>The most use I found from labels was just knowing what vocabulary to maximize the likelihood of someone understanding what I was saying

I think this is an ultimately defining conclusion. Something I've been on to recently is that the way most people think about "being" in the 21st century is hopelessly simplified to finding something that pre-exists to align oneself with. 

It seems self-evident to me - from having lived even a few years into adult life, and from studying things like music theory and philosophy - that this is backwards, that the words we associate with things come after the things themselves in virtually all cases. 

Seeing that the trend of choosing ones labels as opposed to earning or growing into them is so recent, and that looking throughout history, language primarily has been used ontologically and developed as such, I'm lead to the pretty (in my view, at least) obvious conclusion that most if not all major religions were simply describing phenomena and experience through things like allegory and symbolism. 

Obviously each religion varies in what it deals with (with Buddhism for example dealing more in states of consciousness, where Christianity deals more with people and society), but most of them have overlap, and when stripping names from concepts and identifying correlations - especially metaphysical ones, it starts to become clear that a lot of ideas that seem different on the surface are actually functionally identical.

I think where that leaves us in terms of modern spirituality is with the entire world's history of religion and philosophy at our fingertips to sort through. If there are universal human truths - which I certainly believe there are, there's no good reason to preemptively completely dismiss any sufficiently established and documented system of religion, faith, or spirituality in pursuit of those truths, since those *must* be the foundations of any potential world unity, going forward.

Anyway, this post was insightful and thought provoking, thanks for sharing. Really dug the Dune quote too. You might find writings by Carl Jung (Psychological Types, especially) and the integral metatheory of Ken Wilber pretty interesting - they both get very very deep into the common elements and phenomenological referents underlying articulated systems of belief.