u/Prize_Ad7300

basically the title. I feel like my default mode is atheism and being hyper skeptical of everything. I was raised in a Catholic household but I always found it pretty hard to believe in a lot of what I was taught as a kid. I had lapses where I'd be a bit more firm in faith but it usually slipped away. I could never even hear about death without panicking a bit and imagining oblivion. As I've gotten older I've looked more into paranormal phenomena like near death experiences and more scientific stuff about consciousness. It helps a bit but I still find it hard to really believe anything. There's constantly so much science stuff coming out about how we're just brains and how we've proven there's nothing after death. It always feels like we're on the edge of finding out consciousness is just a brain thing and there truly is nothing more. I post some of my doubts on the subreddits devoted to this kind of stuff but sometimes they just get deleted and I get no answer. I really don't know what to do or what to believe anymore, I feel like some kind of social outcast for worrying what will happen to us or being scared of eternal nothing after death because no one else seems to care. The only real way the anxiety could ever end for me is if we scientifically proved consciousness isn't a brain thing, I used to believe that would happen one day but now I realize it's sort of an unrealistic expectation. I feel cursed with this worry, like I'm the only one worried about never seeing my loved ones again, about wasting my only life, about spending eternity as nothingness. i see stuff about psychics who verify themselves and stuff but I'm just unable to convince myself fully that there isn't a deeper materialist explanation to this all. I don't even know what the point of this vent is but I just need to get it off my chest.

a few years ago when I first got into learning about NDEs I remember reading a lot of stories. i cant find the one I'm thinking of right now but I remember on quora there was a story of someone who saw a painting as a kid, choked/drowned (I don't remember which), blacked out and was revived after. during the NDE before he was revived he was having an experience of being in the painting's environment. do you think this counts as an NDE? if it does what could it mean? theres a lot of weird stories of people nearly choking/drowning and being revived and having weird experiences that I'm not sure are NDEs. some are just comatose and see nothing but some do see stuff, I remember one person who mentioned seeing aliens and UFOs torturing people on a beach. do these even count as NDEs and if they do what does it mean?

I think reincarnation is decently likely as an afterlife and stories of people with their past lives does interest me but something that confuses me is that people only seem to ever have a couple past lives and they're usually pretty recent. like every time someone asks to know how many other lives they've lived it's usually just like 200 at the most and they usually only stretch back a couple centuries. I mean why is this? the universe is at least 14 billion years old (and who knows it might stretch back longer or even forever) so where's all the past lives of people as dinosaurs or as bacteria (I've only seen one person with memories of that in an NDE)? why do we not have googols of past lives and just a couple hundred at most? I know some people have previous life memories as aliens and stuff but even then they seem to be pretty recent and sort of a rare occurrence

I get time's a weird thing and maybe trying to quantify lifetimes is the issue (who even knows if there's any such thing as a past or future) but this is just kind of what gives me a bit of hesitancy to fully believe any of it, I'd like some perspective from anyone who believes and has experience with this

have any of you gotten information from a spirit that you were later able to verify? like beyond lucky guesses have you ever been able to point out specific details for someone that neither of you would have possibly been able to know or guess in a million years

one of the more recently popular theories I've seen "debunking" NDEs is that we know your brain can still be active for a few minutes after clinical death. I believe this is referred to as the "7 minutes of heaven" by people where events from your life are said to replay which is a common occurrence in NDEs. Do you think this is an adequate explanation or not and how would you respond to it?

Ed May was involved with Project Stargate and CIA remote viewing experiments and such. his theories propose that remote viewing and PSI are real but that they are explainable by a physicalist perspective and that it’s not consciousness traveling outside of the body when verified information is reported but the information traveled to someone.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244015576056 article written with Sonali Marwaha

https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/edwin-c-may/

the entropy and psi part of the latter article is odd to me especially

title says it all really, after the release of the Epstein Files a bunch of spiritual gurus were caught being buddy buddy with predators or being extremely bigoted or other disturbing stuff. Deepak Chopra is probably the most infamous of them all (I was never personally a big fan of his but I understand how it was disheartening for those who were). like I enjoyed the telepathy tapes but a lot of the people working on it got caught in the files and I remember a tiktok about how apparently a lot of the people interviewed for it were zionists. It's a shame because there are some people I still respect like Fredrico Faggin on there but somedays I feel like this is evidence that all the materialistic people are right and I should just give up any hope of anything greater out there. I know it wasn't all spiritual leaders in the files (some infamous anti spirituality figures were in there too) but it really has shaken a lot of my prior belief