Spirituality, A Personal View – Part I

Last updated on: July 11, 2021 at 9:06 am By Spiritual Naturalist Society

Spirituality, A Personal View – Part I by Thomas Schenk Spirituality is the creative activity wherein we transform life’s noise into life’s music. The word “spiritual” comprises one-half of the term Spiritual Naturalist, but even among members of SNS there is no general agreement about what the word means. There isn’t, of course, one correct definition. It means many things to many people, and people approach it in many different ways. Here, I present what spirituality means to me. Spirit Spirituality... Read more

Why Compassion?

Last updated on: June 17, 2021 at 2:34 pm By Spiritual Naturalist Society

by DT Strain We talk a lot about compassion here at the Society. It’s even in our motto, “Happiness through compassion, reason, and practice.” Talking about compassion will generally get you positive response – everyone likes compassion. It sounds really nice. But there are some important things about compassion in a spiritual practice that get missed. One friend recently said she was in favor of being more compassionate and a more compassionate world, but didn’t understand what I meant by saying that compassion... Read more

Ants As Pets and Pests

Last updated on: July 2, 2021 at 2:15 pm By Spiritual Naturalist Society

by SNS Guest (Today’s article is by guest writer Brock Haussamen. For brief bio, see below.) Of the thirty or so ants that arrived with my ant farm, five are still alive after about six weeks. I never had much interest in keeping ants, but E. O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler’s Journey to the Ants sparked my curiosity. A plastic “ant farm” with its big window and the bag of gel “sand” arrived in the mail, followed a week later by a tube... Read more

Mysticism and Beauty

Last updated on: June 17, 2021 at 2:32 pm By Spiritual Naturalist Society

by Eric Steinhart I’m prone to mystical experiences. I’ve had six that were sufficiently intense that I ended up recording them in detail later. And none of those mystical experiences involved any revelation of God. So they weren’t religious experiences – they were irreligious, and I’m still an atheist. Mainly, those experiences involved an intense awareness of the beauty of nature. My most recent mystical experience happened in October 2017, when I was driving through the San Rafael Swell in the middle of... Read more

Should Naturalists Celebrate the Decline of Christianity?

Last updated on: June 24, 2021 at 5:39 pm By Spiritual Naturalist Society

by Gregory Gronbacher Our crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Antonio Gramsci The predominant influence of Judeo-Christianity in Western culture for the past 1700 or so years has been waning for decades, even centuries, and this is becoming increasingly visible. Yes, the cultural residue of Judeo-Christian moral insights remains, but weakening is widespread, explicit identity with the mythic narratives... Read more

Bodhicitta: The Mind of Awakening

Last updated on: June 17, 2021 at 2:30 pm By Spiritual Naturalist Society

by Daniel Scharpenburg Bodhicitta is the quality that drives away the suffering in ourselves and others. “Bodhi” means awake, free from delusion. “Citta” means mind. So this is about the mind of awakening that we’re trying to develop and strengthen. The way of the Bodhisattva is the way of compassion and wisdom, of realizing your own boundless potential. It comes from realizing that Enlightenment is our true nature, that we have a basic goodness and wakefulness that is fundamental to our... Read more

Maps of the Soul

Last updated on: June 18, 2021 at 8:31 pm By Spiritual Naturalist Society

by Daniel Shkolnik I don’t trust the Zodiac. The Tarot isn’t too different from a Rorschach test. Even less metaphysical personality systems like the Myers-Briggs test and the Enneagram fail to impress me. All these systems promise to give a map of the most complicated regions of the universe we know of: the human mind. More poetically: the human soul. For various reasons, each falls short. But there’s one framework that’s garnered my trust. In the ‘90s, Jungian psychologists Robert L.... Read more

“Damn It, It’s MY Body That’s At Stake”: Autonomy, Sociality and Imperfect Choices

Last updated on: June 17, 2021 at 2:28 pm By Spiritual Naturalist Society

by Brock Haussamen My family were swapping medical grievances one evening—flawed diagnoses, unwanted side effects, useless procedures. “Damn it, it’s my body that’s at stake” was one protest. I thought how forcefully people can stake out the inviolability of not only their health but also “my life,” “my rights,” “my money,” “my free will.” When relatives, employers, government, or banks overstep, we stand by our autonomy. Don’t tread on me. But we work the other side of this relationship too. We uphold—because we benefit from— social codes... Read more

Of the Earth

Last updated on: June 10, 2021 at 9:39 pm By Spiritual Naturalist Society

by Thomas Schenk In his book, The Saviors of God, Nikos Kazantzakis writes: “Earth rises up in your brains and sees her entire body for the first time.” Taking into account that the idea has been made poetic and personified, the idea presented here is not only compatible with Naturalism, but is implied by it. The soils and waters of the Earth, aided by sunlight, have over the eons self-organized and evolved into living forms, into sensitive nervous systems, into awareness, and... Read more

The River of Contemplation (Nature and Soul, the Sacred Unity)

Last updated on: June 9, 2021 at 1:59 pm By Spiritual Naturalist Society

by Thomas Schenk When I was young, I lived in a house on the banks of the Mississippi River. Not the grand, storied Mississippi of the South, but a young Mississippi only a hundred miles or so from it source in Lake Itasca. As a child, I spent many an hour sitting by the river watching the water flow. The river provided me with a natural lesson in contemplation; though I didn’t think of it like that at the time. Perhaps... Read more