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Human beings inhabit two realities at once: the immediate world revealed by our senses and the mental world woven from memory, language, imagination, and belief. This article explores how mindfulness can help us reconnect with direct experience without abandoning the uniquely human capacity to create meaning, culture, and possibility.
As an online community, what kinds of shared events can we realistically build, which address ritual and the experiential side of spiritual practice? Daniel Strain shares thoughts on this in an exercise to imagine what is possible at SNS...
Poetic Faiths are an emerging current within Spiritual Naturalism treating myth, ritual and religion as creative works of art. They are “metamodern folk religions”: consciously made systems of story, symbol, object and practice that recover the folk-religious power and mystique of ritual life without requiring naïve belief or institutional authority. The term is an expansion … Read more
In this review, we praise Erick Cloward’s Stoicism 101 as one of the best modern introductions to Stoic philosophy. Balancing clarity, practicality, and intellectual substance, the book succeeds in making Stoicism accessible without reducing it to inspirational clichés. We highlight its strong organization, modern real-world examples, attention to compassion, and honest discussion of Stoicism’s limitations and misconceptions. It is an ideal entry point for newcomers seeking a concise but meaningful guide to Stoic thought and practice…
November 7–8 | Live on Zoom REGISTER NOW! The Spiritual Naturalist Society warmly invites you to Convergence, a free two-day online gathering dedicated to exploring the many ways people find meaning, wonder and ethical inspiration within a naturalistic understanding of the world. Our aim is to converge some of the most promising visions for the … Read more
Mindfulness meditation is often praised as a powerful tool for mental well-being, but the evidence behind it is more mixed—and more nuanced—than the hype suggests. This article explores both the limits of the science and the author’s own decades-long experience, revealing how meditation may not transform everyone, yet can still offer something quietly valuable.
Learning chess reveals a deeper truth about thinking: we don’t calculate everything—we rely on patterns to navigate overwhelming complexity. This article explores how those patterns shape our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors, often operating beneath awareness like modern echoes of what earlier thinkers called “daemons.”
This article explores the philosophy of naturalism through the stark idea that death is absolute, dissolving not only the body but the self, meaning, and all existence over time. Confronting this unsettling truth, it examines how different traditions—from religion to Buddhism and existentialism—either resist, despair over, or ultimately find freedom and value within life’s fleeting nature.
This article reflects on the death of a beloved cat through the lens of Spiritual Naturalism, exploring how loss, love, and impermanence are deeply intertwined. It argues that meaning is not diminished by life’s finite nature, but instead arises because of it—inviting us to love fully while accepting change as an essential part of existence.