How important is spirituality in your life?
I would have to start by saying that I don’t believe there is anything essential signified by the word ‘spirit’. There is no thinginess or essence in other words that equates with ‘spirit’. Instead it is a sign that we believe that the meaning of objects, animate and inanimate, and the forces that drive them that are constituents often of what we name living is not covered by those things alone. The drive to make meaning of life, even in its quiet patches and imagined interiors, is more than a drive and its products are a knowledge that makes life worth living.
In the word :spirit’ the meaning of the word ‘love’ lies in as far as it is more than mutual self-interest or material drives towards either sex or the proximities of material attachment and their neural analogies. In spirit is everything we like to call transcendent. But we don’t need the latter word. All we need is the fact that we perform beyond the drives of the material world for its material products. Those products include the biochemical and bioelectrical analogues of thinking even.
Since action, thought and feeling and sensation and their interaction, usually involving processes of memory, all have material analogues, performance of meaning will never be free of the material world but it matters that it acts as if it were. That’s because lies and fictions are no more than stories and we need stories in order to make the patterns we call meaning. But the production of beautiful and / or meaningful patterns is not entirely determined.
It is in these exceptionally beautiful and / meaningful patterns that we find a meaning to a life otherwise reducible to objects and forces. They aren’t transcendent, they do not infer God or Higher Powers that exist outside our own and the social body and their environments. They do infer that all that we need and want goes beyond the interests of ourselves or our abstraction of society. They are the reason for living..X
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Well, that’s what I think anyway.
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