Since the dawn of time and the primary pulse, the universe has been propelling itself forward seeking to come to know itself. An absolute dynamism, always evolving and building on its previously achieved states. An unbounded complex entity seeking its non-existent limits.

Since the dawn of our unique form of self-reflective consciousness, perched on this garden planet,  always looking up, we have been struggling to answer life’s greatest questions. Currently, we're standing on the pillars of modern physics and over 2500 years of philosophy and Eastern wisdom and we are still trying to solve them.

Having been blessed with the capacity for conceptual thinking our minds have become ontology engines. As to the origins and purpose of our existence we've produced countless theories, mythologies and cosmologies yet none of these have ever satisfied us. Nor could they ever be the whole of the story. For every time we come up with an answer, we abstract from the totality-that-is and compartmentalize a story that by its nature could only ever be just another piece of the puzzle.

Since the advent of the written word, we've been keeping track of all of our theories of existence and our lines of questioning. With the invention of writing, we allowed ourselves to annihilate time and space and communicate in a way we never could before. Still to this day we study the texts like the Upanishads, some of the oldest surviving manuscripts that seek to explain our conscious experience.

With the Internet, we have nearly decimated time and space altogether. We communicate instantaneously, globally. The cumulative result of human endeavor led by its the impulse to explain. In seeking to know and understand ourselves, we’ve built civilization as we know it. All of our institutions and inventions, products of a collective effort directed towards Understanding. And yet, still we don’t know.

It is our unique gift of thoughtful cognition that has allowed us to divide up the whole and manipulate its parts. And so with this, we can say that all human beings are guided by three spirits. These are; the religious, the artistic, and the scientific.

<3 Guiding Spirits

The religious spirit is concerned with meeting life fully and totally. It is about a felt sense of belonging in the universe and having the comfort of certainty in one's general psychology. This spirit is the most ancient in our collective history. It is uniquely coupled to our ancestors and their original and pure perceptual state. Most assuredly, it goes even farther back beyond our species, to when we had a more primitive and animalistic consciousness. To a time when our concern was not for a hypothesized future nor a forgotten past, but rather, one's immediately lived experience — the present moment.

Our second guiding spirit is the artistic . It's concerned with the world of form and of the movement within it. This spirit is felt as a yearning to participate and manipulate this world. To create and build and to see one's results with their own eyes. There's a certain curiosity behind this impulsive spirit as it is always testing the boundaries and limits of its environment. The earliest manifestations of the artistic spirit can be seen in the most primitive forms of tool-making and rock-art. Here, we can demarcate a point in time of when we began to realize we could manipulate and change our environment. The rest, history.

Our final and most recent guiding spirit is the scientific. A combination of the first two, a yearning to understand and a desire to test and manipulate the world of form. Yet constrained by Nature's logic and Her physical constants. This spirit harbors a necessity for coherency. It is the healthy skepticism that keeps the world in-line and requires all relative knowledge to make sense. The first and most visible sign of the Spirit can be seen in the reality testing and experimentation of the ancient Greeks and received its first crowning achievement in the form of Aristotle's logic. This powerful new spirit would later usher in the modern world. Today, we see it all around us.

Whether known or not, these spirits, these psychological principles, guide each and every human being on the planet. Although, depending on personality and their unique psychology, one of these spirits will play a more dominant role in each individual. Whichever one you honor and cultivate is up to you. But those who honor all three walk the path of the knowledge, knowing their impulsive nature is identical to the Ground of All-Being that gave rise to it.

We would do well to remember that these spirits are but convenient abstractions plucked out from the flux — the totality-that-is. The truth of the world, however, has always been and forever will be, united as one and unified in the Absolute Motion of the universe.

If you've enjoyed this post and would like to learn more about this topic, please consider purchasing my ebook from Amazon.com entitled: Our Spirits: The Impulse to Explain. Thanks. 🙂