Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

It's called Santo Daime, a syncretism between original indigenous beliefs with catholic christianity; though our views of being a Christian are very different from catholics or protestants though. From catholicism, mostly the non-vilification (praise in a non-idolatrous way) of the Virgin Mary and saints. There's also a mix of african religions which spread throughout Brazil and a bit of esoterism.

I’m an atheist, so I think the most spiritual thing I do is indeed believe in the power of my favourite programming languages’s type system to stop me from writing broken software.

Throughout my day, I pray in three steps.

First, gratitude, expressing my thanks for all that I have to be grateful for, all the gifts and blessings I've received.

Second, asking for forgiveness for regrettable actions, which, if I look closely, I can always find, small or large.

Third, I ask for help. I generally don't ask for specific things, but talk about general areas or people I want to help. I try make sure that my intentions and asks are well-intentioned and generally working towards increasing overall levels joy in the world.

The other crucial piece of this, where meditation practice really helps, is to pay close attention and listen for response and guidance.

Along with breathing/mindfulness meditation, I do this throughout the day, and I also find time to sit down and do a dedicated prayer and meditation for 30 minutes each.

I started meditating throughout the day, sometimes in given triggering situations, a few years ago. I started this prayer practice about a year ago and have been working on it.

I recommend trying out this practice to anyone who's curious about our reality and how it works.

> Do you ever struggle with the parts of the bible that feel outdated in the modern context? I never read the bible by myself

I used to, but it becomes more practical and timeless the more I read my Bible. I read a version with cross-references in the center-line so reading slower and checking these makes it make a lot more sense. The way I'd recommend reading is Mark, Luke, John, Matthew, Acts and Romans (all in the New Testament) while periodically reading the cross-references as you go. This covers basic beliefs and how Jesus taught following the spirit of the Law, why Gentile Christians don't follow the full Jewish Law (Acts 15) and how those before Jesus aren't condemned (Romans). Then I'd recommend Genesis and Exodus to understand the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob family line, and the establishment of the Law. Follow with 1st/2nd Samuel and 1st/2nd Kings for most of the rest of the historical side of context. Psalms and Proverbs can be read a little at a time, at any time.

> read a section of the Bible's Old Testament, Psalm, Proverbs and New Testament.

This is also the way I read, and it's super helpful. Old/New Testament for spiritual growth, Psalms for worship, and Proverbs for ordinary day-to-day advice (there's also 31 Proverbs so its easy to pickup whatever day it is).

> I went to Sunday school for 9 years and I remember struggling as a child to conciliate what I was being taught at school and at chruch, and specially ignoring the hipocrisy of the people lecturing

A lot of Sunday school is way too boiled down. There's hypocrisy everywhere and the church is no exception. People try to justify their own sin and resultant problems by ranking it against others--part of the reasons Christians are told not to judge others (especially outside the church), but instead help others in the church with their problems and be open to correction. It's supposed to be handled internally, but occasionally isn't, and I've moved to a different church when I've found it's entrenched and not fixable.

I study how science and spirituality meet. There's tremendous overlap between how machines work, how physics work, and how our own psychology works. Finding these overlaps where 10 different things in 10 different areas are shown to be one thing is my way of trying to grow spiritually and intellectually.

Most recently I discovered a link between the Wheeler-Dewitt equation describing time as a subjective phenomenon of entangling in an otherwise static universe, and how the corresponding models of OOP and FP work. FP is unchanging, it has no time component, but also therefore can't enact "change" (side-effects) without having some mechanism that taps into impurity (like the IO monad in Haskell).

So essentially the absolute being is immutable, but it still needs to conjure up impure beings to whom nothing is absolute and all is relative (and yes I mean also as in General Relativity where one's space is another's time and vice versa), but to those impure beings, as they explore the vast universe of all possibilities, they change. I.e. they are coupled to their own change, which we perceive as time.

I strongly believe at this point that entanglement of macroscopic objects is part of reality. We live in a multiverse, where our own actions are soon reflected in the rest of the world we experience. It's the very mechanism through which "karma" works. Karma is not simply the balance of good and evil, as those categories are subjective. It's rather the balance of all balances. What you do will come back at you at some point. And then you have the chance to judge it from the other side and decide if you were good or bad, and learn.