Spirit: The Intangible Instinct

Science is clearly one of the most profound methods for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning.
-Ken Wilber, The Marriage Of Sense And Soul

It seems like common sense.

We know we have a body, and we know we have minds. But it often feels like there's something more to life. It feels like there's some almost intangible instinct within our minds and bodies that wants to lead us beyond the physical into the world of spirit.
Sometimes we call that a soul, but it seems safer to call it spirit, a word derived from the Latin word for breath. Just as a body is informed with breath, so body and mind are informed with spirit.

So, it follows that if the body seems to produce our minds, and our body is the product of the reproduction of our mother’s and father’s bodies, then our spirits are the product of something beyond. A first Father or Mother or both, or, in any case, a first
Spirit or Spirits of some sort.

We're not only told we have spirit by those in authority, but it certainly helps make sense of things. Our bodies die, and sometimes our minds go before our bodies. Do we exist for nothing? Is there something that remains of us after death beyond a corpse or ashes?

Religion and spiritual teachings comfort us. A comforted and meaning-filled spirit and mind certainly feel good in human bodies.

Still minds wonder about other things.

For instance, minds wondered about the sun.

For some races of early humans the sun was God, or at least, like Apollo in Greek myth, a god.

We would not exist without the sun. However we would not exist if our planet was closer to the sun, or further away. The sun is our main source of energy.

Early humans didn't need science to realize that.

They looked up and they saw the sun's progress across the sky. Since things seemed to pretty much stay still, it was easy to assume that the sun, and the stars, moon and planets traveled around us.

Earth, after all, was the center of the cosmos.