Humanity Redefined: A Humanity of Spirits
“I think, therefore I am,” said René Descartes. He proved that he existed. But to the question Who am I?, the answer has remained a mystery.
Many have tried to answer it, and many more live with confused ideas about their own identity. Ask around, and you will hear:
I am a human being. I am Haytian. I am Christian. I am Hispanic. I am American. I am African. I am Muslim. I am an atheist. I am Black. I am White.
And the list goes on and on.
Others believe, often without saying it, that they are what they own or display: their cars, their houses, their money, their titles, their clothes, their jewels. Above all, most of us believe deeply that we are our body.
We are not our body
The great truth is this: we are not our body. We exist through our body.
Identifying with the body has always been the most common way to understand who we are, and it still makes sense. But another belief has been around for thousands of years: we are a spirit living in a body.
Consider what the spirit does beyond the body’s reach.
Close your eyes, or don’t, and see yourself on Mars. Your body has never been there. Perhaps no human body ever will. Yet you are there. Science can explain what that image is made of: pictures you have seen, memories of yourself, recombined. It has not explained who is standing in it. That one is the spirit.
And the body follows the spirit even into what is not real. Imagine falling from an airplane, and feel your heart race. Think of someone you desire, and feel your body answer.
That we are spirits is my position, not a scientific finding. But what follows from it can be examined, and that is what the rest of this essay does.
A skeptic will say all of this is only the brain at work. Perhaps. But whether the spirit lives in the body or is what the living body does, one thing remains: the body does not decide, imagine, love, or choose whom to fight for. It carries us. It must be cared for, the way we care for our cars and our clothes. But it is the vehicle, not the traveler.
A humanity of spirits
If we are spirits living in a body, then our humanity should be based on our spirit, not on our body. That one shift changes everything.
For most of history, we have measured each other’s humanity by the body: its color, its size, its shape, its abilities, its beauty. Those measures have built walls between people who, in spirit, may be very close.
Bodies come in countless forms. Some are tall, some short, some skinny, some large. Some cannot walk, see, or hear. Skin comes in every shade. These differences are real, and they deserve respect and accommodation, never erasure. But none of them adds to or subtracts from a person’s humanity. Our worth rests on the spirit.
A new paradigm begins there: dignity regardless of the body. It means caring for the body’s wellbeing, ours and others’, the way we care for anything precious that carries us, while refusing to rank people by how their bodies look. It means wellbeing over appearance, without turning health into a new yardstick for judging anyone.
Before we can ever reach collective consciousness, we need this paradigm. As long as we decide who belongs by looking at bodies, the circle will stay small.
We are not our behaviors
To know who we are, we must face another question: are we who we think we are?
We do not choose to be who we are. We simply are. As a behavior analyst, I know better than most how strongly the environment shapes us. Conditioning can create behaviors, strengthen them, weaken them, even control some of them. But it never changes the spirit underneath.
When a child is born, a spirit arrives as part of this natural world. From then on, a great deal happens to it. It grows, adjusts, adapts, explodes, matures, atrophies, expands. Its condition changes constantly. Its nature never does. A neglected oak is still an oak.
So are we our behaviors? No. Yet society treats us according to our behaviors. That is a fact, and a sad one.
The proof of my own life
I align easily with people whose spirits resemble mine, whoever they are. Nationality, color, culture, language: none of it matters. Only the spirit. And whenever I receive information that outweighs what I believed before, the new information prevails. It overrides the old. I was born this way, and I have my own writings and people who know me to testify to it.
As a child, I understood things that still surprise me today. I didn’t know any better; I simply saw. At fourteen, I became an orphan. From then on, I grew up fighting, discovering, applying.
Then I was privileged to find a way: a scholarship to Cuba. There I married a Cuban woman and brought her to Hayti, where we lived. I sent her to the United States to give birth, then changed my mind and asked her to stay there instead. In 2006 I joined her for good, and I started over. I left my teaching jobs to follow her into applied behavior analysis while building a company that grew to more than 80 employees by 2023.
Through every one of those turns, one thing never changed: I still want to fight poverty for all.
When I study the spirits of my wife and my two daughters, I reach the same conclusion: they are their spirit, beyond anything else. The same holds for my sisters, my extended family, my friends, my colleagues. I have observed people across cultures and generations, from my own neighbors to figures like Isaac Newton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. The conclusion never changes. Each person is their spirit.
Why the caring spirits do not lead
I am not alone. Many people carry a spirit like this one: a spirit that cares across every line of nation, color, and language. So why don’t these spirits protect and defend everyone?
My hypothesis is simple: they have not been the most powerful.
Since life first took form and the animal kingdom began to evolve, one principle has resisted every upheaval: survival. Only the fittest make it through. This is true of every human birth: out of millions of sperm cells, only one reaches its goal, and all the others die.
Our species’ evolution was not easy. Cooperation evolved too, for we are a deeply social species. But individual survival skills developed first and ran deepest. They are the most developed, the most widespread, and that is fundamentally why human society looks the way it always has. It seems natural, then, that most of the spirits who rose to power carry those individual survival skills.
Caring for others is rarely the defining trait of the strongest spirits. It has more often shown itself among the less fortunate, from animals to humans. All of this is a hypothesis, not yet a proof, and the continuation of this essay must put it to the test.
From spirit to consciousness
So what is the spirit? Many thinkers today lean toward calling it consciousness, and I lean that way too, with one difference. To me, the spirit is the primary entity. Consciousness is what the spirit becomes as it evolves.
And it has to evolve. Evolving does not mean becoming a different spirit. It means the same spirit growing toward its fullness. Not every spirit does: some are starved by their conditions and atrophy. That is unfortunate, but it is natural. A spirit that grows first becomes aware of itself and its own survival. That is individual consciousness, and among humans it has reached the highest level of development ever achieved.
A spirit that keeps growing becomes aware of others as part of itself. That is collective consciousness, and it has always existed among us. Parents sacrifice for their children. Neighbors share their bread in a famine. Soldiers die for their country. Inside its circle, collective consciousness often wins.
The problem is where the circle ends. A family’s care turns into rivalry toward other families. A nation’s loyalty turns into indifference, or hostility, toward other nations. And very often, the circle ends exactly where bodies start to look different: another color, another size, another way of moving through the world. At every level, consciousness is collective inside the circle; toward everything outside it, it behaves as individual. That is why collective consciousness has never outweighed the individual one: the circle has never been wide enough to hold everyone.
How do we recognize a spirit that has grown this far? Not by what it says about itself, but by what it does:
- It cares across every line of nation, color, faith, and language.
- It lets stronger evidence override its own prior beliefs.
- It fights for strangers as it fights for family.
- It measures its success by how others fare, not only by how it fares.
If the majority carried this spirit
If most human beings carried this spirit, one that cares across every border, honors evidence over pride, and fights for strangers as it fights for family, the world would be far better for all. The spirit exists. Many people carry it. What has been missing is not the spirit, but its power.
We wish collective consciousness would finally outweigh the individual one. But who wishes it? The people whose spirits have evolved this far.
Will the circle widen on its own, or is there a scientific way to evoke it, the way an antecedent evokes a behavior? No formula can change a spirit’s nature. But conditions decide whether a spirit grows or atrophies, and whether caring spirits gain power or are crushed. B. F. Skinner described selection at three levels: genes, individual behavior, and culture. Survival of the fittest explains the first. The third, culture, can be designed. Designing it is the work ahead.
Skinner himself would not accept my view of the spirit. He rejected inner agents as explanations of behavior, and I do not use the spirit to explain behavior. Skinner explained how behavior is selected. I propose what is being shaped: the spirit. This is not a correction of his science but an addition to it, answering a question it set aside.
To be continued…
Dr. Ash
The spirit that I am
