Over the holidays, I had the rare pleasure of sitting down with a rotating cast of friends, thinkers, and cosmic weirdos—some old, some new, all wonderful. No matter where the conversation started—music, kids, death, psychedelics, Christmas lights—it somehow always veered, as if magnetically pulled, into the glowing abyss of consciousness. And, honestly, thank god. I’ve come to accept that if I’m going to be at a party, I’d rather be the guy in the kitchen talking about the nature of awareness than out front debating dry rubs and football stats.
At one point I found myself deep in conversation with someone I’d consider a modern mystic. Not in the performative, gemstone-in-the-forehead sense, but someone with a true reverence for mystery, dream logic, and the deep poetic dimensions of being human. And while I no longer orbit mysticism myself, I still admire it. It’s beautiful. It’s alive. And when done sincerely, it’s about as close as art gets to religion. But when the topic turned to the mind—what it is, where it comes from, why it sometimes sings and other times implodes—I did what I always do: I brought up science. Method, skepticism, data, brain meat. The whole thing.
This was, apparently, a vibe-killer.
With a half-smile, the mystic said something along the lines of, “Science is just too rigid. It can’t explain what’s really going on with people.” And suddenly it was like I’d pulled out a calculator at a séance. Room temperature shifted. And I realized, not for the first time, that for some folks, science is a four-letter word in a tuxedo — a kind of joyless hammer always ready to smash your sacred egg.
But that’s not how I see it. Not even close. In fact, I’d argue that science — real science, not the institutional crust, not the Twitter-bro version, not the smug professor explaining why your gut feeling is invalid — is one of the most flexible, humble, and astonishing frameworks humanity has ever created. It’s a belief system that constantly tries not to believe in itself. It is the only worldview built on the requirement that once it’s proven wrong, it has to change.
Which is, frankly, kind of beautiful.
If science had a personality, it would be the friend who shows up with a theory and a whiteboard, explains how everything works, and then immediately deletes the entire board when one new piece of evidence walks into the room. Not stubborn. Not certain. Just addicted to not lying to itself.
I get the reputation. The scientific method isn’t sexy. It doesn’t channel Pleiadian energy or read your aura or validate the tingling in your fingertips when Mercury goes retrograde. What it does do is ask: What do we know? How do we know it? Can we test it? Can someone else test it too? And if it all collapses — are we willing to admit we were wrong and start again?
That’s not rigid. That’s radical.
As a kid in public school in the 80s and early 90s, I was taught the scientific method like a sacred rite: Ask a question. Form a hypothesis. Test it. Analyze the results. Adjust. Share. Repeat. And that last word — repeat — is the magick one. It isn’t a straight line. It’s a loop. A self-correcting, endlessly curious spiral that keeps turning until something breaks or illuminates.
Science is not a fixed castle. It’s scaffolding. It’s skin that sheds. It’s the only intellectual tradition that requires humility to function. And that’s where it gets quietly spiritual. Because what else do we call a practice built on surrendering ego, admitting you don’t know, and leaning into the unknown again and again with no guarantee of comfort or meaning?
Science doesn’t hate magick. It just asks it to show up more than once.
And yes — there are limits. Science won’t write your love poem. It can’t quantify the way your daughter’s laugh rearranges your soul. It won’t explain why a dream about a blue dog in a laundromat ruins you for three days. But that doesn’t make science the enemy of those things. It makes it the complement. It draws the lines so the chaos can dance in between. It lets mystery be mystery — while keeping one eye open, just in case something repeatable wanders by.
Most people who think science is rigid haven’t had a problem with science. They’ve had a problem with a scientist — or someone pretending to be one — who forgot that doubt is the engine, not the weakness. That humility is the crown jewel, not the footnote. Real science doesn’t walk into a room trying to be right. It walks in asking: What’s actually going on here — and how do we know we’re not just hallucinating confidence again?
That’s not dogma. That’s courage.
So when someone tells me science just isn’t open enough to handle the mystical, I want to gently offer this: it might be the only system we’ve ever built that’s designed to change when mystery knocks on the door.
It just asks mystery to bring some notes next time.
And if that’s not a little bit magickal, I don’t know what is.