The salients of Spirit are

Spirit is the pillar that faces outward and begins to contact the world around us. It feels abstract in this modern day and age but it is the harnessing of deep human underpinnings. Rhythm, pattern, awe, embodiment, and belonging all work to align individuals with something greater than themselves. These underpinnings often operate below conscious thought but surface in three salients of Spirit: Faith, Bonds, and Creation.

At the base of all spiritual life are simple, universal mechanisms:

• Pattern recognition - we find shapes and cycles in the world.
• Mirror neurons & imitation - we learn by watching and synchronizing with others.
• Sacred space & cues - special places shift attention and behavior.
• Embodied cognition - the body learns truths the mind alone cannot.
• Awe & the sublime - vastness pulls us beyond ourselves.
• Story & myth - memory carried forward in narrative.
• Belonging – shared rhythm creates community.
• Repetition & rhythm – grooves that keep memory and meaning alive.

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Spirit

• Everything is alive and communicating. You need contact with something larger, older, and deeper than yourself so that you can engage with the sacred, soul-making work of wrestling with deep questions of purpose and meaning.

• Spirit is in part just as internal as the rest of Bedrock, taking the time to listen to your body, the breath of life, the animating force, vitality. It is also partly external, appreciate the world and the universe that you find yourself in, seeing it as full of meaning, intention, and direction. As if glimpsing the true nature of things, slowly revealing the underlying patterns behind things, and touching a sense of awe.

• These are the things that make you feel small, a massive concert, the night sky, the long tale of history, wilderness. These feelings are transcendent, they are common examples of first contact with woo.

  • Your favorite band takes the stage and plays for three hours. The experience of being part of an audience, whether it’s a dozen or thousands in synchronous enjoyment singing, dancing, cheering can be a wonderfully overwhelming experience of unity.
  • History, when you dig in, begins to feel very big, populated by a hundred billion people with lifetimes all their own. Early humans who used stars as maps and preserved their imaginations in pigment in caves. Eight billion humans are alive right now—a larger population than any other mammal species by a mile. Your town could be an old battlefield, your home could be colonial house on an infilled burial ground. That pile of stones along the river could be an old mill run for generations or a bridge that allowed two villages to meet. You have a line of ancestors pushing back a million years.
  • The vast star filled night sky’s sheer scale and beauty has undoubtably evoked this feeling
  • Wilderness/nature

• There are many with an aversion to Spirit. It is often so closely tied to religion. The common refrain is, “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual” we think it is a loaded term because it’s from a pre-scientific age. And while it can overlap with religion or be a kind of base for that platform,

• is built in community

• From 7 Habits: Spiritual health also contributes greatly to lasting effectiveness: this can mean praying or meditating, but it can also mean regularly confronting your own norms and values and reflecting actively upon them.

• Visa: “spiritually homeless”, or like they are aliens in their own bodies, like they can’t face themselves, their anger, their grief, their neediness, their resentment, their mistakes, their heavy, heavy hearts.

• What can be learned from praising the gods.  

• Myth, rituals, and tradition. 

• Physically and mentally accessing wisdom

• Use of mythology to discipline every part of life

• mythos is the mechanism through which the group comes to experience its past, present and potential. So spirit is the journey of transformation experienced by the group

• i.e. portray history as telling a likely story and the ritual enactment of these events over time

• Spirit (with myth/tradition) as a check on Science as ascendant ideology

• Embodied reasoning vs rationality

• Balance to materialism and empiricism

Faith - Trusting the Unseen

• Pattern recognition gives some scaffolding: we’re built to find rhythms in chaos.

• Awe comes from those experiential sublime sparks where reason falls away to pure feeling

• Repetition (chant, prayer, liturgy) wears grooves deep enough to carry us forward even when sight is dim.

• Faith is the willingness to step into uncertainty, borne along by rhythms that have already been lived into the body.

Bonds - Bringing Lives Together

• Mirror neurons make ritual contagious: one person kneels and soon the group kneels together.

• Embodied cognition strengthens bonds through singing, fasting, feasting, and grieving together which cements memory and connection in the body.

• Belonging turns individual grooves into collective memory: festivals, holidays, mourning rites weave lives together.

• Bonds are not only about affection but about the multiplication of grooves across people so that no rhythm fades when one person forgets.

Creation - Crystallizing Spirit into the World

• Story & myth transform fleeting experience into forms that endure.

• Sacred space anchors those stories: temples, shrines, libraries, landscapes become memory embodied in a location.

• Repetition and pattern provide templates for expression and physical touch points in the form of psalms, icons, mandalas.

• Creation externalizes Spirit: what begins as rhythm in one life becomes inheritance for the next. Without creation, Spirit fades with each death; with it, Spirit compounds.