In this segment of The Scary Guy Podcast, host The Scary Guy asks guest Sebastian Siegel about the nature of spirit. Siegel responds by linking spirit to an ever‑present, flowing energy that is not something we acquire later but has always existed within and around us. He parallels this with the idea that consciousness precedes reality and uses Khalil Gibran’s description of love—“I am within the stream of love”—to illustrate that spirit, like love, is a constant backdrop that we merely become aware of as we evolve. The conversation emphasizes that spirit is a universal, continuous presence that we can access by opening ourselves to it, rather than a construct we create each day.
Is the spirit then— is it energy? Is it, is it moving? Does it move within us? Is it part of who we are? Were we born with this energy to have the spirit within us, or is it something we get later on?
And yes, in both, right? That in the same way that it— that consciousness precedes reality, I would say that, that ultimately, it's like to flip the question almost on its inside out, the convex of it, right? That it's like, you know, the Khalil Gibran type of, you know, he talks about love and saying that now love is not within me, but I am within the stream of love, right? The love is always there, right? We don't find it. We open up, and then when our eyes are open wide enough, it's always there. It's always there. Even in the most wicked, darkest moments, it's always there. And the same thing, right, with spirit, that we evolve and we grow and we do things, and then we start to have a clearer awareness and we think that we've discovered it, but actually it was always there. It's allowing us to discover ourselves, so to speak, right?
So you're trying to tell me, I think, and I kind of understand what you're saying, is that it's actually part of— it's a flow and it's been going on a long time. It's part of the universe and it's here And it's there all the time. It's not something that, you know, we just make every day. It's just constantly around us. It's going on. Is that what you're trying to say to me? Is it— am I getting it? You know, because I don't know. And I can— if I open myself up to it, I can be part of that, is what you're saying. Is that true?
Yes. And further, I would say you can't not be. A part of it because you are, we are an aspect of it. In other words, we open our eyes and there's just an awareness that we see it, that we're feeling, that we are it. But at the same time, we're also driving it, that we're born out of it. In other words, I think about consciousness, spirit, the electrical force, God, whatever it is, it's always extrapolating outward, it's always growing, right? Consciousness is always expanding. So it's like you think about, to make a very kind of crude analogy, the number of love songs that have been written about the same thing. And yet we have always a new love song, always a new love song, always a new poem, always a new, uh, always a new painting, always a new movie, always a new— because we have to keep reiterating these things that we know that are ineffable largely within us, but that as we grow and as complexity increases, yeah, in the cosmos, we have to keep expressing things. It's like a myth for a new age, a new myth. You know, we have to keep looking at the thing and say, ah, we've grown in this way, we're changing in this way. That's spirit looking at itself, God looking at itself through us, through one another, saying, ah, this is fun to expand and to grow. So in the same way that it is everywhere and that we are an aspect of it, it is also us and it is growing and we are driving that growth, right? Our deep impulses, our deep intuitions are the drives of God and spirit. In order to connect. And that's why I think intimacy is such a strong drive, right? The impulse to connect with human beings, as you were saying before we started today, we walk down the street and the impulse is to shake hands, is to hug. These things are sacrosanct because that is the drive of God and spirit. Not without roughness, not without crudeness, not without pain, not without et cetera, et cetera. But the ultimate drive is to proliferate, and proliferate requires contact. That contact is woven into the molecular— our molecular being from the Big Bang and every Big Bang prior to this one, right? Protons, neutrons, electrons wanting to connect. How do they, in an infinite field of space, how do these tiny little subatomic particles reach out and find one? They have nothing else to do. That's what they want to do. That's the impulse of God. That it is better to have dinner with someone than to have dinner alone if you look at it over time. In other words, eventually we want to stand— we can stand and look at the rainbow and say, my God, that's beautiful. I feel the presence with the rainbow and everything. But at some point we want to have a language to be able to say, isn't the rainbow beautiful?
