I'm atheist, but grew up in and around a few religions and new-age spirituality. In my teenage years, I believed in the spiritual existence as fully as I can im

I'm atheist, but grew up in and around a few religions and new-age spirituality. In my teenage years, I believed in the spiritual existence as fully as I can imagine anyone believing in anything. As I reached my 20s I realized these were all dead-ends, but never lost the good feelings I associated with the practice. For a few years, I tried to pin down what it means to be atheist while still embodying the spiritual experience. One morning I was driving to work when my boss called to say the office would be closed and I could take the day off. Suddenly, it was like all the neurons in my brain lit up at once. The sky looked brighter, the air smelled sweeter, and I felt a wave of energy flood my body. I loved my job, this wasn't a feeling of relief of escaping something I dreaded. Rather, it was just the sudden openness of my day, and a feeling of unbounded possibilities. I realized in that moment that that is what it feels like to be both atheist and "spiritual". So, my spiritual practice is two things: first, to make those moments happen. Second, to collect the various ideas, mental models, and frameworks that I believe are the evolutionary successors to spirituality. The core of these ideas center around: focused vs diffuse thinking, the exploitation/exploration tradeoff, computational irreducibility, information theory, systems thinking, and generally allowing some things which don't exist yet, but could theoretically exist, to exist in my mind as if they are already real.