Pneuma Quotes

The “Art Nouveau” appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. “I’m alive.” “I’m decorative.

It is a common belief that we breathe with our lungs alone, but in point of fact, the work of breathing is done by the whole body. The lungs play a passive role in the respiratory process. Their expansion is produced by an enlargement, mostly downward, of the thoracic cavity and they collapse when that cavity is reduced. Proper breathing involves the muscles of the head, neck, thorax, and abdomen. It can be shown that chronic tension in any part of the body's musculature interferes with the natural respiratory movements. Breathing is a rhythmic activity. Normally a person at rest makes approximately 16 to 17 respiratory incursions a minute. The rate is higher in infants and in states of excitation. It is lower in sleep and in depressed persons. The depth of the respiratory wave is another factor which varies with emotional states. Breathing becomes shallow when we are frightened or anxious. It deepens with relaxation, pleasure and sleep. But above all, it is the quality of the respiratory movements that determines whether breathing is pleasurable or not. With each breath a wave can be seen to ascend and descend through the body. The inspiratory wave begins deep in the abdomen with a backward movement of the pelvis. This allows the belly to expand outward. The wave then moves upward as the rest of the body expands. The head moves very slightly forward to suck in the air while the nostrils dilate or the mouth opens. The expiratory wave begins in the upper part of the body and moves downward: the head drops back, the chest and abdomen collapse, and the pelvis rocks forward. Breathing easily and fully is one of the basic pleasures of being alive. The pleasure is clearly experienced at the end of expiration when the descending wave fills the pelvis with a delicious sensation. In adults this sensation has a sexual quality, though it does not induce any genital feeling. The slight backward and forward movements of the pelvis, similar to the sexual movements, add to the pleasure. Though the rhythm of breathing is pronounced in the pelvic area, it is at the same time experienced by the total body as a feeling of fluidity, softness, lightness and excitement. The importance of breathing need hardly be stressed. It provides the oxygen for the metabolic processes; literally it supports the fires of life. But breath as "pneuma" is also the spirit or soul. We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water. By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere. If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist. In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss. That is why breathing is the dominant factor in the practice of Yoga.

Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pass through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that.

The word pneuma (breath) shares its origins with the word psyche; they are both considered words for soul. So when there is song in a tale or mythos, we know that the gods are being called upon to breathe their wisdom and power into the matter at hand. We know then that the forces are at work in the spirit world, busy crafting soul.

The forms tethering us to the mortal world are physical, but our true essence, our pneuma exists beyond what’s seen.

Why put them through the danger of the fire? And then, I heard, as though it spoke, the voice of the guardian-head: "Each piece must go through the fire. The cowl, the wings, the pneuma, the source, the flow. All must go the way that I have gone. Each may crack in the process, as I have cracked. But look, the crack has healed. I did not break. Without the fire, the piece is untested, unlived, raw. Each must go through the fire.

True singing is breath of another kind. A breath that aims nowhere. Pneuma within the god. A zephyr.

When the object perishes, the pneuma that animated it is reabsorbed into the logos as a whole. This process of destruction and reintegration happens to individual objects at every moment.

When I was a young college teacher in my mid-twenties, an older colleague delighted in characterizing post-Enlightenment theology as “flat-tire theology”—“All the pneuma has gone out of it.

Soma dies; pneuma departs; only sarx remains,” it said in a voice that was a paradox: both sonorous and entirely without tone. “So it has always been; so shall it always be; life sucks, then you die.

It’s understandable, then, that pretty much every human culture independently developed some version of the belief that a special animating force makes living things alive. The Romans called it spiritus and the Greeks pneuma (both words also meaning “breath”). In China it is called chi, which also translates to “blood” because they felt the life force was carried in the blood. In Japan it is ki, in India prana, in Polynesia mana, and in Arabic it is baraka.

And the word for breath is the same as the word for spirit; this is true not only in Hebrew (ruakh), but also in Greek (pneuma) and Latin (spiritus). Thus Yeshua and Miriam shared the same breath and allowed themselves to be borne by the same spirit.

Pneuma is the power—the vital breath—that animates animals and humans. It is, in Dylan Thomas’s phrase, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” and is present even in lifeless materials like stone or metal as the energy that holds the object together—the

The Greek terminology for the Trinity, which includes the neuter term for spirit (pneuma) virtually requires that the third “Person” of the Trinity be asexual. But the author of the Secret Book has in mind the Hebrew term for spirit, ruah, a feminine word; and so concludes that the feminine “Person” conjoined with the Father and Son must be the Mother.

His green eyes gave a twinkle to match his amused smile and strong chin, “Again Estelle, really?!” His brow cocked. “Kent!” My feet gave a slight

Our poverty in spirit makes us vulnerable to the IOU seduction of darkness.” Excerpt From: Paul Renfroe. “Nobody Sees This YOU.

What is harvested in the world is composed of four elements: water, earth, wind, and light. What God harvests is also composed of four elements: faith [pistis], hope [elpis], love [agap], and contemplation [gnosis]. Our earth is faith, for she gives us roots. Water is our hope, for it slakes our thirst. Wind [pneuma] is the love [agap] through which we grow; and light is the contemplation [gnosis] through which we ripen.

I would like, in conclusion, to mention the peculiar theory of world creation in the Clementine Homilies. In God, pneuma and soma are one. When they separate, pneuma appears as the Son and “archon of the future Aeon,” but soma, actual substance (ούοία) or matter , divides into four, corresponding to the four elements (which were always solemnly invoked at initiations). From the mixing of the four parts there arose the devil, the “archon of this Aeon,” and the psyche of this world. Soma had become psychized (): “God rules this world as much through the devil as through the Son, for both are in his hands.”97 God unfolds himself in the world in the form of syzygies (paired opposites), such as heaven/earth, day/night, male/female, etc. The last term of the first series is the Adam/Eve syzygy. At the end of this fragmentation process there follows the return to the beginning, the consummation of the universe () through purification and annihilation

Meanwhile, the self can stand in the way of the Not-Self, interfering with the free flow of spiritual grace, this maintaining the self in a state of blindness, and also with the flow of animal grace, which leads to the impairment of natural functions and, in the long run, of the slower processes called structure. For each individual human being, the main practical problems are these: How can I prevent my ego from eclipsing the inner light, synteresis, scintilla animae, and so perpetuating the state of unregenerate illusion and blindness? And these practical problems remain unchallenged, even if we abandon the notion of an entelechy or physiological intelligencer, of an atman or pneuma and think, instead, in terms [of] systems...

Being psychological means that one will need to find the new, the personal myth from within. It will not be found in an external ideology or institution, however benignly intended it may be, for those sources which may have served the past have too often grown self-perpetuating, preserving their own priesthood or corporate leadership, and rigidifying an original primal experience into dogma and formal principles. One will find, sooner or later, that the pneuma, or spirit, has long departed those ideas and places. Nor will right thinking or rational principles of conduct and behavior satisfy the soul. We will not be spared our anxieties, moments of deep despair, and appointments with the fellow with the scythe at the door. No amount of ritual prayer, healthful practices, or salutary motives will plumb the soul’s depths. Quite likely, the soul will speak to us at least some of the time in ways we do not want to hear. But it is speaking, always, and tells of us of that invisible world, which informs, moves, and shapes the visible world.

...the Kabbalist was interested not in the perfected text whose author is dead and can no longer respond but in contact with the living Author for whom the text is an intermediary. Even when the pneuma was needed in order to better understand the Bible, the content of this deeper apprehension was, in many cases, a better insight into divine matters. According to the French philosopher, the death of the author is a condition for finalizing the text and rendering it into a static perfection, allowing for a "complete" relation. This request is based upon a rigid attitude toward the contents, which are to be approached when they can no longer change. It is an axiom of the Kabbalists that the sacred text is in an ongoing process of change, evidently a symptom of its inherent infinity and divinity. For them, Scripture is a way of overcoming the post-prophetic eclipse of revelation, an endeavor to recapture the presence of the Author and its nature; the biblical text produces a silent dialogue and eventually even union between Author and reader,..

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support. Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual practice,” I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error. The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition. I do not share their semantic concerns.[1] Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

[T]he ancients, knowing nothing about vaporisation, drew an absolute line between solids and liquids on the one hand and what we call gases on the other. The name they gave to what we call gas was spiritus (Latin), pneuma (Greek) or ruach and neshama (Hebrew). In each case the word could mean air, breath or wind. The ancients thought of the wind as the breath of God. So when the Hebrews offered their account of the world’s origin, they said the powerful wind (ruach) of God fluttered over the waters. And when they told of the origin of humankind, they said that God made humans out of the dust of the earth, breathed his gentle breath (neshama) into them and they became living persons. Further, it was as obvious to ancients as it is to us that the best way of distinguishing between a living person and a corpse is to look for breath— for a living person breathes. Breath was believed to be the very essence of what constitutes a living human being, and thus the very principle of life. But for the ancients breath, air and wind were all the same. When a man dies, said Ecclesiastes, “the dust returns to the earth and the breath returns to God”. When Jesus died on the cross, according to Luke, he said, “Father into your hands I commit my spirit (pneuma)” and, “having said this he breathed his last”. Of course we are used to hearing the word ‘spirit’ in one place and ‘breath’ in the other, but in the Greek original the same word, pneuma, is used. Similarly in the King James Version (still nearer to the medieval world-view than we are) Matthew reports that “Jesus cried with a loud voice and gave up the ghost (pneuma)”. During the transition to the modern world people continued to speak about spirit without realising that they were no longer talking about something originally conceived to be as tangible as the air we breathe. Christians continued to speak of God as spirit and referred to what they called the power of the Holy Spirit. Preachers continued to expound the story of Jesus and Nicodemus in John’s Gospel (where being born again of the spirit is described in terms of the blowing of the wind), but failed to draw attention to the fact that in this story the same word is sometimes translated ‘wind’ and sometimes ‘spirit’. Only slowly has it dawned upon us that in talking about spirit we are talking about something far less substantial than wind or the air that we breathe. Indeed, spirit has no substance at all. It has become a purely abstract term that has no external referent. It continues in usage as a frozen metaphor from a now obsolete worldview, and its only possible meaning is a metaphorical or symbolic one. Conservative Christians continue to speak about the Holy Spirit, the power of the spirit and so on, as if it were an oozy something that operates like the wind. Without being wholly aware of the fact, they live in the medieval world for religious purposes and return to the modern world for the mundane business of daily living.

I decided to relinquish it many times. I thought, I cannot. I was a deserter but my mutinous ambitions kept knotted me. I still live by my that itch of procuring serenity but I don't know.. I'm in rummage of what?? I delve deep, many times, almost daily, within the walls of my chimeras and fizzle to cryptanalyze...my perturbed pneuma ....

But when the Holy Spirit does His mysterious work of regeneration, the first thing that changes in a person is the disposition of his or her soul. Now he cares for the things of God and desires to seek God. Now there is an affection for God that was not there before. It is far from perfect, but it is real. Its origins and its power remain mysterious. But the reality is that the person's heart is beating for God, whereas it never did before. This is the undeniable effect of the blowing of the Pneuma through the soul.

Only a few days left (as my macabre mind sees it) until Halloween 2018. It is the most wonderful time of the year for a sociopathic pneuma like me.

2 Timothy 1: 7: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” Sound mind is a bad translation; a better one is disciplined spirit. God says, to build this strange, mystical thing—the new man—“ I will give you, first of all, POWER, then love and a sound mind (disciplined spirit.)” Now, why did He begin with power? Because power is the dynamic by which the whole thing is made manifest. No need messing around trying to get love or something else. The whole thing is based on a dynamic power God furnishes, which is the Holy Spirit. You will find the same order in the Old and New Testament, and in your heart and mine. Whenever you see an arrangement like that in the Bible, leave it the way it is written. Some would put love first, instead of power, but we can’t change it. There is a divine order. From creation on, everything that we have comes through the power of the Spirit: (In the Old Testament the word is ruach, and in the New Testament it is pneuma). They both have the same idea of breath or life—the outbreathing, ruach; the breath of God—that is Spirit; that is Life; pneuma, breath—pneumonia, pneumatic tire, air, breath, spirit; all come from the same word. Why do we have the breath of Life? Because we can’t receive anything in creation without it. We have it in the life of Jesus. He was conceived by the Spirit; born of the Spirit; baptized in the Spirit; He ministered in the Spirit.

A héberek hajjé saah-t és hajjé olamot különböztetnek meg. Az előbbi az időélet, élet itt a földön a születéstől a meghalásig. Az utóbbi a világélet, amelynek mértéke nem az idő. Olam egyébként azt is jelenti, hogy örök. Minden nyelv tele van szavakkal, amelyek arról beszélnek, hogy az emberi lét egy időtérben több méretkört él. A bennünk egyidejűleg jelenlevő és láthatatlan. Nefes, ruah, nesamah, thymos, psyché, pneuma, spiritus, anima, buddhi, manas, ātman. Az emberi léttel adott nehézség, hogy az egyik a másik nélkül nincs. Megkísérelték megkerülni és a szellemi létezést, vagy a természetet tagadásba vették. A baj ilyen esetekben mindig, hogy a tagadás a valóságon nem változtat, de a tagadó maga rámegy. Legyen az ember, nép, vagy korszak. Ezúttal ismét, miután több száz évig, rossz lelkiismerettel, kötelező volt a földön szenvedni, most még rosszabb lelkiismerettel kötelező az életnek örülni. Mit jelent örülni? Vitális lehetőségeket kizsákmányolni. Ahhoz képest, hogy másokat mennyire raboltak ki, elenyészett, hogy önmagukat mennyire kirabolták. Az élet önmagában véve szomorú. Nincs szomorúbb, mint a merő életöröm, a paloták, a ruhák, az ékszerek, archeológiai sírzsákmány, kacér Szűzmáriák, kisportolt Krisztusok, múzeumi szenzációk, lakomák és persze meztelen nők. Nyert, aki új élvezetet talált ki. És amíg Firenzében, vagy a Louvre-ban, vagy a Buckingham-palotában éltek, még ment valahogy, de amikor az életet elkezdték követelni az altisztek és a külvárosok és az életkirályt nem Borgiának hívták, hanem Oscar Wilde-nak és az életélvezetre való igényét minden meggazdagodott ószeres bejelentette, a dolog elkezdett bizarr lenni.

Paul is talking about the present body, which is animated by the normal human psychē (the life force we all possess here and now, which gets us through the present life but is ultimately powerless against illness, injury, decay, and death), and the future body, which is animated by God’s pneuma, God’s breath of new life, the energizing power of God’s new creation. This

Trichotomists seek support in the fact that the Bible, as they see it, recognizes two constituent parts of human nature in addition to the lower or material element, namely, the soul (Heb., nephesh; Greek, psuche) and the spirit (Heb., ruach; Greek, pneuma). But the fact that these terms are used with great frequency in Scripture does not warrant the conclusion that they designate component parts rather than different aspects of human nature.

However, psychē and pneuma are not strictly interchangeable but refer to a person’s inner life viewed from two points of view. Pneuma is one’s inner self viewed in terms of relationship to God and to other people; psychē is the individual as a living being, as a human personality, the vitality of a person viewed from the point of view of her or his body and flesh.

Adversity comes before opportunity, but you shouldn’t allow it to be an obstacle to stop you from drawing your opportunity out of it. God created all of us with a purpose—tribulations will refine and prepare us for the high purpose if we don’t give up or give in. The spirituality that shaped my life involved struggle between my soul, my psychic nature outside God, which includes the mind and the intellect, and my spirit, my pneuma, my pure consciousness that relates to God. I experienced divine intervention and miracles and always won when I allowed my soul and spirit to work in my life in harmony. In Matthew 10:16, Jesus said, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” My services did indeed take me among the wolves, but my dove personality dominated in my life, exposing me to many harms. The good thing is, God used it to strengthen me to fulfill the mission He gave me. My self-confidence and faith grew so strong that I was filled with boldness to take risks in the steps I took toward achieving my goals. Handouts create dependency, but handiness builds independence and self-esteem

The breath is the lifeforce itself, the holy spirit that binds us to the mind of God. Known as Ruach in Hebrew and Pneuma in Greek, the breath controls the winds of our energy body and the activity of our minds.

Our life force bioenergy has been known by a multitude of names around the world. For instance: Ki is the Japanese equivalent of chi or life energy; Prana is the Hindu term for Life force, or Life energy. Lung is a Tibetan word meaning inner ‘winds’ of life force; Ruach Ha Kodesh is Hebrew for Breath of God; Nafs and Ruh is the Islamic terms for a kind of ‘soul breath’; Spiritus Sancti is the Latin (Catholic) term meaning 'Holy Spirit’; Pneuma is Greek for 'vital breath’; Élan vital is the term for 'vital life-force' in classical European Vitalism; Orgone was the revolutionary psycho-biologist Wilhelm Reich's term for vital life force; nilch'i is the Navajo term for ‘sacred life-giving wind or life-force’; ni is the Lakota Sioux term for life-force; Mana is an Oceanic-Polynesian term (and more recently also adopted as the term for life-force by several fantasy role-playing games); ha, or the more-specifically Hawaiian (Huna), is the term for ‘breath’ or sacred life force; Ka is the Ancient Egyptian idea of a vital essence or life energy; and, of course, the classic term for bio-energy that George Lucas adopted for his modern classic Star Wars is ‘the Force.

the initiate becomes an “ennoos,” one who possesses nous, or whom the nous possesses, a “pneumaHkos.” 71

Through the writings of Aristotle, Ficino reclaimed from Anaximenes, a fourth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher, the concept of pneuma (“breath” or “spirit”), a substance which he envisioned as constantly in flux and animating everything in the universe.

Then approached the inauspicious day when Fate rolled the dice and Deception danced stealthily in the dead of the night.

Transition occurred not only in Neha’s life. Kovai also transitioned from sweltering summers with extreme temperatures as high as 40 degrees to monsoon madness with the heavy downpour drenching everyone and everything in her line of approach to not so chilly romantic winters offering a pleasant relief to weather-beaten residents.

She became a question mark. An unfinished puzzle. An intricate crossword. An impervious shooting star yet to determine her course.

The Sisters of Fate celebrated their success as a scandalous affair was born.

A few minutes after the initial excited greetings they found themselves journeying in a maxi cab with a contended expression on their fatigued countenances as the moment held promise of forthcoming days of bliss and catch-up prattle that usually follows a family reunion.

His attitude and behaviour was no different from any other Australian high school student and being in the teaching profession she was not entirely unfamiliar with the student culture and their perceptions that academic excellence was not the only gateway to success.

Bickering based on in-laws’ actions and behaviour were not uncommon between husbands and wives. Arguments of such nature usually erected a temporary wall between couples that mended with the passage of time. However, such wrangling left Neha with a sense of impending doom.

A part of her was immune to pain, numbed by humiliating experiences and hatred while the part that had known finer emotions, powerless to alter the course of events, chose to remain nonchalant.

The knowledge that even the most effective bullying policies of schools failed to protect a student, whose difference attracted unwanted attention and scarring comments, influenced Neha’s decision to support John’s choice.

Ever since, Kovai had been a trusted companion in her life who brought frolic, magic and romance to her formative years; a silent witness to her tales of joy and sorrow who was never reluctant to offer a shoulder to cry.

A dead end. The root cause mysterious, Neha continued to bleed from the scratches with her futile attempts to extricate leading to further entanglement.

Be a loner for awhile and devote time to reshuffle you´re forgetten pneuma

I remember holding my face to the wind when Katharine died, feeling the air, the coolness and fluidity, the urgency. Every day, wind in my face, capturing my attention in some fundamentally new way. I was aware of breath, of what the ancient Greeks called pneuma, of a soul-filled world. I gulped the air.

Rather, by psyche here Paul basically means what the Hebrew nephesh regularly meant: the whole human being seen from the point of view of one’s inner life, that mixture of feeling, understanding, imagination, thought and emotion which are in fact bound up with the life of the body and mind but which are neither in themselves obviously physical effects nor necessarily the result, or the cause, of mental processes. Just as, for Paul, soma is the whole person seen in terms of public, space-time presence, and sarx is the whole person seen in terms of corruptibility and perhaps rebellion, so psyche is the whole person seen in terms of, and from the perspective of, what we loosely call the ‘inner’ life. And Paul’s point is that this person, this psychikos, ‘soulish’, person, still belongs in the present age, deaf to the music of the age to come. Here (2:11) and elsewhere Paul can use the word pneuma to refer to the human ‘spirit’, by which he seems to mean almost what he sometimes means by kardia, ‘heart’, the very centre of the personality and the point where one stands on the threshhold of encounter with the true god.

Matt. 5:3 “Blessed are the poor in the pneuma [of them]”: i.e., in their spirit. Or, poor as to their spirit. Here the article is used grammatically, to indicate the possessive pronoun, and pneuma is used as denoting character. Character is spoken of at pneuma because it is invisible; in contrast to that which is visible. This verse, when compared with verse 8, may refer to mental endowments of which we are apt to be so proud; and the other to those affections of the feelings by which we are so apt to be led astray.

Celestial bodies witnessed the disrobing of human dignity in abomination while the moonlight caressed away the vestige of perverse mauling that was captured on celluloid after which she was returned. Anonymous conspirators within the establishment had facilitated and superintended that night's covert exploitation.

The most powerful ancient knowledge has been shrouded within esoteric mystery schools etc And as a collective humanity have been intentionally dumbed down to disconnect from the ability to harness and transmute energy Some can partly, but don't realise they're actually doing it There are lost of names + symbolism for life-force vital energy in every Ancient culture or modern interpretations Prana Chi/Qi/Ki Livity Essence of life Via Vitae Divine breath Breath of life Pneuma Vis Vitalis Orgone Ousia Æether Vril Quintessence The Fifth Element Electricity Call it what you will, it's inside of you and around you.

They have undergone divine, pneumatic gene therapy to address the fact that they were previously unrelated to Abraham. Pneumatic therapy is a much more advanced technology for addressing the genealogical gap between Abraham and the gentiles than cosmetic surgery ever could be. Through the pneuma and in the Messiah, gentiles have become Abraham’s sons and seed.

Inspiration most obviously refers to the living presence of God’s Spirit (Gr., pneuma—breath, air in motion) offering divine insight to the writer to interpret God’s saving activity without negating or undoing the writer’s real humanity.

The canonical Gospels offer no information as to the specific nature of the seven demons or spirits that initially possess Miriam—that is to say, alienate her from her freedom. However, we might make some surmises about them by referring to other texts that were current in those times. According to Evagrius Ponticus, who made a thorough study of such matters, these logismoï (his term for“negative or destructive thoughts”) act to destroy a person’s orientation toward the nous, and then the orientation of the nous toward the Pneuma. In other words, they act to obstruct peace, contemplation, and the Presence of the Son seeking to establish itself in the person. Lists of such demonic spirits vary. In the West they later become known as the seven deadly orcardinal sins: gluttony, fornication, covetousness, sadness, anger, vainglory, pride. Evagrius adds accidie to the list, meaning a kind of despondency or apathetic rejection of spiritual realities.

In the lararia or in public life, as we have seen, deceased or living emperors entered the daily devotions of the Romans. The first, like the Indigetes or Novemsiles - such as Aeneas, Romulus or the mythical kings of Latium - were 'men become gods' (Serv., Aen., 12, 794) who 'merited' it (Am., 3, 39). The second were the incarnation of 'the breath, the life that so many thousands of beings breathe', as Seneca says (Clem., 1, 4, 1), quoting Virgil (G, 4, 212 f.), and comparing the empire to an immense beehive whose unity depends on the well-being of its queen. For the Latin philosopher, the emperor resembled the Stoics' pneuma which, born of the fire of Zeus or the divine Word, gave life to the universe: spiritus vitalis.

El destino de nuestro tiempo, racionalizado e intelectualizado y, sobre todo, desmitificador del mundo, es el de que precisamente los valores últimos y más sublimes han desaparecido de la vida pública y se han retirado, o bien al reino ultratetreno de la vida mística, o bien a la fraternidad de las relaciones inmediatas de los individuos entre sí. No es casualidad ni el que nuestro arte más elevado sea hoy en día un arte íntimo y nada monumental, ni el que sólo dentro de los más reducidos círculos comunitarios, en la relación de hombre a hombre, en pianissimo, aliente esa fuerza que corresponde a lo que en otro tiempo, como pneuma profético, en forma de tempestuoso fuego, atravesaba, fundiéndolas, las grandes comunidades. Cuando nos empeñamos en «hallar» por la fuerza una concepción artística monumental surgen esos lamentables esperpentos que son muchos de los monumentos de los últimos veinte años. y cuando, sin nuevas y auténticas profecías, nos obstinamos en constituir nuevas religiones se producen internamente esperpentos semejantes, cuyas consecuencias han de ser peores aún. Las profecías lanzadas desde la cátedra podrán crear sectas fanáticas, pero nunca una auténtica comunidad. A quienes no puedan soportar virilmente este destino de nuestro tiempo hay que decirles que vuelvan en silencio, llana y sencillamente, y sin la triste publicidad habitual de los renegados, al ancho y piadoso seno de las viejas Iglesias, que no habrán de ponerles dificultades. Es inevitable que de uno u otro modo tengan que hacer allí el «sacrificio del intelecto». No se lo reprocharemos si de veras lo consiguen.

John said he was “in the spirit” on the Lord’s day. The phrase in the spirit (en pneuma) means “to become in the Spirit.” It’s a state in which we see and interact with beings in the spiritual world and receive revelation directly from them and from the Holy Spirit.

To put it in the terms Musil wields so ironically (namely, those appropriate to the “skim-romanticism and yearning for God that the machine-age had for a time squirted out”), by the second decade of the century it had come to seem that spirit (Geist) lacked spirit. For, in post- Kantian usage, spirit means both the motivation of historical becoming and also its “phenomenology,” its formal result. However ironic the context in which he places the project, Musil, like many of his contemporaries, was concerned with recuperating spirit at the “first” and deeper level—not as the arbitrary sum of its formal expressions but as the formative process itself, the self-configuring whole. At this deeper level Geist is a word for that all- pervading pneuma, or breath, diffused throughout the universe and holding all contraries together in tension, the “sympathy of the Whole” of the ancient Stoics. Geist, writes Musil, “mixes things up, unravels them, and forms new combinations.” It was in deference to this Geist that the man without qualities lived so undecidedly. “Undoubtedly—he said to himself— what banished him to an aloof and anonymous form of existence was nothing but the compulsion to that loosing and binding of the world that is known by a word one does not like to encounter alone: spirit,” Arnheim, his arch- antagonist, is willing to admit this much about his young colleague: “the man had reserves of as yet unexhausted soul.

My definition of living is the possibility that we live in a realm of fantasy, an adventure that can only be transpired through the lens of a writer.

The Greek word for “spirit” is pneuma. The word can also mean “wind” or “breath.” That Greek word is the root for what we call pneumonia. Just as it was necessary to reinflate my lungs to overcome pneumonia, I needed the breath of God to help me overcome the depression of my spirit.

Years ago, when I first started mountaineering, I was impetuous, heady, rash, impatient, prideful and arrogant. I in my mind, was both impervious and impregnable, "nothing could stop me," or so I thought. Then, I came face-to-face with Mount Everest for the first time, and she quickly humbled me. She forced me to do away with the false machismo, the fake toughness and the phony bravado, and in return, she blessed me with the gifts of comity, heightened inner-peace, calmness, and steadiness of both spirit and mind. Those blessings were gifts, gifts that rewrote my limbic system, and altered my pneuma. I now climb with laser clarity and aplomb. Less ardor, more piety born of apathetic ataraxia.

Plutarch, in the first century AD, mentions the pneuma (translated as “wind,” “air,” “breeze,” “breath,” or “inspiration”), and that occasionally the oikos was filled with a “delightful fragrance” as a result of the pneuma, but he does not describe its exact nature. Instead he relays a long-running argument among his friends about why the oracle is less active now than it was in the past. The arguments include less pneuma; the moral degeneration of mankind leading to its abandonment by the gods; the depopulation of Greece and the departure of the daimones (spirits) responsible for divination. But Plutarch also insists that the Pythia did not at any point rant or rave. Instead, he comments that, after a consultation session, the Pythia “feels calm and peaceful.

Aristotle pro- poses the existence of a proton organon (primary instrument) of the soul located in the heart. It is composed of the same substance as the stars,*33 fiery spirit (pneuma), yet it is so subtle as to approximate the condition of the soul, while still being a “material” as such so that it may have contact with the corporeal world as well. The soul transmits its vital activities to the body by means of this pneumatic organ, and the body communicates sensory information to the soul by means of the phantasmata produced by this same proton organon. Pneuma, then, was con- ceived of as an intermediary principle, halfway between the material world and the immaterial soul. It was the principle of communication between the two most fundamental ousia, soul and body.

Cor 15 on the subject of resurrection. [It is important to note that the author uses the words soul and spirit based their original meanings, which are significantly different from their modern usages. In antiquity the Greek psyche, which means soul, did not have the same elevated status that the soul assumed in later Christianity, nor was it confused with spirit (pneuma in Greek), as it later came to be and still is in current usage. For the ancients the soul included aspects of the mortal body, mind, and emotions, as well as something of the spirit transcending them. It was an intermediary reality between the physical and the spiritual. In a further refinement of this intermediation, the nous appears here as that “fine point” of psyche (soul) that is closest to pneuma (spirit).—Trans.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:24–25). Here we are given a graphic picture of what things look like when a man or woman is filled with the brilliance of God’s presence. When we are filled with His pneuma (the Greek word for breath), we are not self-absorbed and fearful but walking with God and others in transparent love.

translated it as spiritus, a word gendered masculine. Greek speakers translated it as pneuma, a word gendered neuter—effectively, however, erasing the vision of divine Mother, an interpretation of the Holy Spirit, whose presence resonates through many of the earliest sources.