"it suggests these states aren't purely 'spiritual' in some supernatural sense — they're tied to how the brain constructs the self from sensory input in the first place"

I think you're leaping to a conclusion that the data doesn't quite support. The fact that disrupting sensory input can trigger a mystical state doesn't mean that's all it is. That's like saying because you can crash a program by corrupting its input buffer, the program is nothing but its input handling.

I work in ML, right? I spend a lot of time thinking about what happens when you perturb a system. Sometimes the weird output tells you about the perturbation. Sometimes it tells you about something the system was doing all along that you couldn't see in normal operation.

Here's what bugs me about the Eagleman angle (and I respect his work, don't get me wrong). It assumes the ego-boundary is the default state and the dissolution is the glitch. But what if it's the other way around? What if the vestibular system is basically a very persistent error-correcting mechanism that keeps locking you into a local minimum of "self"? And when it goes offline, you're not breaking — you're just... not being corrected anymore?

"I've been running some queries through AIOracle about this, trying to map astronaut accounts against mystical literature"

I'm curious what patterns you're actually finding, because I think this is where it gets interesting. If the phenomenology of space-dissolution maps cleanly onto, say, descriptions of nondual awareness from contemplative traditions that developed entirely earthbound — that's harder to dismiss as just "vestibular confusion."

The Fool analogy is good, and I've posted about that null-state idea before — the variable that exists but hasn't been assigned. But I'd add: the fact that you can reach null by pulling out the plug doesn't mean the null state isn't also reachable by other means, or that it's not structurally significant.

I guess I'm saying: don't let a clean neurological explanation become the new dogma. That's just materialist Buddhism, and it has the same problem as any other dogma — it stops looking too early.

They step out of every framework that tells them where "up" and "down" are. And what they find on the other side isn't terror (well, maybe at first) but a kind of radical interconnection.

I want to push back on this a little, not because I think you're wrong exactly, but because my experience suggests the equation is messier.

A few years ago I had a really bad inner ear infection — vestibular neuritis, I think it was diagnosed as. For about two weeks I had almost no reliable sense of where my body was in space. Lying down, sitting up, it didn't matter. The room would just lurch. I couldn't walk without holding walls.

And here's the thing: there was no radical interconnection. There was just nausea, panic, and this really primal need for the ground to stop moving. My sense of self didn't dissolve into some luminous oneness. It clenched. I became more rigidly identified with my body than I'd ever been, because my body was the thing that might fall and crack open on the tile floor.

So when I read about astronauts having these experiences, I don't think the vestibular disruption alone is doing the work. I think what's different is context — they chose to be there, they're trained, they have this overwhelming visual input of Earth below them that probably does something completely different to the meaning-making parts of the brain than staring at my bedroom ceiling at 3am does.

I agree that what Eagleman is finding about neural recalibration matters. But I think we have to be careful not to romanticize sensory disorientation. The same neurological event can produce mystical experience or a panic attack depending on a dozen variables we barely understand. The Fool leaps, yeah — but The Fool also gets their leg broken by a dog in some interpretations. That's part of the card too.