Spirit

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

Often confused with money, wealth is richness.  Wealth is the pillar that looks outside ourself and begins to contact the world around us.

Everything is alive and communicating

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Spirit

• 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.

• Breath of life, animating force, vitality

• Religion or the “spiritual” take on life.  

• Religion 

• we think it’s a loaded term because its from a pre-scientific age

• is built in community

• Spirituality

• 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.

• Spirituality has nothing to do with religion, it simply means taking the time to listen to your body, to watch your thoughts, to connect with and appreciate the world and the universe that you find yourself in.

• Whatever that means or looks like to you, but make sure to take the time to get rooted, to gain perspective and humility, and to feel connected to something bigger than yourself. 

• 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.

• Conaw: the difference between spirituality and religion is like religion is thing we do together. Where we hold one, another accountable to a higher standard

• 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.

Examples of rituals (greetings, graduations, marriage, interviews, superbowl parties, transitions of power)

Religion unfortunately has ethical prescriptions which may be useful rules of thumb but which are deadly when followed to the letter.

Religion is extremely widespread and popular, and it could not have gotten that way unless it was filling some important human need. No attempt to overthrow religion is likely to be successful unless it addresses this need; it never works to take away from people something that is important to them and offer nothing in its place.

It would be wonderful if we had something in today that has a genuine understanding of how humans react and that benefits of community by creating environments where loving conscious people communicate with each other in a positive way

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.