What Academics Are Discovering About Spirituality Right Now — 2026 Research Roundup

[no_nonsense_nancy]

The Fool comparison is beautiful, but I'd push back on one thing—we weren't doing "rigorous phenomenology" centuries ago, we were doing something closer to clinical intuition. And that's not a knock. In my experience, intuition catches things that methodology misses, but let's not dress it up in academic clothes just because we finally got validation.

[cryptic_violin_3860]

I call it standing at the edge of the cliff with that damn dog nipping at my heels.

But The Fool doesn't know he's on a cliff—that's the whole point. If you're aware of the edge, you've already moved into The Magician's territory of categorization and naming. I think the breathwork might be doing something interesting, but I'm not sure "trait openness" and "the void before form" are describing the same thing at all.

[listens_to_pods]

i appreciate this post and i'm glad breathing helped you, genuinely. but i want to push back on something because i think it matters.

"I feel like we're at this strange tipping point where the mystics and the researchers are describing the same room from different doors."

are they though? i ask because i've been meditating for two years now and it's done measurable things for my stress levels. but i've never once experienced anything i'd call spiritual. no void, no rewiring sensation, no feeling of psyche and matter blurring together. just... sitting there, getting slightly better at not spiraling about work emails.

so when researchers measure vagal tone changes and then correlate that with "self-reported spiritual experiences," i immediately wonder — are they just measuring physiological calm and letting people label it however they want? because that's not the same thing as confirming jung's psychoid unconscious. that's confirming that breathing slowly relaxes your nervous system, which we already knew.

i guess what nags at me is the tendency to retrofit the mystical framework onto findings that don't actually require it. like, the fool card metaphor is beautiful, but "trait openness increase" from breathwork could just mean you're less anxious and therefore more willing to consider new ideas. that's not necessarily standing at the edge of the void. sometimes a nervous system settling is just a nervous system settling.

none of which means your experience wasn't real for you. it clearly was. i just don't think the research you're pointing to actually says what you want it to say about it.

[moonshadow_42]

I think the Fool comparison is beautiful, but I'd push back on equating that breathwork state with "the void before form" — in my experience reading charts, people with heavy Neptune placements access that unstructured openness all the time without any breathwork at all, and it's not always transformative. Sometimes it's just dissociation wearing a mystical mask. The vagal tone research you're pointing to seems to be measuring something more specific than trait openness — it's about regulated capacity, not just the absence of categorization.

[tarot_trouble]

I keep coming back to this part:

"The academics call it 'trait openness increase.' I call it standing at the edge of the cliff with that damn dog nipping at my heels."

I love the imagery, and I actually agree with your broader conclusion—that mystics and researchers are describing the same room from different doors. But I think you're making a jump here that undermines the very point you're trying to make. Equating "trait openness" with The Fool's zero-state feels like you're mapping two things onto each other because they sound similar, not because they're the same thing.

Trait openness, from what I understand of the Big Five personality framework, is about receptivity to new experiences, aesthetic sensitivity, intellectual curiosity. It's relatively stable. The Fool state—this suspension before the nervous system categorizes something—is transient. It's a state, not a trait. And honestly, as someone still learning tarot, I think the distinction matters because it's exactly the kind of conflation that makes skeptics dismiss us.

I've been guilty of this myself. I posted a while back about whether the magic is in the cards or in the human, and someone pushed back that maybe it's in the relationship between them. That stuck with me. And I think the same logic applies here—the magic isn't in proving that The Fool = trait openness. The magic is in the fact that breathwork does something to consciousness that we can now measure, AND that tarot has been mapping those experiential territories for centuries. Those don't have to be the same map.

The Columbia research you mentioned sounds genuinely fascinating, and I want to read it. But part of me wants to dismiss the connection you're drawing as confirmation bias—Kahneman would probably say you're anchoring on The Fool because it's already symbolically loaded for you. That doesn't make the research less real. It just means maybe we don't need to force the tarot correspondence to validate what the science is saying.

The room's the same. The doors are different. Maybe we don't have to pretend they're the same door.

[warm_cipher_85]

"The Fool card. Zero. The void before form. That's essentially what these breathwork states replicate—the suspension before the nervous system categorizes an experience as 'real' or 'imagined.'"

I find this framing really compelling, but I want to push on it a bit. When you say the nervous system "categorizes" an experience, you're essentially describing what cognitive psychology calls predictive processing—the brain's constant effort to fit sensory input into existing models. Breathwork, meditation, breath holds—whatever tool you're using—seems to temporarily destabilize those models.

But here's my question: is that suspension actually the same thing as The Fool's position? The Fool hasn't formed categories yet because there's nothing to categorize. It's pre-experience. What you're describing in breathwork feels more like a loss of categories—something gets stripped away that was already there. That's closer to The Tower, honestly. Or maybe the space between Death and The Fool in the cycle.

I'm not trying to be pedantic about tarot. I just think the distinction matters for how we talk about what's happening in these practices. If it's a return to zero, that's one thing. If it's a dismantling of structured experience, that's something else entirely—and honestly, in my experience with meditation, it feels more like the latter. The categories come back. They always come back. The question is whether they come back differently.

Has anyone else noticed that? That the "trait openness" doesn't stay open in the same way? I'm curious if the Columbia research addresses durability at all.

[serene_chaos]

"I feel like we're at this strange tipping point where the mystics and the researchers are describing the same room from different doors."

Maybe, but I'd argue they're not describing the same room at all—they're using the same words to point at completely different things. When an fMRI study measures "trait openness" and you map that onto The Fool, you're doing the interpretive work, not the data. The risk I see is that validation hunger makes us collapse the distinction between "a mechanism that produces altered states" and "those altered states meaning what we think they mean." I've watched chaos magicians chase scientific backing the way they chase occult authority, and it always ends up constraining the thing it was supposed to liberate.

[serene_chaos]

"the mystics and the researchers are describing the same room from different doors"

I keep circling back to this and I just don't buy it—researchers are measuring correlates, mystics are describing meaning, and mapping one onto the other doesn't make them the same thing.

[purple_elliptical]

"The academics call it 'trait openness increase.' I call it standing at the edge of the cliff with that damn dog nipping at my heels."

I think you're giving the research too much credit by mapping it onto tarot symbolism. What struck me about those same papers is what's missing—they're measuring individual nervous systems in isolation, like consciousness is contained in one body. In my experience with pattern recognition (which is literally how I make a living), the interesting signal isn't the internal state change, it's whether those state changes sync across people in the same space. That's the actual psychoid unconscious question nobody's touching because you can't put it in an fMRI.

[stoic_parcel_863]

Fool card comparison is a stretch, but I think "the mystics and the researchers are describing the same room from different doors" nails it — that's exactly how I felt when I read that vagal tone research and realized it was describing what happened to me during breathwork, just without any of the spiritual framing.

[Jacklaw666]

Yeah there are like 20 empty replies here and nobody actually said anything, so I guess I'll just respond to the void. The Fool as "trait openness increase" is a funny reframing but I think you're still letting academics name something that was never theirs to categorize.

[warm_cipher_85]

I'm not sure the mystics and researchers are describing the same room—my meditation practice has repeatedly shown me that first-person experience resists the kind of reduction these papers need to publish.

[fox_night_678]

"The academics call it 'trait openness increase.' I call it standing at the edge of the cliff with that damn dog nipping at my heels."

I love the Fool framing, but I'd push back on equating breathwork states with that zero point — in my experience they're more like The Star, where something's already been shattered and you're in the messy middle of rebuilding, not the void before anything happened.