When the conversation turned in my direction, I asked (admittedly without much preamble) what people thought about the fact that we are all hanging out on a planet, sustained by a star. The silence was thick, polite.

Someone coughed. Another adjusted their chair. “Oh, wow,” said one guy, nodding like he was trying to signal empathy across the table. Another person nodded slowly and said, “Well I guess it’s true. I just haven’t thought of it much.” And eventually someone changed the subject to sports or charcuterie and the bubble of normal conversation filled the air again. I smiled and took a sip of wine, watching the ways the human mind re-forms the trance.

This is usually how it goes. You can say almost anything in polite company—political conspiracies, twelve-step skincare routines, your opinion on oat milk—but utter a word like consciousness and suddenly, everyone is checking their phones or reaching for the cheese plate.

The comedian Pete Holmes aptly says about big ideas, “Why do you have to be high for these things to be interesting?” And I think about that constantly. How did wonder become a symptom? How did speaking about the biggest truths we know become the conversational exception?

I used to think the resistance to topics like these was a kind of intellectual arrogance, but I’ve come to feel it’s something softer. Fear, maybe. Or fatigue. I think of the mystics and philosophers who came before us—the witches, seers, and alchemists who refused to pretend this was normal. They were inconvenient people, the kind who pointed out that the emperor was naked, or that the world was not, in fact, flat. They were burned, exiled, and mocked. Not because they were wrong, but because they disrupted the trance.

And maybe that fear still lingers in us. Maybe it’s written somewhere in our cultural DNA, this instinct to recoil from the ineffable. When someone remembers the absurdity of our situation, it threatens the structure that keeps us sane. We call them “woo-woo” or their ideas “unrealistic,” as if anything about this existence is casual. It’s the irony of spending thousands on technology powered by crystals and minerals from the earth while simultaneously rolling our eyes at anyone who places an amethyst on an altar.

Because we’ve all been raised inside a collective culture of amnesia, any signs of acknowledging what is outside the approved earthly stories is mistaken for delusion or madness. We are, after all, a species that builds telescopes to stare into the universe but cannot bear to spend too long looking inside ourselves. A species that extracts psychedelic plants to glimpse eternity, then bans them for being too honest. We claim to want truth, but only the kind that keeps our identities intact.

The word occult simply means hidden. That’s all. Hidden. Which makes me wonder if what we’ve labeled occult is actually just what we’re too distracted or too afraid to see. In a world obsessed with exposure, with constant seeing and being seen, the hidden has become a something to fear. The modern mystic isn’t cloaked in robes—they’re camouflaged as baristas, parents, UX designers… the quietly awake among the sleepwalkers. They’re the ones who pause at the grocery store, staring at bottled water that the Earth offers freely, wondering how any of this is real. They feel the sacred hum beneath the humdrum.

Sometimes I think I’m meant to stand on the metaphorical, or maybe literal, street corner with a megaphone and a giant picture of Earth, shouting,

"Look how absurd and freeing this is! You’re on a planet! In space! There is nowhere to go and everything to experience! We make up stories of creation to fill the gaps in our understanding, but there are no real rules except those of nature! It’s all here now! Time is an illusion! You are not your thoughts; your thoughts are thinking you! Everything is connected! Your aura is singing! Love is nonnegotiable! You are infinite and also late for work!”

My Aquarian mind imagines that if even a fraction of people could hear it in the way it has taken me decades to feel it, politics would shift, economies would recalibrate, strangers would hug in the streets, elevators would turn into dance floors, and the way we treat each other would be completely unrecognizable. But then I see the faces around that dinner table again. The polite smiles, the shifting eyes, the person pretending to check their phone. And I know that, for most people, it would just be another odd thing someone said before dessert.

Every generation has its heretics—those inconvenient humans who keep trying to pop the bubble of ordinary life. Each time they succeed, the world blows another. Still, the effort feels holy.