Skepticism and Spirituality

In the summer of 1996, I took part in a firewalk with my coven and also with my two sons, ages 10 and 14.  It was a great experience.  We integrated the firewalk into a solstice ritual where we focused on confronting fears, and literally walking across red-hot coals served as an exhilarating symbolic context for that process.  As far as I could tell, we all found it exciting, moving and satisfying. 

Discussing the experience afterwards, however, I found myself on an altogether nastier hotbed, namely the firewalking debate between self-proclaimed rational skeptics and self-proclaimed enlightened metaphysicians.  The wired among you used to be able to get a flavor of this squabble by visiting Tom Margrave's attractive Web site, but it has since disappeared.

In a nutshell, the disagreement is this (at least on the surface): the spiritual camp believes, as Tom Margrave put it, that "firewalking is compelling evidence of the human mind's ability to interact with and alter reality in ways not yet understood by science," while the skeptics argue that our ability to walk on hot coals without getting burned can be explained by physics as currently understood, without introducing magickal mind-over-matter effects. 

Who cares?  As far as I can tell, we all live in the same world, where firewalking manifestly does work.  By some estimates, half a million people in the U.S.  alone have firewalked, and few have suffered worse than a minor burn or two.  The evidence suggests that anyone willing to try can firewalk successfully.  And it can be a spectacular experience.  What more do you need to know? 

Well, firewalking leaders might want to know a bit more.  They are responsible for the safety of their charges, and people do sometimes get burned.  Why?  Is it a matter of the person "losing focus?"  Does it have something to do with the fire?  If you were a firewalking leader, wouldn't you want to know? 

The skeptic's main explanation of why you usually don't get burned firewalking is that although the coals you walk on are extremely hot (between 1000 and 2000 degrees Fahrenheit), they are so light and such poor conductors of heat that they can't transfer enough calories per second to burn your feet, which are cooled by a significant volume of blood.  Blood, after all, is mostly water, and requires many calories to raise its temperature.  In the same way, you can stick your hand in a hot oven, and even though the air may be over 450 degrees, it doesn't burn you because it can't transfer heat to your hand fast enough.  The oven rack at the same temperature burns you immediately because the metal both holds heat well, and conducts it rapidly. 

The second theory advanced by skeptics involves variations of the "Leidenfrost" effect, which you've seen making drops of water skitter on a griddle.  The idea is simply that rapid vaporization of sweat on the bottom of your foot may help protect the skin from damage.  Whether or not a special insulating barrier of steam is created, the cooling effect of foot sweat certainly needs to be considered in trying to explain why we don't get burned. 

Firewalking enthusiasts, on the other hand, believe that you don't get burned because you shift reality with your mind when you walk on fire.  Tom Margrave describes an aura of Life Energy or ch'i which, "when energized with the additional life force activated by fear, creates in some way a protective field around the physical body."  This field, he believes, "not only interacts with the physical body but with the environment as well in a way that is not yet understood."  You get burned, he observes, when the "focused intention" necessary to sustain this field is interrupted by a limiting, judgemental thought.  As an example, he describes thinking in the middle of a firewalk, "This is impossible!"  Then he immediately experienced a minor burn: "A small blister was the result of my broken intention." 

In his book, Dancing with Fire (Santa Fe: Bear and Co.  1989), firewalker Michael Sky dismisses skeptical theories as superficial attempts to "explain away" the transcendance of firewalking.  He attacks skepticism in general as a "bad habit… ultimately of no redeeming value to the human species," and observes, "a skeptical mind is invariably a closed mind."  As far as he is concerned, scientific explanations are completely refuted by the testimony of burn specialists who cannot understand why people don't get burned firewalking. 

I can't say that I wholeheartedly approve of the self-proclaimed skeptical community myself; as a long-time reader of The Skeptical Inquirer, I've noticed that some of its contributors seem to be second-tier academics of limited imagination and creativity who don't appear to have done any real science themselves.  Posing as skeptics has undoubtedly given them a career boost.  Where true skepticism involves questioning authority, these folks seem to want to defend a tidy academic status quo against messy metaphysical attacks; they seem closer to medieval scholastics than to scientists. 

But that's by no means all there is to The Skeptical Inquirer, to its parent organization CSICOP, to the scientific community in general, and particularly to the practice of critical thinking.  Real science, as Sky seems to understand on some level, is grounded in curiosity and a lack of fear.  It is precisely fear that usually constrains us from questioning our most dearly held beliefs.  After all, supposing we turn out to be wrong?  At best, being wrong means changing, which is work, and at worst, an essential part of our validity always seems threatened.  Our world might crumble and all our personal importance be destroyed.  What if Jesus were not the paraclete?  What if the earth were not flat?  What if Newton was wrong?  What if spirituality is important?  What if our gurus are frauds?  Let's not think about it. 

No, wait.  Have a little faith that the universe is inevitably different and more beautiful than you imagine, or can imagine.  In fear, we all tend to forget this, whether the subject is science or spirituality.  We want so badly to know the answers already that we talk ourselves into thinking we do.  In the 1890s, a group of eminent scientists concluded that physics was essentially complete; nothing important remained to be discovered.  They look silly in retrospect, given the advances of the last hundred years, but John Horgan, an eminent science writer, has recently revived this kind of thinking in The End of Science; Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age.  Relax, folks, we now know all we can know!  Yeah, fat chance. 

What burns me about the firewalking debate is a similar attitude.  Very little wondering is evident; everyone's mind seems already made up.  And yet, it would not be hard to design some simple experiments to eliminate (or perhaps confirm) the two main scientific explanations of firewalking, and then move on from there.  For example, mount a thermometer or thermocouple in a flat flask of water.  Weigh the water in the flask and measure the surface area of one of the flat sides.  Place that side of the flask on firewalking coals and record the temperature reading every five seconds for several minutes.  You can plot, in a crude sort of way, how many calories per square centimeter per second the coals transfer to the flask (a calorie being the amount of heat needed to raise a gram of water one degree Celsius).  To simulate foot sweat, you could try the same thing with a damp sock over the flask.  Now, find out how fast blood flows past the skin on the sole of your foot (I'd guess it's renewed maybe every five seconds).  Estimate how many calories per square centimeter would need to be transferred in order to raise, say, a five-millimeter-thick layer of blood from body temperature to boiling (I guess about thirty calories per square centimeter).  How does that compare with the measured transfer rate? 

If the experiment seems too crude, refine it.  But one way or another, you could confirm or disprove current physical theories of firewalking, and from there work on understanding why people do get burned sometimes. 

Why hasn't Tolly Burkan's Firewalk Institute for Research and Education done this and published the results?  Could self-doubt play a part?  I sense among firewalk enthusiasts a fear that firewalking would be trivialized if it did not turn out to defy our paltry understanding of physical laws.  Better to claim victory than find out. 

I guess I just disagree.  Personally, I love Jim Rose and his troupe because they scare me silly and confound what I thought was possible, not because they claim to defy physical laws.  Firewalking too will always scare me silly, whether I think I understand it or not— that's what it's about for me. 

I also oppose setting science and spirituality against each other, as if you have to choose one or the other.  Granted, there is a large culture gap between scientific and spiritual communities today, but I think the public antagonism between them has more basis in fear and misunderstanding than in substantive disagreement.  Many rationalists certainly find the almost universal attraction of spirituality frightening, particularly to the extent it "tempts" them, so they try to invalidate it.  On the other side, there is as least as much fraud in the spiritual community as in the scientific, which gives the skeptics plenty of grist for their mill.  And yet, where fraud in the scientific community is generally undertaken for personal gain, I sense that many overblown spiritual claims today are made out of a sense of desperation.  To many folks, it seems as if science and rationalism will banish magick from our lives unless we can "prove" magick to be real. 

But does it make magick real to pretend it's science?  Shall we give it laws, doctrines, professors, priests, bureaucracy, and of course a police force?  No wonder the skeptics call that stuff pseudo-science!  No, to me, real magick and real science alike are about what we don't know, not about what we do know.  In this sense, science is driven by spirituality: the striving to understand the unknown is motivated by the sense of awe and wonder at its mystery and beauty. 

The process of discovery that is at the heart of science looks so different before and after.  After something's been discovered, we tend to see it as clear and obvious (even when it later turns out to be a hoax or misunderstanding).  We "learn" it (memorize it with minimal questioning) and tuck it away with other useful facts.  But what seems so clear and obvious afterwards is generally arrrived at only by a long process of trial and error during which many clearer and more obvious explanations have to be abandoned.  Anyone who has taken part in this process knows how easy it is to become attached to a theory, and how hard it can be to let it go in the face of evidence, to admit that it was wrong (that you were wrong).  It is precisely a lack of investment and lack of fear that makes children such wonderful investigators.  They'll try anything, they're not afraid of seeming fools, they don't worry about making mistakes.  Is this not precisely what we need in our spiritual lives? 

A book that wonderfully illustrates the spiritual aspects of science is Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich.  The author documents several years of research in a way that reveals the process of his science, not just its results.  Although he never describes his motivations in spiritual terms, it is hard not to recognize the personal and internal elements of his quest. 

To me, true science and spirituality are not enemies, they are part of the same process.  Indeed, they share enemies: complacency, bureaucracy, certainty, all driven by fear transmuted into greed. 

Both science and spirituality ask that you take serious responsibility for your beliefs.  There are so many "experts" in the world today, scientific and spiritual, and we're used to giving over our minds to them.  But, when you believe something, you are the one who is responsible for that belief, not the authority who told you to believe it.  Accepting that responsiblility is both liberating and terrifying: you can believe anything you want, but you can also make all kinds of mistakes, some of which might put your life in danger (or perhaps your immortal soul).  Can't it be someone else's problem? 

No, life is a firewalk: have faith, let go of fear.  No one is smart enough to avoid mistakes — no matter what, we make them.  At least have the fun of making your own mistakes, not someone else's! 

(originally published in 1996 in Widdershins volume 2, issue 3).