What does a spirit mean to me?
As a white westerner I grew up with a mixed feeling about what a 'spirit' is. As a young child I thought It was something to be afraid of. A poltergeist or ghost was a spirit. As I got older I noticed connotations within religion but being atheist didn't care much for how I felt about a spirit.
I went to CoE school and sometimes heard the expression "son,father and holy spirit"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity
I think its from this that I thought a spirit was within a person or living animal.
Taken from the wiki page.
"Yet another argument from the Cappadocian Fathers to prove that the Holy Spirit is of the same nature as the Father and Son comes from "For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God."[1Cor. 2:11] They reasoned that this passage proves that the Holy Spirit has the same relationship to God as the spirit within us has to us."
This seams to make a clear cut between a holy spirit being something different to "the spirit within us"
Culture uses spirit as a way to bring fear yet also relief to people. You can used it to haunt which is related to death. Upon death the spirit within is released which can be used as a comfort to some people. They feel that a dead person is able to live on in another world or place as the spirit which was inside them, it gives a feeling of the end is not the end. There must be something else after?
Other cultures believe that your spirit lives on inside another being, I need to research into this a little more as it is something which interests me and see possible usages inside the game. Again back to death and the way spirits can induce fear is the notion that a ghost can be a spirit trapped in 'our' world and can't rest until released from its hold in the world. I should look into exorcism as that seams to be about "bad spirits" residing within people.
To me a spirit might be something that has a personality, from culture anyway there seams to be that idea. As a example the film Exorcist has a young girl acting possessed. She behaves differently to that of the spirits personality.
As a westerner my own perception of a spirit is heavily clouded by culture and what I have knowingly or not absorbed from media. I know there are different cultures around the world which all have a different take on what a spirit is.
My 1st step is to look at 'spirit' in a broad sense and list the different paths I can take to focus research.
As a start I know I would like to look at Native American Indian theories of what a spirit is and also look into the religion of Buddhism as I know reincarnation is a idea behind it. I also briefly noticed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba_%28Egyptian_soul%29 while on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit and decided that ancient civilizations shouldn't at all be exempt from research and if anything more looked at! The wiki page for spirit also talk about soul, is a spirit the same as a soul?
I would also like to do some basic image gathering of how other people/artists visualize and possibly look into video also.
