One of the topics I was most interested in at the beginning of my journey was understanding how the human being was structured. I felt that human spiritual structure needed to be redefined in order to appropriately cultivate spirituality.
I found too many discordances and confused definitions of "spirit", "soul", and "mind" provided by science, philosophy and various religions, both ancient and modern.
In my personal research, which began at an early age, I was repeatedly confronted with contrasting and very unclear concepts regarding human beings' spiritual sides, or rather those constituent elements of the human being not considered physiological elements. Within both scientific texts, sceptical of the spiritual point of view, and in religious texts, particularly New Age texts, I have always had difficulty finding definitions of what animates living beings, namely the essence of life itself, how it is defined and whether something else besides it exists.
Some scientific texts tend to define the wonderful activities of microscopic cell life as "chemical reactions".
To look inside a cell is to be fascinated by the activities that take place unbeknownst to us: from the energy production of the mitochondria, which powers all functions of the cell to the cleaning efforts of the lysosomes, which degrade and digest foreign elements; from cell reproduction by cell splitting, which involves many complex actions, to many other activities, all of which are perfectly designed, organised and orchestrated, certainly not randomly.
Every element within the cell is not inert, gravitated, nor immobile on whatever side of the cell; on the contrary, every element within the cell is engaged in its own activity, somehow conscious of what it is and of what it must do to survive and to ensure the survival of the cell until the end of its own life.
Although cellular life is a part of every living being, the living being is unaware of it... that is, life at the cellular level has its own consciousness, quite distinct from Individual Consciousness.
I remember that a few days after I met Pragnil, I spoke to the son of the man who later became my shaman master. I was doing a sort of amateur anthropological investigation into aboriginal beliefs; it was the dawn of the Anandayana project.
“…
I asked M. what the Shipibo believed regarding the constituent parts of human beings before the arrival of Christianity; he said to me, - My father explained to me that we, the shamans, work with the spirits to heal the spirits of the sick, but there is nothing that we can do with souls - .
…”
What M. told me left me speechless: the ancient Shipibo creed clearly differentiated "spirit" from "soul"; this confirmed the recent studies I was conducting on ancient Eastern and Middle Eastern religions... I did not expect such confirmation from the mouth of an indigenous person from the Amazon jungle.
Above all, I did not expect that a middle-aged person from that village could tell me about the beliefs of an age-old people: indeed, for several decades the area had been invaded by Christian churches that, with their cults, had already greatly confused the beliefs of the local indigenous people... for this very reason, from there I would shortly embark upon a journey into the heart of the Amazon rainforest in search of intact cultures in order to deepen my studies.
A body, a mind, a spirit, and a soul.
This subdivision is a bit crude but it is helpful to give us an idea.
Depending on the reader's culture, they may associate the reading of the words "spirit" and "soul" with common images possessing certain characteristics forged both by religions and popular beliefs.
Maybe the word "soul" is associated with an entity residing in an ill-defined location in the heavens, merely awaiting the conception of an individual for it to slip inside; or we associate it with ourselves, in an unspecified eternal form, reincarnating in various lives, awaiting god's final judgement, which will award eternal joy or eternal damnation.
The word "spirit", on the other hand, is mistakenly used as a synonym for "soul" by some modern religions; also for this reason, many people have never even considered that it could be something different.
Or perhaps you associate the word “spirit" with spiritual entities wandering in the Earth, some benevolent, others less so.
“...
In the late afternoon, when the temperature drops before sunset, I like to walk barefoot outside the village, enjoying the pleasant feeling that the soft warm red soil gives underfoot.
Yesterday afternoon, walking just outside the village, I saw Pragnil in the distance on my path, helping a lady carry buckets of water. I came over, we greeted each other, and we started talking. Speaking of the experiences I was having in the village, I touched upon espiritu; Pragnil asked me whether I had asked myself the meaning of espiritu.
…”
"Espiritu” ("spirit" in the Spanish language) is the spiritual entity that Shipibo shamans associate with any form of living being of the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
In the following days, I dedicated my moments of reflection to seeking to understand the concept of the spiritual parts of the human being; I wanted to have some basic knowledge before resuming the topic with Pragnil... but it wasn't a question of days as I had expected.
It took years of various and varied experiences and in-depth study, not to mention enlightening conversations with Pragnil, before I reached a degree of understanding of the spiritual parts of the human being... this concept continues to be the subject of deeper study.