The word "spirituality" is off-limits to a lot of the faithless. Largely due to Sam Harris' outspokenness for the word to be used more loosely, recently secular people are using it to describe states of mind with no satisfactory synonym. Often, an emotional response to a concept is described, with an explanation at the end that "this is the closest I get to spirituality."
I am one of these people. Here is the closest I get to spirituality:
Every once and a while, while learning about science, the simple forces in the universe humble me, move me, and may overwhelm me. The astrophysics behind the too-enormous-to-comprehend, and the quantum physics in the opposite power of 10 remind me over and over where we sit in the universe.
We are all too large, a wave of the hand swirling about more particles in a nanosecond than imaginable. This does not in any way make us important. The particles don't give a damn about us, or anything, and obey their laws with indifference. In fact, all the particles in the entire universe are simultaneously doing this. We are not Gods due to the butterfly effect.
On the opposite spectrum, the units of time and distance used to define the span and life of the universe are impossible to fully grasp in the mind.
This is why videos like this below choke me up some.
"Simulated Galaxy Collisions - Gas View, Star View, Multiview"
Supermassive black holes at centers are shown in all simulation versions.
0:00-0:50 Gas is shown,
0:50-1:45 Stars are shown,
1:45-end Top Left = Gas (Face on View) Bottom Left = Gas (Edge on View) Top Right = Stars (Face on View) Bottom Right = Stars (Edge on View)
Video Credit: CfA (Center for Astrophysics) https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~phopkins/Site/Movies.html
Justin Trottier via the Centre for Inquiry expressed my sentiment in what some might think is in more depressing terms. For me, it is just as accurate, with the exact same emotional response.
"...these truths about physical reality which pull me towards a sense of the spiritual are the same truths which simultaneously tell us that in the long run the universe is bound to a slow and final heat death. All forms of matter and energy will in end get turned from useful to useless, providing us ultimately with that same universe becoming barren, inhospitable and devoid of life."
[Update] When I uploaded this video, YouTube gave me a pretty bad tag suggestion FAIL:
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