Understanding spirituality The term
‘spiritual’ is derived from the Latin word spiritus (Hebrew: ruach or
neshamah, Greek: pneuma, Sanskrit: prana),
meaning breath. The ancients believed that breathing, i.e. breathing on or breathing
in, starts life, that life begins with the first breath and ends with the
last. They also believed, falsely, that breath comes from a source (possibly
eternal) and at death returns to that source. Ancient Greek ‘spiritual’
seekers called themselves pneumatics, i.e. breathers. Hence spiritual people
are truly only breathing people. Christian
doctrine originated its mystifying notion of the term spirit from Genesis 2:7, mistranslated into English as:
“Then the Lord God formed man and breathed (spirited?) into his nostrils the
breath (spiritus, so Jerome) of life; and man became a living body
(Hebrew: nefesh, to wit, body rather than soul).” Obviously
the ancients got that one badly wrong. It’s not breath that animates (i.e.
gives life) but contact (upgrade to mean: instruction). Contact makes real and activates (i.e. gives momentum) to further contact (a
series of contacts being interpreted as animation or life). Contact (read:
touch) not only makes real, it transfers and receives identity (i.e. bits of
difference interpreted as a self), thereby producing self-realization. In plain English, an individual is spiritual (i.e. acts
spiritually, to wit, as the breath of G-d) if and when she or he makes
contact (or touches) another, thereby making that other real and transferring
information (i.e. all or part of her identity) to the other. By so doing she
or he de-and restructures the other’s identity so that the latter begins a
new life. In short, ‘spiritual’ means giving (or sustaining) life. Each and
every act that gives or sustains life is therefore spiritual. That the religious hijacked ‘the spiritual’ (Greek: pneuma)
by limiting it solely to acts performed in the service of their religious
belief was and still is one of the most outrageous and graceless deceptions
of all time. For, any act that gives life (i.e that breathes life into, animates),
performed at any time, in any circumstance, by anyone, whatever the motive,
is spiritual. Any person who makes contact, thereby giving life (or
animation), is spiritual. Consequently, the definition given to the term
‘spiritual’ by the New Oxford Dictionary, namely: “of, relating to or
affecting the human spirit or soul (?? read: psyche) as
opposed to material of physical things” is misleading and reflects the New
Oxford Dictionary’s boffins’ continuing kow-towing to self-serving Christian mythology. Understanding spiritual to mean: animating,
giving life, wrenches the spiritual from the life-denying grasp of the
religious and returns it to the realm of ordinary everyday action by ordinary
everyday folk.
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