Understanding the human spirit, the thinking, motivating, feeling aspect of a person, need not entail supernatural reference in any more than a boundary sense. Methodological naturalism accounts for many putatively supernatural experiences in terms of naturalistic and scientific research. Fairy tales have natural functions, naturalistic accounts of miracles can have moral and spiritual power, and neuropsychological research can have value in understanding experiences of ghosts, apparitions, and presences. Even beliefs in personal immortality, at odds with current neurobiology, may serve a range of psychological functions and may raise more moral questions than they answer. Naturalistic accounts can make spiritual explorations possible where supernatural answers provide epistemic barriers.The human spirit-the thinking, motivating, feeling aspect of a personis haunted. Like many a haunted house or ghostly possession in our developmentally primitive past, the haunting is a product of our imagination, of projected fears and anxieties. Unfortunately, it is often our beliefs about such haunting that block our understanding. I believe that this haunting is a deep problem for the life of the human spirit, a life for which egocentric denials of death, rooted in fear, might be better replaced by a message of redemption, sacrifice, and the transformation of our own lives and those of our fragmenting communities. I nevertheless believe that the meaning of our individual lives can transcend their mortal and contingent existence. The position I wish to explore here is a kind of methodological naturalism. Without denying the possibility of a supernatural realm, I only wish to argue that the life of the human spirit, and our understanding of it,