Spirit

For other uses of the term spirit, see Spirit (disambiguation).

• (Singular-lower case) The transmitting organ of man for contacting God. The deepest part of the soul of man.
• (Singular- upper case) The processed Triune God. The result of God reaching to man by the Father as the source, the Son as the course, and the finally through the Spirit as the transmission.

In the fields of religion and spirituality, the term spirit may mean:

• An ultimate, unified, non-dual awareness or force of life combining or transcending all individual souls or individual units of consciousness; the term spirit has been used in this sense by at least Anthroposophy, Aurobindo, A Course In Miracles, Hegel, and Ken Wilber. In this use, the term is conceptually identical to Plotinus's "One" and Friedrich Schelling's "Absolute." Similar to Greek pneuma and Sanskrit akasha. See soul for a more detailed description.

Philosopher and anthropologist David Abram has expressed that the understanding of spirits in most indigenous cultures are primarily modes of intelligence or awareness that do not possess a human form, which is the source of the common misunderstanding of and generalizations of animism: "many of the earliest Western students of these other customs were Christian missionaries all too ready to see occult ghosts and immaterial phantoms where the tribespeople were simply offering their respect to the local winds." (The Spell of the Sensuous, pg. 13).

Etymology

In the Bible, the word "ruach" (רוֹאח "wind") is most commonly translated as the spirit, whose essence is divine (see Holy Spirit. Alternately the word nephesh is commonly used. Nephesh, in the Kabbalah religion, is one of the three parts of the human soul, where "nephesh" (animal) refers to the physical being and its animal instincts. Similarly, the Chinese language uses the term "breath" to refer to the spirit.