"The High Priestess sitting between two pillars, that liminal threshold space — isn't that basically what these OBE accounts describe?"

Yes, and I think that's why she resonates so deeply with me — when I'm out with my telescope at 3am, caught between the dark sky and the ground beneath me, I feel that exact same in-between pull.

In quantum physics, convergent results from independent experimental setups are considered strong evidence for an underlying mechanism. I see no principled reason to apply a lower evidential standard to consciousness research. The fact that someone experiencing this in 3rd-century Alexandria and someone in 21st-century California report the same phenomenology suggests a common underlying state — not shared cultural programming, which would predict more variation, not less.

Your Vipassana experience — the brief hovering sensation during emotional distress — is worth taking seriously. In the Theravada Buddhist framework, intensive meditation can produce vipassana nimittas, experiential signs that indicate the mind is approaching a stage of insight. One common nimitta is the dissolution of the sense of bodily boundaries. Two seconds is brief, but the phenomenology is consistent with early-stage boundary dissolution, especially under conditions of emotional intensity.

The Hermetic tradition and Buddhist insight practices arrived at overlapping descriptions of consciousness through completely independent methodological paths. The convergence is, to me, more remarkable than any single account. It suggests that what they were mapping has genuine topography. Not metaphorical. Topographic.

"these people back then didn't have reddit threads to compare notes on, they just had religious texts and symbols"

But they DID have each other. Mystical traditions weren't isolated people having private experiences — they were in communities, reading each other's work, building on shared language. The reason medieval mystics sound similar to each other isn't because they tapped into some universal truth, it's because they were literally part of the same intellectual lineage. Same way Reddit OBE people are part of theirs.

I'm not saying OBEs aren't real experiences for the people having them. Your hovering thing after the breakup sounds intense and I wouldn't dismiss that. But I think lumping together "dissociation during emotional distress and meditation" with "structured hermetic symbolism" actually flattens both things. One is something your brain does under stress and focus, the other is a deliberate symbolic system. They don't need to be the same phenomenon to both be interesting.