What is the spirit? To understand what spirit is, we must overcome the classical and modern understandings and place greater value on the contemporary. The classical concept says that spirit is an essential element beside another material element - the body. The spirit would be the intelligent and immortal part, with the ability to transcend. It lives for a limited time with the other part which is mortal, opaque, and heavy. Death separates one part from the other, with different destinies: the spirit to the beyond - eternity - and the body to the nearby - cosmic dust. This is a dualistic vision and it does not explain the feeling of unity we experience. We are a complete whole and not the sum of parts. The modern concept says that spirit is not a substance but a way of being unique to the human being whose essence is freedom. Surely we are free beings because we shape life and the world, but the spirit is not exclusive to the human being nor can it be disconnected from the evolutionary process. It belongs to the cosmic picture. It is the highest expression of life, supported in turn by the rest of the universe. The contemporary conception, fruit of the new cosmology, says that the spirit is as old as the universe. Before being in us, it was in the cosmos. Spirit is the capacity for interrelationship that all things keep within themselves. It forms ever more complex relational webs, generating ever higher entities. When the first two top quarks began to interact and form a relational field, therein the spirit was born. The universe is full of spirit because it is reactive, panrelational, and self-organizing. To a certain degree, all beings participate in the spirit. The difference between the spirit of the mountain and that of the human being is not in principle but in matter of degree. The same principle works in both, but in a different form. The uniqueness of the human spirit is that it is reflective and self-aware. Through the spirit we feel inserted into the whole starting from a part that is the living body and, therefore, the bearer of the mind. At the reflective level, spirit means a subjectivity that opens to the other, communicates, and thus transcends itself, gestating an open communion, even with the supreme otherness. To define it: an aware life, open to the All, free, creative, marked by lovingness and caring - this is really the human spirit. If spirit is relationship and life, its opposite is not material and body, but rather death and absence of relationship. The desire to encapsulate oneself and reject communication with the other also belongs to the spirit but it never achieves this completely, because to live is necessarily to live with . Even while denying it, it cannot stop connecting and being connected. This understanding makes us aware of the chain that links everything over and over. Everything is wrapped up in the huge and extremely complex process of evolution, cut through at every stage with the spirit which emerges each time in different shapes - unconsciously in some and consciously in others. In this sense, spirituality is any attitude or activity which favors relationship, life, communion, subjectivity, and transcendence, steering towards ever more open horizons. Finally, spirituality is not just thinking of God but feeling God as the chain which passes through all beings, interconnecting them and constituting ourselves and the cosmos. Free translation from the Spanish provided by Annefullerton@mybluelight.com.
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