These ideas are based on personal experience, but are certainly influenced by my interest in science, Buddhism and yoga philosophy. I wish to highlight an aspect of being human which is difficult to categorize or analyze. [...]]]> I use the words spirit and spirituality very freely in my writing. What do these words mean to me?

These ideas are based on personal experience, but are certainly influenced by my interest in science, Buddhism and yoga philosophy. I wish to highlight an aspect of being human which is difficult to categorize or analyze.

The word spirit has many uses, and in fact is overused. This especially true in New Age culture, which I believe has weakened its meaning by lack of focused thought and application. In Christian culture, the use of spirit implies something outside any empirical or tangible sense.

So why write more about “spirit”? My intention is to balance its use in favor of something both ancient and current at the same time. By ancient I mean pre-Christian, indicating its use by American Indian, Buddhist, Yoga and Pagan cultures, where spirit is something knowable and sensed through experience, yet mysterious and powerful. To give modern support for its meaning, I rely on knowledge of the human experience as described by scientific research, including physics, biology and astronomy.

The foundation of spirit is, I believe, based on personal experience and sense, “What do you feel spirit is?”, rather than what someone has told you it is.

In my twenties I often used the phrase “poetic moment”, meaning an experience where many factors contributed to a higher than average intensity of pleasure, understanding and connection. I mean something more meaningful than, for example, just sex, which is certainly intense and usually pleasurable. A poetic experience involves mind, body and something else, some out of body emotion or understanding. Things click in a big way. When I had these experiences, they didn’t last long, but always left a lasting impression on my memory.

For example, I listened to all 9 symphonies of Beethoven on day, beginning in the afternoon and continuing until late evening. As my fatigue accumulated from so much listening, my mind opened up to another level. I stopped thinking about the music and started just experiencing it. That’s when Beethoven came rushing deep into my being. The last three symphonies, Nos. 7, 8 and 9, were truly spiritual experiences, poetic inspirations, moments of connection to history, culture, music, myself and my muse, through a humanist spirituality. Beyond a connection to something there was also a liberation from something. Boundaries became less distinct between me and the world. I felt as if I were in Beethoven’s head, hearing and writing them with all their meaning and depth and quality.

I’ve always appreciated the value of “subjective experience”. A lot of my poetry comes from what I feel rather than what I know or understand. The personal experience of something, your version, has absolute validity for everyone. Beethoven is a great composer, but your subjective experience of his music will be completely different than mine. I can try to show you what I’m experiencing, but I can’t make you experience it. Your path is yours. In that way, your spirit is yours to acknowledge and develop. Again, spiritual humanism.

So it is with the spirit of living. Spirit is a subjective (individual) experience of living, a consciousness of being alive. It is your coaxial cable connection to the universe, a direct link to all that is and is possible. This individual experience of life is to be cherished. It must be protected and respected, both by you and others. I see this as the very basic, simple form of spirit, which needs to be cultivated and nurtured to grow. Animals have spirit, and so do plants. But we are capable of much greater levels of spirit. We need to help ourselves grow past our limitations, and with the help of a rational, humanist spirituality, we can accomplish our goals.

There is spirit in our experience of all things, from the beauty of a sea Anemone and also in its sting, to the magnificence of the Milky Way and its daunting void, in the magical flutter of a hummingbird’s wings, in a baby laughing or crying, an animals sadness and joy. There’s spirit in the acts of eating, thinking, reading, cooking, painting, sculpture, poetic inspiration, hearing or making music, roller coaster riding, mountain climbing, fixing cars, blogging, thinking, gardening, etc. And there’s spirit in just plain sitting.

The problem is, our natural spirit is often damaged, or at least obscured. The various trappings of life maintenance, physical distractions, ego, desire and self-deception cause myriad malfunctions and disconnections. It’s as if the “software” to life is damaged by various “viruses”. The usual suspects are judgment, self-deception, hubris, attachment, fear and ignorance. Add to that habits of unclear thinking and living, or the misfortune of traumatic experience, and one faced a veritable minefield of obstacles to experiencing pure spirit.

A damaged self-esteem is a symptom of a damaged spirit. The spirit still exists under these circumstances, but it is obscured, as if looking at life through a cracked or soiled lens. One could argue that a cracked lens may also act like a prism, offering a unique, poetic view of life. Perhaps. Ultimately, there is no objective good or bad spirit, just balance and clarity and flow of the point of view you inherit. The tools offered by science, psychology, behavioral learning, and the mysteries of nature and beauty are our keys to growing deep and balanced in our living.

Beyond the personal experience of spirit, one can begin to appreciate the bigger picture, the recognition that we are not a multitude of separate spirits, but all part of a Great Spirit. My sense of this comes from reading about a variety of spiritual traditions, including American Indian, Buddhist, Yoga, Pagan, Christian and Jewish. I have also delved into scientific writing of human biology, psychology, history and culture.

All spiritual traditions refer to something which encompasses All. Monotheistic myths have given us the best view of this universal entity. I prefer to call it Great Spirit because, I believe, it is an extension of our own individual spirits. With greater awareness, we begin to know that we are a part of something much larger than ourselves. We can sense and fathom the Great Spirit, a connection between all. Here again, the hybrid joining of scientific humanism with emotional spirituality can lead us forward. We also know that we came from and will go back to the Great Spirit, since our matter only changes forms. So, we are from it and of it. Scientifically, the atoms are barely differentiated between earth, life and sky. Boundaries blur further.

I propose, we are also the Great Spirit’s sense of itself, its consciousness. I don’t give this Spirit a sex or a personality. It is best described by science, which continues to reveal the magnificent complexity of the Great Spirit, as if It is getting to know Itself through us. Looking at it this way, our lives are precious purveyors of a grand consciousness, and we have good reason to nurture and respect our “voice” of the Great Spirit.

What I am searching for in life is a connection and balance of Spirit on all levels, a refinement of my experience of life down to its essence, without attachment, fear, or judgment. This idea comes from Buddhism, that our suffering is caused by attachment. The ultimate goal is to break the illusion of separateness from the Great Spirit, breaking the illusion of duality. Taoist thinking also observes the unity of opposites: good cannot exist without bad, black without white. These empirical truths are often elusive to our clinging, controlling natures. We are often distracted or unbalanced by daily life so as not to have a strong connection to the natural Spirit of our living.

I recently saw a bumper sticker which said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience”. I love that. It makes me feel more human, more forgiving, to think of it that way.

So, Spirit is a flow of direct experience of your life in all its facets, all its poetic inspiration, good and bad. The goal of a “spiritual person” is to embrace Spirit in a focused and refined way, with a fearless directness of experience, a depth of awareness, a greater consciousness of our connection with all life through that Spirit.

It’s a poetic coming together of awareness and experience, a joining of knowledge, reason, identity, mystery and infinity. Ideally, cultivating a healthy Spirit will lead one to achieve a balance of physical poise, mental and emotional confidence, and an open consciousness to all learning. With these tools, one can live a life of heart filled intentions and good action. When we embrace our spiritual gifts, our humanist natures can blossom.

It’s like being inside Beethoven’s music, except the music is your life.

PS After writing this, I found an article which states some of these same ideas, though in much more obscure language. It is a Theosophical view, written in 1966, and is included in a Theosophical website called WisdomWorld.

It’s Jon Favreau, called “Favs” by his friends, a 27 year old who plays video games to relax and likes to hang out at Starbucks or another coffee shop to write the brilliant speeches for our brilliant President [...]]]> While watching Obama’s excellent address to the joint session of congress, I wondered who wrote his terrific speech.

It’s Jon Favreau, called “Favs” by his friends, a 27 year old who plays video games to relax and likes to hang out at Starbucks or another coffee shop to write the brilliant speeches for our brilliant President Obama.

Jon Favreau is called Obama’s “Mind Reader”. I say he’s much more than that. How about the feeling of being a rhetorical force changing the world with words!! Still, writing the words which change the world takes work.

He is too busy to read much. “I’m embarrassed to say that since college” — Favreau graduated from Holy Cross in 2003 — “I’ve been so busy speechwriting for Kerry and then Barack that I haven’t been reading all the good literary stuff I used to read back in the day.” As for speechcraft, while he says the speeches of Bobby Kennedy are his favorites, he also says Peggy Noonan is his all-time favorite speechwriter. He cites Ronald Reagan’s Pointe du Hoc speech marking the fortieth anniversary of D-day as his favorite of hers, and in Noonan’s sugary epic, you can hear the faint echo of Barack Obama talking about his grandfather.

Jindal’s Republican response sounded so flat afterwords. He sounds more like a used car salesman than a leader of the free world. Ahh, Republicans, counting on people’s continued ignorance.

I love how both ABC and our local PBS station cut him off.

These days, almost everyone used web based mail programs, which are accessible from anywhere on any computer, rather than downloading messages to a desktop email program such [...]]]> I have recently become frustrated by the default mailto: default settings on my PC, which always open Outlook Mail when I click on an email address to send to.

These days, almost everyone used web based mail programs, which are accessible from anywhere on any computer, rather than downloading messages to a desktop email program such as Thunderbird or Eudora, or Outlook Express.

But in the settings of my browsers, Firefox and IE, the settings for email programs didn’t include any web mail programs.

I researched the situation, and found that most browsers need a little script to tell them to go to a web based email handler.

I’ve used Yahoo Mail for awhile now, and I like it.  But I have to pay to be able to access my other self hosted email accounts through pop mail.  And recently, yahoo mail has been acting up, slow to load, slow to send. But I intended to stick with it.

So I researched how to make Yahoo Mail the default “mailto:” program. I found that Firefox needed the addon “greasemonkey” with a little script “mail to webmail”. And it came in one package in a new version of the browser with a Yahoo toolbar.  So I downloaded and installed the new Firefox and enabled the webmailto feature.  I was all set!

But when I tried a mailto link, it opened in GMAIL! Yes, it’s a web mail handler, but not Yahoo. I have a gmail account, but I never use it.  I spent some time trying to direct the settings to Yahoo, and finally had to manually edit the script to set it to yahoo instead of gmail.  How it came set to gmail I will never know, since it was advertised to go to Yahoo.  Ahh, the mysteries of the Internet.  I’m sure there’s an explanation, but that’s water under the bridge, or bytes and bytes down the wires.

While attempting to resolve the situation, however, I considered moving to Gmail.  I went to my Gmail account and found that they also offer Pop mail access to my other addresses, but for FREE. It took me awhile, but I installed all my other emails (I have four others) on Gmail, and set up iGoogle as my home page, with a nice little addon to check my mail regularly right from my home page!

So, after all I went through to set mail to open Yahoo, now I wanted out!  That opened up a whole new can of worms!

Now I couldn’t get rid of Yahoo, no matter what I tried.  I deleted Yahoo Messanger, which came with the Firefox installation.  I manually edited the greasemonkey script back to Gmail, to no avail.  The main solution, adding a special script “Gmail Notifier” would have worked, except in Firefox, which I like best.

I was about to give up, at least for the day, and I did one more search for “how to make Gmail my default email program.  It came up with two decent posts, one slightly confusing one from The Digital Wanderlust and About.com article which cleared up the problem.  The About.com article shows clearly how to set Gmail as your default email program in Windows, Mac, and particularly in Firefox, where you have to do some funky stuff to get the little program into the browser.

The huge mystery of all this is: How bizarre that I had to manually add Gmail as a mailto choice after having trouble getting rid of it yesterday, when it seemingly installed itself in Firefox by seemingly “tagging along” with the new Firefox special “Yahoo” browser!