I went from strict Sunday school to hardline college atheism, and now I’m just… circling back. I don’t need a label, but I keep running into this weird sense that we’ve lost a shared operating system for the inner life. When I look at how ancient Indo-European roots split off into words for “dream,” “vision,” and “soul,” it feels less like etymology and more like archaeology of the mind. Carl Jung talked about the collective unconscious housing archetypes, but what if those archetypes were originally coded into grammar itself? Before we started treating consciousness as something to be measured, it was probably treated like a landscape to be navigated.

It reminds me of the High Priestess in the tarot—that quiet, veiled figure who knows that not everything needs to be spoken to be real. We’ve traded that intuitive, symbolic literacy for something much more linear. I catch myself wondering if that’s why modern spiritual practice feels so fragmented. Are we just using the wrong vocabulary for the territory?

I’m really curious how everyone else is tracking with this. Do you think reviving older linguistic structures could actually shift how we meditate or work with cards? When I shuffle lately, I keep noticing how the imagery bypasses the modern brain and hits something deeper—like my subconscious recognizes a syntax I haven’t been taught. What do you guys think? Is there a “golden age” of perception we’re just beginning to stumble back toward, or am I just romanticizing the past? I’d love to hear what’s been working for you.