The salients of Spirit are Faith, Bonds, and Creation.

Spirit is the pillar that faces outward and begins to contact the world around us.

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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 partly internal, taking the time to listen to your body, the breath of life, the animating force, vitality. It is 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 an easy 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 the 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

Mythos as a story, which gives shape and focus to Spirit, and makes everything make sense. Manifesting spirit through mythos in experiential terms, blending ritual and primal stories.  Tales with motion are boring, so they become embodied as ritual to act out.  The blending is called liturgy (literally the people’s work).  Liturgy is the sum of what the people do and say as an expression of their deepest being. As such, it may be highly conscious, artful, and carefully crafted to express the best of the human spirit. Or then again, it may be purely happenstantial, dull, drab, and degrading. Good or bad, liturgy is what the people do.

Absent believing in transcendent Truth and God, people will create or map on to their own secular religions complete with liturgy, sacraments, saints, and precepts.

• Liturgy - official set of rules for performing a religious ceremony
• Sacraments - a visible sign of an inward grace, especially one of the solemn Christian rites considered to have been instituted by Jesus Christ (baptism)
• Precept - a commandment as to moral conduct (like a maxim) Can’t help but see intermittent fasting, meditation, gratitude journaling, etc., as a return to religious fundamentals.

Benefits of Rituals

• Reaffirm your connection to spirit/elements/deity
• To raise energy to channel towards a particular goal
• To celebrate the milestones of the year and to honor the deities that rule over those times.
• Dedicate yourself to a path or deity.
• And many others that could be seen as facets of the list I’ve created above.

Put another way: ”A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.” - Joseph Campbell

Looking Forward: We’ve already got ”people of the book”. I wonder what “people of the database” or “people of the machine learning model” would look like.  Dive into this further in Woldbuilding Lite and Worldbuilding.