Spirituality is the study of, the cultivation of, or the conscious experience of, a relationship with God in Christ.
Etymology
The word spirit is derived from the Latin spiritus, which in turn is a translation of the Greek pneuma, both mean “breath” in their root definition. But they took on a deeper meaning. As Thayer’s Greek Lexicon (1911) explains, Aristotle, Polybius, Plutarch, and others used spirit to refer to “the vital principle by which the body is animated.”
So how did the word for breath come to refer to the “real you” inside the body? Well, what is the first thing you notice about a dead person? They are not breathing. Their breath has left. Hence, “breath” was thought to be the vital principle in living things.
Breath and Life
This only makes sense. The difference between a dead body and a living body is that one is breathing while the other is not. This was why breath was equated to life. When the breath ceased, life ceased. It was a small leap to think that the real person left the body when the breath left, and hence the spirit was somehow different than the body.
But what actually happens according to science? The heart stops pumping and the brain shut down, which shuts down consciousness. So spirit is the consciousness in living things. It is not that the primitive people were completely wrong; it is just that they did not fully understand death. Death is not the result of the breath leaving, but the stopping of heart and brain.
So today, with the help of science, we can properly identify this mysterious “vital principle” as consciousness. As breath is an unseen reality that animates physical life, so is consciousness an unseen reality that animates mental life.
Just think for a minute. The body ages but the consciousness never seems to age. This gives the intuition that the two are separate. This is why most people know that their body and consciousness are two different things .
Spirit is Consciousness
I would argue that one of the meanings of spirit is consciousness. I am not the first to suggest this, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1807, 440), in his Phenomenology of Spirit, wrote that “spirit is consciousness” (Phenomenology of Spirit § 440.) Although, it should be noted, he sometimes seems to distinguish the two.
One of the definitions of spirit in the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, is “life, will, consciousness, thought, etc., regarded as separate from matter.”
You can see this meaning even in the Bible, “For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit [consciousness] of the man which is in him?” (1 Cor. 2:11 NKJV). In other words, it is a person’s consciousness that is aware and “knows a person’s thoughts” (NIV).
Spirit, Spiritual, and Spirituality
If spirit is consciousness, then spiritual refers to the cultivation of this consciousness. Spiritual refers to the quality of a conscious experience of a relationship with God. And spirituality, then, is the study of, the cultivation of, or the conscious experience of, a relationship with God.
Note
This material was adapted from an article I wrote, entitled, “Spirit as Consciousness” (2016).