Mea Culpa: Why I'm a Spiritual Person in a Scientific Community

I’ve always been curious. That’s the heart of it. I want to understand how the universe works — from the bending of fabrics of space-time to the workings of our own minds. That’s what drew me to science. But that same curiosity, that same longing to understand reality and ourselves, also led me deep into the world of religion and spirituality.

To many in the scientific community, this might sound like a contradiction. In fact, I’ve often felt a certain snobbery — a kind of proud mockery — from some of my peers whenever spirituality comes up. And to be fair, I understand where that reaction comes from. Science has had to fight long and hard against dogma and misinformation. We’ve all seen spiritual communities that reject evolution, deny vaccines, or claim the Earth is flat. And history is littered with religious institutions abusing power — from the Crusades to modern-day cults.

But those failures — of institutions, not of spirituality itself — don’t justify dismissing the entire spiritual endeavor. To frown upon spirituality is to reject a profound and ancient part of the human experience. Whether or not you believe in God, it’s not an accident that the Bible is considered by many to be the most influential book in human history. Religion is not just a system of beliefs — it’s a repository of human attempts to make sense of suffering, meaning, morality, and the transcendent.

What many in science fail to see is that true spirituality has little to do with blindly following a priest or guru. In fact, I’d argue that the real spiritual path is a deeply personal and experimental process — much like science itself. It involves reflection, discipline, and methods aimed at transforming our perception of reality. These methods may include meditation, prayer, rituals, and sometimes even the careful, respectful use of substances that alter consciousness.

I’m not just speaking in abstractions here. My own path has taken me through a wide array of spiritual traditions and practices:

• I’ve sat in 10-day silent Vipassana retreats;
• I’ve consecrated Ayahuasca with native communities;
• I’ve had psychodelic trips with psilocybin;
• I’ve joined secret orders;
• I’ve studied and practiced Spiritism, Umbanda, Quimbanda, Candomblé, and Voodoo;
• I was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, explored Adventism, Mormonism, and various branches of Protestantism;
• I’ve read the Stoics, Leibniz’s Theodicy, and The Brothers Karamazov;

These experiences weren’t about joining a religion. They were about exploring consciousness — the most immediate and yet most mysterious aspect of reality. They’ve offered me insights, not just into myself, but into the nature of being, connection, and existence itself.

Ironically, I’ve often found more honest, childlike curiosity in spiritual seekers than in academic circles. Academia, for all its brilliance, has grown dry and mechanical. Overburdened by grants, bureaucracy, and performance metrics, it’s lost some of the wonder that shone in the eyes of the scientific pioneers — those who once looked at the night sky and asked “Why?”

The philosopher and physicist Richard Feynman once said:

I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things… I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.

And yet, many of today’s self-proclaimed scientists seem terrified of not knowing — especially when it comes to questions science was never meant to answer. They cling to certainty and posture over mystery, hiding their insecurity behind the cold altar of rationality. In their zeal to appear objective, they’ve begun worshipping a new deity: their newly erected god now named The Scientific Method.

But Feynman understood the limits of that god. He was clear — painfully clear — that moral questions are not within the domain of science. How to live, how to treat others, how to suffer well, how to face death — these are not equations to be solved. They are spiritual, philosophical, existential questions. And pretending they can be resolved with peer review and p-values is not only naive, it’s intellectually dishonest.

In his own words, science is about what is, not what ought to be. It can tell you how to split the atom — but not whether you should. It can explain the chemistry of love — but not how to be a loving partner. And yet, many scientists today dismiss entire traditions that have wrestled with those questions for millennia. In doing so, they amputate one half of the human experience.

So when I turn to religion, I’m not rejecting science. I’m completing it.

Disclaimer: This text was written with the assistance of ChatGPT, I’m not this good of a writer. The ideas and tone is definitely mine, but I attribute the style and flow entirely to GPT.