I am using the name spirits to indicate bodiless but enduring entities.
There isn’t any robustly adequate explanation for them. Every explanation seems to fall a bit short. They themselves don’t know their origin. I read where a cleverer one once said, “Who can remember his own birth?†They are spirits and they are everywhere.
My current, and limited understanding:
They generally have minor intelligence, although some can gain more than others. They are not directly destructible but they can gain and lose force. Spirits are usually geographically linked; they are bound either to a certain object, structure or region. Spirits can join together into larger conglomerations and operate as one being.
Spirits are not the leftover portion of a formerly living person. Those are called ghosts which are something different.
I find over the years that I am a relucant animist. I believe in spirits despite a preference to disbelieve in them. Non-physical enduring entities are complete outside of conventional modern physics, which feeds my discomfort about beliving in them.
Nobody taught me to believe in them. Nobody in my family believes in spirits. No teacher has ever taught this idea to me. If there is an external cause for this belief, then it is the spirits themselves.
Is this really so unusual? I mean, Christianity puts things in terms of angels and demons and so on.
So, xanderman, what’s the context of spirits as you understand them? Are they wrapped up with nature, ala shamanism? Are they wrapped up in human morality plays, like demons and angels? Are they Greater/lesser than we in the grand scheme of things? Or are they just another creature, like bears and jellyfish and such?
Everything does have a spirit in the context of your reference. In many ways God is connected to everything. And for lack of a better term these spirits are anchoring points for physical matter and objects.
Our own minds have a limited ability to sense this. And because of our vivid imagninations we often make much much more out of these things than they are.
You also spoke of limited/minor intelligence. I rather see it in this fashion. They are about as intelligent as a cell. They simply perform the duties assigned to them. For a rock… its just sit around and take up space. I believe an object will only temporarily inherit more than its normal intellectual capacity upon being charged/activated by a Being such as God. Once God has finished with the object it will lose that attribute or go dormant in other words. Kind of like a server… it does nothing untill something requests a resource from it. And it will only fulfill a request by authorized persons!
I often explain creation by God being more like a computer advanced beyond comprehension running an AI program. And we are part of that program and all the manipulations are Gods changes to the programs! You should be able to fundamentally get my point now!
I don’t know the context Uccisore, but I am ever seeking a better understanding.
They seem to have no cosmic significance. I wouldn’t compare them to demons or angels. They seem more naturalistic. They flower naturally from objects and places. The character of the spirit seems to develop over time. Newer object have almost no spirit while older objects have a richer spirit. They are a participant in the human game, albeit a minor one. They are like bears in that they are concerned with the kind of things that concern humans, but only to a limited degree. A bear isn’t concerned everything a human could care about but we do share certain overlaping areas of interest.
These spirits are like perpetual children concerned about human things, but with very little direct influence upon them.
Another aspect of this subject is my agnosticism about God. I believe that God is both unknown and unknowable by humans. People have some interesting ideas about God, but that is all. Nobody can know anything about God, not even the mystics, although I think their ideas are often very powerfully inspirational.
I think that spirits aren’t any more Godly or divine than a person. They might be considered more moral because they don’t have any inclination or ability to do immoral things. They don’t have the same temptations towards harmful practies like hording or murder because they have no desire for things like food, possessions, or mates. They don’t reproduce so they have no sex drive. They can’t starve so they neither gather nor hunt. They can’t travel, so they don’t fight over territory. They are generally content although the do have a bit of curiousity.
I don’t think they anchor anything. I don’t think an object needs a spirit in order to exist, but every object has the capacity to develop one. Or it could be that every object does have a spirit, but not all of those spirits have a personality.
Most of my post is in the context that he placed with his ideas on what a spirit would be. Spirit has more than one meaning.
And while I will at least agree that people cannot know God completely, they still can know quite a bit about God. How much that quite a bit can be is up for large debate. Our capacities are limited by far compared to God but this does not mean we cant understand or know things. I seems very counter productive to me for God to create all this and and then sit around being “Unknowable”. We have the sense of purpose bound in us and part of that drive is the desire to seek knowledge and to know. If not the question of “Why am I here?” would never have been asked by so many!
A fundamental answer about God was answered with that very question! Just think about it! With God sometimes the Question is the answer and the answer is the Question!
I’m just curious, is there anything tangible about this thing you call spirits? How did you arrive at the attributes you have given the term? Who decided and from what position of knowing, that these are bodiless entities, possessing minor intelligence, indestructible, geographically linked, and can join collectively as one being?
That’s a lot of specific characteristics. Who claims the authority to know these things?
That’s the whole trouble. No, these spirits aren’t tangible in any conventional sense. They cannot be seen by the eye, or touched by the hand or heard by the ear. They can only be felt as an abstract sensation of presense. Like if you have an object in front of you, close you eye and try to feel it being there. Its all very abstract. That is part of why I almost never discuss this topic.
I developed that list of characteristics. It is is my own creation. I claim no authority on the subject only my history of accumulating similar sensations.
Again, this whole subject is so out of accord with conventional physics that it doesn’t fully make sense even to me.
Now I am going to get myself into trouble if I try to address this question. Then again I did broach the subject, so I ought to go ahead and see it through.
I would put in the other way around. I would say that the spirits made contact with me, I never sought them out. They made me have a sensation of their presence. Or it could be said that I have some kind of capacity to be aware of their presence. Just like if you felt the presence of someone you could see you might just ask if anyone was there. So that is exactly what I used to do. I asked if anyone was there and felt the joy from them at being acknowledged.
Now a there is an easy explanation that would fir in with a materialism and reductionism. It would go something like this: These experiences are all self-generated. There is nothing outside of me that is causing these sensations. There are no such things as spirits and this is all a product of my imagination. I have attempted to embrace that idea for years, and must admit that I still haven’t fully let it go either.
Enduring consistency can wear away at the most resolute skepticism. My experiences with spirits have continued to be the same for many, many years.
I haven’t encountered any other symptoms of brain malfunction, so must assume that if something is wrong with me then at least my condition isn’t degenerative.
They consistantly enjoy being acknowledged. They like it when people are aware that they exist.
I’ve spent some time in coastal old growth forest where sunlight nevers touches the ground, and I understand the sensing of some sort of presence. Oddly, I had that same sensation in blue water with a storm running in 45 ft swells. I’ve never been able to assign any attribute or meaning to the episodes, but it does make chills run up and down. I guess I can’t say there was anything I would call a spirit, but perhaps an intense sensation of mysteriousness? It certainly gave me understanding of the coastal indian clan totems of orca, raven, wolf, and bear. Animists the world over have probably sensed this ‘presence’. I just have a problem with naming or describing something that is more of a feeling, than a knowing.
That intense sensation of mysteriousness is the beginning of it. Yes, that is where it starts. I run trouble in that it continues beyond that point. It isn’t just a moment when you almost feel something and then you can shake it off and forget it.
It like when you can feel eyes upon you and then you turn around and spot the person who is looking and then you run after them. It is not just my awareness of the spirits it is that they know that I am aware of them.
Some of them aren’t passive or kind. Some of them have tried to intimidate me and get me to leave their space. While I believe they didn’t have enough force to actually physically harm me or push me away they definitely wanted me gone. I could feel their menace. They would do anything within their power to influence me to depart.
I believe that some of these are created by something other than human agency. The trouble is that one admitted or proven incidence of fraud makes all of the other incidents all the more highly suspect. It is the same problem in UFO research.
Spirits might be much the same as those (vibrations) that create energetic physical images. I have seen film footage of such an image from the sky appear in the ocean and in an instant it was gone. What if we ourselves exist in other dimensions? Not two or three but lets pick a figure, twelve (for example?). Say our thought waves, um…collective or individual manifest on the other dimensions…it doesn’t need to be alien, they could indeed be human. Just not in the way that we think.
Almost all species have “ghosts” which come out of them at death, and either the spirit dies at that time, or it continues to exist, grow & evolve, or it will merge with other live-energies.
Eventually new spiritual species evolve & form groups, at times.
Thus we find “angelic” species [which were originally human]. And “demonic” species [which were originally angelic?].
Besides these there are FAR more.