When My Emotional Subjectivities, Cultural Background, and Cartesian Theory Collide

I'm someone who is incredibly subjective to emotions and ~the feels~. And most, if not, all of those things are experienced through my sensory abilities. Further, to me, existence is something that is the unique resulting phenomenon of both human subjectivities and more "concrete" rationalities that can be applied more generally. I actually wrote this in a journal entry for an honors seminar I took, in which the prompt was to explore the 7 main questions of identity as published by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/) in which I had said,

"My response to the 6th question of identity (What am I?) is that I am a human being with a potential to influence other human beings around me. I do believe in the makeup of humans down to the level of atomic matter. I do believe in the scientific aspects of what constitutes a human, but what I also believe in are the emotional processes and experiences that shape us as unique people that science just simply cannot explain on a personal level."

However, now, I find myself at crossroads upon the question of accepting/adopting even a semi-Cartesian view of my existence/the world around me. I try to think about the idea of my body merely being a mechanistic object that is separate from my mind, and with my current beliefs/current state of quandary with a lot of other aspects of my life, things become a little fuzzy.

This past weekend I actually celebrated Chinese New Year with my family. One of the most significant parts of this celebration is to set up altars, burn (fake) money, light incense, and pray to our ancestors. Thus, we largely believe in the existence of ancestral spirits and an afterlife that I think could be equated to a heaven of sorts. And sometimes we think that when the ashes on the incense stick stays standing for a certain length or when the flame on a candle reaches a certain height, it indicates that the spirits of our ancestors have descended from the heavens to visit us momentarily. Throughout the celebration, I had this question of how I have come to "know" this belief and whether I truly do pinging in the back of my mind. Have "knowing" these things been reached through mine and others' sensory abilities such as seeing flame and incense length? Are these innate ideas? If ideas are innate, do we have a need for sensory indication? Are these ideas rational?

So, part of me, I think, relies on sensory phenomena to come to "know" certain things, but on some level, I have to believe that my mind is separate from my body if it can exist in an afterlife, right?
This is a seriously messy blog post, but if anything, it serves as a pretty accurate example of where I stand in my own mess of understanding when it comes to reason, metaphysics, and the roles of cultural upbringing.