Spirit of the Law
Spirit of the Law
“The spirit of a group is determined by the emotions that dominate it.”
—Gustave Le Bon
Spirit of the Law
When I consider our conflicting voices, I can’t help but draw some interesting parallels. Back when I was a child, it was a common trope to have an angel sit on a person’s shoulder with a devil sitting opposite on their other shoulder. They would both whisper into the ear of the character owning those shoulders and would provide guiding advice of the expected good or evil nature.
The depiction was common because this concept of consciousness was passed along from a very long time ago until it eventually lost its meaning. Seeing it in our cartoons, we laugh it off as a concept of wrestling with our choices, but we failed to realize that this activity is truly taking place in our minds. Not necessarily angels and demons, of course, but at least of our own internal voices. The only difference from the cartoons is that we rarely get both voices at the same time. If we are in a bad mood, we’ll get the demon on our shoulder. If we’re in a good mood, we’ll get the angel.
Up until we start making a concerted effort to hear only the angelic voice of wisdom do we start to hear the angel while in a bad mood. We may still struggle to choose the best guiding voice in the moment, but beginning to even hear the voice is the first step. When angry, it is far too easy to hear all the awful things we want to do or say and it’s far too easy to make decisions we will later regret. But we can begin to hear that quiet voice telling us, You know this won’t help—wait until you are calm.
This concept of guidance goes back perhaps further than written history, and when we look at ancient spiritual practices, it gets oddly similar to everything I’ve shared regarding moods. Even the word spirit is aligning moods with voices, guides, and the power to create.
From Merriam Webster, a Spirit is:
1: An animating or vital principle giving life to physical organisms
2: A supernatural being or essence
3: Temper or disposition of mind or outlook
4: The immaterial sentient part of a person
As in definition #3, we often use spirit to describe emotional dispositions such as being in high spirits. Consider school spirit. The idea is that we have positive emotional feelings toward our school and thus proudly display its symbology and participate in collaborative or competitive events. This usage of spirit is very well aligned with our topic at hand. With that definition, instead of emotional regulation, we could call it spiritual regulation, and if we replace emotion with spirit, the whole first half of this book suddenly looks like a religious text in its own right. But let’s take a look at the other definitions.
Consider the “Holy Spirit” per the Christian Bible. The Holy Spirit is typically understood as a supernatural being or essence (definition #2), and yet one of the authors, Paul, often refers to walking in the Spirit, remaining in the Spirit, and altogether speaking as if these behaviors are something that takes effort on our part to abide in. The Holy Spirit, to Paul, was more than just an entity—it was definition #3: a disposition of mind—an outlook—or dare I even say, a mood? The Holy Spirit is also presumably one and the same as God, the creator, the one who spoke the world into existence with words (definition #1). So here we have 3 definitions found in a single entity of “The Holy Spirit”.
This could all be coincidence, of course, or it could be that they were picking up all the rules of how we create our feedback loops based upon our moods as previously described. Perhaps because they lacked the language and science to explain it, they attributed it to the gods in the same way earthquakes were seen as God’s wrath. Then again, maybe science is confirming the gods. Who is to say? It is surprisingly irrelevant since the guiding actions are the same unless one’s faith is not oriented around love.
I’d like to emphasize that I am not attempting to sell or diminish any particular faith in these realizations. The purpose in sharing is not for convincing of a religion, but to provide some introspection into what we do and don’t know. Some frameworks will work for some people better than others and the main goal is to grab hold of a framework that we can believe in and so align our voices. In such a way, I will logically refer to many perspectives to aid in this endeavor and it is entirely up to the reader to choose what perspectives aid them.
Back to spirits, this multi-faceted meaning is not isolated to any one faith or dogma. The combination of spiritual beings, emotions, and creation, is also not solely an English word phenomenon. The Greek word pneuma means breath, soul, and vital principle. It is used in Stoic philosophy as the fundamental element from which everything originated—a breath, our very soul, and the vital principles from which all things were created.
In Hebrew, the word רוּחַ (roo-akh) means spirit, wind, or breath—and serves as the very method of transmission for divine insight through overwhelming impressions. This sounds a lot like our emotional voices with or without words. The same layered meaning appears in Latin (spiritus), Sanskrit (prāṇa – प्राण), Chinese (qì – 氣), Japanese (ki – 気), and Arabic (rūḥ – روح). Across these traditions, this creative and spiritual force can be tied directly to emotional energy and focused intention.
What Christians call the Holy Spirit is literally written as “the Spirit of Holiness.” God is equated as being love itself and after each creation, this sentient emotion declared each thing good and in the very image of goodness itself. Until that sneaky demonic serpent presumably came along and ruined everything, of course.
The word demon actually originates from “daimon” in Greek which means a guiding spirit—or emotion, perhaps? Ancient philosophers initially used daimon positively to mean that internal nudging we often refer to as one’s conscience—aka the voices we’ve been referring to in this book. It used to be that spirits and daimons were understood specifically as these quiet guiding voices in our minds.
Spirits were felt as urges or emotions that guided us into action. This understanding slowly got lost over time as we began to think of them as physical creatures in a different realm—perhaps due to our aforementioned cartoons. By doing so, we began to equate spirits with boogeymen and fairytales or simply as angels and demons with finite capabilities rather than emotional guides. The word “angel” is simply the literal Greek word meaning messenger—nothing angelic about it in the way we think today. Elijah, a prophet of the Old Testament spoke of God’s guidance as a “still small voice” in the book of 1 Kings. Angels, demons, and spirits were often, though not always, understood as emotional nudges in our minds that gave us messages or guidance—both good or bad.
It appears that the spiritual world is filled with hearing the voices that are attached to our emotions. The only real choice from there is to decide if we want to give agency and consciousness to those voices outside ourselves. We know they exist, but are they separate from us? Are they entities in a spiritual world or are they just our own brains and the means by which psychology operates? Honestly, we may never know for sure, but this may provide all the insight we need either way.
We don’t need to decide if spirits are real as entities in another spiritual dimension or just a facet of our multi-agent minds per the Internal Family Systems (IFS) as described earlier. The response is the same either way: treat the voices as inputs as opposed to our own identity and make a conscious choice to the path which benefits us and creates a better reality.
That said, there is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to spiritual matters that is often overlooked due to the lens with which it is presented. While some may not like the idea of gods and demons, chakras, aliens, and bigfoots, or even Jesus or Mohammed, there are some interesting things to be found that indeed help us attune to hearing the right voices.
The means to curating our feedback loops are entirely mind over matter, as they say, but since we cannot simply force ourselves to believe in ourselves when we are in a bad mood, it takes some extra hoops to give us permission to have such “faith.” In such a way, spiritual practices and beliefs have many ways to give us those permission slips, and as we continue to read, we’ll see there are significant points of overlap between spiritual beliefs and science—they simply use different terms or attribute various reasons to describe the very real effects.
In many spiritual circles, people will speak of vibrations. They’ll talk about high vibrations and low vibrations. These vibrations can be thought of in an equivalent manner to our emotions and moods. High vibration is acting and feeling in moods of love and safety while low vibration is acting and feeling in moods of fear and anger. The spiritual and the sciences are in perfect alignment here.
When spiritual circles speak of energy, they are often speaking of the waves that push us into our currents or moods or speaking of the wave itself. Emotion has power to create opportunity, to destroy capability, and to move us to action. It is itself a form of energy that we literally feel. As we know, emotions can push through groups of people to make them riot as a mob or weep in solidarity. One’s energy, therefore, is the output of their “vibration.” Or, put another way, the emotion we feel from a person is due to their alignment with safety or fear—the mood from which they are operating—which is itself contagious.
Alignment or attunement is another common word in spiritual circles. Adherents often attempt to align with higher vibrations, or love, which is quite literally the same goal we’ve been discussing. It’s a scientifically valid endeavor.
With these parallels in mind, we can search for spiritual practices and re-interpret them in our mind as mood-selecting practices. When we dive into spiritual practices with this in mind, we get a widely different perspective than what we see in most religions today. So let us redefine some religious concepts into more scientific, spiritual concepts.
Consider the word “pray” found in the Bible. The Greek word used is a combination of two words: “pros” (meaning “in the direction of”) and “eúchomai” (meaning both “speaking one’s desire” and “expressing strong intent / vow”. It’s expressing a desire in alignment with the one whom you are beseeching. If we consider the idea that God is love, then prayer was truly an act of vowing and wishing alignment with love itself before dogma got ahold of it.
Prayer was also more often a meditative practice rather than simple statements or requests. They meditated and attuned with the higher vibration, so to say, as they made their needs known in alignment with that mood of love. With this in mind, prayer can be understood as meditation with intent toward alignment with love. Science now has a wealth of positive things to say about prayer when viewed as meditation.
Meditation practices are associated with improvements in attention, emotional regulation, and self-awareness1. A large meta-analysis of 47 trials with 3,500 participants found that mindfulness meditation improved anxiety, depression, and pain2. After 8 weeks of mindfulness training, working memory capacity was increased and focus improved3. MRI scans even showed a physical increase in gray matter in the brain which is associated with learning and memory4. But most importantly, meditation improves emotional regulation with physiological stress reduction5. As we know, that stuff kills. Put another way, prayer does all that. And by doing all that, things work out better for us. It’s no wonder, then, why people believe prayer works—it actually does—perhaps just not in the way we often expect.
Back in the 90s, meditation was more of a fringe hippie or eastern religious practice—it was not my born and raised Christian prayer and certainly not a science-backed behavior with multitudinous benefits. The practices of spirituality beat science to the punch and only until science chose to look at the spiritual practices did science finally choose to accept it and call it a normal psychological phenomenon.
Oddly enough, spiritual practices often precede science. Before we had germ theory, we had fears, phobias, and religious decrees regarding dead things and dirty things. Many ritualistic practices revolved around washing and keeping clear of dead animals before germ theory was understood. To not obey made one “stricken by God”—up until we discovered germs and realize we were stricken with disease, but functionally we were stricken either way.
I don’t wish, however, to take away all that is mystical and replace it with boring science. There are still many things that science cannot yet explain or which even yield very magical perspectives in their own right. There are even scientific discoveries that make us scratch our heads and provide us the very permission slip to believe in the common spiritual stance that everything works out for the best. This permission slip is perhaps the true key to success when aligned with these other principles.