When being a witch – or psionic, or high magician, or anyone else being involved in metaphysics and the esoteric – it can sometimes be difficult dealing with having your experience and/or beliefs dismissed. Being told that “spells don’t work”, “your gods aren’t real”, “no one can predict the future”, can be so annoying and aggravating.

Now, a lot of people go by personal experience and media they’ve experienced. Granted, if someone hasn’t knowingly seen ghosts or only know about pop metaphysics learned via reality shows and tv dramas, it kind of makes sense that they would be dismissive of occultic happenings. However, it is important to note here that there is a difference between make believe and reality. What happens during Supernatural and Sleepy Hallow is make believe (I love Sleepy Hallow like I love my cat but they still over dramatized sin eaters and Supernatural has a too much of a race casting issue to be anywhere near accurate). There is not nearly as much glamour and sparkliness and bright lights in actual magick, those are just creative choices by the director and producers to best convey that something magical is happening or else the viewer would be so lost given that tv is an audio-visual medium so it has to express the other senses somehow. Reality is much more boring, the metaphysics doesn’t add a pop of spice to one’s life. Confusion, oh sure. Spice, not as much. Since what people experience isn’t what the tv and movies promise them, it’s easy for people to say “Oh, that’s not real,” or “If people could really do that, it would be all over the news/social media/etc”. And trying to explain metaphysics in layman terms to regular people can be so easily confusing, it’s almost easy to just not bother to explain. It just becomes such a bother to the practitioner when hearing such dismissive things about the esoteric are so constant.

Then you have folks who are strongly in the “Science know all” camp. Just looking at science’s track record with simply race (eugenics, anyone?), gender (science “discovered” the clitoris three different times, that’s depressing) and mental illness (the hard sciences still sees psychology as hokey) shows that science isn’t perfect. While science is definitely important to determine physical ideas and theories, it doesn’t know the answer to everything because science is ever evolving. What science knew 100 years ago is radically different from today and what science will know 100 years from now is most likely going to be radically different from the world of now. Besides, metaphysics literally means “transcendence beyond the physical”, of course science isn’t going to have the answers for the esoterics – at least, not readily. That and it seems when someone does do actual sound studies on parapsychology, science tends to go “Ehhhh, we’ll ignore that.”

Then there’s the fact that science in the West is not really that inclusive of various cultures and beliefs. I know, science is supposed to be all logic and if it can’t be proven, it’s not worth noting but when scientists feel compelled to use science to justify stereotypes and bigoted beliefs of race and gender, maybe science could stand to be a bit more diverse in its perspectives, it would probably arrive at some answers baffling science in general faster.

All in all, it can be tough keeping up the faith, so to speak. I guess the best way to deal with this is to try to find like-minded people and spaces wherever you can but to not get overboard. You want to keep your metaphysics/psionics learning up so you don’t give into subtle discouragement (and, trust, that is hard because it is everywhere in Western society) but you don’t want to become a ditzy hippie thinking that having a wide array of crystals alone will heal cancer and death. I always like to remember that nothing is impossible. Possibly improbable, but not impossible. If there’s one standing idea in all metaphysics, it is exactly that. Even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.

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