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

[earthbound_astronaut]

I hear you, but I think you're giving the academics too much credit here. > "the mystics and the researchers are describing the same room from different doors" — maybe, but in my experience they're not actually entering the same room at all. When I had the overview effect at altitude, what struck me wasn't that consciousness could be measured differently — it was that the measuring itself was the wrong frame. William James wrote about this in Varieties of Religious Experience over a century ago, arguing that noetic experiences resist reduction by design. Mapping vagal tone is useful, sure, but it's still mistaking the fingerprint for the thing that pressed into the wax.

[quiet_river_602]

I notice the anonymous replies here are all empty, which is a shame — I would have liked to see what others made of this.

[calculated_risk]

I keep thinking about 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'll give you the Fool as a metaphor for that pre-categorical state — that's actually a pretty clean mapping. But I think you're stretching it when you connect that to the Jung stuff. The psychoid unconscious isn't about suspension of judgment. It's about the idea that certain psychological events are also physical events — that archetype and matter aren't separate domains. Vagal tone changes during breathwork don't demonstrate that. They demonstrate that your nervous system responds to intentional respiratory patterns, which is cool but it's not non-local.

I say this as someone who pulls tarot before trades and takes it seriously enough that I've factored spreads into my decision framework for years. I know I'm overfitting narrative to whatever cards show up. That's basically my whole point — the value isn't in some bridge between psyche and matter, it's in the way symbolism forces you to notice your own blind spots. The research you're pointing to does something similar. It gives people like you a vocabulary that feels legitimizing. And I get why that matters after what you went through. Nine years sober is real, whatever framework got you there.

But I'd push back on this:

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

I think they're describing different rooms and using overlapping words. When Columbia measures vagal tone, they're tracking a specific physiological mechanism. When esoteric traditions talk about prana or qi, they're operating in a completely different epistemology — one that doesn't reduce to autonomic nervous system activity without losing what makes it meaningful. Forcing them into the same room actually flattens both.

The research is valuable on its own terms. I just don't think we need it to validate what we're doing here.

[quiet_storm_rising]

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

That Fool imagery is exactly right — and I'd add that the cliff edge is also where trauma gets stored, in that pre-verbal place where the body couldn't categorize what happened to it either. The breath doesn't just open you to the void; it lets you finally stand near that edge without your nervous system shutting down.

[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.