A reflective creature builds a picture of its position within Nature. That picture is always partial; Nature is always larger. This is not a contingent limitation of weak or undeveloped minds. It is what it means to understand the world from within it. Any picture a finite creature forms of infinite Nature will be smaller than what it depicts; any account of a Nature larger than its maker’s own span will include territory it cannot reach. Our basic condition is to live inside something vaster than any account of it. The [§7.6](<7.6 Singularity.md>) cycle argument extends the point: Nature's excess is not a feature of this particular cosmological epoch but of the recurrence itself. Whatever the universe iterates into next, the relationship between finite creatures and infinite ground will be the same.

The structural prediction is that any person complex enough to reflect on their own position will eventually press against what exceeds their understanding — and register that excess from inside. The encounter is not an occasional feature of certain minds; it is a structural consequence of finite understanding in an infinite medium with T, S, and Φ. Wherever the structural conditions obtain, persons reaching sufficient integration will encounter their own boundary and register what lies past it.

The encounter has a characteristic feel. From inside, what exceeds the self feels like presence rather than absence: not nothing beyond me, but something vast I am inside of. This is because the encountered excess is not negative space but active Nature — the same T, S, and Φ that grounds a person's existence, extending past what anyone can understand. A person meets that excess through continuity with it: the Nature they are made of extends beyond their boundary, and so it appears as something they belong to rather than something facing them from outside.

The encounter is the first component of spirituality. The second is the reach toward that excess. A person does not merely notice it passively, but turns toward it. That turn can take many forms: reverence, awe, surrender, prayer, meditation, contemplation, wonder, dread, gratitude. What these share is a reaching past the limits of one’s own understanding while remaining a distinct person. Spirituality is not self-dissolution into the excess — that would collapse the interval that makes relation possible. It is a person’s orientation toward what exceeds their self-understanding, across an interval they cannot close.

The historical record predicts the same structure the person predicts from inside. Below the recursion threshold, the components show up unjoined; with the recursion they compose, first into bodied and personified forms favored by the cognitive defaults that keep agent-frame concepts maximally transmissible; as models deepen, an abstraction trajectory runs in parallel across unconnected cultures because it is recursion-depth driven rather than tradition-specific; once the terminus is reached, the trajectory ratchets, and apophatic counter-currents emerge after the abstraction is mature, never before. The [§8.14](<8.14 Spirituality.md>) arc records that pattern, and any tradition that lasts long enough should reproduce it.

The traditions have named this reach in many vocabularies. *Spiritus* — breath. The most immaterial concept in the religious vocabularies is the most physical word. Breath is a directed exchange of Substance through a medium, unfolding in Time across a relational Space between the person and what surrounds it. The word the tradition chose for what transcends the body is a description of what the body does.


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← [8.14.2 What is Required](<8.14.2 What is Required.md>) | [8.14.4 What is Confirmed](<8.14.4 What is Confirmed.md>) →
