The Myth of a Neat Sequence
It is tempting to imagine your spiritual work as a tidy sequence: first fully deconstruct your beliefs, then rebuild them, then design new practices, then live them out—step 1, step 2, step 3. Real life does not unfold this way. You do not stop having experiences while you are thinking, and you do not stop thinking while you are trying new behaviors. Your history, beliefs, experiments, and relationships all keep moving at once.
For secular spirituality to be honest and usable, it has to match this reality. That means accepting that you will be questioning, constructing, and acting all at the same time. You will be qualifying and eliminating old patterns even as you test new ideas, and you will be learning from experience even before you feel ready. The work is simultaneous, not sequential.
Three Intertwined Strands
You can think of your ongoing work as three strands that are always interacting:
- Examining and pruning what you’ve inherited
- Bringing in new ideas and perspectives
- Grounding everything in concrete activities and applications
These strands map directly onto the outline bullets in Section 6.
Strand 1: Qualify or Eliminate What You’ve Inherited
You carry a large bundle of presuppositions and scripts you did not choose. Doing the work simultaneously means you are regularly noticing and, when necessary, revising this bundle while you live your everyday life. Four major sources are especially important: presuppositions, childhood environment and upbringing, culture, and religion.
Presuppositions
Presuppositions are the taken‑for‑granted assumptions underneath your explicit beliefs. Examples include:
- “If something feels profound, it must be pointing to something supernatural.”
- “If I can’t be certain, I can’t commit.”
- “A meaningful life has to look impressive from the outside.”
In simultaneous work, you do not wait for a special time to handle these. You catch them as they show up in real situations and gently question them:
- Is this assumption actually true, or just familiar?
- Does it fit with a naturalistic view of the world?
- Does it help me live the kind of life I want?
You may not fully replace a presupposition in one go, but every time you notice and qualify it, you loosen its grip.
Childhood Environment and Upbringing
Your early environment gave you powerful messages about:
- What emotions are acceptable
- Who you are allowed to be
- How conflict and vulnerability are handled
- What counts as success or failure
Doing the work simultaneously means that encounters in adult life keep becoming opportunities to see these influences. A tense conversation might reveal that you still believe “Disagreement is dangerous.” A compliment might trigger discomfort that reveals “If I accept this, I’m arrogant.” Each time, you can:
- Note the script (“This feels like my family’s rule, not a fact about reality”).
- Decide whether to follow it, gently push against it, or replace it.
You are not waiting to fully “process your childhood” before changing small behaviors now.
Culture
Culture offers broad narratives about identity, gender, class, nationality, productivity, and what counts as a “good life.” These narratives show up in media, institutions, and casual conversation.
Simultaneous work treats everyday encounters with culture as moments to qualify or eliminate messages that do not fit your secular spiritual path. For example:
- Questioning the idea that constant busyness equals worth.
- Noticing when consumer culture tries to sell you meaning in the form of products.
- Seeing when nationalism, sexism, racism, or other biases are masquerading as “common sense.”
You are not stepping outside culture entirely; you are learning to be more conscious within it.
Religion
If you come from a religious background, doctrines, rituals, and identities from that tradition may still echo in your inner life, even if you no longer believe them.
Doing the work simultaneously means you:
- Notice when fear, guilt, or hope tied to past doctrines flare up (for example, fear of punishment for doubting).
- Decide in the moment whether to treat those reactions as authoritative or as remnants of an old framework.
- Gradually keep what still serves you (values, community, some practices) and release what no longer fits your understanding of reality.
Again, this is ongoing. You will not “finish” this elimination; you will visit and revisit it in different situations over time.
Strand 2: Simultaneously Replace Using a Mix of Theories and Fields of Study
As you qualify or eliminate inherited material, you create empty space. That space needs to be filled with something, or old patterns will simply grow back. Rather than looking for one new master‑belief system, a secular approach draws from multiple sources: theories, fields of study, and other perspectives that help you see more clearly and live more wisely.
Theories
Here, “theories” include philosophical approaches and psychological models that you find helpful. Examples might include:
- Existentialism (emphasizing responsibility and meaning‑making in an indifferent universe)
- Humanism (emphasizing human flourishing, dignity, and ethical concern)
- Certain strands of Stoicism, Buddhism, or other traditions interpreted in non‑supernatural ways
- Psychological theories about attachment, trauma, cognition, and behavior
Simultaneous work means you:
- Let these theories offer you language and concepts for understanding your experience.
- Use them as lenses rather than dogmas—helpful ways of seeing, not new absolute systems.
- Notice which ideas actually help you respond more constructively to your fate and support the destiny you care about.
Fields of Study
Fields of study give you a broader view of reality and your place in it. These might include:
- Psychology and neuroscience (how minds and behaviors work)
- History and sociology (how societies shape individuals and vice versa)
- Ecology and cosmology (your place in nature and the wider universe)
- Art, literature, and cultural studies (how humans have grappled with meaning)
Rather than studying these fields purely academically, you integrate them into your spiritual work by asking:
- What does this teach me about human limitations and potentials?
- How does this change the way I understand my fate and my options?
- Does this perspective support more compassionate, grounded ways of living?
You might be reading, listening to podcasts, taking courses, or just learning informally. The key is that you are feeding your worldview with information that fits a secular, naturalistic frame and supports your values.
Strand 3: Activities and Applications – Grounding It All in Daily Life
Both strands above—pruning the old and bringing in the new—remain incomplete if they never touch your daily routines, relationships, and choices. Activities and applications are where your secular spirituality becomes tangible.
These include:
- Personal practices:
- Short reflections or journaling, especially around fate and destiny, beliefs, and experiments.
- Time in nature, creative work, or other activities that reliably evoke a sense of depth or connection.
- Simple meditative or contemplative practices interpreted in secular terms.
- Relational practices:
- Honest conversations where you share what you are wrestling with.
- Listening carefully to others’ experiences and views.
- Setting and respecting boundaries that reflect your values.
- Contribution and engagement:
- Helping others in ways that fit your skills and situation.
- Participating in community or civic life.
- Creating or supporting spaces where others can also explore meaning and secular spirituality.
Doing the work simultaneously means these activities are not postponed until after you have “finished” belief‑work. You are acting, reflecting, and adjusting beliefs all at once.
A Weekly Structure That Touches All Three Strands
To see how this might look in practice, here is a simple weekly pattern you can adapt. It is not prescriptive, but it shows how qualifying/eliminating, replacing, and applying can happen together.
1. One Belief‑Questioning Moment
Choose one belief, presupposition, or script that showed up during the week and spend 10–20 minutes on it:
- Where did it likely come from (family, culture, religion)?
- Does it still make sense in light of your current understanding?
- Can it be qualified, or is it time to begin letting it go?
2. One New Input from Theory or Study
Engage with one piece of content that broadens or deepens your perspective:
- A short reading, lecture, podcast, or conversation that introduces or develops a theory or field of study relevant to your concerns.
- Afterwards, ask: “What, if anything, changes in how I see my life or options after taking this in?”
3. One Concrete Experiment or Practice
Design and run one small experiment:
- A new or adjusted practice (e.g., a different kind of reflection, a boundary in a relationship, a change in how you use technology or free time).
- At the end of the week, briefly reflect: “What effect did this have? Do I keep, adjust, or drop it?”
This simple structure keeps all three strands alive. Over time, these small weekly cycles add up to substantial change.
Why Simultaneous Work Fits a Secular Spiritual Path
Working simultaneously across beliefs, influences, and actions is not just realistic; it fits the logic of secular spirituality:
- You are not waiting for a revelation or final doctrine before you live differently. You accept that understanding and action will always co‑evolve.
- You respect the complexity of human life: that past conditioning, current context, and future aims are all in play at once.
- You treat spirituality as something woven into ordinary days, not as a special compartment that must be perfectly organized before you start.
In a world without guaranteed scripts or supernatural rescue, this kind of overlapping, iterative work is how you carve out a path that is both truthful and humane.
Preparing to Bring It All Together
Section 6 has now given you:
- A way to understand fate and destiny in secular terms.
- A method for deconstructing, qualifying, and rebuilding beliefs.
- A creative process for experimenting with how you live.
- An appreciation for iteration and degree.
- A picture of how to work on multiple fronts at once.
In 6.8, you will see how these elements fit together into a coherent whole, and how they prepare you for the work of Section 7: designing your own secular spiritual path or mix using these tools as your ongoing companions rather than one‑time fixes.