WillSpirit!

This post is actually the About writeup that I put on my website the first day. It explores why WillSpirit seemed appropriate as a blog name. What I think this blog is ‘about’ changes regularly, so this old piece needs to go somewhere else. Placing it at the head of my blog entries will preserve it as part of my archives and also provide a useful introduction to anyone who wants to start at the beginning and read through. The piece shows my initial concepts, which have since evolved. I continue, for instance, to work on the connection between spirit and feelings. The word spirit sometimes has the connotation soul, and that is not what I meant in this first entry. At that time, I was aware that what seems like our soul is sometimes just our feeling side influencing us in its usual subtle and nonverbal way. That is why I thought the word spirit to be an apt counterpart to will. But as time has passed my attitudes have changed and I’ve explored spirit and soulfulness from other angles, including metaphysical ones. In any event, spirit has multiple usages. Consider: “she is in fine spirits today!” and: “he is such a spirited boy!”  Both show our automatic connection of spirit with emotion.

With that as background, here is what I wrote as my initial musing:

The idea, so far, is to explore how to bring our thinking selves and our feeling selves into harmony. The thinking self (what I call the WILL) works with abstraction of sensory information, logic, and words. It constructs models of reality and then makes decisions based on its interpretation of those constructions. Its decision making style is best described as analytical. The feeling self (I call it the SPIRIT, for reasons that I’ll explain at some later time) uses feelings, emotional logic, and symbols to interpret reality on a moment-to-moment basis, and then makes choices based on a synthesis of what it understands about the current internal and external states. Its decisions are often called ‘intuitive’. 

Both the will and the spirit have value. We make the best decisions, and feel the best, when both are active. Unfortunately, that seems to be a hard balance to achieve. Because our society has historically valued analytical as opposed to intuitive reasoning, the will tends to be overvalued. It often believes it is the only part of the mind that matters. It also has a thing about control, and seems to have trouble with the ‘big picture’. As a result, it often refuses to accept that it must share decision making with the spirit. In fact, it is not uncommon for the will to deny the existence of the spirit altogether. It values things that are ‘right’ (as opposed to ‘wrong’) and ‘true’ (and not ‘false’). It sees things in black and white. 

The spirit, for its part, is fully aware of the will. It just doesn’t take it seriously. It believes analysis to be shallow and unable to capture what really matters in life. Because it operates on moment-to-moment feelings, it has a hard time projecting into the future, and seeing long term consequences. The spirit emphasizes love and altruism. It knows that black and white are abstractions, and sees situations in shades of gray. Even better, it knows color. 

One problem with this work is the tendency to make value judgements. The will is a newer part of the brain. It has specific skills, but it is not fundamentally who we are. This does not make it bad, however. It just means we have to recognize it for its true nature, and make use of it without identifying too closely with it. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has appeared in the psychotherapy world within the past few years. It is based on the premise that we need to detach from our thinking. It is worth exploring. Here is one link to get you started.

It is tempting to equate the will and the spirit with the left and the right brain, respectively. The right brain does seem to have a more symbolic and intuitive style, and the left brain a more analytical and verbal one. However, it is not necessarily helpful to make that anatomical connection, even if it is valid. We do not experience our brains as divided in half down the middle. Instead we recognize shifting influences within ourselves that roughly fall into these two categories. 

The point of this website is to explore how to harmonize the forces within, for the good of ourselves, our communities, and our planet. We need the will to be directive and defined, and we need the spirit to be creative and flexible. I believe the battle between these two parts of ourselves (you might call them subroutines, to cautiously use a computer analogy) causes much of the discord on this planet. Until the will listens to the spirit, and the spirit goes along with the will, we will remain confused, angry, and looking for someone to blame for our internal frustration and unhappiness. 

I hope to explore these issues in my writing, and in exploring like-minded communities and resources. So here I am, just getting started, trying it out.