(To preface this, I am a Deist. Basically I believe something created the world and then let it spin: exactly like the clock maker model of God if anyone is familiar with that.)

I'll give a very brief overview of my history with religion and spirituality. Throughout most of my life I claimed to be Christian but I never felt like one. After enough time of trying to force myself to care about religion, I gave up. I didn't really care to understand and coalesce my thoughts until around a year ago when I realized I never really believed in the Christian system and changed my classification to Deist.

Alright with that out of the way I'd like to talk a bit about the ways I see spirituality manifest in other people. Spirituality is a fascinating beast of varied forms, but I'll talk about two examples of it that I have seen that are markedly different from one another.

The first is tied to religion and how some people come to religion. I had a friend tell me about how he came to Christianity and I found it interesting but nothing I couldn't already explain. He essentially described to me the feeling of a text(in this instance the Bible) speaking or resonating with him. While I agree this feeling can be quite rare in certain people(especially people who haven't read literature very often), I have felt it myself from a few certain texts. Obviously I don't think a religion can be created out of Hamlet(but I do think that would be a really cool religion), but the similarities are there. The Bible is a piece of literature and of course some of its stories will resonate with certain people like certain stories have done to me.

The other instance is more appropriately connected to belief in the supernatural(which is a kind of spirituality). Several friends of mine believed they were connecting with ghosts while using a Ouija board. I think it is pretty easy to guess my position on the matter, but what I did find incredible was the effect their belief caused. Because they believed in this ghostly connection, they actually physically felt sick. Nothing was happening to them and yet they had such a strong reaction purely because they believed they would have such a reaction. A simple instance perhaps, and yet it showed to be that the mind really does have a lot of control over our physical bodies.

Maybe I seem like a skeptic to people, but I don't really mind. I do not believe in any spiritual world and I doubt anything will make me change my mind(but I am open to attempts, I'd love to be proven wrong or at least be forced to consider something I hadn't thought of before). That being said, I do believe that there is an incredible power that the spiritual sense can bring out. There are certain people that are able to control their body to impossible degrees and warm their body temperature in intense cold(Here is an article about an instance of this, honestly fascinating stuff: http://thescienceexplorer.com/brain-and-body/iceman-controls-his-body-temperature-and-immune-system-his-mind). These people have gained an incredible degree of control over their own minds and because of that control they can manipulate their own bodies in ways we can't understand.

I would easily chalk this up to the ability of the mind to control our own bodies. I've already seen it in those people who physically reacted to a supernatural encounter. But I can't reasonably discount the fact that nearly everyone with incredible control over themselves also have a spiritual connection. It is very possible a spiritual mind is simply one more likely to spend the time to attune itself than one lacking spirituality, but maybe there is something more to it.

But then again, I'm just a college student trying to get a degree in English. Thank you all for reading!