The existentialist approach has always made sense to me since reading Sartre way back in college. Also Buddhism, which surprisingly overlaps with existentialism very well, especially in Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs. And Alan Watts was great, though I’ve only read bits of The Book. Glad to know about that video game, as that’s the main way I deal with existential despair (I know, I should probably meditate instead). More recently I’ve been watching this YouTube video series by John Vervaeke called The Crisis of Meaning. All of Western philosophy combined with a dollop of Buddhism. Its downside is that it’s an old-school lecture with lots of ums and ahs, which is maybe why I’m only a few episodes in.
Honestly, that video game should count as meditating. It is extremely zen, it's all about exploration and introspection. I found out after writing it that it was a big influence for the movie "Everything Everywhere All at Once."
Honestly, the idea of nihilism is comforting to me. The idea that nothing really matters is calming. It’s helped me be less stressed at work.
I do just enough to get my job done, but I know my silly little spreadsheet won’t exist 10, 20, 100 years from now so I don’t go nuts trying to make it anything more than it needs to be. I’m able to focus more on what makes me happy or is fulfilling right now since there’s no point living anywhere but in the present ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh I have precisely zero argument with that sort of nihilism -- that sounds healthy AF. I've had a few people reach out to me and say that they are "cheerful" or "altruistic" nihilists, and I think that's a really healthy understanding of nihilism. Next week's article is going to be an interview with Britt Hartley, an atheist spiritual director who helps people through these dark moments, and she basically argues for exactly what you're saying.
i've struggled with depression and nihlism quite a bit. while all of the above works pretty well as emergency first aid—in my experience, this approach will only plaster over the problem. people can do everything recommended in this post and still underestimate how thoroughly alienated they are from the rest of Creation (in a universal sense). the feeling of isolation and meaninglessness is not just an accidental byproduct of our culture: we've spent hundreds of years convincing ourselves that we're just a brain in a bone jar, cut off from everything else, gazing dispassionately out from the dim window of a finite existence, unanswerable to any higher power—and that's (supposedly) *a good thing*. that's the bedrock needing to be excavated if we really want to undo nihlism. Western philosophy has a nasty genius for taking competing metaphysics and bleaching out anything that might trouble its material-reductivist framework. so anything that we fit into an existing category of a "belief system" within Western empiricism will ultimately be ineffective.
Western Buddhism is just one example: if you go back to the primary texts, there is some *wild* stuff that is foundational to Buddhist metaphysics. (Look up "rainbow bodies," for instance.) but all of that gets stripped away as primitive superstition. the Buddhism presented to Western, educated, right-thinking audiences becomes an intellectual exercise in accepting your confinement, and going into the cold, empty darkness of mortality with some equanimity—rather than the radical re-evaluation of material reality that Buddhism (and most other indigenous metaphysics) can actually be.
the only way to truly counter nihlism, in my experience, is to allow for the possibility that our understanding of reality is fundamentally incorrect, all the way down to how we think we exist. that can be frightening work too, but it's the only way that's worked for me.
Could you tell me what you've found helpful in changing your understanding of reality?
For the record, there wasn't space in this article, but a few of the philosophies I listed here do just that, they question our fundamental understanding of reality. The longer title of that Alan Watts work is "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are," and it is basically a direct counter to the western materialist understanding of existence through the perspective of Vedanta Hinduism. The Discordians (along with Timothy Leary) argue that our understanding of existence is a "reality tunnel" and that there are virtually infinite understandings of reality one could live in, which things like psychedelics and ritual and meditation can give us access to. Robin Wall Kimmerer's view of humans as active parts of ecosystems in a vast web of life is fundamentally different to the hierarchical western "Great Chain of Being" approach. I would also note my experience of learning about Buddhism has not been just a cold, rational intellectual exercise, but I do know that it can be presented that way.
My problem is this: I am hesitant to go too far in telling people what they should believe. A lot of the people trying to overcome nihilism got there by deconstructing their religious beliefs. The best people at helping with that are the New Atheist/rationalists, who are firmly grounded in western empiricism. Which I am not 100% against! I think it is a great system for testing and discovering new things about reality. Some people, like Carl Sagan, have been able to turn their love of science into something resembling spirituality, with their emphasis on the numinous and humility in the face of a vast, incomprehensible universe. But for most people (people who aren't engaged in the world of science every day) there isn't enough ritual and practice to keep them from slipping towards a place of cold nihilism.
The other alternatives frequently veer into the New Age movement, which I am really hesitant to engage with, the space is just too full of pseudoscience, cults, scams, and abuse. And for people leaving behind a religion, a lot of what is claimed by the New Agers is just too much to swallow after you've talked yourself out of the Christian God.
For me, what has worked best is Discordianism and the philosophy of Alan Moore, which I've written about a bunch in other articles. They allow me to maintain a basic belief in science for understanding the "objective" universe, but open up doors to exploring the massive "subjective" universe of consciousness and imagination. But once you reach the "find your philosophy" point, I think what matters most in choosing is your own intuition about what works best for you. I don't want to prescribe beliefs: for some people, Sagan's approach to science will be enough, for others, Camus will do it, and for some (like myself) it's going to have to get into some pretty trippy territory.
yep, got it in one: bumping into Alan Moore's philosophy was the inflection point for me too.
i think the key was that i wasn't looking for a new religion or a new philosophy at the time. Moore's work as an artist with a background in occultism made him the perfect messenger for me, because he works within a radically participatory metaphysics. from there, a big turning point was unwinding the nature of belief. i've written a bit about this on my own stack: Western material-reductivism is committed to the idea that its own metaphysics (or lack thereof) represent objective "knowledge," whereas all other (especially indigenous) metaphysics are subjective "beliefs." you're ostensibly free to have your own beliefs—quietly, in the privacy of your own home—but if they come into conflict with the dominant metaphysics, *you're* the problem. implicit in that is the idea that beliefs need to be decontaminated by a central authority (the Academy, the Church) before they're safe to consume. never mind if the thin gruel we're permitted is enough to sustain us; we're discouraged from going foraging for new ways of knowing on our own, exploring our own subjective realities. that's why people get lost trying to find a "new religion": they try to hot swap Buddhism or Wicca in place of a spiritually anemic mainstream religion, looking for a new authority to trust in without ever questioning whether they need to follow one in the first place. (that's how cults happen.)
Moore and the other occultists might sound completely insane (and dangerous) from modernity's point of view, but it turns out that i really needed some unverified personal gnosis to shake me out of a very bleak worldview.
Just gave you a follow! I don't know if you've come across the writer John Higgs at all? He writes a lot about Alan Moore's worldview and Discordianism (as well as people like Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary) -- his book on the KLF and his cultural history of the 20th century, "Stranger Than We Can Imagine," were really vital to me early on in getting through nihilism.
Totally agree with you though, I think it's about exploring our own subjective realities. I keep trying to dip my toe into the occult, but I've found relatively few writers outside Moore who are appealing to me. Moore's whole cosmology isn't dismissive of science's ability to explore "objective" reality, it just views what he calls magic as being the way to explore "subjective" reality. That doesn't seem to be the mainstream view in occultism, a lot of it still has pseudoscientific/scammy claims that I just can't get comfortable with. If you know of anyone else worth reading in that space, I'd love recommendations.
the pseudoscientific thing is a tough one. i don't know if there's an easy way to bridge that gap. it's an ontological divide that is either crossed all at once or not at all; venturing out into occultism without brushing up against some "pseudoscientific" ideas is like trying to go swimming without getting wet. it worked for me because i realized that indigenous cultures have been making pseudoscientific claims for thousands of years. we can either adopt a paternalistic attitude and assume that they're occupying some lower order of understanding, because they don't have microscopes or whatever. or we can allow for the possibility that they understand things in a way that we don't, which is fundamentally incompatible with lab-tested hypotheses. (even the most devout progressives will quickly get themselves in trouble if they try to talk about ayahuasca shamanism or Aboriginal songlines from a material-reductivist perspective.) if the fundamental element of reality is Mind and not matter, how much can we confidently say is pseudoscientific? the scientific method is universal; what we call Science—and, consequently, what we label as pseudoscience—is an inherently colonial project.
personally, i realized that i was tired of being an evangelist for modernity at the expense of my own wellbeing. it's not my job to be the Belief Police, for myself or anybody else. i went through a devastating personal loss not too long ago; i got through it only by permitting myself more metaphysical flexibility than secular modernity typically allows. if i had held any of it up to the light of empirical science, it would have evaporated—but it got me through one of the worst years of my life.
for further reading (or listening): you can't go wrong with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel over at the Weird Studies podcast. "Sand Talk" (book) by Tyson Yunkaporta is excellent. Duncan Barford seems not to be doing his Occult Experiments in the Home podcast anymore, but his back catalog is excellent. if you're ready to push the boat out a bit, Aidan Wachter has a pretty grounded approach to occultism that still works even if it's "just" self-hypnosis.
Thank you for the further reading, I will check those out!
My issue with that understanding of pseudoscience is that pseudoscience is not inherently harmless. A "live and let live" approach would be fine if, for example, pseudoscientific beliefs didn't actively undermine public health initiatives or prevent children from getting access to lifesaving care because their parents' religion says it's forbidden. From a personal perspective: as a kid, after leaving the Catholic Church (which was its own bag of worms), my family went down some New Age pseudoscientific rabbit holes, and it was both a) not of my own doing and b) harmful to me. Belief of one's own choosing is one thing, belief that is foisted upon you is another. And the pseudoscientific stuff wasn't coming from indigenous cultures, it was coming (usually) from extremely white people who were operating out of western esoteric beliefs. I don't want to police anyone else's beliefs, but I have also seen how "tolerance" can be weaponized to enable abuse.
And we don't have to throw out indigenous beliefs while engaging in science: Robin Wall Kimmerer's indigenous understanding of ecology was once derided by western science for engaging too much with concepts like beauty and myth, now it's widely seen as a much more complete and effective understanding of ecology. Ayahuasca/psilocybin shamanism has an ENORMOUS amount of scientific evidence backing its effectiveness -- Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind" talks about how this has forced psychologists to totally re-examine the way they think about objectivity in the study of the mind.
I also wouldn't agree that science is inherently colonial -- I think it is frequently applied towards colonial projects, but it could just as easily be applied towards liberative projects. In an ideal scientific community, what counts as "truth" is not chosen by a centralized authority, but through testing, argument and consensus. I think there are times that the scientific community operates that way, and times that it bows to authority.
This is why I love Moore -- he lets science explore the realm of matter and magic explore the realm of mind. I appreciate that divide. In the west we've assumed that science holds claim to all truth, and we could do with a shift towards exploring more of the magic realm. But I do think it's worth scrutinizing magical claims about matter, just as it's worth scrutinizing scientific claims about mind.
i hear that. my religious background was shaped by bewildering indifference—"this is just what we do on Sundays" suburban Protestantism—so my motivation has been toward finding genuine spiritual engagement, rather than trying to temper its excesses.
the ayahuasca example i had in mind is more to do with its indigenous spiritual identity, rather than its visionary qualities. it's been a while since i've read Pollan's book; i can't remember if he gets into the origins of ayahuasca. but Western science still doesn't have a coherent explanation for how people with no understanding of "proper" chemistry were able to synthesize one of the world's most potent entheogens using a very specific preparation of two distinct plants, out of the many thousands growing in the Amazon jungle. Western science hand-waves this away as an unsolvable mystery. but if you ask the shamans, there's no mystery: the plant spirits taught them how to do it. similarly, the shamans will tell you that ayahuasca can cure all kinds of illnesses—including cancer—in the proper ritual settings, because it allows them to work on (something like) the spirit body from which physical ailments originate. Western medicine considers this pseudoscience, because, of course, there is no such thing as a spirit body; that's just what "they" "believe"—a quaint superstition that gives their culture some rich aesthetic texture, but nothing to be taken seriously. those are two mutually exclusive viewpoints. that's where it turns into a colonial exercise: modernity as the dominant overculture gets to decide what exists and what doesn't. Science (with a capital S) is not just a technical process. it's an ontological projection that is, in many ways, still very much stuck in its imperial past.
on a personal level, i've had weird stuff happen to me too. if i look at those indigenous examples alongside my personal experiences, i can see the obvious connection of something outside of materialism that is worth exploring. i was a skeptic for most of my life. i don't see that i gained much from it: i got a smug intellectual satisfaction from being smarter than the rubes who believed all that nonsense, and a rhetorical cudgel for beating up on theists. but it didn't make me a better or happier person. that skepticism—material-reductivism's insistence that this is all there is, which was supposed to emancipate us from all those abusive religious institutions—was the main driver of nihlism for me, because modernity doesn't have much to offer in the way of an alternative. if we insist on official verification for everything that we recognize as real in our lives, and expect others to do the same, then all we're left with is the bland, soulless, empty clientelism that late-stage capitalism is already becoming.
The existentialist approach has always made sense to me since reading Sartre way back in college. Also Buddhism, which surprisingly overlaps with existentialism very well, especially in Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs. And Alan Watts was great, though I’ve only read bits of The Book. Glad to know about that video game, as that’s the main way I deal with existential despair (I know, I should probably meditate instead). More recently I’ve been watching this YouTube video series by John Vervaeke called The Crisis of Meaning. All of Western philosophy combined with a dollop of Buddhism. Its downside is that it’s an old-school lecture with lots of ums and ahs, which is maybe why I’m only a few episodes in.
Honestly, that video game should count as meditating. It is extremely zen, it's all about exploration and introspection. I found out after writing it that it was a big influence for the movie "Everything Everywhere All at Once."
Honestly, the idea of nihilism is comforting to me. The idea that nothing really matters is calming. It’s helped me be less stressed at work.
I do just enough to get my job done, but I know my silly little spreadsheet won’t exist 10, 20, 100 years from now so I don’t go nuts trying to make it anything more than it needs to be. I’m able to focus more on what makes me happy or is fulfilling right now since there’s no point living anywhere but in the present ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh I have precisely zero argument with that sort of nihilism -- that sounds healthy AF. I've had a few people reach out to me and say that they are "cheerful" or "altruistic" nihilists, and I think that's a really healthy understanding of nihilism. Next week's article is going to be an interview with Britt Hartley, an atheist spiritual director who helps people through these dark moments, and she basically argues for exactly what you're saying.
i've struggled with depression and nihlism quite a bit. while all of the above works pretty well as emergency first aid—in my experience, this approach will only plaster over the problem. people can do everything recommended in this post and still underestimate how thoroughly alienated they are from the rest of Creation (in a universal sense). the feeling of isolation and meaninglessness is not just an accidental byproduct of our culture: we've spent hundreds of years convincing ourselves that we're just a brain in a bone jar, cut off from everything else, gazing dispassionately out from the dim window of a finite existence, unanswerable to any higher power—and that's (supposedly) *a good thing*. that's the bedrock needing to be excavated if we really want to undo nihlism. Western philosophy has a nasty genius for taking competing metaphysics and bleaching out anything that might trouble its material-reductivist framework. so anything that we fit into an existing category of a "belief system" within Western empiricism will ultimately be ineffective.
Western Buddhism is just one example: if you go back to the primary texts, there is some *wild* stuff that is foundational to Buddhist metaphysics. (Look up "rainbow bodies," for instance.) but all of that gets stripped away as primitive superstition. the Buddhism presented to Western, educated, right-thinking audiences becomes an intellectual exercise in accepting your confinement, and going into the cold, empty darkness of mortality with some equanimity—rather than the radical re-evaluation of material reality that Buddhism (and most other indigenous metaphysics) can actually be.
the only way to truly counter nihlism, in my experience, is to allow for the possibility that our understanding of reality is fundamentally incorrect, all the way down to how we think we exist. that can be frightening work too, but it's the only way that's worked for me.
Could you tell me what you've found helpful in changing your understanding of reality?
For the record, there wasn't space in this article, but a few of the philosophies I listed here do just that, they question our fundamental understanding of reality. The longer title of that Alan Watts work is "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are," and it is basically a direct counter to the western materialist understanding of existence through the perspective of Vedanta Hinduism. The Discordians (along with Timothy Leary) argue that our understanding of existence is a "reality tunnel" and that there are virtually infinite understandings of reality one could live in, which things like psychedelics and ritual and meditation can give us access to. Robin Wall Kimmerer's view of humans as active parts of ecosystems in a vast web of life is fundamentally different to the hierarchical western "Great Chain of Being" approach. I would also note my experience of learning about Buddhism has not been just a cold, rational intellectual exercise, but I do know that it can be presented that way.
My problem is this: I am hesitant to go too far in telling people what they should believe. A lot of the people trying to overcome nihilism got there by deconstructing their religious beliefs. The best people at helping with that are the New Atheist/rationalists, who are firmly grounded in western empiricism. Which I am not 100% against! I think it is a great system for testing and discovering new things about reality. Some people, like Carl Sagan, have been able to turn their love of science into something resembling spirituality, with their emphasis on the numinous and humility in the face of a vast, incomprehensible universe. But for most people (people who aren't engaged in the world of science every day) there isn't enough ritual and practice to keep them from slipping towards a place of cold nihilism.
The other alternatives frequently veer into the New Age movement, which I am really hesitant to engage with, the space is just too full of pseudoscience, cults, scams, and abuse. And for people leaving behind a religion, a lot of what is claimed by the New Agers is just too much to swallow after you've talked yourself out of the Christian God.
For me, what has worked best is Discordianism and the philosophy of Alan Moore, which I've written about a bunch in other articles. They allow me to maintain a basic belief in science for understanding the "objective" universe, but open up doors to exploring the massive "subjective" universe of consciousness and imagination. But once you reach the "find your philosophy" point, I think what matters most in choosing is your own intuition about what works best for you. I don't want to prescribe beliefs: for some people, Sagan's approach to science will be enough, for others, Camus will do it, and for some (like myself) it's going to have to get into some pretty trippy territory.
yep, got it in one: bumping into Alan Moore's philosophy was the inflection point for me too.
i think the key was that i wasn't looking for a new religion or a new philosophy at the time. Moore's work as an artist with a background in occultism made him the perfect messenger for me, because he works within a radically participatory metaphysics. from there, a big turning point was unwinding the nature of belief. i've written a bit about this on my own stack: Western material-reductivism is committed to the idea that its own metaphysics (or lack thereof) represent objective "knowledge," whereas all other (especially indigenous) metaphysics are subjective "beliefs." you're ostensibly free to have your own beliefs—quietly, in the privacy of your own home—but if they come into conflict with the dominant metaphysics, *you're* the problem. implicit in that is the idea that beliefs need to be decontaminated by a central authority (the Academy, the Church) before they're safe to consume. never mind if the thin gruel we're permitted is enough to sustain us; we're discouraged from going foraging for new ways of knowing on our own, exploring our own subjective realities. that's why people get lost trying to find a "new religion": they try to hot swap Buddhism or Wicca in place of a spiritually anemic mainstream religion, looking for a new authority to trust in without ever questioning whether they need to follow one in the first place. (that's how cults happen.)
Moore and the other occultists might sound completely insane (and dangerous) from modernity's point of view, but it turns out that i really needed some unverified personal gnosis to shake me out of a very bleak worldview.
Just gave you a follow! I don't know if you've come across the writer John Higgs at all? He writes a lot about Alan Moore's worldview and Discordianism (as well as people like Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary) -- his book on the KLF and his cultural history of the 20th century, "Stranger Than We Can Imagine," were really vital to me early on in getting through nihilism.
Totally agree with you though, I think it's about exploring our own subjective realities. I keep trying to dip my toe into the occult, but I've found relatively few writers outside Moore who are appealing to me. Moore's whole cosmology isn't dismissive of science's ability to explore "objective" reality, it just views what he calls magic as being the way to explore "subjective" reality. That doesn't seem to be the mainstream view in occultism, a lot of it still has pseudoscientific/scammy claims that I just can't get comfortable with. If you know of anyone else worth reading in that space, I'd love recommendations.
haven't come across Higgs yet, i'll check it out!
the pseudoscientific thing is a tough one. i don't know if there's an easy way to bridge that gap. it's an ontological divide that is either crossed all at once or not at all; venturing out into occultism without brushing up against some "pseudoscientific" ideas is like trying to go swimming without getting wet. it worked for me because i realized that indigenous cultures have been making pseudoscientific claims for thousands of years. we can either adopt a paternalistic attitude and assume that they're occupying some lower order of understanding, because they don't have microscopes or whatever. or we can allow for the possibility that they understand things in a way that we don't, which is fundamentally incompatible with lab-tested hypotheses. (even the most devout progressives will quickly get themselves in trouble if they try to talk about ayahuasca shamanism or Aboriginal songlines from a material-reductivist perspective.) if the fundamental element of reality is Mind and not matter, how much can we confidently say is pseudoscientific? the scientific method is universal; what we call Science—and, consequently, what we label as pseudoscience—is an inherently colonial project.
personally, i realized that i was tired of being an evangelist for modernity at the expense of my own wellbeing. it's not my job to be the Belief Police, for myself or anybody else. i went through a devastating personal loss not too long ago; i got through it only by permitting myself more metaphysical flexibility than secular modernity typically allows. if i had held any of it up to the light of empirical science, it would have evaporated—but it got me through one of the worst years of my life.
for further reading (or listening): you can't go wrong with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel over at the Weird Studies podcast. "Sand Talk" (book) by Tyson Yunkaporta is excellent. Duncan Barford seems not to be doing his Occult Experiments in the Home podcast anymore, but his back catalog is excellent. if you're ready to push the boat out a bit, Aidan Wachter has a pretty grounded approach to occultism that still works even if it's "just" self-hypnosis.
Thank you for the further reading, I will check those out!
My issue with that understanding of pseudoscience is that pseudoscience is not inherently harmless. A "live and let live" approach would be fine if, for example, pseudoscientific beliefs didn't actively undermine public health initiatives or prevent children from getting access to lifesaving care because their parents' religion says it's forbidden. From a personal perspective: as a kid, after leaving the Catholic Church (which was its own bag of worms), my family went down some New Age pseudoscientific rabbit holes, and it was both a) not of my own doing and b) harmful to me. Belief of one's own choosing is one thing, belief that is foisted upon you is another. And the pseudoscientific stuff wasn't coming from indigenous cultures, it was coming (usually) from extremely white people who were operating out of western esoteric beliefs. I don't want to police anyone else's beliefs, but I have also seen how "tolerance" can be weaponized to enable abuse.
And we don't have to throw out indigenous beliefs while engaging in science: Robin Wall Kimmerer's indigenous understanding of ecology was once derided by western science for engaging too much with concepts like beauty and myth, now it's widely seen as a much more complete and effective understanding of ecology. Ayahuasca/psilocybin shamanism has an ENORMOUS amount of scientific evidence backing its effectiveness -- Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind" talks about how this has forced psychologists to totally re-examine the way they think about objectivity in the study of the mind.
I also wouldn't agree that science is inherently colonial -- I think it is frequently applied towards colonial projects, but it could just as easily be applied towards liberative projects. In an ideal scientific community, what counts as "truth" is not chosen by a centralized authority, but through testing, argument and consensus. I think there are times that the scientific community operates that way, and times that it bows to authority.
This is why I love Moore -- he lets science explore the realm of matter and magic explore the realm of mind. I appreciate that divide. In the west we've assumed that science holds claim to all truth, and we could do with a shift towards exploring more of the magic realm. But I do think it's worth scrutinizing magical claims about matter, just as it's worth scrutinizing scientific claims about mind.
i hear that. my religious background was shaped by bewildering indifference—"this is just what we do on Sundays" suburban Protestantism—so my motivation has been toward finding genuine spiritual engagement, rather than trying to temper its excesses.
the ayahuasca example i had in mind is more to do with its indigenous spiritual identity, rather than its visionary qualities. it's been a while since i've read Pollan's book; i can't remember if he gets into the origins of ayahuasca. but Western science still doesn't have a coherent explanation for how people with no understanding of "proper" chemistry were able to synthesize one of the world's most potent entheogens using a very specific preparation of two distinct plants, out of the many thousands growing in the Amazon jungle. Western science hand-waves this away as an unsolvable mystery. but if you ask the shamans, there's no mystery: the plant spirits taught them how to do it. similarly, the shamans will tell you that ayahuasca can cure all kinds of illnesses—including cancer—in the proper ritual settings, because it allows them to work on (something like) the spirit body from which physical ailments originate. Western medicine considers this pseudoscience, because, of course, there is no such thing as a spirit body; that's just what "they" "believe"—a quaint superstition that gives their culture some rich aesthetic texture, but nothing to be taken seriously. those are two mutually exclusive viewpoints. that's where it turns into a colonial exercise: modernity as the dominant overculture gets to decide what exists and what doesn't. Science (with a capital S) is not just a technical process. it's an ontological projection that is, in many ways, still very much stuck in its imperial past.
on a personal level, i've had weird stuff happen to me too. if i look at those indigenous examples alongside my personal experiences, i can see the obvious connection of something outside of materialism that is worth exploring. i was a skeptic for most of my life. i don't see that i gained much from it: i got a smug intellectual satisfaction from being smarter than the rubes who believed all that nonsense, and a rhetorical cudgel for beating up on theists. but it didn't make me a better or happier person. that skepticism—material-reductivism's insistence that this is all there is, which was supposed to emancipate us from all those abusive religious institutions—was the main driver of nihlism for me, because modernity doesn't have much to offer in the way of an alternative. if we insist on official verification for everything that we recognize as real in our lives, and expect others to do the same, then all we're left with is the bland, soulless, empty clientelism that late-stage capitalism is already becoming.