The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'closeup of living soil.'
When I was a young child, my parents were intensely religious evangelical Pentecostals. They prayed on everything and actively tried to convert everyone they could. Sometimes they traveled to prisons to preach and sing gospel. On Sundays, we would go to fringe churches where everyone spoke in tongues and talked about how the end of the world was imminent.
I left this faith for paganism around age 14. And for a long time, I considered myself to be in that fashionable category of "spiritual but not religious." Over the years, I studied many religions, as well as quasi-religions like 12 step programs. Gradually, I came to see their benefits as primarily social, conferred through participation in shared rituals, the particulars of which were largely unimportant.
Although I'd left the Christianity behind, the religious programming wasn't so easy to shake. Unconscious beliefs, assumptions, and ideas had, after all, been instilled in me from birth. The belief that God was a person with a personality. The assumption that the afterlife was an either/or choice between eternal punishment and eternal reward. The idea that the literal end of the world was just around the corner.
A different brand of programming was layered upon this from ages 15-18. This was vaguely New Age stuff encoded into my psyche by the tutelage of a self-styled holy man. His programming swapped out God for Creator, named the eternal reward/punishment mechanism karma, and held that society would soon collapse and/or be destroyed by high tech totalitarianism.
At 19, I read all of Carlos Castaneda's books and consequently became aware of my unconscious programming around life's big questions. I became aware of it, but changing it was another matter. I'm naturally the sort of person who needs meaning and purpose in life. I couldn't just carry on without feeling like I understood my place in the cosmos. So I relentlessly searched for stories that conferred such understanding.
I studied Jung and Campbell hundreds of others. I sought out spiritual teachers of many varieties. A story eventually came together that satisfied my need for larger purpose. A story that served me regardless of its objective truth. Once my psychology was able to organize around this new story, much of my old programming fell away, but some remained.
Five years ago, in a moment of crisis, I had a spiritual epiphany. I was feeling as alone as I'd ever felt, pacing around and looking for something to do with myself. Then, I suddenly found myself pushing my hands deep into a nearby barrel of rich gardening soil. I grabbed a double handful of the cool, living earth. No matter how hard I squeezed it, it remained perfectly spongy and moist.
Holding this soil, I started crying, because I suddenly knew that what I was holding was god. I knew that god was the soil. And not in some metaphysical sense, but in the sense that it gives rise to our biology. With this, my unconscious sense of God as a person with a personality finally gave way to apprehending god as a system.
These days, I occasionally participate in Christian or pagan family rituals, but I don't feel at all religious. When people display religious beliefs, I feel neutral about it. When atheists bash religion, I feel sorry for them. At the same time, I do think people are innately religious, and that unconscious religious fervor more than rational thought drives politics and lots of other secular activity.
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