The actual meaning of spirit is simple. Spirit is life energy. You can see this by analyzing words like "spirited" or "team spirit" or "fighting spirit". Spirited means enlivened or lively. Team spirit is the energetic motivation that drives the team...gives it life. Fighting spirit is the energy that makes one a good fighter.

Spirit, therefore, means the active or the potential energy that drives and sustains life. Although that energy itself may be invisible, its effects are totally obvious. A body containing spirit is a body containing life. That life is the energy which imbues the otherwise inert body with consciousness, emotion, desire, memory, ideals, humour, motivation, drive, and everything else that one needs in order to be alive.

So, Wolfgang, for you to deny the existence of spirit is for you to deny your very own conscious existence AS a living being...but that's not why you're denying it. You're denying it simply because your understanding of the word itself is inadequate...and, in your case, mythical. When you hear the word "spirit", you imagine a childish myth of some kind which you label as "spirit". If you were to enlarge your definition of "spirit" you would have no trouble finding evidence of its existence in every living thing and every atomic structure.

It's like the electricity that powers a machine...or the energy that binds atoms together. Just because you don't have a clear idea of where it's coming from, you pretend it isn't there at all. It's effects are everywhere visible...unless you choose to be blind to them.

You're like a radio that says..."There is no electricity in me, and there is no station sending a broadcast through me, there is just me...a collection of wires and circuits in a cabinet. What you see is what you get. If you can't touch it, it's not real."

Well, my friend, that radio is totally inert and useless without the electricity and the broadcast to give it life. And so would you be without the spirit of life moving in and through you.