Home Range, Home Base, Hearth: The Evolutionary Architecture of Spiritual Belonging

Vervaeke, drawing on John and Kellyanne Allen's work on the psychology of belonging, identifies three nested evolutionary structures of homing. The home range is the territory shaped by niche construction — the organism actively reshaping its environment, with culture accelerating this process through distributed cognition. This grounds the sense of belonging, mapping onto the "Mattering" dimension in the meaning-in-life literature. The home base provides a defensible prospect-and-refuge space that gives the Relevance realization machinery an origin point, enabling genuine orientation — not mere habit but an origin-to-horizon relationship that supports interpolation and extrapolation of exploration. The hearth condenses within the home base as the locus of ritual transformation, serious play, and shamanic healing — functions identified by Rossano and others as evolutionarily ancient.

These three structures stack phylogenetically and ontogenetically in a manner consistent with Henriques' Tree of Knowledge framework: organism, animal, mammal, primate, person — each level co-opting the spatial and temporal structures below and embedding them in progressively richer relational value, belonging, and shared propositional narrative. The spiritual home people seek is not a physical place but the homing functions themselves — belonging, orientation, and ritual transformation — operating at the level of cultural and Ontological environment. They want to be homed by a worldview.

The Meaning crisis is precisely the collapse of any shared worldview capable of providing these nested homing functions. Transcendent naturalism is presented not merely as compatible with restoring them but as entailing their restoration — and doing so chirotically: orienting persons within the specific civilizational moment they inhabit, making the spiritual quest inseparable from the collective awakening that moment demands.