David Galin
Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute
University of California, San Francisco

ABSTRACT

The concept spirit can be a useful addition to the scientific repertoire if it can be formulated, even approximately, within the frames of reference of the scientifically-minded community. I explore its grounding in subjective experience; examine its source in fundamental cognitive processes; and speculate on why spiritual experience evolved and has persisted, and why it has been widely rejected as a legitimate scientific concern. I ask, "How do ordinary people experience, name, and react to what they call the spirit and the spiritual?", rather than "What is the ‘true’ nature and ‘objective’ properties of the spirit and the spiritual". This leads to a conceptual reframing that puts spirit back into a natural rather than a supernatural context.

I argue that the experience of spirit is a special case of our capacity to experience implicit organization, part of our specialization for detecting patterns. The evolution of such an experience is adaptive; the span of our consciousness is too limited to explicitly represent the full complexity of our world. The experience of implicit organization radically condenses this immensity for use, just as a concise equation compresses the details of a complex trajectory. Whether or not an experience is labeled "spiritual" depends on the amount of hidden order perceived; e.g., experiences of Grand Canyon or Chartres cathedral contain more hidden order than a child’s jigsaw puzzle. But an "appearance of the spirit" depends on the observer’s capacity as well as on the stimulus. Each experience we have of the implicit organization of an entity or event spans some fraction of the maximum dimensionality that we can conceive or apprehend. The greater the fraction of one’s capacity spanned, the greater the degree of spirituality one will attribute to the experience.

This reframing of the experience of spirit suggests the reframing of the putative "external" object of such an experience. Today’s technical vocabulary often refers to aspects of wholeness, including such terms as: nonlocality, field, emergent property, hologram, global, goodness-of-fit. The term spirit can be a useful, precise addition to this list. The spirit of an entity is the dynamic organization of that entity over its full dimensionality, including the whole set of its inter- and intra-level interactions (emergent properties).

Definitions are always incomplete; this limited reframing may be of little interest to those seeking the experience itself, not concepts. But, for whatever may be possible within the limits of concepts, this formulation may be helpful.

1) "Spirit" carries a great weight of meanings, only partially connected to institutional religions. The term is pervasive and evocative. Even in our allegedly scientifically-minded, physicalist-materialist culture 70% of Americans say that they believe in God, and 80% say that they believe in angels (Shorto 1997). For some people spirit touches on foundational ideas and sensitive feelings that they hold sacred. For others the word is irritating or anathema; undefined and undefinable, outmoded, superstitious nonsense, even dangerous nonsense. In many of its usages, particularly those associated with organized religions, the term spirit has been found by some to be incompatible or incommensurable with the concepts of natural science. These "incompatabilists" include professionals in both science and in religion. For most people the concept behind the word is confusing, unarticulated, highly and ambivalently charged.

2) One reason for thoughtful people to be interested in the concept spirit is that it is so ubiquitous in common speech and thought. Another reason is that spirit has played a major role for millennia in accounts of how the world works, including the accounts of western science in the Age of Enlightenment. A wealth of observations, practices, and theory development has been brought to bear on it, down to our culture and time. While it is true that spiritual concerns have been used by charlatans and fanatics to exploit the fear, guilt, and greed of susceptible people, so have scientific concerns ( e.g., genetics, diet and health, "protective" nuclear armaments). But neither science nor spirit need be dismissed or disparaged on that account.

3) The purpose of this essay is to rehabilitate use of the concept spirit in natural science. I argue that it can be a useful addition to the scientific repertoire if it can be formulated, even approximately, within the frames of reference of the scientifically-minded community. I will explore its grounding in subjective experience; examine its source in human cognitive processes; and speculate on why it has evolved, has persisted, and has been widely rejected as a legitimate scientific concern. My approach is through descriptive psychology rather than philosophy; I begin by asking, "how do ordinary people experience, name, and react to what they call the spirit and the spiritual?", rather than by asking "what is the ‘true’ nature and ‘objective’ properties of the spirit and the spiritual". There is no reason for either believers or non-believers to feel threatened: a psychologically and socially significant subjective experience can be examined without assuming that it is or is not valid (James 1902). From an examination of the psychological experience I am led to a definition of what such an experience usually refers to.

4) People in all cultures and at all times have had experiences (or intuitions) of something that they have named with a term like spirit. Although the term has many senses, two of the most familiar and important are a Universal or "Great" Spirit, which is understood as pervading or presiding over or sourcing the universe, and Lesser Spirits associated with particular places, events, and objects (including individual humans). Examples of these usages for spirit are common in everyday English: team spirit; Holy Spirit; Ghandi’s spirit, the spirit of a great corporation; the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. It is the same for the adjective spiritual: "He is a spiritual man"; "Grand Canyon is a spiritual place"; "Harry’s funeral (or the concert last night) was a spiritual event". These can all be looked on as metaphoric uses of the same word with somewhat different implications. As is usual with our unconscious use of metaphor to express and think about abstractions, various applications of the metaphor are taken as literal descriptions, which leads to ambiguity or incoherence. To sort out the confusion it helps to identify the literal meanings on which the metaphors are based (Lakoff and Johnson 1998).

the sense of "something more": COGNITIVE BASIS ANd Possible EVOLUTIONARY RATIONALE.

5) Many scholars have suggested that there is a central core in the agglomeration of meanings around spirit. The core concept is that there is something more to the universe than what appears to us in our daily practical activities, more than what we can perceive and manipulate. This concept is not reasoned or deduced; it comes out of a common subjective experience, often vivid, unbidden, and compelling, although one cannot readily say just what this intuited more might be. Such difficulty verbalizing should be familiar to most people from the common "tip-of-the-tongue" experience, in which one cannot give the name one is searching for, although one has a sense of certainty that the name is there and a sense of specificity which allows one to immediately reject other candidates. Despite its supposed special ineffability, the experience of "more" in relation to spirit has been described in detail in this century by William James (1902), Rudolf Otto (1917/1950), Emil Durkheim (1912/1995), Mircea Eliade (1957), and Joseph Campbell (1959), among many others. It has been described with all its degrees and varieties, with the emotions and interpretations that follow on it, and their social consequences. In this paper I am concerned only with the basic cognitive processes, and the reader interested only in personal aspects of religious studies will perhaps find this somewhat arid.

6) There is some confusion about things that are thought to be "ineffable" and those that are not. When a person says that something is hard to put into words, (e.g., the feeling of more, or spirit) the skeptic suspects an evasion covering poor observation, muddled thinking, or that the "something" does not actually exist. The skeptic might think that at best it signals simple vagueness and ambiguity unacceptable in science. Actually, the entries for ineffable in Roget’s Thesaurus are under the heading of "abnormality" along with extraordinary and mythical; under "wonder" with unmentionable and indescribable, as well as under "sanctity" with sacred and the holy and the numinous. Thus, the consensus of usage seems to be that ineffability signals special importance. However, the specialness is just an aura hovering over the basic meaning of ineffable; the definition from the Latin is simply "not expressible in words". The confusion arises as usual when a matter of degree is treated as an absolute. In fact, no experience is completely expressible in words! Nothing is absolutely effable, neither something as mundane as a mouthful of mashed potatoes nor something as "scientific" as an electron or time. In this, spiritual matters are not different than other matters. But ineffability is also always only partial; verbal accounts can communicate much or little, depending on the richness of the knowledge structures already shared by the speaker and listener. When people do have knowledge structures in common they can communicate to some extent about dogs, electrons, spirit, even about wine. That is why we have trouble communicating only some things in words, and trouble communicating them to some people more than to others. We get our basic vocabulary by pointing to objects and by demonstrating actions. Some things, like abstractions and inner states, are harder to point to or demonstrate. The usefulness of language is in being just complete enough for the situation’s purposes, not absolutely complete. The aim of this essay is to make spirit more effable, not completely effable.

7) The sense of "more" can be understood as part of our specialization for pattern perception. We search for patterns (i.e., organizations, gestalts) everywhere, and for any ambiguous field we make up a best guess, hypothesis, or model; we find patterns even when they are not there. When we cannot find organized wholes we impose a plausible organization on the most promising set of apparently separate parts. An important variety of our pattern seeking is to infer linkages between events (which we call purposes, or causes (Rosch 1994)).

8) Much of this activity associated with pattern seeking can go on outside of awareness. When it does come into awareness as a complex sense of there is more here it may include many specific experiences; e.g., the feeling of the meanings implied by current ambiguous input; the feeling of familiarity; the feeling of being on-the-right-track. Such feelings are important because they appear to guide our search strategies (James 1882/1950, Mangan 1991, 1993). Of course, in a particular instance, they may or may not be correct. I have discussed this group of feelings previously in a taxonomy of awarenesses based on the types of information they carry (Galin 1994).

9) These feelings are highly motivating. We eagerly pursue hints of meaning (cf. the crossword puzzle industry), and feel great satisfaction when we grasp whatever seemed just out of reach. What is it "to grasp a meaning"? Finding organization is one sense of it. According to William James the meaning of a thing (an object, event, idea or word) is given by the network of other knowledge and relations in which it is embedded. When we are confronted with a complex field, we call it meaningful if we can determine enough of the relations of its parts to organize it into a whole (a unit, or entity); if not, we call it ambiguous. We seem to be wired to like unity and wholeness, and the process of resolving ambiguity to achieve it, as shown by our preferences for closed gestalts such as circles, closed musical cadences, resolved tonal sequences, and detective novels. The larger or more salient the ambiguity, the more satisfying is its resolution. Perhaps this is the basis for the ubiquitous yearning for union with something like a Great Spirit; the nature or meaning of the whole universe is the largest possible and most salient ambiguity (Galin 1996).

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE EXPERIENCES OF "MORE" AND OF "SPIRIT"

10) How do people classify an experience, a place, a person, or an attitude as spiritual? If it is correct as argued that the experience and concept of spirit is cognitively developed upon the mundane feeling of something-more-here, then what else must be added to turn more-here into spirit? One feature that seems to qualify or disqualify events and objects as spiritual is the range of scale in time and space that they evoke. This aspect spans depth (resolution) and breadth (scope); it is exemplified in now-trite expressions such as that "the spirit is concerned with the smallest sparrow as well as the celestial spheres...". If something includes the micro and the intergalactic, the momentary and the eternal, then we tend to call it spiritual. Many people say they have a spiritual experience looking out and down into Grand Canyon, up into the night sky, looking through a microscope or a telescope, or contemplating the sequence of their generations and evolution backward and forward in time. But what of other dimensions than time and space? Life/death, being/nothingness, love/isolation,... The experience of spirit seems to occur to people whenever they engage with the full range of a great polarity, a pair of opposites with great existential implications, like man/woman, moment/eternity, good/evil. I suggest that all the dimensions that we (people) can conceive or apprehend are potentially involved.

11) Note that, as in the examples above, people seem to experience spirituality as a matter of degree rather than all or none. It is as if we experience in each entity or event some fraction of the maximum dimensionality that we can conceive or apprehend, and that fraction determines the degree of spirituality which we attribute. If it is a small fraction, as in the case of crossword puzzles or detective novels, we sense it as something more; if it is a sufficiently large fraction, as in the case of Chartres’ cathedral, Grand Canyon, the Nazi Holocaust, or a great romantic love, we tend to experience it as "of the spirit".

SPIRIT AND RELIGION

12) Spirit should not be confused with institutional religion. The connection of experiences of spirit to religion in its myriad aspects is described concisely by Eliade in his classic The Sacred and the Profane (1959). He asserts that across history and geography humans have created interpretations of their experiences of spirit that are homologous. The basic form is that the universe is divided into the prosaic, ordinary, profane part which we perceive and manipulate, and the "other" part, the locus of the something more that we sense, called sacred. The two parts are not completely separated. Power and efficacy is held to come from the sacred part, and in that sense the sacred is more real, more causal, more fundamental than the ordinary, and therefore held as the highest value. These interpretations tend to become institutionalized and the institutions take on a life of their own, characterized by creed (beliefs), cult (practices), and code (social prescriptions), not to be confused with the individual’s experience of spirit.

13) This two-part sacred/profane schema is not foreign to our science. We have many accounts (interpretations) of domains of otherness such as the quantum, the molecular, the electromagnetic, peculiarly linked to the ordinary human-scale world we can directly perceive and manipulate. Many scientists believe that fundamental power and causal efficacy are to be found in those domains and give rise to apparent effects in the ordinary human domain. These other domains are given the appropriate awe (and funding). Most scientists have a monist faith that all the domains can be brought together under one account. So far this is just a promissory note, frequently renegotiated over the centuries.

14) In almost all cases of hierophany (an appearance of the sacred), there is an observer - the individual. Scholars of the sacred have often ignored the observer, asking only about the nature of that which appeared. But observation is an interactional, relational event, and we can ask what is the nature of the observer that he can participate in such an event. People differ in the dimensions they can conceive or apprehend and what they find salient. This may account for the wide differences of opinion on spiritual matters; a petit bourgeois may experience a visit to the Bank of America as spiritual.

15) If, as I propose, the experienced degree of spirituality is based on the fraction of total personal dimensionality engaged, then it follows as a corollary that, as a person acquires more dimensionality by maturation, education, or experience, their spirituality becomes more nuanced. But the intensity or total possible range of spiritual experience would be the same for the "primitive", the young, and the unlettered as for the sophisticated elder; 100% is the maximum for everybody. The little children, having less dimensionality to engage, will experience a large fraction much more often than fully differentiated adults. Perhaps this accounts in part for the nostalgia and reverence for "childlike experience". As far as I know, no appropriate and reliable metric has been developed in this area.

16) In its interactional aspect religion is no different from psychology (perception), or physics (observation elicits wave-function collapse), or philosophy post Kant (categories are built-in), or mathematics and logic (Gödel), or aesthetics, or love - all are observer-dependent. Thus in religious experiences, as in the experiences of love, aesthetics, or physics, the observer often reifies its content, or projects the properties of the experience into the stimulus as an independently existing object. We need not, but we tend to.

PROPERTIES OF THE "MORE": THE WIND METAPHOR:

17) No matter how intense, more is very abstract, and to think about or express it we must use metaphor, as we do for all abstractions (Lakoff and Johnson 1998). Many metaphors are used; I emphasize the metaphor of wind because of its ubiquity in our culture. It gives rise to our modern word spirit, as in the root of respiration. Etymologically the word spirit is related to the cluster of air, wind (moving or dynamic air), breath (the mini-wind linked to animal life), and thus to life itself. The Old Testament describes the Beginning before the creation of the universe in the second line of the Book of Genesis, saying, "God-wind hovered over the waters". Wind is the Hebrew ruach, translated into the Greek pneuma, thence to the Latin Spiritus, and the English spirit.

18) This wind-cluster has many obvious literal properties that made it adaptable in metaphor to stand for the experienced something more:

--- invisible, unseen, though not necessarily hidden: but yet omnipresent, not localized in space or time, hence unbounded.

--- powerful, forceful, causal, yet most delicate, subtle, refined.

And by way of the linking of wind-breath-life the metaphor can include the less obvious properties of:

--- vital, vitality, energy-force.

--- supremely valuable, essence, God.

22) Please remember that we are still discussing the psychology of an experience and the metaphors used to convey the experience; we are not yet talking about any possible independent entity to which the experience might refer and therefore I have not examined the accuracy of its reference or the aptness of its metaphors. Some skeptics hold that spirit does not refer to anything at all.

SPECULATION ON HOW SPIRIT CAME TO BE EXCLUDED FROM NATURAL SCIENCE: TRANSCENDENCE VS. IMMANENCE, hierarchy vs. COMPLEXITY

23) Until recently natural science has relied on a metaphoric model, the universe as hierarchy, that like all metaphors has limited application. In this model big things are made up of (consist of, are the results of, and sometimes nothing but) smaller things, and the smaller things are arrangements of still smaller units. As Simon (1964), Wimsatt (1976), and many others have shown, the hierarchical model works very well where its metaphor is apt. It has allowed scientists to "split off" a level in the hierarchy (such as atoms, molecules, societies, or galaxies) and analyze the interactions of the elements at that particular scale, assuming minimal interactions with other levels. For example, the domains defined by atomic physics, electricity and magnetism, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology, geology, and cosmology each have their own narrow span in space and time, whether it is angstroms, meters, or parsecs, or femtoseconds, hours, or millennia. This strategy works to the extent that subcomponents and wider contexts can be treated as non-existent, or negligible because their effects are small or invariant (Simon 1964). Natural science inherited the hierarchy model from antiquity (matter, plants, animals, humans, angels, archangels, seraphim, cherubim, God), and in earlier times causal potency was envisioned primarily as top-down (God to humans to matter) rather than bottom-up, as it is today (quarks to molecules to humans...). I believe that the concept spirit and the experience that points to it have been progressively excluded from natural science in recent centuries because it was seen, consciously or unconsciously, as incompatible with this metaphor. The ad hominem and political reasons for rejection are less important.

24) Throughout Western history there has been a debate as to whether spirit is better characterized as transcendent to the rest of the hierarchical universe (set apart and above, at the highest level in the hierarchy), or as immanent in the hierarchical universe (pervading all levels, inherent, in-dwelling). Both have been used, but in Western societies transcendence has dominated, perhaps because it seemed simplest to set the Great Spirit off at the top. In fact, the term hierarchy comes from Greek roots meaning "rule by the sacred or consecrated" (i.e., the priests). As reductionist scientists developed more and more sufficiently successful causal accounts at the lower levels, they were less and less willing to attribute power and control to phenomena they had assigned to the upper levels, such as Spirit, Value, and Mind. Bottom-up explanations eventually were given greater primacy than top-down explanations (Wimsatt 1976, pp. 243-245). In their enthusiasm, many scientists and some of the lay public have come to believe that complete explanation, prediction, and control will soon be achieved at what is currently conceived to be the lowest levels, so that finally the higher levels can be dismissed as useless, or mere figures of speech, or declared imaginary or non-existent (e.g., P. S. Churchland 1986, P. M. Churchland, 1996: see Galin 1998a for further discussion).

25) Now however, for many purposes, the hierarchical metaphor is outgrown. Much of our universe has been found to have a more complex organization than simple hierarchy. As Wimsatt has shown (1976a, pp. 251 ff.), even levels, the building-blocks of hierarchies, cannot always be identified or assigned an order in complex systems. Intricate feedback networks among the "levels" are so dense that any particular parsing of them into "levels" seems arbitrary, although it may have limited heuristic value. If everything is reciprocally connected, who is the boss? "A" is determined by arrangements of "B" which are determined by "C" which is critically dependent on "A". "The fact that anatomical organs can be viewed as made up of physiological processes and physiological systems as made up of anatomical components suggests that neither view is complete...." (Wimsatt, p. 255).

26) With increasing frequency, contemporary models seem more congenial to immanence than transcendence. They emphasize complexity and non-locality, with control being distributed widely, or acting through global properties at many levels and across levels. Non-linear causal thickets have replaced linear causal chains, bottom-up as well as top-down (Wimsatt 1976, pp. 251 ff.). Examples include W. J. Freeman’s neurophysiology drawing heavily on non-linear dynamics and chaos theory (1992,,1995, 1997), connectionism and parallel distributed processing in cognitive science (Rumelhart and McClelland 1985), and applications of quantum physics conceptions such as the E.P.R. non-locality and Bose-Einstein condensates to psychology and biology (e.g., Hameroff and Penrose 1995). In the last decade the influential Santa Fe Institute has focused explicitly on developing a science of complex self-organizing systems, bridging disciplines as diverse as physics, economics, and biological evolution (e.g., Wheeler 1990, Kaufman 1995, Holland 1997; for a readable popular account see Waldrop 1992). The hierarchical metaphor is such a useful heuristic that it is unlikely to be totally displaced, just as Newtonian mechanics has not been replaced by Relativity Theory or Quantum Mechanics. However, in areas where it is not an apt metaphor, it has been outmoded by the development of complexity theory. Immanence seems to be creeping back in where it was excluded. The more that we experience (and name as spirit) was never well-captured by "higher" in a hierarchical sequence of levels of organization.

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF SPIRIT

27) Now, having examined and defined the experience of spirit, important enough in itself, we are ready to consider a new formulation of what the concept spirit might refer to, independent of human experiencers and their interpretations and projections. While being careful not to reify our favorite new metaphors, we can ask, as is common in science, "Is there another frame of reference in which the same data can be expressed"? If the new frame of reference has useful properties that the old one lacked, (e.g., polar vs. Cartesian coordinates, Arabic vs. Roman numerals), then we may be able to do more with it, without taking the new frame of reference as absolute.

28) As suggested above, just such a frame of reference seems to be taking shape in the scientific community in the notions about complexity and self-organizing adaptive systems, still in a relatively infant stage. Two of the central concepts are deeply entwined: organization and emergence. They have technical meanings as well as their common ones, but they are not mysterious or difficult. Excellent rigorous discussions of emergence are given in Wimsatt 1976a, and Holland 1997. In brief, the organization of a system is just the relationships of all its parts or properties, and changes in the organization can itself give rise to new system properties. A property of a system is called emergent if it depends on the organization (interactions) and is not a property of any of the parts taken separately. Holland (1997) describes principles governing the development of emergent properties in self-organizing systems that allow them to become much more complex than the elements they started with.

29) I propose defining spirit in terms of organization, which is the core concept of the new scientific metaphor of the universe as a complex self-organizing system. I propose that what is intuited and signaled in the experience of "more", and often named as the spirit of an entity, corresponds to the dynamic organization of that entity over its full dimensionality, including the whole set of its inter- and intra-level interactions (its emergent properties). By dynamic organization I mean to include functionality (what it does) and energetics, as well as the medium in which it is implemented. People half-jokingly or completely seriously impute intent and consciousness of some sort to complex systems, natural (animism: rivers, forests, weather) or artificial (cars, computers, totems and icons). For some, spirit implies these qualities, and my definition of spirit without regard to consciousness or intent will at first seem odd. My purpose is maximum generalizability, and besides, we know next to nothing about consciousness or intent.

30) This definition has a number of advantages. Most important, it clarifies that the experience of spirit can be adaptive, giving us some grasp of the interactional dependence that is our world. Without it we repeatedly fall for single-factor solutions which so often make things worse. The span of our consciousness is too limited to explicitly represent such massive complexity: the experience of spirit radically condenses or summarizes this immensity for use, just as a concise equation compresses the details of a complex trajectory. I suggest that this may be a reason for it to have evolved and persisted and been assigned so much of the resources in every culture.

31) Second, the sense of most common usages of spirit are preserved. For example, the notion of Great Spirit corresponds to the organization and interactions of the whole universe, and lesser spirits correspond to the organization of lesser entities however they are defined. Phrases such as "team spirit", "the spirit of the Constitution, "Grand Canyon is a spiritual place", all can be used as usual, but now with greater clarity; the team, the Constitution, the Canyon, are each understood to be enormously complex dynamic systems, whose patterns of often fragile internal relations give them vitality.

32) Third, this definition brings out interesting new connections. In previous papers in a neurological and psychological context, I have urged that we view a person’s self as the organization per se of all the person’s subsystems rather than as just another subsystem, as many theorists would have it (Galin 1992, 1994). Under the present definition a person’s self and spirit turn out to be the same thing; organization. As we understand better how to describe and measure both qualitative and quantitative changes in organization, we can understand more of the intuitions behind phrases like "development of self", "spiritual development", "inspiration", and "the spiritual emptiness and hunger of our culture". To the extent that a person is not an absolute entity, but rather embedded in larger systems, the personal spirit is embedded in the larger spirit, as religious traditions would generally have it, but without the traditional dualism or mystery. This may help us understand the common but inscrutable advice that one must "transcend the self" to know God. With spirit thus defined in contemporary conceptual terms, the ubiquitous human experiences related to it can be integrated within the frameworks of natural science, and studied.

33) Definitions are always incomplete; the most basic, and sometimes the best, definition may be ostensive (pointing). But even pointing does not always eliminate quarrels; the Sufis have a saying, "If a teacher is pointing to the moon, don’t get hung up looking at his finger". Of course, the limited definition of spirit I have offered may be of little interest to those who are seeking the experience itself, not concepts. Some traditions, such as Buddhism, that conceive of states of mind beyond concept, beyond self/other and subject/object, have developed physico-psycho-social disciplines to achieve such states. But for those who want to explore whatever may be possible concerning spirit within the limits of concepts my formulation may be helpful.

THE CONTRAST CLASS: "NON-SPIRITUAL

34) Reductionist science has had many successes guided by the hierarchical metaphor, isolating and reifying one "level" at a time. But to the extent that a chunk or aspect of the interdependent manifold which is our universe is taken out of the manifold and treated as an unarticulated whole at a single level, it loses its spiritual quality (its over-all organization in depth and breadth). In formal terms, the dimensionality of an ensemble is reduced if you limit range or resolution to such an extent that emergent properties are lost. If you try to abstract a (relatively) local subsystem out of a complex entity (i.e., treat a partially decomposable system as completely decomposable (Simon 1964)), you truncate the spirit of the thing, just as you would truncate "vision" if you leave out color. Truncation may or may not suit our purposes. I suggest that modern man has his spirit truncated to the extent that he accepts the identity offered by reductionists who see him as just his body, or just his brain, or just his chemistry, without the larger contexts. In contrast, an augmented spirit may be found when entities are examined from a perspective that marries the macro and the micro, the inner and the outer, the concrete and the abstract, the manifest and the possible. Or, as I think Jung would say, the union of the opposites.

CODA - SO WHAT?

35) The conceptual reframing that I have proposed puts spirit back into a natural rather than a supernatural context. Natural scientists and plain folks will both benefit. Science-talk is evolving from nearly exclusively reductionist descriptions in terms of composition ("what is it made of?") toward more frequent use of holistic descriptions including contexts ("what is it part of?"). The holistic description does not reify one particular slice through the manifold as "ontologically fundamental". Today technical vocabulary refers more often to aspects of wholeness, including such terms as: nonlocality, field, emergent property, hologram, global, goodness-of-fit. The term spirit can be a useful, precise addition to this list. The spirit of an entity is the dynamic organization of that entity over its full dimensionality, including the whole set of its inter- and intra-level interactions (emergent properties).

36) Similarly, the psychology of the subjective experience of spirit can be framed more precisely: Each experience we have of an entity or event spans some fraction of the maximum dimensionality that we can conceive or apprehend. The greater the fraction of one’s capacity scpanned, the greater the degree of spirituality one will attribute to the experience. Thus an "appearance of the spirit" depends on the observer’s capacity as well as on the stimulus. The evolution of such an experience is seen to be adaptive; a response to a potentially important aspect of the world around us. We need presume nothing about how well a particular experience maps the dynamic organization of the entity in question, but similarly, we need not presume that it is vacuous or totally projected.

37) Most important for psychology, the experiences of spirit will be more available for study. The interminable dualist/monist polarization can be set aside. Western natural science need no longer cut itself off from examining the thousands of years of observation, practices, and theoretical development that has gone on in the context of the world’s religions. If natural science is no longer limited to entities at isolated hierarchical levels, it will not be cut off from plain folks’ compelling experiences of "more", of integration, and of wholenesses.

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