I was quite pagan by now, practicing shamanistic magic and ingaging with spirits nearly daily - I could see this was real, the evidence of my eyes couldn't be lying to me BUT I still had questions. I needed to learn how these things were happening, why principals of science could support this magical world I had discovered lurking beneath the surface? So along side my books on mythology, magic and religion I now took down books on psychology, sociology and science. For a second time my world was rocked, a new gleaming and irresitibly sexy world was lying beneath all the things I thought I knew - it was rather breath taking. James Randi and Richard Dawkins began to mold my mind, and yet again what I had believed and known to be true began to slip away.
I wonder if you'd be willing or able to describe more about this,
1) what you mean about "engaging with spirits daily" and
2) why, if you "could see that this was real" you were so apparently easily talked out of its being real?
Just for context, I went through a phase of occultic exploration before I became a Christian, mostly astrology and the I Ching, which are both like lenses onto the spirit world, had some mostly scary experiences of such entities too, and found other people in that phase extremely open to talking to me about their own similar experiences.