This morning my wife discovered that the left side mirror on her car had been smashed by vandals sometime during the night. The same thing happened to our neighbor’s car, both parked on the street. As I later reflected on my initial response to this, I found it interesting. Sometimes, as we are making progress in our practice, change is not noticeable until an event takes place that tests us. When this happens, it can remind us of the last... Read more

  As my wife and I slogged along on our bicycles, generally irritated at each other, suddenly there was a pop. Her back tire went flat, and we were in the middle of nowhere on a Korean highway. We had to find a repair shop, communicate our problem, and somehow make it home. As we pulled through this minor crisis, a peculiar thing happened: we were no longer irritated at each other. Through working together as a couple, each of... Read more

  One of the side effects of being a happy person is that unhappy people sometimes attach themselves to you hoping that a little of your sunshine will rub off on them. I’ve attracted people like this to me for as long as I can remember. I used to call them hangers on. But really, they are more accurately described as Negative Neds and Nellies. These are people who need help and who are looking towards anyone who will listen... Read more

Deep in the mountains of South Korea, a cicada hummed its last. Walking along the roadside, I saw a spider fall upon it with its venomous mandibles. Caught in the web, it had no escape, and cried: hum… hum… silence I stood equally silenced as the spider carried off the corpse into the splintered bark of a dead maple. It occurred to me that one day I too would sing the silence of my last song. Death happens. It’s a... Read more

The Spiritual Naturalist Society is proud to announce that the Charter for Compassion and the SNS have recently become partner organizations. This will mean that the SNS has agreed to share Charter announcements with its members, subscribers, and the public; and the Charter will likewise provide a link to the SNS on its website, and has allowed the SNS to post its announcements to the Charter’s Facebook page. The Charter for Compassion is a document that transcends religious, ideological, and... Read more

Drumming is an ancient art that has played a ritualistic and spiritual role in different cultures all over the world. Drumming practitioners today may be most familiar with West African and Native American traditions, but there are many others – for example, Taiko drumming techniques from Japan. Why does drumming have a spiritual role in the lives of so many diverse cultures, and what role might it have for naturalists? In the West at least, new spiritual movements have come... Read more

“It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.” –Paul Dirac. There is a general notion that “beauty” is something that belongs to the arts and humanities and has more or less been banished from science. Yet, in the last hundred years, many prominent artists and humanists* have banished beauty from their consideration (e.g. the Dadist, Fluxus, and much of the Postmodern) and many prominent scientists and mathematicians have in their way proclaimed... Read more

More and more I have come to realize that happiness is a matter of reflection. We rarely feel happiness in the moment. We may feel good, or pleasure. But it is only when we take a moment to reflect in the moment that we realize: we are happy. If we seek to have more happiness, we need to make more time for reflection. This is one of the reasons why meditation is so useful. Even if you don’t get yourself... Read more

Skeptics have often been accused of being cynical, negative, etc. They will (quite appropriately) correct us that skepticism is not the same as cynicism – always about denying or a denial that we can reasonably know anything. While skeptics might reject certain claims on the basis of lacking or contradictory evidence, skepticism also includes the acceptance of claims on that same basis. Skepticism can be a good thing because it is the opposite of gullibility and fuzzy thinking. So, that’s... Read more

Many philosophies and wisdom traditions have independently come to realize that anguish and emotional suffering is caused by our attachments. Buddhism is perhaps the best known, but Taoism is closely related in this, and many other philosophies touch on it as well. Some philosophies approach the matter by talking about fear, or greed, or false judgments about which things are necessary or beneficial; but these concepts tend to boil down to attachment. Attachment and non-attachment can be difficult concepts because... Read more