I Thou Spirit

In his book, The Religion of Tomorrow, Ken Wilber writes about different pronouns denoting spirit, which he refers to as "1 2 3 spirit". First person spirit relates to the identification of one's mind or interior as ultimate spirit. Second person spirit relates to spirit as a "you", or an enduring conversation with an other, whether it's God or the Buddha, or another practitioner. Third person spirit sees spirit as something out there, that has no direct connection with us, such as Aristotle and Plontius's ideas about the Prime Mover of things, or Spinoza's idea of conatus.
    I find that the "Second Person" spirituality is perhaps the least definable--and, for this reason, sometimes the most problematic. This is because trying to picture spirit as an ongoing dialogue between two or more persons is sometimes conveying the idea that spirit is never completed, and cannot ever be defined or contained. Wilber suggests that conversation with the other is the way that qualities such as "compassion, love, gratitude, forgiveness, and so on" (p.173) can be expressed.
   Thinking about spirit as an ongoing, incomplete conversation that never ends, can sometimes help a person let go of a certain pride that might come from believing that they have found spirit or have achieved it in some way. Speaking personally, I have found that it's only when I admit my lack of control, or exhaust the feeling of being "in control", that spirit is allowed to seep into my insides and lift me up. Part of it is because spirit always falls behind or out of range of words, so we only realize spirit when we run out of consoling words. But part of it also is that spirit can't happen if we feel already complete and full. When we are "full", we have ossified ourselves, and are not able to let anything in, which is why failure is often the prelude to many spiritual moments. When spirit is allowed to get into the broken cracks of a tarnished surface, one can then realize that the brokenness is part of a process, and there is no harm in ever having to break for lack of any other way to proceed forward.

Wilber, K. (2017). The Religion of Tomorrow Boulder: Shambhala.