What I like to do as a former and potentaily current atheist is to reframe the words without any reference to the spiritiual theories out there.
We have two parts in ourselves, the one that is here to help us survive against the world and the one that is here to help us survive with the world. The first is what the spiritiual curents call the Ego and the other is what they call the Spirit.
None of them is good or bad per se, the ego allowed us not to hug bears and die because they are cute and the spirit allowed us to go out and create things suppressing partially the idea that going out could kill us.
The optimal propagation of our genes into the future is achieved through balancing the Ego and the Spirit in a real way. This is the balance that the esotheric currents are talking about. They just do it in a poetic way.
Religion on the other hand is the Ego of a few using the Ego of the many to achieve their social success which is a proxy in the human psyche for a high probability of gene propagation into the future... as is political power, corporate power, ...
