On the Concept of the Spirit

15 May, 2026

Thinking Through It

I have spent my life adamantly opposed to the idea of the spirit. After all, what is the spirit but a golden one-size-fits-all tool for religious indoctrination? When I was a child, I felt pretty clear on that after some bouts of Sunday school (and one over-the-top Hell House – but arent’t they all?).

Thus have I spent nearly my whole life convinced of our binary construction: we have a body, and we have a mind. The “mind” is what we call everything managed by the brain, including memories, thoughts, emotions, dreams, and what we register with our senses. The body is, well, just our hardware. I have two feet. You probably do, too.

So the “spirit,” to me, felt like a fraud. A convenient hook to entice would-be believers to subscribe to a particular religious doctrine.

However, let me not be hypocritical. I place zero trust in anyone who proclaims definite answers to unknowable, unprovable questions. So it may be more appropriate to say that, per my continuous understanding, I have never found cause to believe in the concept of a spirit.

Some weeks ago, a thought occurred to me. It was peculiar enough to slow down, pay attention, and think on this some more. It goes a little like this:

Suppose everything is exactly how I believe it to be, based on my available data.
So every person lives a life that begins with birth.
Memories form in early childhood, and a life builds over years of experience.
When the life is over, whenever or however it occurs, then that life will cease to exist.
Fade to black. Close the curtains. There’s nothing more, but also no person left to feel raw about it.
Null. Nil. Zero.

So then… who or what am I?
Not “me,” the brain, the mind asking itself about itself.
This planet hosts an unfathomable quantity of life forms.
I am not a dog, or a starfish, or a piece of coral, or an amoeba, or a bacteria.
I am a person. A human. I stretch my arm (assume I’m doing this).
Who or what is the thing that pilots this vessel?
If the human body is a vehicle, operated by a mind, then who or what is there in that mind?
What is the fundamental thing that insists on this life, in this body, behind these eyes, at this time in history, on this planet?

What That Means

For lack of more appropriate vocabulary, and even starker lack of scientific consensus, I think the spirit and the consciousness are the same thing.

Yet I so prefer the word “consciousness.” The “spirit” has been weighed heavy with millennia of contradicting religious theory. It holds a connotation I would aspire to shake free. For how many millions does the word “spirituality” evoke imagery of church pews and stained glass, towering mosques and white ladies doing yoga in Bali?

I am starting to see real value in discussions and philosophies of “spirituality,” but by that I mean consciousness.

To seek spiritual wellness would be to seek wellness – peace, harmony – of the consciousness. In this way, many avenues of mental healthcare would necessarily be linked intrinsically with the spirit. For a religious person, it could also mean to find comfort in elements of the belief system they hold most closely.

One might propose, even, that the mind/brain keeps the spirit or consciousness in a chokehold. All that we, as drivers of these vehicles (bodies) experience and think and interpret, is filtered through the unique physical makeup of the brain. Every moment is fed through our cerebral hardware, in its individual strengths and weaknesses, and through the physical alterations inflicted by trauma.

There exist no humans on Earth, not one, who holds a clear, untarnished, completely objective understanding of literally anything. Everything that has ever been known about anything, from cave paintings to quantum mechanics, has been strained and filtered and reassembled and interpreted through the layers of the physical components of the brain.

So then, let consciousness be that essential thing. The “self” that exists independent of the brain and all the ways it helps and hurts our understanding. If there is any trace of my “self” that exists before or after my life on Earth, it would be this consciousness.

And if consciousness is the secular understanding of the spirit, would that be so wrong?

I do not think so. If anything, it helps to have the words and the ideas to better make sense of a religious individual’s views or perspectives. We may not agree, but clarity of understanding fosters empathy. And empathy is a hot commodity, harder to find by the day.

Is a person a mind and a body? Is a person instead a mind, body, and spirit? Is consciousness a simple phenomenon of the mind interpreting its environment, using an internal voice to catalogue memories and direct physical maneuvers? Or is consciousness instead a distinct entity, a thing or force independent of the brain, strapped in for the ride – ever-reliant on all that it perceives and learns and remembers from the mind?

I hope we will one day have clearer answers. For now, I can no more answer these questions than can my cat describe for you the fundamental theorem of calculus.

But place no stock in the words of anyone who claims absolute certainty in their answering.