The thing about Science is that it is, itself, a Magical structure.

It is a formal system designed / evolved to allow us to look at the world in a specific, disciplined, self-reinforcing way.

It is a structure for creating a certain quality of space. Philosophy of Science is a construction. The referential web of academic publishing and citation can be thought of as a single, enormously complex sigil.

Science wants to understand "what is really going on". It takes as an axiom that there is "something really going on" and then sets up rules for examining the world and learning about it.

One of the things Science does is banish subjectivity. It seeks to exclude opinion and the unverifiable, the non-replicatable. The irrational. The stuff you don't have a hypothesis about, an idea of what is going on that is falsifiable, that can be tested with an experiment.

Science is incredibly powerful magic. Its way of looking produces real-world results that have reshaped the physical reality of our world and the way we experience it in fundamental and pervasive ways.

It has been so successful that the space it has opened can start to seem like... just... The World. How things actually are. It's a big, complicated place and there's lots to do inside it. Enough that you could spend your whole life in there.

I'm from an academic family. My parents are scientists. I was raised inside Science. It's where I'm from.

But I'm a weirdo. I'm a dreamer and my mind appears to work differently from a lot of people's and I spend a lot of time and attention in my imagination.

A lot of my life has been about learning to live with how my mind works and how that meshes well or poorly with the superorganism I inhabit: late 20th / early 21st century Western civilization.

But beyond survival and a degree of comfort and stability I provide myself and others to support good life and good work I have been on a quest to find a way out of Science's circle.

It hasn't been a direct path. I reach the fringes and then often need to circle back to stabilize and integrate what I've learned.

I'm starting to feel ready to express some of this, to share some directions about this.

Magic is uncertain. It is inherently ambiguous, elusive. Seeking to grasp it, to look at it in good lighting, to take it apart to understand what makes it tick --

Faerie finery is revealed as a handful of leaves and pebbles. It was nothing after all. Just imaginary. Something I ate before falling asleep under that tree, perhaps too much cheese, ha ha.

Science is about resolving ambiguity. Eliminating self-deception, cognitive bias. Driving out the weird, the possibly imaginary.

Science is a banishing.

Deliberate construction of a baseline, exclusion of side-effects irrelevant to the question we are examining, isolation, clean glassware, clean signal, filtering out of noise.

So if you are looking for Magic, where to look?

Outside the circle.

Look in the ambiguous. Look in the imaginary. Reconsider the way Science and our culture's Science-informed world view treats imagination.

Remember where you are. Here. Now. Perceiving the World through your senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, proprioception, kinesthetics, yes, but also remember that awareness of your thoughts is a sense. Awareness of your emotions is a sense. Remember that memory is a sense.

Remember that everything you remember about how the world works, about science, about culture, about everything that you are not directly perceiving right now through your outward bodily senses? You are remembering.

Remember where and when you are. Remember who you are.

Science is a lens. You can pick it up. You can look through it. You can put it down. There are other lenses. You can pick them up. You can look through them. You can put them back down.

You can find new lenses. You can invent them. You can share them.

Different ways of looking at the world are going to give you different kinds of knowledge. The kind of knowledge Science affords is not the only way of knowing.

Science is not neutral. It has a grain. It's very, very good at certain ways of knowing and much less useful for other ways.

When you are looking through a lens it is very easy for it to become invisible to you. For its grain to become also the grain of your perception.

When a light is shining out of your eye, you will see no shadows. You can only see where it is shining.

Removing that lens and looking in another way, you can see the shadows cast. You have perspective. Parallax.

But! You are looking then through another lens, subject to similar but different limitations.

Because there is no way to look without a lens. Because lenses are the way of looking.

So here are some approaches. I'm going to try to articulate these more soon, but for now:

Become comfortable with ambiguity. With allowing it to exist and not to be compelled to resolve it. This is mystery.

Respect mystery.

Consider the possibility that there may be rich, deep ways of knowing that you are only dimly aware of right now. You may have forgotten about them. You may just not have developed them yet. You may have been unconsciously avoiding them because it seems like the sensible thing to do, following the unwritten rules of our culture about how to believe a thing is real.

Allow it to be possible that imagination is more than just daydreams, fantasy, stray thought. Something to be enjoyed or feared, indulged or dismissed, but not taken seriously.

Give yourself permission to take imagination seriously. Allow yourself that it might be safe to do this.

Give imagination permission to open into a way of knowing. Give imagination permission to be real to you. To matter.

If you do this, there emerges the possibility of surprise.

Allow yourself to be surprised.