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

[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.