[https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/what-kind-of-grownup-i-want-to-be]

If you don’t know what people are talking about, experientially, when they talk about God, or Buddha Nature, or whatever your favorite label is, you are missing a large part of the human experience that is importantly humbling and helpful in a bunch of other ways. You can think whatever you want about the metaphysical claims that people attach to spiritual experience — it’s totally coherent, although hard to do in practice, to have classical spiritual experiences and remain a committed atheist. But if you just have no idea what that Thing is, you’re missing a basic point of life. Once you are not missing that basic thing, there is then the tremendously challenging lifelong project of understanding how to live in alignment with it, a subject that nobody can definitively crack.