Inspiration
--from the
Latin
word for
soul,
meaning breath. Like the
other
Latin word for soul, or the
Greek
word, or the
Chinese,
or the
Sanskrit,
or the
Hebrew,
the ancient term "spirit" reflects the ancient truth that the soul has physical
and material existence as a flow of air through the human body. This flow
sustains human life, and it is the physical manifestation of the human connection
to the rest of the earth.
Pythagoras saw the
life-breath
as a god
imprisoned in a human body; this perspective greatly influenced
the Platonic theory of the soul as the guiding force of human action that
still animates both monotheistic traditions and the various fields of inquiry
which investigate human behavior. But the
Pythagoreans were far too rigid
in their opposition of human to divine, and the Socratics distilled a concept
of human personality that completely effaced the connection between the human
and the physical world - the
breath. The
breath, is, of course, not only
the human connection to life and the earth; it is also the human connection
among humans.
Speech is most fundamentally the exchange of
breath between
human beings.