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Gospel of John 3.6 speaks of this role of a living creative-vital-power initiation - what Christians came to call "born again," or "born from above."
That born of the flesh is flesh [body, matter], and that born of spirit is spirit.
So, we have the same challenge here as in Buddhism, that something is so of something that we cannot separate the two, the two are one and two, yet each is one. While Buddhism cannot define or describe "Mind," we cannot define or describe "spirit, Spirit." And appealing to the Greek, the language of the New Testament, where "spirit" is pneuma - meaning the same as ruach -, or how Stoics defined "spirit" cannot provide a final understanding. To say the Stoics understood "spirit" as "vital, creative power" is true, and this does apply to how "spirit" is understood in both the Jewish and Christian faiths, as well as in Taoism. Yet, Spirit is this and more.
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Genesis has another scripture closely echoing Jesus breathing the spirit, and the John scripture may be intended to reflect the other. Genesis 2.7 is within the second story of creation.
And YHWH Elohim [LORD God] formed a male from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life [literally, lives]; and the man became a vital-life-being.
Consequently, as the form of man [matter] is lifeless without the Creator's breath, the early disciples were impotent spiritually without the infusion of the breath, or spirit.
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The Way is a Way of spirit. The Way is not something set in place-and-time, which has a beginning and end. No, the Way is alive. It lives. The Way moves. And the Way, as spiritual, is a metaphor for something too subtle to speak of.
See, only stillness belongs to the Absolute; all else, being relative, is in movement. Nature moves, like wind, like breath. A basic understanding of the physics of matter demonstrates this. Also, the unseen qualities, or "spiritual worlds" - Being's more subtle expressions - are in movement.
We tend to reify Nature, fixing phenomena into time and space, making the living subject a lifeless object. By reifying the spirit, we gain some sense of control over it, of safety from its ineffability and power. Spirit, we think, we can manage, then, to our liking, like the religion of the Breath in a bag.
A spiritual path, true to the Way, so spirit-ual, or Spirit-ual, deconstructs the illusion that we know what spirit is and locating it in place and time, so as a mental construct. The Way deconstructs our objectifying of Presence's subtle qualities. Truth pulls us out of the head, so to speak, into the Void. This Void is the Absolute we cannot think, speak, or share through ideas - even the best spiritual teachings. In the Void co-inheres the subtle qualities manifesting in matter. God is these qualities, for they co-inhere in God, yet God is the Absolute in which are the qualities.
Spirit is not merely a something. Spirit is alive. Spirit lives. Spirit is that of-God in time-and-space whereby Life moves among us and moves us, indeed moves all Nature. Hence, as we are drawn more into the Silence, we surrender into this God-moving among us and ourselves as that movement, too. Being of this motion of Grace, we cannot even locate ourselves? We move.
If I say, "This is who I am," that is thought moving. I cannot be located, for "I" is nonlocal. You can say who you think you are, but can you find yourself? No. You can think, but you cannot think yourself. All the thought is proves to be the ego, called often the false self, mirroring back to itself the illusion that it is the True Self, the soul, that it has self-existence. Likewise, you cannot point spirit out, yet you can point to the effects of its being-moving action. When the wind blows, you can say, "Look at those limbs the wind is blowing," but you cannot say, "Look at that wind that's blowing the limbs."
All we can reasonably do in response to the Breath is to give ourselves to it. Then, we can enjoy witnessing its mysterious movements in the whole being - matter, body, and soul, and, also, about us. We can grow to feel our oneness with the flow. Yet, if we respond illogically - if we try to bag the breath, so to speak - we will suffer the consequences of the repression of this vitalizing presence - the absence of this is called "spiritual death." We must find ways to nurture our communion with the breath-of-lives. Indeed, the spiritual life is wholly a ceaseless movement of inspiration-expiration. The motion is inhalation, nurture within, and expiration, whereby we bless others from what we have imbibed of Grace.
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