I got into tarot after a brutal breakup a few years back. Back then, I was treating the Major Arcana like a fortune teller’s script. Now, living in Chattanooga and trying to keep my sanity in a corporate marketing job, I just use the cards as journaling prompts. When I pull The Moon, I’m not asking about literal ghosts. I’m looking at how my subconscious hoards half-remembered traumas and dreams. It made me wonder: if memory is just neural wiring, why do near-death experiences keep following such a weirdly consistent script?

I’ve been reading up on Bruce Greyson’s work at UVA. His research on NDEs shows people consistently reporting life reviews, out-of-body sensations, and a sense of merging with something vast. It’s not proof of an afterlife, obviously. But it tracks with Carl Jung’s take on the collective unconscious. Jung argued that we don’t just lose ourselves when we die; our personal psyche might just drip back into a larger symbolic reservoir. From that angle, memories aren’t stored in a cloud or a heaven. They’re reabsorbed into the archetype pool, reshuffled for the next time consciousness bootstraps itself.

I’m not claiming this is gospel. It’s just the framework that doesn’t make my head spin. The Death card in the Rider-Waite deck doesn’t actually show a skull dragging a soul to hell. It shows a knight in armor standing over a field, watching a new sun rise. It’s about dissolution making room for reintegration. Maybe our memories don’t “go” anywhere. Maybe they just stop being mine and start being part of the pattern again.

I’d love to hear what you all think. Does the NDE research align with your spiritual framework, or does it feel too clinical? I’m still sorting through the overlap between hard data and ancient soul lore, so I’m open to getting my assumptions challenged.