I Spent A Few Days in Sedona, Investigating America’s Capital of Woo

There is a metaphorical tension in my body now about this experience, as my logical brain can find reasonable explanations like the placebo effect and the non-linear nature of grief and the confusion it creates, while my gut instinct is much less certain about anything in any direction. What I know the most is how I felt, which was overwhelmed with love and sadness.

Feelings Are Knowledge

This gets to one of the notions I heard over and over and over again in Sedona: feelings have plenty of intellectual legitimacy in the town’s worldview, and to the more woo-inclined residents, can often be more accurate than the rational thoughts you compile in your brain. Society has become so hyper-logical in the Age of Enlightenment, and we downplay the notion of things like gut instinct simply because we cannot measure and quantify it the way we can with other strange but more understood things like gravity. I believe gut instinct is real, and that perhaps studies of the strangeness of consciousness provide it with a potential scientific basis. Much of the studies around flow state that helped win NBA Championships resemble this idea that you just innately know how to do something, and you do it without actively thinking about it.

Honestly, that describes my writing process. After doing the research for the story, I just put my fingers on the keyboard, tap into an emotion the story evokes, find an evidentiary track to take it down, and all of a sudden, here’s your daily Splinter. It’s produced largely without an active form of thinking aside from routing the emotion from point to point based on my open tabs (editing is quite another thing though), and I’m far from the only writer who feels like this, and there’s potential scientific explanations for it. The quantum realm is plenty strange, as it connects particles across millions of light years. There’s no reason gut instinct driven by some quantum mechanics we don’t understand yet couldn’t be part of our evolutionary path, where humans with a less developed innate feel for the world around them went down the wrong path and were eaten by a predator, while those who took the other route survived and passed on this feeling that did not lead them down the path to being something else’s meal, and it’s led to a world where we call it flow state and Steph Curry uses it to make shooting threes look easier than anyone else ever has before.

I still don’t know about this quartz and iron oxide notion or vortexes or a lot of the woo theories I encountered in my travels. The UFO aspect is different, in part because I have a very credible source telling me it’s different, to say nothing of the interest the last two Democratic Senate Majority Leaders have in it. But as I have dove into the UFO realm, it has become more complicated than just interstellar SUVs, and a lot of the good evidence tracks back towards woo and eventually connects back towards objective reality through scientific studies of consciousness. I have always been more open to some level of woo in part because like the town of Sedona, I also grew up on stolen Native American land. As a child of the Rockies, I was exposed to the culture of the Arapaho, Navajo, Ute, Shoshone and Comanche tribes across our great state also allegedly filled with vortexes, and definitely filled with iron oxide (it’s practically in Colorado’s name! Hell, I was at a concert at Red Rocks last month).

The problem with “woo” culture in America is that it has different strains that are distinct from each other both in kind and origin, but are still all connected. So one second, you’ll have someone talking to you about centuries of solemnly holy native culture on each side of the Pacific Ocean, and the next you’ll pick up notes of an RFK Jr. acolyte. Woo is a dangerous path to blindly tread down, because one well-trod path in this country leads you to ingesting brain-worms.

But the Navajo existed well before the Kennedys, and they and others have long spoken of “Star People” and the wonderous interactive properties of the earth that lay beyond the ability of the naked eye to grasp it (this is called foreshadowing the UFO tour article)–properties scientists have measured through things like the earth’s natural magnetic field. This is where woo becomes most compelling to me, because centuries of tradition and ceremonies have been built around genuinely held beliefs across the world, and there is at least at the level of theory, a potential scientific basis to explain this broad strain of human culture which believes that something more profound than us lies behind the veil of material reality.

While it’s important to stay woo-vigilant, I think a lot of people approach this stuff far too cynically and believe that all these people who believe things outside the mainstream are full of shit or grifters or total lunatics (it’s also incredibly dismissive of Native American culture). Grifters and lunatics certainly exist everywhere in our modern age, but when you actually talk to a range of people in everyday life who believe this stuff, it’s a lot harder to downplay the humanity showing their vulnerability and demonstrating a level of trust in you. The people in Sedona who were trying to sell me something the most were the poor sales folks this former sales guy sympathizes with in the art galleries who have to watch tourists gawk at the beauty produced by hard work and creativity and not financially reward it. A lot of the crystal and UFO and spiritual healing types I talked to spoke very matter of factly about the culture of Sedona, and they didn’t really seem to care if I accepted it or not.

Everyone is on their own journey, and critical thinking is a core part of it. You don’t want to get so woo-pilled that you just start believing everything and RFK Jr. starts sounding reasonable. But you don’t want to become such a cynic that you just outright reject data or evidence that conflicts with your incomplete worldview. Science is the best thing we’ve got to discover actual truths, but we have made it something of a religion in our less religious era, with many asserting it to be an unflinching set of known things instead of a set of practices and tools humanity has developed to inform us about the world–a set of tools that is constantly proving that what we thought we knew was wrong and the world is more complex than we previously believed.

Quartz is conductive, it’s used in wristwatches and many other electronics. In 2012, “A multi-institutional team led by scientists at Berkeley Lab directly observed electron hopping in iron oxide particles, a phenomenon that holds huge significance for a broad range of environment-and energy-related applications.” Piezoelectricity was a big part of the scientific woo-worldview I encountered. These people aren’t just pulling everything out their asses. I’m not asserting that this iron oxide and quartz woo explanation is correct, just that it is much more well-thought out and evidence-based than the cynics would lead you to believe.

I don’t know much more exiting Sedona than I did entering it, but I do feel different. And according to them, that’s the point. I didn’t have a clue how I was going to feel about this trip going into it, and leaving it, the story Sedona tells is a beautiful and recognizable one. The universe is far more complex and beautiful than we think, the soul is real, and it survives past our lives in these meat sacks. Maybe that’s what all the strangeness in studies of consciousness is picking up. Sedona says there are ways to develop and mature your understanding of all this strangeness and preserve it past our meat sack-driven reality, and independent of whether or not we can use the Han Solo “it’s all true” meme to describe the town’s woo-based science, it has had a dramatic impact on countless people’s lives, making it very real in the only way we can say that we truly know matters.

Here is Part 2 of my woo-vestigation in Sedona, detailing what we saw–and didn’t see–on the UFO tour.