Sam Harris explores a bit of this. The thing that fascinated me was his exploration of the realness of experience among practitioners and where that experience

Sam Harris explores a bit of this. The thing that fascinated me was his exploration of the realness of experience among practitioners and where that experience seems to comes from. As a child of Christian fundamentalism who ran away as fast as I could, it was eye opening to start to see the basis on which many of these religions were founded, which religion manifesting as a symptom of something deeper within ourselves. Not a mystical or metaphysical deeper, but remnants of tens of thousands of years of evolution and humanity’s wrestling with consciousness and meaning. As an atheist, I find it fascinating.