The urge to make consumer goods is, after all, one of the keenest spiritual disciplines that an ascetic can face: it forces spirit to take form.
He also knows when to skip the flippancies: he concedes that the scientific advances of the last 100 years now mean that it is possible to consider life in terms of physics and chemistry ("no life force, no spirit, no soul seems to be involved") and to see in the universe "a magnificence, and an intricate, elegant order far beyond anything our ancestors imagined".
In death, though, a life force or spirit known as ka was immortal, and a soul known as ba, which was linked to personal attributes, fled the body after death.
Sometimes they were used to force the spirit of the newly dead to depart for the spirit world.
Each day I have the privilege of reviewing the world as it comes to me and transforming it into another form altogether, the very form I would have wrought in the first place if only it was I who'd been the demiurge and the original creator — the one, the being, the force, whether spirit or random principle, that set all this delirious life in motion.
More seriously for the institution, the DPR has been talking about whittling away its powers against which, says Mr Goenawan, "all democratic forces of spirit should scream".Some such spirited forces took to the streets of Jakarta in July, calling themselves "Cicak", the Indonesian for gecko, but also an acronym for "Love Indonesia, Love the KPK".
She was a woman of remarkable force and spirit.
There are many instinctive romantics among popular artists, the Gershwins and the Chaplins who, through force of spirit and originality of style, take by storm the balcony and the boxes alike.
If Sander devoted himself to the collating of human variety, and to the minute annotation of quirks, it is because of his faith in Geist, in the animating force of spirit and thought.
A long satirical and licentious poem strewn with political allusions, it was reminiscent of Voltaire's "La Pucelle d'Orléans" ("The Maid of Orleans"), but it lacked the force and spirit needed for public acclaim.
