Naturalistic Paganism
Mid-Month Meditation for June
We bring our late spring theme, “Practice”, to a close with this thought by Mary Jo Weaver:
“First the appearance, then the dance, then the story.”
Pagans often claim that they have no orthodoxy (right belief), only orthopraxy (right practice), by which they mean they privilege action over belief. Mary Jo Weaver writes in her essay, “Who is the Goddess and Where Does She Get Us?” (published in the spring 1989 volume of the Journal of Feminist Studies), that the formula, “first the appearance, then the dance, then the story”, specifies the proper relationship among theophany, ritual, and theology. If we were to rephrase that statement in naturalistic terms, then we might say: “Experience precedes practice and practice precedes reasoning.” But is this ordering true for Humanistic and Naturalistic Pagans?
Give this issue some thought then share how you order these three elements of spirituality: experience, practice, and reasoning. Explain why in the comments below.
Starstuff, Contemplating by Jon Cleland Host: “The Wonder Amplifier”
We are assemblages of ancient atoms forged in stars – atoms organized by history to the point of consciousness, now able to contemplate this sacred Universe of which we are a tiny, but wondrous, part.
While intellectual ponderings were important in my path to Naturalistic Paganism, and these still play a major role, another part of the current topic simply crowds them out in my mind now. You see, the topic also asked about intellect’s interaction with wonder, and that’s a very, very big and compelling topic.
Years ago, Dr. Richard Feynman was told he couldn’t see beauty. As he explains:
“I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, ‘Look how beautiful it is,’ and I’ll agree, I think. And he says, ‘You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you, as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.”
Dr. Feynman goes on to explain how he sees all the beauty in the flower that anyone else does, and that on top of that, he sees inside, imagining the networks in the petal, then down to the cells themselves, and the complex dance of the many intricate molecules working together, and then, even more! Behind all of that is the deep time history, the long process of evolution which – more than 100 million years ago, drew together insects and plants in mutually beneficially teamwork. He describes how he sees all of this, each level adding to the excitement, mystery, and awe of a simple flower! He concludes:
“It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts”
I know that rush. It’s incredible. I see it unfold, level upon level, in the blink of an eye, time and again in my life, all around me. That tree, this rock, that cloud, a blue jay, this computer, and on and on! And that’s not even getting into seeing other people. I can’t imagine living without it, and for anyone who hasn’t experienced it, it’s indescribable. For someone to suggest to Dr. Feynman, that he sees less beauty in a flower, when he sees so much more, just shows that this friend doesn’t understand what knowledge can do. When I first read Feynman’s flower story, it hit me – Here was someone who sees the world as I do, and experiences that beauty of so many things as I do! Wow, it works with other people too!
I caught glimpses of it in others too. Carl Sagan comes to mind. As does this quote from Charles Sherrington, 1942:
“The brain is a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. It is as if the Milky Way is engaging in a cosmic dance. The cortex is an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never a lasting one; with a shifting harmony of entrancing subpatterns.”
That’s why I just simply don’t get how anyone could suggest that a Naturalistic worldview somehow decreases awe and wonder, when the opposite has been so true for me. Have they never learned anything about things they see? For me, a Naturalistic worldview, coupled with some knowledge, has taken my awe and wonder to undreamt-of levels, drawing from deep wells of spirituality that I hadn’t known existed.
Any attempt at examples will fall far short of reality, but a few come to mind.
We just saw how someone could describe our brain as an “Enchanted Loom”. How our brains work, on a basic level, isn’t that hard to understand. We can start with our senses that feed into the brain. For instance, well understood cells in our eyes convert light into electrical pulses, sent along nerve cells to the brain. Nerve cells are also called neurons, and each has many long, thin branches connected to other neurons. It takes many electrical pulses from many neurons to cause another neuron to send its electrical pulse, which may then reach many other different neurons. A number of connected neurons make simple “logic gates”, similar to those in computers. Many logic gates linked together can process information like a computer does. But how do they get connected the right way? Our genes, built by trillions of our Ancestors over millions of years of evolution, give us the starting structure, and our history builds the rest, ending up with trillions of neurons, and a hundred trillion connections between them!
The incredible realization here is that this shows how the mind works. These basic chemical reactions and electrical pulses, all working in milliseconds, make up your every thought from “where did I leave my keys?”, to “Yes! I’ll marry him!”. I don’t know about you, but I find that realization to be mind blowing. We are our brains, without a need for the idea visiting ghosts from some imagined supernatural realm. There are no disembodied “minds”, and so any damage or chemical change to our brains affects (or even eliminates) our thoughts. My thoughts seem to me to be the essence of who I am, yet, at the simplest level, they are undeniably made up of basic chemical reactions! And it’s not just my brain that is this amazing, but your brain, or his brain, or her brain, too! We are surrounded by so many of these incredible thinking chemical, biological machines!
And what if we turn our gaze skyward?
As a ball of plasma a million times bigger than the entire Earth, the sun is not a ball of fire – it’s much too hot for even fire to exist! A few numbers can show us nature more clearly, and for a Naturalistic Pagan like me, practically everything about nature is spiritual.
So how can we conceive of the sheer awesomeness of our Sun? Size? Oh yeah, we already did that. Ok, how about power? The energy output of the Sun produces over 18 million times more energy in one second what the entire worldwide nuclear arsenal! Our local star produces that flood of energy by nuclear fusion, turning 370,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 3.7 X 1038) hydrogen atoms into helium, which by Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, directly converts 4 million metric tons of matter into energy each second. If every grain of sand on Earth were instead several whole planet Earths, then the total number of grains of sand on all those millions of quadrillions of Earths would still be less than the number of hydrogen atoms fused every second by the Sun! And all that energy is only just barely enough to keep gravity at bay.
We could go on all day. It’s truly mindbending. I find it even more mindbending to realize that all this energy has caused simple molecules on Earth to organize over millions of years to be able to build cities, sing whalesongs, understand DNA, and even to love a new baby.
OK, that’s it for now. I can’t write anymore….. I see my fingers moving as I type…. Nerve cells firing….. the actin and myosin molecules converting ATP into motion….. motion causing the electron fields of the keyboard to repel……………. the electrical… ………………………………
The Author
In addition to writing the Starstuff, Contemplating column here at HumanisticPaganism, Dr. Jon Cleland Host is a scientist who earned his PhD in materials science at Northwestern University & has conducted research at Hemlock Semiconductor and Dow Corning since 1997. He holds eight patents and has authored over three dozen internal scientific papers and eleven papers for peer-reviewed scientific journals, including the journal Nature. He has taught classes on biology, math, chemistry, physics and general science at Delta College and Saginaw Valley State University. Jon grew up near Pontiac, and has been building a reality-based spirituality for over 30 years, first as a Catholic and now as a Unitarian Universalist, including collaborating with Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow to spread the awe and wonder of the Great Story of our Universe (see www.thegreatstory.org, and the blog atevolutionarytimes.org). Jon and his wife have four sons, whom they embrace within a Universe-centered, Pagan, family spirituality. He currently moderates the yahoo group Naturalistic Paganism.
See other Starstuff, Contemplating posts.
See Dr. Jon Cleland Host’s other posts.
Postpagan Ceremony & Ecology, by Glen Gordon: “Walking with Whitman”
The following is a small sermon given as part of a larger worship service with three others at the Unitarian Universalist Church of The Palouse in Moscow, Idaho on Sunday, January 27th, 2013.
One of the first poets I fell in love with was Walt Whitman. At 17, I remember wandering the bookstore in search of a literary craving I could not name. I passed the discounted classics, and a leatherbound copy of Leaves of Grass caught my attention. I thumbed through its gold leafed pages, mesmerized with the words flowing on the page. The first pages of “Song of Myself” captivated me as I mouthed the words to myself, flipping from page to page. To this day, the poem continues to have that effect on me. Whitman could articulate the submersion in the natural world as clearly as he experienced it.
In his day, Whitman’s poetry was considered scandalous for its sensual qualities. Yet, often ignored by scholars today is the religious message behind his poetry. Whitman’s intention was within the spirit of his times, when new religions where sprouting all around him. Leaves of Grass was deliberately written as an inspirational spiritual text, in as far as he mimics the poetic cadence of the Bible. He laid a poetic foundation for religion and spirituality that is grounded in the sacred of the everyday and merges the mystical with the scientific, without friction or contradiction, leaving both himself and his words as controversial today as when they where freshly written.
In my personal spiritual affirmations, I have a phrase, “One breath, one flesh, one soul.” In several key passages Whitman’s words reflect the meaning I attach to this affirmation. When he writes, “I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”, I think about all matter being the collective physical manifestation of all creation as one flesh. Putting aside human perception, I question whether there is a distinct line where I begin and end or where the physical world around me begins and ends. I have often stopped while on a brisk walk to allow my senses to fully engage with the environment and feel lost in the landscape, feeling as though there are no barriers between me and the extended world.
Whitman continues, “My respiration and inspiration … the beating of my heart … the passing of blood and air through my lungs”. These words are filled with complete adoration for the act of breathing. From these words comes a sense of what I call “the one breath”, which is the atmosphere itself. With each breath of humans and animals and plants, the atmosphere is created and changed, being inhaled and exhaled, so that it becomes unclear where my breath ends and other’s begins. What I take inside me with each gasp of air belonged to and was inside something else. The unseen particles that float about me could have been anywhere and everywhere, and I take them in myself as a necessity of life.
When Whitman writes about God, it is not the anthropomorphic god of the Bible:
“I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty four, and each moment then,
In the face of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.”
This passage reveals a God that is all pervasive within the very fabric of creation and reality, and dwells within the narrator, the faces of those he meets, and in every aspect of the world around him. This is not much different than my own beliefs about the soul. I do not believe in individual souls or spirits that reside within people, unique to them and carrying the attributes of their personality into an afterlife. Instead, I perceive one soul that is at the core of all physical manifestations.
Whitman might relate my vision of the one soul to God. I tend to view it as life itself, an evolutionary impulse of creativity. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman mentions love as the unifying peace of creation, likening it to the support beam used to unite the keel and floorboards. He declares his love for many things and the whole of creation as a declaration of his own self love. This gives me a sense of love for self that is the one soul. The soul that is not myself is the soul that is is everything and everyone else but is still me.
Whitman’s elegant use of language describes what psychology calls a trans-personal experience, where distinction and identity of the self extend beyond the usual filters of our human perception — in layman terms, a mystical experience. As I continue reading the poem in its entirety, I get a sense for the same awe and wonderment I feel on the occasions where I allow myself to let go of preconceived perceptions and meld into the experience itself. From Whitman’s experience arises a poetry of complex theological thought that parallels my own beliefs in “one flesh, one breath, and one soul”. I could spend a lifetime exploring the nuances and subtleties in Walt Whitman’s poetry.
The Author
Glen Gordon was introduced to Paganism by friends while living overseas in Europe during the late 90′s. He underwent both Wiccan and Neodruidic training during his formative years, but had not self-identified as a Pagan when his path diverged into land-centered spiritual naturalism ten years ago. His focus has been on cultivating beneficial relationships with the natural living world surrounding him wherever he lives. During this time, he discovered Unitarian Universalism and has been active in his local congregations for many years. Since 2007, he has worked on varied projects regarding BioRegional Animism, including this 5 minute video, the words of which came from a short UU sermon he gave. He has spoken on the topic of ecology and the land on a few occasions for his local congregation and facilitated a now-disbanded group of UU Pagans and spiritual naturalists. In the past, he maintained the blog, Postpagan, and is excited to share some of that material at HumanisticPaganism. Currently, you can find Glen writing occasionally for No Unsacred Places and helping achieve Green sanctuary status for his beloved UU community, where he helps create and lead ecological aware earth- and land- focused ceremonies for the solstices and equinoxes.
“Charity: A naturalistic practice of offering” by B. T. Newberg
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As in the story of Philemon and Baucis, who hosted Zeus and Hermes in their home, giving to the figures of myth can enhance your life.
In the ancient world, gods and goddesses were honored with gifts. How can a naturalist carry on this tradition today?
One way it can be done is through giving to charities. For example, if you want to honor Demeter, goddess of grain, why not donate to your local food shelf? If Dionysus, god of wine, is your guest of honor, why not toast to him with a donation to Students Against Destructive Decisions? In this way, you can both honor the deity and make an immediate, concrete difference in the world.
Why mythologize charity?
Some may ask why myth and charity need to be paired. The short answer is they don’t, but doing so can have many benefits.
First, gifting is a natural way to develop relationships, well-documented in the animal world as well as across human cultures. So, if you are seeking to develop a relationship with a figure of myth, a natural way to further the bonding process is with a gift. Whether you relate to deities as symbols, archetypes, or some other naturalistic form, gifting can help develop relationships by recruiting our natural social bonding instincts. An offering in the form of a charitable donation appropriate to the deity is an excellent way to cultivate a relationship.
Second, we may intend to give to charities, but how often do we actually carry through? As Alain de Botton points out, we simply tend to forget. One way to remind yourself to do good is with a regular calendar of rituals. If each of your Wheel of the Year rituals involves some gift to charity, you will be reminded to spread the wealth at least eight times a year.
Third, charitable giving is a historically attested ancient Pagan practice. For an account of the ancient tradition of the euergetes, or benefactor, see Peter Brown’s Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire.
Finally, helping others has been scientifically shown to enhance happiness. So, if you are doing ritual anyway, why not add that extra bit of help to others? It makes ritual all the more meaningful.
How do I choose an appropriate charity?
You can start by asking: What does the deity in question care about? For further inspiration, HP has compiled extensive lists of charities organized by deity.
So far, we have five pantheons:
Don’t see your favorite pantheon? Then create it, and share it with the rest of us!
Check out all the Charities by Deity pages, and leave comments with your ideas of new charities. Thanks for your help!
About B. T. Newberg
B. T. Newberg
B. T. founded HumanisticPaganism.com in 2011, and served as managing editor till 2013. His writings on naturalistic spirituality can be found at Patheos, Pagan Square, the Spiritual Naturalist Society, as well as right here on HP. Since the year 2000, he has been practicing meditation and ritual from a naturalistic perspective. After leaving the Lutheranism of his raising, he experimented with Agnosticism, Buddhism, Contemporary Paganism, and Spiritual Humanism. Currently he combines the latter two into a dynamic path embracing both science and myth. He headed the Google Group Polytheist Charity, and organized the international interfaith event The Genocide Prevention Ritual.
In 2009, he completed a 365-day challenge recorded at One Good Deed Per Day. As a Pagan, he has published frequently at The Witch’s Voice as well as Oak Leaves and the podcast Tribeways, and has written a book on the ritual order of Druid organization Ar nDriocht Fein called Ancient Symbols, Modern Rites. Several of his ebooks sell at GoodReads.com, including a volume of creative nonfiction set in Malaysia called Love and the Ghosts of Mount Kinabalu.
Professionally, he teaches English as a Second Language. He also researches the relation between religion, psychology, and evolution at www.BTNewberg.com. After living in Minnesota, England, Malaysia, Japan, and South Korea, B. T. Newberg currently resides in St Paul, Minnesota, with his wife and cat.
B. T. currently serves as the treasurer and advising editor for HP.
“Top 10 signs of good spirituality” by DT Strain
This essay was first published at The Humanist Contemplative.
Over the course of my comparative studies, there are some general traits I’ve noticed which seem to be shared between those wisdom streams and I thought it could be helpful to point them out. Here are some traits that are a sign of a good and healthy spiritual path…
10) Aim of True Happiness
Good spirituality will have as its aim the happiness of the practitioner. Of course, deep understanding of what this entails is essential. By ‘True Happiness’ we mean something more than mere pleasure associated with one’s conditions. Rather, the kind of happiness a good spirituality will pursue will be a deeper sense of contentment that transcends circumstance. It will be a source of inner strength in the face of adversity and humble appreciation in the face of fortune. Such a happiness is also not selfish in the shallow sense of the word, in that the practitioner will come to see that mere self interest is not always a path to it.
9) Humble approach to knowledge
A good spirituality will engender humility in the practitioner when it comes to beliefs. It will produce a practitioner that is careful about making claims that cannot be substantiated. The practitioner will appreciate their limitations as a human being, not assuming they have more ability to ‘know’ things than they do. They would learn to be comfortable with a state of ‘not knowing’ all things. Such an approach will guide the practitioner in their own assumptions, as well as in accepting the claims of others without good reason. A good spiritual path will encourage doubt, asking questions, etc. It will not encourage the practitioner to accept claims on the basis of authority, or tradition, or faith, or any other means than good sense and self experience. But at the same time, this principle will not be one that encourages the practitioner to spend their time telling others what they should or shouldn’t believe. Rather, its focus will be on helping the practitioner in their own walk.
8) Holistic, not dualistic
A good spirituality will inspire appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things. Dualistic thinking, whether it comes to nature, ourselves, us/them mentalities, and so on, will be anathema to a sound spirituality. Such a spiritual path will, in part, help to guide the practitioner to operate more effectively in an interconnected universe; appreciating subtle cause and effect, and acting more wisely in such a system. This ‘skillful means’ will be a way for the practitioner to see the big picture – to handle the complexities of life more like a surfer on ever-changing waves, moving in a dance with the universe, rather than stubbornly trying to move against the grain.
7) Acceptance of impermanence
The ever-changing flux of the universe, and the impermanence in which that results, has always been obvious to any observer. Nearly all worldviews, philosophies, traditions, or religions can be grouped into two categories regarding how they handle impermanence. One group will try to claim that there really is some permanent phenomenon to which we can attach our hopes and secure our philosophy (an afterlife, a deity, a ‘salvation’, magic powers, etc). While this may or may not be true, #9 (a humble approach to knowledge) suggests that we cannot know for certain whether it is. For that reason, a good spirituality will belong to the second category, which instead helps the practitioner to come to terms with impermanence; to accept it and learn to live effectively and happily in an impermanent universe. Spirituality, at its best, even helps to grow a sense of awe and wonder at such a grand flux, as we come to realize that impermanence means not merely death, but birth as well, and makes possible everything we love and experience.
6) Motivation-focused, not consequentialism
While much philosophy is often concerned with elaborate logical models to define the ethical, based on actions, consequences, and outward results, a good spirituality will know the limitations of these approaches. In the face of highly complex situations we rarely know all the variables, let alone their values and the results of our actions. But a good spirituality will emphasize the importance of good motivation on behalf of the practitioner. It will direct the practitioner to that inner motivation in all actions. Surely, it is important to use our reason as best we can to take responsible action, but in the end, if we have good motivation and take that due diligence, outcomes are not entirely within our say, as the rest of the universe will play its part as well. A good spirituality engenders a deep appreciation and intuitive-level knowledge of that truth. In this way, our deeper happiness in life begins to divorce itself from circumstantial outcomes.
5) Practice-centered
A good spirituality will be more than merely intellectual teachings or academic philosophy or a ‘world view’. It will not be merely centered on intellectual assent to a certain set of beliefs. Rather, its true power will be in its practice. That is, it will be a system of disciplines one can apply and become more skillful at over time. Its wisdom and its practices will be integrated and support one another. In this way, one’s spirituality will not merely be a label – it will be an activity; and the practitioner will have a sense of making continual progress, day by day, as they walk that path.
4) Changing self instead of others or the world
A legitimately spiritual person will certainly be found taking positive action to help others and help make positive change in the world, but these are merely symptoms of the spiritual life. A good spirituality will help the practitioner always to focus on changing what they have the most capacity to change: the person in the mirror. Understanding that we live in an impermanent and interconnected world, the practitioner will understand that all of their efforts may or may not come to fruition. Therefore, a good spirituality will help us to change our focus from “I must change the world” to, “I must be the kind of person that seeks positive change in the world”. Thus, when we adopt this focus we have already succeeded, regardless of outcomes. This focus not only helps against ‘burn out’ in activist efforts, but it helps us avoid the pitfalls of focusing too much on how others ought to be acting without tending to our own shortcomings.
3) Transcending the ego
A sign of a poor spirituality will be that it coddles the practitioner and makes all things about them. Perhaps it promises wish fulfillment and certain externals such as wealth, health, reputation, etc. It fools us into thinking we have more control than we do. These claims to empower the practitioner appeal to the practitioner’s shallow and mundane self interests and reinforce the ego. A good spirituality will be ego-busting. It will help to free the practitioner from the prison of the ego, expanding one’s sense of self and concern outward to include others. Only through such a liberation from the ego can we begin to see what had been consuming distress for what it is, and begin to know a larger world. Healthy spiritual paths will help us in this process.
2) Wisdom, not -ism
Good spirituality will not be about labels, or a particular people or culture, or particular brands, or personalities. It will inspire the practitioner to seek out and respect wise notions and practices wherever they can be found. It will not inspire the practitioner to defend their ‘ism’ as though holding a flag, but rather to seek truth first with an open mind. Such a practitioner will not care too much whether this or that is considered a religion by some or a philosophy by others, or what titles by which they may or may not be called. They will be adept at exchanging lexicons to suit the context and the conversant, keeping in mind the meaning behind that language as what is important. They will not turn away from certain sources because of bias, ignorance, or reactionary tendencies. Good spirituality encourages the practitioner not to form attachments to the trappings of its own form.
1) Compassion as foundation
Most importantly, a good spirituality will have compassion at its core. Even the pursuit of truth is only worthwhile because of the good it makes possible for all people and is thus secondary to compassion. Good spirituality will help to expand one’s sense of empathy and compassion, ultimately toward all beings. It will teach forgiveness and reject retributive approaches toward dealing with human conflict. Even when action against others is necessary, it will help the practitioner maintain compassion even for enemies. A good spirituality will reject the notion that compassion and pragmatism are at odds – that the virtuous and the advantageous can be exclusive to one another. Ultimately, the practitioner of a good spiritual path will come toward greater perception that virtue (including compassion) and wisdom are synonymous.
About DT Strain
Rev. Strain speaks and writes on a wide variety of philosophic concepts and participates in several organizations. His “Humanist Contemplative” group and concept has since helped inspire a similar group at Harvard University. He is former president of the Humanists of Houston (HOH), and has served as vice-chair on the Executive Council of AHA’s Chapter Assembly, on the Education Committee of the Kochhar Humanist Education Center, and as a member of the Stoic Council at New Stoa.DT is a Humanist Minister, certified by the American Humanist Association (AHA) and a Spiritual Naturalist. He is the founder and director of the Spiritual Naturalist Society.
His writing appears in the Houston Chronicle and has been published in magazines, newsletters, and in the AHA national publication “Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism”. He has been a guest speaker on the Philosophy of Religion panel discussion at San Jacinto College, and has appeared on the Houston PBS television program, The Connection, discussing religious belief and non-belief. DT Strain is an enthusiast of Stoicism, Buddhism, and other ancient philosophies; seeking to supplement modern scientific and humanistic values with these practices. His essays and blog can be found at www.HumanistContemplative.org.
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