirits, but I'm not entirely sure if all of creation shares the same form of spirit, or do people have people spirits, dogs have dog spirits, etc.

well, obviously the answer to this question is going to be subjective to your view of the universe at large, since your opinion on what a spirit is basically answers the question of our purpose and place in the grand scheme of things. your paradigm informs your experience, and whatnot. personally, i'm still not entirely convinced in the existence of what we would conventionally term a "spirit." i've always considered consciousness and spirit to be more or less one and the same.

to stop dancing around the question: i can see the merits of the aetheric/web-of-consciousness view of the universe. certain aspects of particle physics and nuclear chemistry actually seem to support this model, in the sense that all matter and energy in the universe are essentially the same thing - just energy vibrating at different frequencies. expanding on that: every system has a natural harmonic frequency, a frequency at which the entire system will begin to sympathetically resonate (see the tacoma narrows bridge failure in the forties for more on that concept). i think it could be argued that consciousness - what you could call the spirit, essentially - is something akin to a vibration on a frequency that harmonizes a bit better with the overall universe. the closer the vibration frequency is to being in harmony with the average frequency of the universe, the more sympathetic vibration - and, consequently, the higher the level of consciousness. we have a "consciousness frequency" (kitschy, i know, but for lack of a better term) closer to the universal harmonic than dogs, say; and even different individuals will vibrate at slightly different frequencies, possibly telling us something about psychic phenomena or how "in-tune" someone is with the world around them.

just ideas. i don't necessarily fully buy into it, but it was just something that's occurred to me. apologies for the messy delivery, but i'm in a bit of a hurry; i may come back later and edit this to clean it up some and/or add a few thoughts. just wanted to get something down to kick things off a little and promote discussion.

I do think that all spirits are connected, like a super consciousnesses. I'm not sure if that's what you meant by web of consciousness but I have been doing tedious research into the super consciousness recently and have found some pretty crazy results. For example dowsing is a great way to look at the effects of super consciousness. Asking questions about people's current state and then referencing them to see what their state actually is (what they're doing, what mood they're in, etc.). I think that's a great example of super consciousness.

For me, I think that it is all energy. Just one big never ending cycle of energy being transferred from one place to the next. But that's just me.

I'm going to go with the Buddhist view of spirits. It is an energy that moves on from a living being to another but it doesn't keep the same consciousness as on the previous being. It is more like a candle with a flame and that flame is used to lit up another candle. It is not the same flame but it's origin is the same. In the eastern religions the idea of a higher consciousness is very often used and I think it is something really to consider about. I think that spirits all come from the same source. Maybe it is a network similar to our neurons. Everything is connected. I am not sure but I still do believe all spirits are somehow connected. Some seem tightly and some loosely. Maybe it is the reason why you get along with some people and with others don't?

The word "spirit" or "soul" can refer to two distinct things.

Hendrix isn't the most technical guitar player ever, but he's one of the best because he plays with so much soul.
People who have OOBEs describe them as their body being seperated from their spirit.

I think, for the sake of simplicity, we should refer to the first one as "soul" and the second as "spirit".

As an aside, I've been noticing mind/body/spirit symoblism in an absurd amount of places (random example: terran = mind, zerg = body, protoss = spirit), but I don't know what it means, if it means anything.

EDIT: Also, I've been referring to the soul as the part of the self that processes analog data, i.e. it deals with feelings, emotions, things that aren't strictly one way or the other, as opposed to the mind, which deals with digital data, i.e. discrete units of information, conscious thoughts.

I have been thinking about the subject of souls and spirits basicly all of my life sine my young teenage years. I believe, not just only that spirits are able to transend hostes, but they are also able to transend inbetween dimensions. Some physicists believe that just like the universe is eternal, there are eternal "strings" of other universes, or, dimenisons. I believe that the spirit is able to cross inbetween these. I also believe that meditation makes you able to (in a very small sense) see gateways between these dimentions. To meditate strenghtens your mind, or your spirit and makes it illuminated with thoughts and feelings that otherwise would be harder to get access too in an "awake" state, so when you meditate, you open your mind, spirit, soul (i believe they are all three conected, almost as in being the same thing) to these other dimentions, expanding it to give you a higher insight.

the spirit, it took me a long long time to figure this out. its was easy to understand what the body is, what the mind is, but the spirit was a tricky thing .. think about this we are a body/mind/spirit complex . ok, now when you take out the body from the equation whats left? your thoughts and feelings right? now what if you take this out, you get that blank state of nothing or everything or something, that's your spirit that's the flame from where all your thoughts and feelings come from...

now when OBE you still have a body not a physical body, but an etheral body so that's not the spirit, that's your soul you could say, but more like another body of yourself.

i do believe everything is connected through our spirit.

i believe the reason people reincarnate is that when they die, they go into this spirit state and they go in shock and beg for another body because they feel like they wouldn't exist without one and so they are granted one, you get what you ask for.

now when OBE you still have a body not a physical body, but an etheral body so that's not the spirit, that's your soul you could say, but more like another body of yourself.

i do believe everything is connected through our spirit.

Like in taoism, when you have three bodies? Physical, Mental and Divine.

i think what that refers to is the body(physical)/mind(mental)/spirit(divine) which is what we are all made of. we are in the physical realm, but there are many other realms in which you also have this body/mind/spirit complex and you exist there too.

I agree with you totaly, this is what I meant when stating that your spirit can travle inbetween the dimensional universes i was talking about earlier, to expand itself.

tospiteyourface wrote:well, obviously the answer to this question is going to be subjective to your view of the universe at large, since your opinion on what a spirit is basically answers the question of our purpose and place in the grand scheme of things. your paradigm informs your experience, and whatnot. personally, i'm still not entirely convinced in the existence of what we would conventionally term a "spirit." i've always considered consciousness and spirit to be more or less one and the same.

to stop dancing around the question: i can see the merits of the aetheric/web-of-consciousness view of the universe. certain aspects of particle physics and nuclear chemistry actually seem to support this model, in the sense that all matter and energy in the universe are essentially the same thing - just energy vibrating at different frequencies. expanding on that: every system has a natural harmonic frequency, a frequency at which the entire system will begin to sympathetically resonate (see the tacoma narrows bridge failure in the forties for more on that concept). i think it could be argued that consciousness - what you could call the spirit, essentially - is something akin to a vibration on a frequency that harmonizes a bit better with the overall universe. the closer the vibration frequency is to being in harmony with the average frequency of the universe, the more sympathetic vibration - and, consequently, the higher the level of consciousness. we have a "consciousness frequency" (kitschy, i know, but for lack of a better term) closer to the universal harmonic than dogs, say; and even different individuals will vibrate at slightly different frequencies, possibly telling us something about psychic phenomena or how "in-tune" someone is with the world around them.

just ideas. i don't necessarily fully buy into it, but it was just something that's occurred to me. apologies for the messy delivery, but i'm in a bit of a hurry; i may come back later and edit this to clean it up some and/or add a few thoughts. just wanted to get something down to kick things off a little and promote discussion.

to sort of try to clarify my thoughts from my above post:

a) every system has a harmonic frequency, the specific frequency being determined by various properties of that system. what this means is that anything that vibrates at that particular frequency will eventually (with enough applied energy) cause the entire system to vibrate at that frequency through sympathetic resonance. one vibrating molecule bumps into another, which starts vibrating, and so on until everything that's in the same system as the original molecule is vibrating at the same frequency.
b) a good example of that is galloping gertie, the former incarnation of the tacoma narrows bridge. galloping gertie, as with all systems, had a harmonic frequency at which it would sympathetically resonate (the frequency determined, in gertie's case, by the length of the roadway and the cables supporting it). the tacoma narrows are essentially a ravine in central washington state, and wind would blow down the ravine at just the right speed to begin swaying the bridge at the its harmonic frequency (through a phenomenon known as aeroelastic flutter, but that's not important). so the roadway would start billowing up and down and these waves in the bridge would keep feeding each other because it was going at the right frequency for that particular length of roadway. eventually, in november of 1940, the stress was such that the bridge essentially shook itself to pieces. there are videos all over youtube, worth a watch if you haven't seen it.
c) so, we take this concept of harmonic resonance at a specific frequency and apply it to the universe. why can we do that? because string field theory allows that the entire universe can be viewed sort of similar to a sheet of fabric, with every part connected to all the parts around it - and so, vicariously, connected to parts all the way across the universe.
d) assuming that this "field" is an actuality (which hasn't been proven, yet), one could take that a step further and apply the concept of harmonic resonance to it; the universe is a fabric of energy, condensed into different states, and all those condensed states (solids, plasmas, liquids, gases ... all of it) are connected to the pieces around them - and so, vicariously, connected to parts all the way across the universe.
e) you might be asking what a condensed energy state is, at this point. simply think of matter as energy vibrating at a lower frequency; a piece of paper is just a flame that's vibrating more slowly, say, and the match you touch to it makes the paper more energetic.

see where i'm going with this?

if we can assume the above, it's just a hop-skip-jump (kind of a long one, i'll admit) to viewing consciousness as just a condensed energy state. that might sound misleading. what i'm saying is: our being, the thing that makes us us, whatever it is that drives around this fleshy bag of condensed energy, is just the energy in a particular spot of the universe vibrating at a higher frequency than the energy around it.

now, applying the idea of harmonic resonance to that: maybe as we become more enlightened (the match adding energy to the paper), we shift the frequency of our consciousness (condensed energy state). and if the universe is a fabric, which has a resonance frequency, then maybe the more enlightened we become, the closer we are to approaching that resonance frequency. so, y'know, maybe our idea of god is just some dude whose consciousness is vibrating at the same frequency as the rest of the universe.

clear as mud? thought so. if you have any specific questions about all that, i'll try to conceptualize it a little better.