
I will acknowledge at outset here that I don’t presume to project my own world views and opinions on the broader population of atheists or nihilists. Just wondering if others have had similar experiences given this is a really lonely subject to discuss in person.
Anyway, in my own experience, and like most people, my deeply held philosophical / moral systems have informed my view of the universe. After making my way up and through academia to a post-graduate education, those views had pretty much crystallized into a solid foundation that can generally be summarized as:
science and math can explain all phenomena; as human understanding has progressed, previously unknowable phenomena has become known and explained; this trend will continue and most sensational unknown oddities today are likely explained by less sensational natural circumstances; the size of the universe is incomprehensible and there are almost certainly other lifeforms somewhere else but the practical reality is that contact and communication with or even just knowledge of other intelligent life would require more years than is possible for humans given the sheer scale of distance; we the human race will likely continue on hurting each other and polluting the planet alone on our little floating rock until there is nothingness
Which is not a particularly comfy conclusion to come to and a bit depressing at times but has always felt to me to be a pretty solid foundation to go about making sense of this world and living in it.
Now I will freely admit I have long thought alien conspiracies were the peak of obviously fake. It felt very comfortable for me to pass them off as easily explained even if I couldn’t, someone else more well informed and with more time than me would look into it I’m sure and it would turn out to be a hoax.
Then a friend of mine, who I respect and think to be a credible and intelligent person, convinced me to watch the Go Fast, Gimbal and FLIR videos and I couldn’t make any sense of them and the fact that the Government confirmed that they were real and that they didn’t know what they were either was bizarre to me. Then the Grusch testimony and all of the attendant video gave even more credence that something was there.
I struggled with this for some time trying to make sense of it. And I got to a certain point where I felt like “logically” I could trust what my eyes were seeing and that there were UAP on video with high ranking intelligence officers claiming there were more and that they were non-human. But it always felt like there was a kind of a layer of reality between me and it, like I was considering some thought experiment and not real life.
But at some point something clicked in my head and I crossed the threshold of intellectually thinking about it to actually believing it to be true. And I have never experienced anything like it. I literally cried tears of joy at the thought, like my brain felt like an orange that was having juice squeezed out of it. All this time I thought we were doomed to a monotonous existence on some backwater rock and nothing really mattered much. And now that I really BELIEVE that this is true, I am so hopeful of what is to come and what amazing events we are going to witness in our lifetimes it is overwhelming me to the point where I thought I was having some sort of manic episode. It feels like everything needs to be viewed in a new light and I can’t stop thinking about it like a kid on Christmas.
I suppose this is the “ontological shock” thing that people reference?
submitted by /u/ThomasFitzroy
[link] [comments]