When Science Forgot the Soul: How We Were Taught to Forget Ourselves

By Virginia Underwood

I was in sixth grade when I first felt the sting of a truth too sterile to hold life.

My science teacher—a kind man, but rigid in his logic—told our class that animals don’t have souls. That my cat, with her careful rituals, her moonlit stares, her way of curling up beside me like she knew exactly when I needed her most, was just a bundle of instincts. No personality. No inner world. No “someone” in there. Just biology.

Even then, I knew he was wrong.

I watched her, pawing at her blanket just three times before settling in, blinking at me with a gaze that saw more than most humans ever did. She wasn’t a collection of neurons and reflexes—she was herself. And something inside me broke a little that day. Not because I was taught facts, but because I was told those facts were the only truth that mattered.

That was my first taste of how science—when stripped of soul—can sterilize the world.

We are taught from a young age to measure, dissect, and label life, but not to honor it. In the dominant worldview, the universe is a machine, and we are clever machines within it—here to decode, manipulate, and conquer. Consciousness is just brain chemistry. Love is just oxytocin. Death is just the shutting down of systems.

Even the most profound human experiences are reduced to clinical events.

Falling in love? “It’s just a flood of dopamine and serotonin.”
Spiritual awakening? “Just a misfiring in the brain.”
The sacred visions of our ancestors? “Just DMT releasing at the moment of death.”
As if mystery itself were a glitch. As if everything that makes life worth living could be dismissed with a shrug and a scan.

But I’ve worked with psychedelics. I’ve seen beyond the veil. It is not “just a trip.”

These experiences take you into a deeper reality—not away from it. They dissolve the illusion of separation, not because of chemicals, but because something sacred opens. You meet your ancestors. You feel the heartbeat of the Earth. You remember who you are.

To reduce that to a “hallucination” is to stand in front of a cathedral and insist it’s just bricks.

We’ve forgotten that science is a tool, not a worldview. A map, not the terrain. It can tell us the how, but not the why. It can describe the chemical composition of a rose, but it will never explain the ache in your chest when you smell one that reminds you of your grandmother’s garden.

Meanwhile, Indigenous cultures—keepers of embodied wisdom—have been ridiculed for believing what now even quantum physics is starting to whisper: everything is alive.

But in school, we were taught to roll our eyes at that. We were taught that only humans have real consciousness. That it’s silly to believe a tree can speak, a river can feel, or that a plant might offer itself in communion. That kind of thinking was labeled “primitive,” “unscientific,” “superstitious.”

But what if it’s we who are disconnected? What if we were systematically desensitized to a living world?

Even modern ethical movements sometimes mirror this fragmentation. I’ve met vegans who refuse to eat meat out of respect for animal souls, yet treat plants as if they are inert. As if life only matters when it has eyes. But the truth is—life is life. All of it pulses with consciousness. Plants know when they are being harvested. Trees cry in frequencies we’ve only recently learned how to measure.

And then there’s religion. I remember one sermon where a preacher told us that humans had dominion over the Earth. That it was our right to take what we wanted, rule as we pleased, because we were made in God’s image and the rest of creation was here for us to use.

That didn’t sit well with me then, and it sits even worse now.

We were never meant to dominate. We were meant to steward. To participate in the sacred dance of reciprocity. But we’ve been taught we are separate. Superior. Special.

And that belief—that great forgetting—has led us to the brink.

We are in danger. Not because we know too much, but because we believe that knowledge without soul is enough. We are drowning in information and starving for wisdom.

But it’s not too late.

We can re-soul our vision. We can reclaim reverence. We can return to the knowing that lives in our bones, our breath, our blood. The kind that listens to the Earth. That kneels before mystery. That looks into a cat’s eyes and sees the universe looking back.

Because if we keep following only the facts and forgetting the spirit, we will end up in a world that is clinically explained—and utterly lifeless.

And I, for one, refuse to live in a world where love is just chemistry, where death is just a glitch in the system, and where the sacred is reduced to data.

The soul is real. I’ve met it. And so have you.

You meet it every time you pause to feel something deeper than words, something truer than proof. Every time you remember that life is not a machine—it’s a miracle.

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