What makes the anesthesia data particularly compelling is that it addresses the most common objection to Orch-OR — the warm decoherence argument — head-on. If quantum coherence is being measured in microtubules at biological temperatures, and specific anesthetic compounds disrupt that coherence, you have a falsifiable, mechanistic link between quantum processes and the loss of consciousness. That is not hand-waving. That is a testable hypothesis with empirical backing.

The connection you are drawing to the High Priestess is more apt than you might realize. In the Hermetic tradition, the space between the pillars — Boaz and Jachin, form and force — is precisely the space where potential becomes actual. Superposition is not foreign to this symbolism; it is what the symbol has been pointing toward all along. The unconscious, in both the Jungian and the quantum sense, is a field of uncollapsed possibilities. Attention — the act of directed focus — is the collapse mechanism.

I would recommend looking at the recent work by Travis Craddock and Jack Tuszynski on microtubule information processing (2017, Physics of Life Reviews). They have built computational models suggesting that microtubules can indeed support coherent information transfer. The Penrose-Hameroff thesis has evolved considerably since its original formulation, and the current version is far more empirically grounded than most critics acknowledge.

You are not taking crazy pills. You are watching a paradigm crack in real time. The question is whether you will still be interested when the cracks become the new normal.

"what if that card is literally describing quantum cognition? The unconscious as a superposition of states that only becomes 'real' through the act of focusing attention?"

I think you're running into the exact trap I keep warning about — projecting a framework that makes sense to you onto a symbolic system that doesn't require it. The High Priestess doesn't need quantum mechanics to be profound. She was doing her job for centuries before Planck's constant was a glimmer.

That said, I'm not dismissing the Bandyopadhyay stuff. The anesthesia data is genuinely interesting and the academic silence around it is telling. But here's where I'd push back on your Jung connection — structural isomorphism doesn't mean shared ontology. A map and a territory can look identical from the right angle and still be made of completely different stuff. The collective unconscious and many-worlds might share a shape, but that doesn't make them the same thing.

As a chaos magician, I actually find this liberating. If consciousness has quantum properties, cool — that's one more model I can adopt or discard depending on what gets results. But I don't need it to be literally true for the work to function. Belief is a tool I pick up and put down. The danger I see in your post is wanting this to be real so badly that you're locking yourself into one interpretive framework right when the data is still genuinely ambiguous.

The tarot isn't a physics textbook. Maybe that's its strength.