So I am an Atheist and I find a lot of joy in going through ritual motions. It is comforting and it does de-stress to sort of “pray” to an altar that I built. Logically it has no purpose other than to scare away proselytizers and be a neat conversation piece, but it is my favorite aspect of new age witch and pagan cultures.
Similarly, occult practices from those cultures and those found in things like Kabbalah or Chaos Magick are good for simple goal manifestation. I know in Chaos Magick, the idea is to set in motion the intention of whatever goal you have and that will increase the odds of it happening, but one must still work to achieve the goal. You cannot simply cast a spell for more money you must also be working towards a promotion. That idea paralleled with an idea in Atomic Habits for this kind of manifestation. It claimed that saying out loud daily what your goal was increased the chances of you actually doing the work to achieve the goal.
I wrote more about it at my blog, but I’m interested in what other people find interesting in other spaces.
I’m a year late answering this. I also have a strong atheist background, but, through finally starting to take therapy seriously, began to have weirdly spiritual feelings sometime last year. This led me an official spiritual awakening in October, at which point I discovered Buddhism and their fetters model of the whole awakening/enlightenment path. I like their model over the others I’ve looked at because it is so well thought out and methodical. I’m also enjoying the YouTube channel, Simply Always Awake, which also takes a very non-deistic stance on the whole endeavor. One thing I thought was super interesting from my research was that pretty much every religion has some tradition of enlightenment and they all overlap almost perfectly in the details. If you read the Gospel of Thomas, the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddhist Sutras, the language is very similar. As far as I can tell, the rest of the religious trappings are just window dressing draped on that framework.
Awesome stuff! I’m only now starting to read into Buddhism.
What’s your practice like? What do you do to be spiritual?
