I describe myself as a spiritual atheist. I’ve never looked the term up – I may have made it up entirely – but it seems to be the most honest way I can articulate how I move through the world. I know the two words sit awkwardly together for many people. Spiritual conjures incense and prayer and a sense of something greater; atheist conjures the cold dismissal of all that. Put them side by side and it sounds like a contradiction. For me, that tension is precisely the point.
The first thing worth saying is that this is entirely mine. I believe spirituality is necessarily a unique and individual journey – which means my truth is not your truth, and yours is not mine. What follows is not a prescription. It’s an account.
It hasn’t come from nowhere. Several years of life crashing down around me. Hundreds of hours of meditation. Six ayahuasca ceremonies. These aren’t credentials I wear lightly – they’re the raw material from which everything I’m about to describe was forged, often uncomfortably, always irreversibly.
On the question of God
When I say I’m an atheist, I don’t mean I’m certain there’s no creator. What I mean is something more specific: I don’t believe the human mind is capable of comprehending the concept. Every time you ask what created this?, you’re forced to ask what created that? – and so on, infinitely, in a loop the mind has no exit from. Trying to land on a final answer isn’t enlightenment; it’s a category error.
The human mind is, by nature, reductionist. It wants a singularity – one origin point from which everything else flows. That instinct may or may not map onto reality. But I find it a particularly sloppy move to call that singularity God – because the moment you use that word, you inherit everything that comes with it: a figure with intentions, perhaps an image (the bearded patriarch, the pantheon, the avatar), and the implied possibility that this being’s whims might intercede in the daily affairs of a planet circling an unremarkable star. That doesn’t resonate with me at all.
What does resonate – and this is where the psychedelic piece matters – is something far stranger and harder to name. In my deepest ceremony experiences, I found myself completely untethered from the human perspective: zooming through infinity at the speed of thought, creating at the speed of thought, and laughing – genuinely, maniacally laughing – at the sheer absurdity of the human condition. Of our condition. The smallness of the anxieties we carry. The comedy of the whole thing. Whatever that experience was pointing at, it wasn’t a God in any conventional sense. It was something closer to the fabric of things, indifferent and vast and, if I’m honest, hilarious.
On religion
I’ve never been religious, but I haven’t lived outside of culture either. I grew up shaped by societal expectations – moral frameworks absorbed rather than chosen, behavioural guidelines I assumed were simply correct. It was only when my life fell apart that I started examining any of it. That examination is uncomfortable. It is lonely. But it means that whatever I’ve rebuilt, I built myself.
I want to be careful here, because I genuinely respect what religion does. I’ve watched people arrive in unfamiliar cities and immediately find community through a shared faith. I’ve seen religious traditions hold people together through grief in ways that nothing secular quite manages. The social architecture of organised religion is not nothing.
But I also think religion, at its core, is a bulk subscription. A pre-packaged set of values, ethics, and answers – adopted wholesale, either because you were born into it or because, at some point of crisis, it offered the easiest footing. The decisions get outsourced. Someone further up the hierarchy has already done the thinking; you follow. For many people, that is a meaningful and dignified way to live. For me, it has never been possible. I need to know why I believe what I believe, not just that I was told to.
Where spirituality becomes religion
My one anxiety about the spiritual world – and it’s a real one – is the packaged guru. The teacher who arrives with a complete system, a named practice, a community of followers, a set of rules. The moment a spiritual path comes ready-made with instructions, it has, in my view, quietly become a religion. That’s not automatically wrong – I’ve experienced real benefit from structured spiritual communities, especially in moments of crisis, when the comfort of belonging to something larger than yourself is exactly what you need. But I’ve learned to give myself space afterward. To ask which parts of the experience genuinely served me, and which I was simply told to value.
Pi and the operations manual
Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi contains a character I find genuinely illuminating – though perhaps not for the reason people expect. Pi Patel is a young, open-minded boy who doesn’t sample from Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, taking the best of each and politely declining the rest. He says yes to all three, fully and simultaneously. Each religious leader believes Pi belongs entirely to their tradition. When they finally meet each other in the marketplace, they argue over him – each insisting he must choose. Pi refuses the premise. His position isn’t curation; it’s radical openness. He will not be made to narrow himself.
I’m drawn to that refusal, even if my own instinct runs slightly differently. My analogy is the operations manual. Some people join a company, read the manual from page one, and follow it faithfully. That’s a valid way to run a business. I prefer to start my own and write the manual as I go. Compared to established companies, I’m almost certainly doing things wrong in places – overcomplicating, misdirecting, reinventing wheels that didn’t need reinventing. But whatever emerges is mine, built within my own image, without someone else’s architecture underneath it.
That, in the end, is what spiritual atheism means to me. Not the rejection of the sacred – quite the opposite. It’s the insistence on being the author of my own encounter with it.
