Lunatics, Idiots, and Charlatans: Bridging the Secular and the Spiritual

I was raised in a secular-intellectual environment firmly grounded in materialist reductionism: there is no world but the physical world and that which can be verified through research science.  Religion had no part in my upbringing, and spirituality even less.  Spirituality was the realm of lunatics, idiots, and charlatans; people who were either too crazy or stupid to be rational, or people who were intentionally trying to con the naive and gullible.

Imagine, then, what it was like as an adult to find myself going from the field of neuroscience into traditional Chinese medicine and then into shamanic healing.