The Loneliness of Living Between Worlds

On what it costs to hold both the scientific and the spiritual and why I have never been able to put either one down

There is a particular kind of loneliness that has no obvious name. It is not the loneliness of isolation, of having no one around. It is the loneliness of being in a room full of people and finding that you do not quite belong to either half of it.

I have spent most of my adult life in that room. On one side: the academics, the scientists, the rationalists, people I respect enormously, whose rigour I share, whose commitment to evidence and careful thought I do not want to abandon.

On the other side: the shamanic practitioners, the mystics, the people who know from the inside what it is to work with spirit, to journey between worlds, to hold experiences that resist every conventional framework.

People who have touched something real and live by it.

I love people in both halves of that room. And I have found, repeatedly, that fully belonging to either half requires a kind of amputation I am not willing to perform.

This essay is about what that costs. And about why, despite the cost, I have come to believe it is exactly the right place to stand.

Walking on different paths at the same time

What the Rational World Asks You to Give Up

I came to serious intellectual life through philosophy and research. The culture of that world, which I absorbed as thoroughly as anyone, has a particular shape. It rewards precision, scepticism, and the ability to dismantle weak arguments. It is suspicious of anything that cannot be operationalised, measured or, at minimum, defended in terms that a peer reviewer would find respectable. And it has, woven into its fabric, an unspoken assumption: that the kinds of experiences reported by mystics, shamans, and people who claim to have encountered something beyond the ordinary bounds of the physical world are, at best, interesting psychological phenomena and, at worst, evidence of confused thinking.

This assumption is rarely stated outright. It does not need to be. It operates through tone: through the slight shift in register when certain topics are raised, through the careful absence of those topics from serious conversation, through the way a raised eyebrow can communicate everything that a full argument would say less efficiently.

I have felt that raised eyebrow directed at me. I have also, in my less honest moments, deployed it myself: the small, protective scepticism that signals to the room that I am one of the reasonable people, not one of those people.

It is a dishonest gesture. Because I know, from direct experience, that something happens in shamanic practice that does not fit the categories I was trained to use. Not as belief, not as a position I have adopted on insufficient evidence, but as something I have encountered, something that has the unmistakable quality of reality, of contact with what is actually there rather than what I have constructed.

The rational world does not have good language for this. And its response to the absence of language, the retreat into dismissal, is not rigour. It is a failure of intellectual honesty dressed up as one.

What the Spiritual World Asks You to Give Up

The other side of the room has its own demands, which are in some ways more subtle and, in some ways, more personal.

Spiritual communities, and shamanic communities are not immune to this, as they can have a complicated relationship with rigorous critical thought. Not always. Some of the most intellectually serious people I know work in these traditions. But there is a current in certain spiritual spaces that treats analysis as a form of resistance, scepticism as a spiritual failure, and the demand for evidence as evidence of a closed heart.

I have sat in circles where to ask careful questions, like 'Where does this claim come from?', 'What is the evidence for this mechanism?', 'How do we know this is not projection?', felt like a breach of faith. Where the expectation was not engagement but assent. Where the unspoken rule was: if you have to ask, you haven't arrived yet.

This makes me deeply uncomfortable. Not because I distrust spiritual experience, as I trust it enormously, including my own, but because I know what happens to traditions that lose contact with critical thought. They become systems for the confirmation of existing belief rather than genuine explorations of what is real. They become vulnerable to the grandiose, the manipulative, the self-serving claims that every human community produces when accountability is replaced by deference.

The spiritual world, at its worst, asks you to give up your mind. I cannot do that. Not because the mind is all there is, but because it is the instrument by which I protect both myself and others from the very real dangers of surrendered discernment.

I refuse to choose between the rigour that keeps me honest and the experience that keeps me alive. Both are real. Both are necessary. Neither is complete without the other.

What the Loneliness Actually Feels Like

I want to be honest about the texture of this, because I think it is more common than people admit and less often spoken about than it should be.

It means, in practical terms, that there are conversations I cannot fully have in most rooms. In academic or professional contexts, there is a portion of my experience and thinking that I keep folded away, not because I am ashamed of it, but because I know the cost of producing it unbidden, and I am not always willing to pay that cost. There is a version of me that does not appear at work in the way she appears in the world.

In spiritual contexts, there is equally a portion of me that holds back. The part that wants to push on the epistemology, that notices when a claim is doing more work than the evidence supports, that experiences genuine discomfort when awe is demanded rather than arrived at. That part also waits, knowing it is not entirely welcome.

The exhaustion of this, of perpetual code-switching between different registers of the self, is real. It produces a particular kind of loneliness that is hard to explain to people who have not experienced it: the sense that the full self is not available to any one room. That you are always, in some measure, a partial guest.

What I have wanted, for most of my adult life, is a conversation in which I do not have to choose. In which I can say: I have read the hard problem of consciousness and I find it genuinely unsolved, and I have also journeyed shamanically and encountered something I cannot reduce to neurological process, and I think these two things are related, and I think the relationship matters enormously, and I want to think about it carefully with someone who takes both halves seriously.

Those conversations are rare. When they happen, they are among the most nourishing experiences I know.

This Is Not Both-Sidesism

I want to be precise about something, because I think the position I am describing is sometimes misread as a kind of false balance, a both-sidesism that refuses to commit, that hedges its bets, that treats the materialist and the spiritual as equally valid options between which a reasonable person simply chooses according to taste.

That is not what I am describing.

I am describing a position that takes both the scientific evidence and the evidence of direct experience seriously which means being willing to let each challenge the other, and being willing to follow the argument rather than the tribal affiliation. This is not comfortable. It is not designed to keep anyone happy. It is, I believe, simply the intellectually honest response to a body of evidence that does not fit neatly into either of the standard frameworks.

The materialist view of consciousness, the claim that experience is identical to or wholly generated by neural activity, is not an established scientific fact. It is a metaphysical assumption, and one that faces serious, unresolved philosophical difficulties. The hard problem of consciousness is not a gap that will be closed with more neuroscience. It is a structural problem in the framework itself.

The uncritical spiritual view, the claim that subjective experience directly reveals the nature of reality, that what feels true in altered states is therefore cosmologically accurate, that tradition is sufficient warrant, faces its own serious difficulties. Subjective experience is real. It is not self-interpreting. The history of human belief is strewn with sincere, vivid, genuinely transformative experiences that turned out to be wrong about the world.

The position I inhabit says: both of these frameworks are incomplete. The truth, whatever it turns out to be, is more interesting than either of them. And the only way to approach it with any integrity is to hold both the rigour and the openness simultaneously, even when that is socially costly, intellectually uncomfortable, and yes, lonely.

Why It Is Worth It

I have been sitting with this position for long enough now to know some things about it that I could not have known at the beginning.

The first is that it produces a quality of attention that neither world alone provides. When you are not allowed the comfort of a received framework - when you cannot simply defer to either the scientific consensus or the spiritual tradition, because you know the genuine limits of both - you are forced to think more carefully, more originally, and more honestly than you would if you had a team to belong to. The loneliness, in this sense, is also a kind of freedom.

It is the freedom of not knowing which answer you are supposed to arrive at before you start.

The second is that it creates a particular kind of availability to other people. I have found, over years of practice, that the people who seek me out are often exactly the people who share this predicament: the scientist who had a mystical experience they cannot explain and cannot dismiss; the spiritual practitioner who finds themselves tormented by epistemological questions that their community has no patience for; the person who simply knows that they are more than the materialist story accounts for, and equally knows that the spiritual stories on offer are not quite right either.

These people are, in my experience, among the most alive and most honest people I know. The discomfort of their position has kept them thinking. The refusal to settle for a framework that does not fit has preserved in them a kind of intellectual and spiritual vitality that the fully settled - on either side - sometimes lose.

The people who live between worlds are often the ones doing the most interesting thinking. The discomfort is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that something is being taken seriously.

The third thing I know is that the position itself of the willingness to hold both and to refuse the amputation is not merely a personal stance but something with larger significance. The questions that living between worlds forces you to sit with, like 'What is consciousness?' 'What is the relationship between experience and reality?' 'What do the anomalous data points in the scientific literature actually mean?', are not niche philosophical puzzles. They are among the most consequential questions of this moment.

We are living through a period in which the materialist framework is beginning, under pressure from its own anomalies, to show serious structural strain. The hard problem of consciousness, the NDE evidence, the results coming out of psychedelic research, the quantum mechanical challenges to classical intuitions about the nature of reality all are producing a situation in which the received view is increasingly inadequate and the alternative views are not yet sufficiently developed to replace it.

The people who can think carefully in this space, and who have the scientific literacy to engage with the evidence and the experiential depth to know what is at stake, are not standing in the wrong place. They are standing exactly where they need to be.

The threshold is not a comfortable place to live. It is, however, the most honest one available.

A Note to the Others

I know you are out there, because I hear from you. The researcher who journeys, quietly, and tells almost no one. The GP who has sat with dying patients and knows, from what they have witnessed, that the materialist story is missing something crucial, and who carries that knowledge in private because the professional cost of saying it openly is too high. The philosopher who meditates, the neuroscientist who has had an experience they cannot publish, the therapist who uses practices they cannot name in their case notes.

The person who has read the serious scientific literature on consciousness and anomalous experience, not the credulous popularisations, but the actual peer-reviewed research, and finds themselves unable to accept either the dismissive consensus or the credulous alternative, and so exists in a kind of unmarked territory that most maps do not show.

You are not confused. You are not failing to commit. You are not waiting until you have enough information to finally choose a side.

You are doing something harder and more valuable: you are taking the full complexity of the evidence seriously, at personal cost, in a cultural moment that rewards tribal certainty over honest uncertainty. You are refusing the comfort of belonging to either camp because you know that the truth, whatever it is, is not served by that belonging.

That is not a failure of conviction. It is an act of intellectual and spiritual integrity. And it is, I increasingly believe, exactly what this moment needs.

The loneliness is real. So is the company, once you find it. And so is the work, the strange, uncomfortable, necessary work of thinking carefully at the edges of what is known, refusing to close prematurely, and keeping faith with a complexity that neither world, alone, can hold.

I would not trade it. Even on the difficult days, I would not trade it.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is a researcher, philosopher, and shamanic practitioner who has spent her career working at the intersection of rigorous inquiry and direct spiritual experience. She works with people who are ready to stop choosing between their thinking and their knowing. She can be reached at kathy@magicinharmony.com or www.magicinharmony.com.

Do you know this loneliness? Have you found your way to the others? I would genuinely love to hear where you stand, what it has cost, and what it has given you.