What we’re about
Spiritual Naturalist Drumming allows us to get to know ourselves – to learn to trust our instincts, our ways of sensing and acting in a complex environment intuitively and skillfully.
We seek in living more consistently with nature and our nature as rational/moral beings. This can potentially shift our attitude in ways that enable us to apply this perspective in other places in our life. And as we become more accustomed to entering this state of mind, we learn to free ourselves from self consciousness, which could be an aspect of being constrained by the delusions of the ego.
We enter that trance like state of pure experience; without labels; without judgments, and the fictions they often impose upon us. This is, of course, a meditative state, with similar (though not identical) benefits and uses in our spiritual practice. It is also an example of flow which is being more appreciated lately as a source of contentment and happiness in life. And, it is in this altered state of consciousness, that we can become perceptive to things we often overlook.
As we give up part of that control, and we trust others to fill in the beats alongside us simultaneously, a network activity builds between these coordinated nervous systems. We begin to operate as a single neurological system, in every way that matters from an information-processing standpoint.
This creates a profound sense of shared interconnectedness with others in the group. Importantly, this is not just a ‘feeling’, but it is a deep perception of an external truth: that we are, in fact, interconnected with one another in deeper ways than we are typically conditioned to appreciate or capable of directly perceiving.
To explain in more detail, it is helpful to take each word separately:
Spiritual is the first word in Spiritual Naturalism. For many, the word ‘spirituality’ has an association with the supernatural. However, we mean the term in its more general and original sense. The Latin root word spiritus meant ‘wind’ or ‘breath’, or the essence of something. As we might speak of the ‘spirit of the law’ or ‘school spirit’, the spiritual is that which is concerned with the essence of life – or the essential things in life. Thus, a person with no sense of spirituality would be a person that lives on the surface, always dealing only with the shallow or the mundane; perhaps even a materialistic person. But to have spirituality is to be concerned with the larger, deeper, and essential matters of life and to apply ourselves consciously toward them in a committed practice or ‘walk’. This includes, as Socrates put it, the ‘examined life’, and this is what we mean by spirituality.
Naturalism is a view of the world that includes those things which we can observe or directly conclude from observations. Naturalists’ conception of reality consists of the natural world as outlined by the latest scientific understanding. As for claims for which we have no evidence, we do not hold any beliefs in these and do not make any other claims about them. It is quite possible, even likely, that many things exist which we cannot detect, but we believe in a humble approach to knowledge. With humility, we can recognize that human beings are imperfect in their ability to know all things. Therefore, we are careful to limit our claims about reality to what we can experience and measure, as well as reproduce and show to others. On all else, we are content to admit “we don’t know”.
Join our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SpiritualNaturalistDrumming/
