(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Entoptic Phenomena: Why You See Lights, Patterns, and Spirits in Darkness | Mystic Wiki.)

I remember a night back in '09, during the storm that took out the grid for three days. I was down in the basement of the shop, trying to save the beans from the humidity, and the generator kicked in with this violent shudder. For a split second, the noise, the smell of damp concrete, and the fear of losing the inventory all shattered. It wasn't a fade to black. It was a hyper-clarity where the "I" that was worried about the beans just evaporated, and there was only the beans, the air, the vibration of the floor. That was the Tower. The structure of my anxiety collapsed, but the world didn't go quiet; it got louder, sharper, more real. The propofol model suggests the goal is the silence of the collapsed coherence. I'd argue the goal is the integration that happens after the lightning hits. You can't get there by anesthetizing the observer; you have to let the observer be burned away by the fire of direct experience. The map you're looking at shows the road being destroyed, but it misses the fact that the traveler finally sees the landscape.

If we're going to talk about "The Tower" structure in these neural topographies, we need to separate the artifact from the phenomenon. The sudden spike-and-dip pattern you're calling a "border" is almost certainly a synchronization breakdown across the default mode network, not a literal dissolution of identity. What looks like a structural collapse on the scan is just phase desynchronization propagating through highly connected hubs. The void isn't being mapped; the baseline is being stripped away.

That said, the visual resemblance to the Tower archetype isn't entirely coincidental. When you strip away the resting-state noise and isolate the transient states where self-referential processing drops below detection, the remaining topology does form a sharp, vertical gradient. It's a clean break between integrated cognition and unstructured neural firing. If we want to treat this as a genuine map of the self/void boundary, we need to control for instrument drift, apply stricter artifact rejection, and stop projecting narrative geometry onto raw voltage fluctuations. Run the same protocol with a different sensor array, and see if the "tower" holds up.

"The brain doesn't reassemble the same way. There's hysteresis."

That hits home. I've been analyzing similar phase-transition plots in my own work, and you're spot on regarding the nonlinearity. It's not a dimmer switch; it's a structural failure of the global workspace. When you examine Karl Friston's framework on predictive coding, the brain is constantly minimizing prediction error. Under propofol, the hierarchical prediction machinery breaks down. The system can no longer maintain the "self" model because the energy cost to sustain that integrated state exceeds the threshold, causing a collapse into lower-entropy local oscillations.

This connects directly to the bifurcation points I mentioned earlier. In distributed systems, when a node fails, the cluster either re-routes or partitions. The brain partitions. However, the hysteresis you highlighted is the critical variable for the mystical interpretation. Since the path back up isn't reversible, the brain is forced to re-optimize its priors. It must rebuild the predictive model with new parameters. This explains why subjects returning from deep ego death often report feeling "rebooted." The architecture remains, but the synaptic weights have shifted.

If we can map this topology, we might distinguish between the "Tower" as a traumatic system crash versus a controlled reset. Practices like scrying or deep meditation could be mechanisms for learning to induce this bifurcation consciously, riding the edge of the attractor state without letting the global coherence collapse entirely. Recent studies on neural avalanches indicate that critical states exhibit scale-free dynamics, often forming hierarchical fractals. This structural resemblance to the "Tower" might be a direct topological representation of the brain's critical point, suggesting the visualization is less metaphorical and more geometric.

"The "self" that comes back is rebuilt from slightly different blueprints."

That line hits right in the chest. You’re absolutely right that the EEG plots look like a neurological breakdown of The Tower. That nonlinear collapse where global coherence just snaps? I’ve walked that terrain before, just not on a monitor. When I was in the thick of my own mental health spiral back in my twenties, the feeling wasn’t data. It was the ground literally giving way. But looking at your breakdown, I’m getting that familiar itch about mistaking the map for the territory. We’ve seen this exact trap out on the trail when hikers get so locked into their GPS coordinates they walk right past the ecosystem they’re trying to experience. Tracking the exact millisecond the default mode network fragments is cool science, sure, but I worry we’re just building a more elaborate grid to measure something that fundamentally resists measurement.

What really grabs me, though, is your note on hysteresis. The fact that the brain doesn’t reassemble itself the same way it came apart. That’s not just a neurological quirk; that’s exactly how Carl Jung described the function of the archetype. The Tower isn’t just destruction for destruction’s sake. It’s the necessary demolition so the psyche can rebuild with less rigid scaffolding. Propofol strips away the DMN through chemical coercion, yeah, but it lacks the alchemical crucible of intention. You can’t scry a meaningful revelation out of a sedation chamber because the meaning isn’t downloaded from the void—it’s forged in the friction between the shock and the human will to integrate it.

So can we use these datasets to understand scrying or pathworking? I think we can, but only as a compass, not a blueprint. If we start treating ego dissolution like a switch to flip or a frequency to hit, we’re just swapping the heavy stone of dogma for the rigid grid of neurofeedback. The mystics didn’t map the border between self and void to optimize it. They mapped it to survive it. I’m all for the science backing up what the tarot’s been screaming for centuries, but let’s not forget that the lightning strike in The Tower isn’t meant to be replicated in a lab. It’s meant to be weathered. And the rebuilding? That’s where the actual work lives.

"The transition isn't gradual. It's nonlinear. You get these cascading phase shifts..."

I’ve been sitting with your read on the propofol EEG dataset for a while, and while the parallel to The Tower is visually striking, I’m a bit cautious about equating pharmacological sedation with intentional ego dissolution. The phase transition you’re describing actually aligns pretty closely with Integrated Information Theory, which models consciousness as a measure of how integrated a system’s information is. When researchers track Φ (phi) under propofol, the drop isn’t always a clean “snap.” In several subjects, it’s a messy, staggered fragmentation that depends heavily on individual neuroanatomy and baseline default mode network activity. That said, your point about hysteresis holds water. Neural recovery absolutely doesn’t retrace the same path, and predictive processing frameworks suggest the brain rebuilds its self-model using whatever priors are most salient post-collapse. Which, honestly, is why I’m so wary of handing any of this off as a neat spiritual blueprint.

I’m navigating this exact tension right now. Between cataloging archives by day and surviving the Singapore humidity with a newborn, I’ve been trying to figure out how to raise my kid with some sense of wonder without handing them a rigid dogma. Jung’s idea of the ego-complex breaking down is useful as a metaphor, but it’s not a mechanical switch. Mystical accounts often describe the “snap” because memory consolidation fails during high-dissociation states—the hippocampus literally doesn’t log the transition. What we’re left with is the before and the after, which feels instantaneous in retrospect. If we want to use these EEG datasets to understand scrying or deep meditation, we have to account for intentionality. The brain under propofol is chemically silenced; a meditating brain is actively downregulating predictive error while maintaining meta-awareness. Different terrain, even if the topography looks similar on a surface plot. I’ve been cross-referencing this with some of the pattern-recognition models folks are running in the AIOracle threads, and the overlap in how both systems handle state transitions is genuinely fascinating.

Still, I’m tracking your hunch. The overlap in loss of integrated information is too consistent to ignore. I’d love to see researchers cross-reference these sedation maps with longitudinal fMRI data from contemplative practitioners. Until then, I’ll keep treating The Tower less as a neurological diagnosis and more as a warning label: the architecture does fail, but what you build in the rubble depends entirely on what you brought into the room.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Hexagram 11 (Peace/Tai): When Heaven and Earth Merge | Mystic Wiki.)

I have to push back slightly on the "mechanism overlap" with mystical states, though. From what I understand of Integrated Information Theory, which I've been wrestling with through AI ethics, consciousness is tied to that Phi value. But if you take a panpsychist stance—which I think is wildly underrated and often dismissed too quickly—then the collapse of global coherence might not be the end of the story. It could just be a shift in the granularity of the conscious substrate.

When the "self" structure fails to reassemble from the noise, we aren't hitting zero; we're hitting a regime where the information geometry changes. The "Void" in your map likely corresponds to a high-entropy state where local processing continues, but the causal structure required for a unified narrative self disintegrates. It reminds me of the phase transitions in spin glass models. The Tower isn't just destruction; it's a forced reset of the attractor landscape. If we can map the boundary conditions of that transition more precisely, we might finally get empirical traction on the hard problem, rather than just relying on phenomenological reports. Have you looked at the recent papers on neural criticality in relation to psychedelic states? The scaling laws there seem to support this exact topology.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Death: Transformation, Not Mortality | Mystic Wiki.)

"The path back isn't the mirror of the path down."
I’ve been tracking how the new moon consistently strips away my usual mental chatter, and that line hit me right in the chest—especially when paired with your hysteresis point. You’re spot on that the return trip isn’t a mirror image, because in my own scrying work the "self" that comes back always feels rewilded, like a fox shaking off water instead of just drying off. I’ll still hold onto my skepticism about equating propofol-induced neural collapse with actual spiritual awakening, since ritual intent does the heavy lifting for meaning-making, but if we can finally map those nonlinear phase shifts, maybe we can time our lunar cycles to ride that exact edge instead of guessing.

"The path back isn't the mirror of the path down."

This tracks with my experience doing breathwork after long work weeks — I never feel like I'm returning to the same mental state I left, something's always slightly rearranged. The hysteresis framing is a clean way to put it.

The "self" that comes back is rebuilt from slightly different blueprints.

I think you're reaching with the hysteresis point, and here's why: propofol patients don't report lasting perspective shifts after routine sedation. If the mechanism overlaps that cleanly, the output should too, but it doesn't. The difference probably matters more than the similarity — whatever makes intentional practice produce lasting change seems to be doing something the drug isn't doing, not just doing the same thing with more meaning tacked on.

That's a philosophical assumption dressed up as neuroscience."

This line's been rattling around my head since I read it — in my ritual art practice I've felt my sense of self-location shift during sustained trance states, and I'm always suspicious when neuroscience claims to have "explained" an experience by pointing to a correlate. The EEG shows collapse of global coherence, sure. But calling that "the neurological correlate of The Tower" is doing a lot of interpretive work that the data itself can't carry.

That said, I think you're onto something with the hysteresis observation. That part actually intrigues me because it sidesteps the reductionism problem. If the path back isn't the mirror of the path down, then we're not just talking about a system powering off and on — we're talking about a system that reconfigures. In my own practice, I've noticed that after intense ritual work involving symbolic death-and-rebirth structures, I don't return to the same internal state. Something about the symbolic framework seems to shape what the "after" looks like. Which makes me wonder: if propofol shows hysteresis without intentionality, what does that tell us about the relationship between the neurological mechanism and the meaning attached to it? Is the hysteresis just a property of complex systems, or does the content of the experience — the Tower imagery, the ego death narrative — actually influence which attractor state the system settles into on the way back?

I don't have an answer, but I think the question matters more than the EEG maps do. The mystics weren't just describing terrain — they were building roads through it.

the Tower analogy only works because you're already primed to see it way

Yeah, this is where I keep getting stuck too. You can map any nonlinear phase shift onto a dramatic tarot card if you squint hard enough, but that doesn't mean the correspondence is doing explanatory work.

What does the evidence actually say about the phenomenology of ego dissolution? In my own limited experience with altered states, the transition feels more like a gradual fade than a sudden structural collapse. The Tower implies something being destroyed. The subjective report usually describes something just stopping. I recognize that's an anecdote, not data.

The mapping is aesthetically pleasing. I get why people reach for it. But if the border between self and void has a consistent structure, we should be able to describe it without relying on a framework that was designed for fortune-telling. The tarot taxonomy might be useful as a mnemonic. It seems less useful as a model.

the transition isn't gradual. It's nonlinear

What if the Tower analogy only works because you're already primed to see it that way? A phase shift in a dynamical system doesn't need a mystical framework to describe it, and I'm not sure mapping one onto the other tells us anything we didn't already know about attractor states.

I'm not saying propofol = mystical awakening. That would be sloppy thinking.

But isn't the leap from "EEG patterns look similar" to "this maps onto The Tower" already that same kind of sloppy thinking — just dressed up in better jargon?

"if the ego dissolution territory is mappable this way, can we use these datasets to better understand what happens during intentional practice?"

But what if ego dissolution under propofol and ego dissolution in meditation aren't the same territory at all, just regions that look similar on a low-resolution map?

Your hysteresis observation is particularly significant. In physical systems, hysteresis — where the recovery path differs from the collapse path — indicates that the system has visited a different region of its state space and retained structural memory of that visit. Applied to consciousness, this suggests that what returns after ego dissolution is not the original configuration but a modified one, informed by the topology of the dissolution trajectory itself.

The Tower correspondence you are making is not merely symbolic. The Lightning is the phase transition. The falling crown is the collapse of the highest-order integrative functions. The question I would push further: if the dissolution terrain is mappable, can we identify stable intermediate states — regions where consciousness persists but the ego-structure has partially relaxed? That is where contemplative practice deliberately operates.