Frank Heile is the author of “Spirituality Explained.” Frank has a Ph.D. in Physics and considers himself to be an atheist – and yet Frank has been doing a number of different spiritual practices (with positive results) for many years!  This is evidence that these ideas permit an atheist, like Frank, to get value from spiritual practices.
Frank has also been very active on the question and answer site, www.quora.com. He has written more than 1,000 answers to questions – mostly about physics, astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics.  He has also written a number of answers that explain parts of this model of consciousness and spirituality.  See the <Writings> page for links to those answers.  Frank has been honored as one of Quora’s “Top Writers” four times (2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013).  In addition, nine of Frank’s answers have been republished on sites such as Slate, HuffingtonPost, and Gizmodo. 

• Frank was raised Catholic; then converted to atheism in High School
• Needed multiple 12-step programs – which are spiritual programs that require a “Higher Power”
• Frank used his “Higher Self” (or intuition) as his Higher Power in his 12-step programs.
• Read Hofstadter’s “Godel Escher Bach” and Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” which prompted the idea of the two agent model.
• Developed the two agent model and realized it explained the origin of spirituality and why spiritual practices work.
• Later started reading about enlightenment and doing practices that could lead to enlightenment.
• Realized (in 2014) that adding a third agent could explain more about enlightenment.
• Learned neuroscience by reading books and articles, going to many Stanford neuroscience and psychology colloquia and by attended many conferences on consciousness, neuroscience and spirituality
• Presented these ideas 22 times at the following conferences and meetups (some as poster sessions and some as 20 to 60 minute talks)
• There are two videos on YouTube  that explain this model in detail – see Resources page

• Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Physics from MIT in 4 years,
• Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University
  • Frank’s thesis was a small part of the evidence for the Tau lepton for which Frank’s thesis advisor, Prof. Martin Perl, received a Nobel Prize in 1995
• Worked for 24 years in Software Engineering,
• Inventor on 46 US patents assigned to Altera Corp., including 11 where Frank was the sole inventor and 15 where he is one of a small group of inventors (see: USPTO Search Results )
• Retired as a Software Director from Altera Corp. (which was acquired by Intel),
• Publications:
  • Anomalous e+e− and μ+μ− events produced in e+e− annihilation – by F.B. Heile, M.L. Perl, et al. – This publication based on Frank’s Ph.D. thesis
  • Hybrid product term and LUT based architectures using embedded memory blocks – by Frank Heile & Andrew Leaver
  • Programmable memory blocks supporting content-addressable memory – by Frank Heile, Andrew Leaver & Kerry Veenstra