When I'm thinking about intellectual, fact-based stuff, I think of "mind". When I think along the lines of wisdom, understanding and feeling - including religion - I think of "spirit".
Two different words to refer to the same thing, but in very different contexts. Does this resonate with anyone else, I wonder? :chin: — Pattern-chaser
I've been mulling this topic over, even though it's quietened down. I think I use "spirit" and "mind" as sort-of synonyms, but for different purposes. They're both perspectives on the same thing, even though they're quite different.
When I'm thinking about intellectual, fact-based stuff, I think of "mind". When I think along the lines of wisdom, understanding and feeling - including religion - I think of "spirit".
Two different words to refer to the same thing, but in very different contexts. Does this resonate with anyone else, I wonder? :chin: — Pattern-chaser
hi PC,
Please pardon the cut & paste, Dr. Dennis says it better, and I'm open for discussion. — Daniel Cox
I sometimes meditate on the similarities between 'gist' and 'geist'. — Wayfarer
I've been mulling this topic over, even though it's quietened down. I think I use "spirit" and "mind" as sort-of synonyms, but for different purposes. They're both perspectives on the same thing, even though they're quite different.
When I'm thinking about intellectual, fact-based stuff, I think of "mind". When I think along the lines of wisdom, understanding and feeling - including religion - I think of "spirit".
Two different words to refer to the same thing, but in very different contexts. Does this resonate with anyone else, I wonder? :chin: — Pattern-chaser
In my participation at the mental clinic I've found that they are very unclear on where mental illness comes from. They claim, "Mental illness is a brain disorder" and then remedy it with cognitive therapies pushing forward their claim of naturalism, the belief in psychoneural identity theory. — Daniel Cox
Just my two cents, but I noticed nothing wrong with your posts. My take on the evangelizing prohibition thing is to prevent closed-minded cultist types. (As opposed to open-minded cultist types such as myself. :snicker: )I apologize for talking out of turn. — Daniel Cox
According to Schopenhauer,
The better consciousness in me lifts me into a world where there is no longer personality and causality or subject or object. My hope and my belief is that this better (supersensible and extra-temporal) consciousness will become my only one, and for that reason I hope that it is not God. But if anyone wants to use the expression "God" symbolically for the better consciousness itself or for much that we are able to separate or name, so let it be, yet not among philosophers I would have thought — 0 thru 9
Our original Buddha-Nature is, in highest truth, devoid of any atom of objectivity. It is void, omnipresent, silent, pure; it is glorious and mysterious peaceful joy — and that is all. Enter deeply into it by awakening to it yourself. That which is before you is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught beside.
spirit is like a soft, silent wind that moves things. — Shamshir
Pneuma (πνεῦμα) is an ancient Greek word for "breath", and in a religious context for "spirit" or "soul". It has varied technical meanings for medical writers and philosophers of classical antiquity, particularly in regard to physiology, and is also used in Greek translations of ruach רוח in the Hebrew Bible, and in the Greek New Testament. In classical philosophy, it is distinguishable from psyche (ψυχή), which originally meant "breath of life", but is regularly translated as "spirit" or most often "soul". — Wikipedia
Thank you for that. Well put. The mysterious spark of life. Without it, even the strongest brain and body is an abandoned house.Spirit is the the power that moves.
One may compare it to wind.
Now, consider the following:
If you should sever your hand, you would no longer be able to move it.
Yet you will move the rest of your body just fine.
This is severing the flesh from the spirit; something that happens at death, when the spirit leaves the body and the body becomes a lump of flesh, a steak if you will.
If a gust of wind blew by your severed hand, it would move it.
If it blew in a specific manner, it could even make it wave at you or give you a thumbs up.
So I say: spirit is like a soft, silent wind that moves things. — Shamshir
:up: Consciousness is our truest identity, if we have one at all, I would say. The empty space in which everything else unfolds, if it can even be roughly and vaguely described. And it would seem possible that “one” consciousness is somehow in some way connected with “all” consciousness...There is a series of aphorisms in one Upaniṣad, along the lines that 'the eye cannot see itself, the hand cannot grasp itself'. I think it's an important pointer to how we go about thinking about 'spirit' because what is often done is what I consider 'objectification'. But there is no such object of perception or cognition - it is never a 'that' (or even 'it'!) I think in non-dualist philosophy, spirit is the 'being' of beings, so not an objective reality. — Wayfarer
Consciousness is our truest identity, if we have one at all, I would say. The empty space in which everything else unfolds, if it can even be roughly and vaguely described. And it would seem possible that “one” consciousness is somehow in some way connected with “all” consciousness... — 0 thru 9
It was VERY rash of me to say so! Lol. Rash, premature, primative theory about something perhaps indescribable. Almost certainly unprovable. Like a caveman making a crude paper bag out of leaves, and constructing one of those little floating “hot-air balloons” powered by a flame underneath, in a crude attempt to model a flying machine. It might need a whole book to answer, or more likely years of silent meditation. In other words, I need some time to chew on this excellent question... leaving the floor open to @Wayfarer or someone else to field it.so it might be a little rash to assume that "Consciousness is our truest identity", without further qualification? — Pattern-chaser
Without trying to define or explain what consciousness is (we understand it well enough for anything except a direct investigation of consciousness itself), how would you incorporate our unconscious minds into what you say? Our current understanding is that most of our mental abilities are unconscious, so it might be a little rash to assume that "Consciousness is our truest identity", without further qualification? — Pattern-chaser
how do we know we're thinking of the "same" X? Maybe each of us is thinking of a different X, but is instead calling it by the same name. — YuZhonglu
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