Spirit means breath, or wind (the latter of which Richard has plenty). I agree with Barry here. Spiritual experience is about the nature of experience, about that rather mysterious quality called consciousness. My spiritual experience evolved entirely in the absence of a belief in something called 'god', or of spirits. While others around me used the term a lot, it was nothing to me. The word is a conceptual box. At the same time I realise that most people do seem to have trouble pursuing spiritual goals without some kind of specific handhold to grab onto. At some point you have to let go of everything you think is real.
The problem is these spiritual terms are not truths, they are rather strategies to unhook the mind from identification. However such strategies are developed in a particular time and place, a particular culture and language, and once they have been around a while, they tend to lose their potency through the accumulation of ongoing interpretation. Transcendence is not real, it is a description that is part of a strategy to lead the mind out of a particular box. If we say there is something like unity, that everything is somehow 'one', there cannot be separate realities where some aspect of reality is, in essence, different from some other aspect, and that would mean the separation of the 'world' and 'transcendent' is a false dichotomy, part of a trick to get you to experience beyond the obvious character of the meaning of the words. Once what you think is transcendent becomes a familiar experience, you find it is not transcendent at all, it had always been what you are and everything is, and at that point you can ditch the concept. If you cannot do that, progress to a unified experience grinds to a halt as the mind continues to remain identified with the meaning of the words and their supposed significance. There are words that are very concrete like 'concrete', 'water', 'food', etc., that directly represent things. Spiritual language is actually very vague, most of its words are borrowed from the vocabulary of concrete representative words, but they are used in special abstract senses, and most of the concepts are words defined in terms of other words. For example 'the light of life' in the New Testament really just means consciousness, but nowadays it is pretty hard to get people to interpret it that way. Because the mind gets identified with the meaning and significance of thoughts, it creates an imaginary world that dominates primary direct experience. The strategy of spiritual language is to create another imaginary world to wean the mind off its primary obsession, but that second imaginary world is used in conjunction with various other strategies such as meditation, being in silence, etc., in the hope that identification in general at some point cracks and falls away. The thorn to remove a thorn strategy is a tricky one, because you are trying to break an illusion with another one. When the first thorn is removed and tossed aside, what do you do with the second one? You toss that aside as well. What good is another thorn stuck in your flesh. But as we can see, this does not happen very often; the second illusion simply supplants the first one, and delusion continues. Barry makes perfect sense here. ---In [email protected], <punditster@...> wrote : On 5/8/2014 1:52 AM, TurquoiseBee wrote: The discussion of spiritual experience ISN'T ABOUT GOD. > You are not even making any sense. The discussion of spiritual experiences assumes the belief in a spirit world or spirits. For someone who ascribes to Advaita Vedanta, the spirit is transcendental to the material world and to the Hindu gods. All the Upanishadic thinkers were transcendentalists. For them, God is the Transcendental Person, Brahman or Purusha.
