Breaking the Spell of Science
Embrace the Unknown
If you follow me on Instagram you might have noticed that when I publish a new Substack, either a few days before or at the moment I share it, a flurry of content, an article, or something that is in synchronicity with what I’ve just written about will cross my path. You might say: “Coincidence!” but I say: this is the breadcrumb trail that spirit / god / the universe leaves to show you the road to walk along.
And this is what’s been happening recently. I’ve been getting hints, a train of thought, a podcast, a line in a song that confirms it, an entire conversation. Until one day I saw it in plain writing and I knew I had to share my truth.
I’ve been writing this Substack for over a year and for so long I haven’t been able to see wood for the trees. Until now, when very recently a path has been slowly beginning taking form. A path that bravely asks me to share a belief system that I have been refining my whole life, which shape shifts with me in every iteration of myself. It calls me to speak on my deepest thoughts around animism, spirituality and as per the title of this piece, our modern obsession with science…
Now before you shout “Witch!” and delete this article, I urge you to try at least to listen to what I have to say.
I dont hate science. I feel that needed to be stipulated right from the onset. However I do think we are living in a world that is more and more hungry, obsessed and centered around data whilst simultaneously becoming more cynical and distrustful of the subtle mysteries.
Things like intuition, faith, belief, and mystery are all sanitized by double blind placebo controlled trials, analytics or KPIs.
Feeling tired? How can it be when your sleep app says you got a solid 8 hours of good quality sleep. Your scientific sleep tracker doesn’t account for the fact that you might be stuck in a relationship or job which is draining the life force out of you.
The truth is modern science spends a lot of time explaining or denying things we already know. I spent 3 years at university reading trial after trial that confirmed to me that herbal medicine either did not work, or only worked in the limited parameters set out by the experiment.
What I never came across though was a trial that was carried out in a manner which reflected the real way one would take a herbal medicine. Usually a trial would an isolated “active” ingredient, and give this in a pill or tablet format, which would then be compared to a placebo or a synthetic drug (or sometimes both).
When you make a herbal infusion in your kitchen, or you take a tincture, you don’t isolate the “active” compound, you use the whole plant. Science doesn’t account for the all the unknown number of constituents that act synergistically within one plant.
We simply just haven’t discovered every constituent of every plant, neither do we know how big or small of a part they play in aiding or inhibiting stronger acting compounds. We can’t conclude that just because we have a partial understanding of how a plant works, that it’s not an effective medicine.
Anecdotal evidence is essentially the laughing stock of science, but also a large part of how we have come to know how plants have successfully kept us alive before the advent of allopathic medicine. But this is not just about plants and herbalism. Women have been telling us about their pain for centuries, only to be dismissed and often banished from societies for their obstinate refusal to succumb to a doctors diagnosis of “its all in your head”.
Indigenous wisdom which has been handed down through oral traditions, is rich in insights which science is only recently “discovering”.
The animacy of trees is only an accepted thought because science has recently been able to prove that trees can communicate.
Mother trees are able to send signals of danger, they are able to redirect their resources to sick and growing saplings. They can even communicate with other species, and warn each other of changes that might be perceived as danger. These communication lines have been in existence long before humans, and yet the thought of saying that trees are animate beings would have sent you to a straight jacket not too long ago.
In Indigenous cultures the animacy of nature is a long standing belief which has however not been given any degree of credibility until science provided the data to prove it.
When I was around 17 I figured that if quantum physics says we are energy, particles vibrating at various frequencies (which are in turn affected by a number of things such as temperature etc…) and the reality we see with our eyes is an illusion because solidity is a perception, then when I die my energy body must surely regenerate itself into something new? That’s when I decided that reincarnation made the most sense to me. I realize this is science, and at the same time it is spiritual.
If our energy field dissipates when we die, is it really so crazy to think that parts of us will continue to exist in a way we cannot yet comprehend, making ghosts, or spirits perhaps not so far fetched?
Science tells us that our thoughts can be changed, our brains are plastic and if we can change our mindset we can change our lived experience. Our reality can physically change because of the changes we make to our mindset. Which is essentially what magic is: the belief that the intent behind your words, with enough repetition, with consistent access to energy on a certain frequency, can make your wishes a reality.
I might lose you here, I realize.
True science is a beautiful thing, an enquiry into understand the greatest mysteries of our world, and usually true scientists will happily hold their hands up and say “we just dont know”.
The thing I’m talking about is the antiseptic world that data is creating. If we are to put our faith solely in the provable and unprovable, we have to also be willing to question who controls the trials you worship? Who fund the studies that get concluded to be legitimate. Why are there only studies in on certain things and not others, who has authority to decide? These are not just important questions but vital questions if we are to now attend to the church of science and live by its gospel.
Logic and rationality are being used as a tool to keep the patriarchal project in control. Qualities like intuition, feelings, inner knowing and mysteries are usually associated with the feminine. Our society values rationality, logic, control and detachment which are attributed to masculinity. Though we are beginning to understand that there is no binary and these qualities exist in everyone, our society still largely values “masculine” traits.
The thing is, a capitalist society does not want you to be in tune with your body, it requires you to rely on a sleep tracking app, or a calorie counting one. Brands that “empower” women to track their cycles, and predict their next ovulation are really selling an expensive package of data and science, which literally cannot predict what your own individual body will do each month.
We dont need more data for things that are staring at us in the face. You dont need more data to know the things your body intuitively already knows. If you lean into why you’re constantly tired despite the fact that your Aura ring shows your sleep quality and is good, you might discover the cause of your exhaustion is a terrible relationship, a should destroying job, a bad routine. Your body already has this knowing! You dont need another app to tell you so.
Birds can tell when it’s about to rain because they sense the shifts in pressure, dogs will comfort you when they sense you are sad or stressed. If animals are able to attune to their environment, without distractions so are we.
The world is filled with unknown and mysteries, whether science has discovered them or not. It is human and arrogant to think that we might have all the answers out there.
I realize that to go against science and logic is terrifying to some of you because of the safety which the constraints of provability give you. Yet we have to defy this sterile state of mind and not give into the fear of being called crazy for giving into belief, or faith or our own intuition.
I want to live a life where I trust myself above a clinical trial. Where my lived experience is more important than what the data shows. A life where I have sovereignty over my body and I dont question my pain, despite a doctor telling me it’s “impossible”. Writing and creating, despite the fact that my work might not “perform” well according to the metrics, because regardless of this it gives me incredible joy and purpose.
I am delighted to live in a way that would have had me lobotomized or sectioned in the 50’s or burned at the stake in 1690.
True science is a discovery, a curiosity that cannot be tamed but that remains humble enough to hold up its hands to the unknowable mysteries of our human experience. I am grateful for all the brilliant minds that continue to question and give us answers to life’s unknowns, but perhaps there should be more acknowledgment of how many understood these things without proof.