Liberated by Science

I have suffered immensely in the name of alleviating suffering. 

In today’s spiritual-industrial complex, enlightenment is no longer a quiet inner unfolding—it’s a product, packaged and sold with the urgency of a miracle cure. Like many seekers, I spent years chasing its promises, convinced I was healing, evolving, and waking up. 

But my story doesn’t follow the familiar arc of someone raised in a conventional religious household, quietly questioning doctrine until skepticism finally wins out. I wasn’t dragged to church on Sundays or made to sit through sermons that clashed with an emerging rational mind. I didn’t grow up chafing against the confines of Abrahamic faith, searching for truth outside its dogmas. 

The more disillusioned you became with conventional knowledge, the more enlightened you were becoming—or so you were told. 

My path was different—not a rebellion against inherited tradition, but a wholehearted plunge into the spiritual fringe, because that’s the culture I was born and raised in. I wasn’t escaping rigid dogma; I was further drawn to teachings that promised hidden knowledge, inner awakening, and cosmic truth that had been taught to me as a child. In my world, doubt wasn’t something to investigate or resolve—it was something to transcend. You were encouraged to distrust mainstream science, question Western medicine, and reject “limiting beliefs,” but not in the service of rational and real understanding. Instead, skepticism was rerouted into a spiritual superiority: if you doubted what “they” (scientists, doctors, the media) told you, you were simply and joyously waking up. The more disillusioned you became with conventional knowledge, the more enlightened you were becoming—or so you were told. 

It wasn’t doubt in pursuit of truth; it was doubt weaponized as identity, a badge of higher knowing. Critical thinking was encouraged only to the extent that it led you away from consensus reality and deeper into the echo chamber of cosmic certainties. 

I was raised immersed in New Age spiritual slop—no, I was waterboarded with it. 

From the time I was nine or ten, Tibetan lamas wandered through my living room, playing flutes or reciting poetry, their shaved heads and russet robes testament to their monastic paths. Shamans, psychics, astrologers, and mediums were a part of daily life. My mother, raised Mormon, had rejected her own rigid upbringing and headed for Big Sur and the Esalen Institute—ground zero for all things New Age Human Potential—from Washington state, in a VW van, looking to break free from her evangelical upbringing, eventually raising me in her idealistic post-adolescent vision of enlightenment. 

Our entire culture—especially in America—is scientifically illiterate, primed for magical thinking and longing for metaphysical quick fixes. 

Bedtime lullabies were replaced with mantras. Lunches came packed with sprouted seed bread and tempeh. Friday nights weren’t for movies—they were for goddess circles under the moon, sometimes featuring naked dancing women invoking divine feminine energy. 

Then, my mother “got serious.” And by serious, I mean she fell into one of the more dangerous corners of Eastern spiritual philosophy: Advaita Vedanta. 

(Side note: If you’re a nondualist and a parent, and you catch yourself thinking, “This is so beautiful—I want to raise my child in the liberating knowledge that they are no one, nothing, and that nothing is real…” please report immediately to Child Protective Services. You can collect your child when you’ve reconnected with reality.) 

Advaita, in its Westernized, and very misunderstood form, became the most destabilizing force in my young life. It taught that “the self is an illusion,” that “reality is maya,” and that “what you truly are was never born and never dies.” These concepts, introduced to me as a child without a stable psychological framework, led me straight into dissociation, anxiety, and a profound inability to feel grounded or attached to reality. I was mushy and unformed and told by Ramana Maharshi devotees that I was “no one,” “no name,” “no form.” I was terrified and confused, and in this liminal state, I was bypassing my life, not living it. 

So, I did what I had always seen modeled: I kept seeking. 

I chased wellness through yoga teacher training with Bikram Choudhury at age 18 (cough), dabbled in quantum quackery with Joe Dispenza, and earnestly “worked on myself” through Byron Katie’s The Work—a spiritual Mad Libs exercise where you gaslight your own suffering into nonexistence. I even made the pilgrimage to Esalen myself decades after my mom made her first trip for several retreats ranging from disembodied-entity channeling to psychedelic breath bonanzas. I got sucked into the wellness culture’s detox trap and endured cruel and unusual cleanses (i.e., 90-minute daily colonics followed by herbal flushes) that left me frail and faint and passing out in the middle of a Hawaiian jungle. 

Then I met my guru. 

She was raw, funny, and embodied, unlike any spiritual teacher I’d encountered. She assigned mantras for prosperity, prescribed cleanses to “raise vibrational energy,” and encouraged hours of daily chanting. I wore white and meditated on a sheepskin rug for hours each day. This was it, I found my purpose, my teacher, my community. 

And then—suddenly—she died. 

Her death shattered me. It jolted me into looking more closely at the pattern of my life: this compulsive, untethered quest for transcendence. So, as a last-ditch effort, I spent a week in a sensory deprivation cave trying to access endogenous DMT (dimethyltryptamine—a psychedelic that is naturally produced in humans and other mammals present in brain and body tissue, but whose exact roles and origins, especially in the pineal gland [René Descartes’ “seat of the soul”], is yet to be determined)—but all I accessed was a full-blown existential crisis and an irrational fear of my own breathing. 

I was haunted by remnants of Advaita: None of this is real. You are no one. What you truly are was never born. This duality—nothingness alongside the weight of needing enlightenment—created unbearable cognitive friction. I wasn’t living; I was striving for something that required me to deny the life I actually had. 

Simone de Beauvoir once wrote of such teachings: “They have denied life, considering it a veil of illusion beneath which is hidden the truth of Nirvana.” I wish I had read her sooner. 

The divine, I came to realize, is a human invention.

But it took many more years of wandering through the spiritual marketplace before I began to see the depth of the problem. One of the most insidious elements is the way neo-Advaita’s nihilistic “we are nothing” message gets tangled with New Age affirmations of the “divine universe.” One moment: “The Great Spirit is telling me…,” the next: “I am one with everything.” Pick a side. 

Nietzsche captured the contradiction well when he criticized Vedanta for its “double lie,” a supposedly nondualistic philosophy that’s essentially dualistic at its core. If we are all already enlightened, who exactly is seeking? If we are one, what is this flaw that needs fixing? This contradiction is what the Buddha pushed back on with his doctrine of anatta—no self. His teaching wasn’t: Follow me. It was: See for yourself. 

So, I did. 

And what I saw, was that I had been really stupid. I had been gullible. Naïve. Easily manipulated. But I also wasn’t alone. Our entire culture—especially in America—is scientifically illiterate, primed for magical thinking and longing for metaphysical quick fixes. 

I started reading the work of scientists and skeptics. I retrained my brain to ask questions, demand evidence, and validate claims. Carl Sagan’s principle shot ice through my veins, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I had subscribed to outlandish and extraordinary claims my entire life without a shred of evidence. So, I began a different type of quest—one for answers: 

• Is there a divine force with a special plan for me? 
• Do the stars influence my behavior? 
• Is there an afterlife, a soul, a karmic ledger? 
• Is there anything supernatural actually 
• happening on this planet? 

No. At least there is no demonstrable, repeatable, credible evidence. Not for ghosts, gods, karma, psychic abilities, reincarnation, or cosmic messaging. Nada, Zip, Zilch, the Square Root of Zilch, the nth Root! 

The divine, I came to realize, is a human invention. Those mythologies that we still quote today, ancient wisdom from prescientific cultures, are no match for what we now know from neuroscience and cosmology. 

Science, in all its complexity, has brought me to the most grounded peace I’ve ever known.

But science is hard. It’s rigorous. It doesn’t conform to your deepest wishes, comfort you with simple answers, or tell you that everything happens for a reason. Ancient wisdom, on the other hand, is easy. It wraps itself in mystery and metaphors and demands only faith. It’s also deeply outdated. 

And yet science, in all its complexity, has brought me to the most grounded peace I’ve ever known. I have divorced myself from the fantasy that the universe is a conscious entity with a plan for my life. From the idea that I have an immortal soul, that stars guide my fate, that disembodied spirits have messages for me, or that I was born with a divine purpose. 

When I say I don’t believe in God, or souls, or an afterlife—at all—I often hear: “Then what’s the point? Isn’t that depressing?” 

No. It’s liberating. 

I no longer live tethered to a cosmic daddy or a mystical mommy or a supernatural overseer of any kind. My life is my own. My purpose is derived from my own meaning, my own choosing. I am a fallible, biological brain inside of a body—mortal, material, real. Simply a part of nature and of this earth. 

And that’s good enough for me!