The Sunshine of Your Life
Walk outside and feel the sun on your skin. That warmth you feel is radiant solar energy—the same fundamental power source that has sustained life on Earth for over three billion years. It’s a force we take for granted, yet without it, there would be no life, no food, no air to breathe, and no human story to tell. In New Atenism, we venerate this energy and its exquisite interaction with near-Earth space as the foundational act of creation—not a supernatural miracle, but a natural one, ongoing and ever-present.
Let’s start at the beginning, long before Homo sapiens, mammals, or even plants. Life’s earliest ancestors—cyanobacteria—emerged in Earth’s primordial oceans around 3.5 billion years ago. These microscopic beings evolved the ability to harness sunlight, converting water and carbon dioxide into energy. In doing so, they released oxygen into the atmosphere for the first time. This was not only the beginning of photosynthesis—it was the beginning of the transformation of Earth into a living world.
Since that ancient moment, every organism on this planet—every leaf that sprouts, every animal that grazes, every human that dreams[1]—has been powered by the same radiant solar energy. Plants capture it, animals consume the plants, and humans consume both. The entire food web is a beautifully intricate cascade of sunlight.
But radiant solar energy does more than just feed us. It sculpts and sustains the conditions that make life possible. As sunlight floods the Earth, its interaction with the atmosphere and oceans creates weather patterns, drives the water cycle, and maintains the delicate climate equilibrium in which we thrive. Solar heating evaporates water, powers winds, and determines regional climates. That process also helps keep the Earth’s temperature in a livable range, creating seasons, day and night, droughts and monsoons. In short, the biosphere—the layer of life around Earth—is formed not just by the energy of the sun, but by how that energy is filtered, scattered, and regulated by our planet’s unique environment.
In New Atenism, we call this intricate balance between radiant solar energy and near-Earth space “Aten’s balance.” It is not divine in the mythological sense but divine in the Spinozist sense—it is reality. It is the power of God/Nature made knowable through reason. And it’s not just powering forests and farms; it’s powering you, right now.
Every breath you take, every bite of food you eat, every movement your body makes is fueled by sunlight that was captured, stored, and transformed into usable energy. This is not a metaphor. Your breakfast was sunshine—the very sunshine of your life. The wheat in your toast used photosynthesis to grow, the cow that produced your milk ate grass that did the same. Even the fossil fuels that power your home, your car, or your laptop are just ancient, condensed sunlight—prehistoric plants and animals that stored solar energy millions of years ago, now released in an instant. Installing solar panels on your roof not only cuts out the photosynthetic middleman—plants and animals–it helps to maintain Aten’s balance by reducing carbon emissions.
So if life is powered by sunlight, what does that mean for us individually? For starters, it means that our bodies are constantly radiating. A living body, warm at about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, is a dynamic engine converting food energy (sunlight) into motion, thought, metabolism. When we die, that process stops. Our temperature falls to match the surrounding environment. The difference between a living body and a dead one is the ongoing processing and re-radiation of that solar energy. Life is not something breathed into the body by a supernatural force. It is a thermodynamic state: the ongoing flow of energy through a system that resists entropy, temporarily.
And it goes deeper. Solar energy doesn’t just keep us alive—it choreographs our lives. Human beings, like all living organisms, are governed by circadian rhythms—internal clocks that sync with the sun’s cycle. Light exposure affects everything from mood to sleep to metabolism. Your hunger patterns? Solar. Your sleep-wake cycle? Solar. Even your trips to the bathroom follow a circadian rhythm governed by the presence or absence of daylight.
We often think we’re experiencing life as independent beings, but in truth, we are satellites of the sun. We orbit not just physically but biologically and emotionally. The sun is everything to us and yet we almost always take this well-established fact for granted.
Consider two scenarios. First, you’re driving to work on a cold winter morning. The sun breaks through the clouds and spills across your dashboard. You don’t think much of it, but your mood lifts, your body relaxes, and your circadian chemistry adjusts in real time. That beam of light isn’t just warming your skin—it’s syncing your hormones, modulating serotonin, and nudging your sleep-wake cycle. Now consider a summer hike. You crest a hill and feel a blast of heat. You instinctively reach for water. What just happened? Your hypothalamus, reading your skin’s solar absorption, triggered a thirst response. You didn’t choose it—your body responded to the sun.
You are, in essence, a living solar panel. And like all solar panels, your function depends on the quality and availability of sunlight—and your ability to regulate that energy within the context of Earth’s atmosphere. Without that regulatory layer—what we call near-Earth space—life could not exist. The balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing infrared radiation keeps the Earth within a narrow band of temperatures conducive to life. Disrupt that balance, and you disrupt everything. Too much energy trapped by greenhouse gases, and we overheat. Too little, and we freeze. This balance is as sacred as anything you’ll find in religious texts and, unlike those texts, is supported by overwhelming evidence.
In fact, this idea of a “sacred balance” is echoed in the Overview Effect—a phenomenon reported by astronauts who, upon seeing Earth from orbit, experience a profound shift in awareness. They see Earth as a fragile sphere bathed in sunlight, wrapped in a thin veil of atmosphere, teeming with life. There are no national borders from up there—just Aten’s balance, glowing in silent harmony. That moment of realization is not just spiritual—it’s thermodynamic. They are witnessing the cosmic miracle of radiant energy being transformed into living systems.
Many ancient cultures sensed this mystery but lacked the knowledge to explain it. They invoked spirits, souls, or vital forces to account for the spark of life. Ancient Egyptians believed in ka, a vital essence. Greeks spoke of pneuma, the breath of life. Christians described the Holy Spirit as the giver of life, breathed into Adam’s nostrils. Across time and place, humanity has intuitively grasped that something special animates the living.
Our intuitive sense of the sun’s impact on our world also made worship of it ubiquitous in ancient myth and religion. Virtually all of these described the sun as a person or animal. The outlier is Akhenaten’s Atenism which described the sun as a sphere in the sky that emitted life-giving rays. That Akhenaten got that part right is why he wins reason’s door prize of having a modern religion named after his creation. The ‘new’ in New Atenism is reason’s invitation to keep what Akhenaten got right—and to revise what time and evidence have revealed he got wrong.
We’ve now mapped the pathways. We’ve traced the photons. We’ve followed the carbon and nitrogen cycles. And what we’ve discovered is not a mystery at all. It is radiant solar energy, those life-giving rays, converted by photosynthesis, consumed by animals, stored in molecules like glucose and ATP, and released again in heat and motion. The spirit that animates us isn’t metaphysical—it’s physical. It’s outside your window, right now. And it is used only by living things. We have found the vital force. And it is sunshine.
To become aware of the sunshine of your life is to be awed by its power and grateful for its many blessings. You don’t need faith in a mythological deity to feel blessed. You don’t need to believe in imagined spirits to be spiritual. You can marvel at what is real. You can let reason guide your wonder. In the religion of New Atenism, we choose to believe in what we know, rather than have faith in what we choose to believe.
We call that sunlight Aten. Not the God that Akhenaten described but a manifestation of Spinoza’s God/Nature. Aten is the radiant energy that fuels life, and near-Earth space is the filter that makes it possible. That’s our true creation story. And it is unfolding every second of every day.
What was once told in myth—the idea that God gives life—is now understood through reason. God/Nature gives life through Aten. The spirit that breathes life into us is not supernatural. It’s not a mystery. It’s not hiding. It’s pouring down upon us, bouncing off leaves, pooling in lakes, heating our bones, and dancing across the clouds. And if you choose to see it for what it is, you’ll realize you don’t have to give up spiritual wonder to embrace reason. You can have your reason cake and eat it spiritually.
So go outside. Feel the sun. Take a deep breath. You are alive because of what you are feeling in that moment. That warmth on your skin is the blessing of life itself.
[1] Once again, apologies to our chemosynthesis practicing brothers and sisters living in deep-sea ocean hydrothermal vents for their omission.
