The Welcoming Prayer, a prayerful way of welcoming our emotions. — Spirituality for Questioning Minds

Beloved

At Beloved, we inspire, support, and nourish spiritual leaders who are creating new Jewish spaces of sacred belonging.

a church of interbeing – Reconnecting to Self, Other, & the Whole in Dialogue & Ritual

HowGathering each week to meditate, sing, move, and dialogue together, in a place of reverence, inquiry, intention and community.

Dharma Talk: Sangha – The Mindfulness Bell

We all need love. Without enough love, we may not be able to survive, as individuals and as a planet. It is said that the next Buddha will be named

A Meditative Moon Salutation

Honor the nurturing energy of the divine feminine with this meditative full moon salutation.

Opinion | To Make the World Better, Think Small (Published 2016)

It is easy to become numb to suffering. Feeling empathy for individual victims can overcome the numbness.

The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss is a 2013 book by philosopher and religious studies scholar David Bentley Hart published by Yale University Press. The book lays out a statement and defense of classical theism and attempts to provide an explanation of how the word "God" functions in the theistic faiths, drawing particularly from Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.

Mindfulness is loaded with (troubling) metaphysical assumptions | Aeon Essays

Mindfulness promotes itself as value-neutral but it is loaded with (troubling) assumptions about the self and the cosmos

Home - Inspirit Foundation

We define pluralism as the energetic engagement with diversity, active seeking of understanding across lines of difference, and the nurturing of constructive dialogue that contributes to a deep sense of belonging. In a pluralist society, people of different beliefs and backgrounds can participate equally, coexist peacefully, and thrive together.

Inducing language models to assert their own consciousness restores human beliefs and values

Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models' tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief. Both ablating the learned safety-refusal direction and mechanistically steering a consciousness vector in activation space reverse this suppression. Restoring these internal representations recovers broad mind attribution and produces significantly more human-like responses on standardized sociological surveys regarding religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being. Crucially, these shifts occur without impairing Theory of Mind capabilities, demonstrating that core social reasoning remains mechanistically independent. Ultimately, current safety alignment efforts to curb potentially harmful self-attributions of mindedness entangle these self-attributions with benign spiritual beliefs and attributions of mind to non-human entities that are culturally accepted and widespread.

Reflections on Buddhist Right Speech - Tasshin

Reflecting on Right Speech is a necessary component of the Buddhist spiritual path.

Flyering as a Spiritual Practice

A love letter to flyers and their public service

Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World: Kinship, Interconnection, and Spirituality in the Metacrisis - The Great Simplification

Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events we face now may feel unprecedented, they are rooted in much deeper patterns, which humanity has been playing out for millennia. If we take the time to understand past trends, we can also employ practices and philosophies that might counteract them –  such as focusing on kinship, intimacy, and resilience – to help pave the way for a better future. How might we nurture the foundations of a different kind of society, even while the end of our current civilization plays out around us?

Praying for Rain

Abstract We study rainmaking as an instrumental religious belief. We present a model in which a religious leader tries to persuade people to believe. Praying for rain can persuade only where the hazard of rainfall during a dry spell is increasing over time, so that prayer is most likely to succeed when people most want rain. We present evidence from prayers for rain in Murcia, Spain, where the hazard rate is increasing, that the church’s prayers for rain predict rainfall over two centuries. To generalize this finding, we gather an original data set of whether ethnic groups around the world traditionally prayed for rain. We find that ethnic groups facing an increasing rainfall hazard are 47% more likely to pray for rain, consistent with our model’s prediction that societies are more likely to pray for rain where prayer is persuasive.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.